The dark took her.
Chapter 18
RED MOON
moom moom
hear my call
moom moom
speak to me
—Anselm Holto,
“Troll Chanting”
No wind passed her and she impacted nothing, but she knew she was falling. She heaved and twisted. It was excruciating to anticipate a splattering end that never came.
She screamed, but there was no sound. She called out, “Don’t kill me! George, please, please.” Her voice was dead.
So this is what it was like This—this billowing emptiness. Her body was not a body anymore. It seemed more smoke than flesh, thick and cold. But aware, and conscious and very scared. George had succeeded in killing her Of course he’d never bring her back. If he could, he would still have a lab and official approval. She had come into the cave of Godfather Death and gotten herself killed. The final test was over, and she would never inherit the Covenstead.
She began to cringe in her falling, waiting for the shattering crunch, her ribs jamming full force into her shoulders. If terror was a creature, she was dropping down its throat.”
But she had no ribs, and there would be no impact. She was falling into nowhere, and she herself was becoming nothing.
There mumbled in her mind the ragged thought: I’m dissolving.
She didn’t think she could bear it, not falling and falling and never hitting, in absolute silence and absolute dark.
“Please, I can’t die. I’ve got to get back.”
A terrible, thin face flickered nearby, as if in response to her cry. She batted at it, a starved husk of a face with white worms for eyes. But it had delicate eyebrows and a familiar pale shape. Amanda rejected it with all the force of her soul.
“Daughter,” it said, “welcome to hell.”
“Mother! My God, what happened to you?”
The face shifted and congealed, wrinkling and collapsing on itself. “I lived,” it gargled, “I lived wrong…”
And then was gone.
“No, Mamma, no.” How horrible, how hideous, what a tragedy. She said she had lived wrong—but how wrong? What had she done?
“Mamma!”
The face reappeared, dissolving, just inches before Amanda’s eyes. The skin was sloughing off the bones, and the hair was growing long and ragged. Decay that must have taken a year in Mother’s coffin was being re-created in seconds. Amanda screamed and hit, and her blows went right through the apparition.
“Mamma, why?”
“I need this. I chose it, I must atone for my life.”
“What?”
“From the time you were six I hated you.”
“You didn’t hate me. Mamma! You—” But it was true, wasn’t it? Remember the hot sorrowing nights when she would not come, remember how she scorned your art, remember how she sat, as still and rigid as a wooden mother, that time Dad beat you up? “Mamma, I forgive! I forgive you!” Worms, get out of her eyes’ Skin, come back! Hair, stop growing!
“We judge ourselves when we die, honey, and we are never wrong.”
“I forgive you.”
“I have to forgive myself, and that’s going to take some time.”
“You don’t deserve to suffer like this!”
“I told Mother Star of the Sea to discourage your interest in art,”
“Mamma, I know that. And she ignored you.”
“You got into the Pratt Institute. And I threw out the letter of acceptance.”
“Since then I’ve taught at Pratt two semesters. I’m beyond caring about Pratt.”
“I wanted to destroy you. I wanted to hurt you.” The face glowed as it spoke, as if with fire from inside.
“Mamma, I forgive.”
“I was jealous! You were beautiful and talented and I was—me.” Something was moving behind her, something complicated.
“I forgive you!”
“I can’t forgive myself.”
Amanda saw it more clearly now, a huge black hulk of a thing with piercing green eyes.
When it opened its mouth, a great mewing scream filled the still air. Mamma recoiled, her rotted flesh fluttering from her brown bones, as the cat came closer. He was tremendous, but his face was familiar: there was that shredded ear—
Amanda was stunned to see him. Tom must be death or the devil or something. But he had been so cute, lapping milk and cuddling in her bed.
There came a crackling sound as he took a chunk out of Mamma’s skull. Amanda could see the brain within, as crunchy as a sponge that has been dipped in Clorox and let dry. When Tom’s long pink tongue scooped it out, Mamma made a sort of babbling sound. Then her eyes became blank.
