by Chuck Wendig
They cannot see him. They move in slow motion, but the Ghost of All-Dead appears with terrifying swiftness, rushing up on her in a blur of shadow. It has little shape; it has no face. It is like a roiling thundercloud, limbs and tendrils birthing from its center and then turning to a cloud of flies that go to vapor. The entity roars, deafening her with its wrath:
“What are you doing?”
She swallows hard and lashes out again with her senses—a tether cast farther and wider—but then the formless thing takes shape. Louis. His one gone-eye same as the crater here in this space: a divot of black dirt and dead roots. From within emerges a bouquet of spider legs—legs as thick as a crab’s claw—that thrust up and clamp down on the Trespasser’s face. Those pointed arachnid legs rip the Trespasser’s facial skin into ribbons, and as that face falls away, peeling off like steamed wallpaper, a new face is revealed: Eleanor Caldecott, her face slick with algae and striated with death-marks. Then her skin is ripped off too, revealing a new face: Alejandro the killer, his eyes as dead as pennies. Each face is ripped clean from the skull, revealing a new face underneath, like calendar pages torn hastily from their binding, one after the next, face after face: the boy with the red balloon, Wren’s face as she kills Louis, Gabby’s face before it was scarred up, Ashley Gaynes leering and licking his lips, Harriet showing teeth red and gummy with heart’s viscera, Ingersoll’s hairless porcelain visage—
“You think you can trick me?” the Trespasser cries, its words spoken by a half-dozen different mouths.
Miriam realizes now, too late, that it’s too powerful. We fucked up. This is a mistake. We can’t contain it. . . .
She backpedals, tripping on something. Tumbling backward. Ass hitting ground. Head hitting a rock. Starburst behind the eyes. A ringing in her ear as her coconut is rattled—
Now the face is Louis’s again.
“One. Broken. Cookie.”
Now it’s Ethan Key.
Now it’s someone in the Mockingbird plague doctor’s mask.
Now it’s Ben Hodge, the boy who impregnated her the first time—
Now it’s his mother, her face twisted up in sour, mindless rage, her purple lips flecked with spit, the capillaries in her eyes busting so fast, the whites of her eyes go as red as crushed cherries—
Lukauskis has noticed now that something has happened—
Can he see it? Can he see the Ghost of All-Dead? Does he know that the Trespasser is here? She doesn’t know.
He’s rushing over, waving his arms—
“Find the bird! Find the bird—”
She cries out, closes her eyes, and reaches—
INTERLUDE
ONCE UPON A MIDNIGHT DREARY
A mile away, a raven sits alone in a dark tree.
It is a common raven, though ravens are only common in the sense that they are plentiful, especially out here in the American West. But they are uncommon in their intelligence.
Crows, too, are intelligent, but not quite as much as the raven—and so, it is vital to note that a crow is not a raven and a raven is not a crow. (Nor are they blackbirds, jackdaws, jays, or magpies.) Crows caw. Ravens croak and scream. Crows are small, but ravens are large—as big as some hawks. The myths of the raven are many: in Sweden, for instance, a raven that calls after midnight is said to be the call of a murder victim, one who was not given a proper Christian burial and who has been made to linger. Ravens are adaptable. They have empathy. They remember faces. They can be scavengers, but they can be predators, too: hunting eggs and chicks, and swarming them in a way so that their parents cannot mount a proper defense. Ravens too have few natural predators—humans being their greatest foe in this regard. When they gather together, they are sometimes called an “unkindness” or a “conspiracy.”
They are, simply put, not fools.
And so this raven, not a fool, has long stayed away from the dead place at the center of its territory. It does not know what this place is, but it knows that it is wrong, that it is off, and so it and its mate and its fellow ravens do not go there. They remember this.
But then, like that, in the time it would take for the bird to open its beak and snap it shut—clack!—the raven is lost within itself.
The bird is pushed out of its considerable mind.
(Considerable for a bird, anyhow.)
And a new mind replaces it.
