Pale: 10.d - Interlude
Author: Wildbow

One After Another – 10.d | Pale

The Witch Hunter slept.  After a night spent awake and busy, he returned to his motel room at five in the morning, made phone calls, and then retired at six.

It made her job harder, when she wasn’t a creature of the day hours.  She didn’t incline herself toward light and the sun rose at a little past five thirty.  He locked the door and employed other mechanisms, drawing his curtains closed.

Even the most mundane barrier to entry could stymie her, from superstition to symbolic.  Curtains included.

She was grateful that the sky was overcast.  That helped matters.  It helped, too, that there were others nearby who slept.

Alpeana perched on the roof of a squat apartment building and she swelled.  Her mane extended, bubbling forth, locks reached out and across the street, twisted along the length of telephone and power lines, black hair snaking along black insulation.  She reached into the building, found holes in brick, and traced her way along those until she found one that worked.  Ants were trickling in in a thin stream, into a room occupied by a father, his wife, his sister, and their three daughters, the three daughters in one bed, husband and wife in the other, and the sister on a cot.

The children had left snacks unopened and the ants were having a day of it.  The room was a mess and had been because the family had been there for a time.

It made her think of where she’d come from.  The big family.  The crisis.

Alpeana stepped off the roof and into the darkness she’d spread.  She flowed, liquid, along the length of it, reaching and opening herself.

The middle of the three girls, ten, was most receptive.  Her eyes fluttered open, half-lidded, dream ready.

It was a piecemeal mosaic of half-remembered images of the day, each image lacking details, waiting to be filled in.  The girl was standing outside the gift shop with a Wink and a Nod.  Agents of Dream, immaterial and capable of connecting to the half-remembered to find order in the great unconscious.

The girl lurked outside the gift shop, peering around a corner, and she was accompanied by friends.  One a shadow of a face seen on television, the other a juxtaposition of two vaguely recalled classmates, aged up.  They were waiting and biding their time and it was Important.  If this were a scene on the television the music would have been fit to a heist, the tone monochrome.  The distinction was that the feeling of that heist was there without the music and the colors were lacking because the girl didn’t spend much energy on recalling them.

A group of overweight women were pushing and shoving at one another and the three friends were deciding how they’d get in.  For something Important.

Alpeana slithered through the scene, identifying and working with the pillars that held the dream intact, reinforcing them.  There were Rems, who extended from dream to body.  She could touch them and spread darkness into them as she passed by.  If these objects and agents were weak or fleeting then the dream could collapse easily.

There were Mnemes, as other lesser entities, recurring memories, carrying forward information from day to night and from dream to dream.  A car littered with fast food wrappers, until the floor couldn’t be seen.  Alpeana reached in and picked up a paper, and the writing on the wrapper read ‘Toronto’.

Her mane picked up the wrapper and tore it wide.

The car, crowded, the garbage incidental, father in the front seat.  Poking her younger sibling.

Monica, stop it!  That’s enough!  Leave her alone now!”

That was the Mneme, a poking and a fatherly rebuke.  It reached back weeks but Monica would never be able to recall the origin of it.  The loop and repeat were more interesting.

She fed power into the mneme.

“Monica!” the father’s voice was loud, a rebuke.

Alpeana snatched up the Mneme, then pushed the image of the car and the garbage away, darting away.  The Monica at the entrance to the gift shop stopped, turning, alarmed, and she noted the darkness of Alpeana’s passing as an ambient thing without processing it.

Alpeana touched the face of the building while the girl’s back was turned, reinforcing it.  The building face shuddered, and in a mirror to that shuddering, the girl’s eyes started flicking left and right beneath her eyelids.

Alpeana took the friends away.  The girl turned forward and realized she was alone.

“Monica!” the mneme barked, again.  Louder, angrier.

From there, it didn’t take much.  The girl filled in her own blanks.  The reason, the context.  Alpeana only helped it along.  Much in the same way color hadn’t been defined, the quilted patchwork of half-intact details lacked a time of day.  Monica hadn’t defined it so Alpeana defined it for her, as Late.

She could have put other things down, now, but she wanted to conserve her strength.

“Leave… now…” Alpeana controlled the Mneme’s utterance.  It trailed off, begged to be filled in.

Monica headed back for her motel room, the Importance of the gift shop forgotten.

Other mnemes were appearing.  Over a year of moving from motel to motel, of moving, of parking lots.

Alpeana used the disparate pieces and made the scene as real as what the girl might experience waking.  She captured the feeling of not being able to find her room.  She magnified that Late.

The girl provided the final stroke to her own nightmare.  An angry father, late, lost, a strange place.

The car peeled out of the spot in front of the motel room, carrying her family away.  She was forgotten or worse, abandoned intentionally.

“Dad!” she screamed.  She pitched her voice high in a shriek.  “Lea!  Heather!”

Rems tied this to her physiological reaction and carried back power.

From faint dream to words muttered in reality.

The girl reached into her pocket for her phone, expecting it.

Alpeana took it away.  Empty pocket.

Monica broke into a run.  Going for help.  Alpeana got there first.

“You need to pay,” the person said, a little too soon, as Monica got to the office of the motel room manager.

“If you want to use the phone.”

“I don’t have mine.  Please, I need to explain, I have to say I’m sorry.”

Late.  Alpeana took that and used it.

“Can I please?  My father will cover it.”

“Please.  One call!”

The Wink shoved Monica out the door, then closed it.

Late.  Staying up late.  The hours she was usually asleep.

Alpeana played one idea off of another and then strung them together.

Monica ran along the parking lot, vast as four Mnemes held together along Alpeana’s mane.  Into the urban environment.

The angry shout from her father could have been a nightmare unto itself, left alone, with no intervention from Alpeana.  Being abandoned was the sort of nightmare that was forgotten by afternoon.

But entering a city, then realizing she was so lost she couldn’t be found by family if they wanted to come back for her?  It was a prank, leaving her behind because she had been so Late, and she’d ruined it by wandering off.

The city swelled wide, uncooperative, never a crosswalk when Monica wanted one, every passing face unfriendly, and the terror swelled with it.

