Uncanny

by David Macinnis Gill

  “I just— It’s a jumble,” I said and tried to turn away. After everything she’d gone through, I just couldn’t do it to her. “I can’t make sense of it.”

  “Work on unjumbling it,” Ma said with fire in her cheeks. “Start with that boy in ICU. The detective thinks you’re protecting him.”

  “I’m not.”

  “She thinks he was an accomplice to the kidnapping.”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “Then how did you find Devon?”

  “I told you, from clues.” How could I say, from writing carved into the bathroom wall? I pretended to look out at the city lights, hoping to short-circuit her.

  “What kind of clues?” she said, pressing me. “It’s that letter, isn’t it? You’ve gotten mixed up in Michael’s old troubles?”

  The troubles started long before Dad, I thought, but I had to stop her questions, even if it meant pissing her off. “I found Devon because of a note.”

  “That boy left a note?”

  “The kidnapper left a note. On the bathroom wall.” I closed the blinds. The sky made me feel exposed and vulnerable. “It was directions to a hotel where Devon was held. That boy didn’t take Devie. He helped rescue her, and he almost got killed doing it.”

  “You talk about him,” Ma said, “like you care.”

  “Care about him? If I could get my hands on him,” I said, “I’d care to wring his stupid neck.”

  “Somebody beat you to it,” Siobhan said. “Just saying.”

  “Damn Michael Conning!” Ma said. “Sometimes, I curse the day I met that man.” For a second she seemed wistful, then the fire came back to her eyes. “Young lady, I want answers, straight and true. What happened at that godforsaken hotel?”

  “It’s complicated,” I said.

  Ma cut a look that would break bricks. “Straight and true, Willow Jane.”

  “He got thrown out a window,” I said after taking a deep breath. “Not that the cops care. They keep saying he jumped.”

  “If that’s the truth, the police—”

  “Ma,” I said, “how many times did Dad say that cops don’t care about the truth? How many times did they lock him up for no reason?”

  “Sorry to butt in, Mrs. Conning,” Siobhan said, “but that detective’s a real ballbuster.”

  “I’ve had enough of your fresh mouth, Siobhan.” Ma was about to give Siobhan the boot. “One more word.”

  “My throat’s wicked parched!” I announced. “I need something to drink. Can I have a couple bucks?”

  Ma started to argue, then her eyes met mine, and she softened. “Talking to you is like talking to your father. Might as well beat my head against a rock.” She fished some dollars from her purse. “Get yourself a soda and come back ready to pay the piper.”

  “Let’s go, Siobhan.” I grabbed her before Ma could change her mind. “Ma, you okay to watch Devie?”

  “I gave birth to this child,” she said, and that was the end of it.

  “Right,” I said.

  “Thanks for the soda, Mrs. Conning. Hug later? No?” Siobhan followed me out. “Wow, she’s pissed! So where are we really going?”

  “You sure you want to do this?”

  “Hells yeah. Think I’m sitting this one out, after I missed Devon’s rescue?” She pulled me down the hallway. “I know exactly where you’re going.”

  Siobhan headed down to the elevators, following the signs that pointed to the snack bar, which we never reached.

  “ICU, ICU.” Siobhan ran a finger down the placard listing each floor. “Bingo! Third floor.”

  “How’d you know I was going to the ICU?” I said.

  “Don’t even try to lie.”

  “Lie about what?”

  “Harken. You’re totally into the guy, even if you do want to strangle him.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  THE third floor was much busier than Devon’s. Visitors walked up and down talking on their cell phones. Most were grim faced and spoke in low, worried tones. I didn’t make eye contact with any of them, and I swooped past the two full waiting rooms like I had important business to attend to.

  “I am not totally into Harken,” I said. “He’s a total tool.”

  “Six feet? Black hair? Twinkling eyes? Little bit of a beard?”

  “Beards are gross, and eyes don’t twinkle.”

  “Yours do when you look at him, but okay, be that way. You told me about your magic powers. Not a word about his. So spill.”

  He doesn’t have any, I thought. But that wasn’t true. Harken had some serious magic, and I had no idea what he could do. “Like I told Ma, it’s complicated.”

