A Myth to the Night

by Cora Choi

  Chapter 16: The Night of the Dead

  By the first of November, autumn had nearly withered away. Two months had passed since the beginning of the year. Toussaint, All Hallows’ Day, had arrived with a winter chill, weaving itself into the air. Only a few dry, bronze leaves clung feebly to the bald branches, the wind threatening to carry them off with each gust. Despite the dreary weather, preparation for the largest party of the year was taking place.

  I sat atop Stauros Hall during the day and watched as decorators with colorful lamps and bolts of cloth hurried up and down the Five Ring Road. Caterers pushed enormous carts of food up the hill, leaving their trucks at the entrance of Stauros Island. When the bell rang to signal the end of class, I watched the students file out of the old abbey and into the laboratories and reading halls on the second and third rings of the Five Ring Road. Many of them paused to observe the workers who had come to set up the spectacular soiree that was happening that night.

  Having locked myself away for nineteen years, I found it necessary to find some time to be alone. The rooftop was the perfect location—no one near me, and the world stretched out beneath. My constant companion was the wind, which I at first welcomed. But with each passing day, as the air became colder, the wind became more coarse and biting—and mysteriously nauseating. Its scent, normally a blend of dirt, grass, and seawater, was replaced with an odorous jumble of mold, sewage, and rotting flesh.

  On the day of Toussaint, the odor was so dense and pervasive I couldn’t think about anything except the source of the smell. What could it be? There was no news of a war or a plague. I paced back and forth along the Stauros Hall roof, secure in the knowledge that no student except Drev would see me.

  “Hello.” I heard a small voice calling from the open window of the north tower. The tower was like an extended turret stretching out of the main building, and its window opened onto the roof. The arching aperture had been crudely carved from the stone that formed the cylindrical tower. The gap was large enough for a small young woman to step through easily.

  “Pamina!” I said, surprised to see the girl standing there. However, I immediately opened my arms to show her she was welcome to join me. “I didn’t expect you to come up here,” I said, taking her hand and helping her step through the arched window so that her head wouldn’t hit the tracery at the top. She was wobbly as she took her first few steps onto the roof. I saw her eyes widen when she looked down and realized the deep drop that yawned before her. I encouraged her to sit. She did, and I sat next to her.

  “I saw you from the courtyard.” She smiled shyly. “I’m waiting for Drev to finish class. We’re going to go to the Toussaint celebration later tonight. I didn’t want to wait alone, so I-I thought I would join you.”

  “And you were right to do so,” I said. Pamina and I rarely saw each other. Whenever I saw her in passing, which was always with Drev, I greeted her. I assumed she found out whatever she wanted to know about me from him. And all that I knew about Pamina was what the other phantoms had told me that evening when I’d first met her. Since the first night they’d met, in the Forgotten Cemetery, Drev and Pamina had been inseparable. I had been anxious about what would happen to Drev after that, for the phantoms had told me he might risk losing his life. However, my worries had subsided over the weeks and been replaced with a sense of relief. Drev looked happier and was livelier than ever. Although I barely saw him, since he was in class during the day and spent every evening with Pamina, the rare occasion when I did see him, I noticed that his sneers had turned into sincere smiles and his greetings were nothing but friendly. I silently applauded Pamina for civilizing him.

  “What are you doing up here?” she asked.

  “Smelling the wind.”

  She giggled.

  “No, really, that’s what I’ve been doing these past several weeks. There’s an odd stench. Can you smell it?”

  She was still, and I watched her inhale deeply several times. After a few seconds, she just looked straight ahead.

  “You don’t smell anything?” I sighed, perplexed.

  “No, I know this smell well,” she said, her forehead scrunched up in consternation. “When I was alive and lived in Stauros Hall, my room sometimes smelled like this.”

  “Good God! What was in your room?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. She took a lock of her hair and wrapped it around her finger, her eyes downcast. Her voice quieted. “But this was the smell. I would notice it if I woke up from a nightmare. I had night terrors, and I’d wake up crying and sweating. I couldn’t stand it, and even though my great-uncle’s room was right across the hall, I . . . I couldn’t rely on him for comfort. So the only way to get away from it was to run out of Stauros Hall.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “It smelled like this after a nightmare?”

  “I didn’t understand it either, until I told Ahura Mazda about it. He told me it was the smell of fear and that I could stay with him and the others as often as I needed to. After that, whenever I was scared, I always sneaked out of my room and slept in the Forgotten Cemetery, with the phantoms keeping me company.”

  The stench of fear! How could I have been so dense! I stood up again and looked out to the mainland. Where was the Shadow of Fear? Was it spreading this odor of decay?

