“I’ve found something,” Felicity said, bringing a leather-bound book out of a desk drawer. The book was stuffed with loose papers and was kept shut with a black ribbon that had been tied around the covers. Felicity showed me a red magic circle that had been stamped into the leather. “The Midnight Cabal,” she said. “And here’s another.” She brought an identical book out of the drawer and laid it on a pile of papers.
“Anything else in there?” I asked as she examined the drawer again.
“Just these keys,” she said, holding up a set of keys on a metal ring.
“I assume they fit the doors in the basement.”
She nodded and picked up the backpack from the floor. She tossed the keys inside and slid the books in too.
We were way past the stage of trying to be stealthy. The Midnight Cabal was somehow involved with Butterfly Heights and the books Felicity had found would probably be useful to the Society of Shadows. Besides, we wouldn’t have time to read through them even if we spent all night in here.
“I can’t see anything else of value,” Felicity said.
“Nothing on the bookshelves either. I think we’ve found what we were looking for.”
She closed the drawers and I used the Janus statue to lock them and the office door once we were standing outside in the corridor. Campbell would realize the books were missing when he opened the drawer but there was no point in telegraphing the theft of his stuff. Let him wonder what the hell had happened.
As we were heading back downstairs, my phone rang. It was Steve.
“It’s here,” he said as I hit the speaker button so Felicity could listen in. “Reception area.”
I ended the call and we ran down the stairs.
21
When we opened the door that led to the reception area, the first thing I noticed was a smell of saltwater hanging in the air, the same as I’d smelled in the cell downstairs. The second was a mournful song sung in a woman’s voice coming from nowhere in particular.
Steve was in his office, pressed against the far wall, hands pressed over his ears. “You hear it, right? Tell me you hear it.”
“I hear it,” I said.
“Get rid of it,” Steve said in a panicked voice. “Do something!”
I took out my crystal shard and held it up. It glowed brightly, indicating strong magic at work. But without the proper equipment, there was no way we would be able to see the ghost. And I hadn’t brought any of my ghost-hunting stuff to Moosehead Lake, it was all back in Dearmont.
“You were right,” I told Felicity. “We came unprepared.”
“I can’t hear anything,” she said.
“You can’t hear the singing?”
She shook her head. “No.”
Steve clutched his skull. “It’s getting inside my head. Stop it! Please, stop it!”
I had no idea what was happening to him but we had to get him away from the ghostly voice. “We need to get Steve outside,” I said, running for the door that led to his office. He was huddled on the floor when we got to him.
“Make it go away,” he whimpered.
“We’re getting you out of here,” I said. “Can you walk? We need to get you outside.”
He staggered to his feet. His face was drawn, his eyes bloodshot. Felicity and I took a hold of each of his arms and threw them around our shoulders, supporting him as we left the office, and made our way to the exit.
“Almost there,” I assured Steve as we got closer to the door. “Just a couple more feet and we’ll be—” I stopped as an icy finger of pain slid into my head. I cried out and fell to the floor, holding my head as if that would take the pain away.
I heard Felicity’s voice say, “Alec?” but I couldn’t reply. The singing reverberated in my head, mournful and longing. Visions flashed into my mind. I felt as if I were underwater in a deep, dark ocean, saltwater filling my throat and lungs, a woman’s face in front of me, watching me with cold eyes.
Then I saw an island in my mind’s eye, an island with a pristine beach and palm trees atop rocky cliffs. There were more women here, walking along the bright white sand in flowing, diaphanous gowns that seemed to float in the air around them. And the women had wings of brightly-colored feathers that shone in the sun.
The image changed again, became a vision of ships in the distance. They were old ships, sloops and frigates with white sails that bore the red symbol of the Midnight Cabal.
I heard Felicity’s voice again but it was more distant now, drowned out by the singing. And I was suddenly beneath the water again, drowning, being pulled down to a deep, dark, watery death. I could feel my life slipping away as the mournful song continued, twisting through my mind. And in front of me was the woman, seemingly in no need of life-giving air as she held me in her arms and watched me drown.
Then I was lying on the lawn of Butterfly Heights beneath a cloudy, starless sky. Felicity was looking down at me, her dark eyes filled with concern.
“Alec?” she said. “Can you hear me?”
“I hear you,” I said, struggling into a sitting position. “But I’ve got one hell of a headache.”
Steve was lying on the lawn a few feet away, eyes open, staring up at the night sky. He looked as bad as I felt.
“What happened?” I asked Felicity.
“You collapsed and started holding your head and writhing around, just like Steve. I had to drag both of you out of there.”
“You didn’t feel it in your head? You didn’t see the visions? The woman’s face?”
“No. I saw both of you in pain but nothing else.”
“I saw a beach,” I said, getting up. “And ships on the sea.”
“It’s always the same,” Steve said, sitting up and rubbing his temples. “The sea, the ships, and the drowning. I told you, it gets into your head. It gives you nightmares. The images fade eventually but right now I remember that they are the same images every time. And I’m afraid that there’ll be a time when I see them and I won’t wake up afterward. I’ll drown in the nightmare. The patients’ conditions are being made worse by that thing.” He got to his feet unsteadily. “There must be something you can do.”
