Dead Eyes Open

The knocking bothered me.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone. Who wants to be woken up when they’re enjoying a good sleep? Everything was dark and cozy. I was in that blissful haze of unconsciousness that wraps you up better than any blanket, and then—the knocking.

I groaned, closed my eyes harder—you know what I mean when I say that—and willed it away. Whatever “it” was. This was not a matter of “ten more minutes” and rolling over. Oh, no! I wanted them to go away forever. That rest was my due privilege.

It should be in the Bill of Rights,I thought.Thou shalt not wake Emerra when she sleeps…sleepeth? Whatever. I’m so tired.

And I was. My bones ached with exhaustion, and lethargy hung on every part of my body like a weighted blanket.

I had been sick for a long time.

Whoever was knocking didn’t care. There were shuffles and random noises too. And that awful murmuring, just outside my range of hearing—the kind that makes you realize there are people there, but isn’t loud enough to give you any particulars about who those people are and whether you’re supposed to feel dread or joy about them being there.

A loudcracksounded right above my head. My eyes jerked open, but I couldn’t see anything. It was pitch black. I might as well have kept them closed.

There was anothercrack. The murmur of voices returned, and a sliver of light beamed in.

If I hadn’t been in utter darkness, I might have described it as soft, mellow, and orangey-yellow—the light of a lovely October sunset. But I had been in utter darkness, so I’ll say it was a spear.

I blinked the pain away as my eyes adjusted. Then they widened on their own.

Above me was a skull.

It sat atop a well-dressed skeleton—it wasn’tfloatingthere or anything—but when the first thing you see is a skull, grinning at you, you kind of fixate on it. It doesn’t matter how nice his suit is.

Behind him, I could see others. The little red-headed witch seemed to be the most normal of them. A vampire stood behind her, so rigidly upright there wasn’t a single crease in his suit. A mummy was on the skeleton’s right, and a blue-green bog-creature, only as tall as the mummy’s knees, swayed around one of her wrapped legs.The bog-creature was chewing on the end of a bandage in a thoughtless manner. When I caught sight of the pale hand that had lifted the lid of my casket, my eyes followed the arm back to what must have been an Igor. You could see the hump on his back, and he had wild, rolling, mismatched eyes. A wolfman, as tall as the sky, loomed over them all. Every last one of them was looking at me, and each face had a different expression.

But the skull grinned, and I wondered if he would be grinning, even if his head wasn’t a skull.

“Emerra Cole?” He reached out his bony hand to help raise me from my eternal slumber. “My name is Jack Noctis, though most people call me Big Jacky. I cannot tell you how glad we are to meet you.”