A Latent Dark (31 page)

“I can go first if you’re too tired,” said Dale.

“
Naw
, it’s fine,” she said. “But I’m waking you up at midnight sharp.”

“You sure?” Dale asked. “I don’t mind, and you look exhausted.”

“A deal’s a deal,” she said firmly, cutting off another protest.

“Fair enough,” Dale said and shrugged.

They talked for hours on the dust-covered floor as a silk glove surrounded the house. The evening conversation turned to ghost stories, of old fairy tales and the mythology books that Skyla used to read with Melissa.

“Um… Doesn’t the church up there frown on stuff like that?” Dale asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “It was a bootleg book that her father bought for her from a traveling merchant. It was pretty interesting, actually. She made me swear to secrecy.”

Dale made a skeptical face.

“No, I’m serious,” she said, eyes wide with conspiracy. “I know one kid whose entire family was jailed because he’d shown some pamphlet to another kid about some religion where they worshiped elephants.”

“Have you ever even
seen
an elephant?” Dale yawned.

“No,” she said wistfully. “But I hear they’re
huge.
Bigger than a horse, or even a capybara.”

Dale laughed.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said. “You’re right, they are much bigger than a capybara. Why don’t you tell me one of the stories from that book.”

She sent Dale to sleep with stories of the old gods, of myths and forbidden beliefs. She told of giant wolves and serpents that ate the roots of the World Tree. Outside, the fog rolled by like breath from a tired ghost.

*

Skyla yawned, her stomach growling. Standing guard was maybe the most boring thing she had ever done in her short life, and that was taking school into consideration. Dale had given her his wristwatch and now she sat staring at the second hand as it crawled by, each second taking longer than the last. Dale’s snoring was the only sound.

She looked at the coin in her hand, considering for a moment what it might be. Coins didn’t just pop through space and into your pocket. If the goggles could show her other possibilities outside her own actions, maybe they could show her something she didn’t know about the coin. She flipped the lenses down where they clicked into place.

Through the goggles, the room was a scene of what would have been on the other side of the coin toss. Dale stood over a sleeping Skyla, his crooked arm fidgeted nervously as he stared at the girl. It reminded Skyla of the way that hermit, James had been looking at her clothes when they dried. It made her skin crawl.

The goggles provided insights but no sound, a silent stage play. The Ghost Dale stood over her double for a few more moments while she slept. He then glided across the room like a wraith toward the empty doorframe, disappearing around the wall and out of sight.

If wearing the goggles while sitting wasn’t disorienting enough, wearing them and walking was almost impossible. Skyla stood on wobbly legs and followed him along the wall toward the door. Almost immediately, a bright ghost flooded her vision, making her jump and filling the goggles with painful light. Ghost Dale had walked right through her, back into the room.

Guard duty. Maybe he was just checking the—

Her thought was cut short by a second figure, and then a third. They wore the same armor as the soldiers who had killed thousands in Lassimir, the same as the boy who had tried to capture her the day her mother was taken and her home burned by a madman. They glowed a malevolent orange as they followed the Ghost Dale across the room. She held her breath.

The Other Skyla stirred and opened her eyes. Dale said something and she began to scream as the two soldiers grabbed her. A thick armored hand covered her mouth while another guard grabbed her ankles.

She bit the hand over her mouth. The soldier jerked away and held her by her shoulders as she kicked and flailed, screaming into the night. Dale took one last look around the room and followed them out.

The lenses came up. She glared at the sleeping traitor on the floor. Was he even sleeping? She thought about kicking him to find out.

Dry grass rustled outside the house as something took a step, just beyond the window. She dropped to her hands and knees and tossed the backpack over her shoulders when Dale stirred. Skyla froze, watching him.

He rolled over and faced the wall, then continued snoring. She released a long, steady breath through clenched teeth.

On hands and knees, she made her way past Dale, toward the pungent room with the doll. The window was glassless; fog leaked in and over the mountain range of stacked mattresses. She edged closer to the window, wondering if it might be the only exit that wasn’t guarded.

A silhouette appeared, framed by the empty pane, jagged and dark. It was just like the soldiers she had seen before, watching, alert. He seemed anxious, waiting for something, a signal perhaps.
A trap,
she thought.
Dale was laying a trap!

She crept back across the floor and turned toward the rear door, no more than a wooden frame with a rusted screen that hung like torn fabric from the corners. If she could run fast enough, she might be able to escape the house and disappear into the night. Outside, visibility in the thick fog was limited to a few yards at most.

She was reaching toward the screen door when she heard the crunch of a booted foot. Either the same soldier had come around to this exit or this was another one. She had seen two soldiers while wearing the goggles. Where there more? She pulled her hand back from the doorway and from behind her a floorboard creaked.

As she turned toward the source of the sound, something touched her hand, wet, furry with tiny claws like tacks, followed by a scaly tail that raked across her fingers. Skyla shrieked and recoiled.

The soldier, who had only just arrived at the rear door, spun around and centered his gaze on her. He took a step into the doorway—and froze. Something changed in his posture. He took a step backwards, tense and uncertain.

