by J M Guillen
Glorious, terrible chaos burst all around me.
I screamed in victory, terror, and wrath.
2
I stepped into the store.
That’s not right. I shook my head and tried to track what had happened.
Last thing I knew, I had barreled into the front of Fallen Leaves, a wedge of solidified Wind held in front to protect me from ten thousand shattering things. The plan had been for my friends to pour into the store after me and assist Simon onto my bike.
Yet I walked.
Wrong. Something went wrong. I had no idea how things had gone this way. I didn’t think it mattered, however.
I needed to find Lorne.
A chill silence rippled tension down my back. The scent of dust flooded my nose, and fluorescent lights cast a greenish pall over an endless vista.
“Lights are on; somebody’s gotta be home,” I muttered as I ran a hand over my sleeves.
Furnishings gathered from the seventeenth century to the 1960s crowded together with knickknacks from every era. Bookshelves spilled over with antique lace gloves, silver punchbowls, wind-up monkeys holding cymbals, and pocket watches of every sort. Buffet tables held golden candelabras, ceramic vases, old typewriters, and raggedy, stuffed bears. Hat racks pretended to outrageous glory, festooned with patchy feather boas and sequined shawls.
Stunned at the vast collection of junk, I stood for a moment and tried to get my bearings.
“Where to find the bastard?” My voice sounded muted, almost as if underwater. I peered about, though I doubted he’d come to me even if I screamed his name at the top of my voice.
I kept walking.
Only the vaguest sort of organization reigned in the Gaunt Man’s place of business. Various collector’s pieces had been gathered in loose little cubicles. These three-sided, encapsulated snapshots of salvage had been filled to overflowing.
I glanced at the passed-down detritus that had landed here like flies trapped in amber.
Row upon row of cubicles met my gaze. Stacked within them, sometimes to the ceiling, lay every manner of strange and oddling thing.
The aisles wound labyrinthine, senseless.
I sighed.
Somewhere, there had to be a checkout desk. An office, perhaps. The thought made me remember Knucklebones, a lifetime ago.
“Always stuck looking for the office,” I grumbled. I frowned and plunged down the meandering left hand aisle. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” The sing-song rhyme seemed to sink into the floor, deadened of any echo, though the immense place had earned one. It went on for what felt like miles.
He was here. He had to be.
I sidled through a corridor so narrow I had to turn sideways to avoid brushing up against anything. For some reason, I really couldn’t bear the thought of touching anything in that place.
As I stalked along, I planned to make my way around the perimeter, then spiral in from the edges. It made sense to have the checkout near the door, but maybe Lorne operated with different sensibilities. This place had the feel of a giant spiderweb. So the spider should be in the center.
When I passed a mosaic table covered with a variety of ornate, red glass bottles, movement snagged at the corner of my eye.
I whirled and came face to face with… a music box?
The rounded pot body sat on squat gold feet, lid raised to reveal a tiny dancer, one foot outstretched in a classic pose. Richly colored paint formed a tiny scene on the inside of the lid, two tall adults and a child in front of a Christmas tree standing around a toy-soldier. Gold paint around the edge read ‘der Nussknacker.’
I shivered as if face to face with a hissing viper. Something about that box felt terribly wrong. It felt as if it sought me somehow, as if it hungered.
Turning away, I resumed my search, but every few feet I had to stop and stare at some new knickknack. Movement pulled at me nearly constantly, but every time I turned, I only found some new trinket: a painting, a doll, a mirror.
I felt like something stared at me, but worse, I couldn’t shake it.
“Good evening, Ms. Shepherd.” That southern drawl sounded like rotten honey dripping off the comb.
I whirled and reached into my jacket. When I found nothing there, neither gun nor knives, my eyes flew open wide.
“You didn’t think I’d let you keep your toys, did you?” Lorne stood behind me, preternaturally slender in his gray suit. A white half-halo of hair poofed from the back of his head, and his eyes burned summer-sky blue.
“You didn’t think I’d blow out the front of your store, did you?” I snarled. “Maybe you should give me Simon, and I should just go home. Before things get too troublesome.”
“My goodness.” The Gaunt Man chuckled. “You certainly are an optimistic little bee aren’t you? Do you seriously believe you’ve damaged any part of my store?”
“You know the worst part about this?” I stepped sideways around a hat rack that had been loaded with fedoras and ridiculous frippery. “I honestly believe you possess the power to have made my mother truly well. You could have done it.” I shook my head. “I would have happily come to you. I would have been more than pleased to keep my end of the bargain.”
“Perhaps you should have been more specific.” Lorne bit off the ends of his words. “Perhaps you are someone who needed a lesson in how power is to be used. Regardless, all things must bend true to their own nature, including me.”
“Perhaps my true nature is telling you to go fuck yourself.” I did not flinch from his uncanny eyes.
“You will choose. You will choose to do as I say and complete your first favor to me.” He took two steps to the right and kept his eyes upon me. “Once you have, this will all be over. You shall be bound to me.”
