A Broken Darkness

by Premee Mohamed

  Or was it absolutely secular, if you could call it that, was it simply that she had been my only friend for my entire life, and that alone gave me secret knowledge? Would she have been able to, if it had been me?

  Stop it. Remember what you’re doing. She’s still the enemy: this doesn’t change it. Or at least, doesn’t change it for the better.

  “Are you okay?” I finally said, unable to stand the look she was giving me. “What was it like? Are... Does it hurt when it does it? When it copies you?”

  “I’m all right. I blacked out after a couple of seconds.” She stared up at the leaves. “This… isn’t where I came in.”

  “Where are we? I kept thinking…” I trailed off. That it was a trap, that you did this. But looking at your face, the face of a liar… “That we never left. That we’re still under the castle, somehow.”

  “Me too. You know what it was? It was when the…” She waved her hands vaguely. “The dark came at us. For a second I thought it wasn’t moving, I thought we were moving, being moved into it. I put my hand on the wall to see if we were moving or still, and right under my fingers, I swear to God, I felt the wall change. From stone to metal, small cold metallic shingles, smooth as a fish, but dry. I looked down but the dark caught up and I couldn’t see anything. When the light came back, I was in a…”

  She pointed back at the birch wood I had stumbled through. “A room, a big one. But not like the rooms we were going through. It was metal, a plain metal box shingled with a bunch of little hexagonal pieces, with four doors leading outside. I walked around and looked through them, and it was the same on every side, flat fields, this kind of purplish grass. And the grass kept moving, swaying, but there wasn’t any wind.”

  “I saw the same thing, going through the woods. The leaves were moving on their own.”

  “Yeah. Creepy as hell. I kept thinking there was something in the grass, something coming at me… I called for you, but that was actually more creepy, it was so quiet. But I didn’t want to stay in the room, either. I felt trapped. Started walking, and spotted the woods in the distance, maybe these ones, I guess. I saw a thing like a…” She laughed uncertainly. “Okay, so maybe we’re somewhere else? Maybe we’re here? What tipped me off was I saw a thing like a rabbit, all broken glass, kind of, both clear and reflective, and lots of teeth, but as I turned to get away from it, it looked like a rat. I mean, an ordinary rat. A regular rat.”

  “From a certain angle.”

  “Yeah. But then I couldn’t get the angle back. And I was running anyway. Like a girl in a cartoon,” she added, disapprovingly. “A housewife standing on a table with a broom… and it’s not like I haven’t worked with rats.”

  “Lab rats aren’t regular rats,” I said.

  “Anyway. It was sort of two things at once, I mean, whatever it was. And I heard other things for a second—a car horn, people talking. Just ordinary people. In English.” She chewed gingerly on her lip. “Like in The Matrix, you know? Two places at once. You’re in the ‘real’ world and you’re in the Matrix too. You can be in one without being in the other just one way: being in the real, not being in the Matrix. But you can’t be in the Matrix without being in the real.”

  I stared dully at her. In the stream, the last of the blood and remains finally unhooked themselves from the rocks and the reeds and floated away. The rock I had used (both a perfectly ordinary stream rock, and a cut rectangular cobblestone), still stained with blood, gleamed in the grass. “If we’re in the Matrix, how do we get back to the real?”

  “I don’t know that there’s a way to get back if we haven’t left.”

  “What?”

  She closed her eyes, leaned her head on the tree. Her eyelids, streaked and speckled with broken blood vessels, trembled like the leaves above us. I waited out a wave of sudden nausea, as I thought she might also be doing. Wait it out, let it break over you.

  If we had crossed dimensions, I thought, there were ways to tear open a path to get back to our own; not a gate, more like kicking a hole in the drywall—she had told me that once, I had heard it too in my training. And within a dimension, you could move around if you had to, though that too was energetically and magically costly, not necessarily a spell a single person could do, and certainly not with so little magic in the world now. But this, unsure of where we were, of whether we had even moved or not? I had never read about it. And, with a sinking feeling, I thought Johnny hadn’t either.

