Absence_Mist and Shadow

by J. B. Forsyth

  A black and white face pushed itself under her arm and nuzzled her side. She laughed again and ruffled the fur behind Bojoe’s ears. He welcomed her attention with a hanging tongue then sprang away. He yapped playfully at little Annie and tore past her into the woods, zigzagging through her friends and nearly taking Aarron’s legs out from under him. But as she watched him race deeper into the woods the smile dropped from her face. A wall of green mist was suddenly in his path. She jerked up and shouted a warning. But it did no good and he disappeared into it.

  She stood and called to her friends, pointing out the danger and seeing that the mist completely encircled them. But no one heard. They smiled and waved and she could only watch as one by one the mist swallowed them up. Rayle Oakley went first, his white horse disappearing from back to front, his wry smile never faltering as it faded into thickening mist. Below him Jobby Morrit continued to work on his carving, oblivious to the way the mist turned the blue dye in her eyes an emerald green. It took the rest of them in quick succession and little Annie was last to go – swallowed up while picking daisies.

  She realised her uncle had stopped singing and spun around. He was gone and so was the hideaway. She was alone on a shrinking patch of grass, within a tightening wall of mist. And all of a sudden she felt cold. But it wasn’t the kind of cold she could wrap up against – it was like she was freezing from the inside out.

  She called out for her uncle - over and over again, eventually screaming his name. There was movement behind the mist and she stepped towards it, thinking it was him. Her eyes strained, widening when the mist thinned, revealing what was in it. Her uncle was there, but he was everywhere. In one place he was on his back with a dagger in his chest and in another he was hanging by his neck from a tree. And there were many more of him, stretched out in all manner of ugly deaths. She gasped and shut her eyes. When she opened them again there was a dead toruck in the mist, slumped against a tree with his skull smashed in. A short distance away another one was crumpled in the wreckage of a rotten tree stump, covered in blood. She turned from these new horrors to be confronted by another. The encroaching mist had recreated the face of the spirit she had devoured, depicting its final moments. She closed her eyes again and covered her head, unable to bear such stark reminders of her dark deeds...

  For a time there was only darkness, then she heard a voice from somewhere far above. ‘Is she alive?’

  ‘I can’t tell.’ replied another. ‘But it’s nearly dawn and if she’s been here all night, she’s had a good dose of mist.’

  She rose to the voices and opened her eyes. She was back in the jungle and there were two spirits hovering above her. One was a girl and the other a boy, and they were watching her like mourners.

  ‘Are you alright?’ asked the girl. ‘We met your friend Kye and we’re here to help.’

  Della stared vacuously and made no reply. The mist had poisoned the higher functions of her mind and all that was left was slave to her physical need. An intolerable vacuum ripped open inside her – an electrical hunger that craved the delicate light of the little ghosts and the all-consuming bliss it contained. Her eyes sharpened like those of an eagle who had woken to find a pair of sparrows in its nest.

  She tore forth in Absence, grabbing the ghost girl and biting her neck. But as she connected with her energy a blade of light sliced through the Membrane, separating them. She spun away and turned back just in time to see the boy ghost disappearing into the jungle, pulling the girl by her hand. She shot after them, her bottomless hunger clenching miserably with missed opportunity and her eyes gleaming like emeralds.

  Feral Wraith

  Kye was looking across the mud flats when dawn broke and the mist soaked into the land. The last of the worms had wriggled into their burrows hours ago and now they were pushing glistening tree tails up through the muddy pools; spreading fake branches that were adorned with a fresh crop of voluptuous berries. He could smell the strawberry redolence strengthening on the air and despite knowing what the berries were growing on, his stomach rumbled.

  Without hammocks they had spent the night on their feet, shifting weight from one foot to the other in a constant flow of mist. Kye’s back and legs ached, but he didn’t wish for his hammock. With the proximity of the worms and the memory of Kail’s severed body still fresh in his mind, he couldn’t have closed his eyes, let alone fallen to sleep. Kring wandered over early in the night and asked if he was alright. He was close to tears when the giant gripped his shoulder, but he fought them back and sent him away with a wobbly lip. After that he passed the night in sulky thought with his arms folded and a frown on his face. Ormis was wrong about Najo and Allie, just as he was wrong about Emilie. He sensed no badness in the little ghosts and no deception in their request; their sincerity as obvious as the stone the exorcist was using for a heart. Without their help they would all be dead and how Ormis could think otherwise was an infuriating mystery.

  The exorcist called over now and for the first time in hours he turned from the mud flats. The western mountains were gilded with dawn light, but the jungle was still a haven for shadows and it would be some time before the sun penetrated its canopy. In the thin light the others looked haggard, but he sensed they weren’t done yet. He could still imagine Suula sprinting back to the mountains; Kring laying waste to a quaggar army and Ormis firing up a powerful draw at a moment’s notice. Tracker, warrior and exorcist. If nothing else, he was in good company.

  He was walking over when a meteor of light arced down through the trees and came straight at him. He ducked in reflex, but it stopped without striking him, forming a familiar figure when its tail caught up.

  ‘Najo!’

