Teeth in the Mist

by Dawn Kurtagich

  She shook her head and wiped her nose. “It’s been a long time,” she said vaguely, “since I cried. You have no idea how long.”

  “I cry every day. Takes practice to get it right.”

  A hint of a smile appeared in the twitch of her mouth.

  “The snot needs real practice though.”

  The twitch turned into a crack, and her teeth showed. Then a laugh!

  “It was horrible. I’ve seen some things, Zoey. Some terrible things. Worse things, even. But seeing you like… that. Knowing I caused it.” She shook her head. “Don’t do that again. Ever. Not for anyone.” She looked at me. “Always be honest. Don’t tell a lie. No matter who gets hurt. And if you can manage it, don’t Conjure again. Not ever.”

  I remembered the pain, which still lingers in my nerve endings even now, and I nodded. “Okay.”

  “Good.”

  “But what did it look—”

  “Blood. You were bleeding from every single pore in your body. “It was trypophobic. The more I wiped, the more these little spots of blood would grow and grow until they rained down your body. It was in your eyes, your hair. When you spoke, your tongue bled. I’ll never forget your skin with those red dots growing bigger and bigger, like some kind of acid attack, erasing you. Making you part of the darkness of the room. Like hundreds of little pinpricks.” She swallowed.

  “That’s what it felt like. Like thousands of little pinpricks. But… inside of me as well. Through my heart, my lungs, my stomach, intestines…”

  She took my hand abruptly. “Stop,” she whispered. “Please, I can’t hear any more.”

  Her hands were still covered with smears of my blood.

  I closed my eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m the sorry one,” she said, her voice so close to my face. “Shit!”

  I opened my eyes, and Len was sucking her finger. Before I could ask what had happened, she lifted a small shining object from the ground. My pin.

  I was burning inside, fiercely, but not with pain as much as an ache. This girl… She was like the wind. Unobtainable. Free. Mysterious. The light of the fire splayed over her face, her lips, her hair. She smelled like autumn.

  She was completely beyond me.

  And I kissed her anyway.

  She pulled back, and we stared at each other. Her eyes roamed my face, looking for the trick or the lie, but if she was looking for malice she didn’t find it.

  She released her breath and then she kissed me back, and I was alive for the first time in my whole life.

  I lifted my phone and took a photo of her. She was serene with her loose hair, her eyes closed, lips just-kissed. I never wanted to forget that moment.

  Her eyes snapped open. “What did you do?”

  “Pull back your hair,” I said, and watched as she did. I aimed my phone again and took another photo. “So beautiful.”

  She blinked at me like a curious bird, and then smiled. She kissed me again.

  We broke apart at the sense of movement in the doorway, but when we looked, no one was there.

  Chapter 34

  THE DARK

  light

  is

  gone

  and

  the

  earthquake

  is

  stones,

  rubble,

  rocks,

  and screaming

  dust.

  and

  Roan

  falls

  long

  and

  far,

  and

  lands

  in

  a

  heap

  in

  a

  deep

  dark

  place.

  There

  is

  Nothing.

  There

  is

  no one.

  I’m going to die in here.

  Roan bites down upon her lips to keep herself from speaking. She blocks her ears to keep from hearing. She stops all breathing and hopes that for one small moment, the niggling, itching, clawing thoughts, which work upon her mind like rats scratch, scratch, scratching, will leave.

  When the quiet comes, Roan sits wrapped in it. At last, she lifts her head and allows herself to listen. She can feel the rocks collapsed behind and above her and knows that all is lost.

  Still, she says it. “Rapley?”

  No reply.

  She tries again, this time louder. “Rapley?”

  Her voice echoes back from a long space before her.

  Reaching with her hands, she finds the walls beside her. A little farther away than what her arm span reaches. She coughs the dirt and dust from her lungs and her mouth as she attempts to get to her feet.

  Her pulse quickens when she moves and the world, black though it is, tilts unnaturally so that she is leaning against the last wall without knowing how she got there. Hot wetness running over her scalp lets her know, dimly, that she is injured.

  She stumbles forward, feeling and falling, onward, downward, not knowing where she is going or why.

  There are no longer any whys.

  She is dead already.

  The tunnel narrows as she goes, until she is crouching, her head skimming jagged stone, shoulder to shoulder with rock harder than bone.

  I am walking into my grave.

  The thought seems almost delightful and she laughs.

  Onward she walks, forcing her eyes wide, as though some light may penetrate if only she could open her lids enough.

  She closes them sometimes, wondering if she has eyes at all, but when she touches them, there they are.

  The world dips and sways and she is on her feet, then on her back, and things keep hitting her in the chin, in the cheeks, on her knees and on her back.

  And then, all at once

  a glimmer of light.

