by Danny Bell
I didn’t look back as I walked the path, and the way out first appeared ahead of me as white noise, a colorless void that only revealed more of the path as needed, but eventually gave way to a more familiar setting. It unfolded in front of my eyes the way a video game renders in real-time when you have limited memory. As blobs and colors at first, blocky but textured as I approached. I was in a field, and then a dirt road. And then a farm. And all around that farm was blood. So, so much blood.
A chill ran through my spine that seized me in a way that I thought only happened in cheesy novellas. I wasn’t amused by it; I was terrified because I knew where I was. This was that zombie show where I’d failed so many wonderful people. People fated to die, who I couldn’t save. It was my first loss, well, first real loss since I gained any power. Most days, I was able to think around the details of what happened, focus on the children I could yet save and not the people I couldn’t.
Grace. Roger. Asha. Than.
God help me, I still remembered their names.
It was empty now, the destroyed zombies I’d saved the kids from were mostly decayed into mulch, no longer a threat. The house was in somehow worse shape than I’d found it the first time, weathered and aged by years. Even the barn seemed to be barely standing. I turned to look away, see if maybe the national guard base was in view, when I heard a creaking sound that almost scared me out of my skin. And then a gentle voice, an innocent voice I thought I’d lost forever called out for me almost apologetically.
“Elana?”
It was Lainey, hiding in the loft of the barn, not aged a day. And behind her, the dirty, confused, and adorable face of Jayden poked out his head like he’d been caught stealing a cookie.
A laugh tried to escape my throat, but it caught as tears welled up in my eyes, and a sensation of being filled with emotion like a water balloon attached to a hose with too much pressure began to overcome me. I made an incomprehensible sound of disbelief as Lainey tried again. “Elana, did you come back for us?”
“Yes!” I shouted, finding all of my voice in that one word. “Oh my god, yes! Come down here!”
“Okay!” Jayden said happily, guileless as a puppy.
The children exited the barn like prisoners being released from some long-served sentence. Jayden faced the world with awe, looking at the sky as if trying to find where in the vast blue I’d dropped from. Lainey bounded toward me with a head of steam, and I dropped to my knees as she jumped into me, hugging me with her one arm, making an unconscious attempt with the stump on the other. I was weeping in a way I only barely understood. I waved Jayden over to us, and he joined in the group hug.
I never forgot the kids, but my attempts to reach them were always just on the fringes of possible, something I knew was there but couldn’t see with my own eyes. The children were innocent, even in the place they were standing, no way to see the bad things that had always been coming. I had the chance to save them once, and I had aimed high. Not just them, but everyone. I wanted to get everyone to safety, to give them all a chance, but those things that pretended they were still human, things that had lost their humanity, caught up to me, and they slaughtered these kids’ family. I knew in some part of me that the Gardeners following Bres had been human at some point, and even if they had suffered no physical change, no one who would unleash that sort of evil on those kind people didn’t deserve to be called human.
“Where did you get your stick?” Jayden asked. It was such a ridiculous, earnest question that I couldn’t be mad at it.
“A tree gave it to me,” I laughed, wiping away my tears, and before I could collapse in on myself, I focused and addressed the children. “Hey, come on. I’m going to get you home.”
Lainey looked up at me expectantly and my heart broke as she asked, “Is my dad coming?”
“No,” I said, forcing myself to keep it together. “It’s just us, but it’s all going to be okay. You’re going to be safe after this, I promise.”
As if on cue, the ground began to spoil all around us, the sky darkened into crimson, and from all directions, something wicked began to encroach into our little corner of the world. A meat smell overpowered my senses, and I watched as the house and the barn were overwhelmed by the rapid growth of mold and mildew. I felt what this was in a way that only I could.
“How did you two get here?” I asked suspiciously, trying to add up the pieces of this puzzle in my head.
Lainey grabbed my free hand with hers and sniffed. Jayden began to hyperventilate. “We were in the tunnel with you, and we came back here, but everybody was gone,” Lainey whispered. “You were the first one to come back.”
“I…I’m not scared,” Jayden lied needlessly in the way that little boys of his age lied in exactly situations like these.
“I am,” Lainey admitted, and I gave her hand a reassuring squeeze in return. We were still in the Knowing. The kids never made it back to their world. They must’ve wound up in a facsimile of their world, something that would make sense to them. And while often times this place likes me, we were surrounded by the infinite parts of this place that hated me, and they were gathering steam. I realized now what the kids were in all of this. They were bait.
“We are so glad to see you again,” the voices mocked in unison from all around us. This was the Knowing, there was no mistaking it. “But you were just leaving, weren’t you, Elana?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” I answered a little louder than I meant to, trying to sound brave for the sake of Lainey and Jayden. “Me and the kids.”
“Oh, but the children no longer belong to you.” I’d never heard the Knowing sound this sinister before, and every instinct I had said I needed to get the hell out of here or I’d be obliterated. “After all, you dropped them. Finders keepers.”
“Why lead me to them only to make me give them up to you? Why even bother?”