“Yer folk will be here when ye wake, lassie,” Alpeana whispered, as the girl twitched, made frightened sounds, and wept into her pillow, still asleep.  She kissed the tear off of the girl’s cheekbone, brushing her hair with a hand.

The nightmare served little in the grand scheme of things.  It didn’t smooth any wrinkles or resolve anything.

She had the material to carry elsewhere, now.

A Nod helped Alpeana to bring the youngest sibling from the cusp of waking up to deep slumber again.  Rems could be dropped in to lock her in that state.

Running, happy, chasing a sibling.  Alpeana helped her lose track of the sibling.

A Mneme.  A happy moment, a birthday celebration.

The song played for Lea, a group singing the song without her.  If she didn’t get there before the song ended she wouldn’t get her birthday.

Rushing taking a familiar path, bursting into the room.

Alpeana populated it with another family, a scraggly looking boy who had said mean things.  A woman with missing teeth and an agitated way of moving, her clothes in tatters, always out at night, never the day.  She spoke to a fear in Lea, that this movement from motel to motel might never end.

She had been sassy about it, had complained, had even cried, demanding her parents improve the situation.  This fear, here, was fanning the flames of that behavior.

Alpeana crafted the scene while Lea tried to navigate it, feeling the anxiety of accidentally being in the wrong place.  She laced it with the sentiment of seeing something that shouldn’t be seen.

The door locked as Alpeana closed it.  She placed a snarl of imagery into the mechanism, drawing on a Mneme of a shower in Hamilton that replaced nearly every shower that appeared in Lea’s dreams, the controls incomprehensible.  Now the knob and the lock to get out of the room was incomprehensible.

The eight year old girl was locked in a motel room now, with a mother that wasn’t hers and a new, mean sibling.  She needed time to figure out the lock and nobody helped.  The new mother and sibling said mean things and distracted her, resetting her to the beginning.

And with that, the slow burning horror of becoming like the woman who sat on the bed, rail thin with skin that looked like she was dead.  The longer she was in a place like this, the more it progressed.

The oldest sibling dreamed of her father, explosively angry at her mother as tensions reached a peak.  Except Alpeana rearranged the scene, put Heather down as the focus, screwing up, her father angry at her.  Words tore into the many insecurities of an eleven year old without roots.  She could play into the loop, making this a Mneme localized to the dream.  Move this way, do this, and the scene would replay.  Try to move away, try to think about a way out of the loop, and Heather received a slap to the cheek, sharp and surprising more than it was painful, reset to the beginning.  A father she loved but was losing respect for tearing into everything that mattered.

Alpeana gave the father the same kind of nightmare, but twisted around.  His temper lost, saying biting, unforgiveable things he shouldn’t to a daughter who would carry those things with her for the rest of her life.  Instead of the slap, there was a feeling of flailing, being out of control.  If he pulled back or reined in feelings, then Heather or one of the other girls would do something and he’d snap.  Right back into it.

The mother dreamed of waking up in the motel room, realizing she’d forgotten her daughters in the car.  At Alpeana’s silent direction, Rems carried back the feeling of dripping in sweat, of heat, of physicality, and turned up the temperature.  The girls in the backseat were young, dead or dying of heat exposure as she tried to get into the car.  She tried to break windows to get at them but car windows were hard to break.

The aunt had a nightmare that was rooted in her own childhood, becoming its own Mneme.  Finding an animal by the side of the road, hit and hurt, and trying to put it quickly out of its misery.  Each attempt failed, eliciting biting and scratching from the roadkill, adding to the horribleness and misery, demanding the next attempt.

Alpeana took one room in the motel, then moved into the next.

A man away on business had a nightmare about returning home to discover he had a child he didn’t know about, riddled with health issues and complications.

An alcoholic sleeping things off in the motel was harder, too numb to reality, too lucid.  She spent more of the available resources and the limited time she had on the man than she’d wanted before realizing he wasn’t a good candidate.

She perched on his chest instead, drowning him in her mane.  The agents of Dream took his body’s movement, paralyzing him, and she let him see her as the nightmare.

Her, her dark eyes locked to his, her mane extended out to an employee elsewhere in the building, waiting for coffee to brew.  She helped guide the employee to sleep and then plunged him into nightmare.  Leeches and black slugs crawled across him, each leaving behind a snail-trail of slime with filaments.  His attempts to wipe it up only revealed the strings that wound around him.  No string could be torn or fully entangled, he couldn’t get the undulating life off of himself- every attempt only revealed that more were crawling out from under clothes.  Binding him.

There was no need for blood, or for the things to crawl into him.  He hated the idea of being unavoidably bound so much that he wet himself while nodding off, waiting for his painfully early morning coffee.

She reached out of darkness to draw curtains, then unplugged the coffee maker before plugging it back in.  It stopped boiling.

She unplugged the alarm clocks that would dismantle what she was making and wake those having nightmares, plugging them all back in.  She took phones and she didn’t know how to use them, so she put them in piles of clothing, instead.  More curtains were drawn closed.

The Witch Hunter had no doubt trapped his room, and there was too much danger that he had secured it against things like her.  It wasn’t hard.

She couldn’t enter his room and she couldn’t get to him directly, so she took the motel.  Every room painted black and drowned in Nightmare.  Her mane filled the available space.

That one motel room became an oasis.  One bit of light in a motel-wide darkness.  The darkness was left with no place to go but inside.

She let it bleed in, darkness dripping and leaking in, filaments of her mane naturally extending in through outlets and the holes drilled for cable and plumbing.

No traps were sprung, any wards that had been placed were only active for a little while before the inexorable pressure of accumulated nightmare broke them down.

She found him fast asleep.

The moon was starting to eclipse the sun.  It sizzled and roared, a static intensity that filled all background noise.  Darkness deepened further across the city, where everything was asleep and the people who weren’t asleep were a particular breed of nocturnal human.  Criminals and the desperate.

Monica ran until she bumped into the man.  She shrieked, looked at him, and at the first hint that he wasn’t lashing out at her or getting angry, she broke into tears.

He bent down, hand on her shoulder, and listened as she tried, in terrified sobbing, to explain that she’d lost her family.

