Somewhere Gray

He hadn’t meant to close his eyes, but when they fluttered open again he was already gone. There was no sort of sensation to accompany the transition. No sense of sliding, no pain, just a bright, white light that burned his pupils and made him cover his face before the whole thing faded out.

He felt the breath rush away from him, tearing from his lungs and forming a cloud in the crisp air. This time he didn’t try to take it back in—not to salvage that last bit before the wind snatched it away. He was empty then, and he was cold. This was the way it felt when the body became still and vacant; never the screaming, desperate clinging of a proper death. This end was slow and seeping. It numbed him from the core and left him shivering.

There was no bitter denial, no final attempt of the body to revive itself. That was because the body had fought its final battle long ago. This passing was only illusion, the experience of the imitation of life ceasing, the mask of a mortal soul being stripped away. He was laid bare, and there was nothing within him but blackness even deeper than the solace behind his still closed eyes.

After a moment, he looked out again, squinting at first until his became comfortable with the change. A dirt trail—a road—through the woods laid before and behind him. There was an eerie glow in the place, a grayish cast on everything that drained the color from what might have been a golden autumn scene. All was black and white, and shadows like smoke where reds and yellows of the changing season ought to have been. The dirt on the path was like ash, the trees, stripped of their foliage and left bleached as bones, stretching their skeleton fingers high into the haze of sky overhead. Leaves remained scattered on the ground, black as with rot and in various stages of decay.

A flurry of those leaves greeted him as they spiraled upward in a lazy cyclone and swept across the path. He had to stand for a moment to steady himself; to remind himself that by rights he belonged here, with the darkness and the dead things. There would be no leaving soon. He was not able to come and go as he pleased, for he was a captive spirit, and his every action was subject to the dictates of his mistress.

It seemed that bidding always involved this place; involved keeping him here as long as he could stand it. If history was any indication, he would remain here until his body roused in the morning. The waking world was his only escape.

So he began to walk. The road spanned miles of open woods, and he could follow it for hours. He walked with his head down. He knew the way, and there were any number of others who could be looking on.

Voices began whispering his name—calling out in their breathless voices—but he didn’t stop. There were more by the second, unseen spirits shouting. The leaves spun up in maelstrom, dancing in the air around him. He was determined to continue; it had never served him well to linger in one place. It was only when the leaves became a barrier and blocked him that he stood, and he watched the forms being cut through the wall with his wary, black eyes.

First it split in half, and each side shrunk and morphed into distinctly human shapes. Two men emerged from the flurry, both swathed in the blackness from which they had been birthed. They had long, ebony hair, and their faces were covered with black and white greasepaint. They circled him, grinning smiles full of sharp, rotting teeth and hollow mouths beyond. The remaining leaves drifted to the ground, unanimated once again.

It took only the pair of them to surround him. In an instant they were anywhere he could escape to. They moved as though they were without bodies—flowing from place to place with a quality of near fluidity. Though the two looked similar, and it would have been difficult to 

distinguish between them if not for the variations in face paint, he had no trouble. He knew this duo as the prankster devils who enjoyed playing tricks on those recently fallen. Hell’s two-man welcoming committee; and they took their job very seriously.

“Warren!” the one in front exclaimed. His hair was sheared in jagged lines at his shoulders, and his makeup was drawn in the smirking face of a Halloween jack o’ lantern. “Glad to have you back.” He was the more outspoken of the pair, and Warren had had more run-ins with him than he liked to recall.

Warren eyed him with contempt. “How is it, Tober, that you always manage to show up at the worst times?” Warren’s voice, too, was little more than a hoarse whisper, and the sound of it startled him. Another thing that took some getting used to. He blinked and Tober was behind him, leaning over his shoulder to murmur in his ear,

“Chalk it up to love,” and he grinned.

Tober’s cohort had hair a few inches longer, and his visage was divided into four quarters, one set of diagonals filled in with white, the other with black. His name was Linux, and he had always been more Tober’s sidekick than his equal. Besides being less talkative, Linux gave off the impression of being average at best in intelligence. Average or not, he only spoke to Tober, and he did so now with giddy enthusiasm.

“Ask him,” Linux panted, “ask him about the mortals.”

