Darkness Watching (Darkworld #1) (12 page)

“The sky’s really pretty!” she said. “I want to lie on the field and stare at the stars all night.”

“Lovely idea, but it’s raining,” I said firmly.

“Killjoy.”

Another late night and I’d pretty much gone back to being nocturnal again.

I awoke the next day at two o’clock in the afternoon with a throbbing headache and sore throat.

I groaned.
What the hell? I wasn’t even drunk.
I tried to stand up and doubled over, coughing. My throat felt raw and my nose was blocked. I looked in the mirror and saw my face was unnaturally flushed.

Oh God.
I’d caught flu.
Sarah, I’m going to kill you.
As it turned out, our entire flat had caught the bug. Alex knocked on my door to tell me hoarsely she wasn’t going to be able to go out tonight, and Sarah couldn’t even leave her room, merely croaking something unintelligible from behind her door.

I spent the next two days in bed with a cool flannel on my forehead. Whilst I couldn’t feel the fever burning, my dreams were tangled and confused, startlingly vivid in detail.I dreamt of demons ripping their way out of the dark spaces, the world around me shattering like a mirror. I dreamt of fire searing a path of destruction through a manor house. I dreamt of being frozen, a living ice sculpture, whilst crowds of people gawped at me. I saw the faces of people I knew in the crowd. Cara. My parents. Alex, Sarah, David. The girl from the club. All turned their backs, oblivious to my shouts, until one remained: the fortune-teller, who regarded me with a pitying stare.

“Such a shame I couldn’t save you,” she murmured, her breath fogging the ice surrounding me. “But even the best of us can succumb to demons…”

In the hours I lay awake, my mind reeled, not with the fever, but with the fortune-teller’s words. Demons were one thing, but magic was another thing entirely. The fortune-teller had said that magic was more subtle than flashing lights and explosions, but if I was supposedly a magic-user, then I expected some kind of clue. Maybe I ought to check out the arcane section of the local library.

Maybe I should just forget about it.
If magic attracted demons, then I’d be tempting fate. As attractive as I found the idea of trying a Harry Potter-style summoning charm, I didn’t want to bring a horde of demons down on me.

But they follow me anyway.

If there was one thing I hated, it was when people refused to give me a direct answer, and the fortune-teller had left me with more questions than she’d answered. I considered going back to talk to her again, once I’d recovered from flu, but I suspected I wouldn’t get answers easily this time, either. She’d only talked so much because… well, I didn’t know.
Was she just trying to warn me off?

But she’d made one thing quite clear: I’d have to face up to this now. I couldn’t hide any more.

Despite the flu, I was gradually settling into the student life. I couldn’t imagine ever having lived differently. True, my first attempt at cooking had almost set the flat on fire, and the kitchen stank of burning for days afterward―and that was beans on toast. I omitted to mention that incident to my mum when she phoned, asking how I was getting on. Instead, I said truthfully that I was having the time of my life. Even with the fortune-teller’s words on my mind, I still wholeheartedly joined in the fun, whether it be long conversations in the kitchen with my flatmates late into the night, learning to play pool in the common room, or going along with Alex’s scheme to make milk chocolate by microwaving dark chocolate and then adding milk. Shockingly, it didn’t work.

I’d thought I was becoming nocturnal, but, judging from the noise coming from his room, Terrence didn’t seem to sleep at all. At all hours of the day and night, we could hear raised voices, opera music, and the occasional scream. Once we heard such a banging and crashing that we thought the ceiling was falling down.

“Who was he yelling at?” I said. He hadn’t exactly made an effort to make friends.

“I think he was on Skype.”

“Ah.” That explained it.

“Or he’s clinically insane,” Alex added.

But our sullen flatmate’s odd behaviour extended further than that. On Saturday night, when we returned from the fancy-dress pub crawl in Blackstone in the early hours of the morning, we found him just going out the flat.

“Where’re you off to?” I said in surprise.

“The lab,” said Terrence and stalked off as if I’d insulted him.

“Lab?” I said blankly. “Are we living with Frankenstein?”

“I think he means the physics lab.” Alex giggled. “Weird, though. Term hasn’t started yet. Unless he has assignments already.”

“Could be.”

