Yet, it was not the velvety oblivion of sleep. The night echoed with an odd scraping that dragged me back to full consciousness.
“Go awaayyy,” I complained, groggy with fatigue.
The annoying scratching went on. Fortescue bringing breakfast already? I rolled over, triggering a dull ache in my shoulder. With utmost resentment, I dragged myself upright and groped to switch on the lamp. Muted lighting battered my eyeballs and it took a minute before I could focus without splotches in my vision.
On checking, my door remained firmly closed and my room empty of pushy butlers. Rats in the rafters? Where were the cats? The digital glow of my clock showed 2.30 am.
The sound came from the corner of the ceiling nearest my wardrobe. It must be a mother of a rat. I squinted in that direction, not sure what I was seeing. A pink stain seeped rapidly outwards across the plaster, as if the roof was bleeding. Alarm zipped up my spine. Not again!
Surgical wadding crinkled when I moved, which spoke of an actual wound on my shoulder and the weird truth of what I’d experienced earlier in the evening. I’d never heard of tactile hallucinations that inflicted real injuries. But if such mental torment was even vaguely possible, what was I in for now?
Yanking the sheets to my nose, I twisted the heavy cotton in tight fists, entranced by this latest nightmare dredged from my darkest fears. But secretly I knew: these were not fears conjured by my brain alone. The fabric of my existence was warping beyond the accepted; something other-worldly wished me harm. The hideous discolouration began to throb, bulging towards the floor. I tried to convince myself it was truly all in my mind, I would ride it out and have myself committed tomorrow. But I no longer believed that lie.
“Bea?”
Trembling, I began to hum ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’, a habit I’d picked up when I was younger and struggling to ease the anxiety over starting at another new school – distraction by music. But my petrified dirge didn’t do Kid Cudi justice. And this experience was so much worse than whispers behind hands and Third-grade stares.
“Someone,” I called with rising hysteria.
The sodden roof sagged and broke open, giving birth to a skinless head that writhed its way through. The skull was about the size of a wolf’s and similarly elongated to accommodate a ragged hole crammed with long yellowed fangs. Where its eyes should have been were bloodied cavities. Instead of relying on sight, the demon sucked air moistly through slitted nostrils, apparently dependent on smell to guide it.
“Anyone!”
A repulsive body disgorged, and with it the stench of the morgue. It was totally flayed, the absence of skin revealing gnarled sinew and leathery muscle, stippled by rot. I tasted bile. My humming intensified. The creature clung upside down. Front facing the floor, its hook-tipped wasted limbs jutted backwards, piercing thick plaster at impossible angles. The rift in the roof grindingly sealed, caging us together. It paused and swivelled its head a full circle in response to my fevered humming, then cocked it to the side. I shut up, too late. Clearly it also possessed a good sense of hearing.
Quivering violently, its abdomen split open, spilling entrails onto the ground. I could do no more than blink, frozen by horror and nausea as the steaming bowels congealed into a double of the original demon with a sickening squelch. The first creature stayed where it was on the ceiling, while the second struggled to its feet on the floor. Its looks didn’t improve on standing, hunched over and stringy and even less tolerable now much closer to me. About the size of a small man, it stank. Ugly beetles and centipedes oozed through the mummified gristle of its form. Those teeth and claws looked exceptionally sharp, made to rip and tear. The grotesque twins snuffled eagerly, twitching their heads to test the surrounds.
Without taking my focus from them, I desperately fumbled objects on my side table for something that would suffice as a weapon, finally gripping the polished marble of my mermaid. The sculpture had saved me from a pervert, why not a fiend? Ferocious growls and splintering wood reverberated out in the hall. Vovo and Cherish unleashed their full might against my closed door. I could almost feel the shaking of the frame when the cats ran and repeatedly pounded into the oak barrier, howling in frustration.
They were too far away and I was out of time. Even if my aim was perfect, I only had one shot and had to choose which of my two enemies to target. Both beasts’ full attention lasered in on me, like they sensed my intent, and each of them scuttled with murderous speed towards my bed. I let lose with an ear-shattering scream, launching from the sheets to hurl the mermaid with all the force I could muster at the one on the ground as my door flung open.
