“My mom’s dead.”
Rina drops her gaze and mutters an apology.
“She died down here, actually. In the first Ghost. The first Ghost anyone here remembers anyway.” She giggles and shrugs when Rina meets her eyes. “At any rate, it’s not about sway. People get that wrong all the time. It’s not even about who you know. It’s about sacrifice, Rina. Are you willing to give whatever it takes to restore order and joy to your life?”
Tiffany’s voice is deeper now, silkier, and her lips move with such deft subtlety, she could have a side hustle as a ventriloquist. The voice seems to come from all sides, echoing, dizzying Rina as she whispers, “Make a wish. Anything. Something big, something small. Make a wish.”
Holding her swirling stomach, she grunts. “Fine. Get us out of here then.”
Tiffany lifts her eyebrows and beckons Rina into the main tunnel. When she places her hand upon the wall, the structure changes, softens, and pores open in the concrete, amalgamating and forming a large dark portal.
Rina approaches the hole cautiously, hand outstretched, and a salty breeze sucks on her fingertips. She pulls back, panting. “Jesus. What is that? Where does it go?”
“You only said ‘out.’ You should really be specific next time.”
“But how—”
Tiffany’s smile drops suddenly, and sorrow creases her brow. “How isn’t important. Rather, why. Why would you want to leave, Rina? This, like many paths out of here, leads only to a life of loneliness and regret. The path before you will continue to crumble and rot, just as it has since the accident. There’s nothing out there for you. No one waiting. No one missing you. You’re a brat. You’re a drunk.”
“That’s not true.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s true. Labeling you is easier than letting you explain, and your gigantic fuck-up makes people like me feel better about my failures. That’s how America sees you, how they’ll always see you.”
Rina’s heart thumps madly in her breast. Tiffany Law is annoying. She’s bitter and sardonic. She can even be vicious if she’s backed into a corner, but she’s never been so cruel.
“You’re not Tiffany.”
She snorts. “You sure about that? You don’t actually know me very well. Or anyone, really. You don’t have any friends, Rina. Or family. Or prospects. This was all you had, wasn’t it?”
Rina’s hands are cold and trembling, and the apprehensive knot she used to able to ignore on the ice feels like a fist twisting up her guts.
“I can give you what you had and more, Rina Bestler. I can help you find your way back into the spotlight. Whatever you want, it’s yours. If you’re willing to pay the price.”
“What the hell are you?
Tiffany sighs as she saunters into the kitchen. “Harlan called us ‘hyperia;’ it was better than a lot of the names we’ve gotten over the centuries. He didn’t want to make sacrifices at first either, but he realized soon enough it was in his best interest. In everyone’s best interest. But he wasn’t strong enough to handle it in the end. It’s a balance: sacrifice and success.” With a nose-scrunching grin, Tiffany spins to face her. “But you know all about that, don’t you? It’s why you don’t have anyone. You understand what it takes to be great. It takes loss. It takes independence. And the hyperia enjoy rewarding that.”
“I don’t understand. What did you do to Tiffany?”
“Tiffany couldn’t handle the price,” she says. “She wanted to be Princess Papillon just like Mommy, and we would’ve given it to her if she’d been able to deliver.”
“Deliver what?”
She hisses through a chuckle. “You, of course. The prized part in exchange for bringing you to us. We made the deal on the day of her audition, while she was walking the beach, just like Harlan did all those years ago.” She looks up fondly, lips pursed. “But she obviously didn’t have the guts for it. So we let you keep the role and took a different payment.” She opens her hands, and thunder shakes the tunnels, dropping debris on Rina’s head. “But we still demand a real sacrifice. A human to appease us. Blood in the bay. Do that, and all your wishes will come true.”
Rina hardly believes it when the words, “Which human?” leak out her lips.
A grin consumes Tiffany’s milky face and she wheezes in amusement. “Oh, I think you know who won’t be missed.”
