THE EDGE OF NIGHT

The stars were liars. At least, that’s what her Da always said. But he was a liar too, so who knew what she could believe.

The girl sat with her eyes squeezed shut, counting backwards from one hundred the way Ma had taught her when she was alive. Before.

Ninety-seven.

The lights had gone out again. She clutched the carton of eggs more tightly to her chest, and in the sudden silence, heard one crack. Her breathing quickened and she felt alone despite the crowd in the square. If she squinted, she could just barely make out the faint outlines of nearby buildings, blacker than the darkness.

Sixty-three.

The ground rumbled beneath her with the force of the rushing river, and then finally the generator turned back on, groaning like a sleeping giant. The girl looked around her at the signs of relief, townspeople catching each other’s eyes with smiles as grey as their ashen faces. The lights had come back on. It was not the inevitable last time.

She looked down at the egg carton in her hands, mangled by fear. Two of the twelve had broken, and she and Da would not be able to request eggs again for two weeks. She had cost herself two meals, and likely a beating. Unwilling to return home, she followed the rumbling of the river through the twisting caves, her shadow stretched before her in the artificial light.

She approached the edge of town, passing the greenhouse at the outskirts. She paused at the shaft that would take her to the pipes and the generator, and peered down into the darkness. She’d never been past the generator to the river’s end. No one had. It was rumored that the stars could see you there, that there were grates in the top of the cavern they could peer through. It was where her Da said Ma was taken.

She got in the shaft and began the descent deeper.

She shuddered at the thought of the stars. It was the reason they lived underground, the reason she had never seen a tree or the ocean but for pictures. One star got too hot and burned its way to the surface, and now the rest of the fallen could follow, escaping the sky and stealing bodies on the ground. But that was a long time ago, and no one had been surface-side in over fifty years. It sounded like a fantasy world, and the girl wasn’t sure she believed the stars could hold that much power.

She peered up at the generator, now rumbling above her, shaking the rock beneath her feet. She took one step past it, then another one. No one cried out to stop her. She looked around her, and no one was looking in her direction, too busy patching holes to keep the water and sewage flowing.

She began to run.

The tunnel was rounded, and pipes ran all along its sides: ceramic, copper, and iron. She descended a set of staircases carved into the stone and felt as though she were standing in the bottom of a canyon. The deeper she went, the stranger things became. She found collapsed rooms full of rubble and mouldering chairs, large open caverns that reminded her of the cathedral in town – she even came to a room with the ceiling held aloft by great columns, pictures carved into their sides. In one, a young boy stood looking up at a star. In the next, the boy himself seemed to glow surrounded by five bodies without faces.

The girl shuddered and kept walking.

When the pipes and drains ended, so too did the light. She could still hear the roar of the river, and the rocks were slick when she approached its edge. She hesitated at the last reaches of light, not brave enough to go beyond it. When she looked up, she saw an iron grate and slivers of the sky between the bars.

These were the grates her Da warned her about, but she didn’t understand how they could exist so deep below the ground. She was not yet at the river’s end. The sky above her was an orange hue, heralding dusk, and the clouds towed evening behind them. She had learned that people could once tell time and direction by the light of the stars. Now they had candles and knots, and the lights shut off between 10 and 7 every night.

She took a step back into the safety of the light.

“I could protect you.”

A man’s voice slithered from the darkness, barely audible over the roar of the river. A crater nested just before the river’s edge, beyond the last reaches of light, too modest to hide a full-grown man. The girl crept closer, hesitant on the rock this close to the river’s edge, and peered into the crater’s shadows.

“Protect me from what?” the girl shouted, to scare off the encroaching darkness.

There was no reply. But the silence was more than silence; there was a heaviness to it that reminded the girl of her Da’s anger and the impending threat of the belt. The water glistened on the stones, and she crouched low to avoid falling into its rush. Suddenly, a soft glow began to emit from within the crater.

As she got closer, she saw a small orb full of tiny holes sitting in the center, milky white and glowing a brilliant white-blue. The crater around it looked charred, and when she touched the orb, it burnt her hand. Wires slithered out from the holes like centipede legs. She yelped, startled, and pulled her hand back, almost slipping from the stone.

The same voice came from the glowing orb, and had a raspy quality that hinted at world-weariness. “It requires sacrifice.” The girl stared at it, very much at a loss.

The orb stayed silent, but she could hear it breathing. “What do you mean?” she finally asked.

Nothing.

 She tried again. “Have you seen the river’s end?”

“It is where night hides when the day chases it from the sky.” This time the voice was softer, kinder. “Would you like to go?”

The girl assuredly did not.

“I have to get home to Da,” she said instead, not that the idea appealed to her much.

The orb hissed, and lost some of its glow. “Take me with you,” it suggested.

