Burnt Snow

by Van Badham

  Jealous of our command of the elements, selfish kings and evil popes sought to extend their domain. Shadow men dragged the screaming shadow women by their hair, threw them into darkened rooms where other men stood with chains and irons, or strapped them into wooden chairs.

  Those who had found the space between worlds evaded capture. Those who lived on the fringes of our knowledge – the midwives, the healers, the men learning science, the peasants who prayed to the old gods, all of them were taken, and tortured, and killed. A woman in a chair screamed as men clamped her feet into metal boots lined with spikes. They asked her, ‘Have you had truck with the Devil?’ The woman hollered ‘No!’ – and a man with a huge iron hammer struck the boots with all his might.

  The torture was prescribed in the book they carried: Malleus Maleficarum. Another shadow showed an old man, screaming as screws were tightened on his thumbs. It pardoned their lies. It sanctioned their cruelty. In a corner, a helpless young girl was horsewhipped. In another, a woman was strapped to a rack and as torturers turned cogs and her arms were ripped from their sockets. It made their deeds holy.

  ‘Did you summon demons at a sabbat in the moonlight?’ demanded a torturer.

  A beaten, half-conscious woman in front of him, her hands tied above her head, did not answer. I watched terror bloom across her face as one man held her and another approached her bare limbs with a white-hot poker in his hands. She screamed. For two hundred years, the Finders killed and prospered. As many as nine million people died.

  I heard a vast creaking of wood and the snap of rope immediately behind me. Surprised, I whirled around.

  The dark landscape spawned a vast gibbet, where seven female bodies swung, their hands bound with rope. All were hanged. Looking up, I saw shadow faces and startled with fear: Sue, Lauren, Gretchen, Nikki, Kylie, Michelle and Fran – hanging from their broken necks, their dead tongues loose out of their mouths. I gasped, terrified.

  Izek was at my side.

  ‘Just for their deeds in this life, your friends would all be dead,’ he said.

  As if to distract me from the gibbet, the roaring sound of hooves against earth turned my head towards the shadow forms of a forest and a herd of deer racing through it.

  Our kind was their real quarry, but we had hidden ourselves in the caves and the trees, continued Izek, amongst the deer and the dogs. We waited until kings grew old and the world overtook their cruelties. The shadows churned, the landscape changed. Knowledge was the new rule of power: modern lords promoted scientists and cartographers. Out of the shadows, small rooms appeared, convening secret meetings. The Finders’ families, nurtured on hate, made rich by murder, never lost their taste for hunting. They pursued the secret knowledge that was our own, striking dark bargains to obtain the old grimoires. In low light, a man in a hood appeared amongst the tombstones of a cemetery, handing a package to a dark figure in exchange for an old book. As the dark figure took the package, the package let out a baby’s cry.

  They learned to read the portents of our world, and to find us, and to use our own spells to bind us to their Will. The shadows blended into darkness and, on the ground appeared a circle of white crystals, and the Circle was the size of the room. Instantly, Izek and I were standing on the circle, unseen amongst a crowd of men and women in hooded robes who stood the same. They condemned us for using the magic that they wanted for themselves. Chanting began. In the middle of the Circle, a naked girl with a coarsely shaved and bleeding head was frantically trying to rub away symbols that had been painted on her body. Burning torches were above our heads and lines began to glow on the ground around the girl, as if tracks of petrol had been lit.

  She scrambled, trying to crawl out of the flames, but she was trapped – the same strange force that had kept me in the Circle of Nikki’s Tell-All had her stuck in the centre of a burning, nine-pointed star.

  The chanting grew louder; the girl started to hiss at the crowd, and sputter incantations, but two hooded people emerged from the circle, one wearing gloves and carrying something that looked like a hot branding iron.

  The girl spat at them, she implored gods with forgotten names to save her, but the gloveless hooded man hit her in the face, again and again, until she fell to the ground.

  I turned my face away but the scene reconfigured itself in the other direction. Again, I turned and there it was: the naked, screaming girl, the hooded men, the branding iron, the crowd chanting louder and louder.

