“It is no safer here for you than for them, but the fear that protects them does not seem to affect you as yet. I expect that will come to you in time, and things will change then.” He sounds weary, old enough to have lived half a millenium. I’ve never heard him sound this sad.
“I stay in my room at night just like they do and can hear just as much as they can. What makes me so different?”
He gives no answer.
I think it through for a few minutes before coming up with the only possible explanation. My voice is lower, softer, as the reality sinks in. “Something happened before. Didn’t it? Something terrible happened, and they saw it.” I don’t clarify whether the ‘it’ is the something terrible or the griffin itself. I suppose either one would be enough.
He nods once, slow and solemn. “The villagers were not always so careful at night.”
He clearly doesn’t want to talk about this, and if he remembers whatever awful things happened years ago, I can’t blame him. I don’t want our conversation to end, though. I resume my previous line of questioning without a transition. I try to make my voice light and curious again, shaking off the dark mystery of the griffin and the villagers’ fear.
“Don’t you ever get lonely? I think I’d have gone stark raving mad long before now, to stay in a dirt-and-torches back room of an abandoned underground castle for five hundred years. Do you ever visit the village? The gardens? They’re beautiful, you know. Impossible, too, but I’ve been getting used to impossible things here.”
“I visited the village many times in the early days, but the danger of the griffin soon made that impossible.”
I guess we’re back to discussing the creature. Life here seems to revolve around it. “Why does the griffin affect you so much? And so differently than the villagers or me? You don’t seem afraid of it, but you fear for us—you sent me away when nightfall came but you were perfectly safe in your back room. And you always seem sad and serious when the thing comes up.” I don’t mention his strange, pained behavior that night he sent me away. That seems like a separate conversation, and one he’d be no more open to having.
“I’m afraid those are questions I cannot answer.” His voice is tight, another tone I don’t recognize, and one I can’t place this time. There’s a long pause, as I refrain from asking even more questions, staring down at the floor waiting for him to continue. Then he speaks again. “You’re right.”
I turn to face him. “About what?”
“I did go mad.” The hood bends down and he pulls the long black arms of the cloak in, like when a person stares at their hands in their lap. “The loneliness was not the cause of my madness, but I did go mad. And soon the madness will overtake me and I will be lost.”
This was not the direction I expected him to go. “Don’t say that. You’re not crazy.” I lean over and lay my hand gently on his cloaked arm. It feels a bit strange under the fabric, too skinny and hard. He seems to tense up a bit at my touch. I hold very still, but I don’t pull away. “You’re not alone anymore, either. I’ll come back every day and visit you.” The villagers are nice enough, but I’m not nearly as comfortable with any of them as I am with Shadow. Except maybe Adele, but she’s so quiet. She treats me like a fragile little girl, and it gets old after a while. I just chalk it up to her being both mother and father to innocent little Louna for so long.
“Do you not think of your home?”
“What do you mean?”
He tilts his head at me, in a way that sort of reminds me of a bird. It’s almost funny. “You had a life outside this prison of a world, like the rest of us. Your home is in New York, a modern place the rest of us can’t begin to understand. Don’t you ever miss it? Do you not feel out of place here?”
My body pulls back a little automatically, and I swallow several times before answering. I have to think for a few minutes before I can answer, my head getting that weird throbbing ache again. I clear my throat to chase away a sudden scratchy feeling, but it doesn’t go away. It makes my voice sound rough when I speak.
“I guess not much. I used to, when I first got here, but now…I feel like I’m a completely different person, like this is my life in the real world and New York was just a dream. Other times I feel like this is the dream, but I’ll just live in it until I wake up. It’s like this place is totally unconnected with anywhere and anything else—like home ceases to even exist while I’m here.” I wait a few moments before adding, “The clothes were a bit of challenge, though,” trying to lighten the mood. Why does Shadow act like everything is always so serious, so important? I’m honestly quite happy to just continue stopping by the garden for breakfast every morning before escaping to this beautiful little corner of a grand, sun-bathed library with the person who makes me the most comfortable I’ve ever felt with anybody.
“This place—and you, and I, and the villagers—are not here indefinitely. For the past five hundred years, these tunnels and those of us living in them have lived in a sort of…I suppose you might call it a stasis or limbo state. We’ve simply been living in very much the same way for day upon day, week upon week, month upon month, never aging, never changing. Everything was forever the same, until nearly five hundred years added up, and you joined us. You realize you are the only person to live in these tunnels that did not arrive with the rest of us? Who was not here from the moment the tunnels first existed? Your presence here is not an accident. You have a purpose in these tunnels, one that the entire village is depending on—a purpose that only you can fill, Beila. You must not forget that. When you came, this world started to fail. The magic is forsaking the tunnels now that you are here. It’s not apparent now, not yet. But unless the spell that created this place is broken…there are lives at stake, Beila, and people—people you care about…”
His sentence trails off. I stare at him, surprised at his sudden speech, confused by his words.
After a long pause, he clears his throat. “I’ve already said more than I should. Just remember this, Beila: the truth shall set you free.” He says it like he’s quoting someone, rather than telling me something himself. “Promise me you won’t forget.”
