by Kathryn Moon
I had a dense stick of chalk weighing in my pocket and it felt as comforting as being left naked in a thunderstorm. I didn’t say that to the others.
Storm clouds gathered at our backs the deeper we walked into the woods. The path back to the clearing I had met Isaac in weeks ago was silent, dull and gray and devoid of life.
“What if it doesn’t come back?” Isaac whispered as if to avoid shattering the hush of the woods. “Why would it walk back into the cage we let it out of?”
I let it out of, I thought. “That’s what I’m here for,” I said. “To lure it back.”
Callum looked over his shoulder at me, eyes flinching at my words. But it was true. It was one of the things we had talked about in the dead of night in his office.
I thought I wouldn’t recognize the clearing a second time. That I would rely on Isaac or the others to tell me when we had arrived. But it couldn’t be mistaken. The ground had been scalped down to a barren mudscape, already our feet were squelching in the wet earth. In the colorless landscape the trees ringing around the clearing really did look like bars on a jail cell.
We walked into the cell in silence, my covenmates sticking close to my side. Bryce remained near us and Gwen, Tatsuo, and Hildy continued on to the three farther points, like the ends of a compass. The sky darkened in a ring all around the tops of the trees and I knew we were being watched, tracked. I just wasn’t sure if the Hollow saw us as a predator or prey.
“Are- are you sure?” Aiden asked before I could kneel, the neck and bow of his violin in one hand and the other reaching out to me.
Callum’s plan, the order of actions and all the different variables he and I had argued and pored over in our planning, rattled through my head. I went to Aiden, pressing myself to his chest and feeling Callum and Isaac at my back. Aiden’s arm folded around us and we held each other for several deep breaths.
“I’m sure,” I said, starting to pull away. Aiden gave me a hard swift kiss, Callum leaving a softer one at the back of my neck.
Isaac bent as I knelt into the mud; cold, wet earth clasping around my knees. He left the stone in front of me and a long, soft kiss to my temple.
“Be careful,” he said, standing again.
It wasn’t a careful thing we were doing. I didn’t answer him. There was a sound in the distance like a tree trunk splitting open, and it seemed just as likely as a crack of thunder.
I looked over my shoulder and Isaac’s hands were held out in front of him, the space between wavering darkly. He had said he didn’t need paint or ink or canvas to work color and I hadn’t understood what he meant till now. Color was pooling in the air between his palms, the sickly gray green of the woods around us growing dense and rotten. It was a stagnant, dying shade, the color of the Hollow. It clogged the back of my throat and left a pungent smell in my nose.
Aiden raised the violin to his shoulder and with the first stroke of the bow over the strings the sound was a tear in the air. I turned back to the clearing, closing my eyes and finding the spoiled color behind my eyelids. The melody Aiden had dragged off the page was a slithering, rasping piece running talons through my head.
My stomach rolled and when I blinked my eyes open the clearing was spinning around me. I slammed them shut again, trying to push past the twist of music in my thoughts and the pounding dark color that hammered through me. I dug for the headache I woke up with in the mornings, right at the base of my skull. It was there, dull and pulsing in time with the Hollow’s melody. When I found it, everything tangled together into one blurring, burning cacophony.
And then it was there, lurking inside the headache, coiling around itself like a snake. I opened my eyes, finding the clearing around me but with the feeling that I was somewhere else. Bryce was watching my face and we nodded at the same time.
As Bryce began to hum, the color squatting at the back of my head spread across my vision, flattening the stone gray of the woods. Hildy in all her rich blues faded away, swallowed up by rotten green. The droning buzz of Bryce’s voice joined the music and goosebumps rose up on my skin until I was one tingling, vibrating nerve.
And then I was nothing.
I remained that way for what seemed to be too long. There was something at the edges, something crawling in a circle like a perimeter. Pacing at a horizon of a color that stopped being a color and a song that had no beginning or end.
I tried to hold onto what Tatsuo had said, to let the trance carry me. But I was afraid now of being left here, rotting in a color gone bad.
Then there were shadows, rising up over my head. My knees were cold and my skin was clammy. The space around me sharpened, the foggy edges of darkness grainy in my sight. I looked up and the shadows became impenetrable. I looked down and saw the faint trace of my own feet, now standing, and a cluttering tangle of dark around them.
That was a very stupid thing to do.
I spun and stumbled back, my feet catching and tripping over uneven ground. The words were in my head, but the language was foreign on my ears, like the thunder of rocks breaking against each other.
