Netherworld

by Lisa Morton

  Still, she reminded herself, they couldn’t really do anything to them while they kept to the path. At least that’s what Hob had claimed.

  And then one of the ghosts stepped onto the path directly before them.

  Yi-kin, head down and eyes averted, didn’t see the thing until Diana clapped a hand to his shoulder and stopped his forward movement. Then his head involuntarily jerked up, and his eyes went wide when he saw the six-foot tall spectre that stood in their way.

  It was female, and dressed as a bride, in tattered white gown and veil. Although it was difficult to make out a face under the tulle, Diana thought she saw eyes gleaming with malevolence, set far back in deep sockets. The ghost hadn’t moved since it had appeared on the path (although the shreds of its dress and train blew in the opposite direction from the breeze), and Diana began to have the uncannily strong notion that the spirit was somehow related to her.

  Or that perhaps…it was her, the part of her that was still a young bride devastated by the loss of her husband; the part of her that died with William.

  Yi-kin and even Mina seemed to sense some connection as well; He looked from the spectre to Diana and back again, while Mina—who thus far had hidden herself away in his arms—raised her head and spat furiously at the ghost.

  Diana stepped forward, intending to to soothe Mina—and instead stared in shock as the spectral bride hurtled towards her. She forced herself to freeze, thinking that surely the thing only intended to frighten her off the path—

  —and it passed directly through her.

  Every molecule in Diana’s body suddenly ached as if it had been paradoxically scalded by great cold. She was shaking so badly that she fell to her knees, and she might very well have tumbled over the edge of the path had Yi-kin not been there to catch her. He dropped Mina as he knelt behind Diana, and she crumpled into his arms.

  “Miss Diana!” he called in alarm, holding her awkwardly. Mina stalked back and forth along the near edge of the path, apparently intuiting the dangers of stepping over its edges without needing to be told.

  Instantly Diana knew that it was possible to feel a color, and the color she felt was black, the black of the infinite, cold void between stars, the black that comes at the cessation of life. Then, slowly, she began to feel warmth creep back into her, banishing the blackness and returning strength. After a few minutes she pulled away from Yi-kin, and began testing her legs.

  “I’m all right now,” she said, as she wobbled with only a hint of unsteadiness.

  “That ghost—it go through you!” Yi-kin exclaimed.

  Diana nodded, then turned to look behind them. The bride had disappeared, and Diana hoped they’d not see it again.

  “You are fine?” Yi-kin asked, eyeing her warily.

  Diana didn’t take the question lightly. She searched within herself, but found that she really was fine; apparently the invasive spirit had left no taint, no piece of itself behind to poison her. She felt strong and warmly human again, and tried to smile for him. “Jan ge ho. Really, I’m fine. Let’s go.”

  He eyed her doubtfully for a second more, then reluctantly scooped up Mina. “Good…but I will go first again.”

  Diana’s experience turned out to have an unexpected benefit: Yi-kin no longer seemed quite so disturbed by the ghosts around them. Now that one had possibly injured his employer by passing through her, he deemed them all enemies, and was energized to fight…even though there was nothing to hit.

  As, for example, there was nothing to strike out against at the first spirit who passed through him.

  They had reached a point where the path wound through a stand of withered trees. Their branches were largely denuded of leaves, their wood cracking and gray, and yet they must have possessed some latent life, for thick clumps of parasitical growth prevented the moonlight from reaching the ground beneath the trees, and even the green aura of the path was obscured by fallen leaves. Yi-kin stopped fifty feet from the entrance to the grove and peered into it warily.

  “I think we will need lanterns,” he said, and was just setting Mina down to remove his backpack when Diana saw the spirit that floated towards him from the side of the path. It was half-formed, little more than a suggestion of human form, without distinct features.

  “Yi-kin—!” she cried out, but was too late.

  The amorphous thing passed through him, and he stiffened and abruptly toppled over. And the thing that had passed through him briefly gained strength, and some shape. It turned on legs clad in translucent shreds, and Diana saw that it now had a cadaverous face, with lips drawn back from gumless teeth. It was grinning at her.

