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The Valley
A Guest Quarters Story
by

Alana Joli Abbott


I

True love is the hardest to get over.

Not every first love is romantic. The first person that Victor Hernandez ever truly loved was his sister, Isolde. He was five years older than she was, strong where she was weak, wise where she was naive, courageous where she was timid. That they were opposites made them an adorable pair as children, and close as they grew older. Victor called her Izzy, and it became her name more than Isolde ever had been. He was an adventurer; she was a scholar. He joined the military after high school and succeeded there, then chased legends around the globe to learn their truth. He was dashing and romantic. Izzy went on to college and studied languages and folklore and her research fed his dreams. When Victor got married, he could not abide the idea that anyone else might be his wife's maid of honor; and because his wife loved Izzy, too, no other possibility was discussed.

When Izzy hung herself, Victor's heart shattered. He was never the same.

True love is the hardest to get over.

When Izzy went to college, she roomed with a brilliant girl who was dashing and exciting, beautiful and charismatic. Tristana was the type of girl who drew people in, and Izzy loved her. Izzy loved her with a passion she could not contain, with desire and heartache.

Tristana loved Izzy like a sister. For Tris, things worked out perfectly; when she married Victor, she and Izzy would be sisters forever.

Isolde was the maid of honor in Victor and Tristana's wedding. Afterwards, she holed up, studying her tomes, listening to the stories Tris and Victor told of their adventures. When she could bear the pain no longer, she looped a cord around her neck and stepped off a chair. The pain faded, and Isolde felt nothing.

True love is the hardest to get over.

When Izzy introduced Tristana to her brother, Tristana had felt her heart leap in a way it had never leapt before. Fate had handed her true love, had given her a love that meant she and her best friend would truly be sisters. Victor was everything she wanted, everything she needed, everything she wished she herself could be. She became his guide and his advisor, and together they traveled the far reaches of the world seeking adventure. She wrote and Victor hunted for treasures, artifacts, works of art to sell to museums. Her work paid more often than his, but they were happy. Her life seemed perfect.

Victor stopped speaking when Isolde died. He no longer looked at Tristana, no longer touched her, though she ached to be held to stave off her own pain. But he blamed her, and Tristana could not reach him, and her heart crashed into her stomach and stayed there, waiting until it could find his again.

True love is the hardest to get over.

The Valley had never loved a people the way it loved the people of its city. The Valley provided flowers for weddings, for braids in the hair of young girls, for beaus to give to their girls. The Valley echoed with laughter and rang with the sound of church bells. The Valley invited the sun to shine on upturned faces, allowed the rain to come only at night or as a reprieve to the heat. The Valley took care of its people.

When the war came, the people went away to fight. They meant to protect the Valley, but they could not keep the war from coming home. The day the lights went out and everything turned white, the Valley looked for its people, but there was only ash and screaming and bodies turning inside out on themselves. The Valley refused to believe that such a thing could be so, and it blocked out the screams, did not acknowledge that its people were dead. It waited for them to return from the war, waited for them to come home. The wind held its breath, though the flowers pretended it still blew. The flowers themselves wept each night, and in the morning, they were surrounded by jewels, a solid, constant reminder of their tears.

True love is the hardest to get over.

II

The Wizard had been a contact of Victor's from his early days of adventure. The man knew myths, legends, and drugs that took away pain. Victor saw him regularly. The Wizard gave him hope some days and dulled his senses others. With the Wizard, Victor found his voice.

He stared now at the curtains behind the Wizard's divan. The Wizard lounged back, purple robes swirling with stars and moons, an opium cloud buzzing above his head, making him dream of caterpillars with long pipes and mushrooms that made little girls grow.

Victor's eyes were red and puffy and his hands twitched, although he did not notice it.

"There is a place where your sister might have gone," said the Wizard, almost in a trance.

"My sister is dead," Victor said, breathing deeply, hoping that the cloud might ease his pain before he gave the Wizard any more money.

"Ah, but the dead are only separated from us by a small spark of life," said the Wizard. His long mustache curled down his chin and dropped pearls of swirling colors down the divan onto the floor. "There is a place that calls the unsettled to it. When it realizes they are not the ones it seeks, it holds them captive." The Wizard pulled up out of his recline slowly, his eyes boring into Victor's with intensity like fire, like demons, like ice. "There is treasure there, as well. They say the flowers cry tears of gems, and that the one who breaks the curse could collect them all and sell them for millions. And that he who breaks the curse would also be able to speak with the dead, bring them back to life." The Wizard poked at Victor with his long pipe. "Eh? Eh?"

"Tell me where it is," said Victor.

III

Tris didn't like the Valley. She could see the wind, but she could not feel it on her face. She was not sure why she had come. Victor walked away from her into the Valley. He stooped at the stem of various flowers and picked up small crystals, some of them precious, some of them not.

