Waking Light

by Rob Horner

  It wasn't some epic, silent battle of wills as I fought to hold fast to my sense of self. It was a tank rolling up the beach from the river Scamander, crushing through the earth and stone palisades of Troy, and destroying the Trojan nation with a few well-placed shells and a steady barrage of machine gun fire. There was no fight, no clawing for a foothold. There was the statue, and then all that was me was crushed, forced back into a tiny corner of my mind, surrounded by darkness.

  The first pains of transformation began...

  ...and I woke up, covered in sweat, light blanket twisted around my arms.

  My ears rung, as if I'd screamed, but there were no pounding footsteps, no one coming to see if everything was all right.

  I sat up on the couch, freeing myself of the blanket, trying to calm my breathing, slow my pulse. With my head in my hands, I shuddered. Unlike the dream of the night before, every detail remained clear. I could feel the cool night air blowing against my water-damp shirt, could hear the scritch-scratch of demon claws on concrete.

  "I hoped you'd wake up," a soft voice said from the direction of the loveseat. Startled, it took my sleep-fogged eyes a moment to focus on the speaker, a form curled up against the armrest, shoulders covered with a knitted throw.

  Either my vision cleared as she stood, or some trick of the light made the room seem brighter, giving a sheen to the long blond hair falling over her shoulders. Crystal stepped forward, and the light grew, or she came into it more fully, a beam sent through the window by the moon to grace her form.

  Another step, and the gray throw blanket fell from her shoulders. All she wore was a thin nightgown, hardly any cover at all, with the moon shining behind her, accentuating every curve.

  "Crystal, I..."

  One more step, and she was before me, her hands out to push my shoulders, her face coming down to my neck. Her lips moved, and a sharp pain flared just below my left ear. "Through this one, you are ours!" she said, but it wasn't her voice.

  It was the demon voice from the dream!

  The feeling of my own hand slapping my neck woke me up, for real this time. The living room wasn't completely dark. We'd left a hall light on just in case I needed to navigate a path to the guest bathroom in the middle of the night. In that light, I could see the palm of my hand, clean, without a trace of blood.

  Gingerly I felt at my neck, but other than a mild irritation in the area where I'd hit myself, there was no spot of pain.

  The clock showed four-thirty. I'd been asleep for maybe four hours, and that was all I was going to get.

  Those dreams were so real, and so different. The first one was like being a spectator at a play, where some playwright has made a few modifications to the real story to make it more artistically pleasing to the masses. You recognize the story, but some of the details are just enough off that you don't completely suspend disbelief.

  Then that second one. Was it a warning?

  If so, from whom?

  Were they both from the same source, or was I reading way too much into this, blaming bad dreams on some indefinable they instead of old ham and too much milk?

  Regardless of the source, there were two important takeaways from the dreams, and I caught hold of them, rolling them over and over in my thoughts the way a tongue pokes at a sore tooth.

  If it wasn't from me, then whoever sent those dreams didn't know that Tanya, rather than Crystal, held my heart.

  And they didn't know I'd worked out a way to fight without banishing the demon inside.

  Chapter 27

  The beginning of the end

  Thursday dawned clear and bright. The forecast was for a high around seventy-five degrees, dropping back down to fifty-five or so by midnight. A perfect day to visit the carnival.

  With all the events of the previous day, and with Mrs. Fields now a full-time co-conspirator in our plans, there was no mention of sending Tanya to school. If a local church could be co-opted just on the hope of seeding demon statues downstream and catching Tanya, how much more a stretch of the imagination was it to think they might also target her school? It was a tightrope we walked, between practical safety considerations and paranoia. The longer we had to wait and the more information we received, the narrower that rope became and the greater the distance between safe moorings.

  "What is it you children plan on doing, anyway?" Mrs. Fields asked at breakfast that morning.

  I described the box, and the ceremony.

  "So, your idea is to try to find the trailer again, find the black box, and destroy it?" she asked.

  It was the best we'd been able to come up with over the past three days, and it made sense when we followed the logic: the carnies prayed to the box; the box glowed red; demons came out of the box and possessed the carnies. I mentioned the strange feminine figures, how they might already have been demons, but since we couldn't find a way to work them into the problem, they became a factual outlier. They might not be anything more than women, serving some function in the ceremony, handmaids or metaphorical midwives, facilitating the transfer of the demonic spirits from...wherever...and into the bodies of the waiting men.

  The news at night talked about strange occurrences overseas, but nothing that led us to believe the demons were more widespread than our area.

  It was wishful thinking, almost magical thinking, a willful underestimation of the extent of the problem. But it was necessary. The idea of three teenagers going up against something capable of subverting and enslaving the people of the world, with an overall goal of total domination, was unrealistic and unreasonable. The advent of the biblical Apocalypse was the stuff of fairy tales, the Grimm kind. It made excellent fodder for books and movies, but it was sphincter-loosening, diarrhea-inducing, and terrifying.

  If we kept it compartmentalized, us against a single group of carnival workers, one thing (altar, gateway, source) as a target, then we could function. That they were able to trap spirits in inanimate objects and propagate them into churches and schools was alarming, but still manageable as an outgrowth of the concept of a single target.

