Lightning struck down twice as we grew closer, accompanied by the sound of thunder splitting the air. The hovel was clearer in my sight now, and I saw it was no larger than a simple, one-room shack constructed out of what looked like rotten driftwood. The door hung ajar and swung a little in the stuffy air that filled this world like a miasma. I could feel the presence of one of the Cunning Folk and a familiar inside those poorly constructed walls, yet his was unlike many of the others. It had a flavor of corruption, like a computer’s programming that had fallen into disarray but still tried to work, still carrying out the commands even with the inherent flaws that could never be remedied.
When we were within a few feet of the hovel, something bizarre occurred. All of a sudden, it wasn’t like we were running forward, but rather falling toward the building, though the perspective didn’t change—just the feeling of gravity. The expanse lengthened and my scope of vision stretched, along with the feel of my body. The world was flattened, and it sucked both Felix and I into it. I tripped over my own feet, stunned by the strangeness of what was occurring.
Just as suddenly everything snapped back to the way it should be, and Felix and I both sat on the ground, trembling. We were mere feet from the door of the shack, and drew closer to one another as it opened with a creak and revealed a small, dusty room. Trembling, I stood to my feet and peered inside.
“HE-HELLO? IS ANYONE in there? I need to talk to you.” I craned my neck a little more with each cautious step into the hovel.
The first sight I beheld was of a teapot standing on a rickety old table. However, when I looked at it, all the parts of it seemed disconnected. The spout was floating upward and the handle looked like it was in front of everything else, and I just knew if I touched it that it would feel normal. This peculiar illusion hurt my eyes and I didn’t want to look at the thing, but the more I tried to break away, the more I became fixated on it. Something about that teapot and its spinning, moving, impossible parts and the lurid, floral design made me forget about everything else.
It’s making me feel sick. It’s making me want to puke. It’s making me remember the time at the café when I was watching that girl and she didn’t know that I knew that she’d been changed, the most sinful change, that she wasn’t one of us but I knew about her. I knew that she was watching me from inside that teapot, where they were talking softly about the game that only the dead security guards knew how to play and how those orange cigarette burns would—
I kept blinking and shook my head, trying to shake out the thoughts. They dispersed and I gasped for breath, adamantly keeping that infernal object out of my sight. I had felt my mind slipping away, and it scared me—badly. Those mad, winding thoughts would start again if I looked its way, so instead I turned my eyes past the table to the corner of the room where a man sat on the floor.
Skin, much of the muscle tissue, and organs had been eaten away from the front of his torso, leaving a glistening, black-brown ribcage strung with stray fibers of flesh. From inside the ribcage, I could see something crawling around and gnawing its way deeper into the man’s core. However, from the neck up, he was still whole. His bald head was glazed in sweat and printed with tattoos that reached over his gaunt cheeks and hollow, haunted eyes. He turned and smiled at me, gesturing lifelessly with his arm.
The crawling thing emerged from under his ribcage, and I saw it was a scorpion with the head of some other animal—perhaps a bear or wolf. Its exoskeleton was a poisonous red, dotted with spots that pulsed with the familiar’s light, its eyes unfocused and wild as it scurried up the man’s neck to the crown of his head, clicking it claws and gnashing its teeth. The man looked at me with his hazy black eyes and laughed at my apparent revulsion as the flesh on his torso began to regenerate.
Felix was not reckless enough to lead this time, and it was I who took the first step into the low-roofed shack.
“So you’ve finally come to do away with me.”
“D-do away with you?” I stammered.
The man’s eyes widened as Felix entered, staying close to my ankles. “No, so, it’s not you after all. You’re not the one who’s following me, are you? You can never be too careful,” the man breathed, and then his defenses rose. He stood up, his torso complete again and his chest now covered with the same types of intricate tattoos as his head. The creature atop his head opened its mouth wide and hissed.
“Are you Charles Poe?” I asked, my voice shaking. I balled up my fists, letting the fear-fuelled anger inside of me grow. It wasn’t courage, but it was better than nothing.
“Why do you want to know? What have you come here for?” he demanded frantically, and I put up my hands in a gesture of peace.
