The Mortal Sleep (Hollow Folk Book 4)

by Gregory Ashe

  I had my blades, but this called for more than blades. This called for something bigger. The saw, a small part of me thought, and I pushed that thought away. But I couldn’t find anything. Not a damn thing. Maybe the guys with the cigarettes. Just about every guy that went into Slippers had a lighter or a matchbook or—

  Just about every guy.

  Behind me, the Impala’s door wobbled shut with a soft click; I didn’t care if it was really latched or if it had just caught halfway. My skin was starting to itch. Sweat dampened my shirt, and it clung in a wet diamond between my pecs. Flannel-guy was still where I’d left him, blowing his bubbly breaths. Maybe his jaw was broken. That was an interesting thought. Maybe his teeth had cut something inside his mouth. Maybe that was the sound of blood trickling down his throat. Those were interesting thoughts too. But not interesting enough, not when another thought, a blinking-red-traffic-light thought, went on and on in my head: they were sending me back to Dad.

  My hands shook as I patted flannel-guy down. Keys. Wallet—eighty-eight bucks, which meant the guy either hadn’t even gotten inside Slippers or he’d left early for some reason, before he’d had a chance to blow it all. The cash went into my pocket. A cinnamon disc in crinkly plastic. A condom. I pocketed this too. Then, a piece of hard plastic. I shoved it toward the top of the pocket, and the steel wheel emerged first. My fingers were shaking so badly I could barely work it all the way free, and then I had it: three fingers around the tube, with its stored cloud of butane, and my index and thumb bracketing the wheel and the head.

  I almost went back to the Impala; the dome light was still on, a sure sign that I hadn’t actually closed the door, and that spooked me. I didn’t want light. I wanted to be off on my own. I wanted that black hole in my head to swallow me up—to finish eating me, instead of this piece-by-piece bullshit. I wanted total dark. Privacy. But I heard Austin saying, You promised. My empty hand clutched at my jeans, the palm sweaty and the denim rough and slippery all at the same time. I could get in the car, I could drive to the hospital. He’d be there. He’d talk me through this. He’d make sure it didn’t go too far—just far enough, just so I could pull myself back together again.

  And then the words from the interview flashed red and hot, stoplight red, in my head: Sometimes I think it’d be so much easier if he weren’t here.

  Fuck that promise. And fuck Austin.

  I walked, all diagonals like some kind of crazy drunk, back into the apartment. The bedroom light was still on, this huge, God-like eye stabbing at the back of my brain. I shut the front door, flipped the lock, and tripped over one of Dad’s New Balance sneakers, the one with the sole lolling like a dog’s tongue. One hand on the couch to keep me walking a straight line, I plunged into that God’s-eye light. My hip caught the jamb. Just like in the kitchen. Just like when he’d had me cornered against the counter, my hip checking up against the laminate. And the light washed out everything else. Just like his fist in my eye, that explosion of neutron white. I slapped at the wall until the switch caught, and then everything was dark.

  At the window, my nose on the cool glass, I rolled the wheel. Sparks jumped. No flame. I undid the button on my jeans. I shimmied out of the denim, and it pooled around my ankles. My boxers next. The cold off the glass was like ice-water from the waist down. I struck the lighter again, and sparks flew up. The glass caught them, reflected them. I saw the cut from earlier that day—or had it been the day before?—weeping red through the bandage. I saw my own face. It looked a lot like that kid in Emmett’s memory, the one stepping off the bus, with his face hollowed out. That was just the shadows, though. I rolled the wheel a third time, and the flame caught.

  And then I held that flame against the inside of my thigh. The red on-off in my head went off, one final time, hard and dark and absolute. The bee-buzz went quiet. The itch on my skin went flat. I howled because it hurt, and I dropped the lighter. Sagging against the glass, the cold sharper against my wet cheeks, I had to hold that leg up because it was trembling so bad, because it wouldn’t take any weight.

  But after a while, the shaking stopped, and everything was quiet, and all the pieces were back where they were supposed to be. I tried to pull up my boxers, but it hurt too much, so I shuffled to the bed and lay with my legs spread, a blob of heat pulsing on the inside of my thigh.

