The Death Seer (Skeleton Key) (10 page)

I squeezed my eyes shut and held my breath.

“Better ways to go than that,” came a voice.
 

For a moment, it didn’t register. It seemed as though it had come from a great distance and possibly somewhere imaginary. But it was enough to freeze my motion—it
was
my motion after all. The swamp hadn’t risen, rather I’d slowly leaned into it. I opened my eyes and looked up. In the dull glow of the soul-lights I saw a man in brown pants and a billowy white shirt with a cloak of leather and fur over his shoulders. His beard was long and his face craggy, but his hair was a youthful brown. “Who are you?” I whispered.

“Name’s Grim. Who are you?”

“Brenna.”

He shrugged. “Name don’t mean nothing to me. But, like I said, there’s better ways to go than that. I’m headed there, in fact. Nothing left for me here, and I sure don’t want to end up like these poor saps. You know what happens if you go under that water?”

I shook my head.

“You live in a nightmare for eternity. Always cold. Always aching. Always frightened and hopeless. You don’t want that, do you?”

I shook my head again.
 

“Then come with me, Brenna. I’ll show you the way out.” He extended his hand.
 

I took it and let him pull me to my feet, though the effort was massive, as though gravity was fighting tooth and nail to keep me down. He kept hold of my hand once I was up and pulled me toward…toward wherever it is he was going. I, for one, could see no end or beginning to this place.
 

After a while, his hand began to feel comfortable. Safe. I started to think that perhaps this man could help me. Perhaps not all was lost. That’s when my feet hit dry land for the first time. “Atta girl,” he said. “Didn’t take you long at all.”

I looked around. The swamp was right behind me, only a few steps away. But I was dry and beginning to warm. “Keep moving forward, girl,” he said, tugging at my hand.
 

I looked forward and up and up at a massive wall that disappeared into the darkness above. “What is this?” I asked.

“Door to the end of the world. Only us reapers know about it. Come along.”

I followed him to the black rock. I trusted him when he led me straight forward and into it, into yet another invisible door. On this side of it was a tunnel lit with torches, just wide enough for the two of us to walk side-by-side. “This is the end of the world?”

“The tunnel that leads to the end of the world. You just follow me. It’s a bit of a hike, but we’ll get there.”

“And then what?”

“And then we feed ourselves to the serpent.”

Now that I was out of the swamp, I was having difficulty remembering why I wanted to feed myself to the serpent. “Will it hurt?”

“Don’t know. But if it does, it’ll only be for a moment. And then blissful oblivion.”

“We’ll cease to exist? Completely?”

“Completely. No more rebirths. No more following the cycle of life like a reed caught in a water wheel. Just nothingness.”

“Rebirths? Like, reincarnation?”

“Maybe. It’s more like your energy flowing in and out of life. But think about it. Each time you’re born, you must grow up knowing you’ll die and not knowing what will happen on the other side of that death and living with that constant fear. And then when you do die, what do you get? Life as an ancestor in a poor copy of what you had before. Unless you’re one of the lucky ones gets a trip to paradise. And regardless, us reapers don’t even get the momentary joy of a fleeting life. Now that Father Death’s gone missing, we don’t even get the satisfaction of doing our job. Nope, I’m done with it all. I hope the serpent turns and devours the whole world. What’s the point of it all?”

I’d quit listening at some point and was thinking of all those adventures Kord talked about us having. When it came down to it, I didn’t actually remember the specifics of those pretend games, only that we’d pretended. Maybe he was really remembering lives…many different lives in which the two of us continued to find each other and fall in love, over and over.

The tunnel suddenly forked. I looked to the left and saw a path that led to an open cavern. The cavern was glowing, and from the edge of it that was in my view, I saw that the glow came from candles—dozens of them on the floor along the edge of the wall, nestled in hollows and on ledges of the rock wall. “What’s that?”

“Never you mind. This is our path.” He pulled me to the right and into the darkness.

“What was that place?”

“Death’s house. He ain’t there, though.”

“The lights were on.”

“They always are.”

We kept walking into the blackness, but soon there was a red glow in the distance. My blood rose at the sight of it. My breaths came in short, panicked bursts. If I ended, Kord would never be loved again. If the cycle of life repeatedly brought us together, that meant we were eternally connected. If I took myself out of the equation, what would happen to him? His whole life would be a swamp of despair. Or an endless life of false hope.

The red glow grew bigger and the man next to me let out a mad, triumphant laugh. We were approaching the end of the tunnel, and when we got there, he pulled me to an abrupt halt. The tunnel ended with a sheer drop into a black cavern, but the red glow, it came from…a tree.

In the center of an endless black cavern, larger than a mountain, rose the trunk of a red, glowing tree. It went higher than I could see, and if it had branches, they were beyond this place. Its roots reached everywhere, sinking into the cavern, and into the rock walls. As I looked down, I saw that what I’d taken to be a black emptiness was actually something else. Something that moved. Water perhaps? A black water that the tree roots drank from.

“Serpent!” the man bellowed.

The black water moved. Swirled. Not water at all, but the coils of a snake that was as large as a city. The coils rotated, and the earth let out a deep and mournful groan, straining against the motion of the serpent. There was a sudden rush of air, the hot hiss of the snake as its head suddenly appeared, its jaws gaping open right beneath us.

“Come!” the man shouted with a triumphant laugh. He bent his knees to jump, his hand still gripping mine.

“Wait!” I shrieked. “How do you know?”

He turned and frowned at me. “How do I know what, girl?”

“How do you know this will be the end? How do you know you won’t go on living, being digested eternally by this thing?”

His frown deepened. “That’s impossible.”

