Shadow Land

by Adam J. Wright

  Felicity stepped out from the mirror and stood next to me. “So this is the shadow version of the hospital. It looks almost the same as the real version.”

  “But it isn’t the same,” I said. “There will be differences. Thoughts have power here and Mister Scary has had a long time to shape this version however he wants it. We have to be careful.”

  We left the room and stood in a dark, deserted corridor with closed doors running along the walls on both sides. Each door was numbered and bore a small hatch like the cells we’d seen in the basement.

  I went over to the closest door and pulled back the hatch. Inside, a man lay curled up asleep on a bed. He was restless, as if having nightmares. Floating above the bed, a mass of black smoky tendrils writhed and twisted, occasionally reaching down and slithering over the man’s sleeping form, making him stiffen and cry out in his sleep.

  I stepped back from the hatch and Felicity looked into the cell. “Is that one of the patients at the hospital?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Come on, we need to find James and Mister Scary.”

  We set off along the corridor, past the doors, to a shadow version of the day room we’d seen during our first visit to Butterfly Heights. Here, there were shadow people sitting at the tables, playing games with cards that were no more than squares of black smoke and chess pieces that were made of shadows.

  “No sign of them here,” Felicity said.

  I stepped out of the room and back into the corridor. “I think they might be in the basement. That seems to be the center of activity in this place. It’s where the Midnight Cabal was working on its project and it’s where there’s something locked away in a cell. It stands to reason that Mister Scary might run his own little project from there.”

  “That makes sense,” Felicity said. “But how do we know where the basement is in this version of the hospital? Everything here is a bit different, including the floor plan.”

  I remembered how Leon and I had managed to escape the Shadow Land before, by thinking ourselves into the shadow version of Blackthorn House, where we knew there was a portal to the real world.

  “You remember the basement door?” I asked Felicity.

  She nodded. “Yes, of course.”

  “Close your eyes and think of it, imagine you’re standing in front of it.”

  She looked at me incredulously but she said, “All right,” and closed her eyes.

  I did the same, picturing the basement door in my mind, the oaken wood and the brass plaque that said Basement.

  When I opened my eyes, we were standing at the shadow version of the door. “Open your eyes,” I told Felicity.

  She opened them and they went wide when she saw the basement door. “How did that happen?”

  “Like I said, thoughts have power here. I don’t think the Shadow Land has a conventional geography. Its landscape is determined by mental images.” I opened the door.

  “And this version of the door is unlocked,” Felicity said. “That’s lucky, because we left the Janus statue in Steve’s office.”

  “Even if it was locked, we could just think it unlocked. Maybe. There’s a lot we don’t know about this place.”

  “Well, let’s find out what’s in the basement,” Felicity said.

  We descended the spiral staircase, both of us on high alert in case Mister Scary should come rushing up at us.

  When we reached the bottom, the shadow version of the iron door was unlocked. I pushed the door open and we stepped through.

  This version of the subterranean room wasn’t like the one we’d seen in the real world. Where that room had been empty save for a desk and the Midnight Cabal logo on the wall, the shadow version was inhabited by shadow people.

  Like the shadowy card and chess players we’d seen in the day room, the insubstantial people in this room seemed to be no more than a recording of what had once taken place here. They ignored us as we walked among them.

  There was also shadow-furniture in the room; desks set against the walls and bookshelves along one wall. In the center of the room, a long table sat beneath a surgical light.

  Some of the shadow people sat at the desks, writing in books, while others were gathered around the table, holding medical instruments. I walked over to the table to see what was lying on it.

  The dark shape seemed to be a woman with wings. When I looked closer, I saw that she had the torso of a woman but the legs and feet of a bird. Her head was covered with some kind of hood.

  “Felicity, any idea what this is?”

  She came over and looked at the creature on the table. “Half-woman, half-bird. Probably a siren or a harpy. Oh, of course, it’s a siren. The name Project Ligeia makes sense now. I thought it was named after the Poe story but Ligeia was also the name of one of the sirens in Greek mythology.”

  “Looks like the serum they were making was created from her blood,” I said, watching the shadow doctors bending over the siren with their scalpels and needles.

  Sadness filled Felicity’s eyes. “Project Ligeia ended in 1942 when the Pinewood Asylum closed down. Do you think she’s been locked in her cell all that time? For almost eighty years?”

  “I think it’s possible she’s been a captive for much longer than that,” I said. “When I had those visions earlier, I saw Midnight Cabal ships that looked like they were from the eighteenth century. I think the cabal members aboard those ships somehow captured her. She must have been moved to Pinewood Asylum in the late nineteenth century when it was built and was either forgotten or left to rot when the Cabal abandoned the place.”

  “That’s awful. No creature should have to suffer like that.”

  “I guess that’s why she’s attacking the hospital staff and patients with her song. She’s reaching out the only way she knows how. And what is Campbell’s involvement in all of this? He knows about the siren in the basement and he had the project notebooks. Is he a member of the Midnight Cabal or did he stumble on the remains of their forgotten project and resurrect it for his own ends?”

  Answers to those questions would have to wait. We still needed to find Mister Scary.

