Again Tom heard Molly’s voice. It came from the giant demon prowling the forest. It was imitating Molly, intuitively calling out to Tom, luring him. The oddly shaped body of the giant and the eerie noises it produced reminded Tom of the dreigher, the demon that had once possessed him. The Uyl Talisman around Tom’s arm still carried the evil spirit. Feeling it wrapped around his arm gave Tom a chill. He ignored it and began to carefully make his way past the lumbering legs of the giant, again following the thread, which took him through a dangerously thin clearing of trees. As he crept along, hoping the giant would not see him, Tom heard a voice cry out, and this time he knew it was not a hallucination.
“Msaada kwangu!” the cry for help came from the forest between Tom and the giant. “Ni wewe huko? Tafadhali msaada!”
Tom hadn’t the faintest idea what the voice was saying. He’d never heard the language before. Just as he began to wonder if his mind were playing tricks on him again, he watched the giant scoop one of its hands through the trees and come up with something different. A man—not a spirit or demon, but a real man, like Tom—was clasped between the giant’s fingers, wrestling against it!
Tom defied instinct and ran to help the man. Using the werewolf curse to carry him quickly through the trees, he kept his head low and stuck to dark places. For a second he showed himself, calling to the giant, which saw him and followed him curiously with its eerie white eyes, forgetting the man in its hands. Tom dashed out of sight again and ran wide around the giant, coming up behind it.
The demon’s feet crashed against the ground just behind the tree to which Tom kept his back. He didn’t know if Yatagarasu would do what he hoped it would. He didn’t even know if he could pull it from the sheath, but he was going to try.
Ine’s blade came out from its sheath with no trouble. The smoothness of the weapon gave Tom courage, and as he turned and ran toward the demon’s vulnerable legs, Yatagarasu burst to life, a dark light blazing from it as Tom ran like black fire. In one stroke, he swung the blade and cut through the demon’s ankle. The giant, taken by surprise, released its victim and fell to one knee as it turned and its leg gave out beneath it. Tom ran from the giant and followed the other man into the darkness of the forest.
“Wait!” he called out after the man, “Stop!” Tom found the man after searching for a moment. He was hidden in the trees, watching for any sign of the demon. “What was that?” Tom asked him, pointing back toward the demon.
“Anakula roho. Je, si basi ni kuona wewe,” said the man.
Tom could not understand him. He assumed the man was from the living world. He looked about as unreal as Tom did, ghostly and translucent. His skin was very dark, and he wore simple clothes—a blanket around his shoulders and another around his waist. He wore a beaded headdress and a wig that made his black hair appear longer. In addition to a simple knife, he carried a long spear. Where he’d come from and why he was here, Tom didn’t expect to find out, but by the way the man was dressed, Tom—having seen Maasai in various African ports of call—conjectured the stranger was a Maasai warrior.
“Mwuaji,” the man kept saying, pointing toward where the demon had been.
“Mwuaji?” Tom repeated. “It was eating souls, wasn’t it? I knew it had to be some kind of demon, or …” He didn't finish, realizing the man probably couldn’t understand much of what Tom said, either.
“Demon?” the man said in a strained accent. “Yes, a demon.”
“Where does this go?” asked Tom, pointing to the fine thread coming from his chest. When the man looked confused, it occurred to Tom that the man could not see the thread. The Maasai warrior must have come into contact with Europeans frequently when he was alive, having learned enough English to suture some crude sentences together.
“I don’t understand,” he said, still confused by Tom’s gesturing.
Just then, a shriek split their ears and Mwuaji’s glowing eyes bore down on them from above. In one powerful stride it had come upon them hidden in the dark. Like a large child scooping up marbles, it swept a giant hand down and lifted Tom off the ground. As it swung its arm through the air, it ripped through the trees, which wrapped around its fingers like delicate hairs and burst into wisps of gray before disappearing. The sound of shattering glass followed the breaking of branches, trunks and roots.
