Oh, what an idiot I had been.
Then Theo was talking, and although I noticed that his lips weren’t moving, I couldn’t give meaning to it.
“Time to pay the piper, Hasadiah. It’s time to suffer for the crimes you’ve committed. You have to face the music. You need to cross the Rubicon. Swallow the pill, girl. Take your damned medicine!”
I started to say that I wasn’t afraid of him, but I couldn’t help the step I took backwards that contradicted those words. Something dragged at my ankle. I looked down helplessly and saw that my ankle was manacled again. The shackle was tight around my ankle and fixed with a small lock. The chain was firmly attached to the wooden part of a pew that had somehow appeared close to me. It chain was wrapped around the seat part and fastened with a large padlock. The pew was bolted to the floor with thirty-six bolts. When I looked up, Theo was in front of me and Bathsheba stood next to him. Both sets of eyes glared down at me with the scarlet fire of a massive bonfire.
I would have run, but I was no longer able to do that.
Lulu, came Landers from what seemed like an eternity away. Lulu, you have to believe that this isn’t real. You have to break yourself free. You have to do it.
Bathsheba looked at me with her wretched eyes both mournful and accusatory. “You could have saved me,” she said.
“I—”
“You knew what he would do when he brought me to the church,” she said. I knew that her lips weren’t moving any more than Theo’s, but my thoughts were a jumbled, distorted mess. I was barely hanging onto sanity as it was. If I started thinking about details, I would lose my grip and plummet away. “You should have done more.”
I glanced down at the chain again, which was a mistake. When I looked back up there were others with Bathsheba. These were the ones from The Golden Gate Bridge; these were the people Theo had judged unworthy and murdered. They had hangmen’s nooses draped around their necks, and I could hear the scratching noise as the ropes rubbed against the metal of the bridge even though there was no bridge there.
Their words were similar to Bathsheba’s. (What had her name really been? Theo had told me, but I couldn’t bring it to the forefront of my mind.) “Hasadiah, you could have saved us.” “You let us die.” “You could have done more.” “You’re a terrible person.” “You’re as much a murderer as Theophilus.”
“I’m not,” I protested. They were all so close, and I couldn’t bring myself to look away from them. If I did, they would close in and do appalling things to me. Their clawed fingers would shred my flesh and pull out my intestines for the crows. The fear inside me was a surge of frothing magma from the bowels of a shuddering volcano.
“You are,” they insisted. “You let us die. You murdered us. You don’t care. You’re apathetic. You’re flighty and capricious. You’re shallow and unloved. You’re…Louise.”
I wanted to fold in on myself. Every fear that had roiled about inside my head was bubbling to the surface in the words of these things. I knew on some level that Landers had to be right. These weren’t ghosts, but some trick of my mind. Something in this dark grove was drawing them out to taunt me.
“Time to pay, Hasadiah,” Theo said. “You owe a debt. You owe God, and He wants you to pay.”
There wasn’t an answer to that.
I stepped backward, but the chain connected to the manacle around my ankle stopped me. I was trapped. Gather the chain up, I told myself. Strangle Theo. Beat the pew until it breaks. Jump up and down on the seat. Use your brain. Take a chance. Make your escape.
Landers’s words came back to me. They’re not real. I wanted to repeat them a thousand times like an affirmation that would make me whole. Another voice interjected itself into my brain with, They may not be real, but they’re stronger than I am.
Abruptly, Landers was there in front of me with the rest of the group. His handsome face was twisted with scorn as he stared at me with red eyes that were the same as Theo and Bathsheba’s. “No one would ever want you, Lulu,” he said contemptuously. “They all want Louise. Lulu is second best, and she always will be. You should have died in that church so that Bathsheba didn’t have to.”
I wanted to scream and cry at the same time.
They’re not real.
Landers glared at me and those fiery eyes sank into my soul piercing it like a hot poker into a pat of butter. “I’ll never love you. You’re not worthy of being loved,” he said.
They’re not real. Landers isn’t real.
Don’t listen, came another voice in my head. It was equal parts imperative and frantic. For God’s sake, don’t listen! Gideon said not to go through the black door.
All of the people around started to talk to me, and their critical words blurred together as they rushed to condemn me. “Time…you’re…you…to…not…let…pay…worthy…us…die!”
The magma of fear surged up inside me, the prelude to an explosion worthy of Mt. St. Helens. I wanted to run. I wanted to scream. I wanted to curl up into a fetal ball and cover my head with my arms.
Lulu. The thought came to me as unerringly as a rocket being shot into space. Lulu, you are worthy! You’re everything!
Louise was there, too, whispering in my ear. “Just bat your eyelashes. Just wiggle your butt. You’ll be safe if someone takes care of you. You’ll be okay if you do all the things that used to work so well for you before. Just let me take over, sweetie.”
There was a long moment of indecision that seemed like it lasted an entire year and a day. I suddenly felt something intangible burst out of my chest, and I yelled something I should have said what felt like decades before. “Screw you, Louise!”
