Spellbent

by Lucy A. Snyder

  I stood and took a deep breath. There had to be a way Out of the bedroom, hopefully a quiet way that wouldn’t let Lake know what I was up to. I glanced toward the window. A big crow hovered awkwardly outside, cocking its head to stare at me with its cold black eyes. It pecked the glass fiercely as if to emphasize that the exterior of the house was indeed a very bad place to be. There’d be no sneaking out across the roof and down a drain spout to the storm cellar, at least not for me.

  I stared back at the crow. More and more of its brothers were arriving to hover beyond the glass or lurk on the windowsill. All stared at me balefully. Soon there would be so many crowding at the window that they would block out the light from the shattered moon.

  Acting on a hunch, I blinked to the gemview that had shown me insane King Lake and the wooden feast. The cozy guest room around me turned into a stark medieval gaol cell. The bed was a dirty burlap sack of straw on a wooden bench; the bathroom was nothing more than a narrow alcove containing a filthy pine bucket and a crude floor drain. The window had become a tall, narrow opening through the stone, far too stingy for an adult to squeeze through. Nonetheless, it had been covered with a rusty iron latticework.

  The creatures pressing against the lattice no longer appeared as birds. At first glance they looked like sponges soaked in black india ink. I pulled one of the torches out of its sconce and brought the flame to the window to get a better look.

  They still looked like sponges, but in some of the larger pores I could see small, probing, tentacle-like tongues. In other pores I saw tiny, circular grinding mouths. I thought of the slimy jaws of hagfish. And in others shone beady eyes a deeper black than their porous flesh. I felt a deep, primal hatred toward the weird creatures, the sort of animosity I supposed a mongoose raised in a laboratory might feel when it finally laid eyes on a cobra.

  I squinted at the spongy little monsters, wondering if I might remember some long-forgotten bit of information that would explain to me what they were. Something nagged in the back of my head, just below my conscious recollection, a shark in murky water that refused to surface. Perhaps I’d read of creatures like these in some arcane bestiary years ago. Whatever the case, I could no longer recall their proper names.

  But as I continued to stare at them, I realized that whatever they were, they were giving off the hungry, heedless energy of very young creatures. They were larvae, perhaps, or hatchlings.

  “So where’s your mother?” I asked them through the window. They answered me by sucking at the iron bars, tiny teeth chattering silently.

  I jumped and nearly knocked over the lamp when the lock clunked and the thick oak door swung open.

  The sad woman’s ball-jointed doll stood in the doorway, the torchlight shining on its dark glass eyes. It raised a wooden finger to its blank face in a shushing motion, then set a wooden toy block down in the doorway. The doll stepped into the room and let the heavy door swing almost shut behind it, kept from locking by the little block.

  “What are you?” I whispered.

  “I am Blue,” it replied. I realized I was hearing it telepathically, as if it were a familiar. “And I am not an ‘it,’ I am a boy.”

  Blue didn’t sound irritated; his tone was one of patient correction.

  “My father put me to sleep, but I woke up after the monster trapped us here. It made me so angry seeing my mother get hurt every day that after a while it felt like there was nothing in me but bad thoughts. I sent the angry part away so I could try to think of a way out of here,” Blue said. “My bad half hurt you; that’s why you can hear me in your head, because a little bit of me is still inside you.”

  The Wutganger. Blue was the other half of that monster, everything that was left of the original soul, the part incapable of feeling pain or hatred. I stared at his strange, featureless doll body.

  What on Earth was going on here?

  chapter twenty-one

  Palimpsest: The Gamble

  Bruce flipped me in the air and caught me by my neck; I felt the man’s strong fingers closing around my tiny windpipe, threatening to crush the life out of me.

  I bit the man’s index finger as hard as I could while I raked the tender underside of the man’s wrist with my back claws.

  “Dammit!” Bruce dropped me.

