“Your mother’s blue dress.”
Another memory bled in like ink spilling on paper. This one of her mother dancing with her father in the living room. Grace’s radiant blue dress swayed back and forth as she stepped in rhythm. His hands resting on her hips. Her hands wrapped around his neck and her cheek pressed against his chest. His chin nestled atop her head. Sharon watched them in her pajamas from the top of the stairs, peeking out between the posts. She added her own hum in place of the missing music.
Her father removed his hands from Sharon’s eyes. He leaned in, his lips to her ear, and whispered. “Now open your eyes.”
Sharon did as he bid her, struggling not to blink as her pupils adjusted to the light. She squinted down at her hands and parted them like the blossoming of a rose. Her fingers peeled back to reveal a vibrant glow of blue. The light emanated with such a force it was as if Sharon had plucked a shooting star from the night sky and now the star slept in the heart of her palms while she waited to make her wish.
Sharon’s eyes widened as she glimpsed something strange. There was movement. The light was alive. Her breath was stolen from her lungs. A small impish creature emerged, birthed from starlight, stretching out its tiny butterfly wings and gazing up at Sharon with bug eyes. It blinked at her before cracking a smile. Sharon smiled back at the fairy, her disbelief swallowed up by her delight.
***
Sharon looked on with disdain at the blue teddy bear with fairy wings and black button eyes. Lying back against her pillow, she held it up to the light, examining its knitted yarn smile and heart-shaped nose. This furry creature had been the last gift her father had given her before he left. Without a word, without a note, without justification, without even a simple wave good-bye. Sharon tossed the stuffed animal to the floor. She had spent far more nights than she cared to remember squeezing the life out of that teddy bear, all teary-eyed and sobbing wet from crying for her father to return. He never did. That first Christmas without him had been the worst. All Christmas Eve she prayed and wished with every ounce of her heart. To God, to Santa, to anyone who was listening to show her mercy and grant her one and only desire—to bring her father home for Christmas. All she got was a stocking full of broken hearts. She had looked up to him. He had looked straight through her. He was her rock, her world entire. She was sand slipping between the cracks of his fingers, a speck in his ever expanding and indifferent universe. Sharon was seventeen now and no longer naive. There was no such thing as magic and fairies didn’t exist, except in little girls’ imaginations.
“So, let me get this straight,” Sarah Herman said, her voice distorting over the live video chat feed on Sharon’s laptop. “A crow wanted you to follow it into some old creepy basement?” Sarah forked up a bite of lemon meringue pie from a slice sitting on a small white dish in the space between her crossed legs. “And you’re sure it wasn’t just trained? Some old perverted man’s way of luring naive little underage girls into his creepy pedophile dungeon?”
Sharon couldn’t hold back her smile. “I know, Sarah, it sounds bizarre, another in a long laundry list of crap that keeps happening to me since I moved.” Sharon’s smile disappeared as her mind wandered off. Memories of that crow and its hypnotic ghost eyes raked through her thoughts. “It’s hard to describe the feeling when I looked into its eyes. As if I was being pulled into nothingness. And worse yet, I wanted to go. To fill it up.”
“Uh-huh...” Sarah swallowed a mouthful of pie as she studied Sharon’s uneasy expression. After a moment of careful thought, she let a grin break free. “Wait, dost thou hear that rapping at your chamber door?” she said, tapping the camera lens on her laptop. “Perhaps it’s your new boyfriend come to pay a visit to your Plutonian shore, my little Miss Lenore. Quoth the raven give-me-some-more.”
Sharon smirked. Sarah’s lame jokes never failed on Sharon no matter how bad they were. Maybe that’s why they were friends. Who else would laugh at Sarah’s weird stand-up? “Thanks for the poem, Poe, but my lover’s a crow not a raven.”
Sarah shrugged. “What’s the difference?”
“Ravens are intelligent scavengers that live in the woods. Crows rummage through dumpsters for leftover hamburgers,” Sharon corrected her.
