by Simon Holt
The door swung open on squeaky hinges. Reggie raced inside, slamming and bolting the door behind her. She stood in a one-room cabin with a fireplace, potbellied stove, kitchen table, and washbasin. A bed was in the corner, steeped in shadow.
A red cloak hung from a hook by the door. It was warm in the room, so Reggie removed her own cloak and hung it there as well.
Haggard breaths labored from the bed, and she walked forward slowly.
An old woman was lying half under the covers, dressed in a threadbare nightgown and nightcap. Her face was lined with wrinkles, her hands knobby and liver-spotted. She gazed at Reggie with glazed eyes that looked almost dead.
“You brought me my muffins?” the hag croaked. When she spoke, Reggie could see that her teeth were rotted black. Reggie held up the basket.
“You can have your muffins when you tell me where Missy is.”
“Who’s Missy?”
“The girl. She’s about my age.”
The hag shook her head and looked away.
“No more girl. No more Missy.”
“I heard another voice when I was at the door. A girl’s voice. Where is she?”
The woman squinted at Reggie.
“Have to have the daughter before you have the granddaughter.”
Reggie frowned.
“Who are you?”
“I’m… I’m…” She trailed off. “I’m not sure. I lost me.”
Reggie thought she was beginning to understand, and she crossed to the head of the bed. On a hunch, she held a muffin to the woman’s lips. The hag inhaled the sweet scent and took a nibble.
Suddenly her wrinkles began to smooth away, as if someone were holding a steamer to her skin. Her straggly gray hair fell out in clumps, and within seconds thick, dark hair sprouted from the bald scalp and flowed down to the woman’s shoulders. The bags under her eyes tightened, her lips plumped, and the age spots faded away. She winced in pain as her toothless gray gums turned pink, and white teeth pushed up through them. The transformation was equal parts grotesque and wondrous.
“Hello, Missy,” Reggie said.
The girl looked at the muffin with awe.
“I used to make these with Gran,” she said. “Before she died.”
The haunted howls echoed outside again. The wolves were surrounding them. There was a thump and the scraping of claws at the walls.
Scritch scritch scritch.
“Missy, why are you here?” Reggie asked. “What are you afraid of?”
Missy looked petrified. She hugged her chest and rocked back and forth in the bed.
Scritch scritch scritch.
Lone wolves, Reggie thought. Isolation?
“You said your grandmother died. Was she alone? Did she leave you all on your own? Loneliness can be scary, but we can fight it together.”
“I’m never alone,” Missy whimpered.
“What do you mean you’re never alone?”
“Only the Woodsman can help me.”
The baying outside drowned out Missy’s voice, and Reggie had to lean close to hear her.
“Why? What can the Woodsman do?” she urged.
The screeching halted, and all was silent. Three strong knocks at the door followed.
“It’s him,” sighed Missy, sounding both relieved and terrified. “Come in.”
“I bolted the door, Missy. Nobody can—”
The door was already opened, and a hulking man stood on the threshold. He strode forward into the room, carrying an ax stained with black blood and fur. He looked every bit the fairy-tale hunter, with his leather breeches and boots, cotton tunic, and wool coat. His large jowls were covered with a furry beard, his cheeks rosy from the cold.
Was Missy stronger than she had realized—had she brought the Woodsman here to kill the wolves, to free her? But if so, the fearscape should be collapsing.
No, there was something yet to happen.
The man came up to the bed, and Missy held her hand out. He took it and squeezed it.
“I’m here,” he said in a deep voice. “Everything will be all right now. Are you ready?”
Missy nodded.
“Ready for what?” Reggie demanded. “You killed the wolves. Missy can leave, right?”
The Woodsman turned to Reggie. For the first time she noticed how hairy he was—whiskers grew all down his neck, and the hair on his head was thick and shaggy, like a pelt. But worst of all, his eyes glinted yellow at her.
“You’re a wolf !” she cried. She dove toward Missy, trying to shield her, but the Woodsman caught her with one hand and tossed her away. Reggie hit the floor hard, and a bone in her wrist cracked. “Missy! Get out of the bed! Run!”