I have no idea what’s going on, but it’s clearly important. Maybe if I think this whole conversation through later, by myself, away from this grand castle and other people, I’ll come up with something I’ve missed. Something has to make sense eventually.
He’s still waiting for my response. “I promise.” I slide my hand down the cloaked arm and reach the end of his sleeve, pushing my hand under his cloak to take his hand in mine. I don’t think about what I’m doing until it’s too late.
There’s no hand to hold. Instead of flesh and bones and fingernails, a great scaly, scrawny thing lies in his lap. Instead of weaving my fingers through his own, I’m pulling away, stumbling away from his four curved claws, falling backward and hitting my back against the sharp edge of a bookshelf. His hand—the strange thing—not his hand, not a hand…
He stands, dropping his arms, his talons, by his sides so that the cloak slides back down. He stays where he is, by the window. “Beila, please. I’m sorry. This is why—I tried—I’m so sorry.”
I stare at him, at his big shapeless cloak, at his covered head and covered face and covered talons that are definitely not hands. “What’s going on?” I glance at his shadowed face—or the place I assume he has a face, under that giant brown-black hood—for barely a moment before fleeing out the library doors, down marble halls and torch-lit tunnels, back to my room.
I don’t leave my room again all day. I don’t know how many people noticed me fleeing through the tunnels. I don’t know if anyone saw the forbidden tunnel I came running from. I don’t know how many people I bumped out of the way heading to my room. I don’t care. This place is strange and crowded and suddenly does not feel like home.
I stare at the fire and letting my thoughts chase each other around my brain. I think about the griffin. The invisible people. The
ir terror and their routines and their rules. I think about magic and enchanted libraries and entire villages tunneled into dirt and impossible gardens with impossible fruit. I think about shops that refill themselves and rooms that clean themselves and people who live five hundred years and never age. And I think about a strange man hidden in a strange room wearing a cloak to cover his strange talons where there should be hands. What else is he concealing under that dark, billowing cloth?
The more I think about this place, about the strange and impossible and magic things that happen here, that exist here, the more my head hurts. My headache hasn’t gone away since the moment Shadow asked about New York. Thinking about Shadow makes my insides hurt, too. I don’t know anything about him, and I trusted him, and that’s not even his real name, and I thought we were friends, and maybe he’s not even a person, and isn’t anything or anyone in this place at all normal?
I can’t think about the mysteries and magic and secrets for another minute. I try again to think of home. My head still hurts, but now it’s hurting no matter what I think about, so I push through that. I remember Dad’s voice as he talked about the griffin. I think about Damien and how he’d try to figure out the particulars of the magic here, approach it like a scientific experience that could be understood and predicted if he just studied it long enough. I imagine Viviann’s reactions if she saw the kinds of clothing I wore here, and I wonder if she’d find it an enchanting experience or a fashion disaster.
The awful, echoing shrieks of night are just beginning when I remember my backpack—the one I brought with me when I came to the tunnels. There was a notebook, a camera, my phone…I haven’t seen it since I got here. Where did I put it? I can’t remember. Maybe it would be in the wardrobe. Everything I leave lying on the floor seems to show up in there. I pull open the wardrobe doors and slide the dresses and hanging underclothes aside. My backpack leans against the wall behind the row of shoes, but there’s nothing in it. I slide open each drawer, digging through and not really paying any attention to how I leave things. The wardrobe will probably refold the socks and reorganize its neat rows by morning anyway. Finally, in the bottom drawer, I find my pen and pencil, notebook, camera, batteries, now-dead cell phone, flashlight, water bottle, and granola bars—all lying on top of my neatly folded pair of jeans, t-shirt, sweatshirt, underwear, bra, and socks. When I pull these out, I find my sneakers in the drawer, tucked in the back.
I spread everything out on the top blanket of my bed. “He was right about one thing—I’ve forgotten my home too easily.”
As quickly as I can, which isn’t actually quick at all, I pull and push and wriggle my way out of my Renaissance garb. I leave all the parts in a crumpled heap at the corner of my room and slide into my own modern-day New York clothes. The pants feel too tight and the t-shirt too thin at first, but I know I just need to readjust to the feel of normal clothing. I open my notebook to the first blank page and grab a pencil.
I draw simple outlines and half-finished sketches of dresses, rooms, fireplaces, torches, the garden, levitating dishes, sunlit windows, richly furnished rooms, grand bookcases, pointless staircases, and anything else I can think of that belongs to this dark, dirty place. Some of the drawings I focus on making as realistic as I can, but others turn out as distorted versions of the real thing, and others are just the most basic, rudimentary sketches. I’m not really following any sort of system here, just drawing things however I feel as they come to mind. When I’ve finally run out of objects and places in this world to draw, I flip past those sketches and begin new ones, of Dad and Damien and Viviann, of my bedroom and yellow curtains, of trees and birds and clouds and a swingset, of skyscrapers and taxicabs. Anything at all from home.
I’ve filled half the available pages at this point. My hand starts cramping long before I’m ready to stop drawing. I pause to shake it out between drawings, but keep going.
