The Hollows, page 5
“There are three different ways to reach our objective,” Day said. “The choice of direction is yours, but choose wisely. They each hold a different aspect to them, some of peril and some of confusion. But, in the end, I believe that each will lead us to our destination.”
“Any of them hold an aspect of ease and happiness?” I asked, then rolled my eyes.
His amusement crawled on my skin.
“I didn’t think so,” I sighed.
I walked closer to the split. The fork in the road was not necessarily three open paths. The rocks in the road formed only three strides in each direction, then an upward step to three stoops of three doors. Each of the doors was different. One was made of standard wood, pine, two and one-half inches thick and stained in a faded cherry red with a rusted silver knob. There was nothing special about this door.
The second was taller, pointed, and was of heavily weighted cast iron. The handle was the head of a brass lion with the circular knocker dangling from its mouth. I wouldn’t be able to push this door open myself. I’d need help. My assumption was that what lay behind the door would be heavy too.
The third was made of a black glass, maybe diamond, with no handle nor trim. It stood shorter than me; I’d have to duck beneath the frame. Even from a distance, I could feel it was colder than the others, frozen. Ice was forming on the outside, spreading slowly across the front.
“Day?” I gave him a look.
“You can ask what is behind each door, but I can only say that I am unaware. Each door is different, even if traveled through twice. But, as my name suggests, I’m quite in opposition to the cold,” if he had a face, I would swear he would have winked.
I kept my eyes down; it was something I was accustomed to when being told a preference. Typically, I was forced to hear it and then obey.
Day must have sensed my apprehension, “Speak your mind, Serenity. Do not be afraid.”
I shrugged. Another custom, “You say as your name suggests, but your physical nature suggests something completely different.”
He laughed, “I am an enigma, you could say.”
“You are just simply a question,” I said.
With that, his laughter stopped. All of his focus that was upon me made me feel heavy; my sight looked at the floor. He moved a half step closer, “And what is the answer to the question?”
I stood for a moment, carefully pressing flat the words on my tongue, “Just because there is a question, doesn’t mean there is always an answer. At least, sometimes the answer is not completely clear from the start.”
“Questions are not always meant to be answered. Now, which door?” Day asked.
Weird, I thought. I was always under the impression there was an advantage in the ability to answer questions. Yet, in that moment, Day held the benefit in simply being a question.
Turning back, I looked at the options in front of me. The door I chose was cherry red, made of simple wood with a simple handle. Nothing special about it, the same as I’ve been reminded by others about myself. Nothing special will lie behind the door’s face, behind the door’s skin. There was nothing special at all about this place.
But, Day was different. Day was something special. Day was a question; I made a note in my mind to find the answer.
Chapter 3.5:
The Fall
Not bothering to stop, she slammed the door behind her and continued running. It took an instant for her eyes to adjust to see she was in a long, concrete corridor with no doors, or windows, or escape. The girl stopped and looked backward expecting to see the dilapidated red door she came through with the moth still fluttering around it. Although she had only run a few strides, the door she came in was now so far away, she could barely see it; several hundred feet.
How is that possible? She thought. Wrong. It is all wrong.
She turned again the direction she was heading and went face-first into another door, one that seemed to have instantly grown upwards from the ground itself. Even as she looked down at its base, the cracks were sealing and melting back to solid earth.
The girl looked around, feeling closed off and dirty. Too dirty. She rubbed her hands up and down her legs, trying frantically to straighten her dress while looking for another option other than the phantom door. Anything else would have been a blessing. Well, maybe not anything. She would definitely prefer the phantom door to the first two rooms she found herself in. The girl shuddered at the thought of the empty eye sockets staring back at her.
The world around her felt cold. She could hear the wind howling as if funneling through a thin tunnel from open air. The door was different than the others. The wood had long carvings etched deep from what, she could not tell. Her finger traced the etchings as they carved deeper into the door, connecting slowly. After a minute, carvings began to show a picture; a jagged moth sitting on a tree went from the top corners down to the bottom, spreading out roots that grasped at the ground.
There was nowhere else for her to go. She was trapped with only the option of the tree. So, instead of wasting time staring at the carvings, beautifully haunting as they may be, the girl decided to move. The door creaked open slowly, loudly, echoing all around her. Another long hallway stood beyond the door beckoning her.
There’s a feeling one gets when being stared at from a distance. Maybe it’s predatory instinct, or something deeper, but the hairs on her neck stood on end. Her heart beat in her chest, ramping against her rib cage and humming in her ears. Slowly turning her head, she peered over her shoulder to the corridor behind her. Something was hiding. Something different. It felt different than the predator before. Newer, more hungry than angry. More animalistic than intelligent. Like a young starved vulture finally wondering on an injured calf, circling and waiting for death so it can feed.
Two eyes opened against the darkness.
Her blood froze in her veins sending cold chills down to her toes. The eyes were reflecting, not glowing. Things never glowed in the Hollows, but sometimes they could reflect.
But there’s no light, the girl thought.
