She knew the walls were solid. But the terrified whimpering sobs of the boy got under her skin and forced her to try again.
In time, all she could do was pace and try to cover her ears. The torment of hearing the child’s terrified voice, and being unable to help him, was more than she could bear. She had no children of her own, but Collette wanted them, wished to find a man someday who would be a better husband than the asshole she’d married and divorced…wished for a little boy. And here was this child, no different than the son she might have one day, sobbing in fear and despair, and she could do nothing to soothe him.
At daybreak, the child began to scream.
Collette froze, breath coming in tiny gasps. She stared at the smooth wall, the dawn’s light beginning to make a warm glow of the carved sand all around her. Once, twice, three times she spun, searching for the origin of that scream.
She could not just let it happen. Could not just do nothing. Shaking, skin prickling with gooseflesh, she raced to the wall and put her palms against it. Collette closed her eyes, listening more closely than she had ever listened to anything in her life. The screaming-a chilling shriek of agony that went on and on-echoed around the chamber, but its origin was nearby.
Close, but not here. Not right here.
To the left. Her eyes still closed, she slid her palms frantically along the wall, sand scraping her skin. Again she froze, focused, listening.
Here. Just here.
The screaming stopped. She opened her eyes. The Vittora hung in the air just a few feet from her, its light flickering.
“I met her in the mall,” it said, words drifting on the air, so close, as if it were whispering right in her ear. “I should have known our relationship was doomed.”
During her imprisonment, Collette had retreated again and again into her favorite movies, played them on the screen inside her head. There were a handful of movies she loved with a passion, and this was her favorite line from one of them. The Vittora spoke in the voice of John Cusack from Say Anything, as if it could comfort her now. As if the words were anything but gibberish in the panic of this moment.
“I don’t want to buy, sell, or process anything-” it began.
Collette drowned its voice out with her screams. She could not ignore its presence, the dreadful light, the knowledge that it existed there on the periphery of her imprisonment, waiting for her to die so that it could be released from the tether that held it to her. But she would not let it get in her way.
“Where are you? What is it?” she shouted, palms against the wall.
The silence shattered. The boy began screaming again, but this time he cried as well, not only terror and pain but anguish. Absolute despair and surrender.
“No,” she whispered, gritting her teeth. “No.”
Collette tore at the wall, grit getting up under her fingernails. The pads of her fingers scraped on the sandlike concrete. Her heart hammered. Fresh tears traced lines in the dirt on her face. She shouted back to him, pictured the little boy, wondering what he looked like, where he was, what was happening to him.
Anguish clutched her heart, and so it was a moment before she realized her fingers were digging in sand. Then her eyes widened as it came away in her hands, scoops of dry sand. It began to spill down from the wall as though she had broken through some outer shell and now it sifted to the ground, pooling at her feet.
“I’m coming!” she shouted to the boy.
Then his screaming stopped again. Collette kept digging, but fell silent. Perhaps shouting her intentions was not wise. Should the Sandman hear her, what would he do?
“Come on, come on,” she muttered under her breath. Her fingers hurt. They were bleeding. But she kept digging, trying to figure out what she was digging toward.
Another prisoner. That had to be it. The boy must be a prisoner in the castle, just as she was, and now someone, the Sandman or one of those freaky hunters, was hurting him. Torturing the little boy.
Her breath came even faster as she dug. The sun was rising and now she could see clearly. She cupped her hands into claws and she dug quickly, both hands at the same time, tearing the edges of the hole to make it larger and larger, digging deeper.
There came one last, long, lingering scream of sorrow.
“No!” Collette shouted.
She thrust her hands, fingers outstretched, into the hole, into the sand, and felt them break through into somewhere else…into open air. Holding on to the edges of the hole in the wall, she braced herself and kicked at the sand. Gray nothing light showed through from the other side. Almost darkness. But it was another room, some other chamber.
Again and again she kicked and huge chunks of hardened sand fell away, collapsing and crumbling so it spilled on both sides of the opening.
The Vittora began singing a song called “Joe Lies.”
The hole she’d dug in the wall was more a tunnel, its shape an arch almost like a door or the windows of her cell. Collette’s heart soared. She started through, praying it was not too late for the boy. In the darkness on the other side it was all gray light, but she saw now that it was not another chamber like hers.
It was a young boy’s bedroom, a poster of the Justice League of America on the wall, a small night-light casting a dull gray glow into the room. Sand from the hole she had dug had spilled onto the carpet, but otherwise the place looked entirely ordinary, as though she had opened up a tear in this world and back into her own.
With the glare of morning sun behind her, she blinked, trying to get a better look at the figure that lay on the bed. The covers were a tangle, the spread half on the ground. The boy had his arms splayed around him, the shadows making lines upon his face.
She stood in the opening as her vision adjusted to the dim light of the bedroom. Then she saw that the lines on his face were not shadows. They were streaks of blood. And the deepest of shadows were the indents where his eyes ought to have been. Instead they were gaping, empty, bloody holes.
