As I passed the overturned caravan, something darted out and grabbed me by the arm, whipping me around and slamming me to the ground.
Hands jerked me inside the wreckage of the caravan, and I thrashed reflexively to get free. “Quiet!” someone hissed in my ear. “They hunt by sound. I need you to be quiet.”
I stilled myself. If I had had a beating heart it would have been thundering in my ribs. I’d gotten used to danger, enough so that when somebody who could get me out of it told me what I needed to do, I didn’t panic. I’d have to thank my father for that, if I ever saw him again.
And apologize, because I was rapidly realizing that this entire expedition had been a terrible, terrible mistake.
The black cloud passed over the caravan with a scream, and the hands relaxed their grip on my arms. “Sorry,” the voice said. “But I’m not about to get eaten on account of some Walker too stupid to know about the screaming sand.”
I crawled out of the caravan and slumped in the dirt, grit digging into my palms. “Sorry. I’m new here.”
The figure, who turned out to be a man not much older than me, snorted. “Yeah, I figured that out on my own.”
“Well, you don’t have to be a prat about it,” I told him. “It’s not my fault I didn’t know about those things.”
“Thing,” said the man. “The sand is alive, a parasitic hive mind that tracks its prey by noise.” He pushed his dark hair out of his eyes. It was as unruly as my own and covered with a thin layer of dust.
“All right,” I said. “Thanks for the information. I’ll try to stay quiet on the road, but I’ve got to be going.”
I stood, and the man regarded me with such intensity that I folded my arms across my middle, self-conscious under his gaze. “You’re not just a Walker, are you?” he said at last.
I sighed. “I don’t even know what that is.”
“Souls who escape the Catacombs,” said the man. “They wander, lost, unable to ever find rest. But you’re not wandering. You have a purpose.”
“I’m looking for someone,” I said. I filed away the information about the Catacombs. If Dean was here, that was as good a place as any to start.
“Aren’t we all,” the man muttered. “I’ve been waiting for my brother for decades, but unlike me, he’s got the good sense to keep on living.”
“Well, good luck with that,” I said, unwilling to be sidetracked by another soul who just wanted to keep my attention and freedom for themselves. “I really do have to be going.”
“I’m sorry,” the man said, standing and following me back to the road. “But I have the strangest feeling that I’ve seen you somewhere before.”
“I don’t think so,” I told him, taking a step away to keep my distance. “I don’t know you.”
Yet there was something familiar about him as well, even though I didn’t want to admit it. Something about the way the man carried himself, his direct stare, his mossy green eyes …
It clicked, like a gear slotting into its mate. “You’re Ian,” I said, my voice coming out so soft with shock that the wind nearly carried it away. “You’re Ian Grayson. My uncle.”
The man’s face slackened, and he took a step away from me. “Archie’s child?” He blinked and swiped a hand over his face. “I mean, I suppose it’s not so outlandish that he’d have a child, but …” He reached for me, but I still didn’t trust him that much, so I took another step back. “It’s unbelievable. You look just like him.”
Ian was staring at me as if I were his brother in a wig. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I really do need to be going.”
“You can’t go by yourself!” Ian exclaimed. “This place is an eternal hell. Nothing good can survive here.”
I turned back to him and fixed him with my own gimlet stare. “You don’t know me. Ian. What makes you think I’m any good?”
Before he could reply, I started walking again—straight to the polluted city and whatever lay within.
I looked back after a few minutes and saw that Ian was following me, his lanky stride the same as my father’s. Both could close a gap quickly, and sure enough he caught up.
“How are you even here …” His mouth crimped. “I don’t know your name.”
“Aoife,” I said. “My name is Aoife Grayson.”
“I see. You’re Archie’s oldest?”
“Youngest,” I corrected him. He wasn’t trying to keep me from walking, so I decided to let him tag along. “I have a brother.”
