by Heidi Lang
Rae nodded. “Good on your mom.”
Caden blinked. “You don’t think that’s weird?”
She shrugged. “It’s probably one of the least weird things I’ve heard since I moved to this bizarro town. So. You want to look at your mom’s spell book. But I’m guessing you’re not supposed to?”
“Right. No one is allowed to look at it except her. But I think it can help us. Because I think that whatever chased us through the woods, whatever is taking these eyes, it’s not human. Not entirely.”
Rae nodded.
“That doesn’t surprise you?”
“I talked to Jasmine Green earlier today, the one who saw the eye snatcher without, you know, losing her eyes.” She stopped, and Caden knew she was thinking about Brandi. “Anyhow,” she continued, her voice a little rough, “she told me the eye snatcher wasn’t human. And I know there are things around that don’t belong on our world.” She looked away, her face impossible to read, her emotions a strange jumble. “So, where do we look for this book?”
Caden took the hint and didn’t pry. “This way,” he said, leading her down the hall to his mother’s study. He opened the door quietly. The air inside felt cool and still, almost like walking inside a crypt. “Bad analogy,” he muttered.
“What?” Rae asked.
“Nothing.” He took a step over the line of purple chalk his mom had drawn on the floor in front of her door, and immediately the hairs on his arms prickled. Another step, and a creeping sense of dread wrapped around him, the feeling that something nameless and terrible would happen if he didn’t turn and run.
Aiden wouldn’t have let that stop him, so neither could he.
Caden closed his eyes, clenched his fists, and took several long, slow breaths, counting four in on the inhale, four out on the exhale.
The urge to flee slowly faded into a dull, ignorable ache. Caden opened his eyes and took a third step inside. He turned back to Rae, frozen in the doorway.
“It’s not real,” he said.
Her teeth were clenched, her body trembling.
“Push through it,” he coaxed. “Left foot.”
Slowly, like she was fighting gravity, Rae lifted her left foot and stepped inside.
“Right foot,” Caden instructed.
Rae eased her other foot in, then took another step on her own to stand next to him. She opened her eyes. “That was awful!”
“That was just a symptom of my mom’s binding chalk,” he said, impressed that she’d followed him through it.
“Wow… No wonder Ms. Lockett doesn’t allow chalk at school.”
Caden laughed. “Let’s get searching.” Rae followed him over to the twin bed tucked in the far corner. The blankets were carefully made, and a small pouch of dried herbs rested on the pillow. Looking at that narrow bed made Caden’s heart ache. Ever since Aiden vanished, his mom had started spending more and more time in here, sometimes even staying all night. It was yet more proof that his parents were drifting further apart.
He let his eyes glide over to the nightstand beside it, where his mom kept her tarot deck in a special cedar box next to a single large black candle.
Rae opened the nightstand drawer carefully, like she was afraid something would leap out at her. Inside were a few dried petals, several pages of notes, and a folded pocketknife with a white bone handle. Caden remembered that knife; his mom had used it to cut herself the night she’d cast her summoning spell.
Shuddering, Caden left Rae and moved on to the closet, which was mostly empty. His mom only had her work dresses hung up here, the ones she wore when she really wanted to look the part, all long flowing skirts and bright colors. On the shelf above them was a small stack of folded blankets, but again, no book.
He caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned, noticing the tall mirror lurking next to his mother’s dresser. It looked innocently clear now, but he remembered the silhouette stretching from it, the sound of Aiden’s laughter… He heard Rae saying she’d check under the bed, but all of his attention was focused on that length of glass. He walked over and stood in front of it.
At first, he just saw himself, his eyes wide and anxious, lips pressed in a thin line. And then his face wavered, shifting, and it was Aiden smirking back at him.
Caden gasped.
“Look at you. I’m gone for less than a year, and you’re already breaking into Mom’s private study and sneaking girls into the house.” Aiden grinned. “I’ve gotta admit, I’m a little impressed. I didn’t think you had it in you.” His grin dropped. “But then again, I didn’t think you’d ever betray me, either.”
“Look, Aiden,” Caden began. He glanced back at Rae, but she was still half under the bed and didn’t seem like she’d notice him talking to a mirror. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t want—”
“Oh, stop. Poor sensitive little Caden, wracked with guilt. I don’t want your apologies.”
“Then what do you want?”
“Just one simple favor.”
Terror flowed through Caden, black and cold. His brother’s “simple favors” were always anything but. “W-what is it?”
“I need you to reopen the rift and let me out.”
“Let you…” Caden stared into the mirror at his brother’s face. He looked different, his cheeks gaunt, hair hanging long and dirty. And his eyes had a wild, half-crazed look to them, darting this way and that, like he couldn’t let them rest on any one place for long. “Are you alive?”
Aiden laughed, a harsh, awful sound. “If you can call it that.” He shuddered. “If you help me escape, I’ll forgive your betrayal.”
Aiden had never forgiven anything or anyone in his life. He’d changed in there. “How?” Caden asked.
“The book. Which your pretty little friend is about to discover for you.”
Caden turned. Now Rae was kneeling in front of the dresser, checking each of the drawers. “Are you done talking to your reflection over there?” she asked, not looking up.