"Why would she have come here?" Tristana asked.

Victor turned, as though he had forgotten she was there. Then he grunted and went forward.

Tristana could see the line that separated the Valley from the rest of the world. Beyond the border, the color shifted, the grass was bleached. Everything beyond her looked dead. The wind had stopped yards ago, but the line was still in front of her. She did not have to do this. She could still go home. She had never trusted the Wizard, and she did not like this place.

"Victor, please," she called out, even though her voice seemed to hurt him, her very presence seemed to cause him pain. She knew she was a constant reminder of his loss, and yet... she could not let him go alone. She crossed the line into the valley. Almost immediately she felt ghosts surround her. They gathered close, clinging to her, sucking the air she needed to breathe. She cried out once, then closed her eyes. There was no wind, no air, and she knew the presence of the spirits would suffocate her unless she forced them away.

They had fought ghosts before, but they had been together. Now Victor was like the wind in the valley--she could see him moving, but she could not feel his presence. Tris was alone with ghosts pressing in on her, looking for a weakness in her mind. She knelt under their weight, brought her hands up to her head and clutched at her temples.

Suddenly the weight was gone. She looked ahead of her, and Victor was there, entering the ruins of what had once been a city. Under her knees were gemstones, jewels of brilliant colors shaped like tears.

You will die here.

The words entered her ears from behind, and her neck felt as though hot breath had passed by, leaving its moisture along with its message. She turned, but no one was there. The Valley breathed in and out, its unfelt wind blowing the flowers so that their tears wept onto the ground. She turned, but no one was there. She hurried after Victor, but even after she reached him, she was still alone.

IV

Voices whispered to Victor, filled his head and told him where to go. She's waiting for you, they said. Go to the temple. They whispered and hissed and fizzled and constructed a world of sound more real than the ground he walked on, more real than his wife who trailed behind, the woman he had loved, the woman who killed his sister.

Victor knew Isolde had never liked churches; the buildings had impressed and astonished her from the outside, but the interiors had made her feel small. She had gone to one of the great cathedrals with him when they were children and had walked only on the cracks of the stones that paved the aisles, trying hard not to step on anyone's grave. Churches bothered Izzy. They were history, places of the dead. But now, Izzy was one of the dead, so Victor followed the voices in his head, only half conscious of his own feet. He reached the door, pushed it open, and was stepping forward when he was pulled back by a firm grip on his elbow.

"Victor, this is not a good place." The words came at him from the voice that killed his sister. His heart burned, but his eyes did not see Tristana. They saw nothing but white, bleached buildings glowing oranges and reds as the sun set behind them. He tried to move forward again, but the grip did not loosen. "Vic, listen, people die here. They don't come back to life here. The Wizard was wrong."

Victor focused on his wife. He wondered what he had seen in her, how he had not seen the lies that formed her chin, the falseness in her lips, the tease of the hips that had led his sister to a rope. When he looked at her, he saw the rope dangling in her eyes, his sister's body rocking back and forth in its embrace. "Why are you here?" he demanded.

"Why am I here?" The image disappeared from her eyes, and in the haze of his vision, he thought, for a moment, he recognized his wife. She was fire and life in her anger. He supposed he could have loved her once, before she killed his sister. "I am here because I love you, you idiot."

"And Izzy?" Her name tasted bitter on his tongue, and the voices rattled like bones in his skull. He lost focus again, and the golden shades of his wife's hair blended into the orange-red of the sun on the walls.

"I loved her, too, Victor. You know I did." He began to pull away, but she held on. "She's not here, Vic, she's dead. She didn't want to live anymore. Even if you could bring her back, do you think that's what she'd want?"

She's waiting for you, whispered the voices in his head. This other is a lie. She tries to keep you from the truth, keep you from one you love. She is your undoing.

Victor's opposite arm seemed to move of its own accord, striking the blur of color in front of him. The pressure on his elbow loosened as the blur tumbled to the ground. He  sniffed the air and entered the church.

Tris lay on the ground, stunned, tasting the blood from the break in her lip. She watched as the outer wall of the church turned from orange to red to black and the ghosts walked the streets, watching her, waiting.

V

The Valley breathed in. The Valley breathed out. It waited. It waited for the ghosts to become people, to regain their flesh and blood. It spilled out treasure for them, placed it on the ground where it could be collected like berries, like the fruit of the vine. It knew its people would come back.

It had taken people over the years that had heard of the treasure. They came to steal the provisions  the Valley had made for the return of its people. The Valley did not appreciate such things. Strangers were not of the Valley, and were not to be tolerated. But the Valley could not bear to be left, either, so the thieves stayed and became part of the Valley, weeping their own tears of gemstones.

