Out on the polished wood floor two boys in spandex uniforms, heads encased in the insectile helmets used by high school wrestlers, circled each other, crouched, cautious. One was Derek.
Derek lunged, caught the other boy’s leg, pulled, and then fell atop the boy as he squirmed out of the hold, reversed with a smooth twist, and locked his arms around Derek’s shoulders.
The cheering fell silent. The referee’s whistle was stilled. The boy on top went limp and Derek, imagining he had just gained advantage, swarmed out of his grip, threw his opponent down onto the mat, and only after nearly a minute realized that no one but him was moving.
Bewildered, he looked up. He fixed his eyes on me first, then, nervous, shifted to Messenger.
“Derek Grady,” Messenger said. “You are called to account for your actions.”
Derek looked left, right. It would almost have been comical, had I not known some of what awaited him.
“What’s going on?” Derek asked. He disentangled himself from his limp, blank-faced opponent, and stood up. He looked all around and yelled, “Hey! Hey, people! Hey! What the . . .”
His words trailed away as he saw a yellow mist begin to seep between the bleachers, through the frozen crowd, along the raftered ceiling, across the polished wood floor.
“What is this?” he demanded of me, choosing me, I supposed, as the one more likely to be intimidated by his belligerence.
I did not answer. Neither did Messenger. I had already begun to adopt Messenger’s solemnity, though it had not been a conscious decision on my part.
“Derek Grady, I offer you a game,” Messenger said.
“Who the . . . What . . . Go away. Get lost. Creeps.”
“If you accept the invitation to the game and lose, you will suffer a punishment,” Messenger said. “If you refuse the game, you will suffer punishment. If you accept the game and win, you will be allowed to go on without any further interference.”
“Are you threatening me?” Derek demanded.
“I am offering you a choice,” Messenger said.
“Yeah, well, I have a choice for you, loser: take a walk or get your butt kicked. How about that choice?”
Messenger said nothing. He just waited.
Derek was nerving himself up for a fight. He threw out his chest and made a “Come on” gesture with his hands. Messenger did not respond in any way, not by look or gesture.
Derek stepped closer, hesitated, glanced around as if expecting someone to stop him, and then leaped at Messenger. He passed through or past Messenger and landed on hands and knees a few feet beyond.
Angry and frightened now, Derek rushed at Messenger’s back and again space warped so that no contact was made, and Derek found himself yet more angry and frightened. Now Derek swung a fist at Messenger, which would surely have passed harmlessly by except that Messenger had apparently lost patience and, with a simple raising of his palm, caused Derek’s legs to weaken and drop him to his knees.
“I offer you a game,” Messenger repeated. “If you refuse to choose, then I will make the choice for you.”
“Game? What game?”
“Do you choose to play? Answer yes or no.”
“Ah ah ah!” a female voice called out. “Don’t be too quick to answer.”
Oriax, halfway up in the bleachers, stood and sauntered down, legs a mile long, dressed in her third exotic outfit. I wondered if Derek could see her, but from the way his eyes widened, his jaw dropped, and his face flushed, I assumed the answer was yes.
“You don’t need to play Messenger’s little game,” Oriax said. “You’re a big, strong boy, aren’t you? You’re not a pansy, are you? Not like Manolo, right?”
Throughout this, Oriax never even looked at Derek but winked at me and grinned saucily at Messenger.
Messenger ignored her, spoke past her to Derek. “You might lose the game. But you might win.”
“Might win,” Oriax mocked. “How many win, Messenger? One in ten? And only if the Game Master is in a gentle mood. It’s all rigged, Derek, don’t listen to him.” She leaned close to Derek and put her cheek within a whisper of his. Derek’s eyes fluttered and for a moment I thought he might faint.
“Let him be, Oriax.”
“You’re not going to be pushed around by some pretty boy in a ridiculous coat, are you, Derek? Not a big, strong, manly guy like you.”
Derek shook his head. “No.”
