Doors To The Dead by Rae Else (great books for teens txt) 📕

practice for their set, Von tried some new lyrics. Some about Donna.

In the shadow of a vineyard

You see me

The cornucopia of then

I share with thee

Hearts beat, limbs twine

You drink deep

The youth of mine.

Theo felt entranced. She swung between looking like an earnest regency maid and sultry vixen. His Regency Punk’s haunting voice seemed even more spell-like when it was only accompanied by the bass; Antony got pissy and left Richie to accompany Von alone when her lyrics strayed to other topics of inspiration,

This world drowns

Beneath your touch

We leave our bodies

And rise as one

In the other world.

Probably good that they had a gig, faced with any more songs about transcendental orgasms, Antony was in danger of smashing up his guitar once and for all. Ego aside, for the first time Theo realised from Von’s singing that humans did in their own way, visit unseen realms. Now that he’d stopped to listen, the yearnings and ideas that rang through Von's voice and the ambient beat seemed as boundless and infinite as the Between.

.

When the band left that evening, Theo’s sluagh stirred restlessly. He prowled the house, stalking through the shimmering lights that crawled across the wooden floorboards and bare walls in the gloaming.

Yet for some time, only dust motes moved through the drafts of the old villa. Then, he felt it. The swell of Donna’s spirit returned. The air grew charged and heavy as if the humidity had soared and a storm were approaching. He knew if she couldn’t escape, she would once more turn his fear against him. He trod the corridor of the house, feeling the rising certainty that her attack would come swiftly. She would try to drag him into that nightmare, as mercilessly as he’d seen so many soldiers drag their enemy down into the dirt.

The bare soft whites and greys of the walls, even in the falling shadows of night seemed too bright. Whenever Theo caught sight of the dark open timbres of the ceiling, flickers of the forest canopy tripped across his mind. It didn’t help that the same alertness that thrummed through him now, echoed that long ago fear that he’d recently relived.

As twilight deepened, the walls of the hallway took on a purplish hue. At first, it seemed a trick of nightfall, but then the horse's hooves drummed through Theo’s head. Their volume increasing as the blood thrummed in his ears, his own racing heart fuelling the illusion.

The huge Caledonian warrior astride his horse raced towards him. The purplish shadows seemed to melt away from the corridor, and the crystalline day shattered the night. Yet as the painted warrior fused with the fierce daylight behind him, Theo shook away the illusion, refusing to let it claim him.

He smiled as the vision lost its solidity and diffused around him.

His network of sluagh shot out like vipers, tasting the lavender shadows that still stained the air around him.

Donna’s essence.

It was his turn, and he knew where to strike. Earlier he’d remembered her stray thought in the vineyard when she’d first appeared to him.

The sandy-haired man was surely an angel.

Even as she’d tricked him she’d mistakenly told a little truth.

An angel,

finally

come to take her to the promised land.

She believed in Heaven. She believed in moving on and yet she hadn’t. Why? What had caused her to anchor herself here? To stay?

That was the question he drove into her soul now. The one he forced her soul to answer.

Theo savoured her distress, feeling the flow of her memories, feeling them sweep her away, deep into the chasms of her soul, forcing her to confront the most hidden parts of herself.

Theo’s deepest fear was of the night on the Cairngorms when the many sluagh had pierced his soul. As she caved in upon herself, he felt hers rise to reveal itself.

Donna cried, her sobs wracked her chest and juddered through her whole body. She was in the midst of a black sea of skirts. She only came up to the waists and chests of the women she walked amongst. A girl.

The procession exited the house. She and the other women shuffled behind a casket that the men shouldered. She felt as if she and the women were one entity. Their cries mingled and they held onto one another, causing them to shake together. As one.

Yet agitation stirred in her. She wasn’t. She wasn’t one of them. They cried and shook because Nonno was dead. She cried and shook because she’d known Nonno would die. She cried because she was different.

As the procession continued down the street towards the cemetery, she felt as if the women around her, her own family, would pounce upon her. They’d realise she was an imposter. They’d find out that she had seen Nonno die. They would blame her for his death.

In a flurry of feelings and a tide of a thousand images, Theo saw how that first moment had set her upon the course of her reclusive life. He saw it all as surely as he knew that that moment in the Cairngorms when he had seen the purple-hued sluagh had defined him. Donna had cut herself off from everyone because she was different. He felt how invasive the eyes of others were. The smallest of glimpses of someone could set off a dream about that person’s future. In the early days of her life here, she’d tried to do good with it. She’d tried to warn those that she thought she could, but even those she saved feared her. All her pains had earned her was that moniker, the woman with the third eye.

Her innermost fear unravelled, Donna was like a seed stripped of its protective casing. Theo regarded her with the cold interest of a scientist, hypothesising that it was her firm belief that she was different that had caused her to linger. She could have passed onto the Netherworld, but it seemed that her fear of being different had been a self-fulfilling prophecy, cutting her off from others