Caden’s cheeks burned. Clearly Rae couldn’t see Aiden. “It’s not, I mean—” he began.
“Check this out,” Rae continued, ignoring his sputtering. “I think there’s a hidden compartment in here.” She pulled the bottom drawer out of the dresser and set it to the side. “See, this drawer is not as deep as the others. So that means there’s probably something…” She reached into the space below where the drawer had sat. “Yep, there’s—ahh!” She snatched her hand out and fell back, horrified.
“What? Are you okay?” Caden rushed over. Her hand looked okay to him, but she hadn’t stopped staring at it. “Rae?”
She finally tore her gaze from her fingers. “Whatever’s in there, I’m not touching it again.”
Caden crouched down and peered into the dresser. Underneath where the drawer would sit was a small hollowed-out space, hidden in shadow. He reached inside it, brushing against something hard and rectangular.
A jolt ran through his fingertips, and he jerked his hand back. Then he gritted his teeth and made himself reach in again, his hand closing around a book. It vibrated as if it were a box full of scorpions, and his skin crawled. He pulled the book closer as pain shot through his fingertips, his nails peeling back, the skin splitting.
“Ah!” He dropped the book, and the pain slowly ebbed.
“These are just standard revulsion spells. The effects are all in your head.”
They felt so real. Caden set his jaw and pulled the book out. Blood dripped from his nose, and his ears filled with a horrible dull ache. His teeth loosened in his mouth—he could feel them wiggling—and suddenly they weren’t teeth at all, but maggots burrowing into the rotting flesh of his mouth.
Caden sobbed and almost flung the book away.
“Stop being a baby.” Aiden’s scorn cut through the awful sensations of their mother’s spell, and Caden managed to set the book in his lap, but he still couldn’t open it. His heart was beating too fast and he had the terrible feeling that if he read past the cracke
d leather cover, he would die. His breath came in small, short gasps.
And then slowly the terror faded until it was just background noise. His teeth were just teeth, his fingernails were fine, and he wasn’t about to die. He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, grimacing. That had to have been one of the worst sensations he’d ever experienced.
“Are you all right?” Rae knelt next to him, her concern wrapping around him like a much-needed hug.
“Never better,” he croaked.
“You really scared me! I didn’t know what to do.”
He let out a short, humorless laugh. “I scared me too. But it worked. Here it is.”
“Are you sure that’s the right book?” Rae asked.
It looked simple enough, with a plain black cover, slightly battered, the pages stuffed full of notes and serrated along the sides, but it felt terrible.
People’s emotions tended to bleed into the objects they used a lot, especially if they used them while feeling something very strongly. But with his mother’s Book of Shadows, it was the other way around. It carried its own energy, and he knew if he held it long enough, it would mix with his own essence like honey in his dad’s favorite tea. Only there was nothing sweet about the emotions emanating out of these pages.
“I’m sure,” Caden said dryly. He opened the cover, then flipped through the pages, letting intuition guide his fingers. Every available space was taken up by scribbled notes, diagrams, spells, recipes, and stories. There wasn’t any kind of organization that he could see. Not at first.
And then he realized that most of the pages referenced something called “the Other Place.” He read a description:
The Other Place sits below our dimension, throbbing like a diseased heart. A wrong place, full of the Devourers, the Ravenous, the Unseeing, all feeding on our fears. And because fear is powerful, there is great potential for those who dare to cross its boundary.
But for every crossover, there is a price.
Blood opens and blood closes. A sacrifice given and taken.
“What’s ‘the Other Place’?” Rae asked, reading over his shoulder.
Caden pictured the world his brother had fallen into. “It’s a horrible alternate dimension, full of monsters and tentacles, and this awful light.” He waited for Rae’s reaction.
“Who named it?”
“I don’t know.”
“They couldn’t have come up with something more imaginative than the Other Place?” Rae shook her head.
“You’re not, like, freaked out right now?” Caden asked.
“Oh, I’m totally freaked out.” She sat down next to him, and he couldn’t help noticing the way her shoulder bumped his.
He tried ignoring it as he turned the page, then stopped, caught by a drawing of a woman with her mouth open in a silent scream, hands pressed to her cheeks, fingernails long and ragged as they raked bloody lines through the skin where her eyes should have been.
“Whoa, what’s that?” Rae asked.
“I don’t know, but it looks… sort of familiar.” He looked at the page next to it, where a story had been written in careful handwriting. “ ‘Birth of the Unseeing,’ ” he read.
“Sounds promising.”
“ ‘Long ago,’ ” Caden continued reading, “ ‘when giants roamed the earth and man knew how to harness the power of starlight, when ice stretched from coast to coast and the warmth of the sun was a distant dream, there lived a man with hair the pale gold of dawn’s first light, and eyes the winter blue of the sky. But though he was lovely to look upon, beneath his beauty lay a cold, calculating cruelty, as harsh as the landscape he dwelt upon.’ ”
“Why is a fairy tale in your mom’s spell book?” Rae asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, read the rest and see if it says.”
