Chapter 21 #2
Mal tossed a colorful rock off the white edge. He listened and listened and never heard it reach the bottom. Whether he fell gradually or steeply, an abyss awaited him below.
A treacherous path carved the only way forward or back. Cautiously, he followed the path towards a glowing light.
Rock crumbled underfoot, and he fell to his knees. The inevitability overcame him, that he would lose his footing and plunge to his certain death in the uncertain fathoms below.
He forced himself to stand and continue onward, one precarious step at a time.
After what felt like years but might have been only hours, Mal reached the glowing light he had followed like a beacon. It was a massive mirror, collecting the light of an unseen sun and shining it back in an ethereal aura.
The reflection of his own disappointed face greeted him when he stopped before the mirror.
This was not the relic he sought. With his magic reserves draining, he had little time to continue searching for the pocket watch, and few directions to go other than where he’d come from.
Perhaps he could use this mirror as a portal back to Dublin and retry this job with more preparation.
He heaved a sigh. This was an awful lot of work for a trinket.
Mal reached out to touch the mirror, and something reached back. The mirror rippled, taking away his reflection and bringing another.
The creature had been stripped of its humanity long before Mal awoke it.
The demon was a grotesque perversion of its former self.
Black-on-black eyes bulged from the gaunt hollows of its face as it rocked back and forth, gangly limbs folded in on itself, the rungs of its rib cage protruding from gray flesh.
“I am the guardian of the gateway. Who disturbs me?” The demon’s high-pitched voice was strangely melodic.
It cocked its head, and coal-black eyes took in Mal’s form through the mirror.
“Am I awake? Do I exist? Do you exist? You’re not another one of those—?
No, no, you couldn’t be. I killed them all.
” A maniacal laugh fired off like a gunshot in the oppressive stillness.
Mal could only stare, wondering what the hell he had gotten himself into.
“No one has disturbed me since the Tribunal imprisoned me behind the glass bars of this cage, wrought by their devious magic.” The long, filthy curls of the demon’s nails tapped on the glass, followed by its pounding fists.
The glass quivered but did not break, absorbing the blows with rippling waves.
“Inescapable, alas. Many have tried. All have failed. I am their first prisoner, condemned to the cage of my own mind, and for what? Because the king could not take a wee joke? How swiftly he cried ‘witchcraft’ when his beloved court jester took on the royal mien.”
The demon’s face warped like clay smashed repeatedly under a fist, then smoothed into another’s countenance.
Below the neck, the demon remained a rictus of twisted, gray limbs.
Above was the long, sallow face of a weary ruler, crowned in a gold circlet.
The demon wearing a king’s face cackled, sharp and biting.
Mal took an instinctive step back and nearly lost his footing. It was an illusion demon, a Lumomancer corrupted by the Profane Arts. Its face swirled and rolled, then returned to its own hideous countenance. The demon scratched like a dog at its skin until it bled raw.
“Magic must be a secret, the new Masters said as they trapped me here. The humans mustn’t know, they said.
Oh no, for look at what they did—thousands of mages, hunted down and burned at the stake.
Have the Masters condemned you too, boy?
I am the guardian of the gateway, and I…
Am I keeping you in or me out? Are you me, here to rescue us from this lonely existence?
Such loneliness they have doomed us to—”
“I seek a relic in this Realm.” Mal interrupted the demon before it could twist his mind with riddles. “A pocket watch that is more than it seems.”
The demon smiled a curious smile. “Ah. Your Master has sent you far. What will you give me in exchange for it?”
“Once I have the watch, I will leave this Realm, and you may return to your rest.”
The demon shook its head and tsked. “Not enough. No, no, no. More. Give me more.”
Mal withdrew a step at the ferocity of the demon’s words, nearing the edge of the steep ridgeline. “What would be enough?”
“Your face,” it hissed. “Give me your face.”
“No. I’m using it.”
“If not for taking, then for borrowing.” Its features warped, and Mal stared at his own gaunt reflection. The demon’s maniacal laugh fired off from the bastardization of Mal’s face. “A new face! Mine. Ah yes, yes, the places we shall go with our new face…”
Mal shuddered. What untold havoc could this creature wreak wearing his face? Fortunately, it was trapped within the prison of the mirror.