Events of that awful instant seemed to occupy hours. In three long strides, Fortescue rushed into the room wearing a nightshirt and a fearsome expression, the cats surging around him. Strangely, I had the chance to notice his purple socks and white knobbly knees before flying stone impacted the creature’s forehead. The monster on the ceiling screeched in fury and shuffled closer to me as its twin faltered backwards, violently shaking its head to free the stone lodged in the spongy flesh between empty eye sockets.
My mermaid flew sideways to shatter one mirrored panel of my wardrobe. Glass cascaded to the parquetry, my best hope of resistance bouncing out of reach under my bed. A riled snarl twisted the jaw of the creature I’d hit. All the defensive strategy had achieved was to make the wretched thing angrier. Now sporting a hole of pulped tissue in its forehead, it jumped up onto my mattress. I cowered against the bedhead, nowhere else to go.
“Not on my watch,” Fortescue declared, heaving a spear with such anger-fuelled power it crunched through the thing’s backbone and burst out of its ribcage, skewering a desiccated pulsing heart.
Vovo was on the creature in an instant, dragging it down and out of sight at the foot of my bed. Cherish jumped into the air, his paws hooking into the one on the ceiling and hauling it to the floor. The fracas was punctuated only by unpleasant ripping noises. Fortescue trusted the cats with the rest of the job and gazed searchingly at me.
Tears tracked his cheeks and his bottom lip trembled. “I deeply regret this is happening to you, Winsome. Do not fear, I shall get help.”
Then he swiftly backed out of my room, taking the cats with him. Don’t leave me with those things.
“Fortescue come back! Please. Don’t leave me all alone,” I whimpered, closing my eyes and resuming Kid Cudi. After what felt like years, a voice rose over my humming.
“It’s okay, Bear. You’re not alone. I promise. I won’t leave you alone ever again.”
I stared unseeing. Smithy hesitantly walked towards me from the doorway with upraised palms. Glancing down, I sat board-stiff in bed, my hands tangled in the sheets and fingers locked as if in rigor mortis. He edged closer, pausing by my side. I came back to myself, dazed and shivering.
“I’m going to get in there with you.” His tone was soft, like that of a rescuer pacifying the survivor of a car crash.
“On the floor … anything?” I whispered.
“There’s nothing there.”
“No spear?”
He carefully surveyed the floor and shook his head. “No spear. You were screaming at the top of your lungs. In between bouts of …” His expression suggested I might be unstable, capable of sprinkling fairy dust and befriending unicorns. “Humming.”
I looked at Smithy properly for the first time since he’d entered, realising it would be far more unbalanced to let him into my bed. He was in nothing but boy-leg undies, not saturated and clinging like the jelly-bean pair of earlier this morning, but surface-of-the-sun hot just the same. I missed his blue hair. Things were so much simpler when he was a marauding, obnoxious menace.
Bea would probably call the police if she saw us like this. There would be a restraining order. And rightly so! On his feet, barely dressed, Smith was spellbinding. My eyes devoured him. He’d hit the gym a great deal by the looks of it, defined muscle on a fit, lean frame with tennis-player legs from all the running. His lightly tanned skin outdid that of a Brazilian surfer. I considered throwing caution to the wind and requesting he turn on the spot to display the behind view. What the heck? He already thought I was unhinged.
Unhinged – that reminded me. Dreadful monsters haunted my room in another impossible episode that so garishly mimicked reality. As a padded cell beckoned in a few hours, I decided to risk Bea’s outrage. I could blame the impropriety of a semi-naked boy in my bed on my unfolding psychosis.
“I’ll stay on my side. I’ll just hold your hand.”
He slipped between the sheets. With exaggerated care, he moved close enough to prise my fingers apart, pushing me further down the mattress and chastely tucking the sheet around my shoulders. One of my arms remained on the cover. He lay on his side with a virtuous distance between us and placed my hand in both of his.
“Better?” he inquired earnestly.
“Is it true Hugo’s missing?”
“Yes. He’d didn’t return from their hunt for … someone.”
I hadn’t been acquainted with my bodyguard very long, and found him a pest often, but there was something endearing and so lost-kitten (maybe lost lion-cub) about him beneath the I-can-kill-you-with-one-glance demeanour. I wanted him here, safe with us; not out in a hostile night filled with beasts, real and imaginary. My focus wandered to the wardrobe, the central pane of mirror that should be there, gone. The floor was littered with broken glass.
