The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  Edgar yelled as he tumbled over himself. The bloody, dripping cloth enveloped him, blotting out the sky and any means of escape. Sound dulled and then deadened. He felt the air thicken around him, as though it were coagulating. He punched and scratched the tightening material. It deflected his blows and shot blood black at him for daring to do so.

  “I’ll try your world again.” Crestfallen’s words echoed throughout the artery-like tube of satin to which Edgar was confined. “My sister will be happy. I’ve been ignoring her for so long. We were always stronger when we were together. Her name is Pain. Do you know her? You will.”

  Bloody arms and fingers shot out of the weave and grabbed at Edgar. They took his ankles, his wrists; they pulled back on his hair, his waist. He held his breath, because the sharp, coppery smell of Crestfallen’s children was making him nauseous.

  “Please, don’t kill me,” he begged. The red fingers melted into his mouth. “Please!”

  “Kill you?”

  A force rushed past Edgar. Looking back, he saw a river of blood flooding through the tube, toward him.

  “What do you think I am? A villain? You’ve confused me with my sister. I’m only trying to help you, my dear nephew. Yes, I made this harder than it needed to be. But I’ve atoned. Now you must do right by those you’ve wronged, and make right your wronged world.”

  Edgar closed his eyes. He gritted his teeth and braced himself for the impact of the crimson deluge. It hit him hard, like a fist, and took him over. It took him where it wanted, further down the narrowing tunnel of satin. A ball of pressure crashed into his gut. His mouth snapped open and hundreds of years of blood poured down his throat.

  In a red blur, Edgar was hurled through the satin tube and dumped into the shallows of a mist-covered marsh. Quickly, he surfaced and splashed the gritty water into his eyes to wash the death out of them.

  Looking back, he saw that the tube was gone. There was no sign of Crestfallen or her white satin dress. Instead, he found himself checked by a denser part of the Forest that stretched for miles on end. The trees inside it were crooked, bent. Covering each one were layers upon layers of thick, ancient spider webs. Were these the outskirts of Atlach? Edgar wondered. If so, why did they look as though nothing had passed through in hundreds of years?

  Edgar preferred to be drenched in water rather than blood, so he soaked himself in the reed-choked marsh until the only red on his skin was the Corruption on his arm.

  Don’t stray. Stay sane. He missed Lotus, even though he shouldn’t. She, like the rest, undoubtedly had her part to play in all of this, yet that didn’t seem to matter to him. If he was going to finish what he had started, and live with what he had done, he was going to need her, or someone like her, to keep what little was left of his humanity from slipping away for good.

  Enough of the mist had lifted from the marsh to show Edgar what lay further on. Half a mile opposite the tree line, a haggard hill had rolled over the earth. Once, there had been a wood that crowned this hill, but Edgar saw it had since been reduced to a patchy stretch of malnourished oaks. Occasionally, parts of these trees lit up when the sun hit them. It was a reddish light, a winking, refracting signal from a crystalline source. He knew what that was; he should have, at least. He couldn’t begin to guess how many pounds of the vermillion veins were inside him at the moment, but what he didn’t know about was the thing he saw more clearly when he started trudging forward; the decrepit mansion, further back, at the top of the hill, in the heart of the woods.

  “Is that your home, Amon?”

  Edgar panted as he crossed the marsh toward the stony path that cut through it. He couldn’t remember the last time he had a meal or something to drink. He considered drinking the water here, but figured it would kill him more quickly than drinking nothing at all.

  “You said you mimicked someone. Amon… Ashcroft,” Edgar rambled, as he shambled on. “The mansion looks old. This must be where it all began.” The soil sucked on his feet. “Vermillion God?” He laughed. “No, just you. A manipulator. You’re no god, or part of one.”

  Edgar found the stony path, fell forward, and crawled onto it. A pound of mud slowly sloughed off his ankles. “A son for me?” The rocks that formed the path cut into his skin as he struggled to his feet. “A successor for you. A do-over. Bullshit. All of it.”

