Ugly Things
There are ugly things in the shadows surrounding us.
Ever since the senses came back, when I least wanted, needed or coped with them, I've have been aware of the monsters, vaguely and dimly, like air twisting into colours and shapes no one else could see.
I didn't tell Sandburg. Maybe I should have, but I didn't have any words and I didn't think even he could understand without them.
But they've always been there. The deformed, not quite empty spaces that were once humans without souls, spirit animals for those whose spirits are monstrous. I could always see them, and no one else could. And as time went on there were more of them, watching me, watching us... and now, since the fountain, watching him.
Fear is there, a faint, shuddering thing like an eerie afterthought... and it never goes away. I've learned to live with it being there, but I won't - I won't - ask Blair to.
There's Lash, his worst nightmare... a thin, slithering nothing, the edge of a curly wig, battered suede jacket and twisting lips. It hangs about in the shadows, always moving, always turned towards Blair, always reaching out towards him with those thin snakelike tendrils that might have been fingers. I move between them, feel the wet icy oblivion as it wriggles back... I see Blair frown, and question, and I make weak gags about Blessed Protecting.
Carasco - he died in jail, no loss to the world... fatter, a darker, sluglike void like a psychic trail of slime. Stared with empty, hating, sightless eyes at the young man who loved his daughter. Brushes too near, like a foul, tainted wind.
Lila. Oh god, broken bird Lila.
The Starkville jackals, guilty but not of what they died for, dark and heavy and angry, so angry, at anyone who lives when they are dead. And god knows, Sandburg is such a glowing source of life among their deathlike shadows, I can see it hurt them, anger them, draw them. Sandburg always gets baffled when I pull him back into any light I can find, but hey, I can usually divert him, deflect that big, bright, glittering mind of his into brighter brilliant pathways shadows can't follow. The Starkville ones, they don't really hate him... or me.
Others, they hate all right, they reek of it and of fear, and of savage spite. There's Mattson, the arsonist, the vulture, wings twisting and flickering like frozen, invisible flames, hard mouth soundlessly screaming. There are the decaying remnants of father and son serial killers, the reptilian Fosters. There's Oliver, my dead nemesis Oliver, the harsh and ruthless and silent... and now powerless bird of prey.
Many more, named and nameless, the ones Sandburg knew or knew of... the ones he doesn't and won't. They are parts of my past.
I'm not afraid of the ugly things, though Blair might be if he knew, if he could understand. He's got guts, that kid, but this is beyond just plain courage - this is something the Sentinel knows the words for, and Jim Ellison doesn't. I just don't know how to tell him without those words, not in ways that wouldn't sound... that wouldn't scare even him.
They're the ones who fear. They know something about me that even I don't, something about a Sentinel that can cow, maybe hurt, even the worst of the ugly things, and they're afraid of it. That's how I want it. Now and forever. As long as they're afraid enough, we won't have to find out what it is.
But from that day - since I met death in Sandburg's body, forced it out and brought him home, and killed some part of myself in doing so - I've been more aware of them, all of them. And since I heard of a lonely death in a hospital for the criminally insane, there's a new shadow, a brighter, angrier, more menacing one, but still just a shadow.
The tattered, half-glimpsed after-image of a jaguar, its greying, spotted pelt shredded in places, its thin twisted limbs loping awkwardly, its burning blue-grey eyes mad. I see it from the corner of my eye, staring at me and at him... I hear the faint, hollow clatter of its long, blood-spotted claws.
In the night, I know she's there. I'm not afraid, but like the others, she is; it's the Sentinel that she sees, and the Sentinel that she is afraid of.
Like them, she now knows what it is in me - now, since the fountain - that she has to fear.
-the end-