by Iain Ryan
‘One or two. I don’t work the morning shift. You know, it sounds like you need this sauna a mighty great deal. Now go on.’
You cross the room and pause at the mouth of the stair, feeling the heat rising up.
‘Good luck,’ says Margo.
‘What do I need luck for?’
Margo doesn’t answer.
You turn and look down into the heat and say, ‘If there’s danger here, danger of any kind, I’ll come back up and kill you. You know this, yes?’
‘All travellers need a bit of luck, for crying out loud. I say it to damn near everyone. Now will you get a move on before I refund your money with that crossbow of mine.’
You take the first step.
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29
The ogre moves like a grounded bat, a heaving mass of muscle but uneven in its gait. The thing dips its head and screams with ungodly force.
To begin, the smaller of the two creatures sprints out to the side – fangs glistening – and leaps into the air. You parry left and bring the sword across in a wide sweep. The tip of your weapon catches the beast and drops it like a stone. It emits a terrible whimper. With your eyes fixed on the mother, you step across and strike the smaller creature again, skewering it to be sure. As you withdraw the sword, it’s heavy with entrails.
No mercy.
Not for the likes of this.
The mother screeches again. It seems less sure of itself now. It moves forward and back in the water.
‘Come now, beast. It’s your time.’
You charge the ogre and leap into the air, throwing your sword into the creature’s face. The blade hits square and topples it. You land on its torso and grab the sword as the creature’s flailing arms thrash at you. You rip the sword around in a wide arc, removing arms and claws before getting down to the grisly work of finishing the ogre off. A certain blankness takes over.
Muscle memory.
Physical work. Like digging post holes or a grave.
Some tinge of history repeating …
When you’re done, the room falls quiet. The water runs thick and oily with blood. You splash around searching for guarded treasure or secret hatches. There is none of this – the walls are bare – but there is a nest of sorts: a submerged mound of clay and shit, decorated with the bones of unlucky travellers. You reach into the nest and clench your hand around what feels like a large rock. As you tug on the rock, a beam of green light blasts out of the mound. In horror, you watch as your arm evaporates into dust. The room tilts. The smell of singed flesh fills your nostrils. Your face lands in the water and the world goes dark.
Humans sit around a table, eating. A family. A father, a mother and two younger women, two daughters who look the same. Twins. But there is another, a young man. The way he’s sitting and touching one of the twins – a hand gently resting on the back of her neck – he’s no brother. A suitor. He looks around the table and says something but you cannot hear this scene.
The father responds, smiling.
The mother laughs.
One girl nods.
But the other sister, she glares across the table, moving from one person to the next. The suitor looks directly at her and speaks. The girl moves without warning. She steps up from the table, her left hand wrapped around a dinner fork. She swings out.
The father springs up.
The mother screams and screams.
You come up fast and vomit water and ogre blood all over yourself before moving into a coughing jag unlike any other. Every inch of your frame wracks in violent seizure. A part of your mind knows that death has visited you briefly. You almost drowned.
You must be in a state of shock because it’s minutes before you realise that your arm is still intact. It has rematerialised. Terrified, you scurry away from the nest, past the bodies of the slain ogres and back to the stairs. It is only after you have climbed the stairs, arriving again in the large grey cavernous room, that you start to calm yourself. The white crystal poles at the far end of the room start to glow, calling you.
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30
It is a short stair and from the top you can hear running water. Despite being this far underground, some sort of natural light shines up.
‘Hello?’
Your voice echoes.
No response.
At the bottom of the stairs, you survey a broad space about the size of a church hall but with a low, flat ceiling. A thousand lanterns flicker just above head height, all strung to the roof. At your feet, the floor is covered in fast-moving water, bright with the lustre of the lanterns. Off to one side, you notice an object. A shrouded presence.
‘Show yourself,’ you say, gripping your sword.
The presence unwraps itself.
No.
This cannot be.
The creature spreads its wretched talons to full width. It looks to be some kind of deformed ogre: a humanoid but with four arms and a light fur-like covering. The thing roars and another creature, smaller yet of precisely the same design, steps out from behind the first. Milk drips from its mouth. Some horrible family of violence and mayhem.
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31
The passage arcs around to your right. It remains narrow and dark and grows only darker as the golden light recedes in the distance. After a time, the roof lowers gradually, forcing you to hunch down and crawl. The ground beneath your hands and knees starts as dirt but transitions into some kind of stone paving dotted with hundreds of holes the size of pebbles. As you crawl further into the passage, warm steam rises up from the holes in the floor. The steam is gentle, a comfortable wash of heat and moisture. You feel as if you could lie in the passage a while.
