by Mark Cassell
I recognised my surroundings: the gym studio, with sunshine pressing on the windows along the upper part of a wall. Exercise mats and dumbbells sat in one corner. At the other end of the room a Staff Only door stood ajar, with darkness beyond. Along the opposite wall a row of mirrors reflected the room: me and my necromeleon friends. One stood behind my chair, his eyes black, face expressionless.
Feathery shadows rolled across the wooden floor between the legs of Stanley’s dead henchmen. Polly was strapped and gagged too, her face as emotionless as it had been before.
No sign of Isidore.
Then I remembered how I’d gotten there. It hadn’t all been darkness since the time those three smart necromeleons captured us. Where was Georgie? And, oh God, I’d hit Isidore!
At some point we’d been taken into a lift. We headed upwards, away from the maze of corridors and rooms. All I had was a vague recollection of Polly’s silence and Isidore’s yells. At some point on our way to the studio, one of the suited necromeleons knocked out Isidore and carried her over his shoulder. I’d followed, doing little else. I also remembered their eyes: darkness, like a pair of bored holes. And also Stanley. He’d been there to greet us when we arrived.
Dizzy, I strained against my ties.
“Excellent, you’re back in the land of the living,” Stanley said, his voice drifting from the Staff Only room. As his laughter thundered into the studio, he entered and approached me. His eyes, bright and blue, showed no trace of darkness. He didn’t look dead. This was the man I witnessed die by the involuntary hands of his own brother. He stood with a bunched fist, suited like his necromeleon henchmen, except his tie was loose and his top button undone.
The way he held his fist suggested he hid something. Or perhaps he intended to hit me. I relaxed as he poked it into his pocket. When it slipped out, the fingers wriggled—evidently he had held something.
I grunted into the shadows stuffed in my mouth. Why wasn’t I dead?
“All impressive stuff, back at the bookshop.” Stanley laughed again. “Don’t look so confused, I saw it all once The Book of Leaves came into the light.”
I flexed against the shadows. Attached to my awkwardly angled right hand was the Hourglass. I hadn’t noticed it before due to my slow focusing, I guessed. The last time I’d seen it, it had been in a mess of wires and tubes, linked to Goodwin’s machines. This time, it was the device on its own, the glass a web of scratches, and its wooden supports equally scarred with age. White sand heaped in the lower bulb. A short distance away, my gloves clutched the ground like severed hands. I thrashed against my restraints. Useless. I thought of Victor, dead beneath the weight of necromeleons.
“What a waste,” Stanley continued, “burning The Book of Leaves. Impressive your Victor did it so quickly, without even hesitating. Such a waste of evil. Could have been useful, but it doesn’t matter. There’s plenty more to play with, plenty more to stitch.”
Why did Stanley say ‘your Victor’? What did he mean by that? I strained against my bonds. The shadows tightened and the leather straps dug into my flesh.
“Time to play with this marvellous tool.” Stanley grabbed hold of my arm, and even though it was bound to the armrest, he forced it over, and inverted the Hourglass. “It will take a while.”
I groaned into the mouthful of shadow as a collection of darkness slithered towards the Hourglass and fastened on my arm. The pain of pinched skin subsided, the awkwardness relieved. The sand fell from the top bulb in a silent whisper and the grains tumbled over one another.
My muscles ached as I heaved, but my arm didn’t move even a fraction. A numbness spread up my arm and into my shoulder—cold, like putting a hand in the freezer. I expected it to continue to my chest, around my body, and eventually to my head. It didn’t.
Images of the madness we’d witnessed in the rooms below the House raged through me. The poor bastards who’d been driven mad or had died when attached to this device from the dark ages. Watching the sand run down—run out—was like seeing my life coming to an end. If so many emotions hadn’t been driving through me then, I’d have rationalised that those men and women had died due to Goodwin’s experiments, his weird alchemy of high tech and ancient magic.
Stanley’s mouth curled into a smile I wanted to punch. His back straight, and with hands clasped behind him, he stood between the towering hulks of two necromeleons. Their eyes were as black as Stanley’s suit and shadows boiled at their feet. I tried to scream, and only succeeded in making a pathetic muffled groan. I rocked my upper body, and immediately, the necromeleon behind me smashed the side of my head and leaned on my shoulders, clamping me to the chair.