“Amazing.” He shook his head. “Never thought Archie’d do it. Get married, I mean. He always had girls around him, but he was so damn devil-may-care he scared them off just as quickly. And he was never interested beyond a few dates anyway.”
He looked me over, this time with a critical eye. “Your mother must be a knockout.”
“Oh yes,” I said, trying and failing to keep the bitter tinge out of my voice. “She’s very pretty. And very crazy.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you.…” He sighed and gave me a sideways smile. “See, your uncle Ian never had a way with words. I was never the impressive one.”
“You didn’t have a Weird,” I said. “I know. I read my father’s journal.”
Ian flinched. “You’re blunt like him too.”
I thought about spilling my guts to Ian, telling him that I’d never really known my father before a few months ago, about my time in the care of the city, about everything, but I didn’t. I just walked. I didn’t know Ian, and that meant I had no reason to trust him. The fact that we’d just stumbled upon each other made me even more resolute to keep things close to my vest. After all I’d seen, coincidence was not something I’d ever trust again.
“Yes,” I said at last. “I suppose I am.”
We walked for a time, keeping our eyes on the horizon for more signs of the screaming sand. “I’ve gotten pretty good at avoiding it,” Ian told me, “but sometimes it catches you. Not to mention the Walkers. Some of them are feral, just rabid scraps of the people they used to be, and they want to feed on you.”
“Like zombies?” I said, thinking of Cal’s magazines, stories of creatures raised from the dead by magic or science.
“What’s a zombie?” said Ian.
I thought about how long ago he’d died, and sighed. “Never mind.”
“You don’t belong here,” Ian said in a rush. “Your soul may be solid as the rest of us, but your body, wherever it is, is still breathing. I can tell just by being near you, and if I can tell, then others can as well. However you got here, whatever happened, you have to leave.” He stopped and pushed his hair out of his eyes, a repetitive, reflexive gesture as it was long and covered his eyes. “It’s not safe for you here.”
I kept walking. “I’m aware of that. And I’m not leaving until I get what I came for.”
Ian had to run to keep up with me. “What’s that, then? What could possibly be here for a living soul?”
“His name is Dean,” I said. Even saying his name brought a prickle of tears, but I fought them.
Ian’s brow drew down. “You can’t bring the dead back, Aoife. They’re here to stay.”
“He was never supposed to die,” I said. “It’s my fault. I have to bring him back.”
“I hate to tell you this,” said Ian, “but whether he was meant to die or not, dead is dead. There’s no help for it once a soul crosses the barrier from life to the Deadlands. It’s not physical, like space and time, but it’s a barrier all the same. I tend to think it’s still physics, just laws we don’t understand.”
Any other time, I would have been thrilled to meet someone who could tell me more about the Gates, confirm or deny speculation, and just generally discuss science, but I waved him off. “No. My mother said that if someone dies before it’s their time, they can be brought back. And she’d know.”
Ian raised one eyebrow. “Your mother sounds like a smart lady, but it’s still bunk. There’s no way you can free a soul from this place. Dead is dead, Aoife. Once you
cross, unless you’re using a trick like whatever brought you here, then you’re here for good. I’m sorry.”
“Bargained, then,” I snapped. “Everyone has their price.”
A clouded look passed across Ian’s face, and his eyes grew dark, gauging the road we’d been walking. “You don’t want to go that way,” he said, pointing ahead to the smog-shrouded city.
I stopped walking and folded my arms over my chest. “And why is that?”
He shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. “It’s dangerous there. In the city.”
I softened. If he was anything like my father, he wouldn’t respond well to being pushed around. “Look, Ian. You seem to know your way around this place, and I could really use your help.”
He started to cut in and I held up a finger. “Let me finish. I’m going to find Dean with or without you, and do everything in my power to bring him back to the world of the living. So you can help me, or you can get out of my way.” I dropped my hand and started walking again. After a few steps I stopped and turned back. “But I’d really prefer that you help me.”