  I hit the ground running, racing toward the cover of some nearby bushes. Bruce cursed, and then I heard the slide of a pistol being drawn from a leather holster. The gun fired, a bullet kicking up gravel perilously close by. I dove into the cover of a wild honeysuckle.

  “Leave it,” Wilson ordered. “Don’t waste your bullets; it doesn’t have long to live.”

  I barely had time to catch my breath from my mad sprint when I felt a sharp, tugging pain deep in my core. I’d never felt that kind of pain before, but I instantly knew what it meant: My jailers were tearing my soul from the ferret’s body so they could drag me back to prison.

  No. No, no, no, I thought. It couldn’t happen now, not when Jessie and Mother Karen and Jimmy needed me most. But what could I possibly do to stop it?

  I thought back to the night I’d awakened in the ferret’s body, the night Smoky had transformed into a blended version of his true self. I hadn’t thought that sort of thing was possible. Instead of being dragged back to my true body in prison, could I somehow reverse the process and pull my true form into my ferret self? Smoky had gone insane in the process, but that might have been from the shock of the explosion rather than the trauma of his transformation.

  I felt desperate enough to take the risk; I was far too small and weak in this body to do anything to help save Jessie and the others. But was that kind of transformation possible here?

  Another sharp spasm rippled through my body, and I vomited onto the dead leaves beneath the honeysuckle. The ferret’s body was going to die. My jailers would take me soon; resisting them could prolong things, painfully, but only for a few more moments.

  Had the reality shift caused by the portal enabled Smoky’s accidental transformation? Would the portal in the basement of the farmhouse ruins generate a similar effect? Would there be a way to control it, keep my mind intact? I shook myself; there was no way to know any of it until I tried.

  I peeked out from beneath the bush. No one was looking in my direction. I took a deep breath and started running for the dead field and the basement beyond.

  When I leaped across the edge of the dead field, the pain was astonishing. I nearly lost consciousness, and I couldn’t stay on my feet—

  —I opened my eyes, and I was in my true quamo body, chained down to a bare concrete floor. Gray-uniformed human guards stood nearby with wands and pain-staves—

  No!

  I opened my eyes again, seeing a double exposure of the prison and the poisoned field, feeling the little heart in my chest shudder, beating weak and erratic— “He’s almost through,” one of the guards said beside my quamo body. “When he’s fully awake, we’re to take him to Fifth Level for intensive deprogramming.”

  They meant to sap my powers and wipe my mind, turn me into a simpering drudge they could set to work on a host of mundane tasks. There’d be no returning to my nestmates, no respectable position in academia, and no saving Jessie from being trapped in Cooper’s hell. Everything I’d done on Earth the past few weeks would have been wasted. There’d be no heroism in my future, no redemption for my past sins, and not even a marker for my grave.

  Goddess save me, I thought, my mind racing like a rat in a cage to think of a way to escape the living death that awaited me.

  An idea came to me, one so simple, one so pure, I was shocked by its diamond clarity. In my quamo body, I began to sing a variant of a teleportation spell I knew by heart. In my ferret body, I beat a little charm on the dirt with my front paws that would normally allow a spirit to enter my body during a séance.

  “What’s he doing? Somebody stop him!” one of the guards shouted.

  But whatever they planned to do, they were too late. I felt my quamo body collaps
e in on itself as my ferret body began to swell, the furry skin splitting and healing faster than the mind could think. My spine cracked and elongated, sprouting flat ribs and bony girdles where none had existed, extra legs bursting through the flesh of my abdomen, my tail falling away like a lizard’s. The transformation was a sweet itching agony, an adolescent’s years of growing pains compressed into three seconds. I was becoming something not-quamo, something not-ferret, something completely new and possibly never seen in the universe before, something uniquely myself.

  I blinked my four eyes in the gray light of the dead field, shook my shaggy head, and rolled my bulky abdomen over onto my eight legs. The pain of the cursed land wasn’t so bad now; I had my full powers back, and the ambient magic was just a distraction.

