Dark Tendrils (2 page)

It would have been so easy for Kurt to lash out at Holly, then, to make her pay because he felt betrayed. He was tempted to give in to that, but what was the point? Kurt had let this happen. It was his fault Giovanni was in their lives at all.

Holly said, “Let’s get it back now. I think I know where he went.” She avoided Kurt’s eyes when she revealed that, and paused awkwardly before continuing. “We can’t let him get away with all this.”

“Holly, let’s not. Let’s just forget him. Let’s just not ever see him again. Either of us. Promise me you’ll never go anywhere near him again.”

“I promise, baby.”

Kurt nodded and clasped her hand. “Besides, the star would only remind me of Giovanni, now. Its magic is ruined. Corrupted.”

Holly asked, “Okay, but . . . How do you know him? Why does he have it in for you? Why are you so scared?”

Back then, Kurt had always held back; Giovanni had pestered him about it. As much as the older man had fascinated Kurt for awhile, some instinct toward self-preservation had made him resist the urge to fully open up.

Since spotting Giovanni at Carol’s party, Kurt had been trying to avoid his memories, even more than he usually did. But now he had an urgent need to trust Holly, to stop hiding from her. So he finally told her about his time with Giovanni.

“Back in university, a bunch of us got interested in dreams. Every Saturday night we’d fuel up on beer and pot and tell each other our best and weirdest dreams of the week. This girl, Bethany, got really into it, more so than any of us, and one night she brought this creepy old guy with her. Giovanni. At first, a bunch of us snickered at the sight of him. He looked like some kind of perv. But Bethany was clearly impressed with him. He was an expert, she told us. He could tell us what our dreams meant. He charmed us, somehow telling each of us what we most wanted to hear. Were we that transparent?”

Kurt paused. Holly waited, didn’t rush him. She squeezed his hand tighter.

“Soon, we began meeting every evening. Increasingly everyone’s dreams took on a darkly erotic aspect, and that spilled over into the meetings. It was getting too creepy for me, but all the others seemed so into it. I didn’t want to be, you know, the square. Giovanni would usually spend the night with one or more of us. I don’t know that he even had a place of his own.”

Holly interrupted, “He does, now.”

That brought images of the two of them together to Kurt’s mind. Kurt must have let his revulsion show; Holly cringed and looked away.

Kurt remembered Giovanni in his own bed, fondling him, cajoling him into revealing his most intimate secrets.

“Then Bethany died in her sleep, and it all changed for me. Giovanni was with her that night. I was convinced that he was responsible. Regardless, there was no evidence of foul play, and her death was attributed to ‘natural causes.’ But the spell was broken, for me at least. Maybe for a few of the others, but I’m not sure. I was the first to leave the group, and I broke off contact with everyone. That’s the last time I’d seen him before that night at Carol’s. I never wanted to think about him again.”

Kurt wondered if one day he and Holly would ever be ready to discuss what she went through while she was in Giovanni’s thrall. He wasn’t ready to hear it. She said, “Let’s forget about him. Let’s concentrate on the future. Our future.”

Kurt enfolded Holly in his arms, pressed her against his chest as hard as he could, wanting more than anything to trust Holly again.

Kurt and Holly resumed their lives as best they could. Things between them never returned to exactly what they’d been before; that had been lost forever. Kurt thought,
Something else that creep stole from me. From us.

They stopped going to parties; it was too vivid a reminder of how Holly had met Giovanni. There was no fun for them there anymore. Their social life suffered for it; some friends dropped out of their lives, but not all of them. They became much more domestic. There was pleasure in that, too.

Kurt liked to think they were building a new life, that they had faith in each other. It was awkward sometimes, but Kurt was confident that they both wanted to be together. Yet sometimes he caught himself doubting: maybe that was only how he wanted things to be; nevertheless, he let himself believe that. Ignoring the evidence; ignoring his gnawing anxieties.

Holly never mentioned Giovanni, or her time with him. It was a wound neither of them seemed eager to reopen, though sometimes that silence weighed heavily.

Sometimes, she would start to say something to Kurt, and then stop herself after a word or two. Every time that happened he quietly feared that the aborted subject was Giovanni, and he was selfishly grateful for her silence.

Kurt occasionally suffered through snippets of that strange dream—various permutations of paralysis, demonic visitation, and out-of-body experience. He was always a bit shaken the morning after, but he told himself they were only nightmares; he ignored them as much as possible.

