Girl of Nightmares

by Kendare Blake

  I turn; Burke and Jestine repeat the ritual. His blood is shining and crimson against her skin. When she turns to face me, I fight the urge to wipe it off. She swallows hard, and her eyes are bright. Adrenaline is releasing into our blood, making the world sharper, clearer, more immediate. It’s not the same as when I hold the athame but it’s close. At a nod from Burke, the rest of the Order pull their knives out. Carmel is only a half step behind them as they all drag the blades across their palms; her eyes narrow at the brief sting. Then all of them, Thomas and Burke included, turn their hands over, allowing the blood to drip onto the floor, spattering onto a mosaic of pale yellow asymmetrical tiles. When the droplets strike, the flames on the candles flare and energy like the waves over intense heat rushes to the center and reverberates outward. I can feel it, beneath my feet, changing the surface. Just how is hard to describe. It’s like the ground beneath our shoes is becoming less. Like it’s thinning out, or losing a dimension. We’re standing on a surface that isn’t a surface anymore.

  “It’s time, Cas,” Jestine says.

  “Time,” I say.

  “They’ve done their part, paving the way. But they can’t open the door. That you have to do yourself.”

  Magic is swimming through my head in a fucking torrent. Looking around the circle, I can barely distinguish Carmel and Gideon from the others. Beneath the hoods, their features have blurred. Then I catch sight of Thomas, so clear that he might as well be sparkling, and my stomach drops down a few inches in my throat. My arm moves; I don’t realize that I’m reaching for the athame until it’s in my hand, until I’m looking down at it, the flames from the candles flickering orange on the blade.

  “I have to go first,” says Jestine. She’s standing square to me. The athame is pointed toward her stomach.

  “No.” I pull back but she grabs my shoulder. I didn’t know this is what they meant. I thought it would be Burke. I thought it would be a shallow cut on the arm. I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t think anything; I didn’t want to. I back up another step.

  “If you go, I go,” Jestine says from between clenched teeth. Before I can react, she grasps my hand where it holds the athame and plunges it deep into her side. I watch the blade sink in like a nightmare, slow but so easily, like it was sliding through water. When it comes out it shines a translucent red.

  “Jestine!” I shout. The word dies loud in my ears. The walls give off no echo. Her body folds up and she sinks to her knees. She’s clutching at her side; only the smallest bit of blood breaks through her fingers, but I know it’s worse than that.

  Her life’s blood.

  As I watch, she loses a dimension, becomes less, like the air around us and the floor beneath our feet. She’s gone, crossed over. What’s left is hollowed out, nothing more than a place marker.

  I look down at her, hypnotized, and turn the athame inward. When it breaks through my skin the world spins. It feels like my mind is being pulled out through a pinhole. I clench my jaw and press harder, thinking of Jestine, thinking of Anna. My knees hit the floor, and the light goes out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  There is nothing good here. There never has been. My cheek lies pressed against a surface that is neither hot nor cold, neither dull nor sharp. But it is hard. Everywhere my body touches it is about to shatter. This was a mistake. We don’t belong here. Wherever it is, it is the lack of everything. No light, no darkness. No air or taste. It’s nothing; a void.

  I don’t want to think anymore. My eyes might pop and run out of my head. I might break my skull against the bottom and listen to the empty pieces, wobbling like the discarded shell of an egg.

  (Cas, open your eyes.)

  My eyes are open. There isn’t anything to see.

  (You have to open your eyes. You have to breathe.)

  This place is the thing behind madness. There is nothing good here. Off the map. If you eat frustration it chokes you. This place exists in the wake of a scream.

  (Listen to my voice. Listen. I’m here. It’s difficult, but you have to make it. In your mind. Form it in your mind.)

  Mind is unraveling. Can’t make it stay together. Come all this way to drift off and break apart. There are things people need. Air. Water. Laughter. Strength. Breath.

  Breathe.

