by Opal Edgar
“Please tell me it’s not me who smells like that,” I whispered.
“Which part of silence don’t you understand?” Baas growled.
Too late. A crack of glass resounded in the air, making us shake in lapping waves. The cold cascaded over us in one single freezing tide. We did not move, we couldn’t: we were frozen as we floated. We were burning, contorting and yelling.
“What’s going on?” I screamed.
A sharp point dug through us. We shattered, like a broken stalactite hitting the floor. It hurt. It hurt so much! Every part of my body was ripped apart, and sizzled, from the skin under my toenails to the bones at my back of the head. Everything vibrated and refused to come back together – my body expanded and collapsed. I screamed like I would never stop. Somewhere, I could hear Baas scream too. I squirmed in the putrid stench of the castle. My body was back but it spasmed uncontrollably like a broken puppet.
Standing tall in a black shroud, the empty orbits of a skull stared down at us. The Grim Reaper! His scythe gleamed like the tail of a comet. Death held it high above his head: poised to cut me in two. And still Baas screamed.
“I can’t see!” He clawed at his face, clutching his eyes under his sunglasses. “My eyes! Something’s wrong with my eyes!”
The scythe went down as I rolled away. My nose touched the floor and a new scream escaped me. We were on a pile of remains, people that had been like us moments before: full of life, or death, whatever they called it here, but now they were just hundreds of corpses. The smell stung my nose. The metal of the scythe rang by my ear. It dug into an armoured leg as if it was butter, bit the ground and stuck.
I crawled on hands and knees, forcing my twitching muscles to work. The room spun. All round us, in intricate frames, were long mirrors starting from the floor and reaching to the sky.
“How the hell did you ever intend to carry one of those away!” I yelled.
Suddenly a figure I knew too well appeared in one mirror: my mother. I gaped. She stood huddled at the top of the corpse pile. I ran to her and bumped into the glass. She wasn’t there, not really, not in the flesh: this just was an illusion. I turned round, and sure enough there was only the Grim Reaper.
“Baas, get up! I need you!”
I jumped as the scythe dislodged itself with a thud. The Grim Reaper leered. My mother appeared in the mirror behind him. She looked up. She was 19, not like I knew her now. She opened her mouth and I was hypnotised.
“I should never have had you,” she said. “Your father and I didn’t love each other. You were part of the regime's program. Your own grandparents hated you. They only agreed to the courtship because they would have been sent to a work camp if they kept interfering. I was scared and naive. Your father was handsome and nice to me. But it was just an act. You’re like him. With no love in you. No kindness. No goodness. Deep down you’re a fiend.”
I dropped down on my knees. A sob growing in my throat, trying to burst out.
“It’s mind games, Tosho, don’t bloody listen to this pile of pig fart!” Baas yelled.
I screamed.
This wasn’t real! I was here for Elise. We had to save her! She was real, and she was in trouble because of me! I owed her! I had to save her! I shook my head and backed away in time. The Grim Reaper was way too close.
“Thieves!” the Grim Reaper cried.
His voice was otherworldly, so deep it rattled the stomach and echoed in the walls. The only break from the mirrors was a double door. But to get to it I had to ram the Grim Reaper down, he was exactly between us and the exit.
“We need it to save someone, please, you have to understand! They’re going to hurt her,” I said.
I felt ridiculous pleading with Death, over the still bodies of hundreds. What did he care about saving anyone? His scythe grazed my shoulder as I dodged his sudden flying attack.
“Baas!” I yelled.
“Just find the mirror already! I can’t see!” he yelled back.
I needed a shield, or a weapon. I glanced quickly down. There were so many things shrouding the floor amongst the bodies, I was bound to pick up something useful.
“Tosho,” my mother called from within the mirrors.
She was in all of them now. I avoided looking. My eyes stayed on the Grim Reaper. We circled each other. I rolled away from Death’s swing, grabbing a barely knocked helmet. It might not protect me much, considering how easily the scythe had dug through the armour, but I felt less vulnerable with it on.
