The Fell

by Adam Dark

  “Think of it as a sort of marker, if you want,” Rufus said with a little shrug. He was smiling again.

  “You tagged us?” April asked, her eyes blazing.

  “So they can track us,” Peter added.

  Richard Monday tilted his head and studied Peter, but who knew what the heck was going on in that man’s head. Ben couldn’t quite rub the leftover soreness from just above his wrist.

  “You can’t do that,” April added.

  “You all agreed to be a part of this,” Rufus said. “Those chips are part of the process. For every member.”

  “Not without informed consent, they’re not.” April was shouting now, her cheeks flushed bright pink. “We agreed to join you, but we still have basic rights.”

  Richard Monday’s head whipped to the side, his wide eyes fixed on April now. “Not anymore,” he declared. “Not the kind you no longer need.”

  It might have looked like the man’s glare was responsible, but when April’s eyelashes fluttered uncontrollably, Ben knew it was Richard’s words that had done it. They’d completely shattered her resolve, and Ben’s wasn’t that far behind. All her breath escaped her, and her shoulders sagged in a way he’d never seen, her mouth falling open like she couldn’t breathe. But Ben had enough awareness to reach out and grab her hand again. It was completely limp in his.

  He knew what it felt like to be drowning like she was right now. Actually, it was kind of amazing that Ben wasn’t going through exactly the same intensity of denial. These people had definitely crossed a line, and he wasn’t in any way okay with it. But he wasn’t losing himself. He couldn’t lose April, either.

  When he gave her lifeless fingers a gentle squeeze, a short, quiet gasp of disbelief rose from her throat, and April closed her eyes. But she squeezed back, and he knew she wasn’t gone yet.

  27

  “This way,” Rufus said, gesturing to Ben’s right. Then the man crossed that way himself, followed by Anita. Richard typed something into one of the keyboards on the table before following the others.

  Ben looked at Peter. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Not really, man.” Peter’s eyes were still hugely wide, and he was definitely paler than normal. But he stood straight, and he hadn’t grabbed his inhaler again, and he hadn’t gone full-scale Peter-freak-out yet, so that was a good sign.

  Ben just nodded. There wasn’t really anything else he could say. Anything at all on what they just stuck in our arms? he asked Ian.

  ‘It’s not any better than the demon in that trash lady,’ Ian replied. ‘I don’t feel anything, either.’

  So that meant it wasn’t affecting Ian—yet. Which of course the Sectarian Circle would never want, because Ben and Ian were their special prize, weren’t they?

  “Should we be following them?” Chase asked, gripping his own forearm still too. He nodded across the lab where the three other members stood by the wall, waiting for them.

  “We probably shouldn’t even be here,” Ben muttered. But they were. “Come on.” Still holding April’s hand, he walked with his friends to join their seriously lacking welcome party. When they’d reached the other end of the lab, Richard placed his hand on the wall, where a blue panel lit up around his fingers. With a hiss, another door opened into the wall and slid sideways. Ben figured this was where Rufus and Anita had entered the first time they were here, and yes, he wondered where this secret little doorway led.

  Richard stepped through first, then Anita. Rufus nodded for Ben and his friends to follow. The new passageway was wide enough for Ben to keep a good hold on April’s hand and for her to walk beside him. He probably wouldn’t have let go even if it she’d had to walk behind him. They stepped through the doorway, followed by Peter and Chase.

  It was an incredibly long hallway. That was pretty much it. More bright lights clicked on as Richard led the way down what Ben realized had to be a tunnel; they were still underground. The ceiling rose maybe six inches above Richard’s head, and it even made Ben feel a little claustrophobic. Not awesome, but not the worst thing he’d ever stepped into. Obviously.

  After only a few seconds of walking, Rufus said without turning around, “I still want to ask what happened right before you got here, Ben. But fair’s fair, so if you want to start with one of your own questions, now would be the time.”

  April turned her head and nodded at him. Now was definitely the time.

  Ben had so many questions to ask, so many things he had to know, but the most pressing seemed the most recent attempt on his life by what had to be the rag-demon. So he’d probably end up answering Rufus’ question just by asking his own anyway.

  “There’s something coming after me,” he said. “Trying to get in my head. This thing made out of rags, I think. It kind of… froze time outside Richard’s house, and a bunch of…” This sounded really ridiculous now, even in this context. “Okay, there were a bunch of shadow-hand things, coming up out of the ground, and they went right through Peter, April, and Chase to get at me. But I wasn’t in the spirit realm. It wasn’t exactly this realm, either.” He paused, hoping someone would tell him they got it so far. When he looked at April, she was staring at him with wide eyes, obviously recognizing the similarities between what he’d just said and her latest dream. He nodded, hoping she understood he was trying, here. Then he realized he hadn’t actually asked his question. “Do you know what can do that? Stop time somewhere between real life and the spirit realm?”

  “The Fell!” Richard shouted from up ahead. Ben refused to acknowledge that bit.

  “The creatures you call demons, Ben,” Rufus answered. But that wasn’t an answer.