  “That’s it,” says Jestine. “Take it slow.” Her face materializes like fog in a mirror and the rest of the world follows suit, filling in like a paint-by-number. I’m lying on what feels like stone in a gravity chamber, heavy density against my skull, dug up against my shoulder blades. This must be how a caught fish feels, pulled up onto a dock, the wood pressing into its gills and eye when nothing has ever pressed against it before. Their gills throb to no use. My lungs pull to no use. Something is moving in and out of them, but it isn’t air. There’s no sensation of nourishment hitting my blood. I grab my chest.

  “Don’t panic about that. Just keep breathing. It doesn’t matter if it’s real or not. Let it feel familiar.” She grabs on to my arms; she feels so warm, warmer than anything I remember. I don’t know how long we’ve been here. It feels like hours. It feels like a second. They could be the same thing.

  “It’s all about the mind,” she says. “That’s what we are. Look.” She touches my stomach, and I wince, anticipating pain. Only there isn’t any. The wound isn’t there. It should be there. There should be a hole ripped in my t-shirt and blood should have spread out in a circle. The knife should be sticking out of me.

  “No, you don’t need that,” she says. I look down again. Where there was nothing, now there’s a small tear and a dark patch of wetness. “You don’t need that,” she says again. “That still exists. Over there. On the other side, our bodies are bleeding out. If we don’t make it back before they’re empty, we’ll be dead.”

  “How do we get back?”

  “Look behind you.”

  Behind me there is stone. I’m lying on my back. But I turn my head slightly.

  Thomas. I can see him. And if I focus, the window widens to reveal the rest of the room. The Order’s cuts are still open, dripping slowly to the floor. Our bodies are there, mine and Jestine’s, curled up where they fell.

  “We’re on the other side of the mirror,” I say.

  “In a manner of speaking. But really, we’re still there. We’re still alive. The only thing that came, physically, is the athame.”

  I look down. It’s in my hand, and there is no blood on the blade. I squeeze it, and the action brings emotion in a wave. The familiarity in this place of nothing almost makes me want to plunge it into my stomach again.

  “You have to stand up now.” Jestine rises to her feet. She’s shades brighter than everything else. She holds out her hand, and behind her head there is endless black sky. No stars. No edges.

  “How do you know all this?” I ask, and struggle up without help. Wherever we are, there aren’t any rules of perspective. It seems like I can see forever and yet only a few feet in every direction. And there’s no light. At least not light how we would recognize it. Things simply are. And what they are is flat stone, cliff-carved walls of something that might be gray and might be black.

  “The Order kept records of when they retrieved the metal for the athame. Most are lost and what’s left is dodgy, but I studied every last bit.”

  “Are you going to try to ditch me in here, Jestine?”

  She glances down and to the side. I can’t see anything behind her, but if I look back and see Thomas, then she must look back and see Burke. He’s her anchor.

  “If you die here then this is where you belong.”

  “Does anything really belong here?”

  “I’m not here to help you get the girl out. I have my own plan.”

  I squeeze the athame tighter. At least Anna is “the girl” now, and not “the dead murderess.”

  “How long do we have?” I ask.

  “Until we have no more.” Jestine shrugs. “It’s hard to say. Time isn’t the same here. Time isn’t t
ime here. There aren’t any rules. I don’t wear a watch, but if I did I’d be scared to look at it. The hands would probably be doing that weird out-of-control spin. How long do you think it’s been, since you started to bleed?”

  “Does it matter? I’d be wrong, wouldn’t I?”

  She smiles. “Exactly.”

  I look around. This place looks the same in all directions. Even stranger is the fact that despite knowing that I’m dying somewhere behind me, there is no sense of urgency. I might stand in the same place and look around passively for Anna until it’s been too late for days, until my body on the other side had been sent home and buried. It’s an act of will to make my legs move. Everything here is an act of will.

  When I walk, the stone juts sharply into my feet like I’m not wearing any shoes. Apparently shoes of the mind have really shitty tread.

  “This is pointless,” I say. “She isn’t anywhere. There isn’t anywhere for her to be. It’s an expanse.”

  “If you’re looking for her, then you’ll turn a corner and there she’ll be,” replies Jestine.