“To see you hurt,” It replied. I could hear a smile in its voice somehow. “The way you hurt us. To make you willingly give two young, innocent orphans over to us so we can laugh in your face at how easy it is to make you abandon your sense of morality. Leave the children, and we will messily devour them. We will not hide that from you. We will allow you to leave, and no one will be the wiser. Or you may stand your ground, and we will devour you in front of them.”
“This is sick!”
“We know. Now choose.”
Jayden was crying now in spite of himself, all the bravado evaporated. Lainey was looking at me with desperate, pleading eyes, and I knew I couldn’t give them up. I could never live with myself if I did, this wasn’t even a question.
There was an option, but it wasn’t a good one. The ground directly beneath our feet hadn’t been spoiled. The part of the Knowing that liked me was weak here. There wasn’t much of it, but it could lead me out. But not with two kids in tow, and not with that much of reality fighting back against us. I’d already made that mistake once with them.
I knelt down and drew the kids in close to me, doing my best to find a happy middle ground between my serious face and my everything is going to be okay face.
“You’re not going to let it eat us, are you?” Jayden asked.
“Of course not,” I replied. “But I’m not going to be with you either.”
“You promised us!” Lainey wailed. “You promised you would come with us!”
“Oh, come here,” I said gently, pulling Lainey in for a reassuring hug. “I promised you would be safe, and you will. Okay? Don’t cry, Jayden needs you.”
I gave the ground a couple of taps with my staff and spoke directly with the earth. “Hey, you still with me?” The kids looked confused, but I continued before they could talk. “I need you to clear a path. Make sure they know which way to go, okay?”
Before the kids could say anything in protest, a jagged path was illuminated by a golden light. It was narrow in parts, but it was a path. “Lainey, I need you to make sure Jayden stays on the path with you, okay? Whatever you do, don’t let him
take one foot off the lighted parts, not even a toe.”
“You have to come too!” Lainey protested, and I gave both of them one more quick hug.
“I’ll be right behind you,” I reassured them. “I just need to beat up the monster first, okay?”
They looked skeptical. Maybe more than that, they knew I was lying, but I was still able to shoo them off, and as they got further away from me, the ground around me was slowly swallowed up by the tainted parts of the Knowing.
And this was where the stupid part of my plan came into play. Using the staff, I drew a protective circle in the dirt around me and, feeling for the strength of the Knowing itself, borrowed its essence as I fused it with a burst of magic to create a border that would hopefully draw a stalemate from its counterpart.
Before I could gloat, however, my mouth shot open to scream, but no sound came out. The shock of feeling torn apart from the inside out was overwhelming my ability to process said pain. I could feel bones strain inside of me, several of them threatening to break all at once. And I stared in horror at one of my hands held up to eye level as a piece of it began to flake and vanish into the air. See, there were a lot of rules I needed to abide by while I was here building my staff. Getting lost, the wood carving; but I just broke one of the biggest rules I was given. To use no magic until I got back, or if I’m being more specific, the rule was:
Until such time as you find yourself home after your ordeal, you are to use no magic lest you be destroyed absolutely.
Chapter Twenty-Six
It’s harder than you might think to describe the feeling of being ripped apart at a theoretical level, but that was at least my best starting point for what was happening to me. The universe was reclaiming the very idea of me, one atom at a time, and it was excruciating. Imagine if you went to peel a small piece of skin away from a hangnail only instead of plucking that tiny offending bit of flesh from near a nail, something that might sting until it heals, the tearing never stopped. And it moved at a steady, glacial pace until your arm was bloody and de-sleeved. Imagine that, and you were on the cusp of beginning to understand what I was going through.
I wondered if this is what Jason Harris felt at the end.
“Oh, I really wouldn’t have done that,” the Knowing said all around me, flaring up as it did. Jets of flame shot forth from the ground, faceless men and women with mud-blackened Victorian dresses and suits danced madly across the land only to be swallowed by a swamp that grew from nothing around them, and hideous, though familiar-looking, bipedal beings with the heads of deformed crows and oil-slicked wings surrounded the landscape and screamed in unison, discordant and inhuman.
As far as nightmares I’d seen in the Knowing went, this probably only ranked about a four on a scale of one through “What god would allow this?”, though admittedly, it was hard to focus on all of that with my struggle to keep myself from unraveling.
“You’re not getting those kids,” I coughed. I had meant it to sound more defiant than it came out, but I was on my hands and knees now, barely holding on.
“Oh, we will claim them.” The confidence behind that dismissive statement almost convinced me. “But your state of being is a little more fascinating at the moment. Always the habitual rule breaker, and it finally caught up to you in a big way. You didn’t expect it to hurt like this, did you? You didn’t even know this was possible.”
Every inch of me wanted to scream, but I couldn’t release what little hold I had, not yet. Not until the children were safe. I dug my fingers into the earth and gripped the dirt so tightly that my fingers popped. Bits of my hands flaked off into nothing as they did.
“There’s still time to save yourself,” the Knowing said. “Release your circle, abandon the children, and we will make you whole. If you’re lucky, in time, you may even convince yourself that their lives were worth it in comparison to all the news ones you got to save.”
