by David Nickle
Which is to say: everything.
Ann sat down on the bench. She stretched her legs out, and thought about it.
“You there, sis?”
“Yeah,” said Ann. “Right here in the change-room.”
“Okay.”
“Did she . . . did the Smiling Girl visit you in here?” Ann thought that she did.
“Yeah,” said Philip. “Sometimes. She was always with me.”
“She was never just mine,” said Ann, “was she?”
“No.”
More quiet, as Ann thought about that. She wondered how much of it Dr. Sunderland really knew. He’d treated both Ann and Philip. Did he understand that the Insect, the Smiling Girl, was really a part of both of them? That both of them—Ann and Philip—were vessels to this poltergeist he and his friends coveted?
“She sure as shit wasn’t yours to give away in matrimony,” said Philip. “To those fucking rapists.”
“Those fucking rapists,” said Ann, “are the fuckers that you threw in with.”
“Don’t curse.”
“I was duped,” said Ann. “You weren’t duped at all. You threw right in.”
“Oh did I?”
“You wore their bathrobes—while they were doing their Eyes Wide Shut shit.”
“What?”
“Eyes Wide Shut? The Kubrick movie? Tom and Nicole?”
“Must’ve missed it on movie night at the Hollingsworth.”
“Sorry.” Ann thought about that. “Fuck you, Philip. I’m not sorry. You threw in with Ian fucking Rickhardt and Charlie Sunderland and everybody else who took . . . whatever it is we share, and made it into their sex toy.” She stood up from the bench, and went through the door to the showers. It smelled of chlorine in here—like a pool. She couldn’t find the light switch immediately, but she didn’t care. She just stepped farther into the darkness.
“And for what? So the Insect could carry you around like you’re walking under your own power, and . . . I don’t know, get you off? You sold me out. I trusted you. I always trusted you. And you sold me out.”
The darkness deepened as she rounded a corner and the dim light from the change-room vanished. She could hear Philip mouthing something, but the place she was entering didn’t seem to be hooked up to the PA system.
He made a garbled noise that might have been a protest: You don’t understand, it was all for the best . . . blah fucking blah
blah blah.
As Ann kept on, the wall she was following fell away, and she had no guide for her progress. The floor transformed as well, to what felt like hard, dry clay. She felt a breeze of cold, sweet-smelling air that cut through the chlorine smell and eventually drove it away. The breeze intensified, as the darkness became absolute and the clay hardened to stone. The sound of her running shoes shuffling along it took on an echoing quality, and Ann came to imagine that she was in an immense cavern.
She stopped walking.
“I didn’t throw in with them.”
There was no PA system this time. Philip’s voice came from close—very close, because he was whispering. There was no light, so Ann reached out, trying to touch him. Her hand closed on empty air.
Philip went on. “They think I did. They think I’ll do what Michael . . . what he couldn’t do . . . and tame her for them. But I’ll tell you something, Sis.” Ann felt his breath, cold as winter on her neck.
“She was already tame,” he said, “when you flew off to Tobago—what with their tricks, and yours . . .”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll put it to you simple,” he said. “Our friend never would have killed Michael Voors, without my help.”
“What the hell, Philip?”
“I couldn’t stop you from marrying him. Couldn’t stop you from flying off to Tobago. But when she told me what Rickhardt had made her do, in that beach house . . . how she couldn’t do anything to stop it.”
“She burned down the beach house.”
“She didn’t like it,” said Philip, “and she demonstrated that, yeah. But she couldn’t stop it. The . . . rape. They’d conditioned her. That far at least.”
“But you undid that. How?”
“How do you do things, when it comes to her? I dreamed it. As you can imagine, I do a lot of dreaming.”
“Like that school.”
“Like that.”
“How did you learn to do that?”
“She taught me. She learned how to do it from you and passed it on to me. You know. The stuff you learned from that old lady. Eva.”
“I know,” said Ann. “But it doesn’t seem to be working right now.”
