Spinebreaker

by H. Duke

“Me, too.” She said. She watched him for a few more seconds to make sure he was okay, then turned to see where the gate had materialized. Instead of being in a doorway like every other time she’d seen it, it was between two trees at the edge of the forest behind them.

  “It makes do with what it has if there aren’t any doors around,” Dorian explained.

  April nodded, gazing back through the veil. Barty waved to her. She stepped to one side, and he disappeared, along with the rest of the gate—it was only visible when viewed straight-on.

  “We have to be careful to remember where it is,” she said.

  Dorian nodded. “Mae and I once lost the gate while we were in Little Red Riding Hood in The Blue Fairy Book. It wasn’t fun trying to locate it again amongst all the trees. Not to mention the pack of wolves that was stalking us.”

  “I have an idea,” Randall said. He walked over to a small log near the edge of the wood and dragged it in front of the gate.

  “Good idea.” April said. “Where do you think Mae hid the grimoires? Do you think she buried them?”

  Dorian shrugged. “It’s hard to imagine Mae digging a hole even several years ago, but I don’t see anywhere else where she might have hidden them.”

  April looked around. The field was huge. “If we split up, this will go faster. Why don’t you guys look for the grimoires, and I’ll look for the rot?”

  “Fine,” Dorian said. “Just wait for us before you do anything with the rot, should you find it.”

  They separated, and she began walking around the edge of the clearing. Dorian had said that the rot usually materialized within sight of the place where the gate materialized, but she couldn’t see any.

  One edge of the field sloped upwards. As she made her way up the incline, a small stone cottage with a thatched roof came into view. She was suddenly overcome with the certainty that what they were searching for was inside the cottage. It reminded her of how she’d known to look in Mae’s planner.

  Dorian had said Mae would always get hunches and bursts of intuition. Was that happening to her? Was the gate influencing her, affecting her? She couldn’t help but feel violated.

  She tried to ignore the feeling as she stared at the cottage. Should she go in by herself, or get Randall and Dorian? Finally she decided to go back down and get them.

  Dorian and Randall were arguing when she made her way back around the edge of the woods towards them.

  “She must have buried it,” Randall said.

  “There’s no way Mae could have buried it. Maybe she hid them in a tree.”

  “If they were hidden in a tree, they would be ruined by rainwater and bugs. Mae was too smart for that.”

  “Guys, stop arguing,” April said when she was close enough for them to hear her without her yelling.

  “Did you find the rot?” Dorian asked.

  She shook her head. “The field is totally clean, but there’s a house on the other side of that hill.”

  Two minutes later they stood in front of the cottage. Much like the meadow, the surrounding area was deserted.

  Dorian rapped his knuckles against the door. No response.

  Randall glanced through the dirty window. “Empty.”

  They pushed the door open, surprised to find it unlocked. They stepped cautiously inside. Though the place was empty, it was obviously lived in. There was a stack of firewood by the hearth, and the tang of woodsmoke and cooking grease mixed in the air. It felt as though the cottage’s inhabitants had stepped outside and would return momentarily.

  They looked around, checking underneath the bed in the corner, up in the storage loft, and in a large trunk in the corner near the door. The search turned up no ink rot and nothing remotely book-like.

  “Nothing,” Dorian said, frustrated. “Mae wrote down this book and this page for a reason! There must be something we’re not seeing.”

  “Wait,” Randall said. He stomped his sneaker-clad foot on the wooden floor. The sound echoed dully. “It’s hollow.”

  “A cellar in a hovel like this?” Dorian said.

  They pulled up the rug covering the floor. There was a trapdoor loosely cut into the wood. They lifted it up, revealing a dark cellar. The odor of damp earth and root vegetables drifted up to them.

  They stared into the hole. “Should have brought a flashlight,” Randall said.

  “I got it.” April pulled her cell phone from her back pocket and activated the flashlight app. She shone the light down in the hole. It illuminated steps fashioned from rough blocks of stone that led into the darkness.

  “Ladies first,” she said, and before they could protest she descended the stairs. When she got to the bottom she directed the flashlight around her in a circle.

  Dorian’s face appeared in the square of light up above her head. “What do you see?” he asked.

  “The room’s about ten by ten feet, though most of the space is taken up by vegetables. Nothing looks particularly grimoire-y. Hold on…” the light fell on a burlap mound that looked a little too square. She walked over to it and pulled away the burlap. Underneath was a stack of leather-bound books. She opened one up. Hand-written inside the front cover was C.M. Nagles—Grimoire.

  “They’re here.” She walked back to the hole and handed the book up to Dorian.

  “Barty will be chuffed,” he said. “Don’t forget to leave the replacement.”

  She placed the James Patterson book on top of the pile and recovered the grimoires with the burlap, then climbed back up the ladder. Before she could step out of the way for Dorian to head down, Rex began to growl, his eyes trained on the back window of the cottage.

  “Maybe Barty followed us?” April said.

  “Not likely,” Dorian said. “He’s terrified of the gate.” He walked over to the window, and his eyes widened.

  “What?” She and Randall moved towards the window to see what he was looking at.