“Sit still,” Stanley said, “and let it do its work.”
My face heated like a furnace and I slumped.
Polly hadn’t moved—the poor woman still had no idea what was happening. What precisely had made her mind tune out of this madness? Sadly, perhaps that was it: she’d been driven insane.
And where the hell was Isidore? And what about Georgie?
A sudden movement from behind and to my left made Stanley and his dead henchmen snap their heads sideways. One necromeleon charged into action and I saw Isidore, scrambling to her feet. Evidently, she’d been unconscious until then.
I struggled beneath my binding, my right arm still numb. Helpless. In my mouth, the stuffed shadows were a bitter reminder of my inability to scream. I wanted to tell Isidore how sorry I was for striking her, yet couldn’t. I silently pleaded for her forgiveness, hoping she’d read it in my face. Hoping she understood, hoping she would know I hadn’t been myself. It was as if someone had controlled me. Like I’d been a puppet. I never meant—never wanted—to hit her.
One of the necromeleons gripped her midriff. She heaved and grunted, and shouted something, and in an instant a block of shadow shot into her mouth. Her eyes flared in panic.
She saw me, and the panic switched to anger.
I bucked and shook my head, she had to know I was sorry. I never meant to harm her.
Twisting her shoulders, she squatted and tore herself from the dead man’s grasp, sprinting towards me. Her jaw set, her eyes feral, and as she reached me, her leg swung upwards. An explosion of pain shot through my face as her boot connected with flesh.
Then the necromeleons brought her down. She let them. And through a tangle of limbs, her eyes burned into mine.
Stanley lifted a metal box above his head, the studio lights glinting from it, and he slammed it to the floor. An eruption of black squares burst like gothic confetti. The clatter died and the shadowleaves fluttered about his feet. He stepped back and glanced at a necromeleon. With the smallest of acknowledgements, the dead man left the studio. The main doors swung shut.
Stanley laughed. “Doesn’t matter about The Book of Leaves. Your society has some fantastic evils.”
I couldn’t speak, shout, or scream because of the mouthful of shadow, and my face still roared as if someone had smashed a rock into it. There was a stickiness on my brow. Isidore had every right to kick me—I thought nothing less of her. Even though I’d been powerless, I deserved it.
The shadowleaves were silky in appearance, no larger than a postage stamp, and they attracted my gaze like something taboo. And there were dozens of them.
Beside the pile, the metal box—about the size of a shoebox—gaped open. I’d seen the likes of it before; many of them stacked in the room beneath the retreat. I managed to make out the Ministry of Justice emblem where a leaf slightly hid it.
The white sand cascaded into the lower bulb of the Hourglass, piling on top of one another. White over white. An hour was proving a long time. I looked at my watch; its second hand moved around the dial. Slowly.
Isidore was curled on her side. Her wrists and ankles bound by the shadows, as was the lower part of her face. She stared at me through small eyes, her hair a mess of blonde tangles. I hoped she knew how sorry I was. My face still throbbed and my head and neck felt disconnected. She had one hell o
f a kick.
Sunlight poured into the room as the main doors swung inwards. The sentient wisps of shadow had pulled the door open to allow a staggering Natalie to enter. She was dressed in her therapist’s uniform, her wrists and mouth restrained like the rest of us. A necromeleon followed her, his face as impassive as only a dead man’s would be. The girl’s eyes glistened, her nostrils flaring and her chest heaved. She saw me and her eyes widened.
Stanley smirked.
Natalie bustled further into the room. He pulled her against him, seemingly to sniff her hair. She struggled, and her muffled desperation flooded the studio.
I screamed into my gag. Not Natalie, the poor girl. I had to do something. I bucked in the chair and the necromeleon behind me grabbed my head. His fingers dug into my skin. I winced, certain those dead digits would invade my brain and kill me outright. I glared at Stanley. From the corner of my eye those white grains of sand continued to pile up.
