Ascension (Demon's Grail Book 1)

by Amy Cross

  “Dreams are often an expression of forces that we don't fully understand,” I point out.

  “You've researched the matter?”

  “I...”

  “You're so worried by your dreams,” she continues, “that you've even sought professional help. You've also refrained from taking too many lovers to your bed, lest you disturb them when you cry out in your sleep. I suppose that means you're a little inexperienced in certain areas.”

  I want to tell her to get out of here, but somehow she seems to know far more than she could ever possibly have guessed. Either I have a particularly resourceful stalker, or I'm giving away much more than I realized with my body language.

  “Perhaps we should have dinner some time,” she says suddenly.

  I stare at her, shocked by the suggestion.

  “How about tonight?” she asks. “We could talk about, oh, I don't know... Politics, perhaps? The weather? And then we could get onto a few more interesting topics, such as the fall of Gothos, the prophecy of Patrick, the story of the miserable pathetic Sophie Hart, maybe even the fate of Karakh?”

  “I...” For a moment I feel a little dizzy, but I quickly manage to pull myself together. “I really have no idea what you're talking about,” I tell her, “and while I'm flattered by your suggestion, I have to say that dinner really...” I pause, fully aware now that this woman is coming onto me for some reason, but also aware that she must be playing a joke. Glancing around, I half expect to see a group of frat boys laughing at me, or a reality TV crew filming a prank.

  “Come on,” she says finally, leaning closer, “don't keep a girl waiting.”

  “Really -”

  Suddenly she reaches down and grabs my crotch. Startled, I pull back.

  “What's wrong?” she asks. “Please don't tell me you bat for the other team.”

  “It's not that,” I stammer, “I just... I have to get back to work. And if you're not here to take out a book or to use the reference section, then I'm afraid I must ask you to stop disrupting the life of the library and... and leave.”

  “Are you throwing me out?”

  “I'm reminding you that this is a library.”

  She stares at me for a moment, before the smile finally leaves her face. “Fine,” she says, adjusting my glasses for me again before turning and making her way along the aisle, “but something tells me we'll end up having that dinner anyway. Life's just like that, don't you find?”

  “I find nothing of the sort,” I reply, taking a deep breath and, a moment later, sighing with relief as I watch her heading out through the exit. I don't know what was wrong with that woman, but no-one normal or sane would ever behave in such a manner, so as I head back to the main desk I can only conclude that I had a close call with some kind of lunatic. As my glasses slip down my nose yet again, I push them back into place.

  And all that stuff about my dreams? I guess that was just sheer coincidence. At the same time, I slip my notebook out from under the counter and flick through the pages, looking over the sketches I've made recently. Sketches from my dreams, showing the visions that keep bursting into my thoughts, visions of things that can't possibly exist. Huge spiders rising up above mountains; a vast library that fills an entire world; a palace made of silk, nestled under a distant sun...

  Abby Hart

  “Albertville Jackson Orphanage,” I whisper as I park the car. “I never heard of this place before.”

  “I have,” Mark replies. “Unfortunately. Sometimes we used to send kids out here to stay when there was nowhere else for them to go. You'd be surprised how many times we find babies abandoned in the city. I never understood the kind of person who can do that, but people on drugs, people who are desperate...” As he opens the passenger-side door and climbs out, I can tell that the situation weighs heavily on his mind. “It happens way more often than it should.”

  “Olivia Vaughn was found abandoned on the steps of a police station,” I remind him, stepping out of the car and then making my way across the quiet street. The orphanage is way out of town, on a patch of road with just a few rusty old warehouses nearby. “She was just a baby, five or six days old at the time, so she was sent here.”

  “Standard procedure,” Mark says as he follows me.

  “So why did it close down?” I ask, reaching the door and pulling on the handle, only to find that it's locked. I take a step back and look up at the building's dark, dusty windows. It looks less like an orphanage and more like just another warehouse on the block, albeit one that dealt with children.

  “The story I heard,” Mark explains, “is that about ten years ago, there was some kind of scandal involving the guy who ran the orphanage. Everything was kept kinda hush-hush, but the gist of it is that it turned out he'd been...” He pauses, as if he doesn't even want to say the next part. “Well, to put it bluntly, he'd been renting out some of the kids for parties.”

  I turn to him. “You mean...”

  “Most kids just passed through Albertville Jackson Orphanage for a few months while they waited to be adopted by a family. Some, though, ended up staying and growing up here. They were the unlucky ones. Usually they were rejected by potential families because of some perceived flaw. People can be picky sometimes when they're choosing a child. Well, when they're adopting them at least. Turns out, the businessmen and politicians who rented kids for parties were far less picky. They just wanted a good time.”

  “Say what you like about vampires,” I mutter, checking the door to see if there's any chance of picking the lock, “but there are some types of monster that only exist in the human world.”

  “So do you think Emilia was raised here?” he asks. “If she was, maybe that'd explain -”

  Before he can finish, I use my elbow to smash the glass in the door.

  “Abby!”