  The girl was flat on the ground, trying to raise her body onto her hands and knees. A hooded man kicked her, and she fell, and then she tried to rise again. ‘Jasa tu, Choviani!’ curdled one of the men.

  Without warning, he slammed his foot on the girl’s wrist: it broke with a crunch.

  Her mouth flew open but no sound came out; in less than a second, he had struck the branding iron onto the back of her broken hand. As it sizzled, the girl screamed. Steam rose from her burning flesh.

  It was the worst sound I had ever heard.

  ‘Izek!’ cried the girl, blood streaming from her eyes and her nose and her mouth. ‘Izek! Help me! Help me!’

  The steaming mark left on her hand was a circle, containing a triangle missing its bottom edge, with a dot in the middle.

  Ashley Ventwood.

  I looked at Izek. He was weeping. A shadow fell over his face, and everything was dark.

  19

  A flurry of colour confused my vision and, with a rush of sound, I realised where I was.

  This was Snake Bar, the venue for a launch of UrbanHymnal, a biannual fashion magazine. There were partygoers drinking from champagne flutes and beer bottles. In the distance, some twenty-something guys in checked shirts were playing pool. Billiard balls cracked against each other as one of the players broke for the game. I heard Lucy’s laugh ringing above the swollen crowd.

  Izek’s face was dry. His expression was flat. It was as if the previous conversation hadn’t taken place.

  Maybe it hadn’t. After all, I’d thought that a dead girl had crawled out of a plastic storage box last night. A dead girl currently working in a café in Sydney.

  I’d been seeing things for days, and now I knew I was going crazy. My imagination was so out of control that people told me a story and I had visions. For a second I decided that Izek must have drugged me, that the vision I’d just had was because he’d secretly injected or sprayed me with hallucinogens. Or maybe everyone in the crowd was in on it – it was a reality TV show following a thoroughly normal girl whom everyone was trying to convince that magic was real.

  This was also crazy thinking, but the alternative was that magic was real and that just wasn’t possible.

  Like a bird storm wasn’t possible.

  Like Ashley Ventwood’s face wasn’t possible.

  I couldn’t think like this – I forced every brain cell I had to focus on the material reality of my body, the room I was in, the air going into my lungs.

  I felt for my right leg, lifted my foot from the ground. The crowd was thick now. I couldn’t see Lauren and I was suddenly reminded I was worried about her.

  ‘I have to go,’ I said to Izek.

  ‘Don’t you want your pendant?’ He dangled the necklace in his fingers like a cat’s cradle.

  I reached for it, but with a flick of his hand it was in his pocket again.

  ‘I thought we weren’t spending the night playing games,’ I said. ‘Please, I really have to find my friend.’

  ‘We will come for you tomorrow night.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Training.’

  ‘I’m busy tomorrow night,’ I said. ‘My pendant—’

  ‘Sophie—’

  ‘What? What?’ I demanded. ‘Don’t you get it? I sympathise with all those tortured people, and if something bad happened to Ashley I am very, very sorry, but I have a grandmother who’s very sick and, yes, maybe there is paranormal la-la going down and maybe in some other universe it does have something to do with me, but I don’t want i
t, I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to be a part of it!’

  His black eyes glimmered. ‘You may feel differently tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Go and find Lauren.’

  ‘Give me back my pendant,’ I said, stretching out my hand.

  He removed it from his pocket again, but hesitated before handing it back to me. There was softness in his eyes for the first time. ‘Please tell Louhi Salainen … It was not supposed to be this way.’

  He put the pendant in my hand and I snatched it from him. The moment it was around my throat, I could feel a difference to it. A kind of taint. I’d rinse it in clean water after I found Lauren. I saw Lucy in a crowd near the pool table and I marched in her direction.

  Above my head, a black crow circled the room, and disappeared.

  20

  Lucy was unbalanced on her heels when I reached her. ‘Soph!’ she cried as I approached, and some champagne spilled out of her glass. ‘This is Lauchlan and this is Gordon and they are two of my favourite models in the whole wide world.’ She was pointing to the two guys in checked shirts playing pool.