I could take my rest here.
Your eyes are heavy.
Just a moment …
Without much thought, you lower yourself to the ground and dream.
Two women, the same age and with the same features. The same hair, the same brow, the same eyes. One is wounded: bruised with bandaged limbs. The other is unharmed. They appear to be sitting in a garden the likes of which is foreign to you. Ornate flowers grow in the heat.
One of the girls has tears in her eyes. She says, ‘What do you mean, Euan isn’t who he says he is?’ It’s the one with the bandaged limbs.
‘He’s not right for you, Dora. There’s another side to him.’
‘What did he do?’
‘It’s not one thing. Have you noticed how he looks at me? I don’t like being around him.’
‘Erma, that’s not—’
‘I don’t know how you can stand to have him around.’
‘Why? Because he’s more interested in me than you? Is that it? Oh poor fucking Erma.’
They sit beside each other silently for a minute.
The one called Erma speaks first. ‘Mum said that you two were—’
‘It’s true. He asked. I’m thinking about it.’
‘That’s completely insane. What does Mum think?’
‘Why would she have a problem with it?’
‘So you’re actually considering it? Dora, it’s not the time to get married. Even if he were the one.’
‘Not the time? Look at me! If he wants me like this, isn’t that a measure of s
omething? And besides, I want to get married. I’m not like you. I don’t want to just have, I don’t know, choices. I don’t want that. Not after all this.’
‘Dad says he’s after our money.’
‘Dad says that about everyone.’
‘It’s a mistake.’
‘What would you know?’ Dora sister wipes at her eyes. ‘I’m serious. Tell me, what would you know?’
‘Nothing. Forget it.’
‘That’s right,’ says Dora. ‘That’s your answer to everything.’
Your body jolts awake before your mind. You feel a cool breeze on your arms and orbs of light float above you, out past your closed eyelids. You look and it’s all gone: the twin sisters, the garden, the argument, the light. You’re surprised to find yourself standing in a coal-black void. You reach out and touch the world, finding a wall of cloth. A curtain. You open it and light seeps in.
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32
You come to coughing and roll onto your side to heave air. You find yourself in a new room. The sand, the ghost and the bronze panel have all disappeared. The new space is still triangular in shape but the walls are made of dark maroon clay. The ceiling above does not pulse with light but instead appears coated in sand. You know, without understanding how, that you are in the chamber below.
You stand.
You study the walls.
There’s an opening cut into one corner of the room and past that a corridor of strange dimensions. The corridor is impossibly tall – as tall as the sky – but runs only a short distance before sharply hooking right into another hallway and another sharp right and then the same again, and again.
You run these halls.
Right and then right and then right, each turn bringing you to a longer passage. A triangular-shaped maze, spiralling out. As you move along the corridors, you begin to hear something, a low humming sound. It grows in intensity with each turn. The floor begins to vibrate. You enter a final long straight passageway and run towards the sound. As you move, the walls begin to close around you, collapsing inward. A threshold approaches. It is grey beyond, the colour of slate.
You sprint.
The walls brush your shoulders, squeezing in.
The grey threshold grows larger and the sound amplifies until it’s an earth-rending roar, a blasting cacophony.
You dive.
Then nothing.
Silence.
The grey room.
The corridor seals silently shut behind you.
This new chamber is the opposite of that which came before. It’s a wide chasm. Three of the walls are square but the one opposite is curved, as if this whole hall is wrapped around a giant cylinder.
On your left, down the far end of the grey hall, two white crystal poles stand a short distance apart. Both are carefully machined and each are the height of a tall human. The poles look completely alien in this muted space. Up the other end of the chamber, you find a rectangular hole in the floor and a set of stairs leading down out of view.
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1203
I’ve been in here for four days now. Or five. Or six. Less than a week. While I struggle to stay calm and think my way out of this, I’m haunted by bad episodes from my life.
Haunted by Dora.
I can’t fight it.
All the choices are gone now. What’s left are scenes without structure. My life disassembled. Fantasies so warped and real in this place without reality that I can’t tell Sero’s world from my own. I’m not sure I want to. I’m not sure the line is clear anymore. How can reality be clear when the fantasy barbarian dreams of me instead of the other way around?
I’m unravelling.
I’m seeing things I pushed from view.
