Into Eternity (The Eternals Book 3) Read online

  But despite knowing I could not dream it did nothing to preclude its happening. The ghosts materialised before me like cobwebs in the mist and it felt as real as the body laid across my lap.

  A forest of perpendicular trees, they loomed out of a saline fog in shades of subtle charcoal. The shapes demanded silence but received none. Stirred by the ragged breeze, loose skin slapped against their wooden arms breaking the unnatural calm in thwacks of sickening persistence. There were so many. Too many.

  The sun hung low in a sky no longer ruby but a deep claret, a shade away from night that coloured the entire horizon. I covered my eyes, although I had no need, for the light was not intense; there was another reason, something new. Was I scared, I wondered? Had fields of empty wooden crosses achieved what no man ever had? Perhaps it was the chequerboard effect cast upon the ground from their angular forms which unsettled. I had felt a pawn for so long, I suspected my subconscious mocked me in its obscure landscapes. When the empty wood filled with wisps of silver memories, I knew differently.

  The ghosts appeared in drips of silver each one of them pinioned in place; a nail through each palm and one driven through crossed ankles. The figures hung in materialising anguish, mouths agape, eye sockets hollow, undefined apparitions. And though it shamed me, I felt relief in that moment knowing myself unable to identify those thus secured. They heard my thoughts, and colour suffused those misting ghosts. I knew them all.

  The ephemeral shawls slipped from the first figure to reveal the woman I had once loved above all else. She smiled through her anguish, my beautiful Alba, and I felt every ounce of her pain. Hispanic eyes opened wide and took me in, as her form filled to the flush of her former self, all except for her cheeks which remained sunken distortions in her otherwise perfect features. And, as I recognised her, my mind given clarity from the chaos, she, too, recognised me. She struggled to turn away, and it cut me deep. She presumed I saw her as I had that last time as the aged and broken creature she'd become. Her head twisted at such an impossible angle I thought her neck might snap. She attempted to hide her eyes from my own, her shame still nothing compared to mine. She contorted so far that her bones cracked and skin stretched, but she couldn't hide and neither could I, the wooden beams preventing her, as conscience did myself. I reached out to her, but the distance extended between us as though she rode away on a galloping mare, and no matter how hard I strived, I could not breach it. Though I wished, how I wished! Alba's hair slipped from a tied bun to flutter about her face like willow tendrils in the wind. I'd preferred it like that loose and carefree. I grasped at the air and clawed at the mud but the distance between she and I remained infinite.

  “Alba,” I said, my voice distant. “Please forgive me, I never wished to hurt you, my darling Alba.”

  Her head spun back, centred, eyes opened, and mouth spoke. “You do not know what you would be forgiven for,” she whispered.

  “For wronging you. For not being satisfied when I should have been.” My voice echoed in the enormity of the dream as though I spoke into a room, a bedroom depleted of furniture, an empty shell. And there we were back in our house in New Washington, me at my resplendent best, Alba still hanging from her cross.

  “You are troubled, my love. Sit beside me and cast off your pain. I am here for you, Jean, as I always was. I will always be here waiting for you. Always.” Her voice ghosted in and out of the semi-darkness.

  But I could not sit, for there was nowhere to do so, and the room dissolved before my eyes. In desperation, I cast about grasping at the very fabric of my dream, my nightmare, but took too long, the scene reverting to the world of myriad crosses and an empty sea. When I looked up, Alba had vanished, but I still smelled her sweet perfume.

  I did not like how my memories stirred me, so ran. And though it was the last place I wished to, I careened forward into that right-angled jungle. I ran here and there zigzagging to avoid the crossbeams which sprung up before me, as though my life depended upon it, or death, or both. When the inevitable happened and I clattered into an upright sending myself sprawling and the cross's occupant into slanderous uproar, I wished above all else I had not.

  “You idiot!” he bellowed. “You incompetent buffoon, how dare you disturb my work.”

