The Umbral Wake Read online

  “Did you take anything from the box?” Harold asked the boy.

  As the urchin shook his head, Harold glimpsed a burn scar creeping around the back of his head, licking at his ears and neck, reminding him of red marble. Harold looked down at his bleeding hand and felt nothing but sadness. He relaxed his grip as the child took a couple steps back, but didn’t run.

  “I wasn’t going to hurt you,” he muttered, his tone more apologetic than he intended. “But I’d rather not part with some of those items. If you had something to trade…” he shrugged.

  No response. Dark eyes regarded him.

  “Nothing to say for yourself?”

  Silence. The boy only stared.

  “Fine. Leave.”

  But the boy didn’t move.

  “What are you standing there for? Go.” He shooed the boy with open hands.

  If this were Bollingbrook, the boy would have been classified as a special case, a mute, probably no smarter than a retriever, doomed to the confines of the sanitarium. It was a shame they should be left to their own devices here in this city. Adults had little time for the likes of children now, especially those with slow mental acuity. The slums of Rhinewall were practically bursting with them like rats in a cellar.

  The boy’s hands emerged from behind his back, a pencil in one and a notepad in the other. Harold’s own hands dove into his empty pockets as the boy gave him an apologetic, if somewhat self-satisfied grin.

  “Those are mine. You little brat…” But his voice ended there as the pencil met the paper and the boy began to draw—if that’s what you could call it. To Harold it was more like watching a magician with a wand.

  The pencil became… possessed. No other word could adequately describe what he saw. The boy’s tiny hand flew in a blur across the page, iteration after iteration, the scratching of the graphite a sort of rhythmic music. Finished, the boy paused and then slipped the pencil into his pocket as if nothing had happened at all, ripped the page from the notebook in a flourish and handed it to Harold.

  If Harold hadn’t known any better, he would have thought it a photograph. Every item from the box stood in fine detail: the random braid of wires, the broken knob, the gear that seemed to stick out from the side, the loosely coiled generator cap...

  Blood dripped from his bite mark onto the paper, staining it. He pulled it away, shoving the wound into his mouth.

  “Where did you learn to do this?” Harold asked, his eyes stuck to the drawing. “You know what? Keep the pencil… and the pad. Do you need food?”

  He looked up finding the alleyway empty again.

  Chapter 4

  Rhinewall

  SKYLA SAT WITH one elbow resting on the table, a finger touching the goggles over her eyes. Sunlight radiated off her skin and hair casting a warm glow through the room as she stared through the lenses onto the street below.

  The shadows were windows, all of them. People dragged these windows behind them everywhere they went, to market, to work, walking with their children, walking to the memorial to pray. And through those windows Skyla saw the world beneath, the place everyone went once that physical shell was no longer suitable to hold them above it all. And in every shadow, the dead screamed at her. They gazed out like sea creatures behind glass.

  She flipped the lenses up, winced. Pulled them back down.

  It hurt to even look at them for a second without the goggles, the windows becoming strange twisted stories, tales of cruelty, sorrow, and regret. Just thinking about it gave her a headache. It was far easier to just keep the lenses closed, stare at the prisoners behind the world.

  “You’re just making it worse,” said a voice rising up from the darkened shadows. Her aunt stared back at her, a sad smile on the girl’s face.

  “It’s hard either way,” Skyla said. “I either see everyone’s transgressions, or I see the dead waiting to be freed. It isn’t the best choice in the world.”

  Rhia laughed. “Well, call it whatever you want. It is what it is, and wearing the goggles doesn’t make the monsters any less real.”

  “I know,” Skyla said. “But at least I don’t have to pretend. At least with them on I can function. I can get food, travel… Otherwise it’s hard to stay focused at all.”

  But wearing the goggles made her conspicuous. Enough people had seen the fliers with her face on them. Between suspicious adults and the gang boys, Skyla was trapped in their home during much of the day.