While Amanda shrieked, her stomach twisting, her throat burning, her skin tickling with dread, Tom ate.
At last there remained not even a tuft of Mother’s rough hair.
Then Amanda saw that Tom was staring at her.
There was a new sensation involved in facing those eyes. She could actually feel his stare driving like wild snow into her soul, seeking every hidden crack and cranny of her being.
Was this the Last Judgment? Did a cat—no, it couldn’t be Tom, not sitting in judgment over her.
“Please—”
The eyes grew bright and fierce.
“No. No! Keep away from me!”
The mouth opened.
Down Tom’s gullet Amanda saw fires dancing, and a vast legion of tragedies, each as immense and personal as her own.
Hell was inside him.
“Who are you? Why are you after me?”
There was no answer but the oily gush of his breath and the burnt-hair stink of the cooking dead.
He was getting larger and larger, so large that she could walk into his gaping jaws if she wished. But she didn’t wish! “I’m not guilty of anything! I got murdered and I’m not going in there! I’ve got to get back because my life isn’t over and they need me!”
At once the jaws snapped shut. Then she landed, as lightly as a feather, upon a gray and silent field. Her body felt substantial, solid. Or rather, almost solid. When she looked down she could see herself, but she had the feeling that she could have walked through a wall. She peered around her at the storm-turned line of the horizon. This was empty country. Tom curled about her legs. He looked up at her out of his little cat’s eyes and seemed ready to wink.
After what she had seen, she was afraid of those eyes. Maybe they would become big and menacing once again, and those jaws would open—
He carried everlasting tragedy in his belly.
And yet he was the only other thing here, so in a way she was glad for his presence. Without looking at him she bent down and stroked him. His fur was full of electricity. “I wish you could talk. I wish you could tell me what’s going on.”
He didn’t speak, but a gentle force turned her head. She was stunned at what she saw: the quietest, most perfect landscape of trees and green hills, blue sky flecked with white clouds, and in the shadows of the sky something wonderful that had no definite shape. It was, rather, the presence of a condition—an emotional color—as if goodness filled that air. Amanda’s first love, a boy who had died in a fire, came walking toward her. “I remember you,” he said, and there was something eternal in his voice. “I’ve been waiting for you.” He opened his arms, and what flowed from him was as a fine old song.
Other voices soon joined the song, then overwhelmed it. They were soft and yet solid, chanting: “Moom moom hear our call. Moom moom hear our call…” The chant went on and on, splitting and filling the soft air of summer that caressed her.
She recognized those voices—it was Ivy and Robin and Constance and the others. “I can hear you’”
Her heart almost broke: before her lay heaven, behind her life. The name the witches were calling evoked in Amanda powerful, hitherto hidden feelings. Moom! So familiar. How Moom had loved her life.
“I’ve got to go back. The witches need me.”
Her old friend laughed very gently. “Tom guards the line between here and life, Amanda. You can’t make it past him. And nobody who goes down his throat ever comes out again.”
The chant went on.
“Hey! I hear you!” It tore her soul. Despite what her dead friend had said, she turned back from heaven.
The air around her shivered and began to fade. And she knew it was doing that because she had just made a firm and unshakable decision: she was going back to life, somehow, if she could.
A cold wind sprang up. Ugly gray clouds swarmed across the sky. Her first love became a black, dancing skeleton in a bombed landscape, and replacing the song of heaven there arose a great multitude of sorrowful cries. They echoed out of the clouds like high thunder, and Amanda saw that the gray hid monstrous flying things.
Terror began to grow in her. The things in the clouds had wings and black scales and long red nails. She knew that they were demons.
Above their banshee cries there remained the chant: “Moom moom moom moom,” on and on and on.
She wanted to somehow open the sky, to part those dreary gray clouds, to get through to the chanters.