  Then it passed beyond the path and through a tomb wall, and was lost from sight.

  Diana rushed to Yi-kin, who lay unmoving, his eyes frozen wide. At first she feared him dead, then she saw a tiny spasm pass through him. “Yi-kin,” she called, taking his hands in her own. His were freezing cold, and she rubbed them briskly, trying to restore warmth and life.

  She remembered a flask of brandy she’d stowed in the pack; she found it, then tilted it to his lips. Some dribbled over his chin, but enough found its way past his gritted teeth. The liquor seemed to work; he suddenly spluttered, convulsed, and grabbed her hand for another swallow from the flask. Finally he managed to sit up, still trembling, his gaze haunted.

  “Cold thing go through me,” he muttered.

  “Yes,” Diana said, “I’m sorry, Yi-kin. It was my fault. I saw it, but didn’t warn you in time.”

  “I cannot do it again; my chi is not good. I will die.”

  Diana knew it was true; they had each lived through such passage once, and perhaps could twice, but Diana knew she didn’t have enough warmth to survive a third such occurrence.

  “We need to watch out for each other,” she told him, helping him to his feet. “It should be possible to avoid them.”

  Yi-kin staggered, and Diana reached out a hand to steady him. His eyes darted around anxiously, and for a second Diana thought, Stephen was right; we won’t survive this.

  But for the moment she could see no more spirits, and although the path ahead was dark beneath the trees, Diana thought that might be good, since the ghosts had a faint blue light about them.

  She reached into the pack, got the lantern, and kindled it. Nearby, Mina eyed the trees warily, but seemed calm enough.

  Yi-kin re-shouldered the pack, then bent to pick up the cat. Hoisting the lantern, Diana led the way. “Let’s go. We’ll move slowly and cautiously.”

  Yi-kin nodded and followed behind her, still very tense.

  They entered the grove, and Diana felt a new unease. The rotting limbs overhung the path, in places forcing them to duck as they walked beneath them; the dead leaves crackled underfoot, but even so Diana thought she could hear slithering among the woods on either side of the path. Once she heard a skittering overhead, and looked up to see several pairs of golden eyes glaring down at her. As she watched, they blinked and then vanished. She thought she heard a hiss, but whether it was the sound of a dry tongue lapping air or wings taking night flight, she couldn’t tell. Behind her, Mina growled softly in Yi-kin’s arms.

  She brushed past several twigs (trying not to think of how they’d seemed to brush back), and then saw the thinning edge of the stand of trees a dozen feet farther on.

  And beyond the trees were ghosts. Hundreds of them, hovering beside the path, over the path, and on the path.

  Yi-kin joined her, saw the otherworldly road-block before them, and halted.

  “Well,” she could only say, “this isn’t good.”

  The apparitions mulled around the pathway, having neither destinations nor legs to take them there; because they were transparent, Diana realized that she could see ghosts through ghosts, many layers deep. They were of all sizes, ages, professions and genders; some were so solid that Diana could have recognized them in daily life had she seen them again, while others (which she supposed were of great age) seemed little more than a few wisps, distin
guishable from smoke or fog only by their movement, which bespoke some vague intelligence.

  “If we try to pass through there, we die,” Yi-kin said, stating the obvious.

  Diana nodded, even while considering that death in the necropolis of the Netherworld would only be the beginning; they would doubtless be consigned to join these creatures, to aimlessly roam among the tombs for all eternity, feeling more and more of themselves simply drift away until they were little more than a few shreds, perhaps leaving only the awareness of great pain and loneliness at the end. Had these lost souls round her and Yi-kin once been travellers to the Netherworld? Had they each failed this same challenge, and now sought retribution against any who were likewise foolish enough to try? Or had they ever even been human?

