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blakavalon · 8 years ago

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Black Avalon 1.03 - Ivy

“This is me,” I said. Nervous sweat had accumulated on my forehead but I ignored it. “Just a hallway, see?” Into my apartment, followed by Brae and- “Where’s Sefu?”

Brae leaned their head out into the hall again, crouching to get under the doorframe. Their puppies trotted up, looking agitated. One of them, Berus I think, stared at me mournfully and I thought, maybe I have some jerky around here somewhere. Not the time, though. Brae flashed the dogs a few hand signals and they dashed off again. Brae eased the door closed carefully, with their non-glowing hand. I probably should have been more concerned about that. The glowing hand and the demon mask, but after spending all day breaking invisible skulls into invisible chunks, and then this homecoming? It was all I could do to stay upright and fend off the impending panic. Worry could wait.

“Maybe we can take a look around while the pups, uh…” I honestly had no idea what they were doing. Looking for Sefu, presumably. How does someone get lost in a hallway? “Make sure nothing- er, no one- snuck in while I was out.” I dug a baseball bat out of my coat closet, slamming the door quickly so nothing else fell out of the overstuffed little nook. Even with my flashlight and Brae’s magic hand, the room was gloomy and dim. I tried the lights. Nothing, of course. “More light where that came from, Brae?”

Brae nodded, raised their hands, and twitched their fingers in patterns that looked painful and impossible. The apartment lit up as a string of glowing lights flickered into life along the walls.

“Holy shit,” I said. “So you’re like a witch or something?”

Palm up, finger raised. Small circle. Brae waited for a moment, the simply nodded at me. Yes, but maybe? I’d have to learn. My apartment seemed to be undisturbed. There was my pile of clothes, and my other pile of clothes. My three cups, in their permanent spots either in the dishwasher or the sink. My pictures, pinned to the walls or hanging from strings. Or splayed out on the table. Or fallen onto the floor and sort of, well, not forgotten, but ignored in a forgetful sort of way. Everything seemed as it should be. So why was I so uncomfortable?

“So are you dogs,” I said. “Are they familiars, kind of thing?” I felt closer to solid ground with this track. As silly and impossible as it was, magic seemed more understandable than a ghost town full of monster-things.

Brae held a hand flat, wiggled it slightly. They started to peek under my furniture. A good idea, so I followed suit. Much as I despise guns, I wish I had one about then. If Sefu’s wrench could do it, well.

Something felt off about my apartment. Like I was walking into someone else’s dream. Violating some private sanctuary. Fishing a jacket off the floor did nothing to help the chill. “Maybe I ought to pack, while we wait for the dogs?” Fingers tracing along the once-familiar wall, I tapped a pinned-up photograph, almost from memory. “See? The lake. It-”

Wait a minute.

Photo of the lake, sure, but. Not the one I took. Not exactly. Same placid lake, same sunset cast in grayscale. But the birds that had been skimming the lake were replaced by…

I dropped the bat. “Brae? Come look at this.” And Brae was there, next to me. No sound of movement or rush of air. They nodded at the photo, pointed with tattered gloves at a few more along the row. Minor alterations to each. Strange differences. Gargoyles. Laughing skull-things. Animals, but only just. A picture of a man with black ichor bleeding from his eyes and a predator’s smile. One of my neighbors. “Shit. This is like the forest, isn’t it?”

Brae flashed a few hand signs. Even with no earthly clue what they could have been saying, I found myself understanding, sort of. Impressions, feelings. Changes of certain magnitude could be retroactive. A thought in my mind, unbidden, sketched together from those impressions.

“Woah,” I said. “Guess you can’t teach that?”

Brae raised their hands to answer, but one of the pups started barking from the front room. It was in the room. My front door was still locked, chained. No wonder Sefu glared at them wide-eyed and clearly afraid. Still cute pups. Might need a picture taken sometime.

“What is it baby?” I said, crouching down to scratch behind the dog’s ears. “You’re Berus, right?” It brought up a paw to shake, then chuffed and cocked its head toward the door. “Found him, Berus? Brae-“

Brae was at the door, unbolting it, tossing my forgotten bat back to me. Their stance said ‘let’s go’ and I couldn’t argue. The hallway was horrible this time around. Hot. Stifling. I don’t know how I could have missed it the first time, but the walls were gritty. Pooled at the bottom with what looked like dried blood. Too much of it to be Sefu’s, too much of it to be from even just the one person. I slid my eyes from the wall to the gore-slicked floor. Locked my eyes on Berus’ wagging tail and kept them there to protect my stomach. A longer walk than there should have been hallway, to a door hanging half off its hinges. Number scratched off the wall with a knife. The other pup- Ser?- standing sentinel besides. I gripped my bat with both hands and pushed inside. With my world flipping carelessly, I focused on the immutable: solid metal in my hands, rubber grip. Carpet beneath me, slightly spongy. A taste of coppery air in my nose.

This apartment seemed unfurnished at first, but for the glow of dozens of candles arrayed along the floor. Living room seemed empty too, till I caught sight of the smashed furniture peeking half-hidden from a closet that couldn’t quite close. I could hear murmuring from the next room. Half these apartments had the same floor plan, and none of them included forbidding, eight foot high doors of blackened oak. Brae’s turn to push past me, flanked by their dogs. With a hand still emitting ghostly light, they traced frame of the door, then pressed both palms into its center.