  “I didn't mean to, father,” I said, once more a little boy.

  “Excuses, excuses, always excuses!” he spat in acidic vehemence.

  “But I've done everything you asked. I've slaughtered and maimed, murdered and butchered and all in your name,” I replied, older now.

  “Bah! You have done nothing you did not wish to. You never did. You are an arrogant, disobedient child who I wish had never been born. An embarrassment, that's what you are, nothing but an embarrassment, a loitering tumour without the decency to end your own miserable existence.”

  “Why would you say that? Why would you say such a thing? I am your son and have ever been loyal.”

  “Because it is the truth, Jean,” came the voice of an angel.

  “No, mother, it is not you. You are dead, gone, departed from this world.”

  “We cannot leave, Jean. You have ruined everything. All our plans, all our endless aeons of planning demolished. I should have torn you from my womb. If only I had.”

  “No!”

  “I should have throttled you at birth, put us both out of our shared miseries. I should have done the right thing, but I didn't. It is a fact I shall regret for all eternity, my once and only son.”

  “But I love you!” I implored.

  “You, love, you.”

  “That is not true.”

  “It is,” she whispered. “It is.”

  And it hurt because it was. The truth struck home like a sword through the stomach, twisted in situ and dipped in venom. I was a waster, a nuisance, a carbuncle to the perfect pair. I was a disappointment and always would be. I was never so great of mind, never so grand of deed, as they. Where others looked up to my parents in awe and majesty, from me, their accursed son, they turned away.

  I hung my head in shame as a chill wind stirred my shirtsleeves. And there I was back where I had fallen asleep, the crosses still there but empty.

  And I wept in the shade of those obscure creations. I wept for myself and those I had slain. I wept for my parents, my wife and lost love. I wept enough tears to fill the empty ocean, then wept some more. I wept for a world of the heartless as a disembodied voice whispered in my ear.

  “Jean.”

  It was a man although I knew not who? A rich baritone permeated the gloom of my visionary imagination and spoke with an authority I would have bowed to.

  “Do not listen to the past, Jean, when it is the future that depends upon you. Do not forgive, for there is nothing to forgive. Do not repent, for a dead heart is still a heart, and though its beat is infrequent, it still speaks more truth than a billion, soulless ghouls.”

  “Who?”

  “A friend.”

  “Who?” My voice sounded more owl than man. My inability to string more words together drove me to clench my fists, grind my teeth, grimace with frustration. In the end, I sank to the ground and whispered, “I know you false for I have no friends.”

  “You do, Jean, more than you will ever know. I am but one of many.”

  They were kind words. They shushed liked the distant ocean, far away, yet almost there, calmed my mind and soothed my turmoil. They spoke to me as I wished I'd always been spoken to, but had not. I relaxed into a calm I had not felt in years, my chest rising in mock imitation of the humans I resembled. So becalmed did I become that I almost fell into a sleep within a sleep as a weight lifted from my legs.

  “No,” I yelled, but my call was quiet, without conviction. “You can't have him.” I grasped for Sunyin and locked my fingers about his robes. I would not let go, could not let go.

  “I must have him,” the voice urged. “I must take him.”

  “No, he is my responsibility. I owe this man.”

  “You owe no man.”
/>   “I owe him.”

  “Then, we are doomed. You have doomed us all with your misguided loyalties. They will not come. They will not come. Not come. Not come. Not… come…” The voice trailed away.

  I heard the slap across my face and wondered what man would do so with an open palm? The action caused no pain, but the echo of my folly reverberated throughout eternity.

  * * *

  I awoke to the filtered red of impending death and the reassuring weight of Sunyin's dead body. My fingers lingered on the cross which hung about my neck as if for some unknown reassurance; it gave none. Long shadows cast from my medallion's sickening, larger versions leered across my body at contorted angles, the dead teasing me in life as they had in near death. Yet, to be dead and sleeping was very different to be sleeping with the dead and I revelled in my escape from the nightmare world. In doing so, I realised I was not alone.

