by Michael Bray
“I don’t understand.”
“Your father is here with us.”
She said it in such a conversational way it took him a second or two to understand what she meant. There was no channeling, no incantation. Just the words.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“He’s joined us from the light. He’s come to see you. He said he’ll always be watching. He wishes he could protect you from those who wish you harm.”
“The bad man,” he said.
She nodded. This time she did close her eyes, inhaling deeply, cigarette hanging from her limp fingers.
“I hear those who speak to you. The ones who want to worm their way into your mind. There’s one in particular. A dark one. He wants you to hurt yourself. He wants you to do bad things. Your father, he isn’t strong enough to protect you anymore. His light grows dim as the darkness becomes deeper.”
“I see him. Sometimes when I’m asleep, sometimes when I’m awake.”
“Eto is his name. Your father battles him in the other world. That’s why you are so confused. They are both there in your head. Light against dark.”
“I don’t understand why, though.”
“You are the key. The key to bringing their torment to an end. The only child conceived on those lands. Some long for freedom, the innocent souls trapped there. Others will do anything to remain in the space between worlds. Eto and his kin have grown bitter and resentful of humanity. They are afraid of you, boy.”
“I’m scared.”
“But you will go there,” the woman said without hesitation. “They want you to go there. They want you to fear them. This is what feeds them, and they will stop at nothing to harm you.”
“They can’t hurt me. They’re just voices,” Isaac said, trying to convince himself.
“Words can sometimes be a more powerful weapon than you think. This has been proved on countless occasions during the history of that place. Besides, they have a human vessel to do their work for them. Through him they will get to you. They fear that which fears them. This is how they will be defeated. It will take all of you. You will all have to decide if fear or light will consume you. This is how it is. This cannot be undone.”
She blinked, the glassy sheen in her eyes lifting. Isaac exhaled, unaware he had even been holding his breath. Mrs. Alma lifted the cigarette to her mouth, flicking the long snake of ash from its tip into an ashtray, her hand trembling.
“There is a place you must go. A secret place. I do not know where it is, but you can find out.”
“How?” Isaac asked.
“You allow them access to your mind.”
“No, you can’t do that to him,” Emma blurted.
Mrs. Alma silenced her with a glare, then turned back to Isaac.
“Through me you will have protection. If you are willing to let Eto in, you can read him as he reads you. You will be able to learn of the source. You will learn where you have to go to end them.”
“I don’t want to. I’m scared,” Isaac said, chewing his thumbnail.
“It doesn’t matter. This is the only way.”
“Is it safe?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she took a last drag on her cigarette and mashed it out in the ashtray.
“I don’t know. They are powerful, and much more malevolent than anything I have dealt with before. This Eto, his light is cold. Unpredictable. By channeling through me, I can dilute his strength, for a while at least. The rest is up to you.”
“Can he… harm me?”
“No,” she said with a shake of her head. “He can project through me, but he can’t cause you physical harm.”
“So he can’t hurt me?” Isaac said, feeling a touch more positive.
“Not in the sense you’re thinking of,” Mrs. Alma said as she tapped a spindly finger to her temple. “In there, that’s where they will get you. They’ll make you do things. They’ll make the most frighteningly insane decisions seem like the most sensible choices in the world. You need to be sharp. You need to beware.”
“Then I’ll do it.”
“Isaac, you don’t have to. This is insane,” Emma said, pleading with Mrs. Alma.
“Do you want to fix this or not?” she replied, speaking to Isaac rather than Emma. “You come to me for help, and this is what I offer. This is the only way. The land can’t be purified without locating the source. You are the only one who can find it.”
“Mrs. Alma,” Emma said, leaning forward on her seat. “Everyone I’ve ever known has been changed by those things permanently. I’ve seen what happens when you let them in. Don’t do this to him, he’s just a boy.”
“Alex says you should trust what I do. He says what he did to himself was his choice, and that you should leave the boy to make his.”