I tried to block out those words, and I focused on the parts of the Knowing that sat with me, surrounded by terror. My best guess was that my desperate attempt to stave off the encroaching evil had worked by the slimmest of margins. We were not in the right part of town, so to speak, and ordinarily, Knowing against Knowing might’ve been a matter of numbers or mass or however the infinite nature of all creation was measured. By lending my power, it was infinity versus infinity plus one. If I let go, that was that.
More than that, the Knowing, the good bits, were mirroring me. My strain became its strain, so I loosened my grip on the dirt, carefully recovered my staff, and sat in a meditative position, and tried to feed calm in so I could take calm out. It was hell, but I didn’t have any other choice. Moment by moment I was trying every pain management trick I’d ever heard of, but it was no good. This was attacking the very idea of me, meaning the pain was only physical because I thought it was. So, I did as Chalsarda had taught me, hoping that I’d paid enough attention in one of her training sessions for once. I focused on my breathing and tried to ignore what was in front of my eyes in favor of the mission. I failed those kids before, and if this was what it took to save them, if it meant patiently waiting for oblivion, so be it. I felt through the ground once for Lainey and Jayden, sensed they were still on the path, and acknowledged what I needed to do.
“No,” I said evenly.
“Not even for them?” As the Knowing said this, Bres, holding his terrible scythe, came out of a shadow clutching a screaming Olivia by the hair, dragging her behind him with a certain eagerness. Behind him was Jason Harris, holding a struggling Ann in a rear-naked chokehold.
“Elana!” Olivia cried out as she saw me. “Thank god! Help us!”
This wasn’t real. Logically, I knew that, but it was trying the hell out of my heart. Still, it couldn’t be real. And if it was, well, I wouldn’t exist long enough to regret it. It was a cold thought to have, admittedly, but the defense I needed.
I said nothing and sat dispassionately, giving nothing away. I watched with sheer horror as Bres raised the scythe to Olivia’s neck, her eyes pleading with me in disbelief to do anything at all, and with a motion like a cello player, the blade passed over her flesh. Blood cascaded. Ann screamed. Bres and Jason cackled victoriously like cartoon villains.
I cradled my staff, feeling the unsteady power in it threaten to escape, and I breathed deeply through my nostrils and held the air in my chest for a long, reassuring moment before I released it. It was all I allowed myself after witnessing that. Unquestionably it was sick, but it was like watching a bad TV show. The actions were all exaggerated somehow. Too real, and so they were not.
“So, those children mean that much to you?” the Knowing asked as the visions of those actors faded from view. “Fine, sit here and be destroyed if that’s your choice!”
One by one, the aberrations in the area vanished until slowly, even the sky became blue once again and everything returned to what it was. I didn’t move, didn’t release the power in my circle. The pain became a slow, steady pulse, and something viscous began to streak down my cheek, but I ignored it. I kept my calm and took my calm.
“Over here!” There was a shout behind me, distant but unmistakable. It was Ann. There was the sound of footfalls rapidly crunching under tall, dead grass.
“I can’t believe we found you!” Olivia nearly cried. “You did it! You got those kids out, they let us know where you were!”
“Yes, well done all around,” Chalsarda said somewhat nervously. “But may I remind us all where we are? We’d best make haste. Elana, gather your staff and let us leave this cursed place.”
I didn’t bother to look behind me, didn’t move. The three of them walked around the circle, studying me.
“Up and at ’em,” Ann prodded.
“Seriously, Elana, we gotta go,” Olivia insisted.
Chalsarda extended a hand toward me. “Well? Come on!”
I shut my eyes a moment, took in another deep breath, and when I opened my them again, they were gone. Lainey and Jayden were not free
.
The nightmares returned all at once in a flood, the sky darkened, and the chaos intensified. “It’s getting worse. And the pain hasn’t even begun,” the Knowing said all around me. “You can’t even say it’s a terrible way to die because what is happening to you is so much worse than death. Yet you insist, though this isn’t about those children. You’re doing this for you. Because you need to have it be all about you. But what if it wasn’t?”
Elana felt a change deep inside of her, in some forgotten recesses, and it was painfully apparent that the magnitude of what was happening was a fair bit more than she’d ever thought possible. Her brows furrowed in dismay, and bright as she was, she knew that the only smart play was to exit the circle and give up.
“I’m not leaving,” Elana lied. Around her, the self-contained prison filled with rising walls began to feel claustrophobic, and on the upper ledges, the monstrous crows that she could not identify began to resemble watchtower guards, and she began to wilt under their gaze.
Elana became worried, truly worried for the first time in her life, for she knew this was not normal. There was a structure to her world, to the way her stories played out, for better or worse. She disrupted the natural order to that world, stepped into something new and wrong. She wasn’t supposed to be here, and she knew where “here” really was. It was the end. Her end.
“But not their end,” Elana whined helplessly, thinking about the lies people will tell themselves, even in their final moments.
Ugly tumors began to jut from her arms and legs, and silver flakes danced across her vision. She was in poor shape, and Elana did calculations in her mind, coming to terms with the unfortunate reality that there were a thousand ways out, but no way to win. No way to survive. The ambient glow that had been the light her life brought to the world would be snuffed out soon, even the spent wick of her memory would reduce to ash and be lost to the winds of time.