Helixweaver (The Warren Brood Book 2)

by Bartholomew Lander

  She knew what it was. But she couldn’t admit what was happening. This poison in her heart, in her brain. A black toxin that turned love to fury at the slightest sign of distrust. But her baser thoughts discarded all logic. Acid in her veins. The Instinct was alive, but her heart was in agony. It wasn’t the lie, she told herself, as though it justified anything. It was the shroud of secrecy that he just left hanging over Annika.

  Calm down, her rational self told her again. Don’t jump to conclusions so hastily. You could ask Annika about—

  To hell with Annika! The thought just made her angrier. I don’t care what their relationship is. I just hate being in the goddamn dark! But why was he so damn secretive about their relationship anyway? If you’re involved with each other, then just come out and fucking say it, already!

  And it was at that moment that the poison in her heart, the acid in her veins, revealed its true name to her. She froze halfway down the stairs in cold horror. The rotten taste that sat upon her tongue. The anger that flowed through her appendages and into the blackened organ she had the nerve to call her heart. It was at that moment that she knew that it was nothing but petty jealousy.

  She growled to herself as she finished her descent. Jealousy nothing. It’s not about me, it’s about him. If he cared about clearing up the confusion, she thought, then he would’ve done it. He didn’t give keeping me in the dark a second thought. Having me mad at him is apparently preferable to having me know the truth. She’d felt like the two of them had grown so much closer through their excursion to the Web, but had that just been a lie, too?

  No, she thought with a deepening self-loathing. Lie or not, she couldn’t deny what was driving this outburst of hers. You can’t be jealous, she thought. You’re supposed to be better than that, Spins. You’re not this possessive, this dependent. You’re not this small. What the fuck are you even doing? What’s happened to you? What have you become?

  And her mind, still split between fury and disgust at her own emotional response, kept roiling and turning and spitting. She stomped into the living room and collapsed on the couch, digging the tips of her spider legs into the leather covering. Her legs quaked. Her eyes were hot, but she wouldn’t cry. Crying was weakness, and she’d already let her weakness die. Or so she had desperately tried to convince herself. And yet she had never felt so weak before. All the anger she had toward Mark turned inward. She’d never been so disgusted with herself, so meek and unworthy. Jealousy? Goddamned jealousy? That emotion felt far too human for her, and she hated every instant of it.

  Mark stood there, dumbstruck, in the dying light of the fireplace. He had never expected Spinneretta to react so violently. Though he knew she possessed a volatile temper, he’d never thought it could erupt at such a minor trigger. With a hollow sigh, he lowered himself into one of the chairs in the study, eyes drawn to the half-molten hickory log. This is for the better, he thought, though it pained him to vocalize in his mind. The further everyone was from him emotionally, the better. He had made a mistake, allowing Spinneretta to grow so close since he’d arrived. And if anything happened to her now, especially because of him . . .

  He had to redetach from the outcome. Things were easier this way, after all. And besides, it’s not like anything good ever came from anyone being close to him. Only sorrow and death awaited those cursed with his company. But no matter how he tried to rationalize it, no matter what excuse bubbled up from his stomach, he couldn’t bring himself to believe a damned word of any of them.

  He watched what remained of the hickory log burn down to embers.

  Then to dust.

  Awakening into nothing, Ralph found his feet slipping away from him, carrying him against his will into the dark. Permeating dread sank its hooks into his mind, paralyzing it. A cruel image carved through his thoughts. Ferried onward, his surroundings melted into clarity. The dancing light of a bonfire, just beyond the trees. An unspeakable terror clutched his chest and stole the breath from his lungs. Between the stripped branches of ageless wood, tongues of flame leapt and lapped at the sky. And yet Ralph was helpless to stop his feet from moving forward.

  From beyond the clawing, crooked trees that stood in jagged circles, there came the first ringing, trembling notes of a chant, the notes of which sounded like they were choked from the beaks of Jubjub birds. But as he drew ever closer to the exposing light of the fire, it took on a familiar, somehow more horrible tone. The awful noise grew in volume, swelling to a deafening chord. Laughter that he had heard a thousand times before, joyful, blissful. Young children at play. Their voices, discordant in their untuned chorus, carried a haunting melody.

