Crook of the Dead (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 3)

by Jen Rasmussen

  But fuck, if I wasn’t getting sick and tired of that head-popping pain, and not being able to breathe, and all that other bullshit. Even Phineas, who was a lot more used to this sort of thing than I was, was a little disoriented. But we managed to find our remnants and get to our feet before very long. So far, so good.

  Yeah well, take a second to enjoy that feeling of something going smoothly. In case it’s the last time you ever experience it.

  At first, it was just like the netherworld in the canteen: misty, a little muddy, but mostly just blank, like a stage set. The buzzing of insects was everywhere, an unpleasant feature I’d nearly forgotten. But I guessed it was better than the buzzing plus the actual insects, so there was that.

  “Which direction?” Phineas asked.

  “I’m not sure it matters,” I said. “I think this part will pull you farther in no matter which way you go. But…” I looked around, then sniffed the dead air, although I had no idea what I was hoping to smell. “But this way feels like it goes deeper, doesn’t it?”

  “If you say so.”

  We started walking in the direction I’d chosen. Before long the empty landscape began to fill in. Amias’s netherworld—his paradise, if our theory was right—was a mockery of the orchards he’d grown up in. There were dead trees, heavy with rancid-smelling fruit, and crooked towers of black stone. It was cloudy, gloomy, and generally depressing.

  “This is not his heaven, surely?”

  Phineas shook his head. “I doubt it. But it might be more fun for him to create someone else’s hell.”

  “Do you suppose he has anyone else here, besides our hostages and the souls he killed on Halloween?”

  “I have no idea. Presumably the whole point of the mass murder was to populate this place, but he might have had a couple of test cases first.”

  That triggered a memory: Madeline Underwood in prison, talking about her brother. It was a great honor. A confidential mission of great importance.

  “Mark Underwood may have been one of those test cases,” I said. “Which makes sense, since Max said Mark was with Norbert.”

  “If the crossbred shadow eaters were trained specifically for this, Bella Traven might be another,” said Phineas. “We— woah.”

  We’d come to a clearing that was identical to the one Homecoming had been held in. Tables were set up and laid out with food, a mix of what I’d seen at Phineas’s feast and food from my own world. There were roasts, cheeses, baskets of fruit, a great big platter of donuts.

  It was all rotten and furry with mold. A huge, multi-tiered cake decorated with dead flowers was encased in spider webs, like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake.

  There was music coming from the tall tower in the center of the clearing, an off-key, out-of-harmony orchestra playing a song so unpleasant it made my teeth hurt. But amid all that harsh noise was something beautiful: a woman’s voice—an exceptional one—singing along.

  Phineas gaped at the tower for a minute, then hurried toward it.

  “What?”

  He didn’t answer, so I went after him. As we came up to the tower, I realized that the song was a lullaby. Somehow that made this whole scene even creepier.

  Inside it smelled how I imagine a neglected lighthouse would smell, like low tide trapped in a place that hadn’t been aired out in years. The orchestra music fell away when Phineas closed the door behind us, but the singing got louder.

  The stairs made me nervous. They were stone, but crumbling so badly I was afraid they’d fall part beneath us. Each floor we passed was empty, until we got to the top.

  The singer stood at a window, looking down on the feast. I could see her in profile. And here, surely, was the woman who had scared Max so much, he’d told Jack Nimble he didn’t want to see any more.

  Her matted gray hair fell to her feet and covered her face, except for the tip of her nose, and a space that had been parted around her mouth. The hand that rested on the windowsill was gnarled, the fingernails long and yellow. She was a hag, straight out of a fairy tale. Too much so. It felt contrived.

  By then I wasn’t surprised to hear Phineas ask, “Aunt Alice?”

  Still singing, she turned toward him. I couldn’t see her eyes or anything else about her expression, behind that hair. Phineas stepped forward and reached out to brush it back.

