The 'Geisters (28 page)

“Isn’t it?”

“There’s no school here,” said Ann. She held out her arms and turned around. “It’s all a big, dark cave.”

“Fuck.”

“There’s a breeze coming from one direction,” she said. “I bet it’s the way out.”

“Fuck,” said Philip again. “I’m sorry. It’s hard to concentrate.”

Ann started in the direction of the breeze. “How’s that?”

“You fucking try concentrating,” said Philip, “when you’re
flying.
”

“Flying?” said Ann, and Philip said, “Oh.” And the cavern became very quiet.

“Oh,” said Ann after a moment.

“
Oh
.”

At that, Ann became very quiet too.

The Insect was near. It might have been right behind her, long-fingered hands hovering at her throat. It might no longer have fingers, but great mandibles, and a vampiric sucker in place of a mouth. It might have just been a girl, smiling.

It might have been anything.

Ann tried to put the idea out of her mind. There was, after all, also a breeze. By the rules of this place, that should take her out. Ann started walking. Was the Insect following her footsteps? She tested the hypothesis twice—stopping short and turning, arms outstretched. Each time, her fingers closed around air—and Ann was lost, until she found a trace of the wind.

They marched into it. It led her along the bare rock, and she stumbled for a moment as her feet found a stone step, and then another. She began to climb. There were many steps; Ann was disinclined to count, after hurrying up the first dozen or so. The stairs turned back on themselves three times, and when they finally levelled out, Ann thought she could make out a faint light ahead, casting on a gleaming fall of minerals down a sharp cut of rock.

Ann hurried toward it—quickly, but not so hastily that she missed the fact that the floor here dropped away a good distance before the wall, leaving a deep chasm. The floor now became a ledge, crawling along the near chasm wall. The light was off toward her left—a bluish glow at the edge of her vision—so left she went.

As she clambered along the uneven ledge, it began to dawn on Ann that this light, the breeze, did not necessarily point the way toward escape. It might—in one of her old friend Ryan’s dungeon crawls, it probably would.
You feel a breeze—and there seems to be some light coming down the southern passage.
And the party would hurry along, hauling their sacks of loot and golf bags of magic swords. But that was Ryan’s game for you.

Fucking little people pleaser
, Ann thought unkindly, and kept going.

The chasm widened as she went, until the opposite side was all but invisible. Partly it was the distance—partly it was the phosphorescent mist that filled this great space. The mist had a sharp smell to it, like vegetable rot—and Ann worried that it might be toxic. She supposed it didn’t matter if it were; this place wasn’t real, after all, not in the physical, biochemical sense.

As she went on, the ledge levelled out, and the bare rock was replaced by broad cobblestones. The cliff wall behind her, conversely, became craggier. In the distance, she could hear the sound of fast water—rapids, or maybe a waterfall, and she also thought she might have heard the sound of wings beating—
leathery wings, as those of gigantic bats—
and perhaps deep, mournful moaning—
from the souls of the risen gladiators, waiting for their final judgement in the Corridor of Bones. . . .

“Ah,” said Ann aloud, and listened as her voice echoed back across the great chamber.

She thought she might know where she was. And as she took three more steps, and the ledge separated from the cavern wall and became a kind of bridge, she became sure of it.

These were the caverns beneath the Coliseum of Dusk—in the middle of which hung the Arch-Liche of the Games’ inverted tower, a thick basalt uvula that dangled from the greatest cavern’s throat.

She wanted to applaud, as the tower emerged from the mists—carved with runes that she and Philip had devised on the remains of a tablet of scientific graph paper, dotted with arrow slits and balconies, illuminated in parts with firelight, and the screams of the giant glow-bugs that the Arch-Liche had enslaved the last time he’d walked in the world’s moonlight.

Ann smiled. For the first time since she was a child, she truly felt as though she were coming home. By the time she was halfway across the bridge, she couldn’t help herself: she was running.

In the first room—a wide entry hall—a fine meal was set out on a long oaken table. Ann avoided it, remembering it as a trap: the succulent venison that topped the centrepiece was really the carcass of a gigantic spider, basted in its own venom. The bunches of grapes were flesh-burrowing grubs, that would render an adventurer paralyzed, if she failed to make her saving throw. The entire banquet—the suckling pig, the mounds of honeyed yam, the links of sausage, all of it—was poisonous, its true nature hidden by the cunning illusions of the Arch-Liche. The only thing safe to consume on the table was the wine, thick and dark and infused with a healing potion that would undo the effects of all but the most fatal of the poisons.

