"I'm gonna burn his body so he can't come back. Then I'm gonna smash the servers so no one can ever start this program up again."
"Burn him? Ben, let's let well enough alone—"
"He killed my friends, Stan! He tried to kill me, too." And he almost succeeded, his mind finished, dredging up a famous line from Richard Matheson's Hell House.
"I understand you're upset. But we need to get out of here—"
"We have to go, Ben," Lilian said.
"You go. I'll catch up with you."
"I'm not leaving here without you."
"Then stay. Help me end this."
He squirted a jet of lighter fluid onto Garrote's back, down his skeletal ribs and bony shoulders. Another on his bald head, over his ear and down his cheek. He squeezed the bottle methodically, again and again, a blanket of Zen calm draping over him. He thought he'd never felt so calm in the past four years, not since the day he'd seen Rex Garrote standing in the window, watching him.
"Come on, kid," Stan pleaded.
Ben ignored him, splashing the accelerant on Garrote's weak, atrophied arms, across his wrinkled buttocks and spindly legs. The smell of the lighter fluid prickled his nostrils. His limbs felt light and airy. It wouldn't have surprised Ben to know he was getting high, whether from the fumes or the knowledge that Garrote would soon be gone, dead, finito. Dig it, babies, he thought, in his best Rex Garrote impression.
"Ah, fuck it," Stan said.
In his peripheral vision, Ben saw Stan bend to pick up the axe, heard its heavy blade scrape on the floor tiles. The detective brought it to the servers, hauled back, and swung.
The blade struck one of the machines and the plastic splintered, parts scattering in every direction, exposing diodes and capacitors and flashing LEDs. He swung again and sparks arced out in a shower of plastic and machinery. The room dimmed slightly as its lights winked out.
Ben squirted the last of the can onto Garrote's body and tossed the tin aside—remembering the madman performing a similar action with the gas can in the library. He reached into his pocket for the Kitchen God matches and froze, his whole body seizing in horror.
The pocket was empty.
"No," he muttered, his plan ruined in an instant of carelessness. He'd lost them. Somewhere along the way they must have fallen out of his pocket. "Where are they? Where are they?"
Lilian said, "What happened?"
Behind him Stan had gone to work on another server. He heard the whoosh of the blade slicing the air and the car crash jangle of plastic and metal.
"I lost the matches!" he cried, getting angrier with himself, more frustrated. "I lost the fucking matches!"
A hand fell on his shoulder. Stan had laid the axe against the servers and was reaching into the lapel pocket of his jacket. "Loosen up, kid," he said. He took out a chrome Zippo lighter. Ben snatched it eagerly from his hand. "I don't need it back. Burn that son of a bitch, Ben. Send him straight to Hell."
Smiling, Ben spun the wheel. The flint sparked but didn't light. It caught on the second try, flickering with an orange flame that warmed his hand. He glanced over his shoulder at Stan, and the retired detective gave him a nod of encouragement. Lilian watched him with a mixture of fascination and dread. He supposed, with the firelight flickering over the shadows on his face, he looked a bit like a madman himself.
"You might want to step back," he told her.
She took two deliberate steps backward, never taking her eyes off of him.
Ben tossed the Zippo at the dead man and stepped back in a somewhat clumsy movement. The flames engulfed Garrote's body—for a moment, Ben was sure they had all been fooled, that he'd been squirting lighter fluid at a hologram and Garrote, the real Garrote, would step out of the shadows to applaud their futile attempt before closing the curtain on them for good.
But Garrote lay there, his flesh turning a crisp brown, bubbling and crackling with blue-tinted flames. Ben stared at the macabre sight, mesmerized, amazed he'd come so far, that he'd lived long enough to see this insane plan through, to burn his former idol to ash and watch the man's dream crumble to dust.
Stan struck another server with the axe and this time it felt as though the ground beneath their feet had shaken. The sensation pulled him out of his reverie and he realized with sudden terror that his heart was beating very rapidly. He reached into the hip pocket of his shorts and felt for the few pills he'd managed to save from the poltergeists in the prison. He popped two into his mouth, worked up some saliva and swallowed the bitter pills whole.