  As he climbed the hill, they came to him in waves. Lena, Horace, Auster, Audra, and Vincent. They begged him to stop with broken lips and bruised eyes. Memories of their murders twisted and coalesced, until he couldn’t be sure what was true, and what had been warped by guilt.

  Even though he knew they were dead, he still wanted to speak to them, to apologize to them; at the very least, to see them one last time. They were gone, but they weren’t really gone, were they?

  Tears stung his eyes as shame swelled in his heart. He tried not to think of them, because it hurt to think of them, but he did, anyway. He thought of Lena—oh, how much he would’ve liked for her to like him—and Horace—oh, how close they could’ve been. He thought of Auster—so dull, but so damn smart—and Audra—so kind, but so naïve. Even Vincent had his qualities, but of all of them, it was true he deserved to die the most, and if he deserved it, did they, too? Could some justification be made for what he had done, and for what Amon intended?

  That’s what worried Edgar the most: that if he kept himself alive, and if enough time had passed, he would look back on everything and say it had been worth it.

  Coming out of his thoughts, Edgar entered the wood at the top of the hill and confirmed his suspicions about the trees there. They were infested with the vermillion veins. There were hundreds, no, thousands of the veins. He could see the strange liquid inside them, rushing through the crystalline tubes, as though feeding into something yet unseen.

  Hand shaking, begging him to touch them, Edgar said, “Drugged me, from Eldrus to here.” He could feel the pangs of want, of addiction. He steadied his hand. “What the hell are these things?”

  A bell dinned nearby. Then a boy spoke from behind him: “They don’t have a name. They don’t need one.”

  Edgar whipped around. He reached for the sword at his waist that was no longer there. Before him, in a decayed grove, a young boy stood, with a small bell dangling from a rope wrapped around his wrist. He had bright green eyes and dark brown hair, and couldn’t have been any older than ten or eleven.

  “Who are you? What are you doing?” Edgar said.

  The boy’s bell jingled as he slipped his hands into his pockets. “I wasn’t sure you would make it.”

  Pointing at him, Edgar said, “That was you, with the carrion birds.”

  “I couldn’t have you dying so quickly.”

  Edgar sized the child up. He looked strange, the proportions and symmetry of his body off ever-so-slightly. It was as though clumsy hands had put him together, from instructions written in a different language.

  “Why did you help me?”

  “Because we need each other.”

  The woods rattled as a rotten wind blew through. The mire below belched and gurgled.

  The boy continued. “That’s why you’re here. To take me back to Eldrus.”

  Edgar looked past the boy, through the break in the trees, where he could see the wreckage of the mansion ahead. “Actually, not quite,” he said, drooling on himself. Fading, he said, “I’m just here to kill my oldest living ancestors and take over the place.” His face contorted, as though he were about to lose it.

  “And who do you think is going to help you with that?” The boy blinked. His pupils dilated, became vermillion in color. “Not Amon. Not after he lets me eat him.”

  “You’re the thing he sent me in after? That makes you my son?” His cheek quivered. “Could have met me halfway.”

  “No, absolutely not.” Edgar’s suggestion struck a chord with the boy. “The Nameless Forest grew out of us, but it’s not ours anymore. I helped you once, because I couldn’t let you die that early. But I have no plan to l
eave with someone who couldn’t have done all that you did to get here.”

  “So I had to prove myself?” The back of Edgar’s throat tickled. It felt as though a finger were wagging back and forth in his esophagus. “Go fuck yourself. You, Amon, Crestfallen. The fucking lot of you.”

  Ignoring him, the boy said, “Now, the Nameless Forest holds its breath, to see what you’re going to do with it. Now, as long as we stay to the Binding Road, I’ll go with you, and we can go home.”

  Edgar gazed at the vermillion veins on the trees. “What are you?” He wanted to suck on the sweet liquid that flowed inside them, to drink himself into catatonia. “Are you a… creature of ‘mimicry’?” He mocked Amon’s words.

