The Realms of the Dead

by William Todd Rose

  Even when the far wall of the office crumbled, Chuck remained unfazed. The collapse began toward the ceiling with chunks of plaster falling away and turning into a fine powder upon hitting one another. This powder was immediately pulled into smoke-like wisps as it was sucked into a vortex churning where the hallway should have been. Within seconds, the entire wall was gone, revealing a panorama where eddies of pure energy spiraled forever inward upon themselves. The currents crackled and popped as sparks flashed within them, flooding the room with the scent of ozone, and from somewhere within the scene a rope creaked.

  An unblinking blue eye stared from the center of the whirlpool and, as Chuck watched, something moved within its pupil. Silhouettes blacker than the darkness surrounding them rushed forward and spilled out of the eye; the shimmering currents of energy reflected off segmented exoskeletons, revealing them to be the same kind of bugs that had swarmed out of the severed head in Chuck’s nightmare.

  The insects scurried across the whirlpool in the opposite direction, using the energy like a spiral path and apparently immune to the vortex’s pull. Their legs and shells clacked as they thronged toward the office in ever increasing numbers and the tempo of the creaking rope quickened.

  Control’s scream broke through the paralysis that had seized Chuck’s mind. He blinked and the wall was simply a wall again. Though he had no clue how much time had passed, Marilee and Control’s scuffle had led them toward the Buddha fountain. His partner still retained her grip on the girl’s pigtails, pulling so hard that it almost looked as though her scalp was about to tear free from her skull. Control’s arms, however, were covered in blood.

  Slivers of black plastic jutted from her skin. Shards of the shattered EMF detector must have shot through the air in the same way the screwdriver had leapt into the little girl’s hand. Perhaps the spirit controlling her realized the battle was at an impasse and decided to pull out all the stops, enlisting every weapon within its arsenal. Chuck, however, didn’t waste time considering strategies, neither Marilee’s nor his own. He simply rushed forward again, intent on helping his partner in any way he could.

  He’d closed half the distance when the heavy Buddha fountain flew off its table. Water cascaded in its wake as the plug-in popped out of the outlet and the cord wavered in the air like a thrashing tail. Pivoting on the ball of his foot, Chuck whirled as his hand shot out. The fountain passed so close that Buddha’s resin robes grazed his hair and Chuck snatched the cord within his fist.

  He’d hoped that he could use centrifugal force to fling the statue back at the girl. Not at her head, of course, but toward her knees. If they could cut her legs out from under her, the child would fall, perhaps giving him and Control the upper hand they so desperately needed. Chuck, however, had underestimated the psychic force with which the fountain had been flung.

  The cord snapped free from the base and the fountain created a crater of cracks as it thunked into the wall, leaving him holding something that vaguely resembled a whip. The insulation had peeled back, freeing a tuft of frayed wires from the end, and thoughts ricocheted through Chuck’s mind.

  Had he read once that medieval monks used flagellation to cast out evil spirits?

  No, that was insane. He couldn’t mercilessly flail a little girl in the hopes that flogging might drive out the demon inhabiting her. He wasn’t even sure if this was a fact. Perhaps it was nothing more than a half-baked scheme born of panic and desperation.

  All of this went through Chuck’s head in a fraction of a second. In that same amount of time, the corner table the fountain had previously rested upon topped over and pitched forward as Marilee swiped with the screwdriver again. Control retreated from the assault, but the table slammed against her heels. The woman’s body lurched backward and she was suddenly falling, her grip on Marilee’s pigtails pulling the child to the ground with her.

  With the young girl straddling her waist, Control released Marilee’s hair as the screwdriver plunged downward. Control caught the girl by the wrist and squeezed as though she intended to shatter bones, though her hope was actually to make the child drop the screwdriver. Marilee, though, was stronger than an eleven-year-old should have been. Control’s biceps quivered with strain as she struggled just to keep the screwdriver from plunging into her neck.

  Chuck dove to his knees beside the young girl and his hands were a blur of coordinated activity. Holding the frayed end of the electrical cord in his left hand, he stretched out with his right. At the exact moment the prongs entered the outlet, he touched the bare wires to the child’s forehead.

