The Oak Hotel - Watty Awards 2013 Finalist

Chapter Thirty-nine - Through the Glass

Chapter Thirty-nine

Through the Glass

At first, nothing happened. Lincoln braced himself for something extraordinary. He imagined the carousel coming to life, the air filled with the strident sound of calliope pipes. The creatures, empowered with mystical energy, would come to life and run free out onto the boardwalk. Some hidden element of their quest would, finally, become clear.

In the end, nothing of the sort happened.

Instead, everything was destroyed.

In one great, ear-pounding thump that deadened the air, the entire boardwalk and everything on it burst into a massive cloud of sand, falling unceremoniously to the ground below. Lincoln did not even have the chance to shout out in surprise; after the shock of the fall, which was partially broken by the cascade of sand, he quickly dug and pushed upward until breaking through to the surface.

Spitting coarse grit from his mouth, coughing uncontrollably, Lincoln eventually found himself kneeling in the middle of nowhere. The boardwalk was truly gone, reduced to nothing more than a lengthy mound of sand.

And then panic electrified him. Kayleigh! She'd been under the boardwalk!

In a fury, he dropped to a random spot and began digging, pulling great handfuls of sand away in a mad spray. He wasn't sure if it was a minute or an hour later, but the sad truth set in that he was getting nowhere. The deeper he dug, the more quickly the sand slid back into the hole. And it wasn't normal sand, as they’d already guessed, but a strange mixture of large and fine grains that refused to conform.

Lincoln stood and looked in the direction of the artificial beach where Stitch had been. The misty waves were gone, but there was something dark and unmoving. Kayleigh?

Lincoln ran, sliding and tripping continuously in the sand until he stopped and tore off his shoes and socks. Barefoot, he continued his sprint until reaching his destination.

The lifeless body of Truman Stitch lie sprawled, face up on the sand. He held an object in each hand and his open eyes stared with horrible understanding into the grainy, white noise sky above.

It took a moment for Lincoln to comprehend what Stitch was holding and how it all fit together. In his right hand was a jar of rapture fig preserves. The lid had been removed and more than half of the preserves were gone. The fingers of his right hand were stained a dark, gruesome color.

Upon closer inspection, Lincoln realized that this jar had come from that secret place in the Mona's old cellar. Lincoln hadn't taken it, but he could think of one person who might have placed it there when Lincoln was looking the other way.

In Stitch's other hand was Victoria Tompkin's FlipOut; on the screen was Lea Ruttier, her mouth parted and frozen in mid-speech. Lincoln could only guess that the old librarian had further instructed Victoria to secretly hide the jar and FlipOut device in Lincoln's backpack before they left for Hellward Kottabos. He could further imagine the voice of Ms. Ruttier telling Stitch to do the right thing and eat the tainted jam, end it all and let loose the sáwol of Emil and Ka Tolerates. Stitch, of course, would only be concerned with ending his own suffering. The preserves were, of course, not of this world and not bound by the rules of Stitch’s imprisonment.

But what about the sáwol? Hadn't Ka Tolerates spoken to him at the Carousel?

Lincoln reached into his pocket and retrieved the tiny, glass bottle. Holding it up before him, he gently pulled out the sliver of cork. His breath caught as two paper-thin ribbons of prismatic light appeared out of nothingness and approached him. Accompanying their movement was the familiar, heartbreakingly beautiful music. The darker side of Lincoln's mind expected Stitch's body to reanimate, lurch upward and snatch at the light streams, pulling them back inside his body. Monsters never die, he thought with a shudder, but the dead man’s body remained still.