Once upon a time, she would have thought it enough to drive her mad. But she understood more about madness now than once she had.
With her eyes fully open, no longer able to deny that the world around her was real, her face contorted with hopelessness and she shook for several moments. Forcing herself up, she took a deep, shuddering breath and then swallowed her despair. Her right hand came up and she wiped at her eyes. She felt as though she would cry, but no tears came. There was sand in her mouth, tiny pieces of grit that she could not rid herself of. Dehydration was having its way with her, and she hadn’t enough saliva to summon a wad of spit.
Collette hugged herself and simply sat there in the sand, aware that some had sifted into the legs and arms of her pajamas as she slept but not yet able to muster the motivation to do anything about it. What was the point? There would only be more. Really, there wasn’t anything here but sand.
She took a long breath and forced herself to look around. The round chamber she was in— she never thought of it as a room, and it was too airy and open to be a dungeon— had no door, but a dozen windows all around the circumference. They were tall, arched windows with no glass and during the day the sunlight flooded in and heated the chamber. But the windows provided no hope for exit. They were twenty-five feet from the ground and the walls were made entirely of smooth, hardened sand.
It was all sand.
The floor was the soft, shifting stuff of dunes and lonely beaches. The walls were as hard as cement, but it was the same material in a different form. This had been her prison for days, though how many she could not have said. Time seemed to move torturously slow here.
While the sun shone, her prison was not only lit, but heated. By afternoon it often grew so hot that the sand seared her bare flesh and she had to keep to the shadows. Midday was torture. Food and water were often brought to her while she slept, and if it was the same fiendish thing that had imprisoned her here that delivered her meager meals, she had never seen it again. Not since that first night.
Not since it slaughtered her father and tore out his eyes.
“Daddy,” Collette whispered. Still seated, she hugged her knees against her chest and lay her cheek atop them.
She closed her eyes and let the night breeze caress her. For it was dark now. There was no way for her to tell how long she had slept, but it had been hours. When she had drifted off in the cool shade of afternoon, night had been distant. Now evening had come. Later it would grow cold there in that sand prison, but for now it was only the breeze that hinted at the dropping temperature. The sand beneath her still retained the accumulated warmth of the day.
The windows were still visible, the moon and starlight turning them into portraits of the night sky, but in that chamber the darkness was deeper. More intimate. Collette had been alone there too long, however, and that intimacy had become part of her prison. She wanted someone to talk to. Someone to shriek at. Anyone upon whose shoulder she might weep. Company, even in her misery.
A dry laugh escaped her lips. Misery loves company. It took on an entirely new meaning in her mind. She was going to die. Of that she was certain. Having witnessed the mutilation murder of her own father, there was no room for doubt in her mind. But for a woman with only the faintest, little girl’s impractical hope, there was still something about the solitary nature of her imprisonment that was a separate sort of hell.
Where was she? What was the dreadful apparition that had brought her here? Where had it gone, and when might it return? Such questions occupied her waking mind for every moment that she did not spend in anguished grief for her father and for her own predicament.
And what of Oliver?
That question returned again and again, and with it both dread and that one tiny spark of hope remaining. More than ever, now she was certain that Oliver’s disappearance was not of his own volition. Something had happened to him. He had been abducted, or led astray, or driven somehow to leave the night before he was meant to marry Julianna. And Collette believed— she had to believe— that there was some connection to that creature, to the murder of their father, and to her own captivity. If the thing had murdered Oliver, why not leave his corpse?
If he wasn’t dead, on the other hand . . . was it impossible to think this world was the place to which he had vanished?
There was another question, however. One that she avoided as much as possible. When her mind drifted there she would do whatever was necessary to obstruct its progress. The question was: Why am I still alive? The demon— if that was what it was— had torn out her father’s eyes, slain him in his own bedroom, but the only physical harm it had done Collette amounted to cuts and bruises sustained when it had abducted her.
