by Daryl Banner
“You know us,” Collin says, trying to appeal to some imaginary heart he must mistakenly think Shee has. “We were all friends, once. Even your—Even your favorite one, Winter.”
“WINTER,” she growls, absentmindedly spearing the old man in the shoulder with one of her ample legs. I would try to hide my face, but I’ve no means whatsoever with my arms fastened to my sides. “YOU DARE SPEAK TO ME OF WINTER?”
“I … I’m, well …” Collin finds himself out of words.
“I’ve a special thing in mind for Winter, oh yes.”
I am caught between an instinct to thrash my body around until I’m facing away, or break loose, or remain perfectly still and hope not to draw her attention. I feel a sick spinning within me, a terror so deep that ice couldn’t touch it.
“That wretched girl,” Shee nearly sings, carrying a melodramatic agony through her words. “That fraud. That pasty … pimple! I hate her with every—with every—here, come here,” she calls to the nearest spider. It hops up to her with proud confidence. Shee plucks from it an arm—it doesn’t seem to mind—then snaps the arm in half and jams them into her ears, furious. “I HATE HER THIS MUCH!!” screams Shee, her voice breaking.
With a half of a giant spider leg protruding from either ear like antennae now, she pulls the old man off the ground—accidentally tearing off a foot of his own, as she’d still had it pinned to the ground—and she presents it to Collin like some blanket she just whipped off a couch, her face bent into an ugly frown. “Who is this old thing?”
Collin, notably and visibly very unsettled by her explosion of rage, stammers several times before finally producing any words. “He’s—It’s—That’s a man who was saved from the Necropolis a very long time ago. He was prisoner to the Deathless King until—until someone freed him. We do not know his name. He’s a mute.” Collin’s eyes lift, watching Shee quite cautiously.
It’s only now that I realize who the old man is. I am such a fool. He’s the old man that was among our group that I’d rescued from the Necropolis long ago. He knew the way out of the Necropolis and, until the Judge pointed it out to me, I didn’t even realize he was Undead.
“A nameless thing is a broken thing,” Shee decides.
“He might not have a name,” Collin tries to reason, pushing out every word with such effort, fighting the fear that so clearly lives in his chest, “but he is very capable of many things. He is an excellent weaver, a tailor, a spinner. The very pants I’m wearing right now, in fact, he made with his own unique talents, and I’d even say—”
“I don’t like clothes,” Shee announces flippantly. “They’re just another way we lie to each other.” With that, as if by telepathic command, two spiders come to either end of the old man, ripping him out of her grasp and tearing him into pieces. Even in his violent demise, the old man utters nothing. “And I,” she says, stamping the ground, “don’t,” she says, clenching her fists, “like,” she says, tittering two of her cricket legs together, “LIES!”
At that last word, a breath no greater than the beat of a fly’s wing is heard, and then Doctor Collin, formerly Philip Brian DeAngelis, shudders backward and crumbles into dust and bone. His clothes drop with a soft sound.
Shee gasps, a hand moving to her mouth. Her eyes flash with fear. “It happened again!” She looks to her left at the now-seven-legged spider, then to her right, then up at a cocoon or two. “It—It—It happened again!”
No one moves or utters a sound. The cocoons don’t even seem to sway, not even mine. I’ve lost all interest in Shee quite suddenly, instead staring down at the pile of … things that used to be a person. The person who was just a depressed, wordless lost soul when I first met him. The person who was supposed to survive, to carry on the legacy of his brother. The person who was the semblance of saving lives, of saving deaths, of fixing the unfixable.
How’d she even do it? Where’s the Lock-stone? Isn’t that what’s responsible for the Undead turning to dust?
“GRIMMY!” she screams, her hands trembling, her insect parts tittering. “GRIM! GRIM! HELP! … GRIM!”
My heart turns to ice in my chest.
“GRIM!”
Her tone carries the whininess of a helpless lady calling for her husband to come kill a spider. Except her husband is the Prince Of Darkness and she’s the spider.
“GRIIIIIIM!”
