by Amy Cross
Anna spins around just as the plastic bottle hits her head, and this time she freezes as she stares straight at Sam. Or rather, at the floating white sheet in the doorway.
“Is this enough for you?” Sam asks. “Please, Anna, I know you can see me now. I'm right here, and need your help. Please, dig me up!”
She waits, but still Anna seems dumbstruck. She looks down at the bottom of the sheet, which seems to be floating in mid-air, and then she looks at the two eye-holes.
“Please,” Sam continues, making her way across the room and stopping in front of Anna, then reaching out and using the sheet's trailing edge to point at the words on the wall. At the same time, she can already feel herself getting dizzy again, as she's drawn back to her physical body. “Anna! Dig! Me! Up!”
Anna pauses for a moment, before an expression of shock begins to spread across her face and finally she mouths two words:
“Holy moly.”
***
“I'm coming!” Anna screams, running out of the cottage with a shovel in her hands, racing out into the pouring rain and hurrying across the cemetery. “Sam, I'm coming to rescue you!”
Barely able to see anything in the darkness, she slams straight into several gravestones, but somehow she manages to keep going until finally she trips in a patch of mud and falls hard against the ground. Immediately hauling herself up, she struggles onward until she reaches the spot where she buried Sam, and then she immediately starts digging.
Thunder rumbles high above.
“Please be okay!” Anna yells, shoveling out more mud but seeing that rain water is already starting to refill the hole. “Please don't be dead again, just because I didn't understand!”
For each shovelful of mud that she hauls up, another half a shovelful immediately tumbles back into the hole. She keeps digging and digging, however, until finally she tosses the shovel aside and starts using her bare hands.
“I don't wanna accidentally cut your head off or something!” she yells. “I'm coming, Sam! Hold on! Hold -”
Suddenly feeling something down in the mud, she pushes her hands deeper and fumbles for a moment, finally grabbing hold of an ankle.
“I've got you!” she shouts as she starts trying to drag Sam out. “Almost there!”
Rain is still pouring down and she keeps slipping, but somehow she manages to start pulling Sam free.
“I can't believe you came back!” she continues breathlessly, as rain starts washing the mud from Sam's leg. “It's amazing! It's unbelievable! It's like you're some kind of superhero!”
Pulling harder than ever, she manages to get Sam almost halfway out of the grave, leaving only the upper half of her body still buried. Rain is crashing down, washing the mud away from Sam's exposed legs.
“You should have a superhero name!” Anna continues as she pulls. “Cemetery Woman, something like that! Zombie Woman! Or Zombie Girl! Or -”
Suddenly losing her footing, she cries out as she tumbles down into the hole and slams against the mud. Coughing and spluttering, she struggles to roll onto her back, and then she freezes as she sees that Sam is now slowly rising up from the muddy hole with rainwater washes the dirt away to reveal her pale, slightly rotten features.
Anna's eyes widen with shock.
“Or Grave Girl!” she gasps. “That should be your superhero name! We should call you Grave Girl!”
Chapter Twenty
“I'm all stiff!” Sam hisses, limping back into the cottage. “I swear, I can feel things wriggling inside my legs!”
Stopping at the kitchen table, she puts her right foot on the chair and then reaches down. As candlelight flickers against her rotten skin, she reaches into her leg and winces as she slowly pulls out a long, wriggling worm.
“Yeah, that's weird,” she mutters, holding the worm up for a moment. “I really don't like feeling worms inside me.”
She pauses, before turning to see that Anna's watching her from the doorway, silhouetted against the rain that's still pouring down outside.
“You had this problem when you were a zombie, right?” Sam asks. “Did you ever find a way to get rid of all the critters in your body?”
She waits, but Anna simply stares at her as if she's still in a state of absolute bewilderment.
“I guess there's no shortcut, is there?” Sam continues. “When this is all over, I'm going to need a really good pair of tweezers.”
“You're alive,” Anna replies, her voice filled with shock.
“I think so,” Sam says. “Maybe. I don't know. I'm here, though, and that's the important thing, but now...”
She turns and looks at the worm for a moment longer, before heading to the door and tossing the wriggling creature out into the mud.
“You'll be happier out there,” she says under her breath, “and I don't have time to deal with your friends right now. I need to -”
Before she can finish, a flash of lightning briefly illuminates the huge dome of branches and tree-trunks that has formed in the distance, covering the town square.
“What's that?” she whispers, and then she turns to Anna. “How long was I gone?”
Again she waits, but again Anna seems too shocked to answer. Pretty pale, too, even for someone who's died multiple times.
“How long was I gone?” she asks a second time, before hurrying over to Anna and grabbing her by the shoulders, and trying to shake her out of her stupor. “Anna, this is important! How long was I dead, and what's been happening here?”
“A few weeks,” Anna replies. “Scott died. Since then, I've been here alone.”
“You haven't seen anyone else?”
Anna shakes her head.
“What about Abberoth?” Sam asks. “What's he been doing?”
“I don't know.”
“Why not?”
Anna shrugs.
“You didn't think to go and check?”
