It’s an evil spirit, Pen. Don’t be stupid. You might have hurt it, but you certainly didn’t kill it. Her inner voice had returned to its usual level of mockery again.
Penelope couldn’t help herself. Powerlessly, she stood up and with a single faltering step she began to follow the seatco into the forest. Her steps become more certain, and her eyes were fixed on the dark shape moving steadily in front of her. Words that she had read on the internet came back to her. “It sleeps by day and dwells under the earth to conceal its vile form from those who would scream during the time when sun would shine upon its ugliness. It kidnaps those who are unwary enough to avoid it and eats the flesh of those it has taken. It haunts the darkest shadows and beware those warriors who travel by the night.”
This was the beast’s domain, the deep woods of the mountains of which Will had spoken. In the story Magic Elk had come here to fight the seatco and in conquering them, they had revealed a piece of the puzzle that would bring back the woman he so desperately loved.
The seatco continued its journey, progressively threading its way into the blackness, never looking back, never aware of Penelope’s presence. Positive of the state of her dream, she was no longer afraid. After what seemed to be miles of endless blackness, a distant light appeared. As they grew closer, it grew in size, showing shades of pale yellow and blue. It danced weirdly in the depths, showing the twisted trunks and limbs of deformed pine trees and revealing the wretched nightmare in which she walked.
Penelope stopped just outside the perimeter of the light’s hopping limits. It was a great fire, beside which other great beasts lurked, waiting and watching. Their monstrous heads were without masks, although when Penelope tried to see closer, it seemed as though the shadows conspired to keep the secret of their appearance.
The seatco removed the oversized kachina mask and finally exposed itself to the skipping light of the fire. At long last, Penelope saw it for what it was and understood what had happened to Jeremy. Part of the words she had remembered from the Internet came back to her again in a horrid streak of comprehension. “It kidnaps those who are unwary enough to avoid it and eats the flesh of those it has taken.”
One arm had been the color of ripened peaches and well-muscled, as if belonging to someone who used his arms in the pursuit of his employment. The other arm and hand had been soft and feminine in appearance. Its color was snow white and long nails grew from the tips of the fingers. There had been mismatched eyes - one had been brown, and the other had been blue. And when she had seen the back of its head, there had been three distinct colors of hair. “It kidnaps those who are unwary enough to avoid it and eats the flesh of those it has taken.”
But perhaps what was happening was not merely that the seatco ate the flesh of those whom it had taken, but more that it absorbed them. It made them part of itself. Penelope stared through the darkness and saw the truth of her conclusion. What once were three separate people was now one large inhuman beast, mixed and merged like an eerie Picasso work of art.
And in the flickering light of the burning wood, Penelope could see the side of the head that had the brown eye and the gentle features of Jeremy Cooper. Jeremy had gone to creep the house, and just as Anthony had said, he had not been killed. He had been caught by this thing. And since Anthony needed a watchdog, it had absorbed him.
Just as it must have absorbed the other two people, it had proceeded with its malevolent upbringing. One had been a man with powerful forearms and skin that tended toward pink. His features were lost in the side that was not Jeremy. The other had been a woman with pale skin. Her wedding ring was still on the left ring finger that remained. The seatco was composed of three individuals who had crossed Anthony, and perhaps he had planned for a fourth.
A revolting stench wafted to Penelope’s nostrils, and she remembered the decaying smell of putrefying garbage that had surrounded the seatco. It wasn’t that the beast merely reeked of the earth it lived in; it was that it was constructed from the bodies of dead humans. It truly was a dead man walking and to be more specific, it was dead men walking.
But what was truly left of Jeremy? There had been enough to recognize her and perhaps enough to make the barest semblance of what was happening. But Jeremy was lost in the thrall of the beast he had become. Perhaps there was enough to distinguish her face and nothing more.
Penelope was sickened. Jeremy was gone. But he wasn’t truly gone.
