The Nightmare Garden ic-2

by Caitlin Kittredge

  I’m so tired of being shuttled from one place to another like a ball in a maze. I want to stand up, but I can’t. I have to pretend to work for Draven, for Dean’s sake. I had to lie to my father to find my mother. And I have to face the Brotherhood, with more lies, for everyone else in the world, at the same time avoiding being pulled back to the Fae and whatever new scheme Tremaine has for me to take part in.

  So many lies. I don’t even know how many layers deep they go any longer. I don’t think I’ll ever be who I used to be after this is over. The Aoife Grayson who left Lovecraft is dead. And I don’t know who’s taken her place.

  * * *

  Once we’d recharged the batteries and cast off from Newfoundland, the routine on the submersible was unceasing and unchanging. The crew slept in shifts, and everyone had a job to do. I was frequently in the way, so I took to spending a lot of time sitting in the mess, playing backgammon or checkers with off-duty crewmembers, many of whom didn’t speak a lick of any language I knew. The mood was bleak—everyone knew what had happened to Jakob, if not the details leading up to it, and that I was somehow involved, and many of the crew wouldn’t even make eye contact, never mind try to talk to me.

  Not that I minded much. I was busy turning over every piece of information I’d gleaned about the Brotherhood, and planning how I’d approach them. I had to appear to be on their side, which wouldn’t be too hard. I didn’t have any love for the Fae, certainly. I just had to keep the compass hidden and figure out a way to put off Draven until I’d found the clock. Then his plans to ensnare everyone in his web wouldn’t matter.

  When Rasputina wasn’t busy, she taught me a few snippets of Russian and told me about living in her childhood village, which sounded, if it was possible, even worse than life as a charity ward in Lovecraft.

  “There are secret societies as well as press-gangers,” she said one day as we were playing backgammon, “and they recruit children from poor neighborhoods. They make them runners, get them in trouble, and if they want to survive the gulag they have to join the society, get official tattoos and be bound to them forever.” She moved a piece across the board. “It’s that or the Crimson Guard. Don’t know which is worse.”

  She looked up at me with that black bird’s gaze. “So what are you trying to find up there, in the Bone Sepulchre? It’s supposed to be haunted, you know. A place built centuries ago, with engineering not of this earth. They say you can only see it if you’re about to die.”

  “I told you,” I said. “I’m trying to stop what’s happening back in Lovecraft. All the chaos and monsters everywhere. Sooner or later, it’s going to cover the entire world, like the Storm did. The Brotherhood makes deals with the Fae and other creatures. They’re the problem that needs destroying. And I’d …” I took a breath—I had to avoid saying too much. “I’d really like to have a good night’s sleep,” I finished.

  “Wouldn’t we all,” Rasputina muttered, moving another piece. “I win,” she announced. “You’re horrible at this game.”

  “I’m better at machines than games and puzzles,” I said. “My brother always beat the pants off me when we played backgammon.”

  “He’s dead?” Rasputina said, with only the barest interest.

  “No!” I exclaimed, alarmed that she’d automatically assume everyone I knew met a horrible end. “I mean, no, he was alive when I left. Angry at me, but alive.”

  “Hmph,” Rasputina said. “Take it from me—family is like having a hundred pounds strapped to your legs.”

  “I take it you have one, then.” Though I couldn’t completely disagree with her about the weight, my life had certainly been simpler when I’d only been responsible for myself.

  “I did.” She shrugged. “My father was a drunk who had only his boat, and my mother barely survived an attack by the deathless creatures that roamed our village. She was bedridden, and her medical bills cost us everything except the shack we lived in. They’re probably dead now. I haven’t seen them since the Crimson Guard took me.” She collected the backgammon pieces and shut the board with a hard snap, her face rigid and carefully expressionless. “We’re going under the ice in a few hours. We’ll surface to scrub the air and then we’ll be under until we get to the Arctic.”

  “How will we know when we’re there?” I asked, surprised by her abrupt change of topic, but not willing to push her about her family. I knew how much that could sting.

