Walt took a step back, shaking the length of wood menacingly.
“You just. . . you just keep back. . . .”
He was losing it totally, he realized. This kind of thing couldn’t possibly exist. The way the city was, everything was just too insane. He could feel heat building up in the room. He kept the length of wood between them as he continued to back up.
“I. . . I mean it. . . .”
“Walter.”
The voice was oddly familiar. He stared at the creature, and suddenly he could see something of his ex-wife in those hellish features.
“B-Beth . . . ?”
“To have and to hold,” the fury said. “For better or for worse . . . isn’t that what you always told me, Walter?”
He shook his head, the length of wood vibrating in his trembling hands. He was up against the back wall of the store now, with no place left to go.
Losing it.
Lost it.
“Nuh . . . nuh . . .”
“To have and to hold. Don’t you want to hold me, Walter?”
“Nuh . . .”
“Don’t you want to have me anymore?”
The jaws opened wide and something died in Walt when he saw the wriggling mass of snake heads that came lifting out of the back of the creature’s throat.
The creature floated closer.
Walt heard a woman scream, then realized that it was his own voice he was hearing, his own scream ripping his throat raw as the creature breathed fire on him. All around the store, the paint burned with him. The creature’s final words buzzed in his head, whining above the pain.
“To have and to hold, Walter...”
14
THERE WAS A gloomy cast to the hallway outside the interrogation room, making it too dark for either Ned or his partner to really make out what it was that was coming out of the squad room a few doors down. Both men were on edge, expecting anything. Expecting the worst. But as Grier began to fire, Ned recognized Anna in time to throw himself against his partner.
The shotgun discharged into the wall, blowing a hole three feet wide into the plaster. Pellets ricocheted down the hall. Anna’s wail merged with the blast of the shotgun, hanging on through its booming echoes.
“Are you nuts?” Ned yelled, pushing past Grier.
“Jesus, Ned. I never even thought. . .”
But Ned wasn’t listening. He reached Anna and caught her where she stood swaying against the doorjamb, pulling her close with his one free arm.
Grier came up behind him. “Ned, I. . .”
“Take it easy,” Ned was whispering into Anna’s ear. “Everything’s going to be just fine.” He turned to look over his shoulder at his partner.
“Ned . . .”
“It’s okay, Ernie. Nobody got hurt.”
“Yeah, but. . .” Grier wiped the sweat from his brow with a sleeve, his shotgun hanging loose in his other hand, muzzle pointed to the floor. “I’m so goddamned wired. . . .”
“The whole situation’s fucked, partner.”
“That’s no excuse. Christ, I could’ve killed her.”
Ned held Anna closer. Just the thought of her being hurt gave him a sick feeling. First Jack and now . . .
“The . . . the face . . . ,” Anna mumbled against his shoulder. “Jack’s face in the floor...”
Ned and Grier exchanged glances.
“I’ll check it out,” Grier said.
He moved around the pair into the doorway and stared at the ocean of paper that covered the squad room floor. It wasn’t too bad around the door, but just a few steps in it came up to mid-thigh on him.
“Look at this,” he said quietly to his partner. “There could be anything under this shit,” he added as Ned looked into the room.
“What happened?” Ned asked Anna.
She took a shaky breath and stepped away from him to lean against the wall.
“I . . . I fell asleep,” she said. “In the squad room. And then . . .” She rubbed at her face. “Then I was here with all that paper . . . and it just kept getting deeper.”
Grier bent down to pick up a sheet. He held it up so that Ned could see it as well. The foolscap was covered with writing, the same phrase repeated over and over again.
. . . stop hurting me. . .
“It. . . it’s Beth’s handwriting,” Anna said.
“You said something about Jack—about his face being . . . in the floor?”
Anna nodded dully and pointed to one corner of the room. “You’re going to think I’m crazy.”
“After crossing over to this place?” Ned said. “Not a chance.”
Anna wrapped her arms around herself and took another long breath, let it out slowly. She was starting to get over whatever had spooked her, Ned saw. The scare was still sitting there in her eyes, giving her the shakes, but she was pulling through. She was tough. Just like her brother.
“Jack was in there,” she said. “His face . . . it was just coming out of the carpet. Like it was growing there. Nothing but his face.”
Ned wanted to hold her again but held back. She had to get this out first, on her own. Her fingers were going white where they gripped her arms, but otherwise she was still holding up.
“He . . . he talked to me, Ned. Said he was waiting here for me to warn me. He told me to get out of here.”
She went on and related what the face in the carpet had told her. Her voice grew firmer the longer she spoke. When she was done, she gave them a look that Ned knew was just begging for them to say, “It’s okay. It’s just a dream. Nothing’s real here.”
But they couldn’t do it.
People died here.
Died for real.
“I guess we’ve got two choices,” Ned said finally. “We stay here and wait to wake up, or we go looking for whatever it is that’s running this show.”
Anna straightened up from the wall. “I’m not waiting here,” she said.
Grier nodded in agreement.
