Messenger of Fear (16 page)

And worse, far worse than seeing these things, I felt them. I brushed against them, and each new terror sent shockwaves through me. They were like infections that, once touched, I knew I could never fully shake off.

And I knew then, oh, with such soul-deadening dread, that this was what I had felt from my brief contact with Messenger. I understood then that he had absorbed some part of the terrors of so many tortured, twisted minds. I understood that he had never, could never, fully erase them from his own consciousness and that these terrors had made his touch toxic.

And that the same thing was happening now. To me.

I don’t know how much time passed as I dredged through the accumulated horrors of Derek’s mind. Maybe no time passed at all. Maybe it was a thousand years. Time lost all meaning—what good was time, how could it be measured, when all you could think to do was to scream?

Slowly then, slowly the unbearable intensity weakened. Slowly, like a person rising from a nightmare to the light, I floated up and away from the awful beast, the beast that now closed, locking me out. I floated up and away, up and away, but nothing, nothing was forgotten.

I opened my eyes. Derek was before me, his back to me, my hands on his heart and head.

I looked past him and saw Messenger. He was pale, as always, but somehow more deathly now. His blue eyes met mine, and I saw within them the thing that kept me from hating him as I perhaps should: compassion.

I had traveled to a place he had often visited himself. He knew. He understood in a way that no other being could.

My voice trembling, weak, I said, “You did this to me.”

He shook his head imperceptibly. “No, Mara. You did this to yourself. As I did it to myself. As my master before me did it to himself.”

Gasping, I broke contact with Derek.

“Was it . . . fun?” Oriax asked, unable to conceal the cruelty of her curiosity. She licked her green-tinged lips as though she was savoring the lingering flavor of some delicacy.

“What is his fear?” Messenger asked me.

“I . . . There were so many.” I closed my eyes, but that brought the pictures back to life, so I opened them again, wide, knowing that darkness was now my enemy and that what salvation and peace I could find was in light, even the sickly light the mist allowed me.

“There was one fear greater than all others,” Messenger said, his voice soft but insistent. “There was one fear beneath all of the others.”

“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes. There was.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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DEREK WAS FOUR YEARS OLD WHEN HE FIRST heard the story of the Maid of Orléans. He wasn’t even part of the conversation; it was something he heard his older brother talking about to a friend after reading Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc in school. Derek’s brother relished, in the way that slightly sadistic older brothers have done since the dawn of time, the opportunity to frighten his little brother.

Joan of Arc was born in the small French town of Arc in the year 1412 during the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. England was winning.

She heard, or believed she heard, the voice of God directing her to offer her services to the French army. Through a bizarre set of circumstances, and owing to the credulous superstitions of the time, Joan ended up being taken quite seriously. She became a bit of a rock star for the French, who were happy to seize on any inspiration.

Joan, acting largely on her own, rallied a group of soldiers and peasants and townsfolk and captured an English stronghold. Then another. And then she began to capture entire towns and was able to get the Dauphin—the French king in waiting—officially crowned.

Then things took a grim turn for Joan. She was captured by the English. The French abandoned her to her fate, and she was dragged before a trumped-up religious court, which found her guilty of heresy in part because she had worn men’s clothing.

She was taken to the town square and tied to a tall pole, and dry wood was piled around and beneath her. The fire was lit.

Derek’s brother had reveled in the details. The way the flames would at first have warmed her. The way the smoke would sting her eyes. The jeers and insults of the crowd. The way her clothing would have been the first thing to burn, the way it would have curled and smoked and fallen away, and by then the agony would have begun.

Blistering skin. A smell like crisping bacon. Unbearable pain. Gasping for breath as the heat baked the air in your lungs. Skin bursting open.

I told Messenger. I was sure, you see, that he would never inflict anything so inhuman on Derek.

At the start of my recitation, Derek tried to laugh it off. But he began to sweat. He began to lick his lips nervously. And as Messenger listened impassively, Derek began to interject. “No, that’s not right. That’s not right. No. No way.”

His voice grew panicky. Oriax’s eyes glittered with an emotion I could only guess at. Messenger just listened. Just listened and did not stop me.

“Okay, man, okay, you’re scaring me,” Derek said. “I’ll play your game. If I win, I go free, right? I’ll play your game. Let me play your game!”

“You have done well,” Messenger said to me.

“I think he’s scared now—I think he gets it,” I said, pleading Derek’s case.

“Yeah, yeah, I mean, just, like, just, just let me play the game!”

“Too late,” Oriax purred. And then she began to sing in a low but very melodious voice. It was a song set to an ancient melody I knew, though I did not at that moment recall the name and only later retrieved from memory that it was called “Greensleeves.”

She sang this:

It seemed to be made up on the spot, the mocking lyrics coming to her a few words at a time.

Messenger had in his hands a black cloth. I don’t know where it came from. It was rough-textured, felt perhaps, and when he drew it over his hair and pulled it down across his face, it was revealed to be a hood. Only Messenger’s eyes were visible, blue lights shining from eye slits.

“In the name of Isthil and the balance She maintains,” Messenger intoned, “I summon the Hooded Wraiths and charge them to carry out the sentence.”