  “Stories go that the Bone Sepulchre can be seen under the aurora borealis,” Rasputina said. “There’s a launch for journeys over the glacier that pirates carved out a few hundred miles along once we go under the ice. We can come up there and look at the northern lights, see what we see.” She sighed. “And I cannot believe I’m navigating to some place that I’ve only heard stories about on the say-so of a teenage girl.”

  “You’re nineteen,” I said with some indignation, having learned this fact during our earlier conversations. “Three years hardly makes me a girl in comparison.”

  “It’s not the years,” Rasputina said. “It’s how you spend them.” She waved me away. “I’ll call you when we’re under the ice. If you want a look at the sky before we dive, go up when we replenish our air. It’ll be the last you’ll see of it for a few days.”

  * * *

  Diving under the ice was nerve-racking, even more than I’d imagined, and what I’d imagined wasn’t pleasant. The sub scraped the underside of the glaciers, and chunks of what Sorkin told me were free-floating ice bumped the hull with alarming regularity. Once, we came upon a pod of whales and kept pace with them while Oksana, the radar officer, played their song through her speakers.

  I distracted myself from the fact that one wrong turn could bring thousands of tons of ice down on the Oktobriana, pushing us deep into the lightless depths of the Arctic sea, by learning everything I could about how she worked.

  The Crimson Guard had built the boat, but she’d been modified to run on aether batteries rather than a steam furnace that meant diving for only a few hours at a time. There was German tech in the sub too, salvaged from the war—air scrubbers and depth gauges and torpedoes. Its periscope had come from a Proctor vessel Rasputina had found stranded on the Outer Banks off North Carolina and salvaged ahead of a hurricane.

  The batteries were running down, but they could still power the propellers and basic life support for days at a time, creeping along under the ice at a pace that seemed to be even slower than that of the glaciers above us.

  The closer we got to the Arctic Circle, the less I slept. My dreams were tangled and terrible, no longer visits to the dream figure but often just writhing, screaming black masses that exuded the same kind of cold I imagined I’d feel in outer space, a cold that froze me in place so I couldn’t run, couldn’t even scream. Nobody else was dreaming, though—Sorkin remarked to me once that he was sleeping like a baby, deep and dreamless.

  I knew what was happening—the iron was creeping into me. I realized after I woke up screaming for the third day in a row that I probably had less than twenty-four hours left before I started raving like Jakob. I had to get off the boat before then. I just hoped Rasputina knew what she was doing, and that the launch she’d talked about was where she thought it was.

  That afternoon I was drinking some of the sludgy black Turkish coffee the crew swilled by the quart, trying desperately to keep my thoughts in order and not fall asleep again, when the screws of the Oktobriana slowed and then stopped. Rasputina stuck her head into the mess a moment later and jerked her chin at me. “Get your cold-weather gear and come topside. We’re here.”

  13

  The Spine of the Earth

  NOTHING COULD HAVE prepared me for the cold outside the submersible, or the strange half-night sky that confronted us, bright on the horizon but fading to velvet black at the top, much like the ever-shifting sky of my dream place. I’d thought the wind was bad back home, that the ice and snow that enveloped Lovecraft from Hallows’ Eve to spring thaw most years was as cold as an
ything could be, but it wasn’t.

  Even wrapped in a thick coat as I was, mask strapped over the lower half of my face and fur-lined goggles over my eyes to protect them from the wind, the cold crept in through all the cracks and stole my breath. Rasputina, wearing a navy greatcoat and a similar mask and goggles, gave no indication she even noticed it, and I envied her fortitude.

  It was so cold that I felt like I might shatter, drop off the top of the Oktobriana’s conning tower, and become part of the ice, forever staring at the empty sky. Beyond the boat launch the sub rested in, which was only a small hole carved into the glacier allowing ocean water to surface, I saw nothing. The whiteness was gleaming and absolute, as if we stood atop the skeleton of a great beast of incalculable size.

  “That’s strange.” Rasputina gingerly held a pair of binoculars. It was so cold that any spots of moisture clung to her gloves and ripped out tiny chunks of leather. She aimed the glasses at a tiny wooden shack at the edge of the launch. It barely hung on to the ice along with a ramshackle dock.

