The Umbral Wake

by Martin Kee

  Gil looked away, her eyes turning back to the book. Skyla couldn’t tell if she was thinking or annoyed with her. A moment later she stood and fixed the breather mask around Skyla’s nose and mouth.

  “You remember where you were, right?” Gil asked. “In the lab? You’ll find it okay?”

  “Yep.” Skyla’s voice sounded muffled through the breather.

  Connor scratched along the rafters. Gil looked up, annoyed. “I’m going to see if I can get that stolen loot back while you’re away.”

  “He’ll bring it back when he’s ready,” said Skyla.

  “He’s unruly,” said Gil. “I miss Orrin. He would listen to me.”

  “Well, he was no ordinary bird.”

  “Do you think we’ll see him again?” Gil asked

  “I don’t know.”

  Gil fastened the last strap and stepped back while Skyla touched the mask lightly with her fingers.

  “You should be okay with that,” said Gil. “But you look sort of scary.”

  Skyla made a low growl and giggled.

  “You’re sure you know how to get in?” Gil asked.

  Skyla gave her a look. “I lived there once, remember? I still remember most of the layout. I can go anywhere as long as it’s dark enough and the place is familiar.”

  “But a lot of that lab was destroyed.”

  “Just the central chamber and the main generator. The dorms were off to the side, beneath the cemetery. They should still be intact.”

  “Okay,” said Gil with a cautious tone. “Well don’t go near anything warm or glowing. And watch out for loose floors.”

  “I will.”

  “And don’t get lost.”

  Skyla gave a thumbs-up. “No guarantees.” It was hard to keep a straight face with what essentially felt like an All Hallow’s Eve mask on her face.

  “I’m serious,” said Gil. “I can’t help you and I can’t go with you.”

  Skyla looked out into the fading sunlight. “I should go.”

  Fitting the goggles onto her head made her look even more menacing and Gil had to stifle another giggle, not out of humor, but nervousness. What they were attempting was just so unconventional she’d be surprised if it worked. Then a thought struck her, knocking all the humor out of her mind. She spun to face Skyla.

  “If you see my dad… I don’t know how you’ll know if it’s him or not, but... if he’s down there…”

  “I’ll let you know if I do.”

  Skyla walk to the closet, then brought the lenses down and watched as the world went black. Gil turned her attention back to her worktable, a brilliant glow surrounding her. A second Gil turned and pulled out a book, reclining to read. Halfway through reading, a phantom arm went up and scratched a third Gil’s nose. As all possible incarnations, realities, and decisions of Gil began to multiply, Skyla turned away and opened the door, stepping into the darkness…

  *

  …and stepped into her old dorm room, the one with the white bed and mattress. It was where she had been housed upon arriving at the lab. But there were no workers now, none of that humming buzzing voice in her head. The machine god that had resided here was long dead.

  The only light in the pitch-dark room appeared as a blue line underneath the door. She opened it to find a fractured corridor lit by the same dim blue glow, the walls cracked and carbon scored. Water and dust leaked from fissures along ceilings and walls. Within the cracks and shadows Skyla saw things lurking, trapped behind the physical world, waiting for her to stare at them long enough to make them real. She ignored them now.

  She followed the blue glow, stepping around the bodies of dead soldiers, severed limbs, and men trapped halfway in walls. She walked through a tomb now, a tomb that she helped create.

  All around me is death, she thought. Even the air would kill me in minutes.

  When she reached the end of the chamber, Skyla sucked in her breath. The glow came from surface light, filtered through fifty million gallons of seawater. The only thing that kept her from being drowned, and the lab from being completely flooded was a wall of three-foot-thick glass, melted steel, and diamond lace.

