Just as she swung her legs over and dropped down the other side, Bryan cried out.
"Jane, it's––"
She hit the ground and turned, pulling the gun and aiming at the top of the wall. I'm so close to home! she thought, waiting for Bryan to appear, or the shadow, or both of them struggling to reach her first.
Something growled. Bryan shouted, and she heard him dragged down from his hold on the wall, striking the ground hard.
And all that mattered was her dear, dying daughter.
"Bryan, don't give it to him!" she shouted. Then she turned and ran, almost home, nearly there, and behind her on the other side of the wall, following a brief pause, she heard her lover's scream turn into a sickening gurgle as his throat was torn open.
Sorry sorry sorry, she thought, but there was nothing she could do. Bryan would have died anyway, and giving herself just a few more seconds ... surely he'd have wanted that?
Swallowing down the stale, poisonous guilt, she crossed the square, and just as she ducked into the street that led to the block where she lived, glanced back.
A shape was hanging from the top of the wall. Dark, small, and as it dropped into the weak glare of an oil lamp she saw the wizened, wrinkled features of an impossibly old woman.
But when she ran it was with an unnatural athleticism.
Jane braced herself against the wall, lifted the gun, and fired three times. The woman staggered and veered to the left, then tripped over a tree root and fell.
Voices called from elsewhere. A door slammed, a child screamed, and someone else started shouting. Jane ignored them all and kept her eyes on the old, old woman. She was sprawled in the dust, writhing slowly like a wind-up toy reaching the end of its time.
Then she lifted her head and looked directly at Jane. In the half-light she couldn't be sure, but she thought the woman smiled.
She fired one more time and saw the woman's head flip back. Glancing across the square at the wall, knowing that Bryan lay dead beyond, she hurried along the street towards her block, and home.
Franca heard singing, somehow both distant and close, in the same way that her body felt both dreadfully heavy and impossibly light. Her limbs were thin and her body slender, but her bones seemed to drag her down, making every muscle ache. Something within her seemed so wispy and airy that in her fleeting moments of wakefulness she thought she might fly away.
Like tonight.
Her eyes fluttered open in the dark. Damp with sweat, chilly with fever, she blinked several times, trying to focus. Her thoughts blurred along with her vision and she wondered if she might be dreaming—must be dreaming, because in a splash of moonlight in the corner of the room stood her mother, staring at her, whispering something that sounded almost like a song.
Oh, my darling, my baby girl, my beautiful sweetheart. Oh, Franca, I’m sorry, so sorry. I never should have left you but I’m back now, Mama’s home, and I will make you well. You know I’d do anything for you, even give my own life. Oh, my darling, I’m sorry.
“Mama,” Franca whispered, or thought she did. Had her lips moved? Had any sound emerged? She wasn’t sure.
The little girl closed her eyes again. Fever, she thought. I’m dreaming.
I’m dying.
A hand on her arm. The touch alone hurt her. She took a sharp breath, thinking she might have stopped breathing altogether and only that touch—the pain of contact—had brought her back to life. I could have died in my sleep. That wouldn’t have been so bad. Better than the pain.
Her eyes opened. The blurry silhouette above her couldn’t have been her mother. Mama was away. Away, as she so often was. Something heavy lay on the bed beside Franca and she let her head loll, glancing down to see the dark shape of her mother’s valise. Her chest clutched, breath rattling with phlegm, and she struggled not to cough because coughing sent spikes of pain through her and made her cry. She didn’t want to cry in a dream.
“My love,” her mother said.
Franca had no breath to reply.
Her mama reached into the valise and drew out something wrapped in thick cloth, gray in the moonlit room. Hurriedly, her hands trembling, she slipped the cloth away and revealed the strange piece of pottery within. Franca wheezed and began to cough, and her mother said no, no, stay with me darling, as pain lanced through her chest and the phlegm rattled and tears came to her eyes. Her vision went dark and for a moment she saw nothing at all.
The stink of her own sickness made the little girl groan in revulsion.
When she opened her eyes again, she saw the jar in her mother’s hands. Ceramic, but ancient. Mama worked with artifacts at the museum. Franca didn’t recognize the symbols on the jar—her mother always tried to teach her things and sometimes she paid attention, but these weren’t like any of the things she’d seen before. She blinked, vision blurring again, and then through the fog she saw that her mother was trying to open the jar, digging her fingernails into the crusty seal around the lid.
Then she saw the thin, black-hooded figure rise in the moonlight beyond her mother.
The figure reached spindly, bloodstained, shaking fingers toward her mother’s shoulder and Franca felt the breath seize in her chest, fear lancing through her where the pain had been and filling her lungs with a scream she could not voice. The hood shifted and she saw the face of the old woman beneath the hood, the ancient woman, a crone with gleaming yellow eyes, like a panther’s. On her forehead was a terrible wound, splintered bone, but she seemed unconcerned.
The hand fell on her mother’s shoulder.
“You must not,” the crone said.
Her mother screamed and flinched away from the clutching hand, and the jar fell from her grasp. It bounced against the edge of Franca’s mattress and then struck the floor with the sort of dry clink that only came from the sound of something cracking.
