by Scott Hale
“And here it is,” Lotus said. “Now, pack your bags, Audra of Eldrus, we have a long road ahead of us.”
CHAPTER XVII
They were being watched. Not by Camazotz or the Skeleton, or one thing at all, but by many, in the dark and torrential rain; these things kept at bay, it seemed, by the Keep. Vrana could feel eyes moving over her as she, Aeson, and Elizabeth plodded across the drowned land. They weren’t the eyes of flesh fiends, either. The gazes of flesh fiends burned, like fire through clothes and skin, and always found the soft spots, the sensitive spots; the marrows of lovers, the nectars of lust. These eyes were different. Their gaze was pitiful, small in a way; like the vacant, scheming stares of jealous children.
Vrana knew the look well. In all the killing she’d done for the witches, a look was often all that was shared between her and her prey. It said what words couldn’t, and what actions wouldn’t.
“We’re being watched,” she shouted into Elizabeth’s ear.
Aeson, overhearing her, lost the stoicism the skull had lent him. He melted like the mud beneath his feet.
“No, no.” Vrana clutched his hand. “No, not flesh fiends. I swear.”
I trust you, he said with a squeeze of her talons.
Thunder swelled in their ears like water. A single bolt of lightning struck the sky. In one stark second, the firmament lit up, pale and pink; membranous and veined. It looked like the inside of an eyelid with a light shining through. It could’ve been the Black Hour, or even the Membrane itself overlapping with this world—going back and forth between the Void, she’d seen that place more times than she could count—but what if it was God they were inside? What if God didn’t do anything to anyone because It’d already swallowed the world? It’d already won?
She shook her head and met the rain head-on. The Keep grew larger and larger, almost impossibly so, the closer they drew to it. The eyes never left her—stuck to her like thorns—and if she had to guess, seeing what little she could of the tree line, whatever was watching them was following them, too.
Aeson cried, “Fuck!” and tripped.
Vrana spun around and reached for him, but he was already knee-deep in mud. While she helped him up, Elizabeth kept walking, shaking so hard from the cold, her body suddenly appeared as if it wasn’t shaking at all, as if it’d finally become attuned to this place and what they had to do.
“How do we get in?” she asked.
The moon flickered in and out of existence above her, like an optical trick.
“I’m okay,” Aeson said, smacking the mud off him. He righted his mask, got snippy when Vrana tried to help him. “I’m fine.”
An explosion rocked the woods. Vrana crouched, dragging Aeson down with her. From where’d she’d felt eyes on her, the land had bubbled into a hill, like dough. The trees protruded from it, and were jettisoned, as the earthen bubble popped.
Elizabeth ran to Vrana. She shielded her and Aeson. From the second explosion, a wave of splinters and debris washed over them. Deep, itching pain spread across her wings as tens of branches and stones stuck inside them.
“We have to get inside the Keep,” Aeson said. “He’s tearing this place apart.”
Elizabeth stepped out from behind Vrana’s wings. “You see that?” She pointed to the ruptured woods.
Vrana did. Small figures fled behind the veil of rain, some dragging bodies, others their own limbs. They were scrawny, sickly. They looked like children.
“Vampyres…” Elizabeth trailed off.
Thunder trumpeted out a white, hot blast of lightning. The children were gone.
Aeson limped towards her, leg still sore from his spill. “Why are they here?”
The sound of beating wings swelled over the Keep. They couldn’t see the bat, but Camazotz was somewhere out of sight, beyond the Keep’s crumbling towers and detached buttresses. She let out a slow, droning chirp that rocked the place to its foundations.
And her children answered in kind: their high-pitched clicks shot out of the woods, each one distinct, occupying its own space. They were signaling for their savior, and her salvation.
“Black Hour must be holding them back, yeah?” Elizabeth said. “We’ve got to get to the Skeleton before they figure out a way to break through.”
Vrana nodded.
But Aeson, inquisitive as always, asked, “Why?”
“Because we’re the only thing around here with blood in our veins, yeah?”
