The Midnight Ground

by Eric Dontigney

My blood ran cold. I forced myself to look down. Tucker’s eye glared up at me, before it fixated on the knife. The demon was using its inhuman will to squeeze every last ounce of utility out of Tucker’s broken body. I heard a telltale metallic scrape. I didn’t wait to see if the demon could hurl the knife across the room with its mind. I grabbed Demon Tucker’s head and started slamming it against the floor. I didn’t stop when blood splattered. I didn’t stop when I heard bones break. I stopped when I almost passed out from oxygen deprivation. I crawled off the body and dragged myself away from the corpse. I heard a scream of frustration. Acidic anger washed over me, one last time, and then the demon was gone.

  I slumped to the cool floor. I don’t know how long I stayed there, my chest heaving and unable to catch my breath. It wasn’t that I didn’t recognize the passage of time. I knew time passed, but not in any sensible way. It was distorted by all the psychic noise and the presence of a being so immensely powerful that it overcame a blood binding to exert its will across a continent. When the oxygen my lungs could provide finally started to line up with my body’s needs, rational thoughts asserted themselves.

  Was I too late? No, I decided in a fog. There wouldn’t have been anything left to think that question if I were too late. I remembered I was bleeding. Without opening my eyes, I ripped off a piece of my shirt and wadded it up. I pulled my tie off and used it to cinch the makeshift bandage against my leg over the cut Demon Tucker had opened up. I figured he missed the big arteries, since I was still around to feel disoriented and sick. Not to mention all the pain that assaulted me. The injuries, old and new, seemed to have formed a union and were voicing their unhappiness with the working conditions in one voice. That voice worked very hard to sap me of my will to continue. If Tucker was the opening act, I couldn’t possible beat the star of that show, that voice assured me. It was over before it started, it said. Just get out of here, it demanded.

  It sounded good. It sounded really good. In my experience, the wrong thing almost always sounds like a great course of action when things get hard. After all, the wrong thing generally involved doing the self-interested thing. The wrong thing, in the short term, usually conferred wealth, or power, or survival in some form. I didn’t want to die in that awful basement, mere feet from where I’d been forced to murder someone. I didn’t have a choice about it. He was going to kill me, but that didn’t make me feel great about it. I could go. If I announced my intention to leave to the thing in the basement and asked for safe passage, even at the eleventh hour, it would probably give it.

  All I’d have to do was sacrifice a few thousand people and one terrified teenage girl. I mean, sure, I basically promised to help her and she probably still looked up to me a little. Then again, you can’t enjoy admiration when you’re dead. If I bailed, it’d probably lead to Helena’s death. Once she started at the graveyard, which she must have done by then, interrupting her would be as lethal as cyanide. She needed to finish what she started or she wouldn’t do anything ever again. I’d have to leave her to manage her own survival. Maybe she would survive, though. Cavanaugh said she would, regardless of what happened to the rest of us. If that was true, then I could walk. I just had to do the wrong thing, and consequences be damned.

  I pulled the tie a little tighter around my leg and knotted it in place. I dragged myself around until I felt something solid and used it to pull myself up to standing. I concentrated on keeping the world from spinning and opened my eyes. The same wobble was there, maybe a little worse, but I could see. I straightened up a little more and looked around. I saw the door that led out to the stairs. I looked at that door for the longest ten seconds of my life.

  “The wrong thing,” I said out loud, testing the words in the air. “Yeah, the wrong thing always looks good.”

  With that, I turned and started limping deeper into the basement. I just hoped that shock didn’t set in before I got there. I’d have hated to deprive the Midnight Ground of a final chance to kill me.

  Chapter 47

  The deeper I went into the basement, the tougher it got to keep the world from spinning crazily. The nausea grew so intense it felt like a live snake was thrashing in my stomach. Every limping step forward was liquid fire in my nervous system. My arm and stomach throbbed and pulsed in angry coordination with my heartbeat. I tried not to think about how much blood I left on the floor behind me. It didn’t matter, because I didn’t have any good way to staunch the flow. The fact that I was going to die down there started to take on a concrete reality for me.