  Diana forced herself away from pointlessly philosophical musings, and back to the task at hand. Yes, it would certainly be suicidal to attempt to blunder their way through that deathless horde; however, even returning the way they’d come was no guarantee of safety. Both Stephen Chappell and Hob had suggested that this challenge could be won, so there had to be some way to overcome this obstacle.

  She doubted that any of the herbs or talismans she’d brought would be effective against ghosts; she wracked her brain, trying to think of anything she’d ever read that might have mentioned a useful defense against otherworldly spirits, but nothing came to mind. After all, ghosts in her world—while frightening—were typically harmless.

  She’d never heard of someone in the Great Britain of 1880 being frozen by spirits.

  Frozen….

  “Wait…of course….” Suddenly she was looking at the branches around them. She reached up and pulled one down, although it resisted being snapped completely off.

  “Yi-kin, can you break this?”

  He reached up and snapped the branch, then eyed the six-foot length of wood curiously. “Why?” he asked.

  “Crack that in two,” she commanded, already digging through the backpack without even bothering to ask him to remove it.

  Yi-kin broke the branch into two yard-long sections, and waited while Diana rooted around in the pack. She pulled out two strips of paraffin-soaked cloth, which she’d brought expressly for torch-making, and wrapped them quickly around the wooden clubs as he held them, all the while his eyes darted nervously from her to the wandering spectres.

  “You think gwai afraid of light, like lizard people?”

  “Not light—heat. Something that cold would have to react to heat, yes?”

  “But Miss Diana—” he started.

  Diana cut him off, as she finished tying the cloth around the branches, then lit a twig from the light of the lantern. “If we have to, Yi-kin, we’ll set fire to these trees.”

  Yi-kin looked around them, feeling distinctly uneasy at the idea of burning the malevolent trees. “Due m jue, but I do not think that is good idea.” Somehow he thought the bole of the nearest trunk was actually soundlessly snarling at him, its bark whorled in a way that suggested an elongated, nightmarish face.

  Diana finished lighting one of the torches. She put out the lantern and stowed it in the pack, took the lit torch from Yi-kin, and touched it to his. Then she stepped around him, wielding the torch like a sword. “Well, then—I thought of this, so I’ll go first.”

  She took four wary steps toward the ghosts, reaching the edge of the woods. With only a few feet separating her from the spirits, she began to wave the torch in the direction of the nearest spectre.

  And then her heart leapt into her throat as she saw all the entities turn en masse towards the source of the heat, and begin to converge on it.

  She stumbled back, lowering the torch uncertainly. “Oh dear,” she began.

  “I am afraid this happen,” said Yi-kin, also backing away. “In China we light fire at Yue Laan because ghost like fire.”

  “You might have mentioned that earlier,” Diana chided him.

  “I try,” Yi-kin responded somewhat sheepishly.

  And then a new idea occurred to her, and she stopped backpedaling.

  “Wait, this still might work.”

  She stepped as close to the spirits as she dared, then pulled back her arm—and hurled her torch as far as she could into the graveyard to the left of the path.

  All of the spectres turned as one to follow its arc through the air, and they drifted off the path in search of the torch and its heat.

  Not quite all of them had been lured away; a few were still tempted by Yi-kin’s brand. “Throw it the other way!” she barked at him.

  He did, sending his torch sailing through the air to the right. And the last of the ghosts turned to float after it.

  “That’s it—let’s go!”

  Yi-kin paused only long enough to scoop up Mina, then followed Diana, who was moving along the pathway at a trot.

  They had successfully cleared the ghosts.

  Diana knew they were taking a considerable risk—after all, should they round the corner of some tomb and find themselves again confronting a wall of the undead, she doubted she’d have time to make and light more torches—but the path ran straight before them as far as they could see, again offering its green effluence beneath the moon’s light, and there were no more phantoms to be seen.

  They trotted until Diana’s lungs could no longer keep pace with her anxiety, and she allowed herself to slow to a walk, then finally a pause. She was vaguely annoyed that Yi-kin, despite being burdened with both cat and pack, appeared not at all winded.

