Between Decisions (The City Between Book 8)

by W. R. Gingell

  “You’re always warning me.”

  “You never listen.”

  “I always listen,” I told him. “I take it under advisement.”

  “Is that what you do?”

  “I’m not dead yet,” I pointed out, but a thread of deep discomfort still pulled within me, quickening my heartbeat and layering dread, tissue-thin piece by piece. It felt as though I couldn’t stop it even if I wanted to.

  Athelas took a step toward me, then another. “A remarkable circumstance,” he said. “But all good things must come to an end, after all.”

  “That might be your philosophy, but it’s not mine,” I said. “Stay on your side of the room, all right? You don’t need to come over here.”

  “I believe it may be time for you to sleep,” said Athelas, advancing again.

  “You’re not trying to make me sleep,” I said, my breath too fast and shallow. “You’re going to try and kill me, aren’t you?”

  “I think it’s time, don’t you? I always did say that it was a mistake not to kill you.”

  His words shouldn’t have been familiar, but they were: as if I’d heard him say something similar in the past and hadn’t understood it at the time. Instinct urged me to get up and run, to tear aside the bits of Between that ran through my bedroom walls, escape to anywhere other than here.

  But that wouldn’t get me my memories. It would just get me to the real Athelas, who wouldn’t help me, or Zero, who would protect me while smoothing over the surface that this Athelas was so concerned about preserving.

  The problem was, I wasn’t sure that getting my memories wouldn’t end up killing me, and the Athelas up here was real enough to displace the air as he moved, sending wave after wave of panic over me in shivers.

  “Did you?” I asked. “I don’t remember that.”

  “Let us not lie to each other, Pet,” said Athelas mildly.

  If he could kill me—if this version of him could do it, if I could die here—I would allow him to kill me.

  So while every thought and instinct screamed at me to fight back, to get away, I let him put his hands around my neck, his grey eyes gazing down into mine without any shade of regret.

  I’m not sure I expected to feel the pressure of those fingers around my neck, or the confusing deadness spreading across my face as my oxygen was cut off. The face above me darkened, mottled with brown and mustard-yellow spots, and I felt my body spasm as it tried to do what I hadn’t been able to make it do.

  I don’t know if I lost consciousness or if I simply went to sleep, but everything disappeared for the briefest moment.

  And I remembered.

  I woke in a sweat, the air heavy and hot and metallic in my lungs, in my mouth. Far away, in another world, or another layer of the world, I felt the flicker of my eyelids as they twitched; they were closed, but still I could see. I could see the room around me, with the softness of faint moonlight brushing everything in my room. The air felt thick in my throat, and the sheets were tangled around my legs with the light sheen of sweat the warmth of the night had brought out. I fought to free myself from the sheets, breathing in hot, salty air, my heart battering against the inside of my chest in a wild panic that had no reason or sense to it. I made myself take my time to detangle everything. Even when I finally put my feet on the ground, I didn’t stand up straight away.

  I don’t know if I was still trying to control the beat of my heart or if I was so terrified that I just couldn’t force myself to move, but the movements came slowly and stiffly. Sweat trickled down my back, but my feet were cold, toes curling beneath my feet.

  There was something so dreadfully wrong, so absolutely alienly wrong, that I couldn’t even find a way to acknowledge how frightened I was. So I stood and forced myself to move, little by little, until at last I was in the doorway of my room, loosening the latch on my secret door.

  My first steps were tentative and jerky, lacking illumination from the streetlights outside, my eyes capable only of seeing the vague outlines of the room. The deep and abiding sense of dread that had spread over my limbs was so all-consuming that when I stepped on something sticky and soft, it took a moment for me to feel the wetness of it seep through my socks.

  I stumbled on the wetness, then caught myself, and it seemed to me that the couch was lumpier than it should have been in the darkness. The dark horror in the back of my mind painted a head in the shadows above the backrest of the couch, just watching me and waiting for me to make another move. It could have been Dad or Mum, just sitting there in the darkness, having fallen asleep and not yet gone to bed, but in the chill of the moment, I couldn’t make myself believe it.

