by Cameron Jace
They finally arrived at a desolate dirt road. Carmen complained, grumbling and rattling. Loki noticed the trees bending down and curving slowly, their branches tangling together in the dark, curving like snakes above them. A couple of them had appeared to have a single eye on the end of their branches to spy with.
“You see this?” Loki said.
“I—“Axel almost choked on his food, trying to bury himself in the passenger seat. “I read about those trees in the forum. They’re called Juniper Trees. It’s best to avoid them and pretend they don’t exist. They’re spies for the vampire princess.”
“I’m a bit skeptical about who posts on the forum,” Loki said, slowing down his Cadillac.
“Genius Goblin,” Axel whispered.
“Who?”
“Genius Goblin, he is the forum’s creator and its most prestigious contributor.”
“Did you ever meet this Genius Goblin?”
“Never had the honor, really,” Axel said. “But I’d like to. You think he’s a real Goblin?”
“How should I know?” Loki shrugged his shoulders, and watched the trees as they started to crawl away. Loki wondered if they were going back to the vampire princess to tell her she had company tonight.
“When I was a kid, my mind used to play tricks on me,” Axel began. “I used to wake up in bed in the middle of the night with the boogeyman standing on it with my bowl of cereal, gorging on it, laughing and pointing at me with a long finger. Whenever I blinked, he was gone. Blinking solved a lot of problems when I was a kid. You know what’s really strange about it? The boogeyman didn’t look like a boogeyman. He looked like a pirate.”
Loki struggled to find a safe parking place for his Cadillac. He wasn’t even going to bother to comment that no one had ever seen a boogeyman, therefore Axel could not realize the one he saw didn’t look like one.
But as annoying as Axel was, Loki related to his unstoppable need for talking—after all, Loki mumbled to himself all the time. Axel talked incessantly because he didn’t have friends to talk to. Loki was probably the first friend he’d ever made, and he decided that later he’d have to tell Axel that he wasn’t staying in this town. He wasn’t here to make friends. He was here to find his way back home, and sooner or later, he had to leave town.
“I wonder why you never snuck to see the princess yourself.” Loki probed as he stopped Carmen behind a mammoth bristly bush, just wide enough to conceal her from front to back.
“I’m too chicken, which basically means I’m smart,” Axel said. “I only come to Buried Moon Cemetery when I am lonely and want to watch the teens having fun, making out and stuff. But that’s it.”
“So you’re a Peeping Tom?” Loki laughed. “How about Fable, do you ever bring her along?”
“Of course, not,” Axel’s face went red. “She’s too young to watch teens make out. I have to protect her. She means the world to me.”
“You know you suck at showing her that you love her, don’t you?”
“I know. I’ve always been terrible at showing how I feel, but I don’t care. I’m practically her parent. I have to be strict with her, and make sure she’s doing what she needs to do.”
Axel got out of the Cadillac and walked to a tombstone and sat on it. He pulled out another bag of food, dangling his feet from the tombstone. To Axel, this seemed like a little family picnic. Loki didn’t mind as long as Axel stayed calm enough to be his guide.
“Tragic Beans?” he offered Loki.
“No thanks. I’m not in the mood for crying and laughing at the same time,” Loki sat next to him.
“It doesn’t happen very fast,” Axel explained. “You need to eat half a bag before the effect takes place.”
A black cat with green eyes approached Loki after circling a couple of times around the tombstone. Loki worried it would talk to him like usual, but he remembered animals only talked to him when he was alone. The cat brushed its ears against Loki’s jeans and meowed. Loki patted it reluctantly.
“I wonder why animals don’t love me the way they do you and Fable.” Axel said, dropping Tragic Beans into his mouth, one by one. “You know that when I walk with Fable in the forest behind the house, butterflies rest on her arms?”
“She is Fabulous, remember?” Loki replied, winking at the cat. It winked back, and even bit its lip and nodded.
“I still don’t get what my name was supposed to mean. If she’s Fabulous, then who am I?” Axel wondered.
“Hungry,” Loki mumbled. The cat buried a laugh behind a sneeze, and crept away.