“Well, I think you should do it.”
“Huh?”
“Follow your feathered admirer into the basement. Why not? It could be fun. Imagine all the dark sinister secrets this old pervert could be hiding down there.”
“Like what, laundry detergent?”
“I don’t know...” Sarah grinned devilishly. “Maybe there’s the corpse of his dead wife buried down there.”
The thought filled Sharon with unease. Not the prospect of finding dead bodies as much as the idea the crow might mean her harm. Strange, the thought hadn’t entered her mind until just then. Her encounter with the crow was fading like a dream, slowly slipping into the sea of distant memories. Each time her mind wandered to another subject, she lost a bit more. Soon returning would be all but impossible.
“Can’t you hear her screams, Sharon?” Sarah raked her long punk-green nails, which matched her spiky blonde hair in attitude, across her keyboard. “Her scratches as she tries to claw through her coffin? Help me Sharon. Don’t leave me!”
“Maybe I’m just imagining things.” Sharing her experience with the crow with Sarah was stupid in hindsight. Sarah couldn’t take her own funeral seriously.
“Maybe you’re just scared.” Sarah hollered like a banshee.
“Right... Or maybe I’m just crazy. My principal certainly thinks so. She even suggested therapy.”
“You do have that habit of blacking out and waking up with someone else’s blood on your hands, now and then.” Sarah grinned like the Cheshire Cat.
“Har, har.” Sharon fell back against her pillow. “My mother is the one who needs therapy.”
Sarah frowned. “She still not past that first stage of grief?”
“Not even close.” Sharon shifted her gaze over to her bedroom door. Mother should be asleep by now. Good. I don’t have to worry about her coming in for another talk. “She still thinks he’s gonna stroll in one day through the front door. As if we’d all go back to being one happy family, even if he did.”
Sharon wished Sarah a goodnight and closed her laptop. She fell back against her pillow with a sigh. Some things, once broken, can never be put back together, even with the strongest glue.
The day her father left, she lost much more than just a parent. She lost who she was supposed to be. No, he stole it from her. The girl she was. The woman she was meant to grow into. Her very identity robbed. Scientists have studied lab mice and how they raise their young, measured the success rates of mothered mice. Those cubs that were un-licked, uncared-for, and unloved turned into timid adults. Anxiety prone, weak, and sickly creatures that made less love and died short, sad lives. A life sentence spent cowering in the farthest corner of the cage. That was the fate he left her to. After he was gone she simply grew quiet, folded in on herself, and became adrift in an endless sea of terrible self-loathing thoughts.
The reason why people throw things away is because they no longer hold any value. They become worthless and are soon discarded. “Why can’t you understand this, Mom?” she whispered silently to herself. “Why couldn’t you just accept the truth? We were trash in his eyes.”
She curled up under the covers, too tired to form any more thoughts. Her eyelids grew heavier and heavier until she finally drifted off.
***
Sharon opened her eyes. The black button eyes of her blue teddy bear stared back. But the bear wasn’t back on her bed. The bear was floating, bobbing up and down at her eye level. Sharon shot up, mortified. Her room was filled with water. No. She looked around. She was no longer in her room. She was adrift at sea, her bed swaying with the currents of the oily black water. She grabbed the sides of her bed, holding on with a vice grip. At the foot of her bed, the oil bubbled. Two blood-red basement cellar doors rose to gr
eet her. Sharon gazed back with the stillness and rising terror of a rabbit caught in a wolf’s stare. The doors swung open with a hurricane’s force, revealing pure darkness within.
Sharon peered into the void, motionless, breathless.
Without warning, the entire sea tilted to one side, letting gravity take over as the black water poured into the entrance. Sharon panicked, plunging her hands into the oil and paddling with desperation through the thick muck. A hopeless endeavor. Her bed swept with the racing flow into the void. Sharon flung her arms over her face and screamed. She passed between the blood-red doors. Her scream muffled as the darkness devoured her.
