by Opal Edgar
“Why did you follow me? You have to go back to your home, to Elise, to—”
But she cut into my sentence.
“Poo, I can go home any old time I want. This is more fun! And as long as you can’t find me, I’m staying with you!”
“It’s not safe! You heard the crazy couple!” I said.
“Fine! Be by yourself, dumb-dumb.”
I still couldn't see Kemsit anywhere, but I couldn’t hear her anymore either. Making her angry enough to leave was perfect. I had some kind of power thief target on my back and was obviously walking towards some kind of doom, I certainly wasn’t dragging her into that.
I looked both ways down the corridor. Which one was darker?
Both ends shone brightly. Suddenly, the ceiling light turned off at the furthest end of the corridor to my left. The darkness was like a monster: it swallowed the light faster and faster, rushing in my direction. Everything lost its colour. It seeped out like juice, leaving a black husk behind. I stood, transfixed. Dark, dark, dark … and stop. I had one foot in the glare, the other in the shadow. It divided my body neatly in two, right through the middle.
I wasn’t going on a long walk after all.
The first step I took made no sound on the black floor, as if that too was eaten by the darkness. My body rocked inside the shadow. It felt cold and wet like the picture I’d walked through to get into Elise’s world. I guess this was exactly the same thing. Some kind of door to the Oracle’s world had opened up for me. I shivered when I lost touch with the light. Everything was so dark here that I could barely see my hands anymore. The doors, the carpets and even the objects were gone. There were no obstructions anymore, just a ledge I could barely put a foot on. Maybe there was more than a ledge, but that’s all I could see. I didn’t dare stray. A gurgling sound in the background sent chills up my spine. With only one place to go, I set one foot in front of the other and repeated the process.
My eyes adapted to the dimness. Round the ledge was lapping ink. Ghostly vapours flickered inside. They rushed too fast to catch what they were exactly, but somehow they reminded me of silent movie frames. Except the black and white pictures were distorted. Maybe it was a cemetery for dead ideas. I shuddered, unsettled.
Move. Faster. Get to the end, I urged myself.
In the distance was a mountain made of intertwined ruby tree trunks. That’s where I was getting answers. The peak got closer. I was wrong about the trees, it was coral. The ledge opened onto a platform made by the coral. The whole surface was broken by delicate polyps, tentacles fluttering like little hands. The red was a shocking contrast to the shadowy background. My skin broke into goose-bumps. When I took my first step onto the platform, the little creatures retracted into their shells. I stilled. Waited. And they tentatively poked back out.
There was a cave in the flank of the coral mountain. In front of the opening rested a massive blob of cream clay. I sidestepped it, but it stretched like plasticine, creating a wall, blocking me. I tried the other way, just to make sure, and it did its stretching thing once more, colliding with the mountain side, blocking every centimetre of the entrance.
“Well that’s interesting,” I said, to no one in particular.
I poked the blob tentatively. It wasn’t malleable or warm or creepy. It actually felt like solid stone. It would have been a lovely material for a house. I passed my hand over the smooth surface and stepped backwards. My hand left a mark! It looked like I had dipped my digits in rich slate coloured paint and swiped it across the surface. It was so cool! I rubbed my other hand against the clay wall.
“When you’re finished playing, dumb-dumb, give me a shout. I’m taking a nap.”
I jumped with fright.
“Kemsit! What the hell are you still doing here? And don’t call me that!”
“Come on, did you really think I’d leave when you’re just about to have fun? No way!”
Like a fool, I looked round once more, but she still wasn’t anywhere in sight.
“I’m just damned tired of hearing voices!” I exclaimed. “Go back home, Kemsit, I’m no good for you.”
“You go back home, dumb-dumb. You need me more than I need you. You don’t even know what to do. Right now, I’m the master of all knowledge, and you’re my puppet.”
I paused.
She was right. I had no idea what half the things I was looking at were. I had no idea what the rules were. She, as hard as it was to believe, had been dead for thousands of years, if my knowledge of ancient Egypt was remotely correct. Obviously, she knew loads more than I did.
