At last, we crested a platform, rotted wood on a rotating base with a skeleton of iron. The widow’s walk rode the ridgeline of Graystone like a ship in choppy seas, wind humming through the railing bars like water under the prow.
Dean swung his legs up and shut the hatch. We were alone on top of the world, moonlight and mist creating a landscape unearthly as the surface of Mars. I should have been scared to be up so high on an ancient, unstable structure, but the view was too eerie, and beautiful, for fear to reach me.
“Pretty boss view,” Dean said, lighting the cigarette he kept behind his ear. “Nothing like it in the city, that’s for sure.” He offered the Lucky to me after a quick drag. I shook my head.
“Told you, I don’t.”
“Figured I’d tempt you once more,” he said, and exhaled. The smoke formed shapes in the air, crow wings and creeping vines.
“Cal thinks I’m insane,” I blurted, folding my arms around myself to keep warm. Below the mist curled back on itself, a flock of dragons eating their own tails.
Dean looked askance at me.
“You’re about as far from cracked as they make ’em, Aoife. I’ve known brass statues that were crazier’n you.”
I grabbed the railing, letting the dead chill of the iron steel me. “My family has a … reputation. Back in Lovecraft.”
Dean shrugged. I knew because I heard the creak of his jacket. “ ‘Loony’ is just a title they slap on people who don’t fit the gray flannel life we’re all supposed to chase after. Lots of cats back in the Rustworks got the diagnosis, before they ditched out of the middle class and went downside.”
“Cal thinks I’m bound to lose my mind,” I said. Dean wouldn’t get my secret, not yet, but I had to let some of the pressure off before I burst like a faulty boiler, and the fact that he hadn’t just dismissed me as hysterical went a long way to that end. “My brother left me a letter, you know, that told me to find the witch’s alphabet. Well, I found it. It’s my father’s. It’s real as you and I standing here and Cal, he”—I shuddered a breath in and out—“he told me in so many words I was mad, that what I know I saw didn’t matter in the least because what he thinks counts more. Because he’s a boy or because … I don’t know. It’s horrid.”
My hands burned from deadened nerve endings in the cold, and it reminded me of the ink’s toothsome grasp, which only made things worse. I glanced at my palm. It was still bare. “Just because I can’t prove to Cal I saw an … an enchantment on the book doesn’t make me a liar. Cal should have trusted me.” That was the real pain of it—I trusted Cal, faithful and absolute. And all he could do in return was wring his hands over my maybe madness.
Dean came to stand next to me and slid his hand over mine. “You ain’t crazy, Aoife. I don’t care if you said you saw the Great Old Ones themselves returning from the stars, no one has the right to sling that at you.”
I looked down over the spires of Arkham, silent. Dean hadn’t heard what Cal had. He hadn’t read the book and learned about what the Graysons carried. What had my father called it? His Weird. His writings had casually unfolded a world utterly alien from my own, a world where a heretical legend pulsed through my blood surely as his.
Could he be right? I was his daughter, after all.
The village lay silent as a tomb in the night, the moon above a broach on a velvet brocade of stars. Ground fog spun over the valley, the top of Arkham’s church steeple and the twin towers of Miskatonic University thrusting upward like a desperate, drowning hand. Rooftops and chimney pots within Arkham’s outer wall vanished and reappeared, a ghostly town revealed only by moonlight’s gleam.
As I watched, a flame sprang to life at the outskirts of the village, and another. A great clanking borne on the wind echoed off the mountain, back to our ears.
The borderlands of Arkham blossomed with flame, one after the other. Green as a forest, the fire wasn’t oil or tar, but something else that sent acrid smoke up the valley toward my nose.
“What is that?” I said, waving it away. Dean flicked his cigarette end off the roof. It joined the constellation of fire for just a moment before winking out.
“Ghoul traps,” he said. “Keeping the beasties out at moonrise. That two-faced ghoul goddess of theirs hunts with the tide. Least, that’s what I heard around the Nightfall Market.”
