by Leo Hunt
I can’t think of anything to say.
“You can’t have thought I wouldn’t notice any of this happening, Luke. Did you really think I’d pay no attention?”
“I hoped,” I say.
Berkley laughs. “I do find your naïveté rather endearing, it has to be said.”
“What do you want from me?” I ask. He’s standing between me and the gateway, preventing any hope of escape, although I’m not sure it would work anyway. He can find me in the living world as easily as he can here.
“I want us to sit together,” Berkley says, and as the words leave his mouth I find that we are sitting down, facing each other across a small round table made of gold, in golden chairs with places set before us, golden bowls piled with dark meat and fruit, golden goblets and a jug that looks like it ought to hold wine. We’re still at the passing place, the three stones standing around our table like guards. Berkley takes a long drink from his cup. What’s going to happen to Elza? Isn’t she supposed to be following me?
“Don’t worry about your friend,” he says. “She’ll find her own way.”
I swallow.
“If you’re angry about us killing the demon —” I begin.
“Luke. If I am ever angry, you will be aware of it, I assure you. Happily I have been visited with more children than it is possible to name or number, so the loss is of no particular consequence.”
He takes another draft of whatever it is he’s drinking. I have my hands folded in my lap. The witch blade is still tucked into my belt, although I doubt it would be much use against him. The table’s piled high with food, but there’s something wrong with it, some kind of corruption or taint to the meat and soft fruits that makes me feel ill just looking at them.
“What do you want from me?” I ask. “Because I really wanted to go home.”
“And so you shall. I merely desired to sit and speak with you. I do like to reach out to my supplicants now and again, to keep our bond fresh in their minds.”
I look at my hands. I remember touching him, my fingers held in his lineless palm. I invited this creature into my life. I signed his contract, and then, on Halloween, I called him back with my own blood and bargained with him. I’ve tried my best to forget about him, but I know I never will.
“You don’t like me very much, do you?” Berkley remarks.
It’s such an unexpected turn to this conversation that I start in my seat. He’s looking at me intently, his eyes bright, seeming to reflect firelight without a source.
“Now, why is that, I wonder?” he continues, taking a black peach from the nearest bowl.
“You’re the Devil,” I say.
“So you dislike me a priori? You dislike the Devil because he is the Devil? The Devil exists to be hated, reviled, feared?”
“You’re evil,” I say. “You torment people. You trick them. You tricked me.”
Mr. Berkley takes a bite of the black fruit. Chews thoughtfully, swallows.
“In my long experience,” he says, “evil tends to be a matter of opinion. I exist to offer knowledge. To the weak-minded, that is seen as evil. I exist to bestow power to those who dare ask it of me. To the weak of heart, the timid souls that shuffle through their lives and deaths as though both were a dream, I am known as evil. I hoped you had started to grow beyond that, my boy.”
“That’s what evil people always say,” I reply. “They say they’re not evil and nobody understands them and they had to do what they did.”
“Does the Devil know he is the Devil?” Berkley says, looking at me. “When he gazes at his own reflection, is it the face of the Devil that he sees?”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I offer knowledge and I offer power. I did not trick your father, and I did not trick you. You knew my terms, and you accepted them. Attempting to distance yourself from me after the fact is unbecoming.”
“I had no choice! It was that or death at the hands of my Host!”
“So there was a choice,” he says, amused. “And you came to me.”
“I —”
“It is a sorry definition of freedom to apply the term only to choices between palatable options. Ashana saw she could either let her sister die or allow your witch girl to die instead, and she made her choice. To say she did not have one is nonsense. You chose to pursue her, chose to plunge your knife into Ashana’s chest to save your beloved. You chose to raise the dead, bind them to your will, plunge headlong into their world. You chose to lead your hound, who would have followed you anywhere, into danger and death. You chose to call upon me, and now complain I am a disagreeable presence in your life. Do not speak to me of having no choice.”
