The 'Geisters

HOMECOMING

Ann slept deeply.

She lay on the narrow ledge of the sofa cushions. She’d thought to jam a corner pillow between her neck and the sharp edge of the sofa’s arm. She stretched as she slept though, and the pillow slid out, so that her neck cricked against the arm as though it were broken.

Ann worried about that, as she observed herself. She was outside her body; as far as she could tell, she was observing from a vantage point near the living room’s ceiling. The dying might see themselves this way: extended from their bodies, their own ’geist, while their heart slowed and stopped and their brain began to starve, and vanish.

Had the Insect done this, as she lay down—reached down and turned her head, just so—and cracked her neck? She could not believe that were so.

And sure enough, it was not. Ann soon observed herself turn, draw her knees up tighter to herself, and twist her head into a more comfortable position.

So Ann was not dead.

But she thought about what Lisa Dumont had told her, and Susan too: that the Insect would devour her. Was this a place she sat now, on the precipice of the Insect’s throat?

Ann worried about Philip, too. He sat alone in his wheelchair by the curtain, head bent to one side. Was he asleep? Ann didn’t think so, but of course you couldn’t tell with Philip. She didn’t like that he was alone. Since the accident, Philip always had an attendant near; the Hollingsworth Centre made sure of that. If he were to aspirate, there would be no one to help him. He could choke to death. They really did need to get out of here. But of course in order for that to happen, Ann needed to wake up. And that didn’t appear to be happening any time soon.

After a time, the door opened. Charlie Sunderland stepped in. He had changed clothes—he was wearing what looked like a long, purple bathrobe, the same shade as the bruises on his face.

He looked out the door and held up a finger to someone. Ann found herself curious about who that might be, and her curiosity brought her lower, so she could see.

It was Ian Rickhardt, also wearing a bathrobe. He lingered between doorway and curtain, hands jammed deep in the pockets.

Sunderland crossed the floor to the kitchen, eyeing both lolling Philip and sleeping Ann. He opened the refrigerator, and bent down to look in. He was counting the beer bottles. He wanted to see how many of them Ann had drunk. She could not read his reaction to the evidence that she had had none of them.

Ian stepped into the room now. He was followed by others, one or two of whom Ann recognized: the thin man from the hotel bathroom; the smaller one, who’d been in the kitchen scenario; the man from the Gremlin, maybe—she hadn’t seen much of him, but a thick salt-and-pepper moustache made it likely. There were—Ann counted—five others, all wearing those bathrobes. They were made of something like silk, and quilted with a diamond-shaped pattern.

Sunderland was kneeling beside Ann.

Ian stepped around and looked down at her. “Is she done?”

Sunderland looked up at him and smiled tightly.

“Whatever walks in Hill House, walks alone,” he said, and Ian chuckled nervously. “Yeah. I’d feel better if we could have talked a bit before this. Reaffirm it. But it looks as though everything’s all right. Like a bee to honey, here she is.”

“Pat yourself on the back,” said Ian drily.

The other men spread across the room, hands spread delicately at their sides, as though they were trying to keep their balance on a world with strange gravity. They looked around, as though seeking something out in the corners and the shadows. None of them looked to Ann where she watched from the ceiling.

Ian turned to Philip. “How you holding up?”

Philip swung his head up and made a noise at Ian. Ann understood it to mean “Ready.”

Sunderland went to Philip’s side. He put a hand on his forehead, as though feeling for fever. “You’ve been very brave.”

Philip made another noise. This one Ann couldn’t translate. Sunderland seemed to understand it, though. He turned to Ian.

“Philip is ready to join the circle,” he said. “Could you get his robes?”

Ian snapped his fingers, and one of the men—a taller one, with feathered blond hair, brought a folded bathrobe. Sunderland took the robe and in series of quick, professional moves, wrapped it around Philip and threaded his arms through the sleeves.

Ann drifted lower, as her curiosity about Philip grew, so that she was able to look directly into his eyes over Sunderland’s shoulder. They were damp—from exhaustion, from tears… who knew?