“Isn’t it?”
“There’s no school here,” said Ann. She held out her arms and turned around. “It’s all a big, dark cave.”
“Fuck.”
“There’s a breeze coming from one direction,” she said. “I bet it’s the way out.”
“Fuck,” said Philip again. “I’m sorry. It’s hard to concentrate.”
Ann started in the direction of the breeze. “How’s that?”
“You fucking try concentrating,” said Philip, “when you’re flying.”
“Flying?” said Ann, and Philip said, “Oh.” And the cavern became very quiet.
“Oh,” said Ann after a moment.
“Oh.”
At that, Ann became very quiet too.
The Insect was near. It might have been right behind her, long-fingered hands hovering at her throat. It might no longer have fingers, but great mandibles, and a vampiric sucker in place of a mouth. It might have just been a girl, smiling.
It might have been anything.
Ann tried to put the idea out of her mind. There was, after all, also a breeze. By the rules of this place, that should take her out. Ann started walking. Was the Insect following her footsteps? She tested the hypothesis twice—stopping short and turning, arms outstretched. Each time, her fingers closed around air—and Ann was lost, until she found a trace of the wind.
They marched into it. It led her along the bare rock, and she stumbled for a moment as her feet found a stone step, and then another. She began to climb. There were many steps; Ann was disinclined to count, after hurrying up the first dozen or so. The stairs turned back on themselves three times, and when they finally levelled out, Ann thought she could make out a faint light ahead, casting on a gleaming fall of minerals down a sharp cut of rock.
Ann hurried toward it—quickly, but not so hastily that she missed the fact that the floor here dropped away a good distance before the wall, leaving a deep chasm. The floor now became a ledge, crawling along the near chasm wall. The light was off toward her left—a bluish glow at the edge of her vision—so left she went.
As she clambered along the uneven ledge, it began to dawn on Ann that this light, the breeze, did not necessarily point the way toward escape. It might—in one of her old friend Ryan’s dungeon crawls, it probably would. You feel a breeze—and there seems to be some light coming down the southern passage. And the party would hurry along, hauling their sacks of loot and golf bags of magic swords. But that was Ryan’s game for you.
Fucking little people pleaser, Ann thought unkindly, and kept going.
The chasm widened as she went, until the opposite side was all but invisible. Partly it was the distance—partly it was the phosphorescent mist that filled this great space. The mist had a sharp smell to it, like vegetable rot—and Ann worried that it might be toxic. She supposed it didn’t matter if it were; this place wasn’t real, after all, not in the physical, biochemical sense.
As she went on, the ledge levelled out, and the bare rock was replaced by broad cobblestones. The cliff wall behind her, conversely, became craggier. In the distance, she could hear the sound of fast water—rapids, or maybe a waterfall, and she also thought she might have heard the sound of wings beating—leathery wings,
as those of gigantic bats—and perhaps deep, mournful moaning—from the souls of the risen gladiators, waiting for their final judgement in the Corridor of Bones. . . .
“Ah,” said Ann aloud, and listened as her voice echoed back across the great chamber.
She thought she might know where she was. And as she took three more steps, and the ledge separated from the cavern wall and became a kind of bridge, she became sure of it.
These were the caverns beneath the Coliseum of Dusk—in the middle of which hung the Arch-Liche of the Games’ inverted tower, a thick basalt uvula that dangled from the greatest cavern’s throat.
She wanted to applaud, as the tower emerged from the mists—carved with runes that she and Philip had devised on the remains of a tablet of scientific graph paper, dotted with arrow slits and balconies, illuminated in parts with firelight, and the screams of the giant glow-bugs that the Arch-Liche had enslaved the last time he’d walked in the world’s moonlight.
Ann smiled. For the first time since she was a child, she truly felt as though she were coming home. By the time she was halfway across the bridge, she couldn’t help herself: she was running.
