A Latent Dark

by Martin Kee

  “Ow!” she yelled, pulling away.

  She looked up at Harry as if he had materialized in front of her. She jumped and screamed, waking Francine who suddenly began coughing blood. Harold shoved the miserable girl out of the room, yelling at her never to return. A day later, he told a sobbing Melissa that Skyla was no longer welcome in their house.

  *

  Unfortunately for Harold, that was not the end of it.

  The machinery that had kept Harold Montegut’s life making perfect sense began to grind as if lubricated with sand when Francine would no longer wake up. Her face became slick and pale. He knew Melissa was still spending time with that bewitched little street urchin, but there wasn’t much he could do about that.

  Until one day, his daughter ran into the house crying. Harold had rushed down the stairs and held her in his arms. Warm tears soaked his shirt.

  “Oh Daddy,” she said through muffled sobs. “You were so right. Her mother is the scariest woman I’ve ever met. She… she knew mom was sick. She knew. How could she know that?”

  “I’m sure Skyla told her.”

  She shook her head and pulled away from him.

  “No,” she said. “Skyla was just as surprised to see her. She was at the door.”

  “Wait,” he said grabbing her shoulders. “You went to their house?”

  He didn’t know whether to hug her or slap her. He held her in his terrified gaze.

  “I wanted to see where she lived,” she said in a small voice, so innocent it made him ache.

  He took a deep breath, swallowed his anger, let her continue.

  “She was just… there. She looked at me,”—Melissa paused to take a staggering breath—“and then she screamed, daddy. She screamed that now I ‘knew where they lived and now anyone could know’ and then she stopped,”—Melissa wiped her cheek—“and she just stared at me. Then she said that my mother would die soon… and…”—her words were becoming a mix of crying and speaking that was difficult to decipher—“and that so would I. She pointed right at me and said that she could see it in my shadows. Oh Daddy, I was so scared.”

  She completely broke down at that point and Harry held her until the sobs stopped. He swore that if he ever saw either of those two again, he wouldn’t be responsible for his actions. In fact he was pretty sure no court would convict him.

  He tried to get Melissa to tell him where they lived but she refused. He wouldn’t know that answer until the newspapers reported that the house had burned down. By then it was too late for Harold to save anyone.

  *

  Melissa’s recovery was even better than Harry could have hoped for. She began spending more time with the Barkley’s daughter. Her manners had improved as well as her grades. Harry had never been happier.

  The same could not be said for Francine, who seemed to be little more than a corpse in living skin. The coughing lessened, but in its wake was a hard lump that formed just between her ribs. The Physicians, in their beaked masks and tinted goggles, smelling of spice, gave her very little time.

  The night Melissa disappeared Francine woke up. Her eyes were lucid, but she only stared at the ceiling without blinking. Harry was in the room when it had happened, and he almost thought he was imagining it.

  “Where is she?” Fran asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Melissa might have stayed for Mass. I can go walk her home if y—”

  “No.” Her voice was wet and hoarse. “The other girl. The one who spoke to me in my sleep.”

  Harold felt tiny baby fingers of fright climb up his neck.

  “I don’t know—”

  Francine gripped his wrist. The skin on her hand was so tight he could see the veins standing out like a road map.

  “You know who I mean,” she said through a wet cough. “You know—”

  But her voice was cut off in a fit of hacking that lasted for almost an hour. Harold wiped her brow and waited until she was asleep before he left the room. He drank downstairs, waiting for his daughter, but she never came home. Probably at that Skyla’s witch house. He got very little sleep that evening.

  *

  The next morning, he had an important meeting with a man from out of town. The Pope of the South they had called him, a title he waved away with shallow modesty. The Reverend Summers had big plans for Bollingbrook and if Harold could help him, it meant big plans for him as well.

  As the numbers began to roll onto the books and through the difference engines, Harold began to realize that it was, in fact, a mountain of money. The Reverend had certified notes. Piles of them. He brought them in day after day in a briefcase, each one verified not only by the Georgian banks but also by the Vatican. It was an unprecedented display of wealth, and he was in charge of ushering it all into Bollingbrook.

