by Scott Tracey
Woodbury, Minnesota
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Phantom Eyes © 2013 by Scott Tracey.
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one
Remember that time a crazy phantom bitch threw me out of a lighthouse and stole my power? Yeah, that sucked the worst. At least until the night she came back.
“Sometimes dead is better, don’t you agree?” A month ago, my nightmares had involved demons and torture. Now? Talking. Just talking. It was a simple question, thoughtful and almost kind—if I believed for a second that the speaker even knew what a kind word was.
The woman who stood before me had ripped a curse out of me and thrown me from the parapet of a lighthouse just three days ago. All because five minutes of conversation with me had worked her nerves. If this was my follow-up appointment … well, I was disappointed. She didn’t seem to care, though, smiling underneath her veil. “This world is merciless. One shouldn’t linger past their time.”
Was this supposed to be my time? Ever since the night my uncle had died, I’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop. It wouldn’t be enough to cripple me. I’d made enough enemies that someone would want to see me dead. But I was still surprised that it was Grace.
I’d come to Belle Dam to find out who was threatening my uncle and to uncover the secrets of my past. I’d been born with a terrible power—the witch eyes, a curse that let me see the world as it really was. A bubbling cauldron of chaos, memories, and darkness. I thought I’d been alone in my suffering, only to find out that Grace—the woman who’d founded the town a hundred years ago—had held the same power. And she’d built up her sandbox, nurtured two armies, and then vanished into the night.
Until now. Her first act upon her return had been to rip the witch eyes right out of my head. Now I was broken, defenseless, and stuck in the middle of a feud that was about to go nuclear.
Uncle John’s funeral was in the morning. For three nights I’d tossed and turned, both desperate for sleep and terrified of it. Every night there came a point where I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, and then it was … not dreaming. Floating, maybe. Flying. There was wind and the murmur of voices, weightlessness and silver light. That was all I could remember in the morning. That, and the feeling of butterflies in the chasm where my magic had been. A thousand, magic-free butterflies desperate for escape.
Sometimes, when I woke, just for a moment there was a thread. Sulfur-shaped cries, vagabond hearts. The lightest brush of visions against the corner of my mind. Screaming echoes fervor and fire. But never any dreams. Not in three days. Not until tonight.
It was hard to say how old Grace was. Her face was covered in a sheer veil, her eyes a glowing crimson. It was hard to pick out any distinguishing features, but her voice was unmistakable—equal parts old-world British nanny, Catholic school nun, and long-reigning queen of her own nation.
“You fit right in with a merciless world,” I pointed out. I crossed my arms in front of my chest. Why was she here? Why now? She’d already taken everything from me. “I’ve done this before, you know. Lucien already tried using my dreams against me.”
“Is that so?” Grace Lansing asked, a careful smile penciled across her face. “There are no dreams here, little boy. Now is the time for nightmares.”
The room we were in was small, with tan brick walls and open windows that stretched the length of the room—literal gaps in the wall where it opened into sky. There were lights in the distance—at first, I thought they were stars, remembering the surreal views from the lighthouse, but I quickly recognized streets and houses. The harbor in the distance. We were still in Belle Dam, wherever we were. Some kind of tower, maybe. It wasn’t the lighthouse—we were much too close to town.
I shifted around, never completely turning my back to Grace. There had to be a reason she’d hijacked my dreams. But a nervous knot clenched in my stomach. I hadn’t been worried when Lucien had haunted me—I’d been too calm. Like some part of me knew it was a dream and nothing bad would happen. I didn’t have that now. There was no security blanket to keep me at ease. I’m in danger struck only a second before I can’t protect myself.
There was a book tucked against a cobwebbed, dirty bench in the corner. Not a bench, I realized. A pew. “Our Lady of the Sorrows” was written across the front of the dusty hymnal. I looked up, and sure enough there was a bell hanging above our heads. The open holes in the walls made sense now—we were in a bell tower. A church bell tower.
Why here? What was it with the city’s supernatural crowd and their fascination with profaning holy ground? First, Lucien turned the Lansing family chapel into his recovery suite, and now Grace brought me to a church that was probably named after her? Our Lady of the Sorrows? Seriously? That was Grace to a T. Was there something in the town charter that said that creepers and villains had to conduct their business in a religious venue?
“Go now,” Grace said suddenly, and I turned on instinct. Getting thrown out of a building might not have taught me to bite my tongue better, but it made me a little more careful about doing what I was told. But Grace hadn’t been talking to me, I realized a moment later. Her eyes were trained on a corner of the room.
