Without any further sentiment or thought, Wayne tossed the bag onto the highway. It landed with a soft thud near a pothole. From within the bag, Warner uttered a hung-over warble, followed by a kind of gurgling sound. He’d never heard the cat make a sound like that before. But his hearing seemed sharp today—all his senses did—and he found that beneath that steady, dull roar of traffic past and traffic to come, he could hear the soft crinkling of the bag as the cat stretched and tested its surroundings, and the bag stretched and shifted to accommodate it.
A sky-blue Buick Skylark, one of those big old boats, came steadily up the lane. With the sun glare, Wayne couldn’t see the face of the driver, but he hoped it was someone focused on the road and not the bag, someone who, like countless daily commuters, paid no more than passing attention to trash in the road. He held his a breath a moment for fear of the driver’s reflexes, but within seconds, saw he had nothing to worry about. The car passed him—a chubby silver-haired old lady, he saw, sat behind the wheel—and rolled straight over the bag. And beneath the engine, Wayne could hear the crunch of bone, the strangled cry crushed in the throat, even the frenetic twitching of the limbs shocked into separation from crucial nerve centers.
Then the car did swerve, skidding to a stop in the shoulder several hundred feet away. Wayne didn’t wait for the driver’s reaction. It wasn’t, and had never been, about the driver at all. He turned and walked up the embankment. For the first time in weeks, he felt like he could sleep.
He made his way along the forest-flanked road that wound up the hill to the apartments, huffing slightly by the time he reached the parking lot. He had lost a lot of his energy with each breath. Slowly, a liquid weight seemed to be spreading unevenly through his body, dragging at his limbs and numbing his head. It made his trouble breathing even worse. He looked at the Bridgewood Estates apartment building, and then at the Old Ward, and a sudden flash of memory shook his body as well as his thoughts; the thing that attacked him in the tunnel had injected the stuff of the gate in his head. The liquid abyss flowed with his blood, taking over each piece of him, changing it.
Maybe it was a side effect, but he really couldn’t muster up enough energy to worry. Everything was what it was, and that was okay. There was no dwelling on the past and no worrying about the future. There was only the right now, and the odd sensations the stuff inside him caused in his extremities.
And the cuts.
He stood for a moment at the edge of the parking lot near the Old Ward, staring down at his wrists. Uneven abrasions formed a band of red around each one. He winced at the sting of the bands separating the skin and drawing beads of blood to the surface. He felt the same stinging sensation just above each ankle. From somewhere deep beneath the endless night in his veins, something fought to warn him, to shake him out of it and make him do something...something. It was washed over again by the tide of black.
“Oh,” Wayne said, “shit. Oh shit.” The feeling of drowsiness pulling at him deepened with the cuts to a feeling of being drugged. It didn’t do much to dull the pain, but he found the situation sort of funny in spite of that. His left hand was pulling away from his wrist, dangling from seams of skin veined with blue. With a wet ripping sound, it flopped to the ground. Blood flowed from the split in his right wrist and down the back of his hand.
He took a step forward and stumbled onto the grass. When he rolled over, he noticed that his bloody shoe stood a few inches away from him, the jagged separation above the ankle clearly visible over the shoe. His left foot, hanging by a strip of skin, had twisted nearly backward. That panic from below tried to resurface and this time he felt it more clearly. It was wrong that his foot and hand were over there on the ground. His right had tumbled onto his chest and the new stumps each began to ache through the haze in his head.
Then the panic broke through to his forethoughts and he realized he wouldn’t be able to walk. The helpless horror of it, the sense of loss for the completeness of his person, struck him as unbearable. He felt pegged to the spot. He couldn’t walk, would never walk again unless he dragged himself like...it was just like.... Oh God ohGODOHGODMYFEET IT’SLIKETHEDEADGIRL he thought, and then he closed his eyes and started to scream.
He heard the arrhythmic steps of something crunching the grass, and his eyes opened.
