A Broken Darkness

by Premee Mohamed

  I squinted up at the hubcap-sized drone that had just hummed past us, shaking glassy droplets of rain loose from the bare trees. “That’s got a Chambers Aerodynamics logo on it.”

  “Not the point. The point is, no, everybody doesn’t get to know everything, and everybody doesn’t get a vote on everything. What kind of world is that? Every single Canadian doesn’t get to cram into Parliament to make the laws. Every single… every single person in a restaurant doesn’t get to go into the kitchen to decide the menus. Some people have to do the knowing and the choosing, and some people have to stay out of it. Especially with magic. I don’t trust the Society farther than I can throw them, but they’ve got the right idea.”

  “So you’re just gonna profit off it in the meantime.”

  “Yep. Money buys science, science answers questions.”

  I rolled my eyes, but she wasn’t looking. We rounded a corner that looked slightly familiar, and I glanced up instinctively past the sharp peaks of the roofs around us to see the castle high on its hill, still rippling with the reflective tape and orbited by drones and crows.

  “When you said go back to the castle, how exactly did you think we were going to get in?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly…”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. You have no idea.”

  “I do have an idea! Why would you think I wouldn’t? I mean, maybe you didn’t have an idea. But it’s not—”

  “You’re about to say legal,” I said. “Or, um. Nonlethal? Both maybe?”

  “Maybe both.” She got her buzzing phone out, and turned it off with an impatient flick.

  “This is great,” I said, looking up at the castle again. “You know, The X-Files taught me that criminals often return to the scene of the crime.”

  “They better just try it,” she said darkly.

  “I was referring to you.”

  We had huddled out of the wind behind a high stone wall, the main street ahead of us and a shorter, ivy-covered alleyway at our backs. A black cab slowly ticked past; a little group of tourists trailed after a tour guide with a small microphone clipped to her scarf.

  “You have to ask yourself,” Johnny said, and hesitated.

  “Why here,” I said. “Why now. If They’ve developed the ability to go anywhere.”

  “Yes.” She swung her bag around to her back, the same shapeless waxed-canvas sack she’d been carrying for years. It looked like a dirty ottoman. “Feels a little personal. And no other incidents, really? None? So last night was, what, a hit-job? They could have killed us. But They didn’t. They tried to kidnap us. Incompetently. What does it mean?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Rhetorical question. But there might be clues at the castle, they might have left something behind, we just need to…”

  I turned when she did at the scrape of shoes on the cobblestones behind us, but it was only a couple of middle-aged women, tourists I thought, with practical runners in bright shades of neon, each with a large backpack. One had a paper map folded tightly to the size of a paperback. “Excuse me,” she said in a broad American accent, I couldn’t tell from where. “Do you mind? We’re a li’l bit turned around.”

  “Don’t look at me,” I said. “I don’t even know what time zone I’m in.”

  “Where are you trying to get to?” Johnny reached for the map, and froze, her hand out.

  Both women began to tremble, then shimmer, as if viewed through flowing water. The woman holding the map collapsed dramatically, her legs giving way, and hit the cobblestones face-first with a sickening crack that I quickly realized was the least of her problems, as dozens of amber-coloured, spiked legs began to tear through her skin, spraying blood and other fluids into the air.

  I didn’t wait around to see what the other one was turning into, but grabbed Johnny by her sleeve and ran the other way. Dead-end, of course, and I cursed myself: I’d seen that when we came in. Back, towards the main street—

  Johnny twisted free and pointed back at the entrance, where more things were gathering, some still recognizable as people, others less so. They moved towards us in lurches and skips or slithering on the cobbles and walls; some had managed wings that kept them a few inches off the ground. Worst of all, they were entirely silent except for the sound of their scales or claws on the stone.

  Could we climb the walls? I might, I thought, but I didn’t think Johnny could. Nothing to do but follow her at a dead run down the alleyway, longer than it looked, towards the darkness at the end: the opening of a round tunnel or storm drain, half-covered with dangling ivy but fully covered, I realized, with a thick iron grate. “What the fuck? Did you know this was here?”

