Salt Storm: The Salted Series: Episodes #31-35

by Galvin, Aaron

  Then, as suddenly as they had followed, the thumping from the dead on the other side ceased their noise entirely.

  Kellen’s breath caught in his throat as he awaited the return of the noise, swearing he could hear his heart thumping in the deathly quiet. And if I can hear it, the catching fear within him whispered. The dead can too.

  Waiting . . . watching . . . Kellen’s gaze narrowed on the door and the wood beam bracing.

  Nothing came against the dungeon door, nor sounded from the other side; the whole world gone silent with exception of the flickering torch that Kellen held.

  Don’t stop. He told himself then, his hands trembling. Kellen summoned the courage to look away from the door and turn to inspect the chamber he stood within. Find a new way out.

  His eyes rounded at what he found – not any chamber of Orphan Knoll he had ever seen, nor even one that resembled the slaver’s den.

  The ceiling was domed and marbled, black as the night sky he often looked upon from the loft of his barn at home when he went there to escape his father’s drunken wroth and beatings. Then, as now, Kellen saw no stars in the above, nor even a hint of light that his torchlight did not offer up. As the torchlight flames danced over the domed ceiling in mirrored movement, the combined, twin illumination of his torches above and below revealed to Kellen that he was yet to be alone.

  A kindly, thin voice Kellen remembered from his dreams called out to him. “Hello, child.”

  Kellen met the gaze of the withered and sickly one he had only ever spoken with in the dream-like worlds of the Sancul’s own making. The same monster that Kellen had called to and begged for answers ever since his maiming and coming into the Sancul world of abyssal darkness. “Hypnos . . .” Kellen thrust his torch toward the voice in the darkness, illuminating the one who had called to him, even as the Sancul winced under the light cast upon him. “Is that really you?”

  Hypnos managed a weak nod. His eyes held barely an ounce of the blazing Kellen remembered witnessing in them before, both during his healing ceremony and then again when Hypnos fended off his brother, Moros, from reaching for Kellen in yet another dream the two had shared. Unlike those other times, Hypnos appeared far more diminished than Kellen had last seen the sickly Sancul during their journey toward the Cavern of Somnus and their subsequent arrival. Then, as now, Hypnos lay upon his bed of ebony make, his tentacles flat and lifeless as they hung over the edge like wilted plants in desperate need of watering.

  Hypnos raised his trembling left hand, motioning Kellen over. “Come to me,” he urged. “Please.”

  Kellen held his ground. “No,” he said, refusing to move an inch closer, despite the seeming appearance of weakened creature before him. “Not until I get some answers.”

  “K-Kellen . . . please . . . listen.”

  “No,” Kellen interrupted. “For all the times I’ve called out to you . . . you never listened to me. Never answered my questions. Why should I hear you now?”

  Kellen jumped when a loud knock banged against the door and bracing behind him.

  Hypnos looked past Kellen, toward the locked door instead. “M-Moros,” Hypnos called out when the bracing clanged louder still in its ancient holds. “Stop this, brother. Please. Let you stop this, Moros . . .”

  Kellen’s head acted like a swivel, looking between the door and Hypnos, not knowing which was more deserving of his attention as the wood beam clattered in its bracing for every renewed pounding from the opposite side. From the corner of his eye, Kellen noticed a pair of twin lights in the darkness. Their origin came from Hypnos upon the bed of ebony make, the dimness in his gaze flickering to life as Kellen had witnessed them do before. As the flickering in them began to catch and strengthen, Kellen noted the clanging of the door relented until all were silenced once more. And when the quiet returned in full, the brightness in Hypnos’s gaze had diminished too, his head lolling to the side. The slow rise and fall of his chest signaled the mystic Sancul yet lived, but the labored, wheezing breath gave Kellen little doubt that Hypnos would do so for much longer.

  Kellen inched closer, yet kept his distance all the same.

  Hypnos blinked as Kellen approached and then held off. “Forgive me,” Hypnos whispered, a single tear streaking down his withered cheeks. “His strength outmatches my own . . . I cannot hold my brother any longer, child.”

  “What do you mean?” Kellen asked. “What does he want, Hypnos? What does Moros want?”

