by Adam Vine
No. This is wrong. I lost. Got hit with a wrist and head cut. He beat me with my own goddamned combination. I. Lost.
An hour later Carly won her first two matches, then lost in the finals. After, we went to celebrate at a dive bar in the Haight called Teddy’s, courtesy of Evan, who’d booked the place for the competitors and their families until 10PM. Carly even convinced my parents to take shots with us. We lined up next to the bar and drank the caustic, cheap vodka out of a ski with shot glasses glued to it. Nobody could stop talking about how I’d beaten one of the best kendo players in the country by a fraction of a second.
Carly spent maybe ten minutes sitting by herself staring glumly at the bar, but she was always better at thinking herself out of holes than I was. The next time I looked over to where she was sitting, her chin was up and she was splitting a pitcher of margaritas with my mom. The next time after that, they were both laughing so hard Carly slipped and fell off her stool.
It was the best night of my life.
No it wasn’t. I tried to have fun, but couldn’t, and the more everyone basked in Carly’s glow, the drunker and angrier I got. She wasn’t the one sulking by herself at the bar. I was. Until Evan told me to cheer up, and then…
We took a taxi back to our hotel, had loud, drunken sex, and fell asleep in each other’s arms. We did it twice the next morning after we woke up, too, then showered, packed and ate breakfast with everyone before saying our goodbyes. I wanted to get an early start, because I had something special planned for the drive home, something I’d been thinking about doing for a while, but whether or not I actually would was predicated on us both leaving the tournament victorious.
We stopped at Salmon Creek State Beach on the drive home, just outside of Bodega Bay. It was my favorite place in California. I’d planned on proposing to Carly there ever since we started dating back in high school. I pulled off Highway 1 into the unmarked back alley that led to the parking area, making up some excuse about how I needed to get out and stretch my legs. I didn’t have a ring, because Carly had always told me she wanted to wear her great-grandmother’s when – never if – we got married. I’d also nearly gone broke paying for our hotel room for the tournament, and had less than ten dollars to my name until my next paycheck. But I knew she wouldn’t mind. Carly was one of the good ones.
It was a hot summer day, a dichotomy of white clouds and the dark saw-blade of the windblown Pacific rising beyond the amber, ice plant-crested dunes. The smells of salt water and spilled beer from unseen beer bottles left wantonly behind by high school bonfires stung my nostrils, intermingling with the dumb howls of the gulls.
We walked down the beach and found a good place to sit far away from the crowds. My heart was racing faster than when I’d stepped onto the mat with Jaime Jimenez. Bolstered by the confidence of that win, I did what I should’ve done long before she died.
Kneeling, I said, “I’m going to dip my legs.” I took off my shoes, then took Carly’s hand. With the other, I touched my pointer finger and thumb together to offer her a ring. “Carl, will you marry me?”
Carly covered her mouth and gasped.
No she didn’t. I never proposed to her, because she’s dead.
Carly’s mouth was hidden behind a steeple of fingers, but the wideness of her eyes gave me her answer. She fell to the sand next to me and tangled me in her arms and lips. She finally pulled away enough to whisper in my ear, “You know I will.”
No. She’s dead.
The car flipped and rolled, headlights flashing in soundless oblivion. The impact buried me in shattered glass. Minutes or years passed before I was able to breathe again. We had landed right side up, but something was wrong. Carly wasn’t screaming anymore. Why wasn’t she screaming?
My head felt like someone had gone to work on it with a pickaxe. My lungs burned with every breath, and there was a hideous mixture of bile and blood settling in my mouth. I smelled smoke, and thought that meant that I should run, because if the car was on fire it could explode, or suffocate us. Us. Why isn’t she screaming?
She isn’t screaming because she’s dead.
Attempting even a simple movement like turning my head to look at the passenger’s seat brought on sharp, sudden pains through my entire body. I grunted and gasped. In my haze of confusion I didn’t realize how much worse the impact had been on the other side of the car. I’d swerved across the opposite lane to avoid the Ford F-150, then we had rolled…
Carly…
Oh, fuck.
