Halloween I.F. – “Going Dark” – Finale

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For one last moment, Fern hesitated. They knew they didn’t have the time to waste, but the thought of all that knowledge, lost—

But Madoc had essentially confirmed that the knowledge he’d written down had a particular slant to it. Madoc had seen everything in the world as something to manipulate or harm. 

Learning from that would be dangerous. Fern knew how algorithms worked, after all. Once they got used to learning a specific type of thing in a specific way, it’d be too easy to continue to seek out that specific thing…

No, any further learning in this area, they’d do under their own merits. They could only hope they didn’t have to do it alone.

“Bannick,” Madoc said again, warningly, and Fern realized they were out of time to decide.

Fern pulled away from Aris’s embrace, Aris willingly letting them go as they whipped their backpack off and turned it upside down. The jar crashed first, glass shattering and dropping disgusting, sickly-sweet smelling meat out with a splash of blood over Fern’s shoes and jean cuffs. The journals followed.

“You mustn’t—” Madoc gasped, eyes widening.

Bannick whipped around while carrying him, pointing him at Miranda. “Go on, girl. I’ll hold, you punch,” Bannick purred.

And Miranda let out a shriek, rising from her crouch like a trained athlete to launch herself at Madoc.

Fern didn’t have time to focus on exactly what she was doing to him, nor did they want to—though they wished her all the best of it, frankly; she deserved this chance. They needed to make sure that Madoc’s attention didn’t focus again on her, to give her the opportunity to do what she needed to do.

Their hand was bleeding already, but they didn’t want to take any chances. Hoping inanely that they didn’t get an infection from this—trying to remember the last time they got their tetanus shot—they snatched up one of the larger pieces of glass and sliced their palm open.

The hot pain of it almost made them scream, but they strangled the sound, curling their hand a couple of times to be sure they hadn’t done too much damage. Blood poured over their palm, hot and searing; they turned it over, dripping across the covers of the books, then flipped the books open and began dragging their hand over the pages. 

Madoc was screaming, the sound paper-thin and raspy with such dead lungs and fragile throat. Fern risked looking up and saw that Miranda was pulling parts out of Madoc. They tried, simultaneously, to blank out what they were seeing and knew that they’d be reviewing the image over and over for years.

They looked back down and took a vicious, pained pleasure in smearing the pages about fairies and demons with their blood, then began to pull out pages.

They tore a bunch, but that was taking too long—they didn’t think they could stay conscious through doing this on every page. With the clarity of panic, they remembered the weapons they’d brought with them, grabbing the screwdriver and lining it up like an awl, and then using the hammer and all their strength to hammer it through the cover and all the pages. A few more taps sent it into the book below as well, impaling both.

Aris leaned down behind Fern, needle-like hair tickling Fern’s skin as it fell around them. They were glowing again, luminescent, but that might be the blur in Fern’s vision, the aching exhaustion that made the hammer feel like a thousand pounds.

“You can’t take much more of this,” Aris whispered into Fern’s ear.

Fern drew a ragged breath. “I know,” they said, and brought the hammer down on the screwdriver’s head again and again, driving it deeper and deeper until the screaming stopped. 

It tumbled from a numb, bloody hand. Fern tried to look up, couldn’t raise their head, saw Aris’s arms closing around them, saw Bannick’s feet approaching, and then saw nothing at all.

[Tomorrow, the EPILOGUE will go up, along with an Author Q&A!

Rather than the usual general suggestions, tell me what you’d want in an epilogue.
Who would be there, what questions answered, etc. I can’t guarantee they’ll
get in there — some things are locked based on the choices made to date —
but I’ll try to address ’em!]

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