“Fine. Come with me, but any sign of danger you flee, okay?” I said, not sure where to look, so I looked up. “How do I get through that wall?”
“It’s a golem, dumb-dumb, not a wall. Just ask it to go away!”
The blob of clay opened two slit eyes as it heard the word golem and stared down at me.
“Holy pig on a spit! It’s alive!” I exclaimed.
“No way, it’s super dead!” Kemsit laughed.
So that was a golem. He’d taken back his blob shape, kept the eyes, but still had no arms or legs or any features.
“Hello,” I said. “I hadn’t seen you up there. I’m new. I was wondering if—”
“Don’t talk to it!” Kemsit said. “It’s a golem! It can’t think. Just tell it what to do.”
“Oh, a golem isn’t a person?” I asked.
“Wow, you really know nothing, dumb-dumb. Golems are the deceased that broke the only rule: no interaction with the living! If any dead person messes up in the livings’ world, they get tracked down by the Oracle and he strips them of their mind. What you get is a Golem.”
I shivered involuntarily. Hadn’t the spirits threatened me with the golem squad during my evaluation? I’d almost been turned into one of those, and I’d never suspected a thing.
“And I’m going to see a psycho who turns people into thoughtless blobs?”
“Yep,” said Kemsit.
“Why am I doing that?”
“Because you’ve got a clue in your pocket that might tell you why power thieves tried to eat you. And also because you can ask the Oracle any other two questions and he’ll answer, whatever they are. He’s THE Oracle.”
I looked the golem square in the eyes. So there was one thing you weren’t allowed to do after all. Eating other dead people was okay. Playing round with souls was just peachy. But going back to the living world was a mindless sentence?
I shuffled my feet uneasily. The golem didn’t blink. He just sat there, motionless. He … wait, maybe this was a girl golem. How would I know? She? It? ... What exactly had it done to deserve this? There was a soul stuck in all that clay mess, trapped in there, but without a will of its own, without thoughts ... The Oracle was creating automatons out of real people. That was terrifying.
I held my breath.
“Get in already!” Kemsit exclaimed, startling me out of my thoughts. “Out of the way, golem, we’re here to see the Oracle!”
The clay blob slid out of the passage, like a giant snail. I expected a trail of slime to linger behind, but no. A hot-pink hallway opened before us. It was coral in there too, shaped in a curved arch. I’d never seen anything so beautiful. Habitations were made out of such strange materials here. No one needed an apprentice construction worker like me.
I hesitated on the edge of the cave. Did I really want to see someone who sounded like a judge gone overboard? … And people with power going overboard were kind of the scourge of where I came from. This didn’t feel right, like turning to the bad guy for help. That couldn’t be a good path. There had to be another way to get answers.
“Move!” exhorted Kemsit.
She surprised me into taking a step forwards. Only then did I remember it wasn’t what I wanted to do at all! This wasn’t right. What kind of person did it make me to be asking for help from someone who created brainless slaves?
“Kemsit, this is wrong.”
I turned back and knocked
into solid coral. The exit was gone. I knew this was a bad idea.
Chapter 11
The Chambers of the Oracle
Golems appeared by my side, one on each arm. I waited a second for them to grab and drag me kicking and screaming to the Oracle. Sorry, Merlin, I really never thought it would get to this. I messed up your afterlife. You’re stuck in here to be doomed with me.
But nothing happened.
“Don’t be scared, I’ll protect you,” Kemsit said. “Lead us to the Oracle!”
I could stand round grumbling for all eternity, or I could walk on and face my future like a man. The latter sounded better, so I followed the two golems. We arrived in a huge yellow coral room with absolutely nothing in it, except for a circular hole in the middle of the floor, the kind you see Inuit’s make in the ice for fishing. It was tiny for such a huge space. The golems squeezed round the hole and dripped down into it.
“Ugh. What are they doing? Is that the sewers?” I asked.
