Dreams and Shadows

chapter FOURTEEN

THE VEIL RISES ON THE GREAT STAGE

Ewan and Dithers hovered over the small boulder, careful not to step in any of the blood pooling at its base. Abraham Collins lay sprawled across it, his back broken, legs shattered, savage fragments of bone tearing out through flesh. His legs twitched and jerked, still dancing, jagged bone sawing away at muscle and skin.

Dithers looked down with pity. This was no longer sporting. Abraham Collins looked up from his rock, broken almost in two, reaching for Ewan, his eyes bleary with blood.

“Angel?” Abraham wheezed out in between coughs. Ewan took one deliberate step backward, leaving Abraham’s hand pawing desperately at the space between them. Dithers and Ewan exchanged looks.

Dragana the Veela peered over the side of the cliff, one hundred feet above them, her heart as broken and mangled as Abraham’s body below. She flung herself over the side, dancing slowly down along the cliff face, each elegant foot kicking off stray rocks and ledges, toes perfectly pointed as she stepped. Drifting to the ground, she rushed up, put a gentle hand on Abraham’s chest, watching as blood seeped—occasionally spurting—through gashes punctured by splintered ribs. She looked away, dramatically. “Why did you have to leave me?” she whispered, her voice cracking with tears.

Dithers motioned to Ewan and then pointed at Abraham. “You know what you have to do.”

“What?” asked Ewan, not actually sure what he had to do.

“Like I showed you, like you would a rabbit,” said Dithers. He paused, waiting for Ewan to catch on. “It’s not kind to let them suffer like this.”

Ewan nodded.

“I can’t watch this,” said Dragana. She took a step back toward Abraham, cradled his cheeks in her hands, and kissed him deeply on the mouth. Then she pulled away, wiping a smear of blood across her lips with the back of her hand. Dragana turned away, facing the night.

Ewan wobbled Abe’s blood-soaked head in his hands like a large pumpkin, looking to Dithers for approval. He rocked it back and forth just a little to get the motion right, as if he were testing a hammer or perfecting a golf swing. Then, in one swift motion, Ewan snapped Abraham’s neck. The sound was quick and slight, barely even noticeable. Dragana flinched anyway.

And with that, the twitching dance ended and the blood gurgled no more.

Ewan smiled cautiously. “Was that right?”

Dithers smiled back, reaching over, ruffling Ewan’s hair like a proud father. “That was exactly right. Come on, there are still three more.”

Dragana wept quietly, turning back to mourn her lover, clasping his hand to her breast. Dithers and Ewan together walked away from the corpse. Ewan leaned in close, whispering ever so quietly. “If she loves them so much, why does she do that?”

Dithers put a hand on Ewan’s shoulder and shook his head. “Because she doesn’t know any better.”

ELSEWHERE IN THE forest, Dallas’s disembodied head once again poked out from the front of the canvas tent. “Did you girls hear that?” he asked of the pair hastily dressing behind him. The girls both nodded.

“Yeah,” said Carly. “Your creepy, high as hell little friend probably just walked off the side of a cliff or something.”

“I’m serious,” said Dallas. “If that was Abe, he could really be hurt.”

Stacy grimaced. “Well, why don’t you go check it out?”

Dallas shook his head. “I’m not going out there alone.”

“Yeah,” Stacy nodded. “You really are.”

“It’s dark and I’m tripping balls.”

Carly handed him a camping lantern from her pack—crisp, new, fresh out of the plastic, having never seen a day of use. “You better be careful then.”

“Yeah,” Stacy giggled. “Don’t walk off any cliffs there, stud.”

“Yeah.” Dallas looked down at the lantern, fumbling with it for a second, trying to figure out just how to get it switched on, then, finally working it out, turned it all the way up. His head was fuzzy. Everything was hazy, out of focus. The light was sooooo beautiful. Colors he’d never seen before scintillated within the bulb, casting wicked shadows across the faces of the two beautiful women huddled before him. Their eyes twinkled in the light, catching the stray, brilliant rays and reflecting them back like—

SNAP! Stacy snapped her fingers inches away from Dallas’s nose. “Focus,” she said firmly, waving her hand in front of his face.

