“Bode?” Casey turned the older boy a curious look. “You okay? You just about jumped out of your skin.”
“Yeah, I’m cool.” Yet a sudden strain arrowed through Bode’s face, and Emma saw his eyes dart a question at the younger boy. “Just …” Bode’s throat bobbed in a swallow. “Let’s go, okay? The sooner we get this over with, the better.”
“You can do this,” Eric said to her. His grip, sure and warm, tightened around her right hand.
Glad you think so. She closed her eyes. Her thoughts would not be still, flitting from one image to the next, and she felt a splinter of panic. What should she think about? Rima? Lizzie? No, this was the reverse: putting them onto and into a blank. She thought of the door down cellar; watched the memory of her hand reaching toward that inky cold; remembered the blackness dimpling as her palm pressed that odd, glassy membrane.
But the candle flame was still there. I felt it. This would be the same. The trick would be filling them in, making them visible. She let herself see the barn as Lizzie had described it: a black void into which she could drift, like slipping in on the breath of a dream. Now—she felt Eric’s hand in hers—start to fill them in; draw us onto and into the space.
There came the familiar tingle of a blink ripsawing through her skin, a lancet of white pain as the bruised lips of that spiky maw parted in the dark before her eyes. A red rose of heat bloomed on her forehead. Between her breasts, there was a sudden warm flush, and she knew the galaxy pendant must be glowing. A jolt crackled in her chest, an atomic bomb of light and heat that lashed down her arms and out her fingers. Someone gasped. Casey said, wonderingly, “Did you feel …?” But Emma barely heard, was suddenly past hearing. In the blackness of her mind, behind her eyes, she saw them all—Casey, Bode, Eric, her—as cutouts edged with the same kind of glow that had haloed Kramer. His had been the color of a sick, creeping evil, but theirs was true light spun in pulsing filaments from their fingers, knitting their hands together with …
Colors. It was Eric, not speaking but floating in her mind nonetheless. Emma, do you see this?
Man. Bode. It’s like a spider’s web, tying us together.
Eric’s light was a deep cobalt blue, a near match, although hers was edged with a golden nimbus finer than lace, as fiery as the sun’s corona. Bode’s color was very strange, deeply vermillion, but blurry and indistinct, as if whatever Bode was bled and oozed like an open wound. For a second, she could’ve sworn that Bode was not a single color but two.
But Casey … Casey was many and all colors, a nacreous, wavering shimmer that was now rose, now sapphire, sulfur, violet. Casey was anybody, anyone.
Her ears filled with the rush of a thousand birds, as the colors looped up their arms, drawing them tight, tight, and ever tighter, as woven together as the glass creatures knotted in her galaxy pendant. Then she felt a swooning, the earth dropping away, which swept through her like a chilling wind, and they were suddenly falling, their light tangling to a streaming rainbow. The galaxy pendant fired as space folded, flexed, and then …
EMMA
Monsters Are Us
COLD. DARK. SHE felt the press of the black, heavy as an anvil.
She opened her eyes, then fluttered them in a rapid blink because, for a second, she wasn’t sure they were actually open; it was that dark. Then, from the nothing in front of her eyes, she teased their colors, faintly luminous, misty as frayed cobwebs. For the moment, they were still linked, their circle unbroken by their passage into whatever space she’d hurled them.
Yeah, but are we inside? Is this the barn? There was something solid beneath her feet, icier than a tombstone, and she thought, Oh crap, I dropped us in the wrong place.
Casey’s voice reached out from the dark. “Did we get in?”
A scuffling sound, and then their circle winked out as Bode let go. “Oh yeah,” Bode said. “I know inside when I feel it. Just like dropping into a black echo. Man, you don’t know what bad is until—”
A whisper of alarm sighed across her neck. Why? Something Eric had said that, now that she thought about it, echoed a blink; the way McDermott had talked about stories and how ideas were infections … And we wondered what the barn might make.
“Until you’ve run into these things,” Bode continued, “big as your—”
The monsters are us. The thought was sudden, immediate, explosive. Bode’s story is written, and the monsters are in—
“Bode!” she shouted, frantic. “Bode, no!”
RIMA
Blood Have the Power
“DON’T FIGHT IT, baby. Look what you’re doing to yourself. You’re bleeding.” Anita’s skin was pasty and her breath fruity with cheap wine. “Trust your momma, honey, and this will be over quick. You’ve got a black stain on your soul, only I’ll wash it clean. Take care of that stain once and for all.”
“M-Mom,” Rima rasped. She had come back to herself as she was now: spread-eagled, on her back, in no place she recognized. The ropes around her wrists and ankles were very tight, tied off to stakes driven into rock that was strangely smooth, glassy, and very black. There was light, but it was a pallid, bony glow. The ceiling soared to some point high above, where the air was choked and clotted: a dark, shadowed space that swam with what she thought were birds. She could hear the dry, papery rustle of their feathers, and smell their wild animal stink. “Mom, please, let me go. You don’t want to do this.”
“Oh, honey.” Anita’s voice choked off in a sob, and then she was tipping the bottle to her mouth, her throat working as she took another pull. Swallowing, Anita sighed, then wiped her moist, slack mouth with the back of one hand. Her eyes were black holes on either side of her nose. “It’s been so hard. I just can’t deal with it anymore.”
“That’s why I left.” Rima felt the sob welling up in her throat and forced it back down. Crying wouldn’t help. She had to keep Anita talking, or else … Her gaze flicked to the glint of a very long, very sharp boning knife Anita had in her right fist: the same knife that had carved a red necklace the night her mother had pinned her to the bed and come within a whisper of killing her. “Mom, please, just let me go. I’ll leave and never come back, I promise.”
“Blood have the power.” The voodoo priestess was as Rima remembered her, too: hatchet-faced and hungry. The woman lit five fat yellow candles—one at each point of a pentagram—and then began to drizzle a small stream of black sand onto the rock. “Blood binds. When you ask the voodoo for something, you must make sacrifice. The spirits live in the sand. Feed the spirits, and the power come full circle.”