“We need to go back inside,” I told Felicity.
“Not while that thing is in there,” she said.
“It’ll move on to other parts of the hospital,” Steve said. “It doesn’t stay in one place for long. It’s probably moved to the patients’ rooms by now.”
We went back into the building warily. The reception area was quiet.
“I need to put the cameras back on,” Steve said, “at least for a little while. If Campbell knows they were turned off for long, he’ll get suspicious.” He sat at his desk and began typing on the keyboard. The monitors flickered to life. “What the hell?”
“What is it?” I asked.
“I just saw someone walking around the corner there,” he said, pointing at one of the monitors.
“A patient?” Felicity asked.
“Their doors are locked at night. There shouldn’t be anyone walking around.” He typed on the keyboard again, bringing up various camera angles. “Damn it, it’s James. How did he get out of his room?”
The monitor showed James Elliot shuffling slowly along the corridor. He looked as if he might be sleepwalking.
“Where’s he going?” I asked Steve.
He shrugged. “Who knows? I need to get him back to his room.”
“We’ll come with you,” I said.
Steve sighed. “It’d be better if you stayed here. James gets agitated when you’re around.”
He had a point. I needed to know more about James’s knowledge of Mister Scary but I didn’t want to upset him.
“We’ll wait here,” I told Steve. He could help us gain access to James in the future. Better to earn his trust than piss him off.
He took two walkie-talkies from a shelf and handed one to me. “Keep in touch with this. You can tell me if James turns off that corridor.”
“Oka
y,” I said, sitting at the desk in front of the monitors. “We’ll keep you updated.” James was still shuffling along the same corridor, as if in a trance.
“I’d like to know how the hell he got out of his room,” Steve said, taking a last look at the monitor before leaving the office and going through the door that led to the inner part of the building.
The walkie-talkie squawked, Steve’s voice sounding distant through the crackling static. “He still in that same corridor?”
“Same corridor,” I said. “I’ll let you know if that changes.”
“Do you think this is related to that singing you heard?” Felicity asked me, taking a seat at the other desk.
“I don’t know. It could be or James might just be sleepwalking.”
Steve appeared on one of the monitors, jogging along the corridor. I saw him raise the walkie-talkie to his mouth and then heard his voice coming through the one on the desk. “I think he’s headed for the old storeroom again. That’s where we usually find him when he goes missing. He doesn’t have the key anymore but the lock is busted, so he won’t need one to get in there.”
As Steve had predicted, James opened a door and disappeared from the camera’s view. “He’s gone into a room,” I told Steve.
“Yeah, I saw him close the door behind him. It is the old storeroom. I’ll get him back to his room and I’ll be back in the office shortly.”
I watched him on the monitor as he went through the same door James had used moments earlier.
Felicity had opened the backpack and was looking through one of the leather-bound Midnight Cabal books.
“Anything interesting?” I asked her.
“I’m not sure yet.” She flicked through a few pages. “It seems the Midnight Cabal used the Pinewood Heights Asylum as a cover for something they were working on in the 1940s.”
“Which was?”
“I’m not sure but it involved experiments in the basement.”
“Experiments on the patients?”
She shook her head, scanning the pages of the book. “Experiments on a creature they’d captured. There are lots of technical notes here, most of them referring to some sort of serum they were developing. They called it Project Ligeia. Named after the Edgar Allan Poe story, I suppose.”
“It’s a good thing this place got shut down after Henry Fields went on the rampage,” I said. “Who knows what they might have achieved if their project had remained operational?”
“After it closed down, they probably continued the same experiments somewhere else,” she said, reading more of the book. “Or maybe they didn’t. It seems there were nine members of the Midnight Cabal based here, working on the project.”
“And Henry Fields killed nine members of staff,” I said. “Maybe he did the world a favor by taking nine members of the Cabal with him when he killed himself. Maybe he destroyed Project Ligeia.”
“Except he didn’t actually kill himself,” Felicity reminded me. “He may have killed nine members of the Midnight Cabal but only to further his own plans. He used them to escape this place and cross over into the Shadow Land.”
She pulled a black and white photograph from the book and gave it to me. The picture showed a man hanging in an office, surrounded by dead bodies. The photograph was grainy but that seemed to make the scene even more grisly.
“Pretty gruesome,” I said, giving it back to her.
Felicity took a closer look at the picture and held it up so I could see it again. “Look in the corner.”
In the corner of the room, behind the desk that had belonged to the director of the Pinewood Heights Asylum, stood a tall, oval mirror with an ornate wooden frame that was adorned with carvings of vines and ivy, matching the bannister we’d seen earlier. On the top right corner of the glass was a dark smudge. When I looked closer, the smudge looked like a handprint.
“That’s the portal he used to get to the Shadow Land,” I said. “But he didn’t physically step through it, he killed himself after activating it. So what part of him went to the Shadow Land? His spirit? His soul?”