The girl reached out to the orb, more hesitant this time, and while it was quite warm, she could pick it up if she wrapped it in her sleeve. The wires stayed inside.

When she tried to take it with her, it suddenly began to vibrate and grew too hot to hold again. She dropped it back into the hole. Any further, and she may have dropped it into the river where it would be lost forever. Instead, it rolled around the bottom of the crater until the wires poked out and balanced with spindly legs. It scuttled around a bit, but the wires could not support its weight and retracted back inside.

The orb said words that her Da said when he drank, so she thought she might like to leave it behind. When she turned back to the safety of the light, she slipped on the wet stone and fell to her knees. It was a wide flat stone that caught her, but it still caused her leg to bleed; she cried out more in surprise than pain. Her blood mingled with the water that splashed onto the edge, sliding off the rock and sailing away.

The orb went completely dark. “Take me with you,” it commanded again, but this time the voice reminded her of a dream of a woman with long blonde hair like her own. The girl froze, staring at the orb. Overcome, she reached down into the hole and grabbed the orb and shook it, trying to release the voice, Ma’s voice. It was cool to the touch and remained silent, so she stuck it in her coat pocket and headed for home.

Da sat in the shadows just inside their carved-out cavern, the rotting wooden door hanging off rusted hinges. Smoke curled in long tendrils from his nose and an empty bottle of liquor sat beside him for company. Vomit was caked in his beard. He took another long inhale from his cigar, the burning end resembling an eye in the darkness. Her heart sped, and she felt the warmth of the orb in her pocket in response.

“You got the eggs?” he asked.

The girl looked down at her empty hands, remembering the broken eggs but unable to recall putting down the carton. She pulled her hands up in her sleeves and leaned away from him.

“What you got there?” he asked, pointing at the glow emanating from her coat.

She put her hand over it to block it out. “Nothing,” she said hurriedly.

Her Da rose from his chair, putting his cigar on the table beside him. He lurched down the one stone step, catching himself on the cavern walls. “Now don’t you go lying to me, girl,” he spat, staring down at her.

She kept her eyes down. “Yes, sir,” she replied, and tried to skirt past him to her room, but he reached out and wrapped his ruddy fingers around her wrist.

The orb grew hotter in response, vibrating in her pocket so intensely that it rose between them. It grew brighter and brighter, and the girl covered her eyes with her free hand, trying to pull away from her Da.

He released her wrist, backing away from the growing glow. But the orb followed, increasing so much in brightness that the girl could almost hear it. Her Da covered his eyes with his hands as he fell to the ground before it, but blood spurted between his fingers, and he cried out, begging it to stop.

Then he was still, and it was silent again. The orb went dark.

The girl knelt down beside her Da to make sure he was still breathing. In the place where his eyes used to be were nothing but burnt sockets, a single tear of blood still flowing down his cheek. His mouth hung open, and saliva collected in the corners. But when the girl put her finger beneath his nostrils, she felt the soft flow of air.

She collected the orb from where it had fallen at the base of the porch stairs and tucked it back into her pocket. She looked back at her Da again, holding her breath, waiting for him to chase her. His body remained still, and she slammed the door quickly behind her, bracing herself against it. Once inside, she snuffed out the candles and gathered her blankets for bed. She pulled the blankets above her head, hiding from the darkness, still waiting for her Da to thunder into the room at any minute. The orb glowed dully beside her.

“You shouldn’t have done that to my Da,” she whispered to the orb. She thought it may have whispered back, but she had fallen too deeply into the grasp of sleep to know what it said.

***

The girl awoke in full artificial daylight, scratching at her torn knee. Her fingernails brushed against an unfamiliar, smooth surface. The orb was no longer beside her, and she lifted the blankets, shaking them, peeking beneath the cot. She stood to check her coat pocket, but her knee buckled beneath her weight.

Confused, she sat back down heavily, kicking her leg out straight in front of her. A milky-white smooth surface covered her knee, looking almost like bone, but pockmarked with tiny holes.

The orb had pushed itself into the torn skin at her knee, burrowing beneath it.

Alarmed, she dug at its edges, but the wires had already spread like veins beneath her flesh. The skin was red and puckered at the edges, and pain shot up her leg where she pulled. Breathing more quickly, she hobbled towards the small wash room, using soap and water to try and loosen it. It wouldn’t budge.

Desperate, she hopped on one leg to the kitchen. She pulled a knife from its drawer and tried to dig it beneath the edges, but the orb grew hot and her blood painted her leg red. Tears streaming down her face, she gave up. She dried up the blood with a cloth from the kitchen sink and dressed in the only dress she had, grateful that its length covered the orb.