My uncle hesitated for so long that I thought he was going to refuse, and I was going to be on my own. The thought didn’t scare me overmuch, but it would make what I had to do that much harder.
At last, though, he sighed and followed me as I started walking again, reluctant to waste any more time. “I suppose I won’t change your mind? Not even when I tell you what’s in that city?”
“Doubtful,” I said. “What is it?”
“This place”—Ian gestured at the sands and the road—“the Ossuary Trail, it’s a neutral zone, where nobody except the most desperate go because it’s so dangerous.” He grimaced. “Like me, for instance. But in the city—the city is safe, because it’s controlled. Controlled by things that have never been part of the living Lands, things that take human souls and twist them past the point of recognition to keep the lights on and the gears turning. To be in the city is to suffer eternal torment, and the souls who escape can never stay in one place for more than a few clock-ticks in living time. They call us Walkers—the damndest of the damned, except for our freedom. Those souls in the city—it’s not a city, Aoife. It’s a tomb.” He shrugged. “Some prefer a tomb and the chance they’ll be turned into kindling to what’s out here, though. Which should tell you exactly how bad it can get in the wild parts of the Deadlands.”
“No, I understand,” I said. I’d seen the same effect in Lovecraft—people staying put in their comfortable lives and risking a Proctor burning rather than chance what lay beyond the walls. “So most of the souls stay in the Catacombs?” I said, thinking back to my conversation with Nerissa.
“The prison of the dead,” Ian agreed. “If Dean is here, chances are he ended up there, on his own or by force. Those who run the Catacombs aren’t picky about what you did in life, just what your soul is worth to them, and in return they offer a little protection. Not really worth it, but the souls they trap just want to exist. You stray from the city, you run the risk of … well … disintegrating. Forgetting who you are.”
“I understand that part, too,” I whispered. That couldn’t have happened to Dean. He had to be safe, to remember me.
I had to be in time.
“It’s hell,” Ian said softly. “This existence of mine isn’t much, but I escaped the Catacombs and I swore I’d never go back.”
“I’m sorry to make you do it for me,” I said, and I was being honest. “But if Dean is there, I’ve got to find him, and I think we’ve proved I don’t stand much of a chance without someone who knows his way around.”
Ian sighed. “Why not?” he said. “We Graysons have to stick together.”
The air grew thicker as we approached the city, and though my chest didn’t rise and fall as it did when I was alive, I could smell it. It was a toxic smell, one of acrid smoke and charred meat but also of rot, the kind of rot that takes centuries to build, the cloying odor of a forest floor, the musk of turned earth, and the rotten tang of flesh regurgitated by insects.
The closer we got to the city, the worse the stench became. Ian slowed to a plod, and I looked over my shoulder. I could tell by the set of his shoulders and his rigid expression that he was afraid.
I had to keep him talking, get his mind off where we were going. And my mind, while I was at it. I wanted to wake up, to snap my soul back to the living world, open my eyes and see the cobwebbed ceiling of Chang’s shop, but if I did, I knew I’d never forgive myself for failing Dean when he needed me the most. My soul-self could exist here a little longer. It was a small price to pay.
“How did you escape that place to begin with?” I asked Ian, pointing to the city. He flinched and shoved his hands into his pockets.
“In the Catacombs, there are guards—watchers who were never human, never part of anything living. They can be bribed, and I knew things that they wanted to know, things about the other prisoners. I was an informant,” he said, as if dragging out the word physically hurt. “I got them to trust me, to think of me as amusing and harmless. Now I can’t stay in the same place for more than an instant. The Deadlands are infinite. Physics here doesn’t work the same as in a living Land. You could wander forever, compelled to drift, or cross your footsteps a hundred times in one day, but you better never slow down, because everything in this place is hungry for the energy your soul can provide.”
I felt a strong stab of pity for Ian straight through my chest. Whatever he’d done in life, he didn’t deserve this.
“I’m sorry I’m making you go back,” I said softly.
