Soulstice

by Simon Holt

  “Quinn, where are you? I don’t know what to do.” She sat in the dirt, the smell of burning rubber and oil filling her lungs. “I don’t know how to find you. Help me.”

  A soft breeze carrying the scent of bubble gum blew gently in Reggie’s face.

  “Quinn?”

  Nothing.

  “Quinn? Can you hear me? I’m here to take you home.”

  A soft, squishing sound behind her.

  She whipped around.

  Nothing.

  “Quinn? Please. Let me take you home.”

  The squishing sound started again, and then Reggie saw it. Like a water snake skirting slowly across the surface of a pond, the moist, grayish length of thin rope unfurled and slid across the dusty ground toward her. She waited in silence for it to reach her.

  Entrails.

  But whose?

  Reggie reached out and took gentle hold of the intestine. It slithered and wrapped around her hand and tugged. She stood up and followed.

  It wound back around the burning cars, back through the overturned bus, and off into a dark corner of the fearscape until it reached the edge of a steep precipice. There, it unwound itself from her hand and retracted out of sight down the side of the cliff.

  Down.

  It beckoned her.

  Turning her back to the black chasm, Reggie dropped to her knees. Then she slid backward down the cliff with only the sense of touch to guide her on the dangerous descent.

  Aaron ran to Eben’s side, but the old man shooed him off.

  “The wires. Disconnect her from the rest of them,” he grunted.

  Aaron nodded and flew back to Reggie. She lay so calmly on the stone slab amid the chaos around her. The wires and tubes attached to the needle throbbed with electricity; Aaron made sure he was grasping the plastic hilt of the knife, then sliced through the wires, severing the connection with the rest of the bodies in the room.

  There was a flash of light and all the monitors shorted out. The human bodies lay twitching on their slabs, and Aaron felt a tremendous grief. All this pointless death.

  “No!” shouted Unger.

  The doctor was bleeding from the shoulder where he had been shot, but he had managed to crawl a few feet away from Eben, who lay gasping and wheezing on the ground.

  Aaron saw that Reggie’s and Quinn’s hands were tied together. Even with all the danger surrounding them, he couldn’t risk separating them. Reggie was still in the fearscape, and rupturing contact now could trap her inside a living nightmare forever.

  22

  Two boys existed in dark solitude on a small stony outcrop hundreds of feet down the side of the cliff. One of them was splayed out, his tiny body broken and twisted in a tortuous heap on the rocks. His eyes were closed, and his head rested in the lap of the other boy. Reggie instantly recognized them both.

  “Hi, Quinn.”

  He did not look at her. He stared out into the swirl of gray in the vast sky beyond the mountainside.

  “Hello,” he said, as if he’d been expecting her for some time.

  Reggie knelt down next to them.

  Kenny’s entire abdomen had been slashed open by something harsh and jagged. Flies buzzed around the gaping wound, and thousands of maggots undulated inside the split skin. The entrails that had guided Reggie downward had coiled back inside the boy’s horribly damaged body. But he wasn’t dead. His breath was shallow and ragged, but he remained alive.

  “I’m here to take you home,” Reggie said.

  “Don’t want to go,” Quinn answered.

  “You heard me. You answered. You brought me here.”

  “No. It wasn’t me.” Quinn shook his head. “It was him.”

  “You don’t want to leave?”

  “Can’t. Have to stay.”

  Reggie looked at the baseball card and her heart wanted to break. Something truly tragic had happened to this boy, and Quinn had witnessed it. His guilt was deep, and here on this tiny cliff it stagnated. Spoiled. Grew rank in the air.

  “Kenny was your best friend, wasn’t he?” Reggie inched closer, but Quinn shuffled nearer to the cliff’s edge, dragging the comatose boy with him.

  “Still is,” Quinn said defiantly.

  “I’m sorry. Is your best friend.” Reggie scanned the stats on the card. “Third baseman, right? Hot corner. Tough position.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did he really hit thirty-seven home runs?”

  Quinn let out a small laugh. “No. We just made those up. But he would have someday. I bet he would have.”

  “Would have… if what?” Reggie asked. She poised herself to leap if Quinn tried to take himself over the edge.