  In the back of my head, the whirr and gleam of metal had solidified and steadied into a white, rising disc. The moon. That was soothing. That pale light that I got from cutting and burning, that glimmer of illumination, was so much better than the black hole that usually chewed up the back of my head. I took my first real breath all night and enjoyed how steady I felt, enjoyed how my head was glowing and calm and serene.

  And as I dipped toward sleep, I heard the rustle and snap of canvas, a rattle of tentpoles, and then, for a moment, I was in that vast and ancient forest again, and behind me came the beast, always running faster than I was. A voice came. A voice that I recognized from my nightmares. The voice of Urho Rattling Tent, War Chief of the Tribe That Walks Apart.

  You’re making this much too easy.

  IT WAS A DREAM AND NOT a dream; I recognized that much from the beginning. The forest was gone. The beast was gone. The clouds came first, and then the mountain walls and the low, swooping bowl of the valley, and then the Junegrass green under dew so white that, at first, I took it for frost. Then the lake. The water reflected the tumble of clouds without the faintest ripple. On the other side of the lake, set on a stone shelf that overlooked the valley, was a log cabin. Not one of the ultra-modern glass-and-timber constructions like Emmett’s house, but not a dinky one-room that somebody’s grandfather had thrown up. I looked straight at the cabin. I had an audience, and I wanted them to get their money’s worth.

  I had been brought to places like this before. Luke—Mr. Big Empty—had done it, scooping me out of dreams and dragging me into nightmare fantasies that he constructed. Always I had been able to tell that the place I was in was not a dream: everything had a flattened quality, as though I were moving through a set on a soundstage. This place had the same feel, but the difference was one of quality. These background pieces were painted by a finer hand, with little touches to add realism. Seed-heavy, a stalk of Junegrass bobbed and brushed droplets of dew across my sneakers. That, for example. That had been a very nice touch.

  “All right,” I said. “You made your point.”

  “You’re making this so easy for him.”

  River made his way through the tall grass toward me. Where he passed, he left a trail of bent stalks, their tops dark and matte with the dew wiped clean. The trail led back maybe thirty yards until it vanished in the center of a long swath of grass. River was dead; I supposed it was easy for him to appear and reappear. This place, not quite a dream, brushed the other side. Or maybe this wasn’t River’s spirit at all; maybe it was just another special effect. He looked the way he had looked in life: my shoulders, my height, but his hair was curly and tucked behind his ears. It made sense that we shared so much. We were half-brothers.

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “I am dead.”

  “No, I mean really dead. Gone.” Months before, I had done something to River; I had hurt him somehow. The same way I had shredded Mr. Big Empty’s spirit. The same way I had popped the seams holding Krystal’s soul together. With River, it had been unintentional, but I had still frayed whatever psychic connection held him to this plane of existence.

  “I’m here.”

  “You’re still working for Urho.”

  He shrugged; his spirit wore the same denim jacket he had carried in life. “I don’t really have a choice. Unlike you, little brother.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  River’s features twisted in pain, and he shook his head savagely from side to side. “Every time—ah, fuck. Fuck that hurts.” He shrugged, and his face relaxed as he said, “Urho told you himself: you’re making this easy for him.”
/>   “Every time I what? Every time I go to sleep? Every time I close my eyes? Every time I go to the other side?”

  Worry flickered in River’s eyes, and he turned toward the lake and, beyond the lake, the cabin. “I’ve got a message for you.”

  “From Urho.”

  River swiped at a long, bushy tail of Junegrass, and it slid through his hand with a wet smack.

  “What?” I said. “You’re going to tell me I’m making it easy for him. Fine. I’ll make it as easy as he wants, right up until I rip him apart like I did to Luke. Message received, River. Go on back to whatever you’ve been doing.”

  “I’ve got a message for you.”

  “Maybe I don’t want whatever message you’ve got. Maybe I don’t need you haunting the afterlife, hanging around like you’re the goddamn psychic mailman. Maybe you should just disappear, go wherever you’re supposed to go and leave me the fuck alone.”

