Out of the Madhouse

by Christopher Golden

  Quickly the crackling green light enveloped the Gatekeeper’s body. He raised his other hand, so that he held both before him, palms out. Then he pushed something that was invisible to the rest of them. Throughout the Gatehouse, the sound of slamming doors echoed and rebounded until the house itself rumbled.

  Then was still.

  Buffy’s eyes were wide as she looked around. Then she turned back to the Gatekeeper.

  “They are all back in their rooms for the moment,” the Gatekeeper said. “Though I’ve no idea how long I can keep them there. As it is, I will have to immerse myself in Bran’s Cauldron at least once a day simply to stay alive and keep this house in order.”

  Giles mumbled something, looked at Regnier, and said, “The Cauldron of Bran the Blessed?”

  “The very one,” the Gatekeeper agreed.

  “Great!” Buffy said happily. “Your life is back to normal. Now maybe you can give us a hand with our town. It’ll never be a suburban wonderland, but lately, things have been a little more . . .”

  As she looked more closely at the Gatekeeper, Buffy’s words began to trail off. The man’s eyes had lost their twinkle. The luster of his hair, the prominence of his chin, the tautness of his skin . . . all had nearly disappeared. It was as though he were aging before their eyes.

  “Mr. Regnier?” Giles asked, before Buffy could say a word.

  “I need a bit of rest,” the Gatekeeper said quickly. “Perhaps we can speak in the morning? You have come to me for answers, and for aid. The former I can provide. The latter I am afraid I will have to ask of you, rather than the other way round.

  “But that will wait. My mother will see that you have rooms for this evening,” Jean-Marc Regnier said weakly.

  When he turned and walked from the room, the Gatekeeper seemed to have aged more than a decade.

  But the house was stable.

  “What was that all about?” Buffy asked.

  “Perhaps the magick saps his ability to retain a youthful appearance,” Giles suggested.

  “I just know that’s going to be my problem,” Cordelia said sadly. “It’s only a matter of time.”

  “Fine,” Buffy said. “But what about this ‘mother’ thing? Has anyone seen someone else wandering around here?”

  “Oh, I’ve met the keeper’s mom,” Xander said, nodding with obviously feigned exuberance.

  “You guys are gonna love her.”

  * * *

  The sky had only just begun to lighten when Micaela Tomasi slipped her legs over the edge of her bed and sat up, rubbing her itchy, watery eyes. Sleep had been an unfaithful companion the night before, teasing her with its nearness, touching her briefly, and then retreating altogether. It had been a warm night, and humid, and the light breeze that whistled through the open window of her room at the villa did nothing to alleviate her discomfort.

  Still, it had not been the climate that stole any chance she might have had at sleep.

  It had been the screaming.

  Micaela lifted her lavender silk robe from the end of the bed, surprised that she had not kicked it off during the night, and slipped it on, tying it tightly around her waist. She looked out the window, saw the grounds of the villa, crumbling and overgrown with vegetation, years of neglect having taken their toll. In the distance, she could see the domes and spires of Florence, the gem of Italy, and she yearned to walk its streets once more.

  But no, the Sons of Entropy would not allow her to leave them. Not now. They did not trust her, now. Not after the report that Matthew Pallamary had offered upon his return from New York. Little bastard. If he had his way, Micaela thought, she’d be dead already. Her only reprieve had come because Il Maestro was fond of her. He had personally taken responsibility for her when she was orphaned as a child. It had been through his machinations that she was adopted by a family connected to the Watchers’ Council, his grand scheme all along that she should become a Watcher.

  Now, at long last, the ruse was over and Micaela had been called home, to Florence, to be with the only man she had ever truly thought of as her father. He was not, of course, and considering his age, she wondered if any of his own children still lived. But to her he was more than Il Maestro. He was Father.

  But the eyes of a child and the eyes of a grown woman are very different. Since she had returned, and under such extraordinary conditions, she had begun to see things differently. The Watchers’ Council had trained her well. She had been enveloped and embraced by the respect and tradition and the burden that they all held so dearly.