“I want to go home,” I say. “Just send me home.”
Berkley laughs.
“Demanding to be returned home,” he says. “A formidable philosophical defense. I shall have to employ it for myself at some point.”
I don’t say anything.
“Do try the peaches,” he continues. “They’re exquisite.”
“What do you want?” I ask.
“Only that we sit and speak.”
“No. We made a deal. What do you want? Is this the lead-up to you asking me?”
Berkley places the peach stone, shiny with juice, on his empty gold plate. “I told you,” he says, “I want something equal in value to your father.”
“A nonpareil?”
“No. I have no use for such objects.”
“When will I have to pay you?”
“Perhaps I will never collect my debt. Perhaps I will allow you to live out your life, day by day, the sun rising and falling, the moon blossoming with light and devoured by darkness, never knowing when you will round a corner and see my face. Perhaps you will hear my voice in your dreams. Perhaps you will try to forget your debt, bury it like a seed beneath frost-hardened ground, but you will never forget me. Perhaps you will live your entire life never knowing when I will collect, with the debt forever in your thoughts like a scratch on the surface of your eye, and when you lie on your deathbed you will realize that every moment you lived was poisoned by the waiting, the fear, and then you will know that the debt has been paid.”
His smile is wide and white, his eyes alight with a monstrous radiance.
“Or perhaps,” the Devil says, almost in a whisper, “I want something else.”
The gray mist of Deadside swirls and thickens around us, and all I can see are eyes shining like poisoned blue stars, and when the mist clears again, he’s gone.
The table is empty of food and drink, and there’s only one thing, lying in the center: a small book bound in green leather, with an eight-pointed star engraved on the cover. I should have known it wasn’t gone for good. There’s no choice. I know Berkley won’t let me leave it behind.
So I pick up the Book of Eight, tucking it into my jacket, and then, without a backward glance, I pass through the gateway.
It’s late afternoon, with gnats looping in the air overhead and a low sun falling softly through the trees. A perfect Dunbarrow afternoon, as nice as you could hope for in early April. After the gray of Deadside, the warm colors of the bracken and grass and moss are intoxicating. I feel drunk on the blue of the sky, the green of new leaves. Even after everything that has happened, I can’t help but be happy to see the sun again. I feel like I was underwater for a thousand years, stuck at the bottom of a murky ocean, and I just broke the surface.
I turn, taking in the rest of the Devil’s Footsteps, and stop short when I see a figure in white, standing at the tree line back toward the road. Is that Ash? How can it be her? I killed her . . . I’m sure of it. Her spirit vanished. How did she . . . ?
I dart out of the stone circle, hurtling through the air toward the tent, toward my body, to Elza and Mark. How did she get back here? What if she already moved my body? She could’ve done anything — I was so sure she was dead.
Luckily, nothing in the tent seems different. I dive back into my body. I open my eyes to see sun
light dappling the roof overhead, and Ham’s furry body, gone cold, beside me. I quickly check the other sleeping compartments, moving quickly, aware that Ash could be on us any moment. Elza is lying in the compartment next to me, still apparently lifeless. Mark is asleep. I’ve got the witch blade in my hand, and I’m fumbling with the zip of the tent when I hear a voice from outside.
“Luke?”
I don’t move a muscle. The only sound is my breathing.
“Luke,” the voice — American, female — says again, “come out.”
“What do you want?” I ask. I was so sure this was over.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Ash says.
“Oh, yeah?”
“You should really come outside,” she says. “I’ve been here for hours. I could’ve hurt your body and I didn’t.”
She has a point, I suppose. This doesn’t quite make sense as an ambush. Who knows how she survived or what she wants?
I unzip the tent and climb out. There’s a girl standing a few feet away, dressed in white Converse, white jeans, a baggy white sweater. She has Ash’s face, Ash’s build, but her hair is long and unruly, and her eyes are the blue of sun-bleached denim. She raises a hand in greeting.
