by Martin Kee
James was already shaking his head. “You’ll be arrested if you are caught loitering around the wall. It’s too dangerous.”
“So how do we get in?”
He saw then that James was looking the opposite direction, at what John had mistaken for a pile of driftwood piled against the cliff. It was a lean-to, complete with a fish drying rack and the remains of a cooking pit. Most of the camp was covered with sand and kelp, which twisted around and over the wooden structures. Tethered to the post was a small vessel, sun-bleached and worn, the remains of white paint flaking along its side.
“A boat! James, it’s a fishing boat!”
He ran a few steps ahead of the hermit and then stopped. He turned and saw the man paralyzed behind him. After a few moments, James closed his eyes, took a breath and then, quite unexpectedly, smiled. When he opened them, he gave John a small nod and walked up ahead.
The boat was old but intact, its owner long gone. Or arrested, John thought. It had oars and once they cleared it of sand (and a colony of crabs living within) the vessel seemed seaworthy.
“Have you ever ridden in a boat?” asked John.
James was staring at the craft. He nodded once, then cleared his throat. “Let’s see if it’s watertight.”
They pushed it out into a small lagoon, formed by the estuary of the Lassimir River. It drifted out into the placid pool, then rested there. They sat on the beach, watching the craft for any signs of leakage.
“It seems safe,” John said, his voice hopeful, but when he looked at James, he saw the man’s face was a shade of green. “It’s the water isn’t it?”
James let out a small, humorless laugh. “It’s more than that,” he said. “I had a sister once…”
He told John about Anne, about the way she loved the beach and the waves. Even as he confessed to the priest, James could see her clearly in his mind, her dark hair whipping around as she danced along the shore.
At ten, he had been a studious boy, burying himself in books. Anne wanted to stay and swim out to the rock where they sometimes lay in the sun. James chose to read instead. It was one of the few times he had ever defied his older sister and as the adult told this story on the beach, the younger James—Jimmy, she had called him—could still remember the disappointment on her face as if it were yesterday.
“You’re such a chicken, Jimmy. Go read your books. I’ll be in for dinner.”
It wasn’t until his parents came home and found young James on the couch, that they grew worried. And it wasn’t until he heard his mother scream that he even looked up from his books, a cold chill running through his veins.
James saw his sister now, as clear as he had twenty years ago, her face blue, her thigh and neck streaked with long, red, raised bumps. The transparent sac of the jellyfish still clung to her even as his father pounded on her chest, breathed into her lungs.
He remembered now, the look his parents gave him then, the same sad, disappointed look he ran away from. They never had to say a word; their accusing glances were enough.
John looked out at the boat and started to see the connection in his mind. He nodded sympathetically. “I think I understand.”
“It’s not just that,” said James. “I’ve come to terms with it. I blamed myself for years… still do a little. But it’s more than that, I think.”
He paused and John looked back out at the craft in the water, watching it bob lazily. He’s more worried that the boat will work. That would mean he’ll have to ride in it.
“Remember when we met?” James continued. “And I told you about the… I want to call it a hallucination, but I know that isn’t it. But you remember the shadows. You know what I mean.”
John nodded. “The exorcism—”
“It wasn’t an exorcism!” James snapped and John found himself flinching. James closed his eyes. “I’m sorry. Father, but it wasn’t an exorcism. There were no rituals, no candles, no holy words being spoken. The girl was just there, staring at me, staring at it. And if that was a demon, it didn’t speak in tongues or vanish at the sign of a cross. It was just me and the girl and whatever that was—Anne, maybe. Or a sea creature—just the three of us in that room, forced to confront one another.”
He picked up a small stone and tossed it into the lagoon. “Father, I haven’t been this close to water in two decades. Even a few miles of Rhinewall were too close. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“Lyle Summers thinks she can summon demons,” said John. “He thinks she is a threat to The Church.”