Without really meaning to, I find myself drawing whole pages of flowers and herbs and vegetables, all contained in raised garden boxes in a country backyard or pots and dishes hanging on a balcony in the city. I sketch gardens growing the way they should, with boundaries that have to be maintained and a set planting cycle. I trace the lines of familiar hands tending to roses, hands I can see, hands I can never hold again.
Before stopping my drawing and going to bed, I turn to an old page: a drawing of golden feathers and powerful muscles. I stare at it for a few minutes before erasing a section, adding two scaly, skinny arms, each branching into four talons, ending with long, curved, terrifying claws.
With only a few hours left till morning and my sketchbook lying open next to me, I fall asleep, worn-out drawing pencil still in my hand.
I’m in a dark, familiar room, with five walls lit by torches, facing carved double wood doors. I turn around to face Shadow, but the moment I see him sitting up straight and regal under his cloak, I remember. I don’t know what to do with myself, what to say. The room feels tight and too-small and awkward and uncomfortably warm. Finally, he clears his throat.
“You’re dreaming again.”
I look down to see that I’m in my jeans and t-shirt, which I fell asleep in. The necklace is back, too; as important as the current situation probably is, I can’t resist the urge to pull it out and look at the man in the portrait. I only give a quick glance, though. I drop the necklace against my chest and sit cross-legged on the dirt.
I’m a little annoyed that the dreams would come back right when I least want to talk to him. I hadn’t really decided whether or not to come back to see him again tomorrow after what happened in the library. I don’t really want to say that, though. I just jump in with the elephant in the room. “So…you have claws.”
From the way his head jerks back a little, I think he winces, but the hood is baggy enough to hide most of his more subtle movements. I can’t tell for sure. Like always, he doesn’t say anything.
“Sorry about that. In the library, running away…I shouldn’t have. So, sorry.”
“Don’t be. I understand.” He does seem very calm about the whole ordeal, weirdly, but I’m still not sure how I feel. On the one hand, it’s all very confusing and I feel a little betrayed. Why is he acting like this isn’t a big deal? And shouldn’t he maybe have mentioned before that, “Oh yeah, just a heads up, I’m not entirely human”? On the other hand, maybe I should have thought about the fact that a guy living in enchanted underground tunnels with invisible people would probably have a legitimate reason for hiding under a cloak, especially when he’s already isolated as it is. Which leads me to wonder…
“Can I see you? Not just your arm, but you. The whole you.” I want to say ‘how bad can it be?’ or ‘nothing to lose now, right?’ but I realize it could, in fact, get much worse from here.
“I wish I could, Beila, but…I worry. I fear revealing too much to you. You must seek out the truth for yourself.”
His lack of answers irritates me. “Look, in the library, I saw your arm and freaked. I know. I’m sorry. It won’t happen this time. No matter what you look like…” I take a deep breath. “No matter what you are, I know you as Shadow.” I’ve got more doubts about him right now than I’d like to admit, but I’m putting all my faith in the guy I thought I knew before. “We’ve talked and you’ve showed me the library and I know what you are inside. All I’m asking is for you to give me a face for the person in my mind. Even if that face isn’t human.”
He gets out of his chair. He steps forward, hesitant, and reaches out, taking my hands gently in his own. His talons, anyway. His sleeves still cover his arms from sight, but I can feel the rough, tough skin of his four fingers. It’s like warm, living, wrinkled sandpaper. I’m a little surprised by how warm his talons—his hands—are. I don’t know why, but I’d assumed they’d be cold. A cool, smooth claw that resembles metal curves out of each finger. I let go of his right hand and slide his sleeve slowly up his left arm to get a better look. I move slowly, waiting for him to step back
and hide again at any moment, but he remains completely still.
The claws are an uneven black, while his actual fingers are bright yellow, almost golden. There are scales…they sort of look like little plates along the skin, larger and lined semi-neatly on the back of his hands, but much smaller and wedged together on the sides. I turn over his left hand in my own and examine the tiny bumps and dots, like tastebuds or tiny hairs, on his palm.
“It is not your fear that worries me.”
I look up at the hood, just a few inches above my head. It takes me a minute to realize what he’s talking about. He’s not hiding because he’s concerned about my reaction… “Nothing happened after the library. What harm can it be?”
He’s close enough to me that I can see the individual shadows covering his features, can almost make out his face. Is it flesh and bone, with a nose and mouth? Or is it feathers and a hard beak?
“Are you the griffin?” My voice is soft, almost inaudible. I know he won’t answer, and I don’t expect him to. A thought makes me smile. “I wonder how you could talk through a beak, if you are.” I pause again. “But what else could you be?”
He sighs and turns his head slightly away. Without looking down, I twist my right hand around so we’re holding hands again. My left hand reaches up and rests against his hood, pulse picking up in my ears. He doesn’t move. The fabric bunches slightly between my fingers as I slide it down.
Eight
It’s long past morning when I wake up. A quick glance at the fireplace tells me that it’s probably around noon. I push myself up into a sitting position and stretch, brushing some loose drawings from last night onto the floor in the process.
World of Shadows Page 9