Somehow, Axel wasn’t offended. In fact, he laughed whole-heartedly, swinging his dangling legs, munching and crunching.
“You’re good company, Loki,” Axel said. “I like you, and I might make you my friend.”
“I like me, too,” Loki said.
Axel laughed even more. “Either we’re the most awesome dudes in Sorrow,” Axel said. “Or we’re the silliest, and most predictable.”
Loki reached over Axel’s bag of beans and pulled out a single Tragic Bean. Although chatty and a bit trying at times, Loki thought Axel was good company, too, but he wasn’t going to tell him. After all, Loki never had a buddy before. The Tragic Beans were salty, and Loki wondered why they didn’t make him cry or laugh.
Maybe Tragic Beans were a scam. If you laugh and cry at the same time, you end up acting normal, right?
Loki grabbed himself another bean; it was just food with a silly name, he thought. Munching turned out to be a good idea. It took his mind off the crawling branches overhead, and the strange noises in the dark.
9
The Swamp of Sorrow
With a full stomach, Axel lay sacked out on the tombstone while Loki read the Dreamhunter’s notebook under the moonlight. There were many things he had to learn about the process of entering a vampire’s dream, but he was beginning to understand the theories and ideas of doing it. He used his phone to write the information in the pages he was reading before they dissolved into sand. This way he had a copy of the notebook’s material, except the drawings, which he used his phone’s camera to capture.
Loki also noticed there were some missing pages, which he assumed someone had read before him—he wondered if Charmwill had read parts of the notebook.
“You know, I think it’s a good idea we’re waiting for other teenagers to arrive,” Axel said. “Not only will they show us the way to cross the swamp, but we can also use them as a shield since Snow White will waste them first.”
“That’s mean,” Loki raised his head from reading.
“Live mean or die trying,” Axel crouched suddenly behind the tombstone, and motioned at an approaching car. Loki saw a Jeep’s headlights shimmering in the distance, and heard loud rock music roaring from a radio. Girls and boys were laughing and yelling as the Jeep came chugging into the cemetery.
“Here we go,” Axel rubbed his hands with enthusiasm.
The headlights flashed against the lower base of the tombs, illuminating the peeling grey of the stones with carved names and dates and insects crawling over them. Some of the tombstones were overrun by grass and weeds and others were broken in half. One had the following phrase written on it: Happily buried since 1857. Don’t leave flowers, leave a dime.
The light penetrated through the cold mist as the Jeep stopped abruptly over the muddy earth before the swamp.
“Here we are at Buried Moon Cemetery!” a girl said, jumping out of the Jeep then landing in the mud while the others laughed along. There were two girls and two boys. The girl in the mud was a redhead, and wore long leather boots and strangely enough, a skirt, in the cold weather.
One of the boys threw a cooler filled with drinks on the ground. Axel swallowed so loud Loki thought he was saying something.
“It’s Big Bad, and some of his friends,” Axel said, almost choking on his words.
“That’s strange,” Loki squinted, making sure he wasn’t imagining what he’d seen. Big Bad wasn’t the only one with the gir
ls.
The other boy next to Big Bad was…
“Donnie Cricketkiller?” Loki said. “What’s he doing here?”
“You know this Cricketkiller?” Axel inquired.
“He’s a ruthless rival vampire hunter,” Loki said. “I wonder how he got to Sorrow, and if someone also paid him to kill the vampire princess.”
Loki’s heart beat slightly faster. He couldn’t imagine that Donnie was going to kill the vampire princess first and deprive him of going back home.
“I guess this means that once they show us the way to cross the swamp, you’ll have to be beat Donnie to the princess if you want to get the job done.”
“I think not. The best he can do is stake. I doubt he knows anything about Dreamhunting,” Loki said. “This just makes no sense, why Big Bad and Cricketkiller?”
“Bad seeds end up in the same basket. What about Tweedledum, you know her?”
“Who’s Tweedledum?”
“She’s one of the girls. I call all pairs of girls Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Dum and Dee for short.”
“Dum and Dee?”