Then, the nightmare struck every night for an entire week. Each night, the sensation that his life was in danger increased.

It was still the dead of night when he emerged from the paralysis for the seventh consecutive time. His whole body was drenched in cold sweat. He was too freaked out, too frightened, to go back to sleep. He slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Holly. He needed to move around, to get some air. He dressed and went out for a walk.

Outside, it was chillier than he’d expected. He dug his hands into his jacket pockets and scraped a finger against something. He pulled it out. It was that bookmark from Carol’s party:
Lost Pages
. He read the address; it was at least an hour’s walk from where he was.
What the hell
, he thought. He might as well have a destination, even if the bookstore would be closed at that time of night. He needed to occupy his mind.

The shop’s sign was as garish as its bookmark, with gaudy mismatched colours and cheesy, ornate font. There was some light inside, so he peeked through the window. There was a guy sitting at the counter. Kurt went in.

The tiny store was crammed full with books . . . and dogs. At least half a dozen, of all sizes. Kurt couldn’t stand being in there. The smell of dust and dogs. The cramped messiness.
Who would ever want to spend any time in this dump?
He nodded an apologetic smile at the big, tall guy at the cash and turned to leave. But something on the top shelf of a bookcase next to the door caught his eye before he’d made it outside: a leatherbound tome with a faded painting of Giovanni’s face on the front cover. The book looked very old. Too old.

Kurt grabbed it; but the words inside were in a language he couldn’t read. He couldn’t even recognize the alphabet. It was like nothing he’d ever seen.

“What is this?” Kurt shouted to the bookseller, waving the book in his face.

The bookseller stayed calm. He asked Kurt, “You know that man on the cover?”

Kurt glared at him, unable to speak, not knowing what to say. One of the dogs sniffed him; Kurt glared at it, too, and it left him alone.

“You’re in serious danger,” the bearish man warned Kurt. “He worships Yamesh-Lot, the lord of nightmares. He collects sacrifices for his god.”

“Nightmares? Sacrifices?”

The man looked into Kurt’s eyes, considered what he saw. “Aqtuqsi,” he said.

“What?” Kurt couldn’t wrap his tongue around the unfamiliar syllables.

The man called out, “Aydee,” and a teenage girl with creamy brown skin and long, multicoloured braids emerged from the back of the store. “Can you get me that book on aqtuqsi?” She quickly zeroed in on the book in question, as if she knew the location of every speck of dust in that chaotic mess. The bookseller nodded toward Kurt, and she handed him the book.

The book was a tiny hardback with dark blue cardboard covers. On the front was a brown-coloured relief of a sleeping man enveloped in a radiating glow. In blue, the word “Aqtuqsi” was printed below the illustration.

The girl said, “About time you came by.”

For the first time, Kurt remembered her. From the party: touching his wrist; whispering Giovanni’s name into his ear.

The bookseller said, “We can help you.”

What the fuck?

Still holding both books, Kurt ran outside before either of them could say anything else. His heart pounded in his chest. Sweat ran down his face. He thought,
Those people. They were screwing with me. How do they know about me? Giovanni. This has to be part of Giovanni’s game, whatever that is. Yamesh-Lot? What nonsense. How gullible do they think I am?

Kurt stopped running and caught his breath. He oriented himself and headed over to The Small Easy, his favourite 24-hour joint. He downed his first cup of hot coffee like it was water.

Sipping his refill, he examined the book with Giovanni’s face on the cover; it really was entirely written in some weird, unfamiliar language. Kurt turned to the other book. This was it: the explanation for what had been plaguing him.
Aqtuqsi
, an Inuktitut word that translated roughly as “my nightmare”: a supernatural attack by a spirit or sorcerer that paralyzed the body by preying on the mind when it was at its weakest. The phenomenon was known in other cultures under various names—the Chinese called it
gui ya
, ghost oppression; for the Japanese, it was
kanashibari
; in the West Indies, the term was
kokma
; people in Newfoundland named it
old hag
, because the most common variant there involved hallucinating that an old witch was sitting on your chest; even science had a name for it: sleep paralysis—but, this book said, only Inuit shamans had developed defenses against it.

