by Amy Cross
I wait for an answer.
“Mary isn't here,” he says finally. “I'm not expecting her.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, making my way through to the bedroom. “She and Josh headed over to your place last night.”
“She called to they she was coming,” he replies, “but then she called back a few minutes later and said she'd changed her mind. She said she was turning around and going back to your apartment.”
I freeze for a moment, my mind racing as I try to work out what the hell is happening. Finally I head to the window and peer out, and I feel a flash of concern as soon as I see Mary's car parked down on the street.
“When did she call you?” I ask cautiously.
“Last night.”
I stare at the car for a moment.
“Steven?” Pete continues. “Is anything wrong?”
“No, it's fine,” I stammer, trying not to panic. “Pete, I'll call you back. I'll get Mary to call you real soon.”
Setting the phone aside, I hurry through to Josh's room and open the wardrobe, and I'm shocked to see that both his backpacks are in their usual place. Crouching down, I unzip them and find that they're still filled with clothes, as if he and Mary came back but never got around to unpacking. I guess they could have returned while I was at Sanjay's store last night, but then they should have been here when I got back.
I get to my feet and listen to the silence of the apartment.
“Mary?” I call out finally, just to be absolutely sure that I'm alone. “Josh? Guys?”
I wait.
Silence.
Suddenly I hear a whirring sound from the kitchen, and I realize the goddamn printer has started up again. My first instinct is to go and hurl the bastard machine straight out the window, but a sense of growing dread quickly starts creeping its way up through my gut.
“Mary?” I call out again.
The only reply comes from the printer.
Although I tell myself that the whole thing must be a coincidence, I can't help making my way cautiously back through the apartment until I reach the kitchen again. I stop in the doorway, watching as a sheet of paper slowly slides out of the machine with a fresh image. Once the print-job is complete, I take a deep breath and head over to take a look, although I feel more than a little reluctant to see what the printer has come up with this time.
I feel a cold shudder as I see a photo showing a bloodied, naked woman begin dragged across our hallway. She seems to have some kind of thick metal hook embedded deep in her back. At the top of the image, the back of the woman's head is partially visible.
“It's not her,” I whisper, “it can't be her...”
The printer is already producing another photo, which I quickly grab. This time, the picture shows the same woman being thrown onto a bed. Her body is moving so fast, the image is pretty blurry, but I'm already starting to panic.
Looking down at the printer, I see a third photo coming out. I watch in horror as, inch by inch, the sheet of paper emerges from the machine and I see my wife's horrified, bloodied face screaming at the camera as her naked body is pushed down against the bed. There are already cuts and tears all over her flesh, and I can't stop staring at her fearful eyes.
A moment later the page finishes printing and slides out all the way, and I see another face.
Josh.
He's in the background of the photo, screaming in the doorway.
“No,” I stammer, taking a step back as a cold sweat ripples across my body. “This isn't happening, this can't be...”
I pause for a moment, before realizing that I have to go to the police. I need help, I can't deal with this alone. Even if it's just some sick prank, I need to get the police involved.
Grabbing the photos, I shove them into my pocket before turning and racing out into the hallway. As I get to the front door, I hear someone knocking on the other side, but I don't have time to talk to any of the neighbors right now. Pulling the door open, I -
Suddenly a hand grabs me by the throat, slamming me back against the wall.
“Where are they?” screams Dzigniav Wolonovsky, the man from the video, with patches of dried blood on one side of his face. He leans closer, until I can smell his rotten breath. “Tell me!” he sneers. “Where are they?”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“If you go to the police, they're dead. Do you understand? Your wife, your son, they're lost forever if you so much as set foot in a police station. You'll be locked away so fast, and nobody will ever believe a word you tell them. You'll end up in a cell, rotting away while the police bumble along doing absolutely nothing.”
He pauses, staring down at me, having shoved me to the floor just a few seconds earlier.
“And they'll be gone,” he adds finally. “Lost in that awful place, left to die painful deaths. Do you understand what I'm saying to you, Mr. Holland?”
“The police -”
“You're a guy,” he continues. “Face it, their first assumption will be that you did all this. That you're violent, and that your wife and son ran away from you. And then once they realize they can't find any trace of them, they'll think the worst. They'll think you killed them, and that this whole story was part of a plan to cover it up.”
I open my mouth to argue with him, but after a moment I think back to the phone call from the child protection team. My family is already in the system, and they already have suspicions about the bruises on Josh's body.
“I can persuade them,” I stammer, “I can... I can make them see the truth.”
“They'll think you're insane.”
“You can talk to them too! You can tell them what you've told me!”
“Not a chance.”
“But -”
“I'm not risking that again,” he explains. “I'm done with the cops, I don't have time to waste on them, and neither do you. Your only hope of getting your family back is to let me help you. You see that, don't you? After all, I'm the only other person in the world who believes you right now.”