  There was a bright flash accompanied by a sound that was partly a sizzle and partly a pop. The stench of burnt flesh wafted from the whiff of smoke curling from the girl’s hairline and her small body collapsed like a marionette whose strings had been cut. The screwdriver slipped from her fingers and she lay on the floor, panting rapidly as she blinked in quick succession.

  As Control scrambled backward, Chuck tossed the screwdriver across the room and turned his attention to Marilee. The once-smooth skin near the top of her forehead was now marred by a wound slightly smaller than a dime. Raw flesh glistened in the center but the edges looked gnarled and crispy. The singed tissue radiated outward in a miniature sunburst pattern and tiny blisters bubbled up at seemingly random intervals.

  “Good God, Chuck,” Control gasped as she struggled to catch her breath. “What the hell was that?” Control crawled forward and hunched over the girl, spreading the child’s eyelids with her fingertips as she examined the pupils. “You could’ve killed her!”

  Chuck held Marilee’s limp hand in his own, his fingers curled around the girl’s wrist. As he mentally timed her pulse, he glanced up at his partner.

  “I could’ve killed her? I’m sorry. My mistake. Next time I’ll just let you be stabbed in the damn throat.”

  “Marilee?” Control patted the girl on the cheek repeatedly. “Honey? Come on, sweetheart. Come back to us. Come on, girl.”

  “Her pulse is erratic. Weak.” All offices were required to contain a first aid kit, but Chuck had always found them to be unsightly. His was stashed beneath the sofa and he now ran to it as Control cradled the child’s head in her lap.

  “What were you thinking?” she demanded. “You knew she has all that circuitry wired in up there. She’ll be lucky if you didn’t fry her whole damn brain.”

  “Look,” Chuck snapped as he ran back across the room, first aid kit in hand, “I had to do something, okay? Lewis was using her abilities against us. He would’ve killed you, me, and probably Marilee once he was done with her. I thought it would just short out the chip!”

  Squatting beside his companions, Chuck flipped open the kit and snatched a packet of antiseptic cream. Ripping it open with his teeth, he applied the cool gel to his fingertip before dabbing it on the girl’s wound.

  “Yeah, well you feel free to tell it to Murphy when we have to explain why P.R.A.’s star pupil is now a freakin’ Sleeper.”

  “Come on, Marilee. Come on, come on, come on. Don’t do this, girl.”

  “Jesus Christ, Chuck, you’re bleeding all over her!”

  “Will you get off my case, already? I’m doing the best I fuckin’ can here!”

  Marilee’s eyelids fluttered and the tip of her tongue darted across her lips, eliciting a sigh from both Control and Chuck as their bodies relaxed.

  “You guys sound like my parents,” Marilee croaked. Chuck’s and Control’s laughter was tempered by a shaky quality as they fawned over the child, Control stroking her hair while Chuck clasped her small hand in his and kissed her knuckles.

  Marilee tried to force a smile, but a tear leaked from the corner of the girl’s eye and rolled down her cheek. The tear quickly gave way to others and she curled into a tight ball, sobbing in Control’s lap as her shoulders hitched.

  The self-assured prodigy who seemed advanced beyond her years was gone, leaving only a small and frightened little girl.

  Somehow, this unne
rved Chuck more than anything else that had taken place. It was as though it were a harbinger of things to come, some dark omen warning of what lay ahead. After all, if this had simply been the first battle then the conflict to come would not be pretty. In fact, he suspected it would give a new definition to the old adage War is hell. For in this case, the meaning would be literal.

  Chapter 8

  Now that adrenaline no longer numbed his body, the puncture wound in Chuck’s abdomen pulsed with pain. He’d stacked gauze pads atop one another and taped them in place, but the squares were quickly saturated with blood. He’d need stitches, of course, but going to The Institute’s nurse was out of the question. As far as anyone outside of his office was concerned, nothing out of the ordinary had happened that day. A cover story would need to be invented, of course; after all, they had to have some way of explaining the injury to Marilee’s forehead as well as the cracks in the wall. But that bridge would be crossed when they came to it. For now, he simply concentrated on applying fresh gauze while Control plucked slivers of plastic out of her arms.