Hatred blooms for new reasons now. From the rotten garden in Rina Bestler’s soul, weeds spread like cancer, coiling around her heart until only one unblemished spot remains. It’s the part of her that put on skates because she wanted to, the part that pored through college catalogs and dreamed of an entirely different life, the part that was overjoyed beyond belief when Victoria Fell took a chance on her. It’s small, but the fact that it’s there after all the mandatory rehearsals, competitions, and collisions means it’s the strongest part of all.
She says, “No,” and Tiffany’s face falls dead. It doesn’t even twitch before her hand flies to Rina’s throat and closes tight. She pushes Rina through the kitchen, but the skater wraps her fingers around a cabinet handle at the last second and rips the door off its rusty hinges. The force jostles both women, and Rina reels around with the door in hand. When she smacks Tiffany in the face, the ice-blonde stumbles backward, babbling, and covers her cheek. There’s no blood, though. No bruising. But when Rina drops her hand, the nest of white crustaceans in her skull writhes in screeching fury.
Rina screams, tripping over her feet as she retreats backward, and crashes to the floor. The wounded hyperia drop like sloppy pearls from Tiffany’s malformed head, but other areas of her body lose integrity too. Her shoulder slopes, then dissolves into scores of tiny arthropods that skitter down her legs as she clumsily advances. More and more hyperia fall with each step until there’s nothing left of Tiffany but her voice. Like mimetic shrimp, they’re copying her still as they cluster in corners, flood over cabinets, and from all directions chant, “Make a wish, Rina. Make a wish.”
Trying to track them dizzies her so much she has to lie down. Covering her ears, she yells to drown out Tiffany’s voice, but it’s on the inside now, and it has friends: steel slicing ice... the soft smack of rose petals hitting her boots... a crowd cheering her name... and then silence. Even when she uncovers her ears, she can’t hear anything. She screams but can’t hear her own voice. She smacks the floor and can’t feel it. She’s numb. She’s broken.
When someone suddenly touches Rina’s shoulder, she jerks as if out of a deep sleep. She gasps for air and stares wide-eyed at Vic and Raymond standing over her.
“What happened? Are you okay?” Raymond asks.
Rina shakes her head, her voice a frantic whisper, and Vic crouches in front of her with a mostly empty bottle of stale water, which she downs in one gulp. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s going on.”
It feels like a brood of cannibalistic moths are doing battle in Vic Fell’s chest, preventing her from speaking in a steady voice, but she’s able to muster something comforting enough to coax Rina into lifting her head.
“We’re here now,” she says, “and we’re not going to let anything happen to you.” It comes so naturally off Vic’s tongue she wonders if one of the rescue crew said it to her the day after the Ghost. “As best you can, tell us what you saw.”
“Tiffany—” The misshapen teeming skull flashes into Rina’s mind and she shudders. “There were things inside her. Or she was made up of them. They started pouring out of her and then... then she was just gone.”
“What sort of things?” Raymond asks.
“I’ve never seen anything like them. Crabby-spidery things with crazy camouflage. Hyper-something.”
“Hyperia,” Vic says flatly.
“Wait.” Raymond lifts his hands. “What are you saying? These are the same monsters you saw when you were a kid?”
“The word ‘monsters’ doesn’t really do them justice,” Vic replies. “Hyperia can imitate anything, and they can give you anything, and they use those pow
ers to convince you to kill people for them. I don’t know why. It seems like they’re pretty good at it all by themselves. They made me and the rest of the world think I was crazy, but they killed all those people. Everyone in the tunnels, everyone in the park.” Vic rolls her gleaming eyes to the ceiling, her chin dimpled in sorrow.
“You mean these hyperia things caused the Ghosts?”
She shakes her head and whispers, “They are the Ghosts. I don’t know how, but what you saw, Rina, aren’t even half of what the hyperia are. There’s something in the Chesapeake, something big along the cliffs, and it’s been there forever, waiting for desperate people like my father.”
Rina’s lungs empty in grief. “Like Tiffany. And me.” She pushes herself up and glares at Vic Fell. “And you opened a theme park on top of it. You knew they were here, and you had us dancing around like fairies and forest animals!”