Getting to my feet, I take a couple of steps back, keen to get out of his reach in case he attacks me again. The door is open behind him, but Wolonovsky is clearly dangerous and I don't want to get into a fist-fight with an escaped mental patient. For one thing, he has a hand in one of his pockets and I'm worried he might have a weapon. For another, he's a big guy, bigger than me. He's the kind of guy who looks like he could pin me down with ease.
“How do I know you're not behind it all?” I stammer.
He smiles.
“How do I know you didn't set this up in the first place?” I ask. “How do I know you didn't kidnap them? How do I know you're not the one behind the printer?”
“For one thing, you can call the Middleford Vale psychiatric hospital and ask to speak to Doctor Alison Walker,” he tells me. “She'll confirm for you that I only checked out of that place last night. I'm guessing this madness has been going on for longer than that.”
“Then you're working with someone,” I reply.
He rolls his eyes. “The only person I have any intention of working with is you, Mr. Holland. I'm offering my help, to get your wife and son back.” He pauses, before turning away. “Forget it. I tried. You're on your own and -”
“Wait!”
Stepping forward, I grab his arm.
“I have to help them,” I stammer, feeling as if even though this entire situation is insane, I need all the help I can get. “I don't know what's happening, but...”
I pause, before taking the crumpled print-outs from my pocket. My hands are trembling, and I can't quite bring myself to look again at the images of Mary and Josh.
“Wherever they are,” I continue, “I have to get them back.”
“They're in the place,” he replies, “I know. I hoped that maybe I would get here in time, but now I see...” He pauses again, eyeing me with a hint of suspicion. “My question is why you're not with them. Why did they get taken by the Hellforms, while you were left behind?�
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“I don't know what you're talking about,” I stammer. “Please -”
“There isn't much time,” he continues. “I came to help you, and I can help, but you need to listen to me. If you treat me the way those assholes treated me at the psychiatric hospital, there's nothing we can do. There's no time to debate who's nuts and who's not, we just have to trust our own experiences. If we're crazy, we're crazy, but if we're not...” He limps past me, heading into the kitchen and looking around for a moment before turning to me again. “Do you even know who the hell I am?”
“You're the guy from the video,” I reply.
“The what?” He frowns, before nodding. “Right. Those awful tapes they made of me. My name is Dzigniav Wolonovsky and I checked myself out of Middleford Vale Psychiatric Hospital two days ago because I realized -”
“Checked yourself out?” I ask. “How exactly does that work?”
“I was a voluntary patient,” he replies. “I had myself committed several years ago, I stayed at the hospital on-and-off over the year. Sometimes I left for short periods, to see if I might be okay in society, but I always ended up running back to the ward. I thought maybe they could help me, I thought they could prove to me that I was simply insane, but they could do no such thing. And now maybe I think I can help you, and I hope I am not wrong again. When someone from this city began searching online for the phrase Maxinomoticon, it triggered an alert on one of my sites. After that, it wasn't too hard to narrow down the precise location. I guess after all this time, I have a sense for these things. Tell me, how long have your wife and son been missing? What did you see?”
I want to tell him to go to hell, I want to get out of here and go to the police, but I feel as if I'm losing my mind. Finally, looking down at the screwed-up print-outs in my hands, I force myself to unfold them and take another look at the awful photos even as I hear the printer spewing out some more. As soon as I see Mary's terrified, bloodied face, I have to turn away.
“Let me see,” Wolonovsky says, limping toward me and reaching out. He snatches the photos before I have time to stop him, and he winces as soon as he sees them. “This is what I feared,” he continues, “but... How did you get these? Did you go to Hell with a camera?”
“Hell?” I ask, taking a step back. “I don't even know what you're talking about.”
“These photos,” he continues, sounding increasingly desperate as he holds them up for me to see. “They're from Hell, or at least the place I call Hell. Where did you -”
Stopping suddenly, he turns and looks at the printer, and then he limps over and takes the latest photo as yet another starts coming out. He stares at the picture for a moment, before looking down at the printer with a hint of shock in his eyes, as if he really can't quite believe what he's seeing. Dropping to his knees, he places his hands on the sides of the machine and stares with horror. I can't tell whether he's scared of the damn thing, or awestruck.
“This... device?” he asks, clearly a little confused. “The pictures came out of here?”
“Let me see,” I reply, heading over and trying to grab the latest picture, only for him to pull it away before I get a chance.
“You must not look,” he says firmly, getting to his feet. “If this is your wife, you don't want to see her being -”
He glances at it again, and for a moment he seems unable to stop looking.
“Jesus Christ,” he mutters finally. “That place is worse than I remembered.”
“Show it to me!” I snap, reaching around behind him and grabbing the photo. As soon as I see the image, however, I feel a violent sense of nausea in the pit of my stomach and I let go of the piece of paper before turning and leaning against the wall. For a few seconds, I feel as if I might actually vomit, but that image is burned into my mind. I saw Mary's face, screaming as she crawled across the bed, her naked body covered in cuts and rips as a metal hook tore through her left breast.
