Darklands (14 page)

Now to feed the image to my subconscious. I opened the trapdoor and dropped the sheet through, peering after the paper as it fluttered into the darkness. A few feet down, the sheet paused in midair. It shuddered. An avatar of the Harpy rose from the page, taking on three dimensions as it flapped its wings. Another avatar, this one of me, somersaulted off the page and crouched in a fighting pose. The Harpy attacked her. Tina gestured and described its maneuver. The page, now blank, crumpled itself into a ball and continued falling. The avatars, still fighting, moved off into the darkness.

Good. The process was working.

Next came my most recent experience with
The Book of Utter Darkness
. Then, I printed off an image of a far-off figure capturing a demon in Phyllis’s dream. Then another that showed me being pushed through that door, then snatched by a demon.

The printer whirred as I printed out everything I’d learned related to Pryce and what he might be up to: Purgatory Chasm. The Devil’s Coffin. A three-thousand-year-old bronze cauldron. I visualized each one, pouring into the picture everything I knew about the subject. One by one, I dropped the printouts through the trapdoor, watching them fall, become real, and disappear into the murk.

I reached to close the door, then paused. I wasn’t done yet, not completely. I shouldn’t be letting all those images loose in my subconscious without specifying where some of them came from. I needed to add an avatar of the Eidolon.

Admittedly, it’s not a great idea to purposely introduce a guilt-demon—even just the image of one—into your dreams. I might as well send that giant maggot an engraved invitation to come back for dinner tomorrow. Dropping a graphic reminder of guilty feelings into my subconscious would make it harder to deal with those feelings once I woke up. Waking or sleeping, the
subconscious never rests. Still, if I was going to share this information with Mab, I needed to include everything.

I pictured the Eidolon that had risen from my guts and sat on my chest. Its quivering, slimy maggot’s body. Its sneering demon face. Its whiny, insinuating voice. Those needle-sharp teeth of its second mouth chewing my insides. A tide of feelings, none of them good, surged in me like nausea. Guilt. Regret. Shame. Worry. Dread. When the feelings became almost too much to bear, I slammed the Print button. I shoved every speck of Eidolon out of my imagination and onto the page. Then I snatched the sheet from the printer and hurled it down the hole. I didn’t wait to see the Eidolon shudder to life and slither off the page. I slammed the trapdoor shut.

Okay, so I’d just dropped a guilt-demon into my own subconscious. Not an actual demon, I reminded myself; an image of a demon. A picture. It was just a picture.

Even though the nauseous slop of feelings in my gut told me otherwise.

The trapdoor bounced and rattled, like something from below was trying to get out. I conjured a huge padlock, one as big as my head, and secured the hasp.
There.
That would keep any demons at bay.

With my subconscious locked up tight, I pushed all worry from my mind, willing myself to calm, to relax. The bad feelings subsided, and I let myself drift through my dreamscape. The floor with its trapdoor faded away as I floated through a dim, gray twilight. Whatever Pryce was doing, however all those pieces fit together, I let it all be. My subconscious would work on it.

Time passed as I slept without dreaming. After a while, I felt a little nudge, almost like the way Mom used to shake my shoulder gently to wake me up for school, except this nudge came from my subconscious. It was time to contact Mab. I hoped she’d answer tonight.

I roused myself and started to think about my aunt. To call someone on the dream phone, you picture that person and then call up their colors. All of the Cerddorion have a pair of colors, their shades and brightness unique to the individual. Bringing up a person’s colors is sort of like dialing a phone; it lets that person know you want to communicate. To answer, they focus
on your colors. Or they can ignore the call, and their colors fade from your dreamscape.

Now, I pictured my aunt as I always thought of her: sitting in a wing chair by the fireplace in her library, book in hand. I focused on her iron-gray hair, short like mine; on the reading glasses perched at the end of her nose. I saw her frowning in concentration at the book she held until she blinked and looked up, cocking her head as though she’d heard a sound in another room. That’s when I brought up her colors, blue and silver, in a swirling mist that momentarily obscured my mental picture of her.
Please answer,
I thought as I watched the shimmering swirls of rich color.