  “Don't start preaching at me,” I reply, knocking the remaining pieces of glass out of the frame before climbing through into the dark building. “The place is abandoned, no-one cares. There might be some old files dotted about, though, and I need to see where Emilia spent her early years. Maybe it'll help me to understand her.”

  “I thought you wanted to kill her,” he points out, climbing through after me.

  “Which will be easier if I've got a handle on who she really is,” I reply, stepping over the broken glass and looking around at the huge entrance hallway as I make my way forward. With a high, arched ceiling rising above us, supported by a series of columns, there's something almost proud about the place. “It's kind of beautiful, in a twisted way,” I reply, seeing a large stone staircase at the far end, presumably leading up into the guts of the building. “That's another thing I don't understand about humans. You leave places like this to rot.”

  “Probably because of its history,” Mark replies, heading over to a nearby door and pulling it open. “Can't you feel it? There's something in the air here, something that isn't right.” He pauses for a moment. “I think I found the old office.”

  With daylight just about showing through the dirty windows, we're at least able to find our way about. The office turns out to be a large room with a couple of desks at the far end, but when I open the filing cabinets in the corner I'm disappointed to find that they've been emptied. I guess it was unrealistic to expect that a convenient set of documents might have been left behind, detailing everything I could possibly want to know about Emilia Vaughn, but as I wander toward the nearest desk and open the drawers, I feel as if I'm already starting to understand a little more about where she came from. She was just another forgotten kid, at least for a while; dumped in a place like this and left at the mercy of whoever was in charge.

  “So what happened to the guy who ran the orphanage?” I ask. “I assume he's rotting in a jail cell somewhere?”

  “Hardly. There wasn't enough of his body left.”

  I turn to him. “His body?”

  “Did you seriously never hear about the Everard Constantine case?”

  “Must've bee
n before my time.”

  “Constantine was the monster who ran this orphanage,” he explains, “but he was never brought to justice. Not officially, anyway. He was an expert at covering his tracks, he knew exactly how to make all the questions go away. Besides, the people who used his services were politicians, local business leaders, guys who looked after each other and made sure investigations hit dead ends. It pains me to say this, but I honestly don't know if Everard Constantine would ever have been caught if...” He pauses next to one of the other desks. “His body was found right here at the orphanage. The police received an anonymous tip-off about a disturbance, and when they arrived they discovered Constantine's burning corpse in one of the rooms. In another room, there was a mountain of very carefully arranged paperwork that exposed the whole thing.”

  “Including the details of everyone who rented children?”

  He nods. “Not that much was done about it. Some other three-letter agency took over the case and spirited away all the evidence, and somehow no-one ended up getting arrested.” He picks up a piece of paper from the desk and examines it for a moment, before setting it back down, clearly finding nothing of interest. “That was when I realized that the bad guys don't always get locked up.”

  “And they never found out who killed Everard Constantine?”

  “Never. The assumption was that it must have been one of the children. The place was quickly closed down and the remaining kids were fed into other parts of the system. No-one ever talked.”

  “And somewhere in all of that,” I mutter, opening more drawers but finding nothing, “Emilia Vaughn passed through the place.” I pause for a moment, before looking over at the door. “There's nothing in this office. We have to go further.”

  ***

  “Where are you now?” I ask, holding my phone up as I make my way along a gloomy corridor.

  “I think I found one of the old dormitories,” Mark replies from the other end of the line. “Abby, is there really any need for us to go poking about here like this? It's an abandoned building, and like I told you, the whole thing was covered up years ago. No-one's going to have left a bunch of convenient documents behind.”

  “What's wrong?” I ask. “Finding the place a little spooky?”

  “Aren't you?” I hear a creaking sound over the phone, as if he's opening a door. “You can almost sense the misery in the air,” he continues. “There's nothing here, though. It's just empty room after empty room, we're wasting our time.”

  “I need to know where Emilia came from,” I tell him. “She didn't just pop into existence out of nowhere, there have to have been others like her, so I need to get a sense of what really happened. Who left her on the steps of that police station? What happened to her while she was at this orphanage? Where did she go after she was here?” Stopping in a doorway, I look through at a large room with old metal beds arranged on either side, and a shiver passes through my chest as I think of the children who must have grown up here. “I'm starting to realize how lucky I was.”

  “How's that?”

  “I was an orphan too, remember?” Stepping into the room, I try to imagine what it must have been like when there were children in these beds. “Except unlike Emilia, I was quickly adopted by people who cared for me and who looked after me. I lived with Evan and Ruth Parlour in Callerton, New Mexico until I was in my teens. They raised me as if I was their own daughter. I was loved. There was always food on the table, always gifts under the Christmas tree, always a bed-time story.” I stop next to one of the beds, just a bare and rusty metal frame. “Emilia wasn't so lucky, not if she ended up in a place like this.”

  “Are you starting to feel sympathy for her?” Mark asks.

