“I haven’t been,” said Sydney. “I’ve just been afraid . . . I’ve been so afraid.”
“Because you are learning to see and know,” he replied. “True strength and bravery cannot exist without first one knows what it is to be vulnerable, Sydney. Any who claim elsewise reveal their ignorance and having lived without knowing true pain and loss. For while all creatures come to know and live in the shadows of fear and doubt, child, it is precious few who would embrace the shadow within. Aye, and then turn back to face the rest with the hope they’ve discovered residing inside themselves all along.”
Sydney nodded, then quoted the words he had spoken to her in what felt a lifetime ago. “‘To see light and no boundaries when others know only walls and darkness . . .’”
Quill smiled in such a way as to banish all the fear within her. “Aye, child. Just so.”
“Not child,” said Sydney then, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Your child.” Her voice broke at the admission. “Your daughter?”
Quill’s expression softened then, his hand reaching out to cup her cheek, his thumb brushing away the tears falling from Sydney’s eyes, even as she his own fell unattended. “Daughter, aye.” He smiled in such a way that the dimples on either side of his cheeks might fight off whatever remainder of darkness and doubt that Sydney kept within her. “You are mine, Sydney. I have waited all my life to see and know you for such. For you to know me better too. Whatever awaits us in the times to come, I shall never leave you again.”
Sydney threw herself into his embrace then, seeding all the grief for Yvla and those lost, all the joy she felt at his strong and welcoming arms around her, all the tormented fear she knew would linger within her forever. “Where is Mom?” she asked, sobbing as her father held her close.
“Far outside the city by now, I hope,” said Quill, pulling away that she might see the resolve in his eyes matched that of the words he spoke. “And us soon to follow, once you are ready to run again.”
“I’m ready now,” said Sydney, already rallying.
“Then, let us escape this wretched place,” said Quill, standing and helping her to rise beside him. “For I gather the Salt storm is soon to unleash upon this city, both from forces within and without . . . and I would have us leave them all behind to see your mother again. Now, come, daughter of mine.” He extended his hand that Sydney might accept. When she did, Quill smiled at her again, cheering her all the more. “Let us go and find her together that we might all finally be rejoined and live some happier days than all these we have suffered through to reach one another.”
“Okay,” said Sydney, squeezing his hand and the return of it showed to her also.
Quill nodded in silent reply, then led her running down the tunnels again, delving ever deeper into the haunted halls and tunnels of the ancient Nautilus.
35
KELLEN
Is this hell? Kellen wondered when he heard his mother’s screams in the darkness. For a moment, he dared not open his eyes to see, recalling all the times he had awakened to hear such things as a child and beyond. All until the night she fled and abandoned him. Then, as now, he forced himself to face his fears.
Kellen found himself in the bedroom he had known all his life back in Lavere, Indiana. Cocooned in a patch-worked blanket, crafted of his old, Tiber High athletic t-shirts, the comforts of his blanket and pillows smelt of the same freshly laundered detergent his mother used.
For half a heartbeat, he almost convinced himself that all he had endured and remembered of his Selkie and Sancul lives beneath the waves had been the nightmares. That he was merely awakening from them to find himself in a different, if far better known, reality.
As they had done in life, his parent’s argued voices echoed through the floorboards and the closed door of his room, his father’s booming threats overpowering his mother’s shrill replies. Then came that which Kellen knew was sure to follow when his mother argued further against her husband. Any words she had tried to speak out in continued rebuttal were suddenly swallowed by a smack and a sharp thud, then the thump of her crashing into the wall as his father bellowed and cursed at his wife all the louder.
Kellen had thrown off his blankets before his father’s voice returned with still more shouted threats and his mother’s pleas for the long-suffering violence to end. Unlike the Sancul tentacles of his Salt body, Kellen gasped at the sight of his legs, both returned and healed as they had been in that former life ashore.
So, I am dreaming, then . . .
