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.