  “Amon and I are the same.” The boy gestured to the mansion, indicating it was time to go inside. “It took a long time for Amon to become what he has, but he spent too much time outside of heaven, in your hell. He can’t hold on much longer. In time, you won’t be able to remember the difference between he and I.”

  “Monsters, then? That’s what you are. Just like the Night Terrors. Just like anything else. Except, what? You have some queen or king that’s convinced you freaks that it’s a god?”

  “It is God.” The boy beckoned Edgar to follow after him onto the ruined estate. “Why don’t I just show you?”

  Edgar dug his feet into the earth.

  “You killed your family. You just left each of the villages here leaderless. Crestfallen is now free to terrorize the continent again with her sister. Are you really going to let all it be for nothing?”

  Edgar stayed silent.

  “Besides, wouldn’t you like to know where all those veins you’ve been eating come from?”

  Aside from the façade, the mansion was no more than several free-standing walls and battered pillars struggling to keep their place in the overgrowth. The second and third floor of this Old World behemoth had long since collapsed; now, they were no more than dusty piles of rubble that marked the property like forgotten cairns.

  Edgar searched for signs of furnishings, indications of the time period which gave birth to this monstrous place. Pacing back and forth, he noted a Victorian style in its construction, but what the word meant or what era such an aesthetic represented he couldn’t remember anymore. He just knew he knew it, and knew by looking at it he should fear it.

  He became sarcastic when he was afraid, a trait of Vincent’s, so he said, “Beautiful place you have here.” He paused, and bit his lip. “What’s your name?”

  “I don’t have one. Do you have any suggestions?”

  “You’re not a child, are you?”

  The boy shook his head. “People don’t pay children any attention, or they pay them so much attention it borders on worship. Either way is good for our work.”

  The glowing wood of vermillion veins caused Edgar’s throat to prickle again, as though he had swallowed something sour. “What’s our work, exactly?” He had seen these things before, when he first came here, so why only now was he tempted to eat them?

  “It’s better I show you.”

  Edgar snapped out of it. “I could just kill you.” Yes, he liked that, the idea of killing the boy. He imagined strangling him, purple bruising around his neck, red tongue hanging limply from his mouth. He liked that more than he liked to admit.

  “If I can stop a flock of Anathema from carrying you off by projecting my powers across the Forest, do you really think you stand a chance?”

  Edgar shrugged one shoulder. “Bet you couldn’t do much after that.”

  “Good point. I only just recovered from that this morning.” He smiled, shook his head. “Come here, please.”

  Edgar did as he was told, because at this point, like the boy had said, why not? After everything he had seen and done, despite his defiance, he had to know what it had all been for. He didn’t expect anything to justify the murders he was guilty of committing, but he wouldn’t be opposed to hearing out a justification if it existed.

  Even now, as he followed the boy into the mansion, he found himself making excuses for the deaths of Father Silas and Anansi. The priest had wanted it, had practically killed himself. He had just given him permission, under false pretenses, to carry it out. And the spider lord? Probably not even his mother, Crestfallen, could find something nice to say about him. But how much did they really matter? Actually, about as much as Lena, Horace, Auster, Audra, Vincent, and his mother and father meant to those in slums of Eldrus or penthouses of Penance. It was all a matter of perspective, he thought. Like how the Crossbreed could be good for his city-state.

  If God really did exist, was this Its will, like Amon and this boy had been saying, that had led to his family’s death? And if It did, could he really say that It, God, was wrong?

  The mansion’s floor alternated between dirty tile and damp earth. Chandeliers protruded from the mud, while discarded gems and jewelry glinted in the pale sunlight. Half-submerged balconies sat like ship masts in what was some sort of living room. A piano grinned its yellow teeth at the front of a parlor; sticky, decay-stitched bones poured out of its lid. There were dresses here, suits there; ripped portraits and fat safes with faded bills inside, and in the end, from upturned hallways to torn-down staircases, that’s all the mansion was: a maze of forgotten memories that had been reduced to scene after scene of indefinable miseries.