  “There aren’t any corners to turn.”

  “There are corners everywhere.”

  “I hate you.” I lift my brows at her and she smiles. She’s looking too, eyes rolling from side to side desperately. I have to remind myself that she was chosen, and it’s the Order’s fault, not hers, that she’s lying bleeding by my side. She’s got to be scared. And she’s turning out to be a better guide than I could have asked for.

  A wall appears all at once in front of us, a black, porous stone wall that seeps water like the bedrock along the roads on the way to Thunder Bay. Turning my head, I see other walls too, to my left and right. They stretch out behind us in a line for miles, like we’ve been walking in a maze. Except that we hadn’t been until just now. I twist my head more sharply to look back through the window at Thomas. He’s still there, my anchor. Do we keep walking, or turn around? Is this the way? His face doesn’t react to these questions. His eyes are trained on my body, watching the blood saturate my shirt.

  We’re passing by something, lying on the ground. It’s a carcass, busily being worked on by bugs. The fur of whatever it was used to be white, but aside from the presence of four legs it could have been anything. A dog maybe, or a big cat. It might’ve been a small calf. We walk past without comment and I try to keep my eyes off of the movement beneath the hide. It doesn’t matter. It’s not what we’re looking for.

  “What’s that say?” Jestine asks, and points to the wall ahead. It’s not a wall really, but a low limestone formation, white and eroded, low enough to climb over. There’s wet black paint on it that says MARINETTE OF THE DRY ARMS. Beside it is what looks like a rough sketch: the blackened bones of forearms and fingers and a thick black cross. I don’t know what it means. But I suspect that Morfran would.

  “We shouldn’t go this way,” I say.

  “There’s really only one way to go.” Jestine shrugs.

  Ahead the wall changes, from porous wet rock back to colorless stone. As we get closer, I blink and it turns translucent, like thick, dusty crystal or glass. There’s a pale mass at the center, something frozen or trapped. I wipe across the stone with my hand, feeling the granular dust slide against my palm. It reveals a pair of eyes, wide and yellowed and full of hate. I clear the glass lower as my hand drags down, and see that the front of his white shirt still bears the bloodstains of his wife. His widow’s peak of hair is wild and suspended in the rock. It’s Peter Carver. The first ghost I ever killed.

  “What is it?” Jestine asks.

  “Just a scarecrow,” I reply.

  “Yours or hers?”

  “Mine.” I stare into his frozen face and remember the way he chased me, the way he scrambled after me across the floor, his stomach sliding and legs flopping uselessly. A crack forms in the glass.

  “Don’t fear it,” Jestine says. “He’s just a scarecrow, like you said. Your scarecrow.”

  The crack is a tiny hairline fracture, but it’s getting longer. As I watch, it races upward, crackling across the bloodstain on his shirt like a lightning bolt.

  “Focus,” Jestine hisses. “Before you let it out of the rock.”

  “I can’t,” I say. “I don’t know what you mean. We just have to go. We have to keep going.” I walk away. My heavy legs move as fast as I can manage. I turn a corner and then another. It feels like running and it’s stupid. The last thing we need is to be lost. The last thing we need is to not pay attention and the path to turn into a cave. My legs slow. There are no scraping sounds behind us. Peter Carver isn’t dragging himself along in our footsteps. For all I know, I might’ve imagined the fissure in the rock to begin with.

  “I don’t think anything happened,” I say, but she doesn’t reply. “Jestine?” I look around. She isn’t here. Without thinking, I go back the way I came. I shouldn’t have run. Leaving her in front of Carver, thinking she was the one who had to do something about it. What the hell is the matter with me?

  “Jestine!” I call out, and wish that my voice would ring off the stones rather than fall flat. No sound comes back, not mine or her answering yell. I turn a corner, then another. She isn’t there. And neither is Peter Carver. They’re both gone.

  “It was here,” I say to no one. It was. It’s just that coming back the way I came didn’t work. None of the walls look the way they did when I passed by the first time.

  “Jestine!”

