But they didn't move in.
They were shifting and moving, sluggish—sleeping? Keith stared at one, wide-eyed, at the horrible mass of teeth and eyes and hunger.
"Keith," Hiraeth whispered.
No, not sleeping, he realized as they shifted again, a little faster, a little more violently.
Waking up.
In a sudden panic, he brandished the lantern, flinging it up just in time as the one in front of him came to its senses—or whatever it had instead—and lunged forward, snapping its maw at him. A sense of fear washed over him, a sense of being prey, and he stumbled back, still with the lantern thrust out.
"Not good," Hiraeth said, and shifted around to press his back to Keith's, so there was a light on either side of them. Where they were touching, Keith could feel the alert stiffness in him, an animal poised to fight or flee.
It really started to dawn on him that it was what they were.
"Could really use your powers any minute now," Hiraeth said, with no readable tone to his voice at all, as if everything that could be spent on emoting was spent instead on focusing on the Terrors around them. "If you please."
Right. Shit. He had to do something.
The quartz he’d brought with him was a heavy weight in his pocket. Keith tried to focus on drawing the fire out, and let out a cry instead as a Terror lunged. He barely dodged, only just swung his lantern around in time to shine the light of the fire directly in its eyes, and even so claws grabbed and tore at his arm. He could feel it bleeding, an almost numbly bright pain, like ice, and couldn't spend any time thinking about it.
Behind him, Hiraeth let out a yell and swung the lantern as well. Keith could feel that movement, see the swinging shadows and the light glittering across things that weren't supposed to be exposed to light. The sound Hiraeth had let out was half fear and half pain.
There was no time to do this nicely or safely.
Keith's lantern exploded into a narrow column out its chimney, the fire billowing upward using his energy for fuel more than the oil inside. He bent it, letting it follow the curled line of his energy, striking the Terror in front of him with a whip of flame, smacking into it and making it sizzle.
It screamed, the sound tearing through Keith in a way he'd be hearing in his nightmares from now on—if he survived to have them, he reminded himself grimly. The smell of the flame on its strange dark mass was like a cross between cooking flesh and something he couldn't even name. Something was boiling and letting off steam.
That one withdrew, but there were others.
Hiraeth let out a cry behind him, quick and shortly cut off, swallowed behind his teeth. "Don't suppose you can do two of those," he gasped.
Keith couldn't, but he had to do something to turn Hiraeth's lantern into a full weapon as well. They needed more than just one with how many of them there were, given that the Terrors weren't willing to just stay out of the light. He couldn't control it, not whip-cord it like his own lantern, especially without seeing what was going on, but he focused on the chimney of Hiraeth's lantern, pouring a solid cone shape over top so flame engulfed that, forming something like a flaming sword.
Setting that up had distracted him, left his own cord of flame unmoving, and another Terror moved in around the side, grabbed him by the arm, yanked him off balance and away from Hiraeth.
The sudden coldness at his back was terrifying. He couldn't let himself get surrounded, and he couldn't let it keep its hold on him. It was trying to yank him off his feet, make him drop the lantern, and then they'd force him down, move in, feast.
He spun the cord of flame around, snapped it down against the semi-solid limb that had grabbed his, forced the flame right through. That horrible sizzling smell rose again, worse than before, choking him and filling his nostrils. But he didn't have time to recover, still coughing as he stumbled upright fully and backed toward Hiraeth again. Eyes watering, he kept the cord moving, lashing down on that one Terror over and over again, beating parts off it, cutting and burning until it stopped moving.
It wasn't dead. He didn't think so, anyway. It wasn't dissolving, and he suspected a Terror probably didn't have any real form to maintain after it was really destroyed. But it was at least temporarily immobilized.
How temporarily, though?
There was no chance to celebrate regardless. While he'd been focusing on the one, the others had been waking up more, and now were moving toward him and Hiraeth actively.
Keith drew a deep breath and whipped the flame around again.
