Penumbra Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  PENUMBRA

  First edition. December 20, 2020.

  Copyright © 2020 Nazri Noor.

  All rights reserved.

  Chapter 1

  As I lay there on the altar bleeding out of the gash in my chest, with a six-inch knife stuck in my heart, it occurred to me that I really must have fucked up.

  Oh, too gruesome? Sorry. Let’s wind it back. Hi. I’m Dustin Graves, purveyor of the arcane, one-time ritual sacrifice, and dead man walking. But maybe this is too forward. We should start from the very beginning. As a wise woman once said, it’s a very good place to start.

  I like to think that my life only really began the day that I died. Nothing comes closer to a wake-up call than a knife in the chest, first because it hurts like a motherfucker, and second, because getting stabbed in the heart is a great way to remind you of just how awesome it is to be alive. I never fought harder for anything than when I was strapped down to that altar. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  It all happened the night I tried to tell my dad some good news, which was never something easy to do with him. Talking, that is. Not that I blamed him for my death, only that our argument – the last one we ever had – was what put things into motion, the ember that set off the blaze. I just wanted him to be proud of me, you know? Twenty-four years old and I never went to college for nothing, never amounted to anything, and finally it looked like I had saved enough to start a business with one of my buddies.

  “What kind of business?” My dad squinted as he asked the question, the words rolling around his mouth like hot coals. He had been drinking, I could tell. Not a lot, just enough to fill the void that mom left behind.

  “You know,” I said, thumbing the condensation on my own beer. “Business.” I swept my hand across the living room of the house where I grew up, where my father still lived, and where I hadn’t felt very welcome for nigh on six years. “Selling things. And stuff.”

  Dad raised an eyebrow. A chill sheared across the table. “You have no idea what you’re even doing, do you, Dust?” This again.

  Dust was what my dad liked to call me, because of how I could never stick to one thing, how I flitted from one job to another, how I left everything in the dust. It was his way of reminding me how he felt about my scattershot approach to school, work, and life, in general. Real funny, dad.

  Not that he was wrong, exactly. I always did a lot of reading, and I picked up just enough about everything to fake my way through conversations, relationships, and well, life, in general. It made it easy to talk to people, and to charm them when I needed to, which was all of the time, frankly. So, for example, I know enough to recommend a nice, generic red wine from out of California, but talk to me about cabernet this and sauvignon that and I’m dead. Master of none.

  “My friends are handling the business side of it,” I said, trying my best not to stammer under the weight of his gaze. Eyes blue like ice, maybe the only thing I inherited from him, and they did such a good job of making my blood run cold. It was different with us, once. We used to talk. We used to laugh. “I’m chipping in money.” I sat up straight, adjusting my collar, puffing out my chest. “And I’m handling the PR.”

  Dad huffed, took a swig of his beer, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Drops of amber stuck in his mustache, the kind of soup strainer you’d see on a high school science teacher, which is exactly what he was. And it was exactly why he ragged on me for never knowing what I wanted to do with my life. That and the fact that I frequently found myself wound into trouble all through high school, but that’s beside the point.

  Purpose, he told me. Duty. Something to serve the community. Even on the way here it occurred to me that it didn’t matter how I had some new venture to report to him, something beyond an odd job or a temporary freelance project. It felt that it didn’t matter because what I did didn’t matter. He never really showed much interest, whether my plan was to go into graphic design, or pursue music, or, most recently, writing books. “Who the hell makes money writing books?” He had a real good laugh over that one.

  “Public relations,” he said, the word rolling around on his tongue like a wedge of lemon. “Great. So events, and parties. Drinks. Drugs. Is that what you want?” His knuckles whitened as they gripped harder around his beer. “Is that what we raised you for, Dust?”

  Not this again. “That’s not what this is about.” I could feel my beer warm under my touch, or maybe that was just my ears going hot under his gaze. Shame. It was all too familiar. I didn’t know if I would ever live up to what my father wanted of me. This clearly wasn’t it.

