by Carol Oates
Her vision remained as clouded as her mind when she finally blinked her eyes open again. How did I get here? The last thing she recalled was the smell of fresh ground coffee and a bitter tang on her tongue…something coppery.
I recognize this place, she thought to herself. The slant of the grassy knoll nearby was familiar. She leapt to her feet and spun quickly in the direction of the squeaking swing, but it was empty, moving back and forth limply. A ghostly child’s giggle floated in the air. Candra whirled again.
“Hello?”
Somehow, she had gotten back to a park in Acheron, the place she associated with her waking dreams and sleeping nightmares. Where Sebastian had revealed angels could indeed fly, where she had witnessed Ivy battle against freezing lake water, and where she had spent the last moments of her father’s life. Last moments…
Could this be a dream? She asked herself the question over and over, curling her bare toes into the slippery grass, measuring the cool breeze against her skin. The sharp light caused stars to dance across her vision when she averted her gaze from the azure sky. Her jeans were clean, and she couldn’t remember why they shouldn’t be. For some reason, the thought made her heart beat faster and her breath shallow. No, her jeans shouldn’t be clean. Her sweater should be covered in blood. She had no idea how she knew that.
Candra took a couple of tentative steps, fully expecting the ground to warp sideways below her feet or melt away like ice cream, swallowing her up to her ankles. The grass and the earth remained frustratingly solid, reinforcing reality. She walked faster, ignoring the playground and the thick gathering of oak trees behind it. Candra made her way over the knoll, noticing the small rock sticking of out the ground, one side smooth and sharp enough to carve a layer of skin. Her flesh prickled with phantom pain beneath her jeans where Sebastian had healed her.
The sting radiated up her spine, like fingers creeping over her flesh and pinching her brutally. The child’s laughter rang out behind her, tempting her to turn back. She disregarded the tinkling sound and continued onward, surprised when she came to another wall of trees. These shouldn’t be here.
Candra picked up speed and dashed forward along the edge of the woods, sure all was not what it seemed. She should have reached the gate. The light broke through the branches, shining in her eyes like a disco ball, blinding her. She concentrated on the earth below her feet, cool and damp where the sun didn’t touch. The breeze whipped past her face, and her hair streaked out behind her back. Her memory returned with a vicious clarity. She had died at the hands of a monster.
Without noticing, Candra ran out into an open space. Rough stones cut into the soles of her feet, and water splashed, soaking her jeans as far up as her knees. She froze, panting and exhausted, taking in the scenery around her. A lakeshore, its flat, mirror-like surface reflecting everything around it, so she couldn’t tell where the shore ended and the water began. A steep rock face on the opposite side stretched toward the sky, and silence cocooned both the lake and Candra in a plastic bubble.
Her heart thundered, and hot blood rushed under her skin. Perspiration rolled down the back of her neck and plastered tendrils of hair to her face.
I can’t be dead. The words held no real promise. This wasn’t a dream like the others; it was far too real, and she remembered dying. Or at least, she remembered falling…and the light.
She bent over, pressing her palms into her thighs, thinking how this place was so much more a nightmare than heaven. How could she have ended up here, in this desolate, lonely location? She cupped her hands around her lips. “Hello.” The word echoed back three times before fading. “Hello, is anybody here?”
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
Candra stumbled in her rush to turn. Her hand splashed down into the shallow water, but she managed to catch herself. Her insides tightened, as if someone pulled a belt around her waist. Bile gurgled up her throat.
“Mom?”
She had only seen the woman before her in photographs. It made no difference. She would have known her mother anywhere. Candra knew her long, blond hair hanging loose around her bare shoulders and the splattering of sand-colored freckles across her nose. She was exactly the height Candra had imagined. In fact, everything about the woman was just how she’d imagined. Her trim arms hung relaxed by her sides, and her eyes gleamed with healthy youth.
Candra took a step back into the water; it inched higher around her lower legs. Nervous energy fizzled through her veins. This had to be a trick. She’d thought about the one person she expected to see in heaven, and there she was—her mother.
It was the dress that gave her away. The woman wore a full-length gown made of a black crepe fabric. The simple empire line nipped in with a matching draped sash below the strapless bust. Candra had worn the dress to the Watcher ball, and she had seen her mother wear the dress while in the early stages of pregnancy. Sure enough, when the breeze blew, Candra caught a glimpse of a small bump under the slender line of the gown.
“You’re not her,” Candra accused, recalling how Lilith had taken her in once already. Then and now, she wanted to believe the lie so much. It was easier to believe than the truth.
The woman smiled and shook her head slowly, not denying anything.
“Is this heaven?”
Again, the woman shook her head, making no attempt to approach.
Where, if not heaven? Candra concluded she possibly was still on the floor of the gallery. This place felt real, smelled real…but it couldn’t be.
“Who are you?” Candra demanded, brazenly taking a step forward. Frightened or not, she didn’t intend to show it. What did she conceivably have left to fear? What else could they take from her?