She did. When the mist subsided, Mab was there. Not in her library, although she did hold an open book. She was outside on the terrace. She sat at a round wrought-iron table, a pot of tea in front of her. Yesterday’s worry still with me, I scrutinized my aunt. She looked good. The April sun tinged her skin with gold. Although Mab’s current lifetime stretched across three centuries, she could easily be a woman of forty-five. Other than a few fine lines sketched around her eyes, her face was smooth and soft-looking.

When I didn’t say anything, Mab closed her book and set it on the table beside her cup. “You’ve been working with
The Book of Utter Darkness
?”

That was Mab. No chitchat. No wasting time on preliminaries like, “Hi, how are you?” She always cut straight to the chase.

Still, recent events had made me realize that, despite her longevity and her abilities, Mab wasn’t eternal. That made the preliminaries seem more important. “How are you doing, Mab? You look wonderful.”

“Fine, fine.” My aunt waved her hand impatiently, but a gleam of pleasure lit her eyes, as though my compliment pleased her. “But surely you didn’t contact me to ask about my health.”

“I was worried about you. You didn’t answer when I tried to call last night.”

“Yes, I’m sorry I was indisposed. I was dealing with a committee of ladies from the village. The spring fête, you know.” Each April, Mab opened the grounds of her manor house, Maenllyd, for a garden party attended by the whole village. I could see why she wouldn’t want to go into a trance to chat with me long-distance in front of the refreshments committee, or whoever
was there. “I did try to return your call after they’d gone, but you must have been awake by then. And later, Mr. Cadogan sent out a message saying you’d try again today. I’ve been awaiting your call.”

“So you’re all right.”

“As well as I’ve ever been. I assure you, child, there’s no need to worry. My bloodstone has spent two full weeks underground, drawing power from the land. It’s completely recharged.” Mab’s bloodstone was her object of power, chipped from an ancient altar and infused with the blood of several lifetimes. She reached inside the neck of her blouse and pulled out the bloodstone, which she wore as a pendant. It glowed with a silvery light. “In fact, I believe the stone is stronger than ever.” She tucked the bloodstone back inside her shirt and sipped some tea. “And me with it.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said. And I was. In our struggles with Pryce and his father, Myrddin, I’d nearly lost Mab. I’d vowed that never again would I take my aunt for granted, never again would I assume she’d always be there, as eternal as the rocks of Mount Snowdon. So it was good to see her now, strong and vital. “But to answer your original question,” I continued, “yes, I’ve been working with the book. It gave me another rehash of the past couple of months.”

“The same as the previous two times?”

“More or less. Same information. More dramatic in its presentation.” I told her about the vision I’d received from the book. “It knocked me out of my chair. When I came to, I was sitting on the kitchen floor.”

“Hmm. Perhaps it’s emphasizing that past events are coming to a head.”

“Well, I wish it would turn the page, because we’re starting a new chapter. Pryce is back.”

Mab drew in a sharp breath. “You’ve seen him?”

“Yes, tonight. In a client’s dreamscape.”

“But surely that was an avatar.”

“No, it was Pryce. There was a second dream portal. He was there physically, just like I was.” I told her how Boston’s personal demons had been disappearing. “But Pryce isn’t out to ruin my business. He wants me dead.”

Mab pounded the table, making the teapot lid rattle. “
Damn
the spring fête—I knew I should have answered your call.” She
shoved the tea things aside and leaned toward me. “Tell me what happened, child. Don’t leave anything out.”

“I can do better than that.” I could show her. I made the trapdoor reappear. Mab’s eyes registered the knowledge of what I was about to do. “Ready?” I asked.

She nodded.

A huge key appeared in my hand. I opened the padlock and stepped back. The door exploded off its hinges like a bomb had gone off under it.

Then, nothing. No sound, no movement. We waited. The silence from below felt thick with menace.

I stared at the open doorway until my vision blurred. My breathing all but stopped.

Then, as casually as if he were walking up a staircase, Pryce climbed from my subconscious and stepped into my dreamscape. Mab tensed. I knew he was a dream avatar. Even so, a sword appeared in my hand.

The avatar Pryce didn’t look at us. He raised his arms, and a Harpy rocketed out of the trapdoor. With a horrible shriek, it flew right at me.

I braced myself, holding the sword out in front of me. Given the demon’s speed and angle of attack, it would skewer itself on the blade, making itself into a Harpy kebab.

But the Harpy didn’t strike. Right before it hit my sword, it vanished. So did Pryce.