“It’s my fault, isn’t it?” The implications extended far beyond my paltry teenaged understanding. “Hugo told me … No, he begged me to stay inside. But I didn’t believe anything he said. It feels like I’m breaking apart, like I should be carted away to a lock-down ward in the asylum.”
“You don’t need to go to the psych ward, Winnie. And whatever’s going on, I don’t think you’re to blame.”
“Really?” I sucked an unsteady breath, staring at the ceiling and not at all sure the alternative to insanity was an improvement. “Bea’s telling me impossible stories that can’t be real. Yet all these horrible things keep happening, bleeding from my dreams into reality.”
My anguish forced him to do the only decent thing, his resolve crumbled and he moved across no-man’s land to hug me, the length of his body pressed against mine. He was so warm and glorious, his skin so silky. Bea would have a cardiac arrest and I couldn’t guarantee Fortescue had run out of spears.
“It’s not just happening to you, Bear.”
I gazed over at him, a fear more intense than any I’d experienced so far creeping up my spine. Smithy did not belong in this mess. He stretched out fingertips and lightly brushed the tears from my cheeks. His words came out in a torrent.
“I wanted so much to tell you at dinner, but I didn’t want to scare you off. I don’t want to lose you again, Bear. These two years, I’ve missed you more than words can say. When you left, I did everything I could to contact you straight away. But Bea wasn’t so obliging. She said you needed time on your own, almost as if they isolated you on purpose. I thought it was my fault and you didn’t want to speak to me. I couldn’t blame you after how things ended.”
Relief and an infinitely stronger emotion swelled my heart. It was a struggle not to melt into Smithy’s comforting embrace and forget everything else, but I needed answers that couldn’t wait any longer. I braced myself up on an elbow.
“Tell me everything.”
He took a deep breath, talking fast as though trying to purge a toxic burden. “Yesterday, after I’d dealt with Brianna, I wanted to come and find you, but you were so angry after the pool incident I thought I’d let you cool down for a bit.” He grimaced at the memory.
“To kill time, I went to the gym and then for a run to clear my head. It’s weird, but I felt wired all morning, sort of like I could sense danger coming. I initially put my jitters down to your almost drowning. I did the black diamond run, knowing it would take all my concentration.” Black diamond was radical, lots of rooftops and hardcore actions that demanded unremitting skill. “You know the cellar?”
It was the only obstacle I refused to negotiate on a parkour course. A sheer drop down the facade of a three-storey building using a drainpipe to slow velocity, onto a narrow ledge of brick that wrapped its girth, followed by a somersault down another three storeys into a skinny cellar alcove, where momentum forced an immediate run up and over the lip of the alleyway. There was no room for error.
“I hate that part.”
He nodded ruefully. “For some reason, I passed out in the middle of the first leap. Took a six-floor tumble into the cellar. I woke up who knows how long afterwards, praising good luck I hadn’t broken my neck. Anyway, while I was out of it, I went somewhere else. A swampy place, hot as hell with insects the size of crows.”
“Crows,” I shivered. My shoulder improved rapidly, but the recall of our flight from those birds stayed vivid and the mental scars would take much longer to heal.
“Sorry.” Smithy leaned over to cup my face between his hands, brushing a stray hair behind my ear with his thumb. “I shouldn’t have mentioned crows.” He pressed reassuring lips against my cheek.
I yearned to exaggerate the weakling angle, so intense was the pleasure, but he needed his mouth to answer my questions. I filed this approach for future reference.
“It’s okay,” I said reluctantly. “Go on.”
He released me and lay back on his side, punching his pillow until achieving the right firmness. “The thing is, the blackout was not so much a dream as really being there. I felt the heat. Heard the crickets calling. I could smell decaying vegetation.” A troubled frown creased his brow.
It was not a look I was used to seeing on Smithy. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“You mean aside from the obvious?” I raised my eyebrows impatiently. “I don’t want to go through it again. But you have to see it,” he said softly.
Before I could query what he meant, Smithy started to describe the scene and my wits rebelled. There were too many common threads. The details were too exact a match to be coincidental. Any hint of rationality spun away when I tried to account for our shared perceptions.
And I couldn’t shake the idea, no matter how ridiculous, that what we saw had actually transpired. And as he relayed it – Smithy’s voice transported me there, just like the touch of the bloody knife blade that had sent me from the warehouse kitchen to Raphaela’s office during my last lesson with Aunt Bea.