I shuddered. I’d seen the low humps of ambulance jitneys rumbling through the streets the morning after a full moon, when even the Proctors’ nightly lockdown and extra patrols couldn’t keep the creatures from slipping in through the underground. Cal said if you turned the right way, you could hear the screams from Old Town as the disused sewer system opened and spewed forth its bloodthirsty citizens.
Cal. Cal and his look of pity when I’d shown him my palm. My heart tightened again, painful against my ribs.
“Burning aether tainted with sulfur,” Dean explained. “What I hear, the stench and the green light keeps them underground.”
“Cal called me crazy because I told him I found an enchantment on that book,” I said. Dean opened his mouth, but I held up my finger. “I need you to listen.”
“Right. Consider my trap shut,” Dean said, settling himself against the rail.
“I know I should say that magic isn’t real,” I said. That was what everyone I was supposed to trust in my life had told me.
Except Conrad. And I trusted him more than anyone. I swallowed the lump in my throat and continued. “But the ink in the book—it marked me, like a living thing leaves its tooth mark behind. And an enchantment let me see my father’s memories. I’m a rational person. I believe in science and I abjure heresy.” I sucked in a breath, the faint taste of sulfur parching my tongue. “But to hear my father tell it in his writings, it’s not heresy—nothing born of the necrovirus. Nor are all of the inhuman things in the world, the shandy-men and nightjars and the abominations … they don’t come from a person being infected. They aren’t people at all … they came from the … the Land of Thorn. Wherever that is.”
Below, Arkham was ringed in fire. The mist took on an unearthly glow, living and boiling in the cauldron of the valley. “He calls it the Weird,” I said softly. “My father. And his father. A Grayson has had it, for fourteen generations. I …”
I might not be mad after all. The thought was wishful, but I hadn’t been able to get rid of it since I’d read my father’s diary.
“Ever since I came here,” I tried again, “I’ve had a feeling that something was awake in me. That there’s something not right in this house. And now I don’t think it’s the house; I think it’s me.” I ran out of thoughts, because this was as far as I’d ever allowed my speculation—my hope—to go.
Waiting, in the cold and the moonlight, for Dean to speak was agonizing.
“Won’t lie to you,” he said at length. “I’ve been up and down the highways once or twice, princess. I’ve seen some sights that weren’t born from the necrovirus.” He nodded, as if he’d decided something final. “I’d believe in an enchanted book, I think. I’d believe in magic.”
Dean believed me. He made one person, one person in the entire world. Which frankly didn’t comfort me much. “What can I do?” I cried. “I can’t very well tell anyone besides you. I don’t know if I have this … this Weird or if Conrad does or if we’re all just … unnatural.”
“Here’s what you do, see,” Dean said. “Before you go fretting about measuring up to the old man, you gotta be sure.”
I blew on my hands to warm them, then tucked them into my pockets. I was growing used to the cold. Dean not running as far as he could when I’d brought up enchantments helped a bit. And his not recoiling from me and throwing out that hateful word: mad. “I’m sure,” I told him. “I can feel it whispering to me when I’m in Graystone. It’s like having an aethervox in my head, and you can just hear something coming across the spectrum.…”
“Then I suggest you find out what your game is,” Dean said. “Way I dig it, sorcerers are supposed to have some kind of affinity
, right?”
“I’m not a sorcerer!” I snapped. “It’s not even a real thing.”
“Fine, fine,” Dean said. “But I’m telling you now—‘Weird’ don’t sound any better.” He tapped his chin. “What was your old man’s?”
“Fire, I think.” I recalled the passage about the shandy-man and its burning. “He was vague.”
Dean cocked an eyebrow. “Think you could be fire? Make you real handy at bonfire parties.”
I had to shake my head, and at once the prospect of embracing the wild, untested truth of my possessing a Weird didn’t seem so outlandish. “No, it’s not that. I can’t even get the thrice-damned coal grates in this place to go.” Now that I was thinking about the subject, it was vexing me.
“You’ll figure it out,” Dean said, hunching inside his leather against the stiff breeze that had come up. “The one thing you aren’t, besides crazy, is dumb.”
