The Umbral Wake Read online

  “I don’t know where he went. Idiot took off down the hall. Maybe he just wanted to get away from us.”

  His hands shaking, Scribble grabbed items without even really looking at them anymore. He felt a strap and pulled. A backpack. Unzipping it, he dumped the contents, pencils, pens, papers, notebooks, all falling onto the floor. So many things to draw with, and for once he didn’t care. He shoveled the treasure into the bag, nearly laughing at the small window of luck. Another clunk sounded from behind him, and then another, as the doors began to close, blocking his return one by one.

  “Well let’s go then. I figured he couldn’t hack this place. He’s got thirty seconds.” The voices were barely audible. Then yelling. “You hear that Chimp? Thirty… no. Twenty five seconds.”

  I hear you, he thought. But just barely. The voices grew fainter as each door closed and latched.

  Sealing his bag, Scribble jumped up, spun, and reached for the doorknob. It refused to turn.

  Scribble gripped it with both hands, twisting it, his jaw hanging open, panting. The doorknob was frozen, maybe even locked from the other side. He kicked at the door, pounded it with his fists, hoping someone might hear him. But the door was thick and insulated, each impact dulled like pounding on stone.

  Clunk.

  “He wasn’t much good anyway,” said Emil, his voice coming from a million miles away.

  Clunk.

  Tears streaming down his cheeks, Scribble pressed his ear against the smooth surface, listening to the click and latch of the doors. Even the sound of his own breathing was louder than the doors now. Collapsing against the pile of treasure, he listened in darkness to the heavy thunk of metal bolts and dull ratcheting as Emil closed the outside door, sealing him inside the lab forever.

  Chapter 20

  In-Between

  SOMETHING GURGLED AND Lyle twitched. He could never be sure where the gurgle came from, whether it was his own infected lungs, or if it was the sound of machines. But the sound was always followed by pain.

  In the past, in what seemed now like a former life, he had resorted to self-flagellation, a way to punish his own flesh, feed the beast of guilt and regret that he felt hanging over his shoulder. He would use rope, a belt, chains, anything to draw blood, even his own nails. The pain reminded him that the flesh was weak, subject to temptation and impulse. Now, it seemed, that urge was gone, the pain there always.

  He chose to sink beneath the abyss instead—trapped in a glass cube up here or down there didn’t matter to the Reverend. It was all the same. Pain. Fear. Thrashing.

  The problem with the Down There was that it was infested. Demons roamed, attached to men and women, growing from their backs like tree limbs and tentacles. Interestingly enough, many of the people with this affliction were often times consumed by them. But they could not touch Lyle.

  The Reverend watched them from his glass submersible, watched them tumble from the sky as they fell, watched them pass from one world to the next. Many times they recovered, stood, looked around, and left. But others were lost, hollow, afraid.

  Lyle tried to communicate with them, tried to purge those demons the only way he knew how, by calling them out, speaking their own language. This was not some arcane language of devils, but plain English. He told them exactly what their demons wanted to hear. To his amazement, the demons responded like snakes to a charmer’s flute. They rose out of the victims, drawn to Lyle.

  And yet they could not hurt him.

  It seemed painful to the victims. The Reverend could relate. It was always painful to him. Painful but necessary. Some screamed, cried, begged, and in the end he always told them the same thing: “Give yourself unto me. Let me purge the demons.”

  And as they let go, submitting to him, Lyle felt his own beast grow stronger. It fed on them, swelling with sated delight. Often times it terrified him, as if he were riding the back of some monstrous being, a dragon he could not control.

  “I am not strong enough, Lord,” he would mutter. “I am one man marching into battle against an army of multitudes. I cannot defeat them alone.”

  “You will not be alone,” said a voice. Lyle wasn’t sure whether it was a voice of angels, God, or someone else. The words simply appeared in his mind. More confusing were the words spoken after: “Get the scribe. Record everything he says.”

  “What scribe?” Lyle said and felt himself sinking again into that kaleidoscope of shifting images, places real enough to touch. But every time he opened his eyes he found himself encased in glass.

  Always glass. Always a prisoner.

  But it was better to be a prisoner with power than a prisoner in pain. So Lyle chose the Down Below and continued to move along the backs of his throng as they carried him through this strange dream.

  He saw disfigured people, the sort of people who had only existed in his paintings until now. They gave him a wide birth, many of them running from his proxies, locking their strange doors and shuttering their windows as his congregation lurched through their streets.

  Some got away. They ran faster than he could move. They would not listen to his words—and words were the only real power Lyle had in the Down Below.

  The sky was a window to the world of the living. He peered into those lives seen through the cracks in walls, the shadows beneath doors. Lyle watched as sinners went about their lives, watched as some decided to end theirs.

  He became fixated on a woman standing on the balcony of her home. To his delight, Lyle could see the pain in her, could see the tangible worry on her mind as she pined over a man who had left her to be back with his wife.

  “I just want to see him again,” she said.

  “We can see him together,” Lyle said. “It’s easy you know. You just have to hold it in your heart when you jump.”

