Still not daring to track Kailyn with my eyes, I looked directly past the ghouls closest to me to those still waiting near the portal. They had been watching me before, but I was beginning to lose their attention, too. Dammit. Now would be a good time for Uncle Lucas to join the act…
Soon after I’d had the thought, he did. I caught sight of his form, zooming up to the ceiling—a good distance away from the whirlpool—where he began to spin around and around, in a similar manner to what I’d done. More mirthful cackling and clapping ensued, their eyes now drawn to Lucas—the new object of their creepy affection.
Come on, Kailyn.
Where are you?
I didn’t even know yet whether or not she had escaped. Lucas and I just had to keep this circus going as long as we possibly could until they eventually got bored and snatched us. I hoped against hope that by then, Kailyn would be gone.
I quickly shifted to another act, causing some of the ghouls a mild confusion as to which of their pets to observe. I started doing a weird kind of star dance in midair, while Lucas also switched up his act, going from spinning in circles to gliding up and down with the smoothness of waves.
Then the hope that had been rising in my chest sank into the pit of my stomach.
Kailyn yelped.
No. No!
For the first time, I allowed my eyes to trace her… only to see her in the clutches of a ghoul. She was so close to the entrance, perhaps six feet away. But one of the ghouls hovering near it just had not been distracted enough by us. These ghouls were sharper than we had hoped they would be. Maybe a group of ghosts had even tried this sort of stupid attempt at distraction before.
Whatever the case, they’d caught Kailyn.
The game was over.
The rest of the ghouls, previously distracted and being entertained by Lucas and me, soon put two and two together and realized that Kailyn had been making a move to escape. They knew now that it had all been a trick, not some show of playful reciprocity from their doting dependents.
Their amusement fast turned to anger. The ghouls’ eerie smiles vanished and were replaced by hard stares.
It was time once again to discipline their pets.
Ben
The two ghouls closest to me finally closed the gap. They shot forward and gripped my arms before dragging me down toward the tunnel with such speed that I almost missed Lucas being caught. Almost. I caught a glimpse of him in the corner of my eye, in the clutches of a ghoul who’d grabbed hold of his neck. Kailyn was already being dragged toward the tunnel in front of me. The ghouls escorted the three of us along the canal and back through the main door. As we zoomed along the winding tunnels and then headed downward, I knew exactly where we were headed. It wasn’t long until we reached the coffin chamber.
I caught Lucas’ expression, a mixture of sheer dread and terror. Dammit! I wished so hard that he had not volunteered and somebody else had stepped up in his stead. This would only be my second visit here, but for all I knew, this could be his last.
The ghouls milled about the chamber excitedly, lining up three coffins in a row. They flipped open the lids and wrestled us each inside. My coffin’s lid slammed shut, closing me off to the world outside. Lucas was in the coffin next to me, while Kailyn was on his other side. Kailyn screamed, Lucas grunted, and I was already expecting the gnarled hand that emerged through the lid of the box, clamping around my head.
* * *
I thought that the last time had been unbearable but this… this was ten times worse. The first time had been visions of the worst kind of fantasies imaginable, which had become my reality for all those hours I’d remained in the coffin, but none of the visions had linked back to the reality that I had known all my life. The only connection had been the people I loved.
This time, however, it was totally different. Scenes from my actual life replayed in my mind, all the things that I wished to forget, blasting through my mind in more vibrant color and vivid detail than I had ever experienced in real life. I was sure that I was being tortured by a different ghoul this time; perhaps they each had their own particular preference of how to torture a person.
I relived every second of the most painful times of my existence in slow motion, lurching first to my parents’ penthouse, where I’d shot from my seat at the scent of blood on the porch. Grabbing Yasmine by the neck and murdering her in cold blood. At the time, I’d been in such a daze of bloodlust that I had barely been aware of my actions, but now, with everything slowed down to a sluggish pace, everything was a hundred times more torturous. I felt Yasmine’s body grow limper and limper, heard her gargled screams as I tore through her jugular, before her final release of breath and the sudden deadness of her body.
Then I was in the submarine, rushing to the shore of holidaying humans in South America. At the time, I hadn’t even been sure how many lives I’d claimed and who they all were. Now I saw it all, every second expanded… and there… there had even been children.
No. No! I cannot take the rest. Stop!
I tried to escape the vision, but I was there. The experience was so vivid, I could see and hear everything, practically taste the blood flooding down my throat.
It went on mercilessly, like an ogre bludgeoning an enemy, until my mind was so thoroughly drained from being drowned in the memories I’d fought so hard to bury deep in my subconscious, I thought that I would go insane.
Then, as I felt that I could not take even a minute more, a different kind of scene trickled into my mind’s eye in slow motion. Quite different, indeed…
Two figures stood inside a large circular room with a high, conical ceiling, piled up with dusty sacks of flour. It was the inner chamber of a mill. The two figures were Lucas and a woman with large blue eyes and jet-black hair. Lucas, wearing a loose shirt and dark pants, looking very much human, had her hiked up against a mound of sacks as his mouth kneaded against hers, his hands deep within the folds of her petticoat. She returned his kisses passionately, but as his right hand hiked up higher over her thigh, she broke away.
