Mia met his gaze, her own terror matched by the feeling that, ghastly as this place was and despite her own fear, she could not turn a blind eye to the suffering here. She nodded hesitantly.
Lucas smiled. Thank you, he said.
Lucas led them to a trap-door hideout beneath the smokehouse. Seven more souls were secreted there: four field hands worked to death one hot summer, a fourteen year-old girl who'd been raped and strangled by Luther, the head overseer, a runaway who been ripped to pieces by hounds, and a nanny who'd been beaten to death with a fireplace poker by Emmanuel's wife simply for sleeping while the mistress's newborn baby cried.
The spark that glowed dimly in their eyes flared when the door opened. Silently, wordlessly, Lucas led them through the swampy woods that ringed the plantation. Mia brought up the rear, wading waist-deep through stygian waters, watching for the ghastly overseers. Wet things brushed against her skin and slithered between her legs; she said nothing and kept her mind fixed on the faint swish of water as they moved.
Eventually they came to the grisly boundary. Beyond them the woods lay thick with mist. The guards were dangerously thick too, as no sooner did one lantern disappear into the distance then another bobbed into sight. How do we get past them? she asked.
Lucas opened his shirt in response, his fingers drawing down and penetrating his own chest to withdraw an ethereal gossamer thread that pulsed with the beat of his life force. He held it out to her.
Take this, he said.
Mia hesitated, then took it in hand…
…and instantly she felt a rush of energy pulse through her, and with it a sense of connectedness: pain and passion and sheer purpose swirling in and through her, infusing her and filling her with heat. Her eyes fluttered and she almost fainted; when she opened them again, he was gazing at her intently.
On my signal, he said, send them one by one. Then follow…
Mia nodded; Lucas crossed the boundary and was promptly swallowed by the swirling mist.
A moment later, a guard lumbered into view, leading another of the monstrous beasts; the creature paused, sniffing the air, and growled. The guard looked around suspiciously, wandering toward them. Thomas and the other shades trembled fearfully; Mia reached out and touched his thin and brittle shoulder, fiercely willing herself to remain calm.
The guard peered into the darkness, porcine nostrils flaring once, then again. Then, grunting, it yanked on the chain of the beast and pulled it onward.
Mia watched until it was safely out of range, then felt the ethereal thread in her hand pulse. It was time. She took Thomas’s hand and placed it on the thread. As she did, the same rush seemed to pass through the wasted spirit; Thomas trembled under the force of it.
Go, she urged. Now.
She helped him up and he followed the thread, picking his way through the enveloping mist until he too was gone from view. The thread pulsed in her hand as Mia turned to the next spirit, the girl.
What’s your name? she asked.
M-Mary… the spirit replied, the sparks in the shadowed pits of her eyes flaring.
Take this, Mary, Mia said. Follow Thomas. You’ll be all right.
The girl nodded, terrified, and went. Mia watched intently, and then led the next shade, then the next, and the next, to the cord. One after another, she sent them over. And with each passing soul, she felt her own connection grow. To the lost souls. To Lucas. To his passion. And his mission.
The last shade stood, moving through the tree line and into mist that parted like a veil.
Another lantern suddenly appeared. Coming closer. Mia stared into the mist, watching the last slave disappear. It was her turn. The lantern came closer. It was now or never. Mia took a deep breath, and went…
…and there was a moment of threatened madness as Mia headed into the enfolding mist, trading the quantifiable horror of where she'd been for the absolute terror of the unknown. Time and space played tricks, distorting and stretching, disassembling and reassembling over and over. Mia clutched the cord and fought unconsciousness as nausea and vertigo swirled like a rising tide. She blacked out…
…then snapped back to find herself standing in the middle of a dirt road cutting through living green trees. The roiling sky was gone, and above them the heavens were clear and filled with countless billions of stars.
Lucas was there, steadying her. As she regained her bearings, he bid her watch as first one, then another, and another slave stood, staring at him. Lucas gestured to the stars and nodded.