“I didn’t know they were real!” she screams. “I spent more than half my life believing that I hallucinated everything I saw down here. And even then, believing I invented everything, I couldn’t trust that Harlan wasn’t those things in disguise. You saw how they mimic people. You can’t know. So I left. I put it behind me. I got better. I remade my life.”
“But you still came back here. Back to them!”
Raymond steps between and eases them apart. “How about we just calm down and get back to the others. We can talk this out together and find a reasonable solution.”
Thunder rolls, ferocious, and shakes the earth, knocking the trio to the ground and raising an ear-splitting alarm from the group in the lounge. They scramble down the corridors, twisting and turning toward the lounge, but despite the persistent howling, there’s no one in the passage before the break room. In the break room, either. But blood drips thick from railings and the bunk beds are festooned with sinew, from which glistening hyperia hang like Christmas baubles.
Vic spins out of the room and claps her hand over her mouth, but the vomit comes anyway, spurting between her fingers as she crumples to her knees.
“It’s happening again,” she mutters as Raymond wipes off her face with a scrap of sleeve. “And there’s nothing we can do to stop it. They can take us down whenever they want. Just like that.”
“Yes,” the voices cry. “Just like that. Just like the two dozen people you watched die thirty-five years ago, Victoria. You had the power to stop it then, and you had the power to stop it this time. But you were selfish, always selfish.”
Rina whispers, “Vic...” and the woman peeks around the corner to see lumps of meat and bone sprouting legs and crawling across the floor. They join, grow, and they shift into malformed but seamless amalgamations of her employees. The disproportionate, patchwork bodies shamble toward them, hissing and chanting, “Make a wish! Blood in the Bay!”
Rina scrambles from the room, grabbing Vic by the arm and following Raymond as he races down the main corridor. There are suddenly thousands of hyperia on the walls beside them, a swarm that is sometimes invisible and sometimes a frothy wave, complete with shadows of fish caught up in the tide. The longer the walls resemble the churning bay, the slower Raymond runs. His flesh turns green and he starts wobbling to one side. His knees eventually weaken entirely, and he collapses to the floor in a nauseated daze. When hyperia swarm over his body, Rina and Vic kick and smack them away, but there are too many. They each grab a leg as the creatures begin towing and then rushing his catatonic body to the rusted grate that once opened in the face of Calvert Cliffs. Vic falls when Raymond’s shoe pops off in her hands, and Rina hangs on only a few seconds longer, dragged several feet and scraping up her chest.
Jumping to her feet, Vic screams, “Wait!” and the convoy stops inches before smashing Raymond’s skull into the grate. “Just don’t hurt anyone else and I’ll—”
“You’ll what, sweetheart?”
The tunnel stinks of cologne again, and Rina scrambles away as the source approaches Vic from behind. The corpse of Harlan Fell hobbles to her side and lays a warm hand atop hers, then lifts it to his moldering lips for a kiss.
She grits her teeth as she finally gazes into his pale eyes. “Why are you doing this to us?”
His brow creases and he caresses her cheek with a chapped hand. “Because there is nothing else. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. We can’t wish ourselves away, or we would’ve done it by now, and our powers can only be directed outward. So we do our best to remain... entertained... until our rescue arrives. Your family’s been quite helpful, thank you.” Harlan grabs her chin and pulls her closer with a hiss. “Now, what are you going to do for us?”
Vic pushes away and sucks on her top lip. Looking to Rina, she sighs. “You have to be the one. You have to make the wish. I’ll be the sacrifice.”
“I can’t...”
“I’m okay with it, I promise. It won’t be bad. It’s just falling.”
Raymond stirs when the hyperia begin towing him back to the women, but they aren’t returning him—they’re getting ready to use him as a battering ram. He shrieks and thrashes, and Vic screams for Rina to make a wish.
“I can’t kill someone!”
“They’re going to kill us all if you don’t!”