Dallas shook off the wandering, distracted feeling and remembered for a moment that his friend was somewhere out there in the dark. Standing to a crouch, he scooted out through the front flap of the tent, staggering off into the woods looking for Abe. “And bring back a pizza!” shouted Carly jokingly.

“Yeah! Pepperoni!” Stacy giggled. Carly laughed along with her. Then, not wanting to look at the creepy, misty darkness outside the tent any longer, Stacy hurriedly zipped the front flap back up.

“These guys are losers,” whispered Carly sharply, beneath her breath.

“Shut up.” Stacy smiled. “Dallas is cute.”

“Yeah, but his friend is a night-mare.”

“I know. But you still owe me for the cabin. I got stuck with your brother all week. You can deal with a creepy little dork leering at you for two days.”

DISCOMBOBULATED FROM A head full of high, Dallas stumbled through bramble patches, his footfalls heavy and uneven; his senses disconnecting further and further from reality. Where am I going? he mumbled incoherently. He had no idea where Abe had wandered off to and it was dawning on him that sometime between entering the tent and hearing Abe’s cry, a thick, dewy fog had set in. It swirled through the dim wood, rivers of elegant mist pouring down the sides of knobby mounds like swift, wispy waterfalls, spilling a thick pea-soup miasmic sea across mossy earth, ankle high and impenetrable by the naked eye. The air was thick with the humid nighttime sweat of Texas spring, tendrils of misty haze reaching up waist high, swallowing entire sections of the forest whole.

This was a very, very bad idea, thought Dallas, now sure that his friend had taken a nasty spill off the side of some cliff. “ABE!” he bellowed. “AAAAAAAABRAHAAAAAAAM!” There was no reply—not from crickets or cicadas, or Abe in distress. Then Dallas felt it. Despite the heat, there was something about the air that held the cold, damp chill of death upon it. It wasn’t a smell, it was a feeling, a creeping doom; a bleak, barren, soulless hollow that the light of the moon couldn’t pierce.

All the light had fallen away from the world, with only the fog illuminated now. Even the stars struggled against the black, managing only the slightest pinpricks of twinkles through a gloom that was both everywhere and nowhere at once. It wasn’t the dark of night; it was the tenebrous shadow of bad omens. Dallas had done a lot of things to score a night with a girl like Stacy in the past, and he would easily have done a lot more to score a night with both Stacy and Carly at the same time. But suddenly, ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms and stumbling through the middle of f*cking nowhere didn’t seem worth it.

He’d been walking for at least ten minutes, his legs growing heavy, his head wobbling a bit on his neck. It was time to turn around; he’d done his part for Abe. He spun on his heel, gazing across nebulous fog, only to see the flicker of a campfire and the tent not fifty paces away. What? But I . . . ? “Shit.” He hadn’t been out there ten minutes. He hadn’t been out there five. Time was f*cking with him. And no matter how little he cared for Abe’s predicament compared to his own, there was no way the girls would let him back in the tent so soon after leaving. So he turned back into the night, calling out to Abe once more.

THE GIRLS EACH drifted off into a deep sleep. Carly slipped immediately into a colorful dream fueled by afterglow, laced with Dallas’s musky scent. Stacy wasn’t so lucky; she sank into a grim, dusky void, vacant of restful peace. There was something dark and lonely here, something unnatural. She wasn’t alone in her dreamless sleep, unsure what it was that loitered in the empty black of her subconscious, leering at her thoughts, sifting through her memories with filthy, perverted fingers.

Perched above her, in plain view, stooped a skeleton of a man, an ancient, drooling Methuselah, with hollow, sunken sockets surrounding lifeless black orbs; an unfettered beard speckled with wood chips and slivers of cedar; and a flare of wild, untamed white hair exploding out of his skull like a dying dandelion. Nibbling Nils. The Buber.

Stacy was a feast of shame, brimming with insecurity, lashed together with frayed strands of delusion. Nibbling Nils ran his slobbering tongue over his shriveled, cracking lips. He stroked Stacy’s cheek with a bony hand, pinching both sides of her face, forming a gaping pucker. Then he leaned in, kissed her deeply, his enthusiastic tongue flitting around the inside of her mouth. She tasted like an unripened raspberry, a bitter, tart fruit laced with regret but full of promise.