  ‘Your friend’s right behind me -’

  The little ghost was struck by a second meteor, becoming a raging ball of green and white light that was so bright, Kye was forced back with his hands to his face. Ormis rushed over, creating a great spasm of Membrane as he plunged his arms in and began to draw. The light elongated in response; resolving into two spirits. With cringing horror Kye realised the second spirit was Della, but she was more shadow than ghost now. Her eyes were feverish emeralds in black sockets and her arms were like the raking branches of a leafless tree. Najo was twisting violently in her grip, but she held tight and their lower halves entwined, creating a corkscrew of green and white light. And in the same way Kye had felt Najo’s honest intentions, he could feel Della’s malevolence radiating like heat.

  Ormis strengthened his draw and Kye took another step back. His Membrane sensitivity was strong now and it felt as if the exorcist was gripping the jungle and pulling it towards him like an elaborate tablecloth. But Della gave no ground. She appeared mindless of the danger and focused entirely on Najo – her blazing eyes spewing spectral mist over his terrified face. Their combined thrust pulled Ormis forward and he was forced to lean back, his planted heels making deep grooves in the dirt. When he began to stagger, Kring rushed up behind him and knelt, fixing him in place with two muscular arms. His draw ramped up again and to Kye it was like the rising pitch of a note already high enough to shatter glass. The effect was immediate and Della began to funnel into him.

  Kye was paralysed by the sight, unable to make sense of it. Della had become something from a nightmare - a feral wraith of mist and shadow he hardly recognised. He knew something terrible must have happened for her to undergo such an appalling transformation and he was rooted to the spot by the horror of it. She was the only person he felt a connection with since his sister’s death – the only person who could understand and sympathise with his new sensibilities. Only an hour ago he had been thinking about the new life Ormis had planned for him and the possibility of Della joining him in it. He had set his hopes on the idea and now that prospect was vanishing before his very eyes. A swirl of indignation rose in his chest and without the slightest idea what he was doing, he stepped into her.

  Deeper Empathy

  It hadn’t taken Della long to catch up with the little
ghosts and when they split up she followed the boy without hesitation. He was the one who had denied her, so he was the one she would take first. She pursued him for several miles, becoming increasing infuriated by his sprightly manoeuvres. Whenever she got close, he would cut away at a sharp angle or loop over her. In one place he stopped so suddenly she overshot him by a dozen yards and by the time she realised what was happening, he was opening up a huge lead again. He even tried to lose her by going through the ground. But she stayed close enough to feel the grooves he created on the Membrane and she followed him as easily as she did through the air.

  They had put several miles of blurring jungle behind them when all of a sudden he seemed to give up; arcing down and drawing up like a runner catching his breath. She took her opportunity and swooped, so preoccupied with her malevolent intentions she didn’t notice the shadowy figure he started speaking to. She hit him at full speed and his light folded around her like an electrified sheet. She clawed him as he billowed away. His blissful light was clothed in a thin layer of Membrane and she was determined to puncture it. She could already feel its tantalising power, tingling up her arms from where her clawing fingers were raking him. But then something gripped her ankles and a sudden rushing force, much like a wind, began drawing her backwards.

  She turned to see a man the girl in her near dead heart would have recognised straight away - a man whose determination was carved into the hard angles of his face. She tried to pull free, but he was joined to her by the strange wind and she could only drag him through the jungle. But then a giant appeared from the shadows and fixed him in place. The man’s drawing force increased and it was like slipping down a slope with an ever increasing gradient. In a matter of seconds, she knew it would be too steep – a vertical precipice over which she would surely plummet. But then a boy walked out of the shadows; his face brightening in the light of her terrified prey. He stepped into her and it was like a window opening on the Membrane. It presented her with an irresistible means of escape and she took it; letting go of her prey and funnelling into him.

  She planned to take quick possession of the boy and run him into the jungle - far enough to be safe from the man with the strange drawing force. So she went into him hard, meaning to smash through any resistance. But there wasn’t any. Instead of fighting he welcomed her in a spiritual embrace, drawing her deeper than she planned to go. She backed up, trying to fit into his limbs and make him run. But she was too deep to take effective control and all she managed were two disjointed steps after which he collapsed to his knees and fell forward. Bright light flared as he struck the ground, then his raw consciousness enveloped her; his memories and emotion soaking into her mind…

  In one memory he was being lifted from a bath and wrapped in a towel into which his name was sewn beneath a big white rabbit. There was the scent of lemon perfume when his mother kissed his cheek and the dreamy warmth of her lullaby in his tiny ears. In another she saw his sister slip from a rope swing into a glistening river and felt him laugh so hard it put stitches in his side. She saw them walking home with the sun on their backs, their clothes dripping as they cut through a field of blazing barley. In another she felt his exhilaration as he raced from Farmer Fon’s orchard with his friends, apples spilling from their pockets and rolling down the lane. His memories were floating in his raw nature and the ensemble was completely disarming - like running from a stormy night into a sunny afternoon.