  Marilee had only allowed herself to cry for a few minutes. After wiping the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand, she stood without a word and walked to the sofa. For a while, she toyed with the Spirit Box, seemingly inspecting it for damage. Her tight-lipped expression and distant stare, however, betrayed that her mind was occupied with something other than potentially damaged equipment and she eventually gave up the ruse altogether. Perched on the edge of the couch, she sat so stiffly it was easy to imagine that her spine had been replaced with a steel rod. Her palms rested atop either thigh with her feet planted flatly on the floor.

  “Marilee”—Control winced as she applied antiseptic gel to the constellations of cuts dotting her arms—“we can’t write this up in a report. I know you guys in P.R.A. are usually strictly by the book. But what happened…it has to be off the record.”

  “Sums up what I was just thinking,” Chuck chimed in. “I’m pretty sure this would constitute that cowboy shit Director Murphy warned us about.”

  If the girl heard either one of them, she gave no indication. Chuck and Control exchanged a glance. Neither one had to be psychic to know what the other was thinking: Perhaps there had been neurological damage, after all. Control gestured as though she wanted Chuck to say something else to the motionless child; his eyes widened and he held up his hands as he mouthed a single-word question: What?

  Control, though, would not be put off so easily. She gestured again, more adamantly this time.

  “Yeah,” Chuck ventured, “this may not be the best time, Marilee, but I was just wondering. Do you know what happened to Nodens’s recorder chip? I mean, I’m kind of responsible for it and everything.”

  The girl’s head moved a fraction of an inch, nodding toward a piece of silicon on the floor. Chuck sighed as he noticed that the thing lay in several jagged pieces; however, the knowledge that he would be living on an extremely tight budget for quite some time to come was offset by relief. Not only had Marilee heard the question, but she’d also understood and responded.

  The initial movement, though small, almost seemed to remind Marilee that she was capable of moving. She rubbed the Band-Aid on her forehead with her fingertip, tracing its contours softly as her blank expression turned into a frown.

  “Sorry about that.” Chuck’s face reddened. Though sincere, his apology sounded ridiculously simple, even to his own ears and he blurted out words without thinking. “Really. I mean it. I really am sorry. Shit, you’ll probably have a scar now.”

  Control slugged him in the arm as she shook her head in exasperation.

  “But hey, it’s just a small one. I mean, it will be easy to fix. Or hide. Or whatever they do for scars. Hell, I don’t know. I just feel like crap and I don’t know what to do to make it better.”

  Marilee turned to look at them. Her expression never changed, though her words were slow and calculated.

  “I was chipped when I was three,” she said. “My earliest memory is wakin’ up when they were wheeling me into the OR. It was like I was lookin’ up and watching the ceiling tiles scroll by through a thick fog. The sound of the gurney’s wheels seemed so far away…so distant.”

  Chuck and Control remained silent, allowing the little girl to speak freely.

  “There was a man in a mask. Not a Halloween mask, but one like surgeons wear in the movies. He leaned over me and put this little cuplike thing over my mouth and nose. I remember cool air blowing out of it and how the air kinda tasted like peppermint. An’ then everything just kind of melted away.” Marilee had stopped rubbing the bandage and now simply rested her fingers upon it. “My chip’s always been there. Always been a part of me for as long as I can remember. And I was so proud of it. I thought…well, I guess I thought it made me special. Unique. And the funny thing is, I know it’s still physically there. I can feel it shift around, right under my skin. But I also know it’s dead. It’s like there’s this hollow socket up here in my head. And I just can’t leave it alone. Like how your tongue will keep going back to where your tooth used to be when you lose one.”

  Chuck buried his face in his hands and felt as if his entire body had deflated. He wanted to say something; but what could he say? The feeling Marilee was describing was essentially his fault. He’d robbed the girl of something precious to her; and that was something that felt unforgivable.

