by Simon Holt
“No, it’s Reggie.” Her speech sounded thin in the sterilized room, and she realized she was terrified to face Eben here, alone. She heard his ragged breaths and winced behind her mask.
“Ah, Regina. You see the lengths I have to go to get you to visit me.”
“Aaron called me. He told me you were… sick.” The machines hissed and whirred. Reggie stood before the curtain and looked down at the chipped linoleum tiles. “What’s happening to you, Eben? The nurse said—”
Hollow coughs interrupted her.
“Oh, I doubt the nurse, or the doctor, or a team of scientists could diagnose this,” Eben rasped. “There are things I need to tell you, Regina. Pull back the curtain. Go ahead. It’s okay.”
Reggie fingered the sickly green drapery, then pulled it aside, scraping the rings along their metal rod. Behind it, a ruined Eben Bloch stared up from the hospital bed. Reggie, who had never seen him in short sleeves before, saw that the man’s thin arms were not only ropy with muscle, but also pitted and crisscrossed with scars. He looked like the living dead.
Any anger toward him left in her evaporated at the sight of his pallid form. Various tubes and wires ran from his arms and chest, and his wrist was wrapped in a thick cast. Medical equipment stood over his bed. He’d hidden what he’d known about the Vours from her, even after they’d taken over Henry, but for a time he’d been so dear to her—and in the end he’d saved her life. And Henry’s. A desperate sadness rose up in place of her bitterness.
“Please don’t die,” she pleaded.
“That may not be up to me,” Eben said. “And you need to know the truth, before it’s too late.”
He motioned her closer. Reggie rolled the doctor’s stool over to him and sat down.
“It happened to me, too,” he said. “They took my own sister away, like they did to Henry. But I never got her back.”
Reggie put her hand on his shoulder.
“You don’t need to do this now. Not when you’re sick.”
“Yes, I do.” He coughed. “We believed in Sorry Night where I grew up, too. Only our village called it Kracun. In stories, it was supposed to be the day evil spirits returned to the earth.”
Reggie wondered if he was delirious from illness. Eben caught her expression. His gaze cleared and his breathing became steadier.
“When I was a boy, on the night of the winter solstice, we’d light fires in the crossroads and graveyards on the edge of town. Legend said that it warmed the ghosts, but—”
“It drew the Vours away from people,” Reggie said quietly. “They’d follow the heat and light.”
Eben grunted his affirmation. “We’d snuff the lamps and hide in the darkness and cold, huddled together and praying for morning. For years, it passed as just another local tradition to me, a superstition. Then it all changed.”
Eben looked past Reggie, as if trying to remember.
“One year, my older sister Alanna went hunting on the solstice. It had been a harsh winter, and we were starving. Alanna was a crack shot, better than most of the men. She left at dawn, but by noon, a blizzard had rolled in, and at sunset, she still hadn’t returned.” Eben took a ragged breath. “People were too frightened of the ghosts to search for her. My father told me that Alanna would see the lights of the bonfires outside of town, and they would lead her home. So I prayed all night for my sister’s return. She never came back.”
“But something that looked like her did?”
Eben’s head nodded ever so slightly.
“Alanna rode back to us the next morning, but she had changed. She was no longer good-hearted and brave, joyful and funny. She had turned cruel. Gluttonous. She was wise in a terrible way, a witch who knew what everyone feared. I lived in her shadow for years—I endured terrors and visions. So, when I was the same age you are now, I…” Eben’s voice was unnervingly calm now. “I freed her. She took me to the forest to chop wood to keep the fire going, and I carried the axe. And in that forest I freed Alanna from the Vour. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Everyone knew what I had done, and they brought me before the village council. I was sure I would be hanged. Instead, they put me on a carriage and sent me away. Then I was put on a train, then a boat. It seemed they were going to send me to the end of the Earth. But once there, I was taught to be a Tracer.”
“A what? Tracer?”
“For centuries Tracers have tracked the Vours, freeing their victims the only way we know how. We have never questioned what must be done… until now.”
