Phantom Eyes

by Scott Tracey

  “The beginning of all things. The end of all things. The punishment and praise of all things.”

  “The Riders at the Gate,” I said.

  She spread her hands expansively. “Welcome to the Gate. Enter the lighthouse from a thousand different worlds, and exit a thousand more. You could visit a new world every day for the rest of your life and never double back on yourself.”

  I looked around as though I could see them, these doors into other worlds. “This is what you were looking for, wasn’t it? You wanted to travel to other worlds? Why?” Wasn’t one world bad enough? A thousand more filled with lies, betrayal and hatred? Who would ever want to see that?

  “Because I thought the lighthouse was the answer to my gift. There’s a connection. The Riders created the lighthouse, leaving a door in every world they could claw their way into, and sorcerers to draw them into these worlds. The Riders know the trick, you see, to a demon walking in the world of men. Cast off enough of your power, or hide it away, and you can enter the world as easily as any demonic dog. No real demon would ever sacrifice their power this way, but the Riders are beyond simple demons.”

  “And finding the lighthouse was how Lucien found you.”

  She inclined her head. “He found me because I started searching. I found the lighthouse only with his help. This was his plan all along. Then he stole my future from me, and had to be taught a lesson.”

  She might have trapped him, but he wasn’t really punished. Not yet.

  “Again,” I said. “The faster you show me everything, the faster I can return.”

  Grace inclined her head, a smile on her lips.

  It wasn’t all moments of conversation and violence. There were times where she broke through my defenses without even looking in my direction, and when the hit came, instead of debilitating pain, it sank into my skin and electrified my senses. It was scraps of knowledge at first: understanding how to divide my vision so that I could see many different places all at once, how to single out certain kinds of memories, how to pick out liars without unraveling everything that they were. Grace had uncovered dozens of different ways to utilize her power, some of which I’d figured out on my own.

  She also learned things in the exchange. The bits of magic that I’d managed, the way I’d destroyed a hellhound, the overwhelming explosion of power that had first brought me here. But more importantly, she learned things about the world. She saw Belle Dam through my eyes: a world where communication was instantaneous, no matter the distance. The vast power of the Internet and the way it changed how people worked.

  “You’re too slow, too sloppy,” Grace said, days later. I was lethargic all the time now, my body shifting into some altered state of consciousness to cope with the fact that I no longer played by life’s rules. I’d become hypervigilant, convinced that attacks were coming at every moment of the day. When they didn’t come, not for hours and hours, I convinced myself that it was all part of her plan. It only made the paranoia worse.

  Grace started lobbing fireballs at me. I could swat them to the side, transmute the fire into water, disperse the fire into a pulse of heat, or even freeze them where they flew.

  Every time I found a way to stop them, every loophole I exploited, she closed it off and made the next volley even more impenetrable. The longer we went, the more the grim line of her mouth tightened. “The point,” she said icily, “is to unravel the magic and claim it for your own. Do not dodge an attack you can swallow whole. It will weaken your enemy, and throw him off guard.”

  Each time the fireballs struck me, the blue aura that surrounded me constantly now would keep them from doing any real damage, but it was still like sticking my finger into an electrical outlet, just for a second. A jolt, like my heart and body were being restarted. It wasn’t pleasant.

  She wanted me to unravel the spells using only my visions, which was basically the exact opposite of what John had spent seventeen years trying to get me to do. The only problem was that she made it so difficult. The witch eyes could unravel even the most complicated spell, laying out the component pieces and the way it looked and felt. But that sometimes took time. I had, at best, a handful of seconds before I took another fireball to the face.

  Throughout it all, I watched the calculating twist in her eyes, saw the way she regarded me. And so I took my time working through concepts I already understood. Fumbled through spells that I could have managed in my sleep. Because I didn’t dare let her know everything that I was capable of. We were still enemies under the skin.

  I hadn’t lied when I said I hated her. I just knew how to prioritize.

  twenty-five

  Neither of us was prepared the day she tried to teach me how to invade another’s mind. I’d done things that like before—it was how Trey and I had managed to stop Lucien the first time—but Grace’s way was different. Slipping inside Trey had been like jumping onto a moving train and then jumping off before it reached the station. Grace’s way was brute force: a constant barrage of power and pressure until the mind cracked right down the middle.

  She treated it like a game. First, she would try to batter her way through my defenses, then I would try the same. The price was that every time she broke her way into my mind, everything she touched, she tainted. I couldn’t think of one of the emergency room trips with John without feeling her derision soaking into the scene. And she heaped even more anger onto my memories of Catherine, a cold blade of wrath compared to the inferno of my rage.

  “You’ve been wasted,” she huffed, hours into the exercise. “Spending your entire life hiding behind others, hoping they would solve your problems so that you wouldn’t have to. Hiding behind John, behind Lucien, Gentry, and even your father.” She sneered. “You are the very definition of weakness.”

  She moved in for another strike, but her rebuke had pissed me off, and I struck first. As hard as I could. It was the first time I’d ever broken through her defenses, and the first time I’d ever seen the things she saw.

  It should have destroyed me.

