by N. P. Martin
"It feels weird," Dalia said, her voice low as if she was afraid of disturbing the eerie silence that clung to the place.
As I looked around me, I noticed the Druid circle was still there, but all the stones appeared to be in place here. Not only that, they didn’t seem as weathered as they were in the Earth realm, as though they hadn’t long been put up. As I was walking out of the circle, I got the sense that something was behind me, and when I turned around, I saw a number of ghostly forms within the circle. People wearing whitish robes as they softly chanted in ancient Gaelic. "Druids," I whispered as I stood staring through the gaps in the stones. It wasn’t clear from looking if the Druids were really there, for their forms would often fade out and disappear, often being replaced by a completely different form that I somehow knew was from another time period.
"Remember what Davey said." Dalia was beside me, staring at the shifting figures in the circle. "This place holds memories of everything that has happened in these lands."
"They look so real."
"Maybe they are in some way."
A look of surprise came over me as one of the Druids turned slowly to stare at me. It was a tall man with a long white beard, an elder by the looks of him, his eyes gleaming with magic and knowledge. "Who are you that walks across the Glade of Giants at this late hour?" he asked in Gaelic.
I stared for a moment, not sure if I should answer, but deciding to anyway. "We are travelers, here to find somebody."
The Druid stared as others walked around him. "Tread carefully, travelers. Evil is always afoot here." Before he could say anything else, he faded away like a forgotten memory, only to be replaced by a completely different Druid.
"I don’t get it," I said to Dalia. "Are they actual spirits or just memories of a time gone by?"
Dalia shook her head and shrugged. "I don’t know, and something tells me it’s best not to try and understand this place. We might go mad trying."
I couldn’t help but agree with her as I turned away from the stone circle. "I think you’re right. Let’s go and get Amelia."
As Dalia nodded, we headed off in the direction of the Tasar house.
The mood that prevailed inside the Shadow was the same mood felt when you realize you’re totally lost. It recalled feelings of being a child and losing your parent’s hand in the grocery store and suddenly finding yourself unable to find the way back to your mother, your house or the exit. The shelves are stocked high with things you don’t understand: bright colors, dark shapes, and all the while strangers jostle past you, or look down at you with sudden and alarming scrutiny.
Strangers like the massive warrior man who suddenly leaned over a hedge to peer at us as we walked along a country lane that cut through the fields; fields that seemed to be playing host to a huge battle between the ancient native Irish and an army of Viking invaders. The warrior glared at us with blood and sweat dripping down his bearded face, his sword pointing in our direction. "Why aren’t you fighting?" he demanded to know as men roared and screamed in the background, the sound of swords clashing filling the air.
Dalia and I just stared back at the warrior, hardly knowing what to say. "We left our swords at home," Dalia said jokingly.
"Dalia!" I hissed as the warrior glared at us, his eyes seeming to burn inside his skull, delirious almost from all the violence.
Thankfully, the warrior didn’t get the chance to reprimand Dalia for her insolence, for an even bigger Viking came along and chopped off his head, picking the severed head up and allowing the blood from the neck to run all over his face. He then turned and roared at us before heading back into battle.
"Jesus, this place is mental," Dalia said.
She wasn’t wrong. The Shadow represented the world askew. Things that should be familiar—a tree in the field or constellations in the sky—seemed off somehow, as if one or two unseen details remained somehow wrong. Just as a baby without a belly button or a dog with black teeth, the Shadow wasn’t drastically different, but it was just different enough to feel amiss. It was an insane fear, a frightful almost-hallucination that was persistently unsettling. Everything that had ever happened in the area in the Earth realm, was represented in some form in the Shadow, but in a more twisted and often non-sensical way.
"It makes you wonder how worlds like this even come to exist," I said as we continued along the road, the battle still raging in the field to our right, and to our left, strange figures moved through a constantly shifting landscape, as if a myriad of time periods were all bleeding into one another, turning present reality into a total mish-mash of dead people and past events. "The universe never ceases to amaze me."