  “We should check the cells,” I said, indicating the door on the other side of the room. “Maybe Mister Scary has James locked up in there.”

  I opened the door that led to the cells and stepped through. The shadow version of this area of the basement was exactly the same as the real-world version: nine numbered cells with hatches on their doors.

  We checked the eight cells situated on the sides of the corridor. They were all empty. That left the ninth cell, where we knew a siren was locked up in the real world.

  I pulled back the hatch and looked inside.

  The cell was much larger than the others and had a small circular pool at its center. The ceiling was at least fifty feet high and branches had been fixed to the walls at various heights. I assumed these were perches for the siren. The interior of the cell was like the inside of a giant birdcage.

  A shadow version of the siren was huddled in the corner, wings drawn up around her body and overhead as she rocked slowly back and forth. Floating above her, a dark mass of tendrils writhed in the air, like the ones I’d seen over the patient’s bed upstairs. Every couple of seconds, a tendril reached out and touched the siren’s wings. She flinched and let out a low, mournful song that she seemed to be singing to comfort herself.

  I stepped aside and Felicity peered through the hatch. “It looks like she’s being tortured,” she whispered. “Is Mister Scary doing this?”

  “Either him or Campbell,” I said. “I wouldn’t put anything past the doctor at this point.”

  She closed the hatch. “So where is Mister Scary? He obviously isn’t down here. And I can’t think of any other parts of the hospital that would have a particular significance for him.”

  “Maybe he isn’t in this building at all. There’s a part of the Shadow Land where he builds the shadow houses, the part where Leon and I went. James said Mister Scary
shows him things. Could he be showing him the murders he’s committed, replayed over and over in those houses?”

  “It’s possible,” Felicity said. “But how do we get there from here?”

  “You remember what Blackthorn House looks like?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “We can get there the same way we got to the basement door.”

  “All right. The image I remember best of Blackthorn House is from a photograph in the paper, taken from the garden.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  She closed her eyes. I instinctively reached out and took her hand. I wasn’t exactly sure how this thought-travel worked and I didn’t want to lose her in the Shadow Land.

  I closed my own eyes and thought of Blackthorn House, the scene of the Bloody Summer Massacre, where Mister Scary had killed over a dozen high-school students and Mallory had been the only survivor.

  When I opened my eyes again, I was standing on the lawn of Blackthorn House and Felicity was standing next to me.

  She looked at the house and then at our surroundings. There were other shadow buildings here and Mister Scary had arranged them in two neat rows, forming a street. A street memorializing his kills.

  “This is very macabre,” she said.

  “Yes, it is. If we can stop Mister Scary, he won’t be able to add any more buildings to his collection. And the ones that are here will probably fade away over time, becoming nothing more than insubstantial smoke and memories.”

  “That’s all the motivation I need,” she said. “Let’s kill the bastard.”

  We stepped up to the front door of Blackthorn House and opened it. As the door swung inward, we heard a scream from inside.

  23

  “That sounded like James,” Felicity said, stepping into the house and checking the foyer around me. Something rushed at me from the darkness and I cried out in surprise, raising my sword in defense.

  But it was nothing more than the shadow of a teenage girl, fleeing in terror from something unseen. I saw another fleeing shadow on the stairs, this one a young man desperately trying to get to the second floor, looking over his shoulder at an unseen assailant.

  “This is the Bloody Summer Night Massacre,” Felicity said. “Being replayed, just like you said.”

  “It wasn’t like this when Leon and I were here, so Mister Scary must be able to replay that night at will.”

  “Which means he’s here somewhere,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  The scream came again, from somewhere on the second floor. I ran up the stairs, sword ready, and burst into the first room I came to. There was nothing in here but a couple of dead shadow students lying on the floor, runes carved into their bodies.

  There was a door to an adjoining room. I kicked it open and saw James Elliot, kneeling in the middle of a glowing magic circle on the floor. His head was bowed and he was shivering as if in pain.

  “James,” I said, rushing forward.

  He stood up impossibly quickly, as if he were being dragged up by an invisible hand, and threw his head back, screaming again. Then he collapsed to the floor like a marionette whose strings had been cut. But where he had been standing, there now stood a dark figure made of black smoke, his skin alight with orange occult runes glowing all over his body. His eyes also glowed orange and, as the shadowy head turned to face me, they narrowed.

  “Alec Harbinger,” he said. His voice wasn’t deep and threatening—as I’d always imagined it would be—but almost nonchalant. That worried me. He was confident enough in his abilities that he didn’t feel the need to appear menacing.

  “Mister Scary,” I said. “Or do you prefer Henry Fields?”

  “Henry Fields is no more. I shrugged off that burdensome jacket in 1942. I am beyond flesh.”

  “But you can’t do your dirty work without it,” I said, gesturing to James’s prone body. I could see he was still breathing but judging by the way his chest rose and fell, the breaths were shallow.

  “Some things require a physical body, true, but I am not trapped inside any single prison of flesh like you and the rest of your kind. I am free to roam at will, to do as I please.”

  “Not for much longer.”