  Three years ago, the power facility went critical, sabotaged by one of the workers. As the stored dark matter collapsed in on itself, it pulled with it the surrounding matter. The sudden compression formed a temporary singularity that swallowed the lab and some of the surrounding city whole. As the black hole fizzled, spinning and shrinking like a drop of water on a hot skillet, it left a cavity in the earth. The remaining heat and short-lived rogue energies melted glass, steel, sand, plastics, exotic materials, cable, tile, flesh, and rock, leaving behind what was commonly known as the memorial, or the Bowl. The Bowl had filled with water shortly after its formation during the intense heat of the Cataclysm, and now bisected the remaining corridors and chambers of the lab with glass, steel, and diamond lace. Skyla now stared at its belly, a glowing, webbed orb.

  The dissipating light cast dancing shadows along the shattered walls. Asymmetrical silhouettes of fish and rays swirled in the water, some larger than her. Strange algae swayed on the other side of the glass, waving to her from its aquatic cathedral.

  All around her, the sounds of water dripping, the creak of still-settling tile and concrete, and scratching… which seemed strange to her considering that anything in this poisonous atmosphere could scratch or move at all.

  The scratching stopped, and Skyla turned.

  A boy sat at the far wall, his legs crossed, probably dead from being so close to the cataclysm. His helmeted head slumped forward, staring at a notebook in his lap. She looked closer and saw that his eyes were open behind the visor. He was staring back at her.

  “Hello?” She took a step, unsure if he was real or not, perhaps just another of the many dead here. But as she approached, he began scrambling back along the floor, his eyes shifting wildly for some escape path. Yet he didn’t scream, or speak, or utter any sound at all.

  “What are you doing in here?” she began to ask, but the boy was already on his feet, running, his feet padding into the darkness. “Hey!”

  Too late. The boy scurried off, leaving behind nothing but a few scraps of paper, drawings.

  Who comes down here to draw pictures?

  Skyla began to give chase, but the images on the floor caught her eye, stopping her feet in mid-flight. They were skillfully done, photographic even. A few drifted in the breeze of her movement like autumn leaves, turning dark as they touched the leaked dirty seawater. She lifted her foot, realizing she was standing on one, and felt her face turning pale. A trembling hand reached down to pluck it from the damp tiles. She had seen a similar portrait once, in Lassimir shortly before she was assaulted by a gang of dirty orphan boys.

  The portrait was hers.

  She stood in a crowd, nearly buried in the dirty merchant faces of Lassimir. The artist had purposefully and skillfully given the crowd no detail. Skyla was the centerpiece of the page surrounded by mere sketches of people, a lone figure in a sea of suggestions. Every detail about her stood from the page in stark contrast: the dusting of freckles across her nose, the clothes she had been wearing that day, Marley’s ring hanging from a chain around her neck. Her hand went to the ring that she still wore, feeling it press against her sternum, holding it through her clothing as the boy’s name floated to the surface of her memory.

  Tearing her attention from the portrait, Skyla shouted down the broken hallway where Scribble had run.

  “Hey!” Placing the picture into a pocket, Skyla began to run, and the faster she ran, the angrier she became.

  *

  It had to be a ghost.

  Scribble stumbled through the barely lit corridors. He couldn’t think straight anymore, his mind scrambled by fear. He turned corner after corner, each time confronted with the same locked doors, the same dead bodies. He was trapped, chased by a ghost. What else could it be?

  Or maybe I am dead. Maybe I died with a pencil in my hand and now this is
Hell.

  He heard the ghost calling his name, echoing through the uneven carnival hallways. He fumbled with the crank-lamp, sending a beam of dim light bouncing in front of him. He stepped on something soft—a hand. His heart racing, he slipped and scrambled past, deeper into the catacombs.

  “Hey!” The voice floated out at him from the dark.

  His feet slid around a corner and then shot out from under him. A man reached for him, the torso buried in a wall, the hand shriveled and dry. He swatted and the arm fell away with the sound of tearing bark, rolling on the floor to another body—a soldier, broken and empty. Jagged holes punctured dusty black armor, leaving nothing but empty husk and a hole where a face should have been.

  Behind him the ghost, still in pursuit, called his name. “Scribble! Scriiiiiiible!”