  “If this didn’t happen.” Quinn touched Kenny’s stomach, brushing off maggots and shooing flies. But the maggots only returned in greater numbers and the flies settled back down on the wounds. The effort was a tired and defeated one. The boy had sat on this cliff for years, Reggie realized, holding his dying friend and waiting. Just waiting.

  The Vour kept the nightmare alive, having found the one thing that would keep Quinn forever paralyzed and unable to fight. Seeing him here, lost and hopeless, reminded Reggie of the moment she had discovered Henry in the cellar of the department store in his fearscape. He’d behaved much the same way. So had Keech, literally trapped in a more terrible version of himself.

  Quinn was shackled by his own guilt and fear. No need for a lock and key anymore, not when he’d long given up. The only way to save Quinn now was for Quinn to save himself.

  “Tell me what happened.” Reggie sat down and crossed her legs. “What happened in the bus?”

  Quinn turned to Reggie. His eyes were glazed and dim from years of staring into nothingness.

  “We didn’t mean it,” he said sadly. “It was just for fun.”

  A fly crawled across Quinn’s left eyeball, but he didn’t notice. It buzzed there for a moment and then flew away.

  “I would always bring packs of gum, enough for everyone on the team. And sometimes on the way back from games we’d get into gum fights. Nothing bad, but Coach and the bus driver told us not to. One time after a game in Wennemack, Kenny dared me.”

  “Dared you to what?”

  “To throw gum at the bus driver. He said he’d give me his Mayers rookie card if I did it. I said no at first. But Damen and Greg wanted me to do it, too. They chewed up their gum and made it into a big, sticky wad. And they dared me to throw it. I didn’t mean for anything bad to happen—”

  Quinn choked up and looked away.

  “He got so mad. It stuck in his hair and he started yelling. And the bus swerved when he turned around and screamed at us. I was looking at his red face and trying to hide behind my seat when the whole bus went upside down. I woke up on the roof of the bus. I was crying and holding my head. Other kids were crying, too. And Greg was bleeding out of his nose and screaming. But Kenny wasn’t in the bus.”

  “Where was he?”

  Quinn didn’t answer.

  “Did you find him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where?”

  “Outside. He got thrown out the window.” Quinn’s voice shook. “He got cut all open. I could see his insides.”

  “You found him like this.” Reggie brushed Kenny’s cold cheek with her hand. Quinn pulled him away.

  “Don’t touch him. I don’t want him to die.”

  “Quinn?” Reggie touched Quinn’s hair. He had the same soft locks as a young boy. “Quinn, I need you to hear me. And I want you to answer me. Please. Did Kenny die?”

  Quinn moaned and refused to look at Reggie or the dying boy in his lap. The entrails slithered out of Kenny’s stomach and grabbed hold of Reggie’s arm. They squeezed hard as she tried to pull away. They squirmed up her arm and around her neck as she fought to rip them off.

  A young Quinn had been consumed by an overwhelming fear that he’d caused his best friend’s death. The Vour knew it. And it was silencing Reggie before she helped Quinn forgive himse
lf.

  “Quinn! Please!”

  The boy turned to her, his eyes vacant.

  “You shouldn’t have come here,” he said.

  The baseball card fell from Reggie’s hand as she struggled and landed on the open wound in Kenny’s midsection. A broken, pale hand reached inside and pulled it out. Quinn stared at the photo.

  “What happened to me?” Kenny moaned.

  “You’re hurt, Kenny,” Quinn said. “You’re hurt real bad. But I’m going to stay here until you get better.”

  “I don’t want to die, Quinn,” the boy wheezed.

  “You won’t die. I’m your best friend, Kenny. I won’t let you.”

  The entrails tightened on Reggie’s throat. She watched wide-eyed as Quinn and Kenny spoke, both of them—all of this—bizarre figments of a world inside Quinn’s childhood psyche.

  “Don’t leave me, Quinn.”

  “I won’t, Kenny. Not ever.”

  The intestine grew, wrapping around and around Reggie, pinning her arms to her sides so she couldn’t struggle.

