Dark Tendrils

by Claude Lalumiere

  Sometimes, she would start to say something to Kurt, and then stop herself after a word or two. Every time that happened he quietly feared that the aborted subject was Giovanni, and he was selfishly grateful for her silence.

  Kurt occasionally suffered through snippets of that strange dream—various permutations of paralysis, demonic visitation, and out-of-body experience. He was always a bit shaken the morning after, but he told himself they were only nightmares; he ignored them as much as possible.

  Then, the nightmare struck every night for an entire week. Each night, the sensation that his life was in danger increased.

  It was still the dead of night when he emerged from the paralysis for the seventh consecutive time. His whole body was drenched in cold sweat. He was too freaked out, too frightened, to go back to sleep. He slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Holly. He needed to move around, to get some air. He dressed and went out for a walk.

  Outside, it was chillier than he’d expected. He dug his hands into his jacket pockets and scraped a finger against something. He pulled it out. It was that bookmark from Carol’s party: Lost Pages. He read the address; it was at least an hour’s walk from where he was. What the hell, he thought. He might as well have a destination, even if the bookstore would be closed at that time of night. He needed to occupy his mind.

  The shop’s sign was as garish as its bookmark, with gaudy mismatched colours and cheesy, ornate font. There was some light inside, so he peeked through the window. There was a guy sitting at the counter. Kurt went in.

  The tiny store was crammed full with books . . . and dogs. At least half a dozen, of all sizes. Kurt couldn’t stand being in there. The smell of dust and dogs. The cramped messiness. Who would ever want to spend any time in this dump? He nodded an apologetic smile at the big, tall guy at the cash and turned to leave. But something on the top shelf of a bookcase next to the door caught his eye before he’d made it outside: a leatherbound tome with a faded painting of Giovanni’s face on the front cover. The book looked very old. Too old.

  Kurt grabbed it; but the words inside were in a language he couldn’t read. He couldn’t even recognize the alphabet. It was like nothing he’d ever seen.

  “What is this?” Kurt shouted to the bookseller, waving the book in his face.

  The bookseller stayed calm. He asked Kurt, “You know that man on the cover?”

  Kurt glared at him, unable to speak, not knowing what to say. One of the dogs sniffed him; Kurt glared at it, too, and it left him alone.

  “You’re in serious danger,” the bearish man warned Kurt. “He worships Yamesh-Lot, the lord of nightmares. He collects sacrifices for his god.”

  “Nightmares? Sacrifices?”

  The man looked into Kurt’s eyes, considered what he saw. “Aqtuqsi,” he said.

  “What?” Kurt couldn’t wrap his tongue around the unfamiliar syllables.

  The man called out, “Aydee,” and a teenage girl with creamy brown skin and long, multicoloured braids emerged from the back of the store. “Can you get me that book on aqtuqsi?” She quickly zeroed in on the book in question, as if she knew the location of every speck of dust in that chaotic mess. The bookseller nodded toward Kurt, and she handed him the book.

  The book was a tiny hardback with dark blue cardboard covers. On the front was a brown-coloured relief of a sleeping man enveloped in a radiating glow. In blue, the word “Aqtuqsi” was printed below the illustration.

  The girl said, “About time you came by.”

  For the first time, Kurt remembered her. From the party: touching his wrist; whispering Giovanni’s name into his ear.

  The bookseller said, “We can help you.”

  What the fuck?

  Still holding both books, Kurt ran outside before either of them could say anything else. His heart pounded in his chest. Sweat ran down his face. He thought, Those people. They were screwing with me. How do they know about me? Giovanni. This has to be part of Giovanni’s game, whatever that is. Yamesh-Lot? What nonsense. How gullible do they think I am?

  Kurt stopped running and caught his breath. He oriented himself and headed over to The Small Easy, his favourite 24-hour joint. He downed his first cup of hot coffee like it was water.

  Sipping his refill, he examined the book with Giovanni’s face on the cover; it really was entirely written in some weird, unfamiliar language. Kurt turned to the other book. This was it: the explanation for what had been plaguing him. Aqtuqsi, an Inuktitut word that translated roughly as “my nightmare”: a supernatural attack by a spirit or sorcerer that paralyzed the body by preying on the mind when it was at its weakest. The phenomenon was known in other cultures under various names—the Chinese called it gui ya, ghost oppression; for the Japanese, it was kanashibari; in the West Indies, the term was kokma; people in Newfoundland named it old hag, because the most common variant there involved hallucinating that an old witch was sitting on your chest; even science had a name for it: sleep paralysis—but, this book said, only Inuit shamans had developed defenses against it.

