The Nightmare Garden ic-2

by Caitlin Kittredge

  The Nightmare Garden

  ( Iron Codex - 2 )

  Caitlin Kittredge

  Everything Aoife thought she knew about the world was a lie. There is no Necrovirus. And Aoife isn't going to succomb to madness because of a latent strain — she will lose her faculties because she is allergic to iron. Aoife isn't human. She is a changeling — half human and half from the land of Thorn. And time is running out for her.

  When Aoife destroyed the Lovecraft engine she released the monsters from the Thorn Lands into the Iron Lands and now she must find a way to seal the gates and reverse the destruction she's ravaged on the world that's about to poison her.

  The Nightmare Garden

  (The second book in the Iron Codex series)

  A novel by Caitlin Kittredge

  Man rules now where They ruled once;

  They shall soon rule where man rules now.

  After summer is winter, and after winter summer.

  They wait patient and potent,

  for here shall They reign again.

  —H. P. LOVECRAFT, “The Dunwich Horror”

  1

  The Dark City

  IN MY DREAM, I am alone.

  The spires of a ruined city reach for gunmetal clouds, the horizon a wound in the belly of the sky.

  Acrid chemical smoke burns the insides of my nostrils, and all around, sirens wail, banshees made of iron, steel and steam.

  A road stretches out before me, and I must walk. Walk toward the dead city, under the red sky stained with the black taint of fire and smoke.

  Something breaks under my boot, and I know before I look down what I’ll see.

  Bones. Human skulls, femurs, ribs. The bones of other things as well, things that starved once the humans rotted away. Twisted spines, elongated jaws. Teeth.

  I am alone. Alone except for the sirens, alone except for the burning, empty city on the edge of a rotting, polluted river green with algae, host to rubber-skinned, gibbous-eyed things with mouths large enough to swallow me whole and protruding stomachs ready to digest me.

  Not even a ghoul remains to send up a howl. The city is dead. My city is dead.

  My mother was in that city.

  My mother is dead.

  I am alone.

  And I know that this city, this disaster, this spreading disease of flame and death, is all my fault.

  I woke up with my head pounding and the rest of my body fever-hot. My thin blouse stuck to my skin, while the frozen air that swirled through the broken walls of the farmhouse raised steam off my bare legs. The Mists, this place where I’d found myself, so far from my home, was unforgiving in every way, including the predawn temperature.

  Kicking back the blankets from the half-rotted mattress, I pulled on my coat and shoes and stepped through the door. It was held in place by only one hinge, which let out a rusty shriek. I froze, but no one sleeping inside stirred.

  We were all tired. Tired to the bone.

  Outside, unfamiliar stars stared down impassively from a crumpled velvet sky. The horizon was silver now, not red like the sky of my dream, and I felt the pounding of my pulse and the sickness of the nightmare subside.

  “Couldn’t sleep?”

  “I had a bad dream,” I said to Dean. He leaned against the clay wall, a Lucky Strike jammed between his lips, his hair falling in his face.

  Dean blew out a blue cloud that blended with the sky. “I’d offer you one, but it’s my last pack. Somehow I doubt there’ll be a filling station around the next bend in the road.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said quietly. I went and leaned against the wall next to him. I was shivering, and my stomach snarled at me. We hadn’t exactly been eating regularly since we’d run away from Lovecraft. Away from everything.

  From what I’d done, and from the city that poisoned me with its very existence. As long as I avoided the Iron Land, I could stave off the madness the world of men injected into my blood. I’d managed to escape the fate shared by my mother and brother—a descent into madness that took hold of every member of our family when we turned sixteen—but I’d be safe only as long as I stayed away from the one place I’d ever thought of as home. If I went back, the clock would begin ticking again. I’d had less than a week when I left. Every minute I spent there shortened the span of my sanity.

  But how long could I stay away? How long until the people who wanted me to pay for what I’d done in Lovecraft caught up and hauled me back there? Once they did, I’d be gone. I’d be as crazy as my mother, poisoned by the city.

