by Edward Lee
“Radios are out, too. Maybe the tower’s down. Get back to us ASAP, let us know if you need any assistance from the sheriff’s department.”
“Roger,” Cooper tried to sound official. “208, out.”
Ryan and Cooper just gaped at each other. “Fires and screaming?” Ryan repeated. “In Dannelleton?”
“That’s what she said. Now let’s go!”
Ryan was about to break for the cruiser. “Ring-a-ding” had just lost its priority. But then he stopped; his head tilted up and he sniffed the air. “Hey. Do you smell something?”
“Yeah,” Dutch cracked. “I think Arianna just farted.”
“I did not, you asshole!” she shouted from the back. Ryan jumped in the cruiser, Cooper already at the wheel. He lead-footed it out of there. It would take them fifteen minutes to get back to town. “Fuckin’-A right, I smell something,” he said to Ryan. “Something in the air. Something burning.”
Cooper almost had the speedometer pegged by the time they were only a few miles away from the town limits. Was it fog that suddenly obscured everything, or smoke? “What else did dispatch say?” Ryan kept asking. “The phones are all out and the radio isn’t working?”
“Yeah. Something’s seriously fucked up,” Cooper eloquently stated. “How can all the phones in an entire town go out all at once?”
“Maybe a transformer or something caught fire.” Ryan had no idea what he was talking about. “Maybe one of those, you know, phone terminal buildings.”
Just then Dannelleton PD Mobile Unit 208 roared past a long drab brick building with barred windows and poor exterior lighting. High fences surrounded the property. The large sign at the front gate read simply DANNELLETON CLINIC, which sounded unassuming enough, like an HMO facility or a chiropractor’s. It was actually a private and very expensive in-patient ward for the mentally ill, which local parlance had long ago dubbed “The Rubber Ramada.” Ryan watched the obscure facility pass in a blink.
“You know what I’ll bet happened?” he proposed. “I’ll bet someone busted out of that nut hatch and got into town, set something on fire. There’s some hardcore psychos in that place, like that girl I keep hearing about.”
Cooper thought on it. In the meantime he had to slow down to barely twenty miles per hour on account of the fog or smoke or whatever it was. Indeed, it smelled like smoke, but much else, too. It smelled atrocious.
“You know, you may be right,” Cooper finally said. “That girl, the lawyer’s daughter, Heydon. They’ve had her locked up in there for over a month is what I read in the papers.”
“I remember hearing something about that too...”
“One of those Goth chicks. Piss-yellow hair and screws in her face, that weirdo shit. They won’t give her a trial date until she’s had a full psych evaluation, but if you ask me they’re taking their sweet time.”
Details of the case began to surface in Cooper’s mind. “Yeah, yeah, she lived on some big estate with her father in southern Virginia. The father was a big fancy lawyer or some shit.”
“Right, and she burned the entire estate down ... with her father in it. For the money. The guy was worth millions.”
“I’m not exactly grooving on the coincidence,” Cooper admitted, plowing through more fog. “We’re driving hell for fuckin’ leather to town on a fire call, and we’ve got some chick in the Rubber Ramada being evalled for setting a fire.”
Ryan glanced to Cooper. “Not cool. What did you say her name was?”
(II)
“Cassie.”
“No, I mean your full name.”
“Cassie Heydon.
“Age?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Date of birth?”
“October 26, 1981.”
A pause.
“Last time we did this, Cassie, you mentioned that there was some significance to your birth date. Do you remember?”
“It’s the date of the execution of Baron Gilles de Rais.”
“And who is Gilles de Rais?”
“He was the Marshal of France by order of King Charles VII, and the sergeant-at-arms for Joan of Arc. He sold his soul to the devil, and he eventually became the most notorious satanist of the 1400s. He butchered hundreds of children.”
Another pause.
Somewhere, a clock was ticking.
The process was called narco-analysis: the patient—or suspect—was polygraphed while in a drug-induced hypnotic state. It provided an invaluable therapeutic tool; it didn’t matter that anything the patient—or suspect—said couldn’t be used in court, it was the divination of the modern world. It divined the truth. A trained pathological liar could beat one of the systems, but between the galvanic sensors, the voice-stress analysis, all the computer cross-references, and the very latest hypnotic drugs—no one could beat all of the systems.
