by Ilsa J. Bick
“Damn straight,” Bode grunted. “I don’t buy all this multiverse jazz, but if we’re all part of each other? We’re stronger together.”
“He’s right. Give Rima color.” Casey’s voice hummed with urgency. “Please.”
“Okay.” Letting go of a long breath, she searched the quilt until she found what she wanted. “Casey, let me see those scissors for a sec.”
Casey handed them over. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t think the entire quilt is necessary. Lizzie might need it because she’s only five,” she said, taking the proffered scissors, then picking at the web of thread cupping the galaxy pendant. “The beads and fabric might be prompts.”
“So you think the cynosure is the only device?” Eric asked.
“Pretty sure. It’s the only thing on this quilt that keeps popping up in everything House shows me.” Teasing the glass orb free, she watched how it shimmered in the fan of weak porch light. Now that she actually held it, she saw that its designer had done a pull loop. Clearly, the cynosure was to be worn like a pendant on a necklace. “This is exactly what I was going to make, but I’m not nearly skilled enough. It would take me years of flamework to make glass sculptures this detailed. But the urge to do it has been eating at me for a long time, like insisting it gets done, you know? Can’t be a coincidence.”
“Here, use this.” Eric reached a hand beneath his collar. There was a muted clack of metal as he reeled out a beaded chain. “Safer than your pocket.”
“Aren’t you supposed to wear them all the time?” she asked as he threaded the pendant onto the chain. The glass butted against Eric’s dog tags with a dull tick.
“In the field. Technically, I’m not supposed to wear them when I’m not in uniform, but I just like them.” His lips flickered in a brief smile. “I trust you to give them back.”
“Thank you,” she said, hoping the heat she felt at the back of her neck hadn’t crawled around to her cheeks. She let her palm linger over his dog tags, still warm from his body. This is real, too. She held out her hands. “Lizzie’s always talking about dropping people.”
“Hey, I hear that,” Bode said, taking her left hand in his rough, callused paw and reaching for Casey. “Hang on ti—” He broke off.
“Bode?” Casey turned the older boy a curious look. “You okay? You just about jumped out of your skin.”
“Yeah, I’m cool.” Yet a sudden strain arrowed through Bode’s face, and Emma saw his eyes dart a question at the younger boy. “Just …” Bode’s throat bobbed in a swallow. “Let’s go, okay? The sooner we get this over with, the better.”
“You can do this,” Eric said to her. His grip, sure and warm, tightened around her right hand.
Glad you think so. She closed her eyes. Her thoughts would not be still, flitting from one image to the next, and she felt a splinter of panic. What should she think about? Rima? Lizzie? No, this was the reverse: putting them onto and into a blank. She thought of the door down cellar; watched the memory of her hand reaching toward that inky cold; remembered the blackness dimpling as her palm pressed that odd, glassy membrane.
But the candle flame was still there. I felt it. This would be the same. The trick would be filling them in, making them visible. She let herself see the barn as Lizzie had described it: a black void into which she could drift, like slipping in on the breath of a dream. Now—she felt Eric’s hand in hers—start to fill them in; draw us onto and into the space.
There came the familiar tingle of a blink ripsawing through her skin, a lancet of white pain as the bruised lips of that spiky maw parted in the dark before her eyes. A red rose of heat bloomed on her forehead. Between her breasts, there was a sudden warm flush, and she knew the galaxy pendant must be glowing. A jolt crackled in her chest, an atomic bomb of light and heat that lashed down her arms and out her fingers. Someone gasped. Casey said, wonderingly, “Did you feel …?” But Emma barely heard, was suddenly past hearing. In the blackness of her mind, behind her eyes, she saw them all—Casey, Bode, Eric, her—as cutouts edged with the same kind of glow that had haloed Kramer. His had been the color of a sick, creeping evil, but theirs was true light spun in pulsing filaments from their fingers, knitting their hands together with …
Colors. It was Eric, not speaking but floating in her mind nonetheless. Emma, do you see this?
Man. Bode. It’s like a spider’s web, tying us together.
