Something was amiss with most of the space I was viewing. The light of the enchanted plants did not penetrate beyond certain points of the buildings. It looked as though some places were sinking into some light-sucking void. Light. Then abrupt darkness.
It looked as though this part of Bereft itself were sinking into a vertical version of the La Brea Tar Pits.
I breathed in sharply, startling Joy.
“What? What’s going on?” she asked nervously. She tried peering through the gate toward the direction I was staring, but came up having noticed nothing.
“Nothing. Yet. Something about this place is off. I know you both have to feel it.” I pointed toward the direction I was just looking, carefully putting my arm through the gate as to not touch any sides. “Please don’t touch the iron, but look—“
Cool Luke and Joy both inched closer to me and I stepped back and handed the pair of sunglasses to Joy. They bent so close I feared they would touch the gate. In fact, Cool Luke did touch it.
Losing his equilibrium for the slightest of moments, he latched fingers around the iron-wrought ivy in the gate. Catching his balance, he quickly released hold and backed up.
Joy and I stared at him, fearing he had seen something else. “Sorry. Just lost my balance, eh?” He took the pair of sunglasses from Joy and he peered through again. “I guess it’s okay to touch. I hope.” Cool Luke stepped close enough to the gate his face touch and let out an exasperated breath. “I feel no effects. Still, as for what you see, I’m not sure I follow.”
“It’s the shadows. They somehow seem…I don’t know…more severe?” Joy had already stepped back and away from the gates of Bereft. Minutes before she was excited. Now, she grew increasingly skittish before defiantly returning to the gate and tracing the metalwork with her finger. “Okay. So how is it that we’re getting in?”
I just then finally remembered to set the timer on my cell phone. We were stuck here for the next 14 hours. I replaced the phone in my pocket. “I don’t know. I don’t see a lock, so whatever it is, getting in has to be related to our particular sets of skills.” I sat down cross-legged to incubate our solution, examining hinges and gaps. The top of the fence was sealed by the exit from the cave we’d just come through. “Cool Luke—is there any way of dissolving the stone at the top of the gate so we could squeeze through?”
“Yes,” he confirmed, “but we run the risk of collapsing the tunnel…and becoming long-term residents.”
Joy looked through the gate once more. This time, her eyes fixed on a point to our left. Her neck did not move; her gaze did not shift.
“Joy, what do you see?” I stood up and walked behind her, attempting to distinguish something in the pitch she saw. I saw nothing unusual.
“It’s the weirdest thing,” she stopped, not renewing her sentence or averting her gaze. “I swear I see fog or something moving. Shifting around. Shimmering in the black of it. At first, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. Don’t think they are.”
I stepped to Joy’s side and nudged her out of the way with my hip. Cool Luke directed her to step aside and then stood beside me, looking in the same direction. There looked to be some movement hundreds of yards away where there was still enough phosphorescent plant life and artificial moonlight (exactly like the Shadow Mill) to see shadows swirling around the fully erect monoliths of this world’s version of Cashtal yn Ard—and just beyond that, another structure. I removed the sunglasses from Cool Luke’s face, put them on and saw: it was a small castle.
Cashtal yn Ard translates to the Castle of the Heights. Was this the original castle or its shadow knock-off? I was desperate to get through the gate. There were answers in Bereft.
The shifting movement of the shadows reminded me of being at the Shadow Mill, and maybe even that time outside of Chattanooga, in that I recalled that the very properties of the shadows themselves seemed almost sentient; like light itself was intruding and the shadows were always trying to find a permanent purchase on this side of reality.
Here, however large Bereft used to be, it was reduced to a few hundred yards to our left, about 50 feet in front of us, and roughly 150 yards to our right.
At one point in time in Bereft’s history, this place was probably placed so remotely and hidden so thoroughly to keep out any accidental, albeit unlikely, traveler who happened to find the hidden village. Undoubtedly as well, it was here to keep out any unwelcome company. Bereft was founded to be a haven and a meeting-point for the magoi. And Europe was not always a hospitable place for those whose vocation involved invocation and other forms of magic. This gate might very well be here to ward out all those who would mean harm to anyone on the inside.
“I think,” I began copying Joy’s previous movements to race the lines of the bars, twists, turns, and folds of the gate, “that it’s here to keep out anyone would mean to do harm to Bereft and its inhabitants.”
“From the outside, in any case,” Cool Luke scoffed. Looking at him, I could tell he was afraid. In fact, I imagined so much of his life was filled with fear, from his upbringing in Somalia, to his family’s flight away, to living with Triolo and flight and hiding from him. I did not think of him as fearful, but wary in a way I would never understand.
And he was right. Bereft’s foray into the shadows had been collapsing over hundreds of years without any proper caretakers—just as a house would do the same without any sort of upkeep. Shadows or not, Bereft was still a subject to entropy.
“So, what do we do—ask it to open up for us?” Joy wondered, most likely sarcastically.