From a caress of Natalie’s lower back, Stanley’s fingers walked up her spine like a bloated pink spider and clamped her neck. Her moans became a higher pitch and he shoved her to the floor. Both knees banged in a double thud, and he continued to force her closer to the pile of shadowleaves.
Her struggles ceased and a wave of silence spilled into the room. No longer did she resist, no longer were her eyes so fearful. No more muffled protests. As she relaxed, the coiled shadows fell from her face to reveal smudged lipstick and an emotionless mouth. Her face went slack and her wrists were freed. Like water along a gutter, the shadows disappeared past Stanley into the darkness now leaking from the Staff Only door.
The Shadow Fabric. It trembled in the corner, absorbing both sunlight and spotlights.
Laying there, her face pushed against the collection of black squares, Natalie’s breath settled and her eyes shone. No evidence of fear remained, nor pain or panic, only a longing. A want. A desire. I knew where this was going.
With deliberation, almost in slow motion, she shuffled into a sitting position. She even took time to toe off her shoes before she came to sit like a child in playschool, legs crossed and back slightly hunched. She reached out and touched a shadowleaf with a probing finger. As her flesh came into contact with it, the pinkness paled to grey, yet this didn’t bother her. I doubted she even noticed, such was her eagerness to ‘play’. That was what it was like, watching a child discover a new toy. Just like opening a birthday present, unfolding the wrapping paper and giving the toy undivided attention. Nothing else mattered.
Natalie, expressionless, now held the shadowleaf in her palm. She picked up another leaf. Holding one in each hand, her skin tone changed. Subtle at first, as though the lighting dimmed, her flesh paled, turning grey to match her finger.
And there she sat, as if in some meditative state holding a shadowleaf in each palm, like an image of Buddha leaking black stigmata in blasphemous contradiction.
Long seconds passed—more of the white sands tumbled down into the lower bulb of the Hourglass—and Natalie brought her hands towards her face. Before eyes which focussed not on the task before her, but into distance, she pressed her hands together. Like in prayer, as Isidore had said, and that it was like seeing the very nature of Death.
And that is precisely what I witnessed.
Natalie’s shoulders moved slowly forward and back. Her eyelids drooped as though tired, widened again, and then closed fully. With her eyes closed and her shoulders rocking, it appeared as if she tuned into music only she could hear.
The greyness in her flesh darkened. It spread along her wrists and up her arms, disappearing under her uniform. Wrinkles appeared along her fingers and her nails cracked. They yellowed and appeared to be extending, due only to the shrivelling skin.
With the necromeleon holding me in the chair, I could do nothing. Anger surged with a muffled outlet, screaming into the shadows. My cheeks bulged and succeeded only at creating a rawness in my throat.
Natalie’s movements sped up, her rocking now charged by a faster rhythm. Occasionally, her face would twitch, her lip curling with a sideways flash of teeth and an eye squinting like she’d bitten into something sharp. Her face would relax, her skin continuing to grey. The darkness spread into her cheeks, across her nose, around her eyes. All the while, her movements became less rhythmic and more rapid. Irregular shudders wracked her body, and she still held her palms together.
Her flesh wrinkled as the life force ebbed.
By this point, I stopped screaming—it was useless. I wanted to look away, yet couldn’t.
Natalie’s elbows lurched outwards without breaking the obscene prayer, and on a scrawny neck, her head moved forward and back. Her dark hair had now lightened and her scalp was showing. The sudden jarring of her head dislodged wispy strands. Cheekbones and chin prominent, her body shook as if in a seizure.
Stitch-stitch-stitch as the drained life force flowed into the shadowleaves still hidden between her emaciated hands. Her legs had already become like the rest of her: thin, shrivelled, and grey.
On a final backward snap of the head, wisps of hair detached from her scalp and silently floated. Her eyes shot open, a pair of black orbs rimmed by grey flesh at the back of sunken sockets—sockets in a skull’s mask with a wig of trailing white hair. The darkness in those eyes where once a brilliant green had shone, lightened. Wrinkles shifted to cracks and her face paled in death. The black of her eyes, only lasting a moment, lightened to brown, and to yellow…and her eyeballs shrank.