Tober arched an eyebrow and turned his gaze from Linux to Warren. “Oh, that’s right! Your little band of other-worldlings with the save the world complex!” Another blink and he was a few feet in front of Warren, one arm across his chest, picking at his fingernails. He raised his eyes without lifting his head, and smiled. “How’s that working for you?”

Warren moved forward and started to try to walk past Tober. Linux was there immediately, of course, shaking his head with snort of amusement. Trapped again, Warren settled back. “Fine,” he replied grudgingly.

“No use in running off,” Tober commented. He and Linux had switched positions so that Warren was once again facing the jack o’ lantern. “There’s nowhere for you to go.” He turned sharply and nodded to the path ahead. “Nothing down there but darkness…” His eyes pointed over Warren’s shoulder to the opposite end of the road. “And we can’t go far that way.”

Warren followed his gaze, though he knew the trail as well as Tober did. The world they inhabited was a middle path, a place of shadows reserved for those who could find no rest in the destinations the road laid between. They were wandering souls, covering the short distance they were allotted over and again. Nothing changed. It was the same today as it had been a thousand years before, as it would be a thousand years from now.

He had been here long enough to have walked as far as he could go on either side. It was in the darkness that he had first been found, not by Tober and Linux, by something much more menacing. There had been a day when he had gazed through the very gates of Hell and had them opened to him. It had been a woman standing there, and she had smiled so coldly.

She put him in chains and brought him back here, placed him in her servitude for the remainder of his eternity. He had been a much different man then, one too newly fallen to see the truth behind the lies she told him. That had been nearly three hundred years ago.

He still wore the marks of his enslavement: broad, black bands tattooed around each wrist. They were present no matter what form or body he was in. Anyone he inhabited, sported the distinctive cuffs for the time he was within them, and he took them with him when he moved on. They were the ever-present reminder of his status in the afterlife.

“I don’t think he likes us,” Linux whined, drawing Warren from his thoughts.

Warren was grateful for the reprieve. Being in this place always brought bad memories to mind.

Tober was not as oblivious as his counterpart when it came to Warren’s mental state. His eyes narrowed as he inspected Warren, and he rocked back on his heels to consider what he observed. “That’s not true,” he said by way of Linux. “He doesn’t mind us one bit.” He probed a bit deeper into Warren’s gaze, staring unflinchingly until Warren looked away.

The sign of discomfort confirmed Tober’s suspicion. He nodded. “She is looking for you, you know,” he said softly.

Warren’s glare snapped back. “Who is?”

A laugh—such an eerie sound, to laugh with no voice—and Tober replied haughtily, “As if you don’t know.” His expression was far too smug, and it drove Warren to irritation that the other spirit had read him so easily.

“Our Lady Mavrah,” Linux chimed eagerly. He snickered. “She’s not happy.”

Warren set his jaw. Tober and Linux were hardly worth his aggravation, but better to show them that his unease. “Did she send you two to tell me that?” he retorted sharply.

“Oh, no,” Tober chuckled. “You’re far more the queen’s messenger boy than we are.” He nodded to Warren’s wrists. “She’s even got you on a leash.”

Warren scowled and tried to hide his hands, but his attempts only humored Tober and Linux. He said nothing, though, because the only response he could have given was denial, and they all knew he couldn’t do that.

“Just thought we’d brighten your day,” Tober concluded. He had recovered from his laughter and turned a taunting face to Warren when he asked, “Isn’t it nice to be wanted?”

Linux was still giggling. “She wants your head,” he agreed, “and she’ll have it. The queen always gets what she wants.” He grinned until a pile of leaves blew up behind him and skittered down the path. Then his expression went slack. He glanced about quickly.

Tober, too, stopped and looked down the direction the leaves had blown.

Linux appeared to be in a panic, and his voice scratched out, “Time to go.” His head snapped a dozen different directions; everything was suspect. The trees, even the sky, and he backed away from it all and toward the woods. Another instant and he was among the trees. With a final cagey glance, he disappeared into the trunk of a tree, safe from the source of his fear.

Tober’s confident smile returned and he flashed it at Warren. “Here she comes,” he said, and those words were more than enough to explain Linux’s ready exit. If Tober was concerned, he didn’t show it. He did, however, wink at Warren and add, “Good luck.” Before Warren could react, Tober let himself fall backward. He never hit the ground, but instead fell through it without a sound.

