A Shiver of Shadows

by Hunter J. Skye

  One by one, Bertrand, Mephos, Celene, and a handful of others subdued the swimmers and tossed them out of the water. I crushed the chains that strangled my attacker, and Mephos dragged him from the pool. I picked a careful path out of the hot spring as bodies convulsed on the rough stone walkway.

  “Take them to the healing baths. Quickly!” Mephos ordered the others who had helped. Their gaze slid to me. They bent, gathered two guests at a time, and disappeared quickly down the hall.

  More vampires.

  Great.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The Cave of Souls

  Melisande

  I shook in the giant white towel I’d been given in the cavern and tried not to leave a wet mark on the vampires’ nice couch. The tremors were part cold and part mind-numbing shock. The injuries I’d seen were horrifying—gouging bite marks and skin torn open by fingers. Some guests had needed CPR on the spot to pump the water from their lungs.

  “Will they…be okay?” I asked in a quiet voice. I huddled on the couch next to Bertrand. Mephos and Celene occupied the seats opposite us.

  “They will be fine,” Mephos muttered. “The Sisters are taking care of them.”

  “Sisters?”

  “We share the mountain with a convent of nuns. They are quite skilled at healing human flesh. Their cloister is outfitted with healing pools referred to as the Baths.”

  “Good. Good.” I nodded dazedly.

  Suddenly, the air didn’t feel right in the posh apartment. My heart stammered, and a wave of thirst dried my mouth. Something wriggled at the corner of my vision. I turned in time to see a seed of flesh fold outward. Arms and legs appeared, and a narrow chest bloomed complete with its hammering heart. Rasmus’s pale, sickly face materialized with a glower. And, of course, his genitals followed. The nudity didn’t seem to bother the vampires, so I did my best to ignore it too.

  “Hotan is not happy,” Rasmus rasped. Mephos blinked at the new arrival with exaggerated boredom. “What happened?”

  “The gate faltered,” Mephos barked.

  “They will not tolerate any more faltering.”

  “I don’t give a shit what those Djinni ingrates will tolerate. You know this, Rasmus. And you had best revise your tone.”

  Rasmus seemed to consider Mephos’s threat for a moment.

  “This gate is destabilizing the others.”

  “Luego, por favor.”

  “No, we will not discuss it later. Do not exclude her. You must act now.”

  The glass of brandy Mephos had poured himself crushed in his hand. The room iced over in silence.

  “Maybe it’s time to tell me about your hell gate,” I offered quietly. Mephos turned flaming eyes on me. I held very still until his shoulders relaxed.

  “Our gate is like no other,” he offered finally. His young voice was low, but proud. “Some were built on bloodshed. Some were conjured. One has yet to reveal its true nature. But ours was built by Gaia herself. A completely natural barrier.”

  “It’s naturally occurring?”

  “Si. It was shaped long ago by the elements.” Mephos stood and paced the length of the living room.

  I shook my head and waited for more of an explanation.

  “It is a process we do not control. The rain falls on the other side of the mountain.” Mephos mimicked raindrops with a flutter of his fingers. “Then, it sinks and tunnels through the ancient stone fissures.” His hands wriggled downward. “The water collects deep at the bottom of the mountain where Mother Nature’s magic lies. There, it is warmed by the heat radiating from the Earth’s center. After that, it makes its inevitable journey up the long channels, carrying its primordial energy to our pools on the other side. The rocks and minerals of the mountain purify the water, but the planet itself imbues the liquid with its cosmic secrets. It is an ancient elemental dance.” He held a hand out to Celene and tugged her to her feet. He gripped her passionately, then spun her. She twirled like a figurine on a music box. Her wet hair swung in a circle like a bloody saber. It was shocking how quickly Mephos’s moods changed. They seemed to share a madness between them.

  “What part does the hell gate play in that dance?” I was confused and truly curious.

  “Good question.” He waved a finger at me. “As the water flows up, it branches. In the middle of the mountain, the water takes a violent turn. From there, it fragments into the many springs that bubble to the surface.” Mephos released Celene, and she floated to her seat. “There is a place hidden in the rock…a cave. It rests at the crux of the waters. La Grotte des Ames. The Cave of Souls. It filters the raw transformative energy, sifting out its destructive qualities and containing anything that might seek to breach our world. Without it, this valley would be a very inhospitable place.

  I tried to picture the veritable paradise of the valley as anything other than perfection. No wonder it felt different and a little unreal.

  “Is that cave where the hell gate is located?” I directed my question to Mephos, but my gaze slid to Rasmus.

  “Yes, but I’m not sure hell is the right descriptor. It is a gateway put in place long ago to manage the forces of which I speak.”

  “You haven’t seen what I’ve seen.” That was all I had to say about descriptors. I was getting the unsettling feeling that these people didn’t know what they were playing with. They had a hell gate they didn’t understand, and it was breaking down. I’d seen what had happened to those people in the Cauldron. If that was just a sampling of the gate’s effects, what were they going to do when the aperture opened and the denizens of hell spewed forth?

  “We realize you have had a different experience in America.” Mephos seemed to want to say something else. I couldn’t fathom what it might be.

