by Cora Choi
When I stepped out from the cellar, the fresh night air wrapped me in its arms and welcomed me back like an old friend. The wind, coming straight off the surface of the sea, was not cold but cool—a typical autumn night on the island. I looked at the violet sky above me and saw the full platinum moon. Its silvery beams highlighted the spires of a stone edifice that stood next to us—Sora Dormitory looked more like a medieval mansion than a student residence.
I turned my head away from the water and saw the great looming abbey at the peak. Stauros Abbey had changed very little during the nineteen years I had locked myself underground. I heard a twig crack and turned toward the sound. Drev was walking ahead of me. A few meters separated us. He stopped and glanced at me, as if to say, Why are you straggling behind?
Despite the fact that I was in the company of that Mephistophelian character, a feeling of relief swept around me. I closed my eyes slowly and inhaled the fresh air. Why had I not stepped out like this before? Even for just a breath of this crisp night air?
I turned around several times to feel the air whip around me but stopped when I saw Drev studying me with a hard stare. He didn’t seem the least bit wary of me—in fact, I was certain that he was trying to decipher whether I was a phantom or a lost whirling dervish.
From the moment of my death, I had never taken orders from a living man until the moment when Drev had ordered me to follow him. The shock of being spoken to in that manner was enough to render me dumb and docile. I had just followed him without thinking to protest. But now that I had my senses together, I wanted to make sure he understood that he still had a life to lose, and I didn’t.
“I am the defender of the Order of the Crane—the keeper of its secrets! Although the order has fallen and all the legends and myths it once protected have disappeared, there is one myth that has survived through the centuries: the Slayer of the Shadow of Fear. It was I who kept it alive for over four centuries. Throughout that time, I have seen and heard more than you will ever experience in your meager lifetime.” I spoke in the most authoritative voice I could muster. “And you, sir . . . you are just . . . just a . . .” I let those words come out of my mouth without thinking through what I was going to say. Moreover, I noticed I wasn’t producing the effect I wanted. My words came out in barely a whisper. I hadn’t spoken a word for years, and my vocal chords were rusty. He continued to stare coldly at me, waiting. I had to finish the sentence.
“You are . . . you are just a teenager,” I finally forced out.
“So are you,” he said flatly.
I certainly wasn’t expecting this response. I looked down at my rough brown cassock, the very thing I had died in. My hair, as I casually put my hand on the top of my head, was still the stubble it had always been. I ran my hand down the side of my face—I was clean-shaven. I hadn’t seen my reflection for decades. But perhaps he was right: besides the monastic garb, I probably still looked like the nineteen-year-old I’d been when I’d died.
We stood staring at each other in cold silence. Before I could open my mouth and declare who needed to show deference to whom, Drev spoke.
“What were you doing spying on us in the cellar?”
“Spying?” I asked, my voice cracking as I absorbed the absurd accusation. “You and your roommates arrived only yesterday. I’ve inhabited this island for four hundred years—and of those four hundred, I’ve spent nineteen in that cellar. That cellar has been my home probably longer than you’ve been alive.”
At that moment, a wave crashed against the stone wall that protected the island from the turbulent sea. Light sprays of salt water tickled my face. I wiped my cheek with my sleeve. I saw Drev studying me closely.
“You’re not dead. You’re alive,” he said. His words were slow, as though he were thinking at the same time he was speaking.
The strict rules that the university had enforced prevented most of the students from wandering the island during the late hours of the night. Most students, if not all, usually spent their four years at Stauros University unaware that there were phantoms who roamed the island and came alive when the stars came out. Drev had arrived yesterday, along with a hundred other freshmen starting their first day of university. I was most likely the first phantom he had encountered on this island.
“I, like all the other phantoms on this island, come to life at night,” I stated. I saw that although his lips were parted in awe, he was not afraid. He had not been afraid earlier when he had ordered me to follow him out of the cellar. And although he had gone pale when he had first seen me, he hadn’t fled or screamed for his roommates. Either he had seen many ghosts in his lifetime, or he just wasn’t easily fazed.
