Gatekeeper

by Alison Levy

  Stunned, Rachel thought of the long list of files on the flash drive. They were all diaries? How could that be? “All those different documents in all those different languages . . .” She shook her head incredulously. “They were just personal journals?”

  “I just got started on them, but yeah, so far that’s it.”

  Rachel frowned. “Then why did he want the drive so badly? Why did he go to the trouble of tracking it down if that’s all there is? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Sense?” Miss Morley thrust her pointer finger in Rachel’s direction, jangling the chain as she shook her arm. “You’re trying to make sense out of this? We’re in a murderer’s basement!”

  “I noticed!” Rachel snapped back. She winced and grabbed her ribs again. She spoke again, this time calmer. “I’m saying there’s something missing, something I’m not seeing.” She chewed on her lower lip and let the events of the day whirl through her mind. One item at a time, they dropped away, discarded for being irrelevant. Soon, there was nothing left. Pissed at her own seemingly useless brain, she gritted her teeth and balled her fists. “There must be something.”

  “I’m telling you, there’s not,” Miss Morley said, her voice underscored by fear. “It’s all crap. It’s got nothing to do with keeping girls chained in a basement!” On the last syllable of this sentence, Miss Morley’s voice broke and long-withheld tears burst from her eyes. She sniffled and buried her face in her knees. Even as she wept, however, she kept her lips tight to muffle the sound of her cries, as if by keeping them in she was stopping her strength from leaking out of her body.

  The almost inaudible sounds pecked at Rachel’s heart. It’s my fault she’s here. Thoroughly exhausted, mentally and physically, she slid down the wall and sat next to Miss Morley. She put an arm around the woman’s shoulders and gave her a gentle hug. “I have two friends on their way here,” she said. “They’ll get us out.”

  “If he doesn’t kill us before then,” Miss Morley rasped. “Sweet Jesus, help me.”

  Laden with guilt, Rachel ventured another squeeze and pressed her cheek to Miss Morley’s hair. After a few more muffled sobs, the young woman raised her head, threw her one free arm around Rachel, and resumed crying.

  Despite the pain in her ribs, Rachel put both arms around Miss Morley and held her. In between sobs, the young woman prayed and clutched at Rachel’s coat with trembling fingers. Rachel held her tight but didn’t offer any assurances. Instead, she just held on, waited, and, against all reasonable expectation, hoped.

  Give me something, she begged of no one in particular. Something, anything. Give me a string to grasp at and I’ll turn it into garrote. Give me a rock and I’ll turn it into a hammer. Give me a pin and I’ll gouge out his eyes. Just. Give. Me. Something.

  The two women held each other as the seconds ticked away, each one bringing them closer to a confrontation with their captor and, probably, the end of their lives. Leda prayed for the cuff to crumble off her wrist and for the door to open. Rachel silently begged for a weapon to fall into her hand and for Wu and Suarez to show up ahead of schedule.

  Neither of them got what they asked for.

  What they did get was the sudden appearance of Rachel’s cell phone, glasses, card, and lockpick at their feet.

  14

  WASTELAND

  Leda Morley had first seen her lace-trimmed blue skirt in the window of a boutique and had loved it so much that she’d decided at first sight that she would buy it. She had purchased the white knit top she was wearing to replace a similar one that had not survived a bad date at an Italian restaurant. She wasn’t particularly attached to it but it was versatile, so it had made its way into her regular wardrobe rotation. That ninety-dollar skirt was now stained with black splotches and torn up the side. The top, meanwhile, had a ragged hole the size of a fist in it, just above her belly button, and was smeared with grime. The dark blue blazer she’d bought on sale last fall was missing a sleeve, ripped from its seams when her captor dragged her out of the footlocker. Her shoes, blue pumps that were classy and comfortable, were gone.

