Paint it Black, page 34
…to find herself once again outside the front door of the Cheyne Arts Club. Whoever was running the devices in the coffin had been able to tell she’d slipped out of their control and had adapted. She would likely only have a few seconds once she got back to the real world to get herself out of the coffin.
The buzzing headache made summoning the Between more challenging, but weeks of experience struggling to get through her days productively under the effects of Dropnick’s concealed devices had made her accustomed to this kind of agony. She wasn’t about to let it get in her way now. Surrendering to the calm of the twilight was harder, much harder this time, but she managed it. Lightness seeped into her brain, dulling the pain. The hollow weakness inside her from the transition to the real world and back grew calmer.
This time she didn’t fall, didn’t return to the coffin. The mist remained around her, the door to the Cheyne Arts Club in the distance.
Bugger!
She stalked back to the door. If she couldn’t get out, maybe she could confound the bloody devices from within. She had the Between: maybe she could change the game entirely.
Let’s see if I can get out of this ridiculous nightie.
Focusing was a little easier now that she’d had a few moments to establish herself in the Between. She pictured herself in her jeans, her current favorite black t-shirt with the white, angular Bauhaus logo on the front, and her prized studded leather jacket, in one hand her lipstick, in the other her switchblade, and let the wish go.
The twilight took it—she felt the diaphanous fabric of the dress spin itself tighter around her into her jeans and t-shirt, and the comforting weight of the jacket settled on her shoulders—but the sense of the infinite and eternal space beyond the world wasn’t there. This twilight, this Between, was trapped in the dream with her.
Okay. The gates are barred against me, but perhaps I have the tools to dig myself an escape tunnel.
She stopped with one hand on the doorknob. She was able to control what she wore. Perhaps she could control what she would find when she went in. If she could locate the boundaries of this place by testing its limits, she could break through.
She summoned the feeling of warmth and acceptance, pictured happy times with Miranda and Sir Wilfred and countless others at the club, pictured her mother and the boys, pictured Alfie laughing and drinking, pictured Johnny onstage holding his audience mesmerized, pictured summer evenings in the garden with the ladies, drinking beer and playing cards, and let it all go. She offered it up to the Between, and wondered what it would make of that jumble of hope.
She opened the door and stepped through.
The foyer was empty but for Miranda. Raucous laughter filtered through from the bar.
“Gosha, darling. There you are!” Miranda wrapped her arms around her and kissed her on the cheek. “Everyone’s waiting for you.”
She twined her arm around Gosha’s and led her inside.
“How are you and Alfie these days?”
Odd to be asked a personal question by a projection of my own subconscious.
“Not great.” She opted to be as honest as she would have with her friend in real life. “I asked him to move in with me, but he said no.”
Alfie and Agnieszka were across the bar, lounging on one of the large leather sofas, laughing and playing with the boys. If Alfie and George together had been a sight ripped from her nightmares, this was distilled from her most cherished dreams.
“You know, I ran into him at that little bar on Fezzick Street the other day,” said Miranda. “We had a little chat. He’s very brave, but I recognized that look in his eyes.”
This was a surprise to Gosha. Was this made up by the Between, or had it actually happened?
“What look?”
“When you realize everything you thought you knew about the world is wrong. That evil is real, and monsters walk among us. That you’re an insignificant speck in the face of the great and terrible powers all around you.”
Alfie always seems so stoic, so unfazed by all the strangeness.
“Don’t worry, sweetie.” Miranda hugged Gosha’s arm tight. “It’s just a stage you have to go through. The next is realizing how lucky you are to be loved by a witch.” She leaned in and pecked Gosha on the cheek. “After that, things get much better.”
“Goga,” said her mother, rushing over to her from Alfie and the boys. “This respite will end soon. When the madness comes, don’t fight it. It will hurt you to do so, but surrender. Let it do its worse. The more power you—”
Her eyes widened with surprise and she coughed a loud, hoarse bark. She coughed again, and blood spewed from her mouth, spattering over Gosha and Miranda. She coughed once more and collapsed on the floor, open eyes glazed in death.