“Arthur—the man at the library. He told me you were being followed by a familiar, not in this world, but in the other. One that’s got antlers on its—”
He sucked in a deep breath through his teeth and the scorpion’s claws began clicking madly. The man was trembling as he pointed an accusatory finger in my direction, but I was not about to be chased away.
“It’s after me too! I need your help. I need to know what it is. It killed my sister.”
“There’s nothing you can do. Run. Hide. Never tell your name to anyone again. Take the pills your kitty-cat gives you. Take the medication. It’ll keep you here. It’ll keep you stable,” the man advised, shrinking back from me as if I had a contagious plague.
I held fast. “No. I’m not going to let it destroy anyone else’s life. Tell me what it is.”
Poe gave a shrieking laugh that turned into a bellow of rage. As he did, lightning began to ravage the ground outside and the shift of gravity occurred once more. I fell over, reaching for Felix and catching him. The storm subsided and I stayed on the floor, hugging Felix to my chest.
“It’s from Hell. It’s a living sin. It’s the harbinger of all of our dooms, little bitch. Spoiled brat. So you better fucking run, run, run as fast as you can, little girl,” he cried, hysterical laughter interspersed with sobs. “Once it sees you, it’ll never stop.”
“That thing there. That’s your familiar, isn’t it?” I breathed as I pointed to the scorpion, realizing I had fallen into this hellish pit only to find another dead end—one that might cost me my sanity and my life. Poe lifted the scorpion down from his head and cradled it in his arms while it tore at the flesh on his wrists.
“This is a parasite,” he said darkly. “But I need my medication, so I’ve got to pay my abominable piper. That demon is a parasite, too, but it’s lost its master. It needs blood. It needs orders. It’s just doing what it was told to do in the moment before its master went away, over and over and over. It’s lost.”
“Why is it chasing us, then?”
“Because its master told it to. He hated me. He thought I didn’t deserve to live, so he sent it after me to do me in,” he sputtered, and the scorpion crawled down the side of its head and began to chew its way into his ear.
“Well, then why did he send it after me?” I insisted.
“I don’t even know who you are,” he said, his eyes rolling backward as the scorpion disappeared into his head, his earhole leaking a stream of blood. “You probably crossed him wrongly, or wrongly crossed him somehow.”
“How can I stop it then? Do you know?”
“It won’t sleep until it has blood. Until it has a new master. Give it blood.” Poe smiled and the scorpion’s claws pierced his neck from the inside out as it started to chew its way out again.
“I’m not going to make a pact with that thing!” I yelled in a knee-jerk response, and he shook his head, more blood dripping from the hole in his ear.
“Don’t have to. Give it another person’s. Have you met my beautiful neighbor, Miss Jezebel?” Poe asked and he pointed in the direction we had come from. I guessed her to be the woman who had been running from the crab, so I nodded.
“She is here because she did a bit of back-stabbery, or so Arthur says. Jezebel stole her sister’s man, so her sister call
s up that demon in the night and gives her a bit of dear Jezzie’s blood, then hides that sugary skull he trades her in her sister’s food. When she’s here, she’s being punished. She has no idea what happens to her, nor will she heed the voice of the parasite,” Poe explained to me. “You gotta do the same. Give it blood, and it will go away. It will go away.”
“But why can’t you do it?” I asked him, sickened at the idea that I’d have to submit another person to this cursed life that I had stumbled into so foolishly.
“Don’t know anyone. Won’t go out, no one will come in. I’m trapped.” Poe sank to the floor and covered his face with his hands as the scorpion began its feed all over again. This man’s eyes told the story of his pain and I could feel it saturating me the longer I stayed in his domain. It made my chest ache. The feeling of alienation and heightened nervousness ate away inside of me, just like that scorpion ate at him.
“Look, mister, I’m gonna find a way to stop him. I’m gonna make him leave you alone. I’ll help you,” I promised him. Beneath my fear of this man, I felt pity for him, like I understood some tortured part of his tired soul, even if it was just a fraction.
His woebegone smile broke my heart. “You can’t help me. No one can help me. I was born with poison in my mind.”
