by Cate Corvin
The spirit turned, writhing to look up at me as I slashed out with the sickle, the tip ripping through her flesh and hooking her towards me.
I snapped my fingers, witchlight igniting once more, but she let out a watery gurgle, chuckling as I gripped several coffin nails.
I knew I’d made a mistake in underestimating her, but my anger didn’t abate even as several hands gripped my legs and ankles, binding me fast to the bottom of the stairs. I knew the second mirror was just around the corner, the roses growing from it as the hissing grew louder. Another smell was rising beneath the stench of rot and roses.
Vag Hands wrapped around me like a snake, a thousand fingers pinching my skin, arms and legs, as she dragged me around the corner. She’d grown, her body stretching another five feet, bony and writhing.
The plain-framed mirror reflected the progressively darker version of the dusty dining room, and the spirit had no problems dragging me through. I’d anticipated this happening as well, but she hadn’t considered that leaving the large mirror propped on the floor only made my escape easier.
If I could remember how to get back without an anchor. I forced myself to imagine the bedroom… but was the gilt-framed mirror to the side, or in front? Panic jolted through me when I found I couldn’t remember.
We spilled into the darker second level of Death, stirring dust in a billowing cloud. The vines covered every wall, ripping right through into the bones of the deadside. Petals had gathered in desiccated mounds, slimy beneath the dust.
I struggled against my captor, spitting several curses, but they were only strong enough to deter her for a moment, her skin twitching away from me where the curses tried and failed to grab onto her. A second later another hand would creep into its place.
The spirit was dragging me towards the stairs. Towards the first mirror, where we would continue into the third level of the deadside.
I didn’t want to see past this. I didn’t want to know the secrets in the bottomless pit of the deadside, how horrible things could get away from the living and the sun.
I flexed my entire body, hoping to break her grasp long enough to draw my sickle from where it pierced her throat and attack anew, with salt this time as well.
She rasped at me, her serpentine body flexing around me as her spindly fingers pinched and prodded. The guttural words rolling from her mouth, the dead-tongue, buzzed in my skull as though ants had crawled in through my ears and were now chewing on the meat of my brain.
I didn’t need to understand her to know that she was taunting me. I felt the chill in the air around us, the strange heaviness that made it hard to draw breath.
Something was changing in Death. Someone besides us was moving through the still and unchanging air of the deadside and turning it into something else.
The mushy, decaying vines of the roses sent up a gagging stench as the spirit forced us onto the stairs, her many hands reaching out to dig into the walls and leverage us upwards.
She dragged me hard, smacking my skull into the stairs several times, bits of dead plant matter clinging to the strands of my hair. I was almost relieved when we reached the top and she barreled forward into the dark bedroom, dust flaking down from the ceiling in a gray snow.
I’d been an idiot to fight this enemy alone, but there’d been no choice. Not if I wanted the man upstairs, or to keep my human charge alive. Somewhere in the deadside was the way out, back to the living, but the memory of it was cloudy.
A large mirror lay before us, propped against the wall. Tiny specks of gilt still clung to the frame. The spirit dragged us through, the world growing several degrees darker, a whiff of spoiled meat cutting through the stench of rotting roses.
I got a mouthful of dust as the spirit dragged me forward several feet and spit desperately. My tongue went numb, thick in my throat. Everything was confusion, a whirlpool of pain and sickness. How did I get here? Where was I?
My ribs screamed as the spirit suddenly plunged downwards, the edges of the stairway digging into each tender part of my body. I remembered walking into this house, the two mirrors set up, one upstairs, one downstairs.
The spirit had planned to drag me as far into the deadside as it could. I clung to this notion, the one clear memory I could muster here. The edges of my thoughts were foggy and gray, but if I tried, maybe I could hold onto this one idea and make it back.
I gasped aloud as the multitude of hands on me suddenly released, sending me flying head over heels down the last few stairs. I sprawled in the thick dust at the bottom, my head pounding.