A shadow peeled away from the wall, somehow in a corner of a round room that didn’t have any corners. The moment I saw it, my eyes blurred like I’d suddenly been blasted by a wave of jungle heat. It was like a visual hiccup: one moment everything was clear and normal and the next my eyes had gone glassy and vacant and I couldn’t find anything to focus on. My equilibrium shifted, and I threw out my hands, desperate to remain upright. The room was a darkened blob with the occasional splash of color. Grace was just a red haze. A close red haze.
As soon as the footsteps faded, everything was as it had been before. I blinked an
d my vision was clear and easy. Obviously Grace was responsible, but I couldn’t understand why. Why bring me here and then hide something right in front of me. What was the point?
Grace was keeping secrets. Things she didn’t want me to know. But that didn’t make any sense, because she’d already ruined me. She had torn out my magic and left me a shell. She could have killed me. But she hadn’t.
“The burdens laid upon me are many, not the least of which is this need for hands in this world,” Grace murmured. I couldn’t be sure if she was talking to me or herself. “Forced to draw forth phantasms to work my will, they are a necessity, but volatile and mercurial at best.”
Phantasms. Another name for ghosts. Which meant that Grace was more tapped into things in Belle Dam than I’d realized before. “You summoned that little girl. The one that tried to kill me?” It wasn’t really a question. When I’d first come to town, a little girl in a princess costume had tried to kill me. Later, she’d played the role of muscle, intimidating someone into fleeing town altogether before she’d been banished.
Grace extended her index finger and jabbed it towards me. “Every pawn had its purpose, some more wily than others. But sometimes, you need to pull your own piece off the board before it does more harm than good. You should be thanking me. Your ‘friend’ might have been harmed, and I couldn’t have that. There must always be an Armstrong in Belle Dam. Otherwise, what’s the point in winning?”
I didn’t care if it was a dream or not. I couldn’t take it anymore. “You keep talking about this like it’s a game,” I snapped, just as the feeling of butterflies swept through my chest again.
I was wrong. It wasn’t like butterflies. It was like being in the middle of the ocean and caught in the middle of a panicked school of fish fleeing a predator. There was an ocean around me, pressing up against me, warm and cool at the same time. Things brushed against me on all sides, sometimes even going through my skin entirely. Everything surrounding me was in motion, but I was still. Like a statue in the middle of a hurricane.
“What are you doing to me?” I managed to gasp, feeling a disconnect between my mind and my mouth. The words came out like an echo, broken and stitched back together. “What is this?”
And then … fragments. Thorns and thresholds, broken moonlight haze in the distance. Frustration hot and slick like scythes reaping rages. I don’t know why it’s not working. I don’t know why you were wrong.
A flooding pressure drained from my head, my mind cleared, and I remembered where I was. My mind had gone somewhere else, but it had still cataloged the silence that had followed my questions. Grace always had something to say. She loved the sound of her own voice. I could feel her eyes on me—literally feel them, pressing humid and hot against my skin. But she wasn’t answering. She was waiting.
But what for? What was that?
The feeling passed, and with it, Grace’s attention. My head felt fuzzy, like it was floating, but when I closed my eyes I could almost make something out of the shape of lights flaring against my eyelids. Someplace other than this church tower. Somewhere else in Belle Dam. I was there, but I was also here. And also somewhere else. In three places at once, no matter how impossible that seemed.
Now that I was awake for it, I realized that this was what I’d been feeling when I closed my eyes at night. This had happened before—in fact, it had happened ever since the night Grace had attacked me. This … separation. Whatever it was, it had happened before.
“Don’t strain yourself,” Grace said, as close to warm as she got. Which was to say it was bitten off and sharp, a continent-sized glacier only a few degrees warmer than everything else she said. She began circling the bell that was hanging from the center of the room. Her steps were slow, precise, and even. Like a bridal procession, every step was chosen with care.
She touched a finger to the side of the cast-iron bell, and the moonlit-glowing bell caught silver flame. Phosphorescent fire arced down the side and then around the lip, painting lines and words that were almost human but invariably not. The letters, full of swooping lines and hard angles, constantly moved, each symbol shifting into new shapes from one moment to the next. They were not letters in the way I’d ever thought of letters before, each letter was a word, a sentence, and an intent. And still that only scratched the surface.
“What is it?” I whispered, watching the ever-changing patterns circling the bottom of the bells. I didn’t want to be fascinated, but I was. This was magic on a whole other level. This was the kind of power Grace had mastered from the witch eyes. The kind of power I could have had … if things had gone a different way.