  Closer and closer he drew, recognizing the song as one of the many jump rope anthems he’d heard while in grade school. It was about the fairy tale of Cinderella and her beautiful yellow garment. It was a rhyme he’d been exposed to once again thanks to his two daughters. While he was not intimately familiar with the lyrics to that song, he’d heard it enough to know that the words to this version—if indeed they were words at all—were wrong. The light of the fire burned brighter before him, and surrounded by the violent strains of those lyrics he came upon the terror he sought.

  Yellow King and Helixweaver

  The Chosen and the believer

  When they fight, within mists white

  How many dead stars will ignite?

  One, two, three, four, five . . .

  He entered the illuminated clearing, and as the final crooked trees vanished, there unfurled before him a ghastly vignette.

  Four children danced in the light of that fire, two girls and two boys, each garbed in ancient monochrome rags that were stained with soot and ash. Lunatic grins cleft their faces in asymmetric halves. Their mouths hung open and displayed piercing white stubs that leaned in crooked mockery of smiles. With each number they called in the song’s finale, each struck their own head in unison with the blunt hammerstones they clasped. And with each blow, the blood running down their faces grew in volume. Pitch black eyes in pallid, corpse-like complexions.

  The black, viscous blood poured down their faces from their eyes and mouths. And as he swept the children with his gaze, he found himself—the only child with any of that rotten blood still running in its veins. And as he stared into his own eyes, which stared back into his very soul, the whole world began to fade. The periphery vanished into the clasping shadows of death. Those russet eyes began to shimmer with each impact of the stone, and his own laughter grew more shrill, like the sound of a razor scraping broken glass. They shimmered, glistened, and began to glow.

  Ralph stood transfixed as the child-Ralph’s irises turned inside out and birthed a brilliance that outshone the bonfire in the center of the demons’ mass. His mouth fell open as the light began to run in liquescent streams down the boy’s cheeks, which had turned to dull stone. That dull stone broke apart into a latticework of burlap, chicken wire cloned in rotted wood and concrete. And as the world faded away, Ralph found he could not break from the thing’s gaze. The glowing fluid splattered against where the ground should have been, causing unseen matter to sublimate into smoke and steam. The gas flowed along immaterial contours, forming the outline of two legs, a broken trunk, two arms, and the same skull from which those eyes had once stared.

  Ralph’s heart could have exploded at that moment, for there, in the void of his own madness, it stood. The legacy of the Lunar Vigil, the legend, the curse—the goddamn Weeping Man.

  He tried to retreat, but his limbs would not move. They were surrounded by swirling trails of the Weeping Man’s smoke body. And those eyes, which ran with rivers of liquid light, penetrated his soul and left him cold, exposed. Those eyes, absorbing the entirety of his focus, unraveled into a convex collage of memories flashing through the raw synapses of his brain.

  Spinneretta. Arthr. Kara. The last times he’d seen Jack and Emily and Stella before their deaths. His grandfather, hunched over a half-drained bottle of rye, expounding upon the treachery of Golgotha. Blood,
running from the throat of a sacrifice, sparkling emerald fire shining as a death lantern upon the ritual. Mark, Mark’s eyes, Mark’s arrival, Mark’s mercy, Mark’s words, Mark’s anger. And then the Golmont Corporation. A terminal, a command line. Pixels folding into themselves, expanding in electronic vistas like grains of salt on a sunlamp.

  He saw a spider in vitro, a single mind trapped in a web of lies glistening blue with the thoughts of the Helixweaver. He saw himself as a child, strangled by the shining strands, trapped within the depths of the hall of mirrors. Code. Streams of log data running, trying, catching. Each try-catch was a nail in his coffin, a blister that oozed with certainty. And as the images running rampant through his mind receded, the smoke invading his nostrils and ears and eyes retreated, leaving him alone with the eyes of the Weeping Man.