I viciously kicked my leg, and the chain broke. Then it disintegrated into nothingness leaving only wisps of foggy mist that whirled about angrily. Red eyes flashed at me, and I swung my arms in their direction. Bathsheba vanished into a mist of oblivion. The others simply faded away. Landers opened his mouth and red fire poured out, but it sputtered out like sparklers on the Fourth of July. Theo began to shriek inside my head; his infuriated voice was like the loudest feedback from a microphone. “YOU HAVE TO PAY!” he bellowed. There was a hint of fear in the words. “YOU HAVE TO SUFFER FOR YOUR SINS!”
“YOU’RE NOT REAL!” I screamed at them. I punched at Landers, and he melted into nonexistence. I swatted at Theo. His large frame disappeared into the same kind of black-tinged cloud that twirled furiously at me as if it was roundly chastising me for my insistence. I yanked my body backward and felt freedom for the first time. I could run. I could get away.
Looking up and backward, I realized I was standing in the same church where I had been imprisoned in San Francisco. Without hesitation, I twisted my body and ran for the exit. It was the same door at which I had last encountered Theo. It represented liberty and choice in a way that I had never felt before. I could get out. I could find the code keys that I desperately needed to obtain. I just needed to go where they would be located. I wanted that with all my heart. People would die if I didn’t do that. The firefly pixies would die. The good people that I now knew would die. Landers would die.
Just as I threw myself through the black door, a single word resonated in my head that made it spin. NO! it said, and I knew that it was Landers again. It was then that I realized I had done exactly what I wasn’t supposed to do.
And there was a well of blackness a million miles deep.
Chapter 23
Lulu Learns Some Secrets
The Present – Location Unknown
I had a headache. A big whopping headache that made me want to cry out loud with the pain of it. I had a headache like some of the headaches I used to get before the change. The doctors I’d gone to had said they were tension headaches, and sometimes they thought it might have been cluster headaches. The pain often moved from the back of my head to center around my right eye. To put it simply, it felt like someone was shoving a red-hot knife into my eye socket and then slowly rotating it just for the fun of it. The knife mi
ght have been pre-dipped in salt just to liven things up. Hiding in my bedroom with an icepack and a bottle of whatever drugs the doctor gave me had done the trick back in the day. However, I hadn’t had one of those headaches since the change. Once I thought about it, I wondered if the change had cured my headaches. I mean there was still stress around, but maybe my brain processed it in a new way. (Facebook status: I have found the cure for headaches. Simply undergo an apocalyptic event and one shall be cured forever more.)
So why was I having one now? (Well, the answer to that would be, duh, stress. End of the world coming again except in a more permanent way.)
Like a distant dream I remembered entering the dark grove. There had been the slow onslaught of what had become a nightmare cyclone of spiraling paranoia. It had started out with me freaking out over the legend of the sloped giant with the red eyes. (Thanks, Meka, for that vivid image of a giant hovering above me with those horrifying peepers. I was never going to be able to sleep outdoors again without thinking about it.) Then it had been Theo with his plum flower chain whip and his denigrating words. It had been followed by Bathsheba and the others that Theo had murdered. The fact that I had been seeing dead people should have been a big honking clue, but my brain was fried by that point. Finally, it had been Landers with his cold assertion of my character, and what was one of my worst fears, that I had never spoken aloud.
It had been a hazy distortion of reality twisting away from what any sane person would have known wasn’t genuine. With the thudding accompaniment of my headache, the realization of what it had been seemed almost…stupid. It hadn’t been real. Landers had tried to tell me. It hadn’t been real. None of it was real. Even when he had told me repeatedly that it hadn’t been real, I hadn’t been able to tell the difference between fact and fantasy. The culmination had been the black door that I had been warned not to enter.
Now I was here.
Landers? I thought, concentrating on him. The image of his striking face appeared in my mind. Landers, I need to hear you.
I waited with my eyes shut, still lying on my back with something uncomfortable poking into my right kidney, and heard absolutely nothing in the way of a response.
Landers? Just tell me if that’s your first name or your last because I think it’s your last name, and your first name is something inane like Frank or John or Dick. Just…think at me. Please?
I waited and all I could feel or think of was the throbbing headache. For whatever reason, Landers wasn’t going to answer me. I didn’t think it was because he was refusing. It felt like he was gone. I didn’t like that much, either. He’d been riding hard toward us and would have come in after us. He’d be there if he could be. How did I know that? I didn’t have the answer for that, but it felt like it was right. He wasn’t there because he couldn’t be.
Therefore it was time to open my eyes. I didn’t like that at all. It seemed like a bad idea, but I couldn’t help myself.
They opened, and I saw a world I’d never seen before. It was similar to the valley I’d been in before minus the great black wood, but then, it wasn’t comparable at all. The basics of what I was looking at registered in a way that was logical. As I turned my head I saw that I was in a gradually sloping basin with a river of black water flowing not too far away from me. There were trees nearby that looked like evergreens that weren’t really green. (They weren’t anything close to the kind that I’d just seen, and boy, was that a relief.) The skies were oddly colored. Not the sky blue of a fall day. Not the dimness of an evening with the sun about to dip below the horizon. Not the dawn of a day about to break. It was nothing I was familiar with. It was almost purple. It was like the sun was cloaked with a gauzy scarf so that the brightness was muted. The lavender clouds lazily whirled far above my head, and the skies accepted their presence without argument.
