by E. E. Holmes
“Did you feel that?” I asked.
Hannah looked up. “Feel what?”
“That…I was just thinking about how pissed off I was and then…something was there. It was like another thought dropped into my head!”
Hannah lifted her chin off of her arms. “Whose thought? What are you talking about, Jess?”
“I don’t know,” I said, my eyes scanning the príosún. “I was just thinking about how angry I am about this whole situation, and suddenly…” I couldn’t describe it. It was a strange indefinable violation, a hijacking of my train of thought. My heart began to race and my pulse to quicken.
We can hear it, faster and faster, the galloping beat of its fear, its fear.
I leapt to my feet. “What the hell?” I spun on the spot, probing the darkness with my eyes, my ears, my thoughts. Nothing.
“Jess, you’re scaring me,” Hannah said, her voice becoming shrill. “What is it, do you sense a ghost?”
It scares the other, how delightful.
We taste it, the cresting, the breaking of fear.
This time it was Hannah who jumped up as though burned. “Who said that? Who’s here?”
But I’d heard it, too, a seamless part of my own thoughts. “What did it say? What did you hear?”
“Something about my fear…the breaking and cresting, or…” Hannah’s voice shivered and died away as she looked at me. “Is that what you heard?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It…it must be a ghost, right?”
“I’m not sure,” Hannah said. “I still don’t sense one, do you?”
“No,” I admitted. “But maybe it’s using another form of communication? Maybe this is an emotional spirit experience? I’ve never had one before.”
“I have,” Hannah said. “Plenty of times. That was…different.”
It builds and, ah! The intertwining tendrils of it, it finds us, it feeds us.
We longed for it so. It fills us, it feeds us.
A sudden wave of dizziness swept over at me, and I stumbled into Hannah, who grasped onto my arm to steady me even as she began to sway dangerously herself.
“I feel weak,” I said. I swallowed back the urge to be sick.
“I can feel it, too. What’s going on?”
Ah, sustenance! Shall we dance with them? Shall we play?
Oh, let’s indeed! To dance, to walk, to feel and feed.
I exhaled sharply, and felt an indefinable something ride away on my breath, a something I didn’t know had been there until it suddenly wasn’t. Hannah gasped and wretched beside me.
One, cracking footstep in the leaves. One quiet whisper of laughter.
We looked up at the sound, and at the sight of it, every element of the night seemed to go utterly still. The motes of dust hung in the motionless torchlight. The constant dull murmur of the living forest was extinguished into the most unnatural of silences.
At first glance it was a woman, and for a moment I was very nearly relieved to see a form so familiar and human — the long pale legs, the clouds of hair, the suggestion of garments hanging about her body — but the next, I knew that I had never seen anything less human. It effused its own dull light, which pulsed and undulated fluidly as it moved.
Images rippled across its surface, over the planes of its limbs and through the glittering hint of its garment. The images were so quick, so fleeting, that my eyes could not decode them. Instead, I felt them, disconnected flashes of pain and fear and every powerful negative emotion I’d ever experienced and some I’d only imagined.
It had a face. Well, it had many faces —a constantly mutating collection of features, some of them human, some of them bestial, some of them something else entirely —flickering and melting and reforming under the fluttering mass of hair.
A fear filled me that no scream could ever express. I did not need Hannah’s whispered words to understand what had entered the circle with us. Peyton’s casting had worked.
“The Elemental.”
It walked toward us with the very real sounds of living footsteps, but seeming not to actually make contact with the ground. It could have continued until it was upon me or inside me; I was utterly incapable of moving. But it stopped a few feet away and tilted its head, considering us with its ever-changing faces.
From some hitherto untapped spring of courage, I retrieved my voice and spoke to it.
“What do you want from us?”
We have what we want. You are giving it to us. We feast upon it.
Its voice, like its face, was multi-faceted, at once singular and cacophonous with a strange chorus of voices and sounds. I understood its words with my brain rather than my ears.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What are we giving you?”
It beats under your skin. It floods your thoughts and your form. Can’t you feel it getting stronger? We can. Oh yes, we can.
I chanced a glance at Hannah, who even in her terror, looked just as confused as I felt. I didn’t want to press the thing to explain itself; what if it got angry? I tried another question.
“What are you?”
The Elemental moved a few paces closer, the sound of its footsteps slightly out of sync with the movement. For the merest trace of a moment, it was not a woman, but some sort of creature, but before I could commit a single detail of it to memory, it was a woman once more.
Many believe that we were here first, and perhaps we were. With a sidestep, it began to circle us slowly, prowling. We do not know how we began, for we are so many parts, and ever-changing. But we truly began to be with the first of the screams.
“What screams?” I asked.
The screams. The Elemental waved its flickering suggestion of an arm, which flashed suddenly like a bat wing, and back again. The screams of this place. There was a time we gorged ourselves —a time of glorious gluttony. So many prisoners, so much pain—delectable.
And some part of it lashed at us, like the flicking of an enormous spectral tongue. And I felt something pulled from me, something that left me dizzy and breathless.
Such a familiar nectar.
The Elemental glowed a bit brighter as we gasped and staggered. As we cried out, it heaved an animal moan of pleasure.
