Read Queen of the Dark Things Online
Authors: C. Robert Cargill
Queen of the Dark Things (22 page)
“You're not a black.”
“Oh! No. I'm not.”
“But you can see me.”
“Yeah.”
“How? And why are you on walkabout?”
“Oh,” said Colby, thinking for a second about how best to explain it.
“You ever hear of a djinn?”
“No.”
“How 'bout a genie?”
She nodded, smiling queerly. “You mean like from a lamp? Like on TV?”
“Yes. But never, ever, ever say that to one. Because they hate that.”
“They? You mean they're real?”
“Why wouldn't they be? Little girls who fly around in their dreams are real. And bunyips are real.”
“Yeah, but genies? That just sounds . . . silly.”
“They're called djinn. And I made a wish with one. Well, two actually.”
“So you haven't gotten your third?”
“It doesn't work that way. You know, you'd think it would, but . . .”
“What did you wish for?”
“To see the things other people couldn't. Fairies, bunyips . . .” He motioned to her. “Dreamwalkers.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn't like it at home and I thought that this would be better.”
“Is it?” she asked.
“Sometimes. No one ever tries to kill me at home. But there's no one around there I really like either.”
“You like people out here?” She motioned to the desert around her.
Colby nodded. “Oh yeah! Mandu is great. Yasharâhe's my djinnâhe's awesome. I've got this friend Ewan who is a fairy boy. I've met angels and mermen and all sorts of things. You.”
“Me? You don't know me.”
“Not real well. But I can tell you're cool. I like you already.”
She shuffled around awkwardly. “Why? Because you think I'm pretty or something?”
Colby looked away bashfully, his cheeks reddening. “Nooooo. That's not it.”
Mandu smiled secretly behind his didgeridoo.
“You don't think I'm pretty? I'm pretty and I'm tall and I'm fast. You don't like that?”
“I like you because you're . . . you know . . . the way you jumped on the bunyip and you weren't afraid of it.”
“Why would I be afraid of it?” she asked.
“I was afraid of it.”
“Oh, well . . . you think I'm cool?”
“Yeah.”
“And it's not because you think I'm pretty or something.”
“No.”
She smiled, tucking her hair behind her ear and dragging the back of her hand under her chin. “Thank you.”
“So will you tell me your name already?”
Her smile evaporated and she frowned, pushing him away playfully. “No,” she said in all seriousness. Then she looked up at the stars, the sky so black this far out that there were literally thousands of them swimming together in a deep sea of night. “You know, the Clever Man told me once that in the Skyworld, each star was a campfire of the dead. That they come together with their dreaming or tribe and at night we can peer across the gulf of time and see their fires winking back at us.”
Colby seemed incredulous. “Campfires?” He looked at Mandu, who only nodded, still playing his one, droning note.
“Campfires on the other side of the sky,” she said, mired in the romance of it, her teeth chattering lightly. “I like the idea. You know that where we go when we die is a place like this. Around a fire. With friends. Telling stories. Where everyone gets to be exactly who they dream they were meant to be.”
“I like that,” said Colby. “That place sounds nice.”
“Why is it so cold out here?” she asked, her body almost convulsing with shivers.
Mandu stopped playing. The night grew quiet except for the crackling of the fire. “Oh,” he said sadly. “Our time is again too short.”
The pretty little girl in the purple pajamas looked over at him, terrified, the cord attached to the back of her head growing suddenly taut, yanking her backward. She vanished into the dark.
Colby looked at Mandu, his eyes wide, confused. “Where did sheâ”
“Home,” said Mandu. “She'll be back. She always is.”
“Who is she?”
“I told you. She's a dreamwalker.”
“No, I mean, what's her name?”
Mandu smiled, shaking his head. “You know, I never thought to ask.”
L
ight. Blinding. Almost green. Then it goes out, fading. Tracers trickling across the eyes, fireworks soaring through space. Then light again. A whine, high-pitched ringing in the ears. Everything too bright to make out. Shapes in the light, not a one of them clear, crisp. The whine again, then light. The sound of a truck hitting a wall.
“Clear!” shouts a voice.
Then a circle of light. Bright. Blinding. Tracers across the eyes. Then nothing.
The pretty little girl in the purple pajamas stood in back near the wall of a severe white room, doctors and nurses surrounding a cold steel table on which lay her tiny, blood-soaked body. Beside them, a large box beepedâ
beep beep beepâ
with a display tracking her heartbeat, a bag of blood in the hands of a nurse fed through a tube into her arm.
“She's back,” said one of the nurses while another put away a set of defibrillator paddles.
The girl watched the doctors fiddle with her limp body, flipping it over, trying to sew together the back of her head. She looked so small. Tiny. She'd never seen herself like this. She'd stood outside her body, looking down on it as it slept, but never while other people were around. The adults didn't look like giants, they looked normal. She was the one who looked delicate, slight, a kitten in the mouth of its mother.
It was the first time in her life she realized just how young she was.
She walked over to the table, stood by the doctors, bathed in the glow of the fluorescent light at the end of a robot's arm affixed to the ceiling. The pretty little girl was warmer now. Her shakes were subsiding, and she felt cool instead of cold, warmer every minute.
She couldn't be sure how long she stood there watching, time was different out here, outside of her body, her perceptions warped, bent by the dream. But when she was relatively certain she was okay, and they had put most of the eggshell mess of her skull back together around her silver cord, she knew it was time to go. So she soared to the back of the room, passing through the doors as if they weren't there, out into a long, glaring hallway, the lights dazzling, a white so bright she had never quite seen its shade.
The hallway seemed impossibly long, as if it went on forever. She floated, passing a nurses' station blaring with sounds, flashing lights, then on to the waiting area. That's when she saw him. Over to the side, sobbing into his handsâher father, Wade. Next to him sat a doctor with a serious face.
