The Umbral Wake Page 6

They moved into the next location and Skyla froze. They stood in an alleyway, the grim slimy walls looming on either side, blocking the view from the street. Ahead of them was a white fence. She knew this fence.

  But the angle was different than what she remembered. Rather than standing directly behind the fence, Skyla was standing twenty or so feet to the side, looking at it from the shadows. All along the filthy alley floor, the orange scars stretched into the distance, a rash on the world.

  “Do you know where we are?” asked Melissa.

  “Yes,” she said, staring at the paint flaking away like snow. “This is behind the school.” She could see the loose board she had pulled aside a hundred times to get to school, the same one she had stepped through into the ambush that one night—her last night in Bollingbrook.

  “I can show you this much…” Melissa said. “It… it isn’t the most painful part.”

  Another Melissa appeared and Skyla blinked. She was thin, with mousy brown hair. She crouched in the shadows, waiting for someone…

  “I was waiting here,” the actual Melissa said from behind her. “You remember that night. We were all going to get you—me, Dona, Vicky, and Beth. It was cruel, but I wanted to impress them. I’m not even sure if I knew what I was planning… Maybe I’d hold you, maybe just stall you until they got here… but it was as I was waiting to ambush you when he came for me.”

  Skyla’s heart skipped a beat. She didn’t need to ask; she knew the man Melissa referred to. She knew the Reverend Summers all too well. He appeared as a shimmery, white ghost against the bricks in the background, and Skyla almost screamed. The image was so real, so believable. Smoke drifted up from the shaded wall behind Melissa.

  “He had been there in the shadows the entire time, watching me as I waited for you. It might have been hours…” The sound of Melissa’s voice was a comfort now, buffering the dream from reality.

  “You’ve gotten better at this,” said Skyla, watching the scene unfold.

  “I can make basic illusions pretty well now,” said Melissa. “Making things that seem real—physically real still takes a group of likeminded individuals. It’s why we have communities, so we can have a place to exist that isn’t overrun by wilderness.”

  Skyla blinked. “The Wilds infects that place too?”

  Melissa gave her a bemused smile. “What did you think the Wilds are?”

  Skyla mouthed, “Oh.”

  But then the Reverend spoke. “You look like you’re waiting for someone,” he said.

  The image of Melissa jumped, spun around. She covered her chest with a hand. “You scared me,” she whispered, embarrassed.

  The man emerged from shadows and blue smoke, wearing that linen suit of his, so white it seemed immune to the grime and dirt surrounding the man. He dropped the cigarette and stepped on it, all the time holding her in that pale blue gaze.

  “Hiding away in a dark alley hardly seems like the proper way for a young girl such as yourself to be spending her time. Young minds such as yours should be in church or school, soaking up the wealth of words.” He cocked his head to the side. “What are you doing out here anyway?”

  Melissa blushed, looking down at her feet. “I was waiting for a friend.”

  A thin smile spread across the Reverend’s lips. Skyla felt her skin go cold. “Now, I may be old fashioned,” said Lyle, “but last I remembered, this wasn’t the way you greet a friend, hiding in the shadows like some sort of ghoul.”

  “It’s… a surprise,” said Melissa.

  “Oh, I’ll bet it is,” he said. “Tell me…”

  “Melissa.”

  “Tell me, Melissa, this friend. She wouldn’t happen to be a little… odd, would she?”

  It pained Skyla to see that look on Melissa’s face, that expression of confused innocence. The man spoke to her as an adult, asking adult questions, all very conversational. Knowing what was coming next made her cringe.

  “She is… a little,” said Melissa, now looking over her shoulder. The alley was a deserted canyon with looming walls. She could have run right then, run and probably gotten away. But young girls were taught to be polite, and Melissa was being very polite.

  Lyle Summers put his gloved hands in his pockets, a casual gesture—just some man talking to a girl in the park. He looked over her shoulder at the school.

  “I’m actually looking for someone too,” he said. “And as it happens, she is a little odd as well.”

  “Who?” Melissa asked, now hugging herself and rubbing her arms.