  She opened her eyes after a few minutes. “Maybe we should keep moving.”

  “Yeah. We walked in here, right? Maybe we’ll just walk back out.”

  WE STUCK TO the banks of the stream for a while, following it downstream, till it turned back nearly on itself and the ground got too wet. After shoving our way through the brush for a while we squeezed through two closely-twined trunks towards a patch of brighter light, finding an empty, thickly-grassed clearing, humming with fat bumblebees and carpeted with multicoloured blossom. There was something calculated about the sunlight through the leaves, something Disney-ish. Planned to put us at ease. As if, I thought, anyone who watched as many animated movies as we did wouldn’t notice. Tiny birds undulated overhead, chirping and flirting their tails.

  “Wow,” I said, at the same time that Johnny snorted, “Nice try.”

  We looked at each other. “Nope.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  It was harder to walk, sticking to the edges of the trees, but there was no way we were walking into that inviting meadow. Gotta remember who sent the invitation. “So you never saw who did that spell,” I said. “To make the… the thing. The double.”

  She shook her head, pushed down a branch, waited till I took it so it wouldn’t snap back into my face. “It’s a hell of a lot of magic, though. Nothing a human could do. Maybe eight or ten people, working together, siphoning magic and life from one another… or maybe not a human.”

  I took a deep breath, and told her about the burning thing I’d seen: Ghost Rider, I said, trying to laugh, but like a deer. But not like a deer really, not with horns. They were made of wood. I left out the way it had raised its hand to me, mirroring mine.

  “The Burning King,” she said, glancing up at the trees as if he might drop out of them. “Around 800, they say, near Lindisfarne, the monks reported ‘fiery serpents’ flying above the abbey. Disaster, fires, the well ran dry. And then a Viking raid, on top of everything.”

  “Are we sure they were Vikings?”

  “You get it. Anyway, the serpents were supposedly led by a man ‘with the head of a stag,’ with his eyes and his feet on fire... The records are so muddled. They called him the Burning King, and people were claiming they still saw him after the serpents had left. In the woods, chasing people down and eating them. Even if they were on horseback. But he’d usually let the horse go.”

  “Very considerate of him,” I said. “Could he have done that? Made the double?”

  “Maybe.”

  But I knew what she was thinking, as we walked in silence, crunching through the twigs, dodging the huge suspicious fungus. That the spell, costly or not, had not been cast for nothing. That someone, or several someones, had intended for the double to deceive me, and for Johnny and I to be split up here, wherever here was. And that raised the question of why. And neither of us wanted to ask that, in case we found out the answer.

  Quietly she said, “They’re so disorganized, They’re so chaotic. They don’t follow rules, only laws, and we don’t know those. It’s hard for some of Them to even think. I keep remembering the history books, the ones saying when They’ve come, it’s just been random, angry, like...”

  “Raccoons getting into the kitchen.”

  “What? Yes, okay. Because They’re not really intelligent, most of Them. They react, it’s all based on emotions, insults, impulse. But if They had a plan... if they were being directed, somehow. If they had… organized…”

  Yes, I thought. But if that. If you were bees, bees in the wall. Bees waiti
ng silently in the walls, moving. The soft sound of feet only other bees could hear.

  There was a small path at the end of the clearing, branching into three parts; Johnny stepped gratefully into the cross-roads, dusting her clothes free of leaves. “If They—”

  “Wait,” I said. “Don’t move.”

  She froze obediently, eyes wide. There had been something at the head of one path, the rightmost one: slight, delicate. But not just that. It had also carried the Burning King’s sign: the vertical line, the others sprouting off it, glimpsed for just a second as I had looked up. For both of us to find, I thought, but for only one of us to be caught by it, because the other had been warned. I gestured for Johnny to stay put, and edged towards where I thought I had seen it.

  A second later I crashed into something so hard that I found myself facedown in the undergrowth, arms still moving as if they could break my fall. “Motherfuckingsonofafuckingbitch!”