James looked at him and John could see the seriousness in his eyes. “I didn’t come to this point, to be this close to the ocean because of religion, Father. There was no priest or church that could have gotten me out here.”
After an hour the boat showed no signs of leaking. James even volunteered to wade in and get it. Once they had it back on land, the inside was still as dry as before. Dragging it along the beach, the two men launched it into the ocean, James rowing fiercely against the waves until they reached a point where they could drift. Rhinewall was a jagged, ancient strip along the shore.
Father Thomas noticed that most of the color had returned to James’s face and he even seemed to relax as the little boat rocked in the water, drifting inexorably toward the city. At one point James even dipped his hand into the water, watching the ripples drift behind them.
Then after a few hours, as though they had never stopped discussing the topic, James said, “Your Lyle Summers might be right.”
“About the demons?”
James laughed. “No, that she is a threat.” He smiled at John from heavy-lidded eyes. “Father, she would make your religion obsolete. I think she cured me.”
After that he drifted off to sleep, snoring as they rode along the water to Rhinewall.
Chapter 27
The first thing Dale thought, after The Reverend Lyle Summers climbed up into the blimp and flew away, was that the man couldn’t count to save his life. There were clearly only two corpses.
He was looking at the bodies when one of the soldiers hit him on the back. He was about to turn and punch the man, until he realized that something was preventing him from turning. A bayonet had pinned him like an insect in a display cabinet. He could see the pointed end sticking out the front of his chest and almost reached up to touch it in disbelief.
Then there was a body at his feet.
Then he realized that it was his body.
It was as if he were viewing it through a thick pane of greenish glass, standing outside an infinite aquarium. The light from the world stopped at the glass, leaving him in almost total darkness. He was watching some sort of silent theater; the living soldiers stacked Dale next to the two corpses in a neat row.
“They’ll want to review these bodies at the Tinkerer’s Lab,” said one man with a muted voice.
“Even him?”
“Yeah the traitor comes too. They said something about checking for contamination, whatever that means.” His voice sounded like he was speaking underwater.
God, look at my arm, Dale thought. Did it always look that bad?
Dale realized he wasn’t alone and turned to see one of the men standing next to him in the darkness, observing the same scene. He was from the previous night’s disaster, one of the soldiers mauled and devoured by some animal. He turned a helmeted head to face Dale, his chest a hollowed husk, his face frozen behind the helmet he wore when he died.
“Tough break eh?” said Dale.
The soldier only stared at him, then after a while turned away. Dale felt his stomach lurch. The man’s back was covered with large, bulbous sacs, all of them gray and swirling, throbbing and waving as the man moved. They looked like enormous ticks, ballooning out from behind him as he walked away. They pulsed, gorging themselves, their tiny legs clasped to his back, and yet he seemed completely unaware of them.
Dale self-consciously reached behind his back and felt nothing. He scratched there for reassurance.
The Tic
k Man, as Dale would forever remember him, literally vanished as he stepped away from the glass, disappearing into a black mist. When Dale looked at the glass again, the sun was setting. The men, the corpses and the vehicle were all gone. He was staring at an empty stage.
Dale turned away from the glass. The landscape was a charcoal sketch of the farmhouse and yard where he had just been standing. The ground had the same grassy slope, just without the structures. There was even the vague hint of a road where the driveway had been.
He wandered over the terrain, glancing at the gray grass, the moving rocks, the people. He knew they saw him, but they quickly looked away. Every one of them had some sort of cluster of ticks, or insects or other assortments of claws and wings clinging to their backs. One man had something so large attached to him that he didn’t move at all. It was as if he were strapped to an elephantine tumor. He watched Dale pass by with small malevolent eyes sunken behind a grizzled beard and leather skin, his thin lips twitching wordlessly.
The other people looked at him with disgust and shock. One woman spat black bile as he passed through a village of broken houses made of sticks. She hissed at him in a language he couldn’t understand. It wasn’t long before another woman joined her, both of them spitting and cursing until he left the village at a jog. Dale avoided any settlement from that point on.
