The Gravest Girl of All Read online

  When she looks down, Sam sees a human eyeball rolling toward the nearest leg of the kitchen table.

  She tries to scream, but now her mouth is filled with slime and all she can do is pull back until she's leaning against the wall. She tries again to cry out, hoping against hope that somebody will help her, and this time she manages to open her jaw. Instead of being able to yell, however, she feels her jaw starting to detach from her skull on one side, and then she feels something heavy land on her chest.

  She looks down just in time to see her entire jawbone, complete with bloodied skin still attached, slither onto the linoleum and slide over to join the eyeball.

  “No!” she tries to cry out, but all that emerges is a shriek.

  Reaching up, she tries to touch her mouth, hoping to find that her jaw is still in place. Instead, all she feels is her tongue flicking wildly as it dangles from the bloodied cavern of her throat.

  At the same time, she can now feel another crumpling sensation, this time in her left cheek. A moment later her vision fails completely, and she sees only darkness for a few seconds before a sudden shaft of light shatters her senses and she sees a blur of something huge flashing past.

  She cries out again, trying to make sense of the visions that are racing and spinning around. And then, with no warning, everything falls still and she sees that she's down on the floor, staring at the fallen eyeball and then seeing – a little further away – her own eyeless body twitching and bleeding as it remains slumped against the wall.

  In that instant, Sam realizes that her other eyeball must have fallen down through her face and then dropped out onto the floor. All she can do is watch in horror as her body flails, and as her own hands reach up to claw at what remains of her face.

  “Henry!” the body tries to cry out, as if in its death throes. “Henry! Henry!”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Henry!”

  Gasping, Sam sits bolt upright, only to slam her head into a low-hanging piece of jagged rock.

  “Damn it!” she yells, pulling away and reaching up to check whether there's any blood in her hair. “What the hell?”

  The pain is intense, but it passes soon enough and leaves just a faint ache as she looks around and finds that she's wedged in some kind of rocky space. The air is hot, and when she breathes she realizes she can feel tiny particles being drawn into her mouth and nose. She wipes her face and feels sweat on the back of her hand, and then she looks toward the distance and sees some kind of opening that leads out of what seems to be a small cave.

  Somewhere in the distant, loud booms ring out, as if something is exploding on the horizon.

  “Where the hell is this?” she mutters, inching around and then starting to crawl toward the opening on her hands and knees. The heat feels a little intense now, but when she reaches the opening she looks out and sees that she's high up on the side of a black mountain, overlooking a dark land far below.

  As someone with no great love of heights, she instinctively pulls back a little, before spotting a narrow path that runs past the opening and leads higher up the mountain. Forcing herself to overcome the slight dizziness that she feels, she leans out a little further and takes another look, once again seeing that she's perched high up on the side of a vast mountain.

  Suddenly, in the distance, another loud boom rings out, shaking the entire landscape and sending a ball of fire high into the jet-black sky. A moment later, scores of small rocks rain down from high above, forcing Sam to retreat back into the cave for a moment.

  “That's not good!” she says, her voice filled with fear. “That's not good at all!”

  Before she has a chance to figure out what she should do next, however, she hears a coughing sound nearby. Leaning out again once the rocks have stopped falling, she looks along the narrow path and sees that there are many more of these little openings dotted all over the side of the mountain. A moment later she hears the cough again, and this time she's sure that it's coming from an opening that's just a few feet away. She waits, but now the coughing seems to have died down a little.

  “Hello?” she calls out finally. “Is someone there?”

  Another cough.

  “Where am I?” she continues. “Do you -”

  “Keep it down up there!” a voice yells from below, and Sam looks down to see more openings. “Some of us are trying to sleep!”

  “What the hell is going on here?” she stammers, before hearing the cough again and turning once more to look at the next opening along. “Can somebody please tell me where I am?”

  “You answered your own question already,” a gnarled, croaked female voice replies from the dark opening, followed by a brief coughing fit. “You just can't quite accept the truth yet, that's all.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You said it yourself. You know exactly where you are.”

  “I really don't,” she replies. “The last thing I remember is...”

  Her voice trails off as she tries to think back to a few moments earlier. She was in Rippon, she was with Anna, and there was something happening in the town square. No, wait, there was something else, something that came after. She remembers being down by the river with the Devil, and then she remembers searching through Faraday's pile of books, and then she realizes that she ended up back at the town square. Finally her thoughts clear a little, and she remembers the sight of Abberoth lunging at her, and then the sensation of...

  A cold shiver passes through her, and then slowly she looks down at her chest and sees a bloodied wound through a torn gap in her shirt.

  “My heart,” she whispers, and now her voice is trembling with fear. “Wait, that's impossible.”

  Her fingers are shaking now, as she gently touches the torn fabric and pulls the pieces aside to reveal a dark, glistening hole in her chest. The snapped ends of several ribs are poking out, and a thick blob of blood of oozes out from the wound's depths. Somehow, she can feel the emptiness.

  “No,” she stammers, reaching her fingers deeper into the wound but still feeling no pain. “Please, not -”

  It's gone.

  Her heart is gone.

