“You did say you’re younger than your sister and you do look quite young so I assumed that you would be. I tried looking at the black mirror but it couldn’t tell.”
My cheeks were turning beet red. “What the bloody hell is this all about? Do you want to string me up as a sacrificial virgin or something now?”
“No, no, no,” Amicus said as he made a calming gesture with his hands. “I only asked that because this forest is in the realm of the faeries and they are predisposed to be more amicable to virgins and children so if I send in a virgin child our chances of success will be even greater. That’s all.”
I was still suspicious. “So this isn’t some sort of naughty insinuation or something like that?”
“Of course not! Who do you think I am?”
It was my turn to look away. “Just asking. For the record yes, I am still a virgin.”
“Alright then,” Amicus said as we both calmed down. “I need you to prepare, for this will be a long journey and it might take some time.”
“But what about my sister and Mark?”
“They are resting. When they wake up I’m sure they will wait for you.”
“But you said this will take a while and we were planning to leave by tomorrow.”
Amicus placed his hands on his hips. “And where do you expect to go afterwards? There’s nowhere outside that’s safe, you know.”
“But the government had us evacuated when the Fomorians attacked my street so that means there must be safe areas nearby and our parents are probably over there waiting for us.”
“Lad, the Fomorians have effectively conquered the whole of England,” Amicus said matter-of-factly. “Scotland may still be holding out but not for long since the faeries and the giants up north will start to consolidate their own holdings as well. The government has lied to you. There are no safe areas. Even going to other countries will not be safe since other gods now make their own domains there. I am sure your sister and her friend can be convinced to stay until your return.”
I was fighting to hold back my tears. “A-are you saying t-that my m-mum and dad…”
Amicus gently took hold of my arm. “We’re not sure of anything at this point, lad. Just stay strong until this task is done and I’ll see to it that we will look for your parents afterwards.”
I almost cried but I didn’t. After about a minute I calmed down and wiped away the tears that had slid over my eyelids with my hands. “Alright, I’m just going to tell my sister what I’m up to,” I said as I started to leave the room.
The old man’s grip on my arm suddenly tightened. “She is fast asleep, best not to disturb her. Anyway, time is different in the faerie realm so she will hardly notice that you’ve been gone.”
I twisted and pulled my arm away. “I’m going to see her anyway,” I muttered under my breath as I finally got out to the corridor.
Amicus called out to me. “I need you to go now! Hurry up and come back here!”
The sense of dread began to creep up in the back of my mind again but I forced it away as I ran up the stairs and headed for the left wing of the upper mansion. Stopping in front of the door to her room, I knocked softly. There was no answer. As I twisted around and was just about to head back downstairs again, I had a strange feeling that all was not right so I faced the door one more time and rapped my knuckles on it yet again.
There was still no answer so I finally turned the old latch and pushed the door inwards before stepping inside. The place looked like a bedroom from an old period drama on the telly; there was an antique four-poster bed with dark carved wood and crimson curtains hanging over it. The wood paneling along the walls looked Victorian and old painted portraits of long-dead people covered the panels. A few more tables along the side of the room contained rows of identical glass bottles, the same ones I had seen in the main hall. As I moved to the center of the room I noticed that Mark seemed to have fallen asleep on the old stuffed couch near the door. I walked over to the bed and saw that Amy was also in a deep slumber as she just lay there fully clothed on top of the ornately quilted blanket. She must have been so tired that she didn’t even bother to take her shoes off.
At that very moment, as I peered at her sleeping form, that sense that I had earlier returned to the back of my mind and filled me with trepidation once again. Something wasn’t right. As I looked closer I realized that her lips were painted black. I stood fully upright and scratched my head. Having known her since I was born, I never knew my sister to ever use black lipstick. She wasn’t into the goth or emo groups at her school as far as I knew. I placed my finger on her lips to try and brush the dark paint off when I realized that it wasn’t lipstick at all, her lips had somehow turned black!
I got hold of her shoulders and instantly began to shake her awake. “Amy! Amy! Wake up!”
It was no use. She seemed to be in some sort of deep sleep and she didn’t even move. For a moment I thought that she was already dead yet I could still see both her nose and chest moving slightly as she breathed. My fears were slightly relieved as I moved over to where Mark was and then I noticed that his lips were black too. Since he was a man I slapped him hard across his cheek to see if he would awaken but it was of no use as he too seemed to be under some sort of enchantment.
My mind was now racing in all directions as I quickly ran down the stairs, but just as I was about to run back to the room of mirrors, I quickly stopped in front of the open double doors of the great hall as I suddenly remembered something. It was an incident that had happened the day before in the queue in front of the corner shop when the old spinster said something to me.
“Beware of the exiled one,” she had said.
The feeling of dread was acute now as I stumbled back into the main hall. When I walked over to the tables along the sides that contained the tiny glass bottles I noticed that one bottle in particular seemed to contain a shimmering, opaque fog that would apparently twist in my direction as if it was somehow trying to gain my attention. I quickly moved in front of the table and picked it out from among the other small bottles and held it in my hand. As I peered into it, the mist within the bottle began to somehow take shape. My eyes widened in complete shock when the tiny little haze within the container became more distinct and transformed itself into Ray.