In his vision, there had been a statuesque black woman in her early twenties with cropped white hair, pacing edgily at the main entrance to a grand plantation mansion. Billie. I was fairly certain I knew the identity of the house’s owner – fragile, mahogany-haired Raphaela. I could feel Smith with me the whole time, as if we were actors on the same stage.
An impenetrable wall of ancient, moss-draped trees encircled the perimeter of her large property, the forest running to wetlands that stretched as far as the eye could see at the back of the residence. From a briefly glimpsed overhead perspective, there were only two points of access. Rear to the building by boat at the solid wooden wharf or entry along a pitted driveway that disappeared through dense bush for quite a distance. Eventually, the road emerged and passed through a fortified gate, the single breach in a thick wall ringing her boundary. Dissecting a wide expanse of cleared grass, her driveway ended in a turning circle at the front steps.
It was late afternoon, the thin light slanting down in green-tinged rays through a canopy of leaves. The woman stalked up and down the length of the veranda along the house’s front, clearly expecting company. The reception would not be hospitable. She wore combat fatigues and a singlet, armed to the teeth with varied guns and knives. A vicious scimitar, as tall she was, with long blades jutting either end at opposite angles was propped against the stairs.
She jumped to the lawn, holding a small box dotted by a series of switches. Arrayed behind her on the porch stretched an armoury of startling variety. Flamethrowers, automatic machine guns, grenades and more. There were also throwing stars that glistened with a coating of flammable oil. This information swirled my brain with unalterable certainty.
Billie was a formidable opponent, incredibly muscled, her bearing one of military efficiency, coiled to unleash deadly force at will. Her skin shone with sweat in the humidity. The sun finally slunk below the horizon and the woman lit several hurricane lamps on the porch. They barely cast a glow beyond the zone of her patrol; the rest formed a solid curtain of blackness.
Bugs teemed the meagre illumination in grating chorus. Abruptly, their racket ceased, morphing to an eerie rustle as thousands of dead insects snowed from the sky like volcanic ash, carpeting the corona around the lanterns. Whatever was coming sucked the life from all before it. The woman spun towards the road, straining to see and hear. She knew what to expect and she was prepared.
The stillness erupted – a tumult of tightly packed bodies marching through the forest towards her. Hidden by the murk, they jeered and grunted, the sounds unlike any animal known on earth. She waited. The cacophony increased as her enemies closed in. Still she waited. Branches snapped and cracked like gunshot under a battalion of stomping feet. How could one fend off a multitude?
Billie waited and waited, until it seemed as if her enemies were on top of her. Then she kissed the tiny crucifix about her neck, and let loose with her surprise. She flicked several switches on the box in her hands. The crescent-shaped lawn lit up under dozens of floodlights hung from the trees, revealing drifts of insect shells, mummified wildlife and shrivelling grass. The sprinklers spurted awake to douse the huge black-skinned demons forming a blockade five-deep beyond the trees. The distinctive petroleum odour of napalm spread on the air.
These were not the emaciated specimens of my nightmare – their single purpose was to fight. Half a body taller than the tallest man, their hides were plated by knobbly, armoured skin, horned skulls combined with lethal tusks thrusting from bottom jaws. Long, thickly roped arms tipped by jagged meat-ripping talons ploughed the ground when they moved. They were the ugliest, most dangerous-looking things I’d ever seen. Those at the front stared greedily with red eyes at the lone soldier and opened fang-lined maws to roar in ear-shattering unison, flinging drool far and wide.
The woman wore a flamethrower belted over her shoulder. She deftly swung it around and ejected a stream of fire. The creatures contorted and crackled in the conflagration, their battle screams cut short in a stench of charred flesh. Foliage ignited, adding to the blaze, but for every ghastly opponent she crisped, another took its place.
Defiant snarls mingled with the squeals of the burning. Once the flamethrower was spent she tossed it aside. Billie triggered explosives buried about the clearing from her electronic box, each blast a deafening shower of soil and torn flesh. The numerous demon corpses vanished where they fell, cratered land and piles of grey dust the only residue of their demise.
It was obvious from the beginning the gladiator would not win. Her enemies were simply too many. She lobbed grenades, and when none remained, turned to the guns, emptied magazines littering the ground. I realised with dread that Billie’s brave efforts were little more than a stalling tactic across the long night. This was a deliberate sacrifice aimed at buying Raphaela the time she needed to prepare for the coming of the Crone.
