Walking In the Midst of Fire: A Remy Chandler Novel

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

  The institution was no more pleasant on the inside. It was in the midst of decay, the floors covered with plaster from broken walls and collapsed ceilings. It was obvious that trespassers had frequented the building, leaving behind their own, spray-painted scars upon various surfaces.

  “Okay,” Francis said, looking around. “I’m not seeing why a general in the army of Heaven would have any business here.”

  To the right of the entrance was what looked to be a large sunroom. Filthy blankets and fast-food trash were strewn about the floor.

  Something flashed briefly, and Remy gradually changed the shape of his eyes to better focus. Shades of people—some standing before the windows staring out, other sitting in chairs in front of an old nineteen-inch television, others pacing back and forth as if in a trance—appeared to him.

  Residual impressions left upon the building.

  Ghosts by any other definition.

  They did not see him, and wouldn’t, even if he attempted to communicate with them. This was perfectly common for buildings such as this, with powerful emotional energies charging the very environment like a battery.

  “We’ve got ghosts,” Remy announced, hooking a finger toward the sunroom as he started to follow Francis, who was standing at the far end of the corridor in front of a pair of swinging doors.

  “No shit,” Francis responded, pointing through the broken glass of one of the doors.

  Remy came up alongside him to see what he was pointing at.

  There was a nurse in the hallway, wearing a proper white dress and cap with a blue stripe around the top. She was pushing a cart filled with trays of small, paper soufflé cups, disappearing into rooms to dispense her meds before coming out again. They could actually hear her white, rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the tiled floors as she went about her business.

  “Probably a residual haunt,” Remy said. “Just like the ones in the sunroom.”

  The nurse suddenly lifted her gaze to them.

  “Are you going to stand there and gawk, or are you going to help me?” she asked.

  “I don’t think she’s residual,” Francis said.

  She placed her ghostly hands upon her hips and stared at them in annoyance. “Don’t tell me that agency has sent me another couple’a newbies,” the nurse said in disgust. “I’ve got five nurses out with the trots, and I don’t have time to hold hands with new nurses. You two either help me with this med pass, or you can head on out of here.”

  She left the cart, passing through a closed door into the room beyond it.

  “She thinks we’re nurses,” Francis said.

  “And new ones at that,” Remy answered.

  “What should we do? Ignore her?”

  “That would be sort of rude, wouldn’t it?”

  Francis shrugged. “It’s not like we could really help her.”

  “Yeah,” Remy agreed. “I wonder if she could help us though.”

  “What, like maybe she saw something?”

  Remy nodded and pushed through the swinging door, cutting a swath through the plaster and other detritus left on the corridor floor.

  The nurse walked through the wall and stopped to stare at him.

  “Well?” she asked petulantly.

  “Sorry,” Remy said. “But we can’t help you.”

  “Then what did they send you for?” she asked huffily.

  Remy shed his human guise, allowing his true form to manifest itself: a winged being of radiance, transcending humanity.

  “They didn’t,” he said, stepping closer to the nurse. The name tag pinned to the front of her white dress identified her as LeeAnne.

  LeeAnne’s expression turned to one of panic.

  “No,” she cried, stepping back. “I’m not ready to go. There are still so many who need their medicine . . . who need to be taken care of. . . . Please . . .”

  “Great,” Francis said from where he stood just outside the door. “You’re scaring the shit out of her.”

  “I don’t see you doing anything to help,” Remy quipped.

  “Hey, I got us here.”

  Remy returned to his human shape, hoping it would calm the spirit.

  “It’s all right, LeeAnne,” he said, soothing her fears. “No one is going to take you anywhere you don’t want to go.”

  She was still in a tizzy. “There’re so many here . . . so many that need looking after.”

  And she was right.

  Remy looked down the corridor to see the ghostly shapes drifting out from behind the walls and closed doors, slowly floating down the hallway toward their caregiver.

  “This could be bad,” Francis warned.

  “We’re not here to hurt you,” Remy tried to explain. “We’re not here to hurt anybody.”

  The ghosts stood just behind LeeAnne, and Remy could see evidence of some of the twisted medical experiments. Even in their nearly translucent form, jagged lobotomy scars showed upon their shaved skulls.

  “Then why are you here,” LeeAnne asked.

  “We’re looking for some answers,” Remy said. “Someone like me was here not too long ago, and we’d like to know why.”

  “Like you?” LeeAnne questioned.

  “Angel,” Remy said. “A powerful angel.”

  The nurse shook her translucent head.

  “There hasn’t been any like you here that I can remember,” she said. She nibbled at a ghostly fingernail as she thought. “But it’s been so busy . . .” She seemed to drift off then, staring at something Remy could not see.

  “LeeAnne?” Remy prompted.

  But it was as if she could not hear him. She turned and went back to her medication cart, resuming her duties.

  “Well, I guess that’s that,” Francis said, still at the swinging door.

  The patient-apparitions drifted off as well, many fading away as they headed farther into the building.

  Remy shrugged and was heading back toward his friend when Francis suddenly pointed down the corridor past him.