  “I shouldn’t have come here,” I said softly.

  He ruffled a hand through his hair, his ears already reddening with frustration. “You know that’s not what I meant, Dustin. I only want what’s best for you.”

  “Sure.” I stood upright, my chair scraping across the floor as I did. “Okay.” I hated that I sounded glummer than I expected. I hated that he made me feel this way.

  “Dustin, don’t. There’s so much you could be doing with yourself. Go back to school. Get a real job. You’re twenty – ”

  “I know how old I am,” I snapped. I didn’t mean to, but I’d heard this song before. It felt like being caught in a feedback loop, like being stuck in a sitcom where no one ever laughs because the father’s a mean drunk, the main character’s a deadbeat, and the pretty, supportive mom is dead.

  “I should just go,” I said.

  “Dustin.”

  “I’ll call you. Or text you. Something.” I tossed back the rest of my bottle, the bubbles hurting my throat on the way down, the taste of it bitterer than usual somehow. I settled it down on the table, careful to place it on the coaster, because I was angry, but he was still my father. “Thanks for the beer.”

  “Will you please stay?” he said. His voice was plaintive, almost fond, and it sounded like someone from seven or eight years ago, someone from far away.

  “Can’t,” I said, shrugging my jacket on. I stuck my hand down my pockets, hardening my heart against the disappointed sigh heaving past my father’s lips, then threw the door open into the relative chill of Valero’s night air.

  It was cold, then, the night I died. It should have cooled my head, but it didn’t. I didn’t turn around as I let the door swing shut, didn’t look at my father because I knew he already had his head buried in his hands, didn’t look back because it hurt to know how little he thought of me.

  Dust, he called me, once with fondness, but now with some sense of irony. I’d always liked to do different things, even as a kid. I could play the drums decently, I could sing, I started reading early. And I did more and more as I grew older, played basketball, joined the glee club, wrote for the school paper. Jack of all trades, as they say, and in the most painful sense, because I could never stick with anything for long, never long enough to get better, to be good enough at something to really shine. Not even college.

  I thought that maybe the business I wanted to start would finally make him proud, but he was right. The hell was I thinking? I didn’t even know what we were getting into. Tech, maybe. An app? That was it. Or maybe it wasn’t. I kicked at a rock, watched it scuttle across the road, followed it into the park I liked to visit.

  During the day, that is. Sometimes I jogged through Heinsite Park, when the feeling took me, when my occupation allowed for it, and my last gig as an office temp meant I didn’t have much time to do that in a while. I’d rarely been there at night, but I thought nothing of it, my feet carrying me to the familiar old route I took, walking briskly in sneakers slightly too expensive to really run in, in a jacket that was probably too thin for the unexpected Cal
ifornia chill.

  I shouldn’t have passed through Heinsite to get back to my place. Not that night. I shouldn’t have let my anger cloud my judgment. I shouldn’t have helped that lady who said her dog had wandered too deep into the pond. I shouldn’t have bent over to look in the water when I did.

  But we can’t change our past, can we? No more than we can affect the future.

  “He’s in there somewhere,” the woman cried, her fingers digging into the sleeve of my jacket. “Please.”

  Somehow I never thought it strange that I couldn’t hear any splashing nearby. Maybe I was still too focused on my fight with my father. Maybe I was trying to prove that I was worth something, anything at all, by trying to help out a little dog. Of course, as you’ve probably guessed, there wasn’t a dog at all.

  Too late I caught the reflection in the water, of a human figure standing behind me, one arm upraised, something long and thick held in one hand. And too late it was when I tried to turn around and thrust my arms up to protect my head, because that something long and thick struck me heavily across the back of my neck. Classic move, I thought, as I fell face first into the pond. It felt like ice.

  That’s what you deserve, I thought, as my nostrils filled with water. You’ll never amount to anything, Dust. Might as well lay here and drown in this puddle. Might as well lay here and die.

