A Latent Dark (44 page)

“How long have you been in here?”

“Oh… a while,” the man said. “They give us a break from the streets, feed us. It’s not bad, as long as you don’t say something to make ‘
em
want to try their toys on
ya
. And even when they do, you get fairly compensated.”

John nodded as if he understood. He looked up at the guard with his long rifle.

“Not those sorts of toys,” the man said, his voice low. “The tinkerers. They got fancy toys. Scientific toys.”

“They do experiments,” John said, trying to follow. “What sort of experiments?”

The man gave him an amused look. “You really
ain’t
from around here are you?”

“No I’m…”

“I know, I know,” said the man. “Look, between you and me, you’d be smart to just tell them your sins, do a small Confessional, and take your pay. Don’t tell them too much or you get the Full Confessional. And trust me, brother, you don’t want that.”

Clearly the man was crazier than John had first suspected. “What happens to the others?”

The man looked around and pointed. “Him.”

The thin man stood in a corner, staring at the floor. He was a statue. John had seen the mentally ill. He had also seen the results of surgical lobotomy. While this man showed no scars, he stood without a hint of consciousness about him.

“They did that?”

“Oh, don’t think he didn’t deserve it,” said the man. “He hit a priest. You just don’t do that in Rhinewall.”

“I see.”

“Do you?” the man said, suddenly agitated.

As if showing John a piece of furniture to sell, he walked to the standing man. He was pale and thin. His hollow eyes stared at nothing as John’s new friend approached him.

He shoved the thin man. The thin man righted himself and continued to stare. He raised the thin man’s arm and it hung there in the air. It reminded John of the way Lynn’s arm had hung in the air that one day.

His new friend walked back and the thin man remained standing, arm still raised. “He’ll be like that for hours until gravity pulls it down.”

“How long ago did they do that to him?”

“Oh, about a week,” the man said. “He couldn’t even feed himself before. Now he will at least chew and swallow. Turns out he had a lot more sins than he let on. The engine sees that you know. It gets hungry.”

“And you say a machine did this?”

The man nodded. “The sin engine can see the bad ones. It chooses them.”

John swallowed. “Has it ever been wrong?”

The man looked at him. “If it has, nobody’s complained.” He turned from John and continued to watch the thin man, his arm raised in the air, pointing at nothing.

Chapter 33

Dale had always heard that the road to Hell was paved with good intentions. That may have been true, but nobody ever mentioned it being paved with corpses as well. Thousands and thousands of them were encased in the ice. They twisted around trees and rocks inside a frozen river hundreds of yards wide. It would have been slippery if not for the bits of gravel and the occasional exposed finger to provide traction. Dale had to keep reminding himself that it wasn’t real, despite what his senses told him.

“And you said
I
was bleak,” said Dale, stepping around what might have been an upturned heel poking from the ice.

“A lot of this is yours,” said Melissa. “Only some of it is mine.”

“I thought you were just creating everything for your own amusement.”

“No,” she said, a hint of irritation in her voice still. “It’s like”—she thought for a second—“we all have these realities that we create, even when we are alive. They all butt up against one another and our minds just make sense of it all.”

“The river is mine then?”

“Some of it,” she said. “Some of it is me and most of it is Hel.”

“And she’s a god.”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

“Is she or isn’t she?” asked Dale.

“Here she is,” she said. “Or she might as well be. All of this is her. Everything we’ve been walking through for the last day is her. She has created all of this, the river, the corpses, the ice giants you keep hearing in the forest. You and I are very small here. If anything we are just filling in the details.”

“But… Hel…  ice giants… that’s just a fairy tale.”

“To some,” she said. “To other people, people who lived a long time ago, it’s all very real. It isn’t like those ideas ever really died.”

“She must be close,” he said.

“Not really,” said Melissa. “She is just way better at this than I am. I’m just trying to navigate her imagination without getting lost. We have a ways to go still.”

“So, what are we supposed to say to her when we get there?” asked Dale. “I’ve never met a goddess.”

“Neither have I,” said Missy, stepping around a low hanging branch. “All I know is that she requested us, and that it has to do with Skyla.”

“Is she in trouble?”

Melissa glanced at him, then said, “I’m sure it’s nothing good.”

The trees in this area were gnarled and gray, stripped of all their bark. They twisted and snapped under the pressure from the glacial river of corpses. Every so often, Dale would hear a loud
crack
, hoping it was wood, but deep down he knew it was bone.

“Okay look,” said Dale, stopping. Missy turned and faced him a few paces up ahead. She held him in an impatient gaze as the ice river flowed beneath them.

“I know why I’m doing this, okay? I get it,” he said. “What I don’t understand is why you’re here.”

“I’m doing it because she’s my friend… or was my friend,” she said. “You really shouldn’t stand here. It’s not safe.”

