Read Queen of the Dark Things Online
Authors: C. Robert Cargill
Queen of the Dark Things (27 page)
Colby ran. Mandu ran. But the pretty little girl in the purple pajamas huddled behind a dug-in boulder, head between her knees, hands behind her head, fingers laced together. She couldn't outrun the storm anymore; she couldn't ignore its winds or its lightning. With her tether gone, she was slow, clumsy, and exposed. And she was scared to death.
She mumbled quietly to herself, asking for unseen help, praying that the rains soaking her would soon pass, that the winds would soon die down. But the tempest still howled, the storm getting angrier and angrier by the moment. The twisted, broken, red-painted body of a mimi tumbled by, a single splintered hand twitching to grab her as it passed before being thrown into a billabong.
Four clouds broke away from the front, drifting down, letting the gusts tear them apart. They shredded, the wisps becoming feathers, the feathers fluttering together. The four became crows again, dropping through the rain, straight toward the pretty little girl in the purple pajamas.
At once the rest of the clouds burst, the rain stopping, the stars emerging in swaths of sky. Crows formed, flapping back down toward the earth, mist trailing from their feathers. Dozens of birds once again dove down, the thunder having trailed off into the distance, the storm nothing but a memory.
She cowered still behind a boulder, unaware of the hell coming for her.
With the winds gone, the mimis emerged from their holes. This time, however, the kutji were ready, swooping in on the stick men, claws out, tearing them off their trees, snapping them in half against boulders and branches. It had been hundreds of years since the kutji were afforded the chance to be this savage, memories of cobbled-together maces crushing skulls, splattered blood across coral sands flooding back. They felt alive. In a bloodthirsty rage, the spirits relived the heady days of wanton brutality, unleashing centuries of pent-up fury on the mimis they could get their claws on.
What few mimis remained unseen stayed hidden, sure that they would be the next dead against a rock or snapped into pieces by bare hands.
The carnage was over almost as soon as it began, the shadows looking around, eager for other victims, bleeding pieces of mimi in their hands like clubs, crows soaring about them as spotters.
Then the crows formed a murder around the pretty little girl. Some sat on branches, watching, others shifted back into their more human forms. Jeronimus was the last to flap down, dropping to the ground, a stub-fisted shadow, smiling from ear to ear.
“Hello, Kaycee,” he said.
“That's not my name,” she said. “Not out here.”
“It was always your name. It will always be your name. Kaycee Looes. Daughter of Wade Looes. Last and furthest descendant of Wouter Looes. We've waited a long time for you, Kaycee. A lot of years.”
“A
lot
of years,” hooted one of the other shadows.
“And now we can right the four-hundred-year-old wrong. Can you help us do that?”
The pretty little girl in the purple pajamas shook her head. “No.”
Jeronimus leaned in, inches from her face. “Too bad you don't get a say in the matter.”
S
EVERAL KUTJI LANDED
in the swamp just ahead of Colby and Mandu, running toward them at alarming speeds.
“Colby!” shouted Mandu. “The trees! Take to the trees!”
Colby knew exactly what he meant. He felt out for the trees, sensed their connections. A kutji leaped into the air, claws out, raking at Colby. It came down, inches from him, a heartbeat away from striking. Then Colby vanished, running headlong into a tree and out another twenty feet away.
He was alone now, his legs burning, aching, barely able to carry him. And he ran into another tree. And another. And another.
The kutji couldn't keep up.
The ridge was only a few tree hops away now.
Behind him he heard the screams of the chittering mob, but dared not look back.
Run
, he thought.
Just keep running.
Another tree. And then another.
And then the ground was different. He looked down, saw the rock beneath his feet.
Colby had made it to the ridge.
He turned, looked back to see Mandu just below him in the swamp, running into a tree of his own. Then he felt the
WHOOSH
of air as Mandu blew past him, turning as he did and slowing to a stop. Both doubled over in agony, trying to catch their breath. Colby, hands on his knees for support, looked up for the little girl in the purple pajamas, but she was nowhere nearby.