“I mean, look at him. You’re tougher than he is, aren’t you?”
Derek wasn’t so sure about that, but he nodded gamely while glancing warily at Messenger. “This is all some kind of trick.”
“Exactly,” Oriax purred. “A cheap magic trick from a boy who serves powers he doesn’t even understand. Isn’t that right, Messenger? You quote the phrases, you summon in the name of Isthil, but you don’t know what that really means, do you? Child. You are still very young. And now you bully and seduce this poor, blind girl here into taking over your burden.”
I did not want to listen to her—I felt a need to be loyal to Messenger, though I could never have explained it logically. What loyalty did I owe he who was not to be touched?
“Be silent, Oriax.”
Oriax moved away from Derek and closer to Messenger. She waved one long, black-nailed finger slowly, back and forth, and in a singsong voice said, “No, no, no, Messenger, you don’t have that kind of power. You don’t dismiss me. I was old in the knowledge before you were spawned.” Her sex-kitten voice had grown hard and edged with anger. “I am Oriax. You know what I am, and who I serve, and what powers I command, and you should remember your place, Messenger.”
Messenger did not show fear, but neither did he rebuke her. He listened, swallowed a rising anger, kept his arms by his side, and made no reply.
Oriax turned back to Derek. She snapped her fingers in his face as if waking him from a trance and said, “Tell him no. Tell him no, you won’t play his game.”
Derek then looked to me, confused, a silent question in his eyes: Who should I believe? What should I do? And all I could do was shake my head slightly in a weak acknowledgment that I did not know the answer.
Derek threw his shoulders back again, glanced at Oriax, his eyes lingering on her, then in a voice lower than his normal register said, “No. I won’t play your game.”
Messenger glared daggers at Oriax, who clapped her hands and laughed in delight. She grinned at Messenger and said, “He’ll break like a dry twig, the brittle little boy. And the Shoals will have a new inmate.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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THE MIST NOW OBSCURED EVERYTHING IN THE gym and everyone but Derek, Messenger, and Oriax. It was particularly strange about Oriax, for the mist treated her as physical objects so often treated Messenger: it avoided her. She ranged through the frozen spectators, looking at them curiously, sometimes tilting their insensate heads back to better see their faces. I could see only the individuals directly beside her.
Oriax was playful, taking a sip of one person’s beverage, looking in another’s pocket, reading the book of the girl off to one side. She was killing time, waiting, bored. But refusing to simply disappear. Clearly she expected something more entertaining soon.
Messenger looked at me as if sizing me up, weighing my abilities in the balance. He did not seem encouraged.
“Oh, come on, Messenger,” Oriax called from across the gym. “She has to surrender her virginity eventually.”
That particular phrase got my attention, to say the least, but I assumed she was being metaphorical. Though with Oriax, how could I be certain?
Derek was annoyed at being ignored and, I suspected, unsettled by Oriax’s sarcastic dismissal of him as a brittle little boy. He still followed her with his eyes, only managing to glance back at us from time to time.
I must admit that I did not see Oriax encouraging him in any way, but Oriax’s me
re existence was encouragement, I suppose. It crossed my mind, just for the most fleeting moment, that it would be a wonderful thing to spend just one day looking like her.
“We have reached a moment I might have preferred to delay a little longer,” Messenger said to me, his voice as always so close to my ear. “It is called—”
“The Piercing,” Oriax interrupted, her tone mocking. “The Piercing. The perfect blend of solemnity and un-self-aware sexual metaphor. There’s a lot of that, Mara; you’ll get used to it if you decide to stay with Messenger.”
“If I decide? I was not aware I had a choice.”
“Oh, there are always choices, mini-Messenger. Not now, not today, not for you. But there are always choices. Sooner or later. Poor stupid Derek there made one. The time will come for you to choose as well. But right now the time has come for you to penetrate the veil of Derek’s mind, to intrude into his memories, and to find oh such exciting and terrible things.”