“You know who I am.” The woman’s voice held a musical note, just as Candra suspected her mother’s had.
Her mother had loved music, and she imagined lyrical tones seeping into every word she spoke. She didn’t know for sure; she had never heard her mother, not so much as a recording.
“Look inside your heart, Candra.”
Candra took another step, determined to face the woman down. If this wasn’t heaven, maybe she was still alive. If she was still alive, she could help Brie. She did as the woman said: she looked inside herself, disregarding the familiar. Candra’s fingers curled into fists by her side. Her nails bit into her palms. She visualized all the things about the woman swiped from a memory of an old photograph taken before her birth. She pictured them falling away, stripping the woman bare, leaving nothing but a brilliant essence, a ball of blinding light.
Butterflies tumbled in Candra’s stomach as she reached out and brushed her fingers over the gleaming surface of the light. It tickled her skin and brightened until she had to use her other hand to shield her eyes. She wanted to say it aloud, but somehow, the words wouldn’t come. Her brain scrambled to catch up with the notions spinning wildly inside her head. Inside my head…we are inside my head.
As if of its own volition, her hand reached for the light again, as a kind of irresistible force pulled her toward the energy humming between them. The light touched her finger and spread like oil over the surface of still water. Her hand, and then her arm, glimmered, the pearlescent glow slinking over her.
“I’ve always been with you.”
Candra retracted her hand as if she’d been burned, and the glow disappeared. No. That voice had come from inside her so many times. It too was unmistakable, but she hadn’t created it…and now, the part of her she feared—the part she never quite understood—hovered in front of her, separate.
“You are the Arch.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yes, you do.”
Each time the words resonated in her head, the ball of light glowed brighter and dimmed. Candra slowly circled it, scrutinizing its uniform presence from all sides. Terror and peace seemed to exist simultaneously inside her chest. Exhilaration heated her cheeks and caused her legs to tremble. At the same time, tran
quility like she’d never know flowed through her.
“I’m a vessel. You were inside me this whole time?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I needed time.” The ball danced away, bouncing softly on a cushion of air.
Candra followed. “Tell me,” she yelled the words, hearing them bounce off the surroundings and echo back at her like many versions of herself repeating the words in this strange place, all desperate for answers.
This explained Lilith’s shift in plans and why she’d attacked. She must have figured this out, or maybe she’d known all along. Maybe she’d been taunting her, twisting her in knots just like Sebastian had warned she would, given half a chance.
It also explained what Philip had meant when he’d said about hiding. He hadn’t been addressing her at all. He’d been addressing the Arch.
“I am not what they say, Candra. I am not their creator. You might think of me as a sculptor, designing and molding something new from what is.”
“You made the Watchers. You made humans and me,” Candra argued, keeping pace with the movement of the light. Why should she trust that any answers were the truth? Common sense said, Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…
“No. Everything exists, even me.”
“So what, you made up a war?” The idea disgusted her. How could a benevolent force destroy creatures under its protection? For what, to prove a point? Send some into nothingness for the sake of others? Wasn’t one life as important as the next?
“The battle in heaven was real enough, but I underestimated Lilith. She claimed the Creation Blade and used it to slash through. She swallowed the souls of so many, countless innocents corrupted with her vile darkness. My energy was depleted. I couldn’t defeat them. I didn’t have the strength to lock her away again. I needed a place to hide and regain my strength.”
“So you created me.”
“I build, I mold. It’s what I do. What I have always done.”
Candra snorted a laugh. Suddenly, it was clear. The Arch wasn’t God, but simply another layer in the never-ending layers of creation. A being responsible for keeping it together, a child with building blocks…
“You are an architect.”
The light flickered in response. Candra frowned. What does this mean? Everything she’d been so sure of before floated away like confetti in a breeze. If the Arch wasn’t the creator, then where did everything come from and where does it go? Does it go at all? If everything exists, does that mean the Watchers who had died in the past were still somewhere?
“Am I dead?” Candra was somewhat apprehensive, but she needed a definitive answer.
“No. You are close to death, and we don’t have much time. If you die, we will both be trapped here.”
Just like Ivy would be trapped inside Lilith, should she die. Not dead was a start, at least. Candra released a breath she’d been holding and pressed her hand to her chest to relieve the pressure. “What am I? What do you want from me?”
“You are unique. A Nephilim with a human soul. A vessel. You were never meant to be.”
“I don’t understand what you mean. What about the others? If I can possess a soul, why couldn’t they?”
The ball of radiance danced in a circle around her head, twinkling and shimmering like a billion crystals in the sun. Candra’s frustration flared and dimmed repeatedly, her body attempting to balance her own emotions against the calm emitted by the light.
“Tell me.”
The light floated away, stretching and shrinking. Its sides pushed out, as if a hand or leg were trying to escape before pulling inward and testing another area. The glimmer faded and flickered to life with each pulsing shift. Candra’s stomach twisted, and a lump in her throat made it difficult to swallow. She bit down on her lip, forced her feet onto the earth, and felt it squish around her toes. She refused to back away until she’d learned the whole truth. She deserved that much.