  You know when they say you should be careful what you wish for? Yeah. And generally, you don’t get to pick how you die, either. Knife in the heart? Not fun.

  Chapter 2

  Somehow, receiving magical power from being stabbed in the heart didn’t make things much better. Would I have resisted then if I’d known that the knife would be the catalyst for my arcane awakening? I mean, yeah. Because dying fucking hurts. You ever been a ritual sacrifice? You ever been stabbed in the heart?

  No, no. Let me tell you all about it.

  When I came to, my hair was still wet, plastered to my forehead with pond water and, I figured, at least a little bit of sweat. I didn’t know how long I’d been knocked out, only that it was long enough for my captors to drag me to some dark, dingy room and strap me down to what felt like a table.

  Stone. That much I remember, the roughness of it scraping across my bare arms, the leather restraints across my chest and stomach biting into naked skin. They’d ripped my shirt off, I guess to make a cleaner job of it, a cleaner cut. And by they, I mean – the others.

  I counted eight from where I was lying, maybe ten people in robes, their faces obscured by hideous bronze masks. It was hard to tell what the masks were supposed to represent by the dim light of candles, even though they’d lit enough to encircle me.

  It was out of a movie, a horror novel, the exact kind of scene where someone dies, where someone’s still-beating heart gets plucked out of their chest. Kalima.

  Struggle. That was my first instinct. But the leather was bound across me too tight, and it only seemed to tighten as I thrashed. One of the masked figures whispered and gestured in my direction, and the leather straps snapped across my body, tightening so abruptly that it pressed the air out of my lungs. How did he do that? If I wasn’t panicked before, the steady constriction threatening to crush my ribcage was more than enough to drive me over the edge.

  And that was when my mind caught up with me, and my second instinct to scream tried to force its way out of my body through my mouth, except that I could make no noise at all. I was gagged, tight enough that even the loudest bellow I could muster just broke against the dam of whatever my captors had rammed up against my teeth.

  Every failed exhalation only wasted more of my breath as the air shot out of my nostrils. The straps across my chest tightened even more. I heard one of the masked figures chuckle. It was then, when they saw that I’d tired myself out, that the robed strangers began a slow, wordless chant. My body was slick with sweat by then, the damp of it gone cold against my skin. Somehow, all I could think of was how I had left things with my father.

  Every grunt and hiss the figures uttered from behind their grotesque metal faces made the shadows lengthen, made the flame in every candle jump higher. I groaned into my gag, fought against my restraints. That’s when I saw him.

  He was the tallest of them all, his face not just a bronze mask like the others, but adorned with horns, spikes reaching to the ceiling in vicious points. And in his hand, the verdigris dagger.

  By the candlelight I could see that the metal of it was greenish, like tarnished bronze. All along its shaft were spines, sharp and pointed, its hilt a wicked claw. In the figure’s hand, it looked like a talon. At the dagger’s pommel glowed a single gem, like an eye. And the blade was slender, curved, like something used for skinning.

  I struggled, bucked anew. It was true, what they say, about the body being newly consumed by adrenaline, how strength surges in times of great peril. And what peril it was. The chanting from the circle around me grew as the cluster of figures tightened around their demonic master, this bronze-faced god with his horns gleaming in the firelight.

  Somehow, through the frothing panic of my fear, I still had enough of my mind left to notice something. The figure who had tightened my restraints with just a gesture of his fingers was now right by my feet. They’d done a good job of restraining my upper body. The rest of me, not so much.

  I kicked upwards, hard and rough, and it was only when my foot connected with the figure’s bronze mask that I realized I still had my shoes. Good. He shrieked, flecks of blood dripping down the edge of his mask. Good, again. I got the fucker in his teeth. More importantly, now that I had him distracted, the leather restraints around me had seemed to loosen.