Ann wanted to think there were tears there. She looked for some sense that Philip wanted—needed—to be rescued from this perversion.

Don’t let him make you take your clothes off, Philip had told her, the first time they went into Charlie Sunderland’s office.

He had been afraid of Sunderland, then. He had not wanted to talk to Sunderland at all, about the things that he had seen, in his room. Now… now, he was throwing in with them—letting Sunderland put clothes on him.

“They’re rapists.”

Ann didn’t precisely speak the words—whatever force it was that had drawn her from her slumbering body, also robbed her of lips, a tongue. But she still had voice, and she could hear it.

So, it seemed, could Philip. He twisted his lips back from his teeth, and swallowed hard, and said, “Nyuh.”

“No.”

Ann spun in the air, searching vainly for the source of the voice.

“They’re not rapists. They are worshippers.”

The Insect. It was the Insect.

“They know better, after what we’ve shown them. They remember Michael Voors. They remember John Hirsch. Peter. They know what we are. They know we’re not their plaything anymore. See how they come before us?”

Ann turned and looked down. The men were forming a circle— a circle that encompassed Ann’s sleeping body, and included Philip.

Why was he including himself in this thing? The Insect had destroyed him… taken his limbs, his voice… his parents and his girlfriend. Why would he worship?

Why would you worship that thing? Ann called to Philip, but he couldn’t, wouldn’t answer.

“He abandoned me. He knows better now too.”

Ann felt the voice at her shoulder. She turned to it, with great effort. And for the first time, she saw the Insect, hanging above her, long hair dangling over mandibles and great, multifaceted eyes gleaming like giant blackberries.

Ann looked into that eye—and instinctively, the way another person might throw up their hands to ward off an attack or crouch down to protect their vitals, Ann tried to visualize the descending rainbow: Red, and Yellow…

“No. You should know better than that too.” And over her, the Insect’s mandibles extended—and took hold of Ann’s limbs—and drew her in.

She vanished utterly, but only for an instant.

She felt herself returning to her body, breath returning to her lungs, and her eyelids flickering open—and watching the men in their circle sway, in some fetish-court perversion of religious ceremony. Her mouth was filled with stale bile, the peach-fuzz sour of unbrushed teeth. She started to get up—as though she could physically flee what was happening to her; as though it were all but done.

She fell back, pushed as if by an invisible hand. Her eyes fluttered shut again, and she was in darkness—a freezing, numbing pool.

Little Lisa Dumont was right. The Insect was devouring her. It had been, for all her life, in slow, measured bites. It might have stopped, as she grew into herself. But the work of Charlie Sunderland had made sure that didn’t happen. It had kept the Insect cocooned, let it grow on its own, even as it sucked the life—the soul—out of Ann.

But then she thought—that wasn’t quite right.

The Insect wasn’t some alien species, come in a shipping crate from far-off lands to denude Ann’s being like the bark off a tree. It was a part of her—at its most removed, a vestigial twin. Or perhaps, a purer part of herself—a part unsullied by the daily exposure to the world that ground at Ann, the rest of her, as she made her way through it. And had she rejoined the Insect now, newly innocent herself, having passed through her flesh as though it were a filter?

Was the act of that moment—a matter of purification?

“None of us are pure.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh Ann. Remember.”

The Lake House living room. Again. But empty. The curtains were half-drawn, and the remains of afternoon sunlight streamed in.

She could see the lake—and the boat, the Bounty II, hauled up onto the shore, mast cracked, gouged hull covered in a shrink-wrap tarpaulin. A TV was on in the basement. Something with a laugh track.

She was not drawn to it.

There were other sounds. The Lake House was young, and its bones were still hardening, setting into themselves. Softly, in the corners, it moaned.

Upstairs a faucet turned, and the pipes hummed behind the walls.

She thought about taking hold of those pipes—of bending the copper, snapping it, stopping the water. She could do it if she wanted to.

She didn’t want to.

She moved from the living room, past the kitchen, and into the stairwell of the Lake House.

