Soulstice

by Simon Holt

  “When I take this off, you are going to tell me what you know. But if you make any sudden moves, I will hurt you. Bad.”

  Aaron pulled the corner of the tape, the moist and sticky adhesive stretching the stubbly skin beneath. It must have hurt, but Mitch’s expression registered no physical pain.

  He opened his mouth, and the words tumbled out, as if they had been locked up behind those lips for years.

  “Eight years ago. Three days before Christmas,” Mitch said. “He disappeared. Something came for him at night. I heard him crying and screaming. I thought it was just another nightmare—he always had those. But this was different. The bedroom froze. I could hear ice cracking on the ceiling. I never saw anything, but I could feel it.”

  Mitch glanced down and wet his lips. Aaron realized with some wonder that he’d never actually heard Mitch speak before—Keech always did the talking for the both of them. But where Keech always sounded harsh and cruel, Mitch’s voice was soft, quiet, and strangely, almost sensitive. Aaron grasped for the first time what horrors the older twin must have lived with for so long, and where before there had been only anger, now he felt pity for the guy who had so often tormented him.

  “They’re called Vours, Mitch. They prey on the weak and the frightened. Mostly children—”

  “I know what they are, Cole. That thing that took my brother made sure I knew.” Mitch’s eyes, irritated and red from the spray, darted around. “Every day I wish I didn’t.”

  “It’s messed with your mind. Shown you your fears, and scared the shit out of you.”

  Mitch nodded.

  “How do you know these things?” Mitch asked.

  “They’ve done it to me, too.”

  Mitch’s agitated eyes started to glisten.

  “Every night. Every single night.” With his hands taped behind him, Mitch tried to wipe tears away with his shoulder. Aaron took a breath, then undid the tape. He grimaced as he saw that he had wrapped it so tightly, it had cut into Mitch’s skin, leaving slim red welts. Mitch rubbed his wrists.

  “That thing that lives in your brother’s body. What does it want?”

  “To hurt. To destroy. That’s what it wants. That’s all it ever wants.”

  “Has it ever tried to kill you?”

  Mitch shook his head. “What fun would that be for it? Plus I’m its protector from the hunters.”

  Aaron leaned forward.

  “Hunters? What hunters?”

  Mitch shrugged. “One came after us a few years ago.”

  “And where is he now?”

  “She.” Mitch looked away. “Dead.”

  “Keech killed her?” Aaron remembered hearing the whispers when the twins first moved to Cutter’s Wedge that they had killed someone, but he had always chalked it up to the high school’s overactive rumor mill.

  “No. Keech didn’t.”

  Finally Aaron understood. The monster had used a human to do its dirty work. Mitch had been its instrument.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so… sorry.”

  Mitch sniffed.

  “The things I’ve already done, I know when I die I’ll go to hell, but there’s no way it could be worse than this life.”

  He grabbed the side of the Dumpster and pulled himself up. He looked cowed now, not like the bully everyone feared.

  “You shouldn’t have gotten mixed up in this, Cole. You are as good as dead. We both are.” He sighed. “Maybe it’s better that way.”

  “I know how to stop them, Mitch.”

  “You want me to kill him. That it?” Mucus rolled from Mitch’s nostrils and over his top lip. “Some nights when it sleeps, I think about it. I picture myself strangling it in bed. Stabbing it to death. Lighting it on fire and watching it burn and listening to it howl. I’ve seen it do that to animals. Some days I would rather fry in the chair than live with that thing. But I can’t do it. I can’t kill my brother.”

  Aaron scrambled to his feet.

  “We don’t have to kill him. There’s a way to save him.”

  Mitch’s puffy, red eyes locked with Aaron’s.

  “If you are lying, Cole, you better just kill me now. Screw with me about this and I will rip you apart. I don’t care what you’ve got in that pack, it won’t be enough to save your ass.”

  “I’m telling you the truth. But the only way we can save him is if I have your help. There’s no way I could overpower him alone. And if we’re going to find the real Keech, we’ll need to make the Vour vulnerable.”

