“Uh … yeah, right,” Emmett struggled.
“Good. Are you alone out here?”
Emmett was nodding, clenching his jaw from chills that wracked his body in the cold air. The blond-haired young man, Keiran, pursed his lips and whistled a sweet note that seemed to linger even after he had finished. Emmett felt a rush of warmth envelop him. The bitter December air felt immediately like Caribbean-kissed trade winds caressing his body.
“What the hell?” Emmett recoiled.
Silently, Keiran stood up with a Cheshire cat grin on his face. For some reason, in the midst of the bizarre and grotesque night, Emmett noted the young man’s smile with a moment of clarity. It was a grin that signified a superior knowledge without being mocking, aloof without being apathetic. It did nothing to remove the horror of what had happened, and yet it calmed him somewhat from its effects.
The woman had returned to stand next to Keiran. Both serpents were coiled around her shoulders, both heads looking behind her into the darkness.
“The Underdweller’s nearly gone. We’ll need to bury the Revenants. Were there others?” she asked as she motioned to Emmett.
“He said he was alone. That’s his car back there.”
The pair turned to look at Emmett, who was only catching half of what they were saying to each other. His mind was racing with countless questions, things he wished to scream aloud even as he ran to his car. Yet when he tried to push himself up to stand again, he immediately fell forward. It was only the woman’s swiftest movement that caught him. She gently lowered him down with her body so that he lay across her knees. Cradling his head in her hands, she ran a finger across his forehead and swept the sweaty mat of tousled black hair from his face so that her eyes looked down into his.
“I can slow it from spreading until we get him to the Grove,” Keiran said standing over them. “But we’ll need the Archivist to fully heal him.”
Keiran’s words were lost on Emmett as he stared silently into the woman’s eyes. They sparkled as if a great swath of the sky had been drawn down into a crystal goblet. For the briefest moment as he looked up at her, his mind stirred once again with the odd feeling of familiarity.
“My name is Amala Amjadi,” the woman said. “And this is my Companion, Keiran Glendower. We’re going to help you. This will be difficult for you to believe, but that Underdweller—the creature that attacked you—has infected you.”
Emmett wanted almost to laugh, to recognize verbally how ridiculous the situation was—the creature, his apparent saviors, each individual detail playing out in his mind like one of hundreds of films he had watched over the years. He needed for it to be a farce, unwilling to recognize how seemingly close he had come to death.
“Underdweller?” he scoffed. “So what’re you two … monster hunters?” he mocked before coughing and wincing at the pain it caused.
Amala glanced up at Keiran. Emmett observed the deliberate sort of unspoken interplay between them, the look of closeness they shared.
Amala reached for Emmett’s neck and traced her finger down the side of his cheek and toward the edge of his neckline just beneath his ear. Emmett’s body reacted with a shock of pain that lanced through his body, causing his limbs to jerk out uncontrollably, his teeth to clench, and his voice to turn into agonizing moans.
“I’m sorry, but you’re still in danger. That pain is from the Rot, an Underdweller’s curse. It has marked you.”
Needing to confirm the reality once more, Emmett touched the blackened skin himself and gasped at the pronounced pain, a pain that brought startling clarity.
“The Rot will consume your flesh first, and it will continue to grow more painful as it spreads into your chest. It will then fill your bloodstream and choke your organs. It’s eating you alive, and if you do not come with us, you’ll soon be dead.”
“Come with you where?” Emmett asked hurriedly. “Who the hell are you two?”
Everything was changing so fast, details rushing at a mind already struggling to right itself. His mind wanted to deny it, yet already he could feel a restriction in his breathing, as if some unstoppable force were slowly closing his throat. Facing his own death for the second time that night, Emmett struggled to bring order to a chaos of wailing, conflicting voices, his thoughts racing too quickly.
Run away from them.
“I’m going to need you to trust us.”
Find the nearest hospital and call the police.
Emmett again tried to stand, to walk on his own. The world turned upside down before he could stand. With a weakness crippling his entire body, he fell forward again.