  “Everything,” said Hypnos, his voice quivering with the admission. “Y-You must help me, child. You must save us . . . save us all from him.”

  “How?” Kellen asked. “How can I?”

  Hypnos smiled weakly. “R-Rise,” said he. “You . . . you must rise, Kellen. Or . . . or . . .”

  “Or all shall fall,” Kellen interrupted. “I know that part already. I remember what you said, but tell me how, Hypnos! How am I supposed to rise when I’m trapped in here? What does that even mean? How am I supposed to rise!?”

  Hypnos’s eyelids fluttered, the light behind them dying as he let out a deep sigh.

  “Hypnos!” Kellen shouted, running forward then to grab hold of the Sancul and shake him awake lest Hypnos never speak again. “Tell me what to do!”

  Hypnos blinked like one lost in a stupor. “Choose, Kellen . . . you must choose.”

  The banging from the dead resounded from the opposite side again.

  Kellen tensed at the noise, glancing back toward the door when the bracing splintered under the continued pounding that grew louder for each and every ramming thereafter. “Choose what?” Kellen demanded of Hypnos. “What am I choosing from?”

  The voice of another ghost answered him from afar. “Life or death now, iddn’t it, special boy?”

  Kellen shuddered in recognition of the dead, Selkie taskmaster that appeared some thirty-odd yards deeper into the chamber. Kellen swung his torch away from Hypnos, pointing its fiery end at the darkness where the voice had come from. “Tieran . . .” said Kellen, naming the ghost from his past, as if needing further confirmation of the one he had killed in the depths of Orphan Knoll.

  The dead Selkie taskmaster grinned back at him easily enough. “Aye, special boy,” said Tieran, his eyes as milky and lidless as the dead who had chased Kellen out of the dungeons and up the spiral stairs. “Bet you didn’t think to see me again, eh? Nor any of them others we done in together down in the Knoll.”

  Others? Kellen thought, a cold breeze whispering across the back of his neck like a lover might do. Kellen trembled at its phantom kiss, then summoned his courage to make a quick glance over his shoulder. He nearly dropped his torch at what stood behind him.

  A wall of the Selkie dead stood between him and what remained of the broken, oaken door. Its bracing was splintered and cast aside, the darkness having overtaken all existing beyond the open door’s threshold. For all their hunting of Kellen, the dead no longer gave him chase. Their milky eyes stared at him in soulless emptiness, the lot of them like an army of freestanding mannequins and robots awaiting commands.

  “I’m dreaming,” Kellen said, his voice broken and quiet. “This is all a dream. Just another nightmare that I’ll wake up from soon.”

  “Aye, a nightmare true enough, special boy,” Tieran called out to Kellen, reminding him of the added threat before him also. “But not one for you to wake from this time, eh?” He chuckled hoarsely as he had done in life.

  When the corpse of Tieran coughed and choked on the seeming phlegm, however, Kellen noticed the purple-bruised rash of scarring around the dead taskmaster’s neck. The deep marks stood out among the elsewise pale flesh, the circular rashes a reminder of where Kellen had strangled Tieran with the same whip that the Selkie taskmaster had attempted to murder Kellen with also.

  Tieran smirked at Kellen’s stare homing on his throat. “Ready to make your choice, then, special boy?”

  “What choice?” Kellen asked, glancing over his shoulder again at the army of Selkie dead when he heard the scu
ffs of shuffling feet scraping over the cobbled stones.

  The dead were marching as one, an oncoming wall of slow-moving flesh to push Kellen deeper into the chamber.

  Kellen retreated from them. “Stay back . . .” He swung his torch around, waving it as if to try and fear them.

  The dead gave him no more response than they had done before, continuing their slow march to push him further in.

  “Wouldn’t go that way, if I was you,” Tieran crowed behind him. “Nah, special boy, never that way.”

  Kellen wheeled around, whipping his torch with him to illuminate Tieran also. He screamed when finding the dead man had silently crossed the distance between them; Tieran’s milky gaze and eager grin an inch from Kellen’s face.