“She can’t,” growled the Woodsman. “Not with that thing growing inside her.”
Reggie felt a chill go through her.
“What thing?”
The Woodsman ripped the covers off Missy’s body, and to her horror, Reggie saw the outline of a rounded belly beneath the girl’s nightgown. She was pregnant.
“Cut it out of me! Cut it out!” Missy shrieked.
In an instant the puzzle pieces clicked together in Reggie’s mind like the tumblers in a lock. Pregnancy. Being a single, teenage mother. This was what Missy feared. And her mind had perverted a children’s story so that the Woodsman wasn’t the hero because he rescued Red Riding Hood from the wolf; he was the wolf, and he saved her by slaying her.
The Woodsman raised his ax high above his head. The black blood smoked and dripped from the cold steel, singeing holes in the sheets where it landed. Missy closed her eyes and waited.
“Missy, listen to me!” Reggie said. “This isn’t the answer. He won’t just kill your baby—he’ll kill you as well. You don’t need to be afraid of this—we’ll find a way out!”
“No way out,” Missy whispered.
Cradling her arm, Reggie staggered up. She saw a muffin lying a few feet away; the basket had toppled to the floor when the Woodsman had upset the bedclothes. She grabbed it and tossed it at Missy.
“These were made with love, remember? With your gran? She wouldn’t want you to do this to yourself—she’d want you to be strong, to fight back!”
Missy picked up the muffin and looked at it. The Woodsman hesitated, his ax hanging in the air as if suspended by a string.
“That’s right,” said Reggie. She held out her hand toward Missy. “Come with me. The woods are clear. We’ll get through this together—I’ll help you.”
Missy’s eyes shifted from the muffin to Reggie. Tears brimmed in them, and her jaw hardened.
“You’ll just leave me like he did!” she screamed.
With that, the Woodsman dropped his ax, but not on Missy. He whirled about, swinging the weapon through the air and slamming it into Reggie’s stomach.
She let out a startled gasp as the blade sliced through her organs, all the way to her spine. She tasted the rusty blood as it rose up her throat and into her mouth, bubbling on her lips. He held her like that, skewered on his ax, then pulled it out, and Reggie collapsed on the ground. Black bile and inky smoke gushed from her abdomen, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
As her final breaths sputtered from her body, and the fog closed in around her, the last thing she saw was the Woodsman taking another swing with his ax, this time splitting Missy’s body in half. There was a scream, a fountain of dark blood spewed up from the bed like an erupting volcano, and then all went black.
8
Minutes or hours later, she didn’t know, Reggie’s vision began to clear, and she was staring at white now instead of black. White tiles, to be more precise, and they were moving. No, they weren’t. She was moving. She was on her back and tried to sit up, but something was holding her down. Reason and familiarity began to creep back on the edges of her brain: She was on a gurney, her arms pinned to her sides with restraints. Two Vour orderlies wheeled her down the hospital corridor. She couldn’t be sure where she was going. Sometimes after a fearscape they would take
her back to her room; sometimes they would take her for more tests—painful ones that involved lots of needles and electrodes and injections. And, on occasion, Dr. Unger would see her, and ask her irritating questions about her fearscape experiences, as if he really were her doctor, really trying to help her get better. What a sick joke.
“Where to today, boys?” Reggie mumbled to the orderlies. They didn’t answer, and she didn’t expect them to. She had nicknamed them Click and Clack in her own mind because of the sounds their shoes made on the linoleum tiles. Click was white with sandy hair, and Clack was Hispanic with dark hair. That was the extent of her knowledge of them. Like always, they stared straight ahead and paid no attention to her, unless she struggled. Then one of them would inject her with something that knocked her out and left her with an excruciating headache when she woke up again. She had learned a while ago not to struggle. Not that it mattered much; when she came out of a fearscape, she was always terribly weak anyway.