  “What’s strange?” I tried to shrink deeper into the coat and fur-lined pants and boots I’d been given, which wasn’t hard since everything was at least two sizes too large. Another kind of cold crept in, that sixth sense I was developing that said things had gone horribly wrong. I was getting it now, and I hoped I was mistaken.

  “There’s no moon,” Rasputina said.

  “New moon,” I said with a shrug, trying to seem unconcerned even though my heartbeat had picked up and my shivering was no longer entirely from the bone-deep cold.

  Rasputina shook her head. “Half-moon. I checked the chart.”

  I turned my face up and scanned the sky. More stars than I had thought existed scattered the silver-black field of the sky, turning their unearthly white light on the glacier, which glowed as if alive.

  But no moon. Not even the pockmarked slice Rasputina had said should be there. Not a sliver.

  “That is strange,” I agreed, because saying anything else would come across as either silly or panicked. Celestial bodies were constants. They did not change.

  This was unnatural, and I wondered what had happened to make the sky so foreign here.

  “I don’t like this at all,” Rasputina said, echoing my thoughts aloud.

  I turned a slow circle. We were alone. I had never felt so exposed as I did at that moment, certain the great eye of something as ancient as the starlight was turned on the boat, the same something that was blotting out the moon and causing the dead, chill atmosphere that wrapped the Oktobriana.

  “We’re leaving,” Rasputina said. “This launch has always been a bad spot. The captain who told me about it got his throat cut a week later. It’s a cursed place.”

  “You don’t seem like you’d believe in curses,” I murmured.

  “I believe in a lot of things,” Rasputina snapped. “We’re diving. Get below.” She climbed down the conning tower, the thump of her boots against the ladder amplified in the ice field until each footstep was the thump of a coffin lid.

  I stayed outside for a moment longer, hearing only my own breath against my mask.

  At first I found the night around me silent except for the wind, but slowly I realized it wasn’t. The launch was about the size of a soccer pitch, ridiculously small when you thrust a military submersible into it. Displaced water sluiced against the hull, and out in the night I could hear the ice cracking and knocking, over and over. It was an endless rattle, the sound of bone against bone.

  Bone against bone.

  My Weird tingled, and I gasped at the sharp pain against the front of my skull. I fumbled at my goggles, yanking them off, trying to get all the metal off my body to relieve the pain. As the filtered glass came away from my eyes, a thin finger of violet light unfurled in the sky above me, like pale blood in dark water. It was joined by greens, blues, yellows, dancing in concert.

  I’d seen lanternreels of the aurora borealis, but these lights were nothing like that. The violet streak moved with a pattern, a purpose, with none of the randomness that indicated true northern lights. It flowed toward a point directly to the east of me, where the moon should have been.

  The purple light gathered into a starburst, and it touched the very top of something growing out of the ice, the same color as the glacier and nearly invisible in the low light. Something so large that, from my vantage on the tower of the Oktobriana, it was blotting out the moon. Something that was reflecting starlight, like the ice and the sky, invisible until the aurora touched its spire.

  It was ice and sky, I realized as I stared, forgetting that I was cold and ignoring the tears the wind sparked in the corners of my eyes. The aurora illuminated the massive shape by degrees, gleaming against its translucent ice walls. It was a palace, the kind you’d see in lanternreels of faraway lands or read about in forbidden fairy tales.

  Or maybe it was a giant tomb, the kind that held the kings and princes of old, before the Storm or any of this at all.…

  The Bone Sepulchre. My breath hitched, and I was helpless to look away as the violet light illuminated the surface. It was beautiful.

  “Effie!” Sorkin bellowed from below. “We’re diving! Get yourself below!”

  “Just a minute!” I yelled back over the wind, unable to tear my eyes from the great edifice before me. I could pick it out of the glacier easily now. Smooth surfaces I’d taken for natural flaws became columns and balconies and a tower that reached so high it became part of the night sky.

  The aurora flashed and vanished, all its energy running in lines down the Bone Sepulchre like an electric current through a living thing, lighting every window, every rampart, every spire. Shocked and overjoyed, I shouted for Rasputina and Sorkin to come topside and look, pulling aside my mask to scream until the cold stole my voice.