Messenger let her speak but was clearly having difficulty controlling his mounting irritation. “It is called the Piercing,” he said, “because you will pierce all of the subject’s defenses and discover the true fear at the heart of him.”
“It’s a hell of a ride,” Oriax said, wandering nearer, much to Derek’s enjoyment. He had gotten over whatever sting he had felt from her snide remarks. “The Piercing, indeed.”
“I don’t understand,” I said truthfully.
“I am called the Messenger of Fear. The punishment I inflict is raised from the subject’s own mind. It is to be his worst fear. In order to know what that fear is, you must travel deep within his mind, his very soul. It can be . . .” He searched for the right word. “. . . disturbing.”
Derek said, “She’s not going inside anything.”
“There are words to be spoken,” Messenger said.
“What are you talking about?”
“An incantation.”
“An incantation? Like a spell?”
“Stand behind him,” Messenger directed, and I moved with uncertain steps to stand behind Derek. Derek had laughed and tried to thwart this by turning around, but his feet were as if they had been glued to the wooden floor.
“Hey!” he yelled.
“Closer, Mara. Put your left hand over his heart, the center of his chest.”
To say that I did not want to touch any part of this loathsome boy would be an understatement, but now my curiosity was running well ahead of my caution. I wanted to know what this was, what it meant, this Piercing. So I complied. He squirmed but could not move more than a few hairbreadths to the left or right.
I felt his heart beating through his sweaty uniform.
“Now place your right palm against the side of his head,” Messenger directed.
Feeling silly, I nevertheless complied and resisted the powerful urge to apologize to Derek for this intrusion on his personal space.
“I’d rather she did this,” Derek joked nervously, referring to Oriax.
Oriax laughed. It was not a joyful sound. There was the sinister mockery of the hyena in her laugh. “Do you?”
“Yeah, you’re like, so hot.”
“Mmm. You have no idea,” she said.
“Now, speak these words,” Messenger told me. “By the Source. By the rights granted to the Heptarchy. By Isthil and the balance She maintains.”
The incantation was at once ridiculous and ominous. Surely it was all nonsense, the sort of thing that sounded impressive but meant nothing. Was I to believe there was such a thing as the Heptarchy? The word just meant seven of something, but seven of what? And who was Isthil? He’d mentioned that name before, I was sure, and when he spoke the name, it was with reverence. But once more, curiosity would be my preferred vice, so I spoke the words.
“By the Source. By the rights granted to the Heptarchy. By Isthil and the balance She maintains. I claim passage to your soul.”
At first there was no change. I was disappointed, thinking either that I had failed somehow or that the words were indeed meaningless. Derek’s heart beat beneath my left hand. His temple flexed beneath my right. And then, gradually so that for several seconds I could not be sure it was real, my left hand felt more than the muffled thump of his heart and began to feel rather the discrete muscular contractions within. I could feel the components of the heartbeat: valves closing as others opened; muscles contracting as others relaxed; the surge of blood squirting from the heart to fill arteries and push the blood to the lungs and brain.
I swear I almost felt the slick wetness of his heart, the rubbery tension of stretched muscle, the warmth of the viscid liquid within.
And at the same time I felt the fingers of my right hand seem to melt into his head, the gritty feeling of hair, the thin layer of flesh, the hard bone, like wet stone.
I tried to pull away, but my hands would not respond. I sent a panicked, pleading look to Messenger, but now the mist seemed to conceal all but the shadow of him. Muffled voices of Oriax and Derek, neither comprehensible except for the underlying emotion: her derision, his growing nervousness.
I felt myself spiraling, twirling, hands still locked on to Derek while my legs swung around in a wide circle. It wasn’t real, I was certain of that, or as certain as I could be of anything in this new, altered reality. But I could not un-feel the sensation of spiraling, of whirling madly while all the while descending, falling like Alice down the rabbit’s hole.