The other seatco became visible in the bouncing fire’s bouncing light. They were all the same. Constructs of the human flesh they had captured, they had sought to become humanlike in appearance. Arms were mismatched with legs. Hair was differently colored, mostly ranging from black to brown but with an occasional redhead there and a single blonde. They were an army of tottering monsters, lurching around a single fire, ready to do their master’s bidding.
They might very well be evil spirits, Penelope realized. They had lost the capacity for human feeling and thought. They were little more than puppets. Why show me this?
To make you comprehend the magnitude of the situation, came her now-serene inner voice. Figure it out for yourself.
Jeremy is lost to me. And look what was done to him. Penelope stared through the shadows. She unwittingly brought her foot down on a branch, causing it to crackle loudly.
Instantly the murmuring monsters ceased their noise. All of their heads rotated toward where Penelope was hidden in the shadows. Their grotesque heads turned as if on cue, looking at her. Anthony’s seatco smiled in a crooked, gruesome smile and said, “Pa-nel-o-pee.”
Penelope ran.
*
Penelope was in a cave. It was a smooth, long chute of a cave, and the ceiling was twice as tall as her height. The floor was coarse sandy grit the color of charcoal. Dimly she realized that she was in a lava cave and remembered that the central part of Oregon had a huge chain of mountains running through it. The area was riddled with lava fields and caves. This particular cave had been a fissure that had once allowed red-hot lava to flow through it, escaping at one end to feed endlessly growing fields of smoldering murky stone.
But this cave was long since devoid of the life emitted from an active volcano. The walls were cold. The air was sticky. And there were present signs of human occupation. A line of electric lights strung along a wall indicated the way Penelope was to take. The tube had a slight decline and showed a path trodden by repetitive feet. The active lights led downward.
Penelope looked over her shoulder and saw nothing but a bulky blackness. The lights faded rapidly away in the opposite direction, and she was shockingly without a flashlight. The darkness held no appeal for her, so she disregarded the path that led upward and followed the string of yellow lights. Furthermore, she seemed to have escaped from the wrath of the seatco and she was happy not to have to look upon their abnormal visages.
The cave was soundless, and only the echoes of Penelope’s footsteps bounced off the polished sides. It seemed as though she was alone again for the time being. She continued downward at a level pace, neither hurrying nor delaying her rate. There seemed to be a place where she was supposed to be.
Pictographs began to appear on the cave walls. There were fearsome featured figures with large, sharp teeth that ruthlessly strangled and mangled those they came into contact with. There were hapless animals and human beings being sacrificed to unknown gods in vicious methods that made Penelope look away. And there were crudely represented creatures that resembled the shadow people that she had already come into contact with. Their eyes glowed in the gloom of the cavern; someone had used an unusual colored paint to capture the trait.
Is this a mental memory trip down the road of where monsters come from? Penelope wondered to herself.
The glittering lights along the walls made her hesitate. Penelope looked at them with a level regard. The shadow people didn’t need light. Then there was a distant sound of chanting. At first it was markedly similar to the chanting that Joseph John had done during the
purification ritual. The singsong voices went on and filled the cavern with their hypnotic noise.
Penelope moved forward. She didn’t know what she would come in contact with, but this was the kind of dream where she would be forced to go forward. A glance over her shoulder showed that the lights were successively going out behind her and leaving the way back in utter blackness. There was only one way to go.
The words became louder and louder, and as it had been with Joseph John Dick, it seemed to reverberate in Penelope’s head rather than in the air around her. Although in a different language, and one that she didn’t understand or could even hazard a guess at its origins, the words were darker and filled with innate malevolence.
Penelope hesitated again. A bounty of uncontrollable shivers ran up and down her spine and warned her of the evil to come. She took a deep breath and went on, gradually progressing down a narrowing passage.