  If my mother was still alive.

  I couldn’t think through this circle of frantic worry anymore. It was practically all I’d thought about since the night I’d run away with Dean, my friends Cal and Bethina and my brother, Conrad. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t silence the voice: Eventually, they’ll take you back there.

  Dean dropped his cigarette butt and stomped on it, then collected the filter and tucked it away. He was adept at moving through a place and leaving no trace. Dean was a lot of things.

  His arm went around me and pulled me close. “It’s gonna be all right, Aoife. We’re gonna get out the other side of this, somehow.”

  Sixteen years of listening to how I should act like a proper lady tugged at me—I should have told him to take his arm off me, but I moved closer instead. Dean smelled like Dean, like tobacco and old leather and that boy smell of sweat and hair grease. He was practically the only familiar thing in this place, and I was clinging to him with all my might. “You can’t possibly know that,” I mumbled into his jacket, sliding my arms inside and feeling the warmth of his skin and his body.

  “No,” Dean agreed. “But men are supposed to say things like that to the womenfolk. Right?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’m not very good at being womenfolk.”

  “I promise, then,” Dean said. “From me to you: nothing is going to happen to you while I’m around.” He pressed his face against my hair, stirring up the already unruly nest of crow’s-feather black atop my head. All the Graysons had black hair and gray eyes; even my mother’s fair hair and complexion hadn’t changed that.

  My mother, whom I’d abandoned in Lovecraft. When I’d left Lovecraft in shambles, burning and destroyed because of what I’d done to its Engine, the heart that drove the city, I’d promised to come back for her. That was before I’d realized the scale of what had happened. Rip out the heart of something and it will die. I’d been a fool, and I’d listened to the wrong whispers, and now my mother could be dead and Lovecraft was a wasteland.

  “Dean, what am I going to do?” I whispered. “I can’t go back there.”

  He sighed. “Princess, I haven’t the faintest idea what’s coming next. But you’ll think of something. You always do.” He planted a kiss on my hairline and straightened. “You’re the brains of this operation, remember?”

  The sun was almost up, and the silver line was turning blue and gold. Sunrises were different here in the Mists, the unknowable land between lands, the thin place where things that didn’t like the light hid. The sun never shone, not really. It was a dull silver flame rather than a fireball. Just another strange piece of this strange land we’d all fallen into.

  I could admit it, alone with Dean.

  I was lost, and I had no idea how to find my way home. And now, I didn’t even know where home might lie.

  2

  In the Mists

  BEFORE THE OTHERS woke and after Dean had gone to check that the road was clear, I got my battered composition book out of my bag and opened it on my knees. The book was half full of my engineering homework. It was from my other life, from when I was a schoolgirl who thought that magic was a lie and that a virus
was responsible for things like inhuman creatures and uncanny abilities, ghosts and prophetic dreams.

  That girl was gone. The Aoife writing was a new girl, one who’d discovered that the necrovirus was a hoax perpetrated by men who sought the magic for themselves. Who were hunting me, even now. The old Aoife wanted to panic, felt the tightening in her chest even now, watched ink dribble from her pen as her hand started to shake. How was I ever going to stop being a fugitive, knowing what I knew?

  But the new Aoife didn’t have the luxury of curling up in a ball and pretending the outside world didn’t exist. She had to learn how to be strong and unbending, how to evade the men chasing her and the disease that was eating her mind away from within. Had to, because she had no other choice.

  I wrote it all down. I had to write. It was my duty now, because the person who should have been writing this account, my father, was long gone and my brother wasn’t interested. I was the last Grayson still able to record her strange life, as all Graysons before me had. Still, I felt like a fraud the moment I put pen to paper.

  First entry:

  My name is Aoife Grayson, and I am the last person who should be writing this account, but know I am the only one left who can.