The Hollow was behind me. Unshrouded, a naked pale thing that wasn’t human or animal, only horror. It’s flesh was greasy, body elongated, as if it had made an effort to become something and then given up. There was a distended belly, and the suggestion of a face, and pieces that were like limbs but were not.
“Where are we?” I asked, and the words echoed, my voice small and useless.
I’ve been building you a cage, the Hollow said, voice a spider’s crawl up my skin. To keep you in my belly with all the tasty things.
“This isn’t your belly,” I said. “You haven’t swallowed me down. I’ve come for your true name. You’ll be back in your prison before nightfall.”
You think like a human, witchling, the Hollow hissed. I ate my true name too. And I’ll eat your coven and your friends, but I won’t keep them. Not for you. I’ll spit them out into the dirt after I’ve chewed them bloody. I’ll eat the woods and the brick mountains they built to gate me in and the hills and I’ll keep you here to watch it all slide down my gullet.
The Hollow grinned or snarled and its mouth was a fresh rotting rip in the moon white flesh. And then it was gone as I was catching a sour, humid breath to answer it. I gagged on the taste of the air as it clung to my tongue. My breaths stuttered in my chest and my eyes watered as I waited, hoping for the scene to shift like it had with Isaac. But the space was still and quiet and my heart hammered in my chest.
I fumbled in my pocket and found the stick of chalk still there. I shifted my feet over the floor until the right slid back and forth over something smooth and hard. I bent down and wrote blind.
I have a lamp to light the way.
There was a lamp, a little glass and oil one, yellow flame flickering and spitting at my side. The words were written on a piece of smooth dark wood, half swallowed in the muck beneath me. I stood, raising the lamp and shivered. Mountains of refuse rose up around me, bones and brick and glass. There were books, walls, pieces of what looked like an old ship, and more gruesome images I shied away from. I lifted the lamp above my head.
I was in a cavern, dark and massive and held up by spiraling stone gray that resembled something like a belly. My belly heaved and I covered my eyes, breathing into my palm.
It had to be a trick. It had to be.
But how long would it be before the others realized I was getting nowhere in my search? Could I leave the vision if the Hollow didn’t let me out? Or worse, had I come waltzing into a trap I’d built for myself?
My stare fixed to a scrap of bright yellow fabric snagged on a shard of wood, a carved wolf’s face broken into, as panic flooded through my veins. But the wolf was familiar, the yellow fabric too. It was the same yellow as Cecil Pincombe’s shocking necktie, and it was flecked with a rusty brown. And the wolf had been one of the animals carved into the desk of the library.
I ate my true name too.
If that was true…and I wa
s in the Hollow’s belly…
I released a slow, shaking breath. My grip tightened around the handle of the lamp and the flame brightened. Vision or not there was something I could do while trapped here. I crawled to the top of one of the mounds of churned up wood and glass, picking up the books as I went, balancing as carefully as I could. I held my breath at the top, afraid of falling in an avalanche of trash, and looked around.
What surrounded me seemed to be from the campus. Several mountains deeper was the ship, and beyond that my lamp glanced off the window panes of a steepled church. The cavern went on and on, and I wondered how far in I would have to go, digging through waste and wreckage to find the word.
I lifted the lamp higher, squinting to see what was dangling from the steeple of the church. Firelight glinted above me and I tore my eyes gratefully away from the shadowy figure hanging. There was a glitter of warmth overhead, tracing over the bone of a rib, and I swung the lamp in an arch, watching more lines glitter.
There were symbols carved into the bone, worn and polished into the twisting arch. One flickered in the glow, a knot that tangled endlessly. I stumbled over trash, wincing as my foot caught in something sticky, but I kept my eyes up, following the pattern of symbols. Most of them were familiar, foggy in my memory but from Callum’s ancient alphabet.
In my head they made the heavy crashing sounds of the Hollow’s language. The sound looped, inverting in on itself. Like the knot letter and the melody. I practiced it silently on my tongue, working out the shape.
“Gvesdrasveg,” I tried and everything rattled around me, the hill I stood on grumbling and scratching at my legs.
“Gvisardrasivg!” I said, louder and lower, the notes of the word clawing at my throat and grinding on my teeth.
And then the glass and wood and bone dropped out beneath me and swallowed me up.
I was braced, one hand in mud as the clearing reappeared around me. Night had fallen and stars winked over head and my legs felt frozen in the cold underneath me. My right hand was poised over the stone, my palm sweaty around the chalk in spite of the chill. Books I had rescued lay scattered around me in the mud.
“Joanna!” Callum said, palms on my shoulders.
“Gvisardrasivg,” I hissed and a ring of storm clouds snarled in above us, swirling together like a tornado and dropping to touch down in the heart of the clearing.
