Page 23 of The Quiet
The dress grew wet and loose as it dragged through the mud, Ella dodging it with her feet, before it caught under her and nearly tripped her.
She grabbed the end of it and tried to tear it with little success. The ROSE was on one knee a moment later cutting the bottom loose and ripping it high across her thigh, cursing all the while. He grabbed the reigns of a horse nearby, and pulled Ella up with him. He coiled the dirtied rag ripped from her dress and wrapped it around her eyes.
“You can’t see them!” the ROSE said when she protested, “Once you see them, you’ll remember them. Once you remember them, they’re in your head. Get out of here without seeing them–without memories of them. You crossed a line coming in here. Hold still!”
Ella clutched blindly at his clothes, fitting her fingers around any ridge of fabric or belt. She hated being blind, hating it more as he charged forward with the horse. The world seemed louder in her blindness, the horse jostling from one turn to the other, before a blast exploded from ahead, hitting them with an invisible wall of scattered rain that stung her skin.
The horse reared up and fell back in the mud, the ROSE pulling Ella away as the animal lay in the pooling water, struggling to stand. They scrambled up, Ella ripping off the blindfold as they looked in the direction of the blast as a creature pulled itself from above the houses.
It was like a black mountain, growing in the distance. Wings unfurled, spreading across the horizon like a canvas, prepared to envelop the town. Its head lifted to the sky, jaws opening like a canyon of teeth as it roared. The earth shook under them as a series of purple eyes opened like spotlights across its head.
“Amiel,” the ROSE said.
Some primal instinct urged her to grab the ROSE. She wrestled her hands into his coat and yanked him through the nearest door of a dilapidated shed.
The next moment she stumbled onto a hardened surface in complete silence, realizing they’d just lept memories. The ROSE was no longer beside her, Ella having the sense that without meaning to, she’d dragged them deeper into his past, much deeper.
Samual’s warnings echoed again and she tried to stifle them in her brain, exchanging his chastisement for any memories of useful training he’d tried to force on her along the way.
She never remembered him saying anything about the possibility of getting stuck in someone else’s mind.
One thing she did know was that something was very wrong with the current memory. She’d drawn them in the wrong direction, and like taking in a scent, she had a sense of this place. It reeked of abandonment, cold, silence and darkness, Ella having an instant sense of these things before she could take in the sight of it.
She was standing in the wreckage of a world she didn’t recognize, the air saturated with a dense, pale fog that was stifling to breathe. It turned the miles of war torn machines, and buildings into a jungle of gnarled shapes. Survivors huddled hopelessly on a large road between rows of buildings. They’d set up some kind of temporary camp, laden with a mix of dying bodies and dying spirits.
Ella was unable to fend off the feelings of these wartorn survivors, absorbing the horror and the dread as if it were trying to infect her and keep her there forever. In her yellow dress, she felt like one of them, like she’d seen and heard and experienced all of the terrors they had.
She knew without being told that this was when Madness first crept into their world over a century ago, breaking its laws with slow and deliberate cracks that echoed across civilization like the hollow cry of broken bone.
She needed to get out of here. She needed to get out before the feelings drowned her, Ella struggling to breathe as if they were filling up her lungs. She looked for a door, locating one right behind her, but hesitated to go through alone.
A click-clack sound echoed far off. People farther down the road began to shift and move at the sound. There were no signs of ROSE masks, but she found the ROSE. He was standing with his back to her, younger, with nothing visible but his almost black, tousled hair. She knew it was him without a glimpse of his face, recognizing him almost as if in spirit.
Before she could grab him and leap through the door, he stepped forward toward the center of the road and out of reach. He stood out as if to represent these people stranded at the end of the road, the others seemingly too exhausted to try.
A figure waded through the fog in front of them, a horse with a corpse tied tightly into the saddle. The body bobbed and shifted with every step, hanging back across the animal, arms splayed out. A list of names was tattooed on the length of the forearm, covered only at the wrist by the ulcers of shackles worn too long in squalor.
She knew that it was one of the nine survivors of the devastation in the North.
Hooves clapped the road, the horse moving with splintered hooves and a stream of hot red blood seeping from one nostril.
There was something powerful about this memory, almost sinister in how it had completely absorbed the ROSE in its potency. Ella felt vulnerable, getting the sense that without theROSE’s conscious mind to protect them, they were exposed to a very real darkness that lived in these memories.
“They will come from the North,” a voice whispered, and Ella jerked around to find that no one was speaking. “With frostbitten fingers, they play the chords, the broken song plays on and on.” The voice continued and she recognized it from some deep recesses of her own memories. Something in his memories called to hers with a dark magnetism. “They come from the North, prophets of madness, and the North is always there.” The words grew louder, Ella felt the memories merging and was certain she’d be lost forever if they did.
Ella felt his memory waver around her, a ripple pushing beneath the ground she stood on. If the curse was a deep well, she suddenly got the sense that they were at the bottom of it. More than that. She was now certain that they weren’t alone.
She caught sight of a flash from the corner of her eye, like a black deer with broken legs, heaving and limping in the corner of her vision. Just as she turned, it was gone.
She couldn’t explain the sudden feeling that seized her again, that unspoken knowledge that caused her to jerk her entire body forward.
They had to get out. They had to get out now.
She grabbed the ROSE, pulling him through an open doorway behind them.
The world changed as a wave of heat blasted over Ella’s skin and sucked the air out of her lungs. This new place had no rain, only walls of fire that roared and crackled. Smoke hid thesky. Somehow this memory felt better, chaotic and yet somehow safer, Ella still reeling from the inky blackness of the last.
“Hold on!” she heard, her eyes adjusting to the intense light of the scene in front of her.