Finally, she came to a section that spread apart and exposed a large room. In the middle of the room was a small fire banked by round black rocks chipped from those very walls and a set of figures slowly dancing and shuffling around it. Their rhythmic voices filled the cavern and left little room for anything else. Coming as close as she dared, Penelope watched in horror as she realized what she was looking at.
There were five shapes working their way clockwise around a tiny bluish fire. They had nothing but blood and bits of tissue decorating their flesh, and it took Penelope a moment to recognize that they had been cutting on their own skin to produce the specially painted embellishments.
Dark magicks, said her inner voice without inflection. That’s what you’re looking at. The mindless pursuit of black power. It always comes with a price. Death. Misery. Madness.
Penelope tried to lose herself in the shadows. She didn’t want any of the gore-covered dancers to see her. They had appalling masks of finger-painted blood smeared across their faces and strange drawings of figures all over their bodies. Bits of tissue from wounds dug out of their own bodies were interwoven across the dried blood pictographs. Their eyes were large, and the whites showed obscenely in the red-cast features.
Then, as the chanting reached a chilling crescendo, another figure stepped out of the darkness on the opposite side of the bizarre ritual. Penelope had no trouble identifying Merri. Nude and starkly bare of terrifying adornments, she stood out from the others like a princess from a fairy tale story. Her golden skin shone in the dimness. Her long blue-black hair trailed across her back, and her hazel eyes glowed like greenish coals in the dipping fire’s light. The others ignored her for a moment, and then their circle opened up, silently inviting her to step within its confines. One beckoned silently. Another one repeated the gesture.
Penelope stared helplessly at Merri. For a moment she was as afraid as the first moment she had laid eyes on the coldly beautiful woman, but then she comprehended this was not the same woman/thing she had seen before. This was the human Merri. This was the woman that Will Littlesoldier had married.
Merri smiled at the others and stepped willingly inside. Penelope could plainly see the avarice in the woman’s face. Merri craved the power that she thought she was about to receive. She had made a terrible deal with a demon, and she didn’t yet know what she had agreed to do. The circle closed around her, and the greed on Merri’s face turned to uncertainty. The laughing, bloodied faces of those who surrounded her began to draw ever closer. One of them tilted his head up to the cave’s ceiling and even through the gory mask of blood, Penelope recognized Will’s brother, Anthony.
In seeking knowledge Merri had instead found vile death and utter despair. The floor began to glow eerily and the group fused on her frantically twisting shape. Her limbs were restrained even as she attempted to kick and squirm her way free. Screaming words of anguish filtered out to Penelope. “You promised me power! Anthony! You PROMISED ME!” Then Merri began to scream, and it wasn’t a pleasant sound. It grated down the length of Penelope’s spine and made her want to scream as well.
The group of dancers was like a voracious animal. They brought Merri’s body down to the ground, near to the fire and leapt upon her as if she were the main course. Spouts of blood exploded from the twitching body and showed that Merri was dying. She was dying quickly, and her life’s blood was running onto the floor of a millennium old cavern.
She is dying, said her inner voice. She made a deal, but it wasn’t the deal she envisioned. Far too little, too late. Dead now. The gory figures stopped their ravenous movements and stared downward at their deceased prize.
The greenish glow consumed the group and filled the cave with emerald fire. Penelope was caught in its ever-expanding wave and unable to move. When it finally began to fade, she turned deliberately away and then froze as she comprehended she was no longer alone.
Merri stood behind her. Her features cast odd shadows in the wilting radiance, and her head was tilted slightly to one side as she considered the intruder. Her features were torn by the teeth of five madmen, and her hair was clotted with fresh blood. Her naked body was covered with bits of flesh embedded in gushing streams of bright-red blood. But her eyes no longer sparkled with the anticipation of new power. Instead they were frigidly sub-zero, and her beautifully curved mouth illustrated a note of wicked expectation.
“Thief,” the Merri-thing said, and Penelope knew that Merri was no more. Anthony had opened up a doorway to the fourth world and pulled out a witch to take over Merri’s body. The other had taken occupation and wouldn’t be giving Merri up to anyone.