Caden skimmed the rest of the story. “The man was eventually cast out of his village, and then he roamed the frozen landscape until he fell in love with a beautiful woman who did not love him back. So he blinded her and abandoned her in the wilderness.”
“Sounds like a real charmer,” Rae said.
“Don’t worry, the girl’s aunt gets revenge,” Caden said.
“Good. Read me that part.”
Caden smiled. “ ‘Her aunt was not an ordinary woman but a powerful witch, although she had cast no spells in years. In her despair and rage, she tracked down the evil man and cursed him thusly: that he would live out an eternity in darkness, never to see out of his own eyes again.
“ ‘But the aunt had forgotten the first rule of witchcraft: any curse cast upon another will turn upon the caster threefold. The man lost his own eyes, but gained the ability to steal the eyes of others. And so, though he was doomed to wander for eternity in darkness, he never wandered alone.
“ ‘And thus the first Unseeing was born.’ ”
“Creepy,” Rae said. She frowned. “Is that what we’re looking for, then? Some kind of cursed person?”
“I don’t think so. These stories are probably more like metaphors.” Caden flipped through more pages. He saw a drawing of one of the tentacled things that had attacked his brother, and more stories. In fact, it looked like most of his mom’s Book of Shadows was about that dimension.
His mom knew about the Other Place this whole time. Which meant she knew exactly where Aiden was. So why hadn’t she tried to reopen the rift?
“Blood opens and blood closes,” Caden recited. “A sacrifice given and taken.”
“Um, Caden?” Rae said, her anxiety cutting through his shields.
He blinked, tearing his gaze from the pages of the book in his lap. The room seemed darker and colder, shadows gathering along the edges of the walls and slowly thickening, twining out like the vines of some night-blooming plant.
“The mirror,” she gasped. Its surface rippled like a lake on a windy day, flashes of yellow and green swirling up before disappearing into its depths. A shadow grew in the center, elongating, becoming the outline of a person, solidifying into Aiden’s familiar face. He seemed somehow more real than his reflection before. And clearly, Rae could see him now too.
“Stop wasting your time on stories,” Aiden said. “You need to find the ritual.” His eyes lit up with the same eerie yellowish glow as in the Other Place, and the pages of the book began flipping rapidly.
Rae put her hands over her mouth and inched away.
“We can’t reopen the rift here. You need somewhere with lots of negative energy,” Aiden said, and Caden wondered if Rae could hear him now as well as see him. “But we can find another place—” The pages stopped flipping, and Caden stared at the crease in between where a sliver of torn paper poked out.
Something had been ripped out of the book.
“No,” Aiden gasped. He looked up from the book, meeting Caden’s gaze. “I’ll just have to talk you through it and—”
Tentacles burst forth from the mirror behind Aiden, cocooning him in their slimy grasp. He flailed against them. “Not yet! I still need—”
There was a horrible ripping, sucking sound. Aiden screamed, the veins in his face popping, and then he was gone, and the shadows and weird light with him.
“Who,” Rae asked slowly, “was that ?”
“That,” Caden said, “was my brother, Aiden.”
21. RAE
The referee blew one sharp blast on her whistle, and Rae launched herself forward. Her heart thumped in time with her feet as they pounded against the track. She pushed herself, hoping to somehow leave everything she saw the other day behind. She wanted to forget Caden’s brother, trapped behind the mirror. She wanted to forget those tentacles that came out and grabbed him. And she wanted to forget Caden’s explanation of the Other Place, the dimension that lurked beneath their own.
She rounded the first bend, her eyes on the girl in front of her. She could hear Alyssa practically breathing down her neck, but stayed focused on the lines of the track, on lengthening her stride, on the wa
y her breath hitched inside her tightening lungs.
Eight laps. She just had to make it through eight laps. They’d divided up everyone into two groups; the top five from each group automatically made the team. Rae had done a lot of running with her dad, but never on a track. Still, she knew she was fast, and two miles wasn’t that far.
But she should have used her inhaler before this.
By lap seven she was holding on to second place, but just barely. The edges of her vision had gone bright, spots floating in the middle of her eyes. She blinked them away as she started down the eighth lap. Her mouth tasted like blood, and she felt like she was pushing herself through Jell-O, the air growing thicker, holding her back. Alyssa slipped in front of her, her blond ponytail streaming behind her, followed by another girl, Sara, an eighth grader with short brown hair.
Rae tried to speed up as she rounded the next bend. Only one last straight to run, and there was the finish. Her world shrank to the wheezing of her lungs, the slapping of her feet on the track, and one narrow strip of sight. She put on a final burst of speed, passing Sara right before the finish line. Then she bent over and put her hands on her knees, sucking in air in great, wheezing gasps. It felt like she was breathing through a straw that someone had pinched closed.
“Woo-hoo! Way to go, Rae-Rae!” Vivienne ran up to her.
“Third place,” Rae wheezed. “I finished third.”
“Yeah, but considering you look like death, that isn’t bad. Besides, third in any event is high enough to get you on the team.” Vivienne beamed. “Welcome to the Dana S. Roadrunners!”
“You sound like a dying goose,” Alyssa said, trotting over to them.
Vivienne glared at her.
“What, she does! Also, Coach is looking this way.”