She planted her palms against his chest, creating distance between the two of them. Her cheeks were filled with a youthful blush as she gazed at Lucas.
“Wait,” she whispered. “I need to tell you something.”
Lucas looked like he wanted nothing more than to continue ravishing her, but he paused, raising a dark brow. “What?” he asked, his voice deep and husky.
Straightening her dress, she slid down from the position Lucas had been holding her in and touched her feet to the floor. She grabbed his hand and pulled him further toward the center of the room, where she stopped, holding both of his hands in hers. She gazed intensely into his eyes before saying in a soft, unsteady voice: “We’re going to be parents.”
Her expression was a mixture of anticipation and fear as she scanned Lucas’s face for his reaction. His cheeks, also flushed like hers, became deathly pale, almost as pale as a vampire’s.
Removing his hands from hers, he took a step back. His mouth fell open. “What? Y-You’re pregnant?”
She nodded, sliding a palm down her abdomen. “I’m showing all the signs,” she whispered back, even as she looked disconcerted. Clearly, she’d been hoping for a different reaction from her lover. “What’s wrong?” she asked, her eyes widening.
Lucas choked up as he continued to stare at her, dumbfounded. There must’ve been many things going through the man’s brain, but joy certainly wasn’t one of them.
She closed the distance between them again, this time gripping his forearms. She tried to pull him down for a kiss but he resisted. The poor woman was now looking more worried than ever.
“We must marry, my love,” she breathed.
Lucas looked physically sick. “No, Anthea,” he stammered, shaking his head and brushing her away again. “No! This was not supposed to happen.”
He moved toward the mill’s exit.
She hurried after him, her expression forlorn as a lost fawn. “Lucas, wha
t are you saying? You love me, don’t you?”
This Lucas did not answer.
“We must marry,” she said, her voice rising with despair. “We must!” Tears began to spill from her eyes. “I bear your child, Lucas. Your child!”
Her cries rang through the chamber as Lucas turned on his heel and bolted from the mill.
The scene faded out, and was immediately replaced by another.
Lucas moved through a dark, wet forest with the stealth of a vampire. The trees thinned, giving way to the edge of a cliff. A sodden graveyard lay beneath, grim and grey beneath the overcast sky. The graveyard was empty but for a lone boy with dark, shoulder-length hair. A young Jeramiah. He stood in the pouring rain in nothing but a thin cotton shirt and pants. Holed shoes gave little protection for his feet. The boy was gazing down at a white tombstone. I could just about make out a name etched into the stone: Anthea Monrov.
Pain seared through my head as the ghoul’s hand relinquished its hold. The lid to my coffin clicked open, and although my vision was hazy, I managed to make out the outline of a ghoul, standing over my and Lucas’s coffins. She had her hands above either one of them, as though she had tortured us both simultaneously. Her right hand shot out and grabbed me by the throat while her left dipped into Lucas’ box and yanked him out.
As my uncle hung by the neck, he’d become practically unrecognizable again. His eyes had lost the shine they’d started to develop and now looked utterly dead. Kailyn was lifted out by a second ghoul, and the two of them dragged the three of us not back through the entrance as I had been expecting, but through a door around the back of the coffin room, which held a small, empty pool. The ghouls thrust us inside and we were all far too weak to even attempt to rise back up again as they left us and slammed the door behind them.
I was too far gone to think much about the last two visions that I’d experienced—visions that belonged to Lucas, not me—or how I had even managed to experience them. Neither could I wonder much about why the ghouls had placed us in this small pool, all alone, rather than returning us to where we belonged. It took a Herculean effort just to focus on a single thought for more than a few seconds. All I wanted to do was close my eyes and sink… deeper, and deeper, down to the bottom of the pool…
Ben
Like after the first time I’d been tortured, I knew instinctively that I had to keep my eyes open no matter what. I had to keep myself conscious. I could not sink into the deathly lull that I was fated to. I had to fight, and I had to fight hard.
As the time passed in silence, I could see that Kailyn was resisting too. Even as her eyes drooped, her expression worn and ragged, she was fighting to keep the fire alive. Watching her fight the same battle I was fighting, I found myself drawing an unexpected sense of strength from her. Her eyes locked with mine and the two of us stared intensely at each other, both of us willing and urging the other to not give in.
Whatever those ghouls did to us during that torture, it was clearly a lot more than just blasting our minds with horrid visions. It was as though they drained our minds, our very souls.
I looked past Kailyn to my uncle. His eyes were already closed.
“No, Lucas,” I tried to shout, though it came out barely louder than a breath. “Wake up!”
Why I felt so panicked at the sight of him fading, and why I wanted to help him so badly, I wasn’t even sure. But he was my uncle—and a changed uncle at that—and I guessed that should be reason enough.
“Lucas,” I said again, managing to raise my voice louder this time.
He didn’t respond in the slightest. Oh, how I wished that I could shake him. I realized that my intense focus on my uncle, on willing him to return to consciousness was increasing my own strength. Increasing my determination to not fade away myself. I attempted to raise myself into an upright position. It felt like one of the hardest things that I’d ever done, which was ironic, considering that now I was a ghost, I didn’t even weigh anything. By sheer willpower alone, eventually I managed to sit up.
