Waking Light

by Rob Horner

  I fell onto my stomach a second later, no longer graceful and sporting a few new scrapes and bruises. With a sense that time was short, I got back to my feet.

  Nothing moved.

  In my little pool of light were a dozen forms, some I'd managed to purge earlier, others still unconscious from where Tanya had dealt with them. The half-changed demon had reverted fully to human form, which is what happened when something kills them. His head lay almost completely over on his right shoulder. The big demon must have broken his neck with the powerful backhand.

  Thankful it hadn't connected with me, and anxious to find Tanya and Crystal, I took a moment to move around the battlefield, touching everyone, unsure who I'd gotten the first time. When I realized I'd come back around to Skinny Guy for the second time, I forced myself to stop.

  They could be hurt somewhere or captured.

  Which way had they gone?

  Scared for them, afraid of being left alone, my mind insisted on creating images for which I had no defense. Crystal dead. Tanya transforming into a demon. My breath quickened, my heart raced, and my palms grew damp.

  This wasn't helping. I needed to be calm. I needed to figure out where they'd gone, so I could start looking.

  Standing in the center of the light, I tried to remember where they'd been standing. If the Sentra was to my right, they would have been to the left, almost directly in line with the car. There did seem to be more of the golf balls over there. In my mind, I recreated the scene with the large demon, seeing again the move and counter that let it get beyond me, where it saw the easier prey and charged.

  There, that's where they would have been standing. Crystal had shot out to the right, while Tanya went up, both under the brunette's control. She pulled them back together, and they went off into the dark parking lot, angling toward the coliseum.

  Quickly, I ran back to the Sentra, jumped in, and cranked the engine. The lights came on, and I eased the car forward, driven to hurry but all too aware of the unconscious forms around the car, not wanting to run anyone over. As the car eased past the bodies, lights coming around in a slow circle, meeting what I hoped was the angle the girls had taken, I saw them, walking hand in hand back toward me. Impatient and finally clear of the survivors of Golfageddon, I pressed the accelerator, racing the forty or fifty yards to the girls' side.

  Slamming the vehicle in Park, I was met by Crystal as soon as my torso cleared the car frame, who wrapped me in a fierce hug. Tanya was laughing, but it was Crystal's voice against my neck, whispering "I'm sorry, so sorry we left you."

  "I was so scared," I said back, raising my head so Tanya could see my words were meant for her, too.

  "We got the one who was making them invisible, I think," the taller girl said.

  "It was so cool, Johnny," Crystal added. "Tanya made us fly so fast."

  "How'd you do that, anyway?" I asked.

  "I'll fill you in later," she said. "Come cure this guy before he wakes up."

  Crystal moved between us, taking my hand in her right, and Tanya's in her left. That filter moved in front of my vision again, and the flood of white light blossomed from Tanya, almost over-powering the dimmer light coming off Crystal. Looking out away from them, back in the direction they'd come from, I couldn't see any red forms.

  "How far out do you think he was?" Crystal asked.

  Tanya cursed. "Not so far that we shouldn't be able to see him from here."

  We started walking slowly, me leading, unwilling to give up.

  "I'd have just picked him up and carried him back here, if I could," Tanya said. "But it seems my power doesn't work on demons, at least not directly."

  Something she had said a minute ago clicked in my head. "What did you mean when you said, 'the one who was making them invisible?'"

  "He was one of us and one of them," Crystal said. "I saw him when Tanya flew me up in the air. He was hanging back, outside of the light, and he glowed white and red."

  "So, pink?" I said, which earned me the clucking noise which all men eventually come to learn means a fond combination of exasperation and frustration.

  "No, he was red most of the time, except when he used his power, which we think was to make himself or others invisible. Then he flashed white."

  "What makes you think his power was invisibility?" I asked.

  "We flew over him, and he was like those demons that attacked us," Tanya explained. "I couldn't see him unless Crystal was sharing her power with me. A red outline without a form inside."