  Or I could just not wear them at all, she thought. I could try to have a normal conversation with someone while the shame of their first sexual encounter stares me in the face.

  At least with the goggles on she saw doorways, not personal details—windows, not monsters. But then, they were one and the same, weren’t they… just two sides of the same coin. And normal people, like Gil, couldn’t see them at all. They were just shadows, ordinary and easy to overlook. Skyla thought it must be nice to see shadows that way.

  “Is this how you went mad?” she asked Rhia. “Because you couldn’t not see it anymore?”

  “I saw a different kind of horror,” said Rhia, and for a moment she seemed to be remembering something in the distant past. “Something followed me, something I wanted nothing to do with, something that wasn’t my shadow.”

  “Who’s was it then?”

  “It wasn’t anyone’s. It was… separate… but I made the mistake of talking to people about it. I don’t think I need to warn you about doing that.”

  Skyla nodded absently, still staring at the people outside, their shadows moving like locusts on their backs. It made her shiver.

  “How often did you wear the goggles?” she asked her aunt as she stared back out onto the street.

  “Often enough. I learned pretty fast what they do. It was nice at first, not to have to see everything, but… there is a price…” the voice faded and Skyla faced to the shadowed corner again.

  “Rhia?”

  But the image was gone. All she saw through the emptiness was swirling shapes and desires, bleedover from ghosts. What had been her aunt was now a landscape of empty rooms as the worlds slid by one another.

  She sighed. Well it didn’t matter anyway. Skyla knew early enough she wasn’t normal, would never be normal. It was just a word.

  Footsteps and the jingling of bells announced Gil’s arrival from outside. The door opened, and Skyla turned to see Gil enter, the raven Connor on her shoulder. He looked at Skyla and squawked, “Eyes.”

  Gil gave her a reproachful look and closed the door. “I found some bread that isn’t stale,” she said. “And I did some bartering for some cheese.”

  “Yay food,” Skyla said and walked over to her, but Gil pulled away.

  “Take those off will you?” Gil meant the goggles.

  “Why?”

  “Please,” Gil circled around her and went to place the food in the cupboard. “I can’t remember the last time I saw you without them.”

  “It helps when I wear them, keeps the headaches at bay,” Skyla said. “But thanks for caring… Mom.”

  “Well it isn’t helping me.”

  “I don’t wear them for you.” Skyla said, “I could hear you a mile away in those, by the way. You sound like a Christmas sleigh.”

  Gil kicked off her shoes. Small metal ravens dangled from buckles above the heels. “It would be better for people to hear me coming and going, than me being dragged off into some corner of the city… Mom.”

  She settled at her workbench and gathered items around a large wooden box. A small lens protruded from the front, completing the crude camera. Skyla had held still for hours once, while Gil adjusted lenses, changed poses, and shot pictures of Skyla “for science.” The pictures rarely came out, and when they did, the afterimages were not Skyla-shaped.

  Skyla had explained to Gil that the lens might be similar to the lenses in her goggles, perhaps even one and the same. And so Gil had dropped the subject altogether when Skyla began to wear the goggles more and more. Though now, Sk
yla noticed Gil refusing to look at her more and more.

  “It isn’t like I have to wear them,” she said as Gil tinkered with the camera. “I mean, look.” She flipped the lenses up. “See?”

  Gil looked up at her and then immediately back down.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Gil said. “It’s just that… you aren’t getting enough sun or something.”

  Skyla went to a mirror of polished tin that hung in the corner. She pulled the goggles up and looked at herself. Her eyes looked old, shriveled, and distorted in the reflection. She reached up and touched the bag under one eye.

  “It’s just because they don’t get the same kind of exposure as the rest of me,” she said, holding out an arm. She pulled back a sleeve to reveal skin that looked rubbed and raw. “See? Imagine what that would do to my eyes if I didn’t wear these.”

  Gil shrugged. “If you say so…. I’m no doctor.”