This was a different kind of fight, to drown someone in nightmare.  He didn’t know he was dreaming and she didn’t know who he was, as a dreamer.  Every piece she set into motion was a tool at the same time it was a clue.  Rems flickered or maintained inconsistent position, or they throbbed and pumped with dull deep sounds in tune with heartbeat, getting more agitated as he did, or the walls expanded or props moved in tune with his breathing.  All to draw the connections to his physiology, so the dream could have more sway over him physically and pressure him down, keeping him asleep.  Noticing one inconsistency wouldn’t wake him, even if he was good at seeing things, like Lis had described.  But it would get him there.

She used four while he was distracted.  Four figures who walked in the area around him.  Involuntary movements of his arms and legs produced movements of theirs.  She kept them present but out of the way.

If he wakes I’ll have a fight with a Witch Hunter on my hands, me all tangled up in the motel, unable to run, Alpeana thought.

“You can call me Raff,” the man introduced himself.  “Raphael Tindall.”

“Hi Monica.  I’ll help you.”

“I’m a specialist in dealing with scary things.  Don’t worry.”

Alpeana found the Mneme again.

“Monica!” a shout, faint on the wind.  Monica stiffened, all reassurance dashed away in a moment.  She remained transfixed, caught between wanting to go to her father, wanting to run from his anger, and being unsure if she’d really heard anything.

“It’s okay,” Raphael told her.

Her subconscious was laced with lessons taught in children’s cartoons and a school event.  It barely took a prodding for those ideas to leap to the surface.

And Raphael became something insincere, his grip on her wrist too tight.

She pulled free and ran, and he ran after her.

Deeper into the mire.  The moon moved across the sun’s surface, burning, and the roar became that of a plane passing overhead.

“Lea!” Monica called out.

They descended into the nightmare and Alpeana encouraged it deeper, piling up elements together, and accumulating the Rem, taking them from others to put in this nightmare.  She linked his nightmare to the others and their heartbeats, and dragged it all to a deeper, darker place.

The motel was across the street from a church, and that was Raphael’s doing, somehow, setting contrasts.  A dark place opposed to one he saw as warmer.  The motel was now a jumble of a building, rooms stacked on rooms like haphazard shipping containers, with sidewalk stretching up to multiple floors, footing precarious, railing broken in places.  A black slug crawled across the window, leaving a slime trail.

“Lea!” Monica shouted, as the scream repeated.  She ran up the stairs, then pulled open the first door she saw.

A heavyset woman burst out, screeching and angry.  Monica backed away, bumped into the railing, and metal creaked.

The Witch Hunter ran, sprinting, gripping the railing in a fierce effort to haul it back into position, before reaching out for Monica.

She fell, slipping from his grasp to drop a full fifteen feet.  A slow descent, like she had dived into water.

“Monica!” Lea’s desperate scream followed her.

She hit the car windshield below her, headfirst.  The way her body fell left no mystery about her fate.  The exact positioning of the landing called to the Witch Hunter, reflecting something deeper.  Face sliced by the slide of face against broken windshield.  There was something in that too.

Alpeana took note, quick, gathering up what she could from sentiment and symbol before she resumed trying to arrange everything.  Monica woke, her body replaced by a Nod.

Lea screamed, and he found his senses and his voice.

“Call an ambulance!” he shouted at the heavyset woman who had scared Monica.

“There are no ambulances at this hour!” the woman screamed at him.

He pushed his way past one of the Rems.  Alpeana worked, weaving things together, drawing it all in tighter.

“She’s dead anyway!” the woman shouted behind him.

Lea’s screaming resumed.  Desperate.

He gave chase, looking for the room.  People burst out of rooms, others remained locked, with ugly sounds on the far side.  More slugs crawled throughout.  He slapped one off his arm.

The moon continued its slide across the sun’s surface.  Everything throbbed with the roar of flame and the creak of the stone of the moon moving so much mass.  It filled a good portion of the sky, the eclipse two thirds of the way to being total.

He looked for the church, eyes fixing on the stone statue atop its peak.  He found some solace in that and Alpeana wanted to take that solace away, but there weren’t good avenues.  None that didn’t cost her more than she was willing to spend, in figments and half-remembered images, in echoes, ruin, rack, or memory.  She would have to keep him clear of that church.

He found Lea, inside a hotel room, sitting on the lap of the emaciated woman with sores on dry skin and stringy hair.  The woman tried to shush her but everything about the way how felt wrong, too different from her own parents, and the boy pinched her and kicked, adding to the frantic nature of the situation.

“What are you doing to her?”

“She’s my daughter!”

“I’m not!  I’m not!  I want to go home, please, I want to go home!”

He entered the room, and the boy came at him, swinging, clawing, pulling him off balance.  A scrapper.  Something in that was important to Raphael.  Fed the boy strength and tenacity.

He found Lea’s hand and pulled, and the woman pulled back, but she did it with ragged fingernails.  Tearing skin.

“I’ll kill her before I let her go!  I’ll kill her, I’ll kill her, just you see, I’ll kill her!  I’ll kill her and then nobody can have her!”

He couldn’t let her go or she’d be fully in the woman’s clutches, the woman maddened.  He couldn’t pull, because every tug meant fingernails dug another trench into the little girl’s flesh.

Alpeana’s mane twitched, darkness boiling up.  She searched, reaching with hair and hand, across the scene.

Instinct and years of studying let her find the means with which to break him.

His hand slipped.  Lea slipped from the woman’s lap, falling, and fingernails tore skin as if that skin were clay, doing irrevocable damage.  Blood sprayed, slapping him across the face, and he fell onto the bed.  Slugs and leeches spilled out along with cockroaches, chasing after that blood spray.

The slip of the hand.  Another piece of a more meaningful scene.  Alpeana kept it.

Lea woke.  Not that he would notice or see as he stumbled back, onto the second story sidewalk outside the motel.

Below him, a woman pounded on a car window, keening.  Her words were various repetition of ‘no,’ ‘oh god’, ‘help me’, and words of endearment, less spoken than things she squeaked out between the unmodulated screaming.