  “Hugh, is everything okay?” Pamina asked, jolting me from my thoughts.

  “Fine. Everything . . . everything is fine. Apologies if I startled you, my dear Pamina,” I said, trying to keep a controlled exterior, but sharp pains of panic were bursting inside my skull. I ran my hand over my face several times, before clearing my throat and saying in a low, gentle voice, “Tell me, Pamina, what nightmares did you have? What were you so afraid of that would make you cry in the night?”

  “Being alone.” Her sad eyes looked straight into mine. “I was so afraid of being alone, of dying alone. My great-uncle always used to tell me that we arrive in the world alone, and when we leave, we must leave alone. But I was so scared of being by myself—”

  “Pamina,” I stopped her. Suddenly the perplexing question of why she was still a phantom, something I had been mulling over for the last couple of months, came to my mind again. I had thought that after she met Drev, her wish to find her prince would be fulfilled. I was still racked with guilt that my book had led her to that cave. I wanted to avoid speaking about the topic, but I had a feeling that the way she had died would reveal why, after meeting Drev, she was still roaming this island. It would also explain why Drev had not died, as the other phantoms had mentioned. Until now, the simple conclusion I had made was that Drev was simply not fit to be the love of her life, but now I knew that there had to be something more to Pamina’s story than just finding her true love.

  “Pamina, can you explain to me again how you died? Do you recall what happened when you entered the library?”

  She looked at me, her eyes large and wide. “I sought out the cave you wrote about in your book.”

  I sighed. My wretched book!

  “Pamina.” I swallowed with an audible gulp. “If it doesn’t pain you, could you tell me how you came across my book?”

  The question, among others, had been niggling at me since the night I had met her. I clearly recalled having given the book to Anne-Marie years ago, on the night we had encountered the Saboteurs. We had been reading it together in the library when they had suddenly appeared. She and I had escaped the Saboteurs, and I had let her keep my book. Two days later, the school had declared that she had disappeared, and I’d assumed the book had disappeared with her. But now I wasn’t so sure.

  “I saw the book locked in a large glass cabinet behind my great-uncle’s desk in his office,” she said. “I would secretly open it and read the book whenever he was away at meetings. You wrote in your book that the cave was a passageway to . . . to . . .”

  “It’s called the World of the Damned.”

  “Yes, but I wanted to leave—leave the island. I thought when I was in the b
oat, I could steer it away from heading into the World of the Damned.” She shook her head. “I felt that it was my only chance.” Her shoulders dropped as she stared far out to the mainland, perhaps still wishing to see the world beyond the island.

  “I had seen pictures and movies and had heard stories. The world out there—I still imagine how beautiful it is.” She smiled. “I have vague but wonderful memories of the world outside the island. They’re from when I was younger and my parents were still alive. The memories are faint, like fading photos, but I remember how happy I was before I came here to live with my great-uncle.” She looked as though she might cry, as she looked toward the horizon. “I thought going to a university somewhere else would give me the perfect chance to leave Stauros. But my great-uncle forbade it. And so I tried to run away.” She paused, blinked a couple of times, and said, “I didn’t know how I could run away.”

  “So that’s when you remembered the cave that I wrote about in my book—and thought of it as a way to escape,” I said.

  She nodded slowly. “When I started looking for it, I found the cave easily—it was easy to get to. Once I was inside, I saw the old rowboat. It was small, perfect for maybe two or three people, and there was a carved figurehead at the bow—it was a shrike looking out toward the mouth of the cave. It looked enchanting, like out of a fairy tale. I climbed in, but there wasn’t an oar or anything to make the boat move, and yet it started moving anyway. Before I knew it, I was at sea and I couldn’t see beyond the shrike. The fog was so thick. The boat kept moving. I couldn’t control it. I became scared . . . so scared.”

  She covered her hand with her mouth as her tears flowed profusely. I felt only empathy for her. My memory of having gone down in that cave—even though it had been hundreds of years ago—was still fresh in my mind. As Pamina continued to weep, I wrapped my arms around her and rocked her gently until she calmed down. I wanted to keep talking to her to allay any fears she had, but my mind was busy piecing together parts of a mystery, pieces that had scattered throughout the last fifty years.

  I now knew that the students who had disappeared from the island—the ones whose disappearance I had been blamed for—must have vanished through this cave. The question of who had reopened it, and for what reason, remained unanswered. Nevertheless, I was certain that whoever had reopened it had done so knowing that the students would find the cave, board the boat, and never be heard from again.

  All those victims were connected by the fact that they had been students whom I had approached, wanting to tell them about my book, about the myth of the Slayer of the Shadow of Fear. However, unlike Pamina, most of them had not even opened my book, let alone read it. So how had they all been lured to the cave if some of them probably hadn’t even known of its existence?