Emma inhaled sharply, her mind going blank at the words Mrs.Alma had uttered.
“Its fine, I want to do it,” Isaac said, bravado overcoming sense.
Mrs. Alma turned toward him, folding her arthritic hands in her lap. “There are no guarantees. It all depends on whether he wants to come. I can’t force him, only channel him if he chooses to make himself known.”
“He’ll come. He’s been waiting a long time to speak to me,” Isaac said, agitated with a nervous excitement.
Mrs. Alma looked at him, and for the first time appeared uncomfortable.
“Very well. Let us begin.”
Truman looked around the sun-bathed room. “Do you want me to close the curtains or somethin’? Set the mood?”
Mrs. Alma shook her head. “No. There can never be enough light if I’m to channel something so inherently dark. We will need the sun.”
Truman nodded and glanced at Emma, who was watching Isaac.
“We’ll see if he will come.” Mrs. Alma managed a half smile. “The rest will play out as it will.”
She closed her eyes and took a slow, deep breath. Isaac waited, hovering somewhere between excitement and fear. Without warning, Mrs. Alma’s eyes flicked open. In that instant, Isaac was grateful for the sunlight streaming through the windows, because the thing in the chair, which glared at them as if from behind a semi-transparent human mask, was no longer Mrs. Alma. The entire room took on a new atmosphere; a dark, unwelcoming feeling, impossible to ignore. Emma and Truman felt it too, and shrank back against their seats. The thing in the chair twitched and sneered.
“What do you want with me? Why won’t you leave me alone?” Isaac asked, surprised at how calm his voice was.
The thing in the chair screwed up its Mrs. Alma mask features, and flexed its gnarled hands. It began to speak, each word hissed or spat in a language unspoken for centuries. Somehow, Isaac understood everything, its words automatically translated into English in his head.
“Death will come to you. There is no escape. Your father burns and screams for your blood. Death finds all eventually. Soon it will find your mother. Soon it will take you and your friends. The souls of the dead curse you, boy. Only when you join us will they be free. Only when you sacrifice yourself will all be saved. Blood will spill and be on your hands. Let me inside and I shall make it quick and painless. Let me help you do what must be done.”
“Isaac…” Emma said, unable to finish her sentence before the thing in the chair snapped its head toward her.
“Shut up, cunt,” it hissed in broken English, flashing a yellow grin.
Emma took a sharp breath and shrank against Truman as Mrs. Alma turned back toward Isaac and reverted to its own language. “Do you understand you cannot escape us? Don’t you realize death comes to all eventually? This way is easier. This way is better. Give yourself to us and we will spare your friends. If you do not, then they will suffer the consequences.”
“I’m not afraid of you anymore,” Isaac said. Or maybe he thought it. Either way, the thing in the chair heard and understood. It threw its head back and laughed a wet, choking gasp. Still it twitched and flexed its hands and fingers in what looked like some kind of constant state o
f seizure.
“There is no lie you can tell that I cannot see through. I know you, boy. I know everything you feel, everything you think.”
“Where is the source?” Isaac asked.
Mrs. Alma said nothing. She glared and twitched, drool spilling out of her mouth and onto her chin.
“Tell me where it is!” Isaac screamed.
Mrs. Alma bucked in her chair, but didn’t respond. She stared at Isaac with a wet grin. Isaac looked inward to the thing that, for as long as he could remember, had been trying to get inside his head. Something that now had a name.
Eto.