  “I’ve got a message for you, little brother.”

  “Then give me the message already.”

  “Urho Rattling Tent, War Chief of the Tribe That Walks Apart, says this: ‘Defy me again, and I will take everything from you. The children you cared for. The boys that you love. The woman who shelters you. Your teachers, your friends, anyone your shadow falls upon. These things I will take from you. And when you have nothing left, I will leave you with your pain, and I will raise up new tools.’”

  I waited until the silence thickened and I was sure that River didn’t have anything else to say. Then I walked through the grass, the blades heavy and wet and soaking my clothes until I reached the edge of the water. I threw a double bird at the cabin.

  Urho’s anger went through the dream like an earthquake with its point of origin at the cabin. Concentric waves of force rippled out. The stretch of rock and earth sloping down from the cabin sheared away, and the landslide rushed toward the water. The lake drew back from the shore near my feet for half an instant, and then it splashed toward me, the water cresting at my knees and flooding across the valley floor. Where the lake hadn’t swallowed the Junegrass, deep fissures ripped open the ground, swallowing clumps of sage and purple-headed thistles, and below, where everything fell away, there was nothing.

  I staggered against the water battering my legs. Invisible beneath the flood, the ground split and shifted. I stumbled, scrambling to keep my footing. The heel of my sneaker slid along wet, crumbling earth, and then there was nothing underneath. The spray soaked my shirt as I regained my balance and struggled away from the disintegrating ground.

  But it didn’t matter how far I went. The lake spilled out of its bed, unrelenting, the volume of water seemingly—impossibly—limitless. But possibility didn’t matter here; it was a dream, and there was as much water as Urho dreamed there was. If that water knocked me on my back, if the slate-gray flood closed over my face, if the ground washed away, I’d fall into that black dream-void. Whatever might happen after that, I didn’t want to find out.

  I tried to open my inner eye, but nothing changed. I was asleep, but that didn’t change the fact that I was exhausted, physically and emotionally. In fact, the emotional exhaustion—for a moment, I could feel again the red throb on the inside of my thigh—seemed to matter more than anything else. And without second sight, I couldn’t find my way out of this place—I couldn’t stretch and reach and shatter Urho’s hold on me here.

  Another chunk of earth dissolved beneath me. I splashed backward, paddling in water that soaked me to the middle of my chest. When my feet left the ground, the current caught me and spun me hard, driving me toward the valley’s edge. I flailed, rowing against the rushing water with my arms, digging my toes into mud that was too thin to hold me.

  A hand caught my arm, jerking me tight against the current, and I swung around to face River. His face twisted in pain. One eye swelled grotesquely, and a runnel of blood curved along the bridge of his nose and dripped off his upper lip.

  “You’re making it too easy for him. It’s like you’re lighting these signal fires on the darkest night of the year, and he can see you from miles away. He can reach out and touch you, then. Vie, you’ve got to remember that she’s hungry. You’ve got to remember she’s—”

  River’s voice cut off as he gagged with pain, and his fingers shot out straight. Without his grip holding me against the current, the water launched me toward the edge of the valley. For a moment longer, I could see River, blood running down his face in rills, and then he started screaming. Rust-colored water bubbled up around him, like some hidden well geysering to the surface, and then he was gone.

  I spun myself into the current, thrashing with arms and legs. I strained to open my inner eye. It was like heaving my weight against a boulder. I hit it again and again. But I was just so tired. So tired of the broken pieces tumbling around inside me. So tired of the black hole at the back of my head. So tired of being open, of being hurt every time I opened myself up.

  But I didn’t want to die either, and the water was colder and blacker as it sped me toward the edge of the valley, where the dream dissolved into shimmering spangles and, beneath the shimmer, blackness.

  Fueled by desperation and fear, I forced my inner eye open. The hypertexture of the dream rose to the surface, and I braced myself and pushed against it. It was like trying to punch through thick cloth, like canvas folded over on itself again and again. There wasn’t resistance, not in the same way as striking stone, but the dream didn’t break. It bent and folded and warped. But it didn’t give.

