“Myrinda,” he said in a low, firm voice. “Run.” He bolted forward, half-dragging and half-carrying her with him, in the direction of the metal door. He switched the flashlight to his left hand near Myrinda, and drew the gun with his right. A second later the open mouth of a hinshing swam up in front of him. He fired, and the creature jerked back, oozing a black ichor from the hole in its chest. It bellowed in pain and anger, and he shot it again, right down its tooth-lined gullet. It roared in surprise and pain, and the gloom of the tunnel swallowed it.
Derek yanked Myrinda forward again, acutely aware of the angry sound of a thousand nonsense words spoken as curses that the hinshing behind him were closing the gap in the darkness.
“Come on, babygirl,” he coaxed. “Move with me, sweetheart.”
She seemed to find her feet then, doing some of the work for him, but he had to guide her. Another reached with long, sharp fingers for his shoulder and Derek shot at the approximate height of its mouth. It screamed and the fingers fell away.
Derek maneuvered Myrinda around the bodies of their neighbors. He worried how she’d react when she saw them, but she paid them no mind. He wasn’t even sure her eyes were open.
That’s okay, babygirl, he thought to himself. Keep on thinking this is just a bad dream.
Pointed fingers dug into his shoulder and shoved hard, and he felt Myrinda jerked from his grasp. She sank to the floor by his feet. He whirled around and put a bullet down the throat of the hinshing right behind him. It bellowed, already beginning to come apart like flaking paint, the chips of its skin flying away. It spasmed once and stumbled back to the depths of the tunnel behind it.
He swooped down and grabbed Myrinda around the waste again, pulling her to her feet, and plowed forward again. After what seemed like an eternity, the flashlight glow by Myrinda’s side picked up the metal door, and he dove for it, yanking it open. He had some trouble getting Myrinda up the stairs. About halfway up, she began to sink on her feet, claiming she was too tired to keep going, and for one terrible moment, Derek thought he was going to die with her in that stuffy passage on a metal staircase. Already, he could hear the remaining hinshing scrabbling at the metal door.
“Baby, please get up. We’ve got to go.
“Go home?” she asked blankly.
“Yes, yes,” he answered, glancing back at the metal door. It was opening, and those pointed fingers were wrapping around the door frame. “We’ve got to go home,” he said. “Please.”
She blinked a few times, then rose and began climbing the stairs. The two of them finally tumbled out into the foul-smelling office, and Derek lead her back down the hall to the lobby door, shoving her through and then following behind. He threw his shoulder against the door, pushing with all his strength to close it. It skittered heavily across the floor, stuck, then slid into place. Derek turned back to Myrinda and led her through the lobby and out the front doors.
“Stay here,” he said, parking her on the lawn several feet away.
By sheer force of luck (or maybe it was that force in the universe most called God), the gas can was still where he left it. He holstered the gun and dropped the flashlight, then uncapped the gas can just as the remaining four hinshing emerged from the front doors.
EIGHTEEN
Before they could move toward him, he splashed the gasoline at them, aiming for those terrible mouths. Some landed in their throats, and they gurgled. Some landed on the concrete steps. Others tried to shake it off by twitching their heads. Triumphantly, Derek pulled out the lucky lighter and clicked it on.
Nothing happened. He checked the handle, making sure to execute the sliding of the safety wheel and the pressing of the ignition button. Still no flames.
“Fuck,” he said, pocketing the lighter. As one, the four moved forward. He pulled his gun out and aimed at the top concrete step on a slight angle.
“Derek,” one of them said, trying out his name with some contempt.
Another laughed, and the sound was steeped in resignation.
He fired and the ricochet off the step created a spark. There was a single second of confused twitching among the four and then flames roared across their bodies and down their throats. They screamed, babbling different words from a myriad of languages until the words blurred into nonsense. Beneath the sheath of flames, they began to flake apart, the pieces rising and melting and winking out like the embers and ash. They jumped off the stairs and Derek backed up, pointing his gun at them, but they were beyond caring about Derek now. It looked like they were trying to make it to the apartments.