  “Good morning, Jean,” said Aurora. She stood before a cross giving the thing an examination more befitting an exquisite portrait or wondrous tapestry than decaying, wooden planks. Her pale features, ghastly even for her, took in the past in a hope to learn from it. One could try.

  “Good morning, Aura,” I replied. “I see from your expression that you dreamt, too.”

  She nodded. “I would rather not talk about it if that is well with you.”

  “Fine by me, I'll be glad to never close my eyes again. I felt the whole experience overrated. By the way, is it morning?”

  “It is so hard to say now the world has ceased to spin.”

  “To what?”

  “Can you not feel it?”

  “I feel nothing,” I replied, as I didn't.

  “That is because there is nothing to feel. Grella says the sun's gravity has us in its clutches. Whether we like it or not, we are now at the mercy of that which once would have killed us on sight and now shall, regardless.”

  “With an assuredness beyond discussion.”

  “Unfortunately, but at least it's slower.”

  “In short, we are a breath from doom, although I imagine Grella would be more direct in the description.”

  “Very,” Aurora grinned a tired return.

  “And where is your brother?”

  “He has gone on ahead. Grella does not sleep, he never has. The moment your head hit the ground, mine not far behind, Grella departed. He said to follow Merryweather's footprints for that is all he would be doing. He would find us when the time came.”

  I didn't like the sound of that. There was something ominous in the declaration made more so by not knowing quite what. “So, you slept,” I said.

  “As I said, and you agreed, I prefer not to discuss it.”

  “Did you see your past?”

  “Did you not hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why continue to pry?”

  “Might as well if we're all going to die soon. The worst that can happen is you'll beat me up.”

  Aurora threw back her head and laughed like the Arctic wind, cold and ferocious. She placed her hands upon her knees and laughed like there was no tomorrow, which was appropriate in the situation. Eventually, she returned to her feet, arched her slender frame, wiped the tears from her eyes, and smiled.

  “So?”

  “At times, you are so alike, you and he. And, yes, though I wished I had not,” she replied.

  “I know just what you mean,” I said, wiping mud from the side of my face. “And what do you mean, like he?”

  “Merryweather. You are two sides of the same coin although I know you would disagree.”

  “Too bloody right I would.”

  Aurora came a little closer and looked me in the eye, her head held to one side as she did. “I think this place has affected me, Jean. I do not believe I will ever be free of the memory of so much needless murder.”

  “But we are in the business of murder, or were, or should be? I'm no longer sure of such things.”

  “Neither am I,” she replied, shaking her head. “When I first followed you out of Hvit and into the world, I could only imagine what was out here with a sense of wonder. Now, as I gaze upon our past, I am filled with something else.”

  “Anger,” I suggested.

  “No.”

  “Resentment.”

  “No.”

  “Then, what?”

  “I am unsure. If I had to put a name to it, I think I should say pity.”

  “Pity,” I said hauling myself up, Sunyin's cadaver cradled in my arms.

  “Yes, pity. I pity those who felt the need to exterminate a people. I pity those who gave them cause to. But most of all, Jean, I pity us.”

  “You needn't pity me, my friend. I am beyond such concerns.”

  “As am I, and that is why I do.”

  Aurora turned away then and gave special attention to several more of the crosses, whilst I cogitated over her words.

  When at last her attention returned, it indicated our time to leave. The pair of us set off after the twinned footprints of Merryweather and her brother. They led ever on amongst the burial grounds like a footpath through the realm of the dead. We walked in silence, the pair of us. It didn't seem right to waste words.

  Chapter Ten

  -

  Gotska Sandön

  When the wind whipped up sending sediment dried by the Earth's exposed molten core into the air like an upturned blizzard, we lost the sun for the first time in too long. A world of wet, red light turned white.