Ian shrugged. “Don’t feel bad on my account. Most Walkers forget their own names over time. They forget everything about who they were. I don’t want that to happen. At least now I feel useful.”
“Thank you,” I said, but he said nothing in reply, so we walked silently as the sun went down and rose again, the sky changing every hour or so from rose to ink and back again.
* * *
I must have watched the sun rise a dozen times while Ian and I walked. He was right—physics didn’t have the hold here it did in the living world. Finally Ian and I started talking again.
“You said someone in the city would know where Dean was,” I began. “What are they going to want in return?”
Ian gave a thin smile. “You really are Archie’s daughter, aren’t you? Always looking for the angles.”
“I didn’t learn that from my father,” I told him. “I learned that because he wasn’t around.”
“Ouch,” Ian muttered. “Sorry.”
“Just tell me how bad this is going to be,” I said. I wanted to know what price would be culled from me, either in blood or in promises or in sanity. All of those were negotiable with the sort of creatures I’d met lurking in the shadows between worlds.
“There’s a soul in there, one of the oldest I’ve met who still has her faculties,” said Ian. “A Spiritualist when she was alive. She can find things, people. As for what she wants”—he scratched his temple—“it depends. Sometimes she does it because she thinks it’ll be funny, other times she’ll slice out part of your memories and take them. It’s how she’s stayed sane for so long.”
I looked toward the city, listening to the endless wail of the sirens, the screaming of a place full of mindless pain. “Well, it’s not like I expected this to be easy.”
Ian didn’t say anything, and I had run out of questions, so we walked on in silence, until we reached the city walls.
We joined a clot of gray-tinged spirits moving along the road, which forked into the distance until it shimmered out of existence at the horizon.
“Souls,” Ian murmured in my ear. “The new dead. Just walk with them.”
“Won’t they realize we’re not like them?” I whispered.
Ian shook his head.
“They don’t notice much of anything. Some of them don’t even realize they’re dead yet.”
The figures were in various states of decay and decompositi
on. I looked at Ian, who appeared as he must have in life, suit and tie and all. “How come they’re in such bad shape?”
“Your soul manifests your true face when you die,” Ian said. “Good or bad. If you’re rotten to the core in life, your soul rots in death. Some of them hang on long enough to learn how to alter themselves so you can’t see all the things they did in life.”
Here and there, I picked out faces that were relatively normal-looking, but there were so many who were little more than skeletons with bits of flesh and cloth hanging from their bones that I focused on my feet, moving over the white ribbon of road. It crunched under my shoes.
“This isn’t sand, is it?” I realized.
“No,” Ian confirmed. “Ossuary Road is the bones of the things that lived in the Deadlands before men. The first creatures in the living world, the first to die. Eventually, even death grinds you down.”
The white dust all over my feet and legs took on a new weight. Who knew what came before the Fae, before men? “The Old Ones, you mean?” I said. “Things like that? I thought they were eternal.”
“ ‘That is not dead which can eternal lie, yet with strange aeons even death may die,’ ” Ian said. “I don’t know, Aoife. We had as little to do with the Great Old Ones in my day as we possibly could.”
We had nearly reached the gates of the city and I looked up at the archway, carved with an open, lidless eye.
“Welcome home,” Ian muttered. “Can’t believe I’m walking back into this place.”
Two black-clad figures stood by the gate like Proctors, making it seem almost like home. Their faces were shadowed with cowls, however, and I couldn’t attest with certainty that they even had features to hide. Their robes reached the ground, and the only extremities I could see were hands, which held long, clicking devices that spun like oversized pocket watches.
“What are they?” I murmured, careful not to make eye contact. I knew how not to draw attention to myself, and I didn’t want the attention of those things under any circumstances. Over time, since I’d left Lovecraft, I’d grown used to fear and uncertainty as background noise to everything I did, so when the hard, cold kind of primal fear cut straight to my gut, I didn’t ignore it.
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