I took Dean’s hand this time and squeezed it hard, hoping my gesture telegraphed the waterfall of words that I couldn’t get out, except one sentence. “Thank you.”
His hand stiffened in surprise under my grasp. “What’s the thanks for, princess? I didn’t do anything.”
“You believe me,” I said. “No one has ever done that, just believed me. Without any questions.”
Dean brushed his thumb under my chin. “You’re all right, Aoife Grayson. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
I turned back to the vista over the valley, watching the aether fires burn. Dean stayed next to me and we watched for a long time, the only sound between us the wind and the faraway howling of ghouls.
The Dark Place of Dreaming
IN MY ROOM, I changed into nightclothes and turned the flow down on the aether globes, crawling into bed with the aid of moonlight. The sheets were new and scented with lavender instead of must—Bethina must have crept in when I was in the hidden library and cleaned up after me. Another first.
I turned on my side and watched clouds skate across the moon through the crack in my drapery. Wherever Conrad was, he saw the same moon. That comforted me, a little.
It wasn’t, however, enough comfort to dull my thoughts about my Weird. I’d wished for so long not to be mad, to keep the necrovirus in my blood at bay, that what I’d found in the journal seemed like a wish fulfilled rather than a hope. A wispy, intangible thing, a theory rather than a proof. The Weird might be fiction, a product of my father’s teenage fancy as easily as it might be the solution to all of my troubles.
In spite of my mind whirling, the day of discovery proved stronger, and sleep was a fast and true partner.
The madness dream was always the same. I walked through the empty streets of Lovecraft, empty except for the creatures that skulked in the shadows of my real city, my home. Nightjars walked in broad daylight. Springheel jacks shed their human skin and let their long-jawed animal snouts scent the air. The deep-sea aquanoids that swam in the waters off Innsmouth and Nantucket stared at me with glassy, gibbous eyes.
In this Lovecraft, I was alone. In this Lovecraft, only the necrovirus shadowed my footsteps.
I’d had the dream a dozen times, a hundred times. It wasn’t even a dream, because dreams come from a person’s brain and I knew deep down that this one came directly from my madness.
It had no meaning, except that I was indeed doomed to Nerissa and Conrad’s fate. Nerissa saw things. Conrad heard voices. Neither of them had a strange magic in their blood. Just a virus. I wanted to believe my father, but what if he was just as insane?
I dreamed. And I would lie to everyone about the dream, until the day came that I couldn’t lie anymore.
As I dreamed I walked, through Uptown and down Derleth Street to the river, watching the red water bubble and hiss, the ghouls came out of their holes to urge me onward, hunched and hissing like a nightmare honor guard.
Every time I reached the riverbank in the dream—and I always reached it—I tried to throw myself in, to swim and escape or drown and forget. I was never certain which. But every time, the ghouls closed in on me before I could do it, their clammy paws holding me back and their rubbery tongues making my bare skin slick.
Only this time, when I reached the riverwalk where Dunwich Lane and the arcade separated, a figure waited for me.
I’d have recognized the tall stooped body, the raven hair straight as my own was messy, the nervous tapping of finger on leg anywhere. My throat constricted, and the ghouls around me hissed and snarled to fill the silence. They ranged in size from child to full-grown wolf, some hunched on four legs and others walking upright like men. Any of them could have torn me asunder, but they stayed far clear of the figure at the river.
I found a whisper, little more than an aquanoid’s croak from cold and terror. “Conrad?”
My brother didn’t face me, just tilted his head so that the silver sun, eternally blinded by cloud cataracts in this dark dreaming world, caught his profile.
“It’s really me, Aoife.”
I stopped a few feet from him. At my heels, the ghouls closed in, but I ignored them. They weren’t as important as this new turn the dream had taken. They could eat me in their good time, as long as I spoke to Conrad.
“Conrad, I found it. I found the witch’s alphabet like you asked me. Tell me how to—”
“Wake up, Aoife.” His voice was flat and far away, like it was coming from an aethervox rather than his throat.