Rina shrinks against the wall, her mind a whirlpool of life’s biggest and smallest wishes. Which one would make it easier to murder a human being? Would a clean slate or a gold medal really absolve her guilt over killing someone who took a chance on her when no one else would? Even if she wished herself into the perfect life, how could she sleep at night with such an atrocious experience infesting her brain?
Vic grabs Rina’s hands and says shakily, “I forgive you, okay? It needs to end. Raymond will back you up about what happened, and you’ll go on with your life in a way I never could. Okay? Please, Rina. Make a wish.”
The chanting begins again, and the hyperia carrying Raymond begin thrusting him toward the grate. As a ferocious clap of thunder judders the people in the tunnel off their feet, Rina Bestler makes a wish.
“HEY, ARE YOU with us?”
“Pull her away from the edge, will you?”
“No, don’t touch her. Look, she’s waking up.”
Rina moans as she sits up, shivering and aching from head to toe, with a bevy of people in helmets and orange vests staring at her. Once she realizes they’ve come to rescue her, she gasps and throws herself into an older man’s arms.
“Careful, girlie. You’re real close to the edge.”
It’s an understatement. One sneeze in Rina’s sleep might’ve sent her right over, out the hatch in the cliff face and into the Chesapeake. It’s calm now, and the wind has died to a cologne-scented kiss. But the beach is littered with bodies.
Not Vic’s though. As Rina stands at the edge, she doesn’t see her boss’ body, nor does she remember sacrificing Vic Fell to the hyperia—which means her wish came true. Terrified of the guilt, Rina wished to skip forward in time to her rescue, which is precisely where she wakes up. But she also doesn’t remember what happened to Raymond until she spots his corpse broken on the shore, his arm hooked inside the grate.
“What happened here, miss?” one of the EMTs asks.
Her heart races. Raymond can’t vouch for her story now. They’ll think she’s just as crazy as the people who found Vic alone after the slaughter in ‘91.
“Wait, are you Rina Bestler?”
“Holy shit, it is Rina Bestler! The ex-figure skater!”
She wilts to the floor as her rescuers close around her, shouting in her face and raving about the discovery. The noise nauseates her, and her head pounds like a bass drum. Rina Bestler, the former Olympian. Rina Bestler, the sole survivor of the second Ghost Hurricane. Rina Bestler, alone and crazy as hell.
She made the wrong wish. She wasted it, threw it away on fear.
But then the crowd parts, and a familiar face appears between the invasive strangers. Pushing through, Victoria Fell extends her hand to Rina and pulls her free.
“Ms. Fell, you’re alive!�
�� one of the rescuers exclaims. “The police need to speak to you immediately.”
“Of course,” she says. “But first, let me get Rina out of here.”
“They need to speak to her, too.”
“Later.”
“No. Now, Ms. Fell.”
Vic bats her eyes in shock and wraps her arm around Rina’s shoulders. “Well, how about we let the girl decide for herself? What do you say, Rina? Do you wish to be left alone?”
The garden is overrun now, and the strongest part of her withers to dust. Scanning the group of rescuers, she doesn’t see salvation anymore. She sees a gold medal. A college degree. And when she turns to behold the source of the hyperia at the bottom of the Chesapeake, a flashing mass larger than the Fairy Funland grounds itself, she sees the beginning of her first friendship.
HE WHO FIGHTS...
Sean Ellis
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
WHEN VIEWED THROUGH the multiple eighteen-millimeter intensifier tubes of a state of the art GPNVG-18 panoramic night vision device, the stars were so bright it was impossible to see the infinite void surrounding them. Even without artificial enhancement, the altitude and complete absence of any artificial light on this moonless night made for a spectacular visual display, but Major Jeff Hood left his NVGs on. There were things other than stars in the sky tonight, things that were not visible to the naked eye. Somewhere up there, a mile or two closer to the edge of space, men were falling through the sky like wicked angels cast from heaven. Angels who wore infrared strobes which flashed brighter than the surrounding stars and allowed Hood to follow their descent.
“Got them,” he said into his lip mic, his voice barely louder than a whisper. “Looks like four... Scratch that, five.”
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