  “What this city needs is a good war,” the man in white said through a cigarette. “A good war for a good cause, I always say.”

  They transferred money all night at an almost dizzying pace. The telegraph lines in Bollingbrook had never seen so much activity. By the end of the evening, both his and the Reverend’s hands were stained blue from all the signatures.

  “You’ll see a good portion of this, Harry,” he had said. “I hear you’ve got a sick wife.”

  Harry only nodded. A lump jumped into his throat, keeping him from answering.

  “Well, you’ll be able to buy her the treatment she needs, I’m sure. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always faith healing.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’ve been known to do it in the past. Would be happy to come by and help out some day.”

  “I’m... I’m sorry,” Harry said, a little choked. “I’m afraid my wife doesn’t have long.”

  “Nonsense, Harry. Only once you’ve cleansed the soul of its demons does the body have room to flourish. Just let me know. I’d be happy to do it for you.”

  Harold graciously declined.

  *

  Now, Harry sat before two closed caskets, containing two girls who had, at one time, made each of his days worth waking up for. Everything that he loved in the world was in those cold wooden boxes. The priest who delivered the eulogy mentioned Jesus Christ twelve times by name; he mentioned blood and the cross ten times; he mentioned Fran and Melissa by name only twice. Harold counted.

  He was done with the wailing and crying. He had done plenty of that in Fran’s bedroom, then a day later in the morgue. The orderlies tried to restrain him. One of them ended up crashing into a steel tray of instruments.

  What had been on that table was no longer his daughter. The machinery that had so precisely directed the course of his life had become a meat grinder. It chewed up the women he loved and spit them out into unrecognizable slabs.

  Slabs of meat, he thought with a chuckle. We really are all just slabs of meat in the end. It doesn’t matter who you love or what you do. We are just walking slabs of meat.

  The funeral came and went, taking with it, every person who had ever mattered to him, washing them away like a river. A few relatives had insisted he stay with them, but Harry had other plans.

  He sat for hours on the rich golden couch in his empty house. He held on his lap a picture, taken years ago. In the other hand he held a bottle. He drank and stared on into the morning. When the bottle was empty, he delighted in how light and easy it was to throw. It smashed through a vase. Won’t be needing that anymore. It reminded him too much of that witch child anyway.

  It took Harold Montegut approximately ten minutes to destroy every object in the house with the leg of his wife’s favorite china cabinet. He saw Skyla’s face on everything he smashed.

  Chapter 19

  She had fallen asleep with the goggles on. That was the only explanation for how strange everything looked.

  Skyla stood outside The Hungry Skunk under the light of a black moon. She looked around at the placid, grayscale landscape. The trees, the sky, even the rocks all seemed to exist in a strange duality, a negative overlay. There wer
e the physical objects of course, but then there was something else, something alive and conscious about them. Above her, grey swirling clouds drooped dramatically toward the ground, suggesting the inverse footprints of giants.

  Are the Wilds spreading? she thought.

  Movement at the edge of the forest startled her and she took a step back.

  “Hello,” she said.

  A male figure stumbled out from behind a tree, holding his side. She could see immediately that it was one of the boys from the docks. He was Gripper, the one who had grabbed her, the one she had hit. He limped out of the forest with a hand on his abdomen, blood oozing between his fingers. He stopped as he saw her.

  “I know you,” he said. “You were the one who hit me.”

  Skyla looked at the wound on his side. “Did… did I do that?”

  He staggered closer. “No,” he said. “A bullet.”

  Skyla breathed in through her teeth.

  “Who shot you?” she asked. Something in her mind told her she had to help, had to fix this.

  “A man… I think,” he said and turned to point back to the town.

  As he looked away from her, a cone of living shadow sprayed from behind his head, pasting the ground and air with thick moving tentacles and legs. It writhed and twisted. A pale eye stared at Skyla from the center of the mass. Gripper turned back to look at her, unaware as the tangle of limbs and flesh turned with him, disappearing behind his field of view.