  His dark face had no mouth but I was sure that if he had a mouth, he would be smiling at me patronizingly. “And who is going to stop me? You? Or your assistant over there?” He turned to face Felicity momentarily before fixing his orange eyes back on me. “Your swords are useless against me. I am eternal.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

  The glowing eyes narrowed farther. “Eternal,” he repeated.

  “No, I don’t buy it. If it were true, then why all the elaborate rituals when you go on your killing sprees? Why the runes carved into your victims’ bodies? I never understood that until now. But now I can see those same runes on your body. You have to kill to stay alive—or whatever you call your sorry existence. You have to charge up those runes on your body by carving them into freshly-killed victims.”

  I took a step closer to him. “You may have traded in your old body but this new model requires maintenance, doesn’t it? You need magical energy stolen from the bodies of dead teenagers, otherwise you’ll wither and die like anybody else. So spare me your eternal bullshit.”

  He lunged at me, a shadowy hook suddenly appearing in his hand. I tossed up a magical shield and the hook dissipated against it. Mister Scary drew back, an identical weapon forming in his hand.

  Felicity threw herself at him, her sword swinging at his head. The blade passed through his smoky body and Felicity was suddenly off-balance and crashing into the wall.

  So, he hadn’t been lying about the swords being useless against him. I summoned up my anger and directed it into my hand. Blue energy crackled around my hand in the form of magical symbols. I threw it at Mister Scary.

  The energy bolt hit him in the chest and he doubled over as if in pain. I’d hoped to do more damage to him than that but at least now I knew he could be hurt by something. I summoned up another bolt.

  Mister Scary decided to go for Felicity. I wasn’t sure if he intended to kill her or take her hostage so I couldn’t zap him again. I never got the chance to find out because Felicity rolled out of the way and Mister Scary caught nothing but air.

  I threw a second bolt at him. The blue glowing projectile hit him in the face and the force of the impact sent him slamming into the wall.

  “You okay?” I shouted to Felicity.

  She was dragging James out of the circle toward the door we’d entered through. “I’m fine. Finish him.”

  I was about to tell her that I didn’t think my magical bolts were having enough effect on Mister Scary to finish him when he suddenly pushed himself from the wall, hurling himself in my direction.

  I saw the movement too late. Mister Scary lashed out with a shadow hook and I realized I didn’t have time to put up a shield. Throwing myself backward, I tried to avoid the dark weapon but it slashed through the front of my shirt and I felt a stinging pain as it cut through my skin.

  “Alec!” Felicity cried out, running over to me, waving her sword uselessly at Mister Scary.

  He swung his hook at her, arcing it down toward her chest. Felicity’s sword couldn’t damage Mister Scary but when she raised the enchanted blade, it blocked his shadow weapon. The hook exploded into a thousand pieces of shadow.

  She hadn’t noticed a second hook in his other hand. He brought it up beneath her sword and I was sure it was going to slice her in half but she somehow managed to jump back. The shadow blade cut through her sweater and I heard her groan as it made contact with her flesh. I had no idea how deep it had gone but I knew we had to get out of here now. We weren’t going to win this.

  She was lying on her back, trying to get up. Mister Scary was looming over her, about to go in for the kill.

  I conjured a shield and threw it up between him and Felicity. Then I dived over to where she was and took her hand. “Felicity, think of the storeroom.
We need to get back to the storeroom.” I discarded my sword and grabbed James’s hand tightly. Then I closed my eyes and visualized the storeroom where we’d entered the Shadow Land through the old mirror.

  When I opened my eyes, Felicity and I were in front of the mirror in the storeroom but James hadn’t come with us. I’d been holding his hand but he’d been unconscious and hadn’t visualized our destination. He was still in Blackthorn House with Mister Scary.

  “Go through the mirror,” I told Felicity. “I have to go back for James.”

  “I’m coming with you,” she said. “I’m not too badly hurt.”

  I looked at her abdomen where Mister Scary’s shadow hook had sliced through her sweater. A bright red line of blood stretched from below her navel all the way up to her sternum.

  “It isn’t very deep,” she said. “I’m all right.”

  I checked my own wound, a similarly shallow cut that ran in a diagonal line across my chest. I’d have a scar but I’d live.

  “Only my magic can hurt him,” I told her.

  “I’m not letting you go alone.”

  We didn’t have time to argue and even if I went back to Blackthorn House without her, she could easily follow me. “Okay, let’s go. There’s a mirror portal in one of the bedrooms. Leon and I used it. We can drag James through there if he’s still unconscious.”

  I closed my eyes and visualized the room where we’d fought Mister Scary. When I opened them, Felicity and I were in the room but it was empty. Mister Scary and James were gone.

  “He didn’t want to risk losing his newest body,” Felicity said. “He could have taken James anywhere.”

  “We’ll never find him.” I picked up the sword I’d discarded and took a deep breath, trying to calm the emotions boiling inside me. We’d lost James and Steve to Mister Scary and there was nothing we could do about it. He’d won this round easily.

  I vowed to myself that the next time we faced him, he would be destroyed. “We’re going to need to find a way to kill him,” I said.

  “We’ll find a way,” Felicity said. “If it’s the last thing we do, we’ll find a way.”