The Brat's Final Gambit

Niam found himself in a glade in the middle of a dense forest. A riot of ferns rose from the matted floor up to his knees, and thick tangles of vines spider-webbed between the long, moss covered trunks that rose to form a green ceiling far above. As he stood and looked around, he knew this was only a dream, and he also knew where he was—the farthest edge of Siler’s Gorge, just beyond the lake, where it overflowed into a part of the valley that was intermittently swampy, depending upon the time of year. Sunlight poured down through a break in the canopy above, but all around the forest guarded its secrets, reaching up and putting out whatever light that tried to push its way to the ground. Overhead, the susurration of a slow breeze pushed languidly through the greenery. Other than that, all was quiet, and this was odd. Normally, shade-loving animals made a crescendo of whirrs, chirrups, cheeps, and croaks.

From ahead, a scream cut the air. He peered into the darkness and saw Sarah’s form running headlong into the deepening gloom. He knew this was a dream, but . . . something was different. Sarah screamed again in terror and Niam, sprang forward. His feet pummeled the ground as he tore through the thick foliage carpeting the forest floor. Trees blurred by as he rushed into the deepening gloom.

Ahead of him, Sarah’s figure plunged headlong and terrified, like a ghost driven into shadow by the rising sun. Soon, Niam’s breaths tore at his lungs, burning his chest and scouring his throat.

The hot ache was different. It hurt. He had never felt pain in a dream before.

Nimbly, he plunged forward. Moonflower vines tore at his shins as his legs ripped through long, thorny tendrils. More pain lanced along his shins where the vines’ thorns cut his flesh.

A cold river of fear pushed its way into his mind. If he could feel pain in a dream, what else might be able to happen to him? But the realization that Sarah was pulling ahead of him pushed that thought away. Her head whipped around and her eyes seemed to focus on him.

She shrieked again in terror.

Niam ran harder, but Sarah still inched away from him. This is just a dream, Niam frantically told himself. This is just a dream and I’ll wake up in the morning like always. Gritting his teeth, he pushed himself even harder. He ran so swiftly that his legs threatened to spill him to the ground. Desperately, he tried to call out, but his lips wouldn’t move, his throat remained stubbornly still. What was she afraid of? Again, he opened his mouth to call out to her, to tell her it was just him, her little brother, that he was coming. But no sound came out.

Sarah let out another scream, one that was low, that came from a place of abject terror. It was a primal sound. A dying sound. Niam felt a sulphurous lump suddenly fill his stomach. The skin on the back of his neck stood up and the air began to grow thicker and darker somehow, palpably colder. He felt as if someone had opened a door to winter and its frosty drafts were wafting through and encircling him. As he tore through the snaggling vines his shin struck a low branch hidden among the ferns. A loud snap followed, and Niam went sprawling onto his stomach. The smell of the loamy earth filled his nostrils.

WAAAATCHH, the Voice that he knew all too well whispered into his head. LIIIISTEN. As Niam instinctively struggled to catch his breath and prepared to rise, he was hit by another wave of nausea.

No, something worse than nausea.

Almost immediately, Niam heard the sound of approaching footsteps. As he quickly turned his head, a sense of something vile and oily washed over him. A covered figure emerged into view. Niam’s stomach gave a sharp lurch as the figure drew closer, dressed in dark robes, which trailed behind like a garment of angry snakes.

The sight terrified him, and Niam lay there, stunned. He shrank into himself, a drying worm in salt. His arms and legs trembled uncontrollably. He knew he should get up, but he couldn’t. His arms, like his throat, were now frozen. Fear coursed through him, and the wave of sickness grew even stronger. Wake up, wake up, oh sweet Lord, wake me up PLEEAASE, he prayed. But the nausea hit harder, carrying with it the essence of decaying birds and frogs, of fruit that had sat out far too long, of the final vomit that came out of diseased dogs just before they died.

And still, the figure drew closer.

Niam tried to press himself back into the dirt, to bury himself in the loam beneath his back where he couldn’t be seen . . . would never be seen. Oh Sarah, I’m so sorry Sarah! The menacing stranger was now almost on top of him. He looked up in terror, expecting to see a demonic face with eyes alight with the fires of insanity, but the menacing stranger’s features were hidden.

Help me! Niam’s mind shouted in panic. The oily waters enveloped him. Darkness washed around him, and there was nothing now but the growing, unbearable sickness.