“They’re calling the Oracle. Don’t say that to his face,” Kemsit replied.
“He lives down there?”
I peered over the edge of the hole. Clouds looked back at me. I lowered onto my knees to make sense of it. Very far below were green pastures and plains and farms and orchards and a city. But it was far, so very, very far, down. I squinted. Those grey things might have been roofs. What was the Oracle doing in there? Parachuting? My head spun for a second. I swayed. How could we be in the sky? My legs went soft. I sat on my folded legs, right down on the floor. Kemsit shrieked.
I sprang back up, fully cured.
“Kemsit! What’s wrong?” I yelled.
“You sat on me, you big oaf!”
I looked down with alarm and she unrolled herself from my ankle. She was a great cobra, scaly and toothy with a flickering forked tongue. She’d been hidden by my trousers, wound over my sock and riding my shoe. I’d never even felt her there. Her face broke into an unlikely smile over her fangs. She slithered off onto the coral tiles.
The golems sloshed back into the coral room. Apprehension seized my chest. I looked down into the hole. A tiny orange dot appeared in the distance. It grew a little in the mist, very slowly. It was still very far away.
“Don’t stay out in the open!” I whispered furiously to Kemsit who was edging towards the clouds. “Get back in your hidey-hole!”
“No way, your trousers are itchy, dumb-dumb.”
“Stop calling me that! And get back into my trousers,” I said, as she sniggered. “That didn’t come out right. I meant get back round my sock, and don’t get any ideas about crawling any higher!”
Kemsit hissed a laugh, but did as I told her.
“And whatever happens: Don’t. Peep. A. Word. If it gets ugly, disappear. Go back to Elise’s and forget about me!” I added.
“Whatever.”
We already had a pretty good idea of what kind of psycho was surfing the clouds. The snakeskin touched me and I shivered uncontrollably. Those dry gripping muscles were repulsive. How insane was I to tell her to get back there. I jumped from one foot to the next, trying to shake the feeling away.
A cough cut into my dance. I looked up.
In front of me, right at eye level, floated a goldfish. How the hell had it gotten up there? Was that the Oracle’s pet? Was the Oracle coming? He had to be close because I’d heard the cough really distinctly. I got back down, carefully now that I knew where Kemsit was, and peered through the hole in the floor.
Someone coughed again. It came from above. I looked up. The fish looked down. Its protruding eyes goggled at me and its O-shaped mouth plopped away.
“Am I to wait all day until you get tired of the view?” he said.
I gaped.
“Well?” he insisted. “You called me, right? Is your face broken?”
I shook my brain back into thinking mode. This was so not what I’d imagined. How could that little tiny thing do anything scary? Really?
“Sorry,” I said. “You’re the Oracle?”
“That’s one hell of a concussion, Merlin,” the fish said.
I heard a tiny gasp from my ankle. Not sure whether the Oracle was dangerous yet, I drew my legs together sharply. I hoped Kemsit understood this meant to shut up.
“Wait a minute,” the fish said, frowning at me.
I had no idea fish had the muscles necessary to frown. This was so weird.
“Something’s wrong,” he said. “Is that a costume? Please tell me you haven’t gone skin-walker on me, Merlin.” The fish suddenly looked very worried.
“I’m not Merlin,” I finally said. “Well, I mean, he’s inside me somewhere, but I didn’t know that until I died. My name’s Tosho.”
“What a drag. I told him his whole being born again idea was a bad one. It’s not technically illegal, so I couldn’t stop him.” The Oracle-fish grabbed me by the ear and started to yell into it. “But I warned you not to do it! You hear me, you lumbering idiot! I told you not to do all those crazy things that go through your head! Now look at the trouble you’re in!”
“Hey!” I clapped my hand over my ear to protect it from another assault. “I’m sure he hears you just fine when you talk to me. Don’t do that again.”
“With the great big curse you’ve got hanging all over you, I’m not so sure he does,” the fish said, letting me take a few steps backwards.