  I nodded, that was a pretty-succinct description of what we'd seen.

  "I asked her to put me down in front of him," Crystal said. "Since I could still see him, and she could see me. So, she flew me out in front of the dude, then dropped me down."

  Tanya took over the story. "I stayed above them, watching, ready to snag her again if I needed to. I still wasn't sure what had happened with the guys from the fight, and I wanted to try grabbing this one if Crystal could get him visible again."

  Part of me was impressed by Crystal's bravery, while another part wanted to say something about how she shouldn't put herself in danger. The bravery part won out. Plus, I didn't really think it was my place to tell her what she should and shouldn't be doing. It was her fight, too.

  What I really wanted to know was how Tanya figured out she could lift herself.

  "I landed, saw him trying to go around me, like he really didn't want any part of someone who could fly, and rushed right at him."

  "You should have seen her, Johnny," Tanya said, and she sounded impressed and proud at the same time. "She put her head down and charged the guy like Earnest Byner, ready to run him over rather than go around him."

  "Who?" Crystal asked.

  Did I forget to mention that Tanya loved Redskins football just as much as I did?

  "I could see him once Crystal caught him," Tanya continued. "Like, it went from looking like she was charging at nothing, to all of a sudden she was wrestling with this kid."

  We'd stopped walking by now, the three of us huddling under another lamppost, very close to the Coliseum. Aside from us, nothing else moved. There were no forms, invisible or otherwise, glowing white or red, moving anywhere near us. There was still some light shining in the distance, the ambient glow of a carnival asleep.

  "He really wasn't much older than us," Crystal said. "Early twenties at best, and skinny, scrawny even."

  "He was still strong enough to push her away, and as soon as he did, he disappeared again."

  "That's when he flashed white," Crystal said. "Caught me by surprise, but not enough to let him outrun me."

  "When she tackled him this time, he went down hard. Guess he smacked his forehead on the pavement."

  "Then we went back to look for you," Crystal finished.

  "I wonder why he didn't change," I said.

  "Dunno," Tanya answered, the three of us turning back for my aunt's Sentra. "Maybe he saw what you did to those others but didn't know which one of us was responsible."

  "Like, you think they can tell who's a demon and who isn't?" I asked.

  "Or at least when one of them gets banished. Sure sounded like it, from all the hooting and growling when you cured the first couple of guys," she said.

  "And if they're in demon form when I do it, they're gone completely," I said.

  "Seriously?" Tanya asked.

  "Didn't we cover this in Demon 101 last night?" I asked, smiling.

  Crystal laughed, but Tanya answered, "Yeah, well, I'm not sure how much I really believed." She hurried to add, "I mean, I believed you that there was something out here, something bad, and it made sense that we were given powers for a reason...but seriously? Demons? Like, straight out of hell?" The tall brunette shook her head, ponytail wagging.

  "And now?" Crystal asked.

  We were almost back to the car. My attention was split between counting the bodies on the ground--there were still twelve--and wondering about two things. One was sheer amazement, Tanya could fly!
But the other was more concerning. Being gifted did not make us immune to possession.

  And once under their control, our powers would be at their disposal.

  Chapter 21

  The stuff of nightmares

  Tanya was correct in her prediction that her mother wouldn't be home. We returned to the Fields' house around three. Tanya jumped into her car, then followed me to the mall parking lot, where we abandoned my aunt's Nissan. I hated the necessity, but though there was a garage at the Fields' house, it was packed full of rock memorabilia. They never used it, and there wasn't enough time to clean it out in order to hide my aunt's vehicle. There were demon news casters, demon policemen, and even demon-gifted people. It seemed a foolish risk to keep the vehicle near us any longer.

  Tanya drove us back, and once inside we collapsed onto the living room furniture, too tired to drag ourselves any further.