Reggie was stunned. “Do the Tracers still exist?”
“Yes.” Eben shrugged. “But how many? Where? This is not for me to know. I’m just a soldier.”
A nurse peeked in the window. Eben waved her away.
“Why are you telling me this now?” Reggie asked.
“Aaron said something to me today. It made me angry, but he was right. You’ve chosen to fight, just as I had chosen so many years ago. But your power is something this world has never seen. You are a new breed of soldier, Regina. And I fear your fight will cost you dearly before it is done.”
Reggie gripped the bed rail as Eben continued.
“When an infected human dies, the Vour essence seeps out before disappearing. Whether it’s destroyed or gone back to its own world, we don’t know, but that substance, what we see as smoke, is an evil cancer of unknown origin. I’ve killed hundreds of Vours in my time, and who knows how much poison I’ve absorbed. It has taken my lungs, surged through my veins, charred my bones—” He took a handkerchief from the bedside table and coughed into it, then held it up for Reggie to see. Black spittle spotted the whiteness. “This is who I’ve become.”
Eben folded the handkerchief neatly in squares and placed it back on the table. Reggie thought of the smoke that had come from Detective Gale’s body, and she hoped the mask she wore hid the horror she felt.
“I didn’t know,” she said.
“I didn’t want you to,” Eben replied. “This is the curse of the Tracer, at least those who live long enough. A black virus that slowly eats away our insides is the punishment for the life we lead, for the sins we commit on behalf of a greater good.”
“But I don’t need to fight them the way you have,” Reggie insisted. “There’s another way now.”
“Yes, and I imagine your method is all the more dangerous. If a Vour essence can do this to me in this world, what must be happening to you when you trespass into theirs?” He pointed to his scars. “I fear your future will be much worse.”
Reggie tried to swallow the lump forming in her throat. The nurse came in again, and this time Eben could not wave her away.
“I’m sorry dear, but it’s time for your father to sleep. You can come back tomorrow.”
Reggie put her hand on Eben’s.
“I will. I’ll come back tomorrow.”
The nurse had injected something into Eben’s IV bag, and already his eyelids were drooping. Reggie stayed until she felt his hand go limp, and his breathing slowed. She went back into the hall and the nurse followed, clicking off the lights and shutting the door behind them.
Aaron was just flipping his phone closed as Reggie got back to the waiting area.
“Perfect timing. That was Mitch. We’re on.”
14
Aaron and Reggie dropped their bikes behind the football field bleachers and walked the two hundred yards to the school. The sun had gone down, and mosquitoes swarmed them in search of moist skin and fresh blood. Both walked wide circles around the pale pools of light cast by the humming floodlights that illuminated pockets of brick along the building. The school looked like a prison in the night, harsh and secretive.
Aaron spotted the broken window first.
“There. Principal’s office. Figures.”
He scuttled across the sprinkler-soaked grass in an awkward crouch. Reggie followed.
“No alarms?”
“No. But after tonight?” Aaron pulled two sets of latex gloves from his backp
ack and handed a pair to Reggie. Then he took a flashlight out and used it to brush away the glass teeth that protruded from the side and bottom edges of the pane. “This will be the Kassners’ last break-in, I think. Don’t cut yourself, Reg.”
Aaron slipped in through the window, stepped onto the air-conditioning unit that lined the back wall of the room, and hopped to the floor. He offered up a hand to guide Reggie down into the office. Even in the relative dark, she sensed the carnage first. She could smell it.
Formaldehyde.
She snatched the flashlight from Aaron and scanned the room with the ghostly beam of light. Lab animals had been strewn across the floor, some of them torn into pulpy pieces. Two headless rat bodies littered Principal Padian’s oak desk, and blood had been smeared across the family pictures that adorned each corner. In the pen cup, the decapitated heads of the rodents were punctured atop the tips of fine custom pens. A dissected frog was pierced into the back of the leather chair with yellow and blue pushpins. There was nothing ritualistic or sacrificial about any of the butchery, nothing to suggest that the bloody mess had any purpose. It was simple and brutal cruelty.
