But Gwenlyn’s voice intensified in volume, making it impossible to ignore. She sang laments and eulogies directly into my mind, and I shouted out into the darkness, desperate to hear anything other than Gwenlyn’s doleful cries. I yelled and yelled, until finally, the river swept right over my head. I swallowed a lungful of black water, choking and sputtering. It wasn’t fair. I had already died once. I really didn’t need to repeat the experience.
And yet, somehow, I found myself, completely dry, at the front door of a large building. To either side of me stood Calvin and Dorothy, as if they had been with me for my entire trip down the river. I ran a hand through my hair, which had been soaked through with the river water only moments before.
“Are you okay?” my father asked. He reached out a hand, as if to pull me into a hug, then seemed to think better of it. I was oddly relieved that he had reined himself in. For some reason, I didn’t think I would be able to take the compassion. I didn’t answer the question, though, still reeling from the entire experience.
“It can be tough the first time,” said Calvin in a soft voice.
“The first time?” I asked, the words cracking in the back of my throat.
Dorothy cleared her throat. “When you spend a lot of time in the otherworld, you learn to travel between some of the levels. I can’t even count how many times I’ve taken a trip down that river.”
“Do you… hear things?” I asked in a small voice.
“What kinds of things?” my father asked, puzzled.
“Voices,” I said. “Of people you knew. Before.”
Dorothy and Calvin looked at one another. Clearly, neither one of them had experienced anything of the sort.
“It’s fine,” I said, shaking it off. “It’s probably just me freaking out. Don’t worry about it. Where are we?”
I gestured to the door in front of me. It belonged to a long, low building made of old red brick. Like the river, the building seemed to extend perpetually in either direction. As I glanced down its length, I noticed other doors and other people emerging from the river behind us. Without hesitation, these folks reached for the handle of whatever door was closest and disappeared inside the building.
“Don’t worry,” said Calvin, clapping a hand on my back. “This part of the otherworld actually isn’t so bad.”
He pushed open the door in front of us and held it open. I followed Dorothy inside, glanced around, and immediately relaxed.
We were in a bar.
In fact, the place looked strangely similar to one of my old college haunts in New York City. The light was low, the air was smoky, and music pulsed from unseen speakers. The bar’s patrons looked human enough, bobbing their heads along to the beat and sipping beer. Some of them peered up at television screens that showcased a football game. Others played billiards or loitered by an old juke box. A number of bartenders, dressed in all black, mixed cocktails and refilled beer at the taps. All in all, the whole place just seemed… normal.
“This is more like it,” I said, stepping toward an empty section of the bar.
“Well, you did ask for it,” my father said as the three of us claimed adjacent bar stools. “The otherworld often manifests to match your perception of it. Dorothy and I have been here before, so it’s mostly your subconscious that’s influencing what you see right now.”
“I’m totally okay with that.” I leaned past Dorothy to flag down the bartender.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” warned Dorothy. “Many souls get caught in this level. It’s comforting, I know, but you must resist its pull.”
Before I could even order, the bartender poured my favorite beer, a light ale, from the tap and set it down in front of me. I took a deep swig, letting its familiar flavor wash across my tongue. Somehow, the beer tasted colder and more refreshing than it had in the real world. I sighed contently, sinking down to rest my elbows on the counter. I nodded along to the music playing in the background. For the first time since I’d returned to Yew Hollow, I felt like I could sit back and unwind. My eyes found the nearest television, and I settled in to watch the game.
“Morgan!” My father snapped his fingers in front of my face. I had already zoned out, though, and the sharp click of his gesture only disturbed my blissful peace of mind.
“Hm?”
Dorothy confiscated my glass of beer before I could raise it to my mouth for another drink. She slid it to the other end of the bar, where another patron caught it and nodded his thanks.
“Hey!” I protested and attempted to get the bartender’s attention for a replacement.
“Look around you, Morgan,” my father hissed. “You aren’t meant to stay here.”