Below me, darkness was penetrated by flashes of lightning. I fell or the darkness rose, I’m not sure which, but soon it was as if I was in a silent lightning storm, but each flash illuminated nothing but the texture of the darkness around me.
And then I was no longer falling but walking, moving with arms outstretched, unable to find any solid object, a frightened, unsteady wanderer in a black cave. I became aware of a presence. At first it seemed as if it was pursuing me, but no, it was before me and I was pursuing it. It was darkness at the center of darkness, a hollowness in the fabric of the air around me, a vacuum drawing me toward it even as it withdrew from my questing fingers.
And then an electric thrill shot up my arms as I touched the dark form. I felt again the wet and heaving heart, the slick bone, and deeper still my hands traveled until I touched something invisible, a writhing beast, and I cried out but made no sound, and this cry of mine seemed to still the frantic contortions of this unseen monstrosity.
I felt it. It was not large, no bigger than a large cat or small dog. My fingers traveled over it, making out tendrils, craters, some surfaces slick and wet, others like scabs.
There was a crease in it, a slight indentation that I suspected went the circumference of it, and I knew, though how I knew, I could not say, that I was meant to pry the halves apart. In obedience to this instinct I dug my fingers into the crease, and to my surprise, it came apart with no more effort than I might have had to exert to split apart a cracked egg.
And then. And then. Oh, God, how can I put into words the brutal images that erupted from that split? I saw Derek fleeing, panicked, running in sheer mindless terror from a pursuer that could neither be glimpsed nor outrun.
I saw him lying flat, tied down to a crude wooden table, as above him a nearly comically large hypodermic needle descended slowly, slowly toward his abdomen.
I saw him behind the wheel of a car, and a tractor-trailer hurtling toward a head-on collision.
There were snatches of imagery from movies, some of which I recognized.
There were images of one-armed men with chainsaws that I heard as stories told ’round a dying campfire.
I knew what I was seeing as I plowed helplessly through the haunted house of Derek’s imagination. I was seeing his fears, his darkest terrors, the stuff of his nightmares, the things that had frightened him from earliest childhood until this moment.
And worse, far worse than seeing these things, I felt them. I brushed against them, and each new terror sent shockwaves through me. They were like infections that, once touched, I knew I
could never fully shake off.
And I knew then, oh, with such soul-deadening dread, that this was what I had felt from my brief contact with Messenger. I understood then that he had absorbed some part of the terrors of so many tortured, twisted minds. I understood that he had never, could never, fully erase them from his own consciousness and that these terrors had made his touch toxic.
And that the same thing was happening now. To me.
I don’t know how much time passed as I dredged through the accumulated horrors of Derek’s mind. Maybe no time passed at all. Maybe it was a thousand years. Time lost all meaning—what good was time, how could it be measured, when all you could think to do was to scream?
Slowly then, slowly the unbearable intensity weakened. Slowly, like a person rising from a nightmare to the light, I floated up and away from the awful beast, the beast that now closed, locking me out. I floated up and away, up and away, but nothing, nothing was forgotten.
I opened my eyes. Derek was before me, his back to me, my hands on his heart and head.
I looked past him and saw Messenger. He was pale, as always, but somehow more deathly now. His blue eyes met mine, and I saw within them the thing that kept me from hating him as I perhaps should: compassion.
I had traveled to a place he had often visited himself. He knew. He understood in a way that no other being could.
My voice trembling, weak, I said, “You did this to me.”
He shook his head imperceptibly. “No, Mara. You did this to yourself. As I did it to myself. As my master before me did it to himself.”
Gasping, I broke contact with Derek.
“Was it . . . fun?” Oriax asked, unable to conceal the cruelty of her curiosity. She licked her green-tinged lips as though she was savoring the lingering flavor of some delicacy.
“What is his fear?” Messenger asked me.
“I . . . There were so many.” I closed my eyes, but that brought the pictures back to life, so I opened them again, wide, knowing that darkness was now my enemy and that what salvation and peace I could find was in light, even the sickly light the mist allowed me.
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