It was the second time this morning I had thought of Lord of the Rings. Speak friend and the doors will open. “Aperi.” I spoke the Latin imperative for open as it seemed the likeliest of culprits. The gate did nothing. I came to the center of the gate where a keyhole might be if it were a typical gate. I grabbed Bill’s Quill from my bag along with whichever inkwell I touched first. I unscrewed the cap of the well, dipped the quill and asked Cool Luke to hold the inkwell.
I carefully wrote the word aperi on the only flat surface the gate offered. The letters did not stick to the surface iron well, almost instantly disappearing upon contact. The ink remained visible just long enough for the gate to click open.
I replaced my items in my bag and walked further up the stairs. I crossed the threshold of the gate and walked into Bereft.
Joy was behind me instantly, though Cool Luke hesitated a moment before joining us beyond the gate. “I hate to be the one to bring this up…No, I don’t hate it. It needs to be said: this place is creepy. Like, as fuck.”
All I could manage was low, closed-mouth uh-huh as they both allowed me to take lead.
There were still absolutely no signs of life. There were more of the luminescent plants besides the mushrooms that seemed entirely random, with little regard for planning according to the pathways. Some even grew between the cracks in the cobblestone street.
“Right or left?” Joy jogged up several paces to survey the area to the right before coming back. “There is a row of decayed houses up along the street. One of them just disappears completely into the black about 1/3 of its way.”
“It’s like where reality is dropped off a cliff. Unreal,” Cool Luke said.
“Then what could lie beyond?” I stiffened—perhaps the first human being to have entered Bereft in half a millennium. “The castle seems to be the most obvious place to go.” Yet, I was already walking to the three adjoining houses on the road to our right. “We can investigate these quickly and check them off the list.”
“I agree. There may be something valuable in one of these houses. Maybe even something interesting. Information even.” Cool Luke was already on my heels. I glanced back and he was running his fingernails under his other fingernails in some sort of affectation. He would not be a very good poker player.
Joy took up our flank. “Maybe we’ll just find a five-hundred-year-old chicken stewing in a pot or something. Do we even know what we’re look
ing for?”
Cool Luke replied: “Doesn’t seem to be anyone around to ask. We can only look.”
It was Hecate who first put us on the trail to the Isle of Man to unlock the secrets of the box Triolo had given me. No one had heard from anyone here in centuries, but Hecate knew there would be someone or something here to help us decipher the mystery of the chest.
“What did they eat then?” Cool Luke felt around the doorframe of the first house for who-knows-what. He held the handle to the door in his hand and pushed in with his shoulder.
I walked to his left, Sharpie in hand and wrote a spell to open the door directly upon the door itself. From inside, what sounded like a board dropped to the floor. “It wasn’t bolted,” I slipped past the doorway to peak a head around. “It was barricaded from the inside from the looks of it.”
The inside of the dwelling did not have the same dank smell of earth and rot that the outside did, but it did retain a less voluminous odor of rot. The microbial world was something that easily invaded this pocket of shadows, so I could imagine that the wood of these structures were rotting—even without the moisture of rainfall and dew—they just rotted more slowly.
“I’d like to know too,” Joy spoke from behind me, though she pushed past me into the house. “There’s no way they could grow anything edible here? If they had livestock, what did they feed them?”
“Other people.” I regretted it as soon as I said it. It was meant to be a joke, but my intonation lacked the requisite humor. And the timing was obviously terrible. “Kidding. I think. There’s nothing here to indicate they kept livestock, anyway.”
If not for the various forms of pseudo-plant life, Bereft seemed utterly sterile. “I don’t think the plants outside are real. I think they are made with magic; manufactured as much by hand as by magic.”
“Bereft of life?” It took me a second to realize that Joy was not forming a pun derived from the village’s name. It was an honest suggestion as to the origin of the town’s name.
“I wonder how people could have lived here.” Cool Luke was in the corner of the hovel picking through a pile of detritus and dust. He sneezed, sending a plume of dust up in the air. “As good as an idea it may have been at the time for the mages to make their own place to live, this could not have been the answer. What drove them here?”
“And it seemed they figure it out fairly soon after the fact. Maybe a decade. Two?” I recollected all that Athena and Victoria had told me. Nothing indicated that Bereft was inhabited for any length of time. And it seemed to have faded from relevance very early on.
“Why was this place barricaded from the inside to begin with? I mean, wouldn’t we have found some evidence someone was inside—dead or not? Bones?” Joy turned to the door to exit, satisfied there was nothing left to search.
Joy and Cool Luke were looking for obvious relics. Whatever could still be here probably would not be so obvious. My father and his family had a penchant for locking things away in vaults and hideaways in the floorboards. Surely, if something here was left, it would be hidden away? With my hand ignited by a light-spell, I passed it over the support beams of the house. There was spellcraft there, carved into the wood with a delicate hand—with symbols I did not recognize. “Cool Luke, come over here and look at these symbols on the ceiling. You recognize any of them? Joy, we need to see if we can get to the second story. Look for the way up?”
Joy was looking at something in the doorway herself. “There are symbols over here too. Hold on. I’ll find a way up.” She moved around the room while Cool Luke looked at the beams.
“Okay. These are probably for warding, yes?” he asked, not expecting an answer. At least I hope he didn’t. He knew.
