by Shaun Hamill
“Sydney,” I said. Sydney, still a prisoner, but still alive, still human, all these years later. I could hardly believe it.
The person next to me—a fellow in a suit, cape, and domino mask with a long, pointed nose—turned and put a finger to his lips.
“Shh,” he rasped. His mask had no string to affix it to his head. The shiny, metallic material looked soldered onto his face at the temples, emerging from lumps of scar tissue. The eyes behind the mask weren’t dull like Mom’s, or Sydney’s, but bright and glassy, caught up in the performance.
Onstage, Sydney twirled and stretched, ghostly in the intermittent illumination. It was hard to pick out details. Was her hair graying? Were there lines on her formerly smooth face? She’d been seventeen when she disappeared in 1989. She’d be forty-one now. Had she been dancing without pause all these years?
There were thick black vines around Sydney’s ankles and wrists, going taut and slack in time with her movements. Something offstage was pulling the strings.
“I’ll come back for you,” I said, and backed out of the room. The man in the welded-on mask whipped around to shush me again.
As soon as I stepped into the hall, the office door shut itself and Eunice’s bedroom door swung open.
“Okay, I get it,” I said, raising my voice. “Where are you?” I walked past Eunice’s room to my own door. The knob wouldn’t turn. I slammed my shoulder into it, but it was like running into concrete. I headed for the stairs, but when I arrived, I found them guarded by a seven-foot-tall iron gate. If my own door was any indication, there was no point in trying to scale it. There were no shortcuts to the end of this attraction. I’d have to see it through as its designer intended. I entered Eunice’s room.
It was as untidy and cluttered as I remembered it, crammed with books, and a wooden desk pushed up beneath the window. Eunice slumped there, striking keys on a black, oily-looking typewriter. The clatter was loud and rhythmic in the eerie quiet, as if she were playing the machine like a piano. She wore the ragged remains of business casual clothes. Her red hair was tangled and matted. I approached slowly, chest tight. Long, multijointed black stalks had grown from various points in the desk, and lodged themselves in her arms, her legs, her stomach, and even her forehead. The stalks danced to the rhythm of Eunice’s typing. It looked like she was being prepared for transfiguration.
Eunice pulled a page from the typewriter and added it to a stack on her right. I picked the pages up, and she stopped typing. She raised her head. She looked paler than I remembered, her eyes vacant. Her face sagged with something greater than exhaustion. Blood ran down her forehead where the black stalks had pierced her skin.
The front of the manuscript was a title page:
The Turner Sequence
I flipped to the next page and read:
The Turner Sequence I: Margaret
When Margaret enters the fluid waking dream of the City, that mix of memory and nightmare, she thinks she’s in the tiny apartment she shared with Harry in the poorer part of Lubbock—that shabby one-bedroom affair with ratty carpet and wood-paneled walls, although you can hardly see the walls behind the stacks of boxes that line the room—boxes full of Harry’s paperbacks and comic books and pulp magazines.
Eunice wheezed, and I started, stepping away from her.
“Put…it…back.” The voice came from her mouth but sounded nothing like her. “Not…finished.”
I set the pages on the desk and left the room, not sorry to hear the door click shut behind me. Back in the hall, the door to my room finally swung open.
The moment I stepped in, the floor vanished beneath me, and I fell with an unheroic yelp, landing on my hands and knees on a hard wooden floor. Soft warm light lit the room around me, and the dark receded some. Canvases leaned against the walls, and dried plants and roots hung from the ceiling. I’d arrived in Leannon’s hut. Leannon, wearing her wolf’s face, sat slumped in the middle of the room, her back to me. She had her hairy arms wrapped around her knees.
I stood up. “I’m here,” I said.
She didn’t answer. I stomped across the room and grabbed her shoulder.
“Hey,” I said, and stopped as she looked up at me, orange eyes vivid with distress and torment. She gripped my hand, and I had just enough time to read what she had scribbled across the floor before the whole world went white:
FRIEND
HELP
The Hound
In this nearly silent film, a pale woman with red hair and a red cloak carries a basket of flowers through a forest of tall, thin trees. She pauses upon reaching a clearing with three simple crosses planted in the earth. On a nicer day, sunlight might fall on this little cemetery, but today the sky is black with storm clouds. The woman lays a white lily on each of the graves, then sits down before them. Several times she looks as though she might speak, but opts instead for the quiet and the rumble of clouds overhead.
The clouds burst, and she pulls up her hood and hurries back the way she came. She reaches a small wooden house that stands at the edge of the forest, on the outskirts of a small village of wooden buildings. The roads are muddy and empty, all doors shut against the storm.
The woman’s house is a single room with a packed dirt floor, a bed, a fire pit, and a small kitchen. She sits in a chair before the fire with a stack of paper in her lap, drawing with a hunk of charcoal. As the world outside darkens, she remains seated, sketching the same three faces again and again: a bald man with a dark beard, and two dark-haired children. The drawings improve with each successive draft, as if the woman is sharpening the focus in her mind’s eye, summoning laugh lines, playful glints in the eyes, melancholy mouths. She doesn’t move as she works, or shift for comfort. She occasionally closes her eyes, but never looks up and never changes her expression of studious, frowning concentration.