  “And then it happened, like you wrote in your book.” Pamina hiccupped as she tried to keep her sobs at bay. “You wrote, ‘The fear manifests outside of the being like a shadow ready to swallow the victim body and soul.’ I felt the Shadow of Fear creeping up on me. . . .”

  She teared up again.

  “Pamina,” I said gently, “you don’t have to go on if you don’t want to.”

  She brushed away the tears with her delicate fingertips. “I-it’s just that I haven’t spoken about what really happened to anyone. I told the other phantoms only that I fell off the boat. They never ask me any questions, but I think someone should know, because it was terrible and scary. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. The truth is, the Shadow of Fear wasn’t beating or pulling at me. It was me. I realized that I was pulling at my own hair and ramming myself into the sides of the boat. . . .”

  As much as I had researched the story about the Slayer of the Shadow of Fear, I had never imagined that the Shadow of Fear forced its victims to kill themselves!

  Pamina stopped, for I failed hopelessly to remain poised. My mind was like an overturned beehive: a gazillion thoughts swarmed in my head and stung me with one realization after another.

  That stench in the air was no longer a mystery. It was evidence that the Shadow of Fear was at work. Although its victims tore out their own hair and beat themselves to death, the Shadow of Fear was nevertheless the murderer. Instead of incriminating fingerprints, it left behind only a rancid smell of fear as the victims’ terrors consumed them entirely.

  There were probably hundreds, if not thousands, who, like Pamina, had suffered at their own hands. Drev’s words of how the mortuary was the only business that was booming repeated in my head. My thoughts turned to those ghostless bodies Drev had talked about, and how they’d arrived twisted and battered. I now understood that they, too, were victims of the Shadow of Fear. Drev had been right when he’d said they looked like they had tortured themselves. According to Pamina, that was exactly what happened when the Shadow of Fear overtook its victims. As for their being ghostless, it was clear that their spirits would be forever condemned to the World of the Damned.

  I covered my ears as Drev’s words repeated mercilessly in my head. I needed it to stop.

  I felt a cold hand over mine and saw Pamina’s bright eyes.

  “Thanks to your book, I knew that the Shadow of Fear takes a person’s soul to the World of the Damned—and I knew that I couldn’t give in to the Shadow. So I challenged it instead.”

  “You challenged it?” My voice cracked with incredulity. “How?”

  “The old-fashioned way,” she answered matter-of-factly. “My memory is loaded with stories the phantoms told me over the years—the ways the heroes of those stories battled against their demons. I grew up hearing firsthand how goddesses and queens bravely slew witches or baby-eating goblins, and I knew I just needed to follow in their footsteps.

  “At first I struggled in the boat, unsure of what was happening, but I tried to control my arms with all the strength I had. And then I tried to remain calm, even though the Shadow of Fear was hovering over me. I was still scared, but I tried not to show it. I just kept repeating to myself what the headless knight once told me: ‘Face what you’re afraid of. Courage comes after.’

  “I faced the Shadow of Fear, telling it that I wasn’t afraid of it, that my fears didn’t have control over me. Before I knew it, I felt my body relaxing, I regained control of my arms and legs, and I could feel the Shadow of Fear backing away.

  “But the moment it left, it created a strong blast of wind and rocked the boat, and I accidentally fell over the side. I couldn’t swim, and I knew it was the end for me. But even then, my fear of dying was nothing compared with my sorrow over dying alone.

  “It was terrible.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I remember splashing in the water; it was so cold. Then I felt as if I were being pulled—pulled downward. I gave up.”

  “And so you drowned,” I said softly. “I’m sorry.”

  She gave me a half smile. “It’s more painful to think of it happening, I guess. All I remember is, everything just went black. But then, after, I felt a warmth—a soft, calming energy—come to my side. I felt as though I weren’t alone, as if arms had wrapped around me. And everything came into vision, like I had opened my eyes. And it was then that I saw phantoms.”

  “The phantoms? Like Ravana and Siren and the headless knight?” I turned to her, shocked. “In the sea?”

  “No,” she said. “Phantoms who live only in the sea and whom you can see only if you go into the sea—like Poseidon, Oya, and Ma-tsu—and dozens of others.”

  I paused to consider what Pamina spoke of, as I had never even considered sea phantoms. Finally, I nodded slowly. If there were phantoms on Stauros Island, I couldn’t see why there wouldn’t be phantoms in the Stauros Sea.