His mother’s yelp called him from his momentary halt at the sight of his lower limbs returned. Kellen leapt from the bed to bound toward the closed door of his room.
When his bare feet landed, he felt no carpet beneath him. No rug, or even dirtied laundry he often left littered there. In place of all, Kellen found himself knee deep in frigid, black water.
His pulse raced as he retreated back to the bed, glancing toward the window. Outside, he saw the same view of cornfields outside that he had known all his life when peering out the second-story room. For all the seeming memory of his room and beyond its window panes, the reality of pooled water inside bid him to consider his situation. It’s not possible. He knew, again reverting to the surrounding water he waded through. Where did this all come from?
His mother’s scream and his father’s shouting again bid Kellen to forget his questions and rush to her aid instead, as he had done so many times in life. For no matter the beatings given him, Kellen had always preferred the pain of his father’s fists and the lashings of his belt, rather than witness, or listen to, either being struck against his mother. Her screams for help ringing in his ears, Kellen reached for the doorknob and found it locked.
Again, his mother cried from downstairs, her voice muffled as the echoed thuds and smacks of further beating occurred. “Please, Martin!” she cried. “Stop! Don’t!”
Kellen looked for the lock upon his doorknob, but found it no longer there; the door had been locked from the outside. He pulled at the doorknob with one hand and pounded against the wood with his other, both to no effect. “Hey!” he screamed at the top of his lungs, his adrenaline surging, the murderous, fighter’s spirit he had adopted in the depths of Orphan Knoll rising anew with the hopeful challenge that his father might hear and come for him instead. “Leave her alone, you bastard!”
The door splintered against the onslaught of Kellen ramming it with his shoulder.
“Come for me!” Kellen again pounded at the door to further the self-created opening, the skin upon his knuckles laid open and bleeding for his efforts. “I’ll kill you, if you touch her again! You hear me! I’ll kill you!”
When the door still refused to budge, Kellen backed away, preparing to run as best as he could, slogging through the water to ram the door with all the might that he could muster.
He halted at the realization that his mother had stopped screaming . . . and his father was no longer yelling either.
Instead, their voices had been replaced by a gap of momentary silence from beyond the threshold of his room. Kellen swallowed the lump in his throat, the deathly quiet beyond more disconcerting than the violence formerly plaguing his ears and memory.
Then came the sound of heavy footsteps, lumbering up the stairs.
Kellen found both his voice and his anger stolen then, all thoughts of rescuing his mother taken from him too when came the sound of panted, labored breathing from outside his room.
The door knob jiggled.
The hinges tested, even as the lock held.
Then, like a gleaming, onyx stone, a single, marbled eye appeared in the splintered gap that Kellen had created with his previous, shouldered attempts to break free.
Beneath the stare of the monster beyond, Kellen backed to the furthest reaches of his room, his soul warning that no movement or direction would suffice. That it would not matter to where he tried to escape. The eye peering back at him through the door saw.
Kellen’s soul warned that the mons
ter outside would never relent its gaze of him, even as the whispered, taunting voice of the Sancul, Moros, whispered in his mind.
Why dost thou flee, child? Dost thou still fear us?
No, said Kellen when the walls cracked around the door framing like half a dozen hammers attacking it at once. Shadowed tentacles emerged from the holes, widening the gaps as they came. Still more slipped ascended from the water line in front of the door, each slinking beneath the gap separating the door and floor. Rising, each of the shadowy tentacles hastened toward their target.
You’re not real . . . Kellen claimed of Moros as he abandoned the corner of the room, splashing back to stand on his bed rather than be taken in the knee-deep water. This is just another of Hypnos’s dreams!
The voice of Moros echoed throughout the room, resounding off the walls as if he were on a loudspeaker at one of Kellen’s athletic events. No, favored one, said he, his tentacles slicing toward the bed and climbing the posts like fast-growing, trained ivy. My brother’s dreams have ended. I would welcome you home now.