  With one hand, Tieran clapped his icy hand upon Kellen’s dislocated shoulder, squeezing another scream from him. When Kellen tried to swing the torch against Tieran, the dead Selkie taskmaster caught that too.

  “No need for the torch, special boy,” Tieran laughed, wrenching the torch away and then casting it ahead of them. “Won’t need no light where you’re headed, though you’ll be wanting it all the same.”

  Kellen’s heart thundered against his chest as the torch clattered and rolled ahead of him, the light from it revealing the same pair of freestanding doors he had seen in the Cavern of Somnus.

  With a swift kick against the back of his legs, Tieran dropped Kellen to his knees and then kept him off balance by dragging him quickly toward the doors.

  The doors stood in opposite contrast as he remembered seeing them in the Cavern of Somnus and one of them with additions Kellen did not remember from his lone memory of them. The door to his right was liken to a truss of what once may once have been greenish reef and sea-grass, but all were long wilted and dead now. On his left, the other that Kellen recalled having once seen glistening like bone-white coral ivory was different too; now holding streaks of crimson stain from that which adorned it also.

  Kellen’s throat parched at the sight of severed appendages posted to the four corners of the door frame. He screamed all the louder when staring into the milky eyes of the Nomad slaver who had assaulted him in life too. Roland . . . Like a decapitated head upon a pike, what remained of the slaver had been positioned like a door knocker upon the blood-stained, ivory door.

  Choose, boy, Roland’s voice echoed in Kellen’s mind, his words heard even over the continued screams. This door, or the other . . .

  Tieran hauled Kellen to his feet, then shoved him forward to stand between the pair of doors. “Aye, make your choice, special boy,” he shouted. “Else the master makes it for you.”

  The master? Kellen wondered briefly. He averted his gaze from the ivory door and the constant, accusing stare of Roland. He remembered the fear in the Nomad’s begging cries for Kellen to stop the torture of him in Orphan Knoll, all before Kellen had gleefully used his newfound Sancul power, strength, and hate to rend the weakling slaver apart.

  Choose . . . Roland’s voice boomed in Kellen’s mind. Or allow us to do so for thee.

  The army of Selkie dead hissed at Kellen with a singular voice then, hastening him along.

  Without daring to look upon Roland again, Kellen took off for the opposite door. He reached for the coral-encrusted knob of the door littered and crafted with dead sea-grass, revealing still more darkness within. Kellen hesitated upon the threshold.

  The hiss of the Selkie dead broke their unified voice then, all shrieking at him before they raced to cross the distance between them.

  Closing his eyes, Kellen barreled over the threshold with Roland and Tieran’s combined laughter to follow him on into the darkness.

  When their voices turned mute, however, Kellen dared to reopen his eyes, expecting blindness for the surrounding dark he had witnessed beyond.

  Instead, he found himself in yet another familiar setting from his life before.

  A blue, swim locker with slatted gaps in the metal framing stood before him. Inside it, Kellen recognized a magnet featuring his high school logo and swim mascot – a Tiger Shark bearing the blue and crimson colors of Tiber High School. His backpack, swim goggles, and Speedo hung from the hooks too. Kellen’s brow furrowed as he backed away from the swim locker that he had been assigned in his Freshman year.

  He nearly tripped over the wood bench behind him.

  Catching his balance before falling, Kellen’s pulse quickened in wonderment of the continued dream. What is this? Why haven’t I woke up yet, like all the times before? He swallowed the lump in his throat, his gaze searching when he heard the echoed heavy slamming of the main doorway into the Tiber High boy’s locker room and the fast-moving footsteps to follow. Trapped inside the swim team’s personal area with only a single doorway in or out, Kellen immediately looked for and failed to find anything of note that he might use as a weapon.

  Clenching his fists, Kellen put his back to the rear cinderblock wall, then stood as tall as he was able, awaiting whoever chose to come against him.

  “Hey, Freshman! Where you at?”

  The tenseness in him relaxed for a moment, but only just. Kellen swore that he recognized yet another voice from his past, but was unable to put a face to the memory.

  “Winstel! You in here?”

  The answer came to Kellen before his old teammate revealed himself. Campbell? Kellen wondered, the assessment proving true when the once senior captain of the swim team appeared just outside the doorway.