  “Have you seen Scribble?” Gripper asked. His face was concerned, his brow knotted. “We got separated.”

  “No, I haven’t,” she said.

  “Figures. What good are you?”

  “Let me see that wound. Maybe I can help.”

  His eyes narrowed and he moved his hand. “It hurts less now. I think it just grazed me.” A hole as wide as a man’s fist traveled from his stomach to the back of his spine. They both looked at it, amazed that the boy was still standing.

  “You’re really hurt,” she said, taking a step closer. “Let me just—”

  He recoiled. “It doesn’t hurt… really.” Even he seemed surprised.

  As she reached out and touched the wound, she saw his shadow wriggle behind his head, twitching and twisting—forking arms and gnarled claws. The wound flexed and shrank by an inch or two. She smiled up at the boy and saw that he was looking at something just over her shoulder.

  “You have wings,” he said, eyes wide.

  “I do?” she said, blinking. She turned around but saw nothing. She thought of when she was five, on the porch with her mother. My shadow? Does he see my shadow?

  “I gotta find Scribble,” Gripper said and began to walk past her.

  As he pushed by her, his shadow flared out from behind his line of sight, filling the air with indescribable organs wrapped in sinew. She reached out and touched it. Her hand came away wet, a blue-black tendril sticking to her finger in soft strands—black taffy. It didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t particularly pleasant either.

  As the boy walked off into the distance the tendril eventually dropped from her hand and slid across the ground before being absorbed back into the heap.

  Another figure caught her attention, a woman this time. She was burned from head to toe on one side of her body. She walked up to Skyla, unafraid but confused.

  “You’re the barmaid,” she said. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “Who did you expect?” Skyla asked.

  The woman shrugged, her crispy charred skin making crackling noises. “God, Jesus, Vishnu, who knows.” She froze, her eyes filling with tears. “Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, no, no, no!’

  “What?”

  “Is this Hell?” She looked at Skyla pleadingly. “Am I in Hell?”

  “What? No!” Skyla said. “It’s just a forest.”

  The woman looked confused. “Is it heaven then?”

  Her eyes darted between Skyla and the forest. Another person was stepping out of the trees behind her, then another.

  “I don’t think it’s either of those,” Skyla said. “It’s just what the world looks like without any skin on.”

  “And you?” said the woman. “Why do you have your skin?”

  “I… I…” Skyla blinked. “I guess because I’m not dead.”

  The woman gave her a dry laugh, eyeing her cautiously. Skyla looked at the woman’s shadow, vivid and compact. More people were emerging from the forest, backlit in orange, refugees from Hell, their shadows a zoo of textures, shapes, and sizes.

  “What’s happening?” Skyla asked the woman, but she had already left, her shadow dragging a tail on the dirt behind her.

  Skyla ran through the crowd of people. Their eyes followed her warily as if she were the ghost in their midst. The walking wounded and their shadows created a mob within the foliage and Skyla found herself nearly smothered. Dozens of tentacles and bodies pressed against her as she squeezed through the limping, crawling, scraping throng.

  Up ahead, the riverbank glowed as Skyla froze at the edge of the cliff next to a soldier dressed similarly to the one who had grabbed her in her house so many weeks ago. He wore no helmet, his expression proud and arrogant. She barely noticed that half of his face was a mess of tendon and red flesh. One of his eyes was missing, the ocular muscles twitching in the socket. He sneered at her as she stared out into the clearing, his shadow spraying a black cone behind him.

  “We did it,” he said. “We finally sacked that goddamn city.”

  She stared out across the smoke-filled landscape. Flames licked the sky. A mass of people walked silently up the trails and away from blackened, smoldering wreckage. They were all fleeing Lassimir as it burned.