Derek watched as the burning bodies jerked and jumped and finally fell forward, one by one, onto an ugly black puddle whose septic veins had worked their way up one corner of the apartment building. They broke apart then, crumbling into powder and ash, and the fire surrounding them burned over the puddle for a minute, then winked out.
The puddle seemed to deepen then, bubbling and spreading outward. Derek took Myrinda’s hand and they moved a little closer to it.
From his new angle, he saw the puddle wasn't really that at all; it was a growing, yawning chasm. Derek looked down into it; bluish light swirled and pulsed, and beneath that, a black hole. He felt dizzy, and he took several steps back to avoid pitching headlong into it.
“That’s the gate, isn’t it?” he asked Myrinda.
“Their bodies are not the right sacrifice for the gate,” she said. “They died inside, and skewed the proportions. It’s collapsing.”
“You sure?” To Derek, it looked like it was widening, pulling rock and dirt down into it and expanding to fill the space.
Myrinda didn’t answer. She wiped the blood from her nose and sniffed, then turned to Derek. She looked weak, and swayed where she stood. “I can feel the abyss.” She stepped forward and swayed on the edge. Panicked, Derek grabbed her around the waist and yanked her back.
“What the hell are you doing?”
She offered him a weary smile. “I can feel the abyss,” she repeated. “It’s calling. I don’t want to hurt you or me, like they told me. But they’re gone and they can’t undo what they did in my head. The abyss is the only way. The gate is collapsing and then it’ll be too late.”
“No,” he told her, and she stopped her feeble struggling.
“Everything is going away,” she whispered, and closed her eyes.
The gate stopped widening, but Derek could still see the swirling of its substance welling up. It didn’t seem to be collapsing at all, but rather, gathering strength. Anxious, Derek tugged Myrinda back, putting several feet of space between them and the gate.
“I don’t think it worked,” Derek said, exhaling defeat. Then a deafening crack and boom made them both duck.
From the depths of the hole, wailing mingled with ecstatic laughter, creating a sound that jarred Derek to the bones. Myrinda, standing next to him, began to shiver violently. Rumbling preceded a sudden geysering of the substance of the abyss, which splashed onto the ground and across the side of the building. Just as suddenly, a liquid bluishness like plasma leapt from the hole, devouring the black in bright light and cold. With a roar, the hole belched out a plume of it that licked at the side of the apartment building. It was unlike anything Derek had ever seen; it ate through the brick facade like acid and scorched the grass around the base. It glided across the face of the building, the inkiness from the hole racing just beneath it. Fingers of the blue plasma stretched and flexed toward windows, punching through the glass. Shattered fragments rained down on the walkway just seconds after Derek yanked Myrinda out of the way.
Again the gate vomited its substance from its throat, and Derek just managed to jump out of splashing range. He couldn’t begin to imagine what that stuff would do to his body.
He saw what it did to the Old Ward, though, where the majority of it landed. It ate into the brick and cracked the concrete steps. It ate through the doors. There was a groaning sound as it acidically lacerated the building, and then it began to crumble. L
arge chunks of brick fell to the ground with deafening crashes, windows shattered, and all along the empty, echoing hallways, the stains of insanity and tragedy, horror and death were buried under in waves of destruction. The last remnant of the Bridgehaven Asylum, historical landmark and monument to the treatment of madness, tumbled in a spray of brick and mortar to the ground. The Old Ward was obliterated.
The charred ground began to heave upward in a spray of rocks and dirt then fall back heavily, crumbling and sinking into the growing abyss at the building’s foundation. As Derek watched, a swirling black space coated with tongues of flickering blue spread like an enormous blood stain beneath the apartments. The building hovered over the widening chasm, shaking and tilting downward. Cracks splintered across the bricks, sending fragments tumbling into the nothingness beneath.