  “He’ll never come back,” she said. “He’s made his choice.”

  “And now it is time for you to make yours.”

  And so she did. He watched her tumble, hit the street, passed through her body and into his congregation. She looked up, confused.

  The ritual was always the same. He called her demons and they appeared. He consumed them as she screamed in cleansing pain, his beast coring her from the inside out.

  “Give thyself unto me,” he told her, preaching from his glass box. “Give thyself unto me so that I may cleanse your soul. Let me take this burden upon myself so that you may be free.”

  He visited more people, talking to them at their most vulnerable, speaking words of comfort as they teetered on the edge.

  “It’s okay. It’s all right. You’re doing the right thing.” Whore. Sinner. Waster. Slut. Sodomite. Addict. Bastard. Infidel. Hypocrite.

  Lyle stood over the bath of a homosexual boy, a straight razor at his neck. “It’s okay. They’ll love you more dead. They’ll understand.”

  His proxies caught the boy as he fell through the water into the Down Below, held him there as the beast fed on his sins. Soon Lyle had more husks than he knew what to do with, an army of puppets.

  He held up what was left, rag dolls with empty eyes. They stared at him through the glass as he waved his hand.

  “You will help me,” Lyle said to the husks.

  “How?” Their mouths moved, the heads flopping as they spoke. Lyle was vaguely aware of his own hands, moving those joints and muscles.

  “We will fight the demons on their doorstep in His name.”

  “In His name…” they said, their voices sounding very much like his own.

  A young girl who had become pregnant at sixteen, aborting the child with a piece of metal doweling, now sat in a weathered chair in her shack of a home, a revolver in her mouth.

  So much like the home of that little witchling, Lyle thought.

  “Let go,” he said. “Let go and be with your baby again. She forgives you.”

  “She?” said the girl, looking at the wall in front of her, hearing him as a whisper in her ear. “It was a girl?”

  “It was,” he replie
d. “She wants to see you again.”

  The hole she left in the back of her head was almost six inches wide as she slumped from the chair. She fell and Lyle caught her with puppet hands.

  Did it matter that it was a lie? No, not really. The lies were a means to an end. The beast was fed. And if the beast fed on their sins, consuming it like milk from a teat—was the beast not then good?

  This thought terrified Lyle. And in his fear he rose again to the surface.

  *

  There was pain, endless burning pain when he surfaced. He rose from those dreams like a bloated corpse in a stagnant lake. Light pierced the thinness of his eyelids. He heard sounds of machinery and breathing—not his breathing, but an artificial sound, a steady, thrumming billow of air. And the gurgling. The gurgling was always and he thought it might be coming from him.

  Along with the gurgling, Lyle heard voices. They were distant, less real than in the dream.

  They asked him questions that he would answer without remembering what he had said or even what the question was. He could barely speak, and when he did something blocked his mouth, something hard and heavy covering his face, forcing air into his lungs, food into his stomach. He felt his body violated a hundred ways. He felt the sensation of tubes, worms, crawling deep into his veins, tickling his heart.

  Then he remembered a name.

  “Rhia,” he said.

  “What did he say?” a voice said, distant.

  Lyle replied: “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.”

  “He is quoting revelations,” said another.

  “Quick, get the scribe!” said the first.

  And then Lyle would sink again, drifting from troubled soul to troubled soul, his mind meeting theirs. His beast consuming theirs. Some even came to him, begging forgiveness, begging to make peace before they cast off into the Down Below. They would do anything to rid themselves of that sin.

  “Kill that man,” he told them.

  He pointed through the glass of his prison, down into the valley below. There a man walked alone, his demons bursting like boils from his back. He was an obese man, his body moving slowly across the horizon. The head was no longer even visible behind the obstruction of tumors and growths.

  “See how swiftly you can dispatch the sloth,” Lyle said.

  They moved like a school of eels as they slithered down the slope. With the speed of a thought, his followers descended on the nonbeliever, tearing him apart with claws and hooks, beaks and spikes. They fed on the man as he screamed.

  Lyle watched, then added the husk to his army.

  It should have given him comfort, knowing that little could stand in the way of his army. But still that name haunted him.

  “Where is Rhia?” he asked the nearest husk. The puppet stared back at him, the mouth hanging open. “I asked you a question.”

  Silence.

  In his rage he tore it apart, fed it to the others.

  “Where is Rhia?” he asked another.

  Times like these could be maddening for Lyle. He felt alone, surrounded by his menagerie of talking mannequins. He could get no answers from them. Lyle decided that he would simply have to find someone who knew Rhia. It was simply a matter of asking the right husk, simply a matter of time. And Lyle had all the time in the world.

  Chapter 21

  Rhinewall

  “YOU CAN’T SERIOUSLY be out of everything,” Gil said, staring exasperated up at the man. “I came as early as I could this morning.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Harold.

  “But I saw it here the other day. You had exactly what I needed.”

  “It isn’t as though I do it on purpose.” Harold reached up to place a small box on a shelf. “What is it you were so desperate for?”