Slowly the giant stood up, Tom in hand. Tom could not feel its hand around him, but instead a horrific weight surrounded him from which he could not wrestle free. He turned to look into the eyes of Mwuaji as it opened its mouth, the lips of which pulled apart from one another like the weak seams of a piece of cloth. The mouth opened wide, and a furious wind pulled at Tom’s face. The thread coming from his chest bent and struggled against the wind as it screamed and lashed him. An orb of bright light began to show in the middle of his ribs, and Tom saw that it was his soul anchoring the thread to his body. Yelling for help, he squirmed and struggled but could not fight back.
Below, the stranger Tom had rescued was about to repay the kindness. As bravely as Tom—braver, actually—the man leapt up onto Mwuaji’s leg, grasping hold of handfuls of what seemed to be ragged fur. Before Mwuaji could snatch him off, he climbed arm over arm up onto the giant’s lower back.
Tom was whipped through the air as Mwuaji twisted its massive torso this way and that, like someone who’d seen a spider on his shirt. Slow and weighty as the demon was, from inside its grip Tom felt as though he were being shot from a cannon every time it swung its arm. Although dizzy and whiplashed, now hanging upside down by one leg, Tom saw the stranger standing atop one of Mwuaji’s shoulders. As the African warrior plunged his spear into the giant’s shoulder, Mwuaji’s shriek was loud and shrill. In surprise he let go of Tom, who flinched as he fell, expecting to smack the ground hard. Instead when he opened his eyes, he’d already landed in what should have been a painful way, but it wasn’t. Having lain there with his eyes shut for longer than necessary, Tom smiled at his own dim-wittedness.
“Ahh!” Tom yelped, his smile fleeing as he rolled away from one of Mwuaji’s great feet, which pounded the ground where he had been a second before. As he got up, he wondered again if he really had to worry about being crushed, and then wondered if anything could harm him at all. Caught up in philosophical thought, he didn’t flee fast enough from Mwuaji when it came lumbering after him again. Its huge black hands crashed through the trees and gave chase as Tom abruptly jumped up and ran. The stranger who had saved Tom ran past, spear in hand, into the dark. Tom picked up his heels and followed, eventually leaving the giant Mwuaji behind. When he caught up with the stranger, the two waited in hiding until Mwuaji gave up its pursuit and turned its back.
“Let us go. Mwuaji will return.” The man beckoned for Tom to accompany him, and the two men set out. They climbed higher up the slope of the forested valley and took the long way around Mwuaji’s domain, out of the darkness and toward the light.
“Where are we?” Tom asked as they traversed the mountains, heading for lower lands.
“We are with the dead,” was the answer.
“Where does the thread go?”
“Do you know?” the man asked, misunderstanding Tom.
“No, no I don’t.”
“You are English?”
“Yes,” Tom answered. “Are there other people here?”
“We are here,” said the man.
“Excellent point.” Tom laughed when the man didn’t understand his meaning. “Between the two of us, there’s certainly enough life for this place, yeah?”
“Why are you here?” the man asked Tom. With one arm he held to the blanket around his shoulders, using his long spear as a walking stick.
“I was a debtor to Death. He came to collect.” Tom knew that wasn’t much of an answer, but he couldn’t expect the stranger to know who the Alchemist or the Helvetii were. “Why are you here?” he asked back.
“We went to hunt lion. I have killed seven lion.” He raised his voice to emphasize the number and showed Tom
the rows of scars on his stomach that proved it. They were made by his fellow men, not a lion, one gash to commemorate each kill. “I use this spear,” he said, stamping the butt end of it on the ground. “This was my father’s spear. It is magic, and very strong.”
“Mwuaji wouldn’t argue,” said Tom, eyeing the razor edge of the spear’s tip.
“I kill the lion,” he continued. “We carry it to the river. Crocodiles come to steal our lion. I was bitten. I get very sick from the bite, so my father and brother take me to Blue Rock Mountain. Still, I am sick. I go to sleep on Blue Rock Mountain and wake up to see Mwuaji.”