“Keech.” The scene reminded Reggie too much of what Henry’s Vour had done to his pet hamster.
Aaron observed the dead creatures with a cool distance but said nothing. The killer or killers had taken their time. They had enjoyed themselves.
“Let’s go, Reggie. And don’t touch anything. Nothing we can do here.”
Reggie walked ahead down the dark hall. It was a mine of destruction: every glass case shattered, every art piece thrown to the tile floor and smashed. When the Vour inside Henry terrorized her last winter, the film of fear had blunted her anger. But now with each step down the trashed school hall, her blood pumped harder and hotter at this recklessness.
First, the monster had violated her home, her family. And now it spilled its malice across the rest of her life in Cutter’s Wedge, and its evil wreckage marked the deterioration of her own fear and empathy. She stalked into the dark cafeteria toward the double doors that lead into the kitchen.
“Yo.”
A hulking figure stepped out from the shadows and stood right in front of the doors.
“I wondered if you’d show.”
Reggie stopped and thrust the flashlight beam into the large boy’s face. He’d been beaten. His bottom lip bled freely; his right eye was swollen. He smiled to reveal blood-caked teeth.
“Where is he, Mitch?” Aaron asked. “Where’s Keech?”
“Where I said he’d be. Kicked my ass a little, but I got him.” The boy wiped his lip and rubbed the blood between his thumb and forefinger. “Don’t know how much longer he’ll last.”
“Hopefully longer than those little animals,” Reggie spat at him. “You did it, too. It wasn’t just that monster.”
“I had to play along. I always have to play along.”
Aaron pulled Reggie away.
“Reggie, forget about the damn rats. He captured Keech. Let’s get to work.”
Reggie tried to push past the Kassner twin but he blocked her path into the kitchen.
“You need to tell me how you do it. Before you go in there and try to kill that thing, you need to tell me. I have to know.”
Aaron stepped in front of Reggie. He looked like a child next to a tree.
“She doesn’t have to tell you anything, Mitch. She’s here to do a job. And if you stay out of our way, maybe she’ll bring back what’s left of your brother.”
“Will I know him? Will he know me? How are you so sure you won’t fail?”
Reggie took the key and stared up at him.
“I won’t fail. Now get out of my way.”
The boy took a deep breath and moved aside. Reggie walked into the cafeteria and saw the weak yellow light spilling out from the small square near the top of the walk-in freezer door. Ice lined the edges of the window and wisps of smoke circled inside. A padlock dangled from the bar lowered across the door.
She approached and stared into the softly lit freezer.
The body inside looked like a barely animated corpse. He had been stripped down to his underwear, and his skin was a frozen white. He’d been beaten much more severely than his brother, with dark bruises marking his face and torso. Blood had dripped and frozen into crimson crystals beneath his flattened, broken nose. His mouth had been gagged with a bloody strip of shirt. But the monstrous black veins that covered his entire body revealed the thing as an inhuman monster.
She twisted the key inside the lock and popped it open.
“Reggie,” Aaron said softly behind her. “Please be careful. If what you find inside—”
“I’ll be okay.”
Reggie pulled the lock from the bar and lifted the cold handle. The freezer door swung open.
“Get him back, Halloway.” The Kassner twin opened the freezer door wide.
Reggie handed Aaron the flashlight and stepped inside. As she walked toward the shivering creature, the thing lifted its eyes and looked at her with a tired and pained panic. It glanced at her and then at Aaron behind her. Its eyes twitched and it shook its head from side to side.
“I’m coming to get you.” Reggie was grim and determined.
Aaron looked on, assessing the brute. Those big, burly hands that used to beat on him now hung limply at the Vour’s sides, cuts and scars circling his wrists.
Cuts on his wrists.
A jolt of fear burned through Aaron. They were the cuts from the duct tape he had used in the alley. This wasn’t Keech—this was Mitch.
The Vour had them trapped.
“Get in,” it urged behind Aaron. “I think I hear someone coming.”
