Lyn Benedict - Lies & Omens

It was a monster. And it had human-shaped eyes. It coiled lazily, looked at her, and she felt her breathing stop; she crouched small and hoped it wouldn’t keep looking at her. She thought, the monster got aboard that boat, and it looked at the people on it, like she looked at the fish in the aquarium, and the people died.

Its eye was glittering and red. The air was frigid; she couldn’t stop shivering. All around her, the pier was quiet.

The monster slid back into the water and fish bobbed to the surface, silver bellies up, as it passed. A thin wake cut against the waves and disappeared into the deeper sea.

A minute later, sound and warmth crashed over her again, her mother shaking her, “We were worried, Sylvie, you can’t just walk away—oh God no, don’t look at them, you don’t need to see that—” and dragging her away from the dock, from the dead people on the boat.

“There was a monster,” Sylvie told her mother.

“No such thing as monsters,” her mother said. “Come on, let’s go back to the hotel.”

Sylvie had gone, glad to be warm, glad to be safe, glad even to see her dumb little sister. She knew that her mother was wrong. It was a monster. She’d seen it.

The next day she went back to the pier, slipping away when her mother went to get them lunch and her father was trying to get Zoe to stop shrieking. It was closed off, yellow tape where the boat still bumped against the dock. Sylvie kicked at the gravel, studied the area.

A dark-haired woman ducked under the tape, walked out to the pier. She wasn’t a policewoman; she was wearing a long, narrow skirt and lots of strange jewelry. Sylvie bit her lip, followed her. The woman turned when Sylvie approached. Her eyes were dark and hard and she didn’t look nice at all. She looked interesting.

“What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see where the monster was,” Sylvie said. “The papers didn’t say anything about it. It said they all died from drugs. I don’t get it. The fisherman saw it. The dockworkers saw it. Why didn’t they say so?”

“Because people are willfully blind,” the woman said. She turned back to stare out at the sea. Her lips curled. “They want to pretend dangerous things don’t exist.”

“Like the eel-monster thing.”

“Water spirit,” the woman said. “A genus loci, do you know what that is?”

“No,” Sylvie said. The woman shrugged, didn’t explain what that meant. Silence fell, then the woman spoke again.

“They picked it up in the Bermuda Triangle. It gets bored sometimes. That makes it cruel and destructive.”

“It killed people because it was bored?”

“You’re young. The world is new for you,” the woman said. “You have no idea how boring things can get when you’re my age. You have to make your own amusements where you can.”

“Is that why you’re here? To be amused? People died.”

“Aren’t you the junior moralizer?” the woman said. “But not law-abiding. You’re going to get in trouble if they see you behind the tape.”

“I’m a kid,” Sylvie said. “They’ll just send me home to my parents. They might arrest you.”

“Not likely,” she said. She turned, put her back to the water. “So. Little moralizer. When you go home, and you’re back with your little friends. What are you going to tell them? That you saw a monster? Or will you lie and tell them what the newspaper said?”

“Why would I tell them anything at all?” Sylvie asked. “They won’t believe me if I do, and I’m not going to lie. I know what I saw.”

The woman’s hand was on Sylvie’s cheek suddenly; Sylvie jerked, but the woman was strong, her nails curling beneath Sylvie’s chin, scratching, hurting.

“You’re an interesting kid,” the woman said. “But I bet you forget. Go home, get away from the scene, think it’s a dream. A nightmare. Five years from now, and you’ll be shrugging and telling yourself you were an imaginative kid.”

“No,” Sylvie said. “I won’t forget.”

The woman’s mouth turned down; displeasure at being contradicted or at the state of the world, Sylvie didn’t know. “They always do. They like to be blind. They think it makes them safe. It doesn’t. How can we be safe when he cares nothing for us?”

“Sylvie!” her mother shouted.

Sylvie jerked away, left the woman behind, even as the woman’s grip left scratches on her cheek and chin. She rubbed at the welts and shivered. The woman was wrong. She wasn’t going to forget.

SYLVIE HAD FORGOTTEN. IT HADN’T BEEN HER CHOICE. THE CORRECTIVE had taken it. Now, it had given it back.

Sylvie raised her head, saw that the black waters of the Corrective had gone clear and clean, no longer muddied by stolen memories.

“Lilith,” she said. Touched her cheek as if the scratches would still be there. “That was Lilith.”

Demalion was curled up near the edge of the water; he looked as shell-shocked as she felt. “There was a vampire in my neighborhood,” he told Sylvie. “It killed three of my friends when I was in elementary school. I forgot, even though I saw it. Touched it. This skeletal, verminous thing that grabbed me, and was going to bite me, and then … it smelled me and ran. Smelled Sphinx. He called me sphinxlet and threw me against the alley wall. How could I forget that?”

Sylvie looked back at the clear water, and said, “God. A hundred years. A hundred years of stolen memories. Anything big enough to make the news. Anything big enough to reveal the Magicus Mundi . The Good Sisters have been erasing it. Rewriting memories. We just gave them all back. All at once.”

“Shit,” he said. “What did we do?”

Sylvie licked her lips, felt an unaccountable giggle in her throat. Well, she’d always bitched about keeping the Mundi a secret. “We pulled off the blinders. Pulled back the curtain. Jesus, Demalion. I think we changed the world. Or at least, perception of it.”

SYLVIE AND DEMALION SPENT A FEW EXTRA MINUTES WALKING THE edges of the dead Corrective spell, Sylvie looking for any remaining cloudiness, Demalion watching her back. Unlike Pandora’s box, this world-changer had emptied itself completely. Even as she walked the perimeter of the crossed loops, the water began to evaporate, revealing a smooth stone groove only two feet deep.

Neither of the witches’ bodies, wolf or man, was there. They had been taken.

“Think there’s going to be chaos?” Demalion asked.

“When isn’t there? People never react well.”

“I don’t know,” Demalion said. “Some of the memories won’t have people to return to. A hundred-plus years? Some people are long dead.”

“Not all of them. Not even most of them, I’d bet. Population goes up. So do the number of incidents. Yvette said they’d been getting more dependent on it.”

Demalion grimaced, ceding the point. Sylvie winced. Her broken hand cramped and burned. She lifted it to her opposite shoulder, rested her wrist there, tried to slow the swelling.

“Syl. I remember the vampire. But I also don’t remember it. I remember being at home, instead of the alley, watching TV, instead of being grabbed by a child-killing vampire. Double memories. False and real. You’re always complaining about people choosing to be blind. Maybe things won’t change. Maybe they’ll just think they had vivid dreams about a real-world event.”