“I can see where we’re going,” the gypsy offered, “Follow me and we will be fine.”
The gypsy was at the front of the line, only a pace in front of Collette. The tunnel we were shuffling through was barely shoulder width in length and we could only go in one at a time. Frank was in front of me and Damien was at my back; though maybe I should have taken up the rear, given that I had magick I could throw around should it come to it.
Had I been so lost in thought I had forgotten to even protest when Damien urged me to walk in front of him into the tunnel?
“Collette,” I asked.
“Yes?” Her voice was weak. Soft.
“If it knows we are here, can it… manipulate us? Our thoughts?”
“I do not know. But it is not impossible. This is its natural domain.”
Fuck.
It knows. There would be no element of surprise for us. Worse, it would have time to prepare, to plan out a defense. To carefully arrange its resources so that we would walk right into whatever trap it wanted us to. Now, walking through the tunnel, surrounded on all sides by impassable rock, I felt the weight of fate descending on my shoulders once more.
The night I cast a hex on my old boyfriend was the night I set the wheels of fate in motion, and since then my decisions had not been my own. Everything that had happened to me and that would happen to me in the hours, nights, and months to come was decided long ago—and I’ve just been going with the flow ever since. Rolling with the punches.
Sure, I had learned a few things along the way and made some friends I wouldn’t otherwise have made. But, maybe I would have made them anyway. Maybe they, too, were destined to be here in this tunnel with me right now. What if they, too, had done something to get on Fate’s shitlist just as I had?
I felt it now like a solid truth as impossible to deny as the heat of the sun, and as heavy as all of its incredible mass. The tunnel was a metaphor. I could not side-step Fate, only go forward along the path until… until the path opened. And it had to open somewhere. I had to be given a choice sometime.
Everybody has a choice.
Then, suddenly, the path opened. I felt it first in the widening of the tunnel. My shoulders were no longer caressing the rough rock walls to my side and the air wafting into my nose and mouth tasted a little less like old sofa. Then, as I stretched my arms on either side of my body, I noticed my vision starting to come.
The world was black at first, but then it slid from black into dark blue, and the black now had shape and form. And through the darkness I noted spots of… gold? Spots of gold light surrounded by halos of pale yellow were starting to show at the far end of the cavern. Windows. They were windows!
The pale squares of light – they looked like squares now – though dim gave the building they were nestled in a shape I could identify. Tall and grandiose, a monolithic building stood out of the darkness like a beacon and I wanted to run to it. I was like a person who had been lost in the woods for days only to stumble onto a house with light, people, power, and food inside.
But Damien grabbed my arm before I could move. Frank, too, shot me a guarded look that said careful without saying a word.
“Collette?” I asked.
She stared, wide eyed, at the structure and almost went back a pace or two. I had to grab her hand and pull her steady to stop her from tipping over. Part shock, part weakness. I worried for her. She really didn’t have much time left and if we were going to do this we had to do it now, and we were only going to get one shot at doing it too.
“What is it?” I asked.
“The house,” she said. “The house, I know zis place.”
“You do?”
She nodded.
“Zis is ze boarding school I spent most of my teen years in. My parents sent me to Switzerland when I was a girl to study privately. But I… while I ‘ave not seen zis building in real life for many years, I see it in my nightmares.”
“What’s an old Swiss school doing in the middle of the Continental United States?” Frank asked.
“Ze underworld does not conform to our understanding of geography. It is what it needs to be, where it needs to be.”
Collette let out a cough so hard it sucked the breath out of her lungs.
“Damien,” I said, “Take her.”
Damien took Collette’s hand and sat her down on the ground. He sat with her, enjoying the opportunity to rest up for a moment—even if it was only for a moment. I watched him offer her a bottle of water and she downed the whole thing. It was as if she hadn’t taken a sip in days.
“Collette, do you know why this Shadow of yours is showing us this building?” I asked.
She shook her head, but her eyes… I knew she didn’t want to tell. This wasn’t exactly the time to start keeping secrets, but it also wasn’t the time to go asking for explanations. Shit.
“Frank?” I asked.
“I say we go in,” he said. “If it knows we’re here it would have tried to kill us already—if it could.”
I didn’t need to hear anymore.
I turned to Damien, knelt next to him and Collette, and looked at them both. “I need you to stay here,” I said.
Damien’s eyes widened in alarm. “What? You can’t go in there by yourself.”
“I’m not,” I said, “I’m taking Frank with me. But Collette can’t move. I don’t want to risk hurting her and we don’t have a lot of time. If we’re going to find this thing I need to get in there and get back out fast. You need to be the one to protect Collette until we’re done.”
Collette gave me her solemn, weak eyes. She knew I was right. “You have done so much for me,” she said, “I have put you through so much already.”
I nodded. “And I need you alive so that you can help me like you promised, so you need to stay here.”
“I will go with you,” the gypsy woman said.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
She nodded. “You need a guide still, and I have nothing here.”
I stood up. “Alright,” I said, “Damien, if you see any sign of trouble, run back to the river. We’ll meet you there. Otherwise… we’ll be right back.”