  Ah youth. Or gender. Or race.

  Yi-kin apparently caught her look. “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Diana answered. “Mo ah.”

  Half-an-hour later they stumbled over the first body part.

  Literally. Diana, who had been peering out into the unnervingly quiet gravescape, felt her foot snag on something and just caught herself before stepping off the path. Surprised, she turned back, and saw Yi-kin and Mina both peering down at the object that had caused her consternation.

  It was a severed hand.

  “Sau,” mumbled Yi-kin.

  Diana knelt to examine it more closely. It was old and mummified, shriveled flesh clinging to bone, ivory poking through in places. It included a few inches of narrow wrist, and the bone hadn’t been snapped and cut cleanly, but looked splintered. Diana hoped its owner had been well deceased when the hand had been taken.

  “Now how do you suppose that got here,” she muttered, then rose to her feet and turned away from it. “Forget it. Let’s go.”

  But the hand became harder to forget when they stumbled across a skull a few yards on. Then a rib cage. Then a foot that was the worst of all, because it looked alarmingly new. It lay sideways on the path, a small pool of blood that hadn’t yet soaked into the ground surrounding its mutilated ankle.

  “That one is fresh,” Yi-kin noted, as Mina uttered a low growl.

  Diana peered around the necropolis with renewed intensity, but saw nothing. No spirits, no malevolent fairies, nothing to indicate where the remains were coming from. Or why some of them gave evidence of having only recently been separated from living bodies.

  Soon the gruesome fragments were in profusion, strewn across the path, dangling from the roofs of mausoleums, splattered up against headstones. Diana and Yi-kin were forced to slow their pace, having to pick their way carefully amongst the carnage. Their senses were assaulted by both the sight and stench; at one point Diana was swallowing back her gorge when Yi-kin prodded her, and she turned to find him offering her something that looked like a small wood chip.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “Bark from tree used in many cures. Chew.”

  Diana took the bark, surprised. “How long have you had this?”

  “I have bring it from China,” he answered, then, added with a smirk, “I did not take it from Netherworld tree.”

  She put the inch-square tab in her mouth and began to chew. It was tough, but had a surprisingly pleasant, sugary flavor that preoc
cupied her taste and olfactory senses, effectively blocking much of the reek. “Ho ho!” she said, and Yi-kin smiled.

  As they walked, her mind working better now that her sense of smell was dulled, Diana’s thoughts circled in on one puzzle that had nagged her for quite some time: They had established that time moved differently in the Netherworld, and that each hour spent here meant perhaps years in the mortal world. So….

  What was it? Something not quite right there….

  And then she had it. If time was moving more quickly on this side of the gateway, then that would mean that the four years that had passed since William had been brought here would have been mere minutes in this place. But how then could Asmodeus have sent messages and invitations to her? Did the demon possess incredible speed? Could it read the future, and had planned all this years in advance?

  Or did time move differently in various parts of the Netherworld?

  She had to hope it was the latter. She thought that Stephen would surely have warned her, had Asmodeus been able to move that quickly. And if he could read the future, then he would already know the outcome of inviting her to his realm.

  He would only have done so had he foreseen his own victory and her death. Again, she thought Stephen would have given her at least some hint, had that been the case.

  Unless he and his fellows didn’t know exactly what their demon opponent was capable of.

  Diana was mulling these thoughts over when she became aware of a noise nearby, a rattling sound that she couldn’t quite place. She glanced around, and once or twice thought she saw something in the shadows of the headstones, scuttling along, pacing them.

  “Something follow us,” Yi-kin half-whispered to her.

  He was looking off into the gloom with Mina in his arms, her ears were twitched forward, her eyes wide, searching.

  The sound was closer now, and it caused Diana’s own hackles to rise:

  It was unquestionably bone clattering against bone, but coming nearer.

  Halted in caution, they followed the sound with their ears, turning their heads, scanning the left side of the path. There—a shadow of something short, or low. And there—a glimpse of gleaming white, flashing past….