by Martin Kee
“He didn’t tell you his plans to kill the mayor?”
“What?”
“Well, let’s just say that the archdiocese is very displeased with your fiancé here. Now the archbishop has to run the entire city all by himself.” She sighed. “It’s a lot of work. Julian on the other hand, can still be useful once his mind begins to reconnect itself. Granted, the methods aren’t as advanced as the facility in Rhinewall.”
“Jules…” Dona blinked. “What did you do to him?”
“If you cooperate you’ll find out. But for now, the archbishop needs you as lucid as possible. They’re worried the treatment might damage your memory.” She cleared her throat. “Now let’s continue. You saw Skyla leave.”
“Y-yes,” it was hard to answer between the sobs. “Yes I saw her leave.”
“How did she escape?”
“I don’t—no please!” But Gareth was already there, blocking her view. A long steel knife came unsheathed from his belt. The metal was clean, a mirror that showed Dona her own terrified eyes. It was a butcher’s tool, thick and designed for cutting tendon, separating joints. It seemed to grin at her.
“How did she escape?” Victoria asked, her tone flat, almost bored. “Where did she go?”
“I don’t know. She just ran into the closet.”
“Just like that?”
“Yes.”
“We checked the closet for traps doors, secret passage ways. You’re lying. How did she escape?”
“I told you!”
“I. Don’t. Know!”
“I think you do,” said Victoria. The knife in Gareth’s hand twisted in the air before coming down.
“How did she escape?” She asked the same question again and again, “How did she escape?” Victoria’s voice a broken phonograph as the girl stared at her, hands locked behind her back. “How did she escape?”
“I don’t know!”
But Gareth was there anyway, his broad back filling her world. Screams echoed. The knife vanished and seemed to sing now, singing in Tom’s voice. Feral screams. Gurgling. She heard something wet hit the floor, but Dona refused to open her eyes, refused to look at what rolled along the cobble, stopping at the bloody drain. The screaming had ended but only in her ears. At the back of her mind it continued, an endless wailing.
“How did she escape?” Dona wasn’t sure if she was hearing Victoria anymore of if it was her own mind, wasn’t certain who’s voice was who’s.
“I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know!” Dona screamed until she couldn’t speak, until she felt herself pulled from the bench. Her legs no longer worked. Her heels slid along the cobble. Rats chewed at the ledger, scrabbled along its cover. The book closed like a judge gavel made of flesh, closed with the thud of a head hitting stone and rolling.
“I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.”
She muttered it now, staring at the floor and she rocked back and forth, her fingers tugging at her hair. It was her mantra. I don’t know. From outside her cell she heard doors unlock, feet passing by. I don’t know. They stopped just on the other side of her door. There was then a man’s voice.
“You’re done?”
“Yes,” Victoria said.
(I don’t know)
“And nothing?”
“I wouldn’t say nothing. I think she’ll still lead us to the girl. They seem to have some correspondence. We’ll bring her with us.”
(I don’t know)
“We had plans for the Munson boy. Was that really necessary?”
“It was.”
(I don’t know)
“And why did you not choose her as the subject?”
“Dona has been abused by her father already. Such crude physical methods would only have hardened her to any further questioning. We needed someone she actually cared about.”
The man cleared his throat. “Those ‘crude’ methods were authorized because they are orthodox methods. They’ve been proven to work. When you are purging people for the truth in the name of God, you must never stray from the traditional procedures. You’re lucky I don’t fail you.”
“With all due respect, your holiness,” Victoria said. “I am not trying to tell you how to do your job, nor do I intend to stray from church guidelines… But Dona would have been much more resistant to those methods than Melissa Montegut was.”
Chapter 42
In-Between
DALE COULDN’T BE sure if they had been running for hours, days, or years. Despite the pain, he clung to Marley’s back as the giant lumbered through wooded vales, golden meadows, deserts, and tundra. Their pursuer was never far behind. It scooped up houses, towns, and people. If he had to guess, Dale would have thought it was made of people, a rolling collective of insane minds, feasting on the unaware. He had seen similar constructs before, but somehow this place never failed to surprise him.