  “I think we’ve found the source of the ink rot. Or, more accurately, it found us.”

  A small boy wearing plain worn clothes stood on the edge of the treeline. At first April thought his face was in shadow from the trees because she couldn’t make out his features. But he was too far away from the tree line. His face was gone, replaced by feathery dark tendrils that trailed down his throat and beneath the collar of his shirt.

  “That’s ink rot?” Randall said. “It’s horrible. Can he feel it?”

  Dorian shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Can I help him?” There was something repellant about the thought of touching the boy, but at the same time she wanted to do it. Part of her hoped that Dorian would say it wasn’t possible. Immediately she felt bad for the thought. She should want to help the boy.

  Dorian looked unsure. “It’s further along than I would have guessed. I’m not sure you’re ready for this much.”

  “What happens if I don’t do anything? Does it get worse?”

  Dorian nodded. “It will spread until it consumes the rest of this world. The further it spreads, the faster it happens.”

  “I have to try, then,” she said.

  “Ms. Walker—” Dorian said, his voice uneasy.

  “I’m doing it.”

  A tense silence filled the cottage. She added, “Isn’t this what you want me to do? Let me do it.”

  Dorian stared into her eyes for several moments, then nodded. “Very well.”

  They closed the trapdoor before leaving the cottage. As they walked around to the back of the house, the little boy’s head tilted to the side, like an inquisitive dog.

  “I think that’s a good sign,” Dorian said. “There’s still something in there.”

  “What do I do?”

  “The same thing you did last time—contact with your bare skin.”

  “Right.” She walked to the boy, and as she did, the boy’s head turned towards her. She wondered how he was tracking her movement. His eyes were obscured by the inky blackness. As she got closer she realized that his features appeared
totally smooth. Was it an illusion, the rot so black that it made light and shadow indistinguishable from one another, or had it actually eaten away at his face?

  “Hi,” she said when she was five feet away from him. Except for the head-tilt, he hadn’t moved. “I’m going to touch you, okay? You’ll feel better afterwards.” She tried to talk the way Becky talked to the kids at the library.

  She waited for the boy to react, but he only kept his head tilted towards her. It wasn’t like he was looking at her, exactly; it was more like a flower tilted towards the sun. Unseeing but responsive all the same. She approached, placing her hand on his forehead as though testing whether he had a fever. Unlike the dessicated ink rot she’d encountered in One Thousand and One Nights, the substance covering the boy’s features was smooth and shiny, like actual ink.

  As her hand came into contact with it, the edges of the black substance turned to powder and flaked off, but the majority remained wet and cold. It stuck to her fingers, and when she pulled her hand away it came away with it, like gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe.

  “It didn’t work!” she yelled back to Dorian and Randall, her voice high-pitched. She tried to step backwards, but the rot clung to her hands and stretched with her.

  “Concentrate,” Dorian yelled back. “It’s further along than what you saw before. It will take more energy, more will.”

  Concentrate? She didn’t think she could. She quieted the panic rising like hot bile in her chest and focused on the oozing substance on her hand, but then it seemed to be eating its way up her arm…

  She squealed and again attempted to pull her hand free, but the ink held fast. “Help me!”

  “We have to help her,” Randall said, and there was a scuffle behind her as Dorian attempted to hold him back.

  “There’s nothing you can do. She has to do it herself.” he said. “She chose this. This is what being the Pagewalker is.”

  His words must have convinced Randall, because he didn’t come to save her. The ooze continued its slow ascent up her arm. If she was the only one who could stop this stuff, then she was a goner.

  Then she looked at the little boy. Without being able to see his face it was difficult to gauge his age, but from his size he appeared no more than eight. If she didn’t stop the ink rot, what would happen to him? She had to try.

  She concentrated on the place where his face should have been. She made herself pretend that she could see his face, two little blue eyes and a small button nose, thin lips…

  She realized she wasn’t pretending anymore. The features were there, pushing up through the rot. The rot itself grew dry until it cracked like parched clay, then scaled off as the boy gained control of his movements.

  The powdery remainder of the rot blew away in a light breeze, including what had been on her arm.

  She looked down at her arm and then at the boy. She did it!

  She grabbed the boy’s shoulders and checked his face and arms for any remaining traces of the rot.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him.

  The boy’s eyes were the size and shape of silver dollars. He slipped from her grasp and ran into the woods. Happy whupping erupted behind her.

  “You did it!” Randall yelled. He and Dorian ran towards her.

  Dorian smiled. “I knew you could.”

  She was about to tell him that she was glad he thought so because she hadn’t been so sure, but then her knees folded beneath her. She grabbed his shoulders to keep from crumpling completely to the ground.

  He grabbed her by the waist to steady her. “You’re okay,” he told her, but his brow was furrowed. “Dispersing the ink rot takes a lot of energy. You’re not used to it. It’s like building muscle. You just overextended yourself.”

  She nodded, trusting that he was right. She felt like she could sleep for a week.

  “Let’s get you back to the library.”

  “What about the rest of the books?”

  “We know where they are now. We’ll come back for them later.”

  Barty was ecstatic when Randall handed him the dusty tome. He kept touching the pages as though he couldn’t believe they were real.