His last sentence repeated over and over, like it was coming out of a reedy old sound system inside the walls. I locked eyes with Poe as the phrase continued to resonate, growing more indistinct and peculiar to my ears. It started to grate on me, to hurt me like the sound of Styrofoam scraping against itself. I cringed from the sound and intensity of Poe’s stare.
“Oh, God, Jesus, Lord and Savior, I remember you. You fucking demon, you self-indulgent little pig, you whore,” he cried, his voice suddenly full of malice. The scorpion crawled out of the hole in his neck and perched atop his shoulder, its eyes fixed coldly on me. “I know who you are, you liar, you filth. You’re helping him. You came here to give my position away. You came here to help him find me. You prey on the good people. You pretend to be kind, but you’re a vulture, a biting spider.” He was raving now, shaking from head to toe with rage as the scorpion opened its toothy jaws and hissed at me.
“Run, Sarah,” Felix said softly in my ear. I didn’t need telling twice. I leapt to my feet and bolted from the room.
Outside, lightning was pulverizing the cracked earth. Glancing back, I could see Felix was behind me, and behind him the scorpion and its master. The gravity shifted four more times as we dashed across Poe’s garden. Each time I was on the verge of falling, but I kept on running. I would not fate myself to Poe’s mercy.
The gravity shifted again, but this time with it came a new scene. We now stood at the edge of a balcony with nowhere to go but a dizzyingly high drop. Black pine trees stretched upward and in the boughs sat three owls with impossibly large eyes. I stumbled to a halt, paralyzed by these owls that looked so still and threatening. A quick glance backward told me Poe and his familiar were still advancing, thundering down a hallway toward us.
“Jump!” Felix urged, and I trusted him. We leapt off the balcony together, the eyes of the owls following us.
There was no bottom to this fall. Once the tops of the trees left our vision, Felix and I plummeted downward into nothingness, frantically reaching for one another in midair. I grabbed the tip of his tail and pulled him close. Pure terror reigned while I tried to think of any way out of this, which intensified when everything froze. We were suspended in midair for what felt like eons, until out of the gloom I saw something materialize in front of me.
It was an image of myself holding Felix, only reversed. It took me a second to realize I was staring at a mirror that stood between two stone arches, and that ground now lay beneath my feet. I turned, only to see that another mirror blocking the way behind me. I turned again: another mirror.
“This way,” Felix said, leaping from my arms and marching forward through what I thought would be glass barring his way. When his reflection didn’t run up to block him, I hurried after him. “It’s a maze. He knows he can’t keep us trapped here. There are always cracks in every person’s mind, so he’s trying to confuse us. Keep us lost until he can get here first. If we run, we can make it.”
Felix and I took off through the mirrored maze. I felt a little wonderstruck by the repeating hallways and pristine glass that bridged the way between the stone arches. I could see dozens of reflections of myself—bruised and bloody—at every angle. It was almost hypnotic, until I heard the hissing, wolf-like cry of the scorpion beast and the thundering footsteps of Poe.
Of course, he made this maze. He knows how to solve it.
My heartbeat accelerated a hundredfold; I had to get away. Dead end after dead end barred our way, and the madman’s footsteps were growing closer. I felt myself succumb to hysteria.
“Can’t you just bust a hole in it?!” I hissed at Felix. He reared back and took a swipe at the wall, but his claws bounced off.
Suddenly, there he was. There, glazed in sweat and bearing his teeth, was Poe. I put up a hand to protect myself, then realized it was only his reflection that I saw. I ran in any direction I could, twice slamming hard into a mirror and seeing his image hounding me wherever I went. Forcing myself to keep going, I pummeled hard into a pinched end and when I turned to go back, I knew it was over. He’d caught me.
Felix stood between the advancing madman and me. Glee was apparent on Poe’s face, his lips twitched in a perverse smile, the scorpion scuttling at his bony feet. Felix hissed, baring his fangs.
The scorpion struck first, leaping on Felix and stabbing him viciously with his barbed tail. The two rolled over one another, ripping with claws, tearing with teeth, fierce in their urge to destroy one another. Poe sidestepped the brawl and came toward where I was cornered. A sob escaped my throat, and I sunk to the ground, my hands over my face.
