by Martin Kee
“No need to apologize,” said Laura. “I’m just glad you’re alright. You’ve got some big days ahead of you. You’ll need your rest.”
She walked Skyla back to her bed and tucked the girl in. Without even thinking, Laura leaned down and gave her a small kiss on the forehead.
“If you need anything, just tell the room,” she pointed at a corner of the ceiling. There was a glass eye wedged there. A camera, monitoring everything. A small red light blinked next to the eye. “They’ll see you and they can hear you if you need anything, okay?”
“Okay,” the girl said with a smile. “Thank you.”
She brushed Skyla’s hair with her hand and left without saying another word.
Ostermann waited for Laura on the outside of the door. He was wearing a thin, impatient smile. There were hushed voices in the hallway after the door closed and Skyla waited until they receded before she finally allowed herself to breathe.
Skyla closed her eyes, fighting the light. But she didn’t sleep.
The tingling she had sensed before was stronger now. And when it spoke to her in the darkness, she almost screamed.
Chapter 32
He called himself Mr. Henry and he shoved John down alleyways, past gaping sewer grates, sometimes dragging him when he fell or slipped in mud. John tried to reason with the man, but gave up after a few slaps to the back of his head.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Shut-up.” Slap.
“Look, I’m a priest. If you need help—”
“I said shut up!” Something metal struck John between the shoulder blades and he decided instead to keep moving in silence.
The Tinkerer’s Guild spire loomed overhead and John assumed they were somewhere in the center of the city, but the streets and boroughs were so fragmented he couldn’t tell any more than that. Eventually they arrived at another CONFESSIONAL with its tall grey bureaucratic building and long line of people. Mr. Henry shoved him along the line, his gun hidden, until they were at the door.
“Heya!” yelled one woman. “Wait your turn! I got kids to feed!”
“Yeah, who doesn’t?” Mr. Henry muttered.
A pair of guards stood by the door and John found himself thrust toward them. One of them held his palm out, stopping them.
“Hold on…” he began.
“This one’s fresh,” said Mr. Henry. “Fresh off a boat. I saw him arrive with a bunch of the other refugees. He’s a good ‘un.”
The guard turned to John. “Name?”
John breathed a gasp of relief. “Father John Thomas.”
“Your Jesuit Identification?”
John looked up at the huge metal CONFESSIONAL sign and tried to remember. He hadn’t been required to know this since seminary. “Five-two-six-three… no three-two six—”
“See?” said Mr. Henry. “He’s just like the rest of ‘em. And he’s fresh for the Confessional. You’d be good to let this one in for the engine. He’s got some goods on him, he does.”
The guard held up a hand and Mr. Henry snapped his mouth shut. The guard asked John, “Where is your ID card?”
John’s hands went to his front pockets, then his back. He checked his jacket and found the pockets empty. There was a brief moment of shock and crushing disappointment, then John simply closed his eyes and sighed.
Hands shoved him forward and Mr. Henry disappeared behind him as the guard escorted him into the complex. As the world vanished behind a cold metal doorway, John fought the urge to simply collapse. His wallet was only the final straw at this point; he had lost Skyla, he had never found Summers, Lassimir was in ruins, he would probably be excommunicated at this point for disobeying the archbishop, and he had lost James—not that the man wasn’t capable of taking care of himself.
No, James wanted to make sure Skyla was alive. That’s what he wants. If I find Skyla, chances are he’ll be around as well.
“There seems to be some sort of mistake. I’m a priest,” he said. “From Bollingbrook.”
“Sure you are,” said the guard. “And I’m a decorated cardinal. I just happened to leave my ID tag in the house today.”
He caught a glimpse of himself in a polished brass panel and finally realized why his story was so unbelievable. Over the weeks his hair had grown to his shoulders, matching a beard that obscured most of his face. His clothing was splotched with mud and grime, frayed at the edges, with a few leaves pasted on for good measure. He wasn’t even sure he would believe himself.
Of course, he thought. They think I’m mad.
The guard frog-marched him down a hallway past a rather nice study and into a small elevator with a crisscrossing brass grille. Inside, the guard pulled a lever and the grille slammed shut, echoing through the hall. His stomach lurched as the car dropped through the floor.
It was a small consolation to John that his theory about the city seemed correct, as the elevator slid past layers of city, buildings, and streets, long paved over and forgotten.
Light poured up from below them, growing brighter until it filled the car, nearly blinding him. The entire corridor seemed to glow, with brilliant light bouncing off polished white tile.
A man in a white coat approached him. “New subject?” he asked the guard, ignoring John.
“Please,” John said, “I’m from—”
“Another one from the raids,” said a guard over John’s voice. “One of our regulars picked him up. Says he’ll be a good one, if you got room.”
“We do,” said the man, giving John an appraising look through his brass-rimmed spectacles. “This way. We’ll put him in Pen Nine. I believe there’s still room there.”
He was rushed down a blur of white hallways with identical doors and men in matching coats. The smell of fresh paint and sanitizer stung his nose as the walls hummed with electrical vibration. It felt like being escorted down the throat of a giant beast.
