A narrow access road wound through the cemetery grounds, the asphalt old and cracked. They’d replaced the trees but couldn’t be bothered to repair the road? Cheap-ass bastards. The road was only wide enough for one car to drive on, but there was no one else in the cemetery – at least, she couldn’t see any other vehicles – so she didn’t have to worry about having to pull off to the side so another car could pass. More importantly, she wouldn’t have to worry about anyone seeing her here. No one would know who she was or why she’d come, but she still didn’t want any eyes on her. This was going to be hard enough as it was. She didn’t need a goddamned audience.

The headstones were of different sizes and fashioned from different colors of stone. Most were in the typical rectangular shape, but some were shaped like larger obelisks or spires, and others were more stylized in design, carved to resemble a heart or – in one extremely depressing case – a cradle. The headstone she was looking for was a modest one. No pictures of angels carved onto its face, no sentiments like Always in our hearts or Gone to be with the Lord. Just gray rock with simple letters and numbers etched in its surface.

And there it was.

Up to this point, Lori hadn’t felt much of anything. She’d been numb, operating on autopilot, desperately trying not to think about Katie holding the mutilated body of the dead cat out to her.

Want some?

But now that the grave – Aashrita’s grave – was in sight, she felt a lance of pain behind her right eye. The first sign of a stress-induced migraine, she thought. The rain wasn’t helping either. It always played hell with her sinuses.

She parked her car and got out, leaving her purse on the passenger seat. She had a small umbrella in the glove box, but she left it where it was. The rain wasn’t coming down that hard, and it was cool but not cold out. She had a red windbreaker in the back seat, but she didn’t want to have anything to do with that color right now, so she left it, too. As rain hit her – especially her uncovered head and bare arms – she hoped the sensation would provide a kind of buffer that would insulate her from her emotions. So many awful things had happened to her since Goat-Eyes had first approached her in the grocery store, but none of them was worse than this was going to be.

She stepped onto the grass, careful to avoid walking across people’s graves as she made her way to Aashrita’s headstone. She did this out of a quasi-superstitious politeness more than from any actual belief she would be disrespecting the spirits of the dead by tramping on their graves. But given everything she’d experienced since last night, she figured better safe than sorry.

Her bad knee always ached when it rained, and it throbbed now, buckling a little with every step. She was grateful for this pain, too. It was an old friend, and as such was – in a weird way – a comfort to her now. The pain wouldn’t serve as a distraction from her thoughts about Aashrita, though. How could it, considering Aashrita had been there when she’d sustained the injury responsible for that pain?

She was surprised to see one of the new, skinny trees had been planted close to Aashrita’s grave. Too close, she thought. The base of the trunk was less than a yard from the headstone. As the tree grew, would its roots grow around Aashrita’s burial vault, or would they worm their way through tiny cracks in the concrete, widening them until they’d breached the vault and could slither toward the casket – and its occupant? When Lori reached Aashrita’s grave, she stepped off to the side to avoid standing on her friend’s resting place, body angled so she could face the headstone. Fifteen years of exposure to the elements had worn the edges of the letters and numbers somewhat, but they were still easily legible. AASHRITA DHAWAN. That was all, aside from her birth and death dates. There was no sign anyone had visited the grave recently. There were no flowers, and the grass could use some trimming. Lori wondered if the sound of a lawnmower would disturb the dead’s sleep, or if they would welcome sounds of life, however impersonal those sounds might be. She felt an urge then to say hello to Aashrita, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so.

She felt memories pushing at the threshold of her consciousness, demanding that she pay attention to them. But she’d spent so many years suppressing them – sometimes so successfully that she forgot Aashrita had ever existed – that she was afraid to let them in. She feared they’d overwhelm her, inundate her, drown her….

She experienced a powerful urge to run back to her car, get in, drive away, and never look back. But she forced herself to remain where she was, forced herself not to look away from Aashrita’s headstone.

Start with one memory, she told herself. Just one.