Warren was alone again, but this time was different in that he didn’t dare walk. He had no desire to hurry the confrontation, and if he was caught in the appearance of running away, it would only complicate the situation further. So he stood in place and waited, checking repeatedly over his shoulder for fear of being sneaked up on.

Her goal was not to startle him. That was made plain shortly after Tober’s departure. All was silent for a number of seconds with only the rustling leaves to break the stillness. Warren was tense with anticipation, and though very little time passed in those moments, the delay was still maddening to him.

A voice—not a whisper—echoed to his ears from down the path. Out of the darkness a child was singing, “Ring around the rosie, a pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down….”

Warren shuddered. He turned his eyes down the path and saw her coming. It struck him first that she was not in the form he was most familiar with. A little girl, instead, skipping toward him, her hands clasped behind her back and her curly hair tied up in ribbons. Blue ribbons, and that was the second thing. As she drew nearer, still skipping, not acknowledging him, he could see that her puffy, satin dress was of the palest shade of blue. She was fittingly cast in grayscale, not immune to that effect of the world, but her ribbons, her dress, and her wide eyes were color perfect.

She skipped right up to him, still singing softly. “Ring around the rosie, a pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes,” her tempo began to slow, reminiscent of a music box in need of winding, “we all… fall….”

She was directly before him then, and she gazed up at him with her azure eyes. She smiled the way only a child could. When she spoke it was not with the final word to the rhyme, rather a thinly-veiled reprimand.

“I’ve heard some very naughty things about you, Warren,” she cooed. Her voice was quiet, but even that seemed loud to Warren’s ears already accustomed to the breathy silence. “Say they aren’t so.”

Warren wanted to recoil from her, but he would not provoke her. Instead, he turned his head away from her and replied stubbornly, “I don’t know what you’ve heard.”

It didn’t matter where he moved or looked to, she was there. This time was different, however, in that she did not stir, he did. His head was inexplicably rotated back to her. His expression showed his surprise, but hers was only a perceptive smile and a giggle.

“A little birdie told me that you had the wizard boy make you a body.” Her eyes were wide and would have appeared so innocent had they not been set in that face. “But you wouldn’t do anything like that,” she murmured. She wasn’t asking. She was telling. Telling him that surely he wouldn’t do such a thing because he knew what would happen if he did; telling him that no one would be that foolish.

He met her gaze unsure of what to say. As he watched, her form morphed and stretched upward into the shape of a young woman a few years older than Warren. Her black hair fell down and cascaded in waves across her bare shoulders. Her dress transformed into a skimming blue gown that rose just above her breasts and followed the curves of her body all the way to the floor. There was a sapphire pendant set in silver resting between her collarbones, and her cerulean eyes became suddenly piercing.

Her voice remained soft, and she seemed surprisingly nonchalant as she said, “You’re a silly boy, Warren, for thinking I wouldn’t notice.” She strolled across the path before him, unclasping her hands and letting them fall to her sides. She stopped in her stride and glanced back at him. “That is what you thought, isn’t it? That you could get away with it?” She awaited his reply; an answer he was unwilling to give. There was no purpose. It was too late to save himself whatever retribution she had in store.

Still, he held her eyes. There was hesitancy in the downward slant of his head, but his voice remained steady. “I didn’t think it mattered,” he whispered.

In that moment she was a breath away from him, her hand raised to strike him. She stopped the blow before it touched him, but her angry words fell out unchecked. “Don’t lie to me,” she spat, her eyes narrowed. She held that pose for a brief second, then her face relaxed, and she smiled. The back of her fingers brushed his cheek, and when he tried to withdraw, he found his back against a tree, and she was standing in front of him, smiling at his attempt to escape.

“Of course it matters,” she continued, as though her outburst of rage had never occurred. “You’re such a pretty thing, Warren,” she said, “Have I ever told you that?” She put her fingertips to his hair—drained of its natural auburn color since his arrival—smoothing it down with an eerie tenderness. “I much prefer you this way. Far better than that flesh cage you’ve locked yourself inside….” She trailed off and became contemplative as she added, “It almost feels like you’re hiding from me.”

Warren watched her features as they ran the gamut of emotions. The cycle began with a thoughtful sadness, then anger flickered through. Anger was followed by happiness—some sort of fiendish delight—and in all that time she never looked quite human.