They fought. They fought, and fought, and fought, and still had barely managed to move from the spot. Certainly not enough to explore to find what they were looking for.
He twisted and wound the flame and mostly did his best to keep the Terrors back, whipping at them when they came too close. Behind him, Hiraeth was fighting in near-silence too, with his flaming lantern and his antlers, head down, ichorous gore tossed behind him as he caught and tore with them.
And every possible chance they got, the Terrors' claws and teeth were swiping in, catching at flesh. Yanking at limbs, pulling them this way and that. He was bleeding and bruised and every joint hurt, but all he could do was keep fighting and not let any catch hold of him for too long.
The entire basement smelled like hell and Keith was horribly, awfully aware of the fact that if it were any darker than this—if he lost the energy to control the lanterns—the Terrors would gain more strength. He spared a second to be grateful to Hiraeth for having kept him from coming down here at night. If the only reason they were even this sluggish was that it was daytime outside, he could only imagine how it would go otherwise.
He didn't want to, though, and barely had time to. Slowly, between the injuries they'd given the Terrors and the winding light of his fire, they cleared a small circle around them with writhing, hungry darkness churning around the outside. The Terrors were eager still to get in at any moment of weakness, but only moving in when their defenses found gaps.
"Let's move a little," he gasped. "We need to find this work bench…"
Hiraeth didn't answer immediately, making a noise of pain that he perhaps meant as agreement before he managed to get more out: "Yes. All right."
They moved. Swinging fire and limping, hurt and wrung out and aching and bleeding, they moved their small circle in what felt like inches at a time. Keith guided them forward, away from the stairs, under the theory that any working area would probably be across from the entrance, but he couldn't shake the fear that it was anywhere else. Left, or right, or even under the stairs. They hadn't had the chance to look, and the thought of having to move all the way back was horrifying.
But soon enough the Terrors began to part in front of them, running out of places to go and shifting around to the sides, then behind again to close the gaps. As they kept moving forward, he saw it: A large table up against a wall.
It was not unlike the one he'd seen in Marion's mind, though (fortunately) shorter, a normal working height. Various doll parts and tools were laid out, and a doll body—male, bone-white, slim—was also placed, with the limbs not yet strung on but arranged as they would be expected to go.
It struck him with a shocking emotional intensity, as though it really was a dismembered corpse. It couldn't be further from Lucas's actual body—this one childlike, white, laid out neatly, while his had been strong, intensely physical, crumpled, blood dyeing his black skin red, split open on the pavement. It was a discordant, disjointed metaphor. It suddenly clicked to Keith what it meant when Hiraeth talked about an Other being in an inappropriate vessel, what it must be like for Marion right now and why she'd been tearing herself apart in her own mind. Dolls were creepy metonymies for humans to begin with, segmented and empty; but it was so glaringly not Lucas, the fact it had been blithely prepared to hold him made Keith nauseous.
He tore his eyes away and forced himself to take in the rest of the scene, looking for and finding exactly what he'd hoped to: a variety of vials on the table
, near the back. On the right side, they were prepared for someone's use—the enchantment was cast, and the top sawed into a point, but they felt unused, empty, the way the ones upstairs had. Full of nothing but potential.
On the left side, by the doll's feet, they had a sense of being occupied. Keith could almost feel the Others inside them, a strange sense of being faced with a prison he couldn't hear or see. A hammering to get free. Even if he had come here knowing nothing, he would have known that something was terribly wrong there. It gave him a headache to look at them, and his flame flickered briefly as his powers started to feel overwhelmed. The quartz felt hot against his leg, as if it had been burning up as he used it.
One of the occupied vials sat a little forward, placed right between the doll's feet. The one that the doll collector was meaning to use, probably. It had to be Lucas. He was sure of it, with the timing. It would need to be Lucas.
But he didn't feel anything from it to make it seem different than the others: just a churning sense of desperation, a need to be free. Nothing more. He couldn't feel 'Lucas' there, that familiar presence that had been always so close by.