Something crackled as the dried husk of her body settled. And it collapsed.
Gnarly hands, still clutching the shadowleaves, sat atop shards of bone and a dusty uniform. Natalie’s skull rolled away and knocked into Stanley’s boot. It rocked once and cracked open in a plume of dust.
CHAPTER 33
Of everything I’d so far witnessed, this was the worst.
I thrashed against my restraints. Will this never end? Now the necromeleons shoved two more people into the studio. I recognised the pair as the arguing visitors from a few days before: Mick and Pam. Mick held a paperback in his shadow-bound hands. Most of his head was wrapped in shadow, too. Pam, however, wore a dressing gown which sported the familiar embroidered script: Periwick House. I guessed she’d been in a treatment with Natalie while her husband patiently waited for her. The shadows coiling around her were a lot larger and suggested she’d put up more of a fight than her husband. I had no idea how much more I could take.
In the Hourglass, sand tumbled into the lower glass bulb. The white sands had almost run out and I estimated there remained another ten minutes or so. I had no idea what Stanley intended to do to me, or to Isidore. I guessed that after me, it’d be her turn with the Hourglass. What did he intend to do with us afterwards? Indeed, what was he going to do with my shadowleaf when the hour was up? And what would happen to me?
Stanley’s eyes weren’t dead like his henchmen. Clearly human, he still walked amongst the dead as if he was one of them, flanked by the Shadow Fabric. There was some crazy objective to this. The bastard wanted to bring the primordial darkness back into the world. Just as Victor had said.
Victor dead. Natalie, too. Isidore, alive and shrouded in so much shadow. And there I was, also restrained. The frustration in my chest was as tight as the shadows binding me.
Stanley regarded Natalie’s gnarled fingers laying across the folds of her uniform, and a smirk tugged at his mouth.
The dead girl’s spindly digits twitched and parted slightly. A darkness oozed and slipped from the twisted confines of those skeletal hands and ballooned. Its surface shimmered like a diesel spill. Pulsing, it rose up and shot sideways into the mass of Shadow Fabric.
My eyes watered as bile burned my throat without escape.
As the bulbous portion of shadow joined the main bulk of the Fabric, Stanley nodded to the necromeleons and they thrust Mick and Pam onto Natalie’s dusty remains. A plume of decay puffed into the air, and undiluted horror flashed across the pair’s faces.
&
nbsp; The Hourglass sand had almost run out, now piled in the lower bulb in a brilliant white mound. Remembering what Victor had said about the use of the Hourglass, I was relieved there were no black grains. There had to be a few black ones in there, surely. No one was perfect, but what of my mysterious past? God only knew what I’d got up to before this life. Before this madness. If this thing could be trusted, then my past was free of any crime. Good to know.
Stanley stood overseeing the beginnings of Mick and Pam’s stitching. The shadows binding them had now left their faces and hands, sliding from the pair as they had when Natalie became a stitcher.
Natalie: I recalled her questions about the classical concert and whether I needed a date. This had been the morning after I witnessed Victor stab his brother, when I first laid eyes on the Shadow Fabric. No surprise I hadn’t acted on Natalie’s not-too-subtle flirt.
My eyes wandered to Isidore. The shadows had almost entirely cocooned her like a sleeping bag. I guessed she’d put up a massive struggle. Quite an impressive kick she’d given me. But how was I to get out of this? I could only watch as the sand tumbled into the lower bulb. There were only a few minutes remaining, and I closed my eyes. In my head, I heard an angry rush of blood.
Stanley loomed over the stitchers.
“In your own time,” he said to them. Both now held their hands together and sat crossed-legged, rocking their heads back and forth.
Isidore looked at me, and perhaps she nodded. Did she know I hadn’t been myself, that somehow I’d acted like a puppet?
Stanley then bounded across the studio, his eyes focussed on me. The top bulb of the Hourglass was now empty. With delicacy, he detached it from my unresponsive hand.
“Time to play,” he said. When the small compartment at the base of the Hourglass slid open, he froze. His eyes widened.