Alpeana pushed the sound out there, let it chase him as he decided to abandon her.  He was trying to get away now, looking over to the church, looking for escape routes.

Was there one string of utterances that worked better than others, to wedge in his consciousness?  She tracked the Rems who mirrored his heartbeat and breathing, the movements of his eyes, and pushed the utterances out there, twisting them around before they reached him to make each different, and to see what worked.

You’re here for information, she told herself.

But she wanted to break him, to be done with the problem.  She could pursue both at the same time.

At one room, the door was open.  A man came tearing out, holding a hunk of bloody metal that might’ve been a toaster once.  He swung, wild eyed.

Raphael the Witch Hunter tried to get away, and string from the slugs limited his movement, tying him to the railing.  “Stop!”

“Such a disappointment,” the father said, words eerily calm and steady.  A stark contrast to the woman’s ongoing screaming.

“Please, come back to me!” the mother shouted.

Raphael’s composure slipped.  He drew his gun without thinking about it, pointing it at the man.  “Stop or I shoot!”

“She let the family down,” the father said.

He came at Raphael, and Raphael shot.  Killing an innocent.

And the woman below screamed louder, horrified as her husband died.

He tore his way free, resolve slipping in the midst of all the chaos that surrounded him.

Alpeana found sirens in an echo she held.  The echo gave the sound an emotional intensity.  Defeat, loss, panic.

It didn’t have the effect she wanted.  Barely anything at all.

He doesn’t care about police.  That was one piece of information.

He ran, until he came face to face with the roadkill, and the woman trying to put it out of its misery.  It covered walls and floor, spreading with every blow that was meant to kill it.  Limbs twitched and teeth stuck out.

And in that, a final piece of the puzzle.

The moon slid into place against the disc of the sun’s surface and the flames were extinguished, guttered out with a bright white flash spraying out from one side.  Bright enough to erase everything.

Alpeana gathered the critical, interlinked pieces she’d found and carried things deeper into collective unconscious and memory.  They were the passcode, the arrangement of ideas that were both guiding light and key into more vulnerable parts of Raphael Tindall’s psyche.  She delved deeper, to gather what information she could, and to destroy the man if the opportunity arose.

Raphael rubbed the surgical needlenose pliers with holly, then used them to pick a bell out of the bag.

“What the heck are you doing, Raff?” Shawn called down.

Raphael, holding a second set of pliers, raised them close to his mouth, holding his breath so he wouldn’t breathe on them.  The gesture for silence.

Shawn had the body type to be a bouncer, was bald, and had a smile with a chipped tooth.  He crossed arms with biceps the size of watermelons.  Behind him, others were getting out of the car.

Raphael used the two pliers to tie the knot, metal clicking against metal.  He picked up holly with the pliers and rubbed it down.  Then he gave it a tap.

The bell made a small, high sound, and a hundred and thirty bells across the valley below the ski hill answered.

It was a sweet sound compared to the churning, grinding, burning sound of the eclipse, a ring in the sky that marked the ruined, unreliable ring around the city.  A perimeter as clear as day.

Rooted to reality, Alpeana thought.  It was bright and it was the wrong kind of dream for her to get too involved.  Not at this stage.

“Thought you’d want company, or backup.”

“No need,” Raphael told Shawn.

“Do you remember Tess?”

Tess was five feet tall, with enough hair for five people, frizzy black ringlets extending to the small of her back and about a three-quarter foot in every direction.  Even in the summer heat, she wore a baggy sweatshirt, and wore shorts short enough that they were barely visible beneath the sweatshirt.

“I remember Tess being twelve.”

Tess shrank back, as if he’d said something wrong, looking to the side.  “Sixteen now.”

“And you know Dina and Cory.”

Dina was a tough looking woman, muscular, with a knife on her belt, wearing jean shorts and a tank top.  And Cory, despite being about a hundred and twenty pounds, was-

Scrappy, like the boy from Lea’s nightmare.  Alpeana wove it in.

Scrappy, hair messy, chin scruffy, with a perpetually agitated atmosphere that wasn’t because of drugs.  Cory’s eyes were small in a way that looked like he had two black eyes, minus the bruises.  He had the energy of an off-brand attack dog.

Melissa, Alpeana thought.

“Melissa!” Raphael called out.

The girl limped up the slope.  Melissa was aged up to seventeen because fourteen wouldn’t fit the scene, and it was somehow important that Tess be the youngest or close to the youngest.  Melissa had her hair crimped, wore a t-shirt with a logo, and a polka-dotted skirt that flared out a lot.  She unconsciously shrank down a little when situated around the others, like they made her feel uncomfortable.

“They’re friends.  Easygoing,” Raphael told her.

“That makes me feel more out of place.  I’m not an easygoing person.”

It wasn’t the true Melissa, but Alpeana didn’t need much to control the scene or convince Raphael.  He was thoroughly in her grip.

“It’s good if Tess has company,” Dina said.

“Should we go?” Dina asked, smiling.

They all climbed into the van.  The engine started up, then they left Kennet.

Kennet wasn’t in the actual memory, and neither were half of these people, Alpeana noted.  She had to work to stitch things together.  Turning leaving a minor everyday job into leaving Kennet.  It gave her openings.  Such as…

“What were you doing?” Tess asked.

“Alarm and arm,” Raphael said, sorting out his bag.  Shawn opened the back of the truck and Raphael tossed his bag in.  “Control an area, I like to start with the perimeter, because the urban areas get snarly.  Open areas are nice, so I started with that.  One place with room to shoot.”

“Shoot?  What about police?” Tess asked.

Shawn, sitting in the driver’s seat, let out a laugh heavy enough he didn’t drive completely straight down the winding, up-and-down road.  “We have pull.  One phone call to the right names and the worst that will happen is we get dropped off outside of town instead of taken to a jail cell.

“It’s not a card you want to play too often,” Raphael told Tess.  “Are you going to be working with us?”

“Had a bit of trouble at school,” Shawn said.

“Shut up, Shawn,” Tess said, quiet and tense.

“What’d you do?” Melissa asked.  “Swing a punch?  Set fire to the chemistry lab?”