  It didn’t thrill me, but I decided there were worse ways to go out. If I died down there, it meant I got to take a pass on the creeping indignities of old age. The perpetual weakening of muscle and increasing fragility of bone weren’t going to be a problem. I wouldn’t face the horror of incontinence or some nightmare of a nursing home where the staff abused and robbed the patients. Killed making a run at Midnight Ground and trying to save an entire town? That was the stuff of legend. People would talk about it for decades. There were worse legacies to leave behind. It was a better legacy than I had any right to hope for, based on my life to date.

  Even so, I still hoped I wouldn’t die. Maybe Helena would do the impossible and free the trapped souls. If she was right that they were a threat, and my marching orders worked, which was not guaranteed, I might get a window of opportunity to get Abby clear. I might even get clear if that happened. Of course, that plan hinged on me surviving until Helena was done. I didn’t know how much chance there was of that. I’d probably pissed off the spirit of the Midnight Ground something fierce. It might murder me out of hand, simply for inconveniencing it. Unlike Abby, I had no bloodline binding to stave it off. I didn’t have the raw magical power to keep it at bay either.

  I wasn’t the kind of person who lusted after power ninety-nine days out of a hundred. It was just too damned easy to abuse it and, in doing so, turn into something so abhorrent that you couldn’t be saved. My sins were many, and some of them very dark, but none so black that I thought I was utterly beyond redemption. There were lines that I had not crossed, and thresholds of evil that I was willing to brush near, but not to pass over. I’d had plenty of opportunity. Most of the things in the hard case were exactly that kind of opportunity. Those talismans and weapons could have given me power, but power that would have left me less than human. Some things just weren’t worth it.

  I lost concentration and the world spun in crazed circles. I careened into a wall and retched up bile. The sour taste of it made me want to retch again. I closed my eyes and managed to suppress the reflexive gagging. I spat a few times to clear the taste from my mouth and waited for my stomach to settle. I noticed that the corner of my mind that spent most of the day hounding me about time was silent. Or maybe the psychic noise just made it impossible to hear. I wasn’t sure whether to find that annoying or a relief. I leaned my head against the wall. The surface was as cool as only earth-backed concrete can be cool.

  I focused again, driving back the noise and the spinning with a monumental effort of will. Every action demanded more and more from me. Every movement was agony for my leg. Every breath sent fire across my lacerated stomach. By the time I got to Abby, I doubted I’d have anything left in me to fight with, let alone give a good showing of myself. At least she won’t die alone, thinking that no one even tried to help her, I thought. That had to count for something in the big picture, didn’t it? I pushed off the wall and staggered down the hall, every ounce of my concentration and will focused on staying upright. If I fell, I doubted I’d ever get back to my feet.

  After I went another five or ten feet down the hall, the psychic noise went up another notch and I froze in place. It just hurt. It didn’t hurt in the intense but localized way the cuts or the burn hurt. It hurt everywhere, through every molecule of my body, through every fiber of my heart, and it hurt straight through the core of my soul. It wasn’t a sound. It was pain. It was the residual pain of something so huge, so vast, that the echo of it rende
red me barely coherent. It was a sense-memory never meant to be processed by a human consciousness and it threatened to tear me apart. Then, I heard something even worse. I heard Abby screaming in pain.

  Say what you like about the human species. We are a sad, flawed, selfish species with an almost unlimited ability to lie to ourselves about the consequences of our choices. We talk a good game about ethics and morality, but most of us are really just interested in christening things we don’t like as wrong. We pollute our world, mistreat our fellow human beings, and generally act like miserable assholes for no good reason. But beneath all that shit, we are hardwired as pack animals. We are built to defend our young with a profound disregard for our own safety or whether the fight can be won.