“And the pocket watch?”
Black eyes flashed from the hollows of the Mal-shaped face.
“Your Master promised us freedom. For that freedom, I shall give your Master the key to unlock the door of time.” Tauntingly, the demon held up a pocket watch, silver embedded with lapis lazuli, swinging it hypnotically on a chain. “Come, boy. Take it.”
With his portal magic and a sizable portion of skepticism, Mal reached his hand through the mirror to grasp the watch. His fingertips dipped through the warping glass, and wrongness shot through his veins. Before he could grasp the watch, the demon tugged it out of reach, cackling.
At the end of his patience and magic reserves, Mal lunged forward and wrenched the watch from the demon. Magic, dark and wrong, skittered up his arm as he withdrew it from the mirror.
The demon wearing his face smiled.
Mal should have fled then. Instead, he watched in horror as the demon’s illusioned face unzipped. From the hideous flaps emerged an abomination: the demon’s true face. Gray flesh melted and congealed on the exposed bones of its skull.
The demon reached a long, curling nail towards him.
Mal scurried backward as the demon began crawling through the mirror, lurching towards him with too long limbs.
Fear climbed between his bones, ossifying Mal in panic.
Trapped. He was trapped between the massive mirror and the harrowing cliff drops flanking him.
Mal jerked back when a spindly nail brushed him. He forced himself to concentrate enough to traverse away in one piece. Moments before the demon pulled itself out of the mirror and fell upon him, he traversed back to Dublin, the watch clutched in his shaking fist.
He collapsed in a panting heap on the warehouse floor. Shards of glass dug into his flesh from the broken mirror beneath him.
Kieran helped him to his feet. “Did you get it, mate?”
“Aye.” Mal held up the silver pocket watch. Too late he realized that his bare skin was touching the watch. Mal felt nothing but a faint current of the dark magic slumbering within it. He turned the watch over in his palm. On its face, the hands pointed at archaic symbols rather than numbers.
It was a countdown, he realized. But a countdown to what? Whatever it was, it ended tomorrow, on August 6.
Paper crinkled in his pocket. The ivory stationery, now blank. Mal should drop off the strange watch at the memorized address, collect his payment, and forget about the demon in the mirror. If only his hands would stop shaking.
Surely Janus didn’t expect to have the watch by the end of the day. Mal would deliver it in the morning.
After that harrowing foray into the Demon Realm, he required better protection.
At Kieran’s recommendation, Mal stopped at a Dublin tattoo parlor where the Phytomancer artist used enchanted ink to imbue his flesh with magic.
Mal got a rune tattoo to protect against every demon he had encountered thus far.
The illusion demon wearing his face. The plant demon who had strangled Mal with his vicious, enchanted vines on a job in South America.
And the memory demon Mal had summoned to forget his father, long ago.
On his upper back the Phytomancer tattooed a Celtic rune for protection against memory demons. The needle seeped more than ink into Mal. The thing on the tip of his tongue, nagging at the back of his mind for a decade, emerged at last.
Colleen.
Sweet merciful Jesus, he had forgotten her.
Moneta had taken the memory of the woman he’d nearly married in exchange for sparing his siblings’ worst memories of their father.
A decade ago, Mal had abandoned his presumed bride-to-be in a city she’d never wanted to be in. Christ, what had become of her?
Devastation and guilt warred within him. The bittersweetness of those forgotten memories as they rushed back had not been tempered by time. They ached like heartburn.
He was compelled to seek Colleen out, with his upper back and conscience stinging from the returned memories. Even if he couldn’t bring himself to regret leaving her, he regretted the way it happened. Now he’d finally do right by her.
His youngest sister Katie, bursting with excitement at her upcoming fifteenth birthday, informed him that Colleen was living in their old village with her new family.
Before handing over the peculiar watch and gathering his payment, Mal traversed back to the village he had not stepped foot in years.
Seeing the potato blight’s impact on Dublin did not prepare Mal for the tragedy awaiting him back in County Cork.
Famine had ravaged their homes, hollowed their bodies.
Looking around the hellscape, filled with ghosts of the people he had grown up with, he couldn’t help but wonder if Moneta had not done him a favor.