“Just go with it,” Axel insisted. “I have to name things, or I get…confused—I once named my microwave Samantha.”
“Why?”
“You name your car Carmen, and frown at me for naming my microwave Samantha?”
“I mean why Samantha? It’s a microwave.”
“Samantha was sexy; she melted frozen food, because she was hot. Get it? I used it to dry my cat’s hair, too—that was before it exploded in the microwave.”
“And you wonder why animals don’t like you?”
Axel looked like he’d been hit by a speeding train. “OK, OK,” he said, snapping. “So here is how we’ll name them. The redhead is Dee, blonde is Dum,” Axel giggled. “Get it? The blonde is Dum? Funny huh?”
Loki saw Dum pull out a mirror from her purse, to check if the splattering mud had hit her face. Big Bad jumped near her, making silly zombie faces, with stiff hands and legs. He snatched the mirror from Dum’s hand and ran away with it toward the middle of the tombstones.
“Let’s try this,” Big Bad sneered, holding the mirror with one hand and a beer can that was foaming over in the other. He looked tipsy, glaring at the mirror and saying, “Snow White, Snow White, Snow White.“
“It doesn’t work like that,” Dum laughed. “It’s not Snow White. It’s Bloody Mary, you fool. If you say her name three times while alone in the bathroom in the dark, she will come out of the mirror and do bad things to you.”
“No one does bad things to Big Bad,” he said, hugging Dum and tickling her.
“Bloody Mary creeps me out,” Axel whispered to Loki. “When I was a kid—“
“Could you stop commenting on everything as if this is a movie you’ve seen before?” Loki gritted his teeth. “Munch on something.”
“What’s that?” Dum asked Big Bad, pointing at the bag on his back.
“It’s my ghost-hunting-vampire-busting tool bag,” he snorted like King Kong.
Donnie Cricketkiller laughed mockingly at Big Bad, “You don’t need all that; a stake like mine will do.”
“You’re not going to try to kill her, right?” Dum looked worried at the serious Donnie. “We said we’d have fun in the castle and if anything strange happens, we’d call it a night and go home. I have to be back before two or my mom will notice my absence.”
“Donnie is a vampire hunter, baby,” Big Bad told Dum. “And there is a big reward for him if he kills her.”
“If I see that bratty vampire princess, I’ll stake her,” Donnie snorted. “Huzza!” he clicked cans with Dee.
“This group is wicked,” Axel whispered. “The kind you want to die first in horror movies.”
Loki grinned at Axel again.
“B-horror movies?” Axel shrugged his shoulders. Loki was too serious for him sometimes.
Loki didn’t reply, staring at him with intensity.
“Slasher movies?” Axel guessed. “Alright, I’ll zip it.”
“Poor Donnie,” Loki turned back to watch the boys and girls. “He doesn’t know that she can only be killed in her dreams.”
“In her dreams? What’s all this stuff you keep saying about Dreamhunters and dreams?” Axel said then acted like his mouth had a zipper and pretended to zip it shut.
“Hey,” Dum said to Donnie. “We’re just having a little Amityville Horror fun where everyone survives the scary house and returns home alright.”
“Who said killing her wouldn’t be fun?” Donnie smirked.
Big Bad laughed. “You’re right. Killing her would be fun. After all, she has been causing our town problems. I like that,” he gulped his beer. Glock. Glock. Glock. Then he threw it in Axel’s direction. Axel ducked as the can whizzed over his head and landed in an open grave full of other beer cans.
“May you beers rest in peace,” Axel mumbled. “I think if this was a movie, Big Bad would die first. What do you think, Loki?”
Loki pretended Axel was only a figment of his imagination for the moment, and kept his eyes on the boys and girls.
“Let’s do it,” Donnie tossed Big Bad another beer then crushed a beetle on the ground with a big nasty grin from ear to ear, as if doing the world a favor.
Big Bad led the way to the swamp using his flashlight. Dee, Dum, and Donnie followed him after throwing a suspecting gaze in Loki and Axel’s direction. Tucked away in their hiding place, there was no way he could have noticed them. He looked back ahead into the thickening mist.