Ann’s father sat on the stairs. He was wearing a pair of dark wool dress pants and a white shirt, top button undone. Tufts of hair poked out. His elbows were propped on his knees, his hands hung limp in front of him, and he stared ahead, into the empty front vestibule. He seemed very young. His hair was dark, and too shaggy; he had put off his haircut for a few weeks too long. His eyes were blinking rapidly. His mouth hung.

She was curious about that. But they didn’t linger to satisfy it.

Ann had no say. She may have once. But this was nothing but memory. A conversation, with herself, reminding her of where she had already been.

Up they went. Ann’s father shook his head as they passed, and pushed himself up, his knees cracking as he hung onto the bannister and climbed down off the staircase.

The second floor hall now. Five doors: one, to the home office; another, to a spare bedroom; Ann’s room; Philip’s room. The bathroom. One floor up, and the master bedroom. Another bath. Big windows and its own deck, overlooking the lake.

No need to go there.

There was a long red and green rug on the floor of the hallway. They slid it along—so that it accordioned against the home office door. Perfunctory terror for the next person who saw it.

The bathroom door was closed. Behind it, the shower ran hard enough that steam crept out from underneath the door.

There.

Followed the steam.

Into a room of it.

The bath in here had a sliding door of frosted glass. Behind it: Philip LeSage. Lathering up his hair.

They slid over top of the door. There was Philip. Tall and strong. Eyes shut against the water. They circled him. Ran fingers like rope over his throat.

His hands dropped from his head. Eyes opened.

“It’s you,” he said.

They turned off the water.

“It is,” he said.

They reached, and flickered the lights—on and off, on and off. Then off.

“You were in my room last night.”

They moved through his hair, drew it back from his face. He held his head back so the soapy water flowed down his back.

“You’ve been there before. I know that.”

They withdrew. Philip did too. He sat down on the edge of the bathtub.

“I don’t mind,” he said. “I’m not afraid.”

He was lying about that. He was trembling, soaking wet and naked, against the tile. His voice was high.

“You have everyone else scared. Not me.”

His backside squealed against the tile as he slid around. He turned the water on again, set the temperature, then started up the shower. He got under the stream of hot water, and the trembling stopped.

“You turned the lamp shade around. You opened the closet door. You left me a sparrow. You kept touching me.”

They thought about stopping the water, or making it cold, or too hot.

They didn’t want to do any of those things.

“It’s okay. You can touch me if you want.”

He finished rinsing off, and shut off the water. In the dark, he found the handle on the shower door and slid it open. He stepped out into the dark, groped around on the wall until he found the light switch.

“If you’re there, I’m going to turn on the light.”

He flipped the switch and the bathroom lit up. Philip looked around, almost disappointed to find himself alone. Even the fog on the bathroom mirror was smooth, unblemished by even punctuation marks.

“I think you’ve been doing this a long time,” he said. “I think you’ve been around this family since when I was a baby.”

He took a towel, wrapped it around his middle.

“Maybe you’ve been around before me.” He cracked the door open, peered out into the hall. Satisfied they were still alone, he shut the door. “Maybe from Nan’s family. Mom says she rhymes with ‘witch.’ Maybe that’s where you came from. Maybe you came in with Ann on her birthday. I don’t care. I wanted you to know…”

He leaned on the door, as though holding it shut against something.

“I like it when you come to my room. You can always come see me there.”

Could they? They moved in on Philip—wrapping him in tendrils of steam, holding him close in adoration. He began to tremble again, and he did not pull away, and after a moment of that, the trembling turned to a shudder, and he was still.

“You can always come see me,” he said again. “Always, always.”

They believed him.

The bathroom door, open.

Philip, crossing the hallway, heading to his room, noticed the rug, all bunched up. Clutching his towel tighter around his waist, he walked down the hall and took hold of the end of the runner rug, pulling it back straight. As he finished, the door to Ann’s bedroom opened.

Ann. Seven years old. Unrecognizable to herself, with a pageboy haircut and green corduroy overalls.

“What are you doing?”

Philip shrugged. “The rug was all bunched out. You might have tripped.”

“You should put clothes on. I can see your wee.”

“Fuck off.”