Skyla turned her head just in time to see the crooked figure of Dale standing up in the living room. He took a step and froze as well, his mouth moving soundlessly. Confused, Skyla looked back at the soldier who had now taken several paces away from the house, motioning as if to say “get away.”

From behind her Dale yelled, cut off by the deafening sound of cracking wood and shattering beams. The floor gave way beneath her as something enormous launched into the air and over her shoulder.

A roar rattled her teeth. She flattened herself to the ground just before a mass of sinewy muscle and claws flew overhead, charging at the frozen soldier with dizzying speed. The door exploded outward, the frame flung aside as the bear-sized tangle of arms, legs and pitted flesh tackled the soldier with a dull thud and a muffled scream. There was an awful sound of teeth on metal as the man, shrieking, tried to push the thing off of him.

The second soldier appeared at the fallen man’s side, looking confused and stunned, as if he somehow couldn’t quite see the massive beast on top of his fallen comrade. He raised his weapon slowly, as if in a dream, just as the viscous shadow made a smooth, blurred movement, toward him. It twisted through itself as claws and tendrils unfolded from impossible angles, spearing the soldier as if he was wearing paper. He made a guttural moan and went rigid before collapsing to the ground like a dropped curtain.

She took another glance over her shoulder. Dale was a statue, his face barely visible in the darkness. She thought she saw his mouth open as he stumbled backwards.

The black mass of claws and limbs continued to wriggle over the twitching soldier. Its abdomen tapered, flowing from the grass back through the door, a twisting umbilical of shadow that ended in the darkest corner of the room.

Realizing that this may be her only chance, Skyla launched herself through the door, passing inches from the writhing mass of muscle. Looking at it from this distance was like looking through some smoked prism, visible only at the corners of her perception.

The goggles,
she thought. The idea passed through her mind as quickly as she passed the grisly scene on the ground. There was another crunch from the dead soldier as she danced around the feeding creature.

She ran into the fog as dried grass crackled and whipped at her knees. A small grove of walnut trees materialized from the mist and she almost ran into a trunk. She grabbed the tree and hugged it, collapsing against it, panting. Wide green leaves clung to her hair with sticky sap.

The creature was the only noise now as it lolled and rocked over the dead soldiers, which twisted beneath it like broken puppets. She knew she should run. For all she knew, more soldiers were waiting for her. One could have walked up and grabbed her then and there.

Curiosity overriding her actions, Skyla lowered the lenses. There was a click.

What had been an indescribable black mass was now a kaleidoscope of brilliant color. The thing shifted and twisted against the backdrop of black fog. Its neon blue and pink skin shifted and melted like different colored oils over the heat of a flame. Its broad shoulders flowered into a mane of lashing, sea anemone tentacles. Nestled in the center was what could have been a head, or might have been a mouth.
It’s beautiful,
she thought.

Then it looked at her with solid black orbs.

Skyla ran. She ran until her sides ached and her heart felt as if it would burst. She tumbled into the tall dry grass panting when she could run no further. She pulled the goggles up and the world went white with mist. She lay on her back, catching her breath. There was no sound but the gentle rustle of nearby stalks. Her hair was matted against her neck. All around her were the tiny sounds of insects. Once she recovered, Skyla continued to run until morning.

Chapter 22

The gears of Harold’s clockwork world were stripped and broken beyond repair. The tinkerers of religion tried to help, prescribing remedies as black and white as the clockwork machinery that had betrayed him. They consoled and preached as Harry clung to his bottle of whiskey.

“They are in heaven now,” they told him. “They are dancing through the streets with Jesus!”

“Do the streets have names?” Harold asked.

The priest blinked at him. “I’m sorry?”

“The streets,” Harold said, taking a swig. “Do they have names? Addresses?”

“I… I’m sure they do—”

“And when people send mail to each other, what address to they use? Do they use numbers? Roman numerals perhaps? Do they have an address for each person? Or do they simply pick things up at a post office?”

“I… I only meant that they are no longer suffering,” the priest said, his voice soft. “They are beyond death.”

“I’ll tell you about death,” he spat at the man, his breath thick with whiskey. “Death is a smile that splits your throat from ear to ear. It’s a spray of blood on your sheets as you hack out your last breath.”

But the bottle, now that was something that truly made the pain go away. Harry kissed its glassy throat as he stood on the street, staring at the blackened outline of the house that wasn’t there. This was where his daughter had gone. The place nobody else could bear to look at, not even him. He tossed the newspaper to the ground.

WITCH BURNING IN BOLLINGBROOK’S INDUSTRIAL WEDGE

It was written in tall, triumphant letters. He wasn’t the only person who had come by to look at it. The lot was practically a tourist attraction.

What did they do to her? What hex did that witch child and her mother place on Melissa at the end? God, her face…it was…

Harry took another swig of the bottle. It blurred the pain and memories just enough for him to imagine they were gone. He stumbled into the wreckage of the house as the surrounding grass and weeds reclaimed it at nature’s pace.