“Nothing.  I tried to stay out of everyone’s way and they didn’t let me.”

“Bullying,” Dina said, not especially quiet.

“Shut up!” Tess said, insistent.

“Easy, it’s cool, Tess,” Cory said, from the passenger seat.  “We’re having a day vacation, trip up to the lake, enjoy the water…”

“Barrel of laughs, this group,” Melissa said.

“Be good,” Raphael warned.

Melissa shut her mouth, then nodded.

“What’s Melissa’s story?”

“Something opened her eyes, she’s apprenticing under me.  We’ll go to the lighthouse when we’re done here.”

“Lighthouse?” Tess asked.

Alpeana recognized the Mneme as it stirred, seizing it for later.  It would distract and detract from the scene if used now, but it was information.

Without that thread to go by, the nightmare progressed.  A bad sentiment overshadowed everything, and the eclipsed sun burned a ring in the sky directly overhead.  The van sped through dusty back roads and rural communities.  There was the angel again, a lawn decoration.  Then a derelict cemetery that the road curved around, the angel remaining in view, stone with a square base.  Raphael, elbow on the windowsill, watched it.  It seemed to turn to stay facing him.

Clouds moved over the eclipsed sun, until it seemed the only lights were sunbeams in the distance.  The road rose and fell, hypnotic.

“Fucked up my ankle, and apparently there was some sketchy stuff involved.  I started digging… dug too deep I guess.  I tried to drown it all in booze and pills and that asshole got in my way.”

“I’m an asshole, am I?” Raphael asked.

“Yeah.  You held a freaking gun to my head.”

“That’s so Raff,” Shawn said, laughing, like he was quoting a show.  A few people chuckled.

“How do you know each other?” Melissa asked.

“Friends, from high school, led to work.  Cory’s known Raff for a good long while.”

“Childhood friend.  We don’t talk enough,” Cory said.  “Don’t get me started on how hard it is to stay in touch with this guy.”

“Tess is the cousin of one of our mutual friends,” Raphael told Melissa.  “That friend, uh, she’s spending ten years on a vacation from society.”

“Ah huh,” Melissa replied.

“We like Tess enough we keep her around,” Shawn said.

Tess drew a knee up, foot on the seat, and hugged her leg.

“What’s your deal?” Melissa asked.

“Melissa has a hearing problem,” Raphael said, his voice a warning.  “It goes in her ear, everything works physically, but somehow the words do not penetrate.”

“Is it supernatural?”

“No,” Tess replied.  “People suck, that’s all.”

“I think we’re more on the same wavelength than you’d think,” Melissa told the girl.  “Fuck everything, am I right?  Fuck people.”

“I like the people in this car,” Shawn announced, bodybuilder and enforcer in the driver’s seat.

“Fuck you guys a little less than the rest, how’s that?” Melissa asked.

The lighthouse briefly took a position of prominence in Raphael’s mind.  It was an excuse to move the scene forward, while he wasn’t paying attention.

The tire popped.  The van went off the dirt road, hit the slope where the dirt was built up to the road surface, and keeled over.  The van landed hard on its side, one hard impact, followed by the collision with a tree.  A cooler in the back practically exploded, showering the rear of the car in ice and ice water, with one can clattering against the window that now looked down at ground and ground only.

And then the pained cries, the moans, and the struggle.

“No bars, fuck,” Cory swore.

There were attempts made to open the door next to Dina, but the branch of the tree they’d bumped into prevented it.  Melissa had cracked her head on the window as the truck had gone sideways, and wasn’t coherent, Shawn was too hurt to move much, and he was big in a way that blocked access through his door.  Mostly he sagged down in Cory’s direction.

Raphael did his best to move, squirming past the two younger girls, to the trunk area, but even that was fruitless.  The trunk of the tree had crumpled it.  Violent kicks didn’t budge the trunk door.

“Hello!” Cory shouted.  “Hey!  Hi!  Hello!”

Raphael twisted around to look.  At the window above Shawn, a face peered down.  A girl with a long brown braid and a serious expression.

“Can you help?  Can you call someone?” Cory asked.

The girl remained mute.  She reached down, grabbing Shawn.

Dina protested.  “Don’t move him!  If there’s something spinal-!”

“We have to!” Cory replied.  “He’s moving anyway, the way he’s hanging!  Listen, miss, can you even get him out?  He’s like, two hundred and fifty pounds of dense-ass muscle,” Cory grunted.  He was shifting position, using both legs to try to push Shawn up.  Shawn’s own movements were faint and slow-motion.  Dina undid Shawn’s seatbelt buckle, and Cory grunted as he bore more of the big guy’s weight.

Even Dina reached forward, to reach between seat and the side of the car or around the seat to grab onto bits of Shawn and keep him from falling back down.

The woman or girl managed to pull Shawn over the edge.  The car rocked as he landed on the ground.

“Got him, okay, hopefully she can get him into a car or something,” Raphael said.

“Hopefully.  Hey miss!” Cory shouted.  “Are you there?  How’s our guy doing!?”

All of them, except for a groaning Melissa, fell totally silent, listening.  There was nothing.

Cory unbuckled, then, frantic, climbed up toward the car window.  It took a moment, and then he slipped out.

Tess was next, and it was a struggle for her, her ankle hurt.  Then Dina.

“I can but Melissa can’t!”

“We’re going for help.  Look after her!”

Raphael swore under his breath.

But he obliged.  He found towels and adjusted Melissa so he could soak up the ice water that was collecting against the side of her head, arm, and shoulder.

In another, true-to-events version of the scene, it isn’t Melissa, but another girl, an older friend of Tess’s.

“I have to leave you.  See what’s happening,” he told her.

He left her behind anyway.  He had to, because nothing was improving.

It was nighttime out now, the eclipsed sun burned its faint orange ring in the sky, and the wind stirred up the dust of dry dirt road and the nearby field that hadn’t been touched in a long, long time.

He started running, cutting across the field, toward the derelict house and barn.  Dust blew in dense clouds that hung about four feet off the ground and lower.

“Run!” Cory responded.

He squinted through the dust as he hurried in the direction of Cory’s voice.