She closed her eyes and waited for a single memory to emerge from the roiling maelstrom in her mind.

* * *

She opened her eyes and gazed upon the face of a man without any eyes of his own.

“Have you figured it out yet?” the Driver asked.

In the light cast by the mass of firebabies slowly swirling above her, she saw the Driver held a knife large enough to be a machete, the blade slick with blood. Her blood, judging by the fiery lines of pain that crisscrossed her naked body.

There was no way he could see her take in the knife, but he said, “I didn’t have time to clean it off after cutting that cat in two before using it on you. Sorry. You might want to put some antibiotic ointment on those cuts later.”

“If you don’t die from blood loss first,” Goat-Eyes put in.

“Excellent point,” the Driver conceded.

The woman stood on the Driver’s right. She wore a metal gauntlet on her left hand, needle-like spines covering the fingers. The spines, like the Driver’s blade, dripped with blood. Rauch stood on the Driver’s left, his neck gills opening and closing so fast they buzzed like a hummingbird’s wings. He held a flail that looked as if it had been made from the craggy gray skin of some reptilian creature. It too was streaked with blood.

She looked past her three tormentors and saw the crimson-robed figures of the Cabal standing shoulder to shoulder on the tower’s upward-curving spiral, observing her with silent intensity. She tried to move her arms and legs, felt the shackles’ restraint, heard the chains rattle.

“I was in the cemetery,” she said, her voice a soft dry rasp.

The Driver smiled.

“There’s nowhere you can go that we can’t find you.”

“Not even death would permit you to escape us,” Goat-Eyes added.

“You’re ours until we release you,” Rauch said.

“And we won’t do that until the Intercessor is satisfied,” the Driver finished.

He turned to face the assembled Cabal, raised his hands high above his head, and shouted, “Everyone?”

Hundreds of the red-robed mystics spoke through the firebabies in a single thunderous voice, their words so loud Lori felt the X-cross vibrate against her body.

“Confess and atone – or suffer.”

Lori spoke again, her voice louder and clearer this time. Her words still came out as barely more than a whisper, but she had no doubt the entire Cabal could hear her.

“Tell me what I did and I’ll fix it…if I can.”

The Cabal was silent for several long moments, and then the chamber was filled with the roar of riotous laughter.

The Driver, Goat-Eyes, and Rauch were laughing too as they raised their implements of torture and stepped toward her. Seconds later, her screams joined the thundering cacophony of sound within the Vermilion Tower.

* * *

She woke to wet and cold. Aashrita’s headstone lay in front of her, but something was wrong with it. It lay sideways, as if someone had knocked it over. Had she done that? She didn’t remember going close enough to the headstone to touch it, let alone shove it onto its side. And even if for some bizarre reason she’d wanted to knock it over, the thing was made of solid stone. No way was she strong enough to….

That’s when she realized she was lying on the ground. The headstone wasn’t sideways. She was. She remembered being in the Vermilion Tower again, and for an instant she felt the pain of the wounds that had been inflicted on her there. She was about to scream, but the pain receded so swiftly that within an instant it was as if she’d never experienced it at all. She pushed herself into a sitting position with trembling arms and attempted to wipe water from her eyes and face, but the rain was still coming down and her actions accomplished nothing.

She had been dragged back to the tower in the middle of the day without having to fall asleep first. If the Cabal could pull her there whenever they wanted, what would happen if they did so while she was driving? It wasn’t as if she’d had any warning. One moment she was conscious, the next she was manacled to that goddamned X-cross again. If she passed out while behind the wheel, she’d wreck, injuring herself and possibly others. That was a really nasty new wrinkle to this game.

And that’s what it was beginning to feel like to her – a game. A sick one with life-or-death consequences, but a game nevertheless. One that she was being forced to play without knowing the rules. She thought of how the Cabal had laughed when she’d asked them to just tell her what they wanted her to do. Maybe, she thought, her not knowing the rules was part of the game, too. If so, it was an even shittier game than she’d thought.