This mind is not that of another raven, no—though this new mind thinks like a raven in many ways, and there is a kinship there in its brutal, feral intelligence and its predatory ardor. And in this, the transition from one mind to the next is easy. The raven has lost control of itself.
Its wings extend. It leaps off its branch and takes flight.
And it flies toward the dead place, even though it knows in the deep of its mind, in the back of its consciousness, that one should never go to the dead place, presumably because—
Well, that is where you die.
Through the dark it soars, a night-black bird on the night-black sky. It flies over dead trees and dry scrub. It flies over bent signs and a wrecked truck. It flies over old, blood-soaked ground—the blood is mostly long gone, but there has been enough of it spilled in this place that the bird knows it’s there, layers of it under the dirt and the stone. This place has seen blood for longer than humans have been here. It has long been a place where beasts tear apart other beasts. Where their hungers are paramount. That is bad for many beasts. But for ravens, it’s opportunity. (As long as they stay away from the dead place, of course.)
Soon, the raven hears the cries. People. It knows to be wary, but interested—humans kill ravens, sometimes, but people are useful to ravens, too. Just as a raven might use a twig as a tool to get at ants, a raven is happy to use humans as a tool, too. Humans hunt. They hit animals with their cars. They litter. They kill one another. And when they do, ravens will be there.
Ready to eat.
Now, though, the bird feels fear, but it can do nothing to assuage it. It cannot stop what it is. It cannot stop where it’s going. It is going to the dead place. And soon the sounds of screams and the gabbled words of humans are given shape and form to the noise—
It flies lower, toward them. Toward the woman with the dyed-red hair on the ground, her eyes rolled back in her head. Toward the strange man who looks less like a man and more like a human-shaped termite mound. Toward the other woman with the broken-glass face.
But it’s toward something else, too.
The raven cannot see it, but it can feel it. A presence. An embodiment of the dead place. This invisible thing is very, very mad. It hums in the air like a swarm of locusts. It carries with it the torment and anarchy of a windstorm whirling about: worse, a tornado, a hurricane.
The raven tries very hard to reclaim itself.
But it cannot. Its destiny is, at least temporarily, writ.
It flies. It lands on a pipe.
And something fixes its feet there, as if they are stuck to the pipe with little nails. It cannot move. It cannot cry out.
Something is coming.
This is the end, the raven knows.
But the end of what?
Itself, or something greater?
Something stranger?
SEVENTY-FIVE
SLIPPING
Miriam is within the raven now. She found the bird and she brought it. It took all of her concentration to bring it and keep it, because through the bird she can hear and see all of what’s transpiring. She knows that she is flat on her back, and that she cannot move. She knows that the Trespasser—which the bird cannot see but can sense—has left Miriam and is now over Gabby, its tendrils of shadow pushing her to the ground, probing for a way in. She knows that Lukauskis stands there, waving his arms about like he’s trying to command the wind—like he’s performing a madman’s variant of tai chi, stirring spiritual currents that only he can see. Gabby screams. Lukauskis bellows. Miriam cries out too, but it’s not her human body that makes the sound but rather the raven’s: it
shrieks and shrieks and shrieks, wings flapping in panic and fear, because nothing is happening, nothing is working, and she knows full well that the Trespasser is taking Gabby—
Then, a feeling like a thunderclap, but without sound. A vast pressure change closes in on her. Gabby lurches upward, standing, gasping. Lukauskis staggers forward, nearly falling, as if he had been leaning on a chair that was yanked from his grip. And Miriam, inside the bird, feels a great darkness encroaching upon her. The mind of the bird gets paradoxically larger and smaller at the same time: as if Miriam is trapped in a vacuum-sealed plastic bag even as the world explodes around her in a great and terrible void. She manages one last look at herself there in the world, in the dead place—her back stiffens and arches into an arthritic bridge, and blood erupts from her nose like ketchup from a stepped-on sauce packet.