C H A P T E R – F I F T E E N
T H E D R E A M I N G L I F E
From a bed of bones, a figure rises. This figure is not a graceful one. Clumsy, uncoordinated, this person stumbles to his feet, lazily kicking bones out of the way as he slumps to her side. He has hair as black as night and a face as white as the bones under which he was hidden. A scrap of fabric is tied around his forehead, though it has fallen somewhat to conceal his eyes.
“Yes, my Empress,” he says tiredly.
Upon hearing his voice, a new wave of cold washes over my body. I’m frozen to the core now, and I worry not a part of me will thaw, not when the dead of winter himself has arrived and uttered a word.
“Grim,” Shee says to the person, Grim. “It happened again. The Doctor-Emperor broke apart and I didn’t even mean him to.” She pouts out her lip, wrings her hands nervously. “Will you fix him for me?”
The weak and frail thing that is left of Grim stumbles in the wrong way, ambling toward the corner where once Kaela stood. His foot stamps into her blue hair.
“No, no, my love,” says Shee, rushing over to take him by the shoulders. “This way.”
“This way,” Grim agrees glumly, moving where she guides him until his foot kicks into the pile that once was Collin. A stray fleck of metal that might have been part of Collin’s spine or perhaps his kneecap goes flying, slapping against the wall of the cave and landing somewhere unseen. “This?”
“That,” murmurs Shee quite sadly. “Oh, Grimmy, Grimmy, Grimmy. Please fix it.”
Grim, devoid of all happiness and wearing nothing but a shredded pair of denim jeans, crouches next to the pile. He reaches out blindly, fumbling for what’s there. I watch with mounting emotion—both angry and hurt and despairing—as his hands discover Collin’s shirt, then his belt, then picks up a fistful of dust.
Grim sighs, shaking his head slowly. “It is broken.”
“NO!” Shee clenches her fist, gnaws her teeth and yelps something unintelligible before howling: “Please, Grim! Pleeeeease!”
“It’s broken beyond repair,” he says, almost a whisper. His voice is stolen from him. His joy. His life. His every and anything. What has happened to Grimsky?
Empress Shee seems to crouch next to him, some of her insect legs bending, others stretching flat as she lowers herself to wrap an arm around Grim. “I liked that one. He made me … curious.” She kisses the side of Grim’s face twice, once on his cheek, once on the fabric where his eye should be. “Why does it always happen when I’m mad?”
“All that’s left is dust,” he says in half a choke. His hands droop to his sides; he doesn’t bother to brush them off, all the pieces of Collin still stuck to them like sand.
“Walk me back to my chambers, will you? I feel so sad now.” Shee regards the pile of Collin for a moment, then rises to her feet—her many feet—and skitters across the carnage and bone and ash. “Come, come, my Grim. Come. I’ve had enough sadness for a day, I think.”
With great effort, Grimsky rises to his feet. For a moment, he seems to look around, as if searching for something even though he’s blindfolded by that scrap of fabric. Then, quite slowly, he pulls it off, and I discover that he has no eyes at all. Not even the green one.
“Grim,” she calls again, slightly annoyed.
He drops the blindfold. It lands in the pile of Collin. Then, morosely, he turns and follows the sound of Shee’s voice as she begins humming a strange, otherworldly tune. “Yes, yes,” she sings. “Follow my voice, yes.” She skitters backwards out of the room, a zombified, sullen, crippled Grim following. The spiders rush out after her, their lit
tle feet tickling against the bones and skulls as they pass, and then the room is empty.
Except for the ten or eleven of us who still remain hanging. I struggle to turn, looking wherever my restricted face will let me, but I can’t even seem to identify the person to my right or left, let alone the person straight across from me. All of us look the same encased in spider silk.
“Anyone?” I whisper, annoyed at how vastly even a whisper seems to carry in this annoyingly quiet and echoing space. “Please … Please, anyone?”
“I’m here,” drones an irritated man’s voice.
“Chief?” I try to turn, try to see who it is who speaks.
“Willard,” he grunts. “Tell me,” he goes on without prompt. “What part of ‘saving all Undeadkind’ included getting imprisoned by the Spider Queen and dying one by one before her?”
“It isn’t her fault,” calls someone from further down the semicircle, a woman. “No one could’ve predicted the strength of those spiders.”