  “Cold.”

  “Yeah, exactly. Does it still affect him?”

  “It does weird things to its skin. It was a lot worse when we were younger, but it still hates it. Makes it weak.”

  “Good. That’s important for this to work.”

  “So you want me to lure it somewhere cold and trap it for you? Maybe I could do it. Then what?”

  “If I tried to explain it to you now, you wouldn’t understand. Hell, I don’t even understand it. All you need to know is that I have a friend who can bring your brother back.”

  “The Halloway chick.”

  “Reggie. Her name is Reggie. The girl you tried to kill.”

  Mitch closed his eyes.

  “I didn’t want any part of that,” he said. “But it gets to the point when you’ll do anything to make the nightmares stop.”

  “I know.”

  “Keech is extra careful these days because of her. Won’t tell me why, but he’s definitely bugged about her.”

  Mitch took two steps forward and towered over Aaron, looking down at him menacingly.

  “Give me your cell.”

  “What?”

  “Your number. I’ll get him someplace cold. And when I do, I’ll call you.”

  “When?”

  “When I can. Be ready. You and your girl.”

  “Where—”

  “Just give me the number and shut up.” Mitch wiped his eyes and squinted into the morning sun. “I’ve got ten minutes before I meet with my probe. And if Keech sees you here, you’re done. So get the hell out and wait for my call.”

  Aaron nodded, scratched his number down on a piece of notebook paper and handed it to Mitch. Then he grabbed his bike from the other side of the Dumpster.

  “And Cole?” Mitch spoke without turning around. “This doesn’t make us friends. You touch me again, I’ll kill you.”

  Aaron pedaled off toward Something Wicked just as the first sprinkles of rain began to dot the asphalt.

  The harmless spoons and forks in his backpack jingled with every bump in the cracked pavement.

  11

  Quinn leaned back against the wall of the storm drain.

  “Vours have existed for, well, forever, as far as any of us knows. I’ve lived in many different bodies before this one. Let me see… I’ve been an ancient Sumerian, a Renaissance architect, a fifties beatnik. The Dark Ages were the worst. I never want to repeat that experience. But the point is, no one, neither human nor Vour, really knows where we came from, how we come into existence, or how we’re able to take over bodies on Sorry Night. We know we can, but we don’t know why or how the process works. You’ve asked the question before, Halloway—what do the Vours want? Well, above all things, for centuries and centuries, we’ve wanted the answers to those questions. If we knew those things, there’d be no stopping us.”

  Quinn paused as the roar of the motorcycles passed by once again, then faded into the distance.

  “For ages, the answers seemed to lie in mysticism. Black and white magic—mostly black—faith, religion, devil worship, spells—all that bunk. We didn’t know any better. Our sciences were the same as yours. Some of the greatest scientists and religious leaders in history were Vours trying to figure things out. Rasputin was one of the most infamous—not that he did a very good job disguising what he was.”

  “You make it sound so benign,” said Reggie. “Like doctors trying to find a cure for cancer.”

  “That’s a good analogy. To us, humans are the
cancer.”

  Reggie bristled.

  “Hello, you possess us, remember? Like parasites.”

  “Do you want to know this stuff or not? I’m just telling you like it is,” Quinn shot back. When Reggie was silent, he went on. “So yeah, it wasn’t until the last century or so that we started to look at more concrete possibilities. The human brain is a more complex machine than anything else in existence. Scientists started to theorize that Vours and humans were connected physically, chemically, and not just psychically. So they started to look at the brain, its parts, its functions.”

  “And what did they find?” Reggie asked.

  “The amygdala.”

  At Reggie’s questioning look, Quinn pointed to two red spots in the center of one of the brain images.

  “They’re neuron hives that help humans identify and remember emotions, particularly fear. When you’re afraid of something, it’s because your amygdala is sending signals registering fear to all the corners of your body. Sweaty palms, shallow breaths, goosebumps—all responses triggered by the amygdala. It remembers fear, and it tells your body how to react.”