“Oh,” Collette whispered.
All the strength went out of her and she collapsed to her knees, sand spilling all around her, down the back of her pajamas, into her hair, into the room ahead of her.
Then something moved across her peripheral vision, a shadow separating itself from the rest of the gray.
The Sandman stood just inside the room. He had remained out of sight at first, but now he swept toward her, his hideously bony form all sharp angles beneath that cloak, his fingers bent and contorted, hands held up in front of him like some bizarre insect as he moved.
From beneath his hood, he glared at her with those terrible lemon eyes.
Then he turned his right hand palm up, and she saw that he held the boy’s eyes, still dripping blood and vitreous fluid, optic nerves hanging from them like tails.
The Sandman grinned and opened his mouth, showing those yellow, broken fangs, then let the boy’s eyes dangle from the optic nerves above his mouth. He dropped them in and began to chew. Something damp and gleaming spilled over his lips and down his chin.
Collette could not scream. Her breath would not come. Her tears burned her cheeks and her whole body shook. Had she not already been on her knees she would have crumbled then.
“ Was that what you wanted to see? ” the Sandman asked in his rasping voice. He ran his black tongue over his teeth. “ Perhaps in the future you will learn that it is better not to look.”
Then he held up his hand.
Power struck her. The sand she had torn away, that had spilled into the boy’s room, rose up and hit her, wrapped around her, thrust her back through the passage she had dug. It threw her back into her prison so that she sprawled across the soft, shifting floor.
Collette looked up in time to see the wall repairing itself, the sand dancing up from the ground and rebuilding. In seconds, the wall was smooth again, as though she had never touched it.
Solid, again, probably.
But she did not want to know, could not imagine touching it to f
ind out.
The Vittora hung above her, barely noticeable now that the sun had risen. It normally went away while the sun was up, but not this morning. She wondered what that meant.
Quietly, it sang its mad song.
“My daughter,” Halliwell said.
“Excuse me?”
He and Julianna walked side by side. They had been traveling across the plateau for more than two hours and Halliwell felt sure they would reach the river gorge anytime now. Twillig’s Gorge, the tricky little monk had called it. For the past twenty minutes they’d been on a steadily rising slope, but now he could see that it came to a crest ahead where the slope fell away like a cliff.
That would be the gorge.
He hoped so. God, he needed a rest.
Yet it was not only the gorge, or Oliver, that was on his mind. Since their meeting with the thing on the roadside, his thoughts had been of Julianna, and of home. If not for her, he might be dead now, or at least in debt to some monster, some…demon…on the roadside.
They were in this together. Julianna was trying to reach home just as desperately as he was, yet for her, Oliver was a part of that home. Halliwell had never quite believed Oliver was a killer, and by now he was sure of it. He only wanted answers from the man, and some help as well. But he had never looked at it through Julianna’s eyes. To her, finding Oliver was everything. She needed to see him, to hold his hands in hers, to hear his voice and maybe to tell him what was in her heart.
Halliwell understood that now.
And it made him think of Sara.
“You asked me what I need to get back to so badly,” he said, not turning to look at her, not wanting to see her eyes. “The answer is ‘my daughter.’ ”
They went on another ten steps before Julianna replied.
“What’s her name?”
“Sara.”
“It’s been a while since you’ve seen her, huh?”
Halliwell frowned. This time he did look at her. “It shows?”
Julianna smiled kindly. “When Oliver disappeared I was just as angry as I was scared of what had happened to him. There were so many things that I wished I’d said to him, conversations we should have had but avoided so many times. When he was gone, the idea that we’d never say those things was devastating.”
Halliwell nodded. For a few seconds they walked on, but it was an easy companionship, with no weight of expectation. If he said nothing more, Julianna would not press him. Perhaps because of that, he glanced at her again.
“I don’t see her much. But when I do, I never say the things I wish I could. It’s like there’s so much distance between these days and the old days, back when she was my little girl, that my voice just won’t carry all that way. Does that make any sense?”
“It makes perfect sense,” Julianna said. “But she will. You say what needs to be said, and she’ll hear you.”
“Yeah. Maybe,” Halliwell allowed. “But first we’ve got to get home.”
Julianna made no reply. None was needed.
Once again, Halliwell looked up the slope toward the sharp ridge there.
Two figures stood on the ridge, silhouetted in the late morning sun. Halliwell held his breath and slowed, but did not stop walking.
“I assume you see them?” Julianna said.
“Yeah.”
“So what do we do?”
“If you want to go home, there’s nothing we can do. We go talk to them, or try to. They’ve seen us by now, and neither of us is in much condition to outrace them if they want a chase.”
A few more steps, and Julianna whispered again.
“They’re not human.”
“So I noticed,” Halliwell replied. “There seems to be a lot of that going around.”
Halliwell trudged onward until the figures on the ridge came into clearer focus. They were tall, thin creatures with wings, and from the waist down had the powerful bodies of snakes. In their arms, they held longbows, and each had a quiver on his back.