Kellen kicked at the first of the tentacles, but his foot went through as if the seeming tentacle were smoke.
Another was reaching for his wrist, then twining up his arm, encircling and tightening for every continued second upon his flesh. Kellen slapped it away, another cloud of smoke that held no true substance. Despite his combative attempts, the other tentacles warned that it would not be long before their owner overpowered Kellen in full.
Come unto me, child, Moros urged Kellen in continued pursuit. Align thy burden and thy hatred with mine. Join with the darkness and the deep that we both might be renewed and strengthened.
The door burst open on its hinge then, shattering with the force of movement and strength when it crashed into the wall and broke the drywall too.
Kellen dared to face the creature that came for him.
Darkness lay beyond the threshold, but an army of wisp-like tentacles slithered free from the shadows in search of Kellen. The tentacles latched onto the door framing and other objects throughout the room, leveraging their combined holds to pull a larger, shaded mass from beyond. The monster emerged like an ominous storm cloud of moving shadows, all threatening to thunder. Like a fouled, dark batter forming inside a mold, the shadows aligned themselves and strengthened their combined image as they entered further into the room. Upon materializing, however, the shadowed creature there was not the scarred and withered Sancul that Kellen remembered having met before in the dream-like world of Hypnos’s mind. Instead, Kellen’s mouth opened in silent horror at witnessing the Sancul version of himself; a shaded, pretender version, liken to one he might see in a mirror. When the pretender smiled at him, Kellen knew the name of the true master to wear his mirrored face and form.
Aye, spoke the pretender version of Kellen’s own self, raising his left hand in open invitation for Kellen to grasp hold of. Come to us now and rest, child. Aye, join with the darkness and the deep. Align thyself of your own choosing, rather than we take you for my own.
With the pretender blocking the door, Kellen saw only one alternative to his escape. With the pretender’s tentacles continuing their attempts to latch hold of him, Kellen batted them away once more, then lunged for the window above his bed. He crashed through the glass, the shards embedding in the palms of his hands and forearms. Falling, Kellen tucked his chin to his chest as the shards rained around him in twin descent with his body. Vertigo overpowered him as he fell, the voice of the pretender howling in his ears. Kellen shut his eyes then, bracing for the impact of landing.
He struck the ground on his left side, wincing at the dislocation of his shoulder from the fall. Where he knew the firmness of the ground should feel of the shapely and cold, concrete patio outside his home, instead his skin met cobbled stone instead. His cheek was sticky and warm, despite the slick coating of the stony floor around him. Touching the stickiness with his good right hand, recognizing it for fresh blood, Kellen reopened his eyes and discovered he was no longer outside, nor even at his childhood home.
His face paled as he scurried to his bare feet, trapped in the dungeons of Orphan Knoll. The water he had helped to flood and drown the slaver’s den with as a Sancul had been emptied now. The air stank of familiar cold and damp, reeking of death and decay.
Kellen stood in the middle of the slave cage that once held him, its door conveniently unlocked and open. A lone torch flickered just beyond the threshold, and it illuminating the surrounding slave cages.
All were filled; packed tight with the corpses of drowned Selkie fighters, some of them near the age of children to Kellen’s mind. Their glazed, milky eyes were opened, lidless, and forever staring as they lay slumped atop one another in death. Seals and sea lions lay among their human counterparts also, a collection of bloated bodies, all stiff and unrelenting. Like a painted portrait of gothic horror, all were held motionless in death’s final, cold embrace.
Until they weren’t.
The dead began to move – a twitching from one of the drowned boys at first, something that Kellen told himself could not be.
The ghostly movement grew, spreading like wildfire among the rest, the seals and sea lions catching too. The corpses of man and beast all began to rise, their bones cracking as they did with some semblance of necromantic life returned to their frozen joints.
Kellen’s breath caught in his throat when some of the dead began to notice him in opposite of their cage. More even than their hollowed looks, the silence with which they stood and stared at him needled the fear in him deeper still. He screamed when the first of the rising dead began to press against the bars, their voices hoarse and moaning, their arms extending out in reach as if they might cross the gap between the cages and welcome him into theirs.