Now it imprisoned her. Fed her. Kept her alive.
If she spent more than a few seconds wondering its purpose, the question would cripple her.
“Oliver,” Collette whispered, running her tongue over her dry, chapped lips and staring at the night sky through the windows high above, wondering if her brother could see them as well. “Where are you, little brother?”
A breeze swirled around inside that round chamber and she shivered a bit, though it felt good. Sweet. Collette took a breath and looked into her mind’s eye, as she had done during every period of wakefulness since she had been taken, and thought of movies. In her head there was a collection of all of her favorite films, many of which she’d seen a dozen times or more. She knew them well. Well enough to visit them now, when she needed the escape they provided more than ever. If she focused enough she could replay the key scenes from all of these films in her mind, and she had found herself in some way she didn’t quite understand able to wander into the worlds those films created. Not as an actor, nothing so imaginative. But as a tangible observer, as though the events were unfolding around her. The Philadelphia Story. October Sky. Field of Dreams. Casablanca. An Affair to Remember. Heaven Can Wait. Say Anything.
“We’ll always have Paris,” she whispered in the dark, feeling the abrasion of sand on teeth and tongue.
She could see the inside of Rick’s Café Americain with utter clarity; the screens and the drooping leaves of plants, the lazily turning fans, the beautiful women and shady men all breathing in an air of danger. And at the piano, Dooley Wilson sang. Not “As Time Goes By,” but some other tune she was not old enough to recognize. A contest of wills arose at the bar, eyes flashing angrily, and then Bogart entered, eyes heavy with melancholy and gravitas, to resolve it.
No, not Bogart. Rick Blaine. Not Dooley Wilson, but Sam the piano player, the weapon Rick and Ilsa will use against each other.
The music is sweet. The wine is dry as bone. As sand. Standing in the midst of the café, Collette hears a whisper, a voice like parchment paper, the words too soft and muffled to make out.
“Your eyes . . . he’s going to take your eyes . . . maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but sooooon.”
With a sudden, sucking breath, Collette snapped her eyes open, wrenching herself from the trance state to which she had retreated. The whisper had not been a part of the scenario she was painting for herself. It had come from outside.
The chamber seemed lighter, though not with approaching dawn. It was only that she was more acclimated to the night now, and the moonlight and the glimmer of stars seemed to reach more deeply into that prison.
She reached out to touch the wall with her fingertips, another movie scene flashing across the silver screen in her mind. Dorothy in Oz, tapping the heels of her ruby slippers together and saying, in that sweet, lost voice, “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.”
Collette wished she were Dorothy, that she could tap her heels together and just be home.
And even as this thought occurred to her she felt the wall begin to give way. She stared at it and saw that it no longer seemed quite solid. The real solidity of the wall had given way and it was almost as though she were pushing her fingers into warm water, with currents tugging at her hand. Her eyes still saw the wall, but her fingers seemed to pass through it into some darkness beneath, as though she might have passed right through.
Beyond the wall, she smelled something entirely out of place and it took a moment for her to recognize the scent. Pine trees. Sap and needles.
What the hell?
Off to her right came that rasping whisper again. Collette started, breath coming in short bursts, heart thundering like the bombastic promise of a summer storm. She drew her fingers back from the wall and when she realized what she’d done and touched it again, it was solid and unyielding. For a moment it had seemed there might be some escape, but now again she was trapped. Her skin prickled as her eyes searched the hills and dips and crenellations of the sand in that chamber. The whisper was real, yes. But the words? That must have been her imagination, her memory of her father’s murder driving her subconscious. It must have been.
The noise came again, this time above, and she looked up.
A small sphere of glittering light hovered near the top of the chamber. It seemed to dance in the air, a hypnotic series of gentle glides and darting zigs.
“Collette,” the whisper came again. “The problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans.”