Dr. Morse was the facility’s chief clinician, and he looked the part: studied, poised, a trimmed beard with no mustache. But as smart as he was, the eyes behind his spectacles looked confused. He pulled R.J.—his therapeutic director—aside, speaking lightly. “What do you make of this?” he asked the younger technician. “This is just like the MMPIs and the Thematic Apperception Tests.”
“She’s delusionary,” R.J. said. He nearly glowed in his starched, bright white pants and shirt. He looked the way one might expect a psychiatric technician to look—except for the Notre Dame hat on his head. He continued, “It’s just—”
“She’s delusionary but not delusional. She’s not sociopathic, and if this were all a psychotic break, the tests would’ve shown that by now. It’s one thing for a patient to believe her own delusion, but...”
R.J.’s conjecturing gun-metal gray eyes narrowed. “I know. Absolutely no psychopathic personality traits and she’s not lying.” He seemed to shrug off the unsaid implication. “It’s just something we haven’t seen before. We’ll figure it out.”
Both men looked back at the patient. Cassie Heydon. Young, attractive, something strangely radiant in spite of the moody dark blouse and skirt—and in spite of the fact that she was in a deep somnambulistic trance. Even unconscious, she seemed to be waiting for them, giving them their time to consider more of her perplexities. Yet either hypnotized or in a full waking state, she would insist she was telling the truth.
The polygraph was insisting that too.
Perfectly straight hair, collar length and bangs, so blond it was nearly lemon-yellow. Candy-apple red highlights. There was something loud about her Gothy appearance yet her face couldn’t have been more serene.
The Embassador lie-detector was wired to a bank of CPUs which evaluated and scrutinized every response including thermal reactions, diastolic blood pressure, vocal inflection, and heart rate. R.J. knew they could go on with this all night, and it wouldn’t matter—the results would be identical to the first three sessions.
Dr. Morse pinched the chin of his beard. “You don’t think she did it, do you?”
“Burned her house down, murdered her father for his inheritance?” He looked Morse right in the eye. “No, I don’t. And neither do you.”
“I ... suppose you’re right.”
A few minutes later, R.J. was reseated at the console, Morse standing aside.
“Cassie? Can you still hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Did you murder your father?”
“No.”
“Did you want to inherit his money?”
“No.”
“Did you burn your house down?”
“No.”
“Do you know who did?”
“Yes.”
“Who did?”
“A subcarnation. They do it with Machination Spells. It was a succubus sent by Lilith.”
“Who?”
“Lilith is the Kiss of the Apocalypse, the Whore Madonna. She’s the mother of harlots and all abominations of the earth. She tried to burn our house down herself the first time, but that didn’t work. So she sent another succubus.”
> “To burn your house down?”
“Yes.”
“Why? To kill your father?”
“No, to destroy the house. The house was a Deadpass. Like a door, or a portal. To the Mephistopolis.”
“The—”
“A Deadpass is a doorway to Hell. Certain kinds of people can go through the doorway. People like me.”
R.J. kept his eyes on the readout screen. The computer, thus far, had detected not a single negative impulse.
“People like you,” R.J. repeated after her. He glanced down to his notes from the last session. “And you’ve said that you’re an ... Eth—”
“An Etheress,” Cassie said blankly. “I’m a living person who can go to Hell and come back. Any time I want...”
Cassie kept the memory, clear as a picture in a locket. In fact, she had a locket, a silver locket on a silver chain—with her sister’s picture inside. Cassie yearned for that locket, yearned to see the image of Lissa, even though an identical facsimile of that image gazed back at her any time she might look in a mirror. Cassie and Lissa were identical twins; only two traits told them apart; one, their hairstyles (Cassic’s short cropping of highlighted bright blond, and Lissa’s long velvet mane of black, with a snow-white streak on the right side) and two, the tatts: a petite barbed-wire tattoo encircled Lissa’s navel, while Cassie had a petite half-rainbow around hers.