“I was scared.”
Sam sighs.
“It's the end of the world!” Anna points out. “I know you get annoyed when I'm scared of things, but come on! A little context here!”
“He can't just have been sitting around, twiddling his thumbs!”
“I didn't dare leave the cemetery again,” Anna explains. “I told Scott not to go, but he said he'd be fine. He went to find food. The first few times, he came back and he was okay, but the last time...”
Her voice trails off as tears fill her eyes.
“It really is the end of the world, isn't it?” she adds finally. “We lost. This Abberoth guy beat us.”
“I didn't fight my way back from Hell, just to concede defeat,” Sam replies. “No fight is unwinnable. There's always a way to get through, and we just have to be smart enough to figure that out. We have to go through Faraday's books and look for anything that might give us a clue.”
“I've been over those books a thousand times,” Anna says. “There's nothing useful in them.”
“I'm going to take a look,” Sam explains, “and maybe I'll spot something. The one thing we have on our side right now is that Abberoth seems to be stalling for some reason. I don't know why, but I'm pretty sure he could have destroyed this world a thousand times over already. So why hasn't he? What's he waiting for?”
“Sparky tried to tell me something,” Anna explains, “but he didn't have enough time.”
Sam turns to her. “Sparky? Where is he?”
“He's...”
She hesitates for a moment.
“He's dead,” she says finally. “I mean, I think so. He said he burned himself up when he tried to get into the town. He had a few minutes, just enough time to say that the answer is in one of Faraday's books. He tried to put some kind of thought inside me, but I warned him it wouldn't work. I'm the last person he should have trusted.”
“Do you feel any different since you saw him?”
Anna shakes her head.
“I think he was trying to give me some kind of knowledge,” she explains, “but it didn't work. Damn it, if
I could just be smarter, maybe we'd have fixed this whole thing by now.”
“I'm sure it would never have been that easy,” Sam says. “Sparky probably just -”
“Sam, don't move!” Anna gasps suddenly, her eyes widening with shock as she looks toward the doorway. “Oh no. No no no...”
“What is it?” Sam asks, before turning and seeing a figure standing just a few feet away, out in the rain.
And then, before she can say anything else, the figure steps forward and his face becomes visible in the candlelight.
***
“What changed your mind?” Sam asks a short while later, as she sits on the table with her feet on one of the wooden chairs. “Why did you – Ow!”
“Stay still!” the Devil hisses as he turns the tweezers around and then starts slowly pulling another worm out of her calf. “I'd be done by now if you knew how to stop squirming.”
“Why did you come here?” she continues, watching as he sets the worm aside and starts searching in her leg for another. “I thought you were going to keep running.”
“Can't a fellow change his mind?”
“You've been doing that a lot lately.”
“Maybe I wanted to do the right thing.”
“You're the Devil!”
“You really can't let that go, can you?” he says, allowing himself a faint smile. “The truth is, Sam, I already regret following you back to Rippon. At the same time, I know that this is the right thing to do, and I figure that maybe now is a good time to change my ways. Besides, running is exhausting and Abberoth isn't going to stop. Eventually he'll catch up to me, so I might as well face him now.”
“Does he know you're here?”
“If he doesn't, he will soon.”
“Anna says he's not really done anything for a while. Apparently he's just holed up in the town square.”
“I imagine he's been waiting for me to come back. I don't know how he knew I would, but I guess he was right in the end because here I am.”
“But – Ow!”
“Quit that!” he hisses, digging the tweezers deeper into her thigh. “This one's a wriggler! I think it's hooked onto something.”
“What's happening in the rest of the world?” she asks. “Do people realize what's happening here?”
“Rippon's completely cut off,” he explains, still working with the tweezers. “Nobody can get in or out. People are panicking out there, there are all sorts of conspiracy theories, but nobody actually knows what's happening. They won't know, either, until it's too late. All they can figure out right now is that the world's in danger.”
“Is Abberoth really willing to destroy the whole world?”
“This world, and then another, then another,” he continues. “He'll follow me wherever I go.”
“How do we stop him?”
Instead of replying, he digs the tweezers even deeper, still trying to grab the head of the next worm. The creature manages to elude him again, however, so he has to slide the tip of the tweezers around the side of an exposed section of bone.
“Do you have a plan?” Sam asks.
“I'm going to cut the worm off at the pass.”
“I mean for Abberoth!”
“I have the start of a plan.”
“Tell me what we're going to do.”
“I'm not quite at that stage yet.”
“But you know how to stop him?”
He glances up at her.
“You look scared,” she tells him cautiously, “and that scares me.”
She waits, but he simply stares at her for a moment.
“What is it?” she asks.
“Do you remember what I told you once?” he replies. “It can't have slipped your mind. I told you all about a prophecy, about you being the one who'll destroy the world.”
“Why would I ever do that?”
“I don't know, but that's what the prophecy says. I've seen it, and it's very explicit. One day you'll decide to destroy the entire world, and everything and everyone with it. I'll beg you to stop, but you'll be determined and you'll succeed. In fact, in some versions, it's not just this world you destroy, it's everything. Reality, Heaven, Hell, Limbo, the whole shebang.”
