Unreal City (19 page)

“The pact cannot be made in the Unreal City, Sarah. It’s not your real blood, don’t worry,” he reassured me, and went back to licking my arms and face.

It somehow made the pain feel less real, and I let him tend to me for a while before I rose to my feet and wiped as much of the blood on my pants and shirt as I could. The worst part was having to pull two flags of loose, torn skin off my arms, but once I left them lying there on the barren, rock-littered ground, I felt a reluctant, yet strong second wind fill my tired body.

We stood in the middle of a dry wasteland. The ground was parched, yet above the sky was pregnant with black, swirling rainclouds. Not a sprinkle of moisture was in the air, but the air shivered with the threat of lightning. The long-dead, dehydrated skeletons of trees dotted the dry expanse, and it seemed as if this arid, parched hell stretched on forever.

“Find him,” Felix instructed. “Time’s already running out. You don’t want to have to go through all of this again, do you?”

“No,” I sighed, disheartened at the ugly eternity of desert that stretched out before us.

“Then you should run.” Felix took off like a black fish streaming through the ocean and I had little choice but to follow.

I ran until I was sure the memory of this pain would remain in my physical body for months after this nightmare. My lungs stung and my body was drenched with sweat. At least four of my toes felt broken and blisters formed, then split open on my heels. Felix shouted back to me over and over again, urging me to keep hurrying. If I gave up now, it would all be for nothing.

My thoughts became distant and hallucinatory. I was barely conscious, barely understanding where I was, letting my legs propel me forward as I got further and further away from my pain. In the very distance, I thought I could see a little hovel sitting in the center of the wasteland. As we neared it, Felix picked up speed, his eyes wild.

Lightning struck down twice as we grew closer, accompanied by the sound of thunder splitting the air. The hovel was clearer in my sight now, and I saw it was no larger than a simple, one-room shack constructed out of what looked like rotten driftwood. The door hung ajar and swung a little in the stuffy air that filled this world like a miasma. I could feel the presence of one of the Cunning Folk and a familiar inside those poorly constructed walls, yet his was unlike many of the others. It had a flavor of corruption, like a computer’s programming that had fallen into disarray but still tried to work, still carrying out the commands even with the inherent flaws that could never be remedied.

When we were within a few feet of the hovel, something bizarre occurred. All of a sudden, it wasn’t like we were running forward, but rather
falling
toward the building, though the perspective didn’t change—just the feeling of gravity. The expanse lengthened and my scope of vision stretched, along with the feel of my body. The world was flattened, and it sucked both Felix and I into it. I tripped over my own feet, stunned by the strangeness of what was occurring.

Just as suddenly everything snapped back to the way it should be, and Felix and I both sat on the ground, trembling. We were mere feet from the door of the shack, and drew closer to one another as it opened with a creak and revealed a small, dusty room. Trembling, I stood to my feet and peered inside.

“HE-HELLO? IS ANYONE
in there? I need to talk to you.” I craned my neck a little more with each cautious step into the hovel.

The first sight I beheld was of a teapot standing on a rickety old table. However, when I looked at it, all the parts of it seemed disconnected. The spout was floating upward and the handle looked like it was in front of everything else, and I just knew if I touched it that it would feel normal. This peculiar illusion hurt my eyes and I didn’t want to look at the thing, but the more I tried to break away, the more I became fixated on it. Something about that teapot and its spinning, moving, impossible parts and the lurid, floral design made me forget about everything else.

It’s making me feel sick. It’s making me want to puke. It’s making me remember the time at the café when I was watching that girl and she didn’t know that I knew that she’d been changed, the most sinful change, that she wasn’t one of us but I knew about her. I knew that she was watching me from inside that teapot, where they were talking softly about the game that only the dead security guards knew how to play and how those orange cigarette burns would—

I kept blinking and shook my head, trying to shake out the thoughts. They dispersed and I gasped for breath, adamantly keeping that infernal object out of my sight. I had felt my mind slipping away, and it scared me—badly. Those mad, winding thoughts would start again if I looked its way, so instead I turned my eyes past the table to the corner of the room where a man sat on the floor.

Skin, much of the muscle tissue, and organs had been eaten away from the front of his torso, leaving a glistening, black-brown ribcage strung with stray fibers of flesh. From inside the ribcage, I could see something crawling around and gnawing its way deeper into the man’s core. However, from the neck up, he was still whole. His bald head was glazed in sweat and printed with tattoos that reached over his gaunt cheeks and hollow, haunted eyes. He turned and smiled at me, gesturing lifelessly with his arm.

The crawling thing emerged from under his ribcage, and I saw it was a scorpion with the head of some other animal—perhaps a bear or wolf. Its exoskeleton was a poisonous red, dotted with spots that pulsed with the familiar’s light, its eyes unfocused and wild as it scurried up the man’s neck to the crown of his head, clicking it claws and gnashing its teeth. The man looked at me with his hazy black eyes and laughed at my apparent revulsion as the flesh on his torso began to regenerate.

Felix was not reckless enough to lead this time, and it was I who took the first step into the low-roofed shack.

“So you’ve finally come to do away with me.”

“D-do away with you?” I stammered.

The man’s eyes widened as Felix entered, staying close to my ankles. “No, so, it’s not you after all. You’re not the one who’s following me, are you? You can never be too careful,” the man breathed, and then his defenses rose. He stood up, his torso complete again and his chest now covered with the same types of intricate tattoos as his head. The creature atop his head opened its mouth wide and hissed.