  “They asked me what was wrong,” she continued. “I told them that I had drowned—died alone. I knew I had to accept my fate. But if there were one wish that I could ask from the sky, the sea, the earth, the stars—all that was greater than I—it was not to let me be alone forever in death. I couldn’t bear, right up until I was dying, that there wasn’
t a real person with me. I had been alone for too long. Ever since my parents had passed away. And I couldn’t—I just couldn’t—die alone, nor be alone forever after death. That was too much to bear.

  “The next morning, I was in the library—like this.” She held up her hands as if they were covered in mud. The tears rolled down her cheeks once again, and I wrapped my arms around her.

  I imagined that, upon hearing Pamina pleading, the phantoms around her came to her aid. Poseidon was the mighty sea god in the ancient Greek world, while Oya was the goddess of the Niger River, who also guarded the underworld. Either one could manage to salvage a spirit from the dead. Although their powers were notorious, their generosity wasn’t. I suspected Ma-tsu, the ancient Eastern sea goddess who forever came to the aid of fishermen and sailors, convinced them to allow Pamina to come back to the island as a phantom so that she could find someone who was willing to accompany her through death and to the afterlife.

  Although I was relieved to learn that Pamina had not fallen to the Shadow of Fear, her story was nevertheless disconcerting. For now I knew that she wasn’t just searching for someone to kiss her and tell her he loved her; she was searching for the one thing she had yearned for as she died—someone who loved her enough that he would readily join her through death and rest with her eternally. I was more than certain that Drev wouldn’t take to the idea happily. But would any young man?

  I looked at this petite, fairylike creature leaning against me, a woman completely helpless against all the viciousness in the world. I chided myself for having thought of her reason for returning as a phantom as ludicrous. I could see how she could never rest eternally if she were alone. But who would be willing to fulfill her wish? Between the two of us, I stood more of a chance of fulfilling my goal than she did.

  “And you, Hugh?” she said, lifting her head away from my chest and looking at me. “Do you know how you became a phantom? Drev told me that you were once alive, like me.”

  “I consciously chose to become a phantom.”

  “Why?”

  “To find the Slayer of the Shadow of Fear, the one person who will put this monster down once and for all. It was my life’s goal. Now it’s an obligation I must fulfill before leaving this world.”

  “You really think there is a Slayer? Like the one you wrote about in your book?”

  “I know there is, Pamina. And I can’t rest until I find him and know that he is battling the Shadow of Fear.”

  Pamina was silent for a long, philosophical moment; then she looked out to the mainland and sighed. “I hope you do find the Slayer. He’ll do more than just destroy the Shadow of Fear. He’ll set everyone free.”

  As I was thinking about what she’d said, I saw a stream of students filing out into the courtyard from Stauros Hall. Classes had ended. I gave Pamina a squeeze.

  “I think Drev will be out now,” I said as cheerfully as possible. She shifted away from me and toward the edge of the roof. She squinted at the crowd below, drying her wet cheeks with the back of her hand.

  “Oh!” she said suddenly, backing away.

  “What’s wrong? What is it?” I asked, scooting myself over to where she was.

  She turned to me, shaking her head like a frightened child. “My great-uncle. He’s down there.”

  I myself had never seen the chancellor. Curious to know what specimen of a fiend would banish four students to a cellar and cause his grandniece to perpetually fear him, I looked down into the courtyard.

  “Pamina, it’s daylight. He can’t see you,” I reassured her. She nodded, but the fear in her eyes was still there.

  A white-haired man in a maroon velvet robe with a silver shrike embroidered on the back was standing in the corner of the courtyard farthest from the entrance to Stauros Hall. He stood with two men dressed in identical black suits and wearing large sunglasses that made them look like flies. They were far removed from the clusters of students at the other end of the courtyard. Pamina’s great-uncle had his head lowered, while the two men on either side stood close, relaying information discreetly, without gestures or any other movement.

  Students continued to file out into the courtyard and then spill onto the Five Ring Road. I saw Drev among them. His smooth, slow strut was highly distinguishable among the students who were scurrying away to get ready for the soiree that night.

  Suddenly, the white-haired man lifted his face to the sky, his mouth wide open. It seemed as if he’d just heard devastating news. His face had aged, but that sinister profile was too familiar. At first I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, and edged closer to where the roof ended.

  “Hugh, careful,” said Pamina, tugging my shoulder.

  I put my hand over hers and asked, in a voice as steady as I could muster, “Pamina, what is your great-uncle’s name?”

  “Parafron.”

  I closed my eyes and clenched my jaw. I couldn’t believe that life could be so unfair. How could that scrawny student who had wrongly condemned me as the Demon of Stauros so many years ago now be the most powerful man on the island and one of the most influential men in the world?