“You fuck off.”

“You can’t see anything. And cut out the swearing.”

“Fine.” She leaned against the door. “I didn’t make the rug bunch up.”

“I didn’t say you did.”

“I think the ghost did.”

Philip, shrugging. “Maybe. Whatever. Shouldn’t be left like that.”

“Someone might trip.”

“You know it.”

“I hate the ghost.”

Philip stood up straight. “Don’t,” he said, and tightened the towel again. “I’m going to put on pants.”

“I didn’t do it,” said Ann as Philip stepped into his bedroom. “Stupid ghost did it.”

Philip closed the door and Ann was alone in the hall. She looked straight at them.

“I hate you!” she shouted. When she went back into her room, she slammed the door.

See? None of us are pure.

The circle of men had fallen to their knees, in an approximation of prostration. With the exception of Philip, who sat lolling in his chair, looking at Ann, still asleep on the couch. She was turned away now, so her face pressed into the backrest cushions.

“Belaim,” said Charlie Sunderland, his head downcast to the floor. “Redawn,” he continued, working his way through the words he’d taught Ann to chant, as a way to rope the Insect in when the chairs started shifting, the windowpanes vibrating. Sheepmorne… Overwind…

It had been a game when they’d sat up late at Sunderland’s lodge, practising the words—the whole family, chanting them together, in their own little circle, learning Sunderland’s nonsense words to banish the demons into the night.

Philip had sat in that circle—straight-facedly reciting the words with everyone else. When they were alone, he would make up other words—“fuckitutilly,” “scroticalific,” “snotufical”—and Ann would crack up.

Now, he couldn’t even articulate the words with the other men—but he looked deadly serious.

And why shouldn’t he?

He had learned what happened when he didn’t take the Insect seriously. When he’d brought Laurie into the Lake House… brought her to his bedroom, held her close as she squirmed out of her sweater and jeans… kissed him, and took hold of him, and with touch and caress and kiss, brought him from shivering arousal to shuddering climax.

He had learned, the price of betrayal, of abandonment.

Now, see how he comes crawling back. See how they all come crawling back.

The words from the ’geisters continued: a sweet, insensible cadence that lulled, like an old song, like a strong, sugared liqueur. Philip swayed, and sang them too—each time around, his pronunciation getting stronger, as though he, too, were training himself to absorb the words.

On the sofa, Ann stirred.

She stretched a leg out, and then another, and rolled over onto her side. She brought a hand to her forehead, brushing hair out of the way, and blinked. She swung her feet to the floor, and sat straight, and shakily, stood, looking around at the circle with measured disinterest.

The men didn’t stop chanting as Ann rocked back and forth to build a bit of momentum, finally got to her feet, and made her way through the circle to the kitchen, and the refrigerator.

She opened the first bottle of beer and finished it in two long swallows.

The men stopped chanting as she opened a second bottle. Ian Rickhardt looked to Charlie Sunderland, who nodded at him.

From the ceiling, she and the Insect watched, as though they were pinned there, as Charlie got up, crossed the room and whispered into her ear.

The corporeal body of Ann Voors nodded, and swallowed half of another beer. And leaning on Dr. Sunderland for support, she let herself be led from the room.

At the ceiling, Ann tried to reach for herself as the door opened—to follow. It was no good. Ann watched herself take a final swig of the beer, dangle it between two fingers, and disappear as the door swung shut.

Fuck. If she’d had arms, she would have wrapped them around herself, curled up, as the reality dawned on her. She would have shut her eyes tight. Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

“Don’t fuckin’ swear, Sis. Not very ladylike.”

Ann opened her eyes.

She stood in the middle of the dark gymnasium, casting her gaze among the shadows, the beams of sickly light that came in through the high windows. It was cold in here. Snow blew outside. Climbing ropes dangled from the darkness of the ceiling like trailing man-o-war tentacles. At either end, basketball hoops were bent up.

“Where are you?” she called. Her voice sounded very small and weak to her, more frightened than she thought.