Above him, one of the chaotic ones stared down at him. It tilted its head as if puzzled by the curiosity of Wayne. He started to whimper, remembering the tunnel.
“Please,” he croaked. “Please—”
The hinshing reached down and snapped his neck.
SEVENTEEN
Derek had grown up with religion, and had always credited that with his distinctly nonreligious lifestyle as an adult, but to him, religion was a separate aspect than spiritualism. He had always thought that even if the fervor for church services and prayers and the intangible interpretations of the Bible didn’t stick with you and inform your character, it was almost impossible to escape certain spiritual concepts tied to your soul like little ribbons. His need, for example, to believe there was some force in the universe (he was okay with calling it God for lack of a better name) that would guide his judgment and give him strength when he needed it. It wasn’t the basis of religion, which to him, was the crux of spiritualism, that he had taken issue with. He did believe in doing the right thing, in thinking of others and in helping those who needed it. What he could not abide was the stubborn interpretation and execution of those interpretations. He put “Judge not, lest ye be judged” before just about all the other commandments, so to him, the refusal to accept certain lifestyles, certain practices, and frankly, certain people as one big spiritual family seemed hypocritical.
He thought a lot about what he believed as he gathered what he’d need from the apartment. He had been taught as a boy that there was God and the Devil, demons and angels. As a teen, there were other gods that seemed more pressing—the gangs in the streets and then, to prevent him from ending up affiliated with one, the football team his mom made him try out for at the rec center. Neither the streets nor the church ever allowed for the possibility of alien beings. Monsters, yes, but they had faces and bodies like men, dealing drugs, paying too much attention to one kid or another, hitting someone’s mom and walking out on her. Monsters existed in the church and in the streets, but those kinds of monsters never challenged the way the world was.
The thing that terrified Derek about these chaotic ones was that they challenged everything—not just on a spiritual level, but on an everyday thinking and functioning level. It was one thing to come across evidence that challenged what, exactly, hell might be belching up and what kind of God might exist to protect folks from it. It was another thing entirely, somehow more real and immediate, to find oneself questioning the ideas and truths that delivered folks through everyday living. He could only imagine what Myrinda was going through. To second-guess every idea, to feel control slipping away—to really feel like she was going crazy...it made Derek’s heart ache for her.
He got his Glock 19 from the safe in the bedroom. As part of his job, he’d been licensed to carry a concealed weapon, and had developed a fondness for that particular handgun. He didn’t know if it would work against those creatures in the Old Ward, but it made him feel safer to carry it. He loaded it with ammo he kept in a second safe, made sure the safety was on, then put it in a shoulder holster he’d strapped on.
From the key hook hanging by the front door, he grabbed his set of keys, checking to make sure the storage bin key was there. He had a gas can in there, and a lighter for the grill he’d hoped to have when they bought a house together. She had always seemed to need to go slow in their relationship, and he was okay with that, especially in the beginning. He didn’t push; his job could be demanding and sometimes even dangerous, and the thought of being responsible to a family at home that needed him whole and safe and alive had always seemed like an added pressure he didn’t need to take on. He’d bought the lighter, though, on a whim, on Valentin
e’s Day after picking up roses for Myrinda. He didn’t think she’d ever really understand the significance of it to him, but that was okay. He remembered how much he’d felt for her then. It made him feel warm and good, the thought of marrying her and buying a house together and having kids and having barbeques in the back yard where he could grill up burgers for his family. He didn’t have all that with her then, but he bought the lighter to remind himself that he would some day, to keep it in perspective that he had a great thing going with Myrinda.
He got both the lighter and the gas can from the storage bin and grabbed the heavy duty flashlight as well, locked up, and brought them to the car. There was a gas station down the road where he could get gasoline. The plan then would be to figure out how to find Myrinda and get her out of the Old Ward first, and then splash enough gasoline over everything to burn it and its monstrous inhabitants to the ground. He hadn’t gotten much farther than planning beyond that. Wayne couldn’t tell him what the book said about the conditions for opening the gate had been, so he had no idea what he had to undo to cause the gate to collapse on itself.