He looked out farther, then farther still, and finally he saw her, swarmed with maddened kutji, too numerous for her to escape. “KAYCEE!” he screamed. She looked up, as scared as he'd ever seen her, held out a pleading arm, begging him to come back.
Colby ran for the nearest tree, but Mandu put out a stiff arm and stopped him cold.
“You can't,” said Mandu, panting.
“They're going to kill her.”
“Not tonight they aren't.”
“We have to help her!”
“We can't.” He pointed to the edge of the ridge. Below them stood a half dozen furious kutji, braying madly, but refusing to take another step. “We're in Arnhem now. You pass that ridge, they will kill you.”
“We can't leave her.”
“We have to. It is the choice she made. I told you both it would come to this. I told you at the campfire. If she followed, it would not end well. If she didn't go home, she would die before she returned to her body. She
chose
this. This was what she has worked so long and hard for.”
“No! That's not fair.”
“Not all destinies are fair, Colby. Hers isn't, yours isn't. We get the lives we choose, even when we don't know we're making a choice.”
Colby and the little girl stared at each other across the wide gulf of the swamp, both with tears in their eyes. “I don't leave my friends.”
“This time you do.”
“We're staying.”
“Colby, what's about to happen, you don't want to see. I've seen it. And it will haunt me for as long as I live. Don't do this. Come.”
“No. I'm notâ”
“Come, before you see something you can never unsee.” Mandu looked out over the valley ahead of them in Arnhem. “I have something to show you. Something very important.”
Colby turned, crying. “But, Manduâ”
“I have seen many versions of tonight in my dreams. There is one in which you didn't make it up here. And another in which you went back. They both end the same. Those were terrible dreams. Please, let them remain dreams. Come on.”
Colby turned back to the swamps, sobbing, raising a hand to wave good-bye to his friend.
Below, the pretty little girl in the purple pajamas simply watched him, stunned, unable to speak.
Then Colby turned around one last time and walked sadly into Arnhem with Mandu.
T
he shadows watched as Colby vanished into the forest, out of their reach.
The pretty little girl in the purple pajamas couldn't watch. She stood crestfallen, defeated, eyes cast to the ground. “Are you going to kill me?” she asked.
Jeronimus shook his head. “We don't have to. You already did the heavy lifting on that for us. You'll be dead any day now for sure. We just have to wait for your body to die.”
“Where is it?”
“In the hospital where we left it. You're on machines. But they'll pull the plug any day now.”
The tears began to flow steadier now and she sobbed openly into her hands. “And what will happen to me then?”
“You'll become one of us. And then we can all move on.”
“My dad won't let that happen.”
Jeronimus smiled wickedly. “He doesn't have a choice.” He gave a shrill whistle, nodding to a pack of kutji standing behind her.
Out from the pack emerged a single shadow, larger than the others, its limbs long and lanky, having died in much different light than the others. She knew exactly who it was, could feel him, feel his pain, knew it was once her father. Wade.
She fell to her knees, weeping. Destroyed. “No! Dad!”
“Your friends are gone,” said Jeronimus. “Your family is gone. There is only us now. Shadows! Show her what will happen if she tries to run away!”
They descended upon her with a ravenous fury, kicking, hitting, scratching, clawing. They beat her mercilessly. But she wouldn't budge; she wouldn't flinch. In fact, she didn't move at all. Nor even blink. She just knelt there, thinking about her father. The blows landed but she couldn't feel them. Hits as strong as the kutji could throw glanced off perfect, radiant skin leaving nary a mark.
She growled, shaking her head at the shadows around her. Slowly, but surely, the ferocity waned, each shadow backing away until none was close enough to hit her anymore.
