by Levi Black
Her skin has become a dark lavender that gleams against the simple clothing she wears.
She is barefoot.
She is afraid.
I can see it in the tension of her supple jaw and the tightness of her eyes and in every line of her new form and it makes me pull it together.
We are not safe.
Javier.
I roll to sitting and gather my legs under me and find him curled into a fetal position in a pile of dead leaves.
He’s crying, softly, to himself.
I move toward him, taking in our surroundings as I do.
We are in a clearing in a forest. Gnarled, twisted trees stretch over us, branches interlocked against the sun. The light that manages to leak through them is dim, watery, and gray like water polluted with ink. Dead leaves that rustle and move and swirl even though the air is still against my face litter the ground at my feet.
I kneel. “Javi, you okay?”
He doesn’t respond, just continues weeping bitterly.
I touch him and his skin jumps under my fingers, the nerves underneath it twitching and jerking.
“Javi? What happened?”
It takes a long moment, but finally his voice comes. It’s cracked and raspy, and strained. “I’ve never seen things so terrible.”
“What did you—” Before I can finish the question the coat nudges my mind and I have—not a memory, more an impression, of Javier pulling on me frantically, tugging down the part of me that covers his face. The part of me that covers his eyes as we teleport here.
Not me. The coat. He pulled down the coat when his lungs ran short of air.
The things I spoke of that you pass through while wishing … if you aren’t prepared …
“The worst part of it is that I couldn’t scream, Charlie.” He rolls over and looks up at me with red-rimmed rabbit eyes. “I couldn’t scream at all.”
I want to gather him into my arms and hold him.
Instead I say, “Good thing, Javi. You wouldn’t want to draw their attention.”
The skinhound growls.
Ashtoreth is there beside me.
She speaks from the corner of her mouth. “You must get up.”
“Give me a second.”
“They are almost here and they cannot find you on your knees.”
“Javi needs—”
Her face whips down, inches from mine. Black tresses of hair spill against my cheeks, she gets so close. The fear jolts hop in her eyes and this near I can see that what looks like black is actually the darkest tone of yellow, the same colour as a solar eclipse. Her teeth are sharp and white as she bares them, hissing, “I helped you as you asked. You owe me safety. Stand and protect us as is your duty.”
Flinging my arm up, I shoo her off and stand.
On my feet I can feel what she meant. Something moves toward us down the dark trail across the clearing. Something powerful.
My hand reaches into the coat.
“Do not draw your weapon. Here that is an act of war.”
“I’m fine with that,” I snap.
“You brought us here, Charlie. For the sake of all of us, eat your stubbornness.”
I want to pull the sword. Whatever comes is moving like a high-pressure front across the ocean. Its steps vibrate my shinbones through the soles of my boots and its breath makes the leaves on the trees above shake free and fall like rain around us.
“You sure about this?” I ask her.
It is a long second before she says, “Yes.”
I don’t believe her.
But I stand here, unarmed, and wait.
I can draw my sword quick enough.
I can.
The air grows thick, coldly humid, and clammy. It’s hard to breathe, like a wet cloth is pressed over my mouth. Despite the weak sunlight still pouring down, the shadows thicken, slithering through the woods around us until all I can see of the forest floor is the nearest trunks of the trees that soar above.
My stomach tightens, a knot inside my body, and I can’t remember when the last time I ate was.
Oh yeah. At the rest stop.
Even as my breath curls into a wisp of fog in front of my face I’m sweating under my clothes and it makes me feel tacky all over like I’ve been painted in honey and then got dressed. The urge to shake out of the coat so I can cool off hits me strongly and I shrug my shoulders without thinking about it.
The coat screams at me.
The wail of it slices across the backs of my eyes, an ice pick through my temples, so shocking it makes me seize on the inside.
What the…?
Realization drops on me like a sack of cement. I was about to take off the coat. I would have put aside its help and the items it holds inside itself. Oathbreaker. The Aqedah. Any other things I haven’t discovered yet.
I’d have been not just unarmed but disarmed.
Now that I know it I can feel, under the cold and the dark, the softly subtle spell, like perfume on a spring day, that has been working on me. It creeps along the ground and gently laps against me. Insidious.
Sneaky, sneaky.
Reaching inside, I spark my own magick to life, pushing it through my blood, letting it course through me and burn away the influence.
My right hand glows from the inside as the Mark on my palm lights up with spellwork. Glancing down, I can see the tracery of my veins and the phalanges like shadows under the skin.
The oncoming presence stills, pausing just outside of the clearing. It stands there, in the shadows, where it cannot be seen.
The skinhound growls so low I feel it more than hear it.
“Shush, Winnie,” I say. “Javi, get up.”
The skinhound goes silent, standing by my hip. Javier climbs to his feet with a groan and sways over them. His arms are crossed over his stomach and his head is low, but he’s standing.
I speak out the side of my mouth to Ashtoreth, watching the trail. “I thought you were taking us to the Man in Black.”
“He is near.”
“Where?”
“Near,” she snaps. “What more do you want from me?”
I want you to put me in front of the red-handed bastard.
But I bite my tongue. She did the best she could.