Eventually, the light took shape and slowly darkened until the figure of her mother stood before Candra. She looked no worse for wear, considering the effort it took to mold her likeness.
“You ask what you are, how you came to be and your purpose,” the woman began. “You should have come into the world like the others…a soulless creature, a protected container for my essence.”
Candra’s fingers curled into her sweater, resentful at how this explanation made her sound more like Tupperware than a sentient being. She bit back every caustic remark on the tip of her tongue, wanting to hear the rest.
“The Hall of Souls contains more human souls than you can imagine, but the number is finite. I can neither create them nor destroy them. The Nephilim were an abomination. What is contained in the Hall of Souls wasn’t meant for them.” She paused a moment with a thoughtful expression. “Even angel souls are perpetual. There is no beginning or end. All of existence is a piece of string…an endless road, and each life is a fragment. Each time we look back, it’s not from the end but from a point along the journey…until you. Even I could not have foreseen the strength of one human’s love and how it would change everything.”
“What are you saying?” Candra shifted uncomfortably under the loving scrutiny of the counterfeit likeness of a woman she’d never met. She could admit to only thinking of her less than a handful of times, and most of them were recently. She thought of Brie as her mother.
The woman lifted her hand and settled it at her heart. “This woman sacrificed her soul for you.”
Candra staggered. Everything around her blurred and spun.
“Your father warned her about you. He told her the story of the Nephilim. As you took your first breath, her last breath offered her soul.”
“She died for me?” Candra murmured. Tears itched in her eyes. She wiped away one that escaped and trickled over her cheek.
The woman smiled. “You have a soul because hers took its place in the Hall of Souls. And now, I am a prisoner of free will. That sacrifice bound us together in an unexpected way.”
“I don’t follow.” That’s the understatement of the century.
“It wasn’t your free will that bound me to you. It was your mother’s. You can’t choose to set me free, and I can’t escape as I’d planned. Only a rupture in your soul will release me.”
Candra lowered her head and peered down at her bare feet, confused and unable to look at the woman any longer. All this time, she’d never thought much about the woman who gave birth to her, yet without her, she would have been nothing but an empty container hiding the Arch. She had life because of her mother, a soul, the ability to love.
“The one who banished Lilith, it was you, wasn’t it?” There was no answer. “How do I defeat Lilith?”
“She must be returned to her prison.”
“What about the souls, the ones she took from heaven and the others? How do I save them?” The tops of the trees shivered, blurred around the edges.
“They cannot be saved.”
“What? No. I don’t believe that. Some of them have to be still in there. I can free them.” Candra’s fingertips were becoming numb; the real world was calling her back.
“The risk is too high. Lilith and her children must return to darkness.”
“No. What are you saying? Collateral damage, acceptable loss?” She shook her head. If the impossible could happen once, it could happen again. She could save them.
“It is the only way,” the woman said sadly. “I cannot change what has been done.”
“What can you do?”
“I mold, I build.”
Candra didn’t understand. “Your Watchers believe that when they die, they cease to exist. Is that true? Is anything true?” The blurred surrounding shifted and smeared like a chalk drawing on a pavement, washed away by the rain, and numbness chased upward from her hands.
“Nothing ever truly ceases to exist.”
“What does that mean?”
A warm palm pressed to her cheek. Soft fingers cupped her chin
and urged her to look up. The woman’s head tilted a little. This close, Candra saw swirling clouds of shimmering dust inside her eyes. It reminded her a little of the time she’d visited a planetarium on a field trip years ago. She remembered watching a presentation on the birth of the universe, explosions, swirling colors, and flashes of light.
“Have faith. One day, it will come to you, but until then, I will be with you.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
IT HAPPENED TO EVERYONE at least once during their life. They woke up under an oppressive foreboding that the world had vanished while they slumbered unaware. There, in that place between sleep and waking, they had clearly seen and felt what it would be like to exist in nothingness. The panic hit, crashing into them, drowning them in the pain of imagined loneliness until the world came back into focus, offering them a second chance. Life wasn’t over yet. Even if only for an instant, that fragment of nothing before the world came hurtling back opened them to the idea that anything is possible. To have nothing to lose didn’t make a person truly fearless. No, fear was conquered by having everything to lose and risking the unknown, regardless.
Candra’s hearing returned first, awareness of muffled voices she couldn’t decipher and movement of feet treading across tiles, stone, or perhaps marble—something that echoed. Then, a heavy door opened and closed, followed by the hollow clank of metal moving into place. A lock, she thought. Not an ordinary lock—something big and clunky.
She smacked her dry lips together. Her tongue felt furry. She must have been asleep for a while. Her fingers cracked when she stretched them out under the thick blanket covering her. Her bones were stiff from sleep, and the entire length of her spine ached. Every part of her except her head rested on something hard and unforgiving. Candra’s senses returned slowly, like a dream she couldn’t quite latch onto crumbling away.
“She’s waking up.” The urgent female voice was unfamiliar to her.