In the first room—a wide entry hall—a fine meal was set out on a long oaken table. Ann avoided it, remembering it as a trap: the succulent venison that topped the centrepiece was really the carcass of a gigantic spider, basted in its own venom. The bunches of grapes were flesh-burrowing grubs, that would render an adventurer paralyzed, if she failed to make her saving throw. The entire banquet—the suckling pig, the mounds of honeyed yam, the links of sausage, all of it—was poisonous, its true nature hidden by the cunning illusions of the Arch-Liche. The only thing safe to consume on the table was the wine, thick and dark and infused with a healing potion that would undo the effects of all but the most fatal of the poisons.
If Leah and Ryan and the rest of them had ever gotten that far in her campaign, they would have been so impressed. And, Ann was sure, so dead.
Ann bypassed the banquet, and moved farther into the tower. She visited its dungeons, near the top, where the Arch-Liche, in an unholy pact with the ruling families of Tricasta, kept hostage some of their more troublesome political enemies. She spent some hours in the Hanging Gardens, where pale vampiric flowers drank the blood of cave-blind rodents and blossomed into glorious crimson for hours afterward. She slept the first night in the Arch-Liche’s laboratory, where he had invented his glass automaton guards to watch over his treasury and mind the doomed gladiators. The laboratory was deserted, but the forge was easy to light, and it kept the place warm.
The next morning, she found her way to the kitchens and made herself a proper breakfast, absent both illusion and poison, and took the bowl to the Liche’s private chambers at the very bottom tip of the tower. She was delighted to find the Golden Telescope of Scrying there, mounted as she hoped, and settled in to observe all the goings-on in Tricasta and the lands surrounding it.
The next day mingled with the one after, and the one past that, and so on. The Arch-Liche, if he even still occupied this tower, never made himself known. Ann had the entire space
to herself.
There were no mirrors in the Arch-Liche’s chambers, nor anything even polished enough to cast a reflection. But while Ann could not look upon her own face, she could look at her hands and feet, and notice how quickly the scant colour from the Caribbean sun faded. She was becoming like alabaster, like bone, here in these new sunless chambers. When she looked down on the afternoon siestas at the fountain in Tricasta, Ann found herself squinting at the brilliance. Her joints made clicking noises when she bent to pick up a cup. Her teeth seemed to be looser in her mouth.
In these tiny measures, she came to understand that she was dying. She was wasting away—vanishing. In the belly of the Insect.
And she understood also: she did not wish to die here.
She wished she could speak with Eva, and she thought about trying to contact her now, using the telescope or one of the great spell tomes in the library. But she knew that she couldn’t. Eva understood herself to be a master of the psychic realm—able to send stores of energy to needy souls like Ann, speak to spirits and communicate via the power of the Universal Mind.
But Ann had to remind herself that the prison Eva had helped devise for the Insect had failed. Her intuitions about Michael—her assurances that he was a nice man, a good match, probably good in the sack—were as wildly tone-deaf as was her misplaced trust in Ian Rickhardt, who’d been able to draw out the deepest of Ann’s secrets with nothing more convincing than smarmy patter and mediocre flattery. And Eva had utterly failed to ferret out Philip, Ann’s own brother, and his lifelong betrayal.
Eva had shared a house with Ann. She had helped her through terrible trauma—the loss of her parents, and later, of her Nan.
But when it came to this business, Eva was nothing more than a fraud—most charitably, an unwitting fraud. She had no way into this place—this prison, literally of Ann’s own making.
Philip might listen to her call, now. He might help her. Ann wandered to the upper galleries of the tower—nearer its own, inverted base—and considered how she might do so. But she could conceive of no incantation by which to call him, that wasn’t comprised of her tears. He was her brother and she had loved him and it had been . . . what? A lie?
She stepped onto the south balcony, high enough that the ceiling of rock was visible barely a dozen yards overhead. It was freezing out here, cold enough that she felt it in her bones, her thickening joints. Her breath rattled in her throat.