“I’m here,” said Philip. His voice had an odd echoing quality that took Ann a moment to place. There was a loud thumping sound then, a great drumbeat, and it hit her: he was talking over a PA system—tapping the microphone in the office for the school PA system.

“Is this the high school?”

“Fenlan & District Secondary School, that’s right. If… if you hadn’t gone to live with Nan, you’d have gone here too.”

“It’s awfully dark,” said Ann.

“There’s a light switch over by the door.”

“Can’t you turn it on?”

“What do you want, me to hold your fuckin’ hand?”

It wasn’t entirely dark. As Ann became accustomed to it, dim light entered from high windows. Barely enough to see by.

Ann crossed the floor of the gym to what looked like a big set of double doors at the very edge of the brightest pool of light. It wasn’t exactly clean; things crunched under her feet, like peanut shells. Ann looked down as she stepped into the light. They weren’t shells; they were bugs… beetles and flies, curled up dead. Ann brushed out a path for herself with the toe of a running shoe she hadn’t worn in fifteen years. She crossed back into shadow, and felt on the wall until she found a row of switches, and flipped them on.

“That’s better,” she said. Fluorescent lights flickered in rows on high over the court. At the opposite end, wooden bleachers had been pushed against the wall emerged from shadow, as did a deep green banner crossing the wall, announcing that this gymnasium was home to the Fenlan Panthers. Philip had been a Panther.

It didn’t look like any Panthers had been through in a few years, though.

The walls were also streaked with rusty water-marks, where pipes seemed to have burst. Wind whistled through a broken pane up high. It was cold in here—cold as January, cold as a visit from the Insect.

“What’ve you done, Philip?”

“Oh, chill.”

“Literally.” Ann tried the double doors behind her. They opened a little ways, then stopped. “Seriously. What’ve you done? I watched myself walk away—my body walk away. Where am I?”

“You’re at the high school,” he said. “You’ve been here before.”

“So we did speak—when I was on the road.”

“Yeah. It’s a place I’ve put together. It’s where… where she and I talk.”

“She?” Ann leaned on the doors, hard. They gave a little bit, then stopped again. It was as though something were wedged against it.

“Yeah. After the accident… the crash. Sometimes, I’d wake up here. Back at school. She’d be here.”

“Laurie,” said Ann, although she knew that wasn’t so, and a yowl of feedback over the PA system confirmed it.

“Not Laurie. No. She doesn’t have a name,” said Philip, “but I can tell you—she fucking hates being called the Insect.”

“Ah. So her.” Ann stepped away from the doors. There was no getting out that way, she thought, as they pushed back shut.

“You’re going to have to stay here,” he said. “Good that you figured that out.”

Ann moved along the wall of the gym. There were doors farther along, the two change-room doors: HOME first, then VISITOR.

“I don’t really want to stay here, Philip,” said Ann. “I want to wake up.”

More feedback. “Wake up? Who said you’re asleep?”

Ann pushed open the HOME door. It opened easily, into a big square room with a bench all around, and coat hangers. There was another door through it, which Ann guessed probably led to showers.

“I want to go back to myself,” Ann said. Her voice was shaking. She wondered, was this how the Insect felt, when she locked it in a tower overlooking the loamy fields of Tricasta? “I want out of this place, Philip. You got to know, this isn’t right.”

“You know Sis, you might be right.” His voice was louder here because it came out of another speaker, set in the wall in this smaller space. “This might be wrong. But it’s all I’ve got. It’s all I had for years. Her.”

“So you’re just like them,” said Ann. “You’ve used the Insect… you’ve used her for your own sexual pleasure. You… you raped her too.”

“No,” he said. “I never raped her. But we’ve been together for so long. Since I can remember, she was there for me. And I let her down. That’s why…”

“That’s why the accident.”

“I should have known better. Laurie was great. But I should have left her to her life.”

Ann found the light switch, and the change-room filled with a dim yellow glow. She didn’t have to listen to the rest of the story. She knew it, in a way that made her think she’d always known it on some level: how Philip, mesmerized by the red-haired beauty from History of Europe, had one night turned away from the quiet touch of her—of the Smiling Girl…

He had rejected her. Like Peter Pan casting off Tinker Bell for the womanly temptations of Wendy… he’d cast her off.

