The scene in the middle of the room was so horrific her brain melted into a puddle of incomprehensibility.
Three figures, robed in black with mirrored slabs shielding their faces, chanted. In the middle of them, a lifeless body lay on a cot. The masked men pulled entrails from their victim, tossing them to the dirty ground where they landed in coils like shell-pink snakes. She clutched her belly, empathetic agony gutting her midsection.
Helen forced herself to look at the face of the sacrifice. And yes. Brian on the cot. A growl murmured in the pit, animalistic yet terrifyingly other. The crystal pulsed in spurts of phosphorescent light, peppering the grim surroundings with a jumble of wavering pastels.
“Do you forsake all other masters, both worldly and beyond, giving yourself in joy and supplication to the joining?” Joe said, flinging a handful of Brian’s guts to the floor.
Brian croaked nonsense.
“Do you forsake all other masters, both worldly and beyond, giving yourself in joy and supplication to the joining?” A different man spoke, frustration sharpening his query.
The noises in the pit grew louder, snaps and snarls of pure evil. A cone of brightness streaked in the corner of Helen’s eye.
She looked, oh God, she looked. Sinewy hands the size of dinner plates and capped by scissors of claws raked the floor above the top step.
An aberration crawled out of the depression and came into view, lithe and terrible. A cool, pyramid-shaped glow cast off by the crystal illuminated what slunk forward on hands and knees. Hunched shoulders, bald head, nude flesh the graying color of decomposed hamburger.
The face was a skull. Smoke like cumulus clouds floated around the fiend’s outline.
“It’s coming, it’s ready,” Joe hissed. “Do you forsake all other masters, both worldly and beyond, giving yourself in joy and supplication to the joining?”
“No.” Brian slurred like molasses filled his mouth. “No, no, no.”
“No use. We need to find the hex generator and bring them into the fold, like the spell said. I keep telling you.” The man who wasn’t Joe wiped his hands on his robe.
Posture stiffening with alertness as he seemed to notice something, Joe swiveled his head in Helen’s direction. In his mask, her own horrified, grimacing expression stared back at her as a reflection.
Joe advanced, left palm raised. He chanted. Frigid water invaded her veins.
“Come here,” Joe whispered, reaching for her. “Join us on our Left Hand journey, coven daughter. One of six, a sacred order, we welcome you to the helm of our practice.”
“Yeah, that’s a hard no.” She broke into a run, weaving down hallways.
Catching her breath, Helen stopped and took stock. No Joe. She’d lost him. Helen found herself in a square room about the size of L&E’s yoga practice floor. Four mirror walls populated the unfurnished space with images of her.
Helen felt for a door, but her hands brushed smooth glass. One reflection moved on her own, squishing the side of her face in an absurd distortion of features. Yelping as shock jolted her system, Helen jumped backward.
“Let me out.” The other Helen knocked on the glass, wild eyes matching the frantic plea of her voice. “Save me, help me.”
Helen shook her head and fumbled shaking hands along the wall until she found a latch hidden between two panes of glass. She wouldn’t be freeing anyone or anything until she touched base with Nerissa, thank you very much.
“Please. I can bear the load of your curse. I volunteer.”
Helen pulled her fingers away from the handle, meeting her own desperate, undignified face. She recognized that expression, having pulled it while begging foster families to allow her to stay. Pity wrenched her. “Why would you do that? What’s in it for you?”
Clone Helen hung her head, brown hair blanketing her features. “I ferry curses back here and feed them to my master, and he rewards me with peace.”
This mirror-her worked as some kind of hex mule for her overlord?
“What are you? An aspect of me who lives in another dimension?”
Clone Helen lifted her face to view, a pitiful smile crossing her lips. “I’m your castoff parts. Those broken pieces your psyche can’t integrate. Your weaknesses, fears, envy, and hate. Your subconscious sends those elements into me, and as penance for accepting them, I must toil in the inferno until my master deems me worthy of absolution.”
Heavy guilt piled upon Helen’s shoulders. She’d created some kind of psychic scapegoat. Unconscionable, and shot through with somber irony.
She’d been slotted into the fall guy role time and again in her foster homes, taken the blame when some other kid broke a glass or came home from school in a foul mood. Though she assumed she’d gotten over her resentment, had she instead poured the poison on some version of herself locked in a dimension of suffering and grief?
“So if I agree to do this, if I hand the curse to you and you feed the hex to your hell overlord or whatever, we both get a break?”
The double nodded. “Do you know the spell for psyche splitting?” Hope pitched her tone to a squeak. Helen’s own sad eyes stared back at her.
Helen rubbed her thighs in fast motions. “No. Tell you what, I’ll wake myself up and study Psyche Splitting in the grimoire. Then I’ll come back here and help.”
Shrugging, the clone tapped her toe into the edge of the mirror. “If you managed to get yourself here, you probably have enough skill to try. Psyche Splitting is a lower-level spell.”
Though her intuition requested she slow down and proceed with caution, urgency pushed back against the sensible inner voice. Time marched on, with Brian facing a gruesome fate. She’d come this far, and reluctance could result in death.
“Okay. I’ll try—I’ll do it.” Hey, in the immortal words of Yoda, do or do not. She’d act with boldness, striking that impotent word “try” from her vocab.
The