I cried out and nearly dropped the bottle but I was able to calm down fairly quickly as I looked into the container once more. Ray’s tiny form seemed to be contained within the vapors and he was gesturing frantically, as if trying to warn me about something.
“Oh dear,” a voice behind me said.
As I turned around, I quickly placed the bottle in the side pocket of my hoodie without anyone noticing. I knew that voice and it sounded like a man whose secrets had been shattered.
Amicus Tarr was standing in front of the hall doors. “I take it you happen to know one of the souls in those little bottles, yes?”
I took a deep breath. “You’ve been lying to me.”
“Lie? No, not really,” he said. “You just didn’t ask the right questions is all.”
“Let me ask them now then,” I said. “What have you done with my sister and her boyfriend?”
Amicus gently pulled at his goatee. “Just a simple enchantment. I placed them under a spell to keep them out of the way so that you would do this task for me.”
“Are you truly against the Fomorians?”
The old man chuckled. “Why should I deprive the Fomorians of England? What has this country ever done for me aside from ignoring me and my beliefs? All those that ridiculed me are now either suffering or are dead. That is just revenge for me.”
“Then you’re allied with those beasts, aren’t you?”
“Allied? No. We tolerate each other since I struck a bargain with them. They let me do what I want in exchange for…”
I pointed at the numerous glass bottles sitting on the tables. “In exchange for people’s souls?”
Amicus smiled once more as he held a crooked finger i
n the air. “My, you are indeed clever! Very well, I shall tell you everything. Yes, I do collect souls for them and in exchange they do not attack. I wanted you to go on this quest in order to get an old relic that will fully protect me against any future hostility so that I would not have to gather any souls in the future. Surely you can see that my plan is for the better, yes?”
“And I’m to risk my life in exchange for what?”
“In return I will restore your sister and her friend to the fullest of health. After you get me what I need you are all free to go but if you would like to stay I could have a use for you as a successor. I shall pass all of my knowledge over to you so that you can be a powerful magician yourself.”
“What about my parents and the others in my neighborhood? Did you kill them?”
Amicus shook his head. “Oh no, I have only taken the souls of the ones who were foolish enough to venture into my house. I doubt your parents even knew of me.”
I looked over at the multitude of bottles once more. “So all the souls you have here were the ones who came over to you and sought help and instead you murdered them? You are truly mad. You realize that you won’t get away with this, don’t you? Once the authorities hear of this you will be arrested.”
Amicus laughed again. “The authorities? You are a clever lad but still quite foolish. The government and all its authority are quite gone, I’m afraid. We have entered a new dark age of magic and gods in which only the strong shall survive. I ask you again if you will join me. If you do what I ask you will be granted more power than you’ve ever dreamed of.”
“Never. I’m not a murderer and I don’t want to be a bloody wizard.”
The old man frowned as he held the obsidian mirror in front of me. “Then you are a fool. So be it.”
It was then that I realized that I couldn’t move a single muscle in my body. I began to tremble; I was paralyzed yet I could still somehow sense everything that was going on. I tried to talk but my mouth wouldn’t open. My hands and feet stayed where they were. My eyes kept staring at Amicus as the old wizard channeled all of his power into the obsidian mirror. I could hear the beginnings of a terrible noise, as if the heavens were being torn asunder.
“I forgot to tell you the one other thing that the black mirror does,” Amicus said as a cloud of inky darkness began to erupt from the obsidian scrying glass and started to make its way towards me. “It can also send my enemies into the land of the dead. There you shall stay until you change your mind about my bargain.”
My mouth was finally able to function and I screamed while being engulfed in a smoke-filled darkness that completely blinded me so that all I could see was a black nothingness. The numbing cold began to permeate through my whole body and it felt as if the dark energies were tearing me apart before they devoured me. After that I stopped feeling anything at all.
Chapter 6
There were a number of times when I wondered what it would be like to truly die. When I asked my mum about it for the first time when I was seven she simply said that it feel like going to sleep and never waking up ever again. A few days after that one of my other classmates in primary school told me that everyone had a soul and it would go to a wondrous place called heaven, where everything was nice and all that and so I asked him if heaven was so nice then why doesn’t everyone just kill themselves and stay there but then he said that you had to live a good life first in order to get there. When I asked him what that meant he told me to shut up so I slapped him in the face and he started crying and he told me I would be going to hell before the teacher pulled us apart. Hell, I soon learned, was a place of eternal torment and that unless I behaved myself I would surely end up there. When I told all my fears to my dad he simply said that neither heaven nor hell was truly proven so one could never be too sure what would happen when you die so it’s just better to wait. After he told me that I sort of stopped thinking about it for a bit.