Lately there have been other feelings, though, Reggie thought to herself. Not just the weakness and the lethargy. Sometimes it was like she could feel something foreign coursing through her veins, like some kind of drug. It could be a drug—she could never be sure what the Vours were pumping into her bloodstream—but somehow, Reggie didn’t think that was it. It was more like adrenaline, like a naturally released chemical or endorphin. It was the strangest of sensations: Reggie wasn’t sure if she had the strength to stand on her own, but at the same time, her body felt very alive, her senses heightened. But the feeling could pass as quickly as it had come, leaving her deflated and exhausted.
The tiles above her head swept by with maddening regularity; the gurney’s wheels squeaked beneath her; the shoes went click-clack, click-clack on the floor. Reggie’s stomach lurched and her pupils dilated.
Scritch scritch scritch.
She heard the wolves pawing at the walls.
Suddenly she was back in the cabin, lying crippled on the floor in a pool of her own blood. She couldn’t move her legs; the ax blow had paralyzed her, and now she was a mangled heap of limbs and flesh. She felt something pressing on her stomach, and she looked down to see her intestines slipping out of a gaping hole in her abdomen. The pain was too intense to believe, and her breath came in choking gasps of air mixed with blood. She forced herself to look away.
Missy’s corpse lay splayed on the bed, cut in two like two pomegranate halves with their gutty seeds spilling out. Facing her was the Woodsman with his yellow eyes. But now he had a third eye, bloodred, that stared out from the middle of his forehead. He held up his ax and laughed at her, a deep, mirthless laugh that seemed to bounce around Reggie’s skull. The ax came down again, this time on her neck.
She expected to lose consciousness, or to die; at this point, she wanted the blessed blackness to close in, the pain to go away. But instead, she felt the blade hit her, slice through her skin, sever her tendons, and split her vertebrae. For a moment the world spun around her, and when it righted itself again, she wanted to scream, but her vocal cords were no longer connected to her lips, and her tongue fell back down her throat. Her head had rolled across the floor, and she was staring back at her decapitated body.
And then the images around her began to shift. They were in the light-filled cabin—but no, they were in a light-filled office. The Woodsman’s features melted off his face, and his whiskers retracted into his skin, revealing the countenance of an old man with burn scars, wearing not a hunter’s jacket but a lab coat. The ax shrank until Reggie realized it was actually a pencil. She raised her head as her vision continued to clear. She was lying propped on a couch. Wires were attached to her fingertips, her arm, and her neck, and flowed out to a machine in the corner that recorded her brain waves. Dr. Unger sat behind his desk smiling at her, his thin lips making a twisted V.
“Welcome back, Regina,” he said.
Reggie’s extremities began to tingle as she regained feeling in her fingers and toes, her arms and legs. It had happened again—another flashback. This was another unwelcome new development from the constant immersion in the fearscapes. She’d begun reliving old fearscape experiences in the real world, the fantasy mixing with reality. It seemed that anything could trigger an episode.
“Good to see you, too, Doc.” Reggie tried to sit a little taller, to show a strength that she didn’t feel. The clock on the wall said quarter to three. At least eight hours had passed since they’d first tossed her into the fearscape that morning, not that Reggie could have told the difference. It could have been ten hours or ten minutes for all she knew. Time was becoming a less and less quantifiable entity in this hellish existence.
Dr. Unger contemplated her for a few minutes more. Though it was small comfort, Reggie did take some pleasure in his marred visage. When she had first met him, he’d looked like Santa Claus, with a jolly, cherubic demeanor. But now one half of his face was mottled with burn scars, with a particularly nasty one situated in the middle of his forehead. The nerves in one eye had been damaged, leaving his eyelid droopy, and his eyebrows had been singed off and had not grown back. To people like Dad, he had attributed his change of appearance to getting trapped in the Thornwood fire while trying to rescue patients. Really, he had sustained all of these injuries the night of the summer solstice, when he had tried, unsuccessfully, to use Reggie to open the gateway between the Vour world and the real one. Aaron and Eben had rescued her and blown up Dr. Unger’s lab in the process, leaving him looking like the monster that he was.
