Phantasm

by Phaedra Weldon

  “You know both of those guys are in love with you,” Jemmy said in a quiet voice. She was in the botanica side, standing by the fireplace. She was east. The communicator. The mediator. Even her dress was a sunflower yellow.

  I didn’t answer her and simply moved to stand in the center of the pentagram. I didn’t need any of that just then. And I appreciated everything that Dags had done for me. Really. How he’d stuck by me. And Joe—he was someone I could count on when I needed him. When he didn’t disappear.

  But if I had to follow my own heart, it was with Daniel.

  I looked at Jemmy. “I love Daniel.”

  She smiled at me. “Love is hell, Zoetrope.”

  I nodded. Yeah, it was.

  And then I spread my arms wide and allowed the shadows creeping along the corners of the room to lengthen and swallow me whole.

  29

  I’M not sure what divine being thought that this was the life I had ordered. It was not. And like any good consumer, I really wanted to find the customer-service window and make a complaint. Only—life didn’t have a complaint person. Oh, there were prayers, like at Mass when my mom used to pray about better things because she hated the life she had.

  And I used to sit there, kneeling on the tattered bench beneath the pew in front of us, my head down, listening to her. Mom never prayed quietly. It was like she wanted everyone around her to know how miserable she was. How she was stuck with a child and a job that gave her no respect.

  Talk about guilt. But that was what religion was all about to me back then. Feeling guilty. Guilty because of sin. Guilty because I cost my mom so much money. Guilty because I talked to things and people that weren’t there. Guilty because babysitters and kindergarten teachers alike called me weird and smart-mouthed. Guilty because they all told me I was the devil’s child. I was full of sin.

  Guilty because I was born in sin.

  But the truth was—I wasn’t born in sin. My birth itself was an accident. Had to be. My dad was technically dead—a Traveler without a body—and yet he’d made himself corporeal for my mom and fathered a child. The child of a human and a—

  What exactly was my daddy? An Irin?

  That was what was in my head as I stepped through the veil—border—whatever—and into the Abysmal plane.

  I thought for a minute I’d made a wrong turn. This did not look like the same plane I’d bebopped through before with Dags. That plane had had fields of flowers, farmlands, nice cottages, and even a blue sky.

  The place I stepped into looked like the back alley in any industrial city in the world. The sky was soot black, no stars visible at all. Not even the usual electric glow that was present in most metropolises. The alley’s walls were high, but I could just see what looked like TV antennas strung over the buildings’ roofs. The sides were brick—but not like any brick I’d ever seen. As I neared the wall to my right, I thought I saw—

  “What the fuck are you look’n at?”

  I screamed like a girl with pigtails as I jumped back. The damned brick had talked to me! My hands to my mouth, I looked again in the dim light—and that’s when I realized the light was coming from me.

  I looked down and realized my entire appearance had changed.

  Significantly.

  I had my bunny slippers on again, and they looked happy. I was all in my usual black, but there was an eerie glow to every inch of me. And I was somehow not quite on the ground.

  “Hey . . . what the fuck are you?”

  I looked back at the brick. There was a face there, with two beady eyes, a pointy nose, and puckered lips. “Me? Who or what the fuck are you?”

  “I’m asking the questions here,” the little face said.

  “Shut up, Bane. No one’s listening to you. Can’t you just let us get some sleep?” said another brick, about six bricks up and to the right of Bane.

  “No one’s asking you, Dickhead,” Bane said back. “We got another one of those damned traveling muckety-mucks in here again. Damned things keep coming and going, waking us up.”

  “Another one?” I narrowed my eyes at the one called Bane. If I put my imagination to use, it almost looked like my old fifth-grade social studies teacher, Mr. Haverty. He looked all scrunchy and ill-tempered too. It was easier to think that I was talking to him rather than some possessed brick on the side of a building in the Abysmal plane.

  Know what I mean?

  “Yeah, you’re the second one that’s showed up here—and that last guy was ill-tempered.”