Joy disappeared turned a corner next to the fireplace, where there looked to only be a closet of some sort. She came back into view. “There’s a set of stairs here. Steep. Narrow. I’m going to pop my head up to see. Post-It note for light, please?”
Instead, Cool Luke stepped over broken furniture to her and hand her his glowing phial.
“Cool. Thanks.” She disappeared again.
He turned back to me, “No, I do not recognize any of these markings. They are not alchemic. Sorry.”
“No worries.” Except I was worried. While those two were checking out the upper level, I straddled more broken furniture to reach the fireplace. There was an old book there. Upon opening it, I saw it contained symbols that littered the woodwork of the house. It was light enough to carry in my satchel, so I put it inside.
“There’s a set of beds. Nothing else. As in, empty.” Joy was standing next to me with Cool Luke and I was startled by how quickly she seemed to finish her investigation so soon and manage to catch me in my reverie over the book.
“Hmmmm. Okay. For sake of managing our time, let’s move to the next house over. Whoever lived here practiced a form of magic we’re not familiar with, so it seems less likely to offer insight into the box. Let’s go.” I still believed my reasoning was sound for looking for a hidden compartment within along with checking out all the nooks and crannies. However, the first house offered us little, save for more mystery.
We applied the same strategy to enter the next house. It was likewise barricaded from inside. It was also likewise abandoned with no evidence of its owners. Neither house gave the impression of sudden abandonment, either. As we met with nearly identical indications in the second dwelling, we moved to the third—the one seemingly engulfed in shadow.
“Grey, have I told you how much I’m not liking this place?” Joy tried to nudge the door open, but it too was likely blocked. The shadows were several feet away, but in such close proximity caused my hair to stand on end. And I started feeling physically ill.
“Hold on.” I came closer to write the spell on the door. I heard a piece of wood on the other side fall, so I pushed forward, but it did not give. This door did not give way like the previous two. If these buildings were in a state of decay, there were any number of reasons why the door wouldn’t open that had nothing to do with a lock or barricade.
Cool Luke slipped past me and applied more pressure. By the third time, he put his should against it and pushed. It popped open a few inches. The doorframe was askew. Maybe the whole house.
Joy sat on the cobble stone next to me, breathing rapidly. “You feel it?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“Feels like the air is so thick here it’s going to push the eyes out of my skull.” She covered her face and massaged her sinuses.
It was a strange way of putting it, but it most definitely was uncomfortable. More than uncomfortable. The hair on my arms were standing on end, and I could feel raising on the back of my neck.
Cool Luke pushed forward again with much gusto. The door fell off the frame entirely.
Instinctively, I grabbed him as debris from inside the house came crashing down in front of us.
“Thank you.” Cool Luke rubbed his shoulder where he had been pushing against the door. “Sorry. I was trying to open it enough for us to get a steady look around.”
“It’s fine. It was a bit of a lark. We’ll move on. We have the High Castle to go through, and,” I looked at the timer app on my phone, “we’re down to eight and a half hours.”
“It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long.” Joy looked to the immediate right and started to peddle backward slowly in retreat, beckoning us to follow her. The shadows looked even more threatening and for the first time, I noticed how my head ached and throbbed.
There was a madness to the shadows that disabled us from comprehending its effects, I was sure of it.
“Does time work the same way here?” Cool Luke grabbed me by the shoulders and walked me toward Joy.
It was something I had wondered before in San Francisco. “I think it’s warped here and it’s only getting worse as Bereft continues to crumble.” If I were to guess how much time we had spent in the village, it only felt like an hour—and my internal chronometer was impeccable.
Yet three hours had passed.
“Keep a close watch on the timer, please. I don’t think we should stay any longer than past our own sunset.” Cool Luke’s brow was deeply furrowed with concern and anxiety. He was a wary soul, but I appreciated him that much more for it. “I need to do something. May I borrow a piece of paper?”
Joy was already digging through her bag and tearing off a sheet for him. Cool Luke knelt down and folded it into a paper airplane. “Hand me your marker, Bub.”
“Of course.” I gave him the Sharpie I only just then realized I was still clutching, white-fisted.
Cool Luke took it and marked in black upon the stones that made up the street. He made hash marks about every centimeter until he had some 20 marked out. “We need to keep an eye on how quickly the shadows are moving. What if this place is a trap? Once we entered, we only have a certain amount of time before we’re swallowed in darkness entirely?”
He threw the paper airplane into the pitch darkness. The plane moved fast enough that it appeared like it blinked out of existence once it came to the shadows.
Were we to step foot in the darkness, would we even be able to come back?
In a moment of extreme bravery or profound stupidity, I took a piece of paper out of my own bag, walked to the where the house met the shadow and slowly passed the notebook-sized paper into the shadow about half way, before trying to draw it back. I tried to pull back, but met with resistance, so I tugged harder—causing the paper to rip between my fingers. The rest of the paper left on this side of the wall of shadow was pulled into the darkness.
There was only one conclusion to draw: the darkness swallowing Bereft seemed alive with some sort of animal intelligence.
Will of Shadows: Inkwell Trilogy 2 (The Inkwell Trilogy) Page 12
