Harper was in a carnival funhouse where you couldn’t tell up from down. He swirled and twirled in a black sea of ink with little fishes that glowed in weird bright colours: green and purple and gold. Stars and meteors flashed by so fast they were just streaks of light.
Sparks flew around him in the blackness, and the wind whistled. Voices moaned, and some laughed. Some cried, and one called his name. Harper. Harper.
It sounded like Penny, calling from far away.
Harper … Harper …
Was it his mum calling?
Or no, was it him, calling his mum?
Something brushed past him; he felt sticky fur touch his hand. Something else prickly ran down his back. His pants were wet, he was pretty sure of that. Mum wouldn’t be pleased.
He choked and gagged. Something smelled terrible. Rotten, putrid, stinking rancid rot filled his nostrils and slithered down his throat. Harper vomited, and the vomit had worms in it, and the worms were bright red and wiggled down all over him.
Behind his eyelids, the symbols from the Magic Book burned, flashed, and flickered. He tried to talk, to explain that he knew all about this—that he was in on the secret. But he couldn’t speak. His throat was packed with mud, or something heavy and wet, like clay. His mouth stretched wide, his cheeks hurt, and still it filled with more and more swampy-tasting mud.
He gagged and vomited, but the mud grew and spread around him until it encased him in a cocoon, like a mummy. He couldn’t see or hear or breathe. He was going to die.
Maybe he was already dead.
Harper was frightened. Mum, he thought. Penny. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.
Harper was spun hard, upside down, then back up. The cocoon blew apart, and he rocketed into an icy, black mist that ate away like acid at his flesh. His face was eaten away, his arms. He was a skull with two burning eye sockets, which glowed and lit up the darkness like two torches. He saw a wall of green matter, twisted like a brain, wet and shiny and squirming. Then blackness again.
Harper slammed into something hard and felt something in his arm crack. His feet slammed down on some solid, rough surface; he spun again, up, down, and then he shot upward with dizzying speed. He made sick again, all over himself.
I was only trying to help, he thought. He willed his mum to hear him, Penny to come help him. Penny was always there when he called, when he needed her. Even more than Mum, sometimes. Penny! Penny!
Harper thought he might be crying. Drops of something hot and salty ran down his face, down his neck, crawling into the neck of his t-shirt and under his clothes, burning fiery trails down his body.
His body itched all over with searing stings that made him think of fireflies.
He felt something on his neck, tendrils curling. Long, fingerlike tentacles gently wrapped around him and tightened, both scalding hot and freezing cold. Harper had a flash of Evan playing Zombie Apocalypse at home on his Xbox. He wondered ridiculously if Evan could see him now, caught in the thick of the game.
The noose around his neck squeezed until he couldn’t breathe. It then slammed him again and again down onto hard black rock until his bones were broken sweets. Gigantic black birds swooped down, flapping in his face, picking up his bones in their long beaks, taking him away bit by bit.
He felt a tickling in his ear, a blowing, a whisper: Terra, Rectificando, Occultum, Lapidem. It is time.