  “Would this be any fun if it was simple?”

  “This isn’t my idea of fun.”

  “Maybe for the old Willow it wouldn’t be,” she said. “But the new you is loving it balls to the walls.”

  “You’re so anatomically poetic.”

  “So rhyming body parts is my thing. Come on.”

  Up ahead two cops guarded a security door. It was thick and metal with a warning in huge red letters: NO VISITORS. Maybe that’s where the cops were keeping Harken. Now I just had to get to him. I took a quick look around and spotted the nurse’s station.

  “Hey,” I said. “How about a distraction for your favorite defenseman?”

  “Watch the master at work.” Siobhan plucked an eyebrow hair. “Ow!” Then walked right up to the nurse’s station, eyes leaking tears. “Excuse me? My grandmother’s in ICU, and even though it’s past visiting hours, I’d really like to see her. Please?”

  “That was the worst acting I’ve ever seen,” the nurse said, raising an eyebrow and cocking her head. “Girls, you better—” Her pocket buzzed, and she held up a finger to silence Siobhan. She checked the pager, then grabbed a chart. “I’m too busy for foolishness. You two better not be here when I get back.”

  Siobhan held her supplicant pose until the nurse was gone. She waited till the doors swung shut, then brazenly scooted behind the desk and snagged the nurse’s sweater.

  “Siobhan!” I whispered. “She didn’t buy it.”

  “We’ll be gone before she gets back.” She draped the sweater over my shoulders like a cape and tried to push a patient chart into my hands. “Pretend you’re talking on your cell.”

  “This is so not going to work.” I gestured at my clothes. “I look like a truck ran over me.”

  She gave me a push. “Easy peasy lemon squeezy.”

  “I know a better way,” I said.

  I peeled the Band-Aid off my thumb and licked it.

  Siobhan froze, along with everyone else. I returned the sweater and chart, then quickly entered the ICU. The patients were behind sliding glass doors, like experimental test subjects in a terrarium. Harken was to the left, his terrarium guarded by a cop who sat on a chair right next to a placard labeled “John Doe.”

  I ducked inside and ran over to Harken. Up close, his skin was pale and wan, and he was covered in cuts and bruises. They had stripped off his clothes—probably had to cut them off—and dressed him in a blue gown. His mouth was a rigid frown, and he had so many tubes and wires attached to his body, he looked like a Frankenstein monster. His head was tilted back so that his throat was exposed.

  If Malleus was here, I thought, that throat would be cut.

  His medical chart and a bag with his personal effects hung from the foot of the bed. For a second I almost read the chart, but no, I didn’t really want to know how badly he was hurt this time. I buried my face into my cold hands, trying to push the dark thoughts out. When I looked away, my vision was all yellow and blue lights, so that it took a few seconds before I saw the dead girl standing at the foot of Harken’s bed.

  “How did you get in my glimpse?” I said.

  She set a rotting finger to her lips and with the other hand bade me follow.

  “No way,” I said.

  Yes, she nodded and pretended to lick her thumb. She walked into the light of the hallway. I foll
owed her past the nurse’s station to the exit, where she waited until I opened the door, then she scampered by me and downstairs to the next landing.

  She pretended to lick her thumb again and pointed at mine.

  “Wait,” I said, but she didn’t.

  I licked my thumb, and she disappeared down the next flight of steps. I had to run to catch up, my boots squeaking on the slick concrete. When I reached the floor labeled “B” for basement, she was waiting again, her face hidden but her eyes shining blacker than even the shadows. I opened the door, afraid to speak this time, and she moved impossibly fast down the corridor. I hesitated, then followed, jogging to keep up. Her feet never seemed to move, and when she looked back at me, her expression hadn’t changed. She was there, then there, then there ahead, at the corner where an arrow pointed left.

  “Morgue?” I said when I read the sign.

  I heard the rhythmic sound of dryer drums turning, faint at first but growing louder. The dead girl took another left and a metal staircase down. My feet rang on the stairs, deeper and deeper in the cramped and dark stairwell, and when my hand slid down the banister, it sounded like claws on the steel. Not claws—shears. I pulled my hand back and kept both of them close to my chest until I reached bottom, where I found only blackness.

