by A. Sparrow
“Why’d you guys drug me?”
Joshua’s lips made a frown that vanished as soon as it formed. “I’m sorry son, but you didn’t seem willing to cooperate.”
“I told you everything I know, which is nothing. I have no idea where those girls are. I was looking for them just like you.”
Joshua shook his head. His smile struggled to maintain its curve. “I see you’re still a mite reticent. That is a shame. I was hoping you would be more forthcoming, now that you’ve had some time to think.”
“I just told you, I don’t know anything!”
Mark sprang forward and whacked his cricket bat against my already bruised shins.
“Unh! What the fuck?”
“Language please. This is a holy place. We don’t tolerate profanity.”
“What the fuck do you want from me?”
Mark wound up to whack me again, I jumped up and grabbed his bat before he could swing. The barrel of the shotgun came flying up level with my head. Joshua shoved me back down on the bed.
“Cooperate and no one gets hurt. Understand?”
I nodded, my eyes staring down the bottomless pits of those two barrels.
“What made you come to Linval’s door looking for the girls? Why did you think that they would be there?”
“Just a shot in the dark,” I said. “I found out Linval was her cousin.”
“How is it that you came to know my daughter?” said Edmund in a deep voice that could shiver stone and rattle bones. “And don’t tell me you were only pen pals.”
I didn’t know what to say. The truth would only get me beaten.
“Speak! Where did you meet her? Was it the New Craigs Psychiatric Hospital? The Riverdale Centre?”
“No. It wasn’t a hospital. There was no counselor. It was just … a chance meeting.”
“Then where?”
“I can’t … You wouldn’t …”
“Speak!” He pressed the end of his shotgun against my forehead. I saw those old blood spatters on the wall and could no longer hold my tongue.
“I met her in Root!” I blurted.
“En route? To where? Glasgow?”
“In Root. The Liminality.”
Those words hit Edmund like the shock wave from a concussion grenade.
“How dare you speak such … such ….” His face seized up. His lips trembled. “Blasphemy!”
Mark gritted his jaw and swung at my ribs. His bat caught me square. Something cracked. My insides shuddered. I grunted and slid off the bed onto the floor. He rained down a flurry of blows before his father could restrain him.
“Easy son, let him catch his breath.”
The remaining cobwebs in my mind had been seared away by the pain knifing through my lower abdomen. Edmund loomed over me, a corona of stark light from the one bulb in the hallway framing his bearded face, nostrils like the double barrels of his shotgun. His mouth hung open, revealing jagged, tobacco-stained teeth.
“The place you speak of does not exist. It has never existed. I don’t care what Karla told you. This myth. This fairy tale. It is what the faithless use to excuse their sloth and doubt. How many years I have had to deal with this lie? It comes from her mother’s side. They poisoned her mind with it. The Liminality is not a real place. Do you understand?”
I nodded eagerly, not about to argue with him, not with that cricket bat ready to come cracking down on me again.
“Tell me! Where did you meet her?”
“Uh … uh … Inverness.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere!” He turned triumphantly to his flunkies before turning back to me. “You met her at the counselor’s, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, softly. I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t want to get hit again, either. I figured if I just agreed, they would stop beating me.
“It was at the Riverdale Centre.”
“Yes.”
“It was that psychologist … Jennifer Ewing … the kirkist. Yes?”
“I … I don’t remember.” I didn’t want to get someone else hurt.
Mark raised his bat again, but his father checked him. “Give him a chance to explain.”
“Who was your counselor?” said Edmund.
“I didn’t have one … yet. We met … in the waiting room.”
“So you were flirting with my daughter?”
“No. We just chatted. Small talk.”
“So how did you come to know she was going to Glasgow?”
“She … mentioned it.”
“She told you she was going to Linval’s?”
“No. She didn’t tell me hardly anything. I … uh … asked around.”
“How did you connect her with Linval? Are you a friend of his?”
“No. I had never met him.”