Tom had returned, sullen and slinking, mewing loudly. “Tom, they’re calling me back, I can hear them!
Please, Tom, tell me how to get to them! They need me! Oh, God, I can feel how bad they need me!”
She ran, she jumped, she clawed the air. When she scrambled up the gnarled remnant of a tree, she could hear the sucking eagerness of the demons in the clouds.
How absurd, she thought, to have chosen this. Nobody ever came back from the dead, not with all of hell barring the way. The dark once entered…
Guardian: a great maroon scorpion with the blue-eyed face of a little girl.
Guardian: a white bird that warbled lies.
Guardian: something that once had been a nun. Mother Star of the Sea.
Amanda hadn’t thought of her since sixth grade.
Tom spoke, a fierce, rasping voice in her head. “They are death’s soldiers, the demons.”
“Then death is evil.”
“Death is death, neither good nor bad. It’s just there.”
She ran. It was brutal, simple instinct, the reaction of the monkey to the slinking panther. The ground beneath her was spongy and had the slickness of skin. Maybe it was skin. This hideous place could easily be on the back of some inconceivable monster. She slipped and slid in the soft, glittering folds of it, and smelted the sweet stink of it.
The cat ran along beside her for a while. Then she saw it prancing in front.
Then the clouds spit a drop of hot, sticky rain.
The drop tickled her face. She raised her shadows of hands and touched the ooze. It was full of hair-fine worms. The tickle on her face changed to an itch, then at once to a dull ache. She reached up again and pulled away a great gout of skin. It was seething with the threadlike creatures. She threw it down in disgust and wiped her hands on the rubbery ground.
The sensation in her face was awful, an ache and a salty cut and the itching of a scab. She raised her eyes to the sky, which was tossing and bulging down at her, as if great fingers punched behind the clouds. “Let me go home’ I don’t belong here and you’re not going to keep me!” She would have thrown something but she had nothing to throw.
Somebody whispered in her ear, and she knew it was a demon; “You’ve got a lot to learn, baby.”
“Don’t you dare call me that! I’m Amanda Walker and I’m not your baby.”
The clouds twisted and stormed, became a great, dark skull filled with lightning, and began to draw closer to her. The grinning jaws bellowed thunder so loud she held her ears and screamed, but her own voice was lost.
And she had an odd thought: the demons in those clouds don’t hate me. They’re just doing their job.
“Your body can’t receive you back. Dead is dead. The ones who do return end up as ghosts, useless victims of the winds.”
This was a new voice, not big like the storm. Rather it was soft and small and full of peace. Amanda had heard something like it before, at the fairy stone. If a voice could be called sacred—she went to her knees. “I thought death was something like going down a long, hollow tube and then meeting my grandfather or somebody and being welcomed, and—”
“Each person creates his own death.”
Amanda was increasingly sure she knew that voice. And if she was right—then maybe things were going to get better. “Who are you?”
For just an instant Amanda glimpsed a bright, tiny woman, quite perfect, with rowan in her hair.
“Leannan, it is you. I was hoping it was. Listen, please help me get out of here. I’ve got to find a way to go back without ending up in hell.”
The Leannan regarded her. “You’ve set yourself a difficult problem.”
“But I don’t deserve hell. I’m not guilty of anything.”
“If you want my help, then come with me.” Tom was at her side, looking large indeed next to the Fairy Queen. “Don’t worry about your demons. They won’t stop you going deeper into death.”
“Oh, no, that’s not what I want. I’m going to get out of this. I’ve got to go back to the Covenstead!” She turned—and found herself facing a narrow man with a sneer on his face and rape in his eyes. He grabbed her throat with a wet hand. Suddenly both he and she were as solid as living bodies. She could smell his rancid skin, see his oily tongue, hear his breath bubbling in his nostrils. “Hey, baby,” he said, “let’s dance.”
“Oh, God! Oh, God, help me!”
