Unsleeping Patron - Eleven Names Carved in Jade

The crack across Hester’s right lens split the world into two slightly misaligned halves. On the left, the grey pre-dawn mist was a smooth, unbroken blanket; on the right, it jagged upward at an angle, doubling the dark trunks of the trees.She pressed her palm against her breastbone. Beneath the damp linen of her shirt, a faint, rhythmic tugging pull pressed against her ribs, as if a fishhook had caught in the meat of her sternum.”Don’t pull at it,” Gideon warned without turning around. He was three paces ahead, his heavy shoulders working beneath his mud-crusted coat.Hester dropped her hand, wiping a smear of condensation from her cheek. She looked down. Emerging directly from the center of her chest was a single strand of dull, golden light, no thicker than a horsehair. It didn’t cast a shadow on the mud, nor did it illuminate the dark weeds it passed through. It simply stretched out into the fog, taut and silent, pulling her forward.Ten other strands trailed through the dark beside hers. One belonged to the Leeds schoolteacher, who walked with her head down, muttering under her breath; another stretched from the back of the young man in the tracksuit trousers.And then there was Silas.He walked on the outer flank, five yards to Hester’s left. He moved with a strange, unhurried rigidity, his sleeves pulled tight over his fists. In the dim grey light, his profile looked carved from lard pale, greasy with cold sweat, his jaw clenched so hard the muscles worked beneath his skin like buried worms.Hester opened her mouth to ask him if his stomach was still cramping, but the words caught in her dry throat. Every time she got within three feet of him, a faint smell reached her nose. It wasn’t the metallic tang of the river or the damp rot of the leaves. It smelled like the back corner of a cellar where turnips had gone soft in their crates.”There,” Gideon rasped, bringing the column to a halt.The trees didn’t clear so much as they simply failed to grow. The stone-paved path spilled out onto a flat, oval plateau of dark slate. Rising from the center of the plateau was a building that had no right to exist in a forest without roads.It was a basilica, ten yards tall at its highest arch, built from narrow, fluted pillars that supported nothing. The stone wasn’t granite or marble. It looked like thick, frosted glass or oiled vellum, translucent and pale grey. Through the semi-transparent walls, Hester could see the dim shapes of empty alcoves and ruined stone partitions.”It’s a phantom,” the Leeds teacher whispered, her knuckles white as she gripped her own forearms. “You can see the trees through the wall. Look.”Gideon stepped onto the flat slate. The moment his heavy boot heel struck the stone, a low, resonant hum vibrated through the ground not a sound, but a shudder that rattled the teeth in Hester’s jaw.The translucent grey walls shuddered. Like ink drying on paper, the ghostly frost spread across the glass-like stone, turning it opaque, heavy, and solid. The faint breeze died instantly, blocked by three-inch-thick slabs of real, weathered granite.”It turned real,” the schoolteacher whimpered, taking a step back. “It’s… it solidified.””We go inside,” Gideon said. He didn’t wait for an agreement. He pulled his leather belt tighter around his waist and walked straight through the high, doorless archway.Hester followed, her eyes darting between the towering stone jambs. Inside, the air was dead and motionless. It smelled of old dust and dry river silt, entirely free of the sweet, sickening lily stench that hung over the forest.In the center of the nave, behind a low stone screen carved with intricate, interlocking spirals, a soft amber glow floated three feet above the flags. It was a ball of warm light, motionless as a pool of tallow.Thrusting directly into the heart of the light were the eleven golden threads.The eleven survivors gathered around the screen, their breath making faint white plumes in the dead air.”In the light,” Hester said, squinting through her broken lens to double the image. “There’s a slab.”Gideon reached out. His fingers hovered an inch from the amber glow, his face set in hard, defensive lines. When no purple fire erupted and no cold paralysis struck his limbs, he plunged his hand into the light and pulled the object free.It was a jade-green slate, no larger than a ledger, bound along one edge by three loops of tarnished gold wire. The stone was smooth, cool, and carried the faint, translucent grain of deep water.”Is there writing?” the man in the undershirt asked, crowding Gideon’s elbow. “Is it an exit map?”Gideon turned the slate over.The silence that followed was heavy enough to crush a man.Gideon’s jaw went slack. The hard, military line of his shoulders collapsed, his elbows dropping an inch. He stared at the face of the stone, his eyes moving back and forth, back and forth, refusing to process what was carved there.”Gideon?” Hester stepped closer, her heart hammering against the golden thread in her chest. “What is it?”Without a word, Gideon held the slate out into the amber glow.Engraved into the smooth green jade were eleven lines of sharp, precise English script. The letters weren’t carved with a chisel; they looked as though they had been burned into the stone by a fine, white-hot needle, glowing with a faint, dark luminescence.Gideon Verstraten Hester Brierly Silas Blackwood Samuel Wu Evelyn Thorne …Eleven names. Exactly eleven. Spelled correctly, middle initials included, listed in the exact order they were currently standing around the altar.”Our names,” the Leeds teacher breathed, her hand flying to her mouth. “Those are… those are our names. How does it know?””It’s a roster,” Samuel Wu whispered, his voice cracking. “It’s a bloody manifest. We aren’t lost. Something brought us here.”Panic began to bubble through the group again, sharper this time, stripped of the physical exhaustion that had kept them quiet on the trail. People started talking over one another, demanding answers from Gideon, demanding answers from the walls.Hester didn’t join them. She stood on the edge of the circle, her gaze shifting away from the glowing green slate.Silas wasn’t looking at the names.He had walked away from the altar while the others were staring at the stone. He was standing near the back of the nave, at the base of a narrow, spiral staircase that wound upward into the pitch-black shadows of the second floor.His back was turned to the group. From the base of his skull, buried beneath his messy hair, a single, pitch-black thread extended into the darkness above a thread that only his strange, twitching head seemed to be following.He took a step onto the first stone riser. His movement was utterly silent, his hand dragging along the damp granite wall as he began to climb, drifting up into the dark like a ghost returning to a grave.