I laughed like a crazy person. “How can you live in this place and say that anything is impossible? Is this really a risk you want to take?”

“Everyone knows if the serpent eats you, you end.”

“Maybe you don’t. Maybe your energy lives on somehow. Maybe the serpent feeds you into that tree there and you find yourself back in the cycle of life. You don’t know! Not for sure!”

For a moment, doubt clouded his eyes. His grip on my hand loosened and his shoulders sank.
 

I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when he stiffened again, squeezed my hand, and said, “No. It ends.”

I was already pulling my hand away when he leapt, but he was too strong. I screamed as I went over the edge with him, reaching out in desperation with my one free hand. For a moment I thought I was dead. But shooting pain in my shoulder brought me back, and I looked up to see my fingers curled desperately over the rock ledge.
 

The pain had come from my other shoulder. The man clung to my hand, roaring at me to let go. My shoulder was out of its socket and I was screaming and crying. His hand was slipping, but so was mine. I trapped my cries between clenched teeth, channeling my energy to the fingers clinging to the rock, desperate for them to hold on just a second or two longer than the man.
 

He slipped. His scream ended when the serpent’s jaws snapped shut.
 

My relief at being free was short-lived. My arm hung there, my shoulder in excruciating pain, and my fingers were still slipping. I cried out like a woman in labor as I began the slow process of lifting my injured arm. I brought it round to the rock at about waist level and used my fingers to crawl it slowly up the cliff face, crying the whole time. When it was close to the edge, I used all my energy to push it the rest of the way up in a short burst that popped my shoulder back into place. I screamed through the pain and latched onto the ledge, strengthening my grip with the other hand.
 

It seemed like it should be over. Like I’d done enough and should be rewarded with rest and care. But it wasn’t over. A heat warmed my feet, and when I chanced a glance down, I blackness framed by the gaping maw of the serpent. I dug the toes of my sneakers against the rock wall searching for a nook or indentation to leverage myself up with. My arms were too weak, I couldn’t pull myself all the way up.
 

The rock face was smooth. My fingers slipped a little further with each attempt to kick my way up. I wasn’t going to make it. I wept for my loss, my last moments spent in regret. My fingers slipped.

My eyes were squeezed shut, naturally, bracing for the fall that never came. I opened them slowly. Two strong hands had closed about my wrists. When I looked up, I saw myself staring back, my reflection in Kord’s sunglasses. He wasn’t smiling. A vein strained in his forehead as he pulled me up the rock face. He dragged me over the edge and into the cavern just as a rush of hot air hit my back. Blackness closed over the cavern mouth, the serpent coiling against it. I kicked my way backwards, but there was no danger, it was too large to fit into the tunnel.

“Come on,” Kord said, pulling me to my feet. I winced when he pulled on my right arm, the one with the injured shoulder.
 

“I’m sorry—”

“Don’t. Let’s just go.”

He took my left hand and pulled me back the way I’d come with Grim.
 

As we passed by Death’s house, now on my right, I dug my heels in. “Wait. I wanna see what’s in there.”

“What? Come on, Brenna, let’s get somewhere safe.”

“This is Death’s house. Maybe he left behind something that will tell us where he went.”

Kord wasn’t budging. I pulled my hand free and entered the room. It was more than a room, though. It opened into a vast cave with uneven flooring and shelves carved into the walls. The cave twisted into hallways beyond my sight. And on every shelf, in every crevice, along every edge of flooring were candles. All different heights of candles, all lit and glowing. Some looked tall and brand new. Some were shorter, with globs of wax that had melted and congealed down the sides. I stepped closer to a crevice where one candle was about to burn out. Its flame dimmed, holding on to the little bit of wick left. Slowly it faded and ended, a wisp of black smoke wafting off the top.
 

Looking around I saw that there were lots of burnt-out candle bases scattered amidst the lit ones. I reached out to pick up one of the candles.

“Don’t.”

I felt Kord’s heat near my back. “We could light our way with it.”

“That’s not what it’s for.”

“What’s it for, then?”

“Can’t you see for yourself?”

I looked around, at first unsure of what he was saying. Then I spotted them. Two candles lying on the floor. They still had wax, they could still burn. But they’d been knocked off, somehow, and were unlit. It took seeing those two candles for me to understand what this room was. I backed slowly toward the entrance, holding my breath, careful not to bump any of the candles. “Okay,” I said to Kord. “Let’s go.”

He took my hand again and led me back through the cavern. We didn’t speak, not until we stepped out into the open. The red sky was dark, fully night, now.
 

“Maybe we should sleep in the cave,” I said. I turned to face him. His sunglasses were still on, his eyes turned up to the sky. “Kord? Maybe we should sleep in the cave unless you think we can get back to the Weird Sisters’ house safely.”

He turned to me, then, and though I couldn’t see his eyes, the set of his jaw and the thin line of his lips were indicators enough of his anger. “I don’t know how to get back to the Weird Sisters because I don’t know where I am.”

I still wore my backpack. I slung it onto the ground. “Let me get the map and you can—”

“It’s my map. I made that map as a child as I navigated this world. I’ve never been here, therefore it won’t be on the map, therefore the map is useless.”

I stood up and lifted my chin. “Obviously you’re angry at me.”

His eyebrows went up. “That’s an understatement. You couldn’t respect my wishes and stay put for one night?”

“It was late. I thought if you were coming back, then I’d meet you on the road. If you weren’t coming back, then you needed my help.”

He licked his lips, opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “You should have trusted me. I’ve been to the swamp many times. You haven’t. What the hell made you think you could do anything to help me?”

“I was worried about you.”

“You should have worried about yourself, Brenna!”