  She can feel some kind of tube hanging down in the empty space in her chest, and maybe another tube nearby, but her heart has been removed.

  And that's when she remembers everything. Abberoth reaching into her body, his hand clutching her heart, the pounding sensation of the last beats as she slumped to the ground...

  All of it.

  “No, that's not possible,” she says, suddenly feeling dizzy as she remains on her hands and knees at the edge of the cave. Sheer panic is rising through her body, flooding her mind, and for a moment she feels as if she might entirely topple over the edge and fall to the ground far below.

  Nearby, someone in one of the other caves is laughing.

  “It must have been a dream,” Sam whimpers, with tears in her eyes as she pulls back and leans against the cave's rough, rocky wall. Breathless now, she closes her eyes tight shut and tries to regain her composure. “This can't be happening. Where the hell am I?”

  She starts pinching her arms. When that doesn't work, she starts pinching her neck and face, desperately trying to force herself to wake up. She tells herself she must be unconscious on the ground in Rippon's town square, and that if she can only wake up she'll be able to fight back against Abberoth. There has to be something in one of Faraday's books, she's convinced of that, but she needs a chance to keep searching. Yet as she continues to pinch herself, she feels no pain at all.

  “I told you,” the woman's voice says nearby, interrupted by several half coughing fits. “The answer to your question is in the question itself. You know where you are.”

  “This isn't Rippon!” Sam gasps, staring out at the nightmare landscape and seeing flames in the distance. “This can't be anywhere even close to Rippon.”

  “Are you dense?” the woman snaps. “I know it takes a while to accept the truth, for all of us, but you're being
especially idiotic. You keep throwing that word around like it doesn't really mean anything, but it does. It's the name of this place.”

  “What do you mean?” Sam asks, turning and looking once again at the next cave along. “Where am I?”

  “Still? Seriously? Are you that dumb?” The woman sighs. “You said it yourself, girl. You're in Hell.”

  “What?” Sam whispers, unable to believe what she's hearing.

  “You died, like the rest of us died, and now you're here. Well, to be precise you're in the outer edges. It takes time to work your way into the center, if that's even what you want to do. Most of us... Well, some of us have more cause to be nervous down here than others. Sometimes it's safer to just stay up here in these dark little caves, instead of going out and exploring. They say there are things out there, waiting for us. Then again, maybe the fear's worse. I mean, everyone goes down eventually. You can't just sit around here for the rest of eternity, can you? Sooner or later, the curiosity gets to us all. I'll tell you something, though. Not many ever make it back up.”

  “I'm not in Hell,” Sam replies, feeling a cold sweat ripping across her shoulders. “That's impossible!”

  “You think you should be in the other place?” the woman asks. “That's a very confident point of view.”

  “I'd know if I was dead!”

  “How?”

  “I'd...”

  Pausing, Sam realizes she's not quite sure how to complete that sentence. She wants to think of something, anything, that'll prove her point. At the same time, she keeps thinking back to the moment when Abberoth grabbed hold of her heart, and deep down she knows she shouldn't have been able to survive such an assault. Then again, she suddenly remembers the state of grace, which means there's no way she should be able to die, which in turn means she can't be in Hell. Besides, even if that weren't the case, there's no other reason why there has to have been a mistake.

  “Henry,” Sam says, as a rising tide of panic causes her hands to start shaking. “I can't be in Hell. I have to be alive for Henry.”

  “Soon your mind'll go,” the woman continues. “It starts real early. You end up only managing to cling on to one part of yourself. Not always the part you'd want, either. I sure wish I'd understood what this place is really like. When I was alive, I mean. Maybe if I'd known, I'd've lived a better life. I could've been a nun or something like that. I could've been a real Goody Two-Shoes.”

  “I have to get out of here,” Sam says, before stepping along the ledge. “I have to figure this out.”

  “Ah, who am I kidding?” the woman chuckles. “I'd've just been the same anyway. It's just who I was, and there was no way I could fight against that. So come on, girl, what did you do? What kind of life did you lead, to end up down here with the rest of us?”

  “I'm not dead,” Sam whispers. “I can't be. I'm not dead!”

  It's like a mantra, a way for her to stay focused even though fear is running rampant through her thoughts. At the same time, however, she can feel a vast wall of heat against her face and – as she looks out across the landscape of fire and brimstone – she can't help admitting that the place certainly looks hellish.

  “I boiled babies alive, then I skinned and ate them,” the woman says, with a hint of sadness in her voice. “It was a compulsion.”

  “Are you serious?” Sam asks, turning and looking back toward the dark cave.

  “It all feels like so long ago now,” she continues. “I remember each and every one of them, though. How they looked. How they tasted. I remember one tasted so good, I could never recreate it. Just a nice, plump, juicy little baby. I struck lucky that day as I started peeling his skin away. Maybe all the crying made him extra tender, like veal. Honestly, I'm not claiming to be any great shakes as a chef. A little salt and pepper, some herbs, and that's it.”

  “You're sick,” Sam stammers. “Even if you're joking, which I hope you are, you're sick in the head.”

  “So what did you do? Come on, you can tell me.”