Breaking.
Franca heard a faint hiss, like a dying gasp, and wrinkled her nose at the peculiar stink that filled her bedroom.
Her mother cried out, but the crone’s hawk-like screech tore through the suffocating air as she batted her mother aside. Franca wheezed, calling for help as Mama struck the wall with a different sort of crack, thicker and wetter, but just as much the sound of something breaking.
The picture frames on the walls began to rattle. The whole room jolted once, so hard that lines threaded the glass of both windows. Franca’s eyes widened, adrenaline surging and focusing her vision as the whole bed quaked beneath her and she felt the world buck. Her hands clutched at the blanket and she mustered a cry.
“Mama!”
Her mother was trying to stand, clutching her chest, one hand on the wall. The floor shook again and she collapsed. She wheezed and coughed. In the moonlight, despite the juddering of the room, Franca saw blood on her mother’s chin.
The crone whirled on Mama, whispering a chant that might have echoed the song that had first woken Franca. But these were not her mother’s words, nor were they full of love. They carried a promise of fury and terror.
The crone swept towards her mother and slammed her into the wall again, hard. Then she slumped to the floor and stared down at the jar. In those old eyes, Franca saw a glimmer of despair beneath the rage.
"Mama," Franca whispered, but Mama did not reply. She sat slumped at the foot of the wall, crying.
"What have you done?" the crone said, but she remained staring at the jar. When she looked up the despair was still there, but so was something else. Resignation.
"Your mother earned this for you," she said as she drew a rusted, gnarled knife from her cloak and drew it across her own throat.
Blood gushed, dark in the faint light. The ancient woman shuddered, dropped the knife, and pressed a hand to her throat. Then she started smearing her own blood onto the jar, staining the symbols and the thick grey seal, and she pressed it along the crack in the jar's side. Gasping, blood bubbling at her throat, she continued to work until her movements slowed and the flow
of blood lessened.
The room stopped shaking.
Franca gasped. For the first time, she realized that the low light in the room came not from the moon but from dawn's early light. She stared at the face half hidden by that black hood, then at the jar, and she saw that the cracks had been sealed with quickly drying crimson lines, blood that was no longer blood but a threaded vein of marbling in the ceramic.
The girl inhaled. She heard the thick, choking voice of her mother and turned to see her trying again to rise to her feet.
“Mama,” Franca said, levering herself up on one elbow and reaching out, sorrow washing over her.
A strange light glittered in her mother’s eyes. Franca thought it seemed like relief. Like happiness. Her mama tried to stand but could not. Something inside her was broken, and only her eyes still held signs of life. And then, as Franca watched, even they were extinguished.
"Take it," the crone said. She was offering the jar in both hands, crouched close to the floor in case she dropped it. Blood bubbled at her throat as she spoke, and the second time there were no real words, only the hiss of air.
The jar slowly rolled from the crone’s hands onto the floor.
Franca was confused and scared and, most of all, desperate not to believe that she had just witnessed her mother's death along with this old woman’s.
But the crone's eyes flickered wide.
And the world began to tear itself apart.
The room had bucked before but now it lurched, shaking so hard that the walls split. The roof dropped, cracked in two. The city seemed to roar outside the broken windows and Franca heard screams. She took a deep breath and slid to the edge of the bed just as it lurched again and threw her to the floor.
The rumble of the earthquake filled her ears as she grabbed the frame of the bed to anchor her, and tried to reach for her mother’s outthrust leg. Mama sat against the wall, silent gaze full of love for her daughter.
The roof caved in. Thick ceiling timbers crashed down upon them all. The crone closed her eyes in that last moment as if in peace, and then the timber struck her, shattering her dry thicket of limbs and crushing her skull.
A timber fell across the bed, slammed the floorboards at an angle and smashed the wood. The bed frame held. Franca lay in the small space beside it, the timber canted above her, as the jar rolled through a pool of her mother’s blood and came to rest in the cradle of her arms as if it belonged there.
If the foreshock had lasted twenty seconds, this bucking, roaring, cracking of the world went on for at least twice that, and felt like eternity. When it eased to a rumble and then ceased altogether, screams and the sounds of chaos continued in the early morning light, and Franca could smell burning.
“Mama?” she whispered, holding the jar to her chest. It felt warm.
There was no reply. She was alone in the room.
But she felt strong.
And with the jar in her arms, a terrible understanding began to dawn.
They walked through the devastated city towards the Library of the Dead, and Neville told her about her mother.
Franca had known what her mother did, but had never understood the depths of her passion. She had grown used to seeing her disappear for days, sometimes weeks at a time, but she had not truly appreciated the reasons behind the absences, and how much each moment they were apart meant that her mother was chasing her dreams harder than ever before. Neville filled in some of the blanks while fires raged and smoke and dust hung heavy in the air, and Franca had never felt so strange.
In a bag slung across her right shoulder she carried her mother's funeral urn. That urn also bore something else, but she was the only one who knew the truth of that. She was the only one who could know. It was danger and wonder, charm and chaos, and even she still did not understand which.