“How are we going to avoid the Ferryman?” Big Bad asked Donnie.
“Just walk in that direction,” Donnie pointed. “I have a friend who’s a witch. She designed a log boat which Skeliman can’t detect.”
“Now what?” Loki said to Axel. “They have their own enchanted log boat. We can’t exactly hop in it with them.”
Axel shrugged his shoulders, looking at them disappearing in the mist.
“Great,” Loki said with disgust. “We can’t even see them unless we use our flashlights.”
“No can do. They will notice us,” Axel said.
All Loki could see was swirling silhouettes moving in the mist. He relied on their voices for direction.
“We should move slowly so they don’t hear us,” he said to Axel. “Maybe there is another enchanted log boat they use for backup. If not, we’ll have to ride with Skeliman.”
Loki heard Big Bad announce that he’d found their enchanted canoe. They were still laughing when Loki heard the squishing sounds of their feet in the thick swamp.
“What now?” Axel whispered. Loki could barely see him in the mist.
“Follow me. I’ll find something,” Loki said, walking into the mist with Axel gripping his shirt until Loki took a cautious step into the swamp.
“Stay cool Loki, pretend it’s just thick, dirty green pudding soup,” Loki reassured himself as he saw the wavy smoke hovering over the swamp’s surface. It looked like hot steam erupting from a kettle that was boiling the green brain of an extraterrestrial being. Loki felt a sudden chill in his spine when he heard the others rowing nearby in the swamp.
The girls in the canoe were singing as they rowed. It was a rather peculiar song, and it went like this:
Row, row, row your boat.
Big Bad countered with a husky voice:
Gently down the swamp.
The girls finished and clapped:
Deadly, deadily, deadily…
“Ha ha,” they all laughed and clapped their hands.
“Life is but a dream,” Loki silently joined in, actually enjoying their take on the song. The phrase ‘life is but a dream’ reminded him that he was supposed to be one of the greatest Dreamhunters in the world.
“They sound like drunken pirates,” Axel said, his teeth chattering from the cold. “I think you can use the flashlight now. They can’t see us in the mist, and they’re already ahead of us.”
Unexpectedly, Loki bumped into a canoe in the swam
p.
“Why did you stop?” Axel shivered.
“I found it,” Loki said, inspecting the canoe, looking for the ferryman. The canoe was empty.
Loki aimed the flashlight back at Axel to tell him. Axel let out a silent shriek, followed up by the chattering of his teeth.
“If there is a canoe, then it belongs to Skeliman,” Axel whimpered.
“Man up,” Loki said. “It’s empty. Now get in it.”
“I think—“Axel stuttered. “I think I am going to wait here.”
“If you keep stalling, I’ll have to leave you here alone in the dark,” Loki said, ready to row.
“No, I will come with you. But can I ask you something first?” Axel said.
“What?”
“You killed vampires before, right?” Axel asked. “Can I count on that?”
“You can count on me,” Loki said, not really sure he was able to kill the vampire princess. Loki was using a fake-it-until-you-make-it approach. He dragged Axel into the canoe. “I’m not going to fail this time, you hear me?” Loki gritted his teeth.
“Now you’re scaring me, Loki,” Axel said.
Noticing he was losing it, Loki let go of Axel, and started rowing. He couldn’t hear the boys’ and girls’ voices anymore. Rowing across the swamp, he pretended he didn’t hear the many voices of nightly creatures all around. He just rowed, hoping to reach the other side safely. Axel crouched next to him, burying his head under his hood. The cold was increasing substantially.
“This weather is just crazy,” Loki said. “There must be an explanation to it.”
“It’s her,” Axel said in a muffled voice. “It’s Snow White. She can manipulate the weather.”
“Are you sure?”
“Everyone knows that vampires can manipulate the weather, making it colder to suit the environment they need to survive. Snow White likes it cold and snowy around her until she feeds. It makes it harder for her enemies to attack her. After she’s fed it starts to snow red. It’s some sort of ritual to her.”