  “Well, the woman is named Lynn. Her daughter is named Skyla.” He looked at her then and Melissa recoiled, taking a step back. “I’m having a bit of difficulty locating their home. You wouldn’t happen to know her would you?”

  Melissa shook her head, “I don’t know.” But her expression was as revealing as a street sign. She stood frozen in her place as the man nodded, frowning in consideration. He no longer looked at her, just stared out over the fence.

  “You aren’t a very good liar.”

  The conjured Melissa froze. Caught. “I promised not to tell.”

  “I see,” he said. “Well promises are important.” He then looked out past her at the schoolyard, a casual curiosity on his face. “Looks like your friends are here.”

  And just like that, Melissa turned. The Reverend’s gloved hands emerged from his pockets, the flash of a white napkin in one.

  But he simply held it out.

  A boy lunged from the shadows, a soldier. In one smooth motion, he grabbed the cloth then stepped up behind Melissa. He reached smoothly around her head, bringing the white cloth to cover her face as the Reverend wiped his hand on his pants. She struggled for a moment before going limp, her eyes fluttering and rolling up into her head. The soldier nodded at the Reverend then lifted her into his arms, stepping back into the shadows.

  “He didn’t do it,” Skyla said. “I was expecting…”

  “He never did anything,” Melissa said. “The man never gets his hands dirty. He leaves that to someone else. I woke up somewhere cold and dark, chained to a board.”

  Skyla wiped her cheek then remembered that the tears had collected in the lens casings of her goggles. Her skin was beginning to feel raw. She had been here too long, the images too hard to watch.

  “We should go,” said Skyla.

  But Melissa turned to her. “You aren’t hearing my point. They knew where I was. He had been waiting there for me, Skyla. How did he know I would be there?”

  Chapter 7

  Bollingbrook

  DONA STEPPED WITH wobbly legs through the front entrance of her house and walked past her father without a word. Donald Barkley watched her from the fireplace, his eyes dark behind a thin veil of pipe smoke. A newspaper lay on the couch by the window. Dona imagined that he had been waiting for her to arrive home for some time.

  “No Tom?” He glanced at the gold watch on his wrist, then looked back up at her.

  “No,” she said, crossing the room, aware of his eyes on her. That stare used to mean protection when she was little. It used to mean Daddy was watching out for her. Now it just meant he was watching.

  “Something the matter?” He stepped away from the hearth with the overconfident swagger of a man trying too hard to behave twenty years younger.

  She stopped, sighed and turned to face him. “Nothing you need to worry about.” You’ll read about it in the papers I’m sure. One more suicide in cheery Bollingbrook.

  He eyed her, cradling the pipe in his hand. He did a brief sweep, eyes to the floor, back up. “You should watch your tone,” he muttered.

  Donald puffed on his pipe, keeping a cautious distance, sizing her up. She knew he wouldn’t approach her. Not now. Not since she had learned to hit back. Though Dona admitted she would like to have been a fly on the wall when he explained the bruise and swollen nose to his pub buddies.

  Probably not, she thought looking at him there. Probably told them he walked into a wall.

  “The gue
sts will be over at five. Is that suitable for you?” he asked, his tone saccharine. Dona imagined that if he had been close enough he would have smelled like whiskey.

  “That’s fine.”

  “I hope you’ve invited Tom.” He raised an eyebrow.

  “I have.”

  A pause as her father puffed his pipe, his eyes hiding some dark thought. “Then I guess I won’t be bothering the mayor’s office. Where did you say he was again?”

  Dona could always sense a trap from her father, better to lie. “There was some urgent business at the office he had to take care of.”

  “I expect everything is alright between the two of you…”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “Good,” he said, confidence rising in his voice. “He’s a good young man. I expect Perlandine couldn’t run this city worth a damn on his own.”

  “No. I expect not.”

  He nodded, puffed, looked up at the clock. “That play was out over an hour ago.” Donald had a penchant for using these awkward pauses to draw out the truth, his personal torture device.

  “We weren’t doing anything, Father.”