If Leah and Ryan and the rest of them had ever gotten that far in her campaign, they would have been so impressed. And, Ann was sure, so dead.

Ann bypassed the banquet, and moved farther into the tower. She visited its dungeons, near the top, where the Arch-Liche, in an unholy pact with the ruling families of Tricasta, kept hostage some of their more troublesome political enemies. She spent some hours in the Hanging Gardens, where pale vampiric flowers drank the blood of cave-blind rodents and blossomed into glorious crimson for hours afterward. She slept the first night in the Arch-Liche’s laboratory, where he had invented his glass automaton guards to watch over his treasury and mind the doomed gladiators. The laboratory was deserted, but the forge was easy to light, and it kept the place warm.

The next morning, she found her way to the kitchens and made herself a proper breakfast, absent both illusion and poison, and took the bowl to the Liche’s private chambers at the very bottom tip of the tower. She was delighted to find the Golden Telescope of Scrying there, mounted as she hoped, and settled in to observe all the goings-on in Tricasta and the lands surrounding it.

The next day mingled with the one after, and the one past that, and so on. The Arch-Liche, if he even still occupied this tower, never made himself known. Ann had the entire space
to herself.

There were no mirrors in the Arch-Liche’s chambers, nor anything even polished enough to cast a reflection. But while Ann could not look upon her own face, she could look at her hands and feet, and notice how quickly the scant colour from the Caribbean sun faded. She was becoming like alabaster, like bone, here in these new sunless chambers. When she looked down on the afternoon siestas at the fountain in Tricasta, Ann found herself squinting at the brilliance. Her joints made clicking noises when she bent to pick up a cup. Her teeth seemed to be looser in her mouth.

In these tiny measures, she came to understand that she was dying. She was wasting away—vanishing. In the belly of the Insect.

And she understood also: she did not wish to die here.

She wished she could speak with Eva, and she thought about trying to contact her now, using the telescope or one of the great spell tomes in the library. But she knew that she couldn’t. Eva understood herself to be a master of the psychic realm—able to send stores of energy to needy souls like Ann, speak to spirits and communicate via the power of the Universal Mind.

But Ann had to remind herself that the prison Eva had helped devise for the Insect had failed. Her intuitions about Michael—her assurances that he was a nice man, a good match, probably good in the sack—were as wildly tone-deaf as was her misplaced trust in Ian Rickhardt, who’d been able to draw out the deepest of Ann’s secrets with nothing more convincing than smarmy patter and mediocre flattery. And Eva had utterly failed to ferret out Philip, Ann’s own brother, and his lifelong betrayal.

Eva had shared a house with Ann. She had helped her through terrible trauma—the loss of her parents, and later, of her Nan.

But when it came to this business, Eva was nothing more than a fraud—most charitably, an unwitting fraud. She had no way into this place—this prison, literally of Ann’s own making.

Philip might listen to her call, now. He might help her. Ann wandered to the upper galleries of the tower—nearer its own, inverted base—and considered how she might do so. But she could conceive of no incantation by which to call him, that wasn’t comprised of her tears. He was her brother and she had loved him and it had been . . . what? A lie?

She stepped onto the south balcony, high enough that the ceiling of rock was visible barely a dozen yards overhead. It was freezing out here, cold enough that she felt it in her bones, her thickening joints. Her breath rattled in her throat.

She didn’t want to vanish. She let her hands fall to her side.

Warm fingers entwined with hers.

Ann squeezed as breath tickled her throat.
Thank God you were here to hold my hand.

She let herself be turned around, to face the girl.

She had dark hair tied into snaky braids, and darker eyes. She wore a long pale tunic, and black boots with toes that curled on themselves.

You
, mouthed Ann.

She was tall, and she filled out her tunic as a grown woman does—not like the child that Ann remembered distantly; not like the creature, the Insect, that Ann had come to understand her to be. She had grown and shifted in so many ways, but for one:

Her smile was still wide as the world.

Don’t vanish
, the girl mouthed.