  As for the body underneath the clothes—uncountable strands of hair had been pulled from her head, mostly from contact with the footlocker but also when the kidnapper grabbed her by the hair. That was when she bit him; he couldn’t have known that she had paid handsomely for a perm just two days earlier, a price she paid regularly in order to maintain her “professional” appearance. She could still taste his coppery blood on her teeth. Her wounded cheek was throbbing, her head and neck hurt, she was drained, she was cold, and she desperately wanted to hear her mother’s voice.

  She didn’t understand who Rachel Wilde was or how she had ended up in this basement with her, but she was too frightened to dislike her or question her motives. If she was going to die in this psycho’s basement, then she would clutch at any comfort she had, even if it came from a strange woman who was clearly not who she had pretended to be. The presence of a fellow victim was a sick sort of comfort, but it was comfort nonetheless, and with the shadow of death creeping over her, she could not pick and choose her blessings. So she held tight to Rachel and, entirely against her nature, cried freely.

  And then the cell phone and other items fell to the floor like manna from Heaven.

  Already on edge, Leda jumped and clutched at Rachel with one hand while flailing the other, cutting her wrist on the metal cuff clasped around it in the process. She hardly felt the pain over her fright as fresh blood oozed over that left by the previous victim and created a new, larger red stain.

  Heart racing, she scanned the room, expecting to see their captor in every shadow. Finding no one else in the room, her eyes fell to the things on the floor. Because of her crazed panic, it took a moment for her to understand what she was seeing. But once her brain embraced what was in front of her eyes, she was so struck with excitement and relief that she didn’t give a damn where it had come from.

  “A phone!” she shouted. She slapped a hand over her mouth, her startled eyes darting to the ceiling. “Oh God,” she whispered. “I hope he didn’t hear me.”

  Rachel snatched up her things. “Did you see him?” she asked.

  For a moment, Leda wondered what she was talking about, but then she realized she wasn’t speaking to her. She followed Rachel’s gaze but saw nothing but a crumpled old coat. The woman was talking to air.

  “Who are you talking to?” Leda asked.

  Rachel didn’t respond. She continued staring into nothing, listening to silence. Terror mounting, Leda grabbed Rachel’s arm and jostled her, but the other woman’s eyes stayed locked on the coat. She was trying to decide what to do about this insanity when Rachel suddenly shook off her hand, picked up a twisted, pronged length of metal, and attacked Leda’s wrist restraint.

  Leda instantly forgave her companion’s strange behavior as she watched her work, filled with hope. She stayed as still as possible, though her muscles twitched with anxious energy. The fact that Rachel continued to glance back, still listening intently to the air, disturbed her, but if she could get the cuff off her arm, she would overlook this sudden display of irrationality.

  “Where is he now?” Rachel asked the air. “What’s he doing? Really? Unbelievable. Hmm? What’s that?” Rachel’s eyes darted to Leda, startling her. “What about her?” she said over her shoulder. “How do you know?”

  The cuff popped open and Leda’s bleeding wrist fell free. Her heart leapt. Whispering a breathless thank-you to Jesus and his father, she jumped to her feet, ran across the frigid concrete surface to the driveway door, and jerked the knob. The padlock held firm.

  She turned to Rachel. “Can you open this one, too?”

  But Rachel wasn’t listening. Her entire attention was held by the same thing she had been looking at since the reappearance of her belongings: the coat.

  Faced with this inexplicable behavior in a time of extreme crisis, Leda’s heart thundered, a raucous beat driven by anger and fear. She lunged for Ra
chel, grabbed her by the arm, and shook her.

  “Snap out of it!” she said. “He could come down here any minute!”

  “Stop!” Rachel snapped, yanking her arm out of Leda’s grasp. “He won’t be coming down here for a while. He dug a bunch of rope out of his attic, and now the freak’s eating dinner.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “The daemon told me.”

  Leda opened her mouth to respond, but no words came to her. Her brow furrowed and she shook her head. Rachel’s statement raised more questions than she was prepared to ask. Before she could decide which question was most worthy, Rachel whipped out her glasses and slipped them on. Her brown eyes, strangely distorted by the lenses, grew wide as they swept over the room.