  She takes one of the candles from the wall, ignoring the molten wax that drips down her hands, and follows the room from one tunnel to another. Candles have been lit in sconces all along the walls, but she doesn’t trust them or herself. The tunnel

  which

  narrows

  so

  much

  as

  she

  walks

  that

  she

  has

  to

  slide

  forward

  sideways

  to

  make

  any

  progress

  at

  all.

  And then

  it all

  widens

  up

  so

  Roan’s

  candle

  flame

  touches

  Nothing.

  It is a flickering ball of light in a room, the cold air of which would suggest is more than magnificently large.

  She is aware, now more than ever, of how much mountain is above her head.

  And of how very small she is.

  The tunnel continues on and then narrows once again, whereupon it becomes a narrow stairway.

  There is no choice but to climb.

  And so she does.

  The wax has pooled in her hand, dripped onto her borrowed trousers, and scuffed her boots. The flame is burning low.

  Up she climbs.

  Round it bends.

  Up, always up.

  It occurs to her to keep count.

  But 677 steps later, she forgets what number she was on and starts again.

  Did I come down this far? She senses that the mountain is moving and playing tricks on her.

  And there, as though waiting for her, the room appears, and breathes a sigh. There is no door, but thick nails hanging from two bolts in the wall suggest that at some point there would have been.

  She stumbles across the threshold and falls to her knees at the sight of it.

  Candles sit in every nook and niche in the walls, wax flooding the stones around and below like whit
e seaweed, dripping slowly to the rhythm of the mountain. The candles illuminate the walls, every inch of them scrawled with symbols and words. Thin lines of rope are strung about in haphazard zigzags, bloodred with wax and blood, tendrils of flesh hanging from them like garish garlands.

  She tries to close her eyes, to see the blinding nothing of the tunnels from before, but she can’t move. Her breath, jagged and raw, sears her throat. Everything in this room burns like acid upon her skin and mind.

  The first thought is this:

  Someone was here recently.

  The second:

  This is the place.

  She gets to her feet, steadying herself against the left wall, but then flinches and pulls back her arm when the heat of the candle below burns her. The room has numerous holes in the walls—pigeonholes that perhaps once contained scrolls and letters. All are ash and dust now. Except one.

  She walks over to it and reaches out a shaking hand.

  She feels the thing before she touches it. It is clothed in foul magic—it reeks of evil. Her fingers want to recoil rather than touch its oily surface. Still, she unfurls it carefully, like it is a snake, and stares.

  She drops the scroll when she is done and flings it away; it is a vile, cursed, rotten thing, and though she wipes her hands she cannot feel clean. Tainted. Unholy. Evil.

  The scroll tells it plain. The symbols, the linguistics—the language… of Satan. Evil incarnate. Every foul, dark, inhuman thing that is in this world and the next, laid out in harsh script for any to learn.

  Here, confirmed, laid down in a cursed scroll.

  Her native tongue.

  She lifts her lantern and gasps.

  An entire wall is covered with the devil’s script. That forbidden language Cage used, which her father taught her, which she had taken to so very easily as a child.

  The addiction within her raises its head, sniffing the air.

  Speak, it calls. Taste me.

  She steps forward, reaching for the words, which seem to glow in hues of red. So beautiful.

  “Roan, stop.”

  Rapley’s voice shatters the spell. He is in the room behind her.

  “Thank God,” he mutters, and then he is by her side, holding her to him. He pulls back and examines her face. “You’re hurt. Your head…”

  “How did you get down?”

  “I went back and found another way down. There are more rooms. At least—” He breaks off, taking in the wall of solid writing. “…twelve. What is this?”

  “It’s the same script as in the book.”

  He hesitates. “Can you read it?”

  Roan tries not to look, but she has already taken in more than half of it. She nods stiffly.

  “Is it important? For us, I mean. For the… Unclosed?”

  She nods again, swallows, and begins to read, translating as she goes.

  “Here I knelt upon the rocky ground and unraveled a scroll of scar-made flesh, and upon there writ were words profane, cut like knives and sewn back closed to keep within the secret power. And I spake the words and struck my head and they did burn me coming out. And then abound the rocks did roar and a voice declared WHO DARES SPEAK MY TONGUE? And the devil and I spake Unholy, Ungodly pacts and life was giv’d, yet soul was tak’d and now I shall live by others until my due comes again. And then to hell I must go.”

  Roan swallows, closing her eyes. The words were so smooth in her mind, yet their pronunciation was harsh, crude, and guttural. It was no matter. Her mind swallowed the words down like a fine wine, or sweetest honey.

  “It is signed with a name. There. Fvstvs.”

  Rapley’s lips harden. “Fostos.”