Time stretches around us as we wait for the thing in the shadows to come forward. I want to glance at Ashtoreth, to get some clue as to how we should proceed, but I don’t. This is my hunt. My mission.
Like she said: I brought them here.
Fuck it.
I take three steps forward, nudging the coat as I do. It flares out around me like batwings, sweeping a swirl of leaves behind me as I stride. Each step I drive my magick down my arm and into my Mark until it crackles and pops, dripping etheric energy in fat crimson gobbets. They fall and sizzle as they strike the dead leaves, bursting them into tiny bonfires that are snuffed out by the coat as I walk, creating a trail of smoke behind me.
Raising my hand, I shove more magick into it, making my Mark flare in the darkness and the words from my mouth roll like thunder.
“I am Charlotte Tristan Moore and I am here to claim my vengeance on the one called Nyarlathotep.”
It takes a long moment for the echo of my words to fade. When it does there is a quiver in the shadows and the thing that has approached steps into the fading light where I can see it.
Oh.
34
A BLUE GIRL stands, unassuming, across from me.
Her skin is smooth, unblemished but not untarnished, as faint patches of copper green patina swirl over and around limbs and torso and head that are all the palest shade of glacial blue. Her lips and hair match, both an electrified cobalt, the hair looking as if it had been actually electrified, wisps and strands of it twisting and falling in a chaotic cascade around the narrow wedge of her face.
She is tiny.
Like a child, but with nothing childlike about her. No innocence, no vulnerability, no youth. Somehow her age sits heavy upon her, a rock on stretc
hed linen, pulling down with weight and undeniable gravity. This one is ancient.
Dark holes sit where her eyes should be. Something glitters deep in the cavities, not the shimmery shine of something precious, but the wink and lie of bait.
Keep your fingers out of her eyes.
The thought intrudes, pushing its way in. I push it right back out.
The light seems to be falling into her, as if she is sucking it from the forest, leeching it into herself. She appears so delicate, but I’m sure by the feel of her she could level the trees around us if she chose.
“Who are you?” I call across the distance.
Her head tilts and I feel her blink at me although no lid shutters down and then up to disturb those wells of darkness she calls eyes.
“You ask my name?”
The voice is the slice of a sharp knife, so quick and clean you don’t feel the cut until you are growing cold from bleeding out.
“Careful, Charlie,” Ashtoreth murmurs behind me.
“Yeah,” Javier says, his voice low but tight with fear. “She’s creeptastic to the fullest.”
I’ve learned that names are important in this world. They mean things, more than they mean in our world. Every being in this weird reality has multiple names and titles and they all seem important in their own way. It’s why I used my full proper name, stating exactly who I am. “I want to know what I am dealing with.”
She looks at me for a long heartbeat before straightening, clasping the hem of her ruffled skirt between delicate fingers, and walking toward me. Her hips swivel with each step; her footfalls stab the soft earth under my feet, leaving round divots lying behind her like breadcrumbs.
As she draws closer she begins to speak.
“I am the Fetcher. The Collector. The Gatherer.”
Closer.
“I am the Hunter in the Dark.”
Closer.
“The Shatterer of Bones and She Who Sucks the Marrow.”
Almost.
“The Hound of Carcosa.”
She stops, close enough for me to touch.
She smiles without showing teeth, thin cerulean skin pulled tight over the sparrow bones of her face and her lips stretched into strips of nothing. “You may call me Mylendor.”
I let her names and titles wash over me as I stare into the black pits of her eyes, rolling them through my mind, gauging the situation.
Fetcher, Collector, Gatherer, Hunter.
Hound.
“All right, Mylie, good to meet you.” I smile at her and I make a point to bare my teeth. “Now be a good doggie and take me and mine to your master.”
35
THE TRAIL HAS been narrow and twisty, a rocky foot trail between brambles and thickets and sticky-sharp vines that snag and tug on the coat. It is all worked up and chattering in the back of my mind. The collar of it has ruffled across my neck like an avant-garde fashion accessory that fans around the back of my head from jaw to jaw. It clings tightly to me and I don’t feel the prick of thorns, but something warm trickles onto the back of my left hand stuck in the coat’s pocket and I know whatever the coat has for blood is leaking out and running down where a nasty snag has opened it up.
Of course the vegetation parts as Mylendor leads us down the trail, flowing in behind her like water, a Moses of the weeds.
I don’t know where we are. If this is Earth or some other realm. I’m no botanist, don’t spend a lot of time out of the city, I like walls and doors and locks and houses with places to get away if there is danger. Being out in the open like this, especially an open that is so pressed and choked with vegetation, where anything could hide close enough to touch and I wouldn’t be able to see it coming, makes the panic bell ring in the back of my head where my spine meets my skull.
I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.
And I don’t like not knowing where I am. I have learned that even on Earth other places can exist, just steps away; one wrong turn, one pass through a door left ajar, and you can find yourself in a place people should never be. I once walked down some stairs under a sushi joint in a city I think was New York and wound up in a cave somewhere else with a massive elder god named Cthulhu in a jar.
But there’s nothing to do but follow Mylendor wherever she’s taking us.