  “Look.”

  Remy turned around to see a single ghost dressed in pajamas and a bathrobe standing there, watching them.

  “Hello?” Remy called to him.

  “Let me try,” Francis said, passing Remy on his way down the hall toward the ghost.

  “Did you see something, old-timer?” Francis asked.

  The ghost began to shuffle off.

  “Hey,” Francis called after him.

  The ghost stopped, turned ever so slightly, and motioned for them to follow him.

  Remy joined Francis, and they did as the ghost had ordered.

  Nurse LeeAnne was back at her cart again, fussing over ghostly meds as they passed her.

  “Are you going to help me?” she asked them.

  “We’re supposed to be working another floor,” Remy told her.

  She seemed to accept that with a shrug, and resumed medicating the patients on the first floor.

  Remy and Francis continued to follow the old ghost. Every once in a while he would stop, as if resting, and then he would continue.

  The place was labyrinthine in its design.

  “Do you think he knows where he’s going?” Francis asked when the ghost had stopped yet again at another set of double doors.

  The sign above the doors indicated SURGERY.

  Remy felt a change in the atmosphere almost immediately, a sense of weight, as if the air had gained some sort of substance. “Feel that?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Francis answered. “And it doesn’t feel right. . . . In fact, it feels awful.”

  “I’m guessing some really bad shit went down in this part of the building.”

  The ghost disappeared through the doors and Remy pushed through them after him. The ghost was gone, leaving Francis and him in the darkness of the corridor.

  “Where’d he go?” Francis asked.

  They may have lost their guide, but the corridor was filled with others.

  These ghosts were agitated. Snippets of their mo
ans and shrieks could be heard upon the periphery of sound, and given the way this section of the facility felt, Remy could understand why.

  “We’re close to ground zero,” he said.

  He felt that they had arrived before seeing it. In a deep patch of bottomless shadow there was a doorway darker than the darkness surrounding it.

  “Here,” Remy said.

  The specters were watching him, some trying to warn him of something, but he continued forward, passing through the chilling dark of the doorway into the room.

  The room.

  He knew where he was the minute he stepped inside.

  Francis cautiously joined him. “Feels awful in here.”

  “Awful is what was done here,” Remy replied. He could see staccato images of this room’s past: surgery after surgery, skulls cut open and brains played with as if nothing more than modeling clay.

  “Shit,” Francis said.

  Remy looked toward his friend. The old ghost who had led them to the surgery was standing beside a rusted operating table upon which was his own body. A bloodstained surgical team surrounded him.

  “He wanted us to see this,” Remy said.

  “There’s something else, though.” Francis’ eyes were riveted to the nightmarish scenes unfolding around them.

  Remy looked away from the ghosts. “What?”

  “I didn’t think of it until now,” Francis said. “Charnel houses.”

  “Charnel houses?” Remy repeated. “Isn’t that another name for a slaughterhouse?”

  “Yeah, among other things; but it’s also the name used for special places of ill repute.”

  “A whorehouse?”

  Francis nodded. “For special customers with special tastes.”

  “What do they have to do with . . .”

  “They’re not located in this reality,” Francis started to explain. “You can find them on other planes of existence—really bad places that have been sealed off.”

  A ghostly surgeon with a saw was cutting into the head of a man who struggled against his restraints, sending geysers of phantom blood into the air.

  “So how would one get to these charnel houses?” Remy asked.

  “There are weak spots,” Francis explained. “Wounds in the flesh of reality that allow these bad places where the charnel houses exist to temporarily bleed through.”

  “And where can these weak spots be found?” Remy asked, the pieces starting to fall into place.

  “From what I understand they move around, appearing at random times in places where the most horrible acts of cruelty have occurred.”

  “So you think that a passage to a charnel house opened up here?” Remy asked.

  They watched as the doctors worked, feeling the psychic scars that the surgeons were leaving behind in this reality.

  “This place would be a prime candidate,” Francis said.

  Remy walked farther into the operating room, passing through the lingering specters. “So, what, you just show up in a place where something really bad happened, and hope that the entrance to one of these charnel houses opens up?” he asked, turning back to his friend.

  “It’s not as random as that,” Francis said. “These houses are pretty exclusive.”

  “So you’d have to be a member or something?”

  Francis nodded. “Yeah, something like that.”

  “An invitation?” Remy suggested.

  Francis shrugged. “Wouldn’t know where to show up without one.”

  “We should head back to the mansion,” Remy said, passing Francis as he walked from the operating room out into the hall.

  The old ghost that had led them there bidding them good-bye with a wave.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Gareth had been crying nonstop for at least a day.

  Left alone to think about what he had done, the young man could only huddle in the corner of the concrete bedroom and pour out his emotions to the shadows.

  When his keepers had learned of his transgression, there was hell to pay, and he had been banished to his room.

  He pulled his legs up closer to his chest; a whiff of body odor mixed with that of drying blood wafted up to tease his senses, and to remind him of the act he’d committed.