“Conrad, you have to tell me what to do,” I begged. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I don’t know how to find you.”
“Wake up, Aoife,” Conrad repeated. “It’s not real. Wake up.”
“I know it’s the necrovirus—” I started.
“It’s not real, Aoife,” Conrad snarled. “I was wrong. Stop trying to find me.”
I drew back, feeling as if he’d slapped me. Even if this was a dream, just my brain dancing with the pathogen in my blood, it was a horrid thing for my memory to serve up.
“I left the city,” I said. “For you. Conrad, just tell me—”
“Listen.” His outline shimmered, and in the refraction of light on water Conrad was only a black shadow, a shimmering insubstantial dream figure just like everything else about this gray, dream-place Lovecraft. “I put you in terrible danger, Aoife, and I didn’t know it. I haven’t any time and all I can say is stop looking for me. Stop looking for answers. Go home and never, never look back.”
I could see through him now, through his outline and into the ruins of the foundry across the river. Above its crumbled chimneys, a flight of wild ravens swooped, their clockwork claws catching and carrying off a shandy-man for torture. The Proctors might not exist in my dream, but the price of heresy still ran strong.
“Conrad …,” I begged. I couldn’t lose him, couldn’t let him slip away again. The thought of waking up alone was more than I could bear, a weight on my chest that wouldn’t let me breathe.
“I got away, Aoife, but you won’t,” he whispered. “That’s why you have to go back. It’s not real. None of it is.…”
Conrad’s outline curled up at the edges, burned away like a piece of celluloid, and he grew transparent.
I screamed as he vanished, went to my knees and buried my face in my hands. I could endure any torment from my fellow students, any punishment of a care-parent or professor. I could take my mother’s fits and Cal’s well-meaning scorn with my head held up. But to see Conrad vanish before my eyes a second time was more than I was prepared to withstand. I broke, sorrow and rage ripping themselves from my throat. I screamed into the rank, tainted air of my dream-city until the ghouls closed in on me and smothered me with the scent of the dank underground and the caress of their drowned-corpse hands.
“Miss Aoife!”
I bolted awake, lashing out at the thing holding me down. Bethina shrieked as I cracked her in the nose. “All His gears, miss! You were screaming to wake the dead in your sleep!”
I clapped my hand over my mouth, realizing that the air-raid w
ailing was emanating from me. Sweat worked its way down my body and I saw that I’d kicked all of my bedding to the floor.
“I’m so very sorry,” I said, jumping up and grabbing a handkerchief from the clothespress for Bethina’s bleeding nose.
“ ’S not really your fault, miss,” she said around the cloth. “I ran to shake you awake, and that was foolish. You sounded like you was being tortured—are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I lied, one I’d repeated innumerably. I twitched back the curtains and was startled to see it was light. I’d dreamed away the darkness, and the morning was silver and woven with mist.
“Didn’t sound fine,” Bethina said. She examined the blood-spotted handkerchief and made a face.
“I’m sorry I hit you, Bethina, really I am,” I told her, wrapping my arms around myself as my sweat went cold in the unheated room. “It was just a silly nightmare.”
The Mist-Wrought Ring
IN THE DAWN, I decided to go walking. I needed to leave the confines of Graystone and shake off the lingering touch of the dream.
The wardrobe yielded a wool skirt and jumper, as old and out of fashion as the red dress, but I added them to my boots and cape to ward against the morning chill.
No one else was awake, except Bethina cooking breakfast in the kitchen, so I left by the main door and walked around the foundation of the house.
Graystone’s estate was larger than I’d imagined, the stone walls of the borderlands disappearing to the vanishing point in every direction as I left the house behind and started down the long slope of the back garden. Oak trees bent over the path, their twisted limbs black against the dove-wing sky.
Mist was my constant companion. It wandered among the trees, slithered over the ground, wrapped the day in solitude and silence.
The path ended a few hundred yards from the rear of the house, at one of the swaybacked stone walls that veined the landscape. I climbed over the boundary of a forgotten farm field, a ley line traced in moss and rock.
The Iron Thorn Page 20