Eric’s light was a deep cobalt blue, a near match, although hers was edged with a golden nimbus finer than lace, as fiery as the sun’s corona. Bode’s color was very strange, deeply vermillion, but blurry and indistinct, as if whatever Bode was bled and oozed like an open wound. For a second, she could’ve sworn that Bode was not a single color but two.
But Casey … Casey was many and all colors, a nacreous, wavering shimmer that was now rose, now sapphire, sulfur, violet. Casey was anybody, anyone.
Her ears filled with the rush of a thousand birds, as the colors looped up their arms, drawing them tight, tight, and ever tighter, as woven together as the glass creatures knotted in her galaxy pendant. Then she felt a swooning, the earth dropping away, which swept through her like a chilling wind, and they were suddenly falling, their light tangling to a streaming rainbow. The galaxy pendant fired as space folded, flexed, and then …
EMMA
Monsters Are Us
COLD. DARK. SHE felt the press of the black, heavy as an anvil.
She opened her eyes, then fluttered them in a rapid blink because, for a second, she wasn’t sure they were actually open; it was that dark. Then, from the nothing in front of her eyes, she teased their colors, faintly luminous, misty as frayed cobwebs. For the moment, they were still linked, their circle unbroken by their passage into whatever space she’d hurled them.
Yeah, but are we inside? Is this the barn? There was something solid beneath her feet, icier than a tombstone, and she thought, Oh crap, I dropped us in the wrong place.
Casey’s voice reached out from the dark. “Did we get in?”
A scuffling sound, and then their circle winked out as Bode let go. “Oh yeah,” Bode said. “I know inside when I feel it. Just like dropping into a black echo. Man, you don’t know what bad is until—”
A whisper of alarm sighed across her neck. Why? Something Eric had said that, now that she thought about it, echoed a blink; the way McDermott had talked about stories and how ideas were infections … And we wondered what the barn might make.
“Until you’ve run into these things,” Bode continued, “big as your—”
The monsters are us. The thought was sudden, immediate, explosive. Bode’s story is written, and the monsters are in—
“Bode!” she shouted, frantic. “Bode, no!”
RIMA
Blood Have the Power
“DON’T FIGHT IT, baby. Look what you’re doing to yourself. You’re bleeding.” Anita’s skin was pasty and her breath fruity with cheap wine. “Trust your momma, honey, and this will be over quick. You’ve got a black stain on your soul, only I’ll wash it clean. Take care of that stain once and for all.”
“M-Mom,” Rima rasped. She had come back to herself as she was now: spread-eagled, on her back, in no place she recognized. The ropes around her wrists and ankles were very tight, tied off to stakes driven into rock that was strangely smooth, glassy, and very black. There was light, but it was a pallid, bony glow. The ceiling soared to some point high above, where the air was choked and clotted: a dark, shadowed space that swam with what she thought were birds. She could hear the dry, papery rustle of their feathers, and smell their wild animal stink. “Mom, please, let me go. You don’t want to do this.”
“Oh, honey.” Anita’s voice choked off in a sob, and then she was tipping the bottle to her mouth, her throat working as she took another pull. Swallowing, Anita sighed, then wiped her moist, slack mouth with the back of one hand. Her eyes were black holes on either side of her nose. “It’s been so hard. I just can’t deal with it anymore.”
“That’s why I left.” Rima felt the sob welling up in her throat and forced it back down. Crying wouldn’t help. She had to keep Anita talking, or else … Her gaze flicked to the glint of a very long, very sharp boning knife Anita had in her right fist: the same knife that had carved a red necklace the night her mother had pinned her to the bed and come within a whisper of killing her. “Mom, please, just let me go. I’ll leave and never come back, I promise.”
“Blood have the power.” The voodoo priestess was as Rima remembered her, too: hatchet-faced and hungry. The woman lit five fat yellow candles—one at each point of a pentagram—and then began to drizzle a small stream of black sand onto the rock. “Blood binds. When you ask the voodoo for something, you must make sacrifice. The spirits live in the sand. Feed the spirits, and the power come full circle.”