“I think it’s a golem of some sort,” he said, over Marley’s shoulder.
“A what?”
“Maybe… I don’t know. It looked like it’s all made of people. I’ve seen these.” He watched it advance behind them, those million blue eyes boiling to the surface only to roll back beneath. “I saw something like this a long time ago.”
Marley grunted, pushing aside a tree. “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed,” he said. “But I’m a little too busy to be lookin’ at anything.”
“Yeah…” Dale watched as a cluster of arms tear a tree from the ground, stuffing it into a developing maw. “I wouldn’t stop to look either.”
He had fashioned a sling out of Marley’s shirt, cradling the underside of his torso where his legs should have been. They weren’t growing back, he knew that much. His arm had healed though, which he found curious. Marley’s arm was still damaged. But that was before they were attacked.
“Things don’t grow back when it cuts through them,” he said. “Haven’t you noticed that? You arm?”
“What?” Marley said as he leaped over a river.
“Your arm, my legs. Things aren’t growing back. My arm is fine though because it didn’t cut into it. My arm healed because that was before it found us.”
If Marley found this at all interesting, he didn’t show it. The giant crashed through walls, trees, cliffs, anything that stood in his path. Dale had to admit that it had been a long time since he had admired his friend as much. Marley forced his way through worlds with focus. He was the old Marley, the fighter. Marley the survivor. He liked this Marley a lot better.
Up ahead he could see the path thinning, fading into another copse of trees. He hoped they weren’t the carnivorous kind. As they lunged through the forest pines and oaks began to shudder, crack, and splinter. Black ooze spilled between trunks, boulders, and vines, sprouting long fingers of black mold. It was like running from a tidal wave.
“Did it slow?” Marley said. The big man was panting.
“Maybe a little,” Dale said, but he knew he was just being optimistic. “Where are we going anyway?”
“The boat.”
“Is it really that far?”
He could hear the irritation in Marley’s voice. “I don’t exactly remember where I left it.”
“Maybe it’s gone,” said Dale.
Marley stumbled and froze.
“I’m kidding,” Dale said. “God, don’t stop.”
But then Dale heard it as well. Someone was calling Marley’s name, a girl, her voice familiar. The giant changed course, cutting diagonally through the grove of trees. He homed in on the distant sound.
“You sure that’s such a good idea?” Dale asked. “It’s still there, you know…”
“She’s right in its way.”
“Lots of things are in its way.” Dale said. “What if it’s a trap?”
Marley only grunted and ran to the voice as the world crumbled behind them. They reached a clearing and stopped. Feet slid through dirt. Dale clamored over his shoulder and let out a whistle.
Skyla stared at them from atop a cleared incline, her body t
ransparent, a projection. She still wore those goggles, but they looked as if they were run over by a train. One lens had been smashed, now covered in white cloth, and she stared through the single lens at them. Dale looked back the direction they had come. Tops of trees suddenly fell, sucked under the ground as the flood of bodies approached.
“Marley!” she shouted, smiling.
“What are you doing here?” Marley asked her. His voice sounded more angry and concerned, and Dale sensed it too, the wrongness. She didn’t belong here.
“I need to find Rhia. I can’t reach her.” She dangled the ring from a chain. “I found you though.”
The ground behind them began to open in jagged cracks and Dale patted Marley’s shoulder. “We need to go.”
Marley nodded. “No time to talk. Just run.”
“Why?” she asked, her smile fading.
“Just go.” He lumbered past as Skyla finally looked beyond them at the horizon. She said nothing more as she charged after him.
Dale’s eyes followed her from atop Marley’s shoulder. Skyla didn’t move the way they did here. She skipped in and out of space, vanishing behind a tree only to emerge somewhere completely unexpected. It was hard to keep her in sight. She ran beside them, then up a branch. She vanished around corners only to pop into view a few yards ahead of them, sometimes even running at them.