  It was the vision. The one that set everything into motion. But the nature of it has changed. I’m no longer seeing it through my eyes. I’m seeing it through hers.

  It was a simple thing for him, the survivor of a dark apotheosis, to bring forth the lighthouse from between the faded tapestries of worlds dead and buried. Wherever there is power, there are locks. And somehow, for him, the locks swirl around, eager to open though they’ve lain fallow for the few who have known to try. Wherever there are locks, there are keys, and this boy, this boy will be a key like no other. The ground beneath me trembles, shatters, rends its limbs and grinds its bones and the lighthouse emerges into the world that had lost it a century past.

  He can unlock all of the doors inside—doors I’ve spent a hundred years beating against in frustration. But for him, they sing. They cry out in desperation—look at us, open us. Whole worlds who have no clue that a beardless monstrosity who is barely full grown has sown the seeds of their dissolution.

  I can feel Them. The Storm Demons, the Many-in-Ones, the Riders at the Gate. Circling the sewers and ascending through the aviaries. I’ve glimpsed them before, in the darkness behind the ever-raging chaos storms between the worlds. They are massive creatures that are not constrained by one world, or two worlds. Entire planets cannot contain the whole of their glory. Such is the way it has always been.

  But all things have their endings.

  “He comes,” they whisper, in voices that are not words but thoughts that pound the air like a behemoth’s wings. The Riders at the Gate, banished from all worlds when the second world was still new. Legends say that men were born of the second world. But the Riders, they are creatures born from the first. The first world, broken and bartered by the Riders, and the source of the waterfall from which all evil plunges into the world.

  What was once the city of Belle Dam—my city—is now an ossuary worth nothing more than the bone dust it collects. The spells laid into the bones of
this town were so intricate, so careful! But he brings it to ruin with ease, drinking down the marrow of the skeleton that makes it all holy. He saw the truth I hid, the truth hidden by the Rider himself, and so he brings my legacy to ruin. Not simply enough to look into the world and let everything he sees ignite into flames. No, the spells in the town ran deeper than that: trickled down through the generations so that the blood, too, was a spell of its own making. Magics as strong as this tend to spread, it is the nature of all things.

  I will be the first. He comes for me, and I see myself pleading with him. Speaking words that appeal to a human side he no longer has. Calling him by names that no longer describe even a fraction of his power. Who was I, he cried and his voice was the lightning itself, to bray at him with my human tongue?

  I was the first. But I was not the last by a far cry. He makes it into a game. Trapped and waiting, he calls me the Watcher. And so he makes me watch. They scream when he finds them, going door to door and uncovering their hiding places with eyes that brook no secrets. He doesn’t understand the looks on their faces. Their words. Their tears. He has no humanity left to understand them. They are butterflies, and he is the crushing fist.

  His face is confused, until it is presented with the blood. Blood is simple. Blood is easy.

  Bloody is necessary.

  His plan is obvious to me, though I can do nothing to stop him. To commit the most inhuman act, to take his place among them, and become the most heinous parts of himself, the town must first be shattered.

  Storm voices scream out. “Destruction. Herald.”

  The lighthouse tears through this world, leading to both worlds below and worlds above. It is the tree of life, the tower of Babel, the ladder of Jacob. It is impossibly tall, dwarfing even the clouds that have swept away from it like oil from soap. Its size, and presence, are an affront to the world of man, proving once and for all how insignificant they are in the grand scheme of things.

  This should have been my moment, the thought is savage and hungry in my mind. I, who drew the first blood. The Widow upon whom Belle Dam owed its existence. But when he tears my soul from my body, compressing it down until it is nothing more than a shiny bit of carbon, the only victory I have is that I do not utter a single word. With every sparkle of sunlight upon the gem, my soul screams. Eternal agony is a deserved punishment, he tells me, for a soul so wicked as mine.

  “Please,” the Rider below him begs. The boy looks down, surprised. He’s forgotten that his boot covers the neck of the Rider, that at any moment he could crush the life from him. It isn’t quite Lucien, not anymore. The skin is cracked and in places ripped away, and he slithers on his belly like the snake he is. He was formidable once, but now he searches for masters and monsters, one to save him, the other to feed upon.

  “There is winter in my bones, now,” the boy says, and it has the sound of a riddle he hasn’t quite puzzled out yet. “You were called Lucien, weren’t you? I almost remember.” His eyes alight with new knowledge. “The light that blinds thine eyes, fortune; the thousand eyes and the frozen flames. Look at you,” he coos at it like a pet. “How tiny a creature you are now.”

  There are still vestiges of power left within the demon. It would be an easy thing, to empty him out and drain the last of his power away. Lucien tries to cry, but finds himself unable. It unsettles my stomach, to watch a creature like that striving towards an emotion it has never felt before. But it tries harder than it has ever tried before, struggling for survival.

  “I will be better than you ever were,” the boy promises him. “Because I am a being filled with graces and holy fires. Had the stars favored you differently, we might have been brothers.”

  A noxious fume of emotions curled around them both, like some strange perfume of souls. “Look at you,” he said, caressing the side of the demon’s head. “So human. You taste like endings.”