"Smash them?" he asked, in a small voice.
It would make noise. It might draw the ghost before they were ready.
But these people had to be free. And if they didn’t get Lucas back and on their side before they faced Walter anyway, they’d be at a worse disadvantage.
"Smash them," Hiraeth agreed, breathless, after risking a quick glance behind him to see Keith, the table, the setup.
Keith put two fingers to the bottle between the doll's feet, hesitantly. Despite the touch, nothing felt familiar. "All of them?"
What if they were wrong? What if it didn't work? What if smashing them destroyed the essences, or if it interfered with the magic, or—
"All of them," Hiraeth said. Then, in a rush, he changed his mind: "No, wait, save the empties. I have an idea."
It seemed risky to leave the enemy a weapon, but there wasn't time to ask for details and he had to trust Hiraeth. Shuddering, Keith leaned over the workbench, drawing a deep breath—almost choking on the smell in the room—and then flung his arm out, sweeping the occupied bottles aside and down as hard as he could, smashing them to the ground.
Glass flew explosively.
He managed to get his arms up, just barely in time to protect his face. Shards cut into his arms and legs, and he was grateful for his heavy clothes, could only imagine how much worse this would be if it were a warmer season.
Keith hoped that the worst of it had missed Hiraeth too, but there was no way to hear his reaction over the sound that filled the room: a horrible wailing, screaming in a din of different languages, heavy words that felt like curses being cast. The flurry of glass seemed to have stopped, and he managed, with effort, to lower his arms again.
He opened his eyes.
What he saw there was something that he knew he would never really make sense of. It was the Others' essences, he knew that, their true selves without vessel, and his mind couldn't interpret what it saw.
It left him essentially blind, vision overwhelmed, as though he'd plugged a cable into the wrong input. It didn't impact his hearing—he could still hear that awful sound—but his eyes stopped working entirely for a few too-long moments.
Suddenly, he felt lucky for how little his sixth sense actually showed him. The things he saw usually might be strange, twisted, and unseeable to normal human eyes, but they were still things he could make sense of, look at and understand what he was seeing. If he saw things in this much detail always—
The essences departed, rushing out through walls and windows, and the oppressive sense of the room lightened. Slowly, he realized he was seeing again, understanding what his eyes were showing him and identifying shapes and forms, blurry and strained.
The foreign shape that he'd turned to check on was Hiraeth, face tilted up and split in an uncanny grin.
The massive writhing mounds around them, which had drawn back from the force of the essences' departure, were the Terrors. They hadn't moved in—or hadn't been able to move in—during the explosion of souls, and that was probably the only reason Keith and Hiraeth were still alive.
The thing dangling from his hand, sputtering and miraculously not dropped, but certainly not flaming properly, was a lantern.
And the soul that hadn't left, was hovering next to the workbench and facing away from him, slowly turning to look at him, was Lucas.
Keith felt his knees go weak and he leaned on the table, bracing an arm there. It was the arm that was holding the lantern, fortunately, because he didn't think he could keep his grip on it to save his life. He could barely keep himself upright.
"Lucas," he managed. It was him: that same polo shirt he'd died in, the same jeans, the same short curly hair.
And then Lucas finished turning, and he had no face.
Keith didn't recognize the noise of pain he'd made until it was already out of his mouth. He couldn't tear his eyes away from Lucas now that he'd seen him. But Lucas didn't recognize them. He was facing them with a mindless wariness in his posture, darkness swathing his features. He didn't react to Keith in any way that showed anything but caution.
Hiraeth fell back to Keith's side. "That is not a good sign," he said, voice unsteady, risking a glance back.
Exhaustion. That was all Keith felt. Nothing but pure shaking exhaustion.
This was why he'd come, and he was too late. From the look of him, Lucas was as far gone as Walter was. Whatever had been done to get him in that bottle, to break the attachment to the person he was haunting, had caused him to become lost.
