by Simon Holt
“When did you guys get home?” Reggie asked.
“Sometime around two,” Mr. Cole said. “I thought they were going to keep us there all night, but then that Mr. Bloch showed up.”
“I don’t know what that man did,” said Dr. Cole, “but ten minutes after he arrived we were signing Aaron out and packing him into the car.”
“With a warning not to leave town, of course,” Mr. Cole added.
Reggie wondered just what cards Eben held, that he’d been able to make good on his promise to get Aaron released so quickly.
“Well, I think I’ll go up then,” she said.
Dr. Cole put a hand on Reggie’s shoulder. “Honey, I just want you to be prepared when you see him. He’s in a post-traumatic state. Community Mental Health wanted to place him in a hospital. It’s a good thing I know a few people on the board—and Dr. Unger, of course.” She sucked in her lips and took a breath. “Aaron will be fine, but right now he’s a little fragile.”
“Don’t worry. I just want to see how he’s doing,” Reggie said, thinking that Aaron’s mom had no idea how tough her son actually was. “Thanks.”
She made her way to Aaron’s room. The door was shut, but she could hear both the radio and the television blaring inside. She knocked loudly and called out, but there was no answer.
Puzzled, Reggie gently pushed the door open and peered inside. Every light in the room was on, along with all three computer monitors, the TV, and the stereo. The noise was deafening. Aaron’s bedroom had never been what one would call “tidy,” but these days it was a disaster. Energy drink cans littered the floor, and a glacier of printouts leaned against the computer desk. The ripped and tattered remnants of overnight shipping envelopes were scattered everywhere. Reggie assumed they were from the books piled all around. Every title had something to do with ghosts, psychics, secret societies, psychology, or demonic possession. The place had once looked like the bedroom of a teenage horror buff and computer geek. Now it seemed more like the den of an occult-obsessed lunatic.
Aaron slouched in an office chair, wrapped in a blanket. Reggie tried not to stare. His face was drawn and puffy, his eyes sunken and haunted. Though the blanket covered the bruises on his arms, Reggie could see his ripped fingernails scabbed with blood, as if he had been clawing at brick walls. He hugged himself, rocking back and forth in his seat.
Reggie went forward and kneeled in front of him. Only then did he seem to notice her.
“When I found out… that they had you…” She broke off. “I was so worried.” She put her arms out to hug him, but he shied away from her touch. He shook his head.
“Sorry.” His voice was harsh and clipped.
“What did they do to you?” she asked.
“What they do. What they always do.” Aaron cocked his head. Reggie could almost see the effort he made to focus. Then he shut his eyes tightly and twitched. “I can’t see, Reggie,” he said desperately, starting to rock again. “I can’t see out of my head.”
Dread creased Reggie’s forehead. She had seen Aaron scared before, plenty of times, but never shattered like this. She’d always thought his was a mind of unbreakable logic, but the Vours had broken it. There was no way she could tell him about Quinn, or much of anything else, right now. Anger at the monsters that did this to him seethed inside her.
“Shh, shh,” she said, hugging him despite his spasms. “It wasn’t real. Whatever they showed you, it was fantasy. Push back, remember? Push back.”
Reggie held on to him for a while until Aaron finally seemed calmer. His breathing became more even as his mind fought for control of itself.
“It’s all starting again, Reg, isn’t it?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she replied.
“Are you scared?”
Reggie just nodded.
“Me, too.”
At last Aaron fell into a fitful sleep, and Reggie left the room. She left the stereo blasting, however; he seemed more relaxed when the noise could drown out his thoughts.
Having escaped the media circus outside, Reggie took out her phone to check the time and saw that there were three missed calls—and that she was a half-hour late getting home. Dad had told her at least fifteen times that they’d be leaving at 9:30 to go for the family therapy session, and it was now just after ten. She pressed the voicemail button with dread.
“Reggie, we’re leaving here in ten minutes. Where are you?”
“Regina Halloway, you better be walking through that door in one minute. Call me back now.”
“Damn it, Reggie! I asked one thing of you! How could you let Henry down like this? You and I are having a serious talk when I get back.”
Reggie’s stomach churned with guilt as she pressed the speed dial for her house. The phone rang four times before the answering machine picked up.
“Shit,” she muttered, quickening her pace. They’d gone. Her only chance was to catch the next bus that ran out to Thornwood Hospital; she wouldn’t be on time for the session, but she figured this was a better-late-than-never scenario.
Reggie ran the last block, and she was damp with sweat by the time she reached her driveway. Dad’s truck wasn’t there. She pulled out her house keys, and only then noticed the long, skinny white box tied with red ribbon sitting on her front stoop.
Reggie glanced behind her, but no one was around. She looked at the card on the box. “Regina Halloway” it read, in crimson, florid script. With a shaking hand, she picked it up and carried it into the house.
Reggie set the box on the kitchen table and stared at it for a few minutes, half-expecting it to explode. Finally, she undid the ribbon and opened it.
She screamed and pushed the box away. It teetered on the edge of the table and fell, scattering the dainty pink and white flowers that were inside it across the floor. The flowers were covered in a sticky red liquid.
Bleeding Hearts.