Merri’s dead and gone. The only place that body could go is into the flames.
Penelope stepped backwards and bumped into someone else. A glimpse over her shoulder revealed Anthony in all his gruesome glory. White teeth flashed in a crimson face as he perceived the petrified dismay on her face. “Run,” he said, in a voice rough from chanting the evilest of ceremonies. “Run, little thief.”
Penelope’s face came back to Merri, just in time to see her hand flash up and rake her cheek. However, Penelope was already moving, leading off into the blackness, and all she could feel were the stinging remnants of the woman’s fingernails as they had scored her flesh. Blood began to trickle down the curve of her face, and it was then that Penelope knew that she wasn’t in a dream. It was subdued and obscured like a dream, but it wasn’t.
*
The sun was blazing above her. Penelope stood on the lip of a canyon created from an endlessly flowing stream through a bed of infinite lava. It was a grating gash across the land, and the snow-covered peaks seemed to be a hundred miles away. She looked up and saw the moon was shifting across the sky; a full round plate of a moon was crossing the heavens at a speed faster than hurricane-forced storm clouds. It raced like a warrior and fought valiantly to conquer the mighty light of the sun.
An eclipse. Penelope stared upward. A full solar eclipse. The moon slid across the surface of the sun and began to block the overpowering yellow rays. A moment later the diamond ring effect resulted as it slid into place, precisely blocking out the sun.
Shadows began to swirl around Penelope and grow in mass, defeating the Earth as surely as the pallid moon had overcome the golden sun.
Movement caused her to bring her head down to look. It was a man dressed in elaborate beadwork and a feathered cape. His face was covered with a kachina-like mask and he sang an ill-sounding song to the resounding walls of the canyon. The words came back to her and made her flesh ripple with reaction.
The legends about the shadow people came back to Penelope. Her eyes were focused on the chanting man, but she was all too aware of the eclipse that eliminated the powerful sunlight. Will’s words fluttered in her thoughts. “‘Once they were occupants of a distant underworld… Their only failing was that they could only live in the blackest depths of darkness, and the deep canyon was the only place that could protect them from the great light of the sun. But at night they escaped to wreak havoc. Their eyes glowed red in the darkness like the reflection of ligh
t in a mountain lion’s eyes, and they moved as if made of the very thing they hid within.’”
The earth beneath her began to tremble. Penelope looked down in alarm. Her feet shook with the great quaking of the rocks below. The man in the mask laughed; it was a tremendous bellow of malicious amusement that made the earth shudder twofold. She watched as the canyon split apart at the seams, and a light made of the purest black spilled out.
“Come!” the man yelled with all his might. “Come into the upper world and take what should rightfully belong to you!”
Penelope couldn’t look away. Even in the dimness, she could see the shapes slithering out of the cracked earth. One, two, and then three of them, were followed by others. They crowded into the deepest shadows until only one thing determined their numbers. Their eyes smoldered like red-hot coals and shone up malevolently at where she was perched on the precipice. Shadow people.
The earth shuddered anew and closed with a grating noise that was not unlike fingernails being dragged down a chalkboard. Her glance went to the sidem and the man removed his mask. Anthony stared down at his handiwork, clearly pleased with his efforts. Then he looked toward Penelope and said, “Who were you expecting? Brad Pitt?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
? - ?
Sunday punch (slang, origin unknown, probably 1940s American) - a very strong blow, one’s very best hit
The eclipse was gone. Penelope trotted out of the blackness as if passing through a solid wall and suddenly entered a patch of bright moonlight. Jarringly abrupt, she was no longer on the edge of a lava canyon filled with the writhing shapes of things with luminescent red eyes. Instead she was standing alone in a noiseless forest constructed of dark, twisted shapes. Her breath came and went as whistling pants through an open mouth.
She got it. She understood now.
Shadow People Page 23