There was one other difference now, of course. Cassie was alive, and Lissa was dead.
Cassie kicked off her sponge ward slippers and lay back on the thin-mattressed cot. Unconsciously she reached up to her bosom to touch the locket—an incessant reflex—then muttered, “Damn,” when she remembered that her hosts had taken it, along with her watch and wrist purse and a few other belongings, and locked it all up in the property vault when she’d been admitted. “Sorry, we can’t let you keep all that,” the instatement nurse had sternly told her. “Your records from Washington list you as a type-one suicide risk.” Cassie winced back a wave of sarcasm: “I just want the locket, just the locket. It’s got a picture of my sister in it. Jeez! How could I possibly kill myself with a locket? And I’m not suicidal, for God’s sake.” The nurse frowned, flirting with a chuckle; her eyes shot to Cassie’s wrists, which were heavily lined with old scars.
“Really?” Now it was the nurse’s turn to be sarcastic. She flipped through the swollen stack of Cassie’s old D.C. psychiatric records. “Suicidal tendencies are often hereditary. Did you know that? Doesn’t it say somewhere in your records that your sister committed suicide?”
So much for the locket.
And the memory.
Wide awake or in the deepest dreams, the memory would not stop haunting her. Lissa had been less stable than even Cassie could imagine. That night in the Goth House, it had been Lissa’s boyfriend, Radu, who spiked Cassie’s drink with some disorienting drug. Was it really Cassie’s fault? She blamed herself—for being so drunk at the club in the first place—but her therapist had spent a year trying to get her to see that Lissa’s suicide wasn’t the result of anything Cassie had done. She’d been drugged. And when Radu had started kissing her in the storage room, Lissa had walked in at the same moment. Believing that her boyfriend was cheating on her with her own sister was too much for her fragile psyche to bear, so Lissa had promptly shot herself in the head, only after doing the same to Radu. Her face hot pink and streaming with tears, Lissa’s last words to Cassie were: “My own sister ... How could you do this to me?” and the next thing Cassie knew, there was an ear-splitting bang and her sister was a corpse in her arms. Brains and blood spattered the walls and most of Cassie’s face.
In herself, Cassie supposed she knew she wasn’t really to blame for Lissa’s suicide—yet the guilt perpetuated all the same, like an arcane infestation, a psychic cancer that had gone full-blown metastatic. It didn’t matter that she’d been tricked, it didn’t matter that she’d been intoxicated and then drugged. The awful fact remained: Lissa had killed herself because she thought Cassie had betrayed her.
That was all that mattered. And that was the memory that cursed her to this day. Hence, her plight. If Cassie ever did any one thing in her life it had to be to confront Lissa face to face and tell her she was sorry for what had happened, and she knew she would spend the rest of her life trying to do that—which, to a layman, would sound absurd, as absurd and as crazy as the doctors of this psychiatric hospital thought she was. How could Cassie come face to face with a person who was dead and in the grave?
Unfortunately, that was the easy part. Cassie had quite a bit of experience hanging out with dead people.
“This is Xeke and Hush,” Via introduced last year when Cassie had discovered the three transients living in her attic. Via was probably eighteen or twenty, slim but curvy, and with a demeanor that seemed not really butch but definitely tomboyish. What took Cassie most aback was the girl’s appearance: shiny leather boots and black-leather pants, a studded belt, a deliberately shredded black t-shirt under a black-leather jacket. Not Goth but more like late-’70s punk. Buttons on the jacket confirmed the estimation. THE GERMS, THE STRANGLERS, a button of Souixsie and the Banshee’s THE SCREAM. White haphazard letters on the t-shirt read SIC F*CKS!
Via was one of the dead people. “This is Cassie,” she finished the introduction. “She lives here with her father.”