Lie down and go to sleep. Hope that all of this is an elaborate nightmare.
Opening his eyes, he found himself in firm, strong hands that had kept him from harm. He was being lifted up by Keiran, his head pitched backward in a fight to stay conscious. His eyes rolled, half-open and unable to focus on the rapidly-changing world around him. A thousand thoughts flooded his mind as he struggled to mumble something, anything, to his two saviors, but he could only bite down against the discomfort and disorientation.
They were walking together back to his car at the gas station. Amala opened the rear door, and Keiran laid Emmett on the backseat. He stepped back as Amala swooped in behind him to hover briefly over Emmett, her hand gently caressing the side of his face as her starry eyes looked with disgust at the work of the Rot.
Emmett watched her movements slow as his vision seemed to blur. The pain was lessening somehow, and Emmett felt the immense weight of fatigue dragging him backward into sleep.
Go to sleep. It’s just a nightmare … a dream … yes, it must be a dream. And the amber-eyed woman is here, too, just like all the dreams before.
As if hearing his thoughts, the woman’s serpents suddenly spun around her neck and turned their glowing black eyes at Emmett. The woman’s starry eyes registered momentary confusion, followed by wide-eyed shock.
“Emmett?” she whispered as his eyes finally closed.
Emmett knew he was dreaming. He’d had this dream countless times before.
He was standing in an apartment. It was the same apartment he had dreamed of throughout his life. He could hear the evening news anchor’s polished enunciation from a television playing through the walls. There was a weather report of the northern storm blowing in from the Great Lakes. And there was an update on the mother and daughter who had been missing since the previous week.
The apartment was like a Twilight Zone curio cabinet. A seemingly endless collection of odd statutes lined shelves along the ceiling perimeter—hawks and other birds—with towers of unread old books stacked so precariously high that the slightest wind threatened to collapse them. Burgundy shawls doubled as lampshades, casting dim lighting over a pair of over-sized cream-colored ottomans in the room’s center. A wooden table cracked down its length sat between the cushions, on which was a collection of nine Russian nesting dolls. The walls were covered in odd-shaped mirrors, shiny glassware, and hanging baubles that light and image bounced off. A hundred different reflections of Emmett bounded around the room as he tentatively moved through the living room. The fluttering color from the goldenrods and orange velvety wings of two Monarch butterflies sitting on the outside of the window’s ledge registered in his periphery.
Hanging on the far wall beside the window was an unframed oil painting of a group of people at a dinner table looking aghast at a disembodied hand in the air above them. There were five people sitting at a table set with food, each dressed in old period clothes. One of the men wore some kind of crown and, like the others, looked frightened by a hand above them pointing to words written on a hazy cloud-like backdrop. The letters were in a language that Emmett could not read.
“Belshazzar’s Feast,” a voice said to Emmett. He turned to see a young woman standing behind him. It was always the same woman. Her face was concealed by the serpents coiled around her head except for the pair of amber eyes that stared at him.
�
�The Dutch painter Rembrandt created this portrait of the Babylonian King Belshazzar who, according to the biblical Book of Daniel, in drunken revelry blasphemed the sacred vessels taken from Solomon’s Temple by the previous king,” the woman continued as she always did. She stepped past Emmett to the painting and pointed up at it. “In response, the ghostly, disembodied fingers of a human hand appeared in the air and wrote on the wall words that the prophet Daniel interpreted as meaning that God had numbered the days of Belshazzar’s kingdom, and that the Babylonian King had been weighed and been found wanting.”
The woman lowered her hand and looked at Emmett. “The painting is currently on display at the National Gallery in London.”
“Why is it here?” Emmett asked. He always asked the same question.
She always gave the same answer. “Do you know the words?”
“No.”