Reggie stared down in horror at the monstrous bouquet. The red substance pooled in the grout between the floor tiles. Was it really blood? She didn’t want to know.
She fetched a roll of paper towels and cleanser and started mopping up the mess, trying to control her gag reflex. Covering her hand in paper towels, she gingerly lifted the spattered flowers by the stems and carried them to the garbage can; as she did so, a sticky piece of paper fluttered to the ground. Reggie bent down and picked it up.
It was a movie ticket from the Charleston Theater, a place that showed old movies for cheap.
“The Way We Were, 11:30 am, Saturday, June 13,” it read. About an hour from now. Written on the back in the same red script that was on the bouquet’s card was the note, “Be there, or I’ll break your heart.”
Reggie felt sick. Flowers and a movie. There was a time when she would have given anything to attract such attention from Quinn Waters. And he knew it.
She gazed at the ticket as she weighed her options. “Rock” and “hard place” came to mind.
If she ignored Quinn’s summons she still might be able to make at least part of the therapy session. It would make Dad happy, or at least less mad, and, more importantly, Henry needed her right now. But Quinn had threatened her family, and she knew to take him seriously. If she didn’t show, who knew what he might do?
Reggie spoke quietly to herself as she continued to wipe up the gunk on the floor.
“I need to take him out of the equation,” she murmured. “It’s the only way to protect my family. And there are only two ways I know of to do that. Destroy the Vour and save the real Quinn, or…”
Her voice trailed off as her mind finished the sentence.
Kill him.
“Don’t be stupid—you can’t kill him,” she told herself. “There’s a real human being locked away in there somewhere.”
But another part of her brain, one that sounded a lot like Eben, answered back.
“But you’ve seen what can happen to a human after coming back from the fearscape. Look at Henry. Look at what he almost did yesterd
ay. Will he ever really recover? Will he ever live a normal life?”
The unanswerable questions poured forth.
What if the Vour wasn’t really destroyed?
What if it still existed inside him somewhere?
What if, next time, he took a life?
Even if the monster was dead, what if this was where serial killers came from? Murderers, rapists, all the psychos Aaron read about and studied—what if there were others brought back from the fearscape like Henry, who could never forget the horrors they’d witnessed there? Who coped with the pain of remembering by making others suffer?
What if rescuing a soul from the fearscape was just dooming it to a different kind of hell in the real world? And dooming other innocent victims to those psychotic crimes?
Reggie’s heart reeled, and she could feel the tears welling.
But he’s my brother, she thought. I had to save him.
But that was just it. Henry was her brother. Quinn was not.
Maybe she had never even known the real Quinn. Maybe he’d been Vourized for so long he couldn’t be brought back. And even if he could, what if he was still a monster, having lived in hell for so long?
There were too many maybes, too many what-ifs.
Reggie forced herself to look at facts, and stripping away all uncertainties, there were two:
1. If she didn’t help him, Quinn would hurt those she loved most.
2. There was no way she was ever going to help that son of a bitch.
That left one thing for her to do.
7
Reggie pedaled hard, racing her bike across town. It had taken her another twenty minutes to form a plan and gather all the supplies she needed, and now she feared Quinn would arrive at the theater first. She had to get there before him. Her scheme depended on it.
The Charleston Theater was located in a rundown area of Cutter’s Wedge. It was an old theater, with tattered curtains that opened and closed in front of the screen and box balcony seats. Two dollars would buy a ticket to whatever old movie was showing, and a couple hours’ respite from the summer heat in a dark, air-conditioned room. But the shady locale kept traffic to the Charleston low, if not nonexistent.
Reggie locked her bike to a bike rack outside the theater and went inside to the lobby. She glanced around. The lobby was empty except for the grizzly old man behind the concession stand. She approached the counter.
“Large Mountain Dew, please.”
He nodded and shambled over to the drink fountain, taking his sweet time. Reggie kept glancing from the wall clock, which read twenty after eleven, to the front entrance. With every tick of the second hand she expected Quinn to walk in, and her plan would be blown.
Finally the man handed her the soda and collected her money. Reggie snatched the drink off the counter, but she didn’t go into the theater right away. Instead, she headed into the women’s restroom.
It was an old-fashioned vanity, with round lightbulbs lining the mirror, but several were burnt out. Reggie locked the door and set the soda by the sink, then opened her satchel.
Inside were a bottle of pills and a carving knife.
Calmly, Reggie uncapped the bottle of her father’s sleeping pills and dumped a few of them onto the counter. Then she took up the knife and crushed the pills into a powder, using the flat end of the blade. Finally, she swept the powder off the counter and into the soda, stirring the granules into the drink with the straw.
Reggie told herself that morally, she could accept killing Quinn, a Vour. She had to accept it. But physically carrying out the act was a much different thing. The Vour would be gone, but a human body, the victim of foul play, would be left behind. A murder investigation would follow.
As Reggie saw it, the death had to look like an accident, or suicide. Since she couldn’t think of a way to make dying in a movie theater look accidental, she had decided on the latter. Quinn, like all Vours, had a wicked sweet tooth, and she was counting on the sugary Mountain Dew tempting him. She had thought about just relying on the sleeping pills to kill him, but she didn’t know how many pills that would take, and she couldn’t risk stealing too many from her father’s supply. Even he would notice an empty bottle.