Cassie didn’t even move her head to look back at them; only her eyes darted. Xeke, the male, was dressed similarly: late-’70s British punk and appropriate buttons and patches (BRING BACK SID! and Do You Get The KILLING JOKE? and the like). Were it not for her shock, Cassie would’ve been struck by how handsome he was—lean, toned, dark intense eyes on a face like an Italian male model’s. Small pewter bats dangled from his earlobes, and his long jet-black hair had been pulled back into a masculine ponytail. Xeke’s eyes appraised her as though she were iconic, and the same went for the third squatter, the other girl. What did she say her name was? Cassie thought. Hush?
“Hush can’t talk,” Via said, “but she’s cool.”
Cassie felt far away as she listened; she felt detached from herself. Her throat clicked as she tried to speak. “Yesterday ... when I first met you. You said you were dead.”
“We are,” Xeke replied matter-of-factly.
“We can guess what a shock it is to you,” Via continued. “It’ll take you some time to get used to.”
“All three of us are dead,” Xeke said, “and when we died, we went to Hell.”
People living in my house, Cassie thought numbly. She and her father had been living in the old southern antebellum house for several months now. Her father had suddenly retired from his lucrative law practice in Washington, D.C. His wife, Cassie’s mother, had left him for another, richer man several years ago, and Cassie’s father viewed the move as the only real option now: getting Cassie out of the city would likewise get her away from the memory of her sister’s suicide. No more therapists, no more anti-depressant drugs, just a new and different environment, fresh country air and lazy hills and farmland to look at instead of traffic jams and skyscrapers. It seemed to work—at least at first. The house they’d moved into was an old plantation estate called Blackwell Hall—brooding, dark, a clash of architecture. But Cassie had loved it; it fit her eccentric tastes.
Until the day she strayed up into the attic and found these people there.
Dead people, she thought.
She didn’t contemplate any of it now. It was either true, or she was insane. Period. Instead, back on the day of their first meeting, she followed Via, Xeke, and Hush down the stairs.
“We’ll just prove it to you now,” Via said, “and get it over with.”
“Then we can really talk about things,” Xeke added.
Hush looked back over her shoulder and smiled.
Yeah. I’m following dead people down the stairs.
“Blackwell Hall is the strongest Deadpass in this part of the Outer Sector,” Via was explaining.
“Deadpass,” Cass
ie stated.
“It’s because of Fenton Blackwell—”
“The guy who built this section of the house, in the ’20s.” Cassie latched on to the familiarity. “The Satanist who ... sacrificed babies.”
“Uh-hmm,” Via verified.
Xeke laughed when they got to the next landing, his mirthful eyes on Cassie. “Jeez, you must think you’re losing your mind about now.”
“Uh, yeah,” Cassie said. “The thought has occurred to me more than once.”
“Just be patient. Follow us.”
When they went down the next flight of steps, Via advised, “Don’t make an idiot of yourself, Cassie. Remember, you can see us and hear us—but they can’t.”
Cassie wasn’t sure what they meant until the four of them marched into one of the dens, where Mrs. Conner, her father’s new housekeeper, was busily waxing some antique table tops.
Cassie stood there, looking at her.
The older woman glanced up. When her eyes met Cassie’s, there was no way that she couldn’t have seen Via, Xeke, and Hush standing alongside of her.
“ ‘Mornin’, Miss Cassie.”
“Huh—hi, Mrs. Conner.”
“Hope you’re feelin’ better. Your Pa said you had a spell yesterday.”
Via laughed. “Your Pa! Jesus, what a hayseed!”
Mrs. Conner didn’t hear the comment.
“Uh, yes, I’m feeling a lot better,” she replied.
“She’s got the hots for your father,” Via added.
The remark startled Cassie. “What?”
Mrs. Conner looked back up. “Pardon, Miss?”
“Uh, er, nothing,” Cassie said fast. “Have a good day, Mrs. Conner.”
“You too.”
“Your father’s got the hots for her too,” Xeke said through a grin.
“That’s ridiculous,” Cassie replied.
Mrs. Conner looked up again, a bit more oddly. “What’s that, Miss Cassie?”
Instantly, Cassie felt idiotic. “Just, uh, er—nothing.” My father, she wondered, has a thing for Mrs. Conner? The notion was absurd, but then—