  “There’s more,” Roan says, taking a breath before turning to the richer brown writing beneath the first section of wall writing. “He’s talking about time. About time running out.” Her fingers follow along the symbols. “A search for more time. A new sort of bargain. He’s… My God, Rapley. It’s just like the stories my father used to tell me… He’s seeking a way to harvest souls. To barter back his own… or for more time.” Roan exhales slowly. “My father was trying to warn me… My father knew that Faustus… Fostos… was real.”

  “This must have been added long after the first text,” Rapley says.

  Roan’s stomach contracts. “Yes. Much later. Rapley… this… this is my name. And here, Emma’s… Seamus… you… my God. We’re all here. And here, another. Dylan.” She steps back. “My God, it’s real.”

  “And if it’s real… then the tale is true. Fostos is immortal… and he’s here. Somewhere.”

  He knew… He was warning me. Her thoughts race like ants all over, crisscrossing and weaving through one another.

  Roan turns toward the entrance through which Rapley had come and heads swiftly out. She discovers that he is correct: There are more rooms. More than that: These tunnels are different. They are carved carefully, cleanly. Deliberately. And there are sconces for candles built into the walls every few feet. Roan follows the corridor onward, discovering sections where pieces of stained-glass windows have been inset with space for candles behind.

  “This must be the cloister,” Roan murmurs as she passes a silver cross inlaid in the wall.

  Rapley nods. “There was a monastery here, perhaps.”

  They follow the new series of tunnels onward until they’ve come full circle.

  “If these corridors existed, then why dig out the other way?” Roan says. “Look, here are stairs that seem to spiral straight up to the surface. Why go to the trouble to dig those crude paths if this is right here?”

  “Perhaps because there is another reason for the tunnels. When we came in, you took the left-hand path on each branch. Why?”

  “I don’t know. I was following my instinct.”

  “I have an instinct of my own. Come.”

  They head to the crude tunnels and make their way back, but instead of branching left as they had done coming in the first time, they now take the other path, to the right. After more turns and stairs than Roan can follow, they come to a corridor with glass panels placed in the walls at intervals.

  Roan steps close to the wall where a pinprick of luminescence tunnels into the gloom. She presses her eye to the hole—

  and shudders.

  There it is. The Blue Room.

  The room that was meant to be hers.

  The room where Emma was… hurt.

  The room where she was imprisoned.

  Exorcised.

  Drowned.

  The room where she… murdered Cage.

  All of it, right here, at the end of a peephole in the depths of the earth.

  Chapter 35

  HIDING FROM THE LIGHT

  Drowning.

  That is much what Roan feels is happening to her. Drowning, right in the dank air dozens and dozens of feet beneath the surface of the mountain. All of this… all of it… had been so thought out. Giving Roan the Blue Room, blue, which had been her mother’s favorite color, the storm that almost cost Emma her life, Cage, Seamus’s ghost… all of it could have been witnessed.

  She follows the rudimentary stairway farther up, then along a corridor, knowing that she will soon find… yes: another horizontal strip of light cutting the darkness in two. Another peephole. This one looks into a room of… yellow. It’s the locked room along the hall.

  The mountainside has been cut to pieces, like some kind of horrific circulatory system. Here, a stairway cuts down again; there it cuts away from the house, which seems to lie parallel to it. The West Wing. Of course.

  No wonder it was always forbidden, Roan thinks bitterly.

  Corridors follow other corridors and it is clear, suddenly, that this is not a mere lifespan’s work. This must have taken a hundred years or more. How vast is it? How intricate?

  How recently used?

  She follows the sigils and symbols cut into the walls, which direct her upward toward light, eventually staggering out into the open air where a gathering storm ru
mbles above. Rapley follows, brushing himself off and coughing up the wretched dust. Roan looks around, disoriented, and realizes how far they have walked, for Mill House is far away.

  Rapley gathers Roan into his arms fiercely, growling in his throat as he lifts her up and presses her against him.

  “By God and the Devil, I thought I would go mad when I was separated from you.”

  “I did, as well,” she admits, once she is back on her feet. And then all words are lost to their furious, dusty kiss. At last, they break apart, gasping.

  “I can’t believe it,” she says. “We found the place where the monk Fostos made his deal with the Prince of Darkness. With Lucifer himself.”

  He curses under his breath.

  “And more. He’s here. Fostos has been with us all along. I felt someone Conjuring… someone powerful. My father knew—he told me tales about Fostos when I was young. As though to warn me. To prepare me. Fostos is still there. In the house. Now. One of our own.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Rapley steps away from her, shaking his head. “No. No, we should leave. Put this behind us.”

  “I… can’t.” She releases her breath in a rush now that it is said. “I have to go back. I can’t leave Seamus somewhere in there… and despite what Emma did… I can’t leave her either. Nor Jenny, nor Andrew… And we still don’t know what happened to Maudley.”

  “Damn you, Roan Eddington,” he snaps, turning back to her. Then he steps closer and puts his forehead down upon hers. “Damn you for your goodness.”