Vrana didn’t need to hear any more. Instead, she ran. The place fought her every step of the way, but she fought harder. Where it held onto her feet, she kicked it away. When the wind bent her over, she spread her wings and beat it back. Raging streams from the flooded river snaked out of the woods, but she hopped them, her precious cargo of Aeson and Elizabeth in tow.
Forty feet out from the Keep, and déjà vu came in hard with a sucker punch straight to her brain. She’d done this before. She’d really done this before. She’d had her doubts, but no, this was, give or take her company and some details, exactly what’d happened the first time she came to this Keep. And she was going through the same motions now. Just ahead, there was the crack in the Keep’s walls. That’s where she’d slipped through—where they’d slip through—into the gathering-hall-turned-lake. If they kept going that way, would they roam the halls? Sleep as she had slept in some random room? Dream as she had dreamt of hooves and black fire, and the Holy Child castigating her, a chasm of confusion between them? Is that why she had the key?
Vrana cried, “This way,” and led them from the obvious entrance, the one every part of her body wanted her to take. She had the key. There’d been a door, in the floor of the pit the Skeleton had been conducting his experiments in. That door let out somewhere. They just had to find it.
A natural moat had begun to form around the Keep’s perimeter. Where it was shallowest, they crossed; went farther still, until they were face to face with the Keep’s ancient stone walls. Catching herself against them—
Bloody laundry hung out to dry behind a 1950’s dive.
—she gasped and, reeling, caught herself against Aeson.
“What? What’s wrong?” He checked over her wings, plucking the splinters from them. “I’ll get them. Just…”
“It’s not that.” Vrana exhaled, the image leaving with her breath. “Goddamn. What the hell?”
Elizabeth crowded in close to them. “Did you see something?”
“Yeah, how did you…?”
Elizabeth glanced down at her sword, as if she thought it might not be enough for what they were up against.
“Liz… what?” Aeson asked.
“The Skeleton kept the Black Hour’s heart on him at all times, yeah? If you touched him or he touched you, you’d see… things… from it. I don’t think he let the heart go. He’d never do that. So… maybe he can’t hold it back. Maybe… it’s spreading.”
All at once, the storm came to a stop. The streams, still flowing, went silent. The water spilling off the roof fell noiselessly to the ground. The only sounds were their own, and the horrible, gut-wrenching screams coming from inside the Keep.
Vrana, trying to calm them, said, “It’s okay. This happened before. It all happened like this.”
Again, Aeson readjusted the skull mask. It didn’t fit all that well, despite his best efforts. “You didn’t see the image last time, though.”
“No…”
“Or the vampyres…”
“Aeson, we’re so close…”
He closed his eyes, crossed his arms—the Corrupted arm over the other. “I trust you,” he said. “I’d go through hell for you.”
The words rattled Vrana’s bones harder than the thunder had. “You did,” she croaked.
He opened his eyes, tilted back the mask to show that he was smiling. “Heaven can’t be any worse.”
“That’s the spirit,” she said, hating how wrong he probably was.
Elizabeth broke up their moment: “The screams are coming from down th
ere, where the water is pooling.”
They edged their way along the Keep, keeping distance between themselves and the Black Hour-infused walls. The ground fell away to an exposed, underground tunnel packed with scraggly roots and driftwood, and filled with black, stagnant water.
Vrana went first. She dropped into the tunnel, satchel over her head. The water, thick and grimy—a mixture of sawdust, water, and fat—went up to her hips. She was taller than the others, so when she helped them down, the disgusting byproduct of, undoubtedly, one of the Skeleton’s experiments shot past Aeson’s stomach and Elizabeth’s chest.
Vrana waded forward, pushing aside the debris. Thinking she saw a bone, she did a double-take but it was already gone. She lowered the satchel, took out of the Skeleton’s key, and guided into the gated door’s lock. She didn’t turn it, not right away. She let it sit there, teeth to the tumblers, while the muck they’d nearly submerged themselves in seeped into her pores and filled with her rancid doubt.
If I open this door, there’s no coming back.
