For the first time, he took his eyes from the traffic and turned to me. The beatific grin he gave me was the most unsettling thing I’d ever seen, more disturbing than even the crime scenes but with that same sense of wrongness. “I found things,” he told me. “Things no one knows exist. I understood it all. And I saw the flaw.”
I could feel my heart breaking. His mind had snapped. Trapped and alone in the blackness, minutes from death, his brain starved of oxygen, he’d hallucinated God-knows what. That’s what had changed him, that’s what had started him on this path. That’s what had made my brother capable of killing.
But all I said was, “The flaw?”
He nodded and grinned again, glad that I understood. “But it’s okay. Because I’m going to put it right.” He turned his attention to the traffic again. “I just need your blood to do it,” he said matter-of-factly.
I went quiet and sat there as the fear crept up my body, inch by freezing inch. He was going to kill me. My brother was going to kill me.
Calahan, I pleaded silently, where are you?
64
Calahan
I BURST INTO the dove loft and grabbed the VR goggles from the desk, wasting precious seconds because the straps needed adjusting to fit my bigger head. There was a disorienting shift as the goggles lit up and I started seeing from the camera on the nose of the drone: there was the wall of the loft and—Jesus, there was me, stumbling around a few feet away.
Will this even work? It felt wrong, being up in the dove loft when I should be out there, on the streets, looking for her. But in a city the size of New York, I’d have no hope. This was the only chance I had.
I fumbled around until I found the big red button...and pressed it. There was a hiss of air from behind me and my vision leapt forward so fast I overbalanced and fell on my ass. But I barely registered the pain because I was flying.
It was incredible: I was floating over the tops of buildings, swiveling my head to look in all directions. I was there. The whole city was laid out beneath me like a map, the cars like toys and the people ants. Now I saw why Yolanda loved this so much. It’s like being God.
I got to my feet and got my hands on the controls, then tried to get my bearings. That was her building, so over there was the street Josh had driven along. I fumbled with the controls and managed to turn. Too fast. A building loomed up in front of me, a sea of gleaming glass reflecting the slate-gray sky—
I veered the other way, went into a spin, and had to fight the controls to level out. My heart was racing. If I crashed the thing, Yolanda had no hope at all.
Very, very carefully, I flew along the street I’d last seen Josh on. By now, they could have taken a few more turns: the search area was growing by the second. Okay, okay, don’t panic. What would Yolanda do?
Math. She’d do math. I looked down at the traffic below me. The traffic was moving at maybe a block every three minutes. It had taken me about six minutes to get up here. They had to be within a two block radius.
I began to fly back and forth in a rough grid, searching the traffic for beige sedans. There were plenty, but most were too shiny. I finally found an old, beat-up one but when I got closer, the license plate didn’t match. I was about to give up hope when I spotted a beat-up beige car turning into a side street. I lost them for a second behind a building but then they reappeared and I swooped in closer for a better look. I thought I recognized the dents, the shape of the hood...yes! The license plate was a match!
I slowed, keeping pace with them. Now I could call Carrie and tell her to intercept them. I fumbled for my phone, brought it to my ear—
Shit! I caught the edge of it on the VR headset and the thing slipped through my fingers. Worse, I heard it bounce off the metal grate that formed the floor and then clatter deep into the steam catapult machinery beneath that. Maybe if I climbed down there and dug around with a flashlight, I could find it. But I couldn’t take off the headset or I’d lose them.
I was on my own.
65
Yolanda
THE DRUG he’d given me had almost worn off. I could move freely, now...but that didn’t mean I could escape. My wrists were zip-tied together and with the seatbelt holding me back against my seat, I couldn’t lurch forward with any momentum to attack Josh, or reach the button for the central locking. If only my legs worked, I could have brought them up and kicked him in the face, or kicked out the windscreen or something. But I was trapped.
Josh suddenly slammed on the brakes and the car slewed to a stop, even though the street ahead was clear. Horns honked behind us. Josh ignored them and just sat staring through the windshield, panting in fear. What does he see?
Then I saw it. Ahead of us, a construction truck carrying a load of fine, black gravel was pulled up by the side of the road. The wind was whipping up the black dust and drawing it out into long, dark tendrils, just like the ones at the first crime scene.
Josh nervously hit the gas and we moved off again. “I thought that was them,” he muttered. “Angry because I’m slow.”
“Them?” I asked.
“The dark things.”
I thought of the creatures I’d seen when I was tripping on LSD. The things with tentacles, leathery wings and spider legs, the things he’d drawn at the crime scenes. Hallucinations, I told myself fiercely. That’s all this is. He saw them during the bridge collapse because his mind was gone and now because he was suffering from some sort of PTSD, and maybe acid flashbacks. And I’d seen them when I’d taken LSD. That’s all.
So why was my skin crawling? Why was cold sweat trickling down my spine?
I shook it off. I had to try to get through to him. This was my brother. Something terrible had happened to him, down in the darkness, but it wasn’t his fault. If I’d spent another few hours in the darkness, I’d probably be in the same state. “How did you get out?” I asked.