They had talked about it in those days since her mother's and the city's deaths. Neville was glum and mournful, and convinced that the jar had been the bad one. Why else would Jane be dead? How else could this great city still be burning, the ground cracked, aftershocks even now collapsing weakened buildings and sending a terrified populace rushing into the streets once again?
Franca suggested that the jar was the good one. She presented herself as the answer. The fever was gone, infection vanished as if shaken away by the violence of the earthquake. She said that such fortune would not be allowed by the contents of the bad jar, even amidst such chaos.
But in truth, even she did not know.
She had told Neville that the jar had been smashed into fragments, and then burned in the flames that consumed her house and a dozen others mere hours after she saw her mother die. He was devastated at the loss of the artifact, she could see that, but it was not something he could show. Especially to a little girl who had so recently seen her mother killed.
They passed the ruin of a city block, burned to the ground days before and still smoldering. Dogs scavenged within the fallen buildings. The smell of death hung heavy in the air, and groups of rescue workers made their way slowly across the landscape of devastation. Franca paused for a moment and watched, but the weight across her shoulder urged her on.
It needed to be somewhere safe, and secret, and then perhaps she could rest for a while and mourn. But she thought not. Something inside her had changed during those terrible, violent moments. She felt so much more grown up than before, so much older. Perhaps her blood had grown as thick and old as that crone's.
"It's not far now," Neville said.
"Won't they be so busy today?"
"Not really." He was trying to be fatherly, but Franca could see that he didn't really know how to converse with a child. He'd sworn that he would look after her and be her guardian, but though she respected his good intentions, she knew that soon he would leave. Perhaps on another expedition, or maybe back to the museum, buried in the dusty depths where old things lay in shadowed mystery. But that was all right. Franca could look after herself.
"Why not?" she asked. "So many dead. They say hundreds, but it'll be lots more, won't it?"
"I suspect we'll never know how many," Neville answered. "But the Library of the Dead is ... a special place. And you have to be a special person to be interred there."
"And mother was a special person." Tears blurred her vision. She was pleased, because she was still finding it hard to cry.
"She was," Neville said hesitantly. "And also, I know the people who keep the Library. I've known them for a very long time. They granted me the favor."
The urn banged against her hip as they walked. It was far heavier than it should have been.
"I'd like to do it myself," she said.
"Of course. We're almost there."
They saw bodies in the streets, and Neville attempted to shield them from view. After the dozenth corpse he no longer tried. They saw families huddled around fires in metal barrels, people walking with precious water in containers, impromptu stalls selling food in streets among mountains of ruins, weary firemen staring into some hellish distance, policemen looking harried and hopeless. They heard flames and falling things, crying, barking, shouting, and at one point a strangely uplifting sound that Franca thought might have been singing. They smelled fire and death, and the scent of freshly cooking food.
She sensed wretchedness and hope in abundance.
At last they reached the Library of the Dead and saw that it was still standing. Neville stood awkwardly, trying to say a few words but eventually making do with silence. Franca smiled and nodded her thanks, then entered the strange building.
Its shadows welcomed her. The Library's keepers met her, as Neville had told her they would, and told her what to do. Then they left her alone in a room with her urn, and the book-shaped reliquary where her mother's remains would sit out eternity.
Franca opened the urn and stared inside at the contents. The grainy, gritty ashes of her mother softly cradled the jar, its fractured shell tightly sealed by the ancient crone's blood. She
had killed herself to protect its contents, and in doing so prevented a full release of whatever might lie inside. She had also passed on a terrible responsibility to the person closest to the tragedy––Franca. A young girl, now destined to be the guardian of something so amazing, and so dangerous.
When she was finished, Franca would leave this place and emerge once again into the shattered San Francisco daylight. And then her new, long life would begin.
WELLNESS CHECK
A Tale of the Menagerie
by Christopher Golden and Thomas E. Sniegoski
The world smelled—wrong.
Eve tilted her head back in the empty, outdoor seating area in front of Starbucks and took in another lungful of tainted air. She could barely remember a time when it had ever smelled particularly right. Better for sure—cleaner—but this was something altogether different. The wrongness of it all made her teeth itch.
She lifted the black Venti to her mouth and swished the scalding liquid around, allowing herself to feel the burn, a momentary distraction from the sensations she was feeling throughout her body.
Exceptionally sensitive to deviations in the ether, Eve was surprised to see that others of a less preternatural nature also seemed aware of the wrongness. She could see it in the way the people of Boston interacted, the shortness of their tempers, the avoidance of physical contact, the distractedness in their gazes as they went about their business.
They were feeling it too, but they didn’t know what it was, and would probably be driven to madness if they did.
They had no idea the Demogorgon was coming.
Mr. Doyle had explained it in metaphysical terms, as had Sweetblood the Mage. But Doyle and Sanguedolce were just talking to hear themselves talk. If she’d ever met two people who hated to admit when they didn’t understand something, it was the two of them. Mostly, Eve knew the Demogorgon was huge—cosmic-level big—and that it approached now from the dark edge of the universe, out where the light of the farthest star could not reach.
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