“You’re not dead,” Dale said, more an observation than a question.
“No.” She appeared from around a ruined stone wall and ducked again behind a broken pillar. She emerged again from a stone archway, catching up as Marley ran past. “I’m not.”
“Is this what the dead look like to you?” he asked. “Do they simply disappear in one place and reappear in the next?”
“I guess,” she said. “You guys are hard to follow. Everything keeps shifting.”
Dale bounced in his sling as Marley leaped over another small gorge. Skyla appeared to his left, ducked into a cave and then reappeared a hidden tunnel. “Why do you need to find Rhia?”
“I need to ask her—” She ran behind a shadow, popped back into view from below them, catching up. “—what she did with the Reverend?”
Dale looked back at the million blue eyes, at the people roiling like froth. “I think we found him.”
“No—” She ducked under a fallen log. Pop! She jumped down from the roof of a shack. “That’s not him. He isn’t dead.”
Dale gripped the clothing on Marley’s back as he jostled. They began to slide down a slope of naked rock, heavy with shale and loose weeds. Marley’s feet skidded. His arms pinwheeled. Skyla kept pace, but Dale could see there was nowhere else for her to skip in and out of. They were exposed.
“I see the boat,” Marley said, just as he lost his balance. He tumbled forward, hands out, digging man-sized furrows into the gravel as Dale tumbled out over his shoulder. They came to rest in the gravel as Skyla stopped near them.
“You’d better go,” said Dale, propping himself up on his hands.
They had landed at the bottom of a fjord, the boat a good half-mile up the beach. Skyla turned and Dale could see through her. The mass of arms and eyes tumbled down the slope towards them. A dozen mouths parted, exposed teeth like gravestones, encircled lashing tongues. Dale took a breath and waited for the end.
Marley got to his feet and lumbered towards him, scooping him up. They began one last desperate lunge to the boat when he heard the screams. They both turned, fearing the worst. But the screams were not Skyla’s.
Skyla stood with her arms out, her hands grasping a metal tube. One hand wound a crank on the side as a pillar of solid light shot out from the end. It spread in a cone, cutting into the tentacles, the faces, the eyes. It sliced flesh, burned skin, vaporized eyes and teeth. Black ichor sprayed in gouts like a broken pressure hose. The young girl wielded the shaft of light, swinging it as one would a sword. Vents and fissures opened up along the ground as she painted light along the landscape, gouging away great chunks of earth.
A fissure opened up, swallowing much of the pursuing mass. What remained wriggled and slipped through other crevices she had carved. Tiny legs and arms scrambled to pull free, some separating completely from the mass, others clawing in futility at the edges before being pulled beneath into the void. The small individuals that escaped, scrambled away, leaking fluid from their eyes and mouths, their forms shifting as they tried to maintain a semblance of identity.
Skyla held the light away from them until it had completely faded, then clipped it back to her belt. She turned to them and smiled.
“What did you do?” Dale asked.
“I saved us is what I did.” She almost bounced on her toes with excitement. “I realized I had been avoiding the light when I came here. I have to move away from it or it can hurt a lot, even kill, but it never occurred to me that I could use it as a weapon. I mean, I brought Gil’s camera through and I didn’t think that would work, but I guess it can… What?”
The smile on her face faded as she turned to see what they were staring at. They stared into that world of the living as if looking through a prism. Layers of reality pressed on top of one another: an alley, a school, a child’s bedroom, a cabin in the woods, a factory, a church, a darkened street.
“Windows,” Skyla muttered.
People walked through one window holding candles that burned black and solid. Through another window a girl sat crying in a prison cell, pulling at her hair.
“What did you do?” he asked again as they all gazed into Bollingbrook, Lassimir, the Wilds. Each location sat on top of the next, like torn photographs in an album.
Skyla’s hand went to her mouth. “It’s the scars,” she said. “They fell through the scars.”