And yeah—the Insect, the Smiling Girl, had shown Philip just exactly what that meant.

Which is to say: everything.

Ann sat down on the bench. She stretched her legs out, and thought about it.

“You there, sis?”

“Yeah,” said Ann. “Right here in the change-room.”

“Okay.”

“Did she… did the Smiling Girl visit you in here?” Ann thought that she did.

“Yeah,” said Philip. “Sometimes. She was always with me.”

“She was never just mine,” said Ann, “was she?”

“No.”

More quiet, as Ann thought about that. She wondered how much of it Dr. Sunderland really knew. He’d treated both Ann and Philip. Did he understand that the Insect, the Smiling Girl, was really a part of both of them? That both of them—Ann and Philip—were vessels to this poltergeist he and his friends coveted?

“She sure as shit wasn’t yours to give away in matrimony,” said Philip. “To those fucking rapists.”

“Those fucking rapists,” said Ann, “are the fuckers that you threw in with.”

“Don’t curse.”

“I was duped,” said Ann. “You weren’t duped at all. You threw right in.”

“Oh did I?”

“You wore their bathrobes—while they were doing their Eyes Wide Shut shit.”

“What?”

“Eyes Wide Shut? The Kubrick movie? Tom and Nicole?”

“Must’ve missed it on movie night at the Hollingsworth.”

“Sorry.” Ann thought about that. “Fuck you, Philip. I’m not sorry. You threw in with Ian fucking Rickhardt and Charlie Sunderland and everybody else who took… whatever it is we share, and made it into their sex toy.” She stood up from the bench, and went through the door to the showers. It smelled of chlorine in here—like a pool. She couldn’t find the light switch immediately, but she didn’t care. She just stepped farther into the darkness.

“And for what? So the Insect could carry you around like you’re walking under your own power, and… I don’t know, get you off? You sold me out. I trusted you. I always trusted you. And you sold me out.”

The darkness deepened as she rounded a corner and the dim light from the change-room vanished. She could hear Philip mouthing something, but the place she was entering didn’t seem to be hooked up to the PA system.

He made a garbled noise that might have been a protest: You don’t understand, it was all for the best… blah fucking blah blah blah.

As Ann kept on, the wall she was following fell away, and she had no guide for her progress. The floor transformed as well, to what felt like hard, dry clay. She felt a breeze of cold, sweet-smelling air that cut through the chlorine smell and eventually drove it away. The breeze intensified, as the darkness became absolute and the clay hardened to stone. The sound of her running shoes shuffling along it took on an echoing quality, and Ann came to imagine that she was in an immense cavern.

She stopped walking.

“I didn’t throw in with them.”

There was no PA system this time. Philip’s voice came from close—very close, because he was whispering. There was no light, so Ann reached out, trying to touch him. Her hand closed on empty air.

Philip went on. “They think I did. They think I’ll do what Michael… what he couldn’t do… and tame her for them. But I’ll tell you something, Sis.” Ann felt his breath, cold as winter on her neck.

“She was already tame,” he said, “when you flew off to Tobago—what with their tricks, and yours…”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll put it to you simple,” he said. “Our friend never would have killed Michael Voors, without my help.”

“What the hell, Philip?”

“I couldn’t stop you from marrying him. Couldn’t stop you from flying off to Tobago. But when she told me what Rickhardt had made her do, in that beach house… how she couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

“She burned down the beach house.”

“She didn’t like it,” said Philip, “and she demonstrated that, yeah. But she couldn’t stop it. The… rape. They’d conditioned her. That far at least.”

“But you undid that. How?”

“How do you do things, when it comes to her? I dreamed it. As you can imagine, I do a lot of dreaming.”

“Like that school.”

“Like that.”

“How did you learn to do that?”

“She taught me. She learned how to do it from you and passed it on to me. You know. The stuff you learned from that old lady. Eva.”

“I know,” said Ann. “But it doesn’t seem to be working right now.”

“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.