  It mattered to her.

  Of course, her debt to Il Maestro was greater than any of her own petty emotions. Or at least, that’s what she had thought before she met Rupert Giles.

  It wasn’t that she loved him. Not that. Though a part of her certainly had grown fond of him in a short time, and he was attractive, no doubt of that. His eyes were captivating, his proud chin and graven features enticing, and his mind . . . He was a man of extraordinary intelligence and courage.

  Micaela did not love the Watcher. But neither did she want to see him hurt. All of the things that her father had taught her, the entire existence of the Sons of Entropy, was in question to her now. The Watchers’ Council existed to preserve the order of the world, and the Sons of Entropy survived with only one purpose, to tear that order down brick by brick.

  Before she even realized it, Micaela began to weep uncontrollably. She covered her mouth with her hands so that her sobs would not be heard. The stone walls of the ancient villa were little protection from those who might benefit from what they hear and pass on.

  Her feet were cold on the stone as she stepped into the narrow corridor. Here, the dim light of impending sunrise had yet to throw its brilliance, and so she walked the hall in darkness. Several of the robed agents, the Sons, passed her in the hall. All bowed their heads in deference to her who was so favored by Il Maestro. When she reached the top of the long stone staircase that led down into the cellar, the guard did not even raise his eyes to meet her face.

  From deep within the stone-cold heart of the villa, another scream tore the light from the morning, chasing the sun away as Micaela descended.

  It was a dungeon. She had known that since she had first returned to this place two days earlier. Whether it had been used for that when she had lived here as a child Micaela did not know. But now, that was precisely what it was. Stone and mortar round all four sides, except where the stairs were built into one wall. Torches flickered in iron racks jutting from the stone, casting the room in a horrid, violent orange light.

  Micaela shivered. It was as though she had stepped back in time. She was reminded of the Inquisition, and shuddered at the comparison. But it was accurate. She knew that.

  The knowledge sickened her.

  Chained to a wall on the far end of the cellar was Frau von Forsch, a frumpy German woman in her fifties who had been one of Micaela’s teachers when she had become a Watcher. Two stout Sons in black robes attended her with long, tapered daggers. Blood ran freely from some of the many cuts that had been made in the naked woman’s flesh. Other wounds had already dried to a brown crust.

  But the cuts were not the worst. Far from it. For the torturers had also used the knives as brands, heating them over an open torch and then laying them against Frau von Forsch’s flesh. There were dozens of burns on her body, blackened and bubbled, where her flesh had been seared.

  Blade sliced flesh, and a small flap of skin hung from the older woman’s abdomen.

  Frau von Forsch screamed.

  “Stop,” Micaela said quietly.

  The torturers did not hear her over the screaming.

  She clapped her hands to her ears, closing her eyes tightly, tears streaming down her face, and shrieked her throat raw. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

  Her screaming had become almost unintelligible, more agonized, if possible, than the captive Watcher’s.

  The torturers only stared at her. Then one of them reached up and p
ulled the hood of his robe back, revealing the so-sweet features of Matthew Pallamary.

  “Hello, Micaela,” Matthew said kindly. “Did we wake you?”

  From the fog of near-unconsciousness, Frau von Forsch looked up, eyes fluttering. She blinked blood from her eyes.

  “Mi . . . Micaela?” the older woman croaked. Then she tried to say something else, to warn Micaela off, but she could not even find the voice to do so. Her lips moved, and Micaela understood the word they formed.

  Run.

  Micaela only whimpered, then turned her eyes away. Her guilt was devastating.

  “Let her down,” Micaela said after a moment. “Let her down immediately. She has no voice. She cannot possibly tell you anything more.”

  In the silence, Micaela heard water dripping somewhere nearby. Or perhaps it was blood falling to the stone floor. The captive Watcher’s chains scraped the wall. The torturers only watched Micaela, and after a moment, Matthew’s face was split by a wide, derisive grin.

  “Silly girl,” he said. “We got the answers we wanted more than an hour ago. We’re just having fun now.”