  Though fatigued in body, we were wired by our experience, excited by the expanding boundaries of both Tanya's and Crystal's powers. We spent a few moments holding hands, trying to see if either girl could expel force like I did, or if Crystal or I could move things with our minds like Tanya, but it appeared that only the blonde's ability could be shared.

  When we got around to discussing the taller girl's newfound flight, she flushed.

  "Why so red?" I asked.

  "It's embarrassing," she said, ducking her head. "I freaked, even though you guys told me what to expect."

  "It's okay," Crystal said, dropping my hand and reaching out to take Tanya's. "At least you got over it in time to do something. You should have seen me in that school room. I was so scared I couldn't move. Johnny just about had to carry me out."

  Tanya looked up at her. "Really?"

  Crystal turned to me. "Tell her, Johnny."

  I nodded, not sure how far to push the difference in their reactions. It was all fine for Crystal to try to bolster Tanya's confidence with a little self-deprecation, but even a mostly-ignorant-in-the-way-of-girls sixteen-year-old like me knew it wouldn't be a good idea to compliment one girl at the expense of the other. Now also wouldn't be the time to remind Crystal that Tanya had a heads' up, even if she hadn't believed, whereas she'd been confronted with a crazy-eyed guy bursting into the room like his hair was on fire and his ass was catching a few seconds before the classroom filled up with smoke and demons.

  "You did great," I said. "Really, it doesn't matter how you reacted at seeing them. What matters is that you saved yourself and Crystal."

  Crystal nodded. "And I'm extremely grateful for that."

  Tanya took a deep breath then forced it out. Sitting up, she looked calmer, more focused. She'd probably have nightmares for a few nights, but she'd be okay.

  "All right," she said. "We didn't talk about it, but I was trying to get myself off the ground as soon as we figured out that I could lift you. But nothing worked."

  "When you do it to me," Crystal said, "it feels like a big hand grabbing me and lifting me up."

  "Same for me," I added.

  "That makes sense, because it's how I picture it when I'm doing it, whenever I lift anything, like a hand. But I think that's what kept me from being able to lift myself, at first."

  That made perfect sense to me, and I said so, adding, "Because you can't pick yourself up, maybe it limited you with your ability as well."

  She nodded. "And then that...that thing showed up, and suddenly it wasn't about picking myself up, it was about getting myself away. I focused only on him and the ground and pushed. Once I was up in the air, I realized what I was doing."

  She stopped speaking for a second, and I noticed Crystal looking away from her. Tanya began rising from the couch, just a few inches, but enough to show she'd learned to control this new aspect of her ability. Slowly, she sank back onto the cushions. "It's not about lifting myself," she said. "That's the wrong way to think of it. It's about my position in relation to other things."

  Maybe my face showed confusion, because she laughed and continued. "Rather than thinking about lifting myself, I think about moving closer to something, or father away from it. When the demon freaked me out, I pushed against the ground, and I rose. When Crystal took my hand and pointed out the demon hanging back, I thought about getting closer to the Coliseum.

  "It might not be the perfect way to describe it, but it works for me."

  And that's all that mattered.

  Tanya's gaze was more direct, focused on me, not in the challenging manner she'd shown in the parking lot, but resolved. She'd seen the enemy, and now she was ready to fight, in more ways than one.

  That new attitude toward us and our mission continued as we relaxed, debriefing ourselves, winding down in order to be able to sleep. To me, it was a return to form, a re-emergence of the beautiful girl who fought so fiercely in our first competition, the aggressive friend who made you excited to share her orbit, who drew me to pursue a relationship despite the distance between our homes. It was the personality that disappeared when we decided to take our friendship to the next level, though I couldn't have explained it at the time.

  Much later I would learn she'd been trying to soften herself, based on advice from friends at school and the concept of a biblically ideal woman, as espoused by her mother. Tanya grew up a tomboy who learned to fight because her daddy wanted her to. While her mother didn't try to stop the Tae Kwon Do lessons and competitions, she thought Tanya was too crass and unladylike at times. This attempt to change is what I believe caused our first attempt at romance to fail. But learning that she'd cared enough about us, and the potential of us, to ask for advice and try to change meant a lot to me.