  “Never,” I reply, annoyed by the suggestion. “I'm just noticing some parallels and -”

  Suddenly I hear the sound of a little girl laughing, and I turn just in time to see a figure flashing past the open doorway. For a moment, I stand and listen to footsteps racing away, and then I hurry to the door and look out into the corridor. There's no-one there, of course, but I know I didn't imagine that presence a moment ago, and I also know that I have a tendency to pick up on echoes from time to time. The truth always lingers in a place like this, waiting to be seen.

  “Abby?” Mark says after a moment. “You still there?”

  “Just keep looking around,” I tell him. “I'll meet you at the car when we're done.”

  “But if -”

  Cutting the call, I slip my phone away and wait. After a few seconds, I realize I can hear a child laughing in another of the rooms. The sound is faint, almost weak, as if it's here but not here at the same time.

  Making my way along the corridor, I can already feel my heart pounding in my chest, but I force myself to keep going. If Emilia was really here at the orphanage, I have to know as much about her as possible, and that means following any leads that present themselves. Reaching the next turning, I stop suddenly as soon as I see there are half a dozen small figures at the far end of the corridor, standing outside an open doorway.

  They're not ghosts.

  I know they're not.

  That's not how this works.

  They're echoes of something that happened long ago.

  I take a few steps forward, and as I get closer I see that the children are staring at something in the next room, and their faces are filled not with fear, which was what I expected, but with a sense of anticipation. As I reach them, I look through into the room and to my horror I see that there's an elderly man on the floor, with thick ropes tied around his body and a gag in his mouth. He's struggling to get free, desperately trying to call out while a little girl, no more than five or six years old, walks around him and pours some kind of liquid out of a can, dribbling it all over the man's body. Taking a step forward, I watch as the girl stops with her back to me and sets the can on the ground.

  “Everard Constantine,” I whisper, watching the man's terrified eyes as he tries to get free.

  I can smell gasoline.

  The little girl is fiddling with something in her hands, and a moment later she lights a match.

  Before I can say a word, the girl tosses the match onto the man's body and flames burst across the room. I turn and step back, shielding my eyes from the inferno as I feel roaring heat against the side of my face. Looking at the gathered children, I see that they're staring unblinkingly at the flames, even as the man's agonized screams fill the room. My first instinct is to rush forward and try to save him, but I know that these are just echoes and, besides, if even half of what Mark told me is true, I can understand why the children of this orphanage would have wanted to get away from such a terrible man. Still, if this is really what happened, it's hard to believe that these young souls could have committed such a horrific act.

  Turning to look back toward the flames, I see the dark shape of a man's body trying to crawl from the heart of the inferno. His screaming, burning face is visible for a few seconds before, after a moment, he slumps down against the ground.

  The little girl with the matches still has her back to me, silhouetted against the flames, but slowly she starts to turn and even before I even see her eyes, I already recognize her.

  It's Emilia.

  And she's staring straight at me.

  Hearing my phone ringing in my pocket, I slip it out and see that Mark is trying to get in touch with me.

  “Do you hear anything?” I shout as soon as I answer, before he can say anything. Holding the phone out, I give him a chance to listen to the roaring flames for a moment.

  “Hear what?” he asks, sounding genuinely confused.

  “You don't hear anything at all?” I ask, as little Emilia continues to stare at me.

  “Nothing except your voice,” he replies.

  I set the phone against the side of my face, while holding Emilia's gaze. “That's what I figured. It's just an impression of the past.”

  “Are you okay, Abby?” Mark asks.

  “I'm fine.” I w
atch Emilia for a moment longer, and I can't shake the feeling that even though she's just an echo, it's almost as if she senses my presence. Slowly, a smile starts to cross her lips, as if she's proud of what she's done. “What did you want?” I ask Mark. “Why did you call?”

  “You won't believe this,” he replies, “but I actually found something about Emilia in one of the rooms.”

  “Huh,” I whisper, unable to stop staring into the little girl's eyes as the flames continue to burn behind her. “Yeah. Me too.”

  Jonathan

  By the time I get home after a long shift at the library, I'm exhausted. I toss my satchel onto the desk in my cramped one-room apartment, and then I sit on the bed, figuring I need to rest and maybe take my mind of things by reading for an hour or two. I grab my sketchbook, which I've been using to record some of my crazier dreams, and I flick through the pages. In the past few days alone, I've drawn images of figures in dark ruins, and creatures that can't possibly exist. And snow. Lots of snowy landscapes, with rivers of blood flowing through a dead forest.

  Of course, as usual, I quickly fall asleep while looking at the images.

  And then the dreams come.

  They start the way they always start. I'm on my hands and knees on some kind of rough, rocky ground. It's night, and snow is falling. Breathless and in pain, I raise my head and see something in the distance: there's a figure slumped on the ground, and I immediately feel compelled to go to her. No, wait, compelled isn't the right word; it's more like I have no choice, as if the figure is actually a part of me. Struggling to my feet, I stumble across the freezing landscape until I reach the figure, and when I look down at her face I feel a flash of recognition. She's just a girl, no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, but she looks like...

  I feel a shiver pass through my body.