“Remember your purpose,” added Dorothy. “Find the weapon. Contact Gwenlyn. Save Yew Hollow.”
It was all sounding a bit too complicated now. If I was being honest with myself, all I wanted to do was enjoy the atmosphere around me. It had been far too long since I’d been carefree in a college bar. Thoughts of Yew Hollow drifted from my mind, carried away by the lazy smoke of a nearby cigar. I breathed in deeply, savoring the earthy, oaky scent of the smoke, and allowed my eyes to close.
For a moment, I only saw the dark inside of my eyelids. Then, out of nowhere, Gwenlyn’s face appeared, her eyebrows furrowed together and her lips pursed in an expression of extreme determination. She sat cross-legged with a familiar, leather-bound journal in her lap. It was Mary Summers’s diary, a firsthand account of all that had occurred during Yew Hollow’s conception. Gwenlyn flicked impatiently through its pages, as though she had already read its contents several times but still hadn’t found the information she sought. The clarity of the vision made me feel as though I was standing above Gwenlyn, looking down on her as she haphazardly searched through the diary. I could even see Gwenlyn’s tears of frustration leaking from her eyes. They dropped onto the pages of the journal, smudging the age-old cursive. Suddenly, Gwenlyn looked up as though something had caught her attention. She stared directly at me, her green eyes flashing with recognition, and mouthed my name.
In the otherworld’s bar, I nearly fell off my stool. My father steadied me, his strong hand at the small of my back.
“Whoa,” I breathed, planting my palms on the bar top in order to feel balanced again. I glanced around the room, noticing new, bizarre things. The bartenders, it turned out, were all the same person, cloned over and over to serve his many customers. The football players cast on the television screens had no defined faces, just blank, blurry features where their expressions should have been. Even more unsettling, though, was the fact that the majority of the bar patrons were not as lively as I had originally thought. Many of them stared off into space or into the depths of their glasses with vacant expressions, apparently unaware that eternity stretched out before them.
“Done playing pretend?” Dorothy asked wryly.
My eyes snapped back to her face, and I remembered why the hell we were here in the first place. I stood, kicking my bar stool back with such force that it toppled over and fell into the path of a passing soul, and said, “Yup, I’m finished with this place. Where to next? Which level is the weapon on?”
“A few down,” said Dorothy. She nodded at Calvin, who waved at the bartender. “I’m afraid you’ll have to solidify your willpower, Morgan. It only gets harder from here, and the temptations of this bar are the least of your worries.”
“Three shots of your best,” Calvin said to the bartender, who nodded, turned his back to us, and busied himself with some kind of liquor bottle.
“I get it now,” I insisted, still shaking off the strange paralysis that the bar seemed to inflict on its customers. “I’ll be more aware of that kind of thing.”
The bartender dropped three shot glasses off in front of us, all filled with some kind of ominous, black substance.
“What the hell is that?” I asked, wrinkling my nose.
“Our passage to the next level,” said Calvin, handing one of the shots to Dorothy and one to m
e.
I held the glass up to my eye, examining its swirling contents. “I’m supposed to drink this?”
“It tastes atrocious as well,” Dorothy said, her lips pursed in distaste. “I did warn you things would get harder.”
“I didn’t realize you meant in a Fear Factor kind of way,” I retorted. I took a whiff of the drink, nearly retching as the smell of tar reached my nose.
Calvin clinked his shot glass against mine and Dorothy’s.
“No point in putting it off,” he said. “Bottoms up.”
I steeled myself, plugged my nose, and threw back the shot. Before I could even register the acrid flavor of the alcohol, my brain seemed to flood with its immediate effect. My vision blurred, my head swam, and the bar disappeared around us, morphing into another setting entirely.
I fell to my knees in the middle of a damp, grassy clearing. My head felt heavy, weighed down by whatever foreign liquor had just flushed out my system. I gagged but nothing came up, and once again, I realized that the otherworld did not ease its new occupants into its aberrant existence.