“Run away!” Cory shouted, and the clarification made Raphael pause, before he resumed.

Cory stood at the edge of the field.  Wolf traps had snapped closed around his legs, crushing his calves.  He leaned onto the fence to avoid putting weight on it, but it didn’t work.  With his other hand, he held a pitchfork awkwardly.

And the girl with the braid, smaller than Dina, wearing a homespun dress, was carrying a scythe and wearing a calfskin cap and supple leather apron.  No smile on her face, no emotion at all.  But she swung the scythe at Cory and he jabbed out with the pitchfork, catching the blade in the tines.

“Cory!” Raphael shouted.  He broke into a run, eyes scanning for things he could use as an improvised weapon, or the glimmer of metal.

He misjudged the shadows, on a field lit by the eclipse alone and obscured by rolling clouds of dust.  One patch of darkness wasn’t a shadow, but a deep, narrow hole.  His foot dropped into the hole, knee deep, and forward momentum kept him going, his leg nearly bending the wrong way as his lower leg stopped short and the rest of him carried forward.  He screamed at the tearing in his knee.

Cory was distracted, let his guard down.  The woman turned toward Raphael, and swung her scythe around, catching an unaware Cory at the lower legs.  The corroded blade cut through bone, just above the traps.

Raphael hauled himself free of the hole, then tried his best to hobble away.

She didn’t chase, instead turning her attention to Cory.  Picking him up.

House.  Inside the house there had to be a phone.

He hobbled inside.  The door was open.  Nothing in the front hall.  Nothing in the kitchen.

Upstairs?  He didn’t want to give up on escape routes-

“Oh god, oh god,” Tess’s voice was audible.

She’s panicked, not hurting.

Going up the stairs was easier, if nothing else, because there was a railing.

Tess shrieked at the creak of a stair, and he lurched into the hallway, trying to find balance and breath.

“It’s me!” he shouted, belated.

But she was running for a window.  She looked back, and one of her feet hit a floorboard with more wobble to it than the rest.  The floorboard extended to the wall, and the window slid shut, just in front of her.

Tess saw, but couldn’t stop before she crashed, head, shoulders, arms, and upper body, into the glass.  Lacerations to every part of her.

“I can’t do this, I can’t, I’m sorry, I can’t-”

“Tess,” he said, trying to stay calm, glancing down the stairs.  “Help me, let’s do this together.”

“Have you seen the barn?” she asked.

He shook his head.  “Only Cory.”

“We have to get away or die trying.  We can’t go there.  We have to be able to call for help.”

“Why?  What was there?”

Raphael looked, and it was the girl with the calfskin cap, the edges ragged, the original calf’s ears sticking out to the side, the tassels draping down.  It would have been silly in any context where she wasn’t covered in Cory’s blood, soaking face, apron, and dress.

She looked up at him, he looked down at her in fear.

“I’m jumping.  If I break a leg or something and I can’t get away, you have to find a way to finish me off.”

“Tess, that’s insane-”

Tess crawled through the window and fell through.

He raced down the hallway.  That floorboard made the window rattle when he walked on it too.  He reached the end of the hallway, looking down.

Monica fell in a certain way.

A terminal fall.  Bits of cloth from Tess’s sweatshirt were caught on the nails that bristled out like waiting hooks, to catch at flesh and cloth.  She might have made it down without that.

He leaned out the window, noted how the roof slanted, and headed for the bedroom.  Simple, spartan, with a cow skull mounted over the bed and two more skulls in the corner, sitting one atop the other on a chair.

There was a window, dusty.  He hurried there, hearing footsteps behind him.

And the floorboards broke.  It dropped him to the room below, a hard fall that was doubly hard on his already injured knee.

Floorboards creaked and snapped, and he fell to the basement, cushioned by a carpet of bones, big and small.

Hurt, out of air, bewildered, he struggled to pull himself together.  He didn’t manage to before she made her way from the top floor to the basement.  She walked on bones with bare feet, and as ordinary as she looked, in frame and proportion, she was strong enough to drag him with both hands.  Up the stairs, toward the barn.

He struggled, found some strength, and resisted, and she didn’t care.  He groped, fumbled, and fought, and she was relentless.

A deformed calf was at the barn entrance, two faces for one body, all three eyes milky, the coat mangy.  She gave it a pat on the head as she passed, dragging him.  He focused on trying to break her grip, prying at fingers, bending one back as far as he could, and she seemed immune to the pain.

Past a group of mangy, sick looking cows, some with staples across faces or down necks.  The cows moaned, groaned, and mooed at him, or made sick, guttural sounds a cow shouldn’t make.

As she dropped Raphael, she reversed direction.  His hand gripped the end of her dress, ineffectual, and she stepped on his injured knee, making his entire body arch.

He collapsed onto his back, sweating all over, trying to catch his breath, and he got an upside-down view of Cory.

Cory was missing his lower legs, the stumps branded so they wouldn’t bleed as much.  A metal collar and chain were hooked around his neck.

The chain and collar- he turned to look, huffing for breath, and saw more of the chains.  The same arrangement, each chain attached to the ceiling in a way that didn’t look like it was meant to be unattached, extending down to the start of a collar that was buried in cow flesh.

No.  Cow skin.  The collar was around a human neck…

He had to recontextualize everything he was seeing.

The only real cow he could make out was the mutant calf.  The rest, seven in total, were people, people with cow skin and parts stapled to them, bodies bent and broken into the right rough shape.

She returned, carrying the shackle.  He fought, and in that fighting he won a few times, kicking her leg with his good one, bowling her over.  He smashed her across the face with a metal bowl he snatched up.

None of the victories helped.  They only bought time.  She recovered, or she didn’t care about the pain, and in a shamefully short twenty minutes or so, he exhausted himself.

One last attempt.  He groped for and found a nail, old fashioned, half a foot long.  He swung it, aiming to put a hole in the side of her neck, and she reached down with the shackle.

He punctured flesh, impaling her neck.  The shackle slipped closed. There was a part that went into his mouth, pulling his tongue down hard to the floor of his mouth.

The puncture didn’t kill.  He pulled it out, and it barely bled.  She turned away, stepped on his ruined knee on her way back, then rigged the chain, hauling back on it.