  But there were darker memories here too…

  She saw the red face of his stepfather as he beat him with a hard bristled broom and felt the deep scratches on his forearms as he protected his head. She saw his mother’s drawn and loveless face when he went to her for comfort and felt the shock of her bony fingers when she pushed him away. She saw how the loss of his sister hung off his mother like a weight and how every day she blamed him with her eyes. She glimpsed fragments of the terrible dreams in which he relived his sister’s drowning and saw some of the cruel twists that woke him up in a cold sweat. And she felt the guilt stitched into those dreams and his belief they were due penance for allowing her to run onto the ice. She saw how his friends began to reject him and how he was shunned by the village. She felt the infected wounds of that rejection; his crippled self-worth and the aching hunger in his heart. And behind it all was his promise to himself: that if he ever had children of his own - to hold them close and fill their hearts with happiness.

  In the space of a few seconds she understood the boy more than he would ever understand himself, and his name was Kye. She floated up; out of the deep place where he kept his memories and into the part of him that dealt with conscious thought. Here he was contrasting two images: a girl with ringlets of golden hair and a shred of shadow with crocodilian eyes. He was confused and dismayed; trying to understand how these disparate images could be the same person. She saw flashes of imagery as he worked on the riddle. He was remembering the girl staggering through a dark wood and her grief playing into his head in a form he thought of as deeper hearing. And now he was seeing her appear to him in a gaol cell as a ghost…

  The girl was her!

  Della’s identity came rushing back as she relived the moment she told him her secret through his memory of it. And now she understood how bad he felt after being tricked into disclosing it. She felt his determination to save her and how much it pained him to see what she had become. His compassion was enormous and it was like being hugged on the inside…

  Now she was back in her dream. The mist was all around, but now Kye was there. He reached out and when she took his hand the mist blew away. But then, as she looked into his hopeful brown eyes they widened in alarm. She felt fingers pressing into his face and a terrible scouring force plunging through his mind. It was the man she now remembered was Ormis and he was coming for her. His draw was vicious and she was unprepared. He wrenched her from Kye’s grip and she could only look down at his shrinking face as she was drawn from him.

  She gusted into the exorcist and his draw collapsed on her from all sides, compressing her into an increasingly smaller space. She fought against him to no avail and in a few seconds couldn’t move at all. It started to get hot, really hot and she soon realised she was the source of the heat…

  Smaller and smaller…

  Hotter and hotter…

  She screamed and started to burn…

  Kye opened his eyes and saw Ormis’s splayed fingers retreating from his face. He scrambled to his feet, but before he could take a single step, Kring dropped to one knee and grabbed him around the waist. ‘Get off me!’ he yelled, feet sliding in the dirt. When it was clear he was going nowhere he shrieked at the exorcist who was standing with his back to him. ‘Don’t do it! Let her go! She’s better now!’

  ‘It’s for the best lad,’ said Kring, his voice low and full of genuine sadness.

  ‘Get off me! You don’t understand. I was helping her.’ Spittle flew from his mouth and his legs continued to kick, refusing to give up.

  It was only when he heard Della’s screams that the fight went out of him. The multi-coloured light of her exorcism blazed out of Ormis in dazzling streamers, burning up the dawn shadows as they twisted away. There was the virginal white of lily petals and the unblemished blue of a summer sky. There was the vibrant green of spring pastures and the rusty gold of autumn leaves. And there was the blood red of a lover’s sunset and the heart-warming orange of a winter hearth. For a few seconds the jungle was ablaze with the wholesome colours of her character and they blew through the Membrane like a dying breath. Kye’s mourning for his sister, although terrible, was drawn out over many months. But what he felt now was a compressed grief, almost too much to bear. The streaming colours were a sensory eulogy that spoke directly to his heart, threatening to burst it at the seams. It was the saddest and most overwhelming experience of his life and if Kring hadn’t been holding him up he would have collapsed in a heap. And when the light disappeared and its afterimage faded into the shadows, he felt like he was fading w
ith it. He sagged in the giant’s grip, his hands trembling and his legs wobbling like a new-born foal. Della was gone – burnt down into raw energy and dispersed on the Membrane. He glared at the exorcist as tears coursed down his cheeks. What Ormis had done felt like a sacrilege of nature - as if he had pulled the plug on goodness itself, allowing it to drain away.

  When Kring released him his legs weren’t ready and he dropped to his hands and knees. The giant offered a hand, but he slapped it away.

  ‘You killed her!’ he bawled at the exorcist, each word like a flaming arrow shot at his back. ‘You heartless bastard! I hate you! You never gave her a chance.’

  It was some time before Ormis turned to him, his face dark with morning shadows. And if he hadn’t been so consumed by emotion, Kye might have seen that Della’s exorcism had affected him in some uncharacteristic way. ‘You saw what she had become,’ he said in a voice that was almost a whisper.

  ‘She was still there… I was helping her!’

  Ormis recovered and took two furious steps towards him. ‘Is that what you call it? What you did was madness! Didn’t I warn you against such impulses?’

  ‘You never gave her a chance,’ he repeated, his furious face rivalling the exorcist’s scowl.

  ‘A chance to what? Gorge on the boy spirit and come back at us bloated with power? Your friend didn’t deserve what Izle did to her, but her suffering is over now.’