  And a moment later, the lights of those smokeborne eyes were no more than ghosts on his retinas, blemishes burned into his lenses. Shaking, Ralph took an unsteady step back from the wild fantasy. He found that the four children had vanished. The fire had burned low, as though hours had passed, and the blood that fueled the fire had crystallized. Staring into the mesmerizing embers of the purple flames, Ralph could still hear the chant of the children echoing in the dead lands around him, through the mangled claws of the petrified forest. The absence of the children gave no shelter from those haunting lyrics.

  Yellow King and Helixweaver

  The Chosen and the believer

  When they fight, within mists white

  How many dead stars will ignite?

  One, two, three, four, five . . .

  Chapter 20

  Misery Loves Company

  The next day, Spinneretta avoided Mark like a goddamn plague. It was hard enough to even look at him when their paths crossed, which was a thankfully rare occurrence. But that rarity just made it harder to meet his gaze and keep up her front of cold fury. A sleepless night of tossing, turning, and hating had tempered her nerves to brittle glass. Her anger and indignation had mostly cooled, giving rise to an acidic self-loathing that ate at the walls of her stomach. Who the hell do you think you are? she demanded of herself. Are you really this shallow and fragile? There are more important things going on right now, you know. Her own meager pride stopped her from going so far as apologizing, but goddamn if she didn’t feel worthless for it all. She longed for the simple boredom of the previous days.

  What’s wrong with me? she kept finding herself thinking. Why did I have to go and make such a big deal out of nothing? If she had just let it go, then she wouldn’t be stewing in her own angry drippings. The gross imagery didn’t help, and soon she found her thoughts spiraling into the cycle again, alternating between self-hatred, plain hatred, disgust, and helplessness.

  She needed a distraction more than ever.

  And so after wasting the better part of the day avoiding Mark, her mother, Kara, and the Leng cat her sister was so jubilantly risking life and limb to entertain, Spinneretta secluded herself in the study. There she tried to read through any number of the mentally exhausting books on Kyle’s shelf. But they did not hold her interest for long, and soon she was up and wandering again. That was when she found Kyle drinking alone in the kitchen.

  When she passed through the threshold, he started and came close to spilling his beverage all over a stack of books that did not belong on the small breakfast table. “Ahh,” he said, trying to hide his surprise behind a fake coughing fit. “It’s you. Everything okay?”

  You have to ask? What could possibly be okay in this situation? She shook her head. “I’m bored,” she said. “I need something to take my mind off the fact that there’s nothing to do here.”

  He turned his gaze back to the tinted window above the sink. “Mm.”

  “Do you, by chance, have a computer here?”

  He scratched his head a little and groaned. “Computer.” He thought about it for a moment, and then his eyes lit up. “Never really needed one here since I’ve got one at work I use, but I think I have an old one somewhere. In the attic, I’d wager. Wanna come take a look?”

  She did, badly. And so she did not hesitate to follow when his chair groaned and he started toward the stairs.

  The attic, accessed through a trapdoor at the end of the hall, was much larger and filthier than the one at home. Opposite sides of the ceiling slanted away from a single thick beam, like a book with its spine broken in the wrong direction. The floorboards, long uncared for, were covered in loose slivers and pinholes that could have been eaten by termites. Just like at home, boxes were stacked four-high along the walls, creating alleyways where old trunks and footlockers hid.

  Unwilling to dirty her own hands on the piles of refuse, Spinneretta watched Kyle wade through the dust-painted chest stacks with a practiced familiarity. “Let’s see here,” he muttered to himself. He pushed a tower of cardboard boxes off a trunk and pulled it out, kicking up a cloud of cobwebs. “This might be it.” He paused. “Nah, never mind. False alarm.” He kicked the offending chest once and pushed it back against the wall before moving on to another series of boxes.

  The only light bulb in the attic flickered as though it were in its death throes. The sinister shadows of the support beams and boxes made Spinneretta uncomfortable. Between the anger she was suppressing and the darkness around her, she felt like she was stuck in a tomb. Not only that, but that flickering was already starting to grind at her temples. Finally, after what seemed like forever, Kyle hauled a brown footlocker out of the corner and threw the latches open. “Got it. Here’s the ol’ girl.”