But that wasn’t true. This door had been opened a long time ago. They’d walked through without even knowing it. She, the witch, and the Skeleton had been entwined around one another, forever twisted in the other’s lives. Pain had snapped free. All that remained was her and him, and deep down, she knew that, no matter what she did, she’d never been free of him; and wouldn’t be until one or both of them were cut loose by the knives of Death Herself. It wasn’t fate. It was just the way things had to be.
So, she opened the door, and welcomed herself into the suffering it stowed.
The door led into a tunnel that’d been partially filled in with dirt some time ago. Inaccessible doors buried behind earth peered out at them as they headed deeper under and into the Keep. They went from wading in the filthy water to stomping through it, as the elevation in the tunnel rose. Ages ago, before the Keep had fallen apart, they might’ve used the screams as a guide by which to navigate the tunnel’s turns and intersections. But tonight, in the tunnel’s disrepair, there was only one way to go.
Navigating by sound, smell, and touch, Vrana spread her wings and splayed her claws to feel for changes in the tunnel. They were close. The screaming was clearer, and so were the instruments causing them. There were dull, hammer thuds, and the metallic pinging of nails, and the grinding of a saw’s teeth on bone. Something else, too. A girl’s voice. Familiar, and foreign.
“You hear that?” Vrana whispered.
Aeson and Elizabeth nodded.
“It doesn’t sound like R’lyeh…” Vrana said.
“Doesn’t sound like Gemma, either,” Elizabeth said.
It was then, in the naked darkness, that Vrana realized how unprepared they were for what was to come. It was then, in her rare vulnerability, that Vrana had remembered she’d forgotten the reason she’d wanted to come. They had no weapons to match the Skeleton. She had no reason to believe R’lyeh was actually here. They were just going through Vrana’s motions. Shit. Were Aeson and Elizabeth afraid of what would happen if they didn’t?
Too many questions. No one out there to answer them. A good man right here willing to listen to her, and all she did was talk to herself.
Vrana said, “Are you ready?”
The two of them responded: “No, not really.”
And she nodded, took another step, smacked the top of her head into the trapdoor above her. She found the keyhole as if it were an old friend, slid the key in, and lifted herself into her future’s past.
Bleached and blood-splattered, the Skeleton stood above the dais and the man bound to it. The flayed monument was deep in the recesses of his hooded robe. The only parts of him that were visible were his hands—one gloved, the other holding a knife—and his eyes—those horrible, hardened, bloodshot pearls formed from years of being hunted and being hurt, and all the hate needed to hold it all together. If she had never met him before, Vrana still wouldn’t have been afraid of him. Instead, she was afraid for him. He was a man who’d lived too long; an animal who’d never slipped its trap. He was Aeson’s Lord of the Corrupted, a man-made god. The pinnacle of humanity no one should ever achieve.
The Skeleton turned to face her and said, “Well, what is it?”
Vrana didn’t answer. Instead, she looked down into the trapdoor.
Stay there, she told them.
Elizabeth: Go for it.
Aeson: Be careful.
He ignored her, and she ignored him. While the Skeleton plunged his fist into the dying man’s chest, Vrana searched this dark cavity for signs of R’lyeh. Despite the tiny lights winking around them, there wasn’t enough light to see anything more than themselves. Even this place embodied their selfishness.
A sweater of muscle knitted between his digits, the Skeleton scoffed and said to her, “I expect you want to know what it is exactly that I am doing. Yes?”
Vrana drew closer to him without answering. She already knew what he was going to say.
“Is it not clear? I am looking for the essence of life. Yes, I know of blood and breath and organs and all the biological processes, but there is something more, something primal, much like the soul, but without all the religious annoyances and contrivances. Past endeavors…”
On cue, a red candle came to life behind the Skeleton, revealing a wall of bodies in various states of dismemberment and rot.
“… Have not been fruitful. But my eyes grow keener with every experiment, my mind more creative, more mature with every passing day. The sick man seeks cures for his ailment, the dying man cries out to a god for salvation. Why, then, should the undead not seek out life to reverse this most horrible condition of death?”