  I kept going, in tiny, soft movements that slipped and shifted beneath me, moisture seeping between my toes, until I was close enough to lunge for the light switch on the far wall in a panicked dive that seemed to claw at my shoulders with real claws.

  I clung to the side-table that had bruised my hip in the dive and looked over my shoulder as the light flickered, brightened. Barely a thread of the carpet wasn’t red; there wasn’t a corner of the room that hadn’t been dotted or splashed with dark red stickiness. I looked down at my socks, shivering so much that I could feel the teeth rattling in my head: the socks were stained red, too, the colour leaching up and over the arch of my foot to the ankle. Something trailed from my left foot; it had flung itself over the base of the side table in my last rush, too. I whimpered and wiped it on the carpet, but it wouldn’t come off, and I couldn’t bring myself to reach down and pull it off.

  I knew what it was, though. My anatomy classes with Mum left me in no doubt that what clung to my sock was part of someone’s small intestine. Everywhere else I looked in the room, I could see other parts of things I’d labelled and studied recently: stuff that wasn’t meant to be outside of skin and somehow seemed elongated and misshapen in the lack of confinement.

  When I had dreamed the memory, it had always ended right here, and I felt the desperate panic in the back of my mind—the same place from which I had felt my eyelids twitching—that tried to end the memory now, too.

  I loosened myself from that part of me and gave myself entirely to the memory, allowing the terror and dreadful sickness of it to overwhelm me. I didn’t cry, but maybe I would have if I hadn’t been so cold and distant that even the terror had to sink through layers of ice to get to me.

  The house seemed to shift around me, but I wasn’t surprised; the other sense that I always forgot but that came back when I needed it, reached out to the Between part of the house and pulled at the edges of it as if it could be a warming blanket. I did it unconsciously, but something in the house saw, sharpened, and seemed to see me.

  I heard, impossibly loudly, a footstep on the first step in the living room downstairs.

  I gasped in a ragged, aching breath, sure beyond shadow of a doubt that something dreadful and deadly was coming up the stairs. I snapped the light off in an instant and ran back to my room, slipping and scattering slick innards as I ran, dragging the bookcase-door shut behind me with all the terror of not enough time.

  I don’t know how long I lay there under the covers, pretending to be asleep, before I knew that I was no longer alone in the room. The door didn’t open, but I wasn’t alone, and that was so many layers of not-right that my brain didn’t want to acknowledge it. Instinctively, I stayed as I was: asleep. Just asleep. Not dangerous. Not awake. Can’t see anything. I’m just asleep, you can go away now.

  And then he said softly, “It really is no good pretending to be asleep, you know.”

  With dreadful inevitability, I opened my eyes, and there he was at the foot of the bed: smaller than the Nightmare had ever been—but perhaps he had seemed bigger when I was smaller.

  Smaller, and so much more familiar.

  My vision swam, teeth almost buzzing in shock. I heard myself, my present self, whisper Athelas, but my memory self had no idea who Athelas was. He was here, but the younger me didn’t know anything other than the
fact that I was about to die. Gripping, terrifying, and merciless, the memory continued, and now I didn’t think I could have stopped it if I’d tried.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  Moonlight seemed to glow from within the knife he held, peeking out from the darkness of blood that still dripped on my carpet.

  “Does it matter?” he asked, shadows and moonlight reflected on his face from that knife. The play of light and shadows made his eyes into depthless pools of grey, deeply shadowed beneath. He looked ancient and cold, almost skeletal. “You have no need for my name. It wouldn’t do you any good to know it.”

  My younger self’s voice trembled when I asked, “Are you going to kill me?”

  “Oh, I think not,” said Athelas. “We had a bargain, your parents and I: I asked them a question and got an answer. It would be…difficult to kill you.”

  “Are they—are they dead?”

  He looked at me curiously. “I took them apart very thoroughly. You must have seen it.”

