The girl brought the bottle to my mouth. “A bea.”
My hand was shaking as I took a drink and swallowed. It tasted like cheese gone to mold. I gagged and felt a tide of panic rise inside me.
“Poe!” Isabel grabbed my arm. “You okay?”
“Tastes like shit,” I coughed out. But I was okay. No poison seemed to be working its way up my throat. My heart was still beating fast, though. One by one, we were forced to drink from the bottle. It came around three times, and then we were made to sit together under the gray carcass of a tree.
“Now what?” Baz asked. Water dripped down his face still.
The kids stood around us, waiting. For what, I didn’t know, and I was afraid to find out. About ten minutes later I started to feel a strange, creepy-crawly sensation under my skin, and the forest seemed to breathe. When the wind whispered past my ears, I could swear I heard it say, “Vengeance.”
“Izzie?” I heard myself whisper, but she didn’t answer. On a nearby rock I saw a kid drop one of the black-spotted mushrooms into the wineskin.
“What’d you give us?” I slurred. “What the hell’s in that?”
“Something to help you see,” the girl answered, and I understood her perfectly.
“I see just fine. Twenty-twenty.” But already the corners of my vision were curling up on themselves, revealing whatever lies underneath. I walked through chambers of madness. Each one seemed like the end of a dream, only I’d “wake up” and find myself living inside another dream.
I’m walking down the corridor of a jostling train. Left and right, the compartments are filled with the undead: skeletal faces; hollow, haunted eyes; burned, bruised, mangled bodies. They look up like they’re expecting something of me. Mrs. Smith calls from the end of the corridor, “This journey is only just beginning, Poe Yamamoto.”
I’m standing in the church with many others. The scene reminds me of the one painted on the ceiling. A priest in a red, hooded robe reads from a giant book. In the center of the room seven kids are gathered together. They don’t seem frightened. While the priest reads, one of the women cuts a lock of hair from each child and weaves it into the plaits streaming from the goat’s horns, tying it off with string.
Now I’m one of the children. They’ve taken us to the lake. It’s cold and I want to go home to eat lamb. Instead they force us into the lake. The water is freezing and dark. We don’t want to go in but they make us. Our hands are tied together. If one struggles, we all struggle and the ropes tighten around our wrists. Children plead. The priest holds the goat’s head high, chants some words: Let our crops be plentiful and good. Seal our borders against our enemies. Accept our sacrifice as a token of our faith in you, Dark Lord. The mist comes barreling over the lake and under my feet; the bottom of the lake gives way. I’m being sucked down fast.
I’m at the tavern. Inside the closet by the door is a hook. On the hook is a red robe. Scissors cut hair. It falls into a bowl in sheets. The old-timers gather around it, looking. “Devil,” the old woman at the gate says to me. “Devil.”
I started coming out of my drug-induced hallucinations. “Isabel?” I called. I didn’t see the others, so I staggered to my feet, calling for them. “Baz! John!” I was completely alone. The fog danced on the surface of the lake. The stones. They seemed to be swaying. Moving. Rising. They weren’t stones at all. They were the heads of children—hundreds of them—rising from the lake where they’d been drowned years, centuries ago. Snakes threaded through their hollow eye sockets. Moss clung to their cheeks. Lips had rotted away, exposing mottled bone and nubs of decayed teeth.
“They mean to make the offering again,” they whispered. “A sacrifice to save Necuratul. It has begun. Tomorrow, no one is saved. Avenge us.” Their words swirled around me like the rustle of dry leaves. “Avenge us.”
The girl I’d seen first, the one who’d led me into the forest, stepped forward. Her skin seemed pixilated. When I looked again, tiny moths covered every part of her. They flew away, and underneath her skin was ice white and crawling. Maggots.
With a shout I startled awake. My friends were passed out next to me by the lake. No stones were visible; only the slightest cloud of fog hovered there. I shook my head in case this was another dream. It was darker now, and I had lost all sense of time. Our loaf of bread was missing, but a new bread-crumb trail had been laid out.
“Get up,” I said, nudging my friends awake. They sat with effort and struggled out of their stupors. I told them what I’d dreamed. “I think they—the old-timers in the village—are planning to sacrifice us.”