Then the pretty little girl in the purple pajamas stood up, taking one step toward Jeronimus. “I lied to Colby,” she said hatefully, taking another step. “I told him what he wanted to hear. I'm not Kaycee. Not here. Here I get to be whoever I want to be. I'm taller here. Faster here. Stronger here. And here . . . no one can hit me. No one can hurt me. Especially not you.” She strode up to Jeronimus, her eyes bitter, staring down at him as he looked bravely up at her.
“You have no idea what we canâ”
She grabbed his forehead with a single hand, pushing it all the way back on his neck, his mouth open wide and screaming. Then she jammed her fist down his throat, her arm going in all the way to the elbow, grabbed hold of his innards and tugged, turning his soul inside out. Hands gripped tight, she pulled him apart, piece by piece, tearing him to shreds as the kutji shrieked and howled around her like terrified monkeys. Jeronimus was torn into twenty pieces before his pleading stopped and the remains scattered to the ground, melting away into the darkness around them.
And then he was gone.
The kutji went berserk, leaping around frantically, waving their arms, shaking their fists, as confused as they were angry.
“QUIET!” she boomed, her voice echoing through the swamp like an explosion.
The kutji stopped, held in place by sheer terror.
“On your knees. NOW!”
They fell obediently to their knees.
“Who am I?” she asked.
They looked around at one another, murmuring a dozen unintelligible answers.
“Who?” she demanded of them again.
“You're Kaycee Looes,” said one of them. Several others nodded in agreement.
“No. Kaycee Looes is in a bed somewhere. I am your Queen. And you serve me now.”
The kutji eyed one another, hoping for boldness out of one of their companions. But none came.
“We have business,” she said. “I promise never to kill you like I did your master. And you swear, here and now, that you serve me and obey my every command. And no one, not a one of you, ever touches me again.”
One of the kutji near her shook his head. “No. We do not swear.” She attacked far quicker than before, shredding him before he could stand up again. His tattered remnants evaporated in the night.
“Swear!”
“We swear,” they said in unison.
“What do you swear?”
“To serve and obey your every command and never, ever touch you again.”
The pretty little girl in the purple pajamas smiled brutally. She walked over to the shadow that was once Wade Looes, took him by the hand, helped him to his feet. “Dad, what did they do to you?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I did it myself, darlin'. This is what we are. It is what you and I are supposed to be.”
“No. This is not what we are. We're better than this. Better than them. And starting tonight, we prove it.”
“What are we going to do?”
She looked out into the outback, took a deep breath. “We're going to make sure no one ever does anything like this to anyone else again.”
L
arge boulders stood erect, upright in the dirt, dozens of them, perhaps a hundred such stones, the soft tinkling notes of a song ringing sweetly between them. A campfire, tall and bright, blazed coolly within their center. And before that fire sat a devil woman, her flesh pale, her hair a flat black. She had no eyes, just smooth skin where the sockets should be, and a handful of crooked, rotten teeth clinging desperately to puss-dripping gums. She sat cross-legged, grinding plums on a large, polished doughnut of a stone. It was clear that the stone had been ground down in just that manner, worn from centuries of grinding plums against it. In a pile below the stone sat an ever growing sludge of delicious-looking purple pulp.
From out of the desert it came, a whirlwind, a dust devil the size of a tree. It twisted furiously across the plum-pit-strewn sands, coming to a rest on the opposite side of the fire from the old witch. As the winds died down, the dust became a man, large, fat, sweatyâstill as tall as a treeâhis curly hair matted, colored red by the outback he'd picked up along the way. His skin was clay, his eyes like polished onyx.
The eyeless she-devil paid him no mind, instead continuing to grind plums on her stone, tossing away the pits in a different direction each time.
“Oy!” said the desert man. “Marm.”
“I know you, willy-willy,” she said, her voice like wind whistling through dried leather straps. “There's no need to shout. You don't belong here. That song was not for you.”
“It's a beautiful song, though.”
“Yeah, it is. But not yours.”