  I clutched my arms around myself, too cold to try and run, too cold even to cry, and my shoulders ached with the tightness of the grip.

  “Why did you kill them?” I asked him, sick and terrified and somehow more bewildered than anything else. “They didn’t—they didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “They didn’t,” he agreed, and I saw the smile that flitted across his lips. “Very curious. I met only one other couple who deserved to be spared—neither couple could be allowed to live, of course. Not when they deserved to be spared. A delightful irony, don’t you think? Are you glad to be alive?”

  “I don’t know what that means,” I said, shivering in constant waves. “Why did they have to die? Why do I get to live?”

  “I allowed them the choice,” he said, and the hand that held the knife moved just slightly; a gesture of futility. “They wanted to save you—a very good choice, I thought. You, my dear, will cause significant problems, I think. Nothing I can do about it, of course! I am bound by my word.”

  “What word?”

  “You should stay in the house,” he said gently, and the gentleness with which he said it seemed to seep into my mind. “I really do advise you to stay out of sight as much as possible—in fact, you should try to stay in your room. You never know…what is waiting for you outside.”

  “I’m not going to stay inside,” I said, as a vast heat of rage, fear, and tears grew up inside my chest. He had said he couldn’t kill me, and even if that wasn’t true, I was going to make sure someone made him pay for killing my parents. “I’m going to come out and find you. I’m going to make sure you die for what you did.”

  He smiled faintly, but there was a terrible greyness to his face. “Shall you? You’ll forget soon enough, I should think. I believe you’re already quite good at that.”

  “I won’t forget,” I said, but there was already a softening around the edges of what I could see. He turned, the knife sending two drops of blood arcing gracefully through the air, and he faded through the wall, then from my mind, before the droplets hit the ground.

  Before they hit the ground, I broke free from the memory with a cry that should have been panic but was instead pain.

  No, no, no. It couldn’t be Athelas. It couldn’t be him. It was just that I’d used his likeness to kickstart the memory, to shake it loose. Zero had said it couldn’t be him. I had woken to find Athelas in the room when Zero and JinYeong were with the murderer—

  I had seen him when I woke—

  No, I had heard him. Heard him in the dark. Refrained from turning on the lights at his request.

  I sat up, curling over myself to soothe the huge, aching pain that ate its way from my stomach to my throat. Not Athelas. It couldn’t be Athelas, because I had learned to trust Athelas. I had learned to love Athelas.

  But I had remembered his face—remembered it still, now, in horrible detail. Athelas, who was capable of ripping apart an entire floor of humans and behindkind who had kept him captive, who had left another mess for me to walk through with my eyes closed.

  My pocket buzzed with a text, jolting my heart with the suddenness of it, and I pulled out my phone in a distant sort of a way, reeling from memories and terribly aware that the house felt suddenly still and dangerous.

  I looked down at the phone for a good few minutes before I could make sense of what I was seeing, then registered that the text was from 541.

  A smile, or maybe a grimace, trembled on my lips. How was that for good timing? Five was still looking into the paperwork Athelas had made Tuatu gather for him, which was pretty ironic right about now. The text said, Kid. Got a name for you. Come see me when you can. Bring some of those little black things, I’ve run out.

  “No more liquorice for you,” I said, and I didn’t recognise my own voice. It sat uncomfortably in the air around me, and I felt again how dangerously quiet the house was. A shiver crawled up my spine, stirring up a wish that either JinYeong or Zero were somewhere near.

  What was I supposed to do? Crawl out the window and find them to tell them what I had remembered? It couldn’t be true, but I had remembered it, and it must be true.

  I wanted desperately, and feared as desperately, to ask Athelas himself if it was true.

  I could go now—just walk downstairs and into the living room—and ask him what it meant. I made a small, stifled movement that stopped as soon as it had begun, and I knew then I wouldn’t ask him. Because if I asked Athelas, he would tell me. And I knew, with horrible certainty, exactly what he would tell me.