  The hate had always been a constant companion; it was with him when he awoke every morning and when he closed his eyes at night. It was the only thing he could truly count on in his troubled life, and he was certain that his brothers and sisters felt the same. Hate gave them the strength—the power—to survive in a world that wished to see them dead.

  Gareth’s mind wandered back to the moment that had filled him with such distress. He hadn’t been told who the large man with the booming voice was, but when he saw him, Gareth knew.

  The hate told him.

  And the hate that Gareth never dreamed could grow any stronger did just that, and it took everything he had not to lose control of it.

  He wanted to tell somebody about the man, and had considered bringing it up to one of his brothers or sisters, but he wasn’t supposed to have been at the house. He was supposed to stay on the island with the others like him—with his siblings—but since he’d learned his special trick, he hadn’t been limited to the island anymore.

  Gareth was the eldest, and he briefly wondered if the others would soon be able to come and go as they pleased as well.

  But don’t let Prosper know.

  Prosper ran the house, and also took care of him and his siblings on the island. Prosper was also a mean son of a bitch.

  He said they all owed him their lives, and that was probably true—but it wasn’t like their lives were worth anything anyway. From the youngest of ages they had been told how worthless they were, how they had been cast away like so much garbage, and that only Prosper gave two shits about them.

  But that was about all he gave. Two shits.

  Gareth had finally managed to calm the hate down to a dull roar, and had never said anything about the man to anyone.

  But then the man who made Gareth’s hate sing had come to them. Had come to the island.

  It was Prosper who had brought him, and Gareth could see that Prosper was nervous in the man’s presence. As if he was afraid; but that wasn’t possible, was it? There was only one other person that Prosper was afraid of, and he didn’t come around all that often.

  Just every now and again to make sure that Prosper wasn’t screwing up.

  Prosper had taken the man who stirred Gareth’s hate to the building that he used as his dwelling when he visited the island.

  Gareth distinctly remembered how he had felt when he’d seen the man again: how he had wanted to follow Prosper, how he had felt as though he might rip out of his skin, revealing somebody completely different than he currently was—somebody forged from the fires of pure hate. But he had held back, knowing that it wouldn’t have been wise for any of them to interfere with Prosper’s business.

  Soon after, Gareth and his brothers and sisters were summoned to Prosper’s dwelling. The others were excited; attention from Prosper, whether good or bad, was something to look forward to.

  They didn’t know who this man was—what this man was. But Gareth did. And since he’d seen this man, his temper had grown, and he’d spent more time torturing the island rats before eventually killing them.

  He had changed with the sight of this man, and he wondered if his brothers and sisters would be affected as well.

  Wedged deep into the corner of his room, awash in the stink of himself, Gareth relived the experience.

  Those who kept watch over them, the walking dead men, had herded them all into a line, marching them single file into the broken-down concrete building that served as Prosper’s home. The others giggled and shared nervous glances. They thought that something big was going to happen, something important, and in hindsight, maybe they were right.

  Gareth was the oldest, and the others looked to him as they marched toward their destination, their furtive gazes desperate for answe
rs. But he revealed nothing, for they had to see for themselves.

  Their own hate had to show them—tell them.

  They entered Prosper’s dwelling. It was so much nicer than the squalor in which they lived. As they lined up in the front room, Gareth could hear Prosper and his guest talking in the next room, the man demanding to know why he had been brought to such a forsaken place.

  Gareth remembered what Prosper had said.

  “Just you wait and see.”

  The wind outside Gareth’s room howled, and he could hear the incessant patter of rain against the building. It was like the hate inside him, raging against the confines that kept it locked away.

  Gareth didn’t want to remember anymore, but the memory was crystal clear in his mind, and would be, he was certain, for what remained of his life.

  A door at the far end of Prosper’s front room opened with a sharp click, followed by the whine of hinges rusted by the heavy, moisture-filled air of the island. Prosper led the guest into the room with a guiding hand, although he seemed careful not to touch him.

  Gareth could not look away from the man, as if his stare would tell the man who he was. . . .

  Who they all were.

  Then an odd sensation filled the stale, damp air of Prosper’s quarters. Gareth managed to tear his gaze from the powerful figure that stood before them, and looked toward his brothers and sisters.

  Their hate . . . their hate was coming alive as his had.

  They knew this man as well—this powerfully built, finely clothed figure that looked at them with dripping contempt.

  Their hate knew him, as Gareth’s did.

  And the air around them began to crackle with a power both awful, and awesome.

  What soon followed was why Gareth was here, alone in his room. Even in the darkness he could see the blood on his clothing. He lifted his trembling hands and stared at the dried gore of his brutal act. His hands remembered what they had done, and shared with him the memory.

  For the briefest of times, the hate had been replaced by something else. Hope? Was it hope? Gareth wasn’t sure, but the hate was quickly back again as he learned what the man wanted of them.

  What he wanted to make them.

  Gareth would not stand for it.

  The ripping and tearing, the screams of pain and anger, and hate so much greater than it had ever been before. The hate had changed him. . . .