“No, no, no, man, I didn’t do anything wrong!” Derek yelled. “I was just doing it because Charles, man. Charles! It was all him, I never thought . . . I was just messing around!”

It was the mist itself that seemed to form the two dark and hooded figures now taking shape before my eyes. They might have been men, might have been human, but no feature was discernible, no touchstone of normalcy. They were too tall to be truly human, more than seven feet tall; at least they were that tall from the trailing hem of their cloaks to the pointed peak. There were no holes for eyes, no fingers protruded beyond their capacious sleeves.

Then the mist withdrew and I was reminded that we were still in a gymnasium, that people still filled the seats, though they remained immobile. The light was unbearably bright on those immobile faces, but around us, and centered on Derek, a shadow formed. It was not the mist—it was some unnatural extinction of light, as though an invisible force field had formed around us, bending light away, allowing only the faintest illumination.

One of the wraiths raised his arms and, with a shattering noise of ripping and tearing, the wooden floorboards twisted loose from the nails that held them. They flowed in streams from the edges of the gym floor, revealing glue-stained concrete beneath. They flowed, noisy, clattering, and swirled around Derek’s feet.

I had no choice but to step away or be swept off my feet. I felt a jolt of guilt. I was abandoning Derek, a bad person, an angry, malicious person, but still for all that, just a dumb teenager.

He stood rooted in the spot, twisting this way and that but unable to flee.

The wood piled around him, and some of the boards rose to a vertical, gathered together to form a stake, maybe eight feet high. And now Derek was rising as boards forced themselves beneath his feet, forming a rude platform.

The second wraith made a graceful gesture of his arm, and cords that had held suspended banners released the banners to flutter away while snaking down as if they had come alive to wrap themselves around Derek and tie him to the stake. He was bound at the ankles, the knees, the thighs, the waist, the chest. His hands were unbound, but a rope circled his throat and held him to the pole.

“No, stop it! Stop it! Oh, God, stop it!”

That was not just Derek crying for mercy but me as well—this could not happen, this could not go on. Yes, Derek had caused a death, yes, he had ruined Manolo’s life as well, but this was impossible, this was not tolerable. My insides were twisting, twisting as Derek screamed now, screamed, no longer able to plead, no longer able to form words, for sheer terror owned him now.

His eyes bulged, his chest heaved, and he screamed again and again as both wraiths raised high their arms and flame grew from the ends of their sleeves.

“Messenger! No! No! No!” I cried, and I rushed at him, to beat at him with my fists, but I found I could not get near him.

Oriax was singing still, an eerily pretty voice carrying the ancient tune, but with words from no language I had ever heard before. There was a dark malice in the very sound of those words, an evil that did not rely on meaning but could be heard in the few vowels and the thick, clotted consonants.

The wraiths lowered their flaming arms, and bright yellow fire flowed like a liquid to touch the piled wood. The flames were bright in the pool of iniquitous darkness and I prayed while sightless men and women and children in the bleachers sat immobile.

I wish that I could have turned away. I wish that what came next never imprinted itself on my memory. I did not want, do not want, to know what fire does to a human body.

There was little smoke at first, though the burning varnish made an acrid smell. For the first few seconds Derek seemed amazingly unharmed. But then the hair on his legs singed and curled and fell away. The flesh of his legs reddened. His wrestling uniform shorts billowed out as hot air made balloons of them, and then, suddenly, they caught fire, curling up from the hem.

Bare flesh went from the red of a sunburn to something purplish and then black as the fat beneath the skin sizzled and popped like eggs on a too-hot grill. The skin burst open, like time-lapse video of rotting fruit. There was a nightmarish hissing, whistling sound as superheated gasses escaped. Steam rose from flesh turned molten, flesh that ran down rivulets of lava.

And yet Derek lived.

He had been screaming all along, but there is a difference between the scream of terror and the scream of agony. The raw sounds tearing Derek’s throats were animal noises, not human. He bleated like a goat. He squealed like a pig. His mouth drew in air that instantly seared his throat and caused his lungs to begin filling with mucous, so that what were roars and screams and shrieks became grunts, mindless, choked animal grunts.

Derek’s hair caught fire and for a moment his head was wreathed in smoke. I saw his leg bones were appearing as the muscle and fat melted away, white bone at first, then blackened, as his skin was blackened.

And still he lived. His body jerked frantically, spasms so powerful I wondered that his body did not tear itself apart.

“That’s enough,” I said through gritted teeth. “That’s enough! Enough! Enough!
Enough!
”

But it did not end. Derek was a torch. It was no longer a simple wood fire; it was a fire of shreds of clothing, hair, and human grease. Flesh was melting away, revealing the structure of bone beneath.

And now more than ever: the smell. The contents of his stomach and bowels burned and stank like a sewage treatment plant. The meat of him burned and smelled like an outdoor barbecue.

It was the smell, the realization that with each inhalation I was drawing the atoms of Derek’s body into my nose, the stink of human waste blended with a smell that to my horror made my stomach rumble hungrily, that sent me over the edge.

At the end Derek’s eyes boiled in their sockets and, mercifully, I lost consciousness.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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