  ‘Hi there,’ said one of them.

  ‘Sophie is—’ began Lucy.

  ‘—really worried,’ I interrupted. ‘Have you seen Lauren?’

  ‘Isn’t she with you?’ she said, then, ‘No, she isn’t. You were getting hit on by that hot magician guy. Naughty, naughty! How was that?’

  ‘He’s a family friend,’ I said. ‘Where was she last time you saw her?’

  ‘At the bar,’ said Lucy. A pained realisation spread across her forehead. She put her glass down. ‘Urgh,’ she said. ‘I’ll check the toilets.’

  ‘I’ll look around here,’ I said.

  We agreed to meet back at the pool table when Lauren was found. I jostled through the crowds at the bar but found no sign of her. When I saw a scrap of red hair in the crowd in front of the stage, I fought my way to it – but when I was close enough to see properly, I realised it was someone else.

  ‘Hey, be careful!’ said some girl in a gold mesh top as I blundered through the people in front of the stage. The lights were changing and I knew the second half of the show was about to start.

  Where was she? Circus music started to blare through the sound system with a sickening rhythm. I finally grappled my way to the back of the crowd – and caught a glimpse of the act onstage. A woman with no arms performed ballet steps en pointe while a legless woman who was strapped to her back did the arm movements.

  Everyone in the room was watching with rapt attention, and that made it easier to walk through the thinning crowd close to the windows. There was still no sign of Lauren. I saw the pool table, with its limited view of the stage, was all but abandoned – but Lucy was there. Alone.

  ‘I’m worried now,’ she said when I reached her. ‘She’s not in the bathroom.’

  ‘Should I try her mobile?’

  Lucy shook her head. ‘I’ve tried. It’s off. Who was she with when you last saw her?’

  ‘That Brad guy,’ I said. ‘She could be with Seamus.’

  Again, Lucy shook her head. ‘Seamus is over there with Veronica,’ she said, pointing at them in the audience. ‘And Brad left with his boyfriend twenty minutes ago. She must be upstairs.’

  ‘What’s upstairs?’

  ‘A dance floor, a DJ,’ she said. ‘Do you want to have a look up there? I’ll go down and double-check with security that she hasn’t gone outside.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Meet me on the landing up the stairs on the hour.’

  I nodded and slid out of the main bar into the darkness of the stairwell.

  It was like walking into a vertical tunnel of sound. I could understand why the noise was so foggy in the main bar. The circus music was competing with the thundering doof-doof-doof pounding from the upstairs dance floor.

  As I emerged into a fountain of surging, coloured light, waves of music travelled through the soles of my shoes. At one end of the room there were towers of speakers and a DJ behind glass. The wall next to me was hidden by thick velvet curtains. Behind me, I realised, were even more speakers, and a small bar. Lights whirred – not just with colours but patterns too: flowers, concentric circles, triangles. The track playing consisted of drums, relentless metal percussion and a gruff-voiced man muttering inaudible words. The people dancing jumped and thrashed, and when glimmers of light illuminated their heads, they looked monstrous.

  When I was almost in the middle of the room, I smelled something. Amid the flailing, jerking hands and feet, I stood perfectly still and closed my eyes.

  Music pumped. Somehow, I could smell Lauren in here, but I had to work out where. I breathed in. The room’s aroma was sweat and alcohol, deodorant, peeling paint and curtain material. In my mind, I coloured all these scents the same dark blue, and the faint Lauren scent I coloured orange. In that high-ceilinged space, blue abounded; the orange smell was very weak, and as I took a step in one direction, I lost it. Two steps in another direction, I found it again. Then my eyes shot open: I knew exactly where she was.

  I had no time to analyse whether it was weird or spooky to imagine that I could smell my best friend in a crowd. However it worked, I knew two things: Lauren was behind a curtain. And she was in trouble.

  21

  I strode towards the set of curtains that I knew Lauren was behind. Yanking them apart, I met with a blank wall – I looked up and realised that each set of curtains veiled rooms high up that overlooked the dance floor. My nose stung with anxiety; suddenly furious, I scratched at the wall in front of me, trying to hook my curled fingers into the paint so I could climb into the room above it. Paint flakes fell like snow but the wall remained solid.