  “Quinn,” she choked. “That’s not… your friend…” The entrails pulled Reggie toward the edge of the cliff. She wriggled fiercely, but the ropy organ was as strong as an iron cable.

  Quinn bent down over his friend, the Vour, shielding him.

  “Would Kenny want this for you?” Reggie cried.

  “I don’t know,” Quinn said.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “Shut her up, Quinn,” Kenny snapped.

  The intestine tightened, but she battled against it. “I’ve been trying to reach you and save you, Quinn! The bear. The insect-boy. The scarecrow. I’ve fought them all to find you! But only you can defeat this one! This is your fight—I can’t do it for you!”

  Quinn looked from her to Kenny, confused.

  “I can’t fight Kenny,” Quinn pleaded. “He’s—”

  “It isn’t your friend! It’s the monster!”

  “She doesn’t belong here!” the Vour hissed. “Get rid of her. Then it will be the two of us again.”

  The entrails pulled Reggie another foot closer to the drop-off.

  “Would Kenny want you to kill?” Reggie asked.

  “No…”

  “Look at that thing. Does it really look like your friend?”

  Quinn stared at the broken boy’s face, and it flashed and crackled like a bad circuit, giving Quinn glimpses of the bear, the insect-boy, the scarecrow.

  “You’re not him…”

  The intestine surged up around Reggie’s jaw before she could close her mouth and gagged her. She moaned and tried to spit it out; it tasted of slimy raw meat caked in rust and dirt. But it slithered tighter and she could not speak anymore. Her heels hung an inch over the edge of the abyss, but Quinn was staring down at the boy. The skin on his face melted away to reveal a gray skull.

  “You’re not Kenny,” Quinn breathed. Then he jumped up. “You’re not Kenny at all. Let go of her!” Quinn blinked. “Let go of me!”

  The boy on the ground burst into a hive of smoke particles that darted around Quinn like bees. He swatted at them furiously.

  “Go away!” he yelled. “Go away!”

  His breath blew out of his mouth like a jet of wind, and it swept the smoke away until it disappeared into the ether. The intestines that bound Reggie slackened, released, and then vanished.

  The landscape around them faded away, replaced with empty whiteness. Ahead of them a baseball dugout appeared, a strange, solitary opening in the vacant halls of Quinn’s fearscape.

  “That’s the way home,” Reggie said.

  “What is this place?” Quinn asked. “Is it real? It feels real.”

  “I wish I knew for sure,” Reggie said. “Part of it is in our minds, I think. But our minds are powerful things.”

  Reggie felt relief wash over her. Quinn was almost free. But then he pointed above them.

  “What’s that?” he asked. A tremble had crept back into his voice. Reggie looked up, but she could see only the whiteness all around them.

  “What’s what?”

  “That.”

  “Quinn, I don’t see anything.”

  “A black spiral, like a road. Far off. You can’t see it?”

  Reggie shook her head. Quinn’s eyes sparked with worry.

  “It’s okay,” Reggie said hastily. “This is the way out.”

  As she stepped down inside the dugout behind Quinn, Reggie chanced one more look back. But there was only white, empty space.

  What had the boy seen?

  23

  A huge plume of smoke erupted from Quinn’s body; it seemed to flow out of every pore, and a ghastly face formed in its roils. It rushed at Aaron, and he closed his eyes tightly as it broke apart over his skin. Then it was gone.

  Reggie lay still, but her breathing was even. Aaron cringed at the sight of her. Half her skull had been shaved, and electrodes were glued to her scalp. He examined the needle sticking out of her forehead. He was afraid that if he pulled it out, it might do irreparable damage to her brain, but they all had to get out of here soon before the whole place caved in.

  Gripping the needle with his thumb and forefinger, Aaron gingerly slid it out of Reggie’s head. He had to pull harder than he would have liked, since it had pierced the bone, but finally he managed to extricate it. Moments later, Reggie shifted on the slab. Her eyes fluttered open.

  “Reggie?”

  She tried to move, but her limbs were numb.

  “Are you back?”

  “Yeah,” Reggie murmured. “Good to see you.”

  “We gotta go.”