The woman recited the words without having to read them from the painting. “‘Look at the sky, how the orbits of the planets and stars never change, how they rise and fall according to their natural order. Look at the earth, how everything that takes place has their beginnings and their ends—summer and winter, and clouds and dews and rain. The trees appear to shed their leaves; the trees crown themselves in green leaves and fruit. All this from year to year forever and ever and ever like the bottomless sea and the endless rivers that lead to it.’”
“What does that mean?” Emmett asked, already knowing her answer.
The woman turned to Emmett and held one hand up with her palm facing him. She lowered the other hand, palm facing out and down. She always did this with a look in her amber eyes as if she were waiting for him to respond in kind. Yet he never did. And so the dream ended as it always did, the woman repeating the same seven words.
“One day, Emmett, you will save me.”
CHAPTER 5
Emmett raised his eyelids with great effort, wading through murky, imageless darkness. As his eyes struggled to focus, so too did his mind. A formless memory surfaced, steeped in malevolence. He crushed his eyes closed against the torrent of returning images: trees and thorny bramble, a gravel road, a flashing overhead light. Then he remembered a crash. He had been running; his aching limbs told him so. He had fallen. He was attacked.
“Good afternoon,” an accented voice greeted him. Emmett groaned in response, pushing his eyes open again to a whirl of unfocused shapes. As his vision sharpened, he could see he was lying on a plush bed in a massive room whose ceiling and walls were made of glass like an enormous greenhouse. He could see snow-crowned mountains carpeted in fields of thick evergreens filled the horizon. A stone walkway wound through the room whose floor was soft, red earth. Surrounding him were broad tufts of bamboo stalks, dark taro pads, and the soaring green and purple leaves of immense banana trees. Waist-high shrubs of wild, erratic palms and fragrant, feathery ginger blossoms lined a whispering creek encircling the bed. Several large, worn boulders accenting the path were home to heart-shaped fronds whose masses of twisting, exposed roots climbed the rocks, upon which sat several people in hushed conversation. And in the distance, Emmett saw a young woman in a diaphanous white gown and waist-length black hair dancing around by herself, her body encircled by a swarm of bees that seemed to elicit her gleeful smile.
Emmett tried to force himself up on his elbows, a dull tingling of a thousand pinpricks racing throughout his limbs. He felt an immense nausea in his stomach, wincing as his dry throat cried back at his own coughing. He forced himself to swallow what felt like broken glass.
“You’ll want to take it a bit easy, then.” Emmett saw a young man sitting relaxed in a chair opposite the bed with one leg crossed over the other, composed in his gray pinstripe slacks and fitted black turtleneck. His mind stumbled over the chaos of returning memories before registering the face.
“What the hell did you slip me?”
“I didn’t slip you anything. Mind you, I kept you asleep for the last three days while we drove back, but Amala thought it would be easier. Here,” he said, offering water.
Emmett felt too sick to protest, and he accepted it sitting back against the cushions. He groaned and squeezed his eyes shut as he drank and was rewarded with hysterical coughing.
“Three days?” Emmett asked, bracing against the discomfort. The coughing seemed to jar his memory, and tumbling out of the coalescing fog were dueling shadows: one of a white-skulled creature, the other a graceful woman who moved like flowing water.
“After this much time we’ll obviously want to feed you. I’m feeling rather peckish myself. You might want to use the loo first, though.” Keiran pointed at an open door behind Emmett where he could see a bathroom’s sink and shower built from granite.
Emmett felt the telltale exigency and tumbled through the open door. It was a moment later when modesty resurfaced and he closed the door with the back of his foot, Keiran having turned away. When the door opened several minutes later revealing a beleaguered Emmett holding his stomach, Keiran stood up from his chair.
“I had your jumper washed,” Keiran said, motioning to Emmett’s hoodie, which was draped over the chair opposite the bed. “It is wicked cold here in Oregon,” he added, handing Emmett a long, wooly scarf, which Emmett brought around the back of his neck but left untied in the front.
“Oregon?” Emmett scoffed, his mind still struggling to reconcile his surreal environment.
