Vault of Shadows

by Jonathan Maberry

  Milo tore his gaze away but then saw himself in another terrifying aspect. Standing mute and gray-skinned, with a network of wires running in and out of his flesh and a visage that flickered back and forth between his own grim dead face and one that pretended to laugh normally as if inviting his friends to come and play. It was a lie, though. The laughter was a trap, because in that reflected image Milo was a holo-man. A corpse used as a living land mine to trap and murder his friends. Like the holo-man who had appeared as his dad and nearly killed him.

  There were other images. In one he knelt over the still and silent body of his mother. Her eyes were open but a thin line of blood leaked from the corner of her mouth. There were pulse-blast burns stitched across her chest. In that image Milo screamed and screamed and screamed, even though the piece of shattered mirror made no actual sound.

  He saw his dad, playing guitar and laughing.

  He saw his dad turned into a hybrid.

  He saw his dad lying dead.

  He saw his dad in silhouette, twisted and strange, transformed into something more monstrous than anything Milo had ever seen.

  He saw his dad standing with a gun, his face scarred but alive, his eyes filled with power. And Milo prayed that this image was true, that it was more than his own weak hope that his father was still alive somewhere, fighting the aliens. Fighting to come back to him.

  He saw Lizabeth, her shirt burned, her hair tangled with twigs and leaves and dirt, her eyes empty.

  He saw Lizabeth rising into the air, her skin aglow as if all the starlight in the universe shone through her flesh, a sword of fire in one hand.

  He saw himself staggering through a world where everything and everyone lay dead. Shark was there, his brown skin torn by blade and pulse blast. Evangelyne was caught between wolf and girl, and in that mismatched phase she had died, cut down by the Aes Sídhe or the Huntsman.

  He saw all these things and many, many more.

  Death and life. Defeat and victory. Despair and hope.

  Then he turned back to that one sliver of glass that reflected his face as it truly was in this moment. The Milo in that reflection spoke to him, and Milo heard his own voice inside his head. But it wasn’t the voice of a kid. It was an older, stronger, deeper voice. Still his own, but not his yet.

  These aren’t real. They’re lies and predictions. They’re hopes and dreams. The future is a storm that rolls and changes, Milo. Nothing is set. Nothing is certain. Not victory and not defeat. This is a universe of chaos and every possibility exists. Do you hear me? Every possibility still exists.

  Milo tried to reply in thought only, but he couldn’t, and so he answered aloud.

  “Help me,” he whispered.

  “Milo?” called Evangelyne, concern in her voice, but he waved her off.

  You walk in a dream, Milo. Anything is possible. Be very, very careful. Follow your heart in all things. That’s more powerful than sorcery or spaceships or death.

  “How do I know what’s right, though?”

  You aren’t alone, Milo. There are allies you can’t see. You are not alone in this war. Others are fighting too. Some will rise to fight beside you. Others will make their own stand in their own places to fight the Swarm and to fight the dark magicks that have been unleashed. Don’t give in to despair. But know this: In the end you will be called on to lead an army the likes of which this universe has never seen, because only such an alliance can ever hope to prevail against what the Huntsman will become. Darker times are coming, Milo. Be strong.

  And that’s when Milo realized the voice he was hearing was not some older version of himself.

  It was the voice of someone who had been lost. Taken. Maybe destroyed.

  Milo reached a trembling hand toward the fragment of mirror. “D-Dad—?”

  Be strong, son. Be true.

  And then the voice was gone.

  Milo’s knees buckled, and he would have fallen if Evangelyne and Shark hadn’t caught him and held him up.

  “Geez, what’s wrong?” cried Shark.

  Milo pushed them away and staggered across the hall to lean both palms against the wall. The mix of emotions swirling and boiling inside him was almost too much to contain, and he threw back his head and screamed.

  The sound that erupted from him was not right. Not normal.