And then she can no longer see herself. She’s gasping and—
SEVENTY-SIX
WAKING UP
She flails at herself in the hospital bed. Crying, bleating, Miriam rips the tubes out of her nose. She grabs the IV out of her arm—blood squirts across the white wall in a little red line, as if drawn by a leaky pen. Tearing off the little discs from her chest makes all the machines around her beep and shriek, and then she staggers off the hospital bed, but her legs can’t support her, so she goes down to the ground, onto her knees, hard.
Her hands move to her middle.
Her thin, too-thin, middle.
The baby is gone.
It’s soft and sunken, her belly. She cries out. “No, no, no. Not again, not again.” Her lips are dry and her tongue slides across them, and it’s like licking sandpaper. Even her teeth feel sandy and desiccated. She tries to stand again to find someone, anyone, but then her legs are wobbly, and her body feels like it’s made of rubber bands. . . .
Darkness grabs hold of Miriam once more and embraces her.
PART TEN
* * *
THE BIRD OF PARADISE
SEVENTY-SEVEN
ONE BROKEN COOKIE
This isn’t real.
This isn’t real.
This isn’t real.
As they talk to her, that’s what Miriam tells herself again and again, over and over, repeated so often inside the chamber of her own mind that it begins to lose meaning. Three words that lose sense and shape. More noise than anything. Comforting, buzzing noise.
The doctor, a round man with hair that seems to have left the top of his head and migrated to his eyebrows and the inside of his nose, is explaining the coma to her and saying, “Waking up from a coma is not an immediate thing, Miriam. The movies always show someone waking right up out of that inert state, but it’s not always like that. Over the last week, you moved into a minimally conscious state. Your body responded to pain stimuli. Your eyes began to move behind their lids. But you weren’t yet conscious. You scored well on the coma scale, so we could see that there was a good chance you’d recover, and you have.”
“This isn’t real,” she says, mirroring the phrase going around and around inside her head. It sounds just as gobbledygook out loud as the thought does, but she says it anyway.
Her mother, sitting on the other side of the bed, recoils just slightly—a small, strange moment of revulsion. Like she doesn’t recognize her daughter, or that she fears she’s lost her mind. “Doctor, that can’t be right,” Evelyn Black says. “She can’t mean that.”
The doctor now pivots and speaks more to Evelyn than to Miriam.
“It’s somewhat normal,” he says, his voice with a dog’s gruffness, ruff-ruff, “that a coma patient awakens with an uncertain sense of reality. They were in a vegetative dream state. The trauma suffered—”
“When she was attacked,” Evelyn says, coldly.
“Yes, yes,” he says, still not looking at Miriam, not talking to her, either. “That attack caused her body and brain some considerable damage. There’s the Asherman’s Syndrome, like we talked about. And of course the brain bleeding. As I said, the damage was considerable, enough to put her in that coma for three weeks, and it will be difficult to know how considerable until her body and mind set into . . . more predictable, stable rhythms. The good news is, she’s awake—”
“I’m awake; you can talk to me,” Miriam says in a small voice. All of this feels intimately familiar. This has happened before.
This was real.
But it isn’t real now.
He turns halfway toward her. “You’re awake now, Miriam, and we’ll get you right as rain. Some light physical therapy will get you back on your feet, and with a psychological evaluation and subsequent sessions, you’ll be back to work at school and . . .” And he goes on and on and Miriam tunes out, withdrawing into herself, reaching for Gabby, for Louis, for someone or anyone who can pull her out of this nightmare. Eventually, the doctor says, “You were one broken cookie, young lady, but we will make you whole again. Don’t you trouble yourself. The worst of it has passed.”
SEVENTY-EIGHT
THE WORST IS YET TO COME
The therapist is a woman with small shoulders and big hips, stuffed into an itchy-looking sweater. She wears a dour face. Her eyeglasses are too big, like she’s staring through a pair of Sherlock Holmes magnifying glasses.
“It’s normal to feel this way,” she says to Miriam, sitting across from her. Miriam is curled up into herself in a large, brown leather chair. Her arms are around her knees, hugging them tight to her chest.
