by Scott Hale
“Yeah, but look where we are.” Aeson threw up his arms. “This shouldn’t even be an option.”
“You should have died. Vrana should have died. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve dodged death in battles and brawls. I’m not sure if there is a better option for people like us. But you have to promise me we are going to Death to get the weapons.”
Aeson cocked his head. “Why else would we be here?”
“You know why.”
“I’m not my parents. I’m not that weak.” He went to his skull mask and put it on. “I don’t want to die.”
Bjørn cleared his throat. “I did, for a long time. Like I said, I chased Death when I could.”
“Do you still want to? Die, I mean?”
“No,” Bjørn said, grabbing his mask off the ground. “I’ve never wanted to live more than I do today. Told myself all my life I was one thing. Starting to see I might be something else, too.” He smiled and slicked back his hair. “I’m sorry I let these things happen to you. It’s going to get worse.”
I know, Aeson thought.
“But when it does, you’ll have Vrana. It’s easier to heal when you’re whole, right?”
“I don’t know,” Aeson said, memory after memory molesting every inch of his body. “Is it?”
Bjørn shrugged. “That’s what they say.”
Aeson and Bjørn didn’t move for the next few minutes. They stared at one another in silence. For Aeson, it felt as if he had stepped outside himself, like he’d had enough of his body and needed a break from all the bullshit inside it. When he finally came to, Bjørn came to, too. Neither man spoke to the other after that.
The Ferry Woman had been waiting for them this whole time, Aeson was sure of it. Fifteen minutes deeper into the forest and they found several tall, clinically depressed weeping willows standing defeatedly beside an inlet. Beyond them, beside a small boat, the Ferry Woman stood, tracking their every movement. Like the Witch’s sister, Joy, the Ferry Woman wore a white dress; but unlike Joy, the Ferry Woman’s body was only visible where the fabric rested against it. She wore a veil over her face, which kept her head, neck, and shoulders perceptible, but where the dress was open or loose, such as her wrists and hands, ankles and feet, and her legs where the split in the dress didn’t touch, there was nothing.
Bjørn, wading through the willows’ limp branches, went to the Ferry Woman first. He kept his distance, and his sword in its sheathe. From the forest to the boat, the Ferry Woman watched him every step of the way. When he reached the waters, inches away from the apparition, she outstretched her arm, as if she were offering him something from her invisible hand.
Bjørn looked back at Aeson; and that made Aeson feel better than it should have.
The Ferry Woman nodded. Carefully, Bjørn reached for her hand. As it closed around the place it would be, a piece of crystalline rope wavered into existence. Bjørn took it, and the mirage-like fabric went taught, from his palm to the edge of the boat, where it was connected. Again, the Ferry Woman nodded. At the speed of a guilty child, Bjørn shuffled to the boat and, with the tether still in his hand, took a seat inside it, his back to Aeson.
Aeson took a deep breath and did his best to follow Bjørn’s lead. The weeping willows washed over him, baptizing him with the drowsy softness of their touch. The trees smelled like his bed smelled—cool and clean, with an undertone of earth. Stepping up to the inlet, he found himself suddenly drawn to the boat, as if it had its own center of gravity. It didn’t pull him forward, necessarily, but down; the same way sleep would pull his head to a pillow. He found it hard to keep his eyes open, even with the Ferry Woman standing so close at his side.
And now that he was near enough to touch her, if she could be touched, he noticed that the white satin dress she wore was torn in places, and shredded in others. The neckline had been ravaged. The dress’ skirt had been split up the middle, not by fashion, but ferocity. This close to Ferry Woman, he could see that the dress was something that might be better suited for a corpse in a casket.
Aeson glanced at Bjørn in the boat, who was sitting in it so complacently. Was he breathing? He skin did look paler. Turn around. Make some stupid macho comment.
The Ferry Woman outstretched her arm in front of Aeson. The white satin fabric that ended at her wrist slid back loosely. With it went the shape of her forearm, all the way up to her elbow. He couldn’t see what she held, and yet his hand found hers, anyway. Carefully, one eye open and cringing, Aeson clutched the space where the Ferry Woman’s hand should have been. As had happened with Bjørn, a crystalline rope materialized from an unseen dimension and coiled itself inside his palm. He clutched it tightly and that, too, ran from him to the front of the boat.