Her body had been turned into a fusion of woman, metal, and glass. What was left of her was slumped over her seatbelt, her head dangling almost to the dashboard, where a sanguine marsh of blood and whiskey-colored hair pooled beneath the shattered spiral her forehead had imprinted on the windshield.
She’s dead.
My eyes opened and I saw the masked man rising with Zaea slung over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. His chain was sheathed, but the light of his lamp still held me in its imprisoning trance.
He’s going to take her away.
I wanted to reach out and wipe the bloody, fleshy chunks from the whiskey-colored bristles of her hair, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. Even my thoughts were not my own. I was a slave to the will of that warm, golden light.
I pushed through the agony of raising my arm, unlooped it from the tangled prison of my seat belt and reached over to cup Carly’s face. She was warm, but still. No breath rose in the ruined altar of her body. Her lips flagged open in silent, final confession. She didn’t respond when I screamed her name. Tears clouded my vision, and the world became opaque and wet. I tried to tuck her soaked, sticky hair behind her ear, but her ears were gone.
I begged God to bring her back, then he didn't, and I threatened to hate him, said that I wished I'd never known him, and that now I never would.
Somewhere in the distance, a siren whined.
“It took you this long to ask?” Carly said, helping me back to my feet. She clutched my face in both hands and kissed me, then gazed into my eyes and smiled. Thank you God for this moment, I thought. Thank you for everything. Thank you for her.
I brushed the sand from the knees of my pants, took Carly under my arm, and we watched the furious ocean and its guardianship of stalwart clouds for what might’ve been days. For the first time in my life I knew I didn’t have to say, or do, or want anything, because I was happy.
What a perfect day.
Eventually, Carly took my hand and said, “As much as I wish we could stay here forever, I think it’s time to go, so we can start the rest of our lives together. We are going to have a ton of planning to do if you still want to have our wedding in a castle in Scotland. Don’t you think so, baby? Our first road trip as fiancées… pretty soon, it’ll be as Mr. and Mrs. Harper.”
I opened my eyes again and strained to keep them open. If I could just move my hand, only an inch, I could reach Zaea’s boot. The light flared again, draining my will. Yet the blood on Zaea’s hair forced me to keep going. My eyelids felt like they weighed ten thousand pounds.
“Baby?” Carly said, tugging at my hand. She had already started walking back toward the car, but paused when she saw I wasn’t coming. “Dan. Is something wrong?”
She’s offering me a way out, a way to un-see that bloody hair, to undo the downward spiral of the last two years. She’s offering me a new life.
The sirens blared, then cut short, a blue strobe flickering through the mangled, missing windows of the car, turning her blood the color darker than black.
Carly’s eyes widened, filling with the ocean’s missing shade of blue. “Babe? Come on. I’m worried about you. Talk to me, my love. Please?”
I let her hand fall and walked down to the water, swimming my fingers through the warm, lapping waves. But the water is never warm at Salmon Creek. It’s always freezing, even in summer.
And then I realized where I was. I was inside the lamp, seeing some kind of hallucination about the life I could’ve had. O
r maybe it was real, and I really was getting a second chance, on the dunes of some other Salmon Creek on some other possible world, where the water was warm, where I’d beaten Jaime Jimenez, where I’d never driven drunk, and where Carly was still alive.
But if that was true, then it meant that there was also a world in which Carly had really died, and that if I got back in that car and drove away to live happily ever after with her, somewhere else, in the world where I was still gazing into the masked man’s lamp, I would be condemning Zaea to death, or something much, much worse.
The thought kept me rooted in place. I’m never going to marry Carly. I lost that road a long time ago. I watched them bury her, didn’t I? I stood at the bottom of that hill and watched them put her in the ground, because her family wouldn’t let me join them at her grave.
The girl I loved is gone. But Zaea is still alive.
When I opened my eyes for the third time and gazed upon Zaea’s bloodied scalp, the runnels of red dripping down the cheeks that looked so much like Carly’s had, I was able to flex the tip of my index finger. The lamp brightened, but its hold on me was weaker. I pushed and pushed, and found I could close a fist.