Delicious. Her soul flooded into him like a geyser, an eruption of despair and self-loathing, salted with empty bliss and drunken diversion. He cringed a bit at the taste of her childhood—far too sweet for his liking—but the broth upon which a thousand of her disappointments were stewed.

Everything that was Stacy Long faded away, swallowed hard into the belly of a dirty old man. He would soon drink her dry, hollow her out, slide in and wear her into the night like a silk dress. But there were still several years of staggering mediocrity to finish gulping down, and he was in no hurry.

ELSEWHERE, DALLAS CONTINUED blindly through the woods, calling for Abe. It was pitch black and the misting fog had developed a personality all its own, at times sweeping up like a storm surge, silently herding him farther off the trails. Slowly but surely, Dallas was getting lost. It seemed now as if finding camp was going to be as impossible as finding Abe. He tried convincing himself that nothing had happened—that Abe was sleeping off his mistakes under a tree somewhere, dreaming of all the things he was never going to do with Carly—but the mushrooms were getting the best of him and panic was setting in.

Scratch! PAIN. Dallas glanced down at his arm with a wince. He’d somehow walked into the sharp end of a jagged branch, his pink exposed flesh flooding with a shock of crimson. He cupped it with his hand, trying to stanch the flow.

He swore repeatedly. He cursed the tree; he cursed himself; he even cursed the way the fog began to turn scarlet as blood dripped, swirling into it, splashing into the thick, frothy roil before diffusing into the surrounding mist. The fog ran red with blood, pinkening into a soft blush before vanishing into the black. Wait, that’s not right.

Dallas didn’t care whether this was the drugs or not. He’d had enough. He turned without thinking, running blindly into the night, his legs pumping furiously, managing to make it a full fifty feet before a looping root reached out of the earth, took hold of his ankle, and twisted it, slamming him face-first into the rocky soil. Gasping, he tried to catch his breath, but it had been knocked clean out of him and sat swirling in the impenetrable fog beside him. Then he reached out, trying to grab hold of it. His lungs wheezed to life.

That’s when he heard the scuffing sound of footsteps through brush. Then the tinkling notes of a soft voice whimpering in the evening air. “Dallas?” Stacy called out. “Dallas, where are you?”

“I’m here,” he coughed out, trying to form wheezes into words. “Here.”

“Dallas?”

“Here!” This time the word came out, all the way out. Dallas pushed himself to his knees, rising to his feet, careful of the ankle that was throbbing too much to merely be twisted. He didn’t want to look at it; he didn’t want to know. “Stacy?”

Stacy made her way carefully through the soupy darkness. There was something strange about the way she walked, as if she were uncomfortable with her own feet and measured every stride, but Dallas was only just beginning to notice it as she took her final few steps toward him. Then he looked into her eyes, saw only milky white orbs, the irises cloudy, drained of color. She had no expression, showed no emotion, a bag of flesh held steady by the hooks and pulleys of an invisible puppeteer.

“Stacy?”

Without a word, Stacy slashed his throat with her camping knife. His severed windpipe gurgled his surprise as he reached out futilely in self-defense. She thrust the knife violently into him, stabbing each individual organ alphabetically, one by one and twice for the lungs. Dallas twitched with a sickened spasm, his body convulsing, the last seconds of life clinging desperately to remain behind in this world. He reached out, lost two fingers; he swung with an open paw, lost three more. Stacy’s strength was unnatural and Dallas never landed a single blow for himself before tumbling to the ground to bleed out in the thick fog.

The trees rustled. “He was mine,” a voice called from the dark.

“I got him first,” said Stacy, her voice raspy and cold.

Bill the Shadow stepped out from behind a thick tree. He was an inky blot of a man, a tattered black coat and weathered fedora the only details that weren’t too fuzzy to see. Except for his eyes. There was no missing his eyes. He drew a deep drag off a cigarette, its bright orange cherry searing the dark surrounding his featureless face. “Oh. I see.”

Then, with a wave of his hand the trees descended upon Stacy, their branches like talons and teeth, anxious to sink into her waiting flesh. Stacy recoiled, but the forest was far quicker.

The branches first tore the clothes from her body then the skin from her naked flesh; they continued to swing with an angry rage, rending chunk after bloody chunk, tossing each aside while hungrily clawing at the prize beneath. They reached in together in a gnarled wooden unison, dug deep into what remained of Stacy’s body and in one terrible motion tore it apart in an explosion of muck, bile, and bone. Where a woman once stood, now only Nibbling Nils remained. “F*ck . . . you,” he said.