Pulling him into a stall.

Shawn was already her victim, draped in a cow skin, hands nailed to a wooden beam in front of him, his body bent forward.  Dina was in the stall between Shawn and Raphael, draped in a skin that had yet to be affixed to her.  She made low moaning sounds, fought chains, pulled.

He still had the metal nail.  He tried his best to work it into the lock or bend a part of the chain, but it didn’t work.  Too thick.  He worked with the slack on the chain, twisting or manipulating it, but that didn’t work either.

Her procedure was steady, inexorable, and calm.  She worked on Shawn for hours, stitching.  Then, that done, she got a milking machine, and rigged it to the udder that now dangled low, out of Raphael’s sight.  Another one went to the wound at Shawn’s side.

It hadn’t been Shawn.  It had been another person he’d known.

Alpeana used the glimmer of the nightmare of the man who’d found he had a baby who would be in the hospital for the rest of his life.  Tubes and medical… to make this more real, more three dimensional.

Milk coursed into dirty tubes, joined by a measure of blood.  Shawn raised his head, and when he did, the cow’s eye fluttered in a shaky blink.

Raphael concocted his measure of escape, tearing off his shirt with the help of the metal.  Then, terror sealing all things shut, he unzipped, straining.

Dina couldn’t see, except out of one cut in the side of the head of the nearly-intact cow skin that draped over her.  She watched, and that didn’t make it easier.

He urinated on the shirt.  Instinct made him want to pull away, but he couldn’t.

Then, shirt soaking wet, he tied it, wrapped it around the slack on the chain, and used the metal to twist.

Wet fabric was harder to tear than dry fabric, and twisted up fabric doubly so.  The rust of the nail biting into his hands, the smell of urine thick in his nostrils, he wrung the cloth to the point it was compressing the chain.

The monster woman started on Dina.  Nails first, to pin the hands down.  Then the stitching.  He had to wait, holding the slack and the urine-soaked shirt down below the divider between the stalls.  The ‘mooing’ and moaning of captives wearing skin that wasn’t their own filled the air, and he thought it might drive him mad.

A gun cocked.  Raphael stood upright, and for a blessed second, all sounds stopped.

Then the first ‘cow’ made its frantic cry, trying to form words without a tongue available.  Pleading, shouting.

A man at the entrance wore a long black coat, and looked very uneasy, holding a gun aimed at the woman.

“Milkmaid?” he asked.

“Same deal as usual?”

He pointed down toward the base of the old fashioned milking machine, which was soaking in a seemingly endless quantity of milk from people who should not have been able to produce any, mingled with blood and maybe pus in one instance.  Smaller containers held fluid.

“My mama’s been wanting to do a youthening ritual, she says this gets the smoothest results.  Need anything on the next trip?”

“My dad’s getting too old to drive up, so I’ll be the one from here on out.  Dean Rowsome.  I’ll be here next week, if that’s ok?”

“I left the things you like on the doorstep of the house, as I was instructed.”

Raphael cried out, frantic, top of his lungs, straining to make words.

The man walked away, taking his milk with him.

The milkmaid stepped outside.  Presumably to check on whatever was dropped off.

In a frantic, desperate attempt to get free, Raphael wrung the chain with the urine-soaked cloth until metal gave.  Then he unwound, checking.  A link had bent, collapsed.

With the nail, he leveraged that link until it bent enough that the entire chain could come free.

Shawn was- there was no way he could save Shawn in a way that didn’t take thirty minutes.  The guy had been barely able to stand earlier and now he was so covered in stitches and fake skin that he could barely move on his own.

So he focused on Dina.  Opening the door to the individual stable, then approaching her.  He found a hammer and used it to free her hands from the plank in front of her.

He hesitated- he’d rather break the chain, but-

He couldn’t remove the collar so instead reached into the cow’s head that was now attached to her skin, finding and bending the tab that extended into her mouth with the claw end of the hammer.  Blood welled, and she spat it.

“I can’t run,” Dina told him.

“Neither can I, but-”

“I can’t run,” she told him.  “I can’t go.  I’d hold you back, we’d get caught again.  You need to go for help.”

She leaned forward, the chain clinking.  The eyes of the cow head that overlapped and covered her head closed.

The horror of it mirrored the roadkill in someone else’s dream, that he’d glimpsed.  Alpeana drew on that sentiment.

Something in her had been changed, she wasn’t human anymore, or something.  He had no idea what that meant.

“Go, be safe, but you have to go now.  Get Tess and Melissa.”

He hesitated, as if he might tell her, then he nodded.

Alpeana readied the next piece of the picture.

“Please, come back for me!” she shouted after him.

He fled the house, entering the field.

And she was there on the front porch, biting into an apple.  She turned to look at him.

She was faster than he was.  She strode, walking around a dark patch of ground, then leaping over something.  He hobbled, slow already and slowed further by the need to make sure he wasn’t walking into a trap.

Rolling clouds of dust and darkness obscured the scene further.

Alpeana prowled close, playing with the details, pushing him, and picking up the sentiments and feelings that he left behind.  To know what he felt and what he saw, and piece together how he worked.

He turned, deciding he had to fight.  She was unarmed, except for the apple.  He had the nail, clenched in his hand.

The exchange was brief, undramatic from a purely visual standpoint.  She drew close, and he plunged the nail into her heart, doing damage to his hand as he shifted his grip and pressed down on the base, thrusting it down and in, the rough flat head of the iron nail chewing into the meat of his palm.

She staggered back, and he did too, watching his step.  Dust rolled, light brown.  She didn’t die, instead digesting her situation, one hand falling on the spoke.

And something dawned on him.  The color and nature of the scene became clearer.  His eyes opened wide and something in him either broke or became whole again.  A deeper, wider awareness than what his eyes showed him, and Alpeana could see it as he would.

He moved with less fear of traps this time, less fear of holes.  He ran, eyes finding a car in the gloom, so aged and weather worn it shouldn’t run.

With an angel on the front of the hood, with a square base.

Alpeana moved quickly, hurrying to the car, ducking low at the front of it as he opened the door and climbed inside.

