The Lost Girl

by Lilian Carmine

  “Sky …” I croaked through parched lips. My voice was coming out shaky and weak.

  Jarvis’s head shot up, searching for what I was staring at, but found nothing but darkness. It was like he could sense something was there, lurking in the shadows – something eerie, but he couldn’t see what it was.

  “Please …” I called again, still looking in her direction.

  Jarvis looked at me angrily. Despite the fact that he couldn’t see what it was, he knew that my pleading was not to him, but to someone else. Or something else.

  “Let’s see if I can make you beg for me, Joey. Let’s see if I can make you cry my name now,” he hissed.

  I turned to look at him and then my eyes widened in surprise. Stabbing needles shot through my wrist. I started laughing. It was low and quiet at first, but soon it rolled into a crescendo, growing louder, heavier.

  Jarvis stared at me in puzzlement, trying to understand what was happening.

  “I’m going … to love seeing this …” I told him between laughs, “… so much.”

  “GET OFF HER.” Vigil’s cold, hard voice boomed through the room, making the walls shake as if in fear. Vigil was here. He had finally come.

  Jarvis’s body lurched violently away from me and he was thrown up in the air by an invisible force. The knife he had been holding flew out of his hands and clattered loudly to the cement floor.

  His body smacked against a metallic structure in the middle of the room a couple of times, and he cried out in pain. Then his body stopped and hung limply in the air like a floating rag doll.

  I had stopped laughing and was crying now. Vigil knelt silently by my side, setting my hands and legs free with a swift wave of his fingers. He didn’t help me get up, or ask me if I was okay. He didn’t say anything.

  He just stared hard at me, a deep frown painting his angelic face as his dark eyes swiftly morphed into complete white. His fists clenched and an unyielding fury broke out of him. It was like nothing I had ever seen before: cold hatred flaring out like a dying star transforming into a black hole deep within his eyes.

  He wasn’t in blazing flames like I had been when wielding his powers. He was cold – like space: unforgiving and without mercy.

  The air in the warehouse began to freeze in front of me, making puffs of hot air steam out of my mouth.

  Vigil stood up, staring at Jarvis’s form hanging in the air a few feet away from us. Vigil’s fists were clenching and unclenching at his sides as he struggled internally with something. Jarvis began to shout and try to break free from the invisible force that held him captive. Vigil watched in silence, and then turned to me.

  “I am sorry,” he said. “But I have made my decision. I will have to break some rules today. I do not care for the consequences,” he stated, his voice cold and implacable. “That is one of the reasons why you were not meant to wield these powers. You could never do this and forgive yourself afterwards. But I can. It is built in me to have no mercy. And I shall have none with him. He is going to have to die.”

  Jarvis heard this verdict and started to thrash widly in the air, spit and foam escaping his mouth like a rabid dog. Vigil waved a hand and Jarvis slowly descended until he was hovering inches from the floor. Vigil stepped close to him. “Silence now, you poor excuse for a human being,” he ordered. The look in his white eyes and the deadly tone of his voice were enough to make Jarvis go completely still.

  “You are not only going to die, you despicable thing,” Vigil spat out, leaning close to Jarvis’s face. “I’m going to obliterate you out of existence. Not only will your body cease to exist, not only will your flesh and bones vanish, but your spirit and soul will also die. You will never be able to come back; you will not be able to return in any possible way. You will be completely and utterly gone. For ever. I am going to give you the ultimate death. You can never be. Ever again,” he invoked, his voice sharp and cold like an ice blade.

  Sky finally decided to let herself become visible. She walked ahead and stopped right next to Jarvis.

  She had come for him.

  Sometimes I wonder if I could have tried to persuade Vigil in that moment. I could have tried to change his mind, reason with him.

  I knew all too well what it was like to let anger and hate take over your mind until there was nothing left but thoughts of destruction. I knew Vigil was angry – no – he was furious. I tried to imagine how loud the rattling chains were inside his mind.