Ann leaned in, and kissed her. She closed her eyes, and as she did so, many things did vanish, into darkness, and into silence. But not Ann, and not the girl either.

The two of them stayed put.

They were it now.

Susan Rickhardt poured them each another glass, killing the bottle.

It was not a Rickhardt Estates label. Susan had just finished explaining how she liked this stuff, from Rosewood Estates, a little bit better than a constant diet of the house wine.

They were sitting on the long tasting bar, maybe a dozen feet from the urn that held Michael’s ashes. Ann vaguely recalled that Charlie Sunderland had left her here, in Susan’s care.
Just sit here
, he’d said.
Your friend Susan will keep you entertained
. And Ann had said . . . what? Nothing, probably.

The clock over the bar showed that it was coming up on the lunch hour. Susan had changed clothes. She had put on a woolen skirt and a loose-knit grey sweater that Ann thought actually flattered her somewhat. She had fixed her hair—maybe gone for broke, actually taken a shower.

Hard to say, though. The only light here came from the tall windows that lined one wall, and it was inconstant; the clouds were moving fast, and they rippled across the sun to make a shadow-puppet show under the great wooden dome of the tasting room in Rickhardt’s backwoods conference centre. Ann had no doubt that the windows were new as everything else in this space, and strong as money could buy. But the wind still rattled them in their frames.

The electricity had gone out some time ago.

“Ian was thinking about planting Sémillon about a year ago. Never did, and that’s fine by me,” said Susan. “Ian’s got no touch for decent wine. These Rosewood people do it better than he
ever would.”

Before Ann had escaped the tower and returned to herself, her lips had been about to say,
Tastes fine to me.

“Tastes fine to me,” she said, and she let her eyelids flutter closed for a moment—to savour the wine, and turn attention to . . .

Well, to that other business.

The lights in the ceiling of the Lake House rooms sparked bright and died.

Ian Rickhardt and his friends didn’t quite know how to take it—sudden darkness being, under the right circumstances, delicious for men such as they.

But the sharp and growing smell of ozone—the flickering light of flame from the electrical outlets in the kitchen, beside the sofa . . .
that was a different matter. Four of them pointed it out, and made for the door, stumbling over chairs and a coffee table.

Another grabbed a cushion from the sofa, and tried to use it to suffocate the flames at the outlet in the living room. He screamed and jerked as electricity coursed through him.

The door handle was stiff, and the four of them struggled with it before it finally gave way. It opened, onto a bright, greenish light, and a howling wind. Two of them simply vanished through the opening, while the other two were able to swing the door back, and shut it.

Ian Rickhardt had come prepared. He had a small LED flashlight in his pocket, and flicked it on.

It proved unnecessary, however, as the electrical fire in the wall touched onto the drapes. Philip LeSage, floating above them, was illuminated in flame, grinning insensibly.

Rickhardt had stopped smiling as the room began to fill with smoke. The sprinkler system cut in, and he flinched, shading his face against the spray of icy water.

Others crawled on the floor, trying to stay below the smoke, heading for the door, beyond which a titanic wind roared, and beams snapped. He shouted for each of them to find something to hold onto, and as they did so, Ian hauled open the door and pressed himself against the wall behind it.

Ears popped as the wind drew the air and the smoke out—and for a moment, the fires slowed. the doors to the cupboards swung open again as one, and dishes flew and smashed in the wind. The sofa overturned, pillows spewing behind it like entrails. But the men held tight. The only one drawn out the door was the one already airborne. Philip LeSage, held tight in the Insect’s embrace, flew head-first out the door, and was snatched in the bright twister that tore at the belly of the Octagon.

Ian Rickhardt didn’t look to see where he went. As the balcony outside the Lake House room disintegrated, he gasped wonderingly, and reached down, and took hold of himself.

“You ever play any D & D?”

“D & D?” Susan Rickhardt looked perplexed a moment, then made the connection and nodded. “Oh, Dungeons & Dragons. No.”

“I’m surprised,” said Ann. She swirled the bottom half of her glass of wine. “Seems like it’d be a natural for you.”

Susan shrugged. “I came to my habit late in life,” she said. “When I was a teenager, I was more of a Ms. Pac Man kind of kid.”