Tugging on the rope, Aeson felt a tugging inside him. It was a dense force that gripped his bones like the hand of Death Itself. He pulled the tether again, and he could’ve sworn if he had pulled any harder, his ribcage would’ve been ripped from his chest. A terrible thought was then born into his mind: did he literally hold his life in his hands? And what would happen if he were to let go?
The crystalline rope tightened on its own. The hand that held it shot out. He stumbled towards the boat. Nineteen years he’d managed, and now it was time to set sail. He let the tether take him where it willed, because the pain of resistance was too great to endure. Inside his head, however, he couldn’t be farther from this place. Great walls inscribed with passages from The Blood of Before encircled his mind, sealing it off from the very real possibility that he’d made a mistake, that he was going to die.
Night Terrors become more violent the longer they live.
The tether tugged again, and Aeson stepped up to the back of the boat.
Scouts from the Dead City brought a disease back to the villages. The Night Terrors started to become infertile.
Aeson’s hand burned as the rope brought him around the side of the boat, past Bjørn.
The elders tried to use the homunculi to learn how to repopulate the tribe. Then they used the Blue Worm on Lacuna.
The stream the boat sat in glittered with an otherworldly light; it was dusk at the place it reflected, and soon the yellow and orange waters would turn dark.
The Blue Worm taught them how to calm Kistvaen from erupting and to make it disappear; and it gave the ability to reproduce again.
Aeson stepped into the boat. Bjørn, now before him, didn’t so much as budge. He was as stone; a witness paralyzed by his own personal cataclysm.
The Night Terrors should’ve died in the Trauma. They should’ve died with Kistvaen going off. We weren’t supposed to breed. We weren’t supposed to grow old. We aren’t supposed to be here.
The crystalline rope jerked downwards. Aeson’s heart stopped, and then restarted again. Cold and clammy, and certain he had just died, he sat opposite Bjørn.
Mom and Dad knew it. And they knew what waited in the Ossuary. Were they saving me from It? Or from us? From what we would do? From what we could become to survive again? What the hell are—
The walls came down, and Aeson looked up. The Ferry Woman waited at the edge of the inlet, her arms out and held high, like a priest giving thanks for a holy sacrament. There was no point in hiding; they had come this far, and now they had no choice but to go farther.
As the boat began to move on its own down the stream, Aeson closed his eyes and thought terrible thoughts, for what better place for nightmares than the Garden of Sleep? He woke the memory of the flesh fiend who had raped him and let it rape him again and again until the sick subsided from his throat. He wrestled Vrana’s true image from the memory she could no longer be, and gave witness, over and over again, to the terrifying and grotesque thing she had become; until his repulsion retreated like waves upon a shore, and the love he thought he had lost for her lay bare, like unearthed treasures washed up upon the sands.
Then he thought of the witches—Pain and Joy—and all the hate and horror and endless despair they had let loose upon the world,
unchecked and unchallenged, over the countless years. He thought of the Children of Lacuna on their pilgrimage, a forced death march; and of the flesh fiends, and their Choir of depravity spreading its righteous, wretched song across the continent.
And then, with his eyes still closed, and sleep seconds away, Aeson thought of Death and Its weapons, and the sweet satisfaction of plunging them into the witches’ hearts, and knowing that finally, after so much bloodshed, after so much loss, the weight of his deeds to be done had always been too great a weight for the tree that his parents had hung him from to hold.
The boat came to a sudden stop. As if awoken from the lightest of sleeps, Aeson’s eyes snapped open. Bjørn was sprawled out in front of him, his arms and legs every-which-way, grasping at the edge of the boat. They were surrounded by an immutable blackness that stretched forever in front and above them; it was the ground and the sky, and everything else their minds couldn’t possibly comprehend. The only source of light was below them, eons beyond their reach—billions of blinking stars as far as their limited vision could see.
Bjørn lifted his head. Drowsily, he said, “Turn around, Aeson.”