Instead of following the instinct to repel them, which had been with him for as long as he could remember, he opened his defenses, drawing them into his head, letting them roam among his secrets. Mrs. Alma lurched, her flat chest thrusting outward, gnarled hands gripping onto her chair. She kicked out a leg, losing a slipper in the process. She screamed, a deep growling baritone, which had no place in such a slender woman. Isaac also screamed as those awful things were left to run amok in his mind, filling it with the extent of their knowledge. They were more than just a series of images, they were snapshots of people. How they lived, how they loved. How they died. Even the Gogoku’s innermost secrets were shown to him. Everything from how they became, to how they descended into madness and turned to the darkness which exists in Oakwell. Such an overload of information would have been too much for anyone to take. For a ten year old boy like Isaac, there was never any chance. Filled with more information than he could process, Isaac lurched out of his chair and let out a scream from the deepest recesses of his stomach. Eyes screwed closed, veins bulged from his neck. He flexed his hands into claws, grasping at things only he could see.
“You will die like those who came before. I have already shown you this.” Mrs. Alma said, her voice like fire and brimstone, the language understood only by Isaac.
“No. I won’t let you,” Isaac said, horrified to hear his response in the same tongue as the thing in the chair.
Mrs. Alma’s eyes rolled back into her head and she gritted her teeth, breathing in snorts. The icy discomfort in the room built to incredible proportions, then just as it seemed something might happen, it faded away. In her chair, Mrs. Alma groaned as her body relaxed. Exhausted and covered in sweat, her eyes would barely open. Isaac froze, mouth open, hands flexed. Time appeared to stand still. Isaac looked to Emma. She saw the change in him and knew that things would never be the same again. As she watched, blood started to drip out of his nose.
“He’s gone,” Isaac whispered, then collapsed, his head slamming off the floor.
Emma scrambled to him, turning him over. He was unresponsive. Eyes closed.
“Is he alive? Is he breathing?”
Truman put his ear to Isaac’s chest. “Yeah, he’s breathing. He’s just… out cold.”
“Jesus, did you hear him? Did you hear the way he was talking?”
“Yeah,” Truman said, knowing it was a language he would never be able to forget.
“I don’t know what to do. We can’t phone an ambulance, we’ll be arrested.”
“He doesn’t need an ambulance,” Mrs. Alma croaked, pushing herself up on her elbows. Like Isaac, she too had a bloody nose, and her eyes remained closed as she tried to compose herself.
“What do we do, Mrs. Alma?”
“Kitchen.”
“What do you need?” Emma said, starting toward the door. Her mind was filled with concoctions and potions, secret remedies and incantations.
“Tea. I need a cup of tea.”
“What about Isaac?”
Mrs. Alma looked at him, almost as if she was seeing him for the first time. “He’ll be fine. Go put him in the spare bedroom. Let him sleep it off.”
“Sleep it off? You sound so casual. You were speaking—”
“In tongues? Yes, I know.”
“Mrs. Alma—”
“Please,” she said, holding up a hand. “I need to recover. It always takes a lot out of me.”
“And what about him? He’s just a boy. You shouldn’t have done that to him. We came here for your help.”
“And now you have it.”
“How?”
Mrs. Alma picked up her cigarettes. “Because he now knows the answer. We just need to wait for him to wake up.”
“There’s something else isn’t there? What is it you’re not telling me?”
Mrs. Alma looked at Emma, her face tight and frightened. “Before the end, the boy will die. It’s the only way this can be stopped.”
“No, there has to be something else.”
Mrs. Alma shook her head. “No. I wish there was, truly I do. If this is to end, the boy has to die. It is the only way to close the circle created by his birth.”
Emma put her head in her hands and the room fell into silence.
II
He was in a black room. In his dream, Isaac stood, or more accurately existed, floating in perpetual emptiness. He was everywhere and nowhere. Something and nothing. He saw a man. Cheap suit. Blond hair. He was standing by a car talking to two other people. Isaac wished he were closer. The second the thought registered, he was moving, drifting toward them. As he moved nearer, the scenery around the group started to take form, appearing out of the black, becoming more and more solid until he was floating in the physical world. The blond-haired man in the cheap suit was laughing with the couple, his body language awkward. Isaac saw the house, the thatched cottage in the woods. He realized two things in quick succession. This was something which took place before he was born. And the people talking to the blond-haired man were his parents.