“So I’ll be able to kick it,” Anita said, her words beginning to slur. Her hair was plastered to her forehead in oily ropes. “I’ll get clean. Don’t you see, honey? Bringing you up has been so hard, and I’m just not that strong. I give and give, and you take and take.”
“Mom, that’s not true!” She didn’t know what she felt more, fear or rage. “I’ve done everything. I’ve cooked and cleaned, I get food, I—”
“I know,” her mother said, and her voice rode on a sudden growl, all weepy sincerity forgotten. “That’s because you’ve drawn on my strength. You’ve always taken what you wanted. What do you think a baby is? Huh? A little parasite, that’s what. You’ve got no control. The baby’s inside, growing and taking and swallowing, needing …” Her mother’s features twisted to a monstrous gorgon’s. Rima turned her face to one side, but her mother’s claw-hand shot out and clutched a handful of Rima’s hair, twisting until Rima’s scalp burned and she cried out; until she was forced to look back at her mother, and nowhere else. Anita’s face cramped with fury. “Well, what about me? Who takes care of me? Who gives me back what you’ve stolen?”
“I … I didn’t m-mean …” Rima’s voice came in a broken, hitching whisper. “Momma, I was just a baby.”
“Just a baby,” her mother spat. She fisted the knife, holding it in a perfect vertical, the point quivering an inch from Rima’s right eye. “No baby ever drew the dead.”
Rima’s mouth dried up. She went still, although her mind was gibbering: No no no no.
“You started even then, filling me up with death-whispers. I could hear them inside, like beetles scratching in a paper sack, scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch.” Anita’s face twitched as if hearing that terrible sound all over again. “Now’s the chance to let all that blackness out of you, out of me—because you’ve touched me, you’ve been inside, scratch-scratch-scratching my soul with your filth.”
“Not yet.” The priestess wrapped her skeletal fingers around Anita’s wrist. Rima drew in a sudden gasp as the knife wobbled. “Only the blood work,” the woman said. “Blood binds. Kill her too fast before the blood draw, and the blackness stay in you, stain you, doom you.” Small, straight knucklebones cored through the woman’s earlobes, and a long necklace of bird skulls chattered and clacked. “Spill the blood, and the black flow out and the spirits drink. You drink, and then the blackness leave because the girl’s blood is strong.”
There was a long, breathless moment, and then Anita wrenched free. The blade whickered, shaving air above Rima’s face, but Anita was stumbling to her feet now, and Rima remembered to breathe. The bottle winked in the candlelight as her mother drank again. Watching the white length of her mother’s throat convulse and swallow, move and slide, Rima thought back to the fight on the snow and what Tania had become: the way her throat had pulsed and heaved before that bloom of jointed legs erupted from her mouth like a gruesome black rose.
Oh my God. She felt a bubble of hysterical laughter pushing against her teeth. Tania was Anita: one and the same. Like Lizzie’s crazy quilt, names made out of letters rearranged to be both different and yet parts of a whole. Her mother was the monster. She was every monster Rima would ever fight, and always had been.
She thought of poor little Taylor—where was her parka now, anyway?—and how shocked that little girl had been when her father morphed into a monster capable of hurling his child from a balcony. Taylor blamed herself, but what had happened wasn’t her fault.
And this isn’t mine. Rima felt the sting of tears and then the slow trickle as they rolled down her temples and soaked into her hair. The real poison is if I let my mother convince me that it is.
She watched as the priestess began to dance: a slow, rhythmic shuffle. Her mother followed in a drunk-stumble, slashing the air with that knife. Have to do something. Rima’s heart battered her ribs. Can’t just lie here until Anita decides she can’t wait. But what did she have to fight with? She wasn’t stupid enough to think she could will this away; this wasn’t like the fight on the snow, and even then, once set in motion, that story would unravel to its conclusion. She suspected only Emma had the power to jump through one space and Now to another. So what could she do? All she had was a touch that soothed and took away whispers.
Wait a minute. She felt everything inside, even her breath, grow still. I take.
She had to call twice because Anita was that lost, that out of it. “What?” Anita said. Her mother’s words were mushy, and that anger, fiery and a bit insane, had died a little, but Rima knew the embers of her mother’s resentment wouldn’t need much coaxing.