Mab exhaled loudly, like she’d been holding her breath, too. “He sent a Harpy to kill you?”

I nodded. “It found me at Tina’s school. I was giving a Career Night presentation.” I remembered my promise to Tina. “She helped me kill it.”

Mab’s lips moved in what might have been a tiny smile. “Don’t underestimate that young lady,” she said.

That almost sounded like praise. Tina would be thrilled to hear it.

A scream howled up from my subconscious. It was the same scream I’d heard in Phyllis’s dream. A Drude leapt out from the trapdoor and sprinted across my dreamscape. Pryce was right behind it. He tackled the fleeing demon, knocking it flat. As the Drude struggled, yowling with fear and fury, he pinned it down. It was the same scene I’d witnessed in Phyllis’s dream, but closer and from a different angle. The demon went rigid. It lay still,
moaning, its yellow eyes glazed over. Pryce stood and began gesturing. Although I could see his lips move, I couldn’t tell what he was saying. I glanced over at Mab. Her eyes stayed riveted on the scene.

The demon floated upward and hovered in the air. Its moans intensified to shrieks again as its body started to shrink. Pryce gestured faster. His hands became a blur as the demon shrank to the size of a child’s doll. With a shout of triumph, Pryce picked up the miniaturized demon and dropped it into his sack. The sack bulged and squirmed, as though it was already full of struggling demons.

Pryce tied the neck shut and slung the sack over his shoulder, then strode away from us. I turned to Mab, wanting to discuss what we’d just seen, but she pressed a finger to her lips. She pointed back to Pryce.

As he walked, carrying his bag, a landscape formed around him. He made his way along the floor of a narrow, rocky chasm, granite walls stretching fifty feet or more above him on both sides. At the mouth of a cave, he stopped. A cauldron squatted crookedly on a horizontal slab of rock. The Devil’s Coffin; I recognized it from the images I’d seen online. Pryce untied the sack and upended it. Miniature demons—about two dozen of them—tumbled out and landed in the cauldron. Some leapt up, trying to escape. Pryce pushed them back inside. His hands made a flat, smoothing motion over the rim. A glow surrounded the cauldron. Pryce stepped back, his narrowed eyes staring at the vessel. The glow sat on top of the cauldron like a lid. He threw his head back and laughed, looking way too much like the movie version of an evil genius. The image grew transparent. The whole thing—Pryce, rocky chasm, and cauldron—sank through the floor of my dreamscape, back into the basement of my subconscious.

Mab started to say something, but the show still wasn’t over. A book with a pale leather cover rose through the door. As
The Book of Utter Darkness
entered my dreamscape, it grew. It loomed over us, blocking everything else, until it was the size of a house. Slowly, its cover swung open.

When I saw the moving picture that stretched across two pages, I cried out. I couldn’t help it. I’d never imagined such complete devastation.

We gazed at some sort of urban battleground. A huge,
bombed-out building poured out smoke from the fires raging inside. Bodies lay everywhere, whole or in pieces. Several hung from streetlights, twisting and swaying. A woman lay half on a bench, her head and shoulders on the ground, bloody glass shards glinting from her shredded business suit. Unrecognizable lumps of twisted metal littered the area. Blood and ash covered everything.

Wait. I knew this place. Absurdly intact in the middle of all that destruction were yard-high bronze sculptures of a tortoise and a hare, installed to mark the finish line of the Boston Marathon. I was looking at Copley Square. The smoking ruin was Trinity Church, or what was left of it. The central tower with its red roof was gone, the walls collapsed into piles of rubble. Beside it, the Hancock building was an empty frame, its mirrorlike windows all shattered. A crater gaped where the Boston Public Library had stood.

A man stumbled out of the smoke, coughing. Immediately, a robed, hooded figure appeared and lifted the man from his feet. The hood fell back, revealing a yellow, skull-like face with huge fangs. An Old One. The ancient vampire bent his head to the struggling man’s throat. A half-scream, wracked by coughs, rose and then was cut off. The man’s body went limp. In moments it was a mere husk, drained of all its blood. The Old One flung the body aside and disappeared again in the smoke.

The sound of tiny sobs brought my attention back to the tortoise and hare sculptures. A small girl, no older than three, clung to the tortoise’s neck. She hugged the statue with her chubby arms, pressing her face against it as though it could save her, as though it could carry her away from this terrible place.