  “He wasn’t as much of an ass as you, Bane,” Dickhead quipped.

  “Shaddup,” Bane said. “It was the girl’s screams that really made me mad.”

  Girl’s screams. Shit. That was Rhonda. “Did you see which way they went?”

  “Out. That’s all I know. I yelled at them to get out. The guy ignored me, and I was kinda glad. He seemed not right in the head.”

  Uh-huh. A brick called someone not right in the head.

  Hrm.

  Dickhead started making sniffing noises. “Hey, you’ve had sex.”

  I moved back. “What?”

  “Yeah—you smell like sex. Wasn’t with that guy with the girl, though. He smelled like sex too. Lots of sex, but it wasn’t what’s on you. You got something else smelling on you.”

  “She’s got some o’ that Ethereal smell. All funky and weird,” Bane said.

  “I remember sex,” said another brick to my left, whose face looked more like a young woman’s. “I loved sex.”

  “Sex is magic,” said a fourth brick down below near my knees. This one looked Asian. “Sex Magic. You know you can bind people to you with sex.”

  I sighed. “Just drop the sex, okay? If that guy left here, which way did he go after that?”

  The Asian said, “You smell like Symbiont. You’ve had sex with a Symbiont? Can they do that?”

  “I don’t think it’s in the rules,” Bane said. “But then I’ve been here a long time. I think the Phanty has forgotten about me.”

  Phanty? “You mean the Phantasm—”

  “SSHHHHHH!” all of them said. Sounded like a tire on a tractor trailer losing air, it was so loud. Bane spoke in a whisper. “You want him to hear?”

  “Hear?” I leaned in close. “He can hear if I say his name?”

  The brick nodded, which was kinda weird to see. It sniffed. “You do smell like Symbiont. But there’s something else about you—something familiar. It’s just been so long.”

  I moved back and looked at the wall, and if I looked carefully, I could just make out lots of faces on the bricks. Not on all of them, but on most. “Why are all of you bricks on a wall? Were you ever alive or living?”

  “Alive?” Dickhead said.

  “It means had a soul,” the Asian said. “Some of us. Some have never transmigrated because of the border breakdowns.”

  Border breakdowns. “You mean the Watchers?”

  “No Watchers, no movement.”

  Oh. Great. Something else to feel guilty about. Because there were no Irin these—brickheads—were just hanging out, slowly becoming bricks?

  Alice, meet Wonderland.

  “I’m sorry about that, but is there someone else or something else I can talk to about finding this guy who came in with the screaming girl?”

  All of them went quiet—and the silence was deafening. “Hello?”

  Nothing. Not a peep.

  Oh bother. I looked around a bit more and saw an opening several feet to my right. With a sigh I moved toward that opening. At first I thought it might really go Alice in Wonderland, and the opening to the alley would keep growing farther away.

  But I reached it and found myself on a dirty street. There were streetlights—sort of—though more like really big glass jars hanging from metal poles. I nearly yelled out loud when I found myself floating easily up to take a closer look at one of the jars.

  And wished I hadn’t.

  I thought at first it was a jar of fireflies. Er . . . nope. Not bugs
. Inside—flitting about—were bits and pieces of what looked like people. And each piece would actually morph into another body part as it moved and floated in some sort of viscous, greenish liquid. They bounced against the glass, and when that happened, they flared a bit brighter in green, so the lamp itself was always flickering.

  Kinda like really spooky firelight.

  I floated back to the ground—well, sort of above the ground. I wasn’t exactly touching it with my bunny slippers. I looked down again at my slippers—Did they have fangs before?

  I noticed the ground beneath them. Looked like wet asphalt. Wet, dirty asphalt. Wet, dirty asphalt that sort of moved and rippled as I floated over it. I was thinking I was floating because if I actually stepped on the ground, it would eat me.

  Looking forward seemed the better thing to do so I did—though the view wasn’t much better. There were darkened storefronts with boarded-up windows. Aging signs in just about every language there was. Torn, dirty, aged awnings whose colors had faded were still draped over some of the windows. But even as I continued down this road, I started thinking this was the back end of the Abysmal. That the Daniel Horror had used a lesser-known back alley to get in.