The spirit slithered around me, her belly dragging in the dust. Her stretched mouth leered over me, a bead of saliva splattering on my cheek, as the dead-tongue grated from her.
It was hard to breathe. I opened my eyes, focusing on a bright spot of red directly in front of me, just a tiny dab of color in the darkness. A feebly flickering spot of witchlight floated over me, clinging as desperately to life as I was.
It illuminated the tiny red rosebud, a dainty speck no bigger than my pinky nail, as it grew in a strange fast-motion, blooming into a lush rose, and withered away into blackened dust seconds later. I drew another breath, the weight on my chest cold and implacable.
I heard the roses growing. They advanced from the mirror not twenty feet away from me, snaking through the frame to overtake the dark room.
Several figures were crowded at the window, barely visible behind the mildewing white curtains, but I sensed their hunger as easily if they had shouted it.
She was coming for me now. The mistress. She was near.
I bit my lip, tasting blood. This was the end of everything. I didn’t know why I was here, how I had gotten this far into the darkness… memory eluded me. The spirit moved in a circle, eyes never moving from me as I rolled to my side, gasping at the effort it took to not cry out.
Some primal part of me wanted to make a proclamation and emblazon my presence on Death forever. I was… what was my name?... I was someone, a witch from a great coven. I knew that much. I would cling to it even if I was going to die here. I was going to kill this bitch before I went out, as the last thing I would ever do.
“I don’t know who I am,” I gasped, rising to my feet. I still held my sickle, the wood gleaming dully. Grains of salt were stuck to the palm of my clenched left hand. “But I think you know.”
The spirit slowed in her endless circling, eyes fixed on my face with malevolent hunger.
“And whoever I am, you can die now knowing that’s who killed you. Your dust will never become part of the world again. You can rot here in the dark forever.”
I sneered at her, the last of my words thick with malice. It wasn’t the best epitaph, but it was the best I could do for myself… whoever I might be.
I felt the magic in me sparking, unfurling into some great beast. I needed to exhale it or be consumed by it.
I instinctively moved to the left as the spirit lashed out, her many hands supporting her bulk as I sidestepped. I sang words aloud, the air and walls of Death seeming to flinch away from me as the magic in them burned the decay around me.
Motes of witchlight burst from me, a clear, bright light that dissipated shadows into nothingness, the clean purity of sunlight. The vines of the roses snaked aside when the witchlight came too close, writhing over each other in their effort to break away. The watchers at the window moved back, shielding their not-quite-blind eyes from the agony of the light.
The spirit screamed, her voice screeching like nails on a blackboard. She was endless, her body like a centipede looping over and over on itself as she struggled between the urge to run and the need to destroy and feed.
I lunged forward, lashing out with the sickle as she looped in on herself, but a pale hand knocked me aside, grabbing one of my ankles and yanking hard. Already muzzy, I fell to one knee, supporting my weight on the sword.
She writhed before me, her rubbery lips working. I felt her desperation, her desire to be understood before she killed me, her
frustration that I couldn’t hear the true words of her hatred.
The spirit gripped me hard, nails digging into my shoulders, hot blood welling as she pierced the skin. Saliva fell from her lips in thick strands as the coppery stench of my blood hit her.
She didn’t see my hands working, the handful of salt and iron coffin nails I held.
I leaned into her, playing on her desire for blood, her insatiable hunger for the life in me. She embraced me willingly, her tongue as cold as ice, a thick wet muscle that quested over my neck and shoulders in search of the blood, raising goosebumps as it went...
I rammed my fist forward, my fingers slipping past her rotting teeth, into the ice-cold maw that clenched around my arm in one giant spasm. I felt the heat through my fingers as the salt and iron scorched her insides, the pain as her fingers ripped at my back, her body flopping desperately.
I thrust the point of the sickle through her heart with my other hand, every muscle in me moving to keep her pinned while she thrashed before me. She didn’t realize she was making her own death, holding me tight against her instead of releasing me.
We would kill each other. That was a fair way to die.