  The inside of his mask was becoming too tight, too confined. Maybe he had gotten a contaminant inside, slowly eating away at his flesh, embedding itself in his skin and face. Maybe if he just took the helmet off for a second, splashed some water on his face, got some fresh air...

  No. He forced himself to resist, had to keep running.

  A pile of corpses blocked his path through Hell. They looked as though they had died while trying to escape, crawling over one another, their bodies, stacked along the hallways, in various positions, some in pieces, a stack of discarded mannequins. He stumbled over this nightmare landscape wondering just how many eyeless faces he could look at before he went insane.

  “Scribble! Scribble I know that’s you! You come to ambush me again? You come to trick and trap me in the dark?”

  He fell onto his ass and slid back against the wall. And then the ghost was upon him.

  She emerged through the shadows, her form passing through parts of walls. Dark curly hair spun wildly around leather straps on her head, the face a mismatched collection of glass lenses and breathing filters. She loomed over him as he threw his open hands out to protect himself, his voice wanting to scream, but trapped in his numb throat.

  The ghost crossed her arms and shifted her weight.

  “How in the world did you get down here, Scribble?”

  He blinked. Even if he could speak, he still would have been speechless.

  “Where are they?” she asked. “Where’s your gang now?”

  Something in that voice was chiding, mocking. A thrill of fear sent his heart racing again. She was here to kill him, to get her revenge for that attack years ago.

  He shrugged and shook his head.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” she demanded. “Scribble. Lassimir. You were with that gang down by the docks that tried to kill me.”

  He nodded, slowly at first.

  “What are you doing down here?”

  He shrugged, pointed at the picture she had pulled from her pocket.

  “You came all the way down here to draw pictures? Of me?”

  He shook his head. No.

  “No?” she said. “Then who sent you? Are you still with that same gang?”

  No.

  “But another gang.”

  Yes.

  She paused, looked again at the picture in her hand. “So you’re alone.” As she stared back at him, he felt a prickling in the back of his skull. “They left you here, three of them. How long ago?”

  How did she know? He shrugged.

  “You don’t know…”

  Scribble shook his head. This seemed to satisfy her somehow and she relaxed a little.

  “I guess your past finally caught up with you, too.”

  He shrugged again.

  The crow girl reached out and offered her hand. He took it, staring at the contact there, confirming to his eyes that it was happening—real. With a jerk, she helped him up to his feet and then stared at him with her hands on her hips.

  “You’ve gotten taller,” she said. Her voice had an appraising quality to it, no longer the small girl running from his gang at the docks. She sounded angry, bitter even. “You used to be shorter than me.”

  Scribble shrugged, then nodded. It was true. The last three years had been a time of painful growth spurts. Sometimes just pain.

  They caught their breath as Scribble looked around nervously. Yet the crow girl seemed perfectly at home here.

  “Come on,” she said. “This is right near the restrooms. You don’t want to stick around if the sewage backs up.”

  She turned and he followed her through the catacombs, stepping over legs and torsos. He began to wonder if she lived down here. It was, perhaps the first time he had really wished for a voice, the first time he actually felt like he had something to ask. He grabbed her arm.

  Skyla turned and glared at him, through the lenses he could see the distrust there. He pointed at her, then all around them. He gave an exaggerated shrugged, holding up his hands.

  “Do I live here?” she said.

  He nodded.

  “No. God no. Who could live down here? Come on. The Bowl is right up ahead. Any further and I might not have found you.”

  The smudged drawings glowed blue on the floor, coming apart in the filthy water. She sighed. Skyla pulled from her pocket two pieces of folded paper. She held the portrait out for him to see. He blushed beneath his mask.

  “This is almost like the last picture you drew of me,” she said. “I’m going to ignore for a moment how weird it is that you’ve been drawing these, and ask if you have more.”

  He nodded.

  “So it’s okay if I keep this then?”

