Chương 23: Chapter Twenty-Three: In Which She Finally Sees the Stars

When she twisted and slashed the knife across it, she knew the Shade would not disperse but she had hoped that it would take longer to reform. The light from the lantern four feet away was not strong enough to even slow down its regeneration. It needed longer than four feet's worth of sideways-thrown lamplight to come apart. She dragged herself toward the lantern. The Shade did not release her ankle.

It moved with her, and she had pulled it two feet toward the lantern circle when she stopped, turned around and slashed through its fog-like body again. The greater light exposure worked better this time. It took longer to reform, long enough for her to pull her foot away from its teeth. The cold in her ankle did not stop when she was freed.

Two Flickers came in while she was getting upright, or more accurately attempting it, the marsh was wet and her hands were bleeding from the rope cut and the ankle was not cooperating. She got to one knee. The first Flicker came in fast and low and she caught it with the lantern, which was not elegant but effective. Direct contact with the lit glass and it screamed and came apart in her hands.

The second she managed to move her other knee, she slashed with her knife the other jumping Flicker, faster than the first time. That only slowed it down but with the light so close, it didn't take much time for it to disperse. The rest of the demons were a different problem. Especially the Lurker among them. This wasn't going to go well. Alice tried anyway. That was the only thing she could say for what she did next: she tried.

She slashed at the nearest oncoming Shade and the motion cost her balance and she went back to her knee in the wet grass, and the sounds hit her like a physical thing. Not the Flickers specifically, nor the Shades, but all of them at once. Dozens of shapes swarming at the edges of the lantern's reach, clicking and chittering and making sounds that were not quite any she could explain, high and low simultaneously, the kind of noise that bypassed the ears and landed somewhere further in.

The inside of her skull felt full of it. She shook her head and it did not help. The largest among them, the Lurker, did not rush her. It came slowly, and it hit her with the side of itself, a battering-ram impact that knocked her off the knees and into the grass and left her looking at the sky. She tried to stand and got the knife up when it hit her again, her wrist spraining from how it caught on the ground. She cursed and realized then that it was not trying to kill her quickly.

She got up a third time, because what other choice did she have? Lay down and wait for death? She barely managed and it knocked her down a third time and this time it bit her shoulder, sharp uncountable teeth lodging deep into her flesh, spanning wider than any bite had a right to. The pain was sharp but short, for the cold came fast. Faster than from the ankle.

The Shade bite had been gradual, a slow spreading that she'd been managing against the edge of her awareness, but this was immediate, a wave of it from the shoulder down through her arm and across her chest, and her fingers on the knife loosened of their own accord. She switched hands, before she could drop it. She was slower and less certain with her left but she did not have much of a choice. The eyes of many, many demons, watched her struggle to keep herself steady as the Lurker played with her.

Then something giggled. Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. She froze, just as the Lurker did. A sweet, high sound, almost childlike, that had come from the back of the horde just before everything had moved at once. The Lurker let go and stepped back. It did so without looking at her, moving six feet to the left and back. It stood still and the giggle came again, closer, from the darkness behind the lantern's reach.

When she was able to make out its form, she noticed that the Hollow was doorway-height and broad and liquid at the far edge of the light. When it stepped into the circle of the lantern, she realized she was wrong, just as its shape was wrong in ways she couldn't fully describe, as if trying to explain meant trying to understand what the darkness looked like in the outline of a person. It moved through the lantern's circle with barely a pause.

Desperate, and with barely a full thought in her head, she tightened her grip on the knife. Once it was within reach, she spoke, and it was barely heard over the sound of its giggles, "Strike." [Strike] – Active. The hit landed onto its side, into something that was not quite solid and not quite nothing, and the Hollow giggled loudly, voice turning into a childish screech in her ears. It easily ignored the knife and dropped onto the ground on all fours, its body folding in half and made fully of teeth.

Alice couldn't move her hand back, the knife stuck on something slimy and cold, darkness coiling quickly around her hand like tentacles. It looked at her paralyzed leg, slow and amused. Then, it bit. Not a sound escaped her at first. She had been bitten plenty of times now. By Flickers, by Boggarts, by Shades. But it hadn't been like this. Cold and darkness and something consuming, all at once, not just breaking bone and tissue, but tearing it apart, blood spurting instantly.

Alice watched as her leg, severed from the knee down, was consumed by the darkness bit by bit, and the pain arrived somewhere beyond what she could comprehend and her voice came out of her before she could even think. Alice screamed. The sound of it in the open marsh surprised her even as she made it. She had never screamed like this before, in this world or the other one, throaty and painful as she tried to move back, move away, just move!

The Hollow swallowed her leg whole, darkness barely stretching at the effort, shape unchanged. She only stopped screaming because she needed to breathe and she was going to need all of it. She was losing too much blood too fast. Between one blink and the next, she was face-down. She did not remember going face-down. Had she been slapped away? Her arm had gone cold from the shoulder bite and she could barely move it. The lantern was somewhere out of sight. The light it threw was not enough.

She had lost track of the knife. There was blood in the marsh grass near her face, dark and heavy with the scent of rust. Why, she thought, why like this? Her body was cold and wet, and her thoughts turned syrupy and hard to parse through. The Hollow circled her slowly as the rest of the Horde happily screeched and screamed. The Flickers and Shades had closed in completely now, a ring of them at the edge of the area around her that the Hollow had apparently claimed, waiting for whatever came next.

At some point, she counted four Lurkers. She may have miscounted, for the fear was too loud and the pain a constant. She tried to turn around, pushing back against the ground with her only good shoulder and somehow rolling on her back, her eyes catching a glimpse of the clear night sky. She wiggled her sprained wrist around the wet dirt, looking for anything solid, a stick, a twig, anything. Her fingers twitched in pain as they gripped a jagged rock, with some sharpness to it.

She dragged it between herself and the Hollow, and held it there, sharper edge directed up for one last strike. The stars shone so brightly in the absence of light pollution. She had lived almost thirty years in a city and barely seen them. She had meant to fix that from Lisbon, from somewhere with a beach and no reason to hurry. It had taken her a whole other life to finally see the stars clearly. The demon giggled as it stood above her, the darkness writhing in excited hunger. Then… all of a sudden, silence.

The clicking, the chittering, every impossible layered sound she had no word for, gone entirely at once. No screams, no growls, no giggles. She heard footsteps. Even, unhurried footsteps, coming from the direction of the city, as if someone were taking an evening walk at a leisurely pace through a marsh full of darkness and blood and several hundred demons.

"I did tell you," said a kind male voice, somewhere behind the ring of Flickers. It had a slight northern tilt, but gentle, always gentle, even in reproach.

"that the marshes were dangerous, Miss Darling."