  “Of course I did, but I thought we’d have more time to—”

  I nudged her aside and put my shoulder to the spot she was futilely shoving, near the ancient but sturdy-looking hinges, not hoping for much. They bowed at once under my weight, though, revealing that under the hefty metal they had been attached to the stone with much more recent, and thoroughly rusted, thin iron nails. We swung the grating open just wide enough to get through, grunting with the effort, and shoved it back into place, bracing it at an angle on the wet stone on our side. It would fall at once if pushed, but it might buy us a minute or two. But to do what, exactly?

  We splashed quickly through the trickle of water running down the center of the tunnel, the already-dim daylight disappearing much more quickly than my night vision could compensate. In moments all I could see was the gleam of a buckle on Johnny’s bag. She darted suddenly to the left, down another tunnel, and I followed, cursing and tripping on the broken stone.

  “You didn’t say we were getting in through the sewers!”

  “This isn’t a sewer pipe!”

  “Smells like one,” I said, but actually the odour of urine at the entrance had faded; people must have been pissing against the grate.

  “They call these the South Bridge Vaults. People used to live here, I mean, initially they used to like work here and stuff. Shops. But after the plague started coming, it was mostly people who didn’t have anywhere else to live. The main thing about them is that there’s a lot of them, and only part of it is open to tourists these days, and we’re not in that part.”

  “I thought we were pretty far from the actual castle. Huh. Also, by people do you mean, like, millions of plague ghosts?”

  “Well there’s probably a few ghosts, I’m not saying there’s not. You know Burke and Hare?”

  “No. Should I look them up if we live?”

  “Extremely no.” She got out her phone and turned it back on, illuminating low arches, crumbling stone, indecipherable graffiti cut into the rocks themselves, and some soft-looking wooden supports. The stink of piss had been replaced with the mouldy funk of stagnant water.

  “And these lead back under the castle?”

  “Pretty close, yeah.” She took a deep breath and immediately coughed. The weak square of light bobbed in front of us, glinting off the water at our feet. “Can you hear those things? I can’t hear anything. Which is, like, the worst.”

  “Yeah. That’s, like, right before a jump scare.”

  “No, the first jump scare is the cat.”

  “More like a rat, down here.” I took out my phone too, and turned to cautiously check behind us, shading it with my fingers. No monsters, no people, no ripples in the small slow stream. My heart was still pounding. “What the fuck was that, anyway? Can They turn people into monsters now?”

  “Maybe. Looked like it. That’s the lowest-energy option, I think. Alternatively, somewhere They’re making monsters that look and sound like people, and sent them here when they were done.” She paused to run her fingers carefully across a carved wooden beam, half-familiar letters—English or Latin—barely legible. “I nearly peed myself.”

  “Surprised you didn’t, with the amount of coffee in you.”

  “This way.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be sure?”

>   Don’t strangle her, don’t strangle her, don’t strangle her… serenity now! Serenity now! I stifled a small, horrified laugh, and kept trudging after her, turning continuously to check the way we had come.

  “Do you have any, you know, secret weapons in case those things follow us?”

  “They’re not exactly the easiest things to make, you know.”

  “I thought you were some kind of genius.”

  “Not the weapons kind.”

  “Have you ever considered,” I said, “that about two years ago was a great time to start becoming the weapons kind?”

  “The gates. Are. Shut.”

  “You keep saying that like it changes what’s happening.” Why us, I kept thinking as we twisted and turned in the stone tunnels, climbing up sudden shin-tearing steps, sliding unexpectedly down crumbled slopes of stone. Why us, why here, why now? Why not everywhere?

  Don’t think about it. The kids, Mom. The house. Don’t think, Why not there. Call down trouble, as all my aunties would say.

  Why us. Why us again. Why… where was Sofia, anyway?

  And why had I just thought that?