She draws until she runs out of paper, then flips the pages over and draws on the backs. When she comes to the end of this second series, she stands and stretches. She sets her pages on the bed and pulls a cloth purse from inside her dress. She starts to count its contents, but drops the money when a scratching sound begins outside her door.
The woman gasps, and the purse hits the floor with a muffled clank. The scratching ceases. The woman eyes the purse, as if wondering whether to recommence her counting, but then the scratching returns, audible above the drumming of the rain. The woman steps over her purse and opens the front door. The doorstep and the village roads appear empty, although it’s hard to see through the pounding rain.
She starts to withdraw into the house, but something past the tree line catches her gaze: a pair of glowing orange eyes, clear and sharp even through the storm.
Rather than startle or shrink back, the woman tilts her head and furrows her brow. She’s more curious than frightened.
She grabs her cloak and steps outside. Hood up, head down, she sloshes through the mud into the woods. Under the canopy of trees, she pulls the hood back and looks around. The orange eyes appear again, right in front of her face. She stands motionless as the figure unfurls from a crouch to its full height—at least a foot and a half taller than she is, draped in a long yellow cloak. The woman spreads her arms in a clear gesture of surrender. Gently—almost lovingly—the creature enfolds her in its long limbs and pushes off into the air, up through the trees and into the storm.
Rain pelts the woman’s face and lightning flashes in the distance, momentarily brightening the sky—and then the sky changes from purple-black to a swampy green. The village has vanished, replaced with a sprawling mass of black towers and buildings that look like temples and mausoleums, but bigger and somehow more awful than anything ever erected on earth.
After this, the film begins to stutter, the narrative lost in a series of quick cuts and sensations: a mug of something thick and pungent; an incredible drowsiness accompanied by
a sound like dry branches scrabbling across a concrete floor; sharp, unbearable pain and a tightness at the wrists and ankles; darkness, darkness, darkness.
Then, a different sort of pain. This part she remembers all too well, experiences from the inside. Her eyes open on a dark room, to the sound of cutting meat and an agony in her arms, legs, face, and chest, a feeling of something being taken—sucked—from her body and something else, thick and viscous, flowing in to replace it. Her body shakes and goes taut and she wishes for death, for anything to stop this pain—and then an unbearable itch spreads across the surface of her body. Her flesh tears, and clumps of fur burst from her skin. The world turns orange.
She tumbles out of the chair to which she has been strapped and lands on the floor, trembling. A line of wolf-faced monsters in colored robes enter the room and surround her. One of them—a gray wolf in blue—kneels and offers her a red robe. She pulls it on with shaking hands—no, not hands. Claws. She has claws now. She stands and the wolf in blue bares its fangs in a feral grin.
What follows is an orange smear of years during which the wolf is no longer anyone. She is driven by only a few impulses: feed on their pain; capture workers; serve the City. Various faces come and go, consistent only in their sadness, depression, grief, mental illness, and fear, each a crop to be harvested. Some people she only samples (a bad breakup here, death of a family pet there), and others she cultivates like gardens: the deeply depressed, the grief-stricken, the insane, the terminally ill. Some she feeds on for years, and others she takes to toil and dream darkly in the City. A select few—the strongest, most exquisite sufferers—are chosen for ascension and become wolves themselves.
To the wolf, their faces are all anonymous, easily forgotten—until she meets the Turners. It begins with Deborah, a woman teetering on the brink of madness. The wolf kidnaps her, but has second thoughts when she sees the woman’s son, Harry. A small boy with dark hair, standing in his mother’s bedroom in the middle of the night, terrified to be left alone. Something in the boy’s face sounds against a deep, long-hidden memory within her. Another small scared boy whose face she can’t quite place. For reasons the wolf doesn’t quite understand, she lets Deborah go home, and leaves them in peace for years.
The wolf returns to Harry when he’s grown, intending to feed upon him; his wife, Margaret; and his daughters, Eunice and Sydney. For years she dances at the edges of their perception, letting them catch glimpses and hints of her presence, heightening their pain and fear as Harry withers and dies. She delights as the family continues to fracture, but her work is interrupted once again when she meets another little boy: Noah Turner, age six, a perfect double of his dead father, standing behind his bedroom window and staring up at her with open fascination and no fear, able to see her whether she wants him to or not.
How long has it been since someone has seen her without terror and revulsion? Decades? Centuries? His curiosity and friendliness unlock something in her heart. She returns to him again and again. She spends her evenings in the atrium outside the boy’s bedroom, using sidewalk chalk to copy pictures out of his storybooks onto the concrete. When she puts her paw on his hand and guides him through their first drawing together, she loses herself for a moment in a flash of bright white light, a sense of perfect flow.