“Answers for all your questions. With food. Promise,” Keiran smiled, motioning to another door at the end of the stone walkway. The door was built directly into a sheer wall of rock buttressing the glass walls, as if the structure were constructed alongside and within a mountain.
Keiran walked over and opened the door. Whether it was Emmett’s hunger or confusion, he followed. They were in a smaller room. A central fireplace ensconced in tan-colored rock dominated the room, with a variety of floor rugs, thick body pillows of various colors, and low cushions surrounding it. Pottery as tall as Emmett featured wildly arranged and organically out-of-order floral arrangements. They were not the sort of trimmed bouquets found in a hospital, but rather were celebrations of living, unrestrained color.
“Who have we got here? An angel on the road, or a devil at the fireplace?” called out a baritone voice.
A pair of men entered the room from another door, walking as much as strutting. Not appearing much older than Keiran, they were deeply tanned identical twins with short brown hair and brown eyes, though one of the twin’s eyes seemed to sparkle as if flecks of silver swirled in his irises. Like Amala’s. And whereas Keiran was athletic and strongly built, the twins’ wide barrel chests strained against their shirts.
“All right?” Keiran smiled, clapping each on the shoulder. “Emmett, this is Sebastian and Paulo Rodrigo.” He gestured to each twin in turn.
Both nodded silently at the same time. The twin with the sparkling eyes narrowed them, staring at Emmett. “Interesting coloring,” the twin said.
“How long with the Rot?” the second twin asked.
“Three nights ago in Florida.”
“How unexpected,” the twin with the strange eyes commented.
Emmett felt like a child being talked about by grown-ups at the dinner table.
“I never got to say good-bye after the aurora australis in the spring,” Keiran said, ending the momentary uncomfortable silence.
“It’s okay, we had to head back to Noronha early …”
“Allessandro sends his regards…” the other twin added mid-sentence, to which Keiran smiled knowingly.
“So what brings you up here?” Keiran asked.
“La Pastora had us hunting the coast. We left Natal two weeks ago.”
“Anything of interest?” Keiran asked.
“Rumors. An old man in Pureza said that several of the area’s children had gone missing. The trafficking trade is too extensive to be certain what happened to them.”
The other brother nodded. “There was talk of a disease spreading through an isolated villa
ge in Martins—odd muscle spasms, high fever, eventual death … the typical thing you’d expect if they were active in the area and failing to cover their tracks …”
“… but since there was massive flooding in the area and the main roads were washed out, the villagers couldn’t wait for officials to arrive. They burned the dead in case of malaria, leaving nothing left for us to check.”
“So no evidence of Revenant activity?” Keiran asked.
“We followed a trail of similar signs north through the Amazon until we reached what we thought was a dead end in Veracruz. Then we started hearing talk of el hombre de la bolsa again …”
“… which we hadn’t heard that far south of Monterrey before.”
“The man of the sack?” Emmett finally interrupted. And though he’d heard of the foreign horror movie of the same name, he knew just enough Spanish to understand nothing of what was presently being discussed.
The twins turned and looked to Keiran as if it were his responsibility to explain. Emmett couldn’t tell if they were being deferential to Keiran or were simply irritated.
“The Sack Man is a story parents in Latin America tell misbehaving children about an ugly old man who collects and eats bad children. Classic bogeyman story … except, of course, that it’s not entirely untrue. Not when the bogeyman really does kidnap children and eat them, anyway,” Keiran said.
Emmett’s mind numbly absorbed Keiran’s words as the twins resumed. “Honestly, brother, I wish we chased real shadows instead of our own. Some children went missing and some farm animals were slaughtered, but no Revenants.”
“Since we were so close to the border, we caught a flight to rest and visit here. Paulo’s got a crush on that widow who runs that restaurant you’re so fond of.”
The other twin—Paulo apparently, though Emmett was uncertain if he could ever tell them apart but for Paulo’s unusual eyes—jabbed his brother before looking back at Keiran. “We were heading to say hi to Sophie. We’ll let you get back to your tour.”
The Waking Dreamer Page 5