CHAPTER 4
Ripples
BLACK RED CONSUMED THE PURE WHITE. Fresh blood devoured stale snow. The blood stretched out over the stone floor like the veins of a river, beating a path between the cracks, and digesting the top layers of snow with wicked heat. The remaining ice crystals eroded to a ravaged state of deluded red slush. The source of the blood, a man hunched back against the dungeon cell wall clutching to life with all the terror of inevitability.
Eric was dying. His abdomen soaked red and his face drained of color, fading to a ghost white from a night spent bleeding out. He tried focusing his blue eyes, but they remained blurred, his vision turning sickly green and blackening with each failing pulse and deadening heartbeat. The desperation swelled inside Eric as the air grew thick with metallic scent. The odor so overpowering it left the taste of blood on his tongue. Death was coming and Eric could taste him, feel his presence with every inch of his dying flesh. His very bones ached with the sheer indescribable horror of void. And he could do nothing. Nothing but cling desperately to consciousness in a halo of moonlight while snow blanketed his limp body, sprinkling in through the opening of a barred window. His thick unkempt black beard bristled with sharp ice and his animal fur garments bleaching white from the cruel hail.
The devil does not reside in a lake of fire, Eric theorized, but a beach of ice.
Eric was numb to the pain now, the cold stealing the warmth from his insides and sapping the strength from his legs. He wanted to run but could not will his knees to bend. He wanted to scream out at the top of his lungs, nothing but a wheezing gasp of white breath escaped his lips before dying back into silence. Silence. He was dying in absolute silence. Disappearing into perfect maddening quiet. And worst of all he was dying alone. Or so Eric believed.
A woman’s voice, mysterious and full of age, echoed out—murdering the dead air. The voice jolted Eric back to clarity, back from the depths of no return. “Our deeds are like ripples in the water, bending and distorting the entire pond. Forever changed by these ripples, what once remained of the pond then slowly slips into the sea of distant memories. In my time, I’ve witnessed many ripples, Westerner, most from despicable men. Mothers were not meant to outlive their children. Sons were not meant to die meaningless deaths. An empty war gaining nothing but empty tears. The pond has become... cold.”
Did the voice belong to another prisoner? Eric’s mind raced to find the answer. The voice is feminine beyond doubt. That excludes the guards. They’re all Northerners, brutish men with heads full of drink and little else, who are nowhere near as clear and soft spoken as this woman. Perhaps she’s another tribal leader being held captive for information or ransom, left to bleed out in the cold from drunken negligence like me. But from which tribe? Surely not his own, the Western tribes, for as a sitting member he knew all the heads of council personally. The South and East were long since conquered and assimilated by the North. And Eric never knew a Northern woman to speak let alone give speeches. Even the most honorable Northern men, who considered the womb sacred and held life-bringers in high regards, were not above silencing vocally defiant women. With their fists if necessary. Would they go so far to lock up one of their own for speaking out against the war?
He glanced up at a small brick-shaped hole in the dividing cell wall on his right side. Too small to squeeze one’s body through but just large enough to pass a note or tiny trinket on to the other side.
The shadows and light shifted inside the other cell.
His suspicions were dead-on. The woman was in the cell next to him. And, more importantly, he could reach her.
“You must forgive the ranting of an old woman. I just feel the need to bare the soul... to say my peace before the cold air—” The old woman’s own chattering teeth cut herself short. The cold breeze died and she regained control of her shaking body. “—takes me home to my children. You’re too quiet. Are you still alive, Westerner? Or am I exchanging small talk with a corpse?”
Eric tried to answer, to vocalize a simple yes, but something else slipped out. “Are you afraid of dying?”
“I’ve lived too long already. Besides I would welcome warmer surroundings. Are you?”