  But I also knew how to have compassion. I could vividly remember how I couldn’t kill those men in the park, how I couldn’t even hurt Nick in Sky’s desert. Looking back, I should probably have tried to stop Vigil from killing Jarvis. I should have tried.

  But I didn’t. I sat there bleeding on the cold floor and watched as Jarvis burned in agony, his bones, flesh, blood – every cell in his body igniting from the inside. He completely disintegrated right before my eyes until there was nothing left of him, not even ashes or dust. He was gone. In the most complete and possible way.

  I have never seen someone die before. I was shocked, but it wasn’t the shock that got me so rattled. It was the fact that I didn’t say anything. I just wanted to watch him burn. I wanted him dead and gone. For ever.

  I was just as guilty as Vigil of Jarvis’s death. I had silently witnessed this murder and done nothing to prevent it. I had been an executioner just as much as he. And I was going to have to live with that for the rest of my life.

  It was only after the flames disappeared completely and the room was once again bathed in darkness that I realized I was freezing. I was still on the cement floor with a pool of my own blood surrounding me. I felt so cold. So very cold.

  Vigil kneeled by my side and held me carefully in his arms. I couldn’t feel my limbs any more, just this icy cold gripping my body, running slowly and relentlessly through my veins.

  “You came for me,” I let out on a ragged breath which I hadn’t known I was holding. His eyes were still ice-tinted.

  “I am so sorry, Joey. I was really far away. I had just delivered Nick to my colleagues when I felt your call. I came as fast as I could … I-I shouldn’t have left you alone in your house … I wasn’t thinking straight … I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay, V.” I gave him a weak smile. “How could you know this was going to happen? It’s not your fault.” My voice was getting weaker and weaker by the second. I felt so tired and so cold. The pain in my stomach didn’t seem to hurt as much any more. I wanted to go to sleep now and rest for a long time. I blinked slowly. Even that small action seemed monumentally hard, as if my eyelids were glued together.

  Vigil shook me hard, making me focus. “Joey, I don’t know what to do. I cannot heal you; my powers don’t do that. There is too much blood. What should I do?”

  I blinked again and managed to croak one word before I slipped into dark oblivion: “Hospital …”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Into Dust

  I jolted awake and found myself standing on a worn-out wooden platform. A thick mist surrounded me, making it impossible to see mere feet away. It floated eerily, bathing everything in a pale hue of gray.

  After a few seconds’ disorientation I stopped to check my stomach, where the wound had been. All the horrid memories came rushing back to me – the stabbing pain, the blood on the floor – but I didn’t have any wounds now. Where was I? Was I dead?

  I peered into the distance. It seemed there was a vague silhouette way ahead of me. Someone was out there, but the mist was too thick for me to see who it might be.

  I headed over hesitantly, being careful not to step off the old platform. Each step I took made the mist dissolve a little more, making me increasingly confident. I seemed to be on a wooden pier, the sound of splashing a sign that there was water below.

  When I reached the end of the pier I realized the shadowy silhouette was a ferryman, perched on top of a long, thin boat moored to the platform. He had his back to me and a long sandy cloak covered his body comp
letely.

  I stopped as I took in his view: it was an infinite silvery ocean. The mist had cleared considerably now, allowing me to see for miles. The water glittered oddly whenever waves crashed over one other, and that’s when I realized that it was not, in fact, water, but sand. Silver, wavy, moving sand. The movement was beautiful, catching the glittery reflection from the big, white moon above us.

  Was this a dream? Somehow I knew it wasn’t. Something deep inside of me knew this was as real as it could get.

  The ferryman’s boat sank into the sand, wobbling a little just as it would have done had it been on water. I glanced to the ferryman, his long cloak billowing on the soft warm breeze. The air smelled of ancient parchments, of dust and sand. His hood covered his face and the bottom of his cloak merged into the sand.

  Tiny specks of sand floated from the sea upwards into the dark sky. It was like the sand was so light that gravity could not hold it down, and it drifted towards the sky like tiny stars. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

  The ferryman noticed my presence and turned slowly. A washed-out skull of dark wood, the same color as the boat, stared at me intensely from inside the hood. My eyes went as wide as they could get. It is not every day you see the empty eye sockets of a live wooden skull.