Miranda screamed with all the power needed to reach the back of the Royal Albert Hall.
“My little witchlet,” came a familiar voice from behind Gosha, a voice she had spent years trying to forget. “Once again I am summoned to burn you out.”
The witch hunter.
42
“You have got to be kidding!”
Would she ever be free of this bastard?
The ear-splitting, discordant screech of the speakers in her coffin in the real world cut through the dream with all the power of a sledgehammer, buckling Gosha’s knees as the witch hunter walked into the bar, drawing curious glances from the partygoers. The same handsome figure she remembered from her childhood, his hair glistened, thick and lustrous in the warm lights of the bar. His calfskin leather jacket draped casually across his shoulders.
“Nice jacket, wanker,” she sneered, and launched herself at him, her legs pounding like pistons, covering the ten feet between them in the blink of an eye, but before she could tackle him he flicked his hand, and a wave of force knocked her back across the room to crash into the opposite wall, shattering the mirror that hung on it.
Her ears rang as she slid to the ground, and the discordant screeching in her head redoubled. The ground bucked beneath her as the pressure in her head drove her down. Only once before had she experienced a headache this bad, a migraine that reduced her to crawling across the floor to get to the bathroom before she could throw up. Any confidence she could find a way out, any calm the Between granted her, was swept away by the tempest in her head.
“A den of sin,” said the witch hunter, looking around the bar. “How appropriate.”
He raised a hand in an incongruous gesture of welcome and swept it across the room as inviting everyone to draw closer, but as it traced its arc, the partygoers fell to the floor in impossible shapes. The cracking of bones reverberated through the room.
“No!”
She tried to shout, but all that came out was a gasped whisper.
The wave of death swept past her around the room, taking Edmund, Timothy, and Alfie, and twisting their bodies as it killed them.
It’s not them, she tried to reassure herself. This is just a manufactured dream. They’re all safe.
But the pressure in her brain and the infernal buzzing were too strong. She couldn’t think straight. Her body shook with grief. Anger overrode the agony in her head, forcing her to her feet. She hurled herself at him, but he raised a hand and caught her with his power, holding her immobile before him.
“No, little witchlet. This time, you will not succeed. This time, I will take your eyes as a trophy.”
He pulled from a sheath at his side a hunting knife, thick and solid with one serrated side and a deadly point that glinted in the lights hanging over the snooker table, and slashed at her. She felt the blade slice through the arm of her leather jacket, slicing through skin. Her arm grew warm as blood flowed down it from the gash, but fury kindled inside her, burning bright, burning away the power that held her in check. When he slashed again, she raised an arm, numbed by the cut, to block him, clenched her fist and hit him hard in the solar plexus, winding him. She hit him again and again, one arm near-useless, the other as strong as ever, and beat him back against the snooker table.
He braced himself against the table with his hip, spun the knife in his grip, and stabbed down into her shoulder. Pain and disorientation stunned her as her injured arm fell limp, dead against her side. He twisted the knife, severing tendons and gristle, and pulled it out, laughing.
“Yes, little witchlet. Fight! Make this kill one to remember.”
As he gloated, he dropped his guard and Gosha lashed out with her remaining arm, digging her fingernails into his throat. She squeezed and squeezed, hoping to crush his windpipe, but all she could do was feel his larynx bob up and down beneath her fingers as he laughed.
He pushed her back. It didn’t take much to get her away from him. He gave himself enough room to swing his arm and slash at her. He sliced at her neck and chest, at her back when she turned to protect herself, at her head when she ducked, until her entire body was slick with blood. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror on the wall, a glistening ghoul bathed in red.
—It will hurt you to do it, but surrender. Let it do its worse.
Her mother’s voice echoed in her head as if speaking to her through a Devil’s Star.