I lifted my head, and my headache intensified for a moment. It felt more like a hangover than the tension headaches I used to have. For a moment, I felt like I might throw up, but thankfully, the nausea began to recede. Deliberately I panned around and found myself in a pile of ruins. There were bits of wood and cinderblocks. A gray desk sat nearby, cocked at an angle on a pile of rubble. An office chair teetered back and forth as a breeze pushed at its wheels. The faint squeak of a caster made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
I definitely wasn’t in a forest of black twisty trees. On the surface, the valley looked a lot like the other place I had been with the exception of the grove and the oddly colored setting. Plainly, there weren’t any firefly pixies or Horse or Meka. No one was around, and I couldn’t hear anything except the wind’s whistle as it coursed through nearby trees and the intermittent screech of that errant caster. Nor was there anything overtly bad like red-eyed giants or Theo or dead people.
There was more realization as I began to use my head. My mind was clear enough to use it, whereas it hadn’t been before. The dark grove hadn’t been a typical stand of trees that one wandered into and sat down to have a picnic under its leafy branches. It was something else altogether. The comparison that sprang to my mind was that it was a fantastic Venus fly trap. It trapped whatever it could inside its depths, then caused hallucinations by emitting some kind of something that affected all of us, and followed up by what?
The dark grove hadn’t been just a plant. It had been a predator. That was why all of Theo’s people hadn’t come back. Hopefully, Meka and Horse had escaped. With any luck the firefly pixies had managed to fly out of its influence. They would stop Landers and the others from entering the depths of its snare.
I reached up and rubbed my forehead. If I wasn’t there anymore, where in the name of all that was holy was I?
The black door. Gideon had told Landers to tell me not to go through the black door. What did I do? I went through the black door. It could have been worse. I could have raised the dead, too. After all, there was probably some ancient demonic journal that I could have chanted from just to liven things up. I recalled a handy list of things not to do at Halloween. Don’t go to any places named Transylvania or Elm Street. Don’t mess with recumbent DNA or take anything from graves or dead people. If your daughter starts speaking a dead language, then get the heck out. Things like that. So I needed to add this to the list. Do not go through black doors when specifically warned not to go through black doors.
I would have guessed that I was hell and gone away from Utah and the Uinta Mountains, but I didn’t want to think about hell in that context.
I sat up and looked at what had been poking me. It was the twisted end of a desk lamp. One end was cone shaped and had contained a halogen light. The other part was an adjustable arm that swiveled so that one could shine the light on whatever needed it. Like office paperwork, like all the things that someone in a remote location might need. Like someone in a secure facility might need.
I sat for a long minute, looking over the area in a systematic manner. I pulled a water bottle from my pack and drank deeply while continuing to scan the horizon. Apparently, I was alone for the moment. The water made me feel better, and I replaced the cap before putting it in the pack. I carefully climbed to my feet.
For a long minute my head spun and the nausea returned. I closed my eyes while my equilibrium settled. I felt better moments later, and I turned around, carefully placing my feet in the rubble that I stood upon. There were yards and yards of it, and I seemed to be directly in the center of it.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, I thought. But when’s the fire coming?
Soon, I answered myself. Soon. Just you wait.
I reached for Mr. Stabby and realized that the knife wasn’t with me. I thought about it. I had it in the dark grove. I used it on Horse. (Please forgive me, Horse. I’m sorry about your rump.) Then my personal ghosts had nearly overcome me. I must have dropped it before I went through the door. I was going to miss that knife.
Why had Gideon warned me about going through the black door? And couldn’t premonitions be a little timel
ier? For example, a few hours earlier would have been nice. A little more clarity would have been good, too. Don’t go into the dark grove. Don’t go through the black door. Bad things will happen if you do that. You’ll be in a man-eating thing that drugs you and makes you hallucinate. You’ll be somewhere else. You’ll be gone forever and more, and we’ll kind of miss you. Helpful stuff, not vague and frustratingly late stuff.
Sophie had kvetched about such things before. The firefly pixies weren’t forthcoming. When people had their visions and whatnot, they didn’t always make it clear that it needed to be heeded tout de suite. It had happened to me on more than one occasion. Sometimes it was entirely my fault in that I hadn’t listened.
New and improved didn’t always mean easier to accept.
I immediately recalled the way I’d felt the morning of the change. Alone. I was alone. I was just as alone as I’d been before, but this time Louise was gone. I had finally exiled her. She didn’t whisper into my ears. She didn’t feel like a growth at the back of my head prodding me to do something weak and ill-advised. She really was gone.
All that was left was Lulu.
It should have been a good thing, but I really was alone. I looked into the sky and saw that there were two moons rising over the trees. The purplish-tinged skies allowed them to be seen all the more. Neither was as round as the moon I was used to seeing. One was shaped like a peanut. The other was an egg that slowly revolved as I watched. They were clear in the dingy light of the sun at which I glanced.
Forest of Dreams Page 22