A lock clicked open and echoed, sending a tremble through me as if the noise resonated with my bones. We all eased into a huge, circular room. Definitely not standard. Sefu sat alone in a circle of sourceless light, talking to him.

“Ma’am, look, you’ve been very generous,” Sefu said, “but I should go find my friends. They’re probably, ha, worried.” He struggled to sit up and I saw the blood on his face, still dripping from a wound at his temple. I looked at Brae. Brae looked at me. That copper smell was overwhelming. Surely not from him?

“Sefu?” I tried.

His attention snapped towards me, but his eyes unfocused immediately. I tried to track his half-conscious gaze, felt my neck tingle nervously. Very carefully, I fished my camera out from under my shirt by the lanyard. Held it up to the bare drywall of the room. Snapped a picture.

I had to bite down hard on the scream. Felt Brae tense up from their position peering over my shoulder. On the screen: blood. Everywhere. Dripping down the walls from a dozen corpses, pinned together at the hands like paper dolls. Something blurred near the bottom. I aimed the camera at Sefu. Snap.

The thing on my screen was almost humanoid. A bipedal insect. Long, long arms, a body made of some kind of shell. Head of a white wasp. I opened my mouth to scream and the room shivered, split, imploded all at once, and the thing in my camera shuddered to life in front of me. It stood over Sefu and chittered as blood seeped down the walls. The faint scent of plain candles was overpowered by copper and gore as whatever illusion had kept the creature and its grisly trophies from view failed. My camera fell from limp fingers to dangle from its lanyard.

It looked at me. It looked at me. I still had my bat. Manufactured, hadn’t Sefu said? I took a step forward and swung as hard as I could and got it in the side. Shell cracked. It screamed so loud I thought my ears would bleed. Sefu rambled on. Brae leapt into action, producing more of those iron nails from before. They swept past the creature and drove a nail towards Sefu’s right hand. It struck the empty air with a clang, and the wrench appeared in his hand.

“Shit,” Sefu said. His eyes were wide and searching as he hauled himself to his feet. Caught sight of the monster. “Shit.”

“Mmmhmm!” I said, and swung again. And again.

Crack.

It screamed again and turned towards me. Every crack in its shell already healed. It twitched, and I blinked, and it became human in an instant. Still stark white with too-large eyes and too-long limbs, but it could pass for human. Was human? It- she?- was bleeding from the side, from her arms.

“Please,” she said, arms raised defensively as she backed away from me. From us. The terror on her face seemed genuine, but over her shoulder I could see the corpses. Pinned to the wall like moths, glassy eyes turned towards mine. She must have seen the hate I felt. Turned towards Sefu. “Please, they’ll kill me.” Sefu hesitated for a moment while the creature held his gaze. But his eyes slid to those poor souls on the wall as well. The creature started to turn to Brae, started to speak, but Brae was there, swinging a fist sprouted with iron spikes between each finger.

We did not dare bury them, afraid of what else might have been lurking in the night. We took them down from the walls though. Sefu said a few words, and Brae sprinkled the corpses with water. I knew them. Not by name, not personally, but in the vague neighborly way of those who don’t so much enjoy human company as human presence, off in the reassuring distance.

I remember the creature’s noises as it died. Those screams would stay with me. Maybe forever. Back at my apartment, Brae and Sefu helped pack. I didn’t have much worth taking that wasn’t already back with the jeep. Some spare film, a couple cameras. Some clothes. I’d miss the mattress, but it as ratty anyway. Brae painted runes on the door, on the windows, to keep those things out. Those folk.

“Do you want to talk?” I said. Sefu had passed by on yet another check of the wards, closets, so on. He seemed nervous. More nervous than the unspoken unease he’d had since I met him.

“Want to get out of here, “he said, but he sat down on the floor nearby. “I’ve got a theory. About what happened.”

“A theory?” I prompted. Sometimes interest was as good as goading.

“I think,” Sefu said, “someone here made a bad mistake. Maybe recently, maybe when the town was founded. Definitely when they hired Brae and I.”

“Wait, you were hired?”

“I sure don’t ride around getting my ass kicked by horrors for free.” He laughed, patted the bandage on his temple. “But I think someone here made a deal with the folk. Always a mistake. Some kind of contract, that got broken when Brae and I burnt their Hedge. So one of them came around- or was around- to collect.”

“Those people.”

“Yeah. Those people. Maybe some of the people here got out, maybe some of them were put somewhere else, but I’m willing to bet at least some of them didn’t make it.”

“Hell,” I said. “So what do we do?”

“That place, where they would have taken whoever they took? We can’t go there.” Sefu passed his ever-present wrench from hand to hand. “Not wont, not don’t want to, can’t. No one taken there gets out, that anyone knows of. No one but the folk can get in, that anyone knows of. So we’re, uh. Done here, I guess.”

He sounded as disappointed, as defeated, as anyone I had ever known. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t anxious to get out of here. “Where do we go?”

“You’re involved now,” he said. “Sorry. Best place to try is Night City.”

“That cannot be a real place.”

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#writing #modern fantasy #lit

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