  *

  Skyla bolted upright in her bunk, rattling her brain against the rafter, too busy gasping for breath to cry out as the goggles tumbled from her head. A distant rumble replaced the usual sound of bats, branches and rain outside her wall. It played a low cadence through the night air. A slow, cold hand closed around her throat. She leapt from her bed, ignoring her throbbing skull.

  Marley’s door was open, his room empty. She ran to the front of the pub, flung open the door, catching her breath.

  Immediately outside The Skunk trees were still green, the ground dark and saturated with rain. Farther away, steam rose from the damp earth in plumes. A warm orange glow peaked over the tops of the pines like a second sunrise. She thought she could hear muffled yells in the distance, swept away by the crackling roar of flames.

  She packed her belongings hastily. The pub might very well be gone by the time she got back, but she had to find Marley. Wearing her backpack and goggles, Skyla fled and ran toward the city of Lassimir. Déjà vu swept over her as the pine branches whipped at her face. It was as if she had just been here moments before.

  A gigantic figure emerged from the smoke. Marley grabbed her by the shoulders as she tried to run past him.

  “It’s not safe,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do, Skyla.”

  “What happened?” she said, thick smoke burning her eyes and nose. An ember flew between them like a bug.

  Her leg brushed something and she realized it was Dale. He was sitting against a tree, clutching his knees. He looked up at her and she read something in his shadow that made her want to scream.

  “They used a barge,” he said. “They brought a trading barge and used it to launch airships. They inflated them at the port… I think. Nobody had enough time to pack. It caught the entire town by surprise.”

  “But, the signals,” she said. “Didn’t the towers catch them?”

  Dale looked away.

  Marley’s enormous hand began to turn her back towards the pub, but she pushed him away and ran to the end of the trail. The two men called to her as she ran, but she wasn’t paying attention. The smoke blew by in thick, acrid waves, turning the forest into a waking nightmare.

  She stood at the top of a cliff, overlooking what had once been a city made of fabric. From the direction of the docks, fl
ames were eating the city yard by orange yard, sweeping through streets and devouring buildings. The rain fell and evaporated before it reached the tents.

  Some of the flame-covered structures were moving as people scurried to escape their homes, now smoldering ovens. A figure stumbled by one tent, flames eating away at his clothes and hair. He billowed gray-orange smoke from the top of his head, staggering drunkenly as the fire consumed his body. Elsewhere, capybara ran from the fire followed by their smaller offspring. A mule dashed into the forest, its tail aflame. Occasionally a scream or shriek would echo up from the roaring massacre.

  Near the edge of the city, people carried buckets of water. Crude spigots dowsed the shanty houses, steam rising from the tin roofs. In other areas, people were spraying strange white foam over the tops of their tents. The futility of their efforts was visible on their faces, the flames clearly winning.

  Her tear-streaked eyes followed the smoke as it rose. Bulbous shapes bobbed and danced hundreds of feet up in the black waves of soot that rose from the fire, their bloated abdomens rocking back and forth against the warm currents, thrown upward by the dying city.

  The balloons were surrounded by delicate-looking brass harnesses which supported a rounded cockpit hanging forward and away, like the head of some misshapen insect. Every couple of minutes, a bolt of flame would shoot from below the cockpit and ignite another tent, burning the city alive. Black lightweight shields underneath the airships protected them from arrows and heat as they torched the structures below. Shops burst and ignited like tissue to a match.

  Long ropes drooped down from the aerolores, caressing the rooftops. Tiny black dots, soldiers, rappelled down the black strands of cable, firing into crowds as they went. They hit the ground and formed small squads, tearing through the tents and shops, shooting anyone standing.

  Skyla turned her attention to another section of Lassimir and gasped. A group of ring fighters, Fold among them, had pushed back a squad of soldiers. They waded into the armored men, slashing and bludgeoning them with their fists and rings, shattering helmets and bone with brutal efficiency. Skyla watched them intently as bullets ricocheted from wide flat shields. But it was not enough. Eventually the fighters fell to the superior weaponry and training, landing underneath black chitin feet, pierced by bayonets, screaming and dying.