The pub crawl was a laugh. The theme was Anything Beginning with the Letter B, so Alex had the bright idea we would all four of us dress as bin bags.

We’d looked a sight, traipsing downhill draped in black bags, but no one gave us a second glance. In the first pub, the Coach and Horses, we found a bizarre assembly. A guy in a banana costume led the group, accompanied by a contingent of bees, butterflies, bears, cardboard boxes, bartenders, and even a guy covered from head to toe in empty beer cans.

“I’m a brewery!” he announced, as I realised it was Pete.

“Ha, pretty appropriate,” muttered Alex. “Though I don’t see how he’ll pick up any girls wearing that; he
reeks
.”

“I’m surprised they haven’t thrown him out for bringing his own drinks,” I said.

Even though it rained for most of the night, it was fun, walking around dressed like lunatics and not caring a bit.

I’d kept an eye out for the girl, but hadn’t seen her anywhere. What I did occasionally see, though, when I was walking around campus, were a number of large birds flying around, swooping from one roof to another. They were easily the size of eagles, but jet-black as crows. Now, in the guiding lights lining the student village, I could make out the dark shapes just above the rooftops. I squinted at them, trying to work out what they were.

“I can’t see anything,” said Sarah, when I pointed out one to her in an attempt to figure out whether these birds were in the same visibility category as demons.

Still, I puzzled over it. If I couldn’t see demons in Blackstone, why could I see these creatures?

I went to bed as soon as I got back to my room, but I couldn’t sleep. The stuffy air in my room made it hard to breathe, so I went to open the window―then jumped away, biting back a scream.

“Jesus!”

Something white and shapeless lay outside the window.

I stood frozen for a minute, thinking of demons, ghosts, and God knows what else, before I forced myself to pull back the curtains again.

Then I laughed in relief and embarrassment: it was a sheep. It had clearly wandered up to the flat from the fields and dozed off right underneath my window.

Then I heard a voice.

“A sheep called Jesus? That’s a new one.”

A figure walked up to the window. My heart jolted. It was the girl from the other night. Her reddish-brown hair was plastered to her face with rainwater, and her red mini-dress was totally sodden. I guessed she’d just come back from Blackstone.

“Wha―what’re you doing out there?”

“I locked myself out of my flat.”

“What, you live in here?”

“First floor, yeah.”

It seemed weird I hadn’t seen her in the building, but she seemed genuine. “Wait there, I’ll let you in.”

I pulled a hoodie over my head and shoved my feet into my slippers, just remembering to snatch up my keys as I went out the room, and I walked smack into Terrence.

“Oops!” I said, steadying myself. “Sorry!”
What’s he doing outside my room?

Terrence said nothing, just gave me a hostile look.

“Sorry,” I said again, feebly. “What’re you doing?”

He narrowed his eyes at me and stalked back into his room, the door slamming behind him. The words
Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here
swung back at me. It
was
a weird quote for a physics student to have on his door, when I thought about it.

I found the girl still standing in the field.

“Aren’t you cold?” she asked, through blue-tinged lips.

“Me? I haven’t been standing out here all night! Come inside.”

She shook her head. “I don’t particularly want to go back to my flat right now. I had an argument with Berenice this evening. It wasn’t pretty.”

“Which flat are you in?”

She gestured upward. “Flat Four. You never told me your name,” she added.

“I’m Ashlyn. People usually call me Ash. Why haven’t I seen you in the flat?”

“Oh, I haven’t been to any of the Freshers events this year. You’re first year, right?”

I nodded.

“Thought so. I’m second year, so are Howard and Berenice. You’re doing English, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, first year’s a piss-take, you only need a pass mark. So go wild when you can!”

“Right.” I took a deep breath and plunged in. “Look, I spoke to this fortune-teller the other day, and she told me―”

“Oh, you’ve spoken to Madam Persephone? Isn’t she the most exasperating person you’ve ever met?”

“Well,” I said, glancing up at the flat. It didn’t look like anyone was awake, but she probably knew better than I did. “I guess. She didn’t really answer my questions. She said―look, can we go and talk inside? It’s wet out here and anyone could be listening from in there.”

“They’ll be more likely to hear us if we’re inside, trust me. Want to walk in the forest?”