  He undid the cords around her wrists and the straps on her ankles. She grabbed him for support, and he helped her stand. She wobbled for a second, then took a step forward. The paralysis was beginning to wear off.

  “Eben.” She dropped to the old man’s side. He looked up at her, black drool dripping from his lips. “We need to get you out of here.”

  Quinn started to awaken.

  “Hold still,” Aaron said, removing the needle from his head like he had from Reggie’s. Quinn shuddered but stayed silent. His eyes were dazed, not registering his surroundings. Aaron noted that the black scars on his cheek seemed to be fading away already.

  Another tremor rocked the chamber.

  Aaron grabbed Quinn’s arm and threw it around his shoulder, hoisting the boy to his feet. He dragged him toward the cave exit where the lucky Vours had managed to escape.

  “This way!” he shouted back at Reggie, who had helped Eben up and was now supporting him forward.

  “Hold your breath,” she said to the old man as the smoke billowed around them.

  They reached a place where the fallen dirt formed a ramp up into the open forest. Aaron and Reggie struggled with their charges, and Reggie felt especially weak. Adrenaline alone pushed her through. Finally they were up and out of the inferno; a warm summer breeze tickled their skin, and the dark sky above was giving way to the solstice dawn.

  In the fiery trenches below, they did not notice Dr. Unger fade back into the shadows at the other end of the cavern and escape into the underground tunnels. He smiled to himself, for he had seen something the others had not.

  He had seen where the essence of Quinn’s Vour had gone when it had left the boy’s body, and he found it very interesting.

  Leaderless, the Vours had scattered into the woods.

  “Come on,” said Aaron, leading the way. “I saw where you parked Machen’s car. I think we should drive that one back, since it’s more borrowed than stolen.”

  “Stolen?” Reggie asked. Aaron shook his head.

  They had only stumbled along a short distance before Eben collapsed in a horrid coughing fit. He bent forward on his hands and knees, hacking black phlegm into the dirt. The sound was so awful Reggie thought his throat might crack open. She knelt beside him and patted his back tenderly. Aaron let Quinn sink to the ground and joined Reggie by Eben’s side.

&nbs
p; Finally his coughs subsided, and he sat back, resting against a tree. His breaths came in ragged starts, and he closed his eyes.

  “We have to keep going,” Reggie said gently. “The cops’ll be here soon. We’ll get you back to the hospital right away, Eben.”

  A smile played about Eben’s lips, and he shook his head.

  “No more hospitals for me.” He opened his eyes and looked around. The sun was just peeking through the trees, a candle atop a pink icing sky. “No, I think this is the perfect place.”

  “The perfect place for what?” Reggie asked anxiously.

  Eben turned his kind gaze on her. He took her hand.

  “Regina, my body has turned over more years than is possibly good for anyone. So many I stopped counting, in fact. I’ve been kept alive by a poison that devoured me. But I don’t regret it, because these last few years brought me to you. You’re a miracle, Regina Halloway, and I never saw many miracles, though I’ve been looking for over a century.”

  The tears welled in Reggie’s eyes.

  “Eben, I’m sorry I was so angry. It was stupid—I didn’t mean any of the horrible things I said.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you if you did. Sometimes we old folk lose our wits. I was wrong not to tell you the truth long ago.” His voice was faltering, but he gazed eagerly at Reggie. “Your heart gives you your power, Regina,” he murmured. “Follow it, fight with it, and you cannot be defeated.”

  With his last strength he squeezed her hand, then his eyes closed, and his head slumped to the side.

  “Goodbye, Eben.” Reggie threw her arms around his neck and sobbed quietly into his shoulder. She heard his feeble heartbeat slow and then stop altogether.

  Aaron stood above them both, tears sloping down his cheeks. The sun had risen another half a foot, and in the distance he could make out the sound of sirens. He touched Reggie lightly on the shoulder.

  “Come on, Reg. We’ve got to go.”

  Reggie nodded and wiped her eyes. She kissed Eben’s forehead, then rose to her feet. She and Aaron helped Quinn the rest of the way to the car, and soon they were on the road to home, passing a series of police cruisers on their way.