Damien nodded and the three of us – Frank, the gypsy and myself – broke off and made tracks toward the building.
CHAPTER 21
We approached the wrought iron fence which though crooked and dilapidated encircled the entirety of the manse like a suit of armor. At the fence’s center there was a gate, and it was ajar. Beyond the gate, standing tall amidst a section of picnic tables and benches, there was a tree. A tire swing hung listlessly from its branches, swaying against a non-existent wind.
I hadn’t even stepped into the manse and my heart was running.
“Amber?” Frank noticed I had stopped moving. He came up beside me and looked over the park, saw the swaying tire, and also stood still.
“C’mon, let’s get this over with.”
Frank and I went across the front yard toward the building but I noticed our trio of footsteps had become a duet. I stopped and turned around and found Madame Aishe staring at the side of the building. Reading her emotional state wasn’t difficult—she wore her emotions on her sleeve—but the intensity of her emotions threw me off. Instead of worry I saw outright dread on her face. Instead of fear, terror. It seemed as though she was incapable of expressing mild emotion, but if what I had learned about ghosts was true, it wasn’t surprising.
I wasn’t a stranger to TV documentaries about paranormal investigators prodding around in the dark with cameras, digital recorders, and a whole host of gadgets with the sole intention of capturing evidence of the paranormal. They filmed in infra-red, giving the show a spooky night-time feel and often times caught strange and inexplicable voices and flying orbs on camera. I had never done any of that myself but it was something that had always fascinated me.
Maybe if I had a friend who was into paranormal investigation I may have given it a try, but I never did. So I settled for enjoying the
TV shows whenever they were on, some of them were good, others were downright awful. Especially those which featured “mediums” who could connect with the dead; every spirit was evil, to them, and every evil spirit was a demon.
A lot of it, I thought, was just dramatization—for the cameras, you know. But the field of paranormal investigation was a big one. Hundreds of thousands of people were into it, and many, many more bought into the theories they put out there. One such theory was that a ghost wasn’t so much the spirit of a person, but the echo of that person’s passions. If that was true, it explained why the gypsy seemed terror-struck and totally rooted to the spot where I had only been slightly fazed by what I had seen. The question was, then; what had she seen?
I walked up to her, took her by the hand, and she looked at me. For a moment I thought she was going to scream. She opened her mouth wide, her eyes too. I wanted to back up, to flinch, but I didn’t. I held my ground and comforted her. Told her that I was here, that it was okay.
The gypsy calmed down and nodded. “I am sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
I shook my head. “It’s fine,” I said, “What did you see?”
Now she shook her head. “I would rather not say. But we should get inside.”
“Please,” I said, “I need you to tell me what you saw.”
I turned my gaze upward to try and make out what she had seen but was met with windows and concrete. Some of the windows were dimly lit, others pitch black. Some windows, I saw, had burst open from the inside, and that sent a hundred tiny hands crawling up my back. A set of cream curtains had spilt out of the broken window and was also swaying with a breeze imperceptible to my own flesh.
Had she seen someone standing in one of those windows?
No time to think about that now. I tugged on her arm and we headed up the small stony steps leading to the oaken front door of the building. It was faded coffee with black iron flourishes and a set of golden door knobs tarnished with time. I thought they looked like stars that had burned out; still bright, reminiscent of a younger time, but smaller now, pale and dead.
What, I wondered, would be waiting for us on the other side? Would this Shadow play the subtle game and let us wander before ensnaring us in its trap? Or would it reach out and grab me the moment I turned the knob? My heart was racing, hammering now. I could feel it in my temples, the palms of my hands, and even in my shoulders.
I grabbed one of the knobs and turned, not stopping to wonder if the door would be locked or not. As I expected the door gave way with a groan and a stale breath rushed out to greet me. Hello, it would have said, I’ve been expecting you. But I stepped on inside ahead of Frank and the gypsy and stared at the wonderful décor around me.
There was light in here. It cascaded dimly from candles suspended high up along the ceiling. The light was too high and too dim to show outside, but inside it cast playful shadows around the walls and over the floors and exaggerated the different features I could see before me.
A grandfather clock stood to my right along a wall, ticking away at a slow tempo – slower than what I would have expected a second to have been. Beside the clock I noted a beautiful end table – brown and rimmed with gold – and a tall brass vase, empty save for the broken remains of an umbrella. And along each wall there were gothic, black light fixtures, all devoid of bulbs.
Frank and Madame Aishe entered the house behind me and the door roared shut before they could speak. The candles in the ceiling fixture burned bright and hot, so much so that wax was starting to drip from them. Then the light fixtures on the walls lit up, despite the lack of bulb.
I staggered back, closer to Frank and the gypsy woman. We stared in silence for a moment while the activity around us ceased, and it did. There was light, now. We could see easily enough, though the light was ghostly and pale. A dull brown instead of gold. It was like looking at the world through a sepia lens.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Frank said. The gypsy also nodded.
“Alright,” I said, “We’d better get going and find this thing. Collette doesn’t have enough time.”