I raised my hand and reached slowly for Zaea’s boot. I thought of the car crash and the way the blood that had wiped off on my fingertips had stained my soul, the years of my life annihilated by a single, thoughtless instant. The masked man looked at me, flaring his lamp to cow me into submission, but I was already there. I grabbed the knife out of Zaea’s boot, the same one she’d tried to stab me with when I found her thawing in the Royal Crypts, and thrust the blade through the glazed, pale clay of his mask.
It was a wild, desperate, stab, but Zaea’s knife bit home, smashing through that thin disc of fired clay as easily as it would paper. An otherworldly howl split my skull and shattered pottery fell away. Finally I was free. I could move of my own volition.
The no-longer masked man dropped Zaea to the floor, clutching his face in agony. His scream was the sound of worlds splitting, of earthquakes rending continents and black holes swallowing planets into unseen nothings, a wrong chord played in the symphony of existence. I caught a glimpse of his face in that tiny fraction of a second when his hands fell away before he turned and ran. It was nothing but a shadow floating in an endless abyss, a dark, shapeless blot feeding some far deeper darkness.
Then he was gone, leaving only a horrified echo of screams quickly fading into the bowels of the facility.
In that moment I realized that the Ratkeeper hadn’t always been a monster. He was a slave, too. He’d probably enslaved dozens, if not hundreds of innocent people using the hypnotic power of his lamp, but it wasn’t by any choice of his own. Someone else had done it to him first, and the one who made him, too, a vicious cycle carried down through the ages. The mask had been his shackle. Without it he was free to resist the compulsion. He was free to say no.
The shrill notes of utter terror and revulsion in his wailing told me that the one called Ratkeeper wouldn’t be returning to serve the Crippled King any time soon. Perhaps, I hoped, he would never go back to his master, but abuse has a funny way of convincing us we can’t function without it.
Regardless of where he went or what would become of him, I doubted I would ever see the Ratkeeper again.
WITHOUT THE MASK
AWAKE. Free. The agony of unshackling. The darkness, bittersweet. The memories. Horrible stabbing knives.
He could remember. The line between dream and real at last solidified. Firm. Unbreakable.
Free.
He was his own again. Responsible. The string was severed. He was responsible. Centuries of death and pain. His. His own. But free.
Guilty. Yes, guilty. No denying. The knives. The relentless stabbing knives.
To be free means, means what?
Your guilt is your own.
Your failures are your own.
Your triumphs are your own.
You are your own.
Free. Guilty. Guilty, yes. But no longer condemned.
The path unfurled.
His. His own. His own path to walk, to fly, to blot.
The Spiral lay naked, a little tiny thing.
Free.
Free to remember.
Free to forget.
Free.
Utterly, terribly,
free.
THE INFIRMARY
I RUSHED to Zaea’s side to see if she was all right. She was still breathing and her pulse was normal. The gash on her head looked worse than it was. It wasn’t deep, but there was a lot of blood. She must have been hit by a piece of rock shrapnel, not the chain itself, I decided, or the wound would have been much worse. Her face was paler than usual. The blood she’d lost crept in dark splotches across her skin and clothes.
I picked Metatron up off the floor and bedded it back in its scabbard. I was scooping Zaea’s legs to hoist her over my shoulder when the pile of rubble Barn Owl was buried under shifted, and Barn Owl moaned.
Barn Owl’s gloveless, debris-dusted arms poked free of the rubble.
“Hey! Easy! Easy!”
I helped Barn Owl dig herself out. The pieces of the smashed table trapping her were mostly small, but a few big ones had fallen over her legs, thankfully landing in such a way that they’d only pinned her down.
