The Brink of Darkness

by Jeff Giles

  The Ukrainian’s anger had been percolating.

  “Sorry to say, must interrupt touching TV movie,” he said.

  He tugged his sunglasses down over his eyes. It was like a wall coming down.

  “You are idiot, X,” he said. “You will not find magical person you seek. Would be impossible even for superheroes such as Rocket Red Brigade.” The Ukrainian searched his pockets as he continued. “You are lucky Countess did not see your sneaking. And you, Plum, moaning about your sins—boo-hoo! We all carry guilt like bag of stones, okay? You think I am damned for stealing Pepsi from vending machine?” The Ukrainian seemed to arrive at a decision. “I hear no more plans, okay? Am out of little group. Will not watch you become drooling kind.”

  The guard found a piece of meat in the pack on his belt.

  “What is hunger situation?” he asked X.

  X looked at the dry, gray thing in the guard’s hands. It was the shape of a tongue.

  “I am not hungry,” he said, “nor likely to be soon.”

  “Yes, well, take for midnight snack,” the Ukrainian said, thrusting it at him. “Is last piece. I must replenish.”

  X slid the awful thing into a pocket.

  Later, X lay on his back, his coat bunched beneath his head. Something about the conversation with the Ukrainian nagged at him. The guard knew how rarely X needed to eat—and that he’d only just fed him. Why would he ask if X was hungry?

  The answer came to him.

  The Ukrainian was the only one X knew on this hill with any authority at all—the only one who could roam freely and, once X learned everything he could about his mother, aid him in his escape. But now the guard needed to gather more food for him. He would have to leave the hill to do it. And X knew what his friend in the cherry-red tracksuit would do then.

  It was the same thing anyone would do.

  He would never come back.

  TEN

  X decided not to beg the Ukrainian to stay. There was no reason the guard should be chained to him. He should flee if he could. Maybe he could find a safe haven before the Countess discovered he had gone.

  X turned onto his side, so that he faced the top of the hill. Yet again he couldn’t sleep.

  The canopied bed sat empty. The plateau was deserted.

  X sat up on his elbows, and peered down the slope. The Countess was descending—looking for victims, no doubt. Her coppery hair fell down her neck, frizzy and wild. Oedipus and Rex marched a few steps ahead, hurling bodies out of the way.

  X checked to see if Plum was awake. He was. So, it seemed, was every soul on the hill. They were waiting to see who the Countess would subject to her knife.

  “Close your eyes,” said Plum, “and don’t open them, no matter what you hear.”

  “Why?” said X.

  “Because if you watch the violence you will never forget it,” said Plum. “The Countess looks for the most depraved sinners she can find because torturing them exhilarates her the most. She hunts for them like she is looking for ripe berries.”

  X shut his eyes, but it only made his hearing keener.

  There were noises from down below—it sounded like the boxers were descending on someone. There was kicking. Struggling. The noise grew as Oedipus and Rex shoved the soul up the hill.

  New sounds, darker sounds: the soul collapsing, crying, getting dragged to his feet and thrust forward. Or was it a woman? The cries were so wild that X couldn’t tell.

  Plum tightened his grip on X’s shoulder, imploring him not to look. But X had to watch, had to see.

  He opened his eyes.

  The Countess had chosen not just one victim but two: the Civil War soldier called Shiloh, and the woman in the wedding gown.

  Aw, stay a spell why doncha? The Bride and me don’t never get company.

  Oedipus and Rex lifted them onto the giant rectangular rock at the top of the hill. So that was what the altar was for.

  Sacrifices.

  “The soldier,” said X. “I questioned that very man.”

  “It’s a coincidence,” said Plum, his eyes still pressed closed.

  But he didn’t seem to believe it.

  There was another flurry of sound. Guards had rounded up five more victims. X stood to see.

  He knew them all.

  The foul-mouthed mummy: They had to carry him up the hill.

  The Bombers: They were gesturing frantically in code. The American man was already in tears.

  The lonely Knight: He seemed grateful for the guards’ attention. Didn’t he know what was coming?