  “That magic detector of yours,” I whispered.

  “I never got it to work. Never.”

  I blinked at the venom in her voice, and enjoyed the small, mean pang of satisfaction. “Okay, okay. So you ran into a problem you can’t solve and your feelings are hurt. What were you expecting? It’s magic, not science. How did you think you were going to study it in a lab? It’s... what do you call it. Apples and oranges.”

  “It’s not about my feelings. And they’re not different. I know they’re not. And there’s a difference between a problem that can be solved with enough money and time and eight hundred thousand kilos of thrust, and a problem that can’t be solved,” she snapped.

  “Well, maybe you should pick a different problem.”

  “No. I have to solve this one. Humanity needs a solution.” She stopped and turned her phone so she could see me; startled, I did the same. Her burglar-masked face was jittery, flushed. “What do you think will happen to us if we can’t understand magic? If we don’t know how it gets in, how it’s used, wasted, controlled, generated, broken, accumulated, channelled?”

  “How did we survive it before?” I retorted. “Isn’t that Their whole thing? They’ve been here before. They’ve been kicked out before. We’ve always survived. Humanity. Listen to you. Like you’re the only person who’s ever existed in the history of the world.”

  “We had outside help,” she said. “And millions of people, maybe billions, stopped surviving. What’s wrong with your hand?”

  “Uh.” I glanced down at the back of my left hand, where the silver tray from last night had gone awry somehow and left a triangular black bruise surrounded by swirls of ornamentation. But I had been rubbing it against my leg without realizing it, because my palm bore a perfectly round bluish bruise of its own where the watcher had gone in. And it had begun to hurt again, like putting too much weight on a hairline fracture. They hadn’t taught us what happened if you touched a watcher. Maybe everybody else had died. “Nothing. Bruise. Look.” I showed her the top of my hand.

  She lost interest at once. “Anyway, the way you figure out how much magic in the world is by doing a small spell, then a larger one, then a larger one, you know? But that process uses up magic. And you can’t calibrate what’s left until you try a spell that doesn’t work. It’s like driving in a car with no fuel gauge. Trial and error? We can’t live like that. We especially cannot live like that now, after the... after last time. Because this is something They understand and use intuitively, and that intuition isn’t something we can develop. It might not even be something humans are physically capable of. It’s like They can sense things with their skin, like sharks, that we can’t.”

  “Ampullae of Lorenzo.”

  “Lorenzini. Yeah.” She stopped again, and looked up at the ceiling above us, shining her phone on it. Something small wriggled there, eye-level with me, perhaps a foot above her: a small, startlingly magenta worm that must have burrowed through the wood above us. It flinched from the light, opening a line of jewel-green eyes with tiny, sticky pops, one by one. “Ew. What kind of weird-ass bug—”

  I poked her in the back with my elbow, hurrying her along. “That was a tentacle, genius. Are we close?”

  “What in the hell is happening,” she muttered. “What is happening. What could They possibly… How…”

  The next whiff of breeze brought a thread of different stench our way: the rotten, sour, and above all unmistakeable smell of magic. We both caught it at the same time; Johnny stiffened, sniffed, held her breath. And behind us, something plopped into the water.

  “Quick!” she whispered. “We’ll lose them in the castle.”

  “That could have just been a rat!”

  “How is that better?!”

  We sped up, stumbling and even tripping now, cursing softly as we took the hits on our cut palms and sore wrists, trying to spare our phones, the only source of light. All around us the carven stone, the crumbled doorways and columns, the fallen beams, choked off the path through which we ran. More of the waving things—limbs, eyes, teeth, claws—stirred minutely as we passed.

  “I’ve seen this movie,” I panted. “The whole hallway comes alive.”

  “Don’t think about it,” she gasped, rounding one last corner and skidding to a halt at the edge of a deep, still pool. The ceiling had opened out into thick grayish curves of stone, humped in the middle, like ribs. All around us hung rags of moss and other… things, some craning to watch us, our two little lights in the cavernous space.