The ground shook again. This time Stan held the axe over his shoulder, about to swing. The server cabinets rattled. Stan looked back as sparks fizzled from the half dozen machines he'd damaged, their electronic guts spewing from their shells.
"Did you feel that?" Lilian asked, her eyes wet and wide with fear, covering her nose from the smell.
Ben looked at the burning man on the floor, a mass of charred flesh, split open and cracked, almost unrecognizably human. Fat and blood oozed out, bubbling and blackening to a thick scum on the tiles. The smell was both terrible and savory, something like burnt pork, with a cloying, rich undersmell of copper, scalded urine and sulfur.
He nodded. "Let's go."
Stan kept the axe and the three of them stepped into darkened maze of servers. The ground shook again, hard enough to loosen plaster dust from the ceiling and make several cabinets swing open in their path. The survivors danced delicately between them.
Before they rounded the first corner, Ben risked a glance back at the room they'd just left. Fire flickered over the servers, and shadows moved in the yellow light. But Garrote was dead and ghosts threw no shadows. He passed it off as a trick of the light and kept following behind Lilian, who followed behind Stan, still holding the axe out in front of himself as if he thought it would protect them from ghosts.
The floor beneath their feet rumbled as something high above them crashed to the ground. Ben looked up. In the alternating green and red light, he thought he saw cracks in the ceiling. Whatever had fallen had been immensely heavy. Was Garrote House itself coming down? Ben hoped that it was—though the timing could be better. He wished he could have seen it for himself, even from the other side of the wall. Down here it meant nothing to them but more danger.
"I'd really feel better if I led the way," Lilian said.
"Nah," Stan said. "I'm closest to death, I should be up front."
"Then at least follow my directions."
Stan stopped at a T-junction and turned to Lilian. "All right then. Which way—?"
He gasped. His whole body shuddered. His eyes went wide and the hat canted then fell off his head. His fingers unfurled from the axe handle and the blade clanged to the floor, the haft toppling.
Ben thought, Heart attack?
Lilian called Stan's name. He didn't answer, merely gripped his stomach. Pain, sorrow and surprise suddenly fighting for control over his facial features. A mouthful of blood spurted from his lips and dribbled down his chin. More blood oozed out from between his fingers and down over his shiny belt buckle.
Ben grabbed Lilian's shoulders and pulled her back as the detective slumped against the cabinets and slid to the floor with a thump, his blood streaking the black metal, his eyes glazed, looking up at his killer.
The man stepped over him, a long knife held in his right hand, dripping with the detective's blood, his blue chambray shirt and khakis stained by gouts of it. Handcuffs swung from a scabbed and bruised wrist. He smiled.
"Told you I'd stick you, pig," the Doll's Head Murderer grunted, tearing off his headset to get a good look at his victim. He worked up a mouthful of saliva and spat on the bleeding detective. The thick gob spattered Stan Beadle's eyes. He sat there, unblinking, as the murderer's spit oozed down over his eyelashes and onto the lines of his stubbled cheek.
Then the light faded from his eyes for good.
Alex Fischer, still very much alive, turned his handsome, youthful grin on Lilian. "Hey there, do
llface," he said with surprised delight. "What's shakin'?"
Above them the ceiling rumbled again, louder and longer than before. And in flashes of intermittent dark, the man with the knife began to laugh.
THE HOUSE FALLS
WE'RE DEAD, SHE thought. We're so close, almost there, now it's all over, he killed Stan, he fucking killed Stan!—no code, no way to escape, no way to stop him, nowhere to run, and how did he get here, how did he get here, how the hell did he FIND US?
"I'm so happy to have found you, Pretty Polly," the murderer said, swishing the blade back and forth like a conductor's baton. He stepped over the detective's body, coming toward them, and Lilian back-stepped, bumping into Ben's shoulder.
"Don't come any closer!" Ben shouted. In the confined space beneath Garrote House his voice thundered.