  Intentional or not, proximity to the echo of that primordial pain stripped me down to the point where a fixation on reaching my goal was about the only conscious thought left in my head. My undermind, as Cavanaugh would put it, was doing most of the heavy lifting. Abby’s scream triggered that protective instinct in me the way it might trigger an instinct in a jungle predator. Singularity of purpose took over then. Not the single-mindedness that one associates with a zealot or that odd breed known collectively as geniuses. It was something far deeper and deadlier, a psychological and emotional state that belonged to the world of prehistory, where life-and-death struggles were the status quo.

  The psychic noise didn’t go away; the sensation of the world spinning didn’t let go, so much as they both ceased to matter to me. Once they ceased to matter, they ceased to plague me. From that moment on, my conscious was riding shotgun and taking notes while the undermind took the wheel for a bit. I straightened up and purposefully limped the last few steps, grabbing the first heavy thing to come to hand. I shoved through a door, the one that seemed closest to where the scream came from, and looked around.

  It wasn’t a huge room, but it had been emptied. My conscious mind wondered if it had always been empty, but the undermind ignored it. On the far side of the room, Abby was on the floor, back against the wall. She had her knees pulled up and her arms covered her head protectively. I snarled at that sight. The child was in danger. Things needed to be done. Between me and her, I saw the inky black thing of my nightmares. I was aware of the power it held, pulsing, writhing power that set my teeth on edge. That was the problem. That was what threatened the child. If my conscious mind possessed any influence at that moment, it might have advised a different course of action.

  Despite all the things the subconscious does for people, giving them intuitions, sending dreams, sparking ideas, it is not naturally suited to developing strategy. As my conscious mind screamed in impotent warning, my undermind sent me directly at the inky demon, heavy object in hand. It turned and looked at me. I expected it to recoil or express anger or to charge at me. Instead, I got the vaguest sense of annoyance and a sliver of curiosity from it. Then I hit it in the head with what turned out to be a full gallon of interior latex paint.

  The sum total effect of this brute-force physical assault was a dented can. The demon’s head didn’t move as much as a millimeter. I sensed that its annoyance deepened. My conscious mind was still screaming, telling me to get the fuck back from that thing, while my undermind, grand strategist that it was, told my arm to take another swing with the can. The can swung through the air, hit the inky head with a dull thunk, and developed a second dent. The top flew off the can at that point and a particularly gloomy shade of gray paint splattered the demon. I caught some of it. Unlike the paint on the demon, the paint on me did not bubble, hiss and then vanish. There was a lone spark of anger from the demon and instantaneous agony turned the world white in front of my eyes.

  There was a patchy montage of images and sensations after that. I remember seeing, but not hearing, Abby scream as the demon picked me up and hurled me at the wall. I remember hearing bones crack when I hit. There was a blurry stretch of gray. I saw Abby try to get to me and I got to hear her screaming that time. She wasn’t even trying to form words. It was noises of anguish and emotional torment. The kinds of sounds someone makes when they’ve been pushed beyond some edge of sanity. There was more gray, then Abby was pressed hard against the wall, the demon towering over her. I felt its cold, clear intention to kill her and its impatience for the time to be right. It hurt to see her like that. It also hurt to twitch.

  I think everyone likes to believe that when it all falls apart, they’ll rise above. They’ll be more noble, more self-sacrificing, simply better than they are the rest of the time. Maybe I even believed that too, a little bit, but it’s easy to think that when things continue trucking along without much in the way of a crisis. I’d met the crisis, done what I could to avert it, and I’d failed. There was no shame in it. You don’t win every fight. I don’t win every fight, anyway.

  Maybe if I’d been smarter than I was, or stronger, I might have pulled out some kind of victory. Maybe if I’d been purer of heart, or simply less afraid of my failings, I could have reached deep and wielded power the way Helena did. I was just me, though, and I was tired. I was cold. I was hurting in ways I’d never imagined possible. As I lay there, blood trickling from my wounds into a pool beneath me, I missed Marcy on a scale that I had not experienced since the night she died. I didn’t want to fight anymore. I didn’t want to hear Abby’s screams of terror and pain. I just wanted to close my eyes and let it all go. So I did. Everything went still, black and quiet.

  Chapter 48

  “Baby, you need to open your eyes,” said a voice.