  “No. I expect not,” he said, his voice an echo of hers. “Your mother and I raised you to be a lady, not some trollop wandering home alone by herself. What if someone saw you?”

  She could see the tension rising in his face, hear it in his voice. It reminded her of a cork about to pop. Dona could sense that cork straining, the one her father used to plug his more emotional side, his violent side.

  “Plenty of people saw me, Father. I walked home alone on purpose.”

  “Why?” His cheeks flushed. Dona knew that shade of ocher, her father’s personal barometer.

  “Because I wanted time to think.” She clenched and unclenched her fists unconsciously as his eyes narrowed.

  “Think. You’ve never been a thinker, Dona.” His smile was not kind, stretching his thin mustache into a mocking streak across his lip. Curiosity crept into his tone. “A hitter, maybe. A kicker for sure, but not a thinker. What were you thinking about exactly?”

  “Just… things.”

  “Things?” Now she could smell it—far too much whiskey. Small red blood vessels were visible around his nose.

  Dona found her feet moving to the stairs. “Yes Father. Sometimes I think. It’s a common pastime. I understand many people do it when they have a few moments alone, when they aren’t out drinking at pubs or closing business deals. I imagine you’ve thought of things more than once in your life, things you regret perhaps.”

  “Oh, I have.” Somehow he had drifted across the floor during the conversation, a serpent mesmerizing its prey. “I’ve been thinking about what you and that fiancé of yours have been doing without a chaperone. I’ve been wondering how much you let him do.”

  She felt her cheeks go hot with indignity. “He doesn’t do anything.”

  “Doesn’t he?” His leg hit the end table, rattling the lamp there. He didn’t seem to notice. “Does he maybe tell you things a man shouldn’t tell a woman until she is in their wedding bed? Hmm?”

  “You’re drunk.” She squared her shoulders at him the way a person might face down a feral dog. “You’ve always been a drunk.”

  “And you’re fat,” he said. “And you’ll always be a fat, thick, ugly girl who could never keep her fat mouth shut unless it had a sausage in it. What does that boy see in you, I wonder?”

  “Go to bed.”

  “Most boys only like the ugly ones because some things are easier. Do you let him do easy things, Dona?”

  She spun on her heel as he lunged, his hand a meaty vice around her upper arm. Perhaps a few years ago this would have frozen her in her place, turned her into the submissive daughter he always wanted.

  Dona had been raised as a boy by her father… mostly. When she was younger he had allowed her to play lacrosse, football, rugby—sports that raised eyebrows for a girl to be playing. She had loved her father then, the way he stood up for her. “If my daughter wants to be an athlete, then who are you to say otherwise,” he would say to the other men. But when she turned ten things changed. He turned meaner, the bruises he left darker and in places neatly hidden beneath clothing.

  And when he was friendly, it still felt mean.

  Nobody knew this except maybe her mother… and Skyla. And she said it to my face, made me think about it in front of everyone.

  Donald was right about his daughter; she was tall for her age and thick as well. One woman had commented when she was very young (thinking she was too young to hear or understand) “It’s a shame she takes after her father so much.”

  Yes, she thought, Little Dona, who would have been Donald Jr. if she had been born with a penis. What a cruel trick God had played on me, all the tendencies, none of the proof.

  Dona made her own proof on the soccer pitch, the stick-ball diamond, the bowling alley. She had even secretly taken boxing after nearly begging the gym instructor. Donald was too drunk to remember that discovery now.

  And when did she begin to fight back? Was it after the twerp had spilled her dirty secrets to the other girls? Was that when Dona finally decided to end it? Had it really taken me that long?

  She couldn’t remember, nor did Dona think about this as she swung her fist in an arc, pulling her father close, drawing him into her blow. It landed just above his left temple with a dull smack.

  Donald spun, that drunken gaze in his eyes turning downcast and glassy. There was too much booze for that look to be pain, she thought. It was something deeper. Shame maybe. A large hand went to his head and rested there for a moment as he slouched against the banister. She stared at him there for a long time, that awkward silence turning into something else—a grim victory for her, perhaps.

