by Brian Harmon
She studied him for a moment, considering. “I think maybe you are my miracle. Maybe you just don’t know it.” She opened one of the desk drawers and withdrew a single key. “Just use this one. It’ll be easier.”
Eric took it from her. He felt her hand as she passed it to him. Her skin was warm. The spirits never touched him. She was as alive as he was. As far as he could tell, she was precisely who she claimed to be. “Thank you.”
She waved him away and put her head down on the desk. “Just do whatever you have to do.”
He stood there for a moment, watching her. She did look exhausted. He was sure that was the only reason she let him help her. She was clearly a very stalwart woman. If she wasn’t at the limit of her endurance, he wasn’t sure he’d have been able to convince her to let him take over.
He turned and slipped the key into the lock. As soon as he heard it click, the door shuddered. A cold wind belched from the crack beneath it, as if a seal had been broken. He glanced over at Helena, saw the uncertainty in her eyes as she stared back at him.
“Lord, I hope you know what you’re doing,” she told him.
Eric licked his lips. “Me too,” he replied.
He gripped the door knob, braced himself for whatever horror awaited him, and opened the door.
Chapter Forty-One
He was prepared for horrors and he wasn’t disappointed, although it wasn’t quite what he expected. He pulled the door open to find what looked like a small library, with floor-to-ceiling shelves on all four walls. Except instead of books sitting on the shelves, there were… “Dolls?” he turned and looked at Helena, puzzled.
“Lester spent a lifetime collecting them,” she explained.
That much was obvious. There were hundreds of them, each one staring back at him with an eerie, blank stare.
“It was one of his many hobbies,” she recalled, a wistful smile on her face.
He switched on the light and surveyed the abomination that was Bellylaugh Playland’s doll room.
Poppy said she saw him surrounded by dolls, meaning once again that this was somewhere he was meant to be. She didn’t say that they were each and every one dressed as clowns.
Jesus, he thought as he stepped into the room and looked around. This was easily one of the creepiest places he’d ever found himself. And that was really saying something.
Most of them were collectibles and antiques. Hardly any of them appeared new. Most were covered in smudges and dressed in stained clothes. There was just something about a used doll that made it that much more frightening than a new one. The mere sight of an old, well-worn doll lying on a table at a rummage sale or on a shelf at an antique shop was more than enough to encourage him to move along. It made him uncomfortable just looking at the things. It was hard to imagine someone actually picking one up and wanting to take it home.
To him, that seemed even more unnatural than people who kept venomous snakes and spiders as pets.
Of course, not everyone enjoyed the same things. Some men enjoyed collecting old clown dolls and others enjoyed reading sixteenth century English literature. To each his own. The problem was that he’d had a small problem today with the things around him coming to life and trying to kill him, which sort of presented an insanely terrifying nightmare scenario right now.
“What about the demon?” asked Helena.
Eric let his gaze sweep across the room. It looked empty, but it wasn’t. “Something’s definitely here. I can feel it.”
HUGE AMOUNT OF DARK AND SPIRITUAL ENERGY IN THAT ROOM, said Isabelle. YOU’VE DEFINITELY FOUND THE CENTER OF THE ACTIVITY
Just as Poppy’s divination revealed. But what did he do now?
“What’s going on in here?”
Eric turned to see Melodi standing in the doorway of the records room.
Helena sat up straight, surprised. “Mel…”
Melodi stared at her. “Are you okay? You look horrible…”
“You shouldn’t be here,” said Helena.
“What are you talking about?” She held up her cell phone. “You just called and told me to meet you here.”
“No, I didn’t…”
Melodi looked confused, and understandably so. “What’s going on?” she asked again. She looked around at the mess, at the pile of blankets on the floor.
Eric had no idea what to say, but it turned out he didn’t have to say anything.
When she finally looked at him, her gaze immediately shifted to something behind him and her mouth fell open, a look of horror eclipsing her pretty face. “Oh my god…” she gasped.
Eric turned to find that he was no longer alone in the doll room. Behind him stood the woman from the arcade screens. She was deathly thin, little more than skin and bones, wearing a wispy, black gown.
The skeleton in a black dress.
He took a step back, his eyes fixed on the ghastly figure as it raised a long, bony hand and reached out for him.
Then, abruptly, everything changed.
The floor beneath his feet was now grass and dirt. The ceiling above was now a canopy of leaves. Blinding sunlight poured down in mottled rays. A warm breeze blew over him. The doll room and records room were both gone. Instead, he was standing in a clearing in a dense forest, surrounded by the crowded trunks of massive trees. Only Melodi, Helena and the chair Helena was still sitting in were left.
“What’s happening?” asked Melodi, her voice cracking. She turned around, scanning these new surroundings, her eyes wide with panic. “Where…? Where are we? How did we get here?”
Helena squinted up into the bright sunlight, then reached out with her hands, feeling around the empty space where her desk had been only a moment before, as if this whole thing might only be a clever illusion.
Eric looked around, too. He knew this place. It wasn’t the same clearing where he met Judith, but the forest was the same. It had the same warmth and smells. It even had the same eerie silence.
