The Nightmare Garden

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “Keep her busy,” Cal said, shrugging. “We need to get out of here, and this is the quickest way.”

  “Cal,” I snapped. “Don’t be ridiculous.” I turned and pointed at Conrad. “You and I.” We were the only ones besides Cal who had the ability to defend ourselves, even if my Weird was unreliable and my fighting skills nonexistent. At least I didn’t have to turn into a long-clawed, fanged monster to tap into my particular talent. I didn’t relish confronting the Proctors again, but I had to think of the group, not just myself.

  “Me?” Conrad squawked, but I grabbed his arm and tugged him along, keeping to the shadows of the ruined cottages.

  We crept down the hill, and before long I could hear low conversation in human voices.

  “You better at least have a plan,” Conrad hissed. “These guys will have guns.”

  I stopped in the archway of what had once been a barn. Peering around the corner, I could just make out two shapes standing in the fog.

  I’d seen the hexenrings the Fae used to travel between the Iron World and their own, circles of simple stones or mushrooms wreathed with enchantments that could bend space and time, but the Erlkin’s Gates were a mystery to me. I’d watched Conrad use them only once, when he’d helped us escape from the ruins of the Iron World. Not even him, really—the slipstreamers had opened the way.

  After I’d broken the Gates … and presumably allowed Draven to manipulate them somehow, without Erlkin aid.

  That bothered me. If the Mists were open, what was to stop a free-for-all, beings crossing every Gate between every land? The fact that we’d seen only Draven so far in the Mists made me think there was something larger going on, possibly worse, but I hoped with everything I had that what I’d done to the Gates to Thorn hadn’t rippled to the rest of the lands.

  That would be worse than one destroyed city. That would be worse than anything.

  Now is not the time, Aoife. I steadied my breathing, and with it, my racing thoughts.

  Two Proctors stood beyond the last of the ruins, in front of a tumbledown iron structure that was hard to make out distinctly through the mist.

  I crouched down and hefted one of the stones that had fallen from the cottage wall.

  “Whistle,” I told Conrad. He raised an eyebrow.

  “Whistle? Are you cracked?”

  “Will you just trust me for once?” I hissed. I might not have had a grand and daring plan for sneaking into Lovecraft, but I could at least handle a couple of Proctors. All students in Lovecraft learned how to get around guidelines and curfew, and uniformed Proctors weren’t usually the best and brightest of the crop anyway.

  Conrad’s face was marked deeply with skepticism, but he put his fingers in his mouth and let out a piercing whistle.

  Instantly the Proctors snapped alert, and the closer one started toward us. “Hey!” his partner shouted. “Draven said we were supposed to stand on this spot!”

  “That could be him now,” the other insisted.

  “No,” the first said. “He told us to stay put.”

  “You really want to be the one who kept him waiting?” said the first Proctor. “You’ve seen how he gets. Especially since he got to be a bigwig in the Bureau.”

  The other sighed, but then jerked his head in assent. “Make it fast, will ya? This place is the worst. Creepy as all hell.”

  “Hello?” the first Proctor shouted. “Any virals lurking, show yourselves!”

  I blinked, momentarily surprised that the Proctors still believed in the necrovirus. But how could they not? I wondered what excuse Draven had come up with to bring them all here, to a place that wasn’t supposed to exist and could get you burned for heresy for suggesting that it did.

  The Proctor passed the stone wall, so close I could have reached out and plucked at the sleeve of his black uniform. Once he’d passed out of sight of his friend, I stepped out from cover behind him and swung the rock swiftly and surely, connecting with the back of his skull.

  Conrad gaped at me, then at the sprawled Proctor on the ground, who lay unmoving. “Well?” I said to Conrad, hefting the rock. “Whistle again.”

  “Stone and sun, Aoife,” Conrad muttered. “You’re not the sister I left behind, that’s for sure.”

  “You’re not the brother who left, Conrad,” I retorted. That brother wouldn’t have looked at me like I was crazy for doing what was necessary, and it made me sad. But that was for another time, when we weren’t surrounded by Proctors and who knew what other dangers. “It’s a natural progression, as far as I’m concerned.”