She stood, legs weak, but they supported her. She’d been out in the rain long enough that she was soaked from head to toe, and she wondered how long she’d been unconscious, how much time had passed in the real world compared to within the Vermilion Tower. She supposed the details didn’t matter much, but then again, maybe the details were all that mattered in this game. How could she know? She was grateful she hadn’t passed out during her conversation with Reeny. Her sister would’ve been on the phone to nine-one-one within seconds, and Lori would likely have woken up in a hospital.

She looked at Aashrita’s headstone once more, focused on the letters that comprised her name. She needed to remember everything about Aashrita, not just that day at soccer practice when she’d been the goalie and Lori had fucked up her knee, destroying any chance at a college soccer career. She recalled the details of that day without difficulty. It was what had happened in the days and weeks afterward that mattered, she was sure of it. If only she could fucking remember.

She lowered her gaze to read the information beneath Aashrita’s name. Birth date, death date. Aashrita had died when she was seventeen. They’d been the same age – their birthdays were only six weeks apart – so that meant Aashrita had died during their senior year of high school. That sounded familiar, more like the memory of a memory than the thing itself, though. What had the cause been? Accident? Illness? Suicide?

Migraine pain erupted in her head, so intense and crippling that she fell to her knees once more. She clapped her hands to her head and squeezed, as if trying to keep the contents of her brain from exploding outward. Through the agony, she thought, Guess suicide it is.

She hoped this realization would be the key to unlock the rest of her memories about Aashrita’s death, but she experienced no sudden influx of images and emotions, no tidal wave of data crashing into her with psyche-obliterating force. There was nothing.

I’m sorry, Aashrita. She meant this to be an apology for forgetting how her friend had died, but she sensed there was more to it than that. Much more. Before she could explore this feeling further, though, she caught a flash of black out of the corner of her eye.

Oh no.

She didn’t want to look, but she knew she had to. She directed her gaze at the slender tree next to Aashrita’s headstone, saw a shadow creature clinging to the thin limbs like an ebon spider, looking at her with its featureless dark face. Another flash of black, and she turned to see a second shadow creature half-crouched behind a neighboring headstone, long multijointed fingers folded over the top of the stone, sharp black nails clicking against it in eager anticipation. Within moments, a dozen more of the things were visible, most partly hiding among old headstones and young trees, but some standing out in the open, clawed hands at their sides, held slightly away from their bodies like Wild West gunslingers ready to draw on a foe.

Lori got to her feet, turned, and ran toward her Civic. Her shoes slipped on the wet grass, but she managed to keep from falling. She’d left the car unlocked, and when she ran around to the driver’s side, she opened it, threw herself inside, pulled it shut, and locked it behind her. She hadn’t looked back to see if the shadow things had pursued her, but of course they had. They closed in on her car from all sides and slammed into it en masse. The vehicle rocked back and forth, and she screamed. The sound of her terror seemed to energize the shadow things further, whipping them into a frenzy. They began slapping, punching, clawing at her windows, doing so with motions so rapid it sounded as if her car were being bombarded with baseball-sized hailstones. Up close, in the gray light of the overcast rainy day, the shadow things appeared even more awful than they had in her apartment last night. They’d seemed dreamlike then, things that existed half in nightmare, half in the real world. But now they fully inhabited the waking world, the contours of their forms clear, their dark substance possessing depth and a certain fluid solidity, as if they were formed from living, animated oil. Horrible black faces smooth, without even the suggestion of eyes, noses, or mouths, hatred radiating off them like heat from a blazing inferno. Their voices – sound issuing from nonexistent mouths – were like the violent crashing of waves against an arctic shore, the howling shriek of gale-force winds tearing across a midnight desert, the deep rumbling crack of stone being rent asunder by vast seismic forces…. If these voices spoke words, she couldn’t discern them, heard only raw, malignant rage, the entirety of it directed at her. And just as last night, she began to feel strength flowing out of her, and she realized with horror that the shadow things were somehow feeding on her, siphoning away her life bit by bit.