  Her song ended abruptly in a shriek as she jumped back against the wall, then slid down against it until she was crouched, screaming, inside her tent of hair.

  Phineas grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her hard enough for me to hear her teeth clack together. “Alice!”

  She stopped screaming and started crying instead. At least that was quieter. Phineas finally got the hair out of her face. The stark pain there was heartbreaking.

  Alice reached out and touched Phineas’s cheek, then started babbling in what sounded like French. Phineas responded in kind. Later I’d have time to note that his accent was flawless, and that I was kind of jealous of every phantasm’s apparent proficiency with languages. But at the moment I was staring at Alice, a plan forming in my head.

  Probably it wasn’t very compassionate—the woman was clearly broken—but we could use her.

  After they’d talked for a couple of minutes, Alice collapsed into Phineas’s arms. I crouched beside them. “What’s going on?”

  “Pretty much what it looks like,” Phineas said. “She never came to Homecoming, so now she’s always at Homecoming. And she has to sing.”

  “Will he notice that she stopped, then?”

  He shrugged, still hugging his aunt, her head buried against his chest. “I don’t know. I have no idea what he can or cannot see or sense. He may already know we’re here.”

  “Well, since we haven’t been attacked or detained yet, I suppose we’ll have to proceed as if he doesn’t. Phineas, can you get her to tell you his name? His true name?”

  Something like hope flared in his eyes, but it went as quickly as it came. “I’ll try, but I have my doubts about how rational she can be. As far as I can tell, he tortured her for years before he killed her.”

  “She’s dead?” It was hard to tell, in a netherworld.

  “I’m pretty sure. And I’m positive she’s flat-out insane.”

  He whispered in Alice’s ear in rapid French. She shook her head. Shook it again, harder. Then finally nodded.

  “Kevin,” she said.

  “Did she just say Kevin?”

  Amias’s true name was the same as my cheating lying no good ex-husband’s? Figured.

  “Yes, but she doesn’t know what she’s saying,” Phineas said. “Kevin seems to be a human son she had some years ago.” He talked to her again, then let out a little groan of pity. “Sounds like Amias killed the boy.”

  I sighed and stood, pacing around the tower while Phineas did his best to soothe Alice. Amias’s name was locked in there somewhere. We just had to figure out how to get it out…

  “Claudia!” I said.

  Phineas looked up at me. “Who?”

  “Do you remember Claudia? From the farm?”

  “Sort of.”

  I closed my eyes for a second, willing away the memory of Claudia’s angry, accusing face in my nightmares. “She died that day. At the farm. But that just means we’ve got to help her as much as any of them, right? If we want to set their souls free, we need a weapon against Amias. One he can’t melt or turn against us.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “She could help us.”

  “How?”

  “She was a hypnotherapist.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I swear. Do you think Alice could speak English? Or at least understand it?”

  “Probably.”

  “Okay…” I frowned down at the old woman. “Bring her with us to try to find Claudia, or try to bring Claudia back here?”

  “I think we should leave Alice here.”

  “I hate to do that.”

  “Me too, but what you said about Amias noticin
g if she stops singing made me nervous. What if she leaves this place and it triggers some kind of alarm or something?”

  Alice was pawing at Phineas’s chest now, trying to get his attention. They spoke in French for a bit, then he looked up at me.

  “Apparently she understands English, even if she isn’t speaking it. She’s not exactly lucid, but she got that we were talking about taking her with us. She says he’ll know. She won’t go.”

  I nodded, feeling awful, but there wasn’t much to be done for Alice apart from what we were doing. “Then you’ll have to tell her to start singing again.”

  They spoke, then Alice stood and went back to her window. She was crying, her voice shaky. But she resumed her song.

  “What did you tell her?” I asked as we went back down the stairs.

  “That we had to go and leave her here for now. But I promised we would come back, that we would set her free, and she would be safe from him.”

  I nodded. “Then we’d better keep that promise.”