  Kurt read that sorcerers, if they held an object that once belonged to you (the stronger the emotional bond to the object, the better), could weave a spell that would constantly gnaw on your mind, thus making you more vulnerable to aqtuqsi. The different chapters included testimonies; a history; a taxonomy of different kinds of aqtuqsi, cataloguing their level of threat or danger; ways to protect yourself; and explanations about the power beyond the threshold. It was all in the book. Everything that had been happening to him, explained. Except why—if only he could decipher the other book, the one about Giovanni. That was the real key.

  Drinking his third cup of coffee, Kurt caught himself almost drowsing, but he shook his head, willing himself to stay awake. When he looked up, Giovanni was sitting at his table, across from him, snickering. Without thinking, Kurt threw a punch at him. As soon as his fist reached Giovanni’s face, his image vanished, and there was nothing left behind. Hitting emptiness upset Kurt’s balance. He fell from the chair, his chest hitting the edge of the table. The table rocked, and the mug crashed to the floor, scattering shards of china all over the floor and splattering coffee everywhere.

  Sprawled on his back, Kurt shut his eyes for only a second. And opened them to a nightmare.

  Everyone in the café had been transformed into demonic creatures so dark that they seemed to consume the light around them. They converged on Kurt, but, as in his nightmares, he was paralyzed, unable even to scream.

  Their hands penetrated Kurt’s flesh, and he felt his innards and his veins being sucked dry. The more he was drained, the lighter he felt. Suddenly, his immaterial self shot up toward the ceiling while the dark monsters continued to feed on his body. As he was about to collide with the ceiling, or perhaps pass through it, Kurt emerged screaming from the aqtuqsi to find himself lying on the floor of The Small Easy.

  The waitress stood over him, asking him questions, but he couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying. Patrons were staring at him, their arms sternly crossed across their chests.

  Kurt shouted, “Where are my books? The two books I came in with?” He shot to his feet, knocked people aside, searching frantically through the café.

  He couldn’t find the books.

  Hands clutched at him, trying to restrain him. He shouted, “I have to find those books.” Tears of rage and desperation ran down his face. The books were nowhere. He struggled free and ran outside.

  He ran all the way back to Lost Pages. To confront those people? To ask for help? He didn’t know; he couldn’t think.

  But the store wasn’t there anymore. In its place was a laundromat. Kurt was sure that he was on the right street, at the right address. He was certain. He dug through his pockets, but he couldn’t find the bookmark anymore.

  Tired and confused, Kurt walked back home. Holly had already left for work. Kurt was too weirded out, too terrified, to go to work or to call Holly or to do anything besides drink coff
ee. And more coffee. Anything to stay awake. Going to sleep would make him too vulnerable.

  It was late when Holly finally came home. She took one look at Kurt and immediately acted concerned. Kurt felt too addled to continue facing this on his own. He told her about the recent rash of nightmares, Lost Pages, aqtuqsi, Yamesh-Lot, the books, finding the girl from the party, Giovanni’s attack, the bookshop’s disappearance—everything.

  She listened, but she grew distracted, almost as if Kurt were relaying information she already knew. As he related his story, Kurt’s paranoia kept increasing, especially in regards to Holly. When Kurt finished his story, he couldn’t even look at Holly anymore. They sat awkwardly, in silence, like strangers.

  She broke the silence. “I’ve been plagued by a recurring nightmare, too. It’s not exactly like yours, though.”

  Kurt didn’t look at her while she spoke. He knew he would only sneer. He didn’t believe her. He realized he hadn’t believed her for a long time. Since Giovanni had come between them.

  She continued, “I didn’t want to tell you. You seemed to be having such a hard time. I didn’t want to make things worse between us by saying anything that might evoke Giovanni or what he’d done to us.”

  As if Giovanni’s shadow weren’t always there, a dark impenetrable barrier that forever kept them apart. As if her mere presence weren’t reminder enough.

  Holly recited her dream: “My dreams are haunted by a god of pure darkness. It doesn’t matter what I dream about—childhood, sex, weird adventures, eating—at some point, the god manifests itself. The god is infinitely huge and yet standing right next to me. Dark tendrils shoot out of it and penetrate my body. The god feeds on me, drains me, while I go about my dream. I thought it was just a bad nightmare, some leftover from my guilt about Giovanni, my fear of him.” At first, Holly’s tone was blank, as if she were remembering lines rather than something she had experienced, but gradually a note of dread crept into her voice. “But now I realize it’s something more. Something more ominous. What that bookstore guy said about sacrifices . . . that’s what my nightmares feel like. Like I’m being offered to that thing, that god.”