“I told you already,” Wolonovsky says after a moment. “There's really not much time. Your wife and son have been taken to that place, and it might already be too late to get them back. The Hellforms really don't hold back when it comes to torture, and most humans don't last long if they end up there. The odds are stacked against us, but at least we can try. If we don't try...” He pauses. “If we don't try to save your family, then we're almost as bad as the monsters who are doing this to them.”
“First I'm going to destroy this thing,” I reply, grabbing the printer.
“No!” He pushes me away. “Are you a fool? Without the device, how do you think you can go through and save your family?”
“It's just a printer!” I hiss. “It's not -”
He bursts into a fit of laughter, although he has enough presence of mind to still pull the print-outs away from me when I try – yet again – to take them from his hand.
“What is it, then?” I ask. “A magical bridge to fairy land?”
“You don't understand,” he stammers, shaking his head as tears run down his smiling face. “You're as bad as all those doctors at the hospital.”
I wait for him to continue, but he seems genuinely amused by my apparent ignorance.
“Who are you, then?” I stammer finally.
“I thought you -”
“Who are you?” I shout, stepping closer. “I mean who are you really? How do you know about what's happening here?”
He pauses for a moment. “Because I've been to that place,” he says finally, with tears in his eyes. “As a child, I was plagued by visions, images, sounds... At the age of six, I somehow slipped through to that other world. I was lost there for almost a week, I survived by hiding and running, by never sleeping. And then one day I slipped back here, and no-one believed a word I said. I don't know why I was chosen to experience such a thing, but by the time I was in my teens I was struggling to cope with what I knew. I hoped, I prayed that my parents and the doctors were right, that I was simply mad. I felt deep down that I was seeing something real, but I told myself that the certainty was just another part of my mental illness. To this day, I still wish that this had been the case.”
“You're not making any sense,” I reply, shaking my head. “Where the hell are my wife and son, and where are these pictures coming from?”
He turns and looks down at the printer again. “Where did you find this device?”
“It was at a store,” I tell him. “It was cheap, I figured it'd do the job.”
“A store?”
“Just a store at the mall.”
“Amazing,” he mutters. “It's hard to believe that something this evil and cruel could show up in an ordinary store in an ordinary city. Then again, as I know from experience, sometimes these little slips occur. You were very unlucky. You brought a relic of the Hellform world into your home, and it established a connection to that place. These connections are rare, they shouldn't even happen at all. But sometimes, by mistake or perhaps by some design that even I do not understand yet, these little accidents occur. And when they do, it is imperative that something is done to shut them down.”
I wait for him to continue, but he limps over and takes a closer look at the printer. He's muttering something under his breath, and with each passing second I'm becoming more and more convinced that I'm in the presence of a man who has truly lost his mind. Instead of listening to his rambling claims, I need to go to the authorities and trust that they'll know what to do.
Finally I turn and hurry to the hallway, making for the front door.
“Your wife and son have a twenty-four hours left at most,” he calls after me. “After that, they'll be dead. Your wife first, and then the boy. Tortured to death. Slaughtered.”
I pull the door open.
“What do you think the cops will say when you tell them the whole story?”
Pausing, I realize that he might have a point.
“Your must know that they'll take too long,” he continues. “And I promise you, I'll be gone by the time you bring them back
here, and that'll mean you won't have another chance to save your family. I know this might scare you, given the fact that I look like a goddamn tramp, but I'm your only hope right now. I'm your wife and son's only hope, too.”
Slowly, I turn to him.
“So what are you suggesting?” I ask. “What's your big idea?”
“It's kind of obvious really,” he replies. “Your wife and son have been kidnapped, so you have to go and get them. And fortunately for you, you're looking at quite possibly the only man who has ever gone to that wretched place and made it back alive.” He hesitates for a moment, as if he's debating what to do next. “And I will help you.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Hell is my name for that place,” Wolonovsky explains a short time later, as we sit at the kitchen table. He's examining the printer while it churns out yet another image in what seems now to be a never-ending stream. “I never understood their language enough to work out what they call it, but Hell...”
He hesitates for a moment, with a flicker of fear in his eyes.
“I wouldn't call myself a religious man,” he continues, and now his voice is trembling slightly. “Not most of the time, anyway. Some days I'm an atheist, other days I believe in God, but that place I went to when I was a six-year-old boy... I call it Hell, because I can't imagine anywhere worse in all of existence.”
I wait for him to continue, but he simply stares into space as if he's reliving some horrific experience.
“But it's a whole world?” I ask finally. “You can't be serious...”
“It's a world that exists as a kind of mirror to our own,” he continues. “It's not independent. Hell, that place... It's chaotic, it's constantly churning and changing so that it always reflects our world. Take this Maxinomoticon company, for example. Do you really think a tech company could emerge in a world filled with these Hellform abominations?” He takes the latest print-out and glances at it, before placing it face-down on the table and waiting for the next image. “It exists as a mirror of one of the tech companies in our world. And that's how this printer ended up being created. Another mirror.”