“Derek,” Myrinda said, tugging his sleeve. Her voice sounded small and terrified.
He followed her wide-eyed gaze to the parking lot. The ground had caved in along a fault line straight to the parking lot. The asphalt rippled, and the metallic groan of cars being shoved aside mingled with the wailing from the pit.
“Go,” Derek said. “Come on, we gotta go, now.” He grabbed Myrinda’s hand and pulled her toward the lot. “Run, babygirl!”
They flew over the mangled landscape, keeping just ahead of a new fault line behind them. Ten feet from the car, there was a loud boom from below ground and the car launched into the air. Derek skidded to a stop, throwing out an arm to stop Myrinda and protect her. The car came down hard on a blue sedan, both of them crushing on points of contact. Glass shattered outward.
Derek pulled Myrinda away from the lot and toward the road. There was no choice but to flee the hill on foot. All around them, the woods magnified and echoed the terrible wailing of those things that had been just at the edge of the abyss, the crackling of the substance of the gate folding in on itself, the whine and shatter of the apartment building twisting and sinking into depths beyond anything ever seen. He ran, sweating and bleeding, tugging Myrinda behind him. He didn’t stop or even look back until they had reached the main road to town, and only then, he looked long enough to see flashes of light from the top of the hill and hear the final thundering crash of the Bridgewood Estates apartments sinking into a fracture in the earth.
AFTER THE END (AN EPILOGUE)
Derek arrived at Bridgewood General Hospital at the usual time and signed in with Lois at the front desk. He took his visitor’s pass and was buzzed into the psychiatric ward of the hospital to see Myrinda.
When he got to her room, Dr. Alice Edwards was just leaving. A short, thin woman in her late sixties with a thatch of blond hair going gray and glasses just a shade too big for her face, Dr. Edwards had immediately made an impression on Derek as being both warm and caring, and very good at her job. That was important to him. It hadn’t been easy to turn Myrinda over to strangers to care for.
She winked at him encouragingly, clapping his biceps with her strong but tiny hand, and told him they could catch up after his visit.
He went in and sat down on the bed next to Myrinda. “Hi, babygirl. How’re you feeling?”
Myrinda looked at him. It took her a moment to recognize him, but then she smiled. That was progress. “Hi, Derek.” She leaned over and kissed his mouth lightly. “I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you, too, babygirl.”
“Dr. Edwards was here. She says I’m doing better. And no nightmares last night.”
He smiled, took her hand and squeezed it. “That’s great. I’m glad to hear it. That’s a good sign, baby, a very good sign.”
She smiled. She was talking, and that in itself was a good sign, too. Sometimes, trying to talk to her was like trying to jimmy open a lockbox for which one had lost the key. He’d check with Dr. Edwards, but if the nightmares were going away, that was good, too. For weeks after what happened, she’d wake up shouting or crying.
***
On his way out, he stopped by Dr. Edwards’ office, knocking in her doorway. She looked up and smiled at him. “Let’s take a walk.”
As they strolled down the glass breezeway connecting the psychiatric ward to the rest of Bridgewood General, she told him about how therapy was going. Myrinda was making progress, in her professional opinion. She was, as Derek had seen, regaining her ability to recognize faces. She was recalling memories from before their residence at Bridgewood. She seemed less paranoid, too, about people judging and plotting against her, and had given up the idea that the whispering demons would give her no peace unless she hurt people. She had, in fact, told Dr. Edwards earlier that week that Derek had killed the whispering demons, the ones she called hinshing, and so they couldn’t make her hurt anyone anymore. It had been almost three months since Dr. Edwards had been able to get her to speak about anything that had happened in the apartments or in the Old Ward, and she couldn’t always remember who Derek was. Her statement, then, had showed Myrinda had taken the first small step in overcoming both of those hurdles at the same time.