*
The citizens of Bollingbrook congregated outside the front lawn of the mayoral palace. They held candles, mourning the passing of mayor Perlandine. Voices harmonized in song as the procession moved past the man’s portrait. A pile of roses had now grown from the cobble, reaching up to the mayor’s neck.
Beth Humphrey walked beside her parents amidst the mourners. She was supposed to visit friends tonight. But no. Her father had ordered her out of the house instead. Fuming, she plodded along, listening to the low tones of her father’s voice.
“It ridiculous is what it is,” said Theodore. “A coup d’états.”
“Keep your voice down,” her mother whispered. “You’re drunk. You want the police to hear you?”
“And the archbishop claiming temporary authority—I think we all know what sort of temporary authority The Church likes to have. You know it stinks.”
“I know you’ll get us arrested.”
Beth slogged through the line, dropping her rose onto the pile. The mayor’s dark eyes peered over the top of the stems like a man playing hide and seek. Black-clad guards watched from along the fence. Candlelight gleamed on their surface. But the candles weren’t the only light that caught her eye.
“Dad,” she said. “Dad, shut up.”
“Are you talking to your father like that?” he said. “Because we’ll take this up back at home…”
But she wasn’t listening to him anymore. Beth’s feet came to a halt, blocking the line of people behind her. They brushed past, muttering about the rudeness of teenagers. She hardly noticed. Her attention was elsewhere. A flicker of light bounced along the darkened street. It passed behind mourners, then reappeared further away.
“Beth,” her father leaned in to whisper. “What in God’s name are you standing there like an idiot for?”
“It’s an angel,” she whispered. “Or maybe a fairy!”
“A what?”
“Don’t you see it?” she asked.
“All I see is people staring at us. Now let’s go before you make a scene.”
“You’re the one making the scene,” her mother countered. “Let her go play.”
He released her arm and Beth brushed her way through the bodies. She frowned as they blocked her view. Beth had no
real interest in a late night candlelight vigil for a man she had never met.
“Beth, get back here!” her father called after her in a stage whisper.
She ignored him. Theodore would be too embarrassed to leave the crowd now. She could always meet them back home after the boring ceremony was over. She stepped out of the crowd.
The light reappeared. It didn’t emanate from anywhere in particular. It danced through the air, flickering like a star. Beth remembered her childhood stories well. Fairies were little people with wings who flew. They shined like lightning bugs at night, emitting their own luminescence, and if you captured one it would grant you a wish. Or it could be an angel too, she thought. Beth had never met an angel before, but the Bible was full of them. She wondered if they could grant wishes as well. Maybe angels and fairies were the same thing. Maybe they both granted wishes. Beth had a few wishes in mind.
Beth wasn’t entirely sure how far she followed it before it vanished, but when it did, she let out a sigh. Looking around she realized she was standing in the alley behind her old school. It looked smaller now, the broken fence rotting and flaking white paint.
From further away, a twinkle caught her eye, this time coming from an apartment window. How had it gotten all the way up there?
By flying, dummy. She laughed at herself. Of course it had.
She wasn’t about to start scaling walls. Beth watched it for a while instead, wishing it would come down and visit. She waved at it, hoping to coax it closer.
Movement and another light appeared. It zipped past her head, so close she even reached out to catch it. But it vanished between the cracks in the fence. She placed a foot on the boards and heaved, tumbling to the ground on the other side. She stood and felt a tear. Her sleeve had caught on a nail, a small price to pay.
I’ll wish for a new blouse.
But when she looked up again, she slumped in dismay. The fairy had moved too far ahead of her now. There was no way she would get to make that wish. She followed anyway, stepping deeper into shadow. The school’s bell tower loomed overhead.
The light winked out a dozen feet in front of her. In its wake, something shifted in the air. It rippled and shimmered, turning opaque, thick, and watery. The air was bleeding. Spilled ink seeped into the chill air. Tendrils reached out to the walls, sticking to blades of grass, grasping the chains of the swing set like sticky taffy. Thin legs stepped from the ink, trailing arms far too long and far too thin. Scarecrow arms.