“You. Lied. To. Me.” Fury and wrath warred in my mind. “I wanted her back, you sick son of a bitch. I wanted to see her smile again. I wanted—”
“You bore me.” He gave a slender smile that looked like the edge of a knife. “Your bondage need not be wearisome. It may be months or years before I need to call upon you. However, one fact remains.”
“What’s that?”
“You’ve already lost.” That horrific smile again. “You’ve come to me, just as you promised you would. Now you will complete one task and therefore belong to me.”
I stared at him for a long moment and tried to keep the smile off my face. When I couldn’t, and it played at the edge of my lips, I saw in his eyes.
Worry?
“You may not have taken everything into account.” I gave him a wide and wicked grin. “I didn’t come alone. I brought friends.”
“Oh yes,” the Gaunt Man chuckled, and his words dripped with sarcasm. “I am quite aware of your little assault team. You may rest assured each of them shall wander my demesne.” He gestured about. “It is simple to become quite fascinated with the treasures I keep here.”
Fuck. I fought to keep a straight face. The last thing I wanted was for this monster to see me blink.
“I find the children to be quite typical; average specimens on the whole.” He peered at me, and those gray eyes shone in the dim light. “Excepting the young lady, of course. I find her very interesting.”
I ignored all possible permutations of his words in order to push forward.
“Oh, I didn’t mean those friends.” I waved one hand and gave him a sickeningly sweet smile. “Is that what you thought? That I would come against you with little more than a few of my childhood playmates? No.” My tone grew hard. “I would not come here without the means to. Take. This. Place. Apart.”
The Gaunt Man stared at me for a long moment, and cruel light danced in his gaze. Then, as if he heard something very far away, he cocked his head just the slightest. His eyes grew distant.
And those changeable orbs widened.
“What have you done?” His head snapped toward me, and sharpness bled from his voice. “Who have you brought into this place?”
“Don’t you know?”
I gave him an ingratiating smile. “Don’t you already know what I have done?”
In the space of a breath, he crossed the distance between us. Drawing back one bone thin arm, he struck me across the face in a fierce backhand.
My lips and cheeks exploded with agony and I fell backward into an old chest of drawers.
That one strike cast an infinity of gibbering shadows across my mind. Far more than a physical blow, the contact echoed through me, screamed through memory and hidden, secret things.
I felt as if that one touch had been a stone, and it had rippled through the pond of my innermost self.
Nightmares, buried by the light of day, rolled over in their fitful sleep.
“You insufferable little bitch,” the Gaunt Man snarled as he stood over me. His soft, cold tone made me shudder.
“Yeah.” I wiped my mouth, and briefly checked to see if I bled. “I’ve heard that before.”
“Hope.” The word came out as if his tongue were a razor. “Hope that this gambit of yours secures your freedom from my service. Hope that, in truth, you are never mine.” He crouched, though he still stared down upon me. The angular lines of his face made him look like nothing so much as a demonic hawk. His eyes burned into me.
His eyes… They truly held all colors and none. Those eyes had stared into the furnace that burned at the heart of hell itself, and they still carried that light.
“For when I have you,” he continued, “you shall scream for this outrage. You shall scream until your throat runs red with blood. You shall scream until you have no voice, and you gag upon your own sorrow.”
He spat at me.
The spittle, warm and greasy, landed in the middle of my face.
He stood and walked away, a man with a purpose. As he moved away from me, the edges of the store darkened and crept inward. My vision began to gray, and all things faded.
There were only the sibilant shadows of midnight darkness.
3
I awoke in a disaster area.
A few feet to my left, the Valkyrie lay on her side, wheels still spinning. It had smashed into a cabinet, and the remnants of old oak, glass, and fine china lay scattered around. Destruction had blossomed all around us, as if a meteor had struck the place.
I peered down a hallway of chaos where the bike and I had torn into the store and savaged everything in our wake.
I smiled. That felt good.
Gun. I stood and reached into the inside of my leather jacket, wincing as I moved my wounded shoulder. My brow furrowed a touch and I reached deeper.
“No,” I moaned as I wrapped my arm halfway around myself, not wanting to accept the truth.
I had dropped it. Somewhere along the way, I had dropped the gun.
Shit! I searched all around me, nudging my foot through the remains of broken record players, a splintered rolltop desk, and an old armoire. A full-length mirror lay on its back, shattered, and a wooden shelf had fallen over, sundering a dozen glass collectibles.
But no gun.
“Fine,” I grumbled as I reached back inside my jacket. I still had five knives.
I hadn’t ever really spent much time learning to knife fight in close quarters, though. Simon’s training had focused on the ability to throw and use the Wind to fling the knife from my hand as if from a cannon.
“Baxter! Rehl!” I called into the store, disliking how small my voice sounded. The immense size of this place stunned me, the way the aisles seemed to bend back upon themselves and move of their own accord.
Now my friends might be lost in it as well. It should have been a simple thing to follow the trail of carnage I left through the store, but I didn’t think Mister Lorne had lied. I thought he’d told the exact truth when he said my friends would wander his store, fascinated.
Damn it.
Movement skittered quickly out of the corner of my right eye.
I spun, knives up.