  “No,” Skyla said. “You aren’t. Laura Stintwell was a doctor. If she were alive she would certainly be able to explain things to you. She knew all about the goggles, all about what they did, how they did it.” And now she was dead, along with the rest of the people sucked into the Cataclysm. Skyla huffed. “Besides, if you wore them and saw what I see, you’d understand.”

  “I have.”

  Skyla’s face went hot and red. “You what?”

  Gil didn’t look up. “I wore them once.”

  “When?” Skyla glared at Gil with the lenses up, watching the secrets swirl in the shadows along the wall—the coin, the food, the bartering for camera parts. Gil was full of secrets just like the rest of them.

  “A long time ago. Back when you wouldn’t wear them all the time. I wanted to see what they did. So I took them down from the hook and tried them on. That’s all.” Gil said all this with a casualness bordering on nonchalance, ignoring or unaware of the danger.

  “And?” Skyla asked.

  “And nothing,” Gil said. “They gave me a headache. I didn’t see anything unusual at all.”

  “Good.” Good they gave you a headache.

  Gil considered her with that one clear eye. “You sure seem upset about it.”

  “I’m not… I just…” Skyla checked herself. She was angry. Gil had no right. “Who knows what could have happened to you.”

  “But nothing did happen.” Gil turned back to her camera. “I know you’ve been fiddling with my camera without asking,” Gil said, smiling at Skyla’s reaction. “Please… I don’t care. We share things, Skyla. We have to. Just lately…”

  “Lately what?”

  Gil sighed and looked at Connor as if the raven was going to save her from the conversation. Connor croaked at her.

  “It’s just that lately you’ve been wearing them a lot. I know you say it helps you to run errands at night, and that they help you get away, but…” She looked away, out through the open, window. “You sleep in them.”

  “So what?”

  Gil shook her head. “Nothing. I guess it just seems uncomfortable is all.”

  “It is,” Skyla said and frowned. “But if I don’t…”

  “That’s not what I mean…” Gil sighed. “Look, forget it. I really don’t like this direction we’ve gone. Can we just start over?”

  Skyla laughed. “Our lives or the conversation?”

  “The conversation.”

  “Sure,” Skyla said. “What’s for dinner?”

  Gil snorted. “Oh, we’ve got a lovely selection for you tonight, madam. Glazed chicken on rice with parsley and a lemon sauce, a side of mashed potatoes with chives, and a nice side salad.”

  “Sounds great. But what about the salmon?” Skyla plunked herself onto the couch while they played their game. “Is the salmon in season?”

  “The salmon is fresh from the Lassimir River,” said Gil. “It comes with a side of Brussels’ sprouts and corn.”

  “I hate Brussels’ sprouts.”

  “You’ve never had them,” Gil accused.

  “I have, years ago. I hated them.”

  “Well, these are different,” Gil said, rolling her eyes. “They’re glazed with a garlic butter sauce and crisped to perfection.” She made a chef’s flourish with one hand.

  “I still don’t like them.”

  “Whatever.”

  “How about the duck?” Skyla asked.

  Gil looked at the ceiling. “The duck comes with a light cream sauce and a side salad of arugula and spinach. You can have your choice of house dressings.”

  “Duck!” croaked Connor.

  They smiled at him, then at each other. Skyla sighed, reclining further into the cushions. “I’ll try to bring something fresh back tonight.”

  “It’s fine if you can’t.”

  Skyla tapped the side of the goggles. “I’ll be fine.”

  They talked about nothing of substance into the night. It was a luxury, to gossip like a pair of schoolgirls, discussing things like fashion and food, the few boys who weren’t in gangs, the new buildings going up around the Bowl. It was nice to pretend to be normal, to pretend that they were normal.

  Gil finally went to bed, and the cover of evening threw her shadow against the wall of her room. It was moments like this when Skyla truly knew her roommate.