“I don’t believe that I’m really here.”
“That dissociative feeling is normal and should pass.”
“It’s not a feeling,” Miriam growls. “I’m certain of it.”
The therapist—Dr. Sharpe-with-an-e—asks, “Miriam, do you know how I die?”
She hesitates.
“No,” she says, finally.
It’s not a lie.
“In your fantasy—”
“Trust me, it wasn’t a fantasy.”
“In your vision,” Sharpe says, forcing a butt-pucker smile, “you had that power, didn’t you? See how people were going to die?”
“I did.”
“You can see now though that this was just a . . . delusion, right? A power fantasy, of sorts. Let’s lay it all out there. You were pregnant. You . . . lost your boyfriend, the father of that child, to suicide. Then his mother attacks you in a bathroom in an act of brutal, irrational anger, and that causes you to miscarry the child and end up in a weeks-long coma. In your head, while vegetative, you create a world where you have the ability to stop death, but only by expressing your rage at that death—and by causing another. In this world, you’re very special. You’re at the center of things. You were— How did you describe it? ‘Breaking the pattern.’ Sometimes, the power you have is a gift, other times a curse, but then how do you get past that power, Miriam? Tell me.”
“I don’t have to tell you shit.”
“Would you, please? For me?”
She sighs. “Fine. I . . . got pregnant again. And having the baby would fix me. It would end the curse. It would make things normal again.”
There.
She said it.
The therapist watches her. That fake-ass tight-ass little smile of hers doesn’t waver. “Now that you’ve said that out loud, doesn’t it feel a little . . . convenient? A little pat? Isn’t it possible that it sounds like a story that your mind made up to . . . soften the blow?”
“No,” Miriam lies. She unfolds herself out of the chair and then stands up to thrust a finger in the therapist’s face. “Explain this, though: I knew that what I had was called Asherman’s Syndrome. I’d never heard that before that night in the hospital. But I already knew it. When the doctor told me, said those words, I’d already experienced that—years, years ago.”
“You likely overheard him explaining it to your mother.”
“Yeah, but—”
And then Miriam sits back down.
She feels suddenly like a doll with the stuffing ripped out.
Her memory of that day has the doctor talking to her mother, and not to her. Almost like she wasn’t in the room. Almost like you were only partially conscious and they were talking over you.
Sharpe keeps twisting the knife. “And, Miriam, some of the names you mention . . . Louis, Harriet, Gabby, these . . . I checked. These are the names of your nurses. Louis in particular was there fairly often, though he was recently transferred to another floor.”
Miriam blinks away tears. “So, this is just some Wizard of Oz shit.”
“I wouldn’t put it so glibly. You experienced something most never do—a comatose period where your mind concocted a protective fantasy, and now you are free from both the coma and the need for this fantasy. I urge you to view it that way. In your dream, you sought normalcy, but now . . . here it is. Here is your chance.”
Now she’s actually crying. She can’t help it. She sniffs, wipes tears with the back of her hand. “You don’t get it. I had people. I loved people. I had a daughter coming and . . . I was going to save her, I was going . . .”
The way Sharpe hands her the tissue box feels very condescending. Less like Here, you need this, and more like Here, clean yourself up. Like a prostitute handing her john a moist towelette. Do I really know what that means? A prostitute? A john? Did I really live that life on the street, on the highway, or is that really part of my delusion?
“You can love people again,” Sharpe says.
“I don’t know.”
“Our time is up.”
SEVENTY-NINE
BREAKING THE PATTERN
Some nights, she sleeps like she’s back in the coma. Other nights, she stays awake all night, suffocated by the constricting snake of her bedsheets, tossing and rolling and sometimes sobbing so hard, her pillow is still wet by morning. Her mother, too, treats her inconsistently: sometimes, she acts like Miriam is a little porcelain doll, capable of breaking at the slightest provocation. Other times, she treats her daughter like a stranger, like she’s nothing more than a ghost haunting the halls of the old house, irritating her mother with her spectral bumps and phantasmal thumps.