Kellen sprinted from his cage before the masses could follow the others’ example to block his escape. He snatched up the torch from its holding upon the wall, fleeing up the row.
The moaning from the dead grew louder in the darkness he left behind.
Their voices followed him as he went, his side paining as he searched for an escape, traversing the labyrinth of tunnels and staircases. For each time Kellen deemed that he recognized his location amidst the maze, the dungeons mocked his scattered memory all the same. Each turn and new room looked as unfamiliar as the last, and all filled with more cages of the Selkie dead, all reaching for him through the bars that held them back.
When Kellen glanced over his shoulder at a sudden, nearby moan, one of the dead succeeded in grabbing his left arm. The corpse’s long, sharp nails dug into his flesh.
Kellen reacted, slapping at the claw-like hand, pulling away and howling as the corpse’s fingernails rent his skin.
The fresh blood streaking down his bicep seemed to whet the appetite of the other undead.
Behind him, a Southern Elephant Seal with stab wounds littering its carcass leveraged its massive weight against the bars. The force of its massive form, along with the combined might and wall of the Selkie dead broke one of the cage doors from its hinges. The iron clanged against the cobbled stone, the corpses falling over one another to empty out in continued pursuit of Kellen. Unlike the zombie films he had watched in his life on land, those featuring the slow-walking dead easily pushed aside and with little true danger to afflict the living, the Selkie dead hunting Kellen now arose and ran with speed to match his own.
Don’t look back, you idiot! Run! Kellen screamed at himself, relenting his gaze of the dead, searching for any means of escape ahead. He bounded toward a spiraled staircase of stone, then flew up the steps, two at a time. Always ahead of him up the stairs, a pale, greenish light strengthened for each spiraled turn he made. His side ached as he continued in the ascent, his ribs paining with the feeling as though someone stabbed at them over and again.
The scurried footsteps echoing up the stairs below pressed him onward.
Come on, come on! Kellen powered through the pain, the muscles in his thighs throbbing at the never-
ending climb. I’ll fight for air. Kellen swore, continuing his climbing for escape, repeating the mantra he had once heard from a fellow slave. I’m Salted. I’ll make it back!
Coming around another spiral, Kellen reached the top of the staircase.
An open door lay before him with a pair of lanterns attached to either side, both filled with blazing, greenish light. Darkness lay within, the lantern lights and even the shadows they cast all consumed by that which lived across the threshold.
Goose-pimples prickling over his body, the hairs on Kellen’s arms raised at the notion of entering into the next room.
The voices and movement of the chasing dead below grew louder still for every passing moment.
With his dislocated shoulder continuing to throb in echo of that which he felt in his sides and legs too, Kellen abandoned his instincts to turn and fight. He barreled across the open door’s threshold, his torch illuminating a larger room within. Kellen wasted no time in discernment. He whipped around the dungeon door, using all his momentum to close it before the dead could follow. His speed and weight helped to slam the heavy, oaken door to close.
A pale and withered hand shot forward to halt him from the movement.
Kellen’s attempt carried his actions through, slicing off the corpse’s arm when the dungeon door slammed home. The creature’s arm fell unmoving at Kellen’s feet. He grappled with the vertical wood beam attached to the door next, yanking it down to fall in place and brace the door closed. Had he done so a second later, the dead should have succeeded in knocking him free of the door. Instead, Kellen breathed a momentary sigh of relief when the masses thumped and slammed against the opposite side, the door continuing to hold, despite their added attempts and loathsome moans.
Kellen moved away from it, catching his breath, his torch held steady in front of him in the event that the dead broke down this newest of doors too. For each renewed attempt from the opposite side, Kellen convinced himself that he had escaped the ghoulish Selkies.
Salt Storm: The Salted Series: Episodes #31-35 Page 52