  “My camera broke,” she said. “Or, I should say my little sister broke it.”

  “That’s what little sisters do,” he said with a bemused smile. “Look, I sympathize. I really do, but my paying customers take priority.”

  “I’m a paying customer,” she said, on the verge of stomping her foot.

  He smiled. “With that magician’s coin?” He chuckled at her shock. “I admit that’s a pretty good trick. Your father teach you how to do that?”

  Gil swallowed and then nodded.

  “It’s good. You could work in a carnival if you wanted to. You really had me the first time. But you can only use a trick like that so many times on someone. Once people know the truth, it can be hard to make them see otherwise.”

  She could feel her face growing warm. Skyla had warned her, hadn’t she? Subtle in her way, she had told Gil not to keep using it. And it was a trick, a silly trick.

  “I’m sorry,” she began.

  “Don’t be,” he said, still smiling. “It was the most entertaining thing I’d seen in ages. I should warn you, Felton won’t be as forgiving if you try that on him again. He doesn’t like children as it is.”

  “I’m not a child,” she protested.

  He shrugged.

  She sighed. “I guess I’ll go then.”

  Harold regarded her for a moment, something calculating behind those eyes. After a moment, he said, “I think I can still help you out.”

  She followed him through the gadgets, towards the back room. The walls chattered, alive with the swirling, ticking, rocking motion of parts: pendulums, chains, sprockets, and gears. It felt less like a shop and more like hive of mechanical insects.

  “So what’s the fascination with the camera?” he asked. “You an artist?”

  “I’m not sure what I am,” she said. “I like to make things… and I like to learn.”

  “You tell your parents you’re an artist,” said Harold. “They’ll find that easier to swallow than their little girl covered in machine grease. You can tell me the real reason though if you want. I don’t judge.”

  “I…” Gil started to speak, but clamped her mouth shut. There were the scars, the shadows, the man in the closet behind Skyla, things that appeared like ghosts on film then faded to nothing. She couldn’t tell him that. But still, she desperately wanted to tell Harold something as close to the truth as possible. “I’m interested in memory. I’m interested in how memory is recorded, what triggers memories, and how we can resurrect the ones we love in some way, if we keep the memories clear enough.”

  “That sounds like art to me,” said Harold.

  They stopped at the workbench and she realized that Harold was staring at the picture again. He wiped at his cheek, so casually and quick, Gil almost missed it.

  “You’d like her,” he said, and Gil realized he was talking to the girl in the photograph. “She’s smart like you. Curious. You two could be best friends, play with cameras.”

  “Your daughter…” Gil said, her voice a hush. “She’s…”

  “Murdered,” said Harold. “Tortured and murdered.”

  Gil’s hand went to her mouth. “I’m so sorry.”

  For once he didn’t go cold. Instead of growing distant, Harold simply buried his hands in his pockets. He took a long, deep breath.

  “It was years ago, but you two would have been about the same age. She was a smart one, but friendly. I think that’s ultimately what happened. She trusted people, liked people, she didn’t care about how they appeared on the outside, didn’t care about their money, their cars or houses. Melissa thought the world was her friend.”

  “Did they… did they catch…”

  “It’s all in the past, Gil.” He took a breath. “I thought I had caught the man who did it, then thought otherwise. The people who did it were powerful, more powerful than me for sure.”

  There were no words for her to say. Gil stayed silent until she was certain Harold had said his peace. She wanted to tell him about her father, about how she lost him to powerful people as well. But would ly
ing on top of everything really help at this point?

  “Here,” he said, slipping the crate out from behind the workbench. “I’m afraid I haven’t been that honest with you. I keep these items around for a special customer. He doesn’t have much, but what he does have is talent. I’ve been trading him these for the pictures up there. But you’ve got talent too, Gil. I’d be doing you wrong by not supporting you in it. If your parents won’t help, somebody should.”

  She knelt and looked trough the items. They were nice, some of them pristine, but nothing she was looking for. After everything, she felt even worse than before for betraying this man, for lying and deceiving him.

  “Thank you,” she said, standing slowly. “It’s… it’s all very generous of you, but I can’t.”

  “You know another thing my daughter said to me?” he continued as if he didn’t hear her. “She told me once that the things we feel here, in life, they follow us. All the love and hate, anger and joy, it all follows us into the next world. So, please, take something.”

  She reached in and grabbed a thick rubber triangle. “What’s this?”

  Harold blinked at it. “Oh that. Not sure why you would want it. It’s an old particular mask.”

  “A what?”

  “You remember after the lab… the Cataclysm. People wore these who worked at cleaning up the wreckage. You had to have this in order to be anywhere near the lab. All the particulars in the air would kill you as soon as you breathed them.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “I arrived in time to help the city recover,” he said. “I spent some time looking for survivors. Had to wear this to keep healthy. If you ever find you have to go near that place, or God forbid, another accident happens, you make sure you wear this. It will save your life.”

  Gil was silent. She didn’t know what to say.