She didn’t want to vanish. She let her hands fall to her side.
Warm fingers entwined with hers.
Ann squeezed as breath tickled her throat. Thank God you were here to hold my hand.
She let herself be turned around, to face the girl.
She had dark hair tied into snaky braids, and darker eyes. She wore a long pale tunic, and black boots with toes that curled on themselves.
You, mouthed Ann.
She was tall, and she filled out her tunic as a grown woman does—not like the child that Ann remembered distantly; not like the creature, the Insect, that Ann had come to understand her to be. She had grown and shifted in so many ways, but for one:
Her smile was still wide as the world.
Don’t vanish, the girl mouthed.
Ann leaned in, and kissed her. She closed her eyes, and as she did so, many things did vanish, into darkness, and into silence. But not Ann, and not the girl either.
The two of them stayed put.
They were it now.
A SIP OF SÉMILLON
Susan Rickhardt poured them each another glass, killing the bottle.
It was not a Rickhardt Estates label. Susan had just finished explaining how she liked this stuff, from Rosewood Estates, a little bit better than a constant diet of the house wine.
They were sitting on the long tasting bar, maybe a dozen feet from the urn that held Michael’s ashes. Ann vaguely recalled that Charlie Sunderland had left her here, in Susan’s care. Just sit here, he’d said. Your friend Susan will keep you entertained. And Ann had said . . . what? Nothing, probably.
The clock over the bar showed that it was coming up on the lunch hour. Susan had changed clothes. She had put on a woolen skirt and a loose-knit grey sweater that Ann thought actually flattered her somewhat. She had fixed her hair—maybe gone for broke, actually taken a shower.
Hard to say, though. The only light here came from the tall windows that lined one wall, and it was inconstant; the clouds were moving fast, and they rippled across the sun to make a shadow-puppet show under the great wooden dome of the tasting room in Rickhardt’s backwoods conference centre. Ann had no doubt that the windows were new as everything else in this space, and strong as money could buy. But the wind still rattled them in their frames.
The electricity had gone out some time ago.
“I
an was thinking about planting Sémillon about a year ago. Never did, and that’s fine by me,” said Susan. “Ian’s got no touch for decent wine. These Rosewood people do it better than he
ever would.”
Before Ann had escaped the tower and returned to herself, her lips had been about to say, Tastes fine to me.
“Tastes fine to me,” she said, and she let her eyelids flutter closed for a moment—to savour the wine, and turn attention to . . .
Well, to that other business.
The lights in the ceiling of the Lake House rooms sparked bright and died.
Ian Rickhardt and his friends didn’t quite know how to take it—sudden darkness being, under the right circumstances, delicious for men such as they.
But the sharp and growing smell of ozone—the flickering light of flame from the electrical outlets in the kitchen, beside the sofa . . .
that was a different matter. Four of them pointed it out, and made for the door, stumbling over chairs and a coffee table.
Another grabbed a cushion from the sofa, and tried to use it to suffocate the flames at the outlet in the living room. He screamed and jerked as electricity coursed through him.
The door handle was stiff, and the four of them struggled with it before it finally gave way. It opened, onto a bright, greenish light, and a howling wind. Two of them simply vanished through the opening, while the other two were able to swing the door back, and shut it.
Ian Rickhardt had come prepared. He had a small LED flashlight in his pocket, and flicked it on.
It proved unnecessary, however, as the electrical fire in the wall touched onto the drapes. Philip LeSage, floating above them, was illuminated in flame, grinning insensibly.
Rickhardt had stopped smiling as the room began to fill with smoke. The sprinkler system cut in, and he flinched, shading his face against the spray of icy water.
Others crawled on the floor, trying to stay below the smoke, heading for the door, beyond which a titanic wind roared, and beams snapped. He shouted for each of them to find something to hold onto, and as they did so, Ian hauled open the door and pressed himself against the wall behind it.