  Ignoring her, Sam continues to make her way along the ledge, determined to get away from the sheer rock face and to find somewhere she can stop to figure out the truth. She keeps telling herself that she's not in Hell, that she can't be in Hell, but all the while she can still hear the woman's cackling laughter, reaching out to her from further and further away. Somehow, no matter how far she goes, the laughter seems to follow with her in the air, ringing out all around and mocking her attempts to escape. Every so often, she even hears the woman shouting after her:

  “You can't run from your sins, girl! Not down here! Here, they'll come and find you! You're gonna learn that real soon!”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “No!”

  Slipping against the rocks, Sam stumbles and falls forward, landing hard on her hands and knees. Having finally reached the bottom of the wall after several hours, she rolls onto her back and looks back up, staring for a moment at the thousands of small caves dotted all around. And then, feeling the hot ground starting to burn through the back of her shirt, she stumbles to her feet and turns to look out toward the horizon.

  Fire.

  So much fire, burning in the distance.

  The ground is rumbling, too, and when she looks down Sam sees that the black rocks beneath her feet are shaking slightly. She can still feel the heat against her face, and then she looks up and sees a blood-red sky churning high above. A faint black powder is falling, like snowy cinders as the clouds churn and flicker with the light of vast storms. In fact, the more Sam looks around, the more she feels as if – so far – Hell seems to be pretty much exactly how she'd always imagined.

  Only hotter, somehow.

  “Henry,” she whispers.

  Henry.

  That's why she's in Hell.

  Deep down, even if she won't admit the truth just yet, she knows that she can't ever make up for what she did to her little boy. As more and more cinders fall against her face, tears well in her eyes and she thinks back to the moment when she abandoned that crying, scared baby. She's always told herself that he was better off without her, and she still believes that; at the same time, part of her wishes she'd kept him and tried to make a life together. She was his mother, and some inner part of her nature still feels – every second of every day – a yearning to hold him in her arms again.

  “I was never that kind of person,” she says out loud, with tears in her eyes. “I did what was right for him.”

  In the distance, thunder rumbles ominously. Sam turns just in time to see a ball of flames rise high into the sky, and she hears a screeching sound that briefly fills the air, as if people are screaming in every direction.

  “This isn't Hell,” she whispers, stepping forward and looking all around. “It looks like Hell, but it can't be. I can't even leave Rippon.”

  Suddenly remembering the knife, she reaches up and touches the top of her head, only to find to her surprise that the knife's handle is gone. She searches for the spot where Fenroc once drove the knife into her skull, but this too is gone. It's as if the entire wound has vanished, as if...

  “I'm not dead,” she says out loud, even though her certainty is beginning to crumble. “Please, I can't be dead.”

  Still she searches for the wound, running her fingers through her matted hair and feeling her scalp. She knows where the wound should be, and she can't believe that it's gone. Instead she keeps searching until finally she stops as she realizes that if the knife is no longer there, and if she's no longer in Rippon, then...

  “I'm not dead,” she says again. “I -”

  And then she hears it.

  Far off in the distance, a baby is crying. She turns and looks over her shoulder, trying to work out where the sound is coming from. After a moment there's a heavy explosion somewhere, shaking the ground and briefly smothering every other noise, but then the cry returns and Sam feels a growing sense of fear in her chest as she takes a couple of steps forward. She tries telling herself over and over again that s
he's wrong, that this would be way too much of a coincidence, but at the same time she can already feel her soul cracking.

  “Henry,” she whispers.

  It's him.

  She'd know the sound of his cry anywhere. It's ingrained in her soul, even though she only heard it once. And even though she was certain she'd never hear him cry again, she knows right now that it's definitely him.

  “You're gonna forget about me," she remembers telling him, her own voice echoing in her memory as the cry continues in the distance. “You're gonna be raised by someone who loves you. A proper family. People who've got time and money. People who can afford to give you a good life. People who can teach you good things and set a good example. You need a good mother. You need a kind, caring mother. Not some kid who got pregnant at a nightclub.”

  Not some stupid, selfish idiot who screwed up over and over and over.

  “It's not him,” she whispers, before crouching down and clamping her hands firmly over her ears, trying to block out the sound.

  When that doesn't work, she starts humming loudly.

  When even that doesn't work, she starts shouting:

  “It's not him! Leave me alone! You're not going to trick me, this is all too obvious! I'm not in Hell and that is not Henry!”

  When that doesn't work either, she falls forward and leans on her elbows, squeezing her eyes tight shut and shouting as loud as she can, trying desperately to drown out the cries.

  Finally, after what feels like several hours of screaming and rocking back and forth, she opens her teary eyes and stares toward the horizon, and then she slowly moves her hands away from her ears.

  Nothing has changed.

  The cry continues.

  She knows it can't be Henry, but at the same time she swears she recognizes the sound. And even though she's trying to figure out how she's being tricked, at the same time she gets to her feet and then she starts stumbling forward, making her way toward the horizon, unable to keep from going to him. Within a few seconds, she starts running, desperate to stop the crying and make him feel okay, and by the time she starts running she's forgotten all her doubts.