  Kurt didn’t know how to react. He wanted to protect Holly. For a moment, he loved her again, as deeply as he used to. He wanted to, needed to trust Holly, to feel closer to her for having opened up to him. But then the suspicion that it was all a lie, that she was still Giovanni’s pawn, resurfaced.

  She said, “Let’s get this over with. I know where Giovanni lives. Let’s confront him and tell him we’re not afraid of his tricks anymore.”

  With that call to action, all of a sudden, Kurt’s doubts vanished. He admired Holly, her courage to face up to Giovanni, when he’d only ever been a passive coward. Kurt didn’t feel as brave as she did, but he yearned to be swept up in the wake of her courage. “You’re right,” he said. “We should have done that in the first place. He’s just a little creep. A coward who hides behind all this magic mumbo-jumbo.”

  Giovanni was at the heart of too much darkness in Kurt’s past. The idea of confronting him made Kurt queasy, but passively letting Giovanni terrorize him was worse. Both Kurt and Holly had succumbed to him before. But now they were forewarned. And they were together, and stronger for it.

  Holly kissed Kurt. Squeezing his hand, her lips brushing his earlobe, she said, “Let’s go. Now. Let’s make him scared of us for a change.”

  They fuelled up on coffee. They needed the buzz, the extra adrenaline. Neither of them said what was foremost in Kurt’s mind: that they could no longer trust their lives to sleep, that they might never be able to again. And Kurt was utterly exhausted.

  They called a cab. They had no plan, but Kurt was determined to push this as far as they had to, uncertain of what, exactly, that could entail.

  The cab was waiting for them as they stepped outside. They climbed in the back seat, and Holly called out the address to the driver.

  The cab reeked of incense . . . pungent and nauseating. As the car started, Kurt was suddenly overwhelmed with drowsiness. He turned to look at Holly; but it was no longer Holly who sat next to him. His eyes locked with the mocking leer of her demonic doppelganger.

  Kurt yelled at the driver to stop, to open the windows. But the cabby ignored him.

  The demon Holly murmured Kurt’s name in an electrified, distorted voice. Again Kurt screamed at the driver, again with no response. Kurt tried the door, but it was locked and he couldn’t get it open.

  Kurt struggled to stay awake. As his eyes closed, dark serpentine shapes oozed out of Holly’s demonic body and converged on him.

  In Kurt’s aqtuqsi, he was lying at home, in the bed he shared with Holly. Next to him was Holly’s demonic doppelganger. She looked more deformed than in any previous episode, her skin peeling off, her perfectly black eyes glowing menacingly.

  Kurt thought: None of this is real. It can’t be. But it didn’t stop him from being terrified.

  He tried to break free, to shake himself awake. But the invisible cocoon sizzled, burning his skin, keeping him restrained. Crushing him.

  A fiery black tongue slithered out of the demonic Holly’s mouth and licked his cheek, searing off the flesh. The monstrous parody of Holly metamorphosed into Giovanni.

  Kurt opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. His own scream filled up his throat, choking him.

  With no further preamble, Kurt was torn from his body. His ascension dragged on for an eternity. The menace seeping from the ceiling filled him with increasing terror. Suddenly, he was only millimetres away from crossing that threshold.

  With all his will, he tried to scream, to shake himself awake, to call out to Holly. The real Holly. He wondered if she was still alive. Or how long ago she might have been sacrificed to Giovanni’s god.

  And the image of that star from his childhood filled his mind—that rock Giovanni stole from him. He mourned the future it had promised him. He held on to that memory, made it glow as brightly as he could, believing it might be the only thing that could save him. But, despite himself, it dimmed until it became so dark he could not even remember what he was trying so hard to hold on to.

  Giovanni laughed at him. Gloating.

  As Kurt passed through the ceiling, dark tendrils wrapped themselves around him.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Claude Lalumière (lostmyths.net/claude) is the author of the story collection Objects of Worship (ChiZine Publications 2009) and the chapbook The World’s Forgotten Boy and the Scorpions from Hell (Kelp Queen Press 2008). He has edited eight anthologies, including the Aurora Award nominee Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction (Edge 2008), and he writes the Fantastic Fiction column for The Montreal Gazette. With Rupert Bottenberg, Claude is the co-creator of Lost Myths, which is both a live show and an online archive updated weekly at lostmyths.net.