  A man appeared in the sleeping girl’s shadow. He loomed over Gil as he held her by the collar of her blouse. A hand came down, striking her. Even though the image was just memory, Skyla winced. It wasn’t Gil’s father hitting her, but a man who had taken her and her father in. A man named Mr. Henry. Gil had spoken of Mr. Henry like a scary uncle, a man she was tied to in every way but blood. Skyla could see the way Mr. Henry controlled her, controlled her father. As the shadow struck her over and over, the real Gil tossed and turned in her bed, muttering.

  It was too much after a while and Skyla closed the lenses with a click.

  On clear nights like this, with no moonlight, Skyla could see for miles, through the shifting matter of the world. She could see into any place she chose—anyplace familiar. In this case, she stared through a layered prism of rooms, each one a shadow away from the next.

  At the end stood a girl barely younger than Skyla, a girl that could have been her sister. Melissa Montegut hadn’t aged, nor would she ever. She was little more than a shadow, a suggestion, a visual memory. Her hair hung in mousy brown waves around her shoulders as she looked back at Skyla from the deepest corners of her bedroom. The two girls smiled at one another from opposite sides of a chasm.

  “Remember that time you stubbed your toe on my bedpost?” Melissa asked.

  Skyla grinned. “I swore a blue streak until your mom came through the door.”

  “Did you know that after you left she asked me what half the words meant?”

  Skyla laughed. “I made most of them up. I don’t even think some of those actions were physically possible.”

  With no electricity, Melissa’s bedroom was lit only by the dim moonlight and Bollingbrook lanterns from outside. Skyla frowned at the deserted house, the dusty neglected floors, so many memories buried under cobwebs and dirt.

  “Your father doesn’t live there anymore?”

  “Nobody does,” said Melissa. “My father hasn’t lived here for ages… since my end, and apparently the property won’t sell. People think it’s haunted.”

  “Well… you are there right now.”

  Melissa smiled. “Fair enough.” She paused. “My father was going to kill you at one point, you know?”

  “Lots of people were. Some still want to.”

  “Well, he thought it was you who did this to me, or thought you were somehow responsible.” For an instant Melissa looked the way she had been found, broken and abused, parts of her missing. Her skin flashed gray-green a moment, then returned to normal.

  “I hope you corrected him,” said Skyla.

  “He knows… but I don’t think he is as obsessed now. He’s moved on.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yeah…” Her voi
ce trailed off and for a while both girls were silent, each separated by a million rooms and a wall of gray-green glass.

  Melissa moved to the side, raised a hand, and pointed. “Can you see that?”

  Opposite her, on the far wall of the room, a malevolent orange glow spread in streaks along the surface as though some giant beast had torn at the wallpaper with sharp claws, exposing blood and muscle.

  Skyla leaned in, staring through the shadows. “What is it?”

  “None of us know. I’d like you to take a closer look with the goggles.”

  As she stared at it, Skyla could see it shift, stretching around the crevices in the aging plaster. It looked like a disease, like something living. Through the Wilds, between Rhinewall and Bollingbrook lay a hundred miles of horrors—more dead girls, more monsters, more dolls with no eyes. The dead would reach for her, grasp at her, try to eat her. She could traverse the gulf in an instant, but the price was high.

  “What do you think it is then?” she asked, hoping she could just look at it from there.

  There was a long pause, as if by saying it the dead girl could somehow make it worse. When she spoke, her voice sounded worried.

  “I don’t know what they are. But they are growing,” She looked through the shadows at Skyla, her eyes dark and concerned. “Can you travel?”

  Chapter 5

  Bollingbrook

  “WELL, I SUPPOSE it all depends on what you call art,” Tom said, flipping his head back to dislodge a golden lock of hair.

  Dona Barkley walked beside him, her arm through his, the gentle autumn breeze kissing her cheeks as the two of them strolled back from the theater. She yawned happily. It was nice to be alone finally, away from the crowds.

  “I mean, I could dance around up there too. It doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing,” he continued.

  “I doubt you would get the same response,” said Dona.

  “No,” he said. “Shock, maybe. Children crying, perhaps. Women covering their eyes most likely.”