I hesitated, on the brink of pointing out I was hardly dressed for the weather, but the rain had slowed to a drizzle, and I decided to just roll with it.

“All right, then.”

The predawn sky was grey as paving stones; as we approached the forest; the trees seemed to glow with an eerie silvery light. But I was beginning to think of the patch of woodland as more of a sanctuary than anything.

My feet skidded on the rain-soaked carpet of leaves.
I probably should have put on some shoes,
I thought.
Slippers weren’t the best choice of footwear.

I spoke only when we were deep under the leafy canopy.

“The fortune-teller said you’d be able to help me. She said I have a connection to the… Darkworld. Look, I barely know a thing about any of this.”

She regarded me, wearing a thoughtful expression. “You’re unregistered?”

“Huh?”

“Are your parents sorcerers?”

“No.” I shook my head. “No way. They’re totally ordinary.”

“Then you must have sorcerer ancestry somewhere. It’s rare that the Venantium don’t pick up on these things, though. They have every potential magic-user registered. They put it down to keeping neat records, but everyone knows it’s because they’re afraid.”

“Who―who are the Venantium? The fortune-teller mentioned them, too, but I’ve no idea about any of this. She seemed to take it for granted that I knew already, but, until I came here, I didn’t know a thing. I can see dark spaces and demons, but I still don’t know
why.
”

“So you’ve never used magic?”

“No. I don’t think so,” I said, although something nagged at me, one particular experience I’d put down to coincidence…

“How does magic work?” I heard my own voice say the words, but it struck me how weird it all sounded. I couldn’t believe we were actually talking about this.” And what does it have to do with this… Darkworld?”

“The Darkworld’s the source of all magic, the home of all non-corporeal species,” Claudia recited.”Well, that’s the textbook definition, anyway. We can use magic because we have a strong enough connection to the Darkworld that we’re able to take on its power ourselves, to control it.”

“So is the Darkworld a place?”

“Kind of, but not one we can get to it. As I said, only spirits live there. Some sorcerers have attempted to travel into the Darkworld. Theoretically, they say it can be done, but it’s a bad idea. They separate from their bodies and then they can never come back. The demons claim them.”

“So where do demons fit into this?”

“Demons are evil spirits. Evil because they can possess and kill humans.”

I shuddered. “The fortune-teller said they’re attracted to magic. Does that mean… they’ll come after us?”

“Nah, we aren’t important enough. But it’s true that they’re magical parasites. The Barrier stops them getting through to our world, but, if a sorcerer summons one, it causes havoc. The first thing they do is drain your power away, and use it to add to their own. Then they use your body as a vessel. They can possess you and make you do whatever they want. Even experienced sorcerers are no match for a demon, and there’s no way of blocking possession.”

I shuddered, cold tendrils wrapping around me. I thought of those staring, violet eyes. What did the demons want from me?

All the same, the word
possession
put me in mind of horror films such as
Paranormal Activity
and
The Exorcist.
It didn’t match up with the real world I thought I knew. Even as nightmares stared me in the face, part of me still clung to the old notion of reality.

I shook my head. “It makes no sense. I mean, the Darkworld? Possession? It sounds―”

“Like a bad horror movie, I know. I said the same thing. My parents decided to wait ‘til I was eighteen to tell me. It didn’t go over well.”

“At least you knew. My parents…” No. There was no chance they knew what really preyed on my mind. They knew nothing about this Darkworld.

“Well, you’ll never look at
The Exorcist
the same way. Pretty sure the guy who wrote it wasn’t actually a magic-user; most of it’s dead wrong. No ectoplasm, for one thing.”

“Why am I different?” I said. “Why do the demons look at me like that?”

“It’s like I said; they’re drawn to magic.”

“But isn’t there a way to make them go away?”

“Not from here. You saw me fight off that shadow-fox, but it was on this side of the Barrier. The Barrier’s like a force field around our world. It’s invisible; you can’t see it or touch it, but it’s there. Shadow-beasts can only get through if a sorcerer summons them. If that happens, we can fight them. There are kinds of magic demons are afraid of. According to the Venantium, that’s what we’re obliged to do. Like me sending that shadow-fox off. Though I’ve no idea who actually summoned the damn thing. They don’t get here of their own accord.”