  Conrad rolled his eyes at me as if I were unbearably childish, but he stuck his fingers back in his mouth. The second Proctor fell in much the same way as the first.

  Once Cal and Dean had helped Conrad tie the Proctors up, using their own belts and some rope in Cal’s backpack, we approached the Gate.

  “All right,” Dean rubbed his hands together. “Conrad, get this bad boy up and running, and get us far away from Draven and his jackbooted blackbirds.”

  “Me?” Conrad pointed at Dean. “You’re the Erlkin, you get us out of here.”

  “Brother, I know less than nothing about those contraptions,” Dean said. “I’ve lived most of my life in the Iron Land, just like you. ’Sides, you need a technician or a slipstreamer to work the Gates, if you don’t want just anything getting in.”

  “Yeah, you’re the one who’s been going back and forth like he knows a magic trick, according to Bethina and Aoife,” Cal piped up. “How’d you do it, Conrad?”

  “I didn’t, all right!” Conrad answered, clearly irritated. “I paid Erlkin to take me back and forth. Just like that square deal Skip said.” He kicked a clump of muddy earth with his shoe. “I don’t know how to work the Gates. Is that what you want me to say? It’s the one thing I’m supposed to do as a Gateminder, besides have a Weird, and I can’t. I tried, I can’t, and I never could. And now that the Gates are so screwed up even people like us can’t always use them, I’ll never get the chance to try again. You happy now?”

  “Damn, man,” Dean said after a moment. “You don’t have to put your dukes up. We were just asking a question.”

  “Yeah,” Cal said. “I didn’t know. And it doesn’t matter,” he added quickly. “You just haven’t gotten the hang of it yet.”

  I hadn’t known either, and I looked at Conrad with a new light shining on him, surprised that he’d admitted to all of us he wasn’t perfect. I’d assumed Conrad had found his Weird, and more importantly, learned how to manipulate the Gates, long before he’d sent me the letter that started me looking for him. I had no way of knowing he’d found someone to smuggle him. That he’d never touched his Weird.

  That it was all up to me.

  While Conrad sighed and paced away from the group, I turned in the opposite direction and went to examine the Gate. Conrad needed his space when he got in moods like this. He always had. Bethina looked for a moment like she was going to try to speak to him, but Cal laid a hand on her arm and shook his head.

  Gates were, from what little I’d gleaned from the Fae, tears in the fabric between the Lands. Call it physics, or magic, or heresy, barriers kept humans, Fae, Erlkin and the older, darker things apart. Erected after the great Storm, when magic ran unbidden through the Iron Land and nearly caused a catastrophe on a global scale, the Gates had been a human idea first, but the Fae had taken them, twisted them. The Erlkin’s physical markers for their Gates were a far cry from the stone circles of the Fae and the simple thin spaces in the fabric of the Iron Land that a Gateminder felt as a tingle down the spine. This Gate was an iron structure, a plinth that tapered to a point at the top. A network of iron lattice filled the center, and in it a small tube of aether glittered, held at either end by spindly iron arms. That much aether could flatten the land for half a mile if it made contact with the air. I drew back my hand from the iron. I had better not screw this up.

  “What do you think?” Dean asked at my shoulder. I jumped and let out a smal
l noise.

  “Sorry,” he said. “But can you get us out of here?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, tentatively placing my hand against the iron marker of the Gate. My Weird responded immediately, opening a vast void in my head, through which I could feel the mechanism of the Erlkin’s Gate—a machine, here, rather than a spell like the Fae’s stone circle—churning and wide open. “Holy …” I jerked my hand away. The skin was hot and pink, and I felt the telltale dribble of blood down my upper lip. “Darn it,” I said, swiping at it.

  Dean handed me his bandanna. “So,” he said carefully, “not good?”

  “It’s a machine,” I said. “So that’s … better, I guess, than Fae magic. But it’s open.”

  One of Dean’s dark eyebrows arched above his silver eye. “Right now?”

  “Wide open.” I sniffed and tasted metal in the back of my throat. My Weird was far more of a pain than a gift most of the time. And how could the Gate be open, with no one controlling it?