  Destroy the source and remove the taint.

  We hoped.

  We were naive, but what other choice did we have?

  "All right," Mrs. Fields said, "but how will you find this trailer again? The news said there are four different groups all coming together for this carnival. That's four times as many trailers, at least. You said it was dark. I don't suppose you wrote down a license plate number, or anything."

  I shook my head. How could I explain the dreams from last night, the feelings that persisted even after waking? There was something in the darkness pulling at me, something which repulsed even as it attracted.

  "That's where I come in," Crystal said. "I think I'll be able to see it, once we get close."

  "Oh yeah, your red and white ability."

  Crystal nodded, and Tanya added, "We can all see it, if we hold her hands."

  Which naturally led to Mrs. Fields wondering if she could share the ability as well. She couldn't, but if that disappointed her, she hid it well.

  For the rest of the morning, Tanya's mother played the role of sounding board, listening to our ideas and giving feedback. While she wasn't the most strategic-minded---her words, not mine---she had an amazing ability to see beyond the immediate effects of an action, like she was playing Chess, planning two or three moves ahead. "Must be all these years playing Bridge," she said.

  As an example, one of our first ideas involved an aerial approach, having Tanya fly us over the carnival, locating the trailer from above, then landing just outside of it.

  "Never mind the fact that you're telling me my Tanya can fly, there's no way that's the best idea you can come up with."

  "Why not?" I asked.

  "Well, I can," Tanya huffed at the same time.

  "Up in the sky, you're one bird and two passengers. You could be shot at, or...I don't know what all else. And if something happened to my...to Tanya...everyone goes down. Plus, even if noth
ing goes wrong and you manage to land safely, you'll still be surrounded by de...enemies."

  "If we go through the front gates..." I said.

  "Then you can at least see what you're up against, maybe even save a few people on the way in. You run the risk of not getting there, of course, but for every person you save, that's one less enemy, isn't it?"

  The plan changed, and now we were going to go in like everyone else, three kids out for an evening with the carnival. If we arrived before six, we should be able to blend in with the crowd. The carnival opened at four, but most people would still be at work. Better to wait until the post-work influx.

  With nothing better to do besides eat (cold cut sandwiches) or nap (too keyed up, not going to happen), we lounged in the living room.

  The local television stations were locked into their weekday programming schedules: soap operas and talk shows during the day with an expected deluge of game shows in the evening.

  "Check CNN," Tanya suggested as her mother flipped through the channels.

  CNN was a good idea.

  In today's world, the idea of a twenty-four-hour news cycle is the norm. A train derailment in Berlin will be known across the world within an hour, while a Presidential speech is translated in real time to every world leader, all brought courtesy of cable news.

  But in the Spring of 1991, that was a new thing, and just a few short months before, it wasn't the case at all.

  Up until January, Americans got their news on a twice-daily cycle. There were the morning shows, like Today and Good Morning America, and then the evening news, with some people arguing over whether the six o'clock or the eleven o'clock news was more worth watching. That all changed on January sixteenth, when Bernard Shaw began reporting live from a hotel in Baghdad, as the first bombs fell on Iraq. The scoop catapulted CNN to legitimacy as a worldwide news network, and began the shift in news consumption, especially among Americans, from twice a day to twenty-four hours and on-demand.

  As teenagers, none of us were news junkies. We knew about CNN because everyone knew about CNN, but until that moment, deprived of our trusted network source, we hadn't thought to check the cable channel.

  The television showed a picture of a desert town, some blasted-out buildings that looked almost ancient, as tan-clad military men scuttled from cover to cover, the picture bouncing up and down as the cameraman tried to keep up. There was a voice talking, probably a reporter just off-camera, describing the operation.

  "...pushing further into the northern Iraq province of Derker Ajam from Turkey. This wasted town...don't know the name...trying to continue protecting the Kuwaitis..."

  Though the footage had nothing to do with us, the crawl at the bottom of the screen, bookended by the CNN logo, brought us all to attention.

  Religious leaders in Spain, Italy, and France increase calls on the Vatican for a Papal statement to acknowledge the existence of demons. Vatican remains silent.

  The crawl had time to fully repeat before the video on the screen changed to snow, which lasted for a second before the camera feed shifted to a newsroom, complete with semi-circular desk, behind which sat a young brunette. Only her upper torso was visible, clad in a loose maroon blouse. She was looking down at something below the edge of the desk, then suddenly looked up, like she'd been surprised by the camera cutting to her.

  Crystal let out a hiss of air between her teeth.

  "Demon?" I asked.

  "Mm Hmm."

  "Well it looks like we lost the video feed from Travis, but don't worry, he's all right and still talking to our producers." She put on a fake smile. "Let's just catch up with what's going on in the rest of the world.

  The crawl began running again along the bottom of the screen.

  "As many are aware, there have been a lot of disturbing reports from numerous countries, religious buildings attacked and vandalized, people terrorized on the street by roving bands of masked delinquents. We've been told that many of these masks appear demonic in origin, with red skin, long ears, fangs, and oddly twisted features. However, in bringing these reports to our viewers, CNN itself has come under attack by religious leaders, receiving hundreds of calls contradicting the reports, stating these destructive people were actual demons, not kids wearing masks.