  “Are these clues? Do these count as clues?”

  “Yes, they’re still clues if they’re staring at you.”

  There was a strange smell now, or not strange at all really—only strange in the sense that it seemed out of place, as we had once, a long time ago, been alerted that someone was creeping up behind us by the cigarette smoke on his clothes. Here, it smelled of the sea, the unmistakeable sharpness I remembered from my very few encounters with one. Beached seaweed, the stinging odour of the water itself, things disintegrating to bones and ammonia on wet sand.

  “Is... this place built over a—” I began, and Johnny whispered, “There’s the door!”

  I liked doors; you could shut a door. We edged quickly around the pool, heading for the oddly comforting outline in the distance, labelled ELECTRICAL B3-2. An ordinary thing, recognizable, reassuring.

  Behind us, splashing footsteps, the clatter of broken stone. Murmurs, all too human. What were they saying? Something or someone laughed, a hysterical cackle that echoed around the space like the cry of a hyena. We were cornered.

  “We’re not,” Johnny whispered, as if I had spoken. “Keep going.”

  The door swung open silently, giving way into a smaller darkness inside it, something strange about it, thick, moving. We stopped, pressed our backs to the wall. Our pursuers fell silent too, and for a moment I heard nothing but Johnny’s fast breath.

  And then a faint, distant rushing. The iodine smell struck us in a cold wave, and pressure came with it, like the heavy minutes before a storm.

  I didn’t panic until I turned and saw that the way we had entered had vanished, replaced by a thick mass of trees, birches, their pale trunks gleaming in the jittery light of Johnny’s phone. They grew straight through the muddied flagstones of the floor, tilting them up and splitting their mortared joints.

  And still the dark crawled on, the dark and the smell, till we cowered in its shadow, a tsunami bigger than the stone roof, bigger than the castle, than the hill, the clouds somewhere outside, Johnny still holding her phone up, shining it straight into the darkness, the light disappearing into it and showing nothing.

  Just before it reached us, she closed her eyes. I did too.

  Don’t look away, you need to see it come at you, need to see what’s hitting you, was this a trap? Do you know what traps look like
now?

  Did she—

  THE DARKNESS HIT like a true splash of water, cold, humid, not like the still stuffy air of the vaults, shocking my eyes open.

  Light returned slowly, sallow and dim, like the green-tinted minutes before a tornado. Ahead stretched a long uneven slope of charcoal-coloured sand, packed hard near the water, a horizon-spanning expanse of oily-looking waves of a chemical or even electric green. Where the beach became impressionable dozens of huge footprints marked it, all different sizes and shapes. In lines, or ranks, so many in the same place they had rutted the ground like tiretracks.

  Instinctively, like a blink, I looked down and to my left for Johnny: gone. But the motion had revealed something else, or maybe it hadn’t, maybe I was just losing my mind rather than whatever the alternative was. That the painfully-green sea wasn’t a sea at all, but the foot-deep pool of water in the center of the room that Johnny and I had entered; that the sand wasn’t sand, but the crumbled and weathering remains of the floor and walls that had connected the vaults to the sub-level of the castle.

  I moved my head again, cautiously, then shut my eyes. The sound of the waves. Hissing across the hard, rutted sand. And that sea smell, not like the fetid, decades-old water infiltrating soil and stone.

  But. But. When I opened my eyes again there was a flash, like before, of the uneven walls, the toppled furniture, the arched ribs of the roof above. Even the E and the L of the word ELECTRICAL on the door.

  I turned to see that the way we had come in was gone (of course), replaced with a thick birch wood, the canopy interlaced overhead and shading the undergrowth into a hazy mass, the thick pale leaves steadily waving. Worryingly, because everything was worrying, there was a path, bare of the usual forest debris, leading into it. And did the curve of the branches look like the curve of a roof, carved and assembled by human hands? Did the dirt trail look like a corridor leading into some other place?