“Tosho,” my fake mother insisted, “you killed your grandparents. Because of you they were targeted as Nazi sympathisers.”
The shot rang in my mind again. Or did it play out in the mirrors too? I shivered like I had a fever.
Focus.
I was here for Elise. She trusted me. She did not hate me. She believed I wasn’t a threat to all the ones she protected. She believed I was worth the trouble. She lost her world because of me and yet she’d stuck by my side. I gritted my teeth.
“I am not responsible for all the evil in the world!” I screamed. “I’m doing my best!”
My mother’s image vanished. Leaving me trembling in front of all the mirrors. I caught sight of my reflection for the first time and froze. Even my grandfather limping into the frame couldn’t grab my attention. My eyes! They were brown and flashed like a cat’s in the night. Those weren’t mine.
“Baas! I’ve got your eyes! There’s no windows in here, but I can see! I’ve got your vampire eyes! You must have mine, that’s why you can’t see anymore.”
He dropped his hands from his face and my baby blues stared back, open wide but blind as a bat in the darkness. They looked so strange in someone else’s face. My grandfather trod towards him, his boots disproportionately large and his face a cruel snarl.
“No one would have noticed if we’d drowned you, Theodore,” he said. “It would have been better for everybody.”
I covered my ears, but it was no use. The room broke out in images of my grandfather laughing at the corpses on the ground. My mother working and working, and crying and cleaning, and sewing and cooking, and cleaning some more. In every corner she was trying to order the corpses in neat stacks, or mopping the floor, or patching their ripped clothes. It was torture. And still the Grim Reaper flew at me. I dodged, but I was too distracted: I almost hadn’t gotten away in time.
I gritted my teeth. Come on. This was all for Elise. In moments we’d have the power to free her! I could take this. We were so close.
“Not having eyes might be to our advantage,” Baas said, slowly getting up.
My grandmother appeared. She clutched her stomach and fell, again and again, everywhere, adding her corpse to each pile of dead. I tried to tear my eyes away. She wasn’t really in the room, she wasn’t really on the floor. That wasn't her hand hanging down. She was only in the mirrors. I needed to act. I grabbed the first thing that fell under my grappling hand. The steel was cold and heavy. A great hammer swung forth. The irony of me stumbling on barbarian arsenal wasn’t lost. I yielded it above my head just in time. It shook as the scythe hit the metal handle, but my new found weapon didn’t shatter. My bones vibrated with the shock.
“His power needs sight! As long as I can’t see, he can’t call up the memories he stole from me!” Baas yelled triumphantly. “Those are all yours. Let me handle the Reaper – go touch the mirrors!”
“What do you mean?”
Suddenly, Baas was a thick smoke spiralling towards Death. He didn’t need any eyes for that. The Grim Reaper turned to him, realising Baas wasn’t harmless anymore. Death dodged the drill-shaped smoke and swung his scythe at it. Without the burden of my inexperience wrapped within him, Baas was a deadly weapon in his own right.
“One of the mirrors is a soul sucker. As soon as your soul is gone, you’ll be a spirit! Hurry!” Baas whispered in his vapour form.
I dropped the hammer.
Baas’s plan dawned on me.
He’d never intended for me to
finish my mission. What was it that Kemsit had told me already? That a spirit was a body, mind and soul all merged into one. Bartholomew had said that I should have turned into a spirit as soon as I died, but it hadn’t worked for some mysterious reason. Probably because my soul was a spirit already. Maybe I really could turn into a spirit if Merlin wasn’t inside of me. Maybe that was the answer to being my own person ... I walked to the mirror wall, dazed.
“But what about Merlin?” I asked. “If he gets sucked into the mirror, what happens to him? Can he get out of it?”
What was I going to do?
Chapter 19
Soul Search
Baas had no patience for my ethical dilemma: sacrifice myself to save Elise, or stay useless to do right by Merlin.
“Merlin doesn’t deserve out!” he panted, as he dodged the scythe.
I turned towards them. The Grim Reaper and Baas were locked in battle. Death had forgotten about me, so focused he was on his adversary. They were almost evenly matched.