"You think we’ll end up somewhere like this when we die?" Dalia asked.
I shrugged. "Who knows. I don’t think we have to worry about that for a while yet anyway."
Dalia snorted. "Are you kidding? The way you’re going these days, you’re practically knocking on death’s door. I mean, look at where we are."
I smiled slightly and shook my head. She had a point, I guess.
After walking for another while, with strange people passing us by along the way—some of them saying incomprehensible stuff to us, others just ignoring us as if they couldn’t see us—the road we were on seemed to end abruptly as a field appeared in front of us. "Looks like we’re going cross country again," I said. As we entered the field, Dalia began to float above the grass again. "Maybe you should’ve brought your pink waterproof boots, the ones with the white spots."
"Funny," Dalia said, and then stopped abruptly. "Can you hear that?"
"Hear what?" I stoped and frowned, looking around but seeing no one.
"That voice…listen."
I strained my ears, which weren’t as sensitive as Dalia’s, until I was finally able to hear what she was talking about. There was indeed a whispering voice in the background, sounding as if it was coming from all directions at once. "What’s it saying?"
"My name."
As I listened harder, I soon realized the voice was saying more than her name. It seemed to be chastising her. "I’m the real Dalia," the voice was whispering. "I’m the only one that should exist. You don’t belong and you never have…"
"Dalia?" I looked across at her, but she was staring straight ahead, and when I looked in that direction, I noticed that a figure had appeared in the field about ten feet away. The person, whoever it was, seemed strangely familiar. It appeared to be a woman, dressed all in black, her face in shadow.
"I can’t believe it," Dalia whispered. "It’s…"
"You," I finished, suddenly realizing who the figure was. It was Dalia, or more accurately, her doppelgänger, the being created by Queen Hedrema to replace the real Dalia after she was taken to the Otherworld. This was the person who now lived Dalia’s former life, the one who had embedded herself into Dalia’s family as if she had been there all along.
But it couldn’t have been her, not really. This was…
"It’s just a manifestation," I said to Dalia. She carried a lot of unresolved feelings around her doppelgänger, and I know the loss of her former life still played on her mind a lot. The Numina in the Shadow had obviously reached into her mind, distilling the essential Essence there into what stood before us, which seemed to be a much darker version of the real doppelgänger.
"You should’ve stayed in the Otherworld where you belong," the doppelgänger said, stepping closer as she lifted her head to reveal her pale face, which seemed twisted with dark emotion. "But oh wait…you don’t belong there either, do you? You don’t belong anywhere, sister. You’re just a freak, as worthless as you were before you were taken by the Faeries."
"Shut up!" Dalia shouted as she moved forward suddenly. "Shut your filthy mouth!"
"You’re the filthy one," the doppelgänger said, a hint of glee now in her voice, and I soon realized why. She was feeding off Dalia’s emotions, gaining sustenance from her Essence. "You’re the filthy half human that no one wants, that no one cares about…that no
one sees."
"ARGHH!" Dalia suddenly screamed as she lashed out with her powers, the dark energy in her reaching out to grab her doppelgänger and lift her into the air, holding her there as ropes of darkness wrapped around her throat. "I’LL RIP YOU APART!"
The doppelgänger laughed then, a sound that echoed all around us. "Yes, feed me. Feed me!"
"D, put her down!" I said. "It’s just a spirit that’s using you to feed off."
The longer Dalia held onto the manifested spirit, the bigger it seemed to get, growing in size at an incredible rate, even with Dalia’s dark power wrapped all around her, which Dalia appeared to be squeezing her with, but to no real effect, except to transfer more Essence to the spirit. "I’ll crush you!"
But even as she said it, she seemed to have grown weak in a shockingly short space of time, and I realized with horror that the doppelgänger was draining Dalia of her life force. If she didn’t let go now, the spirit would kill her.