Thomas was again first. He looked at the sky, and the others followed suit, gazing up into the heavens, then back to Lucas.
Ah kin go? Thomas asked, his voice trembling with wonder. We kin all go?
You’re free, Lucas replied. You’re all free. Go home…
The enslaved spirits nodded in thanks…
…and one by one, the pinpoints of light in their eyes glowed bright, until they rivaled the stars themselves. Then they flashed, nova white, as their souls flew up into the vaulted night.
And they were gone.
Their remains stood abandoned for a moment, then crumbled: useless husks turning to dust before their eyes. Lucas turned to Mia.
Now do you see? he asked. There are thousands more, too many for one or even two to save. Lucas pointed down the long dark road. Go, he told her. Bring someone who knows how to work the magick. Bring help…
Mia nodded, still dazed and amazed by it all. She took several hesitant steps, turned to ask him. But how…?
But Lucas was not there.
23
She walked for what felt like forever, utterly alone on a road that stretched into darkness as far as she could see. Framed on both sides by tall pine and fir, on a dirt ribbon extending into infinite black, the night was endless, brilliant with stars. Mia moved in what felt like a dream state, so smooth that it seemed she glided. She felt strangely at peace, euphoric and filled with a sense of purpose.
After a time, a glow appeared on the horizon, harsh against the velvet darkness. As she approached, it became clear, familiar, weirdly comforting. Suddenly Mia stopped.
Oh my God, she realized. I'm home.
The garish florescent flicker of a 7-Eleven sign shone before her. Unoccupied cars were parked outside, some with the motors still running. A police cruiser was pulled up before the open doors. Mia slipped through as the doors hissed quietly closed. Inside, the store was brightly lit, but no one was behind the counter, and no customers were visible in the aisles.
“Hello?” Mia called out nervously. “Is anyone here?”
There was no answer. Something moved just out of her field of vision, and she turned to see a solitary figure lingering near the beer case two aisles over, staring wistfully at the refrigerated contents. She moved toward him cautiously.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Can you help me?”
The man at the beer cooler paid her no heed. Mia moved down the aisle, anxious and a little annoyed. “Hello?” she said.
The man continued to ignore her; he was young, grimy and disheveled, dressed in a rumpled flannel shirt and a baseball cap. She wondered if he was deaf, drunk, or just plain rude. He turned and stared blankly at her for a moment, and then looked over her shoulder and smiled as if in acknowledgment. Mia followed his gaze to the counter. Another man was there, this one older, middle-aged and balding, clad in what looked like a hospital gown. The man reached up to the racks of cigarettes hanging overhead. Then something caught her eye, and she looked up and past the counter to the concave security mirror mounted near the ceiling.
She gasped.
People, an entire store full of them, were cruising the aisles. The older man was not visible behind the counter; in his place a young Vietnamese employee rang up the register for a pair of black men buying Bud and munchies, as a gaggle of jocks and their dates joked and jostled by the Slurpee machine and a pair of cops scored whipped mochachino and donuts. It was a store full of living people, leading ordinary mortal lives.
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On the other side of the glass.
Mia felt her heart suddenly race in disoriented panic; she lunged toward the counter and the mirror. From behind her came the low and guttural sound of laughter.
Mia looked back to see the man at the cooler watching her. He leered and nodded, bobbling forward. As he rounded the end of the low aisle, she realized he had no legs below the knees, only wisps trailing off like an unfinished drawing. His body hovered impudently above the grimy tile.
Mia gasped and looked at the cigarette man behind the counter. As he turned, she saw that one entire side of his jaw was gone, a gaping cancerous hole darkly beckoning. His eyes were red-rimmed and wet and looked very sad. He turned his back to her, flaccid ass cheeks drooping from the back of the smock, as he pawed impotently at the shiny glassine wrappings, unable to pick them up.
Two more lost souls, trapped by their attachments to the living world.