The killer grinned. "Or what? You're gonna zap me?" The grin widened. "Well, go ahead. Try it. I'll even give you the advantage." He slipped the knife from his right hand to his handcuffed left and tucked the right behind his back. "You feeling lucky, kid? 'Cause I am. You better believe I am." He jiggled the handcuffs hanging from his wrist. "If you idiots hadn't lured that dumb gangster over, I never would've got away from the bitch's trailer. And that four-eyed doufus, that nerd in the computer, he led me right to the pig with promises of sweet revenge."
Four-eyed doufus, Lilian thought, sharing a brief look of despair with Ben. Could he mean Harrison? And if so, had they really made the right choice severing Garrote's connection to the computers? Had they killed him—or just set him free?
The killer was still blathering. "And then ho-ho-ho! Old Man Stan walked right into my web with two little stinkbugs in tow: the turd and the tartlet. One to kill and one to…" He winked at her. "Well, that's for me to know and you to find out, sweet cheeks."
"Shut up!" Ben said, thrusting the stun gun forward. "Don't talk to her like that."
Fischer gave him an impressed look. "Well, we've just witnessed a historic moment here, sports fans!" He turned the knife on Lilian. "Looks like your boyfriend's balls just dropped."
Sonic booms shook the tunnel before she could reply, one after the other, rattling the cabinets on either side of them and sending down another shower of dust, this time speckled with bits of concrete that cracked and crumbled on the floor around them.
They had to get out of here, and quick. The crack in the ceiling was becoming a chasm. The next crash could topple the servers and collapse the tunnel and they would all die down here in the dark—or worse, they'd survive, broken and unable to move beneath the rubble of Garrote House, until the ghosts found them or they died of starvation.
"Boy oh boy, it's all coming down up there," the killer said with very little concern.
"We have to get out of here!" Lilian shouted at him.
The killer shrugged. "Maybe. But we're gonna have us a little fun first. Yes, we are."
He advanced another step and suddenly the solution came bright and clear in Lilian's mind. But it depended on Ben being quick with the stun gun and he had a dazed look in his eyes, which likely meant he'd taken another pill. If his response was delayed, the stun gun wouldn't matter. Fischer would gut them both and—if the programmer really had led him here—walk right out the back door, letting Hell out with him.
There was no other choice. She had to try.
Fischer took another step. One more and she would spring her trap.
She hurled a thought at Ben, hoping the intensity of her emotions would somehow push it from her mind to his with very little belief that it would: Follow my lead, she thought, watching the killer's shoes. It was a dance between three people. One and two and…
Fischer stepped forward.
Lilian grabbed the cabinet door and swung it outward.
The blade struck it, scraping along its metal face with a high-pitched squeal. The killer's hand jerked backward and the door struck him in the face. He screamed, the sound muffled as he grabbed his nose. Catching her cue, Ben shot out with the stun gun, pulling the trigger, angry blue-white sparks jumping between the electrodes—
And Fischer batted his arm away easily. He kicked Ben in the shin with the heel of his brown leather Oxford and Ben dropped the stun gun, falling to a knee.
"Oh, you little bitch!" Fischer said, his voice nasal, his nose mashed and oozing blood into his mouth. He slammed the door closed and kicked the stun gun out of reach. It skittered across the floor and stopped between Stan's legs. "Oh, you are gonna get it now—"
A terrible crack came from above, as loud as a shifting tectonic plate. Lilian looked up but Fischer ignored it, he kept coming toward her with the knife, even as a fresh rain of concrete and dust sifted down, blood staining his teeth and streaming down his chin like he'd just eaten a meal of raw flesh, his lips curled upward in a satisfied smile.
The chunk of ceiling struck Fischer dead on, and in the instant before the floor collapsed beneath his feet Lilian saw his head flatten, wiping away his handsome rich boy's smile with a remarkable splatter of brain and skull and teeth, and his bones—every one of them—pulverized and flattened as easily as if the clothes he wore had been full of stuffing, and all that was left to prove he'd just been standing there and that the entire ordeal hadn't been a hallucination or simply another hologram was the single Oxford shoe sticking out from the shallow pit beneath the giant hunk of concrete and bent rebar.
"Holy shit," Ben said, looking down at the rubble barely five feet from where he stood. He looked up at the black hole in the ceiling and laughed anxiously. "Holy shit, did you see that?"