“The debris pile shifted,” he said. “The water rushed in and I was carried away by the river. I didn’t know which way was up, it was just black. When I finally surfaced, the current had swept me downstream.” He glanced at me. “They saved me,” he explained. “So that I could put things right.” He glanced in the mirror, back towards the cloud of dark grit, and there was real terror on his face. The eerie calm dissolved if he even thought about disobeying them. In his mind, these dark things had been his saviors, but they were also his masters.
I went quiet and thought: I didn’t dare push him too hard and I could figure out some of the rest for myself. Everyone had thought he was dead so he would have had to stay off the grid. Probably, he’d slept on the streets: that explained his appearance. He’d learned about superstitions and witchcraft, planned all four rituals and completed three of them. He’d probably spent a lot of the time deep, figuring out all those equations, and the rest of the time on LSD, thinking he was communicating with these...dark things. I shuddered. Just a few days working on the equations had been enough to burn me out. Josh had been working like that for a whole year: no wonder he looked like he’d aged a decade.
But he was still him. He was still in there, somewhere. I had to try to talk him down. I thought of how I used to calm him, when he was a child and he’d awaken from a night terror. While eating the Toffee Cores, we’d play a game. “125,222,” I said.
For a moment, there was nothing. Then he said, “27,750.”
The game was to take the answer the other person gave you, split it into thousands and units and multiply the two together, as fast as you could, like a mental game of catch. 27 x 750…. “20,250,” I threw back to him.
“5,000,” he threw back almost instantly. Which ended the game because the next answer would be zero. It always worked that way: that’s the beauty of math. So he started again. “192,764.”
“146,888,” I said. The math felt like a child’s comfort blanket. My mind could nestle in it.
And the same was happening to him. “129,648,” he said. And for the first time, I saw him relax. A little part of h
im slipped out of the delusion’s grip and came back to me.
“Josh,” I said gently. “This stuff, the dark things. I know it seems real….”
He went quiet. Was I getting through to him, or making him mad? I tried a different tack and showed him my zip-tied wrists. “These things hurt,” I told him. “I know you don’t want to hurt me.”
He glanced across at me. And for a second, he looked uncertain, as if the eerie calm surface was being disturbed by a ripple of memory.
“I know you don’t want to hurt me,” I said again, desperate, now.
He frowned. I could see the indecision on his face. It was working, I was getting through to him—
Then he looked at the street ahead and had to stamp on the brakes before hauling the wheel hard over: he’d almost missed our turn. That seemed to annoy him. He shook his head as if to clear it and, when he pulled over a moment later, the uncertainty in his voice was gone. “We’re here,” he told me.
66
Calahan
THEY STOPPED in a quiet side street. I circled and then swooped in low. I saw Josh pull Yolanda from the car and start to drag her towards a metal door. She was struggling and yelling for help, pulling at her bound wrists. I flew lower, a hot rush of fury soaking through me, and reached out to grab Josh’s throat. Get away from my woman you—
My hand closed on thin air and I swept past them.
I ripped off the goggles and swayed as a sickening disorientation grabbed hold of me. I’d been right there, close enough to touch them, but the whole time I’d still been here, in the dove loft, miles away. I stared at the goggles in horror. Jesus, you got lost in those things. No wonder Yolanda had such a comedown, every time she took them off.
I raced out of the dove loft and onto the roof, heading for the elevator. The first heavy drops of rain were just starting to fall, a slow patter building rapidly into a constant hiss. I was halfway across the roof when I remembered my phone.
Cursing, I ran back into the dove loft, dropped to my knees and looked down into the maze of pistons and pipes beneath my feet. It was down there...somewhere. But finding it would take time I didn’t have. Backup would have to wait.
I ran.
67
Yolanda
WE WERE going down, down, down. Josh was dragging me by the arms down flight after flight of concrete steps. I had no idea what this place was, but it was old: the mortar holding together the cinderblock walls was crumbling away and the only light came from small camping lanterns placed at intervals: Josh must have put them there when he discovered this place and broke in.
Five floors down, the stairs started to become damp. Then slick. Then actually wet. Josh slipped a few times and each time, my heart jumped into my mouth. If he fell and lost his grip on me, I’d go sliding straight down to the bottom of the next flight and the first thing to hit the concrete would be my head.
We finally reached the bottom ten stories down, and he dragged me through a hallway that was ankle-deep in foul, stagnant water. He had to lift me over a strange metal outcropping on the floor and it was only when we were past it, looking back, that I saw what it was: the seal for a huge, metal, pressurized door, like you get on a submarine. The door itself was brown with rust and looked as if it had been left open for a decade or more.
The first room we passed through was full of rusting metal frames: it took me a while to identify them as bunk beds, enough to sleep fifty people. The next room was a cafeteria: long tables and scattered plastic chairs. Then a kitchen, then a room filled with computers so old they had big magnetic tape reels. What the hell is this place? We passed through a series of storerooms and then we finally stopped and Josh put me down on my back. I immediately rolled over onto my side, desperate to find a way to escape...and screamed. I was rolling into a bottomless, black drop.