  The mansion floors sloped as they went past the skeleton of a library. The ground opened up to a second part of the house, a basement that was surprisingly still intact. With its mildewed breath, the basement welcomed them in as they reached the bottom of the slope and slipped past the rubble that blocked the only entrance to the place.

  Inside the almost pitch-black basement, a single candle burned at the edge of what appeared to be a circular pool. He followed the boy to the hole in the floor and saw that it wasn’t a pool at all, but another doorway of sorts. Attached to it was a spiral staircase that screwed downward into the dark, into the deeper depths that laid beneath this diabolic house.

  The boy had a wide smile on his face. Whatever was down there, he was eager to show it to Edgar. But maybe it wasn’t even that; human or not, this mimicry of man had probably been left alone in Blackwood for who knows how long. If Edgar had to guess, the boy almost seemed to relish his company.

  Candle in hand, the boy went first. Edgar soon followed after. The staircase was narrow, uneven. The steps were short, unstable. Walking down the staircase was like walking across a line of chairs. The whole thing felt as though it were going to give way at any moment. It reminded him of Amon’s tower, and if Edgar had arrived here a few hundred years earlier, he figured he may have even spotted some details that were to later inspire the Archivist’s current quarters.

  After a few minutes, which should have been impossible, the circular chamber became brighter. At the bottom, a few steps further down, a glowing mist rolled across the ground, bubbling and hissing like the spilled contents of a cauldron.

  Edgar waited until the boy stepped off the stairs and into it. The boy then turned around and offered his free hand to Edgar, to help him off the spiral and find footing in the deep.

  “Almost there,” the boy said.

  Hesitant, Edgar took his hand and stepped into the glowing mist.

  It took Edgar a moment to get his bearings. Because at the bottom of the staircase was a great ballroom that was covered in candles with green and purple flames. Confused, he looked back the way he’d come. The staircase had wound down, through the ceiling of the ballroom, as though it had drilled right through it.

  “Almost there,” the boy said again, trying to reassure him. He started across the ballroom.

  Edgar only made it a few steps before he tripped over his feet. The glowing mist parted around his ankles. There were chains running across the ground, and if he looked hard enough, it seemed the whole floor was covered in them.

  “What are these for?” he asked.

  “No one, not anymore.” The boy ran to the e
nd of the ballroom. Two large double doors stood half-open there. “Fortunately for you, some traditions change over time. Through here.” He tapped his fingers on the door. “You have to see for yourself, and then we can go home.”

  Edgar started to cough. He bent over, growled as he tried to dislodge whatever was holding onto the back of his throat. Hand shaking, he shoved it into his mouth and fished inside it with his disgusting fingers. There was something back there, something thin, waving, like an antenna. He pinched down on it, jerked it forward, and with every inch it gave, he could feel something uncoiling inside his stomach and his skull.

  Beside the boy, a vermillion light flared between the cracks in the double-doors. Knuckles grinding into the roof of his mouth, Edgar pulled harder and harder on the object inside his throat. Until, with a tide of vomit and gaseous belch, foot after foot of dried, translucent vermillion veins broke free inside him and spilled with a splat onto the ballroom floor.

  Edgar reared back, gulping for air. He stomped his feet on the growths and stormed towards the boy.

  Grabbing him by the throat, he screamed at him, “What is this shit? Tell me now! Is this from that fucking spider that was inside me? Is that where this shit comes from?”

  The boy’s words came out constricted as he said, “No. This is—” he grabbed Edgar’s wrists and held on tight until he let him go, “—is from Amon. To help you forget what you did until you were finished here.”

  “Bullshit!” Edgar slapped the boy’s face into the door. “This is what made me kill them.”

  The vermillion light in the passage beyond the doors flared again.

  Baring his teeth, the boy said, “Is it?”

  “Don’t you dare.” Edgar almost hit the boy again, but stopped himself. He took a step back, ran his hands through his hair. Coughing up the last bits of the veins, he said, “You took everything from me. Everything I love. Everything I was.”