Reggie went over the plan in her head again.
She’d give him just enough to incapacitate him, so that she could slit his wrists and let him bleed out. She’d wipe the knife, then wrap his hand around it so only his fingerprints were on it, and leave it with him. Then she’d take the Mountain Dew and go home. When they processed the body, tox results would show Quinn had drugs in his system, but not enough, Reggie hoped, to rule out the possibility he had taken them himself in an effort to dull the pain of the knife.
It was a desperate plan filled with holes, she knew. More than anything she wished Aaron were there, to help her with the details, to point out the flaws and how to fix them. But Aaron was in no shape to plot a murder, nor did Reggie want to endanger him in that way. He could not be party to this, in case things went wrong. Plus, once the body was found, Aaron would be cleared. With the press swarming his house, he had a solid alibi.
She unlatched the bathroom door. What would it feel like to stab someone, she thought. To leave them to die? Could she really go through with it?
At 11:29, it was too late for second thoughts. Reggie steeled herself and pushed open the theater door. Her eyes adjusted to the dark, and she saw that it was empty. With equal parts relief and trepidation, she perched on a seat in the back row as the movie projector sprang to life. Animated popcorn started dancing across the screen in front of her, but Reggie paid it no attention. Focus on the plan, she told herself. Focus.
The minutes passed; the advertisements and trailers ended, the feature began, and still no Quinn. Where the hell was he?
Ten minutes. Twenty. Twenty-five. Reggie’s anxiety grew—was this a trap? Had she really been so dumb as to come out here by herself?
She was about to get up when the theater door opened a crack, and a beam of light from the lobby outside shone down the aisle. Reggie pulled her satchel onto her lap and slipped her hand inside it, wrapping her fist around the hilt of the knife. A figure in a hoodie leaned heavily on the door, pushing it all the way open, then limped through.
Quinn saw her immediately and collapsed in the chair next to hers, slipping back his hood. Old rags, brown and crusty with dried blood, covered his right hand, and there was a huge gash under his left eye, in addition to the skin markings she’d already seen. Reggie stared at him in horror, and Quinn laughed bitterly.
“That bad, huh? You look even more grossed out than you did last night.” His voice was raspy and came in starts, like even speaking was painful.
“What happened?” Reggie asked, curious despite herself.
“My old buddies found my hiding spot, and they decided to stop by for a visit.” Quinn coughed and clutched his chest, then saw the large soda. “Please tell me that’s not diet.” He snatched it up, put the straw to his blue lips, and sucked down half the drink in one gulp. “Ahh. That’s better.”
Reggie eyed him as he wiped his mouth. She kept her hand on the knife, still hidden in her satchel.
“So Vours did this? Why didn’t they kill you?”
“Who says they didn’t try?” Quinn held the cold drink up to his eye. “First they played punching bag with me for a while, then Keech brought out the big guns. Or, rather, the big hatchet. Took off two of my fingers before I managed to escape.” He pointed to the bloodied bandage and smiled wryly. “Guess now my chances at pro ball are really shot.”
“Keech?” Reggie repeated. Quinn grinned, and even in the darkened theater his eyes looked keen like a wolf’s.
“Yep. Keech. It’s getting more dangerous for me. And for you. I found out his orders are to take care of us both.”
“So this is you warning me? Next time just text me or something.”
Quinn’s smile disappeared.
“I guess self-preservation brings out the dramatic in
me. The only way I can survive is to destroy the Vours, and the only way to do that is with your… skills…” His voice trailed off, and he blinked.
“Why now?” Reggie pressed. She wanted to get as much information out of him as she could before the meds kicked in fully. “The Vours laid low for months. Why come after me now?”
“That’s right. Six months.” Quinn took another sip of soda. “And what happens six months after Sorry Night?”
Reggie didn’t understand at first, but then she recalled Machen’s lecture in English class. Appropriate that exams are just a week before midsummer… She shook her head.
“The solstice. The Vours have power on the summer solstice, too?”
“Usually, no. But this year is different.”
“Why?”
“This year they have you.” Quinn leveled his eyes with Reggie’s. “You changed things, Reggie. You changed the balance. When you stepped foot in that fearscape, all the rules broke.”
Reggie’s mind flashed back to the night when she’d gone by herself to the old Canfield house, attacked a Vour, and literally swallowed fear. She had ingested a solid form of the demon, made it a part of herself, and this had given her the ability to enter other people’s fearscapes. It’s how she had saved her brother.
“What rules?”
“Sorry Night’s a rule,” said Quinn. His voice was starting to sound dreamy. “We can only enter a human’s body on Sorry Night. One night a year. It’s a hell of a traffic jam getting out of our world and into this one.”
Reggie was beginning to see.
“But if it could be any day, any time of year that the Vours could inhabit humans… ,” she wondered.
Quinn nodded lazily and tapped his finger to his nose.
“Ding ding ding. That’s right. Since you broke the rules with Henry, I guess they’re looking to try and break a few, too.”