Behind Aeson, beginning where the boat had stopped, was a small landmass completely covered in thousands of different types of flowers. In this Abyss, the floating Garden was an island comprised not of soil or rock, but merely the flowers and their roots. Kneeling down, Aeson could see underneath the Garden, and through it, too. Like the Ferry Woman, it was solid, but only where the flowers could give credence to its solidity.
Death must’ve had a sense of humor, Aeson thought, coming to his feet, because Its Garden was filled to the brim with flowers that could cause it. He couldn’t name all of them, but because of his time with Adelyn, he could identify a few: water hemlock, Black Chrism, Grave Soil, deadly nightshade, white snakeroot, Purgatory, rosary pea, oleander, Fey Blood, monkshood, and Decay. There were even small clumps of vermillion veins, but they appeared to be quarantined off from the rest of the garden, as if Death had no intention of letting the roots spread here.
And while there were many more that Aeson couldn’t name, in colors he could hardly register, he still found himself drawn to the flowers that ran up and down the Garden by the hundreds, before meeting in a dense circle at its center. Death’s Dilemma. Bone-white petals tucked beneath an icy blue stalk—the image was always the same, regardless of the story being told, and the consequence for trampling them just as permanent. To crush a Death’s Dilemma would result in that person’s immediate death. And if Aeson and Bjørn were going to step into the Garden, they would have to crush hundreds of them to reach its center.
“What do we do?” Bjørn asked, coming up to Aeson from behind.
“I… I don’t know.” He started to put one foot forward, and then quickly withdrew it. “I don’t know.”
Bjørn grabbed Aeson’s shoulder—his hands were wet and trembling badly—and whispered, “What’s that?”
At the back of the Garden, where the infinite blackness began, figures emerged from that space and stepped onto the island. They were women, all of them, with long, blonde hair that poured out from underneath their large, tattered hats. They wore long leather jackets and boots that were more buckles than boot. In each of their hands, they held wicked looking crooks that were wrapped in what appeared to be bandages or gauze. To Aeson, the women looked like shepherds.
“Are you okay?” Aeson whispered, not looking back.
“I don’t know. I’m not anything.” Bjørn finally let go of him. “Are we dead?”
And then from above, behind the sounds of beating wings, a woman whispered softly, “Not yet.”
Aeson and Bjørn both looked up. In the blackness above, a massive red ring had formed. Inside it, in the shifting darkness of that great space, there appeared to be a portal to another place; a kind of tunnel, with ribbed, flesh-like walls, that was filled with sinewy strands of light moving aimlessly through it.
“I don’t see anything,” Bjørn said, his teeth chattering. “Do you see anything?”
Aeson shook his head, and then, pointing, said, “Wait. What is that?”
Across the ring’s fiery rim, a shape darted into the blackness.
“I think that’s It,” Aeson started. “I think that’s—”
And then from right beside them, the same woman spoke again. “Over here,” she said slowly.
Aeson’s body went completely numb. He reached for his earlobe and pulled on it. Swallowing hard, and about to pass out, he lowered his head and chanced a glance at what might be his certain demise.
At the edge of the Garden of Sleep, a moth-like creature waited. Its body and wings were mottled brown, like the bark of a molded tree. Deeper within the creature’s fur were striking iridescent stretches of purple and pink. Lining the outside of the moth’s wings, from their apex to the outer margin, were pale, white, satin-like markings in the shape of skulls and eyes.
The moth arched its back, as if a spine ran throughout its thorax and abdomen, and stood on its four thin, jointed legs. Out of the moth’s chest, just below its head, a set of arms lowered; the four fingers on each hand, fused in pairs to give the appearance of scissors, glinted with their sharpness.
Then the creature’s antennae began to move about its head, as if to get a measure of the intruders that stood before it. The moth’s eyes, those large, black bulbs attached to both sides of its head, twitched, and when they twitched, specks of light glowed, like the stars below, across the creature’s compound eyes.
Aeson opened his mouth to speak, but he was too transfixed to manage anything but a whimper.
The moth reared farther back, revealing the underside of its abdomen. Covered in the same fur as its wings, here the color wasn’t mottled brown, but bone-white and icy blue; just like the plants that grew out of the space where the creature now stood.