“Doesn’t make sense. How did you know to go to his place? She must have told you.”
“No. She didn’t. She didn’t want me to be able to contact her.”
“You were hitting on her, weren’t you?”
“No … I … was just … I liked her. I wanted to stay in touch.”
“So how did you find out Linval was her cousin?”
“She told me.”
“Then why would she tell you that if she didn’t want you to contact her? You’re not making any sense.”
I was stuck. I didn’t want to dig myself in deeper, but Edmund had made it clear he didn’t want to hear the truth.
“Speak!”
I struggled to concoct something on the fly that he would find plausible. But there was nothing I could say.
Mark’s bat came swinging in and glanced off my shoulder. I screamed as a new focus of pain blossomed.
“Where are my girls? Where did they go?”
“I told you. I don’t know,” I said, writhing at his feet.
“Did you touch them? Did you touch my girls? Did you ever have relations?”
“You mean like sexual? No. Not at all. Never.”
“Then why was there a condom in your wallet?”
“That thing? That’s been in my wallet for years.”
Edmund turned to Joshua. “Look at the way he trembles. Do you suppose he speaks the truth?”
“I think we’re making progress here, Ed,” said Joshua, clapping a hand on Edmund’s shoulder. “How about we go down to Riverdale Centre and have a talk with Dr. Ewing? I can make an appointment.”
”He’s told us nothing!” Edmund bellowed, shrugging off Joshua’s hand. “We’re no closer to finding them than we were before.”
I spoke quickly. “I told you everything. I have no idea where those two went. Honestly. I wish I did. I really wish I did.”
“He might not know, Ed. He might be sincere.”
The bat came down again. I flung up my arms to ward off the blow. It smashed into the back of my hand. The kid’s face was pinched and surly. Nothing in his beady eyes said he saw me as a fellow human.
“No Mark!” Joshua seized the bat from his son. “Please, Enough! I know we’re all frustrated here, but let’s give the boy some space to think.”
Edmund glowered down at me, rubbing his fingers around that fancy shotgun, his expression calm. His eyes were bottomless oceans of hate.
“Linval’s turn.”
***
Listening to Linval get hit was almost worse than getting beaten myself. They were relentless and merciless with him, certain he knew where to find the girls. They had found plenty of evidence that the girls had shared his flat: toothbrushes in a mug in the bathroom, dresses in an attic drawer.
Linval didn’t deny that the girls stayed with him, but that didn’t slow his beating. But no matter how times he was struck, he could tell them nothing about where the girls had gone, sharing only idle speculations that invited more blows from Mark.
“Leave him alone!” I shouted. “Can’t you see? He doesn’t know anything, either!”
They ignored me. Edmund continued to bellow and berate him. Mark showed even less restraint with Li
nval than he had with me. Joshua did little to dissuade him.
Once Linval’s asthma got going, it made it impossible for him to talk. His speech degenerated into all-out wheezing. He could hardly breathe. Edmund accused him of faking it.
I hauled myself to the door, sharp pains cutting beneath my ribs. Peering through the gap, I could see Linval on the floor, chest heaving. The men stood over him gawking. Mark prodded him with his bat.
I banged on my door. “He needs help. He’s got asthma.”
“Shut your mouth or I’ll bash it in!” said Mark.
“Leave him be, Edmund. We can only push so far. Let these young men think about the wisdom of their choices. We can try again, later.”
They slammed Linval’s door, latched it and withdrew the passage, arguing as they went.
I could hear Linval flailing about on the floor of his cell, struggling for oxygen as the air whistled through the constriction in his throat.
“Hey, Linval. You okay?”
He couldn’t answer me. At some point, he must have passed out. As I pressed my ear against the door, I was relieved to hear the faint but regular sucking sound that told me he still breathed.
I limped back to the cot and curled up, pulling the blanket loosely over me, shivering. These guys were insane. If not for Joshua, Linval and I might be crippled or dead by now.