The battle finished with hand-to-hand combat. Billie’s spinning blades scythed into the horde like threshers through wheat. She was a phenomenal fighter; mixed martial arts with weapons on turbo-charge. Somersaulting into the pack, she swivelled the tip of her javelin to hack heads and limbs. But she was outnumbered, and eventually overwhelmed.
A huge fearsome demon ran in to gore a wide smile across her belly with serrated tusks, thrashing its head back and forth and shredding Billie’s singlet. Next to me on my bed, Smith issued a guttural shriek, curling over, his face flushed and an arm wrapping his middle.
“Smithy?” I cried, but could not break the trance’s hold.
The warrior howled in agony, splitting her scimitar in a practised twist. It came apart and she synchronised to thrust one blade through its eye and another stab to its sternum. The beast vaporised in a swirl of cinders.
From the rear, another beast lumbered in to drag razor talons across her back. Billie dropped a blade, clutching at her spine. Smith thrashed violently in unison. She struggled to fight on, but the blood loss from constant attacks soon took an irreversible toll. The slayed woman fell to her knees, an agonised moan escaping her lips.
Trapped in her suffering, Smithy writhed beside me in a pool of sweat, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. But there was nothing I could do to shake from the vision, which clouded my mind until its course had run.
Cradling her stomach where the guts oozed through, Billie now haemorrhaged freely from a gash at her neck. Just as the merciful end was upon her, the frenzy halted, an alley parting in the demons’ midst. A figure appeared. It was the girl who’d tortured Seth in front of Raphaela. The girl who’d been turned to smoke and sucked into Raphaela’s body as she died – Finesse. She glided with silken poise in red leather, an artificial frown of regret not lessening her stunning beauty. Her shoes remained immaculate despite the dirt and her heels did not sink into the ground.
Seth stumbled behind her in a zombie state, dragged by a rope fastened so tightly about his neck the skin was rubbed raw and weeping. The tether was not necessary. Finesse twitched a finger and he sprawled on his stomach into the muck next to the woman.
“The great Warrior, Billie Kho,” she cooed joyfully. “Although death may dim the legend. Did you enjoy the show, Seth? I don’t mean to be critical, but it did go on. I like the climax though.” She aimed a rib-cracking kick at Seth’s side. There was a loud snap and she chuckled. “Does that count as a comment? Not very original, I’ve heard it before.”
Billie gurgled as she inhaled, her breaths getting fewer and fewer. She struggled to speak. “Go … inside.”
“You dare issue orders? I admire your spirit at this late hour.” Finesse chuckled smugly, as though she was the only one who understood an insider joke. “See what happens to those who defy me?” She lifted Seth’s chin with the tip of her shoe, his expression desolate. “No matter how far you run, no matter where you turn, I am there. Even on boats in the middle of the sea.”
Billie rallied to speak and Finesse pulled her stiletto away. Seth’s head dropped and she placed her foot on the back of his neck, compressing his face into blood-sodden soil. He coughed feebly, but didn’t resist.
“The Keeper … awaits.”
Finesse bent over Billie, gripping her cross on its chain to tow her upright. The Warrior’s head lolled on her ruined neck.
“Still a believer, Billie? Tut, tut. There is only one God and he is not yours.”
Finesse yanked, the chain broke and the cross came free. Billie slumped to the dirt, her shoulders convulsing. After a second, I realised she was laughing even as the life left her body.
“She will give—” Billie exhaled slowly and breathed no more.
Finesse flicked the crucifix to the ground and pressed it into the mud with the sole of her shoe. Her grotesque guard of honour clapped and hissed.
“The feeble Keeper will finally yield my Stone and every thing you have ever done will be for nothing,” she spat contemptuously. “I will hunt the tattered remnants of the thieving Sacred Trinity to the ends of time.” Finesse was jubilant and offered a winning smile unequalled by any supermodel.
I blinked as the images faded. Smith gasped awake, spluttering, “God, I hate her.” He hauled to a seated position, blood dripping from his nose onto my quilt. I scooted over and grabbed a wad of tissues from my side table, leaning in to clean him up.
“That’s the end of Raphaela’s story,” I said.
“Not a happy one because this is no fairytale,” he replied, his voice muffled from beneath balled tissue.