I see this, for example:
Down dark corridors of my old house, through the room beside the upstairs study and the bathroom my father always used. It’s the middle of the night. I can’t sleep because the pain in my legs is so bad I can’t lie still.
There’s a small window in this bathroom by the study. I crack it and light a joint, hoping it’ll get me through to my next dose of Percocet. This window – in the small room – is really a window into a whole new world, because from this small window, in the bathroom my father always used, I can see into the cottage at the back of the property. I can see my mother fucking Euan on the floor of the cottage. I can see her hair and her arse and Euan’s legs.
I close the window.
I sit on the closed pedestal.
Work on the joint.
Ignore the window.
But then I stand and reopen it and look again, to be sure, and I see something different. It’s not my mother. It’s my sister. The meds are fucking with me.
I stare out.
Dora’s hair.
Dora’s arse.
And the legs of …
Ryan Solis.
No, David Brier.
No, Dylan Copson.
No, Euan.
What?
What’s happening?
I close the portal and look into the mirror and Dora’s there behind me like a ghost from a horror film, her eyes staring into my eyes, her lips cold and cruel.
‘Hi.’
‘Jesus fucking Christ, Dora.’
‘What are you doing in here?’ my sister says, and without warning she slams her fist into the side of my skull.
33
A pulse of light fires down and smoke from the vaporised vial rockets into your lungs. You take a heroic toke and hold the smoke. The burn is incredible.
What is this vile poison?
The ghost holds out his hand for the mouthpiece.
He takes it and drags on the remainder. You watch as smoke fills his transparent throat and hovers in the space where his lungs should be. He gasps. ‘It’s good shit.’
You both exhale together.
‘Shall we dance?’ says the ghost and, without warning, he walks into you then turns, covering your arms and legs with his sorcery. As you wave a hand covered in his hand, his voice says, Let me show you how to be a ghost, let me show you how to haunt …
In the white sky, a burning star. Summer. And under it, a monument of some kind – a house perhaps – and a green garden and a pool. By the pool, a girl in scant garments and dark eyeglasses. She has a book. The girl puts the book down and rolls a set of dice across a small glass-topped table.
Eight.
And a four.
Twelve.
She shrugs and notes the number down in her book with a pencil.
She rolls again.
A one and a two.
‘Erma!’ comes a voice across the yard. ‘Erma, where are you?’
‘Down here.’
An older woman and a man make their way down the stairs and into the paved area around the pool. They stop at the younger woman’s feet. Two figures, casting a shadow.
‘Who’s this?’ says the girl.
‘This is Euan. He’s going to be moving into the cottage and looking after odds and ends around here. He’s David Reyner’s son.’
‘Nice to meet you David Reyner’s son,’ says the girl. She raises her book. ‘The pool needs a clean. The guy didn’t come yesterday.’
‘Sorry,’ says the woman. ‘Politeness isn’t my daughter’s strong suit.’
‘I can clean it,’ says Euan.
In the pool beside them, the water ripples lightly; it’s a lig
ht blue, cast by a narrow rim of similarly coloured tiles just above the waterline. Down beneath the surface, there is a bright steel drain set flush into the pearl-white floor. It glistens in the sun.
You feel your chest tighten. You feel like you’re choking.
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34
Erma paces in an alleyway lined with iron containers spilling paper and glass. A demonic thump comes from one wall of this alley. It’s raining but Erma seems immune to the weather. She paces, clenches her fist. A portal in the wall opens and the sound that spills out fills you with dread. Surely this is a place of malicious spirits and wizardry.
A woman arrives via the portal and it slams closed behind her. ‘What?’ she screams. ‘What do you want?’
Erma says, ‘I want what I paid you for. Why are you doing this to me?’
The woman is young. She laughs, then leans into the wall for cover and lights a cigarette. ‘I could ask you the same question.’
Erma steps in close and the resemblance is made clear. They both have similar hair, similar eyes, similar bones. They could be sisters.
‘Jenny, all I ever did was help you.’
‘If that’s what you call help, I’d hate to see what harm is. And now, you’re going to cough up that extra cash or you can do your own fucking—’
Erma’s punch is fast and effective. Jenny folds over: she’s bent double and she retches until she heaves a pint of ale onto the floor of the alleyway. Erma grabs her around the throat and slams her head back into the wall.
‘Hand over that fucking data, Jenny.’
The girl laughs and cries at the same time. ‘Or what? You’ll beat me up?’