"He's gone," Keith whispered.
Hiraeth grabbed his arm, squeezed it reassuringly. It hurt—he was covered in cuts, had glass splinters in his clothes, was soaked through with blood—but it helped, too. The flare of pain grounded him, made him suck in a sharp breath.
"No," Hiraeth said. "But if you give up now, he will be."
What do you want? Lucas asked. It was his voice, but even further below normal hearing than usual. Even with his sixth sense, Keith could barely pick it up.
"Lucas," Keith said, almost stammering. "Lucas. Lucas Brown. It's me, Keith?"
That darkness over his features swirled, and Keith almost made out his face. Then it was gone again, replaced by roaming darkness. No, Lucas said. I don't know those names.
"Go in after him," Hiraeth said.
Keith slowly realized what Hiraeth was suggesting. Heart pounding, he looked around. "Here? Now?"
"I'll hold them off," Hiraeth said, grinning widely enough to show every flat tooth in his mouth. "That's why you went in after Marion, right? To learn how. In case you needed to do it here."
Lucas was advancing in slow measured steps unlike his usual casual walk, threatening. Keith wasn't sure what exactly he'd do, but he didn't think it would be good if he let Lucas come to him like that. If he went to him, he'd have to be in control or—
Or what? he thought helplessly. Lucas wouldn't hurt me.
But the ghost there right now didn't know that.
"I won't be able to keep the lanterns flared up," Keith said, voice trembling. "I won't. I'd have to put all my focus on him."
And the Terrors weren't held back by the rush of souls any longer either. With the flames in their lanterns low and sputtering, they were moving closer as well, gathering in bulk and threat.
"I'll fight," Hiraeth said. "I'll have the lantern at normal heat, anyway, and I was thinking I could grab those bottles." He nodded back to the prepared empties still on the table. "If he can catch Others and ghosts in them, we might be able to catch Terrors as well, am I right? They're just corrupted ghosts."
Lucas was six feet away, five, four—
"Are you sure?" Keith asked, gaze fixed on Lucas, desperate to hear 'yes', terrified regardless that he was making the wrong choice.
"Can you afford not to try?" Hiraeth shot back, grabbing a bottle up from the table and stepping
away from them both, toward the Terrors.
Put like that, the answer was simple.
He turned his attention away from Hiraeth—was aware, peripherally, of Hiraeth brandishing both his unaugmented lantern and an empty bottle at the Terrors—and fully onto Lucas.
Three feet. They were staring right at each other, empty void into Keith and Keith into empty void. Lucas began to raise a hand toward his face.
Everything inside him became still and quiet.
Hiraeth was right. There was no other option.
He had to save Lucas.
"All right," Keith said, as that hand descended. "I'm coming."
He exhaled, then dropped, ducking beneath that hand, rolling forward, and flung himself into Lucas as if he was trying to shoulder-slam him out of the way.
The quartz in his pocket grew hotter, almost enough to burn.
There was nothing physical there to hit, but he was already out of his own crumpling body by the time he fell through Lucas's transparent form into nothingness.
chapter seventeen
Keith found himself in a hazy fog, a featureless white curling mist. It was thick, hiding everything up to a few inches away only. He could barely see his own feet on some kind of sidewalk, swathed and hidden.
He stayed still, breathing fog in, watching his exhalations stir and churn it in front of his face without actually clearing anything.
It was like his dream. The fog there had been too thick to see anything, even himself. As in the dream, he could move in any direction, but had no guide. He drew a slow breath to calm his pounding heart. Better to not run blindly, as he had in the dream. He looked down, trying to make out any details.
If he struggled to, he could see his own body—but only in a vague sense, an outline of hands and arms as he raised them through the mist, a shape of his feet visible briefly as he stirred the air by moving one, then covered again as he went still. He tried waving a hand, saw it a little more clearly briefly, but the mist came back immediately.
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