  Others like me and my family, the Gateminders, who watch the thin spots known as Gates between the Iron Land, the Mists and the land of Thorn, have the confidence of those who have come before. They know how to navigate the Gates, how each different type works, from the Fae hexenring to the mechanical marvels of the Erlkin. I know nothing.

  I have nothing. I am the Gateminder by default, due, I believe, to chaos and chance. It sometimes feels like I’m being punished for uncovering the hoax of the necrovirus, as my father did. For daring to question the Proctors, the order of things. Gateminders before us labored in secret, but at least the rest of the world was not actively encouraged to believe they deserved death.

  The Proctors told us that the strange creatures, my family’s madness, everything in the world that could not be explained by science and reason, was a virus. A powerful virus with no origin and no cure. They never hinted that its origin was inhuman and that the cure was to embrace my Faerie blood, the inhuman, immortal side of me, and to stay far away from iron.

  At the time, all I saw was that my mother was one of the mad, that my brother was a fugitive and that I was about to follow in their footsteps and go mad. I would be locked up, another victim of the “virus.”

  It was all a lie. I was trapped in the stone and iron of Lovecraft, trapped by my own mind and by the lie I believed. And now Lovecraft lies ruined. Ruined because I was stupid.

  I scratched out that word, stupid, so many times, writing this. But it’s the right word. I believed the Fae creature Tremaine when he came from Thorn and told me I was the heroine who would free the Fae from bondage, curing my iron madness in the process. He set me up, and I fell, harder than I ever could have imagined.

  I should have listened to the words my father left behind, in his own diary: as a Gateminder, you should trust only yourself. Only you stand between the Iron Land of men and what lies beyond. And in that role, you have only your own mind to rely on, your own wit and intellect.

  I should have listened to Dean, too. He said it—you can’t trust the Fae. They lie. And Tremaine did lie to me. I destroyed the Lovecraft Engine, in a great cataclysm of magic. I broke down the barriers my father and his Brotherhood of Iron were so careful to construct, over hundreds of years, before the lie of the necrovirus. Barriers the evil things of Thorn had never broken.

  I left my mother in Lovecraft.

  I can forgive myself, possibly, for being the gullible little girl Tremaine thought I was, but I can never forgive myself for abandoning my mother.

  The only way I can sleep at night is by promising myself that I am going to find her and help her escape the city and the iron madness, as I have escaped it, at least temporarily. Conrad, my brother, said that as long as we stay out of the cities, and out of the Iron Land entirely, with its train tracks, iron pipes, steel conveyances, we might stave off madness. In his case, spending months away from the Iron Land meant total remission. In my case, the progress has slowed; I avoided the full psychotic break that usually occurs around age sixteen, and suffer only the occasional headache, visual disturbance out of the corner of my eye and bad dream.

  But nothing I’m doing now seems any saner than the dreams I started having weeks ago, before my birthday and the inevitable onset of madness. The dreams are the first sign of acute and chronic iron poisoning, the warning bell. Though I’m still reasonably sane because I fled, the dreams haven’t stopped. I don’t know now if they come from madness or from another source. From something worse.

  I do know we’re running, me and Conrad and Dean, Cal and Bethina, too. It seems like there’s no one we aren’t running from. The Proctors and Grey Draven, who has some bizarre notion I’ll lead him to my father, his true target.

  The Fae, who did not exact their full price from me after I woke their sleeping queens and ripped the thin, thin barrier between our worlds. Tremaine has more for me to do. He said as much. Opening the Gates between Thorn and Iron was only the beginning.

  It was like knocking aside a spiderweb. How could breaking something so huge feel like less than nothing?

  These things I do have: My brother. Dean and my friendship with Cal, and I suppose with Bethina, too—she was loyal to my father before I came along, even though she’s only human and the law dictates she should have turned me in. But Bethina is steadfast, and stubborn to a fault; plus, it’s good to have another girl along.

  Things I don’t have: A plan to hold off the iron madness and keep ahead of the Proctors and Grey Draven. A way to get to Lovecraft. Anything to go home to if I can get to the city, because the Lovecraft Academy sure isn’t my home any longer. I don’t know what is.