  “Shit,” she said. “It’s everywhere.”

  Leda stared, mouth agape, at Rachel. Her eyes darted to the door, and then back to Rachel again. “What is everywhere? What the hell is with you?”

  “He’s been trying to punch a hole right here,” she said. “The signs are all over this place. Oh shit . . . this is so far out of my league.”

  The adrenaline in Leda’s blood pushed her patience beyond its limit. This woman had brought her the flash drive that led to her abduction, she had conveniently reappeared in time to join Leda in this dungeon, and now she was talking to the air and refusing to open the door that would free them. What the fuck? Leda’s jaw clenched and she balled her fists so tight that her broken fingernails cut into her skin.

  “I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with you, bitch,” she said in a low voice, fresh tears welling up in her eyes, “but if you don’t open that goddamn door, I’m gonna—”

  Rachel took off the glasses and, quick as a snap, popped them on Leda’s face.

  It took all her resolve not to scream.

  Through the lenses, the gray room suddenly became a wash of outlandish color. Frantic patterns swirled and flared in a mist that covered everything in sight, including her own body. Pink, misty spikes rose from the ground, each one six feet tall and mired in an orange bog that covered the entire floor, corner to corner, wall to wall. The bog was riddled with a thousand fluttering, pulsing veins. Black spiral spots appeared and disappeared in the orange goo like winking monster eyes.

  Choking on a cry, Leda instinctively backed away from the sight, only to back into the wall restraint that was streaked with her blood.

  “W-what?” she sputtered. “What?”

  “Don’t freak out,” said Rachel’s voice beside her. “It can’t hurt you.”

  Terror paralyzed Leda. The alien phantasms she saw through the glasses compounded her already extreme fear of the basement and its owner. Fight or flight overloaded her heart until the pain in her chest left her gulping for breath. Her knees began to shake and slowly started to buckle.

  Rachel grabbed her arm and hoisted her up. “Stay with me,” she said firmly. “It can’t hurt you. Think of it as television: it’s just an image.”

  “What is it?” Leda murmured, her eyes too wide to blink.

  “What you’re seeing,” Rachel explained, “is someone’s attempt to punch a hole in the dimensional spectrum. The orange signifies that the barrier between dimensions has been significantly weakened, and those pink towers are signs of violent death. My people can open passages between dimensions using technology that’s common to us, but there are other ways to open an interdimensional passage that are more easily accessible to someone who’s not from my homeland. One of those ways”—she flinched—“involves repeated torture and murder using . . . certain instruments. Probably what’s in that closet.” She nodded in the direction of the second padlocked door. “The black dots you see tell me that he’s trying to open a passage to the daemon wasteland.” She ran a hand through her hair, pulling it back from her forehead. “This psycho’s been committing murder to open a passage to the wastes, and he’s getting really close to succeeding.”

  Leda shuddered. “W-wastes?”

  “It’s where my people send defective daemons when their defect makes them dangerous and they can’t be repaired. He’s trying to set dangerous daemons loose in your world.”

  “Daemons?”

  “Like the one that brought me my phone, glasses, and lockpick.” She pointed to the spot she had been speaking to. “Look there.”

  Leda’s eyes obediently dropped and there she found another blow to her already fragile state of mind. There, at Rachel’s feet, she saw a squat, green monstrosity with wrinkly skin covering fatty folds and warty lumps. Black-and-pink claws protruded from feet beneath its round stomach, and more tipped the fingers on its meaty hands. A curly, cord-like appendage she couldn’t identify stuck out of the creature’s right side at a downward angle, and undulating rolls of skin rippled over its body. The monster had a bulging eye, four pointed ears, and a tooth-filled mouth that wrapped halfway around its head. It looked vacantly at Leda with its trollish face, as if it hardly noticed that she was there. Then it turned its back to her, gathered its coat around itself, and waddled across the glowing floor, dragging the tails of the coat behind it, to the far wall, where it passed through a cinder block and disappeared from sight like it had never existed at all.