  I couldn’t seem to move, one way or the other: not to get up and run, not to get up and go downstairs. Why couldn’t I do something, or feel something other than a dreadful ache everywhere? And why was the house so still?

  I reached out to the Between underpinnings of the house, delicately and tremblingly. In the yawning dreadfulness of my too-full memory, I needed to know where Athelas was.

  And then I heard it—or maybe I didn’t hear it. Perhaps I felt it.

  I heard Athelas rise from his seat downstairs: felt or heard the smooth creak of leather as he stood, the whisper of the carpet as he turned on the balls of his feet and faced the stairs.

  I heard the first of his steps on the stairs and stuffed my phone back into my pocket with a shaking hand, paralysed with the need to run, but without anywhere to run that wouldn’t leave me just as open to danger as I already was.

  Athelas didn’t know that I’d remembered. If I ran, he definitely would know. If he looked at me, I thought, shivering, he would know.

  I pushed past every instinct that screamed at me to run and forced myself to uncurl, to relax, to lie back down on my wrinkled bed. The upper landing outside in the living room upstairs cracked with the weight of a footstep, and desperately, I closed my eyes and tried to still the rise and fall of my chest as I breathed too quickly.

  As I’d done all those years ago, I pretended to be asleep. I let my head sink naturally to the side that didn’t face the wall: I couldn’t bring myself to bare that additional point of weakness. Then I relaxed myself as much as I could, too late remembering that I was still facing the wrong way. I couldn’t let the horror of it sink in, or I would have started breathing too quickly again, and I could hear Athelas moving across the upstairs living room now.

  A breath of displaced air fluttered across the hand that was on top of my stomach, and I concentrated on my breathing. That would be Athelas at the doorway.

  I don’t know how long he stood there, watching me; how long I lay there, just trying to breathe deeply enough to seem as though I was asleep. I let myself move a bit, as if I was starting to wake up, then settled again.

  “Ah,” sighed Athelas’ voice from the door. “Now this brings back memories, does it not?”

  My stomach sank like a stone.

  Ah heck. I didn’t know how, but he knew that I knew.

  Softly, he said, “It really is no good pretending to be asleep, you know.”

  My eyes opened, and I sa
w the memory of that night overlaid with the truth of today. Athelas, standing by the foot of my bed where the Nightmare always stood, with the words the Nightmare had spoken on his lips.

  “What did you say?” I asked him, my voice a thin thread. He wasn’t even trying to hide it—wasn’t trying to convince me I was wrong—and that put the ice in my veins as nothing else would have. He was almost pushing the memory on me, as though he would have forced me to remember it if I hadn’t already.

  Athelas’ lips smiled, but his eyes didn’t. He said it again, exactly as he had before, word for word. “It really is no good pretending to be asleep, you know.”

  It was Athelas’ face, but the voice was all Nightmare, and I saw the depths of shadow behind him for just a moment: shadows that had formed the Nightmare in my dreams.

  “Don’t stand there,” I said, and there was a pull at my chin as it trembled briefly, because it was much too late. But I couldn’t help the pleading tone in my voice, or the searing thought that if he tried to convince me that it hadn’t been him, I would choose to believe it. “Don’t stand there, Athelas.”

  He said again, “Come out,” and there was death in his voice.

  “Told you not to stand there,” I said, my throat closing up. I should have been frightened—perhaps I was, just a bit—but mostly I was dazed and numb and achingly, gut-punchingly desolate. Desolate for my parents. Desolate that Athelas wouldn’t even try to convince me that it wasn’t him. Gutted to find that there was a warring thread of love within the aching betrayal: a thread that I couldn’t unravel from the other.

  I said, “You shouldn’t—you shouldn’t have stood there.”

  I was panting by the time I got to the end of the sentence, because it hurt so much more than I would have expected it to hurt. Maybe I could have understood if he’d been just the murderer, killing behindkind and the occasional human for some twisted reasoning of his own—or even for the king or Zero’s dad. But I knew it wasn’t just that. More, I knew who else had died by his hands—I knew so many people who had died by his hands.