“I’ve seen this before…” said Melodi. “I’ve had dreams about a place like this… I…”
“I’m so sorry for my deception,” said a soft, warm voice.
Eric turned back to find that the skeleton in the black dress was gone, replaced with a soft mist in the vague shape of a woman.
“That’s her,” said Helena, rising from her chair and stepping toward Eric. “The spirit that used to haunt this place, before it turned evil. That’s what she looked like!”
“Say what?” said Melodi. “What spirit? What’re you talking about? Do you know what’s going on?”
Eric laid a hand on Helena’s shoulder. “No. She never turned evil. Something else showed up, didn’t it? Something much darker.”
All of this shouldn’t have made any sense, but somehow it did. Maybe there was some kind of psychic or telepathic power at work, helping him to understand. Or maybe it was just the kind of intuition one gained from being surrounded by the weird. Either way, he found that he knew these things, just as he knew that this was the impostor who pretended to be Isabelle and Helena on the phone.
She was not his enemy. She never had been.
“You can call me Moira,” said the spirit.
“You’re like the others aren’t you,” said Eric. “Judith and Todd and the rest. You’re a fairy.”
“Fairy?” said Melodi. “This is a joke, right?” She looked up at the trees above her. “A really…really…elaborate joke…?”
“No,” said Moira. “Not a fairy. I’m something different. They are simple nature spirits. I’m something more. Something elemental. I prefer the word nymph.”
A nymph? Okay. Sure. He nodded. He wasn’t even going to fight it anymore. If the next person he met claimed to be half hobbit on his mother’s side, he was fully prepared to believe him. Clearly, skepticism had no place in this odd new world.
“This is crazy…” said Melodi, turning and scanning the trees around them, searching for a way out. “None of this can be real!”
“Calm down,” Hel
ena told her. Her eyes remained fixed on the nymph, fascinated. “I thought she was a ghost…” she said to Eric. “I assumed she was someone who died around here.”
“I’ve existed on this land since the creation of this universe,” explained Moira, “feeding off the energy expelled by all living things.”
“Like children,” said Eric.
“I love children. Not just for their energy. They make me happy. I chose this place to be near the children because they give me so much joy.”
“And the fairies…” said Eric. “They don’t care about the children. They don’t care about life or death. They’re here because you’re here, aren’t they?”
“That’s right. They’re drawn to me the way I was drawn to the children. They look to beings like me as mother figures. I can provide for them.”
“Like the way you can create these fringe universes.”
Judith said that the fringe universe was theirs and that the demon was stealing it to use for its own purposes. It wasn’t Judith who had the power to create them. It was Moira. That’s why she said “ours” instead of “mine” when she spoke of it.
“So you’re the one they made the promise to,” realized Eric. The only reason any of them lifted a hand to help him.
“Yes. It was my one condition. I would provide for them, but they had to promise to help me protect the children. They’re selfish, but they’re loyal.”
“I’d keep an eye on Eliot,” Eric told her.
“Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” pleaded Melodi.
Helena took her hand and squeezed it. “Patience, dear. I’ll explain everything. For now, just listen.”
“So Helena was right,” Eric concluded. “The spirit haunting their playland was good luck, in a manner of speaking.”
“I did protect this place,” replied Moira. “I made it my home. I cared for every child who walked through the doors. And I would’ve done so until the end of time if possible.”
“But then the demon came.”
The mist faded until it was barely visible. “It settled here and began taking the energy I lived off for itself. I only skimmed the energy, but it siphoned every drop, sucking the life out of this place, and starving me in the process.”
That was why she looked like a walking skeleton. She was literally starving to death.
“I couldn’t leave. I wouldn’t. I knew the children were in danger. So I stayed. I fought back with all I had. And at first, I was strong enough to keep it repressed beneath the building. But it keeps growing stronger and I keep getting weaker. And now I’m not strong enough anymore.”
Eric nodded. So that was why it couldn’t break free before it reached its full strength. It had to be stronger than Moira.
“I needed help,” she explained. “I became desperate. I lured Helena to the records room and made her believe I was the cause of the evil so she’d seal me in the doll room, creating a second seal around me. The whole time I’ve been trapped in this room, I’ve been holding closed the gateway that leads to the demon, keeping it trapped. But I’ve always known I wouldn’t be strong enough to stop it on my own in the end. I needed help. I needed you, Eric.”
“Why me?”
“You said it yourself. It’s what you do.”
He did say that, didn’t he? “So you brought me here? You arranged all this somehow?”
“No. Fate brought you here. I just had to hold out until you arrived.”
Eric wasn’t sure that made sense. How could it be that he’d just happen to show up when he was most needed?
“It’s already at full strength,” said Moira. “It could break free any minute.”
Eric stood up straighter, startled, and looked at his watch. The party was going to end in fifteen minutes!
Wait… Fifteen minutes? More time than that should’ve passed.
“This place slows time to a crawl,” she explained. “We have enough time to talk. You have time to understand what it is that’s needed of you. And you need to understand.”