The raucous keening in her brain that threatened to obliterate her also spurred her on to fight, even though it was hopeless. This was Dropnick’s coffin at work, forcing her to deplete herself in an impossible struggle.
—A witch obeys no rules but her own, said her mother’s voice.
“Go on.” She pulled herself up to her full height. “Do it.”
As he sliced and stabbed at her, she wanted to flinch, to protect herself, but she forced herself to remain passive, to receive the force of his blows and let it flow through her, as she reminded herself again and again that all this wasn’t real, was only a construct created by hallucinogenic drugs, electric currents, and Dropnick’s hideous cards. She held her ground against every instinct as he clasped his knife with both hands and thrust it up through her diaphragm, through her lungs and into her heart.
She plunged into darkness.
And awoke in the coffin.
It took her a moment to come to her senses, the confusion of the transition disorienting her, but, in the space of three breaths, she realized her head was clear and her body whole. She ran her hands over her arms and body to make sure she was uninjured, the memory of the witch hunter’s phantom cuts still vivid on her skin in a lattice of remembered pain, and yanked on the intravenous tube attached to her arm. The sharp sting of real pain anchored her fully in the real world, the lingering effects of the dream gone.
The interior of the coffin was dark and quiet, the screen before her off and the speakers by her head silent. She pulled the intravenous line the rest of the way out of her arm carefully, pressing the puncture with one hand as she brushed electrodes off her head and pushed the screen to one side on its arm. She paused for a moment before opening the coffin lid, listening for evidence of someone outside. Satisfied there was no one there, she pushed the lid open a crack, just in case, before swinging it open and emerging like a vampire escaping the grave.
The room was painted white, the light from a single overhead glowing off the walls, and filled with coffins. Not coffins, pods made of brass and wood, lined with copper wires that fed to a central console of the same archaic technology as all Dropnick’s devices. All the bulbs on the pods were dark.
Across the room was a window, the observation room on the other side dark and empty. She slunk over to it to peer through the glass, but there was no sign of anyone in there. The consoles that lined the room were all powered down. Confident that no one was watching, she went back to the coffins and opened the nearest, though she had little hope for what she’d find. She’d seen what this kind of technology could do. Inside was the dead body of a young woman barely in her twenties, her skin pale, a trickle of vomit at the corner of her mouth. Gosha went to the other coffins, twenty in all, opening every one on the off chance there might be a survivor, but everyone was dead. The loss staggered her.
Lady guide their souls to somewhere peaceful.
It seemed a strange thing to ask, now that she knew who the “Lady” of the witches was, but she needed some way to mark their passing.
And she needed some way to exact justice on their behalf.
She patted herself down. No switchblade. That would be too much to ask for, but they’d left her lipstick in her bra, useless as it was, and Elsie’s lozenges in her pockets, not understanding their true purpose. She unwrapped one and popped it in her mouth, the strawberry sweetness cutting through the acrid taste of bile at the back of her throat.
The sparse whiteness of the room shifted to warmth as the glow of the Between returned to her along with her second sight, but it was as if the lozenge hadn’t worked. There was no Influence in the room. No lazy drift or turgid mass, no angry storm or shocked fizz. No Influence at all. In all the five years since becoming a witch, Gosha had never felt anything like it.
Though even with her lozenge-enhanced second sight, the strange experience of Influence—part vision, part touch, part physical and emotional feeling—never involved sound, its absence now deafened her. The ringing in her ears almost masked the sound of voices coming from beyond the wall opposite the observation window. She pressed her ear against the adjoining door, and heard a muffled conversation between whoever was on the other side and a voice over a tannoy, though she was unable to make out what they said.
She tried the door.
Locked.
Unlocking it was easy enough. The Between received her wish and turned the tumblers embedded in the metal door so that it clicked open. She pressed the handle down slowly, doing her best not to make a sound, and cracked the door an inch.