  “I know that.” Ben gritted his teeth and focused as much as he could on just moving forward. “What kind?”

  “Ha!” Richard threw his head back with his exclamation, then straightened again. It would definitely be nice if the guy wanted to weigh in with all his apparent knowledge.

  “At their core, Ben,” Rufus said, “they’re all the same. They don’t differentiate one from the other. The only difference that matters is what they want.”

  “That’s not an answer,” Ben said.

  “It is. And it will make sense in a few minutes. My turn. What else did you see when time froze?” Rufus didn’t even give Ben the chance to argue again, and yes, that question of his was also part of what needed to be said.

  “A man came out of Richard’s house. He didn’t have a face.”

  Ahead of them, he saw Richard Monday’s shoulders stiffen more than usual, but the man kept walking.

  “Did he say anything to you?” Rufus asked.

  “He said I wasn’t done yet.”

  “That’s good.”

  Ben rolled his eyes. “Do you know who he is?”

  “The man you saw is a member of the Sectarian Circle,” Rufus replied quickly. “I’m not allowed to tell you his name, Ben, but I can tell you he’s most definitely on our side.”

  Or at least on Ben’s side, after having helped him out of that shadow-hand mess.

  Still, they just kept walking. How long was this tunnel? It shouldn’t have been possible for all this to run under Richard’s house, which it obviously didn’t.

  ‘You can’t see it,’ Ian said, ‘but they’ve got that blue stuff lining this whole tunnel. I can’t go anywhere.’

  So the guy had built this huge bunker literally under Trenton Street, and nobody else in Boston knew it was there. After everything else he was dealing with, it wasn’t the weirdest thing. But it made him feel like he’d been dreaming for a really long time. Or like he was dreaming right now and couldn’t wake up. Probably safer just to stay with me anyway, right? he told Ian.

  ‘Yeah, I’m good with that.’

  “Was Lizzie the first woman you handed over to a demon?” That next question just kind of burst out of him, but it had been boiling in his mind since last night, and with how long this tunnel stretched on, now was still the time for his questions.

  “No,”
Rufus said.

  “How many others?”

  “Hundreds, at least.”

  “Jesus,” Peter muttered behind them.

  April squeezed Ben’s hand really hard now, but she didn’t release the pressure this time.

  “Did they all agree to it like Lizzie did?” Ben asked.

  “Every single one of them.”

  “Was every single one of them left to rot in rooms like Lizzie’s before you showed up to play the hero?” April asked, taking Ben completely by surprise. “Were they all that helpless and unable to speak or move for themselves? Or do you just prefer them that way because it’s easier? Like old homeless women who no one’s going to miss because they have no one left?”

  ‘Woah. That was a lot.’

  April still clenched Ben’s fingers between hers, and they’d already started to tingle in her grasp.

  Rufus didn’t answer her immediately, and Ben started to think the man was trying to find a loophole with this. “Those are all questions I would have asked anyway,” he said.

  The man sighed. “Lizzie wasn’t an isolated case, no. Some of the hosts find us. Others, we have to seek out on our own. And if they refuse our offer, we honor that decision. Ben, did you tell your friends that Lizzie’s role as a host was her own choice? That she formed a symbiotic relationship with the being sharing her body, and they work together that way?”

  Ben expected him to turn around and glare at him, but Rufus just kept walking behind Anita and Richard, neither of whom said a thing. “Of course I did,” Ben said. “That doesn’t make putting a demon in a clearly disabled woman okay.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Rufus said. “But it’s necessary. And everyone gets something positive out of the exchange.”

  Exchange? These people had a really twisted sense of what that meant.

  “What about the first woman we found behind the movie theater?” he asked, unable to actually refer to her as the trash lady out loud. “Did she know she was going to die?”

  “Yes,” Rufus said flatly.

  “And she was okay with it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does that always happen when you take a demon out of a person’s body?”

  “Yes.” No pause, no remorse, no explanation.

  “Is that what the Sectarian Circle does?” Ben had to keep himself from yelling. “You just go around finding people for demons to possess because it’s just the best option for them?”

  “That’s part of it, Ben. We’re trying to make it work for everyone.”

  “Why would you try to make anything work for demons?”

  “Because we have to!” The outburst came from Richard, and it seemed to echo a long way in both directions down the tunnel.

  Then Ben noticed another blue glow ahead of them at the end of the tunnel. At least they wouldn’t be walking like this for the rest of forever, but did it have to be so long?

  Now that they were almost there—wherever there was—Ben figured it was probably better to save his biggest question for last. For after he figured out where Richard was taking them. The blue glow brightened, and they finally exited on the other side of the tunnel into another room. That was it.

  This one was circular, though, and so much smaller. It almost felt crowded with all seven of them in here, though they probably could have fit twice that many without anyone having to touch each other. But that was it. Some kind of round table sat in the middle of the room, forcing them to spread out around it. It was bolted to the floor by just one column at its center, and a few white and blue lights blinked on and off around the edge of this pseudo-table. Ben looked up. The ceiling stretched what looked like thirty feet high or more. Ben imagined trying to climb his way out of here and back to the real Boston—the Boston he’d been living in for the last three and a half years. But the walls were smooth and white and glistening in the light around them. That would be impossible. And what would be the point?

