“Here?” he asked, a tremor in his voice. He didn’t like being in the open, especially with that horrible winged thing so close. “Aren’t you worried about Leland? The Goat?”
Chloe shook her head.
“No, we’re far enough away now. He won’t bother us here. Besides, he has what he needs.”
An image of Shelly, her face the epitome of terror, her hands clutching her swollen middle, flooded his mind and he shuddered.
She wasn’t his—he had wanted her to be, surely—but she wasn’t. She was Robert’s, and yet he still felt guilt at having left her. After all, she was his friend. And the last time that a woman had come between himself and a friend, things had ended badly for everyone.
Very badly.
As if reading his mind, Chloe said, “We can’t get her back. Only Robert can do that now.”
Cal groaned and lowered the travois gently to the ground. After confirming that Robert was still asleep, if that’s really what he was doing, Cal stretched his back and legs, trying to work out some of the soreness that had built inside his muscles like molten wax.
Then he turned his attention to the spot in which they had stopped and frowned.
The damp sand was going to offer him little comfort, he knew. If, of course, he was capable of sleep.
“Why? Why is—”
Chloe hushed him.
“Let’s gather wood and make a fire,” She turned her gaze skyward. “It’s going to get cold tonight. Might even rain.”
“But—”
She turned, and the moonlight lit the scarred crevices in her face like the individual strands of a coarsely braided rope.
“There will be plenty of time to talk, Cal. Now, please, help me gather some wood. Aiden, you stay here and stand point.”
The man had been so silent during their journey that Cal had forgotten he was even with them. When he looked at Aiden, he realized that his form appeared more solid in the moonlight. Not completely opaque—Cal could still make out a sort of low definition representation of the sand behind him if he turned his head at a particular angle—but not as waif-like as before.
Yes, everyone had made a sacrifice in this war for the Marrow.
Chapter 19
“I’m not surprised. Everyone comes across the Curator at least once in their lives. Most people don’t even notice him—or her—they just pass by without knowing. Some though… some are touched.”
Cal stared into the flames, watching them as they ascended upward, dancing their seductive dance. Just when he thought he saw some sort of image, made sense of their twisting shape, they evaporated into the moonlight.
“I didn’t pass him by,” he said softly. “Or at least he didn’t pass me by. He spoke to me, told me things, things that I didn’t—still don’t—completely understand.”
Silence fell over the he and Chloe, and Cal took this moment to look down at his friend as he had done repeatedly over the last few hours.
To see if Robert was still breathing.
And he was. Robert’s chest rose slowly, and then fell. He was enveloped in a deep, deep sleep, something that Cal envied. Exhaustion had wrapped its long fingers around his chest, and had started to squeeze.
“The Curator has been around for a long time, Cal. A long, long time. Even longer than I have, and maybe even Sean Sommers, before his time was up. There are things that he knows, of which I am not even privy. Things about the nature of this world, about the Marrow, about doorways.”
Doorways? Doorways to where?
He shook his head, fighting back memories of that day back in Mooreshead. With all that had happened over the past six months or so, he felt his mind might shatter like Robert’s if he started to relive that, too.
“What’s going to happen here, Chloe? What’s Leland’s end game?”
Chloe didn’t answer for so long that Cal thought that she might have fallen asleep by the fire like her son.
“Chl—”
She raised her face to look at him, her lipless mouth stretching into a thin, emotionless line.
“Leland has one goal: to open a rift in the Marrow. To allow quiddity to flow from the Marrow and back into this world,” she paused before continuing. “Something happened to him, something changed him. He used to be one of us, a guardian. And like me, he worked hard to keep the Marrow a one-way street. Sure, over the decades, there have always been dissidents among our ranks, those who yearned for more. Sometimes these impostors come in the form of religious zealots, other times something just snaps, as happened to Leland, and they go off the rails. They get obsessed with this idea that the self is real, that it’s worth preserving, that it’s so valuable that it shouldn’t simply reside in the Marrow, but it should be here on earth, forever. But it’s an illusion, Cal. The self simply doesn’t exist.”
Cal shook his head. He had heard this rhetoric before, but each successive time he thought he understood it less.
“What does that mean, exactly? I mean, I view the world from my own eyes, view it from my own experience. But I don’t exist?”
Chloe shrugged.
“You exist, but not in the way that you think you do. There is no little man behind your eyes guiding your actions, no overseer of your being. There is just your biology, which is governed by your experiences and your genetics. And there is also your quiddity, your essence, which brings everything together in a cohesive unit. And this quiddity must be returned to the Marrow so that it can become the glue for others who have yet to be born.”
“So, it’s… what? Like reincarnation?”
Chloe sighed.
“Yes and no. Not in the religious sense, anyway. People are fascinated by the traditional idea of reincarnation for the most base reasons: you get to live on, you, the self which doesn’t exist, gets transposed into a new mind, a new body and you get to continue your life journey. This is not quiddity, this is fantasy. There is only life and the Marrow, and the quiddity that must be returned.”