  Aside from holding my hand during the power-sharing experiments, Crystal was distant, a fact I might have picked up on sooner if we weren't all so exhausted. She sat on the big couch with Tanya, reclined in one of the corners, knees drawn up to her chest. Her blue eyes were closed, so perhaps it was merely how she relaxed, one of the many hundreds of nuances to her personality I hadn't had time to learn yet.

  We finally crashed around four, the girls heading upstairs to their rooms, while I took over the couch. Their voices continued in conversation as they ascended, an unintelligible murmur in two tones that chased me into sleep, becoming lights like fireflies dancing through the darkness, one blue, and one gold, moving around and over one other, intertwining in an intricate ballet, before fading away. For one instant, there was peace. No light, no sound, just blackness.

  Then I was in a tunnel, lit by the flickering firelight of torches, one in each direction, placed in sconces high on the wall. The floor was of stone and felt gritty underfoot. In the dim light, hard to define debris littered the surface, what could have been stones but might as easily have been bones. I was still dressed in black, long-sleeved t-shirt and jeans, like my body had slipped from its resting place on the couch, dropping down through the furniture and into this strange environment rather than passing through sleep and into a dream. So persuasive was this perception that I looked up, half-expecting to see the opening of the chute. But there was only a solid stone ceiling above, pitted and pocked with indentions and protrusions.

  When I looked back down, all concept of a difference between dream and reality left me. The dream became my reality. Only in memory do I know it wasn't real.

  The air was damp and smoky, filled with the stench of burning pitch, a black smell coming off the torches, almost masking the scent of something else, fetid and rotting and best left undefined. The tunnel ran straight in two directions away from me, with no clear indication if one way was better than another.

  I started walking, heading in the direction I was already facing. My eyes blinked constantly, watering in the smoky air. Ten steps took me to the torch, mounted about five feet up on the wall to my right. Its bracket was made of old stone, carved to resemble a closed hand, the fingers showing odd joint markings, the tips appearing to be claws curling back into the palm. Not seeing any other sources of light, I reached up and claimed the tor
ch, holding it high to keep the smoke away from my face.

  Standing now in a small pool of light, I looked down and could see what was only presumed before. Those weren't small stones. They were bones, the small skeletons of birds and rats, the larger bones possibly pieces of human fingers, but nothing any bigger. The grit on the floor was the dust of decay, a coarse white powder which showed the prints I'd made in coming from my starting point to here, though no other footprints. Along the sides of the tunnel, adhered to the rough wall by some unknown mechanism, were the small skulls of children, grinning ghastly through mouths showing teeth in various stages of eruption.

  The smell grew stronger, carried to me on a draft so faint that I couldn’t discern the direction of its source, whether from in front of or behind me.

  Swallowing my fear, I continued forward, ten steps, twenty, thankful I'd grabbed the torch because no other sources of light appeared.

  I reached a crossroads in the tunnel, a perfect joining of perpendicular passageways with no clue which way to go. No matter if I continued forward or turned, the tunnels ran away into darkness, the only lights the torch in my hand, and the faint glow of the one far behind. The smell was even stronger here, something feral, like an animal, the stench of a zoo magnified a hundredfold and distilled into this one spot.

  Into my mind came the old rule: if you pick a wall and follow it, through all its twists and turnings, you will eventually find your way out of a maze. I was a second away from deciding to turn right when all three passages came ablaze with a dark, fiery light, shining out at me from a distance. Dark red, like venous blood, the light began moving toward me, coming from every direction but my back trail, not so much illuminating the passages but rather to irradiating them. The lights progressed at a slow and equal pace, so that within a minute, all three would converge on me.

  Like one of those predictable movie plots, I could see what was going to happen. The lights would meet here, then chase me as I ran back down the passage. Better to get a head start then.