Chapter 94: The Drowned Dead
“Eh?! Brother Jared, you’re glowing?!” I asked, my voice sharp with a sudden, inexplicable fear, that something had happened to him
“Hmm? I’m fine. Glowing?” he asked, looking down at himself, thoroughly confused. I stared at his eyes; they were the same clear, brilliant emerald as before. The golden light was gone. Strange. Was it another of those things that only I could see?
“Are you sure you feel alright?” I pressed.
“I feel fine,” he said, a note of puzzlement in his voice. “Better than usual, actually. More… awake.”
“Then I must have been seeing things,” I said with a sigh. Since the first day, it was happening more and more often after long sessions staring at the grimoire.
“You should get some sleep,” Jared said gently. “We have to go ‘shopping’ for that jewelry box tomorrow.” It was late. I nodded, carefully putting the grimoire and my notes away, and we curled up together under the new, clean quilt.
As expected, the nightmares came. This time, I was standing in a black, bottomless lake. The icy water soaked me to the waist, and a violent, uncontrollable shivering seized my body. As far as I could see, there was only the still, black water, stretching to an unseen shore. The bottom was soft, silty, and though the water only came up to my waist on Parula's small frame, I couldn't see the bottom. It was a void. And then, something grabbed my ankle. A hand. Cold, and yet strangely, horribly soft. I cried out, struggling to pull free, but its grip was like an iron manacle. Then another hand, and another, began to snake their way up my legs, their touch a grotesque caress. Fear, pure and absolute, flooded my senses. They were human hands, but the skin was puckered and uneven, like something that had been submerged for a very long time, the flesh beginning to rot and slough away. My frantic struggles finally broke the dead stillness of the water. A hand, its skin wrinkled and bleached a ghastly, bloodless white, erupted from the surface and seized my arm. It was rotten in places, dripping a foul, black liquid.
“Aaaahhh! Help me!” I screamed, thrashing wildly, trying to break free from the dead things' grasp. But it was useless. Parula’s body was too weak, and the hands, for all their rottenness, were impossibly strong, their bones rigid with a deathly grip. More hands broke the surface, grabbing at me, pulling me down. My strength finally gave out, my feet slipped on the soft mud, and I was pulled under. In the black water, I saw them. A silent, floating crowd of the drowned, their long hair drifting like seaweed. Their faces were rotten away, revealing grinning, skeletal jaws. Their eyes were gone, but their empty sockets were fixed on me. They were dead, but they were not still. They held me fast, and I felt a primal, terrifying certainty: they wanted to make me one of them. I opened my mouth to scream, and a lungful of the foul, black water rushed in. No! I’m running out of air! The world began to go dark at the edges, my mind clouding from the lack of oxygen. My body, acting on pure instinct, reached a desperate hand towards the surface. Anyone! Help me! This is a terrible way to die!
Just then, a brilliant, golden light pierced the darkness of the water. The moment it touched me, I felt a warmth spread through my icy limbs. And the drowned things… they recoiled from the light as if it were a flame, their hands releasing me, their rotten forms shrinking back into the black depths. A hand, strong and warm, reached down, grabbed my own, and pulled me from the water.
“Parula! Parula! Wake up!” A familiar voice. A hand, patting my cheek.
“Cough! Cough! Cough!” Air, blessed air, filled my lungs. I coughed up a torrent of water, a foul, black, stinking liquid that pooled on the bedding beside me. To be alive… it was a wonderful feeling. I opened my eyes. There was no lake. I was in the familiar, grimy alcove, and Jared was kneeling beside me, his hand on my shoulder, his face a mask of worry. Another nightmare? But my body was dry, and yet I had just coughed up real, physical water.
Splash! A loud noise from just outside our alcove, the sound of something heavy hitting the water.
“Who’s there?!” Jared yelled, instantly on his feet. Silence. He drew the dagger from his sleeve and, with a courage that bordered on foolishness, he crept towards the entrance.
“Wait!” I scrambled up, the last of the water dribbling from my lips. I wouldn't let him go out there alone.
It was another clear night. The three moons cast their strange, colored light onto the city, illuminating the dark waterway with a faint, ethereal glow. After the disappearances of the previous night, none of the other vagrants were sleeping out in the open. The waterway was deserted. Jared let out a sigh of relief. But my eyes were fixed on the stone platform just outside our hovel. There, glistening in the moonlight, was a pool of water, and a wet trail leading from it to the edge of the canal. The size of the puddle… it was the size of a man. I thought of the drowned things from my dream, of their cold, grasping hands. They were dead, but they could still move. They had tried to drag me into the water, to make me one of them. And the water on the ground… it was the same foul, black, inky liquid I had just coughed up.
“Looks like no one’s there,” Jared said, relieved. But then he saw me staring at the ground, and his gaze followed mine. “Parula? What are you looking at? Wait… what are those wet marks?”
He could see them. He could see the impossible handprint at the edge of the puddle, the mark of a single, wet hand, pressed to the stone as if something had just pulled itself from the canal. It was easy to imagine. A figure, crawling from the black water, its gaze fixed on our hovel. Hearing my coughing, it had slipped back into the depths. Even Jared, for all his bravado, shivered, his eyes darting fearfully towards the dark, silent water. But he was afraid to get close enough to observe, he was a child after all.
“Wait a minute,” I said, a new, dawning horror washing over me. “Brother Jared… you can see the water?” Yesterday, when the other vagrants had disappeared, he had seen nothing.
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