“Probably his astral body,” Felicity said. “Whatever ritual he performed must have required that he lose his physical body. I suppose that without it, he can live forever in whatever form he’s taken.”
“But when he kills, he’s a physical person,” I said. “The Bloody Summer Night Massacre wasn’t carried out by a ghost or an astral being. It was a person who attacked those kids.”
She thought about that for a moment. “Maybe he hijacks real people’s bodies, possesses them so he can commit murder, and then returns to the Shadow Land in his shadow form.”
That made sense and it explained why Mister Scary couldn’t be killed by conventional means. “He’s inside someone else’s body when he commits his crimes. So if the body is killed, he simply removes it from the scene and hijacks a new person next time.”
She nodded. “He can’t actually be killed himself because he’s a spirit, or a ghost, or whatever. He’s only driving the body that carries out the massacre. And I think we know where he’s finding the bodies. The patients here could never tell anyone what happened to them because their experience would be passed off as a delusion. The patients themselves might even believe it’s just a part of their illness.”
“So James wasn’t watching Mister Scary in the Shadow Land through some sort of remote viewing; he was actually there. When Leon and I looked down from that window, it was James we saw standing there, and he was possessed by Mister Scary?”
Felicity’s eyes were suddenly filled with concern. “Do you think he’s forced James to murder people?”
I considered that. “Probably not. The last time Mister Scary struck, Leah Carlyle killed him, so that body was probably dumped and then I guess James was hijacked so he could carry out the next set of murders.”
I turned to the monitor. Steve hadn’t emerged from the storeroom. Unless he’d come out when I’d been looking at the photo, he and James were still in there. I picked up the walkie-talkie and pressed the talk button. “Steve, are you there?”
There was no answer other than crackling static.
“Maybe we should make sure they’re okay,” I said.
Felicity looked at the monitor, at the open door that Steve had gone through. That look of concern was still on her face. “Yes, we should.”
We left the office and used the keycard to enter the inner part of the building, walking along the corridor in the direction Campbell had led us when James had locked himself in the storeroom. The swords in our hands cast an eerie blue glow over the walls.
When we got to the open storeroom door, I pushed my sword blade through the doorway to light the interior of the dark room. The enchanted glow picked out shelves and pieces of furniture covered in dust sheets but there was no sign of Steve or James.
I stepped inside and looked around. Felicity followed me and used her own sword’s glow to illuminate the room.
“It’s very dusty,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I can’t see why James would bother stealing a key to come here.”
“Probably because of that,” I said, pointing my sword at a piece of furniture in the corner. The dust sheet that had covered it lay on the floor, revealing a decorative wooden frame carved in the shape of vines and ivy leaves.
The mirror from the crime-scene photo stood facing us, and pressed into the top-right corner of the glass was an old, dried, bloody handprint.
22
I heard a sound behind me and turned around, sword held ready to strike. The blade’s glow illuminated Steve cowering in the corner. He was curled into a fetal position, knees up against his chest.
“It came out of there,” he said, his eyes fixed fearfully on the glass. “It grabbed James and took him into the mirror. I froze. I’m sorry. I failed him.”
I crouched next to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Listen to me, Steve. You didn’t fail anyone. You brought us here to help the patients and that’s what we’re goi
ng to do. When this is all done, and Butterfly Heights is rid of its problems, the patients will have you to thank.”
He sat up, leaning heavily against the wall, and said through gritted teeth, “Unfortunately, I won’t be here when that happens.” A deep, red slash ran across his chest, pumping out blood at an alarming rate. “He got me,” Steve said weakly. “He hit me with a hook.”
“We need an ambulance,” I said to Felicity. She already had her phone in hand and was dialing.
“No need for that,” Steve said. “It’s too late for me. Just promise me you’ll get the damned thing.” He laughed weakly. “I don’t even know what it was.”
“It was Mister Scary,” I said. “And I will kill him.”
“Thank you,” he said quietly. His head fell to one side, his eyes staring unseeingly at the floor. The blood that had been pumping from the wound in his chest slowed to a trickle. I reached forward and closed his eyelids. He’d been a good man, concerned for the patients in this place. He didn’t deserve to be taken by Mister Scary for no reason other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I stood up and turned to the mirror. “I’m going through,” I told Felicity. “Into the Shadow Land. Are you coming?”
She put her phone into her pocket and looked at me, her facial features highlighted by the blue glow from the enchanted swords. “Of course I’m damn well coming.”
We stepped over to the mirror and I pushed the tip of my sword against the glass. It met no resistance and slid through, disappearing into the glass. “The portal is open,” I said. “It’s probably been open since Fields activated it over seventy years ago. He’s been using it to go back and forth ever since.”
“Now we’ll use it to get to him,” Felicity said.
I nodded and stepped forward into the mirror. When I came out through the other side, I was in the same storeroom but now the walls were dark and seemed insubstantial, as if they were made of black smoke.
Shadow Land Page 14