They came to a guard who stood beside a lever, a light embedded along the wall beside him. The light turned green and the man pulled the switch. A section of white panels slid open, revealing the inside of a room so black John could see only afterimages. Hands shoved him inside and darkness consumed him.
As his eyes adjusted, grimy downtrodden faces emerged from the corners of his vision. They approached him curiously, hands reaching for his clothes.
“You know him?” one voice said.
“Never seen him before,” said another. “He looks scared enough though.”
“They all look scared at first,” said a voice from the back, and a few men chuckled.
A pair of rough fingers poked him in the chest and John stumbled backwards into the closed doors behind him. Someone cackled in the darkness, high and shrill.
I have found Lyle’s Psychiatric Facility, John thought. And I’m one of the inmates.
Dirty fingers plucked and tugged at his clothes. A hand grabbed him aggressively by his collar and pulled. He stumbled into the crowd.
“Naw he’s not one of ours,” came another voice. “I’ve never seen him before.”
The ceiling lights illuminated and John realized he was in some sort of square pit. A guard stood on a ledge over the crowd, his helmet removed while he munched on a sandwich. John looked around at the mass of people who crowded him.
“Keep it down,” said the guard. “Be nice to the new inmates. You’ll all get your turn.”
“Eh?” said a man from the back. “When we get a turn at you Deekins? You come down here and I’ll show you a turn.”
Deekins only took another bite of the sandwich and grinned as crumbs rolled off his chest.
The man closest to John, the one who had grabbed him, now looked up at Deekins with sunken eyes. “We was just tryin’ to see if we knew ‘im.”
“Well, try not to tear him apart in the process. They’re making a list of new subjects. I can easily move you to the top, Hendricks.”
Hendricks loosened his grip on the priest and peered again into John’s face. His eyes narrowed
. “If you want a new subject, you should take this one.” He smiled at John.
“I’ll leave it to the Clerics and the tinkerers to do that,” the guard replied.
“Clerics…” said John. He hadn’t heard that term used for a while. “I’m with The Church,” he said. “I think there’s a mistake. I… I’m just a priest from Bollingbrook.”
“And I’m the King of France!” yelled one man from the back. There was laughter.
“Please,” John said, looking up at the guard. “I work in Bollingbrook. I’m here searching for a girl.”
“He wants a girl, eh?” said one voice. “I thought they only liked the little boys.”
More laughter rolled through the tight crowd. Hands shoved John back and forth like a plaything. He stumbled, trying to regain his balance.
“Knock it off,” Deekins said again, this time hefting his rifle. “What did you say your name was, Father?” There was skeptical humor in his voice.
“John Thomas,” John said, relieved that someone was finally listening to him. “I am looking for a missing girl. She is only about eleven. She’s run away.”
“What makes you think she’d run to here?”
John kept his mouth shut and only stared.
Deekins thought for a moment. “We have lots of holding pens, but I don’t think we brought in any girls that young…”
Another hand shoved him. “He’s lyin!” a man yelled. “He doesn’t know anyone. Nobody knows anyone and if they do, they don’t talk about it.”
“Calm down,” yelled Deekins. “Father, you got a lot of nerve.”
“I don’t understand,” said John. “I’m serious. Skyla was in my parish…” His voice trembled. “Please, I’ve traveled from Bollingbrook to find her.”
Another man laughed. “And next he’ll tell us he came through The Wilds to get here.”
*
Their dinner was a gruel-like sludge which flowed from the walls into moldy troughs. The men crowded together at the walls and fed. John stood back, relieved to no longer be held in the grip of the meandering vagrants. He had no appetite anyway.
He watched them as they ate like animals, shoving and pushing one another. It reminded John of piglets competing for teats. One of the men turned away and walked toward the priest, wiping his hand across his mouth. He seemed reasonably sane.
“Bollingbrook eh?”
John nodded, not sure whether the statement was going to be followed by another punchline or not. But the man only nodded back.
“Never been there myself.”
“You’re from here?” John asked.
“Born and raised. Most of us are… this pen anyway. We’ve got some outside folks, but they stay to themselves mostly.”
“There are others?”
The man nodded. “They have a couple choice victims from the Lassimir raids down the hall from what I hear.”
“How long have you been in here?”
“Oh… a while,” the man said. “They give us a break from the streets, feed us. It’s not bad, as long as you don’t say something to make ‘em want to try their toys on ya. And even when they do, you get fairly compensated.”
John nodded as if he understood. He looked up at the guard with his long rifle.
“Not those sorts of toys,” the man said, his voice low. “The tinkerers. They got fancy toys. Scientific toys.”
“They do experiments,” John said, trying to follow. “What sort of experiments?”
The man gave him an amused look. “You really ain’t from around here are you?”
“No I’m…”
“I know, I know,” said the man. “Look, between you and me, you’d be smart to just tell them your sins, do a small Confessional, and take your pay. Don’t tell them too much or you get the Full Confessional. And trust me, brother, you don’t want that.”
Clearly the man was crazier than John had first suspected. “What happens to the others?”
The man looked around and pointed. “Him.”