  “S-Sky?” I risked. The long cloak and eerie skull were pretty good indicators that this could be Death in all its stereotypical glory. Was Sky portraying herself like this to me now?

  The ferryman frowned slightly – if a skull could even do that – and bowed. “I am but the Ferryman. ‘Sky’ asked me to fetch you and bring you to her domain. She is waiting. Come now, we must leave.” He waved a long, knotty, bony finger at me.

  “Huh … right. But I’ve been to Sky’s ‘domain’ before … This doesn’t look like it. It does have a lot of sand, but no moon in the sky, and the sand doesn’t move, not floating about like here.”

  The Ferryman stopped and rubbed his wooden chin. “That is her workplace, so to speak. This is her residence. Here you don’t have to worry about the scorching sun. Here you have to worry about the dust sea.” His voice was raspy and gritty. He waved his hand towards the sand that brushed against the boat.

  As I stepped inside the boat, the subtlety of his threat reverberated in my head. Here you have to worry about the dust sea.

  “Shouldn’t I give you a coin or something?” I asked, remembering the old stories about Death’s Ferryman. No coin, no ride.

  He nodded as he began to row us away from the pier. “Ordinarily, yes. But you are a guest this time.”

  We drifted away quickly, swiftly gliding through silver waves of sand as if it were water. In the distance I could see dozens of other piers, which slowly disappeared one by one in the distance.

  The boat rocked as the Ferryman continued rowing steadfastly forward. The action made his cloak float back, showing all that was inside. Instead of a skeleton made of wood I saw that the Ferryman was, in fact, part of the boat itself. His body fused with the boat below his waistline, his wooden bones and muscles protruding from the woodwork and his feet merged with the floorboards.

  It was as if he had melted into the wood. It was creepy. And the more I thought about it, the more creepy it got – because I was sitting in the boat … and the boat was kind of part of him. So I was kind of sitting on him as well! I shuffled uncomfortably and decided to look at the ocean rather than the Ferryman.

  The silver sand never ceased floating to the sky. It moved slowly and lightly all the way up to the unknown dark void above our heads.

  Then something started following the boat, something incredibly big, swimming alongside us beneath the sand. Soon others like this creature joined to accompany it. They, whatever “they” were, seemed to be escorting us towards Sky’s home, gliding alongside the boat.

  One of them passed really close to me, its cracked, giant back surfacing above the sand only to quickly disappear again, burying itself in the dust sea. I made to reach my hand in its direction but the Ferryman warned me not to.

  “Beware of the dust sea and what lies beneath it,” his dry, raspy voice said.

  In other words, Do not touch the alien creatures in the sand.

  I nodded and pulled my hand quickly inside the boat, all the while observing the alien-looking whales swimming close by.

  A big wave of sand – boy, is that as weird to say as I think it is? – splashed over us, rocking the boat, and I turned to see what was causing the commotion. A mile or so away a gigantic whale-creature surfaced. But not only that, it also started rising completely out of the sea, floating upwards in slow motion towards the sky, in the same way as the glittery sand.

  It was falling. Into the sky. Or flying up. Whatever. This was getting way too weird for my brain to comprehend.

  My mouth gaped widely as the giant continued its ascension until there was nothing left but a tiny dot in the distance, too far away for me to discern its form any more.

  I was about to ask the Ferryman what the hell that was all about, but he had stopped rowing and was now looking fixedly at something ahead. I followed his gaze and then gasped in even greater astonishment.

  In front of us there was a steep glass staircase leading up to a huge glass mansion. The entire structure was translucent and transparent, shimmering and glinting in the moonlight, almost fusing with the black sky. It was like something out of a wild fairy-tale dream. It was as outlandish and beautiful as the strange sea of silver sand, and the alien creatures that swam beneath it. It was as scary as it was breathtaking.