  By his eyes, Micaela knew that he meant it. The shriek that tore from her then was the sound of her soul crying out for salvation, for she knew in that moment that she was truly damned. She rushed at Matthew with her fingers hooked into savage claws. That laughing face was too much for her. He held up one hand to ward her off, but he had underestimated her. She easily slapped his arm aside, and the nails of her right hand tore furrows across his left cheek, little strips of flesh hanging loose as blood began to drip down them.

  “Bitch!” Matthew screamed, and knocked Micaela to the floor with a brutal backhand, his knuckles shattering her nose. Blood spurted from her nostrils as she went down, and then he was on top of her. His fingers closed around her throat, cutting off her air. Micaela was still screaming, though it was a hoarse sound now and nothing more. She struggled against him as he raised his dagger over her heart.

  “Weak-willed whore,” Matthew snarled. “I should have cut your heart out when you were ten years old.”

  The blade began to descend. Micaela screamed hoarsely. Matthew grinned down at her, anticipating her blood.

  His hand froze in a pool of dark light, the purple-black of a bone-deep bruise. Matthew looked startled a moment, staring at his hand and the dagger there. There was a sound unlike anything Micaela had ever heard, a crunch as though something fragile had been crushed under a terrible weight.

  Matthew Pallamary screamed horribly, high and deranged, much louder than he had been able to elicit from Frau von Forsch the whole night through. The dagger clattered to the stone floor and Matthew crumbled onto his side, pulled into a fetal position where he cradled his shattered hand. He whimpered, his eyes wide with shock, and Micaela wondered if he would pass out.

  “Hello, Father,” Micaela whispered to the darkness of the chamber.

  The deep, familiar voice came from behind her. “I broke every bone in his hand, my dear one. He won’t lay a finger on you again. But I am growing greatly concerned.”

  She turned to face him, but her father, Il Maestro, was still swathed in the darkness of the dungeon. It was as if he could draw the shadows around him as a cloak. Or, more accurately, a shroud, for he was the closest thing to a walking dead man she had ever seen. His heart still beat, of course, but it was cold as ice.

  “You know that I love you,” Micaela said, and knew, in that moment, that it was a terrible truth.

  “That does not mean you will not betray me,” Il Maestro replied. “I had such grand plans for you, Micaela. Please do not make me have to kill you.”

  From the darkness, Il Maestro turned his attention to the torturer who had stood silent throughout the horror that had just passed. “You have learned the location of the Slayer.” It was not a question.

  “She and the Watcher have gone to Boston to find the Gatekeeper,” the torturer replied, without lowering his hood.

  A sigh escaped the darkest corner of the dungeon. “As I feared,” Il Maestro said. “Contact my acolytes in Boston. Tell them we must abandon caution and move forward immediately. Also, tell them if they kill the Slayer before she reaches me, I will have their souls for my dinner.”

  “Yes, Maestro.”

  Micaela’s heart raced. She knew what was to come.

  “Back upstairs with you, daughter,” Il Maestro said, suspicion still in his voice. “Do not leave the grounds without speaking to me first. And do not forget, in the moments when your heart begins to cloud your mind, that it was I who took you from nothing, who formed you into what you are today. I gave you your life, girl.

  “I can take it from you as easily.”

  With a final glance at the bleeding form of Frau von Forsch, Micaela spun and ran up the cellar stairs, sobbing. Before she had returned to her bedchamber, the captive Watcher began to scream again. But this time, her screams were cut terrifyingly short.

  It was the last sound that Micaela ever heard from the cellar.

  Later that day, her father allowed her to bury her old teacher’s remains.

  But he would not let her pray.

  * * *

  October 30, 1713

  I am dying. At long last, the spectre of death stretches his loving hand out for me, and I willingly clutch at his bony fingers.

  Nigh onto fifty years have I lived in this home, traveling by ghost roads to faraway lands, and with my own two feet over the cobblestone streets of Boston. Over those long years I have collected a great many oddities, stored now in this home. Things undead and unnatural, creatures of myth which no longer have a place in the world, but which have escaped the Otherworld.