"D!" I shouted as I rushed over beside her. "That thing is killing you. Let go!"
But as weak as she was, Dalia was still in the grip of her emotions, no doubt stirred even further by the dark spirit. She was so focused on trying to kill the doppelgänger that she didn’t even realize that the doppelgänger was killing her instead.
No matter what I said, Dalia wasn’t listening, so I decided to act before she was drained and killed. Closing my eyes in concentration, I said the words to a Death Spell, a spell I had never used before in my life, simply because I had no need to, and also because it takes a good minute or two to actually recite, which in a pinch, you don’t normally have time to say. But in this instance, I was prepared to take the chance, as I wanted the spirit dealt with permanently. Thankfully, the spirit itself was so focused on draining Dalia that it never noticed what I was doing until it was too late. From what I had read and heard over the years, Death Spells can have vastly different effects according to the circumstances under which they were cast. In this instance, the spirit let out a high-pitched scream as it suddenly released itself from the grip of Dalia’s dark energy. As Dalia collapsed onto the damp grass, the spirit’s form seemed to contort and break apart as if some force were tearing it asunder from the inside. Then, as it continued to scream, it suddenly burst apart, its body exploding into a hundred pieces that thumped wetly onto the grass.
After standing in shock for a second, I rushed over to where Dalia lay. She was sitting up, though she seemed woozy. "What just happened?" she said.
"That thing nearly killed you, that’s what happened," I said. "Are you all right?"
She shook her head. "I’m…not sure. It felt like I was surrounded by this torrent of emotions and I was drowning in it or something."
"Are you okay to continue?"
"I’ll be fine." I helped her up and she stood shakily for a moment to regain her composure.
"You can turn back if you want, I won’t mind."
"I’m sure you won’t," she said, sounding like her old self again. "I’m not giving you any excuse to go on without me, so forget that shit."
I smiled, glad to see that she was all right, on the surface anyway. "Okay."
"Good, now let’s go."
We stepped over lumps of flesh as we carried on into the field. "I wonder if that thing will stay dead," I said.
"I don’t think anything stays dead for long in this place," she said.
"Does that include the Dark One?"
"Let’s hope not."
She lapsed into contemplative silence for a few moments. "Are you all right?" I asked her.
"That thing just has me rattled, that’s all. It was right inside my head, reaching into places that I don’t even go to myself."
"Sounds horrible."
"It was."
"We have to remember, we’re just food here for the spirits. It’s dog eat dog, and certainly no place for the living."
For Amelia.
"It makes me wonder what else is going to manifest."
The thought disturbed me as I noticed figures moving around the field, appearing and disappearing as they went. Whether they were manifestations of our subconscious or not, as long as they stayed away, I didn’t care.
Chapter 14
We saw all sorts of weird and not so wonderful sights on our journey to the house; spirit beings born of the memories that remained within the Shadow; towns and villages that had long since gone in the Earth realm, but which carried on existing in the Shadow, although most of them were strangely empty apart from the shadow creatures that now stalked the streets on the hunt for food. At times it was like we were trapped inside the video game, Silent Hill, such was the deeply creepy and unsettling atmosphere created by the ever-present eery silence and the banks of thick fog that seemed to roll in from nowhere, and then disappear just as quickly. In the background, punctuating the silence on occasion, were unearthly howls and screams, and sometimes low moaning sounds coming from inside buildings. You’d be walking along and suddenly there would be someone getting murdered right in front of your eyes, a murder which probably took place centuries ago in the Earth realm, but which still got played out here in the Shadow. No sooner had you stopped to gasp at the sight when it just faded from view as the murderer ran away. Even the seemingly joyful and happy scenes that manifested around us—children playing, lovers strolling, workers whistling as they built things—didn’t seem quite right, as if something was off, though it was hard to tell what. Sometimes a laughing child would look at us and the child’s face would distort into something monstrous for just a second, making you wonder if it had changed at all or if you were just imagining it. Or a dog would bark and you would look to see that it had five legs or two heads. It was as if whatever magic here was overcompensating, adding more to the reflected memories than was necessary.