Dr. Edwards told him Myrinda was responding well to the medication and that with a little more therapy, she would be able to go home. Whatever Myrinda believed to have experienced at Bridgewood, Dr. Edwards told him, had knocked down certain walls in her mind, in essence burying her conscious self alive. But over the last few months, she had slowly managed to dig herself free, to climb over the rubble, and work her way toward sunlight again. It was possible she’d have some scars, some residual traumas they could deal with in outpatient therapy such as her nyctophobia and nightmares, but Dr. Edwards was firmly convinced Myrinda was getting better.
Derek smiled at her. “I can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done for her. You’ve worked miracles.”
Dr. Edwards chuckled, gesturing modestly. “I am only as effective as the strongest link in her support network, and that’s you. Even before she remembered it, I could tell how much she loves you by the look in her eyes when you’d visit—and how much you love her by the way you are with her when you’re here. People need something to come back to, something to get better for. You’re as good for her recovery as I’ll ever be.”
They walked in silence for a while, Derek chewing over what the doctor had said.
“Derek, what’s on your mind?”
He shrugged, looking out the glass windows of the breezeway at the parking lot. He was still strong and healthy, as his employment physical and psych evaluation post-Bridgewood had confirmed. There had been a new reliable car and a beautiful new rented house that was beginning to feel like home—all it needed was for Myrinda to come home and add her style and her presence to make it so. There was the lighter waiting on the mantel, and next to it, a small jeweler’s box with a diamond ring inside for when Myrinda came home and was well enough to move on with life. There had been time off from the new job to care for her and ultimately, to get her a spot in the hospital facilities where she could receive the help he just couldn’t give her. His boss had been understanding, and had even given him Dr. Edwards’ name because she’d worked wonders with his sister-in-law. Derek’s life was mostly good now. He knew life had a tendency to move on with or without a person so he did his best to keep up, and to carry Myrinda when she couldn’t. But it was his job, for chrissakes, to protect people from danger. Why hadn’t he been able to protect her? And had what kept him from going crazy also prevented him from seeing the illness in her until it was too late to fix it? “Just wondering why it didn’t affect me the way it affected her.”
“Well, these kinds of things are dependent on a lot of factors. Everybody processes external forces and experiences differently—it’s why psychological therapy is really a form of art as much as a science. It could be that, given time, whatever made her unwell would have worked itself on you, too, but you just had a better initial tolerance.” Dr. Edwards paused as if to give herself time to choose her words carefully. “If Myrinda’s symptoms are the result of greater exposure to some chemical or natural
force or some experience that diverged from your own, then her reaction to that stimulus or stimuli would naturally be different.” They reached the end of the breezeway, turned, and headed back toward the office.
Derek nodded. He had told the doctor he thought Myrinda’s state had been the result of exposure to something up at the apartments. The doctor ran with that, citing possible exposure to high levels of some chemical either naturally occurring in the area or dumped there. Derek didn’t see any need to refine that diagnosis, as it was pretty damned close to the truth as it was.
Dr. Edwards was an astute woman, however. She knew something had happened up on that hill that for reasons she respected, he couldn’t or wouldn’t explain. She had told him as much, and had never pushed for details. When he had told her, during one of the early-treatment darker moments, that the demons Myrinda feared were more real than anyone would believe, Dr. Edwards had simply nodded. The next week when Derek came to visit, she’d had article print-outs by a Wayne Tillingford regarding the Bridgehaven Asylum, as well as some paperclipped notes about the place’s history.
She squeezed his arm again with her little mothering hand. “You can’t feel guilty for not being sick, too.”
He smiled at her. She had a way of knowing how he was feeling. Experience, he supposed, but it endeared her to him all the same. “I just want her to be able to let go of the dark memories someday, ya know?”
“Well, all memories are dark, aren’t they? Shadowed, as they are, by time and distance and the merciful ability to forget the sharper details.”
“I guess you’re right about that.”
“No worries,” she said as they reached her office door. “Someday, you’ll both be able to put all this behind you and live the life you wanted. And I’ll do everything I can to help you get there.”
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