  My jaw tightened as I searched for a means of access. The DJ’s glass room was sealed on either side, so I clambered along the wall in the direction of the bar. Sure enough, at the end of this wall was a gap, and around the corner of the wall were some carpeted stairs.

  I scrambled up the stairs, snatching handfuls of carpet with my hands and feet. The smell of something wrong was nauseating, and my mouth set into a snarl as I tried to swallow cleaner air. In the dark hallway I passed one set of closed curtains on the corridor side, with human voices behind it, and then another where the curtains were partially open and the cubicle empty.

  The orange scent stung my nostrils. Enraged, I thundered up the hallway. I knew where they had her; there were two men, one stinking of smoke – and Lauren, confused, barely conscious.

  When I was outside the right cubicle, I crouched in the dark. I lowered my head bringing my eye as close to a gap in the curtains as possible. Poking my nose against the curtain to open it further, I saw a horseshoe sofa, cushions and a low table. My breathing was heavy with anger, but I guessed that the curtains would muffle the sound.

  A champagne bottle was on the table. An empty glass was in front of what I knew were Lauren’s legs. Other legs were next to hers – the smoker’s. Opposite them were the legs of the other man. I looked up; this other man was laughing, and he had a video camera in his hand, filming Lauren and the smoker. Blue light from a viewfinder lit his smiling face.

  I turned and, in horror, saw what the smoker was doing to Lauren.

  22

  With a vicious growl, I leaped through the curtains, launching myself at the man with the video camera. He didn’t have time to react as I landed on his shoulder. Our two bodies collided into the corner of the room – centimetres to the left, we would have fallen through the window, onto the dance floor – and I heard his skull smack into the cement wall with the force of our combined weight. He swung blindly at me with the video camera, but he was dazed from the collision and could barely raise his arm. The video camera rolled out of his hand, and as I pulled away from him, he slid onto the couch, then to the floor. Even with my back to him, I could smell blood on him.

  The smoker pushed Lauren away from him – now she was lying face-down on the couch, mumbling incoherently into a cushion, her white arm flopping to the ground.

&
nbsp; I lunged towards the smoker and he tried to scream, but I swiped at his face. The bones of his jaw crunched with the blow; saliva flew out of his mouth, and across his face four horizontal lines appeared, from his ear to the side of his nose. First they were as thin as paper cuts, then they widened into lines of split white flesh, and then they started to flow with blood.

  At the smell of it, I gurgled. Breath was shooting out of my nostrils and my lungs were burning, but I knew both men were unconscious now, so my heartbeat gradually slowed down. As I calmed a little, I sensed Lucy, true to her word, was standing at the bottom of the staircase, near the bar. The beats of electronic drums pulsed through the curtains and the walls.

  I leaned towards the couch where Lauren was lying. With my teeth, I pulled the cushion out from under her head, in such a way that it pulled her head to the side, so her breathing wouldn’t be obstructed.

  Her eyes were glassy; although they were open, there was no Lauren in them.

  ‘Roar,’ said Lauren. ‘Growl and roar.’

  I swallowed, and nervously lowered my muzzle to lick the traces of blood from my paw.

  23

  Lucy had to scream over the music as I scurried towards her. ‘Have you found her?’

  I nodded, grabbing her hand and pulling her into the relative quiet of the staircase. Lucy was panicking. ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘I told her to stay where she was but she might not have understood,’ I said.

  ‘Is it bad?’ she asked as we ascended the stairs.

  I nodded again.

  ‘Oh God—’

  ‘It may not be as bad as it looks,’ I said, ‘but she’s almost unconscious and I don’t know what to do.’

  I took Lucy’s hand to lead her down the hallway of cubicles and could feel how frightened she was through the coldness of her fingers. We reached the cubicle where Lauren was; I stepped though the curtain and pulled Lucy in after me, shutting the curtains behind her as quickly as I could.