  I meant what I said—I’m the last person who should have taken over my father’s burden, recording my life for the next Gateminder. Yet I continue to write in the books that the Brotherhood calls witches’ alphabets, grimoires of power and experience that are supposed to help me along, to keep me safe.

  Fat lot of good my father’s records did me. And he’s not here, even though I’ve never needed him more and his absence makes me want to sob or scream.

  The one thing he asked of me was to be strong, willful and resolute, and I couldn’t do it.

  All I can truthfully say now is that my name is Aoife Grayson, and I have my freedom, and my sanity. I could at least temporarily cure my mother, if I could take her from the Iron Land and the poison that’s clouding her mind.

  But I don’t know how much longer she’ll survive in ruined Lovecraft. And if I go back to the iron, I don’t know how much longer I’ll have, either.

  After the days of walking, of little food and less sleep, of cold and wet and none of the comforts of the human world—like, say, beds, bathrooms and hot food—the Mists had lost their charm.

  The Mists weren’t exactly the world as humans understood it. Humans saw a single world with no others sitting beside it. Really, the Iron Land sat beside all the others like marbles in a sack. But at least the Mists weren’t Thorn, home of the Fae. We’d run here from my father’s house, Graystone, in Arkham, in a desperate bid to escape both the Proctors and my iron madness. The Mists were where the tides of reality ebbed and flowed, and the edges of other places knit and then split apart like wounded skin held by poorly stitched thread.

  Austere and alien as the Mists were, though, they were largely devoid of iron, and that was important. Iron made me sick, made me see things. This endless windswept wilderness at least wouldn’t drive me insane, according to Conrad. If Conrad was sane. He certainly hadn’t appeared that way the last time we’d met, when he’d shown up and dragged me here with little preamble. That was the extent of his plan—the part he’d shared with me, anyway. Asking him questions just got silence or grumbling.

  Really, I had only his word that he even h
ad a plan other than hiding in the Mists for the rest of our lives, and I hadn’t been able to trust the word of anyone in my family in years.

  And despite the lack of iron, I was still dreaming.

  I’d fallen to the back of the group, my steps leaden and my thoughts heavier, and Dean slowed down to let me catch up.

  “You all right?” He nudged my hand with the back of his and then wound our fingers together.

  “No,” I said. “I’m hungry and I feel like my feet are going to fall off.” I’d taken sturdy boots from Graystone, but they were mud-spattered now, and one of the heels was starting to come away. My legs felt like logs, and my mind was fuzzy from lack of sleep. I’d felt this way before, during finals at the Academy, when I’d slept maybe two hours a night and crammed my brain so full I thought it would burst, but I’d never had to trek through a swamp on top of that. More than anything I wanted to shut my eyes and lie down in a patch of soft moss.

  “I could use a break myself,” Dean said. “Hey, Connie!”

  Dean had taken to calling my brother Connie, and I could see from the twitch of Conrad’s shoulders how much he hated it.

  “Yes, Dean?” He turned his head slightly, but he didn’t slow his pace.

  “Looks like the group’s voted for a sit-down,” Dean called.

  Conrad turned fully to face us but continued walking. He’d always been quicksilver graceful, my brother, in a way I’d never been and never would be. It just wasn’t in me. I tried not to let it bother me as my holey boot filled up with water when I misstepped and put my foot in a soft patch of moss and muddy water. Back in Lovecraft, Conrad was the handsome one, the smart one, and I was, well, the shy, plain younger sister who was never quite as good at anything. Even according to the lore of the Gateminders, he was first in line, being the eldest son of the current Gateminder. I was just the girl. The second choice. The replacement, if neither my father nor Conrad could perform the duties, after all this was said and done—despite my being able to pass between Thorn and Iron, my being able to communicate with the Fae when Conrad had never even seen them. Still just the girl. It stung, and just once, I wanted him to figuratively fall on his face.