Cal let this final sentence sink in for a moment.
“Then what is the Marrow? Why does it exist? What’s the point?”
Chloe drew a deep breath, which had a slight whistling sound to it as it passed through where her nose used to be.
“I’m tired, Cal—I need to sleep. And you would be well-advised to do the same. The time when we need to make a stand is nearing, a stand that will be led by Robert, but one that we all have a role to play in. Tomorrow when we meet with the Curator, you will know more. Until then, rest.”
Cal debated telling Chloe about the book, the one that he had scribbled furiously in all those years ago—about the tunnels and the tanks that had seemingly come from nowhere, passing through his mind to his arm, his hand, the pencil, and then finally transcribed on the page—but decided against it.
He had secrets, too. And while they might eventually come to the fore, now was not the time.
Chloe was right, they needed to sleep.
But he had just one more question before they packed it in for the night.
“The Marrow… it means the middle, right?”
Chloe nodded, the fire dancing as it reflected off her one good eye.
“But the middle of what, exactly?”
Chloe’s body had become still.
“Chloe?”
No response.
Cal frowned and shifted his ass in the sand. Then he lay down and stared at the stars high above.
Is this all there is?
***
Water clung to his calves like two puckering, toothless mouths trying to suck the hair from his bare legs.
He looked down then, his eyes drawn to the flickering creatures that passed all around him. At first, he thought they were bioluminescent krill, glowing bright white as they shed their energy. But upon closer inspection, Cal realized that these were no aquatic critters; instead, the glowing objects were reflections of the stars in the night sky above, appearing to dance their pretty dance as energy passed through the water.
Cal felt a sense of serenity, despite being unsure of whether he was dreaming or awake, and if the latter, how he had come to be in the water. It was as if the liquid itself, suckling at his very flesh, was imbued with some sort of drug, a muscle relaxant, that made him feel completely at ease.
He turned his gaze slowly upward, the stars blurring slightly as if smeared with a greasy thumb.
His eyes fell on the brightest star in the sky, a giant, glowing pinprick that started to grow as he stared at it.
It’s just my eyes defocussing, he thought, but as he continued to look, he realized that this wasn’t the case.
The star really was growing.
Cal squinted, trying to understand what he was seeing.
A supernova? A government satellite? An experiment in deep space?
He had heard of such things, of the government creating cluster bombs in space. Preparing for a war here on earth.
But the stars started to spread out, not in a random pattern as he might expect if it was some sort of explosion. Instead, the stars replicated, duplicated, formed discrete, organized rows.
They almost looked like brushed steel, like tunnels…
Something brushed against Cal’s leg, and his eyes, wide now, whipped downward.
This time there was an aquatic creature in the water, only it wasn’t a miniature crustacean or jellyfish, but a fish… of sorts.
It was thinner and wider than any Cal had seen before, and it had long, flowing tendrils that made up some sort of tail.
For some reason, Cal felt compelled to grab it, and he leaned over to do just that. Only when his hand broke the surface of the water, the fish-like creature flipped onto its side, revealing a scaleless surface roughly the size of a dinner plate.
Cal made out two slits in the side, and then they opened.
Two eyes stared up at him—two large, human eyes. And even though they weren’t masked by round spectacles, he recognized the pale blue eyes never-the-less.
They were Allan Knox’s eyes.
The eyes blinked once, twice, and then Cal started to scream.
Chapter 20
Helen Humphries didn’t need to spring to the surface as she had done twice before. Instead, she simply floated there like foam sitting atop the surface of a swamp.
And yet she didn’t kid herself; she knew that Robert was in charge, that he could push her back down at any moment. But she also knew that if she wanted to, Helen could make it difficult for him to do exactly that, and if taken by surprise, well…
It was a strange, exhilarating, empowering experience when she was in control of Robert Watts’s body. Back when Helen had been alive, control was something that had escaped her the same way calculus seemed out of reach in high school; she knew that an answer existed, that the problem could be solved, but the methodology, the steps needed to get there, simply eluded her.
You ain’t nothin’ but a sack of meat; tits on an incubator. And your fucking incubator’s broke, her husband’s voice grated. Then he had laughed, tilting his thick chin to the sky, a throaty chuckle aimed upward like some sort of organic thunder.
You can’t even fucking do that right!
The truth was, Helen was ashamed. And even if she thought that her degenerate husband would listen, she wouldn’t have been able to tell him the truth, that the reason why she couldn’t have children was because her father had beaten her when she was little, had whipped and punched her so many times that she had first missed, then stopped having her period altogether. The doctors said she had a cyst on her left ovary and that was why it was difficult to conceive, but Helen didn’t believe them.
She knew the truth.