I forced my arm deeper, the bones in my arm screaming as her interior flexed around it, threatening to snap them like so many twigs.
The darkness rose around me and my back was a solid wash of warmth. I realized it was the fog of blood loss, in some dim, far-off way. I only had so much time left.
I sang the words, the song of sunlight spilling from me, flowing into her. My fingers felt like they were clenched around coals, scorching away at my skin layer by layer.
Her thrashing became spastic and random as her skin began to turn black and flake away. Several hands flopped uselessly as her body died, the reanimated nerves giving out.
She squeezed, fingers probing deep into my back, my arms, as her eyes began to collapse on themselves, the sunlight in her guts burning her away slowly from the inside out.
The pressure finally ceased. I swayed in place, kneeling before a carcass of dust and ashes, where it would collapse and become a part of the foundation of Death, just as so many thousands of spirits before her had done.
Darker. Everything was darker. I had to move to the light, or I would join her.
I counted to three and forced myself to my feet, swaying unsteadily as I took shallow breaths. A low drone buzzed in the back of my skull, some faint whisper beneath it that I couldn’t quite make out.
I couldn’t remember how I had gotten here, the pain washing away whatever memories I had managed to retain. I only knew that mirrors would be my salvation.
There was one before me now, dying black vines spilling from its frame. It was darker inside this mirror. I limped closer, taking shallow breaths to keep from blacking out.
Had I come from this one? I peered into it as I leaned on my sword, gazing up into the reflected staircase.
A woman stood there, her feet visible as they slowly descended. I stared in frozen horror as one foot stretched out, toes twitching spastically as she felt for the step. Her flesh was corpse-white, the pallid tone of something left to rot in a dark corner.
The roses spilled around her, blooming and dying in a tidal wave as she descended. The stench of meat grew stronger, flyblown carrion wafting into my nose.
It was the smell that broke the spell of horror, the scream I wanted to voice coming out as nothing more than a rusty squeak.
I turned tail from the mirror, some vague memory tugging at me as I limped away, towards the lighter staircase, the one just behind me. I whimpered as I climbed the first step, sharp pain crackling through my knee. My entire body felt like it would crumble to dust soon.
I was panting before I was halfway up the staircase, my only thought on running from the slow yet inescapable corpse behind me. The tug of familiarity was too strong. I had known her.
A brief memory returned to me, like a fish slipping through clear water. Rosalind.
I turned and looked down the staircase, just barely able to still see the mirror on the floor.
A mistake. The woman crouched, staring after me with pale eyes. She gripped the frame, vines slithering over and around her hands, jerkily moving through the frame with uncertain feet. Her nostrils flared as she sniffed the air, following the scent of my blood to the ash-pile of the centipede spirit and the wide black stain of my own blood soaking through the dust.
Sheets of mildewing brown hair hung to her waist as she crawled forward, mouth scooping open to taste the blood.
I almost slipped and fell back down the stairs as I tried to run instinctively, seeking higher ground. The woman was distracted, my opportunity slowly waning as her too-thin arms swept the ground, searching for a warm body-
I reached the landing at the top of the stairs, looking around desperately as I tried to remember where I had come from. The faintest of divots showed in the dust, leading into a darkened bedroom.
I limped into it desperately, shutting the door behind me with shaking hands, hoping against hope to slow down the terrible woman behind me. A gilt mirror was propped here too, the light inside brighter. That must be where I had come from.
I ducked through without looking first, instinct overtaking training. My mind grew lighter as I took a breath of dusty, yet rot-free air.
Morena.
I jumped, my heart hammering in my chest. As soon as I heard it, I knew it was my name, the deadside calling to me… or was it the woman?
I had to keep going. I stumbled from the bedroom, shutting the door behind me once more as I stood on the landing, the vines here fresher, still green, not as withered. I had to go back down these stairs. How much farther until I saw true sun again?
I whispered a word for witchlight, my aching vocal cords no longer able to sing. The light that gleamed now was a pale imitation of the sunlight I had called before in the darkness.