  The words were soft, gentle, but I heard the undercurrent of urgency. Not just urgency, there was also fear.

  “Adrian, please, you need to open your eyes.”

  It took effort. It was so hard to open my eyes. I realized that it wasn’t just that it was hard. I didn’t want to open my eyes. I knew that, if I did, hurt and obligation would follow in its wake. I fought. I failed. Wasn’t it enough that I fought? That I had suffered in the final moments? Why wasn’t that enough? A cynical portion of me that I think of as Mr. Self-Hatred answered the question. When is it ever enough? I pushed open my eyes, fighting overwhelming fatigue and the desire to keep them closed. Marcy crouched over me. I looked around the room.

  I saw the inky black figure of the demon towering over Abby. Unbidden, a memory rose up of Tucker Smith on the floor, his head beaten to a bloody mass. I pushed the memory away as hard as I could. I kept looking around. I saw the unbridled fear on Abby’s face and her body locked into some kind of stasis. Nothing in the room moved. No breath, no screams, no mind-blistering noise from the netherspaces. Nothing at all. I looked back at Marcy.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “You’re dying,” she said, then frowned. “No, you’re choosing to die. It’s not quite the same.”

  “I lost. It won. Dying is what happens next.”

  Marcy shook her head. “No. It’s what you decided happens next. You can’t make this choice.”

  I started to close my eyes.

  Marcy slapped me across the face. “Stop it!”

  Anger flared somewhere deep inside me. “What the hell, Marcy?”

  “I knew you were no saint, but I never realized how goddamned selfish you were.”

  Disbelief washed through me. “Selfish?”

  Marcy swept her arm around the room. “This fight isn’t over yet! If you decide to quit now and die, that girl will die. Then anyone left in the building. Then everyone in the town. You will be damned for that choice. You will burn for it!”

  I let out a bitter snarl. “God would condemn me for that?”

  She closed her eyes. “No, you will. You’ll do it to yourself. You’ll do it because you’ll know what I know. You had strength and power left in you. You’ll know you could have bought Abby a few more seconds or minutes. Maybe you could even buy her enough time for help to arrive. It will haunt you. You’ll carry that guilt into your next life. You’ll punish yourself for it. It’s who you are.”

 
; I wanted to scream at her to leave me alone. I wanted her to be wrong. I wanted to rest. Except, I knew she was right. I hadn’t played the game to the end. I’d quit at the final hand, without laying all my cards down. I might still fail. Hell, I probably would still fail, but that was a failure I could live or, perhaps, die with, and keep a clear conscience.

  “I miss you,” I whispered. “I miss you so much it’s like being on fire.”

  She smiled and leaned down to me. She kissed me on the lips. It conveyed so much that, in hindsight, I knew it had been more than a kiss. It had been some kind of psychic transference. There was nothing like a thought in it, just a wellspring of love, soothing feelings, and, in some way, she shined a spotlight on the strength that I had left. It was more than I thought was there, or maybe it was there because she believed it was there. She drew back, her hair brushing my face, and smiled again. The truth in Cavanaugh’s words became apparent. I did not understand the nature of my and Marcy’s relationship. She should not have been able to do what she just did. It wasn’t unlikely or improbable or odd. It was, end of statement, impossible for a spirit to reach out and touch the living that way.

  “You’ll see me again, soon enough. Now go and help her.”

  My eyes snapped open and the room was in motion again. The cacophony of netherworld noise crashed down on my mind and I shoved it away with a mental effort. I heard Abby vacillate between screams and whimpers. That same paternal instinct that had kept me in the town, led me to risk angelic script, brought me to the very doorstep of the inky black nightmare, exploded into blinding white fury. I rolled onto to my stomach. I did my best to ignore the puddle of my own blood that squelched beneath my hand and the unpleasant grating sound of my ribs. Oh, and blinding flashes of pain, let’s not forgot those. I pushed myself up to my feet, but even the fury roiling in me couldn’t wholly overcome blood loss and my injuries. I swayed and staggered a little, but managed to stay up.