When that moment ends, too soon, she sees what they have drawn together: a cartoonish likeness of the City. More important, she sees the drawing, the pavement, and Noah in full color. The orange tint of the world is gone.
It’s the boy. Something about being near him brings back color and hints at other, bigger things out of her mind’s reach. She starts working her way into his life. She steals his oldest sister away to the City and uses his confusion to wangle an invitation into his room. She sleeps in his bed, watches him grow up, teaches him to fly. In her time away from him she builds her little house in the black woods outside the City, a place not unlike her final human dwelling, and there she makes her first rough paintings, trying to hang on to her full-color vision.
She tells herself that she thinks of Noah as a tool or a pet, but jealousy burns within her as she watches him give an ebon kindness to Donna Hart and receive his first kiss in return. Perhaps, she realizes, the colors he brings into her world are a side effect of something deeper that has been quietly gathering for years.
She is full of fury as she saves Noah from the Gray Beast, and she finds a new level of clarity and color as she rediscovers her human shape, finds her human voice, and makes love to Noah for the first time. Love has called her out of the dark, and at last given her a name: Leannon.
For years, Leannon paints and makes love to Noah. She hides him from the City, keeps her colors, her human shape, her happiness. But of course this state of bliss cannot continue indefinitely. She withholds too much information from her young lover, ignores too many of his questions. He gets curious, distrustful, and finds the City on his own. When it sees him, it demands his life, as it demands the lives of all its visitors.
Leannon tries to protect Noah, even after he leaves her. She abducts countless others in his stead to try to appease her master, even as the color drains out of the world and her mind grows muddled. She forgets how to handle a brush or stretch a canvas. How to put on a human face, or smile. The City remains adamant, and she has more and more difficulty resisting its command. In a final, confused attempt that might be meant to save Noah or call for his help, she abducts Eunice and Margaret Turner in one night. She hopes that Noah will find his way here and rescue everyone, or that the City will be sated at least a little longer, gaining two new slaves in his place.
After the abduction, she sits on the floor in her house, her head in her paws, trying to hang on to the image of his face, the letters of his name. It’s all slipping away. She is slipping away.
He does find a way back to her, uses the exact right words to open the door between the two worlds. And when he arrives—when his hand lands on her shoulder—she stops keeping secrets. She grabs him by the hand and finally shows him everything.
PART SEVEN
The Haunter of the Dark
1
The avalanche of white light subsided. I’d seen everything I needed to see. Leannon started to release my hand, but I held on to her paw. I knelt next to her and folded her into my arms.
“I missed you so much,” I said.
She returned the embrace and uttered a high-pitched whine from the back of her throat.
I stroked her back and scratched behind her ears. “It’s okay. I’m here now.”
2
After I made the deal, I went to Sydney first. The audience had left the little theater at the end of the upstairs hall, and the music had stopped. Sydney danced alone, to no tune, for no one. When I climbed up and untied the vines around her arms and legs, she collapsed into me and we both nearly tumbled off the stage. I fought to keep my balance and lowered her to the floor, her head on my bent knees. Her eyelids fluttered.
“Sydney,” I said, stroking her matted hair. “Sydney, it’s time to wake up.”
Her eyes snapped open. “Daddy?” she croaked.
I nodded. It was easier this way.
“I don’t understand,” she said. She rubbed her eyes with balled-up fists, like a toddler. “Is this a dream?”
“Yes,” I said. “And I need your help to wake us both up. Do you think you can walk?”
Arms around each other’s shoulders, we hobbled down the stairs and into the living room. I sat next to her on the couch and held her hands.
“In another moment, you’re going to wake up,” I said. “But first I need you to drink something.” I stood, took a steaming mug off the breakfast bar, and handed it to her. She sniffed it, and her brow creased.
“What is this?” she said.
“It’s medicine,” I said. “I know it smells funny, but you have to drink it all, okay?”
She took a deep breath, braced herself, then stopped as a loud thump sounded upstairs, followed by the sound of voices.
“What was that?” she said.
“Another part of the dream. You have to drink.”
She tipped the mug to her lips and chugged its contents in a few short gulps. She put a fist to her mouth, like she was trying not to throw up. After the moment passed, she seemed more awake.
“How can you be here?” she said. “I watched you die.”
“It’s a dream,” I reminded her. “And in dreams we’re allowed to see one another as often as we like.”
3
I went to Mom second. She still sat on the floor of the pink nursery, eyes shut tight. She clutched the photograph of her wedding day and cried. The vines that had been impersonating a pregnancy now lay around her like dead snakes.
“Mom, can you hear me?” I said.
She looked up at me and blinked. Like Sydney, she was confused.
“We can go now,” I said, and offered her a hand.
She squeezed the photo to her chest and rocked back and forth. “I can’t go,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I fucked it all up,” she said. “Everything. I lost my husband, my best friend, and my children. I told myself I was protecting them, but”—she shook her head—“I was pushing them away. I don’t deserve to go home.”