  Why is that? Or is it just where Mom’s shop is in relation to the Abysmal?

  Not exactly a nice thing to imagine. And why was everything so different than what it’d been before? Was it that perception thing? That before I was more Abysmal than Ethereal, so I saw things through Abysmal eyes? And if that’s so, then by looking at things through Ethereal eyes was I seeing the truth? Or just truth from what an Ethereal being believed the Abysmal to be?

  Okay—that kind of thinking hurt my head worse than brain freeze. I decided concentrating on finding Daniel, Rhonda, Mom, and TC was what I should do.

  So—where? I paused at an intersection. There were traffic lights. They were all red. And as I watched, they remained red. Never green. Or even a little bit of yellow. Just red.

  And then—just there on the edges of my hearing, I thought there was a scream. A familiar scream. Something fluttered inside my chest, and I was drawn to the left. But why? Is it me being drawn to TC? Or to Rhonda? Mom?

  AAHHHHH.

  Mental note: Need Abysmal guidebook. Could sell to Plane—

  Wow . . . I just had a mental note.

  When was the last time I had any kind of note, much less a mental one?

  I took that as a sign that I was getting back to my old self. Whatever that might be. So let’s see—Jemmy had said that things that shouldn’t be here would fester, like a thorn in the skin. So Rhonda and Mom were like thorns.

  Okay, I had to laugh at that one ’cause you know I’d always thought of both of them as thorns in MY side.

  But enough kidding around. I looked to the left and figured that way was TC. That had to be the tug. So I’d need to tune in to the Abysmal plane and imagine what a sore would feel like—

  Ouch! And there it was. In front of me—something was just wrong. Kind of like chewing tinfoil with metal fillings.

  I shivered.

  If I concentrated on it, the feeling grew stronger. I also found myself rising above the buildings, higher to where there were antennas strung together everywhere. I could see windows glowing with green light but nobody inside. Were they all bricks?

  And then I was still, a figure floating above a comic-book city at night. I heard the beat of wings, and with a last-minute realization, I knew those wings were mine. And they were behind me. And I was going to freak out.

  I had wings.

  I HAD WINGS!

  But hadn’t someone else said I had wings?

  No time for mirrors and vanity right now. I moved forward toward the bad area. The closer I got, the more dense the buildings became, the more intense the light. It moved from being a dark green to a light mint, to a burning white as I neared what looked like the capital city of Abysmal.

  And whaddya know. It looked just like downtown anywhere, USA.

  Why was I not surprised? All generic.

  From my vantage point there was a central square—or rather a gathering where several streets came together. There was traffic—a lot of it. And there were cars and buses and trains running on aboveground tracks. To any eye this looked like a major city at night.

  But for me—there was something wrong with it. From up there I couldn’t decide what that was. I looked out past the city and its sprawl, searching for the fields I’d seen before. But all I could make out in the gloom were miles and miles of dark forests. And from those lands I could see things moving and writhing.

  The feeling of wrong came again, and this time it was to the right of the city’s center. I dove toward it, easily slipping between the buildings, gliding as if I’d always had wings. Which wasn’t true as far as I knew.

  But this sure beat taking the bus!

  And speaking of buses, there was one now. Only as I passed by, I couldn’t see any people on it. The interior was well lit, but nothing. In fact . . .

  I moved down closer to the ground, to the train, and kept up with it. Looking through the windows there was no one there. Nothing. Not even a drunk asleep in a chair.

  Where are all the people? The souls or creatures that make up the Abysmal? There can’t just be talking bricks.

  Can there?

  A scream pierced the relative quiet of the night and I dove in its direction. I had my hands to my sides like a bullet. The sound and feeling led me to a small intersection—not as dimly lit as the first one I’d seen—and nowhere near as well lit as the middle of town. There were no cars. Nothing. And the storefronts were all closed but not boarded-up.