  ‘This is so weird,’ Ian said.

  April and Peter both craned their necks up to follow the high ceiling as well, then everybody’s heads turned toward the source of another hydraulic hiss. Apparently, this room had a sliding door, too, and it had just shut behind them. So no going back through the tunnel now, either. Awesome.

  “What’s that?” Ben asked, nodding toward the table in the center.

  “We have a lot of things to show you,” Rufus said, dipping his chin slightly. “It’s a lot easier to explain if you just watch.”

  “Not without knowing what it is,” Ben said. He wasn’t about to get caught up in something like getting that chip slapped into his arm, or whatever had happened, just because he thought he’d only be shaking Rufus’ hand. “You answer every question,” he reminded the man.

  “Yeah, I will.” Rufus glanced at the table with a small frown, and beside him, Anita folded her arms. Richard was standing there with his eyes closed; meditation seemed just a little out of character for a man who’d just been pacing and mumbling to himself in his basement lab. “This technology isn’t ours.” Rufus pointed at the table. “Not completely ours. Everything the Sectarian Circle uses now, in the twenty-first century, has been used since the organization was founded over two thousand years ago.”

  “That’s impossible,” Peter blurted.

  “No, it’s not. This has all been left to us, the Sectarian Circle specifically, in preparation for one single event in Earth’s history. Which, of course, hasn’t actually happened yet.”

  “For the future?” April said, clearly unconvinced. Why should this convince any of them?

  “Yes,” Richard replied with another twitch of his lips.

  “For the Gorafrim,” Ben muttered, and Rufus grinned at that.

  “Way to figure that one out,” the man said. “One question you’ve answered yourself.”

  “Yeah but what is it? That demon following me said it twice. And it didn’t sound very happy about it.”

  “Well, it shouldn’t be.” Rufus returned his attention to the table. “We’ve been waiting for the Gorafrim for nearly as long as the Sectarian Circle has existed. They’re coming. Soon.” He reached out to tap something on the table, even though there weren’t any buttons or symbols or anything. A blue flash rose in the center of the table, then expanded in a tall cylinder of light reaching a few inches higher than Richard’s head. The light flickered, and in it were a bunch of little white specs.

  No. Ben stared at the image in what he could only think of as a holographic display, because how could that not be his first thought? Those white dots had to be stars. They had to. Because just off center in the image was a sphere just a little smaller than Ben’s fist, with the unmistakable landmasses and oceans. The smaller, cratered sphere just beside it really made this one a no-brainer. That was Earth.

  “Coming for what?” Peter’s voice broke when he asked the question, and no one could blame him for it. Ben’s would have too, probably.

  Rufus sighed. “They’re coming to re-conquer a race they enslaved a long time ago. A very long time ago.”

  “Us?” April said, her mouth popping open.

  “Well, no. Earth is just a casualty at this point.”

  “Wait a minute,” Ben said, then cleared his throat and tried to find his voice again. “You’re saying the Gorafrim are… what? Like aliens?” Peter let out that high-pitched, nervous giggle Ben had been expecting to hear all night.

  “Exactly like aliens,” Rufus said with a little shrug, totally unapologetic. “Just not the way we have such a fun time imagining them.”

  Ben swallowed hard. “And they’re not coming for us.”

  “No.”

  “I’m out of specific questions, here,” Ben said, shaking his head because he literally couldn’t comprehend what these people were trying to tell them was happening right now.

  “The Gorafrim,” Richard Monday said, opening his eyes and staring at the image projected above the table, “are coming to reclaim a race they’d once enslaved. That�
��s putting it in incredibly simple terms. However they managed to escape, that race, Benjamin, are what you and your friends have mistakenly—and quite irritatingly, I might add—been calling demons.”

  “What?” It didn’t matter who’d said it, because they all did. April’s grasp on Ben’s fingers loosened.

  “I believe we told you this the other night when you joined us for dinner,” Richard said, settling his attention on Ben and each of his friends in turn. “You need to forget everything you think you know about every aspect of this world and the history of human civilization. What we do, what we’ve done for millennia, is far, far bigger. And you, Benjamin.” Richard stared at Ben now, unblinking and still emotionless. “You have something neither of these races possess. The smallest shift can generate the largest and most devastating wave. And the Shaddor—your demons—require a tsunami to face what the Gorafrim will bring. We all do.”

  Despite the fact that that was the weirdest metaphor Ben had ever heard, the shock running through him after Richard Monday’s revelation didn’t quite feel like it was sinking in. Beyond demons and Ian’s undead spirit sharing his body, beyond green fire shooting from his hands and Ben’s ability to see and speak to spirits of the dead, this—this was the most unbelievably impossible thing he’d ever heard.

  ‘Wait, how are they going to explain our thing, then?’ Ian asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

  I have no idea.

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