  The ghost roads have been an extraordinary help, of course, but traveling with the dead is an experience fraught with profound despair and, yes, even a little fear. When a soul is released from its fleshly prison, it travels along the ghost roads to its final destination, whether it be the House of Angels or the House of Demons. Heaven or Hell, or whatever the reality of each of those worlds may be. The entire Earth is criss-crossed with these pathways, an intricate web of paths for the ghosts of humanity.

  But more things than ghosts travel those roads. For those roads connect more realms than the worlds of men, devils, and saints. The ghost roads also form a path to the Otherworld, which I have been at pains to define herein, though I have very little of substantial experience with which to support that definition. When I travel the ghost roads, I am able to move about on the face of this Earth, but Heaven and Hell are closed to me, as is the Otherworld.

  Many times I have explored the possibility of entering the Otherworld, if only to return the more dangerous of the monsters and other creatures who have escaped into my own world. But even if I were able to throw open some kind of door into that realm, I am certain I would be unable to control such an opening. The opposite of my intentions would occur, and all of Otherworld would flood the world.

  Chaos would reign.

  Thus, I am forced to keep the escapees from the Otherworld in a place where they can cause no harm, nor may they undermine the structure of modern culture and society. But as I have collected and made them my captives, I have had to make allowances for their presence in my home. Each new tenant has required a new room. An addition to the inside of the house, though unnoticed from without. Five decades of weaving spells and incantations, glamours and enchantments, so that this house is perhaps the single most intricate magickal construct the world has ever known. The sorcerors of ancient Egypt would be hard-pressed to produce something of greater complexity.

  As it must be. For the world must be forever kept apart from the limbo realm, the Otherworld, where such things exist. Just as the group of those called Watchers, in London, see to it that Hell does not engulf the world, so too must the Gatekeeper be ever vigilant to be certain the chaos of the Otherworld does not overwhelm it.

  But the Gatekeeper is dying.

  My poor son, Henri, will be the next
to take up the mantle of the Gatekeeper. I only wish I could give him a choice, but the responsibility is too great. Henri is well schooled now; I sent him to England to be educated, and he chose to make a home there. Only lately has he returned to me. I have begun to prepare him for what he must face. As he must, in time, prepare a wife.

  For I have cursed my entire family, all of my descendants, from now until the apocalypse comes at long last.

  Upon my death, all of my knowledge, and all of my power, shall pass on to Henri. And upon his death, to his child. And so on, to each heir to the title of Gatekeeper.

  As I answer the call of sweet surrender that I have so long ignored, my only regret is that the evil seed planted by Fulcanelli did not die when the sorceror himself met his end. Word has come from Europe of terrible deeds done in Fulcanelli’s name by a band of rogue magicians and assassins calling themselves the Sons of Entropy. They are, it has been said, the lineage that has come down from Fulcanelli’s original acolytes. They have founded a sect of chaos bringers built upon the foundation of his horrifying philosophy.

  This too, I have explained to Henri.

  I lay down my sword and shield for the last time. Now the battle must be joined by others.

  Richard M. Regnier, Chevalier and Sorceror Boston, Massachusetts Colony

  Giles closed the journal only a moment before he heard the whisper.

  “Jean-Marc will see you now.”

  Startled in spite of himself, he spun around quickly at the sound, and the book tumbled to the ground. The spine tore slightly upon impact, and a rush of guilt swept over him. What he’d just read was not merely a family heirloom, or some ancient artifact, but an extremely valuable resource for all those who would one day become Gatekeeper. Quickly he bent, retrieved the book, and placed it gingerly on an oak table.

  When he returned his gaze to the ghost, he found her smiling at him.

  “It has been a very long time since we have had guests. It is pleasant to have you and your young friends here, Mr. Giles,” she said.

  Giles thought that she seemed a bit more solid now, her legs had even coalesced so that she did not lose her cohesion until halfway between knee and ankle. He wondered if it was the power of the Gatekeeper reinvigorating his mother’s ghost, or the presence of so many individuals who could see her and thus reaffirm her belief in her own existence.