*
The wildlife looked back at him with strange eyes glowing from inside translucent skulls. Some eyes stared at him from nothing at all, simply emerging from rocks or trees, before submerging again. Other creatures were covered in brilliant pulsing lights that left streaks as they ran. The trees were indistinguishable from the ones Dale had been used to in Lassimir, until one of the glowing gazelles ran too close to a redwood as the trunk split open, catching the animal. The animal’s skin flickered and faded, its legs sliding into the trunk of the tree, one hoof kicking in a futile struggle as it vanished into the maw. Dale made a mental note to stay away from redwoods.
The sky swirled like a stirred pot, but as soon as he looked directly at it, it would freeze, its jagged clouds sloping dramatically toward the ground. He began to get the feeling that it was watching him as well.
If this was indeed Hell, it was far from anything he had been taught as a child. He would have preferred the little devils with pitchforks; at least that was something he could wrap his mind around. But this—Dale didn’t know what to make of this. It was as if every object were alive and hungry somehow, a predatory arms race. He wondered where he might fall into the food chain.
It was completely unsurprising to Dale that he might be in Hell. In fact, it made perfect sense. He had, after all, betrayed the trust of not only an eleven-year-old girl, but an entire city as well.
All for a few coins and a little tail.
Sarah told him about the reward for Skyla, saying someone was going to find the girl no matter what. And as for the raid on Lassimir, he wasn’t about to hang around the ruins waiting for someone to blame that on him. It was Sarah who had sent off the codes, so what if he had told her what they were? It wasn’t that hard to figure out once you understood the correlation between the calendar and the weather.
And it wasn’t like he wanted Skyla to get hurt. He had assumed she was some runaway heiress, out to see the world. She wouldn’t be the first. She certainly carried the kind of gear that no normal child has on them—that coin alone was probably some heirloom. Why else would she be worth so much money?
It became much more complicated when he realized that a pair of savior soldiers was following him. He confronted them, told them of the reward and made a deal where he would still get half. They agreed. It wasn’t his fault if the idiots decided to move in too soon.
I even tried to warn them! I didn’t want anyone to get hurt!
And then—and then what happened? Some animal came from inside the house, probably from underneath those mattresses. It killed them both. He thought it was probably some kind of bear—until it had moved. No bear Dale had ever seen could move like that.
Now that Dale was here—dead. You are dead—watching the strange landscape unfold around him—Hell. You are in a traitor’s Hell—he began to think that it was not a bear. It was not anything even close to being a bear.
That wasn’t a bear any more than that tree was a tree or that deer was a deer.
Dale’s pace quickened.
*
“Now that’s more what I expected to see,” Dale said to himself, standing on the cliff. The landscape was bleak and volcanic. Magma rivers flowed off into the distance.
Hundreds of feet below where he stood ran a river of humanity, so densely packed he could only see a mass of heads and shoulders as they pressed against one another with tenacious determination. They flowed in unison as a solid massive river of bodies toward a distant bridge. It was like watching grains of sand flowing through the pinch of an hourglass. At the other end of the bridge was a platform that could have been no less than five miles wide—it was Dale’s best guess.
The masses piled on top of one another once they reached the platform. They were forming what appeared to be a footprint the size of a sports arena. Dale watched in fascination as the outline began to fill in with writhing, wriggling bodies, layer after squirming layer, maggots eating a corpse in reverse.
“It’s weird to look at isn’t it?” came a voice from behind him.
Dale twirled around. A girl no older than eleven or twelve was standing there. She wore a blue dress and had a ribbon in her hair. She was looking past him at the backwards cascade of bodies, her face quizzical.
“I always wonder what would happen if they ran out of people. Would they all be stuck in a giant ankle maybe?” She was standing next to him now, looking over the cliff as the people crawled over one another into the titanic pile that was looking more and more like a foot by the minute.