  Perhaps Marilee tapped into his thoughts. The chip had only amplified her natural abilities, after all. It wasn’t as if it had been solely responsible for them. Or perhaps she simply read his body language: the slumped shoulders, heavy sigh, and how he couldn’t force himself to look her in the eye.

  “It’s okay. I understand. You did what you had to do. It was logical. An’ it’s nice to see that your reputation isn’t just legend. Killin’ my chip was brilliant, Mr. Grainger. It was either the chip or you guys. An’ chips can be replaced.”

  “Look, Marilee,” Control said as she moved to the sofa and sat next to the girl, “there’s something we haven’t told you about this case. We thought it was for your own protection. But with what just happened…well, it seems like you have a right to know exactly what we’re up against.”

  Rather than joining his coworkers on the sofa, Chuck laid down on the floor, hoping that a more horizontal position would ease the pain radiating through his gut. Closing his eyes, he listened as Control filled Marilee in on their suspicions. She didn’t have to tell the child who Albert Lewis was. Within the confines of The Institute, the serial killer had almost become synonymous with Chuck Grainger: If one was mentioned, the other’s name was sure to follow. She did, however, detail Chuck’s recent nightmares, the bizarre birthday party incident, and all of the details they’d discussed over dinner. Choking back groans of pain, he lay perfectly still, listening past the thudding of his own heart.

  “So you really think it’s him, huh?” Marilee asked when Control had finished. “You think it’s Albert Lewis?”

  “More so than ever.” Chuck tried to control the quiver in his voice, but knew he couldn’t postpone medical attention much longer. He kept his description of the vision that had overtaken him brief, omitting how the walls had turned to dust and focusing only on the main points. “What I remember clearest about Lewis was his blue eyes. And the eye in the middle of that vortex was blue.”

  “Not to mention,” Control interjected, “he saw me and assumed I was my sister.”

  “I noticed that, too. So anyway, yeah, I’m positive it’s him. Who else could it be?”

  Marilee considered the information as she rubbed her index finger over the Band-Aid in tiny circles.

  “I’ve never been ridden before.” Noticing the confusion that flickered through Control’s eyes, the girl hurriedly continued. “It’s what we call it when an NCM takes over. What you’d prob’ly call possession. Lots of souls have tried. But I’ve always kept ’em out. Always been stronger. But this one? It was bad news right from the start
.”

  “How so?”

  “I barely felt it barrelin’ down on me. It was like an atomic bomb went off an’ I was right there at ground zero. All this anger an’ hate just howlin’ through the void. It was all over me before I even had a chance to raise defenses. That quick.”

  “From your tone,” Control asked, “I’m assuming that’s something of an anomaly?”

  “To be ridden by a spirit means it has to expend a lot of energy. An’ a lot of energy needs to be put out to create a Tier IV Manifestation like the one Mr. Grainger experienced, too. This spirit? It did both. At the same time. An’ that’s pretty darn scary.”

  The trio sat in silence for a moment, allowing Marilee’s statements to hang in the room like gathering storm clouds. Once familiar surroundings harbored sinister secrets in the shadows and gloom and even the air felt oppressive. It was as though the evil that had invaded the office had seeped into its molecules, bloating them with darkness until the atmosphere was dense and pendulous.

  This was merely incidental for Chuck. He was keenly aware of the blood leaking out of his abdomen and the saturated gauze was warm and sticky against skin that felt increasingly cold. Rogue shivers chased chills around his body, but the pain had crystalized, leaving a patch of numbness that crept through his torso. He felt weak and wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and allow sleep to wash over him.

  He didn’t need to be told that this was a bad idea.

  “Cut to the chase.” His voice sounded distant, even to his own ears. “What do we do now?”

  “We get you to an ER. You’re looking like shit, buddy.”

  Marilee ignored Control’s comment. The girl’s hands had balled into fists and she glowered at some invisible point in the distance. At first, it almost seemed as if her words were not directed to her mortal companions, but rather served as a warning to the dark force that had swept through the office.