Calvin kneeled next to me, brushing my hair away from my face. “How you doing there, champ?” he asked, chuckling. “Stings a bit, doesn’t it?”
“Worst hangover ever,” I choked out. I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping to stop the world from swirling around me. When the worst of the nausea had passed, I gathered the courage to look around.
The three of us had materialized in a dark forest. The trees stretched perpetually upward, obscuring any sign of the stars, and a ceaseless, wintry rain beat down from the invisible sky. It soaked through my clothes quickly, chilling me to the bone.
“This ought to be fun,” I grumbled, pushing myself to my feet.
Dorothy’s eyes perused the perimeter of the clearing. There were no hints of other creatures, no crackling of branches or footprints in the wet grass, but I had the feeling that Dorothy wasn’t exactly on the lookout for bunnies or raccoons.
“We should move quickly through this level,” she said, ushering my father and me to the edge of the clearing and into the inky darkness of the trees. “I’ve seen too many souls fall to the feelers of this forest.”
I moved away from the closest tree. Dorothy’s words did not instill any sort of confidence within me, and the thought of those branches reaching out to close around my wrists gave me the willies.
“How do we get out of here?” I asked, hoping that Dorothy and Calvin knew enough about this level of the otherworld in order for us to pass through it posthaste.
“That’s the thing,” Dorothy said as she led us deeper into the forest. “This level is fickle. The exit is hard to find. People wander through these trees forever, unable to locate the portal to the next level.”
“Great,” I muttered. The rain seemed to be coming down harder now, and I was more than eager to find a respite from it. On the upside, if the only terrible thing on this level of the otherworld was the crappy weather, I couldn’t complain too much.
As if to prove me wrong, a great roar echoed through the forest around us, shaking the leaves from the trees. There was no mistaking the deafening sound for thunder. It surely came from the throat of some unknown beast. One look at my father’s widening eyes told me that my guess was pretty accurate.
“Run,” Dorothy whispered, and then she sprinted away into the night.
My father took hold of my elbow, tugging me along as we took off after Dorothy. We crashed through the forest, trampling underbrush and hurdling moss-covered logs. Whatever demon chased after us was unrelenting. The steady rhythm of four giant limbs tearing through the woods beat along behind our trio, as though an oversized lion was hunting us down. I blinked rainwater out of my eyes, desperate to see the ground in front of me. Ahead, at the top of a small hill, a dark shape loomed and, as it came into focus, I veered toward it.
“Morgan, no!” I heard Dorothy shout as I ripped my hand from my father’s grasp and sprinted flat out toward the mouth of a monstrous, welcoming cave.
“Do you have any better ideas?” I called over my shoulder, refusing to ease my pace. “We can at least hide from whatever that thing is!”
Dorothy and Calvin had no choice but to follow me. We struggled to run up the hillside, weaving in and out of the trees like drunkards. Behind us, the creature roared again, but its call was slightly muted. We had managed to put at least a little distance between us and it. The thought spurred me forward, and I crested the hill with the last bit of my energy. I skidded into the cave, slipping on the smooth surface of its stone floor. My father and Dorothy appeared over the hill only moments later, and I waved them into the depths of the cave.
As they joined me, I finally caught sight of our predator. It was massive, easily the size of a semi-truck, and covered in dark-green scales. It was too big to see its entirety through the maze of trees, but one glimpse of the foot-long fangs protruding from its mouth was enough to send me fleeing farther into the cave. Thankfully, it hadn’t seen us take cover, and as the three of us delved deeper into the mouth of the cave, the monster’s roars became harder and harder to hear.
“This was a mistake,” Dorothy said, panting.
“Our other option was to let that thing devour us,” I said, annoyed by Dorothy’s disparaging tone. “Aren’t you supposed to be the decision maker down here?”
“Morgan,” my father chided.
“It’s fine, Calvin,” said Dorothy.