“Did you hear them when you woke up? Your father and brother?” asked Tom, a hopeful part of him wanting to know the voices he was hearing were real—that Molly was somewhere nearby. The reasonable part of him told him she couldn’t be, and if she were, something terrible would have to have happened.
“No,” the man answered. He didn’t say anything for a minute. “I hear my wife. My child. I look for them. They are not here. Just Mwuaji’s tricks.”
Those last words cut into Tom. His hope sank, and he stopped thinking. The faint whistle of a breeze crossed over the mountain, and when it did, the light falling from the sky in the distance drove the shadows from the flat plain below. In seconds the shadows came back. A funny sensation, the feeling of being home alone on a day one has nothing to do, overcame Tom. Following the thread was like waiting for someone to come home, knowing no one is actually coming. Tom watched the thread ahead of him as if he were looking out a window, unable to go outside. Though he was the one walking, trying to find something, the impression was that of anticipating something trying to find him instead. When the bright shine of light from above periodically surprised his eyes, he’d blink and feel as though he were blind for hours before he could see again. Wherever he was now, it was far from where he’d left Molly. When he’d first arrived, he’d felt as though he’d be going back soon, as easy as walking out through a door. This afterlife was a blank slate. What would he do now? His purpose and his worries were not here with him. They had stayed behind, with his body.
Far behind the men, a great shriek rang out and down the mountainside. Turning to look, they saw the figure of Mwuaji, standing tall above the trees, its head and large, empty white eyes turning round and round, looking for lost souls. From far away, Tom thought, the demon did not look frightening at all. Its black form peacefully rested against the darkness of the grey mountain backdrop. It would not set a foot into the light, where the sky poured its warmth onto the trees in the high hills. Only the long shadow of the colossus reached out toward them. Like a wide-eyed owl it stared at the men and then turned, its steps shaking the ground as it vanished into the valley.
After many hours, or days, of walking—Tom had no way of reckoning the time—he came out of a trance. His only thoughts had been of Molly as he wandered, unthinking. Engrossed in memories of her, he hadn’t paid any mind to the world around him. His only certainty was the thread he followed. It never changed direction, so often he would keep walking without a care. It was when he finally remembered what he was doing that Tom looked up from the ground and saw that he’d long left behind the valley of Mwuaji and had now come to a place he did not remember being in just moments ago. White haze obscured the horizon in all directions like low-lying snow clouds, and fallen trees lay bent and broken as if those clouds had crashed down on top of them.
“Do you know where we …” Tom said, letting go of his words as they left him unfinished. The stranger who had saved him earlier was nowhere to be seen. “Hello?” Tom called. “Hello!” No voice responded. The same inconspicuous sound of the wind carried on, uninterrupted. Little distant sounds mixed with it, but they meant nothing. The world spoke to itself like a person whose mind was slowly abandoning him. Tom walked in circles of many hundreds of paces for what felt like forever, looking in every direction even as the haze blurred the distinction between one direction and another. He did not know when he had lost his companion. The warrior had heard his wife and child again and followed them into the fog. Tom hadn’t heard the man calling out to them or seen him running away.
Tom marched on, the grass beneath his feet giving way to rock and soil, and soon he treaded along a rugged path, barely visible through the foggy haze. Strange visions put him on edge. Images of people, ghostly and silent, drifted by in the mist. They weren’t easy to notice, but when one stood out, Tom would jump in surprise. He tried to talk to a few of them, who appeared not to notice him, perhaps unable to see him. Their eyes searched the fog like his, lost and sad. Tom began to wonder if he would see anyone he knew—his father, Harlan or even his mother. He never did, and he reasoned that they might not be there at all. This was the end, he thought. He would not see Molly again. There was no magic; no hidden escape routes or clauses in his curse would save him from death.