  I looked down at my two front legs; they were covered in fur, and the musculature and bone structure didn’t look right. But at least I had proper hands, though this time I had five digits instead of four, and they ended in crude mammalian claws instead of delicate needles. Still, they were far more useful than what I’d had as a ferret. I’d make do.

  “What in the great blazes is that?” I heard Wilson exclaim.

  “What should we do?” asked Bruce.

  “Kill the damn thing,” Wilson replied. “I gave you that shotgun for a reason, you idiot.”

  Bruce and Wilson both trained their enchanted weapons at me and fired. I made a quick gesture to raise a fiery force shield before me. The enchanted pellets sizzled into the field and vaporized.

  Bruce and Wilson gave each other an Oh crap glance.

  And now, gentle sirs, it’s my turn, I thought, giving them my best saber-toothed smile.

  chapter twenty-two

  Siobhan’s Children

  “My brothers are sleeping. We have waited a long time for someone to help us,” the ball-jointed doll told me.

  Brothers? “How many of you are there?”

  “We are seven, but not all are trapped here. The firstborn has never been more than an idea in this place.”

  Firstborn. Mr. Jordan was easily seven years older than Cooper. “Do you mean Benedict?” I asked.

  “Yes. Father waits for him forever, but Benny has never come. He could have saved us from this fate. The second-born escaped with the seventh, who is just a shadow here. But Father’s grip on the second-born was too strong, and it pulled him back here because Benny never came.”

  “Is the second-born Cooper?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  Blue cocked his blank head at me, his wooden neck creaking and his eyes glittering. “Are you still alive?”

  I paused, my heart bouncing into my throat as my mind flashed on the sudden irrational notion that perhaps I’d died entering this hell. After all, how would I really know if I was actually alive or dead until I tried to leave?

  “Yes. I’m alive,” I replied firmly, as much to convince myself as him.

  “Then yes, he is. For now. As are my brothers.”

  “The young guy I met in the forest—is that Reggie?” I asked.

  Blue nodded. “He saw what happened here, and it made him sick to his soul. The guilt was never his to bear, but he bore it anyhow.”

  “How—how old are you?”

  “I was almost two years old when Lake put me to sleep. Then he stored me like a doll on a shelf until it was time for Cooper to sacrifice me.”

  “What? Cooper would never hurt a baby!”

  “He was just a child himself, and did not know what Lake was training him to do.” Blue paused. “But no, he did not hurt me, nor, did he hurt my brothers who are trapped here. We were in enchanted sleep when the monster drew us into this not-home. Cooper killed only one of us, our brother who escaped this place, leaving his shadow behind.”

  At first I had no idea what he was talking about, but then I thought of the Warlock and his missing piece of soul. It fit. But Blue was saying Cooper had murdered him.

  I shook my head, biting my lips. “No. I don’t believe you. You.. . you’re not even human. And if you’re just two years old, how can you speak so well? This is a trick.”

  “But I cannot speak, not at all.” Blue touched his blank face. “You are just hearing my thoughts in your mind. Your mind is turning them into words.

  Your mind is giving my spirit visual form. I cannot control how your mind chooses to see me.”

  I shook my head, still refusing to believe. “You cannot help any of us if you do not believe me. Not even Cooper. You need to go down to the basement. You need to see the monster who trapped us, and you will believe me. You need to see what happened here. What still happens here, over and over and over again, to our mother and father.”

  Deep inside, I knew Blue was telling the truth, but I also knew that I had to see it for myself.

  “Fine,” I said, picking my sword and shield up off the crude straw mattress. “Let’s go down to the basement.”

  Blue pushed the door open, then nudged the block out of the way and locked it once I was in the hallway. “Be very quiet. Lake will be angry if he hears us. I made a secret passageway where you can see everything.

  “Lake put me to sleep like the others, but after a while my mind woke up even though my body slept. Once I sent my bad half away I was able to think well enough to make a plan. And when Cooper came back here, I was able to borrow some of his power when nobody was looking.