The eyes moved closer. She could feel him now. His hunger. There was nothing else in his mind but to feed. They bobbed forward, slowly revealing a rough outline. Every cell in her body told her to run. The girl knew she should have listened, but there was something else about the creature that lured her. She could feel its pain. The pain of being trapped here, foodless, alone, and wandering. The hurt and panic in its eyes kept her feet from turning.
The tortured animal limped closer. The thing was hunched over, its body horizontal like a dog instead of upright. It was smaller than some of the creatures she knew of, but something felt off about it. Something was wrong. Another wrong thing, she felt it in her gut. Then two more sets of eyes started shining behind the first pair.
Instinctively, the girl backed up a foot, halfway crossing the brink of the door. When the creature came into view, a scream erupted from her chest and she fell backward onto the ground.
They were boys, no older than the girl. Three of them. But, they were all hunched over on all fours, naked, and snarling. Blood poured out of their nostrils, eyes, and teeth. Their eyes were too big for their sockets; their skin was sunken into their emaciated bodies, their lips practically gone altogether as though chewed off by their own teeth. Bones protruding from their rib cages and shoulders and foam spreading down their chests. They let out the most horrible screech from their bodies as they ripped towards her.
The girl shuffled backward in a panic. She turned and shoved herself to her feet, tearing down the hallway faster than she thought her feet could carry her. At the same moment, her eyes flashed to the walls, not having the time to be properly confused by the thousands of hand-drawn, dead trees on the corridor. They flashed by her, one after the other in a blur until she could have sworn they were turning real.
Perhaps to stall the shock, she focused on the ground a few feet in front of her, cutting off the world and the sounds and the thought of her pursuers. The ground was real. The ground was safe. The ground was something relatively unchanging that held her sanity concrete.
After an eternity, when her thighs burned away the anxiety and were left shaky after the sounds had died behind her and the eyes were far away in her wake, her pace began to slow. The trees were now all around her. Alive and tangible.
Her moth flew around them, weaving in and out of their branches. The trees were no longer painted or sketched on the walls, but dying and decaying around her in the shadowed and dead forest. Their white limbs and molding trunks smelled of rotten mildew. She was surrounded.
“No,” the girl said putting a hand up to the limbs. They were in pain, she could feel it. “How did you get this way? Who did this to you?” But the tree died against her palm before answering.
She heard a twig snap. Whipping her head around, she was faced with an infinity of dead forest in the midnight. Mist and fog clouded her vision. Plenty of places to hide. Plenty of trees to stand behind before attacking.
In her gut, the girl knew she was close. She knew if she just turned and ran she would be out of this graveyard soon.
Almost out, she repeated in her head. The saddest word in any language. Almost. It meant so close, but with no guarantee. Almost out, almost loved, almost dead. So many possibilities with just as many dangers.
Another twig snapped, more dead limbs rustled. She could hear them breathing, all three of them, sniffing the air and making prehistoric clicks and clacks of communication she thought was only reserved for the beasts. The girl knew they were no longer human, no longer little boys who played and frolicked and loved. Their innocence was torn from them with the hunger and rage of being trapped in this place. They were changed.
They were getting closer. She could hear their movements in the mist just beyond sight. Soon several dark shapes were outlined in the fog. One was now standing upright, the others followed on all fours. The pack was so close, but she dared not to make a move, not a sound, in hopes they would continue ahead none the wiser.
A sense of something bigger loomed behind them. Something larger, angrier, more intelligent, moved with the silence of the perfect hunter towards the three. The girl wanted to call out to them. She wanted to warn them that they should run, hide, do anything to get away from what was coming. The reckoning was on them before she opened her mouth.
Their screams would haunt her for the rest of her life, however, short that may be. The predators had turned back into children as they were devoured. She heard the roars and the crunching of bone and the stabbing of their flesh, watching as the large mass attacked the three, now so tiny, outlines until they no longer fought or cried or yelled.
Almost out, the girl’s mind woke her out of her shock, and she ran. She ran so quickly away, not bothering about the sounds her feet were making on the dead leaves and dried twigs, not bothering to worry about if she was being chased. The boys’ screams were still in her head as she sprinted around trunks in the forest of the dead.
As her feet slapped the ground, she felt when the beast was finished with his prey and listened for her. Once it located her direction, it continued the pursuit. She weaved through the trees, ducking branches, and pushed herself harder than she had ever before. Bile was rising in her chest from the physical exertion and nearly missed an opening. Her feet skid against the ground to a stop as she saw an opening to a cave hidden in the only knoll she had come by. The opening was just big enough for her body to duck into.
Vines and brush covered the entry way. It looked like the hovels created in the Hollow, but older, abandoned in the wake of some panic. Placing her hand on the outside she looked in, trying desperately to see where her next footstep would be.
The world burned in her chest, anxiety building as she knew the creature was close and gaining ground. No other choice. The girl told herself she was almost out. She was so close to being rid of the beast for another short period of time that she stopped hesitating and took a step inside. Her feet hit solid ground, then a drop to another step. A few steps inside and down the rock staircase, she started to feel a moment’s hesitation of safety. A moment that allowed her to breath.