  It was the roar of a monster, a thing. It was an animal roar of primal rage and endless need, and all along the hallway the doorways cracked and shuddered in their frames. Pictures fell from their hooks and shattered on the floor. Cracks whipsawed along the ceiling, and the pieces of broken mirror exploded into clouds of glittering silver powder.

  The frame that had held the mirror suddenly swung backward, turning inward on hidden hinges. Milo’s scream seemed to be pulled like smoke through a fan, vanishing into the dark recess that was now revealed.

  Milo pushed off the wall and stood there gasping, his chest and throat hurting, strange lights bursting like fireworks in his eyes. His fists tightened into balls and he bared his teeth at this new doorway.

  His friends had recoiled from him and were standing back, fearful and wary.

  Then slowly . . . so slowly . . . the storm that had exploded inside Milo passed. It blew out of him as if pushed by a freshening wind.

  No one asked him to explain what had just happened. They were in a ghost of a house and nothing here was real.

  Except that Milo was absolutely certain it was all real. In some way, maybe in a thousand different ways, this was all real.

  Without saying a word to anyone, Milo bent and picked up the slingshot he hadn’t realized he’d dropped. The ball bearing was there on the carpet, and he looked at it and saw yet another distorted reflection of his face.

  Then he pushed the hidden door open and stepped through into darkness.

  One by one, the others followed.

  Chapter 47

  They stepped into a narrow space that looked like it had been built as a walk-in closet. There was barely enough room for them all to fit. The door swung shut behind them, plunging them into darkness. But almost immediately the far wall swung away from them to reveal another door, and another, and another.

  Milo understood what was happening. The Heir had come this way, going through one doorway to find another and another and another.

  Until they found the last one. Shark swept his flashlight beam around and the beam fell on a large crystal doorknob that was faceted like a big diamond. Milo took a breath and glanced at the others, who nodded encouragement. None of them offered to touch it, though. They were letting him run this hunt.

  He was only sort of okay with it. He knew he had to, but he really didn’t want to. Those strange, cryptic words spoken in his dad’s voice echoed inside his head.

  Be strong, son. Be true.

  Whatever that meant. Be true to what? Or to whom?

  Milo was no philosopher. He wasn’t sure what he was. Maybe he wasn’t really a kid anymore. Not completely. He felt himself changing. Not into the hero that the Witch of the World wanted him to be. Into something else, but he had no idea what label to hang on it.

  Be strong.

  They were searching for a ghost in a house, with dark faeries and the Huntsman at their heels.

  Be strong?

  Geez.

  He gripped the handle. It was so cold. Much colder than it should have been. And as he touched it, the air became filled with familiar smells that made no sense. The scent of burnt toast and of orange peels.

  “Do you guys smell that?” he asked.

  “Smell what?” asked Shark. “I don’t smell anything.”

  “I do,” said Evangelyne. “Burned bread and oranges.”

  “Yes!” said Milo. “What’s that about?”

  “People sometimes smell those things when they are in the presence of great psychic energy. Those two smells. I read about it in one of my aunt’s books, but I’m not sure why it’s those things.”

  “Weird,” said Shark. “My list of
really, really weird things is getting really, really long, you know that?”

  “Welcome to my world,” said Evangelyne.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Mook,” said the rock boy, tapping Milo on the shoulder.

  Milo nodded and turned the handle.

  It took effort; it was as if the door was reluctant to yield. Milo put some muscle into it, and the handle shifted and then turned. There was a soft click, then the door opened and a warm light washed over them. Milo went in first. He felt strange and he realized that this place felt important. Not just magical. It felt special in a way that was almost like stepping inside a church, an institution Milo hadn’t been to since the invasion.

  The others followed. No one spoke. They were all in awe.

  All these books.

  Not just books, but scrolls and clay tablets, too.

  Milo walked over to the closest shelf and ran his fingers along the spines. He knew them from his dreams, and he remembered what he’d written. Or rather, he recalled what he had transcribed, because in his dreams he was reading a book about the Heir of Gadfellyn Hall. The words came back to him now as if they were printed in the air.

