Chapter 8
His face is all scraped up, and his jacket is pulled over his head like a hood. He pushes the dresser back and squeezes inside the cabin.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
“What happened to him?” Ravi sinks to his knees to get a better look at Danny.
“A raven. His hand…”
“Hey,” Danny says. He clears his throat, attempts to sit up straighter, propping himself on his functioning arm.
Ravi nods, takes a breath, and then he’s up, closing the door, pushing the dresser back in front of it. He walks over to the corner and gets a bottle of water out of the mini fridge that I somehow failed to notice. He twists off the cap and gives the bottle to Danny. “Here you go. Water.”
“Thank you,” Danny says. His hand is too shaky to bring the bottle to his lips, so I hold it for him, help him drink. Ravi watches, his expression intentionally blank, determined not to let on how he’s feeling. It’s devastating, how much he seems like a stranger to me in this moment.
“What’s happening out there?” I ask him.
He doesn’t answer. He pulls back the burlap curtains, looks out the front window.
“Ravi?”
“They’re coming with the van.”
“Who?”
“Luke, Cassie, Evan, Wyatt. Tanya.” Hearing him say her name is an electrocution. “They should be here by now.”
“What about Jace? Steph?” Danny asks. He doesn’t sound good, scuffling for every breath.
“They’re fine,” Ravi says. I catch his eye and can tell that he’s lying, but what’s the point of delivering that blow to Danny, who might not survive long enough to validate?
“The birds got in through the windows. We tried to take cover, hide under tables, but there was glass everywhere. Then there was blood everywhere. Then…”
“What? Then what?”
He shakes his head and checks out the window again, steps to the side trying to get a better view.
“Willa,” Danny whispers, tapping my leg. “Who is that?”
“Ravi,” I say. “He’s…he’s a friend.”
Ravi snorts.
“Really?” I ask him.
He won’t look at me, won’t turn away from the window.
“All right. We’re not friends,” I say to Danny. “He’s my ex.”
“Ah,” Danny says, still in a whisper.
“Yeah,” I say to Danny. Then to Ravi, “Why did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Make that noise when I said we were friends?”
“I…” He pauses. “Let’s not.”
I shouldn’t say it, but what does it matter if none of this is real. “Why are you so angry at me, Ravi? I don’t understand. You avoided me all night. And you…you brought a fucking date.”
“You told me to move on. I did.”
“Whoa,” Danny says. “Sorry, but I—”
“I’m not angry, Willa. I came here to find you.”
“All right, so you’re not angry enough to leave me for dead. That doesn’t mean you aren’t angry. Why can’t you just admit it?”
He gives me a look of sheer disgust that buries me in shame. “I’m not doing this right now. People are dead out there.”
“Dead?” Danny asks. “What do you mean? Who’s dead?”
“Fuck. We can’t just wait around. We need to get him to a doctor. Help me get him up.” He crosses over to Danny, leans down, slips his shoulder under Danny’s arm, and lifts.
Danny screams in anguish. A spray of treacly black spittle shoots out of his mouth, a glob landing on Ravi’s cheek, some in his eye.
“Can you put weight on your legs?” Ravi asks him, diplomatically not acknowledging the spit. He tries to blink out the black goo. It’s stuck in his eyelashes.
“Yeah. Yeah,” Danny says, gritting his teeth. “I got it.”
He attempts to stand on his own, but his balance is off. He teeters, and I catch him, wrap my arms around his waist.
Ravi checks out the window again.
“Now.” He pushes the dresser aside.
“I know Danny needs a doctor, but we can’t just run out there without a plan,” I say. “It’s not just the birds. There’s a man. Some…I don’t know who he is. What he is.”
“I’m aware,” Ravi says.
“You saw him?”
“He came into the reception hall.”
“And?”
“I like our chances better out there than trapped in here, backs to the wall.”
“All right. I trust you.” We look at each other, our gazes lingering, and I want to shake the bitterness from him.
I want to pull his hair and ask him why he never grew it out for me.