  I rolled over, rubbing my shins through my muddy jeans, gritting my teeth; it felt like I had walked into the razor-sharp edge of a coffee table. New scars right over the ones she’d paid to have laser-erased from our last gong show. But there was nothing there.

  “The fuck. Did I just trip over a dimension? Because I swear to God, if They’re setting up math traps now, I quit. I’m going home. Fuckers.”

  “Oh my God, dimensions aren’t math. Don’t get up.” Johnny edged cautiously out from the crossroads, craning her neck; after five minutes of heron-like posturing, bobbing, weaving, and covering one or both eyes, she said, “Okay, come here. But carefully. And go like this.”

  Her instructions made no sense, and it took several minutes, but once it happened, it was as if a filter had slotted down over my eyes and I could see it—albeit blurrily—without having to stand in precisely the right pose and place.

  I had pursued, and tripped over, the outcrop of an invisible stone... or not invisible, exactly. It was both clearly exactly where I had fallen over it, with a little shred of bloodied cotton on one bastard-sharp edge, and clearly not. Like her long-wished-for nonexistent mirror, reflecting only the stone, had been planted in the ground, and so it had no more depth than a reflection, possessing only height and width.

  Somehow, and without contradicting itself at all, it also looked intimidatingly solid and real. Shaped like the jagged tooth of a tiger shark (edge within edge within edge), the bulk of it reared high above us, mottled bluish-white and spotted with silvery lichen and fresh smears of something dark and iridescent, like engine oil. The rune on it was carved so deeply I could have put my whole hand into the chiseled stone.

  But something else about the stone bothered me, not merely its invisibility, or half-visibility; not merely its vaguely menacing shape. More that it seemed strangely familiar, and I had never seen it before.

  No.

  I had. Not in a dream but a vision, given to me by Their minions or messengers, when I had been asleep, or entranced, or perhaps They had just taken my consciousness and pressed it through something—who knew how They worked, even They did not, I thought—and I had flown, and in a terrible field of barren ground I had seen stones like this, sharp as knives, white-blue, arranged in repeating semicircles and aligned and staggered like teeth seen from above, the unbreakable teeth of some buried behemoth not as dead as the legends believed it to be...

  “I think it’s an altar,” Johnny said, looking around us, and thankfully not up at me: I had no idea what my face was showing. “It’s always said They insisted on... payment. Protection money. A life was best: then you could get both the sacrifice’s time and their... whatever. Vital energy. And willingly given. They loved volunteers. Supposedly. A lost life gave immense power.”

  I stared at the stone, waves of hot and cold washing over me, crackling into the fresh cuts on my shins, dribbling into my socks. “Hey, uh,” I said. “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “Ss... several things, I think.” She glanced around us, as if an entire battalion would come crashing through the trees, from the warm blue sky, straight out of the stone. “Um, but if it means that this is a gathering source of magic, then... maybe there’s enough to... get us out of here.”

  “Oh hey, there’s an idea.”

  She got her laptop out of her bag, but before I could say something unhelpful she had wrestled the heavy oblong onto its side and ejected the CD drive, which contained not a disc but a flat plastic envelope.

  Opened, its contents turned out to be a handful of laminated square cards bearing hand-drawn sigils: magic circles, the channels that would funnel magic into shapes that could do work, needing only the correct words to activate each. I didn’t recognize any of them. Of course, I only knew a few by memory, but these were far more complex than any I’d seen while training.

  She caught my eye. “Just in case.”

  “I saw you draw magic circles while we were in... while we were... doing stuff last time,” I said slowly. “Why are you carrying them with you?”

  “I just told you.”

  “You told me They’d never come back. What would you need these for?”

  “Can you quit asking that? You never know when you’ll need an emergency spell. Like now.”