  “How can I help?” I attempted to cut to the chase again. Everyone in the room suddenly seemed to relax, and an invisible membrane of tension burst.

  “The gate is managed by a special group of individuals, and we don’t…speak the language.”

  I looked from immortal to immortal. I was pretty sure, between the four of them, they spoke every language known to man. I could read a little French and comprehend a little Spanish, but beyond that, I was a one language kind of girl.

  “What language can I possibly translate for you?”

  Mephos gave me a sober look.

  “The language of the dead.”

  ****

  I asked and then I begged to get out of the car and walk the rest of the way to the cave. They wouldn’t let me. Instead, I gripped the car seat and stared into the foot well of the Aston Martin. It was a low, sleek, fast car that hugged the tiny mountain road as Bertrand sped around blind corners and skirted along the gravel ledges. I didn’t know how to calculate the height of the sheer cliff face that dropped away from my window. However many thousands of feet it was, I was only ever a few inches from it.

  “I’m going to throw up.”

  “No, you’re not. We are almost there.”

  “You said that fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Look up, Melisande, or you’ll miss it.”

  I wanted to miss it. No view was worth the waves of cataplexy coursing through me. I heaved the stony weight of my skull upward until the windshield came back into view. As we tore around the last outcropping, a mammoth eye of darkness opened on the mountainside facing us. Diagonal daggers of morning light stabbed at the stygian orifice looking out over the jagged mountain range. The unblinking eye was five, maybe six stories tall and hundreds of feet wide. A heavy brow of rock slanted down in a seismic frown over the entrance where a row of campers was parked comfortably in the spacious aerie. Had the hulking vehicles magically materialized in the cave mouth? Was there a tunnel through the mountain I couldn’t see? There was no way those RVs had come up the same road we’d taken.

  The thought of going back down the mountain made me contemplate two things: pitching a tent and living in the cave forever, or reaching out to Rasmus. I never wanted to feel the violating tou
ch of his mind inside mine again, but he could make the trip a short one.

  Bertrand whipped us onto the thin ramp that led to the cave’s entrance, and the shadow of the mountain fell over us.

  “See, that wasn’t so bad.” Celene giggled. She brushed a hand over my sweaty hair. The gentle touch felt almost affectionate. Something akin to kindness softened her eyes. Then she stepped from the car and stretched her lanky muscles. I tumbled from the car and wobbled to my feet.

  “Never again.”

  A small crowd of visitors had already gathered for the first tour of the day. Mephos waved to the tour guide. The young woman’s nervous smile nearly split her face in two.

  “I’m guessing we don’t need to buy tickets.”

  “You’re so amusing,” Celene answered as we followed the gathering into the back of the cave opening. The rock walls slowly closed in around us until we were funneled into a narrow space with a small metal door.

  “I’m confused. Where is the cave?”

  Celene just pointed and placed her finger to her lips.

  “We’re going through that?” The entrance was sealed and locked as if we were about to enter a bunker or a submarine. The guide took a spot in front of the door and asked for our attention in English. After she warned us about the slippery cave floor and handed out bulky square flashlights, she opened the door. One by one, we filed through the small space and were sealed in.

  From the sound of her voice, I had the feeling the guide knew we all stood in complete blackness with vampires behind us. She explained that the Chambre Noire, a gallery with ancient paintings created by actual cave people, was a half mile into the mountain. She further explained that our exhalations were damaging to the cave and its art. So we’d have to spend as little time in the cave system as possible. With that said, she let it be known that we needed to move at a brisk pace.

  That was okay with me. Chambre Noire meant Black Room. It didn’t sound like a place in which I wanted to linger.

  I fell in step with the agile gathering as we dashed into the first room. We splashed through perfectly still puddles and leapt over ridges in the unnaturally still subterranean obstacle course. There were no sounds but the ones we made as we struggled to evaluate the footing. The landscape rushed into our small pools of light so quickly it left little time to make decisions. Go around. Go over. Swing wide. Each decision led to another and another as we fought to keep the guide in sight. The exercise was exhilarating, but the sense of all that weight above us never left my mind. I could almost feel the pressure dripping diamonds and grinding centuries.

  At last, we made it to the Chambre Noir, and all the flashlights around me went out. For one frozen second, I thought maybe Grayford was near. Maybe he’d found a way to track me and was drawing energy from the handheld lamps in order to manifest. I tried not to think of the Fetch I’d seen in the catacombs. Then I remembered the guide had asked us to extinguish our lights when we made it to the chamber. I turned my flashlight off and clutched my chest.

  After a few heartbeats of blinding blackness, our guide turned her light back on and shined it at the wall. A collective gasp rose from the crowd. Bodies pressed against a small rope railing. A bison glowed in the stark light. Its dark lines formed a bull-shaped body with narrow legs and hooves. The flashlight moved to another and another. Some of the drawings overlapped each other, while others stood alone. Mixed into the herd was a goat with long horns and a horse so accurately drawn that it could have been a portrait from a modern-day farm.

  The guide drew our attention to the spear-like arrows painted on some of the bison and invited us to postulate as to what the early artists had been trying to convey. I leaned away from the conversation and scanned the wall next to the guide. The smallest bit of light shone on a half-formed beast. The other half of its body was lost to a glistening glazier of lime deposits. It was the cave painting Rasmus had shown me.