Maybe Myrinda would know. Her...exposure to those things and interaction with them might have given her some insight.
One thing Derek was sure of was he was going to get Myrinda away from that hill, no matter what. He was prepared to leave everything they owned and put as much distance between them and the Bridgewood Estates apartments as possible.
He felt a kind of weight lifting as he drove down the hill and away from the apartments. It was tempered by his discomfort at leaving her up there. Every second they had her, anything could be happening. He hated to think of her alone with them in that musty old relic. It made him want to kill every one of those things.
Derek filled up the gas can and paid for the gas, then sped back up the hill and parked the car. He carried the gas can to the front door of the Old Ward and set it down.
He switched the safety off his gun and clicked on the flashlight. He could feel an almost tangible force pushing him away from the Old Ward. The thinnest beginnings of a headache were starting behind his right eye, and he thought he heard rushed, frantic whispering.
They knew he was coming to get her.
His resolve gave him the strength to break the hold against him and move forward to the doors. They opened with a groan, and he stepped inside to the waiting area.
“If she’s there, check the tunnels first,” Wayne had told him. “Find Symmes’s office. There’s a passage leading down from there.” Wayne hadn’t been much help otherwise; Derek suspected he knew more than he was telling Derek, more about the Old Ward and the monsters inside it. Derek wasn’t sure if Wayne had willfully lied, or if the chaotic ones had exerted just enough influence to keep Wayne from spilling everything, but either way, Derek had gotten the message that his neighbor wasn’t going to be able to offer much more than a place for him to start looking. And for now, that was okay, even if the only reason he’d gotten that much information was because the chaotic ones wanted to lead him right into a trap.
Derek had done some security briefly in a mental health facility just after college. He shined the light around the lobby, taking in the marred and stained front desk and skeletal seating. He figured it was a pretty good bet he’d find the offices through the large door against the far wall. It was open a crack, just enough to let a man through. An invitation.
He squeezed through and found himself in a hallway that extended ahead of him into an impenetrable darkness. He shined the flashlight ahead of him, but the gloom seemed to swallow the light the way it swallowed the floor tiles. What he could see were doors to either side of him with name plates and credentialed suffixes. Wayne had told him to look for Symmes, the director.
He made his way down the hall on high alert, sweeping the flashlight ahead of him to check the space for possible danger. Then he shined the light up on the doors to read the name plates. A little way down the hall, he found it: Geoffrey David Symmes, MD, PhD, PsyD. He pushed open the door and was immediately hit with a stench like decaying meat. He pulled back, trying to clear the smell from his nose and throat with the musty but cleaner air of the hallway. He turned back to the office, his nose pressed into the crook of his elbow, and shined the flashlight around the room. It was empty; nothing in there accounted for the smell. On the back wall, though, Derek saw the shadowed outline of the passage Wayne had told him about. Next to it was a crude rectangle of sheetrock and some splintered paneling.
With a last gulp of hallway air, he dove into the room and to the passage as quickly as he could, climbing onto the descending staircase. Immediately, the smell dissipated. Derek shined the flashlight down the staircase. Metal stairs led down into an inky nothingness. He headed down the stairs.
At the bottom, the flashlight picked out the outline of a metal door. He opened it and found himself in the tunnels.
“Okay, now,” he said to himself. “Which way?” Both directions led off into pipelined darkness. From what Myrinda had told him, the administration at Bridgehaven Asylum had used these tunnels to travel from one building to another, to transport patients in bad weather, to move the extremely sick or dangerous without incidents, or to remove the dead without upsetting the other patients. It had also been considered that if an uncontainable riot were to break out, the staff had access to the tunnels to escape. Still, for all its uses, as Derek panned the walls with the flashlight, he could make out no indications of directions. How people managed to come down here without developing a file folder full of new phobias was beyond Derek. It was little more than an oblong cave.