“No one can see the phantoms during the day,” I explained. I hoped this statement would prompt him to tell me how he was able to see me earlier, when the sun was out. Instead he scratched his head, looked out to the sea, and spoke.
“Phantoms are dead people who couldn’t die in peace, right? That’s why their spirit stays on in this world and doesn’t leave with their body.” He then turned to me. “They have unfinished business.”
I didn’t nod or shake my head, although what he said was true.
“What’s your business?” he asked.
My business? I wish it were as simple as to call it “business.” Where would I start? Would he know about a massacre that occurred four hundred years earlier? Would he listen to a story that I had tried to keep alive throughout the centuries? Would he care that I had been wrongly accused as a demon for decades? I inhaled loudly and looked up at the black-velvet sky. Fragments of memories from the Massacre of 1615 filled my head—the smoke from the burning books, the screams, the blood, the Order of the Shrike. I felt as if my skull might explode. No, I wouldn’t tell him everything, just enough to answer his question.
“I chose not to rest eternally in the afterworld so that I could find the hero of a story that had been passed down through the centuries, a prophetic myth called the Slayer of the Shadow of Fear.”
I might’ve just spoken in a dead language, the way Drev looked at me, baffled. For all I knew, after having been locked away all those years, the world might have already succumbed to the Shadow of Fear and I was a crazy ghost, speaking nonsense.
“The Shadow of what?” he asked, creases indenting his forehead.
I was aware that Stauros University enforced the reading of the history of the Order of the Shrike upon its first-year students. However, their history textbooks were anything but accurate, since the Order of the Shrike manipulated every textbook, film, or document in its favor. I knew better than to think the students would know the truth about the past, let alone know the Shadow of Fear.
“I know you know the Order of the Shrike. I heard you say you wanted to be a part of . . .” I paused as I remembered that Drev had told his roommates that although he wanted to destroy the Order of the Shrike, he was going to become a member because it was the only way he would be respected in the world. I found that statement repulsive and was hesitant to repeat it.
“Yeah, I’m going to be a Shrike.” His voice was louder now that it was filled with confidence. He lifted his chin. “Everyone from this school will be when they graduate. That’s why they come here in the first place.”
Both of us were silent for a moment. As if he sensed my disapproval, he added, “You’re a nobody if you’re not one of them. They’re the ones with power. They’re mentioned all the time in the news. And you always see the presidents, CEOS, and anyone else who graduated from here wearing the ring with the insignia of the Shrike. And when I graduate, I’ll get one, too.”
“You would sell your soul for power,” I grumbled as I turned away.
Drev stepped forward and examined me as if I were an alien specimen.
“I would gladly do so. Wouldn’t you?”
There was a gleam in his eye. At first I took a step back, unprepared to answer his question; then I looked him in the eyes and stated a quiet “no.”
My answer perturbe
d him, and he snorted. “It’s because you’re afraid of them, aren’t you? All the better. The Order of the Shrike doesn’t accept the scared and weak—”
“No, they just try to make everyone around them scared and weak.” I snapped at him so quickly, I saw Drev pull his head back. “Are you really that blind? Don’t you see the insanity that they’ve created? Think! That an order of a few thousand people can control millions—perhaps even billions now. Is that normal? No. It’s not. It was never meant to be this way. They’ve been able to do so by enslaving people to fear. And you now say you want to join them!”
Drev stared back at me quietly. Did my words have an effect on him? I wasn’t going to say any more. I wanted him to contemplate for at least a few seconds what it meant to be a part of the Order of the Shrike—that it didn’t just mean having prestige and power.
“I don’t want to join them to really be a part of them,” Drev began in a low voice. “I’m going to join them to—”
“You’re going to join them because you think you can defeat them at their own game?” I asked, sighing. Then, remembering his fiery monologue earlier, I added, “If you’re seeking retribution for your father and . . .”
His eyes turned to black ice as he stared at me. I had stepped over an unspoken boundary. If I spoke further about his family, I was certain this conversation would turn violent.
“I may be the only being on this earth fighting against the Shrike,” I said, steering away from the topic of his family. “But I’ve always stood by a code of ethics and never let my emotions lead me down a path I knew I wasn’t supposed to take.”