The trail is so narrow that we walk in single file. I follow Mylendor, the skinhound a step behind followed by Javier and then Ashtoreth. The skinhound refused to be farther away and I trust Ashtoreth to defend herself far better than Javier could, so she brings up the rear. I don’t like being so closed in, so I concentrate on the soft blue and green glow of the skin on the back of Mylendor’s neck and put one foot in front of the other when all I want to do is pull out Oathbreaker and use it to hack our way free.
The air has gone cloying, thick with the stifling perfume of vegetation, not rot as much as decay, cellulose breaking down, the nose-ruffling odor of chlorophyll exposed to humid air. It’s fetid. Dank. Musty.
Familiar.
In my fourth-grade Earth Science class, Miss Kimbrough brought in a botanist who lived and studied in the Okefenokee Swamp. She showed us pictures of alligators as long as cars and flowers with such colour they made my young eyes hurt with their beauty. She also brought with her a mason jar of swamp water. It sat on her table full of displays, caught in a ray of sunlight that made the glass gleam like diamonds but wasn’t strong enough to cut through the water itself, water that remained murky and thick with effulgence of dead vegetation and some other alchemy my young mind could not comprehend. The light entered the jar on one side and exited the other as a dark green shadow that stretched out onto the desk as the botanist continued to talk. Finally, she lifted the jar and unscrewed the lid with a muffled pop. For a moment she stood there smiling as we all waited.
I was sure something alive would stir inside that murky water and crawl out, slithering wetly across the back of her hand to flop on the table, some salamander of ancient design that would stand in a puddle of its own liquid and stare at me with red cast eyes like drops of blood turned to pearls.
I held my breath in anticipation.
I was the last to discover what did come out of that jar.
Tommy Hanson was the first to react, pinching his nose and exclaiming loudly. His example was quickly taken up, round-robin, in a chorus through the classroom.
One girl, I just remember her with bramble-thick blond hair and freckles across her nose, began to retch and choke as if she were sick.
I looked around, letting free my captive breath, and, on inhaling, discovered what my classmates already knew.
That small jar of swamp water had tainted every bit of oxygen in the room with the same fecund green odor that tries to take my breath right now.
It’s a relief when the trail ends and we break free to the open field.
Oxygen, cool and damp, rolls against us as we step into the knee-high grass. Mylendor continues forward, but I stop. Ashtoreth, Javier, and the skinhound stop as well, Winnie moving up and leaning into me, his blind socket against my thigh.
Javier whistles softly. “You don’t see that every day.”
In the center of the field is a house.
But not just a house, a house that looks like it has been taken apart and then reassembled with the corpses of a dozen other houses. It’s a jumble of weirdly shaped rooms and roof lines, samples from a dozen styles of architecture and time spans all smashed together without rhyme or reason. Here there’s a patch of a pueblo-style adobe that blends into the sleek glass and steel of a modern art deco house that slides into a stucco ranch. There are chimneys that jut into the tree line beside doors on upper stories that have no stairs or porches. The very front of it looks as if it has been plucked from the movie Gone with the Wind and placed here in this untouched clearing. Looming from the ground, it gleams in white. The front has a set of wide steps that lead to a terraced porch with mighty columns rising three stories to its roof. The windows are aglow with buttery light that
spills through them without tinting the soft, pale gleam of the building itself.
As we watch, the front doors open inward as if being swallowed by the house and more golden light fills the space without colouring the porch or the columns.
Mylendor turns her head just enough that I can see her profile, even as she keeps walking, and says: “Come now, Charlotte Tristan Moore; do not fall behind; my master awaits.”
Her voice sounds like she’s mocking me.
She may be.
I feel like I’m being torn in two. I want to follow her. No, I want to run her down and grab her by the hair and drag her to that house and see what kind of thing waits inside.
I want to do that.
I do not want to take Javier inside there. Or Ashtoreth.
Or even Winnie.
This feels like a trap.
I fell for a trap all those years ago because I didn’t see it. I didn’t see Tyler Woods maneuvering me away from the party and into his room, where the other three waited. I didn’t see it and I paid for it.
I still pay for it.
Now I look for traps.
Sometimes I see them almost everywhere.
I reach over, past Javier, and lightly touch Ashtoreth on the arm. Her skin is damp. “Can you get them out of here?”
She shakes her head. “Without you the forest would consume us.”
Javier pushes against my arm. “I’m in this.”
The skinhound whines and gives a short, sharp bark as he trots forward a few steps and then looks back at me.
“I can wish us back,” I say.
“We are too far away. If you take that much from Javier he will be in the same condition as your Daniel.”
My Daniel.
The reason I’m doing all of this.
Is he?
Shut up.
“I’m fine,” Javier says.
He says it forcefully and I take a close look at him. He’s standing straight, but his eyes are set in deep smudges of dark, like he’s pulled three days with no sleep, and there’s a tic yammering like a hummingbird’s heartbeat that has set up in the corner of his upper lip. He needs rest and replenishment, neither of which I have here. My eyes slide past him to Ashtoreth, who slowly shakes her head side to side as if to confirm my analysis of him and his condition.