  “Go to bed, Dona,” he said in a whisper. “We’ll prepare for your seventeenth in the morning.”

  His hand released her as she pulled away, heading up the stairs to leave him in the shadowed living room. She moved briskly up the stairs, passing her mother’s room—the sound of drunken snoring—into her bedroom where she slammed the door.

  Seventeen, she thought. Seventeen and a woman. Perhaps a year or two late, but a woman nonetheless. And what does it mean to be a woman in Bollingbrook’s walls?

  She laughed, leaning against her door as a tear ran down her cheek. Her reflection stared back at her from the bedroom window, not laughing but crying. Stomping across the floor, she closed the curtains on that image. She didn’t want to see that crying girl with the thick line of eyebrows, tree stumps for legs, the embarrassing twin mounds pressing against the lace fabric of her shirt.

  At that moment she was grateful for Tom more than ever. Without his friendship, (his cooperation) she didn’t know what she would do. They both needed each other, and for the same reasons. Without him, she’d likely be forced to marry some rich accountant, or the son of some mogul. Her father certainly didn’t care, handing her off to the first business partner who served the fattest dowry, happy to have his confusing daughter gone at last. Maybe just for kicks, just to teach her one final lesson, Donald would marry her off to someone bigger than her, someone whom she would be unable to fight.

  Yes, thank God for Tom, stitched up by Clerics in a hospital, his flesh torn by the glass surrounding the tenth suicide this month. Thank God for Tom who embraced the same lies and truths as she. Thank God for Tom indeed.

  I’ll have to check on Tom first thing in the morning. Because if anything ever happened to him, she thought as she pulled the buttons from her blouse. It was like being freed from a prison.

  Tom will be okay. He’ll be okay. He has to be okay.

  She kicked off her shoes and saw the dark rust colored splotches of blood there, splattered against them, tarnishing the silver trim, soaking into her stockings. She stared at the blood for a long time. It wasn’t Tom’s blood; it had been sprayed against her feet.

  Thank God for Tom, indeed, she thought, crossing the room and collapsing on her bed. Her han
ds found a stuffed animal, the one in the shape of an elephant she’d had since she was five. She drew it to her face and stuffed it inside her mouth so she could scream in silence.

  Chapter 8

  Rhinewall

  GIL FELT HER stomach gurgle. It was pretty clear Skyla wasn’t coming back for a while.

  The brisk morning air hinted of the winter months approaching, bringing with them early fog and sporadic rain. Gil looked back at their apartment at the end of the street, a converted church—the irony not lost on either of them. It had been abandoned shortly after the Cataclysm, just large enough for two young squatters to move into. Now however, no longer filled with the clatter of activity and the screeching of hungry chicks, the church just looked old and sad.

  From the upper window, Connor watched her with dark eyes. Her smile faded a bit as she looked up at the raven. He had been in her dreams again, half memory, half vision. He was one of Orrin’s three noisy, messy chicks. They crowed for food as she scrambled to feed them all. Then Orrin arrived, as he did in every dream. He took two, and she was left with Connor, who never spoke to her as Orrin did.

  She had always thought that she was special, that she could talk to birds. Gil knew now that it had only been Orrin. Aside from the odd, parroted word, Connor only spoke to her in dreams, leading her through strange landscapes filled with twisted forests. “Follow me to your father,” he would croak. “Follow me to see where he has gone. I’ll show you where he went. He’s so shiny!”

  But every time she awoke, he was always just a bird, and she was always just a girl. She lived in a burnt out church, and she always woke up hungry. Gil smiled at him now from the cobble street, slick with fog. She offered a little wave of her hand and turned towards the center of town.

  The shops hadn’t opened yet, but enough adults roamed the streets that she felt relatively safe; rumor was the kidnappings happened only at night. These were affluent people, the sort of morning strollers who might be going to the memorial, or off to breakfast. They gave her casual glances and polite smiles as she headed towards the center of the city, giving no indication they were even aware of the poverty and reconstruction surrounding them.