  I stopped to listen.

  At first there was nothing, then I heard a pitiful sound like a frightened animal. A light came on. I snapped my head around, and there was the dead girl and the entrance to the morgue.

  She was smiling.

  And then, like a wisp of smoke, she was gone.

  “I’m not going inside a stupid morgue,” I said, but that’s exactly what I did.

  It felt damp inside the body holding area, and the light was barely strong enough to keep the blackness at bay. The room was full of stainless exam tables about seven feet long and three feet wide, the perfect size for a human body. There were tall trays of medical instruments to the left, a desk with an X-ray viewer in the corner, and a bank of cold chambers on the back wall.

  I took a breath and smelled water and mold in the air. I navigated by feel and had to walk slowly, too slowly. The strength seeped from my body. I took a deep breath, trying to keep my teeth from chattering.

  “I see dead people,” I said, but making jokes in an empty room was like tickling yourself.

  Then I heard a sound, as if a pebble had bounced down a hole. It came from the cold chambers, where the dead were kept on ice. In the dim light I crept around an autopsy table to the series of square freezer doors. Each one was numbered, and under the number was a name tag.

  There were four names written on the doors. I squinted to make out the letters.

  Flanagan.

  O’Brien.

  Wilson.

  And Haverhill.

  People I knew—just kids, like me—were in the lockers. They had been brought here after Malleus killed them. Brought here to the hospital to be examined and then put away like lab specimens.

  “Help me.”

  I jumped and spun around. “Hello?”

  The room was empty, and the only sounds were my panicked breathing and the squeak of my boots on the linoleum floor. It was just my imagination, the product of an overexcited nervous system. Who could blame me for a few hallucinations? What an awful place to be, caught inside a casket. There’d be no way to escape. The room was refrigerated, but that wasn’t the reason I was shivering violently.

  “If you think it’s cold out there,” the voice said, “you should feel it here.”

  I spun around again. “Stop screwing with me,” I whispered.

  Nobody was there.

  “I’m not screwing with you, bubs,” the voice said. “Get me out of here.”

  “Kelly?” I said.

  “Open the door.”

  “Not such a good idea.”

  “It’s about Devon,” she said. “Open the effing door.”

  I opened the drawer marked “O’Brien.”

  I grasped the metal tray and rolled the body out. My friend lay naked on the slab. Her eyes were closed, and the blood had been washed from her body so that all her wounds were visible. The lacerations from the hanging rope were bloodless but still raw, like salt pork marinating in water. Tears dripped from my eyes, and I tried not to look at her, but it was impossible.

  “This is all my fault,” I said, starting to hiccup, the precursor to completely losing it.

  Kelly’s eyes popped open, but she lay still as death. Of course, she was still as death. She was dead. I looked into her eyes, black as tar and clouded with mist.

  Then she grabbed my wrist with a cold, rubbery hand. “Come with me or your sister is lost.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  I took her hand and was no longer in the morgue, I was covered in fog, surrounded by it, like a dream sequence from Nosferatu. I expected Kelly to be waiting for me on the other side. Only fog awaited, fog so dense it clung to my face. It was dark ahead. A gas lamppost flickered in the darkness. Sounds were muffled and hushed, except for the swish of my sneakers on the cinder path. The steel resolve I had felt when I opened the cold locker was gone, replaced by the sensation that I was being watched by something that wanted to kill me.

  Ahead an archway appeared—a huge oak door cut to match its shape. I knocked twice, then opened the peephole. I half expected Malleus to be staring back at me, but no one was there.

  The door shut behind me as I entered. The mists faded, the last tendrils reaching under the door, clinging to my legs. I was glad to be inside, but my relief lasted only a few seconds. The cavernous room was lit by hundreds of tall candelabra, their lights flickering in the darkness.

  The fog stank of sulfur, but the room was sickly sweet with the scent of human waste. I gagged and covered my mouth.

  Then I found the source of the stench.