They thought they had enslaved us, to punish and to torture. They did not know that they were nourishing us, creating this form with their beautiful cruelty.
The energy lashed out again.
“Stop that!” I cried. “Leave us alone!”
Hear how it pleads —positively dripping with it. Cannot. Will not. We will not return to the darkness and the famine. We must feed.
Hannah grabbed my arm. “It’s fear!”
“What is?”
“It’s…it’s made of fear! Look at it. Look at it! Listen to it!”
I looked back at the Elemental, trying to focus on the images that continued to flash through it. Most of it was too muddled, but the longer I concentrated, the more I was able to discern. A hand trembling. A woman cowering, hiding her face. A pair of wide, terrified eyes. It was there in its voice too, I realized; the very fabric of its sound was woven of the screams and pleading and whimpers of centuries of victims, all bound together in their abject terror. My own fear heightened in response to this realization, and the Elemental lapped at it with an indecent relish.
“Oh my God.”
“It’s feeding on our fear!” Hannah said. “That’s what it meant when it said we were giving it what it wanted. We were already afraid.”
“Oh great,” I whispered. “As long as we’re afraid, it will keep feeding and getting stronger?”
“I think so,” Hannah said.
“Swell,” I said through clenched teeth as the Elemental lashed at us again. “So all we have to do is stop being afraid. No problem.”
It was the ultimate cycle of torment. A being that created and sharpened the fear it fed on by its very presence. And we were trapped in it.
“Okay. Okay, let’s think here. I know you can sense spirits
and call them to you. Have you ever tried to…send them away?” I asked.
Hannah frowned. “What do you mean? Like, expel them, like the Caomhnóir do?”
“Yeah, sort of like that.”
Hannah shook her head. “I can persuade them to do the things I ask, sometimes. You’ve seen it; those ghosts at the hospital attacked the nurses because I asked them to. I don’t think the Elemental will be interested in any requests I might have to make, do you?”
As though in response, the Elemental lashed out again. The force of it brought us both to our knees. My blood was rushing loudly in my ears, thudding with my racing pulse, and the Elemental purred in terrible delight.
“If you were ever going to try, don’t you think this would be the moment?” I asked breathlessly. “What have we got to lose?”
Hannah bit her lip and closed her eyes. I watched her anxiously, my vision growing hazy around the periphery. After a few moments she opened them again. “It’s no use. I don’t know exactly what the Elemental is, but it isn’t a ghost. I can’t even sense it the way I sense ghosts. It was never human.”
They are sinking, sinking in it. Soon it will swallow them up, and so shall we.
And with the echoing joy of this thought, the Elemental’s hair began to blow around its nightmare of a face, and the tendrils came alive, floating toward us, riding on the currents of our own terror until they reached us. They snaked around our limbs, tightened around our throats, and knotted into our hair. We screamed and clawed at them, but they were as insubstantial to the touch as wisps of smoke. But the pain of them. Oh, God, the pain.
And I knew this was it. We would never see the morning. The Elemental would feed and feed upon us, its very presence spawning an endless supply of fear that would only increase until the terror swallowed us and there was nothing of us left but the empty shells, sucked dry at last. I felt Hannah slip to the ground beside me, unconscious.
I wished, for the first time in my life, to die, and I could feel the Elemental smile at the taste of it. It tilted its head back and basked in its own power, drunk with it.
I closed my eyes. Please just let us die, I thought.
Despair is the sweetest of the sweet, my sweet.
Please.
“Jessica! Hannah!”
Another voice was calling for me, a familiar one. It was a moment before I knew it wasn’t in my head.
“Hannah! Jessica! Jessica, can you hear me?” it said.
“Yes.” I called out.
“It’s Carrick! Finn is here with me! We’re going to help you!”
“Help me?”
I opened my eyes. The edge of the clearing was blurred but visible. Two figures, one dark, one bright and wavering, stood between the torches. The reality of them fell like a heavy weight into my brain.
“Help us! Help us, please!” I cried. “It’s the Elemental!”
“I know!” Carrick called back to me. “Finn and I are going to expel it, but we can’t do it while it’s feeding on you. Listen very carefully to me. It is latching onto your negative emotions. That’s what it feeds on. You’ve got to force it out with positive emotions.”
“Are you telling me,” I cried, panting with the incredible effort of focusing on him, “that I need to think a happy thought? This isn’t fucking Never Never Land, Carrick! You’ve got to do something!”
The Elemental tightened its grip, perhaps sensing my attention focusing elsewhere. I screamed again, cradled in the curve of its terrible grin.
“There’s nothing I can do! As long as you focus on your pain and fear, it will not release you! All we need is a moment, one moment of positive energy, and it will detach. You’ve got to try, Jessica!”
I rose onto trembling knees. I didn’t think I had a single positive thought or feeling left in my body. I dug down into the empty pit in myself and came up with nothing but handfuls of darkness.
“I can’t,” I cried. “I can’t do it. I’ve got nothing left.”
“You have got something left!” Carrick shouted. “And you will lose her if you don’t do this! Look at her! Look at your sister!”