“Are you Charles Poe?” I asked, my voice shaking. I balled up my fists, letting the fear-fuelled anger inside of me grow. It wasn’t courage, but it was better than nothing.

“Why do you want to know? What have you come here for?” he demanded frantically, and I put up my hands in a gesture of peace.

“Arthur—the man at the library. He told me you were being followed by a familiar, not in this world, but in the other. One that’s got antlers on its—”

He sucked in a deep breath through his teeth and the scorpion’s claws began clicking madly. The man was trembling as he pointed an accusatory finger in my direction, but I was not about to be chased away.

“
It’s after me too!
I need your help. I need to know what it is. It killed my sister.”

“There’s nothing you can do. Run. Hide. Never tell your name to anyone again. Take the pills your kitty-cat gives you. Take the medication. It’ll keep you here. It’ll keep you stable,” the man advised, shrinking back from me as if I had a contagious plague.

I held fast. “No. I’m not going to let it destroy anyone else’s life. Tell me what it is.”

Poe gave a shrieking laugh that turned into a bellow of rage. As he did, lightning began to ravage the ground outside and the shift of gravity occurred once more. I fell over, reaching for Felix and catching him. The storm subsided and I stayed on the floor, hugging Felix to my chest.

“It’s from Hell. It’s a living sin. It’s the harbinger of all of our dooms, little bitch. Spoiled brat. So you better fucking run, run, run as fast as you can, little girl,” he cried, hysterical laughter interspersed with sobs. “Once it sees you, it’ll never stop.”

“That thing there. That’s your familiar, isn’t it?” I breathed as I pointed to the scorpion, realizing I had fallen into this hellish pit only to find another dead end—one that might cost me my sanity and my life. Poe lifted the scorpion down from his head and cradled it in his arms while it tore at the flesh on his wrists.

“
This
is a parasite,” he said darkly. “But I need my medication, so I’ve got to pay my abominable piper. That demon is a parasite, too, but it’s lost its master. It needs blood. It needs orders. It’s just doing what it was told to do in the moment before its master went away, over and over and over. It’s lost.”

“Why is it chasing
us
, then?”

“Because its master told it to. He
hated
me. He thought I didn’t deserve to live, so he sent it after me to do me in,” he sputtered, and the scorpion crawled down the side of its head and began to chew its way into his ear.

“Well, then why did he send it after
me
?” I insisted.

“I don’t even know who you are,” he said, his eyes rolling backward as the scorpion disappeared into his head, his earhole leaking a stream of blood. “You probably crossed him wrongly, or wrongly crossed him somehow.”

“How can I stop it then? Do you know?”

“It won’t sleep until it has blood. Until it has a new master. Give it blood.” Poe smiled and the scorpion’s claws pierced his neck from the inside out as it started to chew its way out again.

“I’m not going to make a pact with that thing!” I yelled in a knee-jerk response, and he shook his head, more blood dripping from the hole in his ear.

“Don’t have to. Give it another person’s. Have you met my beautiful neighbor, Miss Jezebel?” Poe asked and he pointed in the direction we had come from. I guessed her to be the woman who had been running from the crab, so I nodded.

“She is here because she did a bit of back-stabbery, or so Arthur says. Jezebel stole her sister’s man, so her sister calls up that demon in the night and gives her a bit of dear Jezzie’s blood, then hides that sugary skull he trades her in her sister’s food. When she’s here, she’s being punished. She has no idea what happens to her, nor will she heed the voice of the parasite,” Poe explained to me. “You gotta do the same. Give it blood, and it will go away. It will go away.”

“But why can’t you do it?” I asked him, sickened at the idea that I’d have to submit another person to this cursed life that I had stumbled into so foolishly.

“Don’t know anyone. Won’t go out, no one will come in. I’m trapped.” Poe sank to the floor and covered his face with his hands as the scorpion began its feed all over again. This man’s eyes told the story of his pain and I could feel it saturating me the longer I stayed in his domain. It made my chest ache. The feeling of alienation and heightened nervousness ate away inside of me, just like that scorpion ate at him.

“Look, mister, I’m gonna find a way to stop him. I’m gonna make him leave you alone. I’ll help you,” I promised him. Beneath my fear of this man, I felt pity for him, like I understood some tortured part of his tired soul, even if it was just a fraction.

His woebegone smile broke my heart. “You can’t help me. No one can help me. I was born with poison in my mind.”

His last sentence repeated over and over, like it was coming out of a reedy old sound system inside the walls. I locked eyes with Poe as the phrase continued to resonate, growing more indistinct and peculiar to my ears. It started to grate on me, to hurt me like the sound of Styrofoam scraping against itself. I cringed from the sound and intensity of Poe’s stare.

“Oh, God, Jesus, Lord and Savior, I remember you. You fucking demon, you self-indulgent little pig, you whore,” he cried, his voice suddenly full of malice. The scorpion crawled out of the hole in his neck and perched atop his shoulder, its eyes fixed coldly on me. “I know who you are, you liar, you filth. You’re helping him. You came here to give my position away. You came here to help him find me. You prey on the good people. You pretend to be kind, but you’re a vulture, a biting spider.” He was raving now, shaking from head to toe with rage as the scorpion opened its toothy jaws and hissed at me.

“Run, Sarah,” Felix said softly in my ear. I didn’t need telling twice. I leapt to my feet and bolted from the room.