  Finally, the Liar, the one X had struck: Why was he to be punished? He hadn’t helped X at all. And it was the Ukrainian who pushed him forward. Even from a distance, X could see how disgusted his friend was to be a part of this.

  “They’ve gathered all of them—every soul I spoke to,” X told Plum. “What will the Countess do to them?”

  Plum was too upset to even shrug.

  “I apologize for cursing,” he said, “but any goddamn thing she wants.”

  Shiloh and the Bride squirmed on the altar. The Countess sat on her bed, languidly putting up her hair. She was prolonging their misery. When she’d finished, she ordered Rex to tighten the laces on her shoes. She seemed to relish having a giant kneel before her. She laughed as he fumbled with the laces. For Shiloh and the Bride—and everyone watching—the delay was excruciating. The servant with the bloody apron stood at the edge of the crowd, waiting to minister to the wounded. She looked fearful. Her eyes were cast down.

  At last, the Countess strode to the altar, and plunged her palm down onto Shiloh’s heart.

  Every torch on the hill went out. The ceiling exploded with light. It became a screen.

  The Bride scrambled to get off the altar. Oedipus and Rex forced her back down. Nearby, the Ukrainian and the other guards tightened in a ring around the next victims.

  Shiloh’s sins began to play, loud and bright, in a movie on the ceiling. The Countess arched her back with pleasure.

  “His pain feeds her,” said Plum. “His sins. His humiliation. She gorges on it all. If you really have to watch, then watch how she glows as she sucks the evil into herself. I swear it makes her younger.”

  Every soul on the hill craned their head back to see Shiloh’s sins. It was like they were gazing at stars. Light and shadow mottled their faces. Shiloh thrashed helplessly, refusing to look. The Countess spread his eyes open with her fingers.

  X looked to the ceiling, too. He couldn’t stop himself.

  He saw Shiloh and his regiment on a plain in winter. They’d attacked a Cherokee settlement. There was snow on the ground. The trees were shaking. Shiloh forced a native father and his daughter into a wooden roundhouse. He shouted slurs at them, and prodded them with his musket. Once they were inside, he set the house alight. Flames raced onto the roof.

  X should have looked away, like Plum had begged him to.

  The father and daughter burst from the roundhouse to escape the fire. Shiloh laughed. He raised his musket and shot the father in the face. The girl screamed. She was maybe six or seven. Shiloh lifted his rifle again, and fired. A red stain bloomed on the girl’s chest. A trail of blood ran down her dress like a tear.

  Finally, the ceiling went black.

  The torches whooshed back to life.

  Shiloh and the Bride whimpered on the slab.

  The Countess took her knife off her belt. It had a thin, curling blade about five inches long. It looked like something used to peel away an animal’s hide.

  All around X and Plum, souls cheered the Countess on. They were greedy to watch someone besides themselves suffer. Some got to their feet. Others shook the giant stalks that held the torches. When the Countess shined the knife on the sleeve of her dress, the cheering intensified, like a rainstorm moving in. Oedipus and Rex looked away. They seemed to have lost their taste for this.

  X stood, and drew closer. Shiloh was only being punished because he had talked to him.

  Plu
m heard him leaving, and urged him to come back.

  X didn’t listen.

  The Countess raised the knife. The hill fell silent. X could hear the torches crackle. The Countess cut through the laces of Shiloh’s boots, pulled them off, and flung them aside. A hunched soul in rags had been watching from the fringes of the crowd. He dashed forward and snatched up the boots. X recognized him. It was Bone, who’d tried to steal Plum’s photograph.

  X was close enough now to see that Shiloh wore no socks, and that his feet were horrifically swollen. The boots hadn’t been off in years.

  The Countess poked one of Shiloh’s toes with the tip of her knife, testing the flesh. Shiloh wailed, and pleaded for her to stop. His foot shook uncontrollably.

  The Countess hissed at Oedipus and Rex: “Hold him fast, else this knife shall play upon THY skin next!”