I turned and looked at Hannah where she lay curled on the ground just inches from me. With a greater effort than anything had ever cost me, I reached across to her and clasped her hand in mine. And unbidden, unsummoned, a love for her rose up in me so powerfully that I couldn’t breathe.
We would not lose each other again.
The icy grip within me slackened.
“Now!” Carrick shouted.
A dreadful echoing scream filled the night, mounting to the skies, and a powerful gust of wind swept the clearing. Then, with a rustle of settling leaves, warm, throbbing life flooded back into the circle again.
The relief was instant and all-encompassing. The pain that had been crippling me moments before vanished, leaving not a trace behind, and as I clambered to my feet, I felt steady.
“Where did it go?”
I turned to see Hannah pulling herself into a sitting position. “I think I passed out.”
“You did, but it’s okay. The Elemental’s gone.”
She stared frantically around the circle for a full thirty seconds before she seemed to accept my words. “How in the world, did you —”
“I didn’t,” I said. “It was Finn and Carrick.” And I pointed to the circle boundary, where Finn was crouched on the ground, hastily scrawling something in the dirt. Carrick stood over him, instructing. Then the torches around us all went out at once, plunging us into pitch darkness.
“It’s alright!” came Carrick’s measured, soothing voice. “That was us. The breaking of the circle put out the fires. Just stay where you are a moment, we’re coming to get you.”
There was the tiny snap of a match and a shiver of firelight, and Finn was stepping over the stone wall, one of the torches relit in his hand. Carrick floated along behind him. They reached us just as I bent to help Hannah to her feet. Finn caught her under the elbow and lifted with me.
“Are you both okay?” he asked gruffly.
“Yes, I think so,” Hannah said. There was wonder in her voice as she said it, as though she couldn’t quite believe that it could be the truth.
Finn looked at me expectantly. I nodded curtly. While the Elemental had been menacing us, I would have given anything for help to arrive in any form, but now that it was gone, I could feel nothing but mortification that Finn was one who had found us. Why, why did it have to be him, the protector I didn’t want, but apparently needed?
“Where is the Elemental now?” Hannah asked.
“It won’t be able to approach this place for a while,” Finn said. “The expulsion casting will take days to wear off.”
“How did you find us?” I asked. I was too embarrassed to look Finn in the eye, so I addressed my question to Carrick instead.
“I’ve been keeping an eye on you,” Carrick said, and then added hastily, “At Finvarra’s request, of course. Fairhaven has a long history of welcoming rituals, not all of them very welcoming in nature. We had a feeling that something like this might be in the works; although,” and he shook his head, “I must admit that I never imagined they would have the nerve or indeed the information to actually try the summoning of the Elemental.”
“That wasn’t part of their plan,” I said. “At least, they hadn’t agreed on it. That part was Peyton’s extra special touch. The rest of them went running when they saw what she was trying to do. Peyton didn’t think it had worked. The Elemental makes a quiet entrance.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Finn said. “Peyton always has had a flair for the dramatic. It’s only gotten worse as she’s gotten older.”
Carrick glanced sharply at Finn. “Finn, I realize that Peyton is your cousin, and so there is a certain degree of familiarity, but it is not in our code to speak ill of the Durupinen.”
Finn hung his head. “Yes, sir.”
“Anyway, I saw the others emerging from the woods and had a hunch about what mig
ht be going on. By the time I reached this place, the Elemental had already begun to feed. There was nothing I could do to help you without a true physical form, so I went for Finn. Protecting you is, after all, his duty now. But he was already on his way. One of the girls panicked and went to fetch him.”
“You’re kidding!” I said. “Who was it?”
“Róisín Lightfoot,” Finn said. “She showed me where to go and went back to the castle. I think she was too scared to come back near here. Then Carrick found me at the edge of the woods and showed me what to do.”
“Right” I said, somewhat stiffly. “Well … thank you.”
“Yes, thank you,” Hannah added. “I don’t want to think what would have happened if you hadn’t showed up.”
Finn just grunted and waved us off. We all trudged up out of the clearing together and onto the path, Finn lighting the way ahead of us with the torch lifted over his head.
“I don’t want you to have a false impression of what the Elemental would have done to you,” Carrick said briskly as we walked. “It is a physical manifestation of negative emotions — specifically, pain and fear. It takes hundreds of years to form, usually in places like the príosún, where negative emotions constantly run high. If feeds off of these emotions, as I told you. As it strengthens, it can project these emotions back on to you, causing you to experience pain and fear that isn’t even your own. This of course only heightens your own terror, creating a cycle that can sustain the Elemental indefinitely. But it cannot really harm you, not in a physical sense.”
I scowled at him. “I was feeling pretty damn harmed.”
Carrick very nearly smiled. “I don’t mean to minimize the horror of the experience. But the pain was an illusion. How do you feel now?”
I considered. “Completely fine. Tired, but fine.”
“Hannah?”
She nodded. “The same.”
“The Elemental was used to force confessions many centuries ago. It was an ideal form of torture. The prisoners always gave in, and since the Elemental did no lasting damage, the prisoners were always able to participate fully in the rest of the penal process.”
“That’s barbaric,” I said.