A jaw lowered from the moth’s bulbous head. With a distinctively human shape, the jaw separated into a thin, somewhat feminine and fur-less mouth. The lips, which were not truly lips, but two hard pieces of iridescent cartilage, split and revealed a hollow mouth lined in silk.
“I am Death,” the moth said, offering one hand to Aeson, the other to Bjørn. “I am Death, and as I understand it, you’ve come here to ask me to help you kill my daughters.”
CHAPTER XVIII
R’lyeh ripped off her octopus mask and hurled it across the barracks. Fists balled and teeth clenched, she paced back and forth between the rows of beds, getting angrier and angrier at every sound she heard coming from outside. Senses sharpened by sheer hate, the smells of the barracks were getting to her in a way they hadn’t before. The warm musk of feet, the cloying vapors of sweat; she could smell the oil stains on the pillows, the drunken desperation on the sheets and dried puddles on the floorboards. But outside was worse. Outside, there were those goddamn stupid sounds in place of what should’ve been mutinous silence. It was the sounds of raised voices and excited whispers, and rapid footsteps of those running rabidly to load their belongings, already ready to be on their way. The Skeleton had given his orders to the cabalists of Gallows, and the fucking idiots took them to heart as if Bone Daddy were the Undead Lord and Savior. And sure, yeah, sure, R’lyeh really couldn’t blame them. When it came to hells on earth, Gallows, at least in appearance, didn’t have much competition. Who wanted to live on a lake of blood? Not R’lyeh, and certainly not these cabalists. But the Boney Bastard was sending them away, into the mountains, to some village whose name was harder to pronounce than R’lyeh’s own. And he was sending them with the very same company of vampyres who had brought Elizabeth to her knees and tears at the sight of them? And have Hex leading the way? No, no, this wasn’t going to work. Maybe it would for the cabalists. Maybe it would for Hex and Warren, and James and Herbert North, too. Hell, maybe even Clementine and Will wouldn’t pitch a fit. But this wasn’t going to work, not for R’lyeh. She wasn’t Corrupted. She was a Night Terror. She was above this. She was better
than this. She had given up Vrana; there was no fucking way she was going to give up the Skeleton. He was going to the Dead City? Fine, then she was, too. Neither of them seemed able to die, anyways. All things considered, wasn’t that the perfect place for them to go? Besides, it was far away. It would take months to get there. She wouldn’t have to stop, or look back, to see the corpses that trailed behind her, trying to show her the greatness of the grave. She was ready for a lot of things, but she wasn’t ready to die. She liked the look of death, and the way it made her feel, but she wasn’t ready to commit to it just yet. She had so much more to do, though what that was, she couldn’t really say. After all, she was only thirteen.
R’lyeh stopped pacing. Her head was swimming. She reached inside herself and found the seeds of a plan in the darkness there—which one had given rise to the other, she didn’t know. But it was the only plan she had, so holding it tightly with every part of her being, she took it and stormed out of the barracks, leaving her octopus mask behind.
The giant bat’s name was Camazotz. Like a baby in a bathtub, it was lying contentedly in the blood lake, its ten-foot-long wings flapping slowly, forcefully, creating red waterfalls with every beat. Going to the edge of the dock, R’lyeh saw that the beast’s pale minions were still at it, still rubbing and spitting gore into Camazotz’s black, matted fur.
The vampyres were children, like Elizabeth and Miranda had said. It was hard to tell how many there were, but most of them, aside from the odd seven- or eight-year-old, looked to be about R’lyeh’s age, or a few years older. Gemma, the skinny thirteen-year-old with the dark hair and permanent smirk, was the leader of this hand-fanged gang. R’lyeh knew the girl was older than she looked, probably by about a thousand years or so, but that didn’t change the fact Gemma was her age, and in charge. And she liked that.
For the longest time, R’lyeh had only wanted to fit in, to find a place to be comfortable and forgotten. But that left too much to chance and the whims of those more powerful than herself. She didn’t want a blood lake or a Marrow Cabal, or even a tribe. She just wanted to have a say when someone else was saying she had to go.