  No. Kellen thought, the Campbell he remembered from his freshman year no longer the pimple-faced and gleeful bruiser, nor even wearing his swimsuit attire. The Campbell blocking the doorway now was as Kellen had last seen him at the Tiber County Jail before Lenny Dolan’s Selkie slave catcher crew had overtaken it and took Kellen away with them too.

  Campbell wore his police officer uniform, the front of it caked with dried blood from the pool that Kellen had last seen his old teammate lying in. Then, as now, Campbell’s throat had been ripped apart by the savage teeth of Henry Boucher in his Leopard Seal form.

  He was also not alone.

  Where Kellen remembered the true-life high school memory differently – he choosing to confront Campbell and his other teammates to perform the swim team hazing they called ‘twelving’ – now, Kellen found himself on the opposite end of a different memory that he had witnessed involving another freshman. The time he had been changing out of his speedo and the seniors had come to trap and haze another of their youngest teammates instead.

  Where Kellen could recall each of the senior’s faces in his mind, there were none of them standing with Campbell now. In their place, Kellen saw others even more familiar and friendlier to him in his life before when he had lived ashore.

  There was his closest friend from childhood, Eddie Bennett, his neck broken and at an awkward angle. Bennett too looked on Kellen with the same accusing, milky eyes as all the other ghosts that hounded Kellen in his continued nightmare.

  Bryce Tardiff stood with them also, his face bloated and blue from drowning when he and Kellen were taken down the Gasping Hole and into the Salted world by Tieran and his Selkie cronies. Kellen’s eyes stung at the sight of Tardiff’s clothes, skin, and hair all still sopping wet, just as he remembered them being when he held his drowned friend in the depths of Crayfish Cavern.

  His father’s friend, Sheriff Hullinger, stood among the reanimated too, as did Kellen’s former cellmate and the town drunk, Boone Merchant, also.

  All looked on Kellen with the same glee that he had witnessed from Tieran also.

  Campbell stepped into the locker room. “You remember what comes next, Winstel?”

  Kellen did, clenching his fists again. “I remember.”

  Campbell nodded. “Well, what’ll it be this time? Will you go willingly again . . . or no?”

  I went willing once, Kellen thought back on his life, the memory of confronting the seniors among his proudest of moments for the fear he saw that his choice instilled in them; that of one to challenge
their authority and brave the hazing none before Kellen Winstel had willingly accepted. For all his memory of the confused and fearful look in the eyes of his teammates before, Kellen understood he would find nothing of confusion or fear in the ghostly faces of the reanimated dead that stood before him now. No mercy or pity either.

  I’m a captain . . . Kellen told himself, even as he trembled. An alpha. He took his stance when Campbell’s phantom grin widened. And I’m not going down without a fight.

  The dead came for him then, and Kellen rushing to meet them rather run from them in fear any longer. For every blow he landed, the dead felt nothing of his attack, nor tired from their combined efforts as Kellen suffered under theirs. Kellen fought and screamed and kicked as they bore him to the ground, their frozen fingers scratching and clawing at his skin for added purchase, all whilst he continued to fight.

  Wake up, Winstel! Kellen shouted at himself when the dead subdued him in full, then lifted him from the floor and moved to bear him out of the locker room.

  Still, Kellen fought on, bucking and writhing like a worm upon a hook as they carried through the shower area and then onto the same door he had once dragged Garrett Weaver through. In his mind, Kellen knew the door had been painted blue in life. In his ongoing nightmare, the door now gleamed of the bone-white and blood-stained ivory he had witnessed before.

  Kellen did not see which of his former companions opened the door, only that the others carried him across the threshold and spilled out onto the Tiber High School pool deck. Unlike the heat he had always felt when crossing over in life, now Kellen knew only freezing cold.

  “Let me go!” Kellen shouted all the while, cursing and screaming, then begging them each by name for his release. “Let me go!”

  None produced any effect, the dead carrying out their muted task and bearing him to the pool’s edge. As one, they flung Kellen toward the middle of the pool, the momentary flight turning his stomach as if he had performed a somersault off the diving board.