But it was enough. I let it warm me and light my path as I descended the stairs, flinching as I heard Death whisper my name again.
Despite the light, the faintly-returning memories, I couldn’t tell where I had come from. The light outside the kitchen window was pearly and white, not the yellow sheen of sun… but maybe it was dawn. Maybe the world of the living was just outside.
I wanted to open the door, run to freedom from the dead woman. Rosalind. Her name is Rosalind.
My fingers brushed the cool wood, the curtains fluttering as I breathed out, peering into the mist. It didn’t feel right at all but the panicked animal urge to flee was overcoming me, overriding any faint memory I might have.
Something enormous moved through the mist, just the faint suggestion of something pitch-black and taller than the house, but it was enough to make me recoil. Just enough.
The loud creak of hinges squealed through the house, cutting the still air like a hot knife. I flinched, my muscles tightening with pain from the involuntary gesture.
The door wasn’t the way. That was the land of the dead. I wasn’t dead, though I was close.
I looked at the mirror, the mess of dust before it. I vaguely remembered hands on me, dragging me through the frame as I struggled…
A footstep. The scratch of nails on plaster. I shuddered, stumbling to the mirror as a palsied hand crept into sight on the staircase. Rosalind. The name disturbed me, spreading through my consciousness like ripples in water.
I choked back a sob as I ducked through the mirror, stumbling into slightly brighter light. How many mirrors? How many stairs? Was I dead already and doomed to roam forever in the mist?
Somebody stood at the foot of the stairs. I seized up, my heart jumping into my throat with the coppery taste of blood. For the briefest moment I thought Rosalind, her age-spotted, twitching form, had somehow gotten ahead of me through the mirror.
Silvery hair caught the pearly half-light, dark blue eyes gazing through me into the next mirror. I could have sworn I had seen that pale hair before, those finely carved lips… the taste of pomegranate
s and wine, the scent of sweet smoke…
I gasped for breath, clutching the rickety table. My shirt pulled at my skin as I moved, a sharp flash of pain as the cloth peeled away from the drying open wounds. I bit back a whimper as a freshet of blood ran down my side.
“Persephone,” the stranger said. I had been wrong about the coldness of his gaze. He was concerned, holding a thin rowan sword. He didn’t sheath it, his eyes flickering to the mirror behind me. “Take my hand. We’re going up.”
I had no choice but to trust him. I was exhausted, unable to remember why I was here, how I had gotten in… this man, this dangerous dichotomy of dark and light, was my only hope.
I stumbled forward, my knee popping with a sharp click. My head pounded, the edges of my vision growing fuzzy. Blood loss. That’s what it was.
The man bolstered me with one arm, keeping an eye behind us. I bit back a cry as the hiss of vines trailed after us, nails tapping on a wooden floor. “She’s coming,” I whispered, my voice raspy and hoarse. “She came from the bottom.”
“She won’t catch us,” he murmured. “Her spirit is still too weak. Go.”
I leaned against him, appreciating how solid he was, the strength in his arms supporting my lack thereof. The last few steps might have been a thousand miles for the effort it cost me. I swayed on the landing, the light dimming as I gazed at the cracked white wall before me.
The man gently steered me to the left, into a bedroom. Rumpled bedsheets lay around a woman’s prone spirit, her skin ghastly white, hair a corona around her head. She lay there peacefully, as though sleeping.
I licked my lips as I stared at her, wondering where I had seen her before. She looked so very vulnerable here in this dreary world.
“Through the mirror, Morena,” the man commanded, closing the door behind us and chanting words that made my eyes tear up with the pain of hearing them.
I stared at the gilt mirror, reflecting nothing but this room. “There’s nowhere else to go,” I said, perplexed.
He had already leaned over the sleeping woman’s spirit, hooking an arm around her shoulders and hauling her upright. “You didn’t forget everything. See the other side. Feel the sun and the air in your lungs.”