Underland Arcana 2 by Jon McGoran

Author:Jon McGoran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Underland Press
Published: 2021-04-05T23:47:28+00:00

On the night of Whitney's celebratory dinner, Rachel awoke in bed with a headache that might have been from the wine, since she drank as much as she thought she could get away with, then finished the second bottle in the kitchen. Unable to fall back asleep, she sat on the ledge outside her bedroom window, the moon full, the joint she just finished making her hands tremble as she smoked cigarette after cigarette. Bone-white light cast chilly shadows across the yard, lengthening like long fingers reaching for the surrounding dark. She tracked movement near the pool house and scuttled across the roof for a better view. Several figures departed the dimly lit building into the woods beyond their property, walking in silence without flashlights, anonymous in the night forest.

Rachel crawled back in through her bedroom window, the ache in her head dulled but not gone, and descended through the dark house to make her way outdoors. She crept past the rhododendrons on the back deck and skirted the edge of the pool, drained now for the season. There was no path to follow but she didn't hesitate to enter the surrounding woods and she could have sworn she felt the presences which came before her as her feet guided her without incident to a clearing amid a group of silent figures.

Her vision was disturbed but she recognized her mother and Whitney, their faces coming clear then shuddering away in shadows, their clothing dark and indistinct.

"What are you doing here, Rachel?" and the voice was her grandmother's, calm but so cold, her white hair threaded with black, and it felt like a betrayal, that her grandmother would be here, although she couldn't have said where "here" was in the first place.

Rachel had no words, her tongue heavy and stuck, and then she saw it, the thing laying on a stone table like a lump of wet clay given cursory human form. It was moving, a little, flailing arms and shaking its shapeless face from side to side. It had rudimentary hands, but no fingers, and its head missing a chunk of what would be skull and brain matter if it were in fact a living thing. Its eyes were gouged out and replaced with tiny dark pebbles set far back in the sockets. She stepped closer.

"What is this?" she asked, her voice so quiet she didn't know if she'd spoken aloud.

"Go back to bed, Rachel," her mother said, and her head, suddenly, was pounding again, and she wanted more than anything to obey this voice, with its unaccustomed gentleness, and when she looked, she thought her mother might almost be crying, and before she became afraid her heart melted at the thought that the tears might be for her.

Rachel stepped closer to the thing on the…was it an altar?...in the center of the grove, and leaning in she saw something familiar wedged into the hole where the figure's heart might have been, and recognized the tiny violin charm her father had given her, and she wanted to snatch it back but didn't quite dare.

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