Derek swore to himself. He didn’t have time to choose the wrong direction. She didn’t wear jewelry she could have dropped, nor did he think she was in the right mind to think of leaving him breadcrumbs anyway. He’d just have to guess, unless....
There, just a few feet ahead to the right—there was a small smear of blood. It was dried on the wall, but it coated the spot without any appearance of fading. That could mean it was fairly recently spilled. Mixed feelings of hope and fear assailed Derek. He tried not to think too hard about the circumstances surrounding the little blood smear. Instead, he took off in that direction.
He’d walked about an eighth of a mile when he heard the whispering again. With the acoustics of the tunnel, it was difficult to tell where, exactly, it was coming from, but it sounded like it was originating up ahead of him. He shined the flashlight down the length, but could see nothing. With cautious steps, he moved forward, ready to grab the gun at a moment’s notice.
Then he heard laughter. At least, he thought it was laughter. Maybe it was the tunnel, but the phantom sound was difficult to qualify; it could have been crying, too. Either way, it sounded like Myrinda, and that moved him forward faster—so fast, in fact, that he didn’t see the large prone objects on the floor until he stumbled over them and nearly fell. Recovering before he went down, he turned and shined the flashlight on them.
They were bodies. The first Derek only recognized by sight, an older man who lived in the building. It looked like his skull had been caved in by something very powerful. His chest looked abnormally narrow, and Derek realized with horror that something had crushed his ribcage so that the ribs overlapped each other. Derek turned away, shining his flashlight on the other body.
“Ahh. Ahh, man, Wayne. What the hell happened to you?” he asked softly of the broken body. He swallowed the lump in his throat. Wayne’s neck had been broken so badly his chin rested on the back of his shoulder blade. Where his hands and feet should have been were ragged bloodless stumps from which shards of the broken bone protruded.
Derek turned away from them, sickened. He had seen dead bodies before—not often, though sometimes he came across them in his line of work—but the brutality against these bodies only served to heighten his worry for Myrinda. He took several deep breaths to steady himself and then continued down the tunnel, fighting the urge to run blindly.
He hadn’t gotten far
when there was a whistle and suddenly, a form was flying at him out of the darkness. He leaped out of the way as something landed heavily on the ground. It moaned. He shined the flashlight on it.
Myrinda lay in a heap, her nose bloody and her nightgown torn to shreds around the hem. Another rip ran between her breasts down and around to her side, revealing bruised ribs. Her hair clumped with grime. A cut on her forehead bled down the side of her face. She curled into a fetal position as Derek ran to her, scooping her up in his arms.
“Babygirl, talk to me. Are you okay?”
She struggled a little in his grasp and then opened her eyes. When she saw his face in the flashlight glow, she went slack. “They took me. They went inside....” She began to cry. “Inside my head.”
He pulled her into a hug. “It’s okay, baby. Everything’s going to be all right. I’m going to get us out of here, okay?”
“I want to go to sleep,” she murmured.
“No,” he told her. “Stay with me, babygirl. I need you to stay with me.” He pulled her to her feet and looped her arm around his shoulders so he could hold her up with his left arm and help her walk. “We’re going to make sure they can’t ever hurt you again.”
“It’s too late,” she whispered, and her thin giggle echoed around them in the tunnel. “They’re here.”
Derek shined his flashlight behind them and in front of them, searching. As far as the light could show, nothing was there. Then a flash of blue, followed by a low pulse of sound that Derek felt more than heard, lit the tunnel behind them. In the brief glow, Derek saw two of the hinshing, moving closer in its erratic, jerky way. Then the tunnel went dark. Another blue flash and pulse ahead of them in the direction of the door illuminated another one. A chattering sound above his head drew the frantic flashlight arcing upward. One of them crawled on the tunnel ceiling directly above them, skittering toward a wall.
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