  They were sitting in the little reading area in the corner. April was lying on the couch, her coat laid over her lap. She sipped tea that Randall had ventured down to the break room to make. They’d dipped into the supplies for Braddy Evers Day.

  “You’re lucky this place hasn’t gotten surveillance cameras yet,” he said as he handed her the steaming mug.

  She snorted. “The city won’t even shell out for new carpets. There’s no way they’re going to pay for security cameras.”

  Barty flipped through the grimoire happily. “There’s archaic knowledge here that the collectors have all but wiped out. When can you get the others?”

  Dorian spoke up. “I think it’s best to have only one volume of the grimoire here at a time. What if the collectors got ahold of them?”

  Barty looked disappointed. “You’re right,” he said. “I should focus on this one, anyway.”

  They fell into a long silence during which April almost dozed off. Then Randall said, “What is ink rot? What causes it?”

  Barty cleared his throat importantly. “From what Mae told me, Oswald Werner was interested in rekindling the magic that the collectors have all but wiped out. I think he may have found the gate itself, but not its keys.”

  “Keys?” April asked.

  “Magical items that tell the gate where to open up to,” Dorian said.

  “Like magical GPS coordinates?” Randall asked.

  “Basically. The keys were all taken by the collectors. So Oswald had the gate and managed to restore it, but he needed keys to be able to use it.”

  “So he, what, made his own keys out of books?”

  “Precisely. But something went wrong. Either he didn’t have all the information he needed to do it correctly, or things like books were never meant to be keys in the first place. So they deteriorate if not maintained.”

  “What happens if we don’t stop the rot?”

  Dorian grimaced. “There’s a certain point where the effects are irreversible. The ink eats everything.”

  April tried to wrap her head around what that meant. “So everything just disappears?”

  “Not quite,” Dorian said. “It’s not pretty.”

  April sat up straight. “Wait—so it’s happened before?”

  Dorian nodded.

  “I want to see,” April said. She set aside her empty mug and pushed her coat onto the floor. She rose to her feet, swaying as she did.

  A second later, Dorian was at her side, again holding her around the waist. It felt good, comforting, and she pushed him away. She didn’t want to feel comforted.

  “You’re spent,” he said, allowing himself to be pushed away though he still hovered protectively nearby, ready to catch her.

  “He’s right,” Randall said. “You can barely stand. You need to rest.”

  “I want to see,” she said. She looked Dorian in the eyes. “Please.”

  “Okay,” Dorian said after a few seconds, though he sounded unsure. “We’ll look through the veil, but we’re not going in. It’s too dangerous.” He walked back to Mae’s office. “We keep the black books under the floorboards in Mae’s office.”

  He came out holding a book. It was the color of tar, as though the entire thing had been held over a flame for hours, slowly collecting smoke. The title was completely obscured.

  “What book is it?” April asked.

  Dorian shook his head. “Impossible to tell. Not that it matters, though. Anything that made this world what it was is gone.”

  They walked over to the gate, Randall holding April’s elbow to steady her.

  “Ready?” Dorian asked. She nodded. He opened the book. The pages were just as black as the cover. She was surprised it left no residue on Dorian’s fingers.

  The gate began to open. The room was filled not with the familiar human sounds and sm
ells that she’d grown accustomed to encountering with the gate. Instead, it smelled like rot—all kinds of it, the rot of old vegetables, old wood, ancient paper. Even decaying flesh.

  “I can see where it got its name,” Randall said. He pulled the neck of his shirt up over his nose. Rex sniffed cautiously at the air. The fur along his back stood up.

  It was hard to make out what lay beyond the gate. The light was dim, like sunlight filtered through thick layers of glistening black smog.

  But then parts of the blackness began to shift. The substance absorbed the light and made everything appear flat and dimensionless. She recognized square shapes that had once been buildings and smaller, bulgier shapes that might have been carriages or cars.

  And yet smaller shapes that were once people, too. They were all featureless like the boy had been, with only black mounds where their noses should have been and indents for their eyes. They were walking around, but their movements were slow and jerky. At first, they seemed unaware of the gate, but then a shudder passed through them, and their faces snapped towards it.

  “Can they see us?” Randall asked. His grip on her elbow tightened. He stepped backwards away from the gate, pulling her with him.

  “No,” Dorian said. “But they can sense that something hasn’t been taken over by the rot. At least, that was Mae’s theory.”

  The closest figure began to shamble towards them, the rest following closely behind. It leaned towards the portal as though to examine it, but how could it, when it didn’t have any eyes to see with, or even a nose to smell with?

  Then it reached out towards them as though to probe the veil with its hand.

  There was a snap as Dorian closed the book in his hands. The gate began to close, and the ink-person leaned back away from it. The last thing April saw before the gate closed was the hunch of the creature’s shoulders.

  “I think we can all agree we don’t want them passing through the veil,” Dorian said.

  Barty and Randall murmured their assent. Their voices were tense, frightened.

  “We need to help them,” April said. “They’re miserable!”

  Dorian shook his head. “It’s impossible. Mae tried and it almost killed her. And that was when she was younger and stronger.”