And I wanted to help. But I couldn’t. How could I save one person by sacrificing another? No matter how much I loved Elise: more than … than most people really.
“Baas, I can’t do that. It’s wrong.”
Baas froze, the anger turning him back into human shape. The Grim Reaper gained all the advantage he needed. His arm came down. The scythe was neatly angled to decapitate the vampire. I rushed forth, screaming. I leaped, hands forwards, placing myself in the path of the famously deadly weapon. It was like watching a film one frame at a time. The curved metal gleamed as my hands, wrists, elbows and shoulders slid past the axis of the blade. It came down to chop me through the hips. It bit through the fabric of my clothes.
I screamed.
The Reaper stopped. The scythe rang out and twisted round, propelled backwards by an explosion of electric blue light. Pain seared my eyeballs. The Grim Reaper flew away.
For the briefest of instants the mirrors flashed images too fast for me to understand. Starved, half-naked people shuffled, wrists and ankles tied up with ropes. They were all of African descent. They walked on the piles of corpses in the room, prodded by white men holding whips and hooks. Down from the ceiling hung thousands of slaves: their backs lacerated and their eyes glassy and dead. Those weren’t my memories. A dark man wearing makeup smiled at Baas, extending his hand out, “A beautiful Mulatto like you: you’re expensive merchandise, boy. I’ll teach you ...” Baas yelled and backed away.
Immediately the light dimmed, and the pictures vanished. Through the frayed fabric of my trousers, the Nazar evil eye amulet winked at me. Baas didn’t lose a second of his regained advantage. Death struggled on hands and knees, dazed. Baas, powered by more anger than ever, leaped, transforming back to mist in mid-air.
The Reaper reached for his scythe, but it was too far away. Baas collided with him. They toppled backwards, the Grim Reaper flapping. Baas crawled all over Death’s face and seeped into his empty eye sockets, nose and gaping jaw. Death thrashed, choked, ripped at his robes … and then dropped his struggling skeletal hands. Rendered statue-like he dropped to the floor to join the other corpses. Baas swirled back out and into human form.
Had we gotten rid of Death for real?
“We should thank your breathing friend for his present,” Baas said in the stunned silence.
The mirrors had gone back to only reflecting what was in the room. I could almost breathe again … if I’d wanted a nose full of the stink.
“Send Sedan a blue denim jacket when you’re in the living’s world, I don’t think I can go back,” I said, showing my Oracle blister in the palm of my hand.
But then I remembered that Baas couldn’t see it in the dark. I lowered my hand again. Death wasn’t moving, but it felt surreal, like he would grab our heels any at moment.
“Did you reincarnate him?” I asked.
“Just knocked him out,” Baas said, turning to my voice.
Baas held his head slightly to the side: concentrating on the sounds round him. His nostrils flared a little, trying to navigate through scent too.
“He’s much more powerful than me, I don’t know how long he’ll stay that way. I couldn’t reincarnate him if I wanted … not without the mirror. And now we’re so close we might as well do it.” He smiled.
It wasn’t a nice smile. It was an angry slash of teeth that said he would stick the Reaper in a grinder if he could. I shuffled uncomfortably.
“What does the mirror do, exactly,” I asked.
“Thundering sunken headed skunk! What don’t you get? If you touch the mirror it takes in your soul. That revolting bone-sack’s been feeding on the souls he captured with it, drawing his power from that. He’s a menace like all of his power thieving kind.”
“So there is a way to get the souls out,” I said, waiting for confirmation.
“Sure, there’s always a way.” Baas shrugged.
“Okay, they’re not trapped,” I said, feeling like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
I placed my hand on the first mirror. My reflection was entirely foreign. Those deep brown eyes looking back at me were full of things I’d never experienced. Lil’Mon’s tattoos crawled down my neck and disappeared into my ragged suit … and that suit was so unlike anything I owned.
“You’re not moving!” Baas complained. “The Grim Reaper will awaken by the time you go a quarter of the way round the room!”