  Again, the torches went out and the ceiling came to life. Again, the souls gazed upward. Everything that happened on the altar played out up there, hundreds of feet tall and wide. Shiloh’s pleading was amplified so much that there was no shutting it out. The Bride writhed beside him. The men waiting to be tortured all wept, even the Knight. The servant woman with the bloody apron never lifted her eyes. Her lips moved soundlessly, apparently in prayer.

  The Countess pressed the blade into the sole of Shiloh’s foot, where the skin was most raw. She was about to cut him open when she paused—and looked directly at X.

  She was taunting him.

  She was saying, This is your doing. This is because of you.

  The Countess pressed the blade into the ball of Shiloh’s foot. She did it just hard enough to produce a single bead of blood.

  And then she ripped the knife down.

  Shiloh’s limbs shot out in every direction, and his back flew up off the altar. He must have been in too much agony to scream. Even if he had screamed, he would have been drowned out by the crowd.

  X did not often miss his powers—they were too tangled in his mind with the wretched business of taking souls to the Lowlands—but he craved them now. He hated his weakness. He loathed his damaged, human, near-useless body. Still, he would have to make do with it.

  He stepped forward.

  He shouted at the Countess.

  “It is me you want.”

  The cheering stopped. Everyone turned their eyes to him. He could feel it like heat on his neck.

  “Is it indeed?” the Countess said mildly.

  She slipped the knife into Shiloh’s wound, and peeled back the skin, revealing a bed of blood. Shiloh gave a cry that did not sound human. The Bride was sick over the side of the altar.

  “You know very well that it is,” X shouted.

  His voice boomed all around. He looked to the ceiling, and saw that now it was he, not Shiloh, projected there.

  “Regent forced me on you,” he said, “without explaining who I am or even what I am—and all you could do was whimper because he is so much bolder and grander than you.”

  He was desperate to rile the Countess, but her heart seemed to beat slow as a crocodile’s. She held a piece of Shiloh’s skin in her fingers. She slid it into her mouth.

  X felt his stomach rise.

  “I see you are fascinated by other people’s sins,” he said. “I dare you to have a look at mine. They were too much for Regent. If you want to know why he drove me out—there is your answer.”

  The Countess’s knife paused in the air, twitching like it longed to go back to work.

  “The Countess ACCEPTS thy challenge,” she said. “She shall force such cries from your throat as shall be remembered forever!”

  Excitement spread over the hill. The woman in the apron helped Shiloh and the Bride down from the altar. Shiloh’s face ran with tears. He looked at X, and seemed to ask: Why would you do this for me? He appeared stunned, ashamed.

  X turned to look for Plum. He couldn’t pick him out in the low light on the hill. He knew his friend would fear for him.

  The Ukrainian, meanwhile, slipped away, no doubt furious at X’s recklessness. The Countess would think the guard had gone for food, but X knew he would never see him again. He watched as the Ukrainian dropped his club and left it behind. It lay like a splinter on the ground.

  Oedipus hoisted X onto the altar, and pushed him flat. The rock felt weirdly alive, as if it still held the heat from Shiloh’s struggle. Its surface was stained every shade of red and brown. It looked exactly like what it was: a butcher’s block.

  “You need not hold me down,” X told Oedipus. “I come willingly.”

  The Countess waved the boxer away. She sat on her bed with her eyes closed, as if clearing her mind. X knew that what she was really doing was giving him time to be afraid.

  The truth was, he was terrified already.

  X had dared the Countess to look at his sins because he believed he had none—that, unlike in everyone else she might turn her knife on, she’d find nothing to torture him for or gorge herself on. But now, as X lay on his back, a fear he had carried for years surfaced unbidden: What if the souls he had taken to the Lowlands were held against him? What if the 15 missions he’d undertaken were not just missions, but murders?

  He remembered Zoe warning him once that the lords were just trying to turn him into a monster—into one of them.

  What if they already had?

  The Countess strutted toward him, her knife in one hand. With the other, she clicked open and closed the silver button on a leather sheath at her waist. For X, the clicking was somehow more menacing than anything else.

  “Art thou afeard?” said the Countess.

  Click, went the button. Click. Click.