Not everything was based around a memory, however. Things that existed in the Earth realm at this point in time also existed here in the Shadow. Buildings, roads, even vague outlines of people. As we came upon a church that I recognized as being not far from the house we were heading toward, it soon became clear that a dark presence was hovering over it, something like a thick gray cloud that was settled over the roof like it was incubating the church building beneath; a vast manifestation of the predominant Resonance that emanated from the church, which was faith. But it was faith that was tainted by fear and doubt, and as such the resulting spirit seemed bloated with sickness, a spiritual kind of sickness that it exacerbated and cultivated with its very presence. It was spiritual malaise made manifest. It also made me wonder what other, more war-torn, parts of the world would look like in the shadow. The Middle East for instance. What horrors would be on display there? What kind of spirits would be born out of the centuries of violence and the current bloodshed that existed there? As we gave the church a wide berth, the spirit on top of the church seeming to pulse and undulate at our near-by presence, I decided I didn’t want to know.
By the time we reached a large stretch of woods, I knew we were only a mile or so away from the house. "These are the woods that surround the house," I said to Dalia, who seemed to have recovered from her encounter with the doppelgänger spirit.
"Good," she said. "I feel like I’m going insane in this place."
"I know the feeling."
I felt myself tense slightly as we entered the woods, because I was now thinking of Amelia, and how close we were getting to her. The possibility that she might be dead still lurked in the back of my mind, filling me with so much dread that I never even thought to keep it locked down, given where we were. I suppose it was inevitable that as we entered the woods, that Amelia would suddenly appear from behind a tree. She stood there dressed in the clothes that she wore when the Dark One took her, looking exactly like the Amelia that I knew…and loved.
"Well, look who it is," Amelia said, or rather what my manifestation of her said. "It’s Corvin Chance and his little sidekick, Dalia." She laughed in a sarcastic sort of way. "Corvin…what kind of nam
e is that anyway?"
"Just ignore her," Dalia said. "She’s not…real."
Dalia knew better, though, and so did I. Amelia was real. Maybe she wasn’t the elf I knew, but she was some version of her anyway. Either way, she was now flesh and blood in the Shadow like everything else.
"Yes, ignore me," Amelia said as she came toward us out of the gloom, and I half-panicked when I saw the Desert Eagle in her hand. "Pretend I’m not here. That’s what you’ve been doing anyway, isn’t it?"
I couldn’t help myself. "No, I’m here to save you."
She burst out laughing again. "Save me? You stupid fool. I’m dead already! Don’t you know that? You killed me, Corvin, when you were too weak to save me."
I shook my head. "You’re not dead."
"Aren’t I?" She tilted her head to the side as she came closer. "Are you sure about that, Corvin? Think back to when I was pulled into that back hole. Do you really think I survived that?"
"Corvin, don’t listen to her," Dalia said, pulling at my arm now to try and get me to move away.
But I was strangely unable to move, and felt as if I was under some sort of spell. I could almost see the energy emanating from me as it was sucked into Amelia’s body. "You get everybody killed, Corvin. Your mother, your father…even her, almost." She pointed at Dalia. "He’ll finish the job soon enough, mark my words little girl."
"I’m no little girl," Dalia growled as I became vaguely aware that she was now floating in the air as thick tendrils of dark energy snaked around her. "And I’ve had enough of you, bitch."
Just as Amelia brought the gun up to shoot her, Dalia unleashed her energy in Amelia’s direction and knocked the gun from her hand, causing Amelia to hiss at her like an animal. "You’re going to die!" she shouted. "Both of you are going to die!"
"Shut it, bitch!" Dalia shouted back, and promptly coiled her dark energy around Amelia’s throat, lifting her off the ground as she began to choke her to death.