I turned to see him pulling on the arm of Death. He hoisted him over his shoulder. I ran at them and took the other arm. The Grim Reaper hung between us, head lolling down.
“I thought vampires had super strength or something,” I said.
“Keep your thoughts to yourself,” Baas growled. “And continue going round the room.”
I let go, curious to see what Baas was doing. He walked in the opposite direction from me. Baas huffed under the weight of Death, but held the skeletal hand up and grazed the surface of each mirror with it. I trailed my hand on the mirrors one by one too, getting further and further from him. Nothing, nothing, nothing … Baas’s steps were careful, toes extended to feel any obstacle in his way. We passed the halfway point, now walking back towards each other.
“I’m pretty sure getting rid of Death permanently, as horrible as he is, might not be such a great idea. Didn’t you see the movie? It was bad enough when he took a holiday …” I mumbled.
Baas grimaced at me, disbelieving. “He’s not THE Grim Reaper, fool! It’s just exaggerations: stories and misinterpretations spread by living witnesses when that maniac was still allowed to roam free. He did spread plagues all through the dark ages, but people will still die if he’s not here to cut their souls out of their bodies. In fact, he’s been formally shunned from the living world for a good 400 years, and, hey, news flash, humans are still dropping like flies and finding new ways to torture themselves out of existence. Death is just one of the reasons we need the Oracle to protect the living from the dead. And, sincerely, the dead could also do with protection from him. A permanent one,” he pointedly said.
Suddenly Baas’s mirror clouded up. From within the depth of its stormy sky, a full mouth with red lips sprang forth. It kissed the glass where the palm of the Grim Reaper lay. A loud sucking noise rang out. After everything, this was too much: I gagged.
Death woke up screaming. He body thrashed, and the slap sent Baas flying across the room. I hurried forth. But no one needed me. It was too late for the Grim Reaper. The mirror bit down on his fingers. It had long dagger teeth that trapped the cracking knuckles. The more he struggled and pulled, the more the mouth fought back, swallowing his hand, chomping down on his wrist.
“You call us the thieves, and believe yourselves superior to us just because you follow the masses, but look at what you are doing!” the Grim Reaper uttered with the last of his strength. “Stripping a man from his soul! How are you better than us? Your actions are what define you. This will haunt you!”
I shuddered. “We are nothing like you. You fee
d from souls, making people disappear for real, until nothing of them has a chance to become good. We are fighting to save someone. And we’re going to free you, so you can have another chance to become a better person.”
He laughed. “Despite all your righteousness, you won’t resist the temptation. I see it: the seed of violence.”
I shook my head with horror as I backed away. He was wrong!
The last of him drained away. There was no other word to describe it. The gleam disappeared from his bones, his shroud and his black orbits. Suddenly, there was nothing to hold him together anymore. He fell in a heap of bones, his skull rolling until it hit a shield.
A rumbling thunder broke out and the walls shook. Lightning strikes flashed across the room, moving from one mirror’s reflection to the next. The light hurt my eyes. The mirrors quivered dangerously. I protected my head with my arms.
“Baas?”
He gathered on all fours, and, thanks to the lights flashing in the mirrors, he saw enough of the room to be worried.
“Hurry,” Baas said, struggling to his feet.
It was my turn to touch that foul thing of a mirror. I hoped Baas was right. This room was full of people that had lost their souls, and it seemed they did not survive the experience. Maybe I was different, but I really didn’t feel very exceptional right now. In fact, it felt like a big gamble. Either I’d be a great powerful spirit in a few seconds … or I’d disappear forever and Merlin would be trapped for no reason.
The surface of the mirror trembled. Baas pushed his sunglasses into my hands. I hadn’t realised, but I’d clasped my fists behind my back, unconsciously keeping them the furthest I could from the mirror. I pressed the sunglasses to my face. I needed them now because my eyes were so sensitive.
“Don’t think,” Baas said.
I tried to forget about the corpses littering the floor, and that in seconds I might be one of them. I extended my fingers, millimetres from the glass. But the ground shook so hard it sent the two of us towards the middle of the room.