“You have it?” Callum asked.
“Gvisardrasivg,” I shouted and Bryce echoed it, the word stronger on their tongue and sounding closer to the right word.
“Sigils, now!” Callum shouted, standing up at my back.
I drew the knot at the top of the stone as the Hollow, Gvisardrasivg, The Belly of Nightmares, poured itself out of smoke and storm cloud, shrouded again and as tall as the trees.
Aiden’s bow was screeching over the strings of the violin and Isaac had turned the world the sick gray green. Bryce shone yellow in the strange light, bellowing the word I had found into the sky. The Hollow bent, lunging at my coven, and there was a flash like orange fire. Callum was behind me like a blaze at my back, the tingling warmth of his protection charm multiplied by hundreds. He was chanting and there was a slice of metal in the air above my head, his knife tracing a ward.
My legs burned and my bones throbbed as I added the next letter, a mass of points like a bursting star. It was like the library all over again, my head pounding and my body screaming in protest. My writing slowed as my hand began to shake while I tried to make smooth rounded edge of an empty moon. The next shape zigged and zagged and my teeth ground together through a scream. My back bowed and my vision blacked as the sensation of my bones shattering and splintering rocked through me.
“Callum,” Isaac shouted. “What are you-?”
“Joanna’s failing,” I heard him say. “Hold the circle as long as you can.”
Arms that burned like fire wrapped around my middle and I writhed against them.
“I have you,” Callum said in my ear and there was a cool touch at the back of my neck that smoothed the rough, tearing feeling under my skin.
“The others,” I whispered. But my body had calmed enough, making an X at the bottom of the stone and then crossing at the top and bottom, like an hourglass.
Across the clearing a tree tore up from it’s roots, crashing dangerously down to the ground in front of Hildy. But the woman didn’t even flinch, tracing a vivid blue sigil in the air that looked like a lopsided clockface.
“Finish the word, Joanna,” Callum said, and I could hear the strain in his voice, feel the sweat sticking us together at my back.
My hands felt numb as I worked and out of the corner of my eye I could see the Hollow thrashing. More trees came crashing, shattering on impact into jagged pieces that scattered in all directions.
The entire world seemed to shake, threatening to break apart, as I finished the second starburst, the last letter. The chalk crumbled against the slate as I joined the last point. Bryce was joining me in the dirt, placing small glowing hands on either side of the name. The letters burned bright with Bryce’s touch turning from chalk to fire to scorched carvings on the stone
The Hollow screamed and the sound reverberated at the back of my head like a white hot poker. I could feel the burn in my throat as I screamed with it, my body seizing and my sight swimming into a blind, bright, burst of empty color. Callum’s lips were on my cheek, moving with a word, but I was falling under.
27. Joanna
Everything was gray and foggy as I opened my eyes. My head still felt split in half and my vision pulsed like a drumbeat for a moment before clearing. The plaster above me was cracked and stained, a familiar bowing moon white circle above a narrow and lumpy bed.
I took one breath, mildew and charcoal and fresh bread, and I knew. I was back in Bridgeston.
I sat up and my head swam, the room blurring to a cloudy smear and then back again.
The house was quiet and my heart sank, knowing the inherent wrongness of the silence. I teetered out of the bed in bare feet, mud brushed away from my knees so they were still dusted in dirt. I looked out the window by the bed and there was a low morning fog hanging over the yard, hiding away the rest of the town.
I stumbled to my bedroom door and out into the hall. The house seemed to have faded since I’d left, like the life and charm had been leeched out over time. That or the cheerful pale yellow of the walls was now dull to me in comparison to the saturated colors of my coven’s house.
Where were they?
There was a choking panic in my throat. What happened in the woods? Why was I in Bridgeston and not with my coven?
My legs were weak and my feet barely felt the grain of the floor underneath me. But when I made it down the hall to the stairs I saw gleaming black shoes under the rickety kitchen table and for the first time since waking I took a full breath.
“I was afraid- afraid you weren’t here,” I said, coming down the stairs and finally seeing Aiden, Callum, and Isaac crowded together in my family’s kitchen.
Their faces turned to me in unison, but instead of relief or smiles their expressions were smooth- a placid smile on Aiden’s mouth, a sneer over Callum’s. Isaac only blinked at me.
“Why are we here?” I asked, at the bottom of the stairs. “What happened with the Hollow? How are the others?”
“The Hollow is caged,” Isaac said, and there was nothing in the words, no joy or feeling.
“Come sit, darling,” Aiden said. “You must be tired.”