Josh caught my shoulder an instant before I rolled over the edge. “Careful!”
I lay there panting with fear. I was on the edge of a precipice, a jagged crack in the floor that must have been eight feet across. I couldn’t even see the bottom. It just plunged down and down into blackness.
I looked up. There was a matching crack across the ceiling, Water was dripping down from it and falling into the precipice below. I suddenly realized what this place was, and what had happened here.
It was a fallout shelter, built back in the 1950s. They’d dug ten stories down and then tunneled out a long chain of rooms for government officials to shelter in. Except at some point, one of the city’s massive storm drains had cracked, and the water had found its way down here and broken through the ceiling of this room, and then, over the years, eaten away at the cheap concrete that made the floor, forming the precipice and hollowing out a cave beneath it.
That’s why everything was wet. Every time it rained, this place filled up with water. My stomach twisted in fear. We were a long way underground. Without a wheelchair, it would take me hours to crawl back to the surface.
Josh took a plank that was leaning against the wall and laid it across the precipice. Then he threw me over his shoulder and walked carefully across. The plank creaked under our weight. I held my breath, staring down at the dark drop and not daring to struggle.
On the far side, he laid me down and cut the zip tie binding my wrists. Then he walked back to the other side and removed the plank. I looked around. This storeroom was the final room in the complex, a dead end. There were walls with empty steel shelves on three sides of me and the precipice on the other. I was trapped.
Josh started to walk away. I looked around, my breathing going tight with panic. The room was only lit by a camping lantern and I was terrified to think about how dark it would be if it went out. More than anything, I didn’t want to be left on my own. I could feel the weight of all that earth above me pressing down, crushing me. We were so far underground, it almost felt like….
Like we were closer to them. The creatures Josh had drawn, the ones I’d hallucinated when I’d taken the LSD. Was that why he’d picked this place?
“Josh, wait!” I yelled.
He stopped and looked back over his shoulder...
“W—Why?” I asked, my voice cracking. “Why do you want me?”
His voice had that calmness again. “There have to be four rituals. One for each of the four dimensions. But you stopped the fourth and I can’t just redo it: I missed the time. But I can still put things right, if I have powerful enough blood.” He gave me that eerie, beatific grin. “Our blood is more powerful than any of the special people. Don’t you understand?”
And suddenly, sickeningly, I did. In his mind, math was magic. So as mathematicians, we were essentially magicians. And what could be more powerful than the blood of a magician? He was going to sacrifice me to complete his crazy plan, and what I couldn’t understand was that he still didn’t seem to see anything wrong in any of this. The Josh I knew would never be able to justify killing someone. “Josh—” I began.
But he cut me off. “I need to go and set things up. I’ll be back for you when I’m ready.”
And he left me there on the floor.
68
Calahan
I SCREECHED to a stop right behind the beige sedan. The street was so wet that I actually skidded a little and smacked into its bumper. The rain was really coming down, now, thick gray sheets that plastered my hair to my head and made it difficult to see. My suit was soaked in seconds.
I pulled my gun and ducked inside the door I’d seen them enter. Dammit...concrete stairs, leading down into darkness. A really good place for an ambush. Josh would hear and see me coming long before I saw him.
But I didn’t have a choice. Yolanda was down there, somewhere.
I started down the stairs.
69
Yolanda
Think! I had to get out of there. It wouldn’t take Josh long to prep the blood thinners and other blood-taking equipment. I was lucky he hadn’t already anesthetized me: I was guessing he was running low on supplies, si
nce he’d only been planning on four rituals.
Think!
I pulled experimentally at the shelves. Maybe I could use them as a bridge. But they were bolted to the wall.
A bitter little voice pointed out that I could take a run up and maybe jump the precipice...if I had working legs.
I wanted to scream in frustration. I’d never felt so powerless. And what really tore me apart wasn’t the thought of dying. It was that Josh would be the one to kill me. I still couldn’t understand how he’d lost his moral compass so completely.
Think!
But there was nothing. My brain wasn’t going to get me out of this one.
I let myself flop back on the floor and stared up at the ceiling. The rain outside must have been getting harder because the drips of water had turned into a steady stream, thickening as I watched into a waterfall a foot wide. My stomach lurched. How big was the cave below us? How long before the water filled it up...and then filled up the whole bunker?
And then I saw something on the ceiling and frowned.
Bare bulbs had been placed at intervals to light the rooms. They were all dark: there was no power and the wiring was probably fried by the water long ago. But I wasn’t looking at the bulbs themselves. I was looking at the thick bundle of wiring they hung from. It ran along the ceiling for the whole length of the room...including over the precipice.
I looked down into the darkness. It was so deep, I couldn’t even see the bottom. If I fell, I was dead. No. No way.
Hold Me in the Dark Page 27