The world, it appeared, was full of them.
Mia fled, desperately heading for home, for family and friends, for something real and familiar. The only problem was, nothing was. The wide open fields and pastures she remembered were now crowded with housing developments, shopping centers that had sprung up seemingly overnight, roads and schools where none had been before. She reached the edge of her neighborhood, a quaint suburban development named Fairfield. Her family had moved there when it first started, a smattering of plush homes plunked down in an old strawberry patch. Now it was vast, the formerly empty acres studded with baby mansions. She found her old house and made her way to the front door. She pounded on it; there was no response.
Mom, Dad! she called out plaintively. Help me!
No one answered. Light glowed from the dining-room window; Mia rushed to the edge of the porch and peered inside. A young family she’d never seen before was seated at the table. Mia screamed and pounded on the glass. No one could hear her. Her home, her family, was gone.
And she, it seemed, was trapped — on a plane somewhere between the hell of Custis Manor and the living world.
Mia backed up, completely freaking out. She felt utterly alone, fearful beyond measure. And that was when her thoughts turned to Justin.
By the time Mia reached Justin’s place, a new feeling had arisen, matching and besting her dread: hunger. It was a boundless, gnawing need that coursed through her like liquid razor blades in her veins.
Mia made her way to Justin’s, stood at the address. Justin’s rundown house had been erased, every trace of it razed and replaced by a McDonald's and a little strip mall with stores advertising tanning booths and real estate. It was as if it, and he, never were.
Oh God, she thought. What's happened? Where is he? How long have I been gone? There was a vending machine in front of the McDonald's, selling brightly colored editions of USA TODAY. She scanned for the date and felt herself go cold.
Eighteen years?? Mia was aghast. Eighteen years, a span of time as long as her entire life up until that last fateful night, had gone by in what seemed one long, never-ending nightmare.
Mia desperately needed to find somebody who knew what had happened to her. And who might be able to do something about it.
And she could only think of one.
The beach house still said CUSTIS on the mailbox, and for that Mia was glad. The house was the same, yet subtly changed. There was an enormous television set, the likes of which she'd never seen before, three inches thick and hung from the wall like a painting.
A sleek Bang & Olufsen stereo system stood in one corner of the room, accompanied by a rack of shiny compact discs. Just then a gaunt, intense man entered the room, a glass of scotch in hand. He crossed to the rack, pulled a box out of its slot and withdrew the disc. He touched a button on the stereo and fed the disc into the extended slot. The room suddenly filled with music: lush, lovely, familiar. The Police. Ghost in the Machine.
Mia drew close to the window, heart pounding, afraid to say something, afraid not to. The man grabbed his glass, turned toward the windows facing the sea. He looked up, and his jaw promptly dropped. Followed immediately by his drink.
What happened to his hair? was Mia's first, absurd thought. His long locks were gone, replaced by a cropped coif receding into a widow's peak. But the face, and the eyes…
No doubt about it. It was Josh. Decades older but still Josh. It was amazing.
Even more amazing was the simple dawning fact that he apparently saw her too.
Josh stood before the window, unable to believe his eyes. He had been feeling weird for days: like something was scratching at a door in the back of his mind, wanting to crawl in. Everything had been going so well; he had long since gotten his life together, come to a state of balance that allowed him to function. His writing had taken off: a string of successful supernatural thrillers with subsequent movie sales that brought him fiscal independence from his family. His health was good. Even his bitter relationship with his father had softened somewhat, as Josh's own star rose.
And then, in the middle of it all, the thoughts of Mia began coming. Vivid, recurring, they nagged at him: invading his sleep, filling his waking moments. He began drinking, trying to dull the feeling. He knew it was dangerous to get back into drugs or alcohol; the long years spent clawing his way back to sanity had taught him how precious his precarious mental balance was, how desperately he needed its mooring if he wanted to survive. Had they not taken that acid years ago — had Simon not spiked them, committing that unspeakably stupid act that had led to all this suffering — God only knew how much easier his life could have been. Justin might not have wasted his life away in prison. And Mia might still be alive.