The thin man stood in a corner, staring at the floor. He was a statue. John had seen the mentally ill. He had also seen the results of surgical lobotomy. While this man showed no scars, he stood without a hint of consciousness about him.
“They did that?”
“Oh, don’t think he didn’t deserve it,” said the man. “He hit a priest. You just don’t do that in Rhinewall.”
“I see.”
“Do you?” the man said, suddenly agitated.
As if showing John a piece of furniture to sell, he walked to the standing man. He was pale and thin. His hollow eyes stared at nothing as John’s new friend approached him.
He shoved the thin man. The thin man righted himself and continued to stare. He raised the thin man’s arm and it hung there in the air. It reminded John of the way Lynn’s arm had hung in the air that one day.
His new friend walked back and the thin man remained standing, arm still raised. “He’ll be like that for hours until gravity pulls it down.”
“How long ago did they do that to him?”
“Oh, about a week,” the man said. “He couldn’t even feed himself before. Now he will at least chew and swallow. Turns out he had a lot more sins than he let on. The engine sees that you know. It gets hungry.”
“And you say a machine did this?”
The man nodded. “The sin engine can see the bad ones. It chooses them.”
John swallowed. “Has it ever been wrong?”
The man looked at him. “If it has, nobody’s complained.” He turned from John and continued to watch the thin man, his arm raised in the air, pointing at nothing.
Chapter 33
Dale had always heard that the road to Hell was paved with good intentions. That may have been true, but nobody ever mentioned it being paved with corpses as well. Thousands and thousands of them were encased in the ice. They twisted around trees and rocks inside a frozen river hundreds of yards wide. It would have been slippery if not for the bits of gravel and the occasional exposed finger to provide traction. Dale had to keep reminding himself that it wasn’t real, despite what his senses told him.
“And you said I was bleak,” said Dale, stepping around what might have been an upturned heel poking from the ice.
“A lot of this is yours,” said Melissa. “Only some of it is mine.”
“I thought you were just creating everything for your own amusement.”
“No,” she said, a hint of irritation in her voice still. “It’s like”—she thought for a second—“we all have these realities that we create, even when we are alive. They all butt up against one another and our minds just make sense of it all.”
“The river is mine then?”
“Some of it,” she said. “Some of it is me and most of it is Hel.”
“And she’s a god.”
“Yeah, you could say that.”
“Is she or isn’t she?” asked Dale.
“Here she is,” she said. “Or she might as well be. All of this is her. Everything we’ve been walking through for the last day is her. She has created all of this, the river, the corpses, the ice giants you keep hearing in the forest. You and I are very small here. If anything we are just filling in the details.”
“But… Hel… ice giants… that’s just a fairy tale.”
“To some,” she said. “To other people, people who lived a long time ago, it’s all very real. It isn’t like those ideas ever really died.”
“She must be close,” he said.
“Not really,” said Melissa. “She is just way better at this than I am. I’m just trying to navigate her imagination without getting lost. We have a ways to go still.”
“So, what are we supposed to say to her when we get there?” asked Dale. “I’ve never met a goddess.”
“Neither have I,” said Missy, stepping around a low hanging branch. “All I know is that she requested us, and that it has to do with Skyla.”
“Is she in trouble?”
&nbs
p; Melissa glanced at him, then said, “I’m sure it’s nothing good.”
The trees in this area were gnarled and gray, stripped of all their bark. They twisted and snapped under the pressure from the glacial river of corpses. Every so often, Dale would hear a loud crack, hoping it was wood, but deep down he knew it was bone.
“Okay look,” said Dale, stopping. Missy turned and faced him a few paces up ahead. She held him in an impatient gaze as the ice river flowed beneath them.
“I know why I’m doing this, okay? I get it,” he said. “What I don’t understand is why you’re here.”
“I’m doing it because she’s my friend… or was my friend,” she said. “You really shouldn’t stand here. It’s not safe.”
On either side of them were steep jagged cliffs that funneled the river down its path. Several of the frozen bodies emerged like branches from the ice as it slowly collided with and swept around rocks. Large monolithic beings moved just beyond their line of sight, crunching bones as they walked.
“I’m sure she had lots of friends,” said Dale. “There has to be more to it than that.”
“No, Dale. I was pretty much her only friend,” she looked at the ground to see she was standing on a frozen finger. She moved her foot. “Skyla wasn’t very popular at my school—or my city for that matter.”
Dale gave her a narrow-eyed look. “I find that pretty hard to believe,” he said. “She seemed like a very likeable person to me. I… I liked her. She was my friend too.” His voice trailed off as he heard himself say the words.
“I’d ask if you sell out all your friends, but I already know the answer to that,” she said. Her voice was snide, and took the air out of Dale’s lungs for a moment. He stumbled a few steps to a nearby boulder that jutted out from the middle of the icy flow and sat.
“I thought she was some sort of runaway heiress,” he said, looking at nothing in particular. “I mean… the amount of money they wanted for her was insane.”
“The Church has deep pockets.”
He looked up at her. “I didn’t know it was The Church that wanted her. I had just heard that some preacher was looking for her. I didn’t know he was dangerous.”