  Leda clapped a hand over her gaping mouth. Suddenly light-headed, she felt her legs start to give. Rachel snatched the glasses off her face, and instantly the concrete dungeon was colorless again. Leda heaved an enormous breath and her body flooded with relief.

  “I’m sorry,” Rachel said. “I’m sorry I sprang that on you, but I didn’t have time for a lengthy explanation that you weren’t prepared to believe.” She brushed past Leda, lockpick in hand, and went to work on the driveway door padlock. “I’m gonna get you out of here, but you need to understand this: you can’t call anyone once we’re out.”

  Despite still feeling off-balance from what she had just seen, Leda whirled on Rachel. “What?” she said, stunned and outraged. “Are you crazy?”

  “What this guy’s up to,” Rachel told her over her shoulder, “your laws don’t cover. Ours do.”

  “And the blood on that cuff? The blood that’s not mine?”

  “He’ll be held accountable for that too. And he’ll be held accountable for your abduction. And,” she added irritably, “he’ll be held accountable for clocking me in the head.” She huffed, shook her head, and muttered, “Twice.”

  “He kidnapped me,” Leda said through clenched teeth. “He locked me up down here to do God knows what to me and . . . and I don’t know what’s going on with those crazy-ass glasses, but it can’t be good. Do you seriously think I’m not going to call the police on that fucker?”

  “If you do, what’s to stop him from doing this again?” Rachel countered. “If he got his hands on the right tools once, odds are he can do it again. And even if he goes to prison— always a big if in your society—all he has to do is bribe someone to get the necessary instrument, and then he can start over. There’s no shortage of people to murder in prison, right? I told you, your people aren’t equipped for this. Mine are.”

  She yanked the lock; it didn’t open. She clenched her jaw and attacked it again.

  “I’m gonna get us out, and then I’m gonna wait for my backup. With their help, I’ll finally be able to arrest this sicko. Just . . . just don’t call the cops, okay?” She glanced over her shoulder at Leda, her hands still working on the lock without the aid of her eyes. “Okay? Just go home and let me do my job. Please?”

  Leda locked eyes with the woman before her and saw something foreign in her stare, something almost as alien as the green monster she had seen walk through the mist. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen that look in someone’s eyes (she saw it often enough in the eyes of tourists at the museum who were hundreds of miles from home), but never before had she seen one of this depth. Rachel Wilde, whoever she was, was a long way from her home and a long way from her “normal.” Leda thought again of what she had seen through the glasses, and it made her shudder. That “no
rmal” was a far cry from her own, much farther than any “normal” should be.

  She put a shaky hand over her bruised cheek, took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly. “I don’t understand what’s happening here,” she said. “I think maybe that psycho hit me harder than I thought and all this is some trauma-induced nightmare. I’m going to wake up in a hospital with my mama sitting next to me, and after I get a long night’s sleep, I’m going to go back to work and forget all about this shit.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Rachel said just as the lock popped open, so quickly that it startled both women.

  Rachel whipped it off the latch, hooked two fingers through the open loop, and tucked it against her palm. “You go home and sleep until tonight isn’t real anymore. I’ll take this freak into custody, and you’ll never have to see him or me ever again. Now let’s get out of here.”

  Rachel grabbed the knob and pulled. The heavy door flew open much faster than it should have—too fast for the amount of force Rachel had used to open it. It struck her in the shoulder, shoving her back. Her elbow hit Leda in the chest and knocked her against the wall. Rachel reeled but kept her feet. The blow to Leda’s chest knocked the wind out of her, but she didn’t fall either. They were both standing when the owner of the house walked through the doorway, tossed a coil of rope and a roll of duct tape to the floor, and calmly closed the door behind him, locking the bolts.

  “Don’t know how you got through the locks, girls,” he said in an oh-so-pleasant voice, “but you’re not leaving.” He held up his hands and gestured around the concrete room. “This is your home now. But don’t worry,” he added through a smile that would make a wolf cower, “you won’t be staying long.”