“Something that has slept for many ages,” the Widow whispered back like we shared a secret. “Something long missed from this world.” Grace held up her palm, thumb extended to the side, and as the bell jerked to the left—nearly knocking me to the ground—the sound pealed all around us, but it sounded like something coming from the outside in. “Something that burns with fires long forgotten.”
An ache in my chest flared up every time I reached forward, just a bit, for the magic that wasn’t there. It still didn’t feel real that I no longer had the power that had defined me all my life. That, to Grace, I was just an empty human, ordinary and worthless.
I wondered what she saw when she looked at the magic she was making. The silver fire burned at my eyes like magnesium flares. The bell continued to clang, but in our own little bubble of the world, the sound was suppressed. However, in the background we could still hear the responding peals of other bells, other churches, ringing in response. Though it was well into the night in Belle Dam, the city was momentarily alive through the sound of a Sunday mass. Could everyone in town hear them? Or just us?
“Did you know that bells can disperse dark energy?” Grace asked, taking on the role of teacher. There was a satisfied, smug little smile on her face. I got the feeling that this was something she’d been planning on for a long time. “They used to say it was the purity of the sound: a bell’s peal is like no other sound in this or any world. But it was always just a little more than that. Bells are only instruments.” Her eyes skimmed over the language glowing across the surface of the bell. “You have to know the right notes to make them truly sing.”
A hush fell over the bell tower then, the aftermath of a significant moment. These bells were a sign of something beginning. Or maybe they were ending.
“The cruelest part of this,” she added in a reverent whisper, “is that they will drive him mad. In the whole of demon-tainted history, there were only two who learned the secret languages. Both men. Only men were ever thought to be worthy. And he buried both of them long before either one of us was even a possibility.” She was talking about Lucien, the foremost demon of Belle Dam, one of the Riders at the Gate. He was somehow more than most demons.
I saw now what Grace was after. “He’s not stupid,” I said. “If he taught them to you, you’ll be the first one he thinks of. Maybe that you told someone or hid the secrets here.” There were other witches in Belle Dam. And this would make them targets.
“Like your father?” Grace tutted, and inclined her head to study the city laid out beneath her. I hadn’t said that last bit out loud, but she pulled it from my head anyway. “Silly pawn. I already told you. Only men were worthy. And though you come close, you fall short in many of the most obvious ways. He won’t go looking for mortals. Very few beings could hold their own against the full strength of the Riders. Their language was very … distinct.”
“So you want him to think that these things are coming for him?”
She sighed as though I’d disappointed her. Twice in one night. “I want him to remember fear. Real fear. There is a difference between fearing you will one day pass from this world. And it is quite another fear to feel the predator’s breath against your skin.”
“You’re just going to torment him,” I said. The words fell into the air like pebbles onto a pond. She wasn’t the only one suffering from disappointment
. After everything Lucien had done. All the people he’d manipulated. Everyone he’d hurt …
I took a seat in the pew, shifting the hymnal to the side with my knee. No, there was something more to this. The way Grace had shown up tonight, the casual conversation … she wanted something.
“Why am I still alive?”
She had no problem leaving me defenseless. Every day, I hid in Jason’s house wondering if it would be the day that Lucien came after me. I’d killed him once, and I’d tried to stop the ritual he’d performed to restore himself. I would have killed him again if I’d had the chance, but Grace had intervened. She’d destroyed me, but she was just going to harass Lucien a little?
“Would you like for me to remedy that problem?” Grace asked in a chilling tone.
“Only if it’s not going to disrupt your plans to pull Lucien’s pigtails,” I snarked back.
“Your contempt means so very little to me. Speak to me when you no longer dance on someone else’s strings,” Grace said with a smirk.
She might be some sort of immortal witch from another dimension, but Grace was also a grade-A bitch. “I’m no one’s puppet!” I could feel my hands starting to shake, and worse, tears building in the corners of my eyes.
She laughed. It was a tinkling, perfectly respectable sound, but it still froze me in place. “Fortune may favor the brave,” she added with a hidden smile, “but irony certainly crushes the foolish.”
“Am I supposed to know what that means?”
“Not yet,” she quipped. “But soon. I must admit, I’m surprised the demon hasn’t come for you yet. To him, you are nothing more than a broken blade. And he’s always been too tidy by far.”
Grace was toying with me. That’s all this was. She was trying to keep me off my guard. Trying to play me the same way everyone else did. I may not have wanted to be a puppet, but the accusation was on the nose. I reacted far too much, let others set the stage. Even now. Especially now.
“He should know that I’m still sharp. If not, he has no one to blame but himself.” I hadn’t entirely worked out my plan yet, but it seemed like Grace and I were coming to an agreement. “That goes for you, too.”