“Ilana?” I ask.
“Sort of,” Ilana Ahlgren says. “It’s complicated.”
I’m still holding the witch blade. I take a slow step toward her.
“What are you . . . I mean, how are you here?”
“I came down to see if you were all right,” she says.
“Why? I mean, I . . . I killed Ash, Ilana. She’s dead. I killed her.”
“Not exactly,” Ilana says.
My throat tightens. “Ash? Is that you?”
“Like I said,” Ilana continues, “it’s a little complicated.”
“You’re in Ilana’s body?”
“We both are,” she replies. “Ilana hid while you fought Ash and the Widow. We, she, saw everything. We saw the servants fall. We felt the blow you dealt to Ash and watched it from the safety of the tree line as well. As Ash was dying, Ilana knew what she had to do. It was so simple. We’d been sharing our spirits for so long . . . and maybe we were always supposed to be one person. We began as one person, after all; it was only later that we divided. It was so clear. Ilana took the rest of Ash into herself, and we became one whole spirit.”
Ilana seems strangely calm as she relates all of this.
“So you’re both in there?” I ask.
“Yes. Ashana and Ilana. All of our memories, all of our thoughts. But we’re one person now. We will be one person from now on.”
“I don’t really know what to say to you,” I reply.
“Say you’re happy for us.”
“Happy? Ilana . . . I killed your sister. I murdered her.”
“I’m still alive, Luke,” Ilana says.
“Aren’t you angry with me?”
“Ash wasn’t happy,” Ilana replies. “It’s strange how clearly we see everything now. She wasn’t well. Neither of us was. The way Ash — the way I — treated you and Elza was wrong.”
This is so bizarre.
“Are they . . . are you happy now?”
Ilana looks up into the trees. She frowns.
“We think so,” she says. “But then, Ilana always was happy. That’s something Ash never saw. Her sister was happy, even though she was dying. It was Ash who suffered.”
I remember the first time I met Ilana’s ghost, the way she reached out to the night sky. The joy in her face.
“Maybe there’s something in that,” I say.
“We feel better than we have in a long time,” she says, brushing hair back from her face. “Maybe things turned out for the best.”
I think of Ham, lying cold just behind us.
“It doesn’t feel like that,” I say.
“We’re sorry for what we did to you,” Ilana says.
“Ash said I could drink from the chalice of Lethe water,” I say. “She told me I’d forget what I read in the Book of Eight. If you want to make things right, you can start there.”
“We can help your friend Mark,” Ilana says. “That was true. But Ash was lying to you. The waters of the River Lethe cannot erase pages from the Book of Eight, for the Lethe flows from the Shrouded Lake, and that place —”
“It is the Book, somehow, right?”
“In some way, yes. We can’t erase the Book’s pages. It’s like using fire to extinguish fire.”
“Will I really go crazy?”
“It might happen. It might not.”
“That’s comforting.”
“It wasn’t meant to be,” Ilana replies. “It was the truth.”
“I need to check on Elza,” I tell her.
“She may not return immediately,” Ilana says. “She has to find her way back from the lake, follow the path you made for her.”
I turn and crawl back into the tent. Ham is still lying where I left him. He looks like he might be asleep. Ilana bends down beside me and gives him a gentle rub on the head.
“He was a brave dog,” she says. “Very loyal.”
“Yeah,” I say. “He was.”
Ilana opens the compartment where Mark sleeps, and she somehow produces the chalice of river water from her pocket, using a hand motion I can’t follow. She tilts his sleeping head forward and pours dark water into his mouth. She whispers into his ears, and he mumbles softly in his sleep as she speaks. Ilana lays Mark’s head back down. “He will forget,” she says. “The Fury’s words are gone.”
“What did the demon say to him?” I ask.
“Who knows? Demons have their own language, and we are not supposed to hear it. Their forbidden words can implant ideas, terrible false dreams. . . . No one knows what it said to him. To know would be to suffer the same torment he suffered.”