  Next to the altar-stone, she outlined a circle in the soil with her shoe. I stepped into it, taking the far side of the card she was holding. My heart was pounding; whatever fear I’d felt at the dark coming at us, my quasi-murder, the dead king, sank under a leaden wave of fresh terror. Johnny was shaking; I felt it through the card.

  But that was what They liked to do too, the fuckers. Like life. Give you a choice that wasn’t really a choice. Force you down the path you never wanted to take. The last time she had done this, we had ended up under a sky that was eyeballs all the way to the horizon.

  And it was then that she knew what They had done to me. What the mere fact of Their approach and request had done to me: how it had burned into and corrupted me, tainted me. She felt her wards trying to throw me away from her. And she said we would talk about it later. And we never did. And we never will.

  She didn’t see the Burning King spare me.

  “Wait,” I said. “Maybe this is… maybe this is what They want us to do. I mean, if They trapped us here, maybe getting out is a trap too.”

  “Oh, okay. I guess we’ll just live here forever then. Hope you like eating leaves.”

  “I’m not saying I have any better ideas,” I said, annoyed. “Just, are you sure this is our only option? You’re the genius. Supposedly.”

  “It’ll be okay,” she said. “I mean, if all of our particles make it.”

  “Yeah. I mean, what do people need, y’know. Particles for, anyway.”

  “Particles are bullshit too.” She laughed weakly, and added, “By the way, none of the spells on these cards have been tested. Just modelled. They’re actually not pre-existing spells, I wrote a program to—”

  “Johnny.”

  “Oughta work. In theory. Don’t let go of that card.”

  “I won’t let go.”

  She whispered the words, soft and fluid, the spell coalescing around us cold, burning, heavy as lead, clear as glass; I opened my eyes, saw the staring mass of darkness across the clearing, shimmering through the burgeoning power, the face aflame, the feet aflame, watching us, but it was too late to say anything. Every direction yanked on us at once, and I instinctively held my breath.

  WHICH TURNED OUT to be the best thing I could have done, as the air pressure vanished, returned, snapped back into place and threw us both upwards and sideways, somehow, into the utter shock of clouded, icy water. Small objects swirled glassily around my face, and I flailed for the surface of what fortunately turned out to be just a few feet of water: a fountain, finished with small blue hexagonal tiles. The things I had seen were coins, stirred up when we hit.

  Spitting and coughing, I climbed out and tried to snort water out of my burning sinuses. Johnny swore as she shook water from her bag; the waxed canvas was water-resista
nt, I thought, not water-proof, and her laptop must have been soaked.

  The fountain marked ground zero of a large courtyard, enclosed by tall, intricate stone buildings and floored with concave cobblestones. Each held a round puddle in its center that reflected the crimson glow of either a sunset or sunrise. I looked around to get my bearings, see which way the shadows were going: not a cloud in the dim, coral sky.

  A burst of lightning flooded the square, so bright and close that it seemed for a split second we’d been submerged in white-hot liquid. Thunder hit hard enough that I felt my internal organs jiggle, and right on its heels, three more pillars of lightning, splitting the sky into segments. One must have earthed close by; behind the walls, I heard a clatter like roof tiles hitting stone.

  “Bad sign,” Johnny said, when the noise seemed to be over; we had unaccountably found ourselves sheltering under a stone archway across the square, for what little protection it would give.

  “Yeah?”

  “Listen, there’s a... you know, the reason we’re alive, basically, when you get right down to it, is that our bodies, and Earth, have approximately equal amounts of positive and negative charge on most of our particles, and the attractive and repulsive forces are close to canceling each other out, right?”

  “...Sure?”

  “Even a small imbalance can lead to... well, local effects. Trying to balance out. Lightning is one you can see: it gets unbalanced in the upper atmosphere, then it restores itself.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said, uncertainly. “So this is natural, then?”

  “It might be, it might not be. Maybe there’s an imbalance building up somewhere else. Or in some other place that’s... that’s affecting us.” She took off her scarf, folding it and wringing out the last drops of water. “I’ll see if I can figure out where we are. Earth, I hope.”