What’s his name?
Isaac didn’t say it. He thought the question. Even so, the answer came back to him almost immediately.
Donovan.
Isaac watched his mother. She seemed full of optimism and happiness as she ran around to the back of the house. Isaac stayed with Donovan and his father, eavesdropping on their conversation. Donovan was speaking, leaning close, Jester’s grin wide. Too wide.
“Don’t worry about the trees. They just take a bit of getting used to,” he said, nodding toward where Steve was staring. “The last owners spent many happy years in this house before they decided to sell up and move to Australia.” He flashed his wide, salesman grin.
Only Isaac knew they hadn’t moved to Australia. They died horrible painful deaths in the forest. The woman screaming. The man cackling as he strangled her, squealing with delight as her face turned blue. Leaving her there to rot. Leaving her there for Donovan to have his way with again, and again, and again until the smell was too much even for him. Leaving her there to go back to the house. To hang himself in the bedroom, smiling all the while.
Isaac moved through time. He was still at the house, but now there were boxes everywhere. Isaac saw his father, sitting at the bottom of the garden, listening to Melody bark orders at the removal men. He saw his father first notice the path over the river, staring at it without knowing that its discovery would start everything unraveling for them all. He also saw Donovan again, crouching in the trees, watching the house.
Watching Melody.
Watching her shout at the removal men.
Watching her pick up one of the lamps they knocked over.
Watching her come to the front door to get some fresh air, fanning herself with a magazine.
Watching.
Watching.
Watching.
Isaac saw Donovan in his house, Polaroids spread out on the floor. Isaac didn’t need to see them to know what they depicted. He could feel the fear of every victim; the cold cut of every savage knife attack.
Donovan staring. Fantasizing. Imagining Melody as part of his collection. Donovan doing things to himself which Isaac knew about but didn’t want to see.
Show me something else, he whispered.
Again he moved. Or maybe the scene around him did. He couldn’t tell. Either way, he knew time had shifted.
Once more, he floated above the house, watching Donovan drive up to the property.
Danger.
Isaac’s mother was home alone. How he knew, he had no idea. He just did. Nothing he saw appeared new to him. It was as if he were recalling vague memories, which was impossible. He hadn’t been born yet. Snapshots of what happened next came to him, flashing in and out of his consciousness.
His mother, disturbed from her bath, answering the door in just a towel. Donovan’s eyes, hungry with the thought of her becoming part of his collection. Thinking of that more than anything else. More than why they’d sent him.
Donovan inside the house, imposing but still friendly. His mother uncomfortable. Going upstairs to dress. Donovan sitting in the chair, rocking back and forth. Over and over again. Staring at the trees. Listening to the house creaking out its instructions. Telling him to make sure the secret place remains hidden. But Isaac knew Donovan was distracted by his own agenda. Thinking of his Polaroids. Thinking about adding Melody’s image to his gallery.
The house creaked with more urgency, the trees rocked with more bluster.
But Donovan knew they couldn’t reveal themselves just yet, and so he ignored them. He ignored why they’d sent him. All he could think about was Melody and her towel. Skin gleaming and wet. She would make a great picture, that much was certain.
Another flash forward.
Donovan unable to resist. Forcing himself on Melody. Her desperate fighting, scrambling to escape. A chase through the forest, the trees thundering in fury, not at Melody, but at Donovan for his defiance. But still he chased, the trees contracting. Not to stop her, but to stop him.
They guided her, leading her toward the clearing. Toward that place. Light as she exploded out of the forest, fear slamming into Donovan as he knew he no longer had the strength to deny them. Enraged, they chastised him, speaking their vile words into his head as he stalked on the edge of the clearing. They wouldn’t allow him to enter. Wouldn’t allow him to kill her as punishment for his defiance and for not ensuring the secret place under the house remained hidden.
Under the house.