  Spinneretta peered into the chest, where an old monitor sat. It was fastened to a triangular wedge of gray plastic that made up the body of the machine, which included an attached keyboard so clunky and mechanical-looking that it should only have existed in a history book.

  “God, this thing must be older than you by half,” Kyle said, vocalizing her thoughts. “This was probably made in, what, eighty-five? Eighty-eight? If you want to try and get this working, you’ve got greater ambition than I ever did.”

  She stared at the fossil. “You never got it working?”

  “Not really. Didn’t have the time. Don’t know anything about UNIX, do you?”

  She shook her head. She’d heard the word, but hadn’t a clue what it meant.

  “Well. I think you’ll have fun. There should be a book in there with it.”

  At his beckoning, she dug down into the chest. Sure enough, beneath the wedge-shaped piece of plastic and machinery was a thick, paperback volume smashed between a broken lamp and a coil of phone cord. She pulled the book out and blew a layer of particulate filth from the cover. A Practical Guide to the UNIX System, the cover declared. The book cracked open between her hands with an audible groan of its time-stiffened pages. The creaking leaves naturally opened to an early page with a bookmark jammed into its gutter. The bookmark immediately caught Spinneretta’s eye. A rubbery rectangular magnet, whose faded blue face had a border of spiraling ribbons that surrounded a familiar couplet in the center:

  The wolf in the warren, ravens overhead

  Three miles in bedlam, Arachne weaves her thread

  What the hell? she thought. Why is this in here? There was no mistaking it. It was the same poem—indeed, the same magnet—that she had found in her mother’s trunk of ancient sentimental garbage. It was a synchronicity too powerful to ignore. Two magnets. Two attics. Two memories. Too late to go back. She closed the book with a shaky breath, not wanting to invite any explanation of the artifact.

  “Well, good luck,” Kyle said over his shoulder as he descended the ladder ahead of her. “Just don’t get too frustrated when you can’t get that thing to do anything.”

  She snapped her head around at him, stung by the accusation lurking in his words. “What?”

  “UNIX is a dinosaur. Not just anyone can sit down and use it. It’s complicated. Not like your smartphones these days.”

  After Kyle had vanished, Spinneretta lingered a few sec
onds longer. Her blood ran hot. That comment should have slid off her shoulders, but the skin on her shoulder hadn’t all grown back yet. After everything that had been building up since prom night, it took all of her restraint not to hurl the book through the floorboards and let the chips—and termite-eaten splinters—fall where they might. A few breaths to calm herself, and a few more to erase the stench of the molded pages from her nostrils. Calm down, she thought. Quit taking everything so personally, alright? We’re not too stupid to work a twenty-year-old computer, after all.

  In the haze of her confusion and anger and rattled nerves, she found a glint of hope. She’d found her distraction. And getting that computer working, whatever that entailed, was now a matter of pride.

  “What the hell is this?” Spinneretta’s outburst rang off the walls of the study, but it was too late in the night for anybody to answer her question. The window in the hall opened into black nothingness. Her half-eaten Hot Pocket dinner sat abandoned upon a plate beside the computer she’d spent the whole evening setting up. The computer screen, nearly as black as the night-facing window in the hall, featured only the soft blinking of a command prompt. After waiting patiently for aeons as the machine ran its disk checks and facing down the login screen, she’d assumed that the Elysian fields of something waited beyond. But after deciphering the old, scarcely legible pen markings of Kyle’s username and password—which he’d been kind enough to leave scrawled in the thick manual’s margins a lifetime earlier—she’d found no reprieve. A few lines of welcoming text greeted her, below which sat an enigmatic dollar-sign and the blinking cursor. Nothing more.

  What am I supposed to do? She’d expected this UNIX thing to at least resemble what a computer ought to be, but there was just nothing. And no matter what she typed on the crunchy old keyboard, the abyss would only echo back the mocking string command not found, like some kind of modern parody of Poe’s The Raven.