  So many books on shelves and tables or stacked by themselves in crooked towers. Books on stands or laid open on tables or facedown on the arms of chairs. . . . Books and books and books.

  A long, long time ago the Heir had come to this place, and upon finding these books he had smiled for the first time in a long while.

  The boy had been abandoned and lost, and when he came here he’d found his way home. Milo knew that, though he didn’t understand it. Just as he knew it wasn’t required of him to understand it. Knowing it was enough.

  Milo loved books too. He read every single one he could scavenge, even though many were burned and missing pages. When he read a book like that, Milo wrote his own endings. Or dreamed them.

  He knew that if he looked for those damaged books, he would find whole ones here. They had to be here. Maybe every book that had ever been written was here.

  It made him wonder if these were only books from his world, from the Daylighter world. Were the books of the Nightsiders here too? Maybe even the books of the Swarm? After all, the library was impossible, which probably made anything inside it possible. He almost smiled at how ridiculous that sounded, but he also knew that it was probably true.

  What had he read in the Heir’s story and then written down in his dream diary? In books anything was possible—even the impossible.

  Shark came up beside him, his eyes fever bright as he looked at the books. “This place is insane!”

  “I know,” said Milo. Despite everything that was happening, he was excited, even happy, to be in among all these thoughts, all these stories, and all this knowledge.

  “Say, dude . . . when this is all over, I mean, if we get through it and stuff, any chance we can come back here and, like, never leave?”

  Milo looked at him. “I—”

  He never finished his reply because Evangelyne called out to them. “Here! I found something.”

  When they turned, it took time to locate her because she had wandered down one of the long aisles, but Shark spotted her footprints in the dust. She was almost invisible in the shadows, crouched down and running her fingers along the floor. Mook stood over her, bending his stiff body to look.

  “What is it?” asked Milo.

  “Shark, give me your flashlight,” she said, holding out a hand. He passed it to her and she held it at an angle to show them. “See here, beneath the dust. Do you see it?”

  They knelt and peered at some faint marks. Evangelyne bent and brushed at them, revealing the distinct shape of a child’s shoe. Smaller than shoes worn by Milo, who had average feet for his age. The sole looked smooth except for a series of round nail-head marks.

  “Old-fashioned shoes,” observed Shark. “But I don’t get it, it looks like it’s been painted there.”

  “There are others, too,” said Evangelyne. “I don’t think it’s paint, though.”

  Milo ran his fingers over the footprint. “It’s not. You know what it looks like to me, Shark? Remember when we went on that two-week hike with your aunt Jenny and we scavenged that museum way over in New Iberia? Remember those pieces of fossilized wood we saw in one of the rooms? It was wood that had turned to stone. Remember how it looked? That’s what this looks like to me.”

  “How’s that even possible?” asked Shark; then he grunted. “Okay, I heard it as I said it. Impossible Library. Got it.”

  “Are these his footprints?” asked Evangelyne. “The Heir’s, I mean?”

  Milo nodded. “I think so. In my dream there was something about his footprints being the only ones in the library. But . . . they were only footprints. Not sure why these have changed like this. I mean, this library isn’t that old.” He glanced at her. “Is it?”

  “We’re in a dream of a house, Milo. Who knows what’s possible or not in here.”

  The footprints ended at the wall, as if the Heir had simply walked through it, but Milo didn’t think this was so. There were so many doorways in the place, and they had already found secret ones. He shifted closer to the wall and began feeling along it, looking for a hidden hinge or release.

  “It’s behind here, I think,” he said. “Help me look.”

  “What’s behind there?” asked Shark. “Are we looking for this Heir kid’s corpse or something? I’m not sure how this actually works.”

  “There’s got to be a secret door,” Milo said. “There was another library inside this one. Where all the really rare and special stuff was kept.”