  “Of pain?” said X. “No. I have known pain before.”

  “Of what, then?” said the Countess.

  Click. Click.

  Click.

  X wouldn’t answer.

  “So there is SOMETHING,” said the Countess, digging at her pimple. “You perceive now that you are no hero. Thou hast deceived thyself at great cost.”

  Again, X held his tongue. One thought looped in his brain: The ceiling will know if I am a sinner. He couldn’t wait another instant. He needed to see what was inside himself.

  Click.

  “Perhaps you wonder where the Countess shall guide the knife,” said the Countess. “Yet the knife picks its own path.”

  “Why must you stoop to such depravity?” said X. “Is damnation not punishment enough for us?”

  The lord seemed intrigued by the question. She stopped fiddling with the sheath.

  “ This ‘depravity’ is the only thing that brings the Countess peace,” she said. “It was ever thus.”

  “So you’re not cutting something out of us—but out of yourself?” said X.

  The Countess bristled, and for just an instant spoke of herself as a more ordinary person might.

  “It is a pretty theory, yours,” she said. “Yet in a moment I shall slice thee apart, and we will shall see which of us screams.”

  She thrust her palm onto X’s chest. He hadn’t expected pain, not yet. But she pressed so violently that he couldn’t breathe. He bucked on the altar, as Shiloh had. His vision blurred. It wasn’t like when Regent put the names and stories of souls into X’s body so he could hunt them down. He was not being given something. Something was being forcibly taken. The Countess was trying to pull whatever sins he had out of his heart.

  This feeling, this pain—did it mean that he did have sins and that they were grievous? Above him, on the ceiling, something was stirring. Something was about to unfold.

  X wasn’t ready to look. He closed his eyes and summoned Zoe’s face for comfort. He summoned Jonah. Then Ripper, Banger, the Ukrainian. Even Plum. They flitted by, one after the other. Everyone he cared about. He tried to stop the faces from flitting by so quickly, but couldn’t. He tried to call Zoe to him again. Hers was the only face he wanted.

  The cat cried in its box on the bed, making a desperate, strangled sound. Distracted, the Countess lifte
d her hand from X’s chest.

  “If that damnable feline erupts again, the Countess shall stop its breath,” she said. “Would that the creature had been named for something mute, like a statue or the wind.”

  A voice X had never heard before spoke. A woman.

  “Let me comfort him,” she said. “He doesn’t belong in a box.”

  It must have been the servant in the bloody apron.

  “Still thy tongue, if thou means to keep it,” the Countess told her.

  The lord returned her focus to X, and slammed her palm back onto his chest. The pain obliterated everything else. X could feel her fingers burrowing into his ribs.

  He tried to fill his lungs with air. He was frantic. His head, his body, his veins … Everything was poised to burst.

  He screamed.

  But no, he couldn’t have. He didn’t have enough air. The scream couldn’t get out. It howled inside him.

  He saw, or maybe felt—he couldn’t tell the difference anymore—a shower of light, an exploding star.

  ELEVEN

  “Slowly, friend. Come back to us slowly.”

  It was Plum, coaxing him back to consciousness.

  X felt himself slip back into his skin, like it was a suit laid out for him. His arms became his again, then his legs and feet.

  Then he noticed the pain. It’d been there all along, waiting for him to wake. His body felt broken. His lungs burned when he inhaled, like a furnace lighting up.

  He opened his eyes.

  Plum stared down worriedly. He’d spread X’s coat like a blanket beneath him. X was moved by that and by the already familiar sight of his friend’s fluttering hands. Soft, kind Plum: it was good to see him.

  Every soul within a hundred feet was staring at X, and murmuring. Whatever had transpired after he’d passed out on the altar had set everyone abuzz.

  X didn’t know if he could speak, but he had to know if his heart held sins as he feared.

  He attempted a single word.

  “What,” he said.

  “Don’t try to speak,” said Plum. “Not yet.”

  “What,” X said again. “Happened.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Plum. “I will tell you everything, but only if you swear you won’t try to speak.” He paused, adding quickly, “Swear to me with your eyes, not your voice.”