Dark Tendrils (3 page)

Kurt didn’t know how to react. He wanted to protect Holly. For a moment, he loved her again, as deeply as he used to. He wanted to, needed to trust Holly, to feel closer to her for having opened up to him. But then the suspicion that it was all a lie, that she was still Giovanni’s pawn, resurfaced.

She said, “Let’s get this over with. I know where Giovanni lives. Let’s confront him and tell him we’re not afraid of his tricks anymore.”

With that call to action, all of a sudden, Kurt’s doubts vanished. He admired Holly, her courage to face up to Giovanni, when he’d only ever been a passive coward. Kurt didn’t feel as brave as she did, but he yearned to be swept up in the wake of her courage. “You’re right,” he said. “We should have done that in the first place. He’s just a little creep. A coward who hides behind all this magic mumbo-jumbo.”

Giovanni was at the heart of too much darkness in Kurt’s past. The idea of confronting him made Kurt queasy, but passively letting Giovanni terrorize him was worse. Both Kurt and Holly had succumbed to him before. But now they were forewarned. And they were together, and stronger for it.

Holly kissed Kurt. Squeezing his hand, her lips brushing his earlobe, she said, “Let’s go. Now. Let’s make him scared of us for a change.”

They fuelled up on coffee. They needed the buzz, the extra adrenaline. Neither of them said what was foremost in Kurt’s mind: that they could no longer trust their lives to sleep, that they might never be able to again. And Kurt was utterly exhausted.

They called a cab. They had no plan, but Kurt was determined to push this as far as they had to, uncertain of what, exactly, that could entail.

The cab was waiting for them as they stepped outside. They climbed in the back seat, and Holly called out the address to the driver.

The cab reeked of incense . . . pungent and nauseating. As the car started, Kurt was suddenly overwhelmed with drowsiness. He turned to look at Holly; but it was no longer Holly who sat next to him. His eyes locked with the mocking leer of her demonic doppelganger.

Kurt yelled at the driver to stop, to open the windows. But the cabby ignored him.

The demon Holly murmured Kurt’s name in an electrified, distorted voice. Again Kurt screamed at the driver, again with no response. Kurt tried the door, but it was locked and he couldn’t get it open.

Kurt struggled to stay awake. As his eyes closed, dark serpentine shapes oozed out of Holly’s demonic body and converged on him.

In Kurt’s aqtuqsi, he was lying at home, in the bed he shared with Holly. Next to him was Holly’s demonic doppelganger. She looked more deformed than in any previous episode, her skin peeling off, her perfectly black eyes glowing menacingly.

Kurt thought:
None of this is real. It can’t be.
But it didn’t stop him from being terrified.

He tried to break free, to shake himself awake. But the invisible cocoon sizzled, burning his skin, keeping him restrained. Crushing him.

A fiery black tongue slithered out of the demonic Holly’s mouth and licked his cheek, searing off the flesh. The monstrous parody of Holly metamorphosed into Giovanni.

Kurt opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. His own scream filled up his throat, choking him.

With no further preamble, Kurt was torn from his body. His ascension dragged on for an eternity. The menace seeping from the ceiling filled him with increasing terror. Suddenly, he was only millimetres away from crossing that threshold.

With all his will, he tried to scream, to shake himself awake, to call out to Holly. The real Holly. He wondered if she was still alive. Or how long ago she might have been sacrificed to Giovanni’s god.

And the image of that star from his childhood filled his mind—that rock Giovanni stole from him. He mourned the future it had promised him. He held on to that memory, made it glow as brightly as he could, believing it might be the only thing that could save him. But, despite himself, it dimmed until it became so dark he could not even remember what he was trying so hard to hold on to.

Giovanni laughed at him. Gloating.

As Kurt passed through the ceiling, dark tendrils wrapped themselves around him.

Claude Lalumière (
lostmyths.net/claude
) is the author of the story collection
Objects of Worship
(ChiZine Publications 2009) and the chapbook
The World’s Forgotten Boy and the Scorpions from Hell
(Kelp Queen Press 2008). He has edited eight anthologies, including the Aurora Award nominee
Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction
(Edge 2008), and he writes the Fantastic Fiction column for
The Montreal Gazette
. With Rupert Bottenberg, Claude is the co-creator of Lost Myths, which is both a live show and an online archive updated weekly at
lostmyths.net
.