  “The Vault of Shadows,” said Evangelyne, nodding. “It’s the library of magic.”

  “Oh,” said Shark dubiously, “that’s not scary at all.”

  “Everything here is scary,” said Evangelyne, and she shivered. Not with cold but with obvious unease. “I don’t like it here. Ghosts frighten me. I want to do what we have to do and get out. We can discuss these mysteries when we are far away from here.”

  “So what do we do?” asked Shark. “Bust through the wall?”

  “No!” said Evangelyne quickly. “This is the house of a ghost and the Vault of Shadows belongs to him. It would be suicide to try to force our way in, even if we managed to find it. The last thing we want to do is anger a ghost.”

  “Why? I mean, okay—ghost, that’s scary to begin with, but why should we be extra-special careful with them? We’ve already got the Huntsman, the queen of the dark faeries, and the entire alien race mad at us. How much deeper trouble could we get in?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t want to find out,” she said sharply. “Ghosts have powers I don’t understand and they are very, very hard to get along with. We haven’t even figured out what we can afford to pay the Heir to repair the Heart of Darkness.”

  Shark sighed. “Last week the worst thing I had to worry about was Stingers. Now . . . hey, I’d love to only have to worry about Stingers. I mean, Stingers—bring ’em on. I can at least make sense of them.”

  They retreated from the wall and stood there for a long time, just staring at the books. Milo imagined that they were whispering to him. Calling him in, wanting to tell their stories to him. And these were whole books, not damaged fragments. More books than he could read in a lifetime. Enough books so that he could spend forever reading them and never get to the last page of the last volume on the last shelf.

  Never ever.

  It was the most wonderful thing he’d ever seen. And in a way, the presence of all these books seemed to make a statement about the people of Earth. They raised a collective voice to shout, “We are here!”

  We’re real.

  We matter.

  It made Milo swell with pride.

  And then a moment later he shivered in fear at the thought of how fragile this all was. Paper and parchment on wooden shelves, while outside this place the Swarm were ever ready with the blue flames of their pulse guns and their total ind
ifference to humanity.

  The fear was followed immediately by a ferocious return of Milo’s resolve to smash the Bugs off the planet. To save not just the people of Earth, but everything they had built and everything they had learned.

  “Hey, what’s that?” asked Shark, interrupting his thoughts. Milo looked where his friend was pointing. Across the library and lit by the warm glow of the fireplace was a low table on which had been set several gleaming silver trays of food. Fresh fruit and bowls of bread, cheeses and cut vegetables, geometrical stacks of pastries, and tall crystal carafes of clear water. They hurried over to take a look, and Milo felt his stomach do a backflip. It was all fresh and real and right there.

  There was something else, too. Leaning against the side of a row of empty goblets was a stiff piece of notecard. On the outside was a single word:

  WELCOME

  “Was this here a minute ago?” asked Shark.

  Evangelyne shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Let’s see what the card says,” Shark suggested, though he made no move toward it. Neither did anyone else; however, Mook placed a hand on Milo’s back and gave him a gentle but irresistible shove forward.

  “Mook,” he suggested.

  “Gee, thanks,” said Milo. He gingerly reached out to take the envelope. It didn’t explode and nothing nasty happened. There was a handwritten note inside, penned in a flowing script. Milo read it aloud.

  I know what you want.

  I know why you’re here.

  I will be with you when I can.

  Relax. Eat. Read a book.

  “Is this for real?” asked Shark as he peered over Milo’s shoulder.

  “I—don’t know,” admitted Evangelyne.

  “I mean, is this for us or are we looking at someone else’s lunch?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Milo said, “This was left for us.”

  “How d’you figure that?” asked Shark.

  “It’s on the card. He says he knows why we’re here.”

  “He? You think the ghost of a dead kid fixed us all a nice lunch? Am I the only one who thinks that’s a little strange?”

  “Give me a better explanation, man.”