  I eased down feetfirst, still not coming to a complete stop on the ground but just above it. I was on one corner, a closed, darkened shop behind me with CHINESE KANJI across the top. To my left was a trash can and to my right a U.S. postal box.

  Huh?

  “So like the Ethereal,” came an all-too-familiar voice. “A cut above those of us who dwell here in the darker regions of life. Always thinking yourselves better than us.”

  I turned and faced the opposing corner.

  Daniel stood facing me, his hands at his sides. I didn’t see Rhonda, nor could I sense her. Though I was beginning to suspect there was a lot here that I wasn’t seeing.

  I could see Daniel clear enough, as well as something else superimposed on him. It was like a ghost image—and moved like an overlay of some sort. Was that the Horror? My heart lurched a bit when I saw his clothes—the holes torn through the shirt and pants. I knew the bullets had been pushed out by unworldly means—but what about the damage inside of him?

  What about that? Or mentally? Is Daniel himself still there, or is it only the Horror possessing him?

  I cleared my throat. “Better than you?”

  He pointed at me. “Never let your feet touch the ground here, do you?”

  I ignored that. “Daniel—please—you have to tell me where Rhonda is. She can’t survive here—neither can you for very long. I don’t know if it’s the Horror protecting you physically or what—”

  “It’s you that can’t survive here, Irin.” Daniel sneered at me. “You’re not supposed to be here. And in a few minutes it won’t matter.” He gave me a wide, devilish smile. “Once your body dies, and your ties to your soul are cut, you’ll vanish. You’ll be nothing but a lousy Irin Ethereal failure—just like your father was.”

  On one level I knew this wasn’t really Daniel talking. But on a superficial level I was letting him get under my skin. I had to believe that the nasty Daniel was the Horror. Had been the Horror all along. And that once I got it out of him, he’d go back to being nice Daniel, and we could finally do some serious talking together.

  ’Cause I had no doubt this experience wasn’t something he was going to dismiss that easily.

  I had opened my mouth to yell back at him when something pulsed inside of my chest. I felt a yank—a painful one—as if something had ahold of my heart and had squeezed
it. I lowered a bit, and bent forward, my right hand going to my chest. What—what the hell was that?

  “You feel that, Irin? That was my influence in the physical world. You’re put together with life support—your body breathing from tubes, pumping blood by artificial means. Your living body can’t survive without you in it for very long. And like this.” He held up his hands. “Ethereal—it’s almost as good as killing you while in your body.”

  This was what Jemmy had warned Joe about. Was it possible the Horror—no the Phantasm—was manipulating Society idiots to disconnect my body from life support? Is Mastiff there? Defending me? Is he getting overwhelmed?

  What the hell is happening? I didn’t dare go near my body or take a peek—if I had gone in, I doubted I’d have been able to get back out for a while.

  Again the tug on my heart, and I hissed.

  Within seconds, Daniel was no longer across the street but standing right in front of me. I was still half-bent forward and looked up at him through my eyebrows. “Daniel, please . . . don’t do this.”

  He gave me an almost Halloran-like smirk and leaned down to be even with my face. “You don’t get it, do you? Daniel’s dead, Zo-E-TrO-pah! He’s been dead since the minute the Phantasm snatched your Abysmal ability away from you.” He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “And then I was born—such a better creature than his first Horror—don’t you think?”

  The pain continued inside my chest. What the hell is happening back in the physcial plane? Oh, how I hated this—with no communication. And the pull and tug of TC was even greater than it had been. As if he sensed something was wrong and wanted to unite now.

  “Oh, and by the way.” Daniel straightened up, and all I could see was his shoes. They were bloodstained and muddied. He was standing on the Abysmal asphalt, and it hardened and remained solid for him. “I already know about your little plan to get me back into the physical world and slap that Eidolon on me. There is no way in hell I’m going back there—this body can just dissolve until the soul still in its DNA turns to shadow, and all that’s left is me.”