Absence_Whispers and Shadow

by J. B. Forsyth

  She thumped the sides in a fit of pure terror. ‘Help! Get me out of here.’

  Whoever was outside the box heard her, but their response was a rumble of laughter that only doubled her efforts. She drummed the wood harder and kicked the lid with her boots. ‘Get me out… Get me out.’ But she couldn’t keep it up. The heat inside the box would not allow her to sustain such protests and she was soon spent. She went limp and could only pant the fusty air as it settled on her sweaty skin like an itchy blanket. Blood trickled between her skinned fingers and her head began to swim. She realised that if she didn’t calm down she was going to black out. So she closed her eyes and steadied her breathing, trying to remember how she had gotten into the box. But several hot and painful minutes passed and her memory refused to reveal what preceded the blackness she had woken from. So she decided the only sensible course of action was to go Absent and see what was going on outside the box.

  That’s not a good idea. I should just close my eyes and go back to sleep.

  It was a strange thought given the circumstances. She ignored it and began the process of leaving her body anyway. She focused on the splotches of colour behind her eyelids, chasing them and separating them, trying to achieve the mental state that would allow the transition into Absence. But it was no use – this was no warm bed and the level of relaxation needed was a million miles beyond her jittering nerves. Worst of all there was some part of her that seemed to be sabotaging her preparations, causing her to lose focus.

  Sleep… It’ll be better to lie still and sleep.

  She gave up and did feel better. Abandoning her efforts seemed to sooth her nerves, allowing the terror to drain from her body.

  When you wake up again everything will be alright.

  Her head lolled to one side and she closed her eyes, accepting the certainty of the thought. But then, just as she was drifting off it all came back, like a message on glass revealed by a single breath.

  Her uncle was dead.

  And the shadow was in her mind again, trying to get her to lay still and accept what was happening. It had used her unconsciousness to rise to an advantageous position in her mind. And it had been waiting for her to wake up – like a black shadow sitting on a patient’s bed. Her terror turned to rage but when she pushed it away she went unexpectedly into Absence, rising through the wooden lid and into a bright forest. She passed through several layers of thick foliage and turned head over heels to looked back down.

  Striding away beneath her through great swatches of bluebells were three torucks: two carrying the box that contained her body and another leading them through the trees. The box was black, wider at one end than the other – the unmistakable shape of a coffin.

  She caught them up and kept pace as she tried to make sense of what was happening. The last thing she remembered now was arriving at Irongate Prison. Everything after that was still hidden in the residual blackness at the back of her mind. She thought and thought as if sheer force of will would be sufficient to penetrate the gloom. But it was only when she started to wonder what might have happened to Kye that she remembered visiting him in his cell.

  She drew up in the branches of a sycamore, in the grip of a dawning dread.

  She had gone to him in Absence and he had seen her…

  And she had…

  …told him her secret!

  She stared after the torucks as the conversation that led to the disclosure came back to her in its entirety. Afterwards she drank soup from a bowl pushed through her cell door. Someone had spiked it and before she could finish the room started spinning and she collapsed to the floor.

  Only one explanation made sense to her: Kye told Ormis about Absence and the Caliste was going to bury her alive. Her uncle had made her promise not to tell anyone their secret, no matter how much she trusted them. But she had broken that promise within two days of his death and now she was suffering the consequences. She thought about the sincerity with which Kye promised to keep her secret and felt his betrayal like a cold hand, twisting her guts.

  As a purifying death for a witch, live burial was an old favourite. She had once witnessed a horrible variation when a young farm hand was buried upside down with his hands tied behind his back. The hole was only deep enough to bury him up to the knees – a sadistic forethought that allowed his lynch mob to watch him kick out his last breaths. For months afterward the boy’s last moments haunted her dreams: the legs of his britches slipping down his pale shins and his loose boot lace whipping around as he peddled the air - the one that came undone while he was running away. The Caliste had officially renounced the dogma and barbarity of their darker days. But they were up to their old tricks again, out here in the woods where no one could see.

  As she stared through the toruck’s broad backs she glimpsed more horrors of her past. She saw the raw writhing body of an old man skinned and salted by the same people who frequented his little candle shop. She saw a keg filled with severed fingers of a hundred villagers accused of harbouring a spirit lure and she heard the screams of a farmer who was fed to his pigs after black roses were found growing on his land.

  All of a sudden she saw the torucks as symbolic of every atrocity born of the Witch Laws and like a meteor of retribution she tore after them. The one holding the top end of the coffin was first in line and she streaked into him, flailing and clawing with five centuries of suppressed indignation. The toruck fell to one knee, dropping his end of the coffin. Her body slid inside, cracking her head so hard she should have felt it in Absence. But she was so incensed it didn’t register at all.

  She turned on the second toruck just as he was dropping his end and drawing his swords. He was looking straight through her, scanning the forest for clues as to what brought his countryman down. She flew at him - a wraithlike battering ram that struck him square in his chest, lifting him from his feet and launching him towards a large maple. He thudded against the trunk with a crack of bones and a rustle of leaves, his swords falling from his hands as all four arms were flung from his sides. He dropped into a heap at the foot of the tree and didn’t move again.

  The sight of his crumpled body doused her temper as affectively as a bucket of cold water thrown over it. She had attacked them in a rage and it should have ended with her feeling better and the torucks continuing on their way; unaware that anything had happened. Instead her violent intention had crossed through the Membrane and one of them was dead.

  She was still staring when she felt a sharp edge against her neck.

  She spun around.

  The first toruck she knocked down was pushing himself to his feet. The coffin lay open and empty before him - a black void in a sash of bluebells. Crouched next to him with her limp body draped over one knee was the third toruck. He had her head tipped back and was holding a blade to the strained white kink of her throat. She had looked upon her dispirited body thousands of times in Absence and except for a few rare occasions it was usually tucked up in bed. This was the first time she had seen it in such imminent peril.

  ‘Little witch,’ he said, his eyes searching the shadowy tangle of forest for what he could never see. He added pressure to the knife and a trickle of blood ran around her neck. ‘I’m going to count to three…and if there’s no life in these bones I’ll open your throat.’

  He began to count. ‘One…’

  She needed time to think.

  ‘…Two.’

  Forced into action she swept into her body, reuniting flesh and soul in one great heave of breath. But before she could even open her eyes the knife was gone from her throat and she was being yanked up by her hair. She screamed. Her hands came up in reflex and grabbed his bunched fist, trying to offload weight from her scalp. There was a moment when she was looking into his dark merciless eyes and then she was spinning around; her legs rising into the air behind her and the ground blurring away. He released her with a roar and she flew on a tangent, thudding to the ground with a sharp expulsion of air.

  She rolled onto
her back and tried to draw breath, but the toruck was already bending over her, pressing his huge knee onto her chest and preventing all but minimal intake of air.

  ‘Izle wants you alive,’ he said bringing his knife into view, ‘but he said nothing about you being in one piece. You killed Rox and I can’t let that go unpunished.’ He gripped her left wrist with a huge callused hand and pulled it out to one side. His knife disappeared from sight and through the sound of birdsong and scent of crushed bluebells she felt it cut her – a bright sensation that took her little finger clean off at the first knuckle. She screamed, but the weight of him allowed only a weak croak to be heard. ‘Next time it’ll be a toss-up between your ears and your nose.’ He touched something greasy to the blood spurting stump of her severed finger and the pain was immense – as if he’d sealed the wound by holding it to a frying pan. She suffered it for several agonising seconds then passed out...

  Here ends Absence Volume I: Whispers and Shadow. Find out what happens to Della and Kye in Absence Volume II: Mist and Shadow