“It’s because of you. It’s your fault that I’m this way. And because of that I’m going to take you apart and give you the punishment you deserve. You did this to me. You’re rotten to your very core,” he whispered, reverent, as though reading scripture from a sacred book. “I’m going to take from you what I could never have.”
Poe lifted his hand. The sound of the familiars’ rage behind him was growing more intense as he snapped his fingers and a bright thread of white light blossomed from his fingers. He brandished it in the air like a whip and brought it snapping down over my shin. It cut like an electric saw through balsawood. Searing pain shot up my leg and my screams reverberated through the mirrored halls. My head thrashed, my eyes bulged, and I could see it happening all too clearly, reflected all around me. I felt every pulse of agony as a rush of blood seeped from my stump of a leg. Poe was laughing at me, empowered by what he’d done. With gusto he reeled backward again and spun that horrid light-whip through the air. I put my arms up to block it, and in a flashing instant of spiraling torture, I saw my left arm drop off and hit the floor. Blood was quickly filling up my little corner and the sound of Poe’s laughter was drilling into my ears. Every inch of my being perceived pain.
He knelt beside me, putting his sweating, smelly head close to mine. “You have no idea what kind of a person you are, do you? You deserve this,” Poe whispered, his breath warm and wet on my face. He lifted a grungy finger and his nail lit up white-hot like the whip. He grabbed my forehead and pinned my head to the side of the mirror, then took aim. I could see in the reflection that he was going for the soft area between my jaw and ear.
The first puncture felt like a drill bit going into my head. My scream came, gurgled, and tears streamed down my cheeks. I caught sight of Felix scratching madly at the scorpion’s shell. Our eyes locked as Poe started to cut along my jawline.
“Help me,” I whispered to my familiar.
Without hesitation, Felix leapt over the scorpion to me, his claws extended. Poe drew back in surprise and with a staggering force my spirit slammed him into a mirror. The glass shattered and Felix tore into Poe’s chest,
ripping off large hunks of his skin with every swipe. I crawled forward and seized a mirror shard that sliced my fingers. I leaned over to Poe and looked him straight in the eye as he tussled with Felix.
“I—am—innocent.” I plunged the mirror shard deep into his chest, and this time I enjoyed his scream.
Felix held him down as I picked up my fallen limbs from the floor. Out of nowhere, the officious little beast of Poe’s stabbed the foot still attached to my body with its stinger. The burn of its poison hit me with the force of a bullet. I clutched my severed arm and leg close to me, holding them in a vice-grip as I convulsed. Felix pushed Poe away, and with one decisive bite, snipped the wolf-like head off the scorpion. Its teeth continued to champ and its eyes rolled as it lay on the floor.
Felix wrapped his tail around me. It stretched out, curling over and over until I was coiled up in his bonds. “Hold on, Sarah,” was his only warning before he tossed me and I went shooting up.
I burst through the ceiling in a shower of glass and stone. My body went limp as I sailed through the clouds and starry sky, which looked as if it were the curved inside of a snow globe. Felix had thrown me into the airway above Poe’s garden.
Then I fell. I fell holding the pieces of my mangled body and watching my blood and tears stream upward into the air. My eyes shut, my face contorted, and I was swallowed up by the sound of wind roaring in my ears. It was the most nightmarishly sublime moment in my life, not knowing where I was falling to or what would happen when I hit the ground. But a large part of me didn’t care anymore. For those few brief seconds when I was falling, I was free.
WATER MET ME at the bottom. But it didn’t knock the life out of me, or even sting my wounds. It swallowed up my body gently, as if I was sinking into a warm bath instead of being tossed by ocean waves, yet it stretched farther than my eye could see. As I sank deeper, I could see the surface above me. Trails of my blood showed how far I was going, and when I let my head roll to the side and all the air escape from between my lips, I saw that the sun was beside me and not above me. I stared into its burning glory as I went deeper and deeper into this warm ocean. When I came to a gentle rest at the bottom, the sensation of being underwater dissipated, but that massive, flaming sun remained.
Unreal City Page 13