“You see it!” I exclaimed.
“Sure, it’s huge. Done by a specialist’s hand. Yeah, definitely someone who does that all the time.”
“Well it was a power thief and they’ve been turned into a mermaid or moray-maid – I don’t know if there’s a difference. And they left that lying round.” I got the bottle of black liquid out of my pocket. “That’s the only clue I have to find out what they want from me. What is it?”
The fish nodded and swam towards my face, or maybe he flew, I wasn’t sure which word was appropriate for an out-of-water floating fish. He put out his fins for me to drop the bottle into. I hesitated for a moment, it looked too heavy for the little guy, but he was growing impatient. I let go, getting ready to catch them if they plummeted.
The Oracle-fish went down a few centimetres in the air. I knew it was too heavy! But he didn’t go any lower.
“Let’s see that.” He bumped his head against the vial and his eyes lit up.
And I don't mean it metaphorically. Light Beams shot out of his eyeballs and blasted the whole room with an eerie glow. It sent terrifying shadows reaching out to the top of the ceiling behind the golems As if they weren’t tall enough already. Surrounded by his clay giants, the Oracle spoke.
“It’s a door,” the torchlight fish said. “You should go through it for answers.”
“A door,” I gaped. “I don’t even know what’s on the other side!”
“Exactly.”
He gave the bottle back to me. His eyes were too bright to look at, so I kept mine averted. The bottle still didn’t look anything like a door.
“How do I use it?” I asked.
“No idea. I see end results, for the process you have to see a tech guy. I’ll be nice because you’re Merlin, so I won’t count that as a question. You still have two to go.”
I shook the black liquid in the bottle. This wasn’t much of a help if I couldn’t use it. I knew I shouldn’t have walked through the gate. I wasn’t going to get anything useful out of this, and I was losing my humanity fraternising with a villain. The golems stood like monstrous pillars in the corners of the room, waiting for orders. It made me so angry.
“Why do you turn people who want to talk to the living into Golems? I sure wish I could talk to my mum, and I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t … well, except you taking my mind away if I do. That’s the cruellest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.
The Oracle-fish’s mouth opened up into a great O. Was it a heart attack? But instead of yapping about a pain in his fin, he broke into the loudest laugh. His torch gaze jumped across the room, up and down, jigglin
g the shadows about. I was a real clown in the afterlife. His fins wrapped themselves round his belly and he spun upside down. We were treated to a light and music show. He whipped his eyes round with insistence.
“Imagine the chaos if every sociopath and broken hearted fool here were trying to breach the separation between the living and the dead! We can’t have that! People poking holes into the natural order of life and death, imagine! There used to be some paths people could take, but most of them are closed now, or strictly guarded. You have to have some mighty good reason to get a permit to go through. Any messing with that and … well, you understand that we have to strike enough fear in people to stop them from committing irreparable damage. Mindless existence is the harshest punishment we could think off. We can’t have some nut collecting the eyeballs of the living in a basket; or some vampire lord running free enthralling whole countries; or a psycho spirit claiming he’s a god, or son of a god or prophet, and force every living person into servitude. Imagine that!” the Oracle-fish said.
The image of a basket full of bloody eyeballs was enough. I looked from one golem to the next and broke out into a sweat, palate suddenly dry.
“No one is punished for sending a message to a loved one,” the fish said. “Well, not if they have a bloody good reason to do so and ask for the right permit. Let’s just say it’s not encouraged. You might get a nasty rap on your knuckles, and a few forever and ever psychological scars, but don’t worry, golem fate is reserved for very special cases,” he added.
“Well, what if there’s a mistake, what if you catch the wrong person, what if—”
“There’s no what if, I can read your mind easier than a trashy magazine.”
I stayed silent. Could it ever be right to take someone’s mind but leave them hanging there as slaves? I wasn’t sure what to think.
“So you’re saying you’re some kind of police. You’re a good guy ...”
“Is that your last question?” he asked.