  “When my bad half attacked you, I felt it; it was like a dream, only I was awake. And then I knew you would come here, or at least try. So I made this place just for you, so you could understand this place and find a way to get us all out.”

  Why me? I thought despite myself.

  “Because you can resist what happens here.” Blue could apparently hear my thoughts. “I can only do things while the monster is asleep; when it is awake, I have to go back to being the sleeping doll in my mother’s arms. Cooper could not resist at all; his guilt was too great once he remembered what he had done to his own brother. He should have sent his bad feelings away like I did.”

  Blue stopped, trembled. “It is time for me to sleep again. Go to the end of the hall, pull out the panel in the wall to get to the secret stairs to the basement. Put the panel back when you’re inside so it stays hidden. Whatever you do, do not let It hear you.”

  And in a blink, Blue simply disappeared.

  “It”? What “It” had Blue meant? I got the feeling he wasn’t talking about mad Lake. I licked my dry lips, wishing I could ‘risk a sip of water, and began to creep down the dark hallway. I reached the wood-paneled wall without incident; I felt around in the dark until my fingers found a loose edge. A tug, and the panel came free.

  The stairs were low and quite narrow, indirectly illuminated from the basement. It was difficult to pull the panel back into place once I was in the passageway. I had to hold my shield sideways and push it in front of me as I crawled down the stairs. The dim passageway smelled of dust and rot, and debris crunched beneath my gloved palms and leather-clad knees.

  The stairs opened into a wood-paneled hallway with a cold stone floor. Flickering candles in several iron chandeliers hanging from the ceiling lit the hall. A dozen narrow windows were set into the walls. I got to my feet, glad that there was room to stand. The windows were set low so that I had to stoop a bit to see through them, but at least they were built more with an adult’s height in mind than the staircase

  Gripping my shield, I approached the first window and peered inside. I saw Lake’s wife cowering at the foot of the bed, a baby in a blue blanket clutched in her arms. Lake stood in the doorway, scowling, holding an unconscious man by the back of his collar.

  “You really thought I’d never find out the baby wasn’t mine, Siobhan?” Lake demanded.

  He muttered a charm under his breath, and the unconscious man was flung across the room to land at the woman’s feet. The man groaned, rolled over; his face was battered and swollen, but still bore a noticeable resemblance to Cooper’s. />
  “Speak up, woman!” Lake barked. “You’d rather be with Corvus here? You’d rather abandon your husband and firstborn son and live with this philandering fuck?”

  “No,” the woman wept. “It—it just happened.”

  “Oh. I see. You just, oopsie, slipped in the kitchen and happened to land on his dick, is that it?”

  “It was only one night,” she pleaded. “My mother just died, and you were in Europe.” Her voice cracked with desperation and fear. “I’d never abandon you, or Benny. I love you.”

  His handsome face darkened with madness that frightened me even through glass. It was as if a cold shadow of evil was seeping in through the walls, eclipsing the entire room.

  “Love us? That’s a laugh. You’ve shamed me, shamed your firstborn son. I’m going to have to send Benny away to boarding school, just to keep him away from your bad influence. You’re nothing but a white-trash whore.”

  “Please don’t hurt us,” she begged.

  “Hurt you? My lovey-dovey wife? And your ittlewittle bastard? Oh, not I. I’d never hurt you. I’d only ever want to give the love of my life what she most desires. And if actions speak louder than words—and believe me, they most certainly do—what you want most in this world is to fuck this piece of dogshit as often as possible and spawn his brats. And you’re gonna get your wish, dear wife, you can count on that.”

  The window went dark; I moved to the next looping memory-scene. Lake was standing in the basement, looking angrier and crazier than before, a whiskey bottle clenched in one hand and a wand in the other. Corvus labored with a shovel in a dirt pit in the floor.

  “Keep going, asshole,” Lake said as Corvus paused to rest. “I didn’t tell you to stop.”

  “Please, man,” Corvus begged. “I’m sorry I did your woman. I was drunk. It was only once. I didn’t mean for her to get pregnant.”