The transition from happiness to realization was a brief one. The thrill of discovery that had prompted her excitement was usurped by recognition of the connotations of that discovery. “It’s because of them, isn’t it?” she demanded, and her words spoken so loudly caused Warren to wince.

She backed away and started pacing, the satin of her gown flowing with every motion. “Do they matter so much to you?” she snarled at length. “That you would risk your life for their sakes?” She was on a rampage, and Warren knew that it would not serve him well to interrupt. She did not want his answers. “You think they’ll help you,” she declared, and she spun around on him. “Free you? Why?” She was before him again, shouting in his face. “Why them?”

When he did not reply, she proceeded with fervor. “It has been three hundred years, Warren, and no one, in all that time, has found you worth the trouble of saving. Not a one!” She caught him under the chin and jerked his head up to meet her gaze. “Do you want to know why?” she sneered. “Because you’re nothing!” and she shoved him away.

The tree was gone, and Warren staggered and fell back and away from her. Tears burned his eyes because he knew the truth in her words. It was a truth that terrified him with the possibility that three hundred years were but a fraction of the time he had left, and that he would find himself here again in another three hundred years. That was why she had chosen him those centuries ago; she had known that he had no one to save him.

He was angry, too, and it was anger that drove him to speak. “Why do you care?” he asked, and his voice nearly broke. “Am I forbidden to have the least bit of happiness?” It was clear that his demanding words were upsetting her, but he continued despite her persistent glare. “Even then,” he could feel the tears hot and searing on his cheeks, “a hundred years and it will be gone….”

She had backed away from him, but he appealed to her as he slowly stood. “I will remain.” That declaration seemed to sap the last of his conviction, and the rest of his words flooded out like those of a man already defeated. “Nothing but a passing joy even in that. You ought to be pleased. It will only hurt me more in the end.”

Everything about him was the picture of a broken spirit. After three centuries, he still resisted, but they both knew that she would win, and the longer he delayed the more severe the eventual punishment would be. So he fought back, but it was with a bitter sense of loss that commanded his very aspect.

She eyed him intently, and while retaliation would have been the typical response, she instead countered with a question. “Why is it happiness you desire the most?” Her brow was furrowed with what might have been genuine concern. “Have I not made you happy? I have given you the power to inhabit any body you choose. Don’t you think that’s more than generous?” This time she did want an answer. She wanted him to agree that she was a good and fair mistress, and he was undeserving of her kindness.

He couldn’t. He wouldn’t lie for her satisfaction. “But it’s none of it mine!” he insisted. “Even when I leave them I cannot get away.” He shook his head, trying to make her understand. “They haunt me!”

Warren had heard stories about other dybbuks, older than he was now, who eventually lost themselves completely. They became trapped in a body they possessed and were overtaken. He believed it. There was a gradual accumulation of thoughts and memories, likes and dislikes. Whole lives could be pieced together from the fragments he was left with. There were parts of his own life that he could not recall, and passing thoughts that he could not identify as his own or the byproduct of a shared consciousness.

He could not begin to fathom how many minds he had occupied in three hundred years, but he knew that each one of them remained, and the longer he continued this way the greater his chances were of someday slipping away like others had before him.

For all the regard she may have felt before, she imparted none this time. “That is what you are!” she exclaimed. “A haunt! A spirit! A ghost! You have nothing because you are nothing. And you shan’t have this, either.”

Warren felt an object appear in his palm, and he nearly dropped it with the shock of its arrival. He looked down warily and saw that he was holding a knife.

Mavrah spoke from across the lane with undeniable authority. “I want you to destroy it.”

He had known this was coming. It was inevitable that he would lose—the argument itself as well as the object of it. What he had not expected was that she would force the task on him. Her taking it away was entirely different than he himself committing the deed. His eyes fell to the dagger he clutched, and his hand trembled.

It was the same knife. The blade that had killed him once, three centuries before, was in his hand again. His mouth fell open, wanting to ask how she had brought the hideous thing here. The blade that would have been the instrument of Isobel’s survival had been tainted as the object of her demise as well as Warren’s own. When he looked to her for the answer to the unspoken question, she had a look of dire necessity, but no explanation was offered.