“Did anyone see what I just saw?” growls Will, having none of it. “FOUR of our own have fallen before our eyes. Farris, Kaela, Collin, the old man … This will not end until we’re all dust on that floor. I could be HOME right now,” he carries on, quite suddenly ignoring the growing volume of his voice, “but Mayor Megan in all her wisdom sent us away to die. You think you mean as much as a Human life? Think again. You’re waste. I’m waste. We are, all of us, perfectly expendable. We’re unnatural. We’re abominations. We’re the Damned, you get it?”
“Oh, shut up your face, you self-important twat,” a woman shouts—Ash, if I had to guess. “What I saw just now is that Empress Shee and the Green Prince have teamed up. We have double trouble, that’s what I saw.” Or maybe it’s Sara who’s speaking, I can’t tell.
“This is … This is all my fault,” another whiny voice contributes. Jimmy. “If I hadn’t fallen asleep …”
“Yeah, this is all about you, Human. Get over yourself. You’re no stronger than any of us,” Will bites back. “Awake or asleep or downright dead, you would’ve been the first the spiders took.”
“Where’d they take her?” Jimmy goes on, his voice not hiding the tears that are likely squeezing out of his big dopey eyes. “Where’d they take my Ann?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. I don’t care about any of it anymore. I can just go rot in Hell,” growls Will. “I’d go happily. I’d go willingly. I want to die on my terms, not hers. Not that Shee. Not that … that fraud.”
The term he chooses, fraud, rings in my ears from when Shee called me that very same word a moment ago. Shee turned into a bucket of anger at the mere mention of my name. What brought her to hate me so passionately? Did she feel some sort of anger toward me because of her apparent union with Grimsky?
Oh, and then Grimsky. The sight of him tore me in half, the way he just dragged himself around the cave, performing what Shee requested—or demanded. He’s a puppet. He’s a nothing. He’s a shell, an empty, nothing, used-up shade of what he once was. Just the sight of him hurt me like nothing else could. Maybe it’s because when I look at him, I see John dying all over again.
“John?” I murmur quietly.
There is no answer. I don’t know if he’s here and just choosing not to answer, or if we’re not all gathered in this room and, perhaps, some of us were taken to another. I clench shut my eyes, furious and torn apart and numb. The world is not very kind today.
Then, suddenly, five spiders spill into the room. “What’re you doing?” Will asks stupidly, as if the spider would answer. “No, no, no,” he begs of it, but suddenly I hear a thump behind me, and I realize Will has been cut down. “Where are you taking me??”
“No!” The spiders are snipping down the woman, too. Was it Ash or the other teen girl? “Stop! Let go!” And then the two are in view, being dragged out of the room by the spiders, the two Undead shouting out in protest. Then another joins them, a third that had been cut down, a woman who, with a grunt, shouts, “Off with it!” And I recognize her: Jasmine. I cry out for her by name, twice, three times, and she’s gone before I can cry it a fourth. Two more struggling cocoons hit the cave floor, then are dragged out gracelessly. One of them issues a grunt that I almost recognize—just that one small grunt. “John??” I call out, crazed, but soon they’re all gone, spiders too.
I peer to my right as far as I can. Two cocoons hang side by side. To my immediate left there is still a cocoon, within arm’s distance if I had them to reach out. Then, much further away, near the hole leading out, another swaying slowly.
“Is everyone okay?” I ask.
“Lovely!” says a voice, chipper as ever.
“Good to hear, Marigold.” She’s the one who’s far away, swaying gently near the way out. I twist to my other side. “You two? Are you two alright? Who’s left?”
For a long moment, there’s nothing. Just as I’m about to ask again, I hear: “I … am … Shee.”
I sigh, a bit relieved and a bit sad. “You’re not Shee, sweetheart, your name is Brains.” I meant to say Helen, but I’ve been calling her Brains so often, I don’t even care anymore. Everyone else calls her that anyway. “Who’s that next to you? Hey.” I squirm a bit, annoyed that he or she is being unresponsive. “Please. Speak. … Please.”
“I couldn’t … I couldn’t save her.” His choked voice is almost unrecognizable, but when he sniffs and I hear the gross slurping of tears and snot, my hunch is confirmed.