Ned didn’t even think of protesting Anna’s decision. There was no way he wanted to leave her alone in this place. Even if they just waited here, who was to say which of them would wake up first? It could happen to any of them. He and Ernie might just wake up, end up abandoning Anna here. But it was Anna’s brother who’d died here. She deserved a shot at whoever it was that had taken Jack down.
“Do you know how to use this?” he asked, holding out his revolver.
Anna nodded, but she wouldn’t take the weapon.
“The rules are all different here,” Ned said. “We can’t play it the same way we would in our own world.”
Anna took the sheet of foolscap that Grier was still holding and showed it to Ned.
. . . stop hurting me . . .
“Remember what Jack said? This is where the victims wait to get even.”
“We’re victims too.”
Anna shook her head. “If we go out, just looking to get even, then we’re no better than the people who created this place. Read what it says here, Ned. ‘Stop hurting me.’ That’s a plea for help—not an attack.”
“People are dying here,” Grier said. “People like your brother, who never hurt anybody.”
“He’s right, Anna,” Ned added.
“Jack said that the weak were strong here,” Ann said. “Do you understand what that means? Force won’t work.”
Her gaze left his face to look at his partner. Her hands rose to rub her face again. The familiar gesture awakened an ache in Ned. It was still so hard to imagine that Jack was gone.
Anna folded the foolscap she was holding and put it in a pocket of her skirt.
“We should be thinking of helping whoever we find here,” she said.
“Even when they killed your brother?” Grier asked.
Anna swallowed thickly, then nodded. “Even . . . even then,” she said quietly.
“So we just wait for them to come and take us down too?” Grier looked from her to his partner.
“No,” Anna said. “We go look
ing for them.”
“And when we find them?”
When Anna didn’t answer, Ned took over. “Let’s find them first,” he said.
He wasn’t sure he agreed with Anna’s forgive-and-help ideas—not right now, not here in this place—but he was at least willing to wait and see what they found. He led the way out of the building.
The elevators were dead, so they took the stairs down to the main lobby. Refuse lay underfoot, so thick in places that they had to skirt it. Outside, the smoggy skies had darkened into night. The air still held its metallic sting, broken by occasional wafts of rotting smells driven toward them by the wind.
The streets appeared deserted, though each of them had the sensation of being watched. There seemed to be motion in the glassless windows of the buildings around them. Pale faces ducking out of view. Feral bodies moving across doorways, disappearing from sight when one of them looked in their direction.
“Any ideas where we start?” Grier asked.
Ned and Anna both looked northeast. There was a dull glow in the sky there, enough to set off the plumes of smoke that spiraled above it. The smoke was thick and black, visible even against the dark night skies. A gust of foul wind from that direction brought the smell of the fire to them.
“Looks like someone’s left us a calling card,” Ned said.
Each of them thought of the burned corpses that had appeared in their own world.
“Pick it up and burn,” Grier muttered.
“Do we need to take a vote?” Ned asked.
Anna glanced at him. “Do we have another option?”
Ned shook his head. Hefting their weapons, the two men set off in the direction of the fire with Anna walking in between them.
15
THEY WATCHED HIM burn.
Inside the creature, the host held to a judgmental silence. Beth could feel their presence surrounding her—no longer warm, no longer comforting. They were too intent on the sentence brought down upon the tormentor of one of their own to offer solace. Strength was still present. Sharp, bright as silver. The agonized voices cried their bitter music. Their peace had shattered, and they watched Walt Hawkins burn through the creature’s bleak eyes, following the simple logic of its thoughts.
He was a bug.
They had stepped on him.
He was a tormentor.
They had turned his torments back upon him.
He was evil.
They had cleansed him of that evil.
The fire rose crackling and pure around the creature, feeding on more than its victim. Fumes ignited and burned. The cans of turpentine and paint exploded from the heat, splattering their contents in flaming sheets throughout the store. The fire was a rainbow of colors. Hot. Fierce. Cleansing. Hawkins had danced his pain in its flames, skin bubbling and popping, before his charred figure was entirely consumed.
The fire had no effect on the creature.
It cut Beth to her very soul.
When Walt died, it wasn’t her ex-husband she saw burning. It wasn’t relief from—
(that dark place)
—his torments that the flames took from her. She saw only the painful death of another human being.
No one deserved such torment. For all the hurt he had given her, for all the pain that the world had let her experience, she couldn’t have wished this on anyone.
She struggled to break the connection that joined her to the rest of the host inside the creature.
But if she left the protection of the host, she would die.
When she continued to struggle, the fury gave her a taste of what lay beyond the protection of their shared body. A momentary taste—that was all. The sheets of flame and heat drove her back as effectively as any of Walt’s disciplines ever had.
“This is wrong!” she cried.
The fury was an elemental force—it had no need to explain its existence. But the other souls that shared its body with Beth replied.
This is justice, they said.
“It’s . . . inhumane. . . .”
He—and those like him—they taught us inhumanity. All we do is show them how well we learned the lessons they taught us.
“It’s wrong,” Beth said.
Her voice lost some of its conviction as the others with which she shared the host washed her with their chorusing voices— women’s voices, children’s voices, babies’ cries—all upholding the same argument.