  A small, narrow, wooden plank rolled out from underneath the boat and parked itself, resting on one of the glass steps: my way out.

  “Milady,” the Ferryman called out to someone, bowing deeply and making the entire woodwork creak with the movement. “In accordance with your request, I bring your guest Joe Gray, Witch Sorcerer, Conjurer of the Underworld, Gray Hood Bearer and Fire Wielder.”

  I turned and looked behind me to see who the hell he was talking about, because that was certainly not me.

  Sky’s deep laugh caught my attention and made me turn in the direction of the glass staircase. “Thank you, Erwin!” she said, acknowledging the Ferryman, and then turned to look at me. “He can be so posh and formal sometimes, you know?” She beamed widely and winked, walking in my direction.

  I skipped quickly out of the boat and stopped at the bottom of the glass steps. Sky’s midnight hair covered her bare shoulders, and wristbands, necklaces and rings adorned her ankles, neck and fingers. She still wore the heavy make-up and black pants, tank-top and those black boots I had grown used to seeing on her at all times.

  “Joey, I’ve been waiting for you,” she said, giving me a tight hug which, as usual, sent cold shivers down my spine as if a cold bucket of ice had just been thrown over my head. I cringed and clenched my teeth, bearing the coldness of her embrace. It was not her fault that she had this effect on people. And everybody deserved a good hug now and then. Even Death.

  “Hmm, you were?” I mumbled when she stepped away.

  “Of course. I told you I’d see you later. Now is later!” she said, with a wise smile on her lips.

  “Am I dying?” I blurted out. This question had been nagging at me from the moment I’d jolted awake on the pier. I remembered what I had been through in the warehouse, the sheer panic, the terror, the pain, the fear of dying. But since I had been in this place, all of that seemed like a distant dream, as if this had been the real thing all long. I wasn’t afraid or scared; I wasn’t in pain. And nothing from before mattered any more.

  And that was freaking me out big time because deep down inside I knew that it should all matter. I should be scared. I should be sad that my life was ending. Was I really dying?

  “Yes, you are,” she answered me, still smiling. “But you have been dying since the moment you were born, Joe Gray. I’m sure you knew that already.”

  I blinked stupidly at her. That was not what I meant! God, I forgot that
speaking with Sky was just as philosophically challenging as speaking to Vigil.

  “Come inside! I’d like you to see something, and it’s almost time,” she exclaimed excitedly, grabbing my hand and pulling me along with her into her glass mansion.

  Goosebumps rose up my arm from her touch as I let myself be dragged inside.

  “The place wasn’t like this a few days ago, but I got the idea from you, from when you stomped your foot in the sand and turned it into glass. That was so clever of you! Heat and sand equals glass. So obvious! And since I have all this raw material available, I thought to myself, why not just do like Joey? So here it is! What do you think? Do you like it?” Sky asked, as she skipped quickly through the glass hallways.

  As it turned out, the mansion really was made of glass, as in, everything was glass: the long floors, the high ceilings, the huge doors and the numerous chairs, tables, vases – even the flowers in the vases were sparkling like beautiful crystal.

  “Y-yeah, it looks great! Really beautiful,” I said. Not very practical, or safe, or even comfortable, but I guess that was just from a human perspective. Death didn’t need to be safe or comfortable.

  It was also a little bit of a death-trap, no pun intended – well, a little pun intended. But since the only source of light was the moon outside and its reflection in the sparkling floating sand, the house was the darkest glass at night-time. If you pictured it, you’d realize how hard it would be to walk around without seriously injuring yourself. I was glad I had Sky to guide me safely through the vast rooms.

  We reached a curling staircase and Sky pulled me up the steps after her.

  “Thanks! I think so too,” she said happily as we emerged on the second floor and walked to what looked like a balcony. “I love to come up here to watch the view.”

  I stopped by the balcony railings and gazed at the view with wide eyes. Although it seemed like we had walked up just a few stairs, when we stepped onto the balcony it felt like we were a dozen storeys up. Scarily high.