“I’m sure she’s fine, Jimmy.” I sigh, tired somehow. We can’t sleep, but I sure feel like I could use a nap. You know, the eternal kind.
“She’s not. She’s so not. She’s just a head. She’s just a head.” He starts sobbing now, his throat making these awful, croaky sounds every time he tries for breath.
“I … am … head.”
When my cocoon twists just slightly, I’m reminded that there’s yet one more unidentified person to my left. “Hey,” I say quietly. “I can’t see your face. Who are you?”
“May your every confidence be great,” he says in a high-pitched, playful sort of drawl, “and your every misconfidence greater.”
Now I realize I’m truly helpless. I’ve been left with a cheery and useless Marigold, Brains, a slobbering Human and a little Warlock who has no powers left.
“Remember?” he says, his tone still annoyingly lively. “When I first said that to you? I do.”
“I don’t care.”
“I said it to you, girl, the first time you learned that Grimsky was not what he seemed. You were attempting to escape the Necropolis and found Grimsky coming to your aid, only he wasn’t coming to aid you, he was coming to stop you.” The little Lynx giggles horribly. “And you learned, right then, that Grimsky had been, all that time, deceiving you. ‘And your every misconfidence greater’ … It’s my motto, really. You can borrow it.”
“He also put a sword through you,” I say, biting back.
“The lesson here,” Lynx continues, unruffled, “is that Grimsky knows no loyalty. He never has, in this Life or his last.”
“What would you know about his last Life?” I snort, annoyed to the brim with my coincidental choice in a cocoon-neighbor.
“More than you,” he grunts back.
I roll my eyes. If I concentrate long enough, maybe I can fall asleep. Maybe I’ll turn Human again and drift into a long, beautiful sleep where I can dream of a rickety house in Old Trenton I used to live in, and the warm, Human man with which I’d cuddle, sharing a bed.
“Weren’t you always curious, Winter? Weren’t you always curious why the Deathless King chose … him?”
“Wasn’t for his good looks,” I retort, feeling snarky. Truth be told, Grimsky actually did have a handsome face. Unconventionally attractive … in that dark, tortured-poet, Goth-punk-in-high-school sort of way.
Lynx giggles again, his voice squeaking when he says, “You don’t even see the flaw in the plan, girl. Oh, how amused it makes me, how so very, very, very amused. The Mayor was
our messenger. He kept his eye on you, yes he did. Grim worked his ways. The Deathless King knew everything, but of course, did not know whether you were her true daughter until you were brought forth. And even then, she had her doubts. That is, until you shook her hand and burned her.”
“That wasn’t intentional,” I fire back. Wait, why do I even care?
“I don’t doubt it. So much of your success has been luck. Oh, but how so very soon your luck’s to run out. I’m sorry, dear girl, but this will not bode well for you or your lovely Not-Human-Anymore fellow.” He laughs again, loud and echoing. “Grim was good at his job. Too good. And when I see him, it’s going to bring me great satisfaction to turn him into soil.”
“Oh, great,” I say, mocking him. “And when you’re done with that, you can, like … plant a tree in him. Circle of life.” The jab sounded better in my head.
After a moment of what I take to be silent and dark contemplation, he says, “If there’s anything I want my little stupid Lives to amount to, it would be that I taught the world the importance of one thing.”
“Friendship and love?” I ask jeeringly.
“One thing,” he repeats. “To listen.”
“I am listening. I’ve been listening. The only thing you seem to like doing is listening to yourself, you miserable, self-important eyeless Lock.”
“I am not eyeless. And you are not listening.”
“You’re missing the only eye that means anything to you,” I spit back. “With two normal eyes, you’re nothing but a short man and a flapping tongue.”
“You’re not listening because if you were listening, you would know by now why your mother chose Grim.”
“I should’ve cut out that tongue when we first met.”
“A tongueless man has considerably less to say,” he reasons, his voice lilting higher.
“Less lies to utter.” I sigh, frustrated. Why can’t I have been left with John? He’s the only person in all the world I want to be around—now, more than ever. I even want to see him more than I do my own mother, wherever she is. Maybe she was one of the cocoons the spiders stole away. Maybe she met her end already, turned to dust before the Empress in one of her angry fits. “We need to get that stone,” I say in half a growl.