She went outside to finally check on Da. He was still sprawled at the base of the door, and she stepped around him, careful not to wake him. His eyes looked more frightening in the light of day, and she turned quickly away from him. He murmured her Ma’s name over and over. Maybe she could beg for bandages at the rations center, or try and find her eggs to trade for some type of antiseptic. Surely that would put her in his good graces again when he woke up.

At the entrance to their cavern, she paused and poked at her knee one final time. The orb was pliable beneath her fingers, still warm to the touch. It seemed to have a pulse of its own. She wiped her finger on her dress and pulled it down further over the orb.

The orb began to glow, impossible to hide, and from it she could hear a chorus of female voices singing in harmony. It was beautiful. Tender. When she listened to the words, she heard a lullaby that rested at the very edge of her dreams, and tears began to fill her eyes. She took another step towards town and the orb suddenly grew hot, vibrating agitatedly in her knee. She stepped back towards the tunnels instead, and the melody continued.

The voices grew louder and the orb glowed brighter as she continued off towards the tunnels away from town, though never hot enough to harm her. She could feel the wires flitting beneath her skin, pulling tight whenever she stepped off the path. She felt somehow that the voice was calling her home, and she walked more quickly to meet it. She skipped and sang along with the voices, and the townspeople gave her a wide berth, pulling their cavern doors shut to avoid the madwoman leaping and laughing alone.

The orb continued to sing, and the girl continued to dream. Whispers joined the chorus, and she would have sworn the orb was laughing from inside her. She felt surrounded, like she was walking amongst the fallen stars, bright and a part of something bigger, but everywhere she turned she saw only tunnels and pipes.

The orb made her walk further than she’d ever walked before, up great hills and over fallen rubble, across stone-filled rooms and past the end of the pipes, the end of the lights. The darkness pressed in around her, but the orb continued to glow, pushing back. Always to her right was the sound of the rushing river. The tunnels were colder and darker here, the rock on either side seeming to press closer together. Her breathing grew heavy, her panting breath in tune with the orb’s song, and just when she was about to ask how much further they still had to go, the rocks began to lean away from each other in a V-shaped opening.

Before her was a great rocky clearing, a grey haze heavy at its edges. She could see the river now, breaking upon the rocks at the base of a steep cliff face, pockmarked with caves and crevices.

She had been taken to the river’s end, where the night hid from the day.

The girl began to shiver, feeling exposed beneath the grates and the watching stars, but the orb whispered soothing words. “Do not worry, girl,” the man’s voice murmured, cutting off the women’s song. “I will protect you. All you have to do is ask.”

The orb was warm in her knee, growing hotter. She pulled up the edge of her dress, and watched as the wires began to dance, growing shorter as they retracted into the orb.

“Please, protect me.” The words were barely a whisper.

The orb began to glow bright enough that she turned away, looking back to the clearing where five bodies with long flowing hair and dresses much prettier than hers stood in a circle, swaying slightly to the orb’s singing. They had not been there before. They were singing the same song the orb had, but she couldn’t see the mouths moving on the women facing her. In fact, she couldn’t see any features on them at all.

Her knee started to throb suddenly, and she cried out in pain as the orb finally extricated itself from her flesh. It floated before her, taking on the shape of the sun, and flew to the center of the circle of women. They began to dance and chant around it.

Shapes flew from the tiny holes in the orb, bolts of light that the women swallowed whole, and they too began to glow white-blue. The girl crept closer to the circle, blood flowing freely from the wound where the orb once sat, and saw that the women were faceless, blurred masks where noses and mouths should be. Their faces were one face, the orb’s face, and it leered down at her.

The orb whispered, and the girl could no longer tell if it was real or in her head. Against her will, she too began to dance. She spun and she spun and the orb glowed above them, a tongue poking out from one of the holes, a triumphant smile on its face before morphing into a woman with long blonde hair. The girl opened her mouth when the bolt of light flew towards her, and the wire tendrils grasped her open mouth to pull and stretch.

The girl began to lift from the ground, and still the faceless women danced, glowing and spinning and singing the song of the stars. She felt herself being torn apart and remolded, until shortly she felt nothing at all.

***

The girl smiled down on her body from a great distance; it clasped hands with the faceless women and continued to dance. Her body glowed as the orb moved inside her, dimming as it made itself at home. The faces all morphed into one face, her face, and her body left the river’s end, out of view of the stars.

 Her new voice was now one of many, a shared story as she glowed in the sky, hiding at the river’s edge for when the day came.

Ninety-nine.

She waited for when she too would fall and be given a second chance, the chance to take the place of another unsuspecting girl. It would be soon, the voices promised.

Ninety-eight.

Ninety-seven.

But the stars were all liars.

---

Rejected by Air And Nothingness Press “Seance Fiction”