“Terrified,” Eric answered, his voice trembling, the desperation overtaking his senses as he patted down his waist in search of his salvation. Though what exactly he was searching for he was no longer sure. He moved on pure instinct now. His thoughts vague and dreamlike, flowing from subject to subject. His mind reflected on a fun-house mirror. And worse still, there were gaps in his memory, the last few days were as blank as the final pages in an unfinished book.
He lifted his hand to his face but only frozen blood rested in his palm. He tried again, this time patting his chest. Crumpling paper alerted his ears and snapped his mind back to focus.
He pulled a sheet of paper out, unfolded it, and stared back at an illustration of three circles. One red, one blue, and a final smaller black one intertwined with the others. Odd symbols were sketched around the three circles. The all-seeing-eye, the black sun, the white flower, and the human skull.
Eric remembered now. This paper had been his reward for rescuing that boy from the snow a few nights ago. The ritual page.
He recalled Able’s instructions and planned his next step of action carefully. “Is it all right if I ask a favor of you?” His voice now steadfast and calculating.
“What is it you want me to do, Westerner?”
Eric grimaced from the pain as he plunged his index finger deep into his gaping stomach wound. The finger came out drenched in warm dripping blood. He dragged his finger along the floor—like a piece of chalk—drawing a small bloody circle in front of his feet and a larger one around his body. He refolded the ritual page and slid it through the hole.
An old wrinkled hand with loose frostbitten skin took the ritual page.
“Draw the bottom blue circle around your body,” he instructed her.
“These markings are foreign to me.” Her voice hesitant. “What are they for?”
Eric’s eyes scanned for an answer. Suddenly, his eyes jolted to a stopped. Foreign? That’s right, she called me a Westerner. Those of the Western tribes just refer to one another as brother or sister. So, she is a Northerner. Deceiving her will take little effort.
“A Western prayer ritual of last rites,” he lied. “Please, I cannot pass into the next life unless you assist me.”
Stone scraped stone, shrieking out like nails on a chalkboard as the old woman carved out the circle on the stone floor. Once finished she slid back the ritual page.
Eric snatched it up without a moment’s waver.
“It’s complete, now what do you want me to do?” she asked.
“Forgive me.” He pressed his palm against his stomach—soaking it red like an ink stamp—and slammed his bloody hand into the center of the circle before him.
The circle lit up with blinding hellish red light. The magic roared like an uncontrollable flame with dark intent.
A flash of lightning struck, illuminating the room.
His hair whipped across his face as the dead air resurrected itself into a terrible twister, engulfing him and hurling the fallen snow into the wind. Shielding his eyes with his forearm, he glanced back at the small hole.
Blue light shined through from the other side, like an ocean that swallowed up the moon
reflecting its glow in translucent waves of shifting light. But it was just for a moment though as red light cracked through, consuming the blue with the hunger of a disease, infecting every ray and inhaling its beauty the way dragons breathe fire.
And when the red took control the old woman screamed a deafening cry. Her cry echoed through Eric’s cell and drowned his eardrums with pain.
He cupped his ears and curled up into a ball, shielding himself from the onslaught.
Then, without warning, the screaming stopped. The light spectacle went dim and shriveled back into the shadows. The wind died.
He raised his head and saw two bright glowing crystals, one blue and one red, appear within the blood painted circle before him. They sparked into existence like the birth of a phantom’s lantern in the dead of night. For a moment, he stared unbelieving, still and thoughtless. As if they were as unattainable as two dying stars shining a thousand galaxies away. But this wasn’t fantasy nor trickery of the mind. They were real. Able’s story was true.
Eric reached forward the way a child stretches out their hand to pluck the sun from the sky, disbelieving and naively hopeful all at once. He stopped midway before touching the crystals and shifted his gaze back to the hole. What of the old woman? He peered into the other cell for endless seconds, watching for the movement of shadows, listening for the rustle of feet and the faint panting of breath. Nothing. He almost turned away when he caught something in the corner of his vision.
A silk cloth—set ablaze with moonlight—flowed with the wind.
The Crow Behind the Mirror_Book One of the Mirror Wars Page 3