If the truth was that Tom had been dead for only an hour, it surely felt like many years. His slow hike through the foggy wasteland taxed his soul more than anything he’d ever experienced during life. He didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t remember why he was following the thread, and with everything he forgot, he saw less and less of the way ahead until he stopped. No light came from the sky, the ground, anywhere. Tom’s soul glowed like a cinder, weak and uselessly optimistic, unaware that its carrier had given up.
“Isn’t it supposed to start raining at times like this?” Tom asked the empty, charcoal smog. “No?”
The darkness gave no answer.
“Nothing wants to steal my soul?” Tom pivoted slowly and gave a sigh. He took a deep breath—an unnecessary thing to do—and began to think of Molly again. As he did, the weak light in his chest pointed to something. A blue light appeared through the haze, small and distant, twinkling like a tiny star. It was just enough to tease Tom’s curiosity, so he walked toward it.
A beautiful sight, the likes of which no living person had ever witnessed, was what revived Thomas Crowe when he first stepped out of the seemingly endless grey oblivion that was the wastelands of Chthonia. Bright light struck his sleeping eyes, and he recoiled in shock. Lifting his head, his eyes swept the world that met them. A long coastline ran away from him and hooked itself around a large bay that opened into a sea beyond. A thousand paces or so from where he stood, the daylight that fell on the world abruptly stopped, and one step farther, dark nighttime fell like dark snow upon the shores. The nocturnal world met the bright one like a black stripe on white fabric. Somewhere on the dark shores, the blue light Tom had seen from the wastelands was twinkling brightly. It was difficult to ignore amid the black, white and grey surroundings. It came from a small dwelling, as Tom could tell as he followed the shoreline toward it. Colorless waves rolled up onto the sand and passed over his boots, splashing his legs but never wetting them. When he reached the division of night and day, he crossed over into the shaded world without a second thought. Now on the dark side, he could see that the night literally fell as he’d seen it, like flurries that collected on the ground and blew around like sand or snow. Dark flakes peppered the air, and what was more, the dark world was not entirely colorless like the former one. Color came through in the shore grasses and even in the low sky, where it met the horizon, but it was pale and washed out. It was still not like the living world. Invigorated and ever more curious, Tom walked faster and faster, almost at a run by the time he came to the little house by the sea where the blue light was hiding somewhere within.
*
“Are you going to come in?” The voice came from inside the little house.
Tom approached cautiously, standing on his toes to try to see through a window and stretching his neck, trying to look around the corner of the entryway.
“No demons here,” said the voice, drenched in a Caribbean accent and unwound with age and wear. “I t’ink I know you. Do I?” the voice asked, as though thinking aloud.
“Is that right?” said Tom, shrugging off caution and stepping th
rough the doorway and into the one-room shack, dimly but warmly lit with blue light. “Anyone who knows me is worth meeting. Who are you?”
“Ah, it is you! I’ve never met you, but I’ve seen you,” said an old man, sitting against the back wall, his legs folded. He smiled and his eyes squinted as he pointed an old, twiggy finger at Tom. “C’mon inside and sit. Sit!” he insisted. “I have t’ings to tell you!”
“What kinds of things? What is this place and how do I leave? Are those some things you can tell me? That would be the best kind of thing to know, honestly,” said Tom, dropping to the floor with a grunt and resting his elbows on his folded legs.
“I said I have t’ings to tell, not answers to questions,” replied the old man impatiently. “You are arrogant! The girl I speak to, she listen to every word I say and ask no questions. You … you …” he shook a finger and laughed to himself, then waved his hand and looked away. “You are here because you are arrogant, yes? I know this, ah ha!”
“You’re the most interesting old man I’ve ever met,” said Tom, “Oh, but don’t tell Ozias that,” he joked, catching the old man’s infectious good mood.
“Who is Ozias?” The old man scrunched his face in confusion.
“Never mind him. He’ll be along in no time, I’m sure. You were saying you had things to tell me,” said Tom, getting back on topic.
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