She broke the angel off, and it hurt, sapping at her power.

But the car didn’t start.

The Milkmaid stepped around the side of the garage, pitchfork in hand, and stabbed through the windshield.  He only barely avoided it.

Alpeana moved, and his eyes tracked her.

With that alone, he had enough control to pull out of the memory.  Alpeana tried to assert control.  She had the Lighthouse.  A scrap of a sentence that fed into something bigger.  She used it to drag the two of them into that something.

“Your friend Shawn put me in touch with you, Raff.”

“Raphael.  For what?”

“Raphael, sorry.  He said you were attacked.  That family members died.  Your sister?”

“I left her there in the van with a concussion, she wasn’t there when I got to her.”

“The police are suspicious and frustrated with you.  You have questions, and you are more aware of things that go bump in the night, aren’t you?”

“Most can’t.  Even among us who have had similar experiences.”

“All sorts of thing.  Monsters and monstrous men.”

“There was one there.  He could have helped.  He didn’t.  For some ritual.”

“We hunt them.  Jury and executioner only.  No judges to adjudicate, no court.  You’re talented.  You escaped a situation that killed many others.  We need that talent.  If you’re willing to help us, then we’ll help you in every way we can.”

“What makes you think I’d want to go back into any situation like that?”

“If you can walk away, knowing others are out there, then do.  This isn’t pleasant or easy.  But it’s important.”

“That’s for you to tell us.  Tell me, what do you want, Raphael?”

“There’s no rush to answer.  But once you can, come to the address I’m about to give you.  It’s a place we call the Lighthouse.  About twenty-five of us coordinate and train there.  If anyone hassles you, ask for Samaniego.”

“Don’t come until you know what you want.  The training is hard and bitter, the resources and tools we use too valuable to give to someone who is going to give up halfway.  You can’t be blamed for the loss of your sister, or the fact that the practitioners got to the stable and executed your friends before you could get to us.  You were unequipped.  Let us equip you.”

“Is the idea that you’ll blame me if I don’t say yes?”

“From what Shawn told me, you’re the kind of person who will blame himself and stay up at night, knowing he could help.  With us you can sleep easy at night again.”

Raphael paused, staring out into the darkness, phone held to his ear.  “With a nightmare dragging me into tired old memories?”

He stirred, twisting, shaking his thoughts free of the cage.

They were back in the collected, shared nightmare, supported by the nightmares of the Luis family, staff, and the other people spending the night there.

He stood in the middle of an intersection, on a street without cars, aware enough of the nightmare and his place in it that she couldn’t sway things as much as she’d like.

The piecemeal, depressed, compressed, jumbled space.  Buildings crowded together and streets lacked logic.  It was deep and intimidating and terrible, more the city that a man who’d never seen anything than a hut might take in, in all the worst ways.

And the church was in front of him, topped by the angel statue.

“I’ll be taking my leave,” he said.

“Ah’ve shirked my work as well, hunter.”

“To pry, to remind me of darker moments.  Is this… this city… is it meant to wear me down?”

He indicated the landscape around him.  And there were small eyes, red and yellow, in every shadowy place.  People ran for cover, and the true nature of this dark, twisted landscape became clear.

“A place where you won?” he asked.  “All of your kind and the people who would sell out humanity for power?”

“This comes fae you only, Raphael.  This is tha fear close tae yer heart.”

The eclipse burned high overhead, a gateway opened, a perimeter encompassing earth as a whole.

He’s a crusader.  A hard man to deter.

“Is it wrong?  As fears go?  That this is what we might come to?”

“Thare’re mare of us than th’ monsters like th’ Milkmaid, Raphael.  Some of us only want peace.  Ye’re focusing on the wrong things.  Does mare harm than good.”

“Within ten minutes of my arriving, I found the wallflower doppleganger that was tracked to this region.  A mass murderer, unless she isn’t the very wary, very careful wallflower doppleganger and you happened to have another appear.  She tried following me.”

Alpeana perched on top of a car, her mane writhing and bubbling out around her, considering that.

“If that’s the quality of your friends, you’re not much different from her.”

“Was th’ cigarette wi’ her?” Alpeana asked, wary.

“Yep.  Nearly doused him in acid.  Can’t take chances.”

He looked around, taking in the buildings, and the creatures that lurked in shadow.  Then he looked up at the eclipse, fat in the sky, edges burning.  His expression was more drawn than it had been earlier in the night.  She hadn’t inflicted any injury, she hadn’t done more than give him a rough time, but he looked like he’d just suffered…

Twenty hours straight of nightmares.  Once she’d had him, she’d had him.  Now he had his way out.

“Thanks for the reminder of what I’m fighting for, I suppose.  I won’t give you another chance to do this.”

“Aye, ah thought not,” she replied.

“This doesn’t change anything,” he said.  Then he headed for the great arching door beneath the angel statue.

She withdrew before he could.  To withdraw her influence, and let the parts of her that had bled into his room rescind and fade.  She avoided any voluntary motion and wormed her way around the bells that were hung up in the room, so she wouldn’t make any ring and wake him.

He was wrong in saying this didn’t change anything.  It did.

Lis had been out with Cig, she remembered the schedule.  They were specifically meant to look for people like this.  They’d seen him, and neither had said anything.

There were other things too.  His intent toward Melissa, indicated by the way he’d treated the Wink she’d inserted in the dream.  The bells- he took over a region but he would keep expanding, until he was alerted whenever any of them made a move.  It would be slow to dismantle, dangerous.

She hadn’t been able to find the person who did the hiring.  She’d hoped to use the practitioner who’d come for the milk, after first seeing him, Rowsome, but then he’d seen her, and he’d started surfacing out of the deep nightmare and traumatic memories.

She had been able to find out who he was, in character and in intent.  A crusader.  A man with a mission, who knew what he was fighting for and wouldn’t be easily turned aside.

She had to tell others.  Avery was hurt, she’d knocked her head, Verona was gone, and that left only Lucy, out of the usual three.  Bothering one meant bothering all three and she didn’t want to do that.  Not until they had more to say.  She’d let others decide to do that.