Katalepsis: Volume 1 by Hazel Young

Author:Hazel Young [Young, Hazel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-10-04T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

She of the Many Tentacles was exactly where I’d left her. Just like Praem.

Out in Evelyn’s front garden, I hugged myself against the hint of winter in the air as I walked down the cracked pathway in the lowering afternoon sunlight, to the little boundary wall. I’d slipped on my shoes but not bothered with my coat. Raine’s borrowed polo-neck kept out the worst of the chill. This would only take a minute.

Nothing remained of my earlier entourage, dispersed to the winds and replaced with the usual spirit life. Scuttling, ghoul-faced hounds and apish pack creatures lurked down the alleyways and crept through the street. Dark faces and staring eyes peered my way, but with mere fleeting curiosity, there and gone again. Back to normal.

Normal. Right.

Barnslow Drive was a desolate place. I suspect that’s why I’d come to like it so much. The house to the left of Evelyn’s was truly abandoned, windows boarded up, front door chained shut. To the right lay a hundred feet of weed-choked lot before the next house, occupied but quiet and dark. The road was old tarmac; no potholes, but ridged and riven from beneath by unseen questing roots, from trees on the far side of the street, covered with rain-matted leaves and puddles of standing water.

The Tentacled Woman still sat on the opposite pavement, in the shade of a gnarled oak tree. The tentacles from her back waved and bobbed in the air, like a human twiddling her thumbs. I realised with an odd shock of recognition that she had her chin in her hands.

“That better not be an act,” I murmured.

She was staring right back at me with those huge, glassy black eyes.

I took a deep breath, checked up and down the street for any casual observers, then twitched back my left sleeve to expose the edge of the Fractal. One step carried me through the boundary of the open garden gate.

Many factors should have kept me in the house—fear of random witnesses, unseen watchers from the cult, potential disaster, cold, loneliness, failure, fear.

Fear. I would not give in to fear anymore. That was why I’d come out here, alone and unsupported.

I wet my lips, tilted my chin up, and raised my voice.

“Come here.”

The Tentacled Woman obeyed.

She rose to her feet in a single sinuous slide, nothing like a human standing up. I assumed no actual muscles were involved. She peered at me from deep-sea eyes set in a face of slow, roiling tar, then crossed the road toward me.

I risked a quick glance left and right again; no other spirits were responding to my order, which was a relief. If they had, I would have freaked out and scurried back indoors, and forever regretted my lack of courage. With one spirit, the Fractal was enough. I kept the fingers of my right hand on my left sleeve cuff, the edge of the Fractal peeking out from underneath, like a gunslinger with a hand on her revolver.

What a joke.

I struggled to stand my ground.

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