Lilian said, "Come on."
They stepped around the debris. Ben stooped to pick up the stun gun at the detective's feet. He snagged Stan's hat with his other hand and laid it on the old man's head.
No time for a moment of silence. Another boom tipped the cabinets behind them and they fell like dominoes, crashing down over the killer's remains. Lilian ran down the corridor to the right, hoping that if they were forced to backtrack, they would still have time before the whole damned ceiling collapsed on them, covering them in the rubble of Garrote House.
Another boom resounded in the semi-dark. The brittle CRACK! that followed, like lightning preceding the thunder, started somewhere behind them and radiated outward in multiple directions, splitting the concrete along jagged fault lines. Server cabinets toppled in their wake—BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!—as Lilian and Ben leaped out of the maze into a large open space the size of an empty parking lot, its circular pillars cracked and straining against the shifting weight above.
As they looked back, a portion of ceiling roughly the size of Kansas caved in, smashing heavily on the server maze with a sizzle of electricity and a mushroom cloud of dust and debris.
Ahead of them, a seemingly impossible distance away, stood a small alcove, its concrete wall painted with diagonal yellow safety stripes, a cone of white light shining down on the large metal door.
The hatch.
It was real. They'd found it.
Behind them the antique carpets, flooring and furniture of Garrote House tumbled noisily into the chasm, crashing down on the mountain of broken concrete and jagged metal, tables and chairs splintering, china and stemware smashing, a grand piano obliterated in a discordant explosion of black and white ivory and a twang of snapped strings. The chandelier jingled the whole way down and struck the expanding ruins with a dull, unmusical thud, followed immediately by an entire flight of stairs, which collapsed accordion-like into itself, then the fireplace hearth and a portion of chimney, still laden with burning logs.
The entire process happened quickly, and the walls came down in Tetris-shaped chunks of brick, letting the last dying light of day shine through the ragged opening.
"Ha! Yes!" Smiling wide, Ben leapt into the air, pumping a fist. When he landed, he grabbed his chest, bunching up his T-shirt between clenching fingers. "We did it," he said, his brow knotted, his voice almost a groan. "We beat him, Lilian! We fucking beat him!" He was so thrilled, so
over the moon, he barely seemed to notice he was in pain.
Silence. The great collapse had subsided. A few small cracks sounded intermittently here and there, like lake ice expanding, but it seemed the worst was over.
But she knew they weren't safe yet, and as she thought this, almost as if her mind had conjured them up from nothing, the first wave of Garrote's army began streaming through the massive hole.
THE HATCH
WITH A FIST pressed between his ribs to keep his heart from bursting out of his chest, Ben stood marveling at the ghosts pouring through the jagged Hellmouth into the tunnels below.
For a moment he wasn't sure it was just ghosts in the exodus: among the legions of dead prisoners and soldiers and carnival workers and pirates and civilians from every other period in history, there were too many people wearing modern attire, survivors in flip-flops and fanny packs and fullback ballcaps and T-shirts with popular catchphrases and iconic fictional characters. These were Ghostland customers, the recently deceased. Ben watched them drop through the hole like paratroopers into enemy territory, sunlight filtering through their bodies rather than catching them in silhouette, and a creeping sensation crawled beneath the flesh of his neck and cheeks.
Scant seconds ago, he'd been sure it was all over. Now he could see it would never end. By separating Garrote from the machines, they'd allowed him to escape the confines of the program. None of the technology his people had made was necessary any longer. In death, for-real death, Rex Garrote had evolved beyond the program.
Beyond Ghostland.
He'd won.
Lilian grabbed Ben by the shoulder, trying to pull him along. But he stayed put, watching the surge, a feeling gnawing at the edges of conscious thought like a caged animal, a sense that he'd forgotten something terribly important.
He could see Lilian was starting to panic, caught between bolting for the door and waiting for him to snap out of it. And somehow, aside from the hammering of his heart, Ben felt calm, almost at peace. All he could think was that the fumes from the lighter fluid must have really gotten to him. He felt lightheaded, and the strange, floating sensation was traveling from his brain down his arms.
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