I had to be ready for anything in here. Anything.
Something small moved through the scattered detritus to my right. Rubble shifted aside as whatever it was moved slowly in an attempt to remain hidden.
I crept forward, both blades out in front of me and kicked at the trash.
“I see you there!” My voice definitely did not sound as if I were close to pissing myself. “Show yourself!”
For a moment the pile lay still. Then it moved again as something wriggled up out of it.
I stepped back, Empyrean Seals already formed in my mind.
“Did you…” A small figure poked its head up out of the remnants of the shelf. The thing appeared to be a cross between a lizard and a little man, only fourteen inches tall. It shook its head. “Did you break the bindings?”
“I…” I glanced around the remnants of my chaos. “I think I broke a lot of things.”
“You did.” The little scaled man peered at its wrists, as if ecstatic to see them. “You broke the shackles of power that bound me.” The lizard stared about, its eyes wide and excited.
“You were one of his creatures.” I glanced around and sifted through the garbage with my eyes. “He bound you into one of these things?”
“A small hand mirror.” He gave me a winsome smile. “The Gaunt Man kept me and would force me to tell him things he did not know, things that were to come.”
“That must be very helpful indeed.” I glanced around us, half expecting some kenku or mutant cockroach or something to lurch out of the shadows.
“You have my thanks.” He bowed toward me. “I must escape, before he catches me again.”
“Wait!” I took an unconscious step forward. “I’m searching for a friend of mine. He’s trapped here, much as you were.”
“You need help to find him.” The small man nodded. “You have done me one service, therefore it is fair if I do you one in turn. You may ask me one and only one question.”
Great. I practically sobbed with relief.
“I’m looking for my mentor, a man by the name of Simon Girard.” I crouched so I could stare the little fellow clearly in the face. “Do you know where he is?”
“Yes.” The man beamed with pleased pride. “I wish you good luck.”
He scurried off into the shadows.
I crouched there, unable to move, my mouth wide open. It must have been almost a minute before I could make a noise.
“Why?” I set one of my knives down to pound my fist against my forehead. “Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
Of all the boneheaded mistakes. We gamers like to watch movies or television and fancy that we would have seen our way past the traps or problems the characters found themselves in. After all, as gamers we practiced thinking around corners.
Which made my epic fail all the more galling. At least the gang hadn’t been here to see me screw up so badly.
Baxter would never let me hear the end of it.
As I crouched there, my head a full two and a half feet lower than it normally would have been, gentle sobs broke into my reverie.
I raised my head and looked about.
Nothing. Nothing but the sound of heartbroken sorrow.
It took a long moment before I could determine the direction it came from. Somewhere back along the path of chaos I’d blazed into Fallen Leaves.
“Okay,” I muttered. “Let’s try not to do something else stupid tonight.”
I walked through the trail of my rampage—it definitely qualified as a rampage now—and appreciated all the things I had destroyed.
I’d ripped up old paintings, shattered two small terrariums, as well as a jewelry box, scattered a collection of signs from the 1920s, knocked over an old movie projector…
And a small child, crouched behind an easel.
“Oh.” I crouched next to her. “Hello.”
The blonde girl glanced up at me. Her tear-streaked face seemed a bit thin, her eyes red from crying. She snuffled and gulped at the same time as she stared at me, face shiny and wet.
However, she said nothing.
“Phae’lintri.” The word rolled off her tongue, fluid and elegant. It reminded me of Tolkien’s elvish, which if I remembered correctly, had been based off Welsh. “Maedd gov’annen?”
“I have absolutely no idea.” I shrugged. “Are you in danger? Do you need help?”
“Eld Calyptia,” she insisted.
“I wish that meant something to me.” I shook my head. The poor girl had likely suffered beneath the Gaunt Man’s bindings. “If you want to come with me, you can.” I stood up and beckoned to her.
The child shook her head fiercely and tried to crouch and smaller as tears welled up again.
An explosion rumbled off to my left.
I stood and spun quickly in that direction. But all I saw were crooked aisles, a labyrinthine maze of odd collectibles, antiques, and junk from ten thousand garage sales.
“Nothing.” I bit my lip, frustrated. Three of my friends were running around this place along with several Facility Ass-hats.
The realization that I didn’t hear four different colors of chaos exploding all over the store unnerved me.
“I have to go.” I extended a hand back toward the child. She might make it more difficult to get out of here, but I couldn’t possibly leave her. Not if she might have been trapped by Mister Lorne.
I turned to her.
The child had vanished.
“Hey!” I called, not too loud but enough to be heard all around. “Come back! You can leave with me!”
I didn’t see her; she’d obviously skittered away when I’d heard the explosion.
I listened, but didn’t hear any crying.
“Dammit.” I peered around for any sign of the little girl.
But no.
“Okay, I suppose I have enough people to find.” I frowned. It seemed truly despicable to leave a small, helpless child alone in the Gaunt Man’s labyrinth. But what could I do?
I stepped back in the direction I’d come, closer to the Valkyrie. Maybe I could find her again, crouched beneath a ruined table or a half-broken barrel or something.