So she chose her words very, very carefully. “Mom, I won’t fight you anymore. I can’t. You’re my mom, and I know you’re only trying to help.”
“Thass righhh, baby.” Anita’s slushy voice went maudlin. A rill of shiny snot slicked her upper lip. “Thass righhh.”
“I know, and I love you, and I’m scared.” She was aware of the priestess’s coin-bright eyes, and somewhere, overhead, the ceaseless churn of the birds, but Rima fixed her gaze on Anita and did not look away. “I’m scared, and I need you. So, please, would you hold me? Would you please hug me just this one last time?”
BODE
Either Way, You Lose
1
BATTLE WAS GONE—and what the hell was that about?
It had happened back at the house, right before Emma did her crazy … well, whatever that was. Soon as Casey touched him, Bode felt the sergeant go, just whoosh away like Bode’d gotten a sucker punch to the gut.
That tripped him out. After, Bode had been distracted, worried about what the sudden silence in his head meant. So when they’d materialized in the dark, Bode hadn’t been on top of his game. Just said the first damn thing that came to mind. Stupid. Like popping out of a spidey hole without tossing out a rock first, seeing if anything up there took the bait and blasted that rock to itty-bitty ones. You never made that mistake twice, because after the first time, you were dead.
Emma’s shout still rang in his ears, but Bode felt the change happening a split second later. The darkness collapsed in a rush, the black slamming down, flattening the space above and all around as if the barn were being squeezed by four giant palms: above and below, right and left.
“Down, get down!” he shouted, dropping to his knees. The darkness heaved, the floor’s texture changing from something smooth—poured concrete—to the unmistakable grit of earth over rock.
No, no, no. Can I think it away? He was gasping, his chest heaving like bellows, trying to pull in air that dwindled by the second. Forests; I like trees and open sky and water.
But that’s not where his nightmares lived, and it was too late anyway. The blackness was hardening, his monsters taking their shape. He heard the others thudding to the dirt as the darkness rushed in, growing close and tight, cinching down, clenching and knotting to a fist. For a split second, Bode thought the black space meant to flatten them. Then, the sense of pressure eased as the ink of this new space stopped flowing.
Casey: “Has it … it’s over, right?”
“I think so.” Emma sounded as out of breath as Bode. “It was like the roof c
ollapsed.”
“It’s not a roof.” Bode raised himself to a squat, relieved that his head and shoulders didn’t meet up with anything solid. Fumbling out a flashlight, he thumbed it to life. A spear of blue light pierced the black, and he saw exactly what he expected. Of course he would.
This was a nightmare he knew by heart.
2
THE TUNNEL WAS not perfectly round. No VC tunnel ever was. The spider holes where snipers and guards waited were two-foot squares cut out of camouflaged earth, wide enough for a very small guy like the average VC or a runt like Bode. Big guys only got hung up. This was good for Charlie, but bad if you were an average Joe looking to make it back to the States in something other than a pine box shoved into luggage class.
Once past the spidey holes, the tunnels opened up a little to a max width of about three or four feet, but they went on forever in a multilevel rock warren of passageways and larger rooms where up to a few hundred VC lived for months at a time. The air was normally very bad, too, smoky and stale and heavy with the odors of human waste and the stink of too many people coughing, breathing, pissing, shitting, spitting in too small a space.
Barely enough room to turn and fight. Bode felt sweat bead on his neck and face and between his shoulder blades. He was very conscious of the club stuck at a now very awkward and uncomfortable angle in his waistband. Slipping it free, he choked up on the wood, but even his reach was too long. Try to take a swing, and he’d be chunking out earth.
“This tunnel’s pretty tight,” Eric said in a tone that had about as much heat as a weatherman’s. “Are they all like this?”
“No, they get worse,” Bode said. Lucky to have that devil dog along. Guy had the temperature of a flounder, or a lot of experience roping back fear. Whatever his story, that Eric stayed calm helped Bode keep his cool. “Down deep, you’re on your belly the whole time. If this is the same, though, we’ll get to rooms, eventually, and they open right up.” He paused. “We should probably cut the lights.”