He stared at me. His jaw muscles tensed, relaxed, and then tensed again, but nothing came from his mouth. I saw his hands curl into tight fists.
“Revenge only creates victims, Drev. Coupled with anger, it will eventually strangle your soul . . .” I stopped. My words were useless; his anger had been fermenting inside him for too long. I exhaled loudly. “But perhaps that’s why you want to join the Order of the Shrike. As you’ve seen, they’ve created a world that’s soulless.”
He was quiet, and I peered at him more closely. To my surprise, within a matter of seconds, he had transformed. Those daring eyes were now downcast. His proud head sagged. Up until that moment, we had looked to be nearly the same age, but now he seemed years younger than I was.
“There’s no other way out without becoming one of them,” he finally said, without looking up at me. “I’m not going to be a slave in their system—their jacked-up system, their government, their companies, their schools . . .”
“The establishment.”
He stood still.
“I understand—”
“No, you don’t,” he cut in frigidly. “No one knows what I’ve gone through, or my family.”
“I died,” I said, before he could say any more. “Because I didn’t see a way out and I didn’t want to become one of them.”
“They killed you?” He winced.
“No, I wouldn’t let them have that glory, either. I killed myself,” I said.
My answer had an effect on him. He went quiet. The last of the autumn cicadas began chirping a nocturne. For a minute, their song was the only audible sound.
“What’s your name?” he finally asked, his tone softer than I had ever heard it.
“Hugh. Hugh Fogg,” I said, offering my hand. But he didn’t shake it; instead, his eyebrows pointed upward.
“You’re the one who wrote that book, the one that got Irving in trouble.”
“Yes. I mean, no. You see, I didn’t know the book still existed. In fact, I thought my book had been lost forever. It’s all strange to me as well. You see that letter in your hand?” I said, pointing to the crumpled yellow envelope. “Those are my words.”
“You wrote this?” he asked, raising the fist that clutched it.
“I didn’t write that letter, but someone copied the last lines of my book and sent them to you. This person, whoever it is, must have at least read my book.”
“You think it could be anyone at this school?”
“No. Everyone here has pledged allegiance to the Shrike,” I said, shaking my head vigorously. “No. If they were to be caught saying words like that—”
“Words like what?”
“Words that describe the Slayer of the Shadow of Fear. That’s what that letter is about.”
Drev took a step toward me, squinting as he asked, “What is the Shadow of Fear?”
“The Shadow of Fear is your greatest fears, coming together into a dark force and taking over your soul,” I said, thinking back to a page in my book where I had even inserted a woodcut of a beast with a shaggy torso of a wolf topped with a decaying head of a vulture. I don’t believe that’s what it looked like, but no one had ever seen it, or at least no one had seen it and lived to tell about it.
“Like a monster or something?”
“No, like a shadow always hovering over you.”
“Has it killed anyone?”
I pondered his question for a moment before I answered, “It has, but not directly.”
The right end of his mouth pinched upward as he heard my cryptic answer. “Why hasn’t anyone ever tried to get rid of it?”
“How can you get rid of your fears?” I asked. “You are always afraid of something, right?” Another wave from the roaring surf collided against the stone wall. Instead of a few sprays, a miniature waterfall fell upon us. Drev and I took a few seconds to shake off the excess water that had drenched us both.
“Let’s move to higher ground,” I said, walking toward the beginning of the Five Ring Road, which spiraled all the way to the top of the island.
“Look, there are stairs over there,” he said, pointing to a crooked set of stairs that seemed to lead up the slope of the island. The first few steps were made of sandstone, flat, broad, and welcoming. The rest bent around a cluster of shrubs. They led in the opposite direction of the Five Ring Road.
Drev began walking toward it without waiting to hear my response. I had been locked away in the cellar for so long that I had briefly forgotten about the labyrinth that covered the island: a series of wayward stairways and pathways that looked like shortcuts but usually led nowhere—or sometimes somewhere dangerous. Only when he set foot on the first step did I recall that those particular steps dropped off the edge of a cliff. I rushed after him and yelled, “Don’t!”
But Drev was already well on his way up those stairs, which led straight into the Stauros Sea.