“What about his nose?”
“He was drunk, out in the forest. He must have fallen. He can’t remember what happened.”
“Could you have made me forget Elza?” I ask. “After she died? Would that have worked?”
“No,” Ilana says. “Your mind is linked with that lake. The Book of Eight resides within you. The river water won’t erode your memories.”
Elza hasn’t moved, but there’s something about the body. It feels expectant, on the edge of something. She has to return. I didn’t look back. I did everything right. She’s still lying on her back, hair pooled around her neck.
“Maybe we could bring her out to the passing place,” Ilana says.
“Would that work?” I ask.
“It might help.”
As I reach down to Elza again, I notice that my little finger is missing. The digit the Riverkeeper took is gone, like I was born without it. I don’t mention it to Ilana.
We carry Elza out of the tent and across the sunlit clearing, and lay her gently down on the moss in the middle of the standing stones. The light plays on her hair, on her freckled face. She looks peaceful somehow, beautiful, like she’s posing for an oil painting.
“So now what?” I ask.
“Have faith,” Ilana says. “Hope.”
We sit down on the flattest stone.
Ilana brought a bag of food: sandwiches, apples, chocolate bars. They taste like the most delicious food I’ve ever eaten. She tells me that it’s Sunday afternoon, Easter Sunday, April fifth. I was in Deadside for less than a day. It feels like I spent months there. Ilana nods when I tell her this.
“We left the lake just ahead of you, but we arrived back in Liveside twelve hours earlier than you.”
I doubt they ran into Mr. Berkley on the way back to Dunbarrow, but I don’t mention that part. Best to have some secrets.
“So we don’t know how long Elza will be?” I ask.
“She’ll come back.”
“I hope.”
“The Shrouded Lake isn’t a joke, Luke. If the sleepers beneath the waters said she’d come back . . . she will.”
“What are you going to do now?” I ask her.
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“Us? We’re going back to California.”
“What are you going to do when you get there, though?”
Ilana frowns.
“All Ash really thought about was Ilana. How to keep her alive. How to get her back. Now that we’re together . . . I don’t know what we’ll do. Live, I suppose.”
We sit together in silence, looking down at Elza.
“You know, I’m going to have a lot to explain when she comes back,” I say. “It might be better if it’s just me here at first. Easier.”
“Of course,” Ilana says. “I’ll wait on the path.”
Ilana embraces me, then walks away through the clearing, back toward the road. I assume she’s got a car parked out there somewhere. I’m glad Ash seems to have found what she was looking for.
I sit alone and wait. Birds trace intricate patterns in the sky, snatching insects from the warm air. I run my thumb over my sigil, over the gap where my little finger used to be. I run my mind over the gap where Ham used to be. I’m going to miss him.
As the sun sinks behind the low hills, as the last hint of light is fading from her face, Elza breathes in and opens her eyes.
We bury Ham on Monday evening. It’s almost dusk, a clear sky, the sun setting on the horizon. We’ve dug a grave for him right at the end of the garden, by the stone wall. The apple trees are starting to blossom, their branches decked out in delicate white blooms. Elza said that in some cultures, white is the color of death.
Mum stands next to me, wearing her poncho, with a wreath of flowers in her hand. She remembers Ham having a stroke, dying in his sleep. She remembers that I never had a little finger, was born without it. Elza stands beside Mum, holding one of Ham’s old chew toys. He never showed that much interest in them, to be honest, but this is the one he seemed to like the best: a ball with a knotted rope stuck through it. I’m holding the spade.
Ham lies in his grave, wrapped in his favorite blanket. As a puppy he’d crawl underneath it and stay there all day, with just his little black nose peeking out. I remember that, back when we first got him, and he was as tiny and sleek as an otter. I think growing up to be so big was always a surprise to him. The blanket, which used to cover him completely when he was young, is now wrapped around his chest and back like a shawl. He looks peaceful.