The last time she was here, Vrana had told him to let the man die. Back then, she couldn’t make sense of why he had no Corruption on his right arm.
She waited for the man to die—one cough, two blinks, a jerk, and he was gone—and said, “Why are you killing Children of Lacuna?”
The Skeleton cocked his skull. He began to bend down, to grab the sheet he’d put over the body once before, but instead, he stood back up and, leaning over the dead man, hands clawed and holding onto his flesh, whispered, “How do you know about them?”
“The Blue Worm sleeps. I put it to sleep. You saw the Cult of the Worm, didn’t you? Thought there was one last chance to get some of that ‘eldritch knowledge’ from them.” She walked to the dais. “To make you mortal again. For your family.”
A dry, clicking sound, like laughter, clamored up the Skeleton’s bones. “Like me, you are something of an oddity, are you not? You are neither human nor bird, yet you present yourself as both. In fact, there is something curious about your arrival here tonight. I am not shocked by it, as though I knew it was going to happen all along. Tell me—”
“It has happened before.”
The Skeleton reared. His fat, black, salamander-like tongue rolled over his uneven teeth.
“A year and some change ago. I’ve been through so much, it’s hard to remember when…” Vrana pretended to pretend that she was talking to Aeson, because talking to the Skeleton like this shouldn’t have been so easy. “You and I met. In the Black Hour. Just like this.”
The Skeleton’s maddened eyes darted back and forth before he finally pointed to the trapdoor.
Vrana took out the key. “You tossed this to me when I tried to leave.”
“Did I?” He dug into the pockets of his robe, laughed. “I had it moments ago…” He approached the dais again. “Seconds and years are one and the same.”
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
He grabbed the hood and lowered it. Except, it didn’t come down, not really. The darkness inside it clung to the Skeleton’s skull, and the fabric, like mold, and bridged the two of them together. Rolling up his sleeves, the black mold remained where the robe had once been. It was like he was wearing an extra layer of clothing, or another organism completely.
“Is that the Black Hour?” Vrana whispered. “You
’re covered in it.”
“I am it,” the Skeleton said. “It is everything that I do. I think, now, it is all that I live for.”
“You’re making it happen everywhere, all the time, throughout time,” Vrana said.
The Skeleton shrugged.
“There won’t be any reason left to live if you don’t stop, Atticus.”
Hearing his name, the Skeleton’s jaw quivered. He backpedaled to the wall of corpses and fell into them. Limp arms, clumps of hair, and soggy legs fell down and hung around him, like fleshy shades and curtains. Comforted by their death, he calmed and said quietly, “What’d you say?”
“Atticus. That’s who you are. I’m Vrana. That’s who I am. I think both of us are very different than how we used to be.”
In a country drawl, he said, “You weren’t always a big bird?”
“No, just a Night Terror who used to wear a big bird’s head.”
“That’s some shit, I guess,” the Skeleton said, continuing in the accent. “I used to be a skeleton of a man. Look at me now.”
Thunder smashed into the Keep like a boulder. The rain picked up from a pathetic pattering to what sounded like hail being hurled against the place.
“You might be you—” the Skeleton’s tone became stilted and formal, “—but I am much more.” He pushed away from the wall of corpses. He went to the dais and picked up the saw. “I do not know why you came here, but there is nothing I can do for you. I have a lot of work to do, and only forever to get it done. Please, see yourself out, before I do it for—”
Another voice, young and female—the one they’d heard earlier—shouted, “Don’t let her go! I’ve been trying to find…”
Whatever was said next, Vrana didn’t hear it. Because there was she. R’lyeh. Out of the darkness, wearing a bloodied surgeon’s apron, she came. But there was something wrong with her. It wasn’t that her mask was missing, or that she’d been turned into the Skeleton’s assistant. It was her, all of her. Everything about her was wrong. Her skin was greenish and pallid. Her body was limp, almost of out of her control, like a marionette’s. And her eyes. They were empty. Grayed-out. No spark of recognition in them, only the realization she should recognize Vrana for who she was. An old memory from an old life.