“I’d say we’re even, old man,” said Bill the Shadow. “Let’s not make this a bigger deal than it has to be.” He narrowed his eyes.

Nils backed down. He didn’t want Bill’s wrath any more than Bill really wanted his. “Yeah. Whatever. F*ck it.”

Bill smiled. “Kind of fun though, wasn’t it?”

Nils curled the corner of his lips into a slobbering sneer—the closest thing he could manage to a smile. “Yeah. It really was.”

“Come on, let’s go watch the Aufhocker.”

CARLY JERKED AWAKE, surprised by something that wasn’t there. She hadn’t heard anything, couldn’t see anything, and apparently Dallas and Stacy had slunk off for another tryst. She thought for a moment of the two off in the dark, passionately wrestling, clawing at each other, and she sighed deeply, left with no other option but the loser. But even he wasn’t around. Carly Ginero was a crestfallen second place, her role that of booby prize to an unworthy, unwanted suitor. She really hated Stacy sometimes.

SNAP! A twig cracked outside the tent. She didn’t think, didn’t stop for a moment to wonder if it was an animal or an intruder; she got up, storming out of the tent, angry that she had been left alone. Calling out into the night, she barked: “Now just where the hell have you been?” She trailed off, her eyes losing focus gazing out into the eerie silence. No one. No one at all. She looked around, uneasy, wondering who or what might be lurking in the woods just outside the dwindling firelight.

She saw the rustle of movement, heard another twig crack. Her head whipped around and there, just beyond the bushes, stood the creepiest, most emaciated little boy she’d ever seen. He stared back at her through the dark, his eyes hollow, empty. Her heart sank into her stomach and she froze in place. Then, with the flutter of eyelashes and the slight twitch of eyebrows, the little boy turned and ran into the woods, daring her to chase him.

That’s when the thing leapt from the dark, grappling her from behind. “Run,” breathed a husky voice into her ear with air so hot it singed her hair. Carly sprinted, immediately hitting her full stride. Her bare feet tore over broken ground, rocks digging in, scraping the skin from her heels. She ran harder than she’d ever run in her life. There was nothing but fear now, a terrible anxiety that this was how she would meet her end—alone and screaming in the dark underbrush.

Eberhard rode astride her back—all three goblinoid feet of him—a snaggletoothed smile resting beneath his crooked hook nose that showed no malice at all. Only amusement. He hooted and hollered, his grip firm, his stance that of a prize-winning jockey. “Run, my little pretty, run!” he cackled. “Run until your feet fall off.”

The forest thundered with the steady, drumlike pounding of her heart. BA-DUM! BA-DUM! BA-DUM! BA-DUM! So great was the pounding that they couldn’t hear the rustling leaves, snapping twigs, or even the crackling branches below them as Carly’s delicate feet were nibbled apart piece by piece by a ravenous forest. Nor did they hear the distant rumble of thunder, or see the stars engulfed by dark black clouds backlit by distant fires. And by the time the rumble had become an unbridled roar, it was too late.

Eberhard and Carly looked up to see a dark rider atop a shadowy mound of matted fur emerging from the wood in front of them. In its hand it carried a monstrous ax—the blade alone half the size of a grown man—and by the time either realized they were in danger, the ax swung, cleaving Carly into two perfectly bisected pieces, then followed through, taking the Aufhocker in two pieces with her.

Carly stopped running, each leg still shuffling forward a bit more before both of her halves fell in opposite directions, the wet, gelatinous slop of her innards spilling out upon the earth the last sound she would ever make. And were the countryside not echoing with the deep, brutal thunder of Hell, someone might have noted the lonely sadness and what it had to say about her troubled, meandering, unfulfilled life. But Carly Ginero—the daughter of an autoworker and a nurse, who had dreamed up to the last moments of her life of becoming a princess—would not be the last sad story to come to an end that night. Nor would her end be the most spectacular. In death, much as in life, she would prove to be an unnoticed footnote amid a much larger story—not even a close second in her bid to be noteworthy—for tonight was another woman’s big night, and that woman had waited seven long years in Hell to get it.