Her father had beaten her so badly one night that she hadn’t been able to take a deep breath, let alone sleep. And these cramps, the worst cramps she had ever experienced, had kept her near or on the toilet for hours.
And there had been blood in the bowl, lots of it.
When she had finally gathered the courage to leave home, the day she turned nineteen years of age, Helen left the weathered two-story colonial with the red brick front and off-white siding, vowing never to return.
And she had held that part of the bargain—not returning home—but her first relationship… well, the man had been a splitting image of her father, complete with the same thinning hair, same scowl, but most damaging was the fact that he had the same temper.
It was her fault, she knew. Not all of it, of course, not in the way that she had done something to deserve the punishment she took first from her father—You little shit, you think that you can track mud in here and just go about your merry fucking way? Oh, oh, oh, nooo. You are sadly mistaken. You will clean this with your fucking tongue—and then from her husband—the dishes still ain’t clean? Still? And you’ve been home all day, doing what… exactly?—but she had had plenty of opportunities to stop it.
The first time Frank Humphries had laid a hand on her had been his first time as well. He slapped Helen across the cheek, not in pure fury, but with something akin to trepidation. And then his eyes had changed, and in that moment—in that split-second—Helen could have altered the course of not only her own history, but perhaps the history of a woman after her, or maybe two or three who might happen across Frank Humphries in their time, but she hadn’t—Helen had done nothing.
And when no divine or secular power had intervened, Frank’s eyes had changed again. They went dark. And they would remain dark until her own vision turned black as his fist collapsed the side of her face.
She had waited so long to respond, to actually do anything to help herself, that when she finally tried, it was too late.
Far too late.
Helen was like the boxer who had already lost the fight, the ref was holding her while at the same time trying to wave his arms and signal that the match was indeed over.
She pawed at Frank as he struck her, which only served to infuriate him further.
How dare she respond this way now? After all this time? After the precedent had been set, after the pattern had been established.
And then, Helen Humphries had died.
Only she hadn’t, not really, not all the way.
The darkness of death that she had expected had encompassed her, but while her visual senses had been obliterated, something remained. There was something in that void.
A voice. One that called to her.
Hellllennnnn, Helllennnn.
A masculine voice, one dripping with authority, one to which she was compelled to listen.
Helllllennn, I need you to do something for me.
Helen felt her head nod up and down, despite the fact that she no longer had a head or even a body to actually move.
The next thing she heard was the rain. The sound, but not the sensation as even though the water pelted down on her—she heard it, saw it, smelled it, almost tasted it—it didn’t seem to touch her.
Confused, Helen turned her head skyward, expecting the careening droplets to force her to blink, but that didn’t happen either.
The drops appeared to simply pass through her. Helen raised her palms next, confusion washing over her.
It’s my eye, she thought, as she tried to grow accustomed to her monocular vision. It’s just strange, something I need to get used to.
But with her palms up, she realized that she couldn’t feel the drops on her skin. And her skin… it had a strange, bluish tinge to it, and if she focused hard enough, Helen could pick up the sight of wet grass through her hands.
This made her feel nauseous, and she decided not to consider it for a while, at least.
After all, there were more pressing questions to deal with. Starting with figuring out how she had gone from being pummeled by her husband in her living room to being here, outside in the rain.
Alone.
Confused.
Headlights suddenly lit up the night, and Helen instinctively crouched down and scooted backward. She was at the side of the road, she realized,
at the edge of a small, overgrown area that might have at one time been the borders of the woods, but had since been clawed back to make room for more roads, infrastructure, town houses.
But then she saw something else. A little girl, eight maybe nine years of age, her head down, her pace slow, trodden. She was on the sidewalk, but the car that approached was taking the corner too quickly on the rain slick road.
Helen realized what was going to happen, and started to move.
And then the voice spoke to her again, and her actions were magnified.
Now! Go to her now!
Helen leapt forward, not thinking of what she was doing.
It was a terrible mistake.
The girl would have been better off if Helen had stayed in the woods, maybe even more so if she had remained dead after Frank Humphries had killed her.
Helen saw the woman’s face clearly through the windshield, her pretty, heart-shaped features illuminated by the ambient glow of a cell phone.
Their eyes met, and the mouth of the woman behind the wheel parted in a scream. In order to avoid Helen, she yanked the steering wheel to the right and aimed the two-ton hunk of metal and plastic directly at the young girl in the soggy sneakers who continued to walk, head down, wet hair dripping in front of her face.
And then Helen was gone again, surrounded by the velvety blanket of darkness, only to return in a derelict Crematorium some months later, a single thought echoing in her mind: Amy.
Chapter 21
Aiden Kinkaid watched Cal rise from his slumber, staring in confusion at the whites of the man’s eyes which were visible between thin slits.
What the fuck is he doing?
After Chloe and Cal had fallen asleep, Aiden had receded away from the fire, taking up post against a small outcropping of rocks roughly fifty yards from where they lay.
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