“It. . . it can’t be right. . . ,” Beth said.
In this place there is no wrong, no right. Only our will.
The music whined, shrieking chords underlying the words.
Our will, the voices echoed.
Through the rush of the flames, sheets of heat that leapt in a solid blaze from floor to ceiling, she caught a glimpse of the dead plains. That unending vista of wasteland, rolling emptily to every horizon, spoke to her as the voices couldn’t. She remembered floating above it. The peace of that flight. The escape it offered from all hurts and pain. From decisions.
That will always be ours, the voices told her. Only the need for justice calls us back. We visit here—nothing more.
Beth was too used to letting others have their way with her to fight the creature or the host for long. Instead she concentrated on the peace she’d known in that wasteland and drank it in, letting it wash away the more immediate memories of how Walt had died. Tried to forget his pain.
We draw the guilty to this midground and visit them with justice, the voices said. And then we return.
Their chorusing voices soothed her.
We always return . . .
The view of the wasteland was lost in the flames once more, but its memory shone bright inside her. She was barely aware of the creature lifting its head, like a hound catching a scent. The painful music returned. The tongues in the creature’s throat hissed like a nest of snakes.
Part of the host, Beth knew what it sensed. More were coming. There were always more. . . .
As they glided toward the front of the burning building a skeletal hand, bones charred black, gripped its ankle. Walt’s skull lifted from the floor, eye sockets empty, fleshless mouth shaping a death’s-head grin.
“To have and to hold, babe,” it said, its voice ringing clearly above the roar of the flames.
Through the creature’s eyes Beth stared at the monstrous thing. Terror rose whining up through her nerves.
The creature shook its ankle until the bones of the hand fell apart and the skeleton collapsed back into the rubble. But that moment had been enough to shatter the druglike mood that was holding Beth. She screamed—a shrill wail of fear that went on and on, echoing into infinity.
The host shifted restlessly inside the creature, disturbed by that sound. Then Beth’s voice was drawn into the unholy music that was still growing in volume. The host settled once more as the creature continued its interrupted journey toward the front of the store.
16
POLICE CHIEF BERNARD Gauthier stood with Staff Sergeant Andy Coe and Deputy Chief John Bohay, looking into the interrogation room where three more volunteers lay on new cots that had been brought up from the quartermaster’s storeroom. The volunteers wore the vests and helmets of the Tactical squad, shotguns laid across their chests as they tried to sleep.
Gauthier looked at his watch. “It’s been fifty-five minutes,” he said. “Why isn’t anything happening?”
“The men are trying, sir,” Coe said. “It’s just hard to get to sleep when your adrenaline’s got you all wired up.”
“I don’t trust any of this,” Bohay said. “There’s something off about every one of these men.” He glanced at the chief. “Can’t you feel it?”
Gauthier nodded. “But I’ve read the files, John—just as you have. These are all good men, no matter how . . . uncomfortable they make us feel.”
“Ned said something about that,” Coe said, “and I’m beginning to feel it too. People getting hostile for no good reason. Just a bad feeling whenever someone looks my way.
I don’t know, it’s—”
“Unless you’ve got something constructive to offer, Sergeant,” Bohay interrupted, “I suggest you keep your—”
“John!”
Bohay glared at Coe, then slowly looked at his commanding officer. “Sir?”
“Think about what Sergeant Coe has just told us—and then consider your own reaction to him.”
Bohay got a sullen look on his face, but he kept quiet.
And God help me, Gauthier added to himself, I’m feeling it too. I just want to get as far as possible from Coe and the men behind the glass here. But they’re all we’ve got. If we don’t give them the support they need . . .
“Sir?”
Gauthier turned to the duty sergeant who had approached him. “What is it, Sergeant?”
“You asked to be kept informed of any unusual occurrences, sir?”
“What have you got?”
“There’s a major fire out of control in a paint shop on Bank Street, between Lewis and Waverly. We’ve got men on the scene with the firefighters, and the initial reports are that there was no explanation for how it started.”
Gauthier rubbed his temples. He thought of charred corpses appearing out of nowhere in the gun range downstairs and in the middle of Elgin Street. No question about it, it was escalating right out of control.
“Thank you, Sergeant,” he said. He turned to Coe. “Keep watch here and let me know the moment something changes.”
He left without waiting for a reply. It was time to get back to the mayor again.
FIVE
1
THE FIRE WASN’T far from the police station on Elgin Street. The three of them took their time approaching it, starting at shadows, at the rustle of old papers whipped by a sudden gust of wind. Rats watched them from the refuse. The night was filled with a mixture of rotting smells, a metallic tang, and smoke. There was a sound in the air that started off like the drone of insects and grew into a kind of music. Faint and vague, dark with menace, the sound of it settled inside them, making them walk closer together.
The walls of the buildings they passed were covered with graffiti. Most of it just variations on what they’d already seen. Violent. Of a sexual nature. But here and there, in paint that looked so fresh that it had to have been applied recently, was that simple phrase repeated from the foolscap in the squad room.
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