“What just happened there, Regina?” Dr. Unger asked finally. He poised his pencil over a pad of paper, ready to record all pertinent data. But Reggie wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
“Oh, I think I just fainted. My corset was probably too tight. You know us females—get us too excited and the vapors take us. Whew!” Reggie fanned her face melodramatically. She tried to keep her manner airy, but her breath came in rasps, and it took all her concentration to stay focused on the doctor, not to slip back into some terrible vision.
A shock ripped through her body, and Reggie involuntarily jerked forward, nearly falling off the couch. Panting, she glared up at Dr. Unger. He continued to smile back at her, but his eyes were like ice. He gestured to the brain-wave machine.
“Cute. But you know I have little time for cuteness. Shall we continue?”
Reggie thought the hate would overpower her, but she kept herself in control and nodded grimly at him. The machine didn’t just monitor her brain; it shocked her when she lied. Unger was a lot of things, but stupid was not one of them. Their sessions often went like this: Reggie would resist at first, but eventually the pain, and Dr. Unger, would triumph. And Reggie seemed to have less and less will to withstand him these days.
“Excellent,” Dr. Unger continued. “So, what just happened there?”
“I have no idea.” Another shock. “Look, I don’t! I had a flashback, or a vision, or a living nightmare! What do you want me to say? You’re the goddamned doctor!”
“No need to get angry, my dear,” said Dr. Unger. “Simply tell me what you saw in this ‘living nightmare.’ I am thoroughly intrigued.”
“I bet you are,” Reggie muttered, but she did as he asked, trying to keep things as vague as possible. But every few minutes the electricity would jolt through her body and she would begrudgingly share more.
Dr. Unger kept at her for the next several hours, asking her all kinds of questions, some about the fearscape she’d just been in, some about how she was sleeping, what her appetite was like, if she was noticing any other physical changes. Every time Reggie would ask for food or water, he would put her off, telling her she’d receive anything she wanted when they were through. I want to kill you, was all Reggie could think when he said this.
At least the constant shocks kept her alert. Reggie could feel the endorphins—or whatever it was—creeping back into her veins. Her mind became sharper, and though she was weary and in pain, the feeling of being alive, of having some k
ind of power or strength she didn’t quite understand yet, was getting stronger. Still, she had no trouble feigning exhaustion—physically her body felt like it had been hit by a truck and then steamrolled for good measure.
At last, long after the orange streaks of sunset had disappeared and the office was lit only by a few lamps and weak moonlight, Dr. Unger put down his pencil. He had used up almost the entire legal pad.
“I think this has been a very constructive session, Regina,” he said pleasantly. He poured some water from a pitcher on his desk into a glass and walked over to her. “You’ve done a lot of talking—you must be very parched.”
Reggie took the glass and drank thirstily. When she was finished, Dr. Unger took it from her and refilled it.
“You see? When you cooperate, you’re rewarded,” he said.
“With basic human needs? You are too generous,” Reggie seethed.
“One needs to start somewhere. Perhaps in time you shall eat cake.”
Wrath welled in Reggie. Hate boiled up inside her like a churning sea, all of it directed at the monster before her. The irony was that he wasn’t even a Vour—no, he was a full-blooded human, though Reggie doubted if he had a heart. He simply worked with the Vours, ran their experiments for them, carried out their work, and he did it all because of a morbid curiosity to see what new discoveries he could make, without regard to the people he hurt or killed in the process. As far as Reggie was concerned, there was no more despicable creature on the planet, including the Vours.
Reggie sipped the water more slowly this time, and as its icy coolness flowed down her esophagus, she felt that strange energy surging throughout her body, tingling, like the feeling the air has before an electrical storm. She breathed slowly in and out, in and out, desperately hoping she wasn’t giving anything away.
But Dr. Unger seemed to notice a change.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Reggie continued sipping her water and nodded at him.
“You should try sending ten thousand volts through your own body sometime. It’s exhilarating.”