Aaron stood still for a second, and his frosted breath wafted up in front of him. Then with a yell he whipped around and slammed the flashlight into the side of Keech’s head. The surprised Vour dropped hard to the ground. Aaron set upon him like a wild animal, the anger boiling up in him giving him a freakish strength. He beat Keech over and over with the flashlight, kicking him in the ribs as he squirmed on the ground and tried to crawl away.
“Nice try, you piece of shit!” Aaron rammed the front of his foot into Keech’s face.
“Aaron! What the hell are you doing?” Reggie raced over and grabbed Aaron’s arm, but he threw her off.
“You think I give a damn if it was you or the monster you? It makes no difference to me!”
“Aaron! Stop it!”
“It’s Keech, Reggie!” He leaned over the Vour, panting and red in the face. “This one is Keech.”
“Aren’t you clever, Cole.” Keech coughed up blood and tried to stand, but Aaron crashed the flashlight down on his head one final time, and with a last crack Keech lost consciousness.
“Yeah. I’m clever. And you’re done, you prick.”
Reggie ran back into the freezer and ripped the gag from Mitch’s mouth. Up close she could see that the marks had been crudely drawn onto his frozen skin with a black marker.
“Help…”
“We’ll get you out of here, Mitch. You’ll be all right.”
“Not me.”
The beaten, freezing boy looked into Reggie’s face. Crystal tears lined the bottom of his bruised eyes. Then his gaze shifted past her to the twin left bleeding and unconscious on the floor just outside the freezer.
“Help him.”
Aaron dragged Keech’s unconscious body into the freezer by his ankle. He dropped the leg unceremoniously. Reggie untied Mitch’s hands and used the frosty rope to secure Keech’s wrists behind him. Then she helped Mitch stand.
“Take him, Aaron. Find him some clothes or a blanket.”
“I’ll make sure he doesn’t die,” Aaron answered.
His voice was flat. Reggie caught his hand as he guided Mitch out of the freezer.
“That was some display back there. And you saved me. Now let it go.”
He offered her a slight smile and nodded.
“Good hunting,” he said. “And be car
eful.” Then he shut the freezer door, and Reggie was alone with the Vour.
15
Reggie knelt beside Keech and patted the side of his bloody cheek with her hand.
“I want you awake for this. Get up.”
Keech’s eyelids fluttered and opened. He looked up and gasped, the conscious sensation of the deep cold finally registering in him. When he let out a breath, a small puff of black smoke expelled like a coughed-up insect and dispersed into nothing.
“That’s right. Your game is over,” she said.
The monster inside roiled. Reggie felt its malice.
“No. My game is just beginning.”
Reggie moved her hand to Keech’s throat and pushed with her mind. She had learned with Henry that to go into the fearscape she needed to be in contact with the Vour’s pulse, and now Keech’s throbbed against her fingertips. The confines of the freezer warped and undulated. She closed her eyes and started to fall. The descent engulfed her and all went black.
An eternal moment later, she was seated in a giant overstuffed chair. A long space with sharply sloping walls and a low ceiling enclosed her. Furniture stood under white sheets like a crowd of ghosts, illuminated by a single twilit window, and a glass-fronted cabinet towered in the far corner. Piles of junk rose everywhere, and dust stung her nose and throat.
The most outer place of Keech’s fearscape was an old attic.
She understood how a place like this would frighten a child, but to her it came as something of a relief.
“I was expecting something a bit more blood and guts.”
The Vour had taken him years ago. Keech’s essence undoubtedly suffered somewhere much more sinister, lost in a darker realm of fear than this. The dust and stench of decay marked an environment abandoned by the boy’s mind; he had long since been lured into worse places. Places she’d soon visit.
But right now, she needed a way down.
She picked up a sheet of paper among a heap of moth-eaten clothes and old curtains. It was a child’s crayon drawing of two boys, both in identical red shirts and blue pants, smiling on green grass under a yellow sun. The young artist had signed it with awkward capital letters: Keech. The picture was a shred of hope the boy had left behind. She’d found similar symbols inside Henry’s fearscape: a treasured stuffed animal, a family photograph.