  The whole thing sucked. Walking away from Alice. Planning to manipulate her, and use Claudia. In that brief moment of recalling what she did for a living, I’d actually been glad that Claudia was probably here in Amias’s hell.

  As we walked out of the clearing to the soundtrack of Alice’s lament, I wondered just how like the devil I’d have to become, in order to beat him.

  We walked for quite a while through Amias’s horrid orchards, before we got to his horrid beach instead.

  The landscape changed abruptly and without warning, much like the plots I’d known in the other netherworld, except it was easy to see the influence of the same twisted mind in these. The water—a great lake, rather than an ocean—was inky black, the sand gray. The beach was bare of plants or even rocks, anything that might add beauty or break up the bleakness.

  “I suppose we should try to walk around it,” I said.

  We’d seen no other inhabitants of this netherworld since we’d left Alice, nor had we been accosted by Amias. But the emptiness was becoming its own problem. Were netherworlds sized according to their vessels? The one in my switchel ring had been pretty big. How much bigger might this one be, with a whole coffin to contain it?

  “No,” said Phineas. “I think we’ll have to swim.”

  I stared aghast at what he was pointing at: an island, in the middle of the lake. “But that’s too far to swim!”

  “Someone is there,” Phineas said with a shrug.

  He was right. The island was mostly shrouded in mist, but there was still no mistaking the flickering light at the summit of its single hill. Someone had built a fire. Possibly a big one.

  I looked up and down the beach. “I know this isn’t our netherworld, but I don’t suppose we could will up a raft or a kayak or something.”

  “Give it a try. You’re the netherworld expert.”

  I did try, but it did us no good. I was clearly not in any kind of charge here.

  “I’m not a very strong swimmer,” I said as I took off my shoes. “And that really does look far.”

  “Whoever is out there got there somehow,” said Phineas. “If they made it, we’ll make it.”

  “How optimistic of you.”

  He graciously pretended not to notice the snap in my voice.

  We did make it, but barely, in my case. By the time we came ashore on the island I was practically wheezing, and my limbs felt like lead. The air was cold, the water even colder. My teeth were chattering so hard I could barely talk.

  Phineas, on the other hand, seemed fine, which only made me snappier.

  I got snappier still when I realized the hill was pretty big, up close. And steep.

  Have you forgotten everything you learned in the canteen? This isn’t a physical world. You only think you’re tired. Snap out of it.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  We hadn’t gotten very far when we heard splashing from the direction we’d come. The kind of splashing someone might make if they were just coming ashore, having followed us across the lake.

  But the beach was empty.

  I gave Phineas a pointed look, and he nodded in return. We moved carefully after that, looking behind us often, and stopping occasionally to listen. I had that awful feeling of being followed, of eyes on me. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything; it was inevitable from the second I heard that splash. We didn’t see or hear anything else.

  “Could have been someone swimming away, once they saw us come ashore,” I whispered.

  “That might be worse, depending on where they were going,” said Phineas. “Or who they were going to tell.”

  “True.”

  Neither explanation made sense, though. The light had faded to the dull gray of a winter twilight, but it was still enough to spot movement, or a figure of any kind. And that beach had been as bare as the one on the mainland. If there’d been anybody there, coming or going, we would have seen them.

  And yet, the whole time we were swimming, the water around us had been completely still, no current, no waves. And I knew you couldn’t conjure animals in a netherworld, unless that rule was different here, too.

  Which meant that if the water had really moved, it was because a person had moved it. And we’d both heard it move.

  The splash remained a mystery. We reached the top of the hill with neither incident nor explanation.

  The light of the enormous bonfire was blinding. It was a couple of seconds before my eyes adjusted enough to see the people gathered around the fire.

  There were maybe two dozen of them, talking, sitting, staring. Crying. Most were dead. I could tell they were dead, because they’d clearly been partially eaten by shadow eaters. Some of them had only one eye, or none. But oddly enough, they weren’t so chewed up as to be unrecognizable. I saw several familiar faces.