  "Our field correspondent, David Murkowski, currently stationed in Vatican City, has more. David?"

  The camera shifted to a view from outside of Saint Peter's Basilica, where a man in his thirties looked into the camera while speaking into a microphone. He had a pleasant face, short brown hair over brown eyes, but the veins in his neck popped as he talked, straining to make himself heard over the crowd of people behind him, all turned away, shouting at the uncaring walls of the building. He wore a white shirt and seemed to be juggling the microphone and a spiral-topped notepad, with more papers folded and held securely in his left armpit.

  When Crystal jerked to the edge of the loveseat, my initial thought was that this reporter was also a demon. But she reached out, taking Tanya's left hand and one of mine, so that we could share her sight.

  The reporter wasn't the source of her alarm. He was normal.

  It was the crowd behind him.

  Perhaps ten thousand strong, shouting in different languages, most notably English and Italian, the crowd was a hodge-podge of cultural diversity both in skin tone and manner of dress. Businessmen rubbed elbows with thick-robed clergy and fashionable Euro-hipsters, while veiled women with exotic eyes stood clustered together, surrounded by dark-skinned men in colorful African dashiki, with children in all shapes, sizes, colors, and dress darting through and around the legs of the adults.

  Among the thousands were more people glowing white than should be mathematically plausible, as if this gathering called to them. They stood together in groups, none smaller than five or six individuals, one appearing to be more than twenty. Their total number was probably less than a hundred, which made them a small percentage of the overall gathering, but it was still an amazing sight.

  Among the clusters of white, always with a cluster of white, were people with a distinctly yellow aura who, other than that, appeared no different from the people they were with, same skin tone, same manner of dress, similar nationality, if features were any indication.

  "Thanks, Lisa," David said, straining to be heard. "As you can see behind me, a large crowd has gathered outside the gates of St. Peter's Basilica, shouting for the Pope to acknowledge the physical presence of demons in the world." He read from a notepad the first time, then seemed to realize exactly what he'd said. "Yes, you heard me right. The people are demanding an official pronouncement of demonic forces at work in the world, which they seem to believe will mean an affirmation of what many are calling the beginning of the end times."

  He stuffed the notepad into a hip pocket, then pulled the folded paper from under his left arm, giving it a flick that opened it so he could show it to the camera.

  "What you see here is an official statement from the Catholic Church, which reads, and I'm quoting here..." he flipped the paper around to read from it, "'From the time of the first man, humanity has striven to separate themselves from responsibility for their actions. While we decry the vandalisms against the Holy Church, as well as all other institutions where the faithful gather, it is no more appropriate now to blame this on some demonic presence than it was for Adam or Eve to place the blame for their actions on the serpent. As it was then, so shall it be now, that mankind should own responsibility for its actions, thereby paving the way for repentance, forgiveness, and growth.'"

  The words washed over us. I understood them, and took it to mean that either the church was wholly unwilling to even consider the idea of demons walking among us, or, and more likely, they were willfully refusing to give the protesters what they wanted because they'd already been infiltrated and corrupted. The demons wouldn't want the world at large to be forewarned and taking control of the Catholic Church would be a huge blow to the credibility of anyone daring to speak o
ut against them.

  While the reporter talked, the crowd behind him seemed to grow more restive, not quite agitated, but certainly more animated. Voices chanted in unison, "Fateor peccatum tuum, Fateor peccatum tuum!" while fists pumped in the air. For all the people surrounded by white and yellow, our eyes watched for the slightest hint of something happening, some violation of the laws of nature and physics, a force, or a flare of light like Crystal saw whenever Tanya used her ability. But we saw nothing.

  "And now, Lisa, they're chanting 'fateor peccatum tuum,' which, if I remember my Latin correctly, means something like 'Confess your sin,' but whether that's in response to the Vatican's statement, I can't say.

  "Back to you."

  This time, Lisa was ready for the hand off, sitting prim and proper in her maroon blouse, her poise only slightly diminished by the red aura surrounding her. "Thank you, David. As our regular viewers will know, we've been following a string of bizarre reports from all over the world in the days following the Night of a Thousand Lights, as one of our lead anchors termed it. From political pundits to radio talk show hosts, religious leaders to NASA astronomers, medical doctors and psychiatrists, we've been entertained with theories and conjecture that all amount to nothing more than educated guesses and exaggerated conspiracies. No one has an answer as to what caused the lights, just as no one can explain the increase in criminal activity reported in almost every major metropolitan city."

  The crawl on the bottom of the screen read: Police concerned as reports of missing children skyrocket. Is a new child trafficking ring to blame?

  The camera did one of those angle changes, and Lisa turned her head to the left, now meeting the lens straight on.

  "Most disturbing are the reports of missing children, mostly teenagers. An overwhelming majority of the reports are being made by the parents. The kids are seen leaving the home, getting on a school bus, and are recorded present in class. But they don't make it home after school."