Sarah screamed again.

And in the darkness, there was this and only this—

The Voice.

REMEEEMBER

Niam bolted up in his bed. His stomach heaved and gave up its contents. He barely had time to gather his sheets and hold them before he threw up. The acrid taste of half-digested food filled his mouth. And he vomited a second, and then a third time. Images of the dream flooded his mind and his body reacted violently to them. He knew, even as his stomach clenched and evacuated itself, that it was not the food he had eaten hours earlier that it was ridding itself of, but the rancid memories.

When he was done, Niam sat in his bed, trembling for a moment, and then he doubled the sheets together and tiptoed down the hall and into the kitchen where a cleaning pail sat near the hearth. He deposited the sheet in it and grabbed a mug and filled it from a pitcher containing clean water. Niam rinsed his mouth and spat the taste of sickness into the pail.

His arms and legs still trembled.

On the wall hung a lantern that gave off a low, flickering light. Niam grabbed it, and took the pail outside to the burning pit beyond the kitchen door. There was already wood in the pit and all Niam had to do was light the tinder kept in a small shed nearby. After the flames began to spread and catch, he emptied the pail. The fire eventually took, and as everything burned, a warm circle spread around Niam, illuminating his nightshirt and pale arms. Niam looked at them and thought about how thin they were, and in a world where strength and brawn ruled, thin was tantamount to impotence—like the impotence of a boy who couldn’t, even in a dream, defend his sister.

No. Boys like that could only sit in terror and pray for the dream to end, and once again, the Bode’s and Ravel’s of the world won. Niam shook his head and sobbed. A shame like none he had felt before hit him, and for a moment Niam thought he was going to be sick again. Only, this time, it was a different kind of sick, born of remorse and self-recrimination.

No. He thought. No. I won’t let that happen.

And then there was this: as he slowly allowed the feeling to diminish, his thoughts began to center on the actual events of the dream itself, which had been no ordinary dream. He remembered how the thorny vines had lashed at his shins and bit into his skin like hundreds of sharp, tiny teeth and the way his throat really ached as he tried to call out to Sarah. And then there was the dark, rich smell of wet earth and decaying plant matter he had inhaled after toppling over the low-lying branch as he chased after his her.

He knew.

Although he had not actually been there the day she died, what he had seen and experienced tonight had been real.

Murder.

Niam sat there allowing the realization to sink in. And it sank and sank. Where his sister could only float and wait to be found drifting like a piece of pale, dead wood on the surface of Siler’s Lake, this awareness sank until it struck bottom within him like a stone thrown into the cold waters where she died.

Murder.

Someone had been chasing her. The voice told him to look. To listen. To remember. Someone had been chasing her. Had he killed Seth and then chased her, screaming to the water’s edge? In his mind he imagined her murderer struggling with his brother. Seth would have put up a fight. He had never been the weakling, that Niam was. Then he saw the bastard catching up with her in his mind’s eye, he saw him strike her with a rock. That must have been why everyone thought she had plummeted down the gorge’s edge.

The Voice told him to look.

And there was always a reason behind the Voice to do the things it told him to do. But Niam burned. And the thing within him that burned made the fire in the pit before him seem cold by comparison. Whatever the Voice was, it had the ability to reach back in time, to show him events and give him commands. Before this was all over, Niam vowed that he would live long enough to know why the source of the Voice hadn’t warned his sister and his brother that a killer stalked them. Instead, it played with Niam, sent the ghost of a dog to rescue a boy at the bottom of a drop off but didn’t bother to send a damned soul to rescue them.

And then there was Jort.

Did the three of them share the same killer? Niam simmered and fumed. He threw another log on the fire and watched as the flames crept higher and higher. Somewhere in the night did a killer stalk another victim?

As the fire ate greedily at the wood that fed it, Niam allowed his anger to feed on his sense of inadequacy. He vowed that he wouldn’t always be Niam the runt. One day he would find his sister’s and his brother’s killer. And if possible, Jort’s. And he would see to it that the bastard paid for what he had done the people he knew and loved. One day there would be a reckoning. In the east, a bloody slice of crimson glowed like an angry wound in the sky. The morning sun rose in its pitiless progression into the darkness, eating the stars as it climbed, fracturing the night’s hold on the world.

For Niam, another day had begun.