The people of the Valley had returned as ghosts, had watched as their bodies decayed, watched how their shadows on the walls never faded in the sunlight. They had watched how their bodies melted from the inside out, boiling the souls still trapped inside, then been bleached by the sun, just as the walls had been bleached before. They hated the living.

For years, the ghosts had tried to convince the Valley they were there, that they had returned. But the Valley would not accept them, and the air did not move, and the clouds flew by overhead and paid no attention to the lost souls below. The ghosts could not leave; the Valley would not allow it. They had been cursed twice, once in life, and now beyond it. So they waited, knowing their bodies would never return. They had no hope.

When visitors arrived, the Valley killed them, and the ghosts reveled in the change. So little changed. And then they returned to waiting.

VI

In her dreams, Tristana saw Isolde hanging at the end of a rope. Izzy had been there for days before she was found. Each night, Tristana found her again, the stench as fresh as it had been when Tristana had first opened the door.

She welcomed the ghosts that surrounded her. Some appeared as though they had been turned inside out. Some looked as if their eyeballs had been boiled. Some had a head hung askew on their shoulders. None frightened Tris so much as that image that returned to her in her dreams.

He doesn't love you, the voices said. He doesn't care if you die.

"No," Tristana said, her tongue feeling the crack in her lip. "He is not himself."

Then who is he?

Tristana thought of her husband when they had first met. He had been confident then, so sure of his place in the world. He said he had always seen himself in the reflection of Isolde's eyes. Now that there was no reflection, what could he see?

She is hanging in your eyes.

"I know."

You are worth nothing to him now.

"I am less than nothing," said Tristana. "I am pain."

She lifted her head. There was a ghost in front of her, floating like smoke above the ground, a specter of a man who had starved to death, his iridescent skin hanging loosely from his skeletal form.

You can make it end.

She sat up and glared. "Has it ended for you?"

The ghost's arm lanced through her, a sensation of cold drilling through her middle. She gasped, then flared in anger, and she reached out her own hand and struck it through the ghost's body.

"And now," she said, "I am angry."

It was her anger that fueled her desire to live more than anything. The ghost gasped as though he was seeking air, his eyes bulging in his translucent form.

"Tell me," said Tristana, "is there a way to leave here alive?"

VII

The voices pushed and prodded Victor, led him up an ancient set of stairs that broke beneath him as he traveled. The tower continued up and up, but he paid no attention to where he traveled. She is waiting, they told him. So he climbed until he reached the top of the bell tower. And there he saw her turned away from him, her body gleaming starlight, reflecting the sky beyond the Valley.

"Izzy?"

But then she turned, and the face was not his sister's face, it was a bloated purple thing with bulging eyes hanging loosely from a broken neck. Startled, he stepped backwards, but behind him was the bell and there was nowhere to flee.

See how I waited?

The ghost rushed through him, through his daze, piercing him with the chill of the dead. He knew in that instant he had been horrible to Tristana, that he had not let her suffer when her loss had also been great. That he had not mourned, only denied. He fled forward, stumbling, tripping, throwing himself thorough the window of the bell tower. The ghosts surrounded him as he fell, and when he crashed to the ground, his body broke into pieces, blood dripping away from it in streams of rubies.

VIII

Tristana found Victor's body in the morning surrounded by precious stones, red and flowing from his brokenness. Her anger left her, and all that remained was loss. She entered the church, stood on an old chair at the bottom of the bell tower, wrapped the bell pull tightly around her neck, and jumped. Her neck snapped at once, and she felt no pain. The ghost of the man whose skin hung loosely from his bones smiled at the ghost that rose from her body before fading into nothing.

IX

The Wizard looked at the pair of treasure hunters in his office. He smoked his long pipe and leaned back on his divan. They watched him anxiously, waiting for wisdom.

"There is a valley where the dead walk," he said carefully, "where the flowers bloom in gems, ripe for the plucking. They say the Valley will be haunted until all the souls of those who died there have been replaced by others." He blew blue smoke at them, enjoying watching their noses crinkle. "It could be dangerous."

They paid him for the tip and to arrange their travel. He pulled out a roll of paper from his desk and made two more check marks.

Only a few thousand souls to go.

END

Alana Joli Abbott is the author of two novels, Into the Reach and Departure, and is the writer for the webcomic Cowboys and Aliens II, hosted at DrunkDuck.com. She is also a contributor to roleplaying games, including Chronicles of Ramlar, Steampunk Musha, and modular adventures for Kenzer and Company and the RPGA. Her love for fantasy and science fiction has led her to many diverse pursuits, including traveling to visit ancient ruins in Turkey, Greece, Ireland, the UK, and Mexico, singing madrigals, studying stage combat, and practicing kempo karate with her husband. She lives near New Haven, CT. "The Valley" is her first published short story.

Story by Alana Joli Abbot, Copyright 2008

Image by Rory Clark, Stopped Motion Photography, Copyright 2008