  “But what does that have to do with Vours?”

  “As far as we can tell, our world is some other plane of existence from this one, like another dimension. Somehow, only on Sorry Night, we’re able to cross over into this dimension. How? What’s the popular sci-fi explanation for traveling between dimensions?”

  “I don’t know. Wormholes. Gateways—”

  “Bingo. A gateway. But it needn’t be a physical door. What if the gateway is something in the human brain, something that neurologically links the Vour world and the human world? Fear, after all, is just a series of nerve impulses caused by these neuron groupings. The amygdala is the key—it’s the gateway.”

  Reggie squinted at Quinn.

  “So you’re saying that all this Vour research has proved that you monsters enter us through our own brains? That does sound like science fiction.”

  Quinn chuckled.

  “And I suppose when your brother was taken over and sent to a fearscape, you thought it was rationally explainable? Come on, Reggie, you know there have to be alternative theories about these things. The beauty of this one is that it’s not rooted in witchcraft or voodoo or original sin or anything like that. It’s letting science guide the way to the answer.”

  “But what does Sorry Night have to do with it?”

  “That was the stumbling block. I didn’t even realize they’d hit on it until I found these. New advances in their equipment have yielded better studies and pictures of the amygdala—look here.”

  Quinn started flipping through some of the brain scans. A label at the top read “Patient B137.”

  “So you can see these are all pictures of the same brain, right?”

  Reggie nodded.

  “Check out the time stamps.”

  Reggie took the scans and examined the dates printed in the corner of each: June 21, Aug 13, Oct 31, Dec 21, Feb 27, Apr 16. In the June picture, the red dots were small and faint, but as they progressed through the summer and into fall and winter, they grew in size and intensity. Then as winter passed to spring, they started to shrink again. According to the images, Patient B137’s amygdala was at its largest on Dec 21, the night of the winter solstice. Sorry Night.

  “Why would the time of year matter to the amygdala’s size?” she asked Quinn.

  “Don’t ask me—I needed tutoring in biology,” he replied. “Maybe it has to do with circadian rhythms or something like that, or something not yet explainable by today’s science. The point is, the Vours think this is the key. Look at these.”

  Quinn handed over a few more MRIs, all of different patients. But they were unlike B137’s. L52’s amygdala was comparatively large for an April 5 scan, while R255’s was tiny on Dec 16.

  “What does this mean?” Reggie asked. “They found exceptions to the rule?”

  “Or they created exceptions to the rule.”

  Reggie caught her breath.

  “You mean like… experiments?”

  Quinn took the scans from Reggie and put them back into his bag.

  “I told you—lots of scientists in history have been Vours. And let’s just say they don’t have too many ethical qualms when it comes to human testing. What these pictures tell me is that the Vours think the size of the amygdala is the key to us being able to take over humans. Now they’re trying to artificially enlarge them, so that we can come through any day of the year, not just Sorry Night.”

  “How are they enlarging them?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t envy whoever they’re doing it to. Knowing my old kindred, I’d guess it’d have to do with injecting them with various concoctions, feeding them things, giving them hallucinations—”

  “Okay, stop, I get the picture. But it obviously hasn’t worked yet, since we’re not all walking around as Vours.”

  “Given their current spree to get rid of the two of us, I’d say they’re close to discovering the answer. The summer solstice is days away—if they can make this work on that day, when we’re usually at our weakest…”

  Reggie blew out a slow breath. Aaron was always talking about how humans used such a tiny percentage of their brains, that skills like ESP and telekinesis could be achieved if people could just learn how to access those parts of the mind. Maybe the brain was also home to darker things, more evil things…

  “How can we stop it?”

  “We have to find them, first,” Quinn said. “Wherever they’ve set up shop, I don’t know about it.”

  Lightning flashed, and thunder growled like a giant’s belly. They were silent as they heard the bikes pass by again. Reggie began to pace.