The one time that death truly did affect me was when we visited my grandmother while she was in the care home. I was around eight years old then and I always wondered why everyone seemed so nice and quiet yet it felt like they were all hiding something. Granny had knitted a sweater for Dad and he proudly wore it while Mum couldn’t help herself as she made a loud snort and then left the room in tears. It had all felt so artificial and strange when a few days later my parents called me over to the living room and said that Granny had died of cancer. That was when I remembered all those things about heaven and hell and I didn’t talk to anyone for the rest of the day when I finally realized just how cruel and heartless the world could be.
And now it looked like my questions might be truly answered as I woke up in the land of the dead. As soon as I opened my eyes I experienced an instant flood of awareness as all my other senses had also come alive almost instantly. The first image that I saw was the gray sky. I could not see a sun shining nor was it dark; it seemed to be an overcast day encompassed by a shroud of perpetual mist and gloom.
I had been lying on the soft, marshy surface of damp grass that I sensed was neither alive nor dead. As I sat up I noticed that every blade of grass in this seemingly endless bog was as gray as the sky. When I stood up and looked around I saw that the wet, gloomy mire was dotted with an occasional tree; their lone trunks of gnarled, twisted gray wood seemed to sprout out of the bog like some sort of petrified serpents that had tried to worm and slither their way into the misty air. There were also bog pools of dark, brackish water that seemed to contain stone statues of people in all sorts of deathlike poses just beneath the surface. I was instantly reminded of the time when we went camping in the Scottish moors last summer, only this particular land seemed more hellish and damned.
My feet were soaked as the wet ground had penetrated my trainers and so I walked around making mulching noises with every step as the cold dampness began to chill me all over my body. The visibility of the whole place was no more than about thirty feet as an endless fog seemed to cover the horizon in every direction. The more I traveled the more it seemed that this land had no end to it. As I kept on going, hoping to find a way out, I noticed that there was a hunched figure up ahead of me.
As I got closer to it, I saw it was an old woman; from my own memories it looked to be someone I knew. When I got to within ten feet of her she turned around and I got to see her face.
It was Ms. Faulkner. Her entire form seemed to be made out of the grayish mist that was all around us while her features seemed vaguely transparent as the wind continuously poked holes in her ghost-like body. “You are now in the land of the dead, Steve,” she said mockingly before cackling like a witch.
I screamed in fright as I turned and ran the other way. As I dashed across the horrific landscape, I could see that there were times that the mists would form into the familiar faces of the people in my neighborhood as well as an occasional classmate and they all seemed to call out to me, as if trying to either warn me or to lament about what had happened to them. Their shrill screams echoed across the infinite bog and I had to cover my eyes to prevent myself from going mad.
After a while I was finally out of breath and couldn’t run any longer so I finally gave up and just sat on the stump of a barren, gnarled tree. I brought my knees up to my chest, wrapped my arms around them and put my head down. I was on the verge of crying my eyes out until I heard a small tapping noise coming from the side pocket of my hoodie.
My eyes went wide as I remembered that I had placed the glass bottle in the pocket of my hooded pullover. I quickly took it out and looked at the glass container closely. The swirling mists within the bottle reformed again and Ray’s tiny figure was staring back at me as he pointed at something above him. Realizing what he meant, I placed my other hand around the cork stopper at the top of the bottle and twisted it off. Almost immediately the bottle began to emanate a swirling black cloud; I set it down on the ground and stepped back.
Within seconds the black mist had subsided and Ray stood in front of me. He didn’t seem
fully formed though—he looked to be slightly transparent and there was a strange, neon-green aura of energy surrounding him.
If he was a demon that planned to kill me I was far too tired to run anymore. “Ray, is that really you?”
He nodded. Ray was still wearing the same clothes as the last time I saw him. “It’s good to see you again, Steve.”
“Ray, what happened? How did you get into that bottle?”
He just shrugged. “Right after I called you I was able to make it to the park but I realized that it wouldn’t be safe there either. So I made my way to the wizard’s house using the address that I texted over to you. He seemed like a nice man and invited me inside after I knocked on his door. There were a few dozen others who had the same idea as me and we all just sat around in one of the rooms until the old man came back and served us some tea and reassured us that we were safe. I think we all drank it and pretty soon we were unable to move our bodies. Amicus then went to each one of us and began to chant some sort of spell and he used the mirror as a sort of focus for it. That old wizard destroyed my physical body and trapped what remained of my essence in a bottle along with the others.”
The words struck me like a bolt of lightning and I nearly fell over. “Y-you mean, you’re dead? Like a ghost?”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
It was all too much now so I really did start to cry. My best mate was dead and his ghost was talking to me now while my sister was most probably going to be killed as well. I didn’t even want to think about what had happened to my parents.
For a few minutes neither of us said anything. Ray just stood there watching over me like some guardian angel while my tears and sobs just kept coming out. Just when I thought I had finally gotten over it I would all of a sudden think back to what had happened once more and the snuffles would start all over again. This kept on going for a bit until I was too exhausted to cry any more.
Ray was pretty patient over all this as he waited until I got my wits back together. “For what it’s worth, Steve, none of it was your fault,” he said softly.
Pagan Apocalypse Page 7