  Because you didn’t just open the Gates to Thorn, my thoughts whispered. You broke something, some fundamental backbone, and now it’s just a matter of time until another Storm.

  No. I couldn’t let my thoughts spin off track. It was just the Weird, or residual echoes from being on Windhaven and close to so much iron. That was all. I hadn’t kick-started a disaster of apocalyptic proportions.

  Now if I could just believe that.

  “Well, hell,” Dean said. “I’m taking the leap, then. We need to move—those two are going to wake up and Draven’s going to come back sooner or later.” He braced himself to run at the Gate. “I’ll go first, make sure it’s safe.”

  “No!” I cried. Dean’s impetuous lack of forethought was one of the things that had appealed to me when we’d met, but now he was just acting insane, and it wasn’t helping anything.

  I grabbed for his arm, but his leather jacket slipped between my fingers as he took a run at the Gate. “We don’t know what’s on the other side!” I shouted, frantic. Dean couldn’t get hurt. Couldn’t leave me alone. I couldn’t let him put himself at risk.

  A split second later, Dean smacked into the metal lattice with a loud clang.

  “Shit!” he bellowed, sitting down hard on the spongy ground, clutching his nose, which leaked a velvety trickle of blood down his square chin.

  “Dean!” I cried. I ran to him and crouched at his side, using the tail of my shirt to stanch the bleeding.

  “You said it was open,” he groaned.

  “It was.” I fluttered my hands helplessly, wishing more than anything that I could stop his pain, but there was nothing I could really do.

  “Man, that smarts,” Dean said, muffled against my shirt. He closed his hands over mine. “It’s okay, princess. Not your fault. I’ll be okay.”

  I reached out from where I crouched and passed the tips of my fingers over the cold, mist-kissed iron of the Gate. It was dead now—nothing pricked my Weird as working. As quickly as it had opened, it had shut again. Which lent even more credence to my theory that something was deeply wrong.

  Later, I could puzzle it out, worry and fret over what I’d done, but for now, Conrad’s statement remained true—we had to go before Draven found us here.

  I focused my attention fully back on the Gate. I opened my mind, just as I had on Windhaven, not able to control a slight wince at the anticipation of skull-shattering pain.

  I felt the machinery of the Erlkin Gate respond to my Weird, the aether blazing across my mind. I cracked one eye and saw the lattice begin to move. The arms were mechanical, and they moved like spider legs, crimping and rearranging themselves into new formations as gears within the Gate begin to grind. For a moment I felt the Gate slipping open again, responding to the blood of a Gateminder as it should, and then all at once it was too hot, too bright, and I couldn’t feel anything except furnace-warm air. I was burning alive, turning to ash, and I think I screamed before the world fell away.

  The room had turned from sunset to night, the skies replete with a million stars. On one horizon, a faint blue line of dawn flared, while above my head triple moons, in phases from swollen full to the hunter’s horns, turned and waxed and waned in time.

  “It’s not just gears and aether,” said the figure standing before me in a black cloak. “It’s those things, but it’s more. It’s the same thing that puts uncanny power in your blood, and it’s what allowed the Gates to come to exist in the first place.” He turned to watch the moons, cloak swirling. “And it can’t be harnessed and controlled. It’s a wild force, Aoife. It must be bargained with.”

  I looked at the spinning clockwork palace and voiced the thought echoing in my head. “Am I dead?”

  “Dead?” the figure snorted. “Knocked out, perhaps. Far from the Deadlands as you are from anywhere else, in this place.”

  “Then why are we talking?” I said. “I haven’t been exposed to enough iron to trigger a madness dream.”

  The figure smiled at me, the darkness of its face shifting. “You don’t know, Aoife?”

  “No,” I said frankly. “I have no idea who you are or where we are.” This time, it felt even more real, more present, than when I’d first dreamed of the place, and it made me want to scream. I couldn’t be mad. I’d been doing so well, trying to hold on until Conrad and I found a more certain cure than simply hiding in the woods.

  The sunrise beyond the dome was growing in intensity, but it wasn’t the sun of the Iron Land—it was green and flared around the edges with sunspots. It was a dying sun, looking down on a dying universe.