Ann nodded. “I played a
lot
of D & D,” she said. “A lot. From junior high school, all through university. It was a real lifeline for me. Also, wicked fun.”

“Wicked, now?”

Ann took a delicate sip of the wine and shut her eyes. She thought about the grand plaza in Tricasta, and how that world’s sun would paint the stones a rich gold as it set, the streams of water from the great fountain there sparkling like gemstones. There were pinkish marble benches surrounding the fountain, and on these adherents to the doctrine of the great water elemental Casta would sit, burn a cinnamon-tinged incense in special brass philtres, and contemplate Her greatness. When Ann described it the first time, Ryan had rolled his eyes and Leah had giggled, and for that moment, Ann had been embarrassed and thought she might be on the wrong track.

Ah, but when the sun went down—and the adherents began to chant a deeper rhythm—and Casta Herself emerged, a terrible cascade like a waterfall, falling up to the heavens . . . she could tell by the widening of Ryan’s eyes and Leah’s sharp intake of breath . . .
she’d done it right.

Beauty was a prerequisite to terror. And yes—when it finally came, the terror was exquisite.

At least it was from Ann’s perspective.

“I always wanted to learn how to play it,” said Susan. “I mean, it’s pretty much like Skyrim, but in your head, right?”

“Yeah,” agreed Ann, turning her attention even as she said the words, “in your head. But it’s not for the faint of heart.”

And her eyes flickered, and she thought about that.

The faint of heart.

Charlie Sunderland wasn’t an MD—by any reasonable academic standards, he wasn’t even a doctor—but he’d gleaned enough over the years to know how to administer a hypodermic and manage some basic first aid. He thought he might be able to set a bone, if it weren’t a complicated fracture. He was pretty good with CPR.

He was heading back from the conference centre, where he’d dropped off Ann—right on the covered bridge—when the tornado descended into the middle of the Octagon. He couldn’t see the twister itself—the roof of the glassed-in bridge blocked it perfectly as it descended. But he stared, frozen, at the greenish cloud that surrounded the vortex. The roaring wind left a ringing in his ears when it passed and drove him to the ground, in abject terror.

Sunderland was not an MD, but he was no fool either—he had after all compiled the file on the Lake House, and the Bounty II. He knew what the Insect was capable of.

He may not have understood why it had come to pass, but he understood what had happened. The Insect had broken free. The plan that they had all made—to do with Philip what they had not been able to do with Ann, and bind it tight—had broken down. Somehow.

And now—this.

The walls of the Octagon remained standing. Sunderland was amazed, although he knew he shouldn’t be: tornadoes in nature could be alarmingly selective. One house might be reduced to matchsticks; a neighbour’s might survive untouched.

And this . . . this was not nature.

Dr. Sunderland opened the door to the Octagon. It was dark inside, which he took to be a good thing; it might mean that the chambers surrounding the centre had survived. There might be survivors.

There was a first aid kit somewhere in this room, and a good one. Rickhardt had boasted about it when they’d arrived. It was above one of the sofas, attached to the wall. If there were light, Sunderland could have found it easily. In the dark, he had to feel around for it.

As he searched, he called out: “It’s Sunderland! I’m going to try to bring help! Shout if you can!”

No one shouted as he searched over the first sofa. He moved around to the other side, through the grey, changing light of the day. He was about to call out again as he reached out to the wall behind the second sofa.

He found he had no words. There was nothing to say, as the cool, dry hand wrapped around his own.

And her eyelids flickered.

“I used to dungeon master,” said Ann. From Susan’s blank expression, Ann could guess that the woman had no idea what she was talking about, so Ann explained: “I would be the one who made up the place where the adventures happened. In the game, I’d describe what was happening there, and the players would react.” Susan nodded, slowly, in that nervous-but-encouraging way that people who’d never rolled up a first-level halfling thief did, when Ann tried to explain how a game of Dungeons & Dragons went.

“Basically, it comes down to this,” said Ann. “I’m the one telling the story. If the characters run into . . . I don’t know, a band of trolls . . . I’m the trolls. If they meet a dragon—it’s me. If the bridge they’ve just crossed crumbles into dust . . .”

“You,” said Susan.

“Me.”

Susan got up from her stool, and went around to the other side of the bar. She opened up the refrigerator and got out another bottle of the Sémillon.