I pulled Barn Owl free and examined her wounds. Miraculously, they were mostly superficial, and she was more aware and together than should have been humanly possible. Two of the fingers on her right hand had been crushed by a large rock. Both of the end joints leaked red pulp, barely held together by the shredded flaps of skin. They’d need to be sewn back together or amputated as soon as we got back to the Burrow. I realized with a tightening in my stomach that I would probably be the one to treat her wounds, as well as Zaea’s, unless Bunny, Squirrel, or Vole were better at first aid. I also strongly suspected that she’d suffered a concussion, but there was nothing to be done about it now.
When I was sure she could stand, I helped her to her feet. “Can you walk?” I said.
“Yeah. I think so.”
“Take a few steps. I need to see if you can balance.”
Carefully, Barn Owl obliged. She stumbled at first, then walked slowly to the other side of the room, where she collected her spear, and limped back to where I was standing. “Head feels funny,” she said. “And my hand fuckin’ hurts. Shhhh… ah!” she gasped, grabbing her fingers to throttle the pain as if feeling it for the first time. “I think I blacked out for a minute. What the hell happened?” she said.
I pointed to the broken pieces of the Ratkeeper’s mask where they still lay smoldering on the floor.
“Did you do that?” Barn Owl said.
I nodded.
“I’ll be damned… Little Leech, the Ratkeeper-Killer. Never thought I’d live to see this day. You’d better take that or no one’s gonna believe you did it,” Barn Owl said.
I scooped up the broken clay pieces and shoved them into my coat.
Barn Owl cringed as she checked the damage to her fingers. “I’ll be fine. I don’t need all of my fingers, anyway. We need to get Princess Mouse somewhere safe, and fast. Looked pretty bad when she went down. And I’m guessing we’ll have company soon. Where’s Gazzo? I mean, uh… shit. Where’s Gator?” Barn Owl said.
I shook my head.
Barn Owl hung her head in her hands, squeezing her eyes shut to stem the sudden flow of tears. “Oh, no. No, no, no.” The tears came anyway, carving glistening canyons in the dust of her cheeks. When she spoke again, her voice was a hard, thin whisper. “Was it the lamp?” Barn Owl said.
I shook my head again. Barn Owl followed my gaze to the blanket of frost and tiny ice chips covering the floor where Gator had died and let out a long, heavy sigh. “That stupid son of a bitch.” She choked back a sob, holding onto me as she lurched forward and nearly lost her feet. “You won’t be forgotten, Cousin. But I’ll save my mourning until after our asses are out of the fire. Now, Leech. You’re gonna
have to carry her. Think you can do that?” Barn Owl motioned to Zaea.
“Yes, sir.”
Barn Owl wiped a wayward dribble of blood from her forehead. “Damn. You hear that? They’re already coming. Or is that just the ringing in my old, busted-ass head?”
“No, I hear them, too,” I said.
Somewhere outside, a Snowman howled.
GANHEIM
THEY CAUGHT US on the stairs. Their bloodthirsty howls carried down to us from the top of the stairwell. I hauled ass as fast as I could, but no one can run at full speed carrying a human body over their shoulders. We had only made it to the B3 landing before the Snowmen’s meaningless, guttural voices flooded down the stairwell to meet us.
“Where?” I mouthed to Barn Owl.
“We need to get what we came here for.” Barn Owl said.
A harsh cry boomed down from the uppermost landing three stories above us. A bone-tipped arrow sailed past my face, missing Zaea by inches.
So much for sneaking out.
I ducked and ran as arrows rained down on us from the floors above. I heard one bite flesh, thought for a terrified instant that it was Zaea. Barn Owl yelped in pain. She’d taken one in the knee diving for cover.
I kneeled to jiggle the door handle. “Locked.”
Barn Owl winced, snapped the shaft of the arrow stuck in her leg, and tried the door herself. “Wake her up,” she said. “I know you can hear me, Mouse. You ain’t dead yet, but you about to be if you don’t open your eyes and do something with that ghost hand. This is not a drill.”
“I’m… awake,” Zaea said, her voice a whisper somewhere between sickness and sleep-talk. She reached out her hand and the ghost’s black line bloomed into the iron bar blocking the door to the landing. She shot the two guards watching the cells as they came running, cutting one off at the knees and the other, the neck.