  “Cover your mouth,” Aurora called, pulling her cloak tight about her leaving only the flash of those brilliant blue eyes.

  “It's not so bad,” I called back.

  “You do not want to inhale the bones of our ancestors.”

  Only then had the nature of the fine, white sediment that curtained the world in a spectral embrace, revealed itself. I did as instructed, bent low so as not to lose Merryweather's and Grella's boot prints, and took my companions proffered hand. Aurora stood firm whereas I would've crumbled in that knowledge of the deceased. She drew me on, not the other way round, and I marvelled at the girl's courage.

  * * *

  The island sprung from the seafloor like a bunion on a foot. An unsettling lump in its heaped ugliness, I almost recoiled at the sight of it wishing the deceased winds to return and smother the repulsive carbuncle. Where litter and death had lain in an almost flat world of past destruction, the island stood tall, supreme, a crow's nest overlooking the largest cemetery the world had ever seen. Even at a distance, the rock towered over everything, Merryweather having looked to have chosen his destination well; he would've seen us long before we saw him. With unerring accuracy, the dandy had picked out the perfect place to spy, as though he knew it his destination all along.

  After perhaps another hour, I stopped and scratched my chin.

  “What is it?” Aurora enquired, still submerged within her outer garb.

  “Merryweather's footprints, they are now closer together; he's slowed.”

  “About time,” she huffed with a frustration not before displayed.

  We continued, but I'd almost forgotten why I even tracked him. The thought occurred to just walk on by and keep walking, but as seen as I had nothing else to do, what other choice did I have but to continue?

  Then I realised that which Aurora had not. Grella's prints, the almost constant companion to Merryweather's own, had vanished, as if never there at all. A shadow crept over me then but was soon swept away.

  “Hello!” called a voice, and my heart lifted at the sight of Aurora's brother hailing us from not far away.

  “Hello!” I called back as Aurora rushed to him like a falling star.

  “Anything to report?” I asked once I'd caught up to the pair.

  “Just that you might want to go first,” he said, his bone-white forefinger aiming at a rising landmass.

  “It is an island,” I stated.

  “And much more,” he chortled in a most un-Grella-like way. The simple flourish of his ha
nd suggested he wished to spend more time with his sister, so I plodded on and left them to themselves.

  * * *

  The first sign we were not alone came in twinned flashes of white. Unsure as to what I witnessed, the objects unmoving and globular, I continued on my way uncaring of who or what they might be. My curiosity piqued, I crunched my way close enough to see it was, in fact, two beings sat upon the backs of two others. A few steps more, a subtle change in the now slight breeze, and the blue and yellow fluttering flags raised by the riders suggested Gorgon's people had seen us. I cared not, let them come.

  But they did not come. The riders, who sat atop almost identical hairy beasts, observed me in impassive calm until I reached the cliff face and lost them to a wall of stone. The pair must then have dismounted their peculiar mounts, as they came to the cliff edge and gave synchronised, low bows over the sheer drop. At least, I hoped they were bows and not sighting to drop rocks on our heads.

  I thought it all rather odd bearing in mind Merryweather's footprints led up the cliff face in a scramble of talons and booted toes in a direct line to the riders' very feet. However, there appeared no sign of the Britannian himself. With any luck, Gorgon's men might have finished him off and saved me the trouble.

  “Please, this way honoured guests,” called one guard.

  “They seem welcoming,” said Grella, drawing alongside.

  “A little too,” I replied.

  “Shall we?”

  “I suppose so,” I sighed.

  Grella grinned at my outburst, our role-reversal not lost on him. He led the way, as was his right, shooting up the cliffs like a spider over a windowpane. I heaved Sunyin over my shoulder and followed in less exuberant stylings.

  “Welcome to Gotska Sandön,” greeted us, as we crested the cliffs to two deep bowing Baltic Guards in full ceremonial dress and the steaming breaths of the two creatures they'd straddled.