  They came rushing up the ladder. The dive siren sounded below, but they ignored it, as transfixed as I was by the glowing sight before us.

  Rasputina stared, her face slack with disbelief. “I’ll be damned. It’s real.”

  “It was the ice. The—the sound it makes,” I stammered. “The sound like breaking bones. It made me think, and then I saw the lights.…”

  “It was right here all this time,” Rasputina muttered. “I could have been making a fortune doing this run.”

  I swung my leg over the conning tower and grabbed hold of the ladder leading down the outside, knowing what I had to do. I was so close—just a jump to the ice and a short walk to the dock.

  “Where in this frozen hell do you think you’re going?” Rasputina shouted at me. “You’ll die out there with nothing but your coat!”

  “Going where I meant to when I got on this boat!” I shouted back. I couldn’t risk waiting around for more trouble in getting where I was going. I could make it. The Bone Sepulchre was so close, I had to tilt my head back to see the top spire.

  “You can’t trek over ice!” Rasputina bellowed. “The snow could be six feet deep, and who knows how far away that thing really is!”

  “Thanks for everything,” I shouted, jumping from the bobbing boat to the ice. I turned back to wave to Rasputina and Sorkin. They’d taken me far enough. This part I could do on my own. The thought warmed me a bit. My satchel was under my coat—I had barely let it out of my sight since I’d boarded the Oktobriana, because if Rasputina or her crew found the compass or my diary … well, it didn’t bear thinking about. I had everything I needed, minus a plan, but I’d deal with that when I actually reached the Brotherhood.

  “Dammit, girl!” Rasputina shouted, leaning over the railing of the tower. “I am not responsible for you any longer! You are insane!”

  My feet dug into the ice for balance, and I stood for a moment, staring at the Bone Sepulchre. I couldn’t argue with Rasputina—the idea of trekking across ice and knocking on the Brotherhood’s door unannounced was insane—but off the boat, in the open air with no iron close to me, I felt more lucid than I had in days.

  I started walking, Rasputi
na’s voice and the Oktobriana’s bulk fading behind me, until I was alone on the glacier, with only the stars for company.

  The Bone Sepulchre was much farther away than it had looked under the glow of the aurora, and I felt as if I’d been walking for hours when I heard the bells. Not the dull tolling of the bells at St. Oppenheimer’s back in Lovecraft, but a light tinkling that traveled to my ears across the windswept waste.

  A shape came into view, whiter than the starlit ice field: a low conveyance of some kind, pulled by another hulking white shape.

  The shape stopped, and something that at least looked human tugged at reins hung with sleigh bells. “Whoa.”

  The shape was alive. I stood perfectly still in surprise, wind buffeting the empty bits of my too-large coat and pants, as it huffed a puff of dragon’s breath at me. Horns curled behind the creature’s ears, and its fur hung shaggy and white. It stamped its black hooves and returned my stare with glowing gold eyes. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just put up my hands in surrender. Better to let them think I was harmless, at least to start with.

  Despite my gesture of surrender, the human in the sleigh pointed a very businesslike gun at me, which I found to be a bit extreme. “State your business,” the man snapped. His eyes were covered by goggles like my own, and his winter gear was completely white, down to the fur on his collar, which looked suspiciously like the coat of the thing that pulled the sleigh. I didn’t like talking to faceless people, be they Proctors or the Brotherhood, but I backed up a step and raised my hands higher.

  “I’m Aoife Grayson,” I said, over the howling wind. “I’m here to—”

  Before I could finish, the faceless man vaulted from his seat and grabbed me, pressing the gun into my side and shoving me toward the sleigh. “Get in and get on the floor. Facedown.”

  I tried to comply, but he shoved me and I fell. My bulky coat saved me from smashing my ribs on the bench, but I landed on the satchel, and Draven’s compass dug uncomfortably into my side. That was fine. As long as this man didn’t think I was a spy, he could shove me around all he wanted. I’d do what I’d always done back in Lovecraft when faced with a bully: keep my head down and try not to draw attention.