“Sounds wicked,” said Susan.

Ann chuckled. “Yeah. I used to play
rough
. Not everybody’s cup of tea.”

“Not for the faint of heart.”

“Right.”

Susan refilled Ann’s glass nearly to the brim. Ann widened her eyes and laughed. “Sure that’s enough?” she said, and Susan laughed too.

“We got big merlot glasses in here somewhere, if you’d like some more.”

Ann let her smile fade a bit.

“No,” she said. “Thank you.”

Susan came back around the bar and sat down by Ann again. “It’s okay,” she said.

Ann blinked. “What’s okay?”

“You’re all gone now,” she said. “It’s done. You can just relax.”

All gone now.

Ann thought about that. Earlier that morning, in the dark, Susan had predicted just exactly this: that she’d be eaten up soon. So had Lisa. The Insect would devour everything. And now, according to Susan anyway, that had happened. The Insect had devoured everything. Ann was here by herself now, or rather her flesh was . . . And Susan—or the flesh Susan left behind—was here helping her to adjust. To her new life—as a vessel that largely stood empty.

Of course, that wasn’t precisely what had happened—not to Ann at least.

Ann was, for the first time in decades, entirely whole.

Ann climbed off her stool. She swayed a little bit, what with the wine in her, but steadied herself with the stool. She walked down the bar to the urn that contained Michael’s ashes. She ran a finger up the cool metal.

“Tell me,” she said. “Does Ian have an up-to-date will?”

Susan shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Michael and I made out wills,” said Ann. “Part of the elaborate plans we laid for our wedding. It made sense; we both came into the marriage with considerable assets, after all. Michael owned property, had investments. I . . . I had my part of my parents’ trust fund. You probably should have done the same thing.”

Susan shifted on her stool. “I’m sure I’m looked after.”

“Hope so,” said Ann. She left her wine glass on the bar and crossed the big room to the bank of windows. It had begun to rain, but the wind was blowing the right way, and not a drop of it touched the glass. The view was perfect.

Susan came over with both glasses—Ann’s dribbling a bit over the rim. “What you looking at, Annie?” she said, and then added, “Oh,” as she came closer, and saw.

Ann took the glasses from Susan, and set them down on a nearby table. “There was a storm,” said Ann. “It was terrible—a tornado. It touched down on the Octagon, and tore it out from the middle. You can see the pieces of it—there—and there—and that thing.” Ann pointed to a twisted helix of metal, sprouting from the edge of the ravine like a broken bedspring. “That’s the staircase, I think.” The trees that must have covered the grounds outside the tasting room were just as mangled. There was a wide swathe where the branches had simply been sucked away, leaving cracked stumps in their place.

“That’s one of your husband’s friends,” said Ann, pointing at a slender figure, clutching a blood-red bathrobe around himself as he staggered away from the ravine. The rain was coming hard and it lashed at him, but he didn’t stop. “We weren’t introduced when I came across him in the Octagon. Do you recognize him?” Susan must have taken the question to be rhetorical, because she didn’t answer. “All right. Well watch carefully. I am going to cause him to trip, and fall forward into mud.” The man did so, arms wheeling comically as he fell to his knees, and then his face. “He may wish to get up,” said Ann, and indeed, the man tried to do so, his narrow elbows emerging over his back, as though he were to begin a push-up. Ann smiled slightly and shook her head. “But I don’t wish it,” said Ann. It was difficult to see precisely, but it seemed as though something—a tree branch, perhaps?—reared up, and fell onto his back. His arms were splayed in the mud, and as he tried to manoeuvre them back under him, more branches seemed to come up from under him. “He won’t be getting up,” said Ann, and sure enough, he showed no more signs of it.

In the course of this work, Susan had dropped her wine glass. The floor here was carpeted, and it prevented the glass from breaking, and also absorbed the wine around Susan’s feet. From the way she wrung her hands together, eyes wide and mouth half-open in terrified dismay, it could have been the result of another kind of accident.

“So here’s the thing about dungeon mastering,” said Ann. “You can play rough—take-no-prisoners, re-roll no stats. But it doesn’t work at all if you’re not giving the players what they want. And it doesn’t work if you’re not giving them what you want them to have.”

“Why did you ask me about a will, now?”