I want to kiss his face, feel the familiar scratch of his beard, to retreat, escape into something that no longer exists, an illusion.
I want him to hold me and tell me everything’s going to be fine and that this is just another bad dream, and when I wake up, I’ll be in bed next to him, and it’ll be like it used to, before the mundane drag of everyday life eroded the bond between us and the weight of wanting different things finally snapped it in half, before all the shitty things that we can’t take back, and it won’t be so hard anymore.
So complicated. It’ll stop hurting so badly.
I want him to do something, anything to make it hurt less.
But he won’t. He can’t.
Danny groans in pain again. He’s as heavy and unwieldy as a sack of bricks, and his breath reeks of decay, and his hand…
his hand is just a pale, withered mound oozing that black tar-like substance.
An hour ago, I thought he might be my future, and now I’m afraid he’s about to dissolve into nothing, to disintegrate in my arms.
“All right, Danny. We’re going to head out. You ready?”
“Born ready,” he says, attempting a smile. His teeth are rotted.
Ravi holds the door open for us.
The air outside smells like Danny. Like death. A thick fog shrouds the former campground. I can barely see a few feet in front of me.
It’s eerily quiet save for the random caw or scream that aggressively punctures the silence. There’s no cadence to them, no rhythm. I can’t predict when they’re coming or get any sense of where they’re coming from before the night snuffs them out.
I do my best on my injured foot, attempt to carry Danny’s weight as we turn left onto the path, moving toward the reception hall and the small parking lot.
“I don’t have my keys,” I tell Ravi. He walks a few paces in front of us, in danger of disappearing into the fog. “Ravi, did anyone call nine-one-one?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Ravi?”
He stops and turns to me. The pupil of his right eye is dilated; it bleeds into the white.
His eye leaks that dark substance. It trickles down his face like a bleak tear.
He looks resigned. He looks far away. I swear he was only a few steps ahead, that a moment ago I could reach out and touch him, but somehow the space between us has expanded, stretched to a distance I cannot fathom, even though we’re standing still.
“Did you hear that?” Danny asks me.
I look away for a second, just a second, and when I turn back, Ravi is gone. He vanished.
“Ravi?” He’s lost to the fog. He was there, and now he’s gone, and I can’t run after him because I’m holding Danny. “Ravi!”
“Willa,” Danny whispers. “Willa, it’s coming.”
There’s another scream. A blood-chilling, dizzyingly awful scream. It’s coming from behind us, I think. It’s not Ravi. It can’t be Ravi.
“Where did he go? Did you see? Did you see him?”
“I can’t see anything,” he says. “I think…I think my eyes are gone.”
I don’t want to look, but it’s nothing I haven’t seen before, so I look. His eyes are intact. But they’re black, and that inky mucilage seeps from the corners, streaking his sallow skin.
“Why the eyes again?” I ask. “What’s with the eyes?”
“It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“No. No. It’s not bad. It’s…it’s not real.
I’m telling you. We’re not actually living this.
You’re…” I can’t keep carrying him, wandering through the fog.
I’ve lost my sense of direction. A caw overhead.
Movement. Footsteps. “You’re all right. You’re going to be fine.
We’re going to Tokyo, remember? You have to take me to Tokyo, asshole. ”
He laughs faintly and it’s too much for him; he stumbles a little. I can’t hold him anymore. He’s too heavy. He falls to the ground. Hits it hard.
“Danny! Are you okay? Danny?”
“I hate weddings. I’ve always hated weddings.” He laughs again. “Now I’m going to die at a wedding.”
“No, you’re not. Listen to me. This isn’t real. Think about it. All those ravens? Ravens? A guy with red eyes and a…”
Tick tick tick tick tick tick.
Pocket watch.
He’s in front of us, the malignant glow of his red eyes piercing through the fog. He steps closer. Closer.
I can’t run. Not without leaving Danny.
The man is almost to us. He lifts the brim of his hat, revealing his full face.
Except he doesn’t really have one. I can’t tell if he has no skin, if I’m looking directly at his skull, or if he’s just that gaunt, that ghostly pale.