Kurt read that sorcerers, if they held an object that once belonged to you (the stronger the emotional bond to the object, the better), could weave a spell that would constantly gnaw on your mind, thus making you more vulnerable to aqtuqsi. The different chapters included testimonies; a history; a taxonomy of different kinds of aqtuqsi, cataloguing their level of threat or danger; ways to protect yourself; and explanations about the power beyond the threshold. It was all in the book. Everything that had been happening to him, explained. Except
why
—if only he could decipher the other book, the one about Giovanni. That was the real key.

Drinking his third cup of coffee, Kurt caught himself almost drowsing, but he shook his head, willing himself to stay awake. When he looked up, Giovanni was sitting at his table, across from him, snickering. Without thinking, Kurt threw a punch at him. As soon as his fist reached Giovanni’s face, his image vanished, and there was nothing left behind. Hitting emptiness upset Kurt’s balance. He fell from the chair, his chest hitting the edge of the table. The table rocked, and the mug crashed to the floor, scattering shards of china all over the floor and splattering coffee everywhere.

Sprawled on his back, Kurt shut his eyes for only a second. And opened them to a nightmare.

Everyone in the café had been transformed into demonic creatures so dark that they seemed to consume the light around them. They converged on Kurt, but, as in his nightmares, he was paralyzed, unable even to scream.

Their hands penetrated Kurt’s flesh, and he felt his innards and his veins being sucked dry. The more he was drained, the lighter he felt. Suddenly, his immaterial self shot up toward the ceiling while the dark monsters continued to feed on his body. As he was about to collide with the ceiling, or perhaps pass through it, Kurt emerged screaming from the aqtuqsi to find himself lying on the floor of The Small Easy.

The waitress stood over him, asking him questions, but he couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying. Patrons were staring at him, their arms sternly crossed across their chests.

Kurt shouted, “Where are my books? The two books I came in with?” He shot to his feet, knocked people aside, searching frantically through the café.

He couldn’t find the books.

Hands clutched at him, trying to restrain him. He shouted, “I have to find those books.” Tears of rage and desperation ran down his face. The books were nowhere. He struggled free and ran outside.

He ran all the way back to Lost Pages. To confront those people? To ask for help? He didn’t know; he couldn’t think.

But the store wasn’t there anymore. In its place was a laundromat. Kurt was sure that he was on the right street, at the right address. He was certain. He dug through his pockets, but he couldn’t find the bookmark anymore.

Tired and confused, Kurt walked back home. Holly had already left for work. Kurt was too weirded out, too terrified, to go to work or to call Holly or to do anything besides drink coffee. And more coffee. Anything to stay awake. Going to sleep would make him too vulnerable.

It was late when Holly finally came home. She took one look at Kurt and immediately acted concerned. Kurt felt too addled to continue facing this on his own. He told her about the recent rash of nightmares, Lost Pages, aqtuqsi, Yamesh-Lot, the books, finding the girl from the party, Giovanni’s attack, the bookshop’s disappearance—everything.

She listened, but she grew distracted, almost as if Kurt were relaying information she already knew. As he related his story, Kurt’s paranoia kept increasing, especially in regards to Holly. When Kurt finished his story, he couldn’t even look at Holly anymore. They sat awkwardly, in silence, like strangers.

She broke the silence. “I’ve been plagued by a recurring nightmare, too. It’s not exactly like yours, though.”

Kurt didn’t look at her while she spoke. He knew he would only sneer. He didn’t believe her. He realized he hadn’t believed her for a long time. Since Giovanni had come between them.

She continued, “I didn’t want to tell you. You seemed to be having such a hard time. I didn’t want to make things worse between us by saying anything that might evoke Giovanni or what he’d done to us.”

As if Giovanni’s shadow weren’t always there, a dark impenetrable barrier that forever kept them apart. As if her mere presence weren’t reminder enough.

Holly recited her dream: “My dreams are haunted by a god of pure darkness. It doesn’t matter what I dream about—childhood, sex, weird adventures, eating—at some point, the god manifests itself. The god is infinitely huge and yet standing right next to me. Dark tendrils shoot out of it and penetrate my body. The god feeds on me, drains me, while I go about my dream. I thought it was just a bad nightmare, some leftover from my guilt about Giovanni, my fear of him.” At first, Holly’s tone was blank, as if she were remembering lines rather than something she had experienced, but gradually a note of dread crept into her voice. “But now I realize it’s something more. Something more ominous. What that bookstore guy said about sacrifices . . . that’s what my nightmares feel like. Like I’m being offered to that thing, that god.”