  Beside each candelabrum, a corpse lay on the floor. They were covered with sheer shrouds that looked like cobwebs. Their feet were bare, their eyes closed, their mouths shut tight in thin lines. The room was too dark, the lights too dim, the smell too strong.

  I looked straight ahead and walked. So many dead bodies! My heart pounded, and I could barely breathe. I took a deep breath of foul air and heard my sister cry out.

  “Devon!” I yelled, but the only answer was the echo of my own voice. “Kelly?”

  I took a few more tentative steps. If I didn’t turn back now, I would be lost in the caverns. I sobbed “Devon!” and turned back.

  Then a strong hand, cold as steel, grabbed my ankle.

  I screamed.

  A pale hand reached out from the darkness. I screamed louder when I saw that the hand was thumbless and that it belonged to someone I knew.

  Will Patrick lay on the ground, his skin the color of a mourning dove, his scalp covered in clumps of wispy hair. It couldn’t be Will Patrick. He was dead. His mother had been on TV, her face puffy and bloated with grief, cursing and vowing to sue whoever had hurt her child. He was dead, and yet he was here.

  “Willow Jane,” he said, pleading. “Please help me. I am lost. I am lost. I am lost.”

  “Lost?” I said.

  “In the Shadowlands,” he said. “She has imprisoned us.”

  “Us?”

  “Show yourselves,” he whispered.

  One by one, others came into the light. Their eyes were black as ink, their thumbs missing. I had to cover my mouth again. Their bodies were in a state of decay: Malleus had left them here to rot.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “There is no time here,” Will Patrick said. “Only pain.”

  “Only pain,” Flanagan said and rose beside Will.

  “Only pain,” Kelly said and rose beside Flanagan.

  “Only pain,” Miss Haverhill said and rose behind them, followed by a janitor, a bus driver, and hundreds of others:

  Only pain.

  Only pain. Only pain.

  Only pain. Only pain. Only pain.

  Only pain. Only pain. Only
pain. Only pain.

  Only pain. Only pain. Only pain. Only pain. Only pain.

  Only pain. Only pain. Only pain. Only pain.

  Only pain. Only pain. Only pain.

  Only pain. Only pain.

  Only pain.

  Only.

  Pain.

  This was what was waiting for my sister. “You’re all dead,” I said. “How can you be here?”

  “Our lives were taken by the Shadowless,” Will Patrick said.

  “Our souls are locked out of time,” Flanagan said.

  “We can’t rest,” Kelly said, “unless you help us.”

  “There’s hunger in my belly,” Will Patrick said, “but I can’t eat.”

  “I’m weary, but I can’t sleep,” Flanagan said.

  “We’re trapped,” Kelly said. “Only you can set us free.”

  “I—I can’t,” I said. “My power doesn’t—”

  “You’ve got to,” Kelly said. “There are others here. Some’ve been here a really long time. And the longer they’re here, the more pain they feel.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, shivering. “I can’t imagine anything that horrible.”

  Kelly touched my arm. “You don’t have to imagine.”

  As soon as our skin touched, I saw everything that she had seen. I heard the screams, and I felt the unquenchable thirst and the insatiable yearning and loss.

  Tears rolled from my eyes, and I started to shake.

  One by one, they touched me, saying, “You have my name.” Kelly. Will Patrick. Flanagan. Even Miss Haverhill and two cops I’d never met. It felt like a glimpse, except there was no tug at my belly button, and time did not stand still. It ran faster, splintering, traveling down arteries of memory, through the hearts of their pasts. All of their emotions, thoughts, and recollections opened up in front of me.

  I saw Kelly looking down on me as she swung from the ceiling in the hotel. I felt the gut-wrenching fear that paralyzed Will Patrick when Malleus drove her shears through the lock and lifted the trunk of his car. I heard Flanagan’s screams, and I tasted the blood in Miss Haverhill’s mouth. But there was more, memories not so vivid: birthdays, school days, last Christmases, first kisses, and happy birthdays. All of it was laid out before me in a million flickering images, sounds, and sensations. Their memories became mine, and I could no longer tell where my life ended and theirs began.