“ . . . coma,” the doctor said, the only word she'd arrived in time to make out.
Wade cried openly, almost wailing as he talked, his speech still slurred with drink. “It's my fault,” he said. “I should have been there. For her. If I hadn't been, you know, I mean, I could have heard her. Could have gotten her here sooner.”
The doctor put an understanding hand on his shoulder. “At times like this, it's best to think about what we
can
do rather than what we didn't.”
“She didn't want me to drink. She was gonna pour it out again. Hadn't done it in a while. Though she probably should've. She deserved better. She was trying to make me better. Nowâ” He cried more.
“We're going to do the best for her we can. But there's no telling how extensive the damage is.”
The pretty little girl in the purple pajamas moved closer to put her hand on his, tell him, even if he couldn't hear, that it was all going to be okay. That she was fine. But she didn't get the chance. Because that's when she heard the scratching. Claws across windows, walls, marble floors. Scratches like animals digging under a house, like nails on a chalkboard. The whole hospital shuddered with the sounds.
Then the lights went out and the whole hospital, for an instant, went black. Time slowed, and the black went on seemingly forever. Then the building convulsed, groaning slowly back to life, emergency floodlights winking awake, rooms and hall corners bathed in electric daylight. Were she awake, she might note the dingy dullness to the light, the way it made the dim outskirts seem brown and neglected. But in the dream, those lights blazed a thousand megawatts strong, like rays of the harnessed sun shot into blinding white spots amid the lonely black between them.
She looked down the hall, staggered spotlights like islands in the night, and then she saw them. The shadows. Kutji. Jet black against stinging white marble and paint. Crawling on all fours, some across the floor, others across the ceiling, others still scampering toward her along the walls. Each avoiding the light when they could; tearing through it, sizzling in agony when they couldn't. Mouths open, teeth bared, eyes wide with a hungry hate. A squirming mass of black overtaking the white inch by inch.
“Get her,” slavered Jeronimus.
“Wait!” she shouted. “I thought you said you'd help me.”
“We did,” said one.
“We took you to the bunyip,” said another. “Our business is done.”
They poured toward her along every surface, a black wave of shadowy mayhem, nipping at the air in front of them, clawing to get ever closer.
At once the girl realized these things were not her friends; they were trouble. So she ran, ran as hard and as fast as she could, silvery cord trailing behind her. Down another hallway. Around another corner. Smack into another writhing wall of caterwauling kutji, drooling, pounding theirs fists on the walls and floor as they skittered closer toward her.
The halls echoed with the sounds of screaming shadows.
The pretty little girl wound her way through an endless sea of twists and turns and abandoned gurneys, black shapes shuffling past bright white spots, disappearing into the dark after her. She was confused, turned upside down and backward, not used to navigating the world of man when in the dream. At last she came to a four-way intersection, the point at which two corridors crossed, a single floodlight illuminating the center like a theater spot on a dark stage.
There she stood, dead center, watching the shadowy mass of kutji crawl over one another just past the event horizon of the light. She was surrounded, the vicious creatures snapping their teeth together, scratching the marble, taunting her to step out into the dark.
“Come out and play with us!” shouted one.
“Yes! Out into the dark!” shouted another.
“Out into the dark to become one of us! One of us forever!” shouted a third.
One of the kutji hovered at the edge of the light, sticking a cautious stump of an arm out into it. The nub smoked, hissed, searing like it had been thrown into a fire. It howled, yanking the arm back into the dark, blowing on it to soothe the pain.
“You can't stay in the light forever,” said Jeronimus. “You have to become one of us sometime.”
“No, I don't,” said the little girl.
“Yes, you do. It's what we were promised, what we were tasked to do. Two more souls and we can go home. We can find peace. Like we were promised.”
“No!”
“You have no choice. We are what you were born to become.”
The pretty little girl in the purple pajamas, bathed in the bright light of the emergency floods, screamed, her shriek rippling like waves from a pebble through the hospital, the walls undulating, quivering.
The shadows stopped, silent, for a moment fearful.
Then she shot away, traveling at a thousand feet per second, the shadows left wondering where she'd gone.
Jeronimus howled, calling the pack together. “Take to the skies,” he said. “Find her. Tonight she is ours, and let nothing get in our way. Nothing.”
And with that they shuffled back into the black, turned into crows, and flew out into the night after her.
M
andu grew suddenly nervous, his head cocking a little to better hear, his eyes wide and alert.
“What is it?” asked Colby.
Mandu shook his head, his didgeridoo gripped tight in his hands. “I don't know,” he said. “Something's not right.” He looked around with a cockeyed concern weighing on his troubled brow.
It was growing chilly, the warm desert sands cooling in the night. The sky was clear, the moon bright, the air still and quiet as the dead. If something was amiss, it was both silent and well hidden.
She emerged from the dark as she had a short while before, wiping tears from her eyes with her sleeveâthe pretty little girl in the purple pajamas. Her eyes were red, bloodshot, and bleary with tears, but she smiled, pretending nothing was wrong.
“Child, you're back so soon,” said Mandu.
“I know,” she said. “IâI missed you.”
Colby pointed at her, but looked instead at Mandu. “Was that what you wereâ”
“Sshhhht!” he said, hushing him. “No. It wasn't.” Mandu looked up toward the pretty little girl in the purple pajamas and motioned to her to get low. “Get down. Something . . . is out there.”
The three looked out into the dark, the light stretching only a couple of dozen feet out from the fire before the world became pitch-black. Mandu lowered his didgeridoo, picked up his walking stick. With his free hand he reached into his dilly bag and pulled out his bullroarer.
“If I say run,” he said, whispering, “you run like the willy-willy. You don't look back. Do you both understand?”
They both nodded.