  “The fifteen thousand years between us and the Magdalenians make it impossible to know exactly why they painted these animals here and nowhere else in the cavern systems. But we do know that this place was sacred.” The guide addressed the mesmerized group. “No one lived in these caves even though there was ample space to house them and protect them from the weather and predators. There is evidence that suggests many tribes visited this spot, but not even the remains of a single hearth fire have been found. Torches and paint are the only tools ever used in La Grotte des Ames.

  I gaped at the red ochre handprints on the walls. Was that the way the cave people, called Magdalenians, signed their artwork? Their hands looked just like mine. What would draw a person so deep into that pitch-black world? If they didn’t live here, why trek so far with guttering torches? What called them to step away from the light and cast themselves into the unknown?

  I closed my eyes and let the tiniest piece of my brain fall asleep. Before I could even make sense of the danger hanging over us, the darkness devoured me whole.

  ****

  Before there was thought, there was something far more real. A knowing that possessed the wandering world. It flowed through the earth and the water. It burned in the depths and rained from the heavens. It breathed the ether and spoke life into being. I quaked at the enormity of its presence whilst knowing that it slept in every microscopic corner of me. It spun like electrons and clustered like cells. It was the thing that gave us all sentience, and it had been the force that split us apart.

  I tried to breathe in the rending blackness. This was one of the places that still remembered when there had been only one reality instead of two. Both violent and gentle, creative and catastrophic. But the oneness couldn’t understand itself. It needed to compartmentalize in order to process. It ached with the need to feel its dimensions. It struggled and burned and bled for eons until it finally dug its fingers into its own flesh and tore itself in two.

  The duality was intoxicating. The distance was miraculous. Creation had a mirror in which to look, and at long last, it saw itself.

  “Melisande.”

  I floated in the emptiness between two selves and prayed.

  “Father of all, is this what you are?” The fragmented mirror outside of Mephos and Celene’s suite flashed through my mind. We were just a miniscule segment of a larger whole. A oneness that so wanted definition that it broke itself to know it existed.

  “Melisande!”

  I opened my eyes to the shifting cave walls. Shapes changed. Molecules danced. Time flowed, forming the womb in which I sat. I turned to the embryos crouched next to me. They were barely formed, barely a thought in the mind of the world. They’d lived for centuries and had not yet gained an awareness that would be measured by the universe. Neither had I. We were amoebas beneath the notice of the cosmos.

  Someone shook me, and I came awake. Tears slid down my face as the expansion inside me shrank. I was in my fragile, fleeting body again, and my mind would never be the same.

  “Melisande, breathe.” Bertrand gripped me by my shoulders. “Take a deep breath.”

  “What happened?” My voice was dry and cracked from the long journey back to myself. “How long was I gone?”

  “Gone?” Bertrand frowned. “Melisande, you never left.”

  I looked around at the cave. It was empty except for me, Bertrand, Mephos, and Celene.

  “Where did everybody go?”

  “We sent them away, dear.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “You sat down and went very still. The tour group left, and we waited.”

  I looked at the echoing darkness above us, and the universe moved. Fireflies winked, and embers drifted. Stars twinkled, and galaxies spun.

  I reached a finger toward the celestial sprinkling and smiled. The stars were faces, and the faces smiled back. A hand reached down from the dizzy darkness, and a finger met mine. A finger stained an ochre red.

  “They’re here,” Mephos whispered, and his words echoed into oblivion. “Melisande, ask them what went wron
g.”

  His miniature mind struggled against its constraints. Its scaled-down concerns danced around a larger question. I turned back to the starry person whose supernova senses barely even perceived Mephos.

  “Ask them how to fix the gate.”

  The gate. I remembered now. The reason we’d come here. The mountain. The springs. The carnal energy creeping through the water.

  “Please,” I rasped. “What can we do?”

  The guardian’s hand reached for mine. Her frozen fingertip played along my skin, tracing lines, dots, and finally a circle. I understood. We were alike, she and I. She was an artist too, but what she had painted was more than what we saw. The cave wasn’t the gate. The hole in the world was being held in place by will…her will…and something had interrupted it.

  She left as suddenly as she’d appeared, and she took the stars with her.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  He must have been a really sucky priest.

  Melisande

  I sipped from a bottle of gift shop water and watched as another tour group lined up to play flashlight tag with eternity.

  “Here.” Celene handed me a pack of crackers. I opened it and crammed one in my mouth. I hated hell gates. They took me apart and reassembled me in a slightly misaligned way. Everyone waited while I finished the snack and chased it with the remaining water.

  “What did they say?” Mephos paced.

  “The cave isn’t maintaining the barrier. The paintings are.”

  The immortals were oddly speechless. Yet the lack of surprise on their faces told me that maybe they already knew about the paintings.

  “Did you already know that?”

  Mephos’s distant look drew back to me.

  “We have funded all of the research on La Grotte des Ames. We know the Magdalenians were magic-users. We suspected the paintings played an important part, but there was no way to know for certain.”