  I didn’t know how kicking him in the teeth made that happen, exactly, but all that mattered was that I finally had an opening. The leather straps fell off my chest as I started struggling once more, and even as the figures rushed at me they couldn’t control me long enough to pin my arms down. I shouted madly into my gag as the tall man plunged the dagger at my chest, the chanting all but ceased.

  My hands flew up by instinct, clutching around the dagger’s hilt in some vain, pointless attempt to stop its descent. The spines all along its sides ripped into the palms of my hands, tearing stinging gashes into my fingers. I screamed, and screamed, and no one heard.

  And finally it was too much when eight, maybe nine, maybe ten of the hooded figures found enough of their senses to pin me to the table I now knew was a stone altar, splaying my arms to my sides, fully exposing my chest. I clawed at the stone with blood-slicked fingers, a silent scream begging to work its way out of my body. The dagger fell.

  I don’t like recalling how that felt. I don’t like rewinding to that night and bringing back the sensation of cold metal already wet with my own blood first pricking at my skin, then sliding further, deeper down as it cut its way through my flesh. To say that it was excruciating would be an understatement. I was a frog on a dissecting table, a patient under some mad doctor’s scalpel, caught between the instinct of struggling to free myself and the knowledge that every buck and twitch of my dying body meant that the knife would only have a chance to bite deeper, faster.

  That night I learned that the coolness of metal saps away quickly when it’s brought against heat, say, when it’s sheathed in human flesh, when it’s drinking blood. Tears blurred my vision as I watched my chest blossom crimson, blood mingling with the sweat on my skin, warm, thick, inviting. Strange that my dad and I had an altercation over my sense of purpose just earlier that night. This was my purpose, to become a sacrifice. I groaned against the pain, at the sensation of agonizing fullness stuck inside me. Finally I had amounted to something.

  At some point, I knew that the tip of the blade had entered my heart. It might have been around the time when the pain faded to numbness, when the searing heat of my own blood pooled across my body cooled to ice. The room felt like the inside of a freezer, the stone at my back like a slab of frost. It went dark, and for the very first time, I knew what it meant to die.
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  Chapter 3

  And as clarity and stillness follow the storm, so did light pierce through darkness. Dramatic, maybe, but give me a break. I was dead. Or at least I thought I was. Who survives a knife in the heart?

  Me, as it turned out. Me, as the Lorica gently explained.

  It was scorchingly brilliant when I opened my eyes, and I’m sure you’ll forgive me for thinking I was in heaven. Some place like it, if you don’t believe in that sort of thing. Of course, that gave me no end of confusion. I wasn’t a bad guy by any stretch of the imagination, but I wasn’t an angel, either.

  But she was.

  For a moment I hesitated, squinting through the haze of eyes still gummy with sleep. “Muh,” I muttered, swallowing the word as soon as I realized what sound my mouth was trying to form. Mom.

  It was impossible. She’d been gone too long now. I was there when they buried her, and dad was too. This woman could have almost passed for her in the murk of the filter between wakefulness and sleep, but as I forced my eyelids to lift, I saw the starker differences.

  She stood against the light, the pale perfection of her short-cropped hair like a halo bathed in florescence. Her lips were tight with concern, but her eyes smiled, and in the light of things they seemed to glow golden, peering out of a face as smooth and as white as hewn marble. Like I said, an angel, and not at all the woman I thought would be my future boss.

  She smiled, and everything seemed all right.

  I opened my mouth to say something, instead finding my lips smacking from disuse and dryness. I think I moaned for a good second before I remembered what it was to speak, but even when I found the words to say, they came out in a tumbling slur.

  “I – wha. Where?”

  The woman’s smile grew wider. It kept me safe.

  “Someplace you won’t be hurt. Everything’s going to be okay now, Mr. Graves.”

  That’s right. Dustin Graves. I still knew my name. That was a good sign at least. I tried nodding, except that it felt like I did nod, except that whatever drugs were still coursing through my system stopped me from actually tilting my head. I planted my elbows in the mattress, lifting my head off my pillow – and screamed when my chest ripped like fire.