  “Don’t you have any idea where they might be? Any old haunts? Can’t you sniff them out or something?”

  “What do you think I’ve been doing the past several days? They’ve gone underground. But look, they’re doing medical experiments. That means a place with equipment, labs, technicians. Maybe a clinic? Or a hospital? I don’t know how we’d search out every doctor’s office in the area by next week, but it’s a place to start.”

  Reggie stopped pacing.

  “A mental hospital,” she said.

  “What’s that?” Quinn asked.

  “They’re studying brains—it could be a mental hospital.” Reggie felt her knees weak beneath her. “Oh, God. Thornwood.”

  “What?”

  “Where Henry goes, where his shrink works.” She raced to the grate and pulled on it, but Quinn caught her arm and held her back.

  “No way, they’re still out there.”

  “I need to see my brother.”

  “Is he at Thornwood right now?”

  Reggie’s mind was racing, and it took her a minute to think of the right answer to the question. It was Friday afternoon; no, Henry saw Unger on Thursdays now.

  “No.”

  “Then you don’t need to save him from anything right this second. Chill. Let’s think this through.”

  Reggie paced again.

  “Thornwood would be the perfect place for the Vours. It’s a private hospital, out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “It could be the place. Just make sure Henry doesn’t go back there until we check it out.”

  “No kidding.”

  The trees thrashed and waved in the gusts. Neither of them said anything for several minutes. Quinn squatted by the wall, resting his back on it. Reggie eyed him warily.

  “Why are you doing this? Why do you want to stop this from happening? Open bodies twenty-four seven—sounds like your dream come true.”

  Quinn stuck his hand back in his bag and pulled out two purple lollipops.

  “I just like these too much.”

  He held one out to Reggie, but she shook her head, so he unwrapped them and popped both in his mouth.

  “Our world is a void of nothingness—no warmth, no sugar, no fun stuff.” He sucked on the lollipop for a minute, savoring
the sweet flavor. “The truth is, if there were a revolving door between this world and ours, I think we’d fuck it all up over here. We’d turn here into there. We’d lose everything that we crave.”

  “And we wouldn’t want that,” Reggie said.

  Quinn stood and looked thoughtfully at her.

  “You know, Halloway, I think you like having me around.”

  Reggie’s eyes flashed.

  “Sorry. Demons aren’t my type.”

  “Right, so geeky guys who follow you like puppy dogs are more your style? I don’t think so. What does Mr. Unrequited have to say about me, anyway? I’m surprised I haven’t seen him around, armed with a lead pipe and a shovel.”

  Reggie flushed.

  “Leave Aaron out of this.”

  The corners of Quinn’s mouth lifted into a sly grin.

  “Wait. You didn’t tell him, did you?”

  “After what he’s been through—this would distract him from the big picture.”

  “So you put him on a need-to-know basis. I like this side of you, Halloway. It’s so… devious.”

  “He would kill you if he knew you were still alive.”

  “I think you just want me for yourself.”

  Quinn stepped closer to Reggie, and she could smell his sweet breath. She was reminded of the first day she spoke to him in the hall at school. Her heart had pounded in her chest then, and it was pounding now. The gash beneath his eye had started to heal, but there would always be a scar, as well as the black crisscrosses down his cheek. Yet somehow, he wasn’t hideous. He’d lost his conventional looks undoubtedly, but they’d been replaced with something striking and dark. His exterior matched his true self now, the Vour self, and Reggie realized she found that refreshing. It was honest. There was no more pretense between them, no walls, no masks. It was both a relief and a terror.

  She turned her head away.

  “You went through hell and lived,” Quinn said softly. “That leaves marks.” He lifted her forearm and lightly touched her skin. “Marks deeper than these.”

  “They’ll heal,” Reggie said.

  “Why don’t you just ask me what you’ve been dying to know ever since I showed up in your bedroom?”

  “And what’s that?”