The sandpaper rasp of that voice came from above, as though from that sphere, and after those words that used the famous dialogue of her best-loved film against her, there came a dry chuckle that seemed tinged with almost parental indulgence.
Collette shook, eyes wide, staring at the light. It terrified her, and yet it also had a sublime beauty that she could not ignore, a purity that touched something inside of her.
There came another sound— this from behind her— a shifting of sand and a soft thump. She gritted her teeth and forced her eyes closed and kept her back turned. Collette did not want to see any more, did not want to know what else might be down in that doorless chamber with her. All of her unspoken prayers had been pleas that she would be freed, or at the least that she would find some relief for her loneliness. Now she would have given anything to be alone again.
“It is called Vittora” came a new voice from behind her.
A child’s voice.
Slowly, steadying her breathing, she turned and opened her eyes. In the shadows of her prison was a small boy, no more than nine years old by the look of him. His shirt and pants were colorless, leeched by moon and sand of any character at all. The rest of him was equally bland and ordinary, save for one terrible detail.
He had no eyes.
Where the boy’s eyes would have been, set in to an entirely unremarkable face, there were only dark, hollow pits that might have gone on forever. He took a step nearer and Collette flinched, drawing back half a foot. A smile touched his lips and he turned his face upward, catching more of the light from the Vittora, and in that glow she could see that a trickle of sand slid like hourglass tears from the ragged holes where his eyes ought to have been.
In his hands he held a small silver tray upon which sat a glass bottle full of water, an apple, a block of cheese, and several thick slices of bread.
Collette was not aware, at first, that she was screaming. Every muscle in her body was tensed and her fingers dug into the soft, shifting sand beneath her. When she at last heard the sound of her own fear and realized it came from her own mouth, she fell silent and could only stare. The child made no further move to approach her, and the light . . . the Vittora . . . paused in the air above her, trembling just as she was, as though they were connected.
“The Vittora is your guide . . . it is the luck that stays with you throughout your life, only manifesting itself when it prepares to leave. Most people never see it, but here . . . anything is possible.”
She refused to stare into those empty eyes, instead watching that tremulous light. “Why is it . . . leaving?” she managed.
“The Vittora leaves when it senses that its host is soon to die.”
Collette felt as though some part of her gave way, some central bit of her structure, and she collapsed in upon herself. She wanted to weep, but dehydration would not allow it. Her tongue moistened her chapped lips.
“Why?” she wailed. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“The past is a dream from which we never wake,” he said. Words she had heard before.
The boy moved two steps nearer. She cringed but did not bother to move away. She was crippled by anguish, but also by the knowledge that she had nowhere to run. Still she refused to look into those hellishly empty eyes.
“You should scream more,” the boy said.
The Vittora sighed and whispered, but she could no longer make out the words.
“Really, you ought to. That will bring things to a conclusion more quickly. If you scream enough, perhaps your brother will sense you, and he will come. And that will bring the end.”
“My . . .”
Collette went cold, entirely numb. She turned and faced the eyeless, colorless boy. “What do you know about my brother?”
The child’s voice became a kind of sigh. “Olllliver.” He smiled, laughed quietly, and sand spilled from his ragged sockets. “You asked why. He is the reason you are here. They freed the Sandman, Collette, do you not understand? Your father’s murder was a message, and you are the lure to bring Oliver here. They sensed something about him from the moment he passed through the Veil. They sense the same thing in you. And I can feel it as well. You both must be eliminated. And so he will come here, for you, with his traveling companions, and you will all be destroyed.”
She shook her head in denial, revolted by these dark intentions, plans she barely understood. And yet a part of her was gleeful. Oliver was alive, just as she had believed.
“So we shall wait for him. And while we wait, the Sandman visits your world . . . and he plays.”
With a grin that showed jagged teeth like broken concrete and sprinkled sand once more from the hollows in his face, the boy reached into both pockets and brought forth two handfuls of wet, gleaming, bloody eyeballs, each trailing a slick nerve tail.