  “This isn’t how they want to be,” I whispered.

  Phineas stared at me like I’d lost my mind. “No, I should think not.”

  I shook my head. “No, you don’t understand. In the canteen, they looked however they saw themselves. Their clothes, even their age, I think.” I nodded at a half-devoured zombie. “This is how Amias wants them to look. How he sees them.”

  Not that I needed another reminder that the rules here were different, and all of them were Amias’s. But this was an especially gripping one.

  They were starting to notice us. The zombie I’d just been looking at stumbled over, and I saw that he wasn’t a zombie at all, not really. He looked a little sick (and who could blame him), but he also looked alert and aware.

  “Got you too, did he?” he asked in a gravelly voice that suggested the birds had been at his throat. I couldn’t even tell whether he was human or phantasm. His skin was so mangled I couldn’t make out its original tone, or whether it had that indefinable glow of Phineas’s kind. Nor could I determine the color of his eyes in the dim light.

  “Actually, he didn’t,” Phineas answered. “We came on purpose.”

  I instinctively stepped closer to Phineas as the zombie’s eyes got a hungry look.

  Crikey, he’s not going to try to eat our brains, is he?

  “You’re the ones we were told to look for,” the man said. “We’re to bring you to him. There will be a reward.”

  The tone of his voice, his anticipatory expression, his mutilated body. I’m okay with admitting I was feeling pretty freaked out. But Phineas, bless him, didn’t miss a beat.

  “Well, you can certainly take us to him,” he said. “In fact, I was hoping you would. But we need to talk to a couple of people first, and see if we can figure a couple of things out. It won’t take long.” He leaned forward and put his hand on the zombie’s shoulder, buddy to buddy. He didn’t even look grossed out by the contact. “I’m sure you’re not so loyal to him that you’d deny us just a tiny bit of time, am I right?”

  The zombie looked affronted. “Not loyal to him at all. But I won’t invite punishment, that’s for sure.” He smiled. His teeth and gums we
re bloody. “And there’s to be a reward.”

  “I assure you,” Phineas said, “that we want to see Amias. Just a little time to prepare?”

  By then we’d been joined by several curious onlookers.

  “Don’t do it,” one woman hissed. I recognized her as one of the witches from the farm. Monique? No, Morgan.

  “It’s a trick,” someone else said.

  “He’s testing us,” said Morgan.

  A few of them had already shuffled closer. I felt Phineas tense beside me, ready for a fight. I reached into my pocket, and felt the round bone hilt of my dagger.

  Please, people, please don’t put me in a position to fight you. You’ve suffered enough, frankly.

  “They’re here to save us.” That voice had an accent. A Texas accent.

  Claudia stepped forward. My heart slammed against my ribs, then tried to jump out my throat. She’d been half eaten, too, and had only one eye. I was overwhelmed by grief and guilt, as I had been every time I’d seen her in one of my mirrors. We’d been looking for her specially, but now that we’d found her, I wasn’t sure I could face her.

  “They can’t save us,” said the zombie.

  “There’s no way to stop him, Claudia,” someone else said. “There’s no way out.”

  “You’ll only be punished,” Morgan added.

  “Might be you’re wrong,” Claudia said. “They might be the way to stop him. Why do you suppose he wants them so bad?”

  “Because he hates them,” said Zombie Man.

  “Because he’s afraid of them,” Claudia said.

  “He’s not afraid of anybody,” Zombie Man argued.

  “He must be,” said Claudia. “He wouldn’t bother having all of us watching out for them, if he didn’t see them as threat.”

  “We intend to kill him, and set everyone here free,” Phineas said simply.

  “And we’re not asking you to help us do that,” I added loudly, talking over several of them. “We’re not even asking you not to turn us in. We’re just asking you to give us a little time to get ready first.”