His lips curl over gray gums. His teeth are big, way too big, and they’re…
they’re black. It’s confusing. It’s…it’s because they’re not teeth.
They’re beaks. He has a mouth full of raven beaks.
I don’t know if he’s smiling or if that’s just the shape of his awful, awful mouth.
His jaw hangs loose, misaligned. His tongue is bone white.
“Tick, tock. Tick, tock.” He raises his ornate silver pocket watch. “Tick, tock.”
His voice is pure torture. It makes me long for the Eyeball Man’s wheezing.
In this moment, I feel a strange affection for my former villain.
He was a ruthless psychopath, but I don’t know.
At least his evil was of this world. At least he was of this world.
He wasn’t whatever is in front of me now.
This macabre revenant, this gothic phantom with his sinister pocket watch and army of ravens.
Only…maybe this villain is of this world, and I’m the one out of place.
“Run,” Danny tells me, coughing up more of the black substance. “Willa. Go.”
“I’m not leaving you. You didn’t leave me.”
“I’m already dead,” he says.
“I…”
He grabs my arm, gives me his classic crooked grin. “It’s okay. This isn’t real, right?”
“Your time is up,” the man says as a raven lands on his shoulder. He slowly lifts his arm, and Danny rises off the ground.
The shock of it sends me stumbling backward.
My breath withers in my lungs. I can’t scream.
I can’t beg for his life. I can’t do anything.
I’m helpless. Again, doomed to watch someone I care about suffer with no recourse.
Only this time the suffering isn’t plain violence. It’s something worse. So much worse.
Danny is in the air, his feet off the ground, in a supernatural choke hold. He’s rigid. He’s no longer in control. He lets out a scream, this forlorn wail that makes him sound like a child. It’s the loneliest sound. A hopeless sound.
And the man in the top hat, he’s inhaling. He’s sucking in and Danny’s disappearing inside his suit. His shaggy overgrown hair turns gray, and then white, and then to ash. His face is putrefying. And his insides, his blood, his…
It’s his soul.
He’s getting his soul sucked out.
And no, no, no, no, no, no. The vulgar squish of it—the wet, feasting, merciless consumption. The man’s pale tongue wags, slurps up the shapeless pink iridescence of Danny’s soul.
He drops Danny’s lifeless body to the ground. It barely makes any noise. There’s nothing left of him. He’s a shadow. He’s gone. He’s dead.
But I died last night, and I’m here now. Maybe it’s all right. Maybe it’ll be all right.
I want to believe that, but I can’t because what if this time is different?
What if the rules aren’t the same? I was stabbed; I didn’t get my soul slurped out.
What if I was wrong to reassure Danny? What if this is real?
What if last night was a dream, and this is reality? What if this death is forever?
The man in the hat runs his long, pallid tongue over his big, strange teeth. He looks at me with his foul, fiery eyes, then down at his pocket watch, then back up at me.
“Tick, tock.”
I turn on my heel and run.
I don’t know where I’m going. I can’t see through the fog, which is so dense that it’s difficult to move through, like swimming in cream.
Tick tick tick tick tick tick.
He’s following me. I hear his pocket watch and the harsh flap of raven wings overhead.
The fear is finally catching up to me. The understanding that just because I don’t trust what’s happening doesn’t mean that it isn’t happening. I’m going to endure it whether it’s real or not. Just because I woke up this morning doesn’t guarantee I’ll wake up tomorrow.
I’m running as fast as I can, but my ankle’s twisted, and every time I come down on my injured foot it feels like it’s in danger of exploding.
I listen for the ticking, and I think it’s fading. I think I’m getting away.
I’m getting away.
The ground changes underneath me. I’m not on the path anymore. I’m on gravel. The parking lot. I look down, and there’s blood everywhere. Everywhere.
Blood and clots of that black goo.
There’s the crunch of footsteps on gravel, fast approaching from a direction I can’t discern. I spin around.
Two hands emerge from the fog and pull me forward, into the haze.