I laid there and tried to picture a scenario where we would be let free to walk out of this basement, but I could find little hope. These men were determined to pry something out of Linval and me that didn’t exist. Neither of us could tell them where Karla and Isobel had gone. And yet, all indications were that they intended to continue with their inquisition.
Even if I fabricated something along the lines of what they wanted to hear, what would happen once they checked it out and discovered it was a lie?
I realized I might never see Karla again. I might never even get to squint at the sun or feel the wind on my face. I might die in this basement.
Once that bit of logic clicked into place in my mind, my spirit descended. The woolen blanket came alive, its fibers lengthening and thickening as they wrapped around and around my aching limbs.
At last, I had summoned Root. I welcomed its coming like a long, lost friend.
Chapter 9: Dust
I lay on my back in a bed of sand. The cloudless, cobalt sky harbored a sun, bluer and cooler than the one I thought I knew, hanging high over distant hills. There were plants around me—real plants. Not those fake, botanically inaccurate replicas that Luther used to decorate his little cavern.
All of this surprised me. I had expected to find myself immersed in darkness and stench, tangled in a pod, deep in the tunnels of Root. I was ready for the Reapers, but I guess they weren’t ready for me.
I rolled over onto my knees, startled by the sudden absence of pain. My body still bore signs of the damage Mark had inflicted, but its impression on my senses had become muted and distant, like a faded memory of an old injury.
The unexpected reprieve made a smile grow on my lips. I felt empowered and free. It felt like coming come. It was like being on leave from a war.
I was naked as usual, but the air was balmy and still, like a mid-summer’s morning in Ft. Pierce. I stood up and stared across a barren plain pocked with sinkholes leading to the underworld. Beyond the pits, sheets of windswept stone stretched to a horizon as smooth and curved as a billiard ball.
The opposite direction led to another world altogether, complex and corrugated with tier after tier of ridges and peaks that vanished into blue mist. The intervening landscape was gently undulant and creased with shallow channels and fan-like washes.
Though I had only seen it at night, silhouetted by stars, the profile of the land before me struck a chord in my memory. A cloud-shrouded, glacier-sheathed massif dominated all, looming over tiers of foothills gashed with canyons. A larger valley opened to the left, bounded on the far side by a tableland of flat-topped ridges and mesas.
As I had done with Bern and Lille a month and a half ago, I started walking towards the hills. There was no other choice, really. Nothing about the desert plains made me want to go there. At least the hills offered some signs of life in the scrub and trees that clothed them.
I came to a deep, narrow pit, and steered well clear, but couldn’t help sneaking a glance as I went by. I instantly regretted it. The matrix of roots and tunnels came disturbingly close to the surface. A thin crust of stone and soil separated me from the domain of the Reapers.
Knowing how they roamed below my feet made me pick up my pace. I hoped the crust grew thicker in the heights. I would sure feel a lot better with a mile of stone between me and the Reapers.
A broad but shallow channel offered the path of least resistance. It also felt familiar. Either all these channels looked alike, or this was the same one we had followed my last night in Root.
A grove of trees appeared around a bend and behind them, the glint of a pond. Glimmers of remembrance told me I knew this place. Here, Lille had gathered water for tea. On a terrace of gravel and silt tucked against the gully wall, she and Bern had laid the cornerstones for the cabin they had intended to build.
I saw no sign of any cabin, but that didn’t worry me at first. Maybe they had found a better spot upstream. Maybe they had made their way to Frelsi.
The trees were sad little things with limp leaves and sagging branches. The leaves were oval and whitish-green. The grove smelled faintly of turpentine.
I went over and stood by the pond. There was no wind. The glassy water looked more dead than placid. The stillness disturbed me. I walked along the shore and stepped onto the low terrace, and what I found roiled my mood with the first shadings of anxiety.
The cornerstones remained in place, connected by a simple foundation of flat stones. Between them was a rectangular patch of fine, yellow dust; inches thick in most places with lumps here and there. The dust lay deepest along the outermost edges of the foundation, where walls would have been. I stared, trying to make sense of what lay before me.