The creatures watched them come. As Halliwell and Julianna approached, the larger of the two slung his bow across his shoulder and slithered forward to meet them, wings rustling against his back as though at any moment he might try to take flight. The other, whose flesh was a deeper blue, nocked an arrow and drew back the bow, watching them carefully.
“Hold there,” said the snake-man, slithering toward them, powerful upper body upright, wings unfurling.
Halliwell glanced at Julianna. Her chest rose and fell with short little breaths, and just from looking at her, he could see she wanted to bolt. He understood: the presence of this thing made his skin crawl. The very atmosphere of this bizarre world felt too close and claustrophobic around him; only by denying the reality of his surroundings could he fight that feeling. Otherwise it would shatter him.
Panic had been simmering in him from the moment he had stepped into this impossible world. Halliwell didn’t want to think about what would happen to him if he let the panic out.
He turned his attention to the snake-man, determined not to look away.
“Good morning,” Halliwell said, just as though he were walking on a backcountry road up in Maine and had come upon someone he did not know.
“State your business,” the snake-man said, pale blue skin rippling with corded muscle as he swayed before them.
High upon the mountain plateau, it was hot out in the sun. But when the wind blew, it carried a chill from somewhere far off, and Halliwell shivered as the thing spoke to them. He took a protective step nearer to Julianna.
“We’re…newcomers,” Halliwell replied, glancing from the snake-man to the other, whose grip was firm upon the bow. The tip of the arrow glinted in the sun.
The snake-man crossed his arms, scrutinizing them. “Lost Ones? Just arrived?” he asked, and Halliwell thought he was paying close attention to their clothes.
“Yes,” Julianna said. She smiled, a quiet plea in her eyes. “We’re not supposed to be here. We just…we’re trying to find someone. A friend. We were following him and we went through this door and came out…” She looked around, spreading her arms wide. “Here. We came out here, and we couldn’t get back.”
The archer fluttered his wings and took better aim. They were close enough that Halliwell could hear the twang of the bowstring being drawn further.
“Not the first,” the archer said. “Nor the last.”
Halliwell held up his hands. “Look, we don’t want trouble. We’re not even asking for help. All we want to do is get down to the river.”
The older, pale one narrowed his eyes. “Why?”
Julianna cleared her throat as though to get his attention. Halliwell glanced at her, realized that she was just as unsure as he was what to say next. What words would get them where they needed to be without an arrow through the heart?
“This woman is searching for her fiance. The man she’s supposed to marry,” he said at last. “His name is Oliver Bascombe, and we think he’s passed through the gorge sometime yesterday afternoon. He may even still be there. All we want is to find him, or to pick up his trail so we can continue our search.”
Something changed in the snake-man’s diamond eyes. Halliwell wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw pity there.
“That is all?” the creature asked.
Julianna laughed softly, and a bit manically. “Well, I wouldn’t say no to a sandwich and a cup of coffee…”
“That’s all,” Halliwell said, shooting her a wary glance. “Did Oliver come through the gorge yesterday? It’s a simple question. You don’t even have to let us down there if you don’t want. Just tell us where the river comes out of the mountain and we’ll leave you alone.”
The older snake-man gestured to the other to lower his bow. The archer hesitated a moment, then complied.
“Your names,” the snake-man said.
“I’m Ted Halliwell. And this is Julianna Whitney.”
The creature bowed his head. “I am Ananta of the Naga, and this is Shesa.
Our people are the guardians of Twillig’s Gorge. I am afraid that this is not a welcome time for visitors.”
Ananta knitted his brows and bowed his head toward Julianna. “The arrival of your fiance has only made things worse. Suspicion is rampant here and throughout the Two Kingdoms. Neighbors begin to distrust neighbors. With strangers, the situation is even worse.”
“Wait,” Julianna said, moving closer to Ananta.
Shesa raised his bow again, but the older Naga waved him away.
“You said…you mean, Oliver is here?”
“He was,” Ananta replied. “At daybreak he departed, along with his companions. It appears that before they left, one of their number murdered the innkeeper at the Stonebridge Inn.”
“Murdered?” Halliwell said. His pulse quickened. “How was he killed?”
Ananta frowned, studying him. “Violently.”
He did not want to raise the Nagas’ suspicions again, but Halliwell could not help himself.
“Were his eyes removed?”
Ananta and Shesa exchanged a confused look.
“What prompts the question?” Ananta asked.
Halliwell shook his head. “Never mind. Where I come from, I’m a…guardian, much like yourself. But it’s not important now.”
Not important, because the look between the two Nagas had told him the answer. The innkeeper’s eyes were not taken. So whatever had killed Max Bascombe and all those children, it hadn’t caught up to Oliver here. Or so it seemed.
“Do you know where Oliver went? When he left, I mean? And how long ago?” Julianna asked, the questions tumbling frantically one after the other.
Ananta gestured toward the east. “Across the Gorge. He traveled east with Kitsune at dawn. The other Borderkind who were with him yesterday left earlier, on a westerly course.”
The Borderkind v-2 Page 12