Warren let the dagger fall from his fingers. “No,” he said, and he stepped back from it. “You may take it, but I will not.” Tears were still brimming his eyes, but he quickly wiped them away. “I am no murderer.”

She closed the space between them, and the sting of her hand on his cheek snapped his head to the side. “You are whatever I will you to be!” she roared. As Warren recovered from the blow, her features relaxed into a matronly look.

“I only wish your happiness, as I always have,” she explained. “And I will do whatever is necessary to ensure that happiness.”

Warren met her near condescending gaze and made a final plea. “Mavrah, I beg of you—”

“Enough!” she shrieked. With a flick of her wrist, she threw him against a tree. “I have heard all I care to on this matter!” She was holding him there, pinned in place by some invisible force that seemed to pull on him from behind. The tree took on an energy of its own, like it was drawing its strength from inside of Warren. He felt nauseated and dizzy, and the force weakened as he felt his body slide to the ground.

“I will warn you only once:” Mavrah was saying, “if we begin down this path I will not stop until you have done as I command.” She looked to him, and her expression urged him to end this before it began.

Warren shook his head. As much as he wanted to stay down and rest, he forced himself to his feet. “You may take it,” he repeated, speaking slowly until he regained his equilibrium, “but why should I?” Tears were streaking his face; tears of frustration, tears of loss. In a moment, tears of agony would overcome them both.

Mavrah just sighed and shook her head. She opened her hand and let a matte black whip unfurl. “I’m sorry, but you’ve brought this on yourself.”

(Cut away, insert short scene or another chapter)

The whip had been discarded sometime along the way, but not before doing its share of damage. Warren’s neck was rubbed raw from an occasion when the leather had been wrapped around his throat and pulled tight. He was cut but he did not bleed. He couldn’t bleed, not in this form, but somewhere not too far away, an unconscious body was soaking the bed sheets with red. But he didn’t need to show the wounds to feel them. His skin was afire with the stinging, burning of rent flesh, and every other tear that fell sizzled in a colorless gash.

She had invaded his mind now, when he was far too weak to resist her. There was an immense pressure building in his head. Throbbing, pulsing, pushing against its skeletal confines and there was nothing he could do to alleviate it. This new kind of pain had assaulted him when he was on his knees, and it had driven him to the ground.

Mavrah stood over him, her face contorted with her wrath, blue eyes narrowed on his huddled form. She could have stopped his suffering, but instead she goaded it on until he cried out.

He was blind for a moment, so intense was the pain, and he curled himself even closer as though that could somehow protect him from her fury. He was quivering from the tension in his body, and his thoughts were swimming with her repeated promise: “I will not stop until you do as I command.”

He saw the knife—within his reach—before the pain intensified to an impossible level. Every muscle in his body convulsed in that instant and he nearly choked on a sob. He was ready then, and she knew it.

“Are you not mine to command?” Her voice echoed in his ears, her question scarcely registered. She circled him, every bit the predator, and he the weakened prey. He did not reply quickly enough for her taste, so she stopped and seized a handful of his hair, using it to drag his head upward to meet her glare.

She demanded it of him then, and Warren knew that even if he could find a way to manage this degree of agony, he could not withstand it till morning. “Are you not mine to command?”

It was with tear-swallowed sobs that he replied, “Yes….”

Mavrah let his head fall back between his hands. She kicked the knife the short distance to him and stood back with her arms barred across her chest. “Then kill it,” she said resolutely, “and do it now.”

Warren never felt himself take the knife in hand and bury it to the hilt in his own chest. He didn’t realize he had left the shadow lands until the pain began to subside and his posture shifted to a crouched position in the corner of his bedroom. He was still crying, still quivering as Mavrah’s clutches slowly released him. There were far too many tears to wipe away, and he did not look up until the throbbing in his skull had muted to a dull ache.

He was outside of the body, and that was how he truly knew the deed had been done. It was with a good deal of hesitance that he rose, and a sense of dread pervaded him as he neared the bed to inspect the now empty shell.

The face alone was at peace, as though it was unaware of the havoc that had been wreaked on the rest of the form. There was blood everywhere, pouring out of trailing lacerations as well as from the corpse’s nostrils and ears.

And that, my dear, is where I shall leave you! Have fun!

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