“That's impossible,” she tells him. “I'd never hurt anyone. I'd never let anything happen to Henry.”
“Yet that's the prophecy.”
“Then it's wrong,” she says firmly.
“Oh, it could be,” he continues. “Most prophecies are, to use a very human term, a load of bollocks. But some are real, a very small number, and something about this one...”
He pauses for a moment, before shaking his head and getting back to work.
“Forget it,” he adds. “I'm sure you're right. Ignore everything I just said. You're not going to destroy the world, Sam. The idea's ludicrous. I shouldn't even have brought it up. You could barely even destroy a snowball in the Sahara.”
“But if -”
“I said forget it!” he snaps. “There's nothing worse than people getting their knickers in a twist about a bunch of pointless prophecies. Humans have a tendency to go crazy for anything like that. Don't take this the wrong way, Sam, but as a general rule your species can be very naive.”
“I'm not sure that -”
Suddenly she gasps as he pulls another worm from her thigh.
“This mess will not be decided by prophecies,” he says firmly. “Believe me, there are no prophecies in existence that reference some lunatic taking control of Hell and then hunting down the Devil. Nothing about this situation is fated. We have to make our own decisions.”
He stares at the worm for a moment.
“Do you think this little critter worries about prophecies? Do you think someone once told him that he'd end up like this, wriggling at the end of a pair of tweezers? Of course not. There's something weird about humans, Sam. No species is more worried about what comes next, but at the same time no species has less of a natural sense when it comes to the way existence works. When it comes to spiritual matters, humans have ambition but very little else. You might as well be worms, for all the good your pontificating and theorizing will ever do you.”
Getting to his feet, he sets the worm aside.
“That's the last one,” he adds. “You'll need to be vigilant, though. There could be some eggs in there, and you'll need to get them out as soon as you feel them hatch. That won't be for a while, though.”
“Thank you,” she replies, watching as he heads to the counter and sets the tweezers down. “You still haven't told me your plan.”
“I still don't have it figured out.”
“And -”
“Will you just stop asking questions!” he hisses, turning to her. “You know, maybe if you hadn't been distracting me for so long, I'd have come up with something better by now!”
“How have I been distracting you?” she asks. “I've been avoiding you!”
He opens his mouth to reply, before shaking his head.
“I need to think,” he adds. “I need to work out if there's another option, because right now my only plan involves doing something that I really don't want to consider.” He pauses for a moment. “Why is it always so hard to do the right thing? Why can't existence just be simple for once?”
With that, he leaves the room.
“There's got to be something else we can do,” Sam says, climbing off the table and heading to the table by the window, where she picks up one of the books. “Faraday was no idiot. He must have left something in here for me.”
She opens the book and starts flicking through the pages, but then she spots movement outside. Looking through the window, she sees a dark figure slipping through the cemetery gates and then making its way slowly along the path that leads to the cottage.
“Someone's coming,” she whispers, before turning and hurrying to the door. “We've got company!”
Chapter Twenty-One
“What do you want?” Sam calls out, storming out of the cottage and taking a
few paces across the dark, windswept cemetery, before coming to a halt next to one of the more crooked gravestones. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see if it's true,” a hissing voice replies, and a moment later the Vassal comes closer, allowing his face to be seen in the candlelight that flickers in a nearby window.
For a moment, he looks past Sam, toward the open doorway. There, the Devil and Anna are watching proceedings.
“And it is true,” the Vassal continues, purring with delight. “Master will be pleased when he learns that this most hated of creatures has finally returned to Rippon. It is all as he prophesied.”
“You have to leave!” Sam says firmly. “Do you understand? We won't let you destroy this world!”
“You have no say in the matter,” the Vassal replies calmly. “You're not looking too well, my dear. Did you have fun, on your way back from Hell? I've heard that the trip can be rather tiring for those who choose an unconventional path.”
“We have a plan! We're going to stop you!”
“I'm pleased to hear,” the Vassal continues, “that you're keeping yourselves occupied in these final hours. Better that, than sitting around twiddling your thumbs. Nevertheless, any plan you might have developed is inconsequential. I have been instructed to make you an offer.”
“We don't negotiate!” Sam says firmly.
“This world can be set free,” the Vassal explains. “Abberoth will leave, and he will never return, so long as the Devil surrenders and agrees to return with us to Hell.”
“No way!” Sam snaps. “Like I said, we -”
Suddenly her voice falters as she realizes the true extent of the offer that was just made. Her mind is racing, but she quickly tells herself that there's no way she can simply surrender. Somehow, deep down, she's convinced that Faraday's books will offer a better solution. She's had that faith for a while now, and her confidence is starting to dip, but she quickly forces herself to stay strong. At the same time, she can feel doubt starting to chip away at her faith, and she tries to think of some way to remain focused.
“I stopped Fenroc,” she says after a moment, “and I stopped Charles Raven, and I dragged my way back from Hell. So if you think bad odds are really going to stop me, then I guess you haven't been paying attention.”