I had barely taken three steps into the hallway when a loud crackling sound caught my attention. The crackling was replaced by an electronic static, then by the whirring sound you might hear in the space between radio stations. Then the sounds quieted down, and someone spoke.
“Welcome,” said the voice. It was mechanical, distant, but feminine. I couldn’t find the source of it but I got the distinct impression that the voice was coming out of some kind of old PA system, out of speakers built into the wall somewhere. A distant, echoed laugh. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Who are you?” I asked into the ceiling.
“Who am I? But you already know, don’t you red witch?”
Frank nudged me and we continued to walk down the hall. “You’re the Shadow,” I said, “You realize that you’re killing her, don’t you?”
“Oh but I do,” it said, “Unfortunately, you mistake me for an entity that cares.”
“You should care. If she dies, you do.”
“And you know this… how?” more and more the voice was beginning to sound like Collette—that delicate, sweet, soft voice of hers. Like honeyed silk, only without the French accent.
“There are rules,” I said, “Rules that not even you can avoid.”
“Yes, rules, indeed. But every game has different rules and this is a game you, my dear, have never played before.”
“Why don’t you come out and show me how to play, then?”
“All in due time, red witch. First, I would like you to become better acquainted with my mansion. Meet my guests. Drink some wine, eat some croissants. Please, make yourselves at home. You are, after all, not leaving anytime soon.”
“I could tear this whole house down if I wanted to,” I said, my voice low and threatening.
“Ah, but you won’t. Because then you’d be killing all of them, too.”
“All of who?”
When we turned the corner into the parlor I saw them.
CHAPTER 22
The parlor was easily three floors high with a veranda that ran all along the left beyond which I could see the closed doors leading to other bedrooms. The room was easily as long as a regulation size tennis court, at the end of which sat a fireplace that could eat a car. But the size of the place wasn’t what struck me. It was the amount of people standing around. Some were sitting at the oaken table which stretched for miles across the room. Others were standing by the stacks, some leaning over the veranda, and others, still, sitting on arm chairs arranged around circular tables. Their faces, every last one of them, were glassy and expressionless. None of them moved or spoke. They were like statues, save for the odd twitch or blink.
“As you can see,” said the voice, “If you tear this mansion down, you seal the fate of every last soul in here. And I know you care, don’t you red witch?”
“I don’t owe these people anything,” I said.
“And yet you care nonetheless. This is part of your humanity, a trait I do not possess.”
“Why are you showing me this?” I said.
“Because I want you to see what I am doing here. I want to show you the extent of my power, my influence. I want to offer you something.”
“Offer me what?”
“Linezka.”
My heart jumped into my throat, squeezing my windpipe and taking away my ability to breathe. I turned to Frank in search of guidance, but he could only mouth the words “I don’t know.”
“Ah, Frank,” said the voice, “When I see you, I don’t see a pawn. I see a Rooke. Or a Bishop, maybe. The wise one, the guide. Unfaltering, unwavering. I see experience, a man who has tasted the darkness and returned – whole – to warn the world about it.”
“Oh stop it,” Frank said, in a mock voice. “You’re gonna make me blush.”
“I can bring them both back, Frank,” said the voice. “Although m
aybe this would be a gift you can share with Damien.”
Frank’s eyes darted around the room. For a moment, a split second, I saw his composure crack. I heard what the voice had said, I knew what it had just implied. It was talking about Joanna and Lily. Lily was Damien’s sister but the pair of girls were Frank’s best friends. His coven.
I took Frank by the elbow and squeezed, shaking my head. “Fuck you,” Frank said. “You’re gonna have to do better than that if you want to play with my head, you twisted little piece of shit.”
“You would stop insulting me if you could only see past your own perceptions of what is possible and what isn’t. Even you don’t know just how vast the world is, how powerful magick really is.”
“We’re done talking,” I said, “Show yourself and face us or I’ll tear this place apart – I swear to the Gods.”
Silence, now. My heart was racing, my skin was on fire, and the Power was coursing through me ready to strike. Would I really tear this place down? Probably not. I doubted I could so much as start a campfire with my mind or fling an arm chair from one side of the room to the other. Not without succumbing to extreme exhaustion. But I bluffed all the same.
“Think about my offers,” said the voice. “Just, think about it.”
A screech, a crack, and the voice was gone. It was like the Shadow had just… hung up on us. And there was no way to trace the call.
I turned to Madame Aishe. “Do you know who these people are?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I believe they are lost souls,” she said, examining the closest one – a man in his thirties with a pair of broken spectacles and a white buttoned shirt on. “I do not recognize them, but they look… like they’re spellbound.”
No one was moving. They truly were like statues. I passed in front of many of them, staring into their glassy eyed faces, and got nothing from them. No intelligence, no emotion, no movement. It was a strange thing to see the dead look even more dead. How was it even possible?
But it was. The Shadow was magick, and its power was necromantic – power over the dead. This thing had all of these ghosts under its control, and if I didn’t act fast it would take Madame Aishe too. But there was something else, too, something that Frank noticed.