  “Bear witness,” the voices call from the far sides of both heavens and hell. Scattered as they are, in corners of worlds where the lighthouse is barely legend. But they are coming. They come. He turned to me, even though I am dead and ash in this broken world. “They come, and I will welcome them with flames and anguish.”

  The end of the world begins with a boy, a demon, and a power that should never have been.

  Grace disappeared into the bowels of the lighthouse and left me to linger in the lantern room while she soothed her pride. Or whatever it was that I’d wounded.

  I didn’t let those days go to waste. I continued trying to become the master of my own power and figure out all the different ways it could be used. Grace claimed the only thing one needed was grief, or some other strong emotion, but deep down that didn’t seem right.

  And if were so easy to master the witch eyes, then why did the demons get involved at all? There were pieces she wasn’t telling me, pieces I could discern on my own. Grace had a fraction of Lucien’s power herself—maybe not as much as one of the wellsprings, but a few drops at least. Enough to help her control her powers, and enough to let her manipulate the same strands of fate that Lucien did, giving her access to the same visions of the future.

  Knowing that she was holding back was annoying, but I also understood it. Grace wouldn’t give away everything, not when she was setting me up to take her place. She still didn’t realize that I knew, of course.

  It was fine, because I did my best work while being underestimated.

  When she did return, finally, I saw the grim line of her mouth and knew that our time here was done. “You have three days,” she said coldly. “But first, you will fulfill the rest of the terms of your contract.”

  “Within twenty-four hours,” I said, not meeting her eyes.

  “You will do it as soon as you leave!” Grace snarled, losing any sense of composure. “You cannot break the bonds of our contract. You belong to me.”

  “I belong to myself!” I fired back. “And you don’t have to remind me about what I owe you. I know what I have to do.” I had already done enough for her. Now was the time for me. For what I wanted.

  I turned towards the stairs, realizing that Elle was already there, waiting to escort me back. “You realize if you haven’t done your part,” I said over my shoulder, “then all of this will be for nothing. I’ll be dead and you’ll never escape this lighthouse. I won’t be the last one born with our gift. Eventually, Lucien will find the skeleton key he needs, and then he’ll come for you.”

  Grace hurled obscenities at me as I descended the stairs, antiquated words in a language I didn’t speak. But “Fuck you” had a particular sound to it that was the same no matter what language it was in.

  A portal waited for me at the bottom of the stairs, Elle at its side like an attendant at an amusement park. You must be this tall to travel between dimensions.

  “Make sure she gets her fiber,” I said, jutting my head towards my shoulder, back towards the way I’d come. “There’s still time for you to escape, you know.”

  “I struck my own bargain,” she said grudgingly. Interestingly enough, her head was still bowed low. She was going to have one hell of a headache for all the posturing she’d done. “I’ll stay where I’m at. At least one of us should be predictable.”

  I paused at that. “Does she know? About me?”

  “She thinks you’re under control.”

  “Are you going to tell her?”

  “We should all pay for our mistakes,” Elle said slowly. “Even her.”

  twenty-six

  Belle Dam had changed in my absence. I’d left in the midst of a prolonged summer with warm days and warmish nights, and returned to full-fledged winter. Returning to a giant pit in the ground was inconvenient when snow had been coming down for days. The snow came up to my knees, and even as I stood there getting my bearings back, a sharp wind sent a sky full of dust spilling out over top of me.

  I had to turn around a few times to figure out where I was, exactly. With snow coating the sides of the hole, it was hard to see where the gr
ound sloped gently upwards in the hill we’d used to climb down.

  We.

  And now there was only me.

  I promised myself I would stop and feel what had happened once my time was done. Either I would be successful, or my three days would pass and I’d spend the rest of them in the lighthouse. The difference between a living hell, or just the actual hell.

  I felt different now that the witch eyes were a part of me again. I could look out into the woods and see the story of every tree, every path. The people who’d walked these woods, their stories. Their lives and lies and troubles. It was all there, waiting for me. I didn’t need the sunglasses now, to shield me from the visions. I willed them to stay silent, and they listened.

  My magic curled around me, warming the air and keeping the snow from seeping cold into my skin. I plodded through the accumulation until I found the hill and climbed back up. There would still be a half mile trek back towards civilization, but I could handle it.

  “Braden?”

  Jade’s voice was tentative and disbelieving. She stood at the top of the hill, wearing a bright white parka and snow boots that had probably cost more than my entire outfit. She looked like she’d been standing around here for a while—her skin was pink with cold, and she was shaking.

  “Where were you? How are you okay right now? Everyone’s been looking for you!”

  “Jade, calm,” I said slowly. “How long was I gone?”

  She shook her head, still bewildered. I guess I couldn’t blame her. I’d basically appeared out of thin air after all. “Three weeks? You missed Christmas.”

  Three weeks. Time had moved strangely in the lighthouse. I would have thought I was gone more like six months.

  “Is Drew with you? We know you both came out here and then you disappeared. We found his motorcycle on the side of the road. It wasn’t hard to figure out where you’d gone. Where is he?”