He shook his head, feeling indulgent and stupid. Feeling like the crazy they had always accused him of being.
And then the vision appeared.
At first it was but a flicker of light and shadow, a momentary trick of the eyes. Then the form emerged: shimmering, ethereal.
“Mia…” he murmured. He felt like he was tripping again. He blinked, blinked again “Mia, is that you?” The vision looked at him and nodded, her mouth silently moving.
And in that moment all the years of fighting — his father, his brother, his shrinks, anyone and everyone who'd ever sought to tell him that what happened wasn't real, had never really happened at all — all those years of struggle came slamming home.
She hadn't aged. Her skin was translucent, as if lit from within, and almost transparent in places. She looked like an angel, or a hallucination. Then she smiled, and he knew: this was no dream. He moved toward her image, brought his hand up to touch it. She did likewise. As their fingertips met, there was a loud crack as the two opposing fields of energy united. Blue-white sparks skittered inside its surface, the atomic substructure of the glass rippling.
The glass shattered. Josh recoiled, half expecting a razored rain to fall. But it held, a thousand glittering shards kept in place as if by some obscure loophole in the laws of physics. A smear of blood graced the jagged, spider-webbed striations.
Mia saw it and her eyes flared; she reached up from her side to touch the surface of the glass. The blood sucked through the cracks and came away on her fingertips. She brought it to her lips, and two things happened. Mia became instantly more substantial. And the cracks in the glass begin to mend.
Josh watched, stunned, as the cracks simply withdrew, drawing back to the impact point. Mia looked at him, her form more stabilized. But the hunger still burned in her eyes.
And as he watched, she seemed to phase in and then out of focus. As if she were slipping away…
“Noooo!” Josh cried, placing his still-bleeding hand to the freshly reformed glass. She reached out in kind, and as her fingers touched the glass the blood sucked right through. With every new drop she seemed to solidify, become that much more stable. Josh opened his hand and smeared gore all over the window, watched in fascination as Mia fed.
She tried to speak; but though her lips moved, Josh could hear no words, only a high-pitched r
inging deep in his inner ear.
“I can’t hear you…” he cried. “I don’t understand…”
Mia paused, then raised one delicate finger and began to write on the glass: her movements languid and surreal, as if she were moving underwater. The first word appeared as a glowing cryptograph.
Justin? it said.
Josh looked away uncomfortably.
“Prison,” he said. “I haven’t seen him in years.”
Her expression filled with immense sadness and pain. His name faded, disappeared. She wrote again.
Need help…
Josh nodded, feeling enervated and more than a little mad. “What can I do?” he asked. Mia wrote again.
Magick.
They conversed for as long as they could; it took too much effort, not to mention blood, to maintain contact. Josh felt tapped: his mind reeling, his flesh bled to the danger point. Her image was fading, going two-dimensional and diffuse, like a badly lit hologram. She wrote again with great difficulty.
Back soon.
Josh's blood ran cold. “No, don’t go!” he cried.
But Mia merely smiled, and then flickered and faded away, leaving Josh to the task of finding someone who knew the secret of the magick. And how to use it.
PART THREE
UNDERGROUND
24
Friday, August 29th. Church of the Open Door.
For a moment there was silence, as Josh's captive audience allowed the ramifications of the story to sink in.
“I know this all sounds crazy,” he told them. “I didn’t want to believe it myself. But she came again about six months later, and I couldn’t deny it anymore.”
Amy looked at him. “Six months?” she said. “Josh, how long have you known about this?”
“Two years,” Josh replied. “She first came to me two years ago tonight.”
A collective gasp sounded amongst his friends. “After I accepted it, I started digging into my family’s history,” he continued, “and suddenly all kinds of things started to make a perverse kind of sense.”
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