  Above, the black tentacles lashed and writhed in the green light, and the figure turned back toward the great gears that churned before us.

  “You’re dreaming, Aoife,” he said. “Not seeing the product of iron poisoning, but really dreaming. And it’s time for you to wake up.”

  “Fantastic,” I mumbled. “Not only do I visit this place every time I close my eyes, I have to leave it and go back to the real world.”

  “You don’t give your world enough credit,” said the figure. “I’ve seen them all. Yours is beautiful.”

  “It’s awful,” I said. “And I made it that way.”

  “No, Aoife,” said the dream figure. “What you did to the Engine was not as terrible a thing as you think. The worlds were never meant to be gated. At least, not your worlds. The Fae and the Iron … they need one another.”

  The figure turned away from me again. “Now it really is time for you to go.” He turned the great gear, and I saw the green sun begin to spin out of its orbit, and the tentacles to recede with it.

  “By the way,” said the dream figure. “Don’t try to use your handy little magic trick on a Gate in the Mists. The Erlkin are much better at keeping your kind out than the Fae.”

  He moved the gears again, and I watched as the green sun began to go nova, burning out in a flash so bright that it seared my vision.

  I came back to the world with a gasp, and the worst spike of pain in my head that I’d ever endured, save the one when I touched the Lovecraft Engine with my Weird. “Did I faint?” I demanded of Cal, the first face I saw leaning over me with an anxious expression. It was embarrassing, but better than blacking out from a madness-induced hallucination by miles.

  “You just kind of keeled over,” he said, and upon seeing my mortified expression hastened to add, “You were only out for a few minutes.”

  “You fell like somebody cut your strings,” Dean said, frowning. The bloody mark across the bridge of his nose made him look savage, but his eyes were filled with pure worry. He put his hands under my shoulders and helped me sit up. Touching Dean calmed the throbbing in my skull a bit, until Conrad cleared his throat.

  “You were mumbling,” he said, reaching out his hand for me and then pulling it back like touching me might pass the fainting spell. “Your eyes were twitching in their sockets too.” He swallowed. “I’ve never seen you do that. Are you okay, Aoife?”

  “Not really,” I sa
id. I managed to stand up by myself, so that was something. When your friends and brother could disappear at any moment, every small thing a girl like me could do for herself was monumentally important.

  “I really don’t like this place,” Bethina piped up. “I feel like something is watching us.”

  I had to agree with her. This ghost-colored bit of the Mists was eerie, even by the standards of the things I’d seen recently, and my skin crawled as the drifting moisture kissed it.

  “Don’t worry, Bethina,” Dean told her. “Nothing’s going to jump out and bite you.” He patted me on the shoulder. “Aoife will get us out of here.”

  I didn’t say that with my spinning head, I wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry, but I grasped Dean’s hand in return. He was something solid to cling to, and I was so glad he was there.

  Conrad’s lips compressed in a straight line. “If this is what’s going to happen, I’m not letting her touch the Gate again.” He fished in his jacket pocket, pulled out a dirty kerchief and handed it to me. “Clean yourself up,” he muttered to me, pressing the cloth into my hands. “Don’t like to see you bleeding.”

  I swiped at my face and then shoved the kerchief into my own pocket.

  “Thanks,” I whispered to Conrad. He shrugged—a gesture of kindness I thought we’d forgotten how to exchange. I felt a little less strained in that moment.

  Planting my feet carefully until my balance came back, I returned to the Gate, but this time I examined the plinth itself. The Erlkin were engineers, I was an engineer. Surely I could make their machine work without my Weird. I still had a brain, at least until I fetched up against that much iron again. The plinth, not iron itself but some kind of smooth black stone, revealed a hinged door in the side, which opened into a small space studded with dials and gauges.

  The symbols stamped next to each were similar to what I’d seen in Windhaven, and I called Dean over to translate. “There’ve got to be instructions for this thing.”

  Dean whistled. “There’s just markings for places like the black forests, the dry wastes—not that I know why anyone would want to head there—and there’s one marked Iron.” He fingered the burnt edges of the panel. “But this thing is dead, princess. No way we’re turning it on manually.”