  Cold, now. Frigid. The water sucked the heat from me as it swept me toward the abyss. The cold ate its way into me, gnawing at nerves and joints and ligaments so that each movement was clumsier, slower, uncontrolled. My paddling became ineffectual slaps that skipped along the black chop of the water. My kicks lost direction and strength. I felt myself moving faster.

  An arm hooked me around the neck. I flailed at my attacker, trying to catch whoever had come up behind me, and then River’s quiet words reached my ear. “When I’ve got his attention, that’s your chance.”

  Before I could look behind me, before I could say yes or nod or give any sign that I understood, River was swimming again, dragging me cross current, moving with an ease that had nothing to do with physical strength and everything to do with the strange rules of the other side. Urho’s shriek rang throughout this tiny, private dimension. I watched as the force of his anger descended on River: River shook his head, and then his back bowed, his fingers fumbling their hold on me.

  I could feel it then: the sudden thinning of the barrier between worlds. I flexed again. I was exhausted. I was half frozen. I had barely survived a nasty battle with killer plants. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to stick around while a dead man tried to kill me. I brought as much of my power as I could against the grayscale fabric of the dream, and this time it ripped like wet, rotting cotton.

  Shuddering, I launched upright in bed. I was wet. Not with sweat; there was too much of it. I sniffed. Not pee, either, thank God. Water, real water, and when I opened my mouth and pulled in a breath, the drops on my lips ran down onto my tongue, and I tasted clay and calcium and magnesium. Hard water. Mountain-lake water.

  The cold hit me a moment later: I shivered so badly that I bit my tongue. The heat was off in the apartment—of course it was off; Dad must have used the money for another dime—and my skin prickled with goosebumps. Far off through the window, tacked against the dark velvet of the Wyoming night, a blue-white security light glittered. It was barely enough illumination for me to recognize where I was.

  Still shivering, I dragged myself upright. My shirt and coat were soaked through; I shed them and stood naked in the darkness, but naked was better than the heavy, wet cold of flannel. I found my pants where I had left them by the window, but I couldn’t drag on the boxers and jeans; they were dry, sure, but they were too tight. The burn on the inside of my thigh flared. I had to bite the inside of my mouth to keep from crying out. Asphalt c
rumbs, the spines of dead leaves, something wet and cold and sticky—blood, my brain supplied, that silver dollar of blood—clung to my bare feet as I crossed the front room in darkness. I rummaged through Dad’s bag. My shoulders kept heaving. My hands wouldn’t do what I wanted. I thought of the last time I had been in Austin’s arms, the sweat pasting my back to his chest, and how stupid I’d been because all I had been able to think about was opening a window.

  In the bag, I found joggers that I dragged on. Even the soft, broken-in cotton felt like I was rubbing sandpaper across the burn, but I could handle that. Then I found a sweater, real wool, scratchy against my chest and under my arms and tight around my throat. But it was warm. I curled up on the couch, the vinyl sticking to my wet cheek, and tucked my feet between the cushion and the couch’s arm. Then I was shaking so badly I couldn’t do anything else. I kept seeing the lake, and sometimes it was that valley lake rising around me, swallowing me. And sometimes it was Lake Thunderbird, and the only noise was the hiccup of water as the stone skimmed the surface. And at some point, I stopped shaking and went to sleep.

  YOU'RE MAKING IT TOO easy for him.

  I groaned, and the vinyl farted as I rolled onto my side, trying to burrow deeper into the sofa. My feet were cold. All of me was cold, but my feet in particular, and I dug my toes under the cushion. I wasn’t going to open my eyes. Not yet. It was still too early; I could feel how early it was in the cold damp. Even with the cold, even with the throb behind my eyes, even with the burn on the inside of my leg, I was going back to sleep. I could sleep for as long as I wanted. I could sleep forever if I wanted. The black hole at the back of my head yawned at the idea. Forever. Just quiet, black forever.

  You’re making it too—

  I scrubbed away the thought. I wasn’t going to worry about the War Chief and the Lady. I wasn’t going to worry about Sara and Emmett and Austin. I wasn’t going to worry about my dad. I was just going to sleep.