The cave system was more complex than I had expected. Tunnels branched out in several directions, and I stopped short of the first fork in our path.
“Should we keep going?” I asked them, peering down each of the tunnels in turn. The cave itself glowed with a peculiar, greenish light, bright enough for us not to trip over the roughly hewn stone.
As if in answer to my question, the walls of the tunnel straight ahead of us blossomed with white flowers. They grew from the stone itself in quick succession, blooming in front of our eyes.
“Lilies,” Calvin muttered, reaching out to pluck one from the rock.
“The flower of death,” Dorothy added, her voice tinged with uncertainty.
“Sounds promising,” I said, but when I took a step down the tunnel of lilies, Dorothy reached out to stop me.
“Morgan, you have no idea what could be waiting at the end of that tunnel,” she said.
“Did you know that lilies are also symbolic of purity?” I asked her. I took her hand in mine, squeezing gently. “You said the otherworld shapes itself according to my thoughts. I’ve decided that this is the way we should go. Just trust me.”
No further arguments were made. Calvin and Dorothy allowed me to lead the way down the corridor of lilies. The green light of the cave seemed to refract off of their petals, illuminating our path. I walked lightly, keeping a cautious eye out, but the soothing sight of the flowers hid any sign of danger. Then we rounded a corner, and my confidence in my choice of tunnels died suddenly.
The scaled green monster sat before us, lounging upon a bed of lilies with its colossal front paws crossed over one another. I froze at the sight of it, but it merely gazed at us from tire-sized emerald eyes and yawned lazily, exposing its massive fangs.
“Do you wish to pass?” it asked in a surprisingly docile voice. I couldn’t figure out how it shaped words past its gargantuan teeth.
“Y—yes,” I stuttered, unable to look away from its immense girth.
“Then you must answer a question,” the beast said.
“And if we answer incorrectly?” my father asked, his voice stronger and more confident than my own.
The beast seemed to smile. “Not we,” it said. “She.”
I swallowed hard in response. The monster had dipped its head to indicate that I should be the one to respond to its question. “And if I answer incorrectly?”
“Then you remain with me until I see fit to ask you another question,” the beast replied, examining its claws with one giant eye.
“I suppose that�
�s better than getting eaten,” muttered Dorothy from behind me. I motioned for her to be quiet.
“Ask the question,” I said.
The beast shook itself out like a dog waking from a nap, its scales glimmering in the strange light of the cave, and stood. I tried not to back away as it approached me, its girth casting a shadow over Dorothy, Calvin, and myself.
“Morgan Summers,” it boomed. “To pass into the next realm, answer me this. What is your innermost desire, the one that eats away at your soul?”
My first thought nearly worked its way out of my mouth before I had the chance to think about it. I wanted to go back to Yew Hollow, of course. Alive. But the more I pondered the beast’s question, the more I realized that it didn’t want the easy answer from me. It wanted something more, a response that would not only hurt me to admit but would also hurt the others around me.
“My innermost desire,” I said, wishing that Calvin and Dorothy weren’t visible in my peripheral vision, “is to have never been a part of the Summers coven in the first place.”
Dorothy dropped her face into her hands, either so affected by my response or convinced I had answered the question poorly. My father simply looked dumbfounded.
The beast blinked, peering down at me. “You challenge your very existence?”
“I thought I only had to answer one question,” I replied wearily.
“Not so often does a mortal surprise me,” the beast admitted. It leaned down on its front paws, one of its emerald eyes now level with mine. “You may pass, Morgan Summers, and you may pass well.”
The beast’s jeweled eye grew in size, enlarging steadily until its pupil stretched and reached the stone ground. It dilated into a dark, round passageway that we were obviously meant to step through.
“Thank you,” I said to the creature, its massive face now oddly distorted by its transformation. Then I took Dorothy’s hand in mine, held my father’s arm with the other, and stepped into the deep blackness of the beast’s eyeball.
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