The room beyond was dark but for reflected light rippling across the walls. She slipped through and closed the door behind her before the brightness from the other room drew attention to her. The room was dense with Influence, a balloon inflated to its maximum with power. She felt the pressure as phantom hands squeezing her brain and guts.
“System charge is at sixty percent.” said a voice over the tannoy. “How is the headset, Doctor?”
In the middle of the room a dozen screens arranged geometrically with only a few inches space between them partitioned off the area. Dropnick’s voice came from within.
“Working perfectly, just as designed. I am able to perceive a visual representation of the psychospiritual force.”
“Have you thought further about what to name it, Doctor?” said the voice over the tannoy.
“Would it be too egocentric of me to call it Dropnick’s Force?”
The voice on the tannoy chuckled in response.
“I think it would be entirely appropriate, Doctor. We’re at eighty-five percent.”
“Activate the system as soon as you reach one hundred percent and optimum spread.”
“Yes, sir.”
Gosha snuck around the room, the screens protecting her from being seen. The walls were lined with copper etchings, large symbols arranged geometrically. She recognized the style: the alphabet the spheres used to anchor and control Influence. The symbols were overlaid on a grid of copper wires that buzzed with current, causing both wires and symbols to ripple and glow, the only source of light in the room.
"Activation," said the voice over the tannoy, "in ten, nine, eight, seven…"
Gosha looked around, frantic to find some way to stop whatever purpose this new diabolical device might have, but short of ripping down the walls, she didn’t know what to do. She pictured all the symbols melting off the walls and offered it up to the Between, but all that happened was an increase in the buzzing of current.
"Three, two, one, activating."
Somewhere beyond the room, something clicked loudly. The buzzing of current spiked, and the intermittent glow of the symbols on the wall stabilized. The ambient Influence froze, stunned, just like it did when she used fathom’s bane, and then exploded into a dense cloud of fluttering wings. With no talisman to absorb and channel her overcharged aura, the wings of Dropnick’s corruption latched onto her immediately and began to consume it.
She’d thought the torture of his blasted coffin was bad, but this was so much worse. The corruption burrowed into her, squirming maggots seeking out the tender places of her psyche and ravaging them with poison. The size and power of her untapped aura might give her more time than others she’d seen afflicted this way before the Lords and Ladies of Influence cauterized her corruption by wiping her from existence, but that would still mean she only had seconds before the dark bloom of obliteration took her. Her only hope of stopping Dropnick was a direct attack. She could use whatever power she could muster to wreak havoc with the equipment, perhaps cause it to overload and destroy itself.
As she prepared to launch herself at the partitions and Dropnick, the wings froze, the spread of corruption stopping, and began to beat in time, a million slips of chaotic ethereal energy tamed.
“One hundred percent synchronization, Doctor,” said the voice on the tannoy.
“Yes, yes!” Dropnick’s voice was rich with excitement. “I can see it! I can actually see it!”
A wave began to spread through the beating wings, a tiny change in the motion that multiplied out to a mesmerizing pattern. The entire room turned into a living, pulsing organism with the partition at its center the heart. The effect was mesmerizing. The fatigue of everything she’d been through in the past few days overcame her and made her woozy.
“WHO SUMMONS ME,” boomed a voice from everywhere and nowhere. “WHO DARES DISTRACT ME FROM THE GREAT STRUGGLE WHEN DEVIOUS POWERS RANGE AGAINST ME? WHO DARES PRESUME TO COMMAND ME? WHO DARES THINK THEY CAN CONTAIN ME WHEN I AM DESPAIR MADE FLESH, WHEN I AM THE ANGUISH OF ALL WHO DIE, WHEN I AM THE SPARK OF GRIEF, THE CATALYST OF WOE…”
The speaker booming his own virtues may have intended to intimidate his listeners, but, after years of dealing with record company executives and fashion magazine editors, she recognized the self-aggrandizing ramblings of a narcissist when she heard them. Her deeply ingrained irritation at tinpot despots of every stripe cut through the hypnotic effect of the Influence and brought her back to earth.