I scooped up a pinch of dust and rubbed it in my fingers. It was ultra-fine and slippery, like corn starch. There was no sign of any singeing so these couldn’t be ashes. It was just dust.
Outside the oblong I found more patches of dust. I found evidence of what had likely been a table and two chairs. A small white circle marked what had likely been a saucer. A smaller patch with a loop marked the remains of a teacup that had been obliterated.
I had seen Weavings come undone, but never like this. Roots usually reverted into the wiry brown strands that formed their default state. Whatever had done this had been highly selective. None of the wild shrubs replanted in the flower beds had been harmed. A stone wall and a cobbled walk, half completed, remained in place.
A jolt of trepidation rattled me. I paced the terrace, dreading I might find Bern and Lille-shaped patches of dust. I didn’t, thank God, but there was this weird set of prints in the soft sand below the terrace—pairs of deep impressions like tent spikes combined with lobed indentations like overlapping dinner plates. What kind of thing had spikes and plates for feet?
I circled wider, trying to construct even the vaguest explanation of what had happened. Down below the terrace I found a pit dug deep into the soft sediments all the way to the root matrix. I thought at first it might be a latrine or trash pit, but the rock and silt that had been removed had motile fragments of root that wormed their way free and crept from the tailings, tumbling over the lip of the pit to rejoin their kind.
This was a mine. Bern and Lille had likely used it to obtain raw material for their Weavings. The overlay of stone and soil was apparently inert, or at least refractory to our brand of spell craft.
I lay down on my belly and reached into the hole, scooping up a fistful of severed strands. I plopped them down on the sand and tried to modify them with my will. I had in mind a pair of jeans and a hoodie just like the ones I wore on the farm.
I was way out of
practice. As I stared they dispersed like an overturned can of worms. I rounded them back up into a clump and tried again, my ire rising.
That little bit of annoyance proved the missing ingredient. Idle thoughts had no effects on roots. They responded only to passion and I wanted those clothes! I was tired of traipsing around butt naked.
I picked up a stick and pointed it at them like a wand. As soon as I made my desires clear, focused and urgent, my worms responded,
It happened slowly at first, but the pace picked up and accelerated into a blur. The strands thinned and divided and sorted themselves into a tiny patch of coarse denim that expanded into a pair of jeans, sans zipper or rivets or pockets, but I couldn’t complain. They were blue jeans.
I still had the knack! That realization sent a thrill surging. If only I could do this on the other side.
I repeated the process for my hoodie, approximating my favorite cool season garb. Both articles turned out a little too baggy. But I didn’t mind. I could cinch the belt loops tight. Just pulling on these new duds made me feel more human.
But I could only savor my little victory for a few moments. As I stood on the terrace and gazed out over the dry riverbed I was gripped by an intense pang of loneliness. I was really hoping I would run into Bern and Lille, to catch up on things, to vent about my predicament with Edmund. Without them, and without Karla, I had nowhere to go and no reason to be here.
I knew people in the ‘Burg. I would be guaranteed companionship down below. What better way to win friends than to free a willing soul from a pod? But I wasn’t about to return to those tunnels. I had seen enough Reapers for one existence. If I was going to risk losing my soul, it was not doing to be down the gullet of some ghastly, gluttonous shape-shifter.
What was the point of suicide if souls just continued on and on in other worlds and variants? What was the point of being? And just like that, I succumbed to a whirlpool of existential angst.
The idea of this never-ending cascade of pointless existences made me nauseous. When had wanted to kill myself, I had gone into it with the hope that it would bring peace. I pictured a limbo-like nothingness free of all responsibility.
Instead, here I was across the threshold, but still stuck in the same mind with the same anxieties, longings and doubts that had driven me to Root in the first place.
Was this place actually Hell? That made sense, in a way. The only problem with the idea was that I knew very well that there were worse places in the tunnels below. But that was no deal killer. Hell could have levels, could it not?