On either side of them were steep jagged cliffs that funneled the river down its path. Several of the frozen bodies emerged like branches from the ice as it slowly collided with and swept around rocks. Large monolithic beings moved just beyond their line of sight, crunching bones as they walked.

“I’m sure she had lots of friends,” said Dale. “There has to be more to it than that.”

“No, Dale. I was pretty much her only friend,” she looked at the ground to see she was standing on a frozen finger. She moved her foot. “Skyla wasn’t very popular at my school—or my city for that matter.”

Dale gave her a narrow-eyed look. “I find that pretty hard to believe,” he said. “She seemed like a very likeable person to me. I… I liked her. She was my friend too.” His voice trailed off as he heard himself say the words.

“I’d ask if you sell out all your friends, but I already know the answer to that,” she said. Her voice was snide, and took the air out of Dale’s lungs for a moment. He stumbled a few steps to a nearby boulder that jutted out from the middle of the icy flow and sat.

“I thought she was some sort of runaway heiress,” he said, looking at nothing in particular. “I mean… the amount of money they wanted for her was insane.”

“The Church has deep pockets.”

He looked up at her. “I didn’t know it was The Church that wanted her. I had just heard that some preacher was looking for her. I didn’t know he was dangerous.”

“So you figured you’d return her to her parents and collect the reward.”

Dale nodded again. “I didn’t know anything else. All I saw was the money.” He gave a little chuckle. His hands felt cold and he tucked them under his armpits.

He looked down and saw that the road was not as still as he had assumed while walking. It moved with geological slowness, too slow to notice unless he looked for a few seconds. It was like watching a flower bloom, or waiting for the sunrise. The corpses rolled incrementally in the glacial current, hair fanning out behind marbled scalp.

Melissa walked over to him until she was at eye level, her footsteps crunching along the icy surface. “Dale, I’m sure we both would change things if we could. It’s part of why we’re here.”

Dale looked at her face. It was kind and wise. It made him feel small, the worst person in the world.

“I just…” he said and then gave up. Even the words were too much effort to get out.
And really
, he thought,
what’s the point? I belong here more than anywhere else.

A cold breath brushed his ear, but he ignored it. He knew what it was, but didn’t care. He felt a slow hug as a thousand tiny fibers began to wrap itself around his waist from behind.

Melissa grabbed his arm and pulled. “Get up, Dale,” she said. “This isn’t the time to have this discussion.”

Something over the ridge moved again, but Dale had lost interest. He had lost interest in everything. He let the small girl tug on his arm while he continued to sit apathetically on the boulder. The icy flow beneath his boots looked so inviting.

It would be so nice to just lie down and let that river carry me away
, he thought.
I could just sleep for days right now
.

He yawned and felt something slimy slip around his waist and creep toward Missy’s hand. There was a vague sense of urgency, but everything felt so dull, so muted. He thought he heard a sort of panicked crying from—what was her name?

Mel… Melissa. Right… man, he was tired. Somewhere behind him was laughter, cold and cruel. He watched as his boots slid infinitesimally into the ice as the slimy tendrils began to work their way out from his body and along his arm toward Melissa. But that river… it looked so… peaceful. He could just—

The slap almost knocked him off the boulder. All at once, his focus returned with a sharp clarity. Melissa was glaring at him, a tear freezing halfway down her cheek. Her eyes were like cold gems.

Melissa. Right. Oh…
“Oh!”

Dale stood up as feeling returned to his body. Warmth flowed back into his face as he rubbed his tingling cheeks.

“You’ve got one hell of a slap.”

“Move,” she said. “You have to move right now or this is over. I can’t carry you and you’ll never leave this place.” She wiped the frozen tear from her face.

“Okay… okay,” he said, pulling on his legs. His boot came free with a small spray of frost. From the corner of his eye he saw one of the dead hands reaching with brown fingernails for him from beneath the ice. His other boot came away quickly with a loud crunch.

Melissa was still crying and he put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m up, I’m up,” he said. “Let’s go.”

They began to walk again and Dale realized that Melissa also had to break free from the ice where she stood. He tried not to think about the consequences of what he had just done.

“Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have wallowed like that.”

“That was really close,” she said, her voice shaking. “You seriously have no idea what was happening below you… or behind you.” She shuddered.

“I have a pretty good idea,” he muttered. “It just looks so… calming from up here. I look in there and I feel as if I could just drift away and forget everything.”

“You probably would have,” she said. “What would have been left of you, anyway.”

Dale looked back at one of the corpses that were still reaching toward his frozen footprints. Its face was a fixed scream that exposed yellow, fractured teeth, the mouth wider than it should have been, its eyes as white as marble. The gray hair fanned out in the frozen water around its head. Dale turned away from that gaze, afraid of what might happen if he looked any longer.