My show of strength seemed to rub off on Kailyn, and she too began striving to sit up. I instinctively reached my hand down to hers to help her, but of course she was on her own. She managed it, albeit in a longer time than I had taken, and now the two of us, sitting upright, set our focus on Lucas.
“Lucas,” I said, still louder. “Lucas!”
Oh, God. Could this really have been the fifth and final strike for my uncle? Or perhaps it had only been the fourth, but had been enough to finish off his weary soul.
“Come on, Lucas!”
“He needs to wake up,” Kailyn murmured, her voice thick and sluggish. I turned to see that a glimmer of life was slowly returning to her eyes, as I guessed was the case with mine, too.
I tilted my head slightly in question.
Kailyn blinked, clearly still struggling to stay awake, before explaining in a slow voice, “Marcilla told me that sometimes, after the ghouls torture ghosts, they bring them to a back room, to their own little pond, where they wait for a few hours… and if they haven’t fully recovered by then and made their own way back to their pool, they get shifted down to a lower level to join other demoted ghosts. She warned me that if I ever got taken to this pond, I should do whatever it takes to get back to the upper levels. I should act lively in the pool and not like a dead rock, even if that’s what I feel like. Because they come round to inspect whether you’re still attractive enough to belong in their highest, most prized ornamental waters.”
I wondered how Marcilla even knew all this; after all, she hadn’t been here that long. I guessed she must have picked up the tip from another ghost, perhaps one who’d been unsuccessful in escaping after torture and forced down lower in The Underworld.
I grimaced. So those ghouls would “judge” us in a few hours… If Lucas didn’t move—heck, if he was incapable of moving—I felt certain that he would be thrust directly down to The Necropolis. His home had already been in some of the deepest levels of The Underworld, and now he seemed to be even more motionless than the other comatose ghosts who shared his pool. I doubted he could be put any deeper except for one place…
“Lucas,” I persisted. I was shouting now.
We had to leave this pond before the ghouls came for their inspection, to demonstrate that we still had life in us and deserved to be kept in the upper levels. Kailyn and I could try to get back to our pool in time and force ourselves to move around and demonstrate that we deserved to remain in one of the higher pools. But my uncle… We had to force some life into him somehow. But how could we, when he wasn’t even responding to my shouting his name?
Then my mind turned back to the last two visions that I’d witnessed—the unexpected visions that did not belong to me. Perhaps, because the same ghoul had been controlling both of our minds, some of his memories had passed through her and transmitted to me. I couldn’t think of any other way it could have happened. But whatever the case, I now had more information about Lucas’ darkest secrets and fears than ever before. My own mind was still foggy but, after fighting to keep my eyes open and then to sit up, I was better equipped to attempt thinking straight.
So if those really were Lucas’ memories… he knew all along that he had a child. Jeramiah’s mother—Anthea—had told him that Lucas never knew she was pregnant, but perhaps she had told her son that to make him feel better. Perhaps Lucas had been still in the area as a human even up to Jeramiah’s birth, but like a coward refused to have anything more to do with his lover. And I guessed not long after that, he would have turned into a vampire and been forced to leave their town.
Whatever happened, Lucas had known of his child’s existence. And then, based on his second memory, he knew that Anthea had given birth to a boy. It appeared from that last vision that Lucas had even tracked his son down after he became a vampire, in secret, without Jeramiah ever knowing. Perhaps that had just been out of curiosity to see what had become of his child, since he’d obviously made no attempt to enter his l
ife, not even after Anthea had died.
To think that all that time, my uncle kept Jeramiah a secret. From his father, sister and brother. Nobody had known that he had a son. Abandoning Jeramiah was a decision that clearly tortured Lucas now.
“Jeramiah,” I said suddenly to Lucas, in a last-ditch attempt to rouse him. “Jeramiah, your son, wants to meet you, Lucas. Your son!” Jeramiah was what had gotten through to him before. Maybe it was the only thing that could get through to him now.
Kailyn joined me in reciting Jeramiah’s name, our voices echoing around the small, grim cavern. Slowly a slit formed between Lucas’s lids, which broadened until his eyes were half open. Encouraged at the sight, I began talking more animatedly. “You just need to hold on, Lucas. Uncle. Hold on. We’ll get you out of here,” I went on, even though they felt like empty words after our failed escape. “You just need to keep your eyes open and sit up.”
His eyelids remained half open, though his irises were still cloudy.
“You’re not ready to leave yet,” I urged. “Your son needs you.”
At this, his eyelids lifted further, and then a slightest sparkle of consciousness lit up his eyes. His lips began to mouth the word, “Jeramiah,” although no sound came from his mouth.
“Yes, Jeramiah,” I said, nodding with as much force as I could—which admittedly was not much. My movements were still so sluggish. “Sit up, Lucas.”
Now that his eyes were alive, or at least semi-alive, I knew that if I could just get him to sit up, the rest would fall into place more easily, just as it had done with Kailyn and me. It was the first assertion towards life, a step away from giving in.