Eric glanced back at Helena and Melodi. Melodi looked as if she were balancing precariously on the brink of a panic attack, but Helena looked impressively stoic. After all she’d been through, he supposed this wasn’t that much of a shock to her.
“I know what I have to do,” he told her. He had to go face the demon himself. That was what it always came to, wasn’t it? Stopping the bad guy before it was too late?
“No, you don’t,” said Moira. “You can’t defeat the demon from here. You’ll have to face it on the other side of the gate, in its own realm. And I can’t promise that you’re strong enough to make it back.”
Eric stared at her. Usually people like Moira were a bit more positive about this sort of thing. But it didn’t matter one way or the other. He didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t let all those people upstairs die. Even if Karen, Holly and Paul weren’t among them, he couldn’t let anything hurt those children.
“It may be that I have to ask you to make a profound sacrifice today, Eric. Possibly not just your life, but your very soul.”
He flashed back to his first conversation with Poppy and her vision of him paying the ferryman. And wasn’t that how it all started? He had his chance to walk away, but instead, he went to find Todd. He gave him the gold-colored tokens. A gold coin for the ferryman. And ultimately that first coin had led him here, to this very conversation.
“I wish there were another way,” said Moira. “But there’s not. I have to ask you save them, whatever the cost may be.”
Eric nodded. “I understand.” And he did. After all, wasn’t that always the way it went down? Wasn’t there always a chance he wasn’t going to come back? “I’ll do it. Just show me how.”
The mist gathered and the hag’s withered face became visible. Somehow, even with that awful, deathly visage, she managed a smile to express her gratitude.
She raised one, bony hand and pointed across the clearing to a stone wall that wasn’t there before. There was a door at the center of it. It was ten feet tall, heavy and intimidating. “This is the gate I’ve been guarding these past two years.”
“Where did that come from?” asked Melodi. Her voice had grown small by now. She sounded like a frightened child.
Eric stared at the door. Why did a door to a demon’s lair have to look like that? Why couldn’t it be pink with Hello Kitty stickers all over it? Would it have killed anyone to give him just that one little ounce of “I’ve got this” as he marched off to his probable doom?
“‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,’” said Eric. “Right. Well, let’s not keep the demon waiting.”
A familiar giggle swept through the forest then.
Eric turned to find the clown sitting beneath a tree where the door leading out to the hallway used to be. “You must be joking,” it said. It was the first words that had actually come out of the clown’s mouth. Until now, it had either mimed everything or spoken to him through a disembodied voice. It sounded strangely human.
“Who the hell are you?” demanded Melodi. “Who are these people?” she asked Helena.
The clown ignored her. It kept its gaze firmly fixed on Eric. “You’re actually going to go through with it. You’re going to face a demon head-on, in its own domain.”
It threw its head back and laughed.
Eric clenched his fists and said nothing.
Then, just as suddenly, it stopped laughing and snapped its head back down again. “You know what?” it said. “This could be fun. Yeah… I like this.” It clapped its hands together, happy with itself, and then jumped to its feet. “Knock yourself out, buddy.” It turned, as if to leave, giggling. Then it paused and glanced back once more. “This is going to be so much fun, I think I’ll even give this back to you.”
It twirled itself around in a circle and vanished, leaving in its place none other than Paul.
He was just standing there, hunched over, clutching his little flashlight and shivering, his teeth chatterin
g. Frost was clinging to his beard and he was squinting up at the brilliant sunlight. He looked half-crazed.
“Who are all these people?” cried Melodi.
Eric stepped toward him, worried. “Are you okay?”
Paul squinted at him, his face sort of scrunched up to one side, like a gnarled old sailor. After a moment, he seemed to wake up. He threw his hands out to his sides and said, “Big rat! Huge… Very big and huge and…” He trailed off, then dropped his arms and scrunched up his nose. “Smelled awful… Smelly. Huge. Big.”
“You’re okay now,” said Eric. Then he glanced back at the mist that was Moira. “Is he going to be okay now?”
“He should be fine,” she replied.
“What’s going on?” asked Paul. “What do we do now?”
“It’s time to go fight the demon.”
Paul shook his head. “Don’t wanna do that. Do I have to do that? I mean if you need me to do that…like, really need me to do that…”
“You don’t have to do that,” said Eric. Then he looked back at Moira again. “He doesn’t have to do that, does he?”
“Oh, no,” she replied. “He’d almost certainly die.”
“You don’t have to go,” Eric assured him.
Paul nodded. It was an exaggerated gesture. Down and up, quick and hard. “Good. I’ll be at the bar.”
“The bar’s closed,” said Melodi.
Paul shook his head. “Don’t care. I’m going to go and sit at the bar. If someone would like to serve me, I’ll buy a drink. Maybe lots of drinks. If not, I’ll just be sitting there. I like sitting. Sitting’s good.” He turned to walk away, but only ended up turning in a circle twice. “How do I get out of here?”
The door didn’t exactly appear. It didn’t pop into existence. It was simply not there, and then it was as if it had always been there. It hurt Eric’s head to try to comprehend it.
“There it is,” said Paul, as if he’d only overlooked it until now, and then he ambled out into the hallway and was gone.