  Nothing. Why didn’t she tell me we couldn’t separate? Why didn’t she follow me? My stomach hurts. I put my hand against it and feel warm wetness. The wound is coming through.

  I don’t need that. I left that behind. I need to focus. To find Anna, and Jestine.

  A few deep breaths and my hand comes away dry. Wind passes over my cheeks, the first sensation of that kind since I’ve been here. It brings noise with it. A manic, girlish giggle that sounds nothing like Jestine or Anna. I hate this place. Even the wind is nuts. Footsteps patter behind me, but nothing’s there when I turn. What am I doing here? It feels like forgetting. There’s pressure against my shoulder; I’m leaning against the cliffside. When the wind brings the laughter again, I close my eyes until I feel her hair brush against my cheek.

  She’s sunk half in and half out of the rock. Her eyes are bloodless, but she looks a whole lot like Cait Hecht.

  “Emily Danagger,” I whisper, and she smiles without humor as she melts backward. The instant she’s gone her footsteps sound behind me, running closer. It sends me stumbling forward. I twist through rock formations that look like spined fossils and trip over stones that weren’t there before I hit them. Just another scarecrow, I keep thinking, but I don’t know how long I run before the wind changes from a giggle to harsh, unintelligible muttering. It gives me such an urge to clamp my hands over my ears that at first I don’t notice the other thing that it carries: a strong smell of sweet smoke. The same smoke that spat down over my bed last fall. The same smoke my father smelled right before he died. It’s the Obeahman. He’s here. He’s close.

  All at once my legs feel pounds lighter. The athame sings in my hand. What was it Jestine said? If I’m looking for her, I’ll turn a corner and she’ll be there. But what about him? Should I be so eager? What can he do to me anyway, in this place?

  It happens just like she said it would. One corner of stone and there he is, at the end of the maze of walls, as if it was leading me to him.

  The Obeahman. The athame spins deftly between my fingers. I’ve been waiting for this. And I didn’t know that until right now. Looking at him, at his hunched back, clothed in the same long, dark green jacket, the same rotting dreadlocks hanging over his shoulders, my stomach twists like an eel. Murderer. MURDERER. You ate my father in a house in Baton Rouge. You stole the power of the knife and took in every ghost I meant to send away.

  But even as my brain screams these things, my body stays hidden behind the stone wall in a half-crouch. I wish I’d asked Jestine what could happen to us h
ere. Is it like they say in dreams? That when you die in them, you die for real? I slide closer to the edge, letting a sliver of eye show around the corner. If it’s possible, the Obeahman is bigger than I remember. His legs seem longer, and there are more bends to his back. It’s like seeing him through a funhouse mirror, elongated and unnatural. He still hasn’t seen me, hasn’t smelled me or heard me. He’s just bent over a low, flat stone, his arms working like a spider at a web, and I could swear that each arm has grown an extra joint.

  I remember the spell using the Lappish drum, and how frightened Anna seemed. She said this was his world.

  The Obeahman pulls hard at something. He tugs and jerks; it looks like white string, the kind a butcher uses to tie up a roast. When he pulls the string again he raises his arm, and I count four distinct joints.

  Rushing in would be a mistake. I need to know more. Looking around the maze walls, there’s a set of rough-cut steps to my right. I didn’t notice them when I passed. Probably because they hadn’t been there. I climb up silently, and when I reach the top I drop down on my hands and creep to the edge. I have to dig my fingers in to keep from throwing myself over it.

  It’s Anna on the rock. He’s got her lying there as on a mortuary slab. Her body is wrapped round and round with white string, stained dark with blood in places. The jerking motion I watched him do with his arms was from sewing her mouth and eyes shut.

  I can’t look, but my eyes won’t close as he ties his knots and slices through the string with his fingers. When he straightens and surveys his work, one hand cradles her head like she’s a doll. He bends close to her face, maybe to whisper, or to kiss her on the cheek. Then his jointed arm snaps back into the air, and I see that his fingers have sharpened into points before he shoves them deep down into her gut.