He brought out a long, serrated knife. “This is God ” When he started squeezing her throat, she suffered very real agony. “This is just the beginning, you stinking bitch. I’m gonna cut your heart out and eat it right in front of your eyes!”
The blade caressed sensitive skin, and she saw a long spike of flecked drool start in the comer of his mouth. “Leannan, please, you said you’d help me!”
“Then you must follow me.”
“I’m sorry. I will.”
At once the rapist began to change. His form wavered and he rolled his eyes. His knife fell into dust, his whole body shivered, twisting back on itself.
Then Tom was there, swishing his tail.
“It was you! All the time, it was you! You’re evil, you’re a monster. A monster!”
“He obeys the law, Amanda. And so must you.” A hand so small it felt like a little, warm mouse came into her own. “Come with me. I want to show you your past, so you can learn what’s drawn you so against your better judgment to your witches. Perhaps then you’ll see that you should go to what you think of as heaven, which I call the Land of Summer. You’ve long since earned your peace.”
“I want to go back. I’ve got to.”
The Leannan sighed. “You’re very strong,” she said ruefully. But the small hand squeezed Amanda’s fingers.
Amanda walked along with the Leannan. She wasn’t at alt sure she wanted to, but every other choice seemed worse. She had expended her last bit of resistance facing Tom the rapist.
She suspected that he was only the first in a long line of guardians of the gates of life. The scorpion, for example, was worse. And the little bird far worse. And then there was Mother Star of the Sea. Dear God, she was the very personification of guilt. In school she had managed to make Amanda feel hell-bound for having an untied shoe.
“Will you please hurry up, Amanda? I’m having trouble with my damn fire.”
That was Constance Collier—and this place—they weren’t on the field of skin anymore, they were—oh, God, this was all familiar. “Oh, Leannan, thank you, thank you!” All the time she had been bringing Amanda back to the Covenstead. Deeper into death, indeed.
“The veil between life and death is thin here. But make no mistake. I have not brought you closer to the resurrection you seek. Let Constance show you your first life. Perhaps then you’ll see that you have the right to the summer you have earned.”
The meadow was clear and bri
ght, and Constance was sharply outlined by the sun. Things were still very strange: there were people around her, for example, but they were mere shadows, seated in a vague circle. Connie was stirring a great, iron cauldron, and that was very clear, too.
She smiled at Amanda. “You’re slow as molasses, girl!” Her voice renewed Amanda’s determination. Despite what the Leannan said, she could hear how very desperately Connie wanted her to return. The old woman waved her long staff for emphasis. “By the very Goddess we’ve got to get you back.”
Amanda ran up to the edge of the circle. “Constance, am I really dead? This is crazy—if I’m dead how can you be here?”
“Go round the circle once widdershins and you can come in. Then I’ll tell you.” Amanda began to walk.
“Not that way. That’s sunward. Widdershins is the other direction.”
Inside the circle even the air was different. It had less of the sparkle of spirit air, and smelled of fields and farm. She could just see, if she looked very, very closely, the faces of the people huddled around its edges. She recognized Ivy, and her heart panged to see Robin. But they certainly did not see her.
“Where is this place?”
“We can meet here for a time. The witches’ circle lies between the worlds.”
“I’m on the estate?”
“The circle is in both places.”
“What places? Have you given me some kind of a drug?”
“Oh, little baby, the drug is death! You are really and truly dead. And we don’t even know if your lunatic of an uncle will get himself back together enough to return you to life. He doesn’t want to, that’s for sure.”
“But you sent me to him! If you knew this would happen—”
“To be the witches’ guide in life, you must learn the secrets of death. And to do that you’ve got to die.
Unless there’s a chance you won’t come back, you aren’t really dead.”
“The Leannan said that you were going to show me why I don’t need to return. But you seem to want me back so much.”
“I’m going to show you your first life. How you take what you see is your business. Now I’m going to swirl the cauldron and you lean over and look into it. Be mindful of what appears, young woman!”