The beast’s shadow loomed over the entrance behind her. She turned and slowly, silently, descended the stairs, keeping her breath and her movements low. The shadow grew over the hole to the cave. It was on top of her and soon would find her sanctuary.
The moth circled above her head. She begged for it to leave for fear it would give away her position. The girl reached up and swatted the air around it. Her foot slipped and the ground cracked. As the shadow enveloped on the opening, the floor gave way underneath her, letting her fall into the open air.
INTERLUDE II
Ethan walked through the city, not bothering to marvel at the openness and tranquility of the cool night. He saw Maggie to his side out of the corner of his eye; her pink dress was not flowing with the wind or rippling with her movement. She was shorter than him, but not by much, as it is with younger siblings with days of their birth as closely aligned as possible with the cycle of conception. His steps were lethargic, nearly dragging against the dirt, kicking grains into his sandals.
The buildings and hovels were more than familiar. There was never a time where he strayed further than a few miles’ radius from where his family once held residence, always thinking he would cross paths with the Woman in Red who tore everything apart. His gut wrenched at the sites where he and Maggie used to play hide and seek, where his father had picked him up off the ground after a tumble, or where his mother would wipe Maggie’s tears after losing a friend to the things in the dark.
Ethan saw the broken remnants of large concrete buildings probably full of lost creatures that made claim to the empty rooms and dusty floors. Large fissures made their reach from its foundations and cracked their way upward to the tops. On either side of the clefts were pastes and scratches of drawings made from long ago. He remembered a few of them, how his hands dipped into thick liquid with homemade brushes, flicking and splattering strokes to make shapes of whatever was on his mind. Ethan marked up a few to give Maggie and him signs of home. It was easy to get lost, he wanted to make sure she never wandered astray from not knowing her way back.
Ethan’s fingers traced the crevices that separated one hemisphere of a black cat from the other. He stared long and hard, what had started out as brief remembrance turned soiled when he could no longer avoid the secondary drawing just beneath his own. A small obscure flower with over emphasized vines and awkward petals was drawn from the base as if connecting its roots to the ground.
“Do you remember this, Maggie?” Ethan asked.
She nodded next to him, “You said my first one was not very good.”
Ethan shook his head, “No, I said it wasn’t right. There is a difference.”
“I thought you were being so mean, and then you disappeared for nearly two days. Mom nearly lost her mind trying to figure out where you had gone off to,” Maggie said. She stood next to him staring down at the black flower with her hand touching his shoulder so lightly that he barely noticed it.
“Then you came back,” Maggie continued. “I still don’t know where you found it. But, you wanted me to see a real flower so I knew what they looked like. I tried to draw it as best I could.”
“I made a deal at another market outside of town. A young witch that probably did not know what she had in her hands. It was an easy deal to make, but I got lost on the way back. Father was furious,” Ethan said.
“But, I was happy. I had never seen blue before.”
“Neither had I.”
With Ethan keeping his gaze on the ground, he nearly ran into the solid figure turning from the corner of a dilapidated building. The thing was of small frame and dainty features, quick to tuck away its wings and look as unremarkable as possible. Ethan recognized the hard callouses of the tiny hands and the shine on the pupils.
The little Finder’s eyes went wide, “Oh! I am sorry. So sorry.”
Ethan nodded and took a step to the side to get around her.
The little Finder moved back into his way, “Can I help you? Can you help me? I have recovered plenty if you have any needs. I can recover more if you desire.”
“No, I’m fine,” Ethan said, trying to maneuver around her, again unsuccessful.
“Can you help me, then?” She said, “I have so much to look for. Have you seen-?”
“I’m not interested. Move,” He said. Maggie moved and positioned herself just on the other side of the girl. She looked at Ethan patiently.
The little Finder’s hair bounced as she shook her head, “No, no, there has to be something.”
“Unless you can find the Woman in Red, I don’t really care what you have or need.”
Her eyes widened, “What red woman? Oh! Do You need to locate her? I can help, oh yes. I sure can help.”
“No, you stupid fairy, if you don’t know where she is now, then get out of my way. You’re irritating me,” Ethan felt the heat rise to his cheeks.
Maggie whispered, “Maybe she could help.”
“No, she couldn’t,” He said.
The little Finder’s eyes furrowed, “I could, though! I find things.”
Ethan tried to push her aside, but she grabbed a hold of his arm, “I said, move.”
“Please! I need to help. We can bargain, we can barter. I have found things others never went looking for. We can trade, oh yes we can.”
Ethan stood as tall as he could, towering over the little finder, “Get out of my way, or so help me I’ll kill you.”
She stiffened. Maggie went still. They both looked back at him, stunned and silent.
The little Finder took her hands off his wrist, “Never mind. Never mind, at all. I can help find trinkets and gold, but I cannot help someone find their soul.”
“Excuse me?” Ethan stopped. He wheeled around and pressed her against the wall with all his might, “Find my soul? Who the hell said I needed to find my soul? Fuck you, fairy. You can’t help me find anything. You can’t do anything at all! You just wander around and steal other people’s things just because they leave them there after a tragedy.”