“Why are they doing that?” asked Dale.
“They’re followers, I guess. The only time I ever tried to talk to them, they all ignored me. They’re very focused,” she said with mock seriousness.
“Looks like it,” he said.
“You’re Dale.”
“I am,” he said. Nothing surprised him anymore, but this did raise an eyebrow. “You are?”
“We need to talk.”
He followed her away from the cliff and noticed that she carried a surprising lack of ticks or spiders or whatever it was that hung on people’s shoulders and backs. Dale noticed how the terrain shifted around her, as if she were dragging some kind of sculpting tool in her wake.
Grass sprouted around the girl from every crevice while the jagged gray rocks became mossy and round. A spring gushed from nearby, causing the surrounding rocks to sprout long-stemmed reeds, mushrooms and flowers. It was like watching the day of creation.
“That’s a neat trick,” he said.
“Hmm?” she looked around her and then realized what he meant. “Oh that. Yeah. It is a trick.”
“How do you do it?”
“It’s just what I want to see, what I feel like seeing. Your reality is pretty bleak, Dale.”
“Mine?”
“Yeah,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You folks who obsess with the hellscape imagery. It gets pretty old. Gray rocks, pools of lava. Bleh. I’ll take a meadow any day over that mess.”
“What?” said Dale. “You think I have anything to do with this?” He gestured back at the desolate ground off in the distance.
“You have a lot to do with it,” she said. “You and that…”
She gestured over his shoulder and Dale became instantly aware of something just beyond his periphery. Tiny beetle claws scratched his back and shoulders like little hooks. He thought he could hear a breathy chittering noise in his ear, close enough to touch. He batted a hand and the empty air as if shooing away a mosquito. She only nodded and didn’t say anything more about it as he walked beside her.
A city rose from the distance surrounded by a massive copper shell. It had th
e signature orange-pink walls of a Church domain city-state. It sparkled amidst the surrounding pine trees. At its center was a three-pronged steeple, a thousand feet high at least. A shaft of bright sunlight illuminated the building out of nowhere, like a religious painting.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“That’s where I died,” said the girl. “It’s also where all this nonsense started. But we aren’t going there. Sorry, I sometimes drift there by accident. Force of habit.”
“I don’t understand,” said Dale.
“You will,” she said. “But first we have to go see Walter.”
“Who’s that?”
“He is a friend of mine.”
“What does he do?”
“You sure ask a lot of questions. What are you, five?”
“Sorry,” he said, taken aback. “I’m new.”
“I know,” she said, sighing. “It’s just that I need to concentrate to get us back, and all the questions don’t help. I’m trying to navigate.”
“Get us back where—sorry.”
She gave him a sideways glance. Dale made a motion across his lips and pursed them shut. She looked back in the direction they were headed.
“You’re a funny guy, Dale,” she said. “I can see why Skyla liked and trusted you.”
That hit him like a fist to the stomach. He took a long breath and released it. “Skyla’s not… here is she?”
“Nope,” said the girl. “But I know she’s the reason you’re here. Now shut up and let me concentrate.”
“You never told me your name,” he said as a large mushroom sprouted next to his feet, then wilted in his wake.
“Melissa,” she said as she tested the ground with the tip of a shoe. “This will do…”
The road shifted in front of them like a serpent stretching to the horizon. Dale gave up on the questions once he realized that he was causing a direct impact on the landscape and direction they traveled. Sensing Melissa’s irritation, he shut up and followed.
Chapter 28
Before the hood went over her eyes, Skyla saw the vehicle. She also saw the cage, and the bodies, one of which was Dale’s. He was on his back, his shirt dark with blood. He lay on the flat bed of the vehicle beside a metal cage appropriate for a large dog. The soldiers stacked around Dale looked more like wax figures that had been melted from the inside out. One of them had his arm draped over Dale in a way that, looked almost affectionate to Skyla.