  Stunned, he nodded and pressed a hand against the paper, pushing it towards her.

  “Thank you.” She shoved it into a pocket, then unfolded the second one. “Sorry to interrupt with business, but I am on an errand. I trust you were too. I can’t imagine anyone comes down here on purpose, though it is awful pretty in a way.”

  He nodded. It was becoming a bit unnerving how she seemed to know things about him, staring past him at the shadows he cast on the wall.

  “And you got… lost? No… they abandoned you. And a gun? Ugh. Boys.” She sighed, then said, “Well come with me. I guess you don’t know how to get out or you would have already.”

  They walked through corridors, twisting and turning until they ended up back at the place he had begun. They stood in the storeroom where Jimbo had deserted him. She paused and looked at him in the faded light.

  “You really thought you were going to die in here?”

  He paused, nodded. How did she know?

  “And instead of screaming and panicking you just picked up your pencil and started drawing…”

  This time he took a step back. After a long pause he nodded again.

  “Huh,” she said, then held out her hand. “Can I see that torch?”

  He wound it and placed it in her hand.

  “Thanks,” she said. “You sometimes have to flush them out or they creep in when you least expect it.”

  She swept the beam over the shadows and Scribble began to suspect that she was in fact, crazy. She then hung the light from a shelf and began to rummage through the piles of salvage on the floor.

  “I’m trying to find some items, mechanical things I don’t really understand,” she said. “If you help me, maybe we can get out of here sooner.”

  He nodded and she showed him the list. The drawings were crude but accurate enough for him to know what they were. The work was tedious and not much conversation took place, except for the occasional “Do you know what this is?” or “Thank you” from Skyla. She placed each item they found into an old leather rucksack.

  “Have you seen anything like these?” she asked, pointing to her goggles.

  He pointed to the beaked man. Skyla walked up to the mannequin, looking at it from all angles. She stood back and put her hands on her hips again.

  “My aunt used to hate these,” Skyla said. “So did my mother. They had them in the city where they grew up, not here, but out east. She said you could never read them. She didn’t even think they were entirely human. I think this
one was some sort of replica.”

  Then, flipping the man around, she plucked the lenses from its face. Inside the sockets he could only see smooth wood.

  “See?” she said. “It’s just a replica. I guess they never showed me these because they didn’t want to frighten me… well, Laura didn’t anyway. Everyone else didn’t care how scared I was.”

  They went back out to the Bowl and sat, exhausted from the scavenger hunt. They rested a moment and Scribble pulled some more paper out of his backpack along with an extra pencil he had stolen. Making a flat surface, he began to draw.

  “This is your default state, isn’t it?” she asked, watching his hands move over the paper. “It would have to be habit for you to be so good at it.”

  He held up the sketch for her to see, old Rhinewall the way she had first seen it from up on the hillside, a vast wagon-wheel of streets and buildings. At its center was a ball of white, eating away the center of the city. She never witnessed the explosion, didn’t need to for her to know what it was.

  “You saw it, the Cataclysm?” she asked, her voice muffled behind the mask.

  Nodding: Yes.

  “You went there after the raid on Lassimir?”

  Yes.

  “You must have arrived right as it happened.”

  Yes. He made an additional gesture pointing at his eyes, then at the drawing. Then he pointed at her.

  “Was I there?” She paused, thinking. “I was… but then I wasn’t. I was somewhere else when it exploded… when this happened.” She waved a hand at the Bowl.

  Scribble pointed at her again, making an explosion gesture with his hand.

  “Oh… did I cause it? No. Well. Not entirely.”

  She had been sitting on a question for a while and finally decided to ask.

  “You’re with another gang here? Another gang in this city as well?”

  A knot formed between his eyebrows. Yes.

  Skyla frowned. “Why should I trust you then?”

  He only stared, his eyes drifting away from her. He didn’t know how to answer that.

  “You understand why I ask though.”

  Yes. He felt ashamed, his hand drooping to the floor a moment.