by Derek Landy
Valkyrie skidded to her knees beside him. He blinked at her.
“Run,” he said.
She hooked her free hand under his arm. “Get up.”
“I can’t move,” he said.
“Then I’ll carry you.”
“You’re carrying your sister. Run, Valkyrie.”
“I’m not going to leave you here.”
“Get to Ghastly,” Shudder said. “He’ll take you to safety. Go now. Go.”
She had no choice. The Nemesis was already stooping to pick up the hammer.
“I’m sorry,” said Valkyrie, and ran on. She glanced over her shoulder to see the hammer swinging down towards Shudder’s head, but averted her eyes before it hit.
There was a church ahead of her. It was small, made of black stone. The door was open.
She ran in, closed the door, turned as her eyes adjusted to the new gloom. Pews, an altar, and a man sitting in the front row with perfectly symmetrical scars running down his head.
Ghastly Bespoke looked round. His smile was tired. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“The Nemesis is chasing me,” Valkyrie said.
“She won’t be able to break through that door,” Ghastly responded. “Sit.”
She sat beside him. Alice gurgled happily.
“Do you know what’s happening?” Ghastly asked. “Do you know where you are?”
Valkyrie did her best to focus on a thought that flitted through her mind too fast to catch. “Not really,” she said.
“You’re in Greymire Asylum,” Ghastly told her. “Do you remember Greymire?”
“Yes,” she said. Of course she did. She was there right now, looking for K-49. “They’re doing something to my mind.”
“Sort of.”
“They’re making me go crazy.”
“Just a little.”
“They gassed me. So this isn’t real. This is in my head.”
“No,” said Ghastly, “it’s real. I’m not the real me, but you’re the real you, and you’re sitting in a real church. But it’s a church that didn’t exist until you saw it.
“This floor of the asylum, it transforms to reflect the inner workings of your mind. The longer you stay here, the deeper it goes, and the harder it is to find your way out. It’s how they examine their patients.”
“And why do they send the Nemesis?”
He looked at her. “They don’t. The Nemesis just appears.”
A hammer pounded on the church door.
“She wants to get in,” Ghastly said, standing. “I should let her.”
Valkyrie jumped up. “What?”
“I have to let her in,” said Ghastly, walking towards the door.
Valkyrie ran round him, planting herself in his path. “Why would you do that?”
“She’s here to punish you.”
“I don’t want to be punished.”
Ghastly smiled for the first time. “Of course you do. The Nemesis wouldn’t be here if you didn’t. There are one thousand, three hundred and fifty-one graves out there because of you.”
“I didn’t kill them. Darquesse did.”
“It happened because of you,” Ghastly said. “They all died because of you.”
“I can’t be held responsible for—”
“You were warned about her. The Sensitives had the dreams. They had the visions. They told us she was coming, and they told us all the horrible things she was going to do. And you knew that was your future self. You knew that if you stayed on this path, if you stayed with magic, with Skulduggery, then you would become her. But, instead of turning away, you stayed. You couldn’t even consider depriving yourself of the adventure. Of the wonder. You wanted so much to be different, to be exceptional, to be important, that you walked right into that future and you allowed it to happen. The people in those graves, they died because of your arrogance. Finbar and Cassandra, Kenspeckle and Anton and even Billy-Ray Sanguine, they died because of your hubris. I died because of your ego – and so did she.”
Valkyrie frowned. “So did who?”
Ghastly moved past her and walked towards the door. The pounding was getting heavier, shaking the door on its hinges.
“So did who?” Valkyrie shouted, and noticed that Alice wasn’t gurgling any more.
She pulled the blanket aside, but there was just another fold beneath. She pulled that fold down, pulled down the next one, held Alice away from her so she could figure out how to get at her, and then the blanket slipped from her grip and unravelled as it fell and the bones of her sister clattered to the stone floor.
Valkyrie sucked in a groan and fell backwards, crashed into a pew, her hands scrabbling for purchase, trying to keep herself upright.
Daylight, dim and cold, slanted across the church and the Nemesis of Greymire came inside, and Ghastly turned to Valkyrie. “You deserve this,” he said.
There was a door behind her. Valkyrie sobbed and shouldered it open, went stumbling into darkness. She lit up her hands. Stone walls on either side. She ran.
None of this could be real. Ghastly, the others, they were dead. And Alice … Alice wasn’t a baby any more. That was wrong. Her thoughts were wrong.
She tried to slow her mind down, but it was travelling too fast. She couldn’t focus. Couldn’t do it.
So she stopped running, and she held her sister’s face in her mind. This was all for Alice. All of it. Helping her. Healing her. Saving her. Making her whole again. That’s what this was. That was the only thing that mattered.
She burned that image into her thoughts until that’s all there was. Until nothing distracted her. Nothing tugged at her. Her sister was all that mattered. Her sister was her whole world.
She could think now. Her thoughts travelled the path they were supposed to travel. This was better. This was sanity.
She opened her eyes.
She was in a large room with white walls. She turned.
Doctor Derleth was standing there. “You are interesting,” he said.
Valkyrie shoved him, sent him hurtling off his feet, feeling the power that burned in her eyes.
“What did you do to me?” she snarled.
He gazed up at her curiously. “I took a peek into your mind,” he said. “Just a quick one. Just to see if you were filled with all the interesting things I suspected. And you were. It was delightful.” “You gassed me.”
“A paltry amount,” Derleth said. “Barely worth mentioning. All the gas did was unscrew the lid. Whatever happened after that was all you.”
“It wasn’t real.”
“That’s right.”
“It was a hallucination.”
“Oh, no,” Derleth replied. “No, no, no. You went insane.”
Valkyrie pulled the magic out of her eyes, drew it back inside her. “Bull,” she said. “That’s a load of … It was an illusion.”
“Your mind broke, my dear,” said Derleth. “Snapped like a twig. That’s what this place does to people, even us doctors.” He smiled. “You’re one of us now.”
Valkyrie picked him up by his coat. “Give me what I came for.”
“Forgive me,” Derleth said, “but you have no idea what you came for. You think K-49 is a pill, or a serum, or a treatment? You are stumbling around in the dark, my dear, attempting to interfere in matters you simply do not comprehend. You’d be far better off—”
Valkyrie slugged him across the jaw and the doctor crumpled.
“Do not patronise me,” she said to his unconscious form, then stepped over him.
She left the room through the blue door and hurried down the first set of stairs she came to. Avoiding the doctors and the Brothers, she slipped through a rusted door where all the crying and moaning was coming from. There were metal doors on either side of her. Cell doors.
She started walking. The patients couldn’t know she was there, and yet there were suddenly a hundred fists hammering on those doors and she quickened her pace, hands at her ears, trying to block out the cacophony that follow
ed her.
This place was insane. Every corner she took led to more moaning and crying and hollering, more metal doors with their numbers peeling off.
Valkyrie stopped.
The door beside her had a number: 84.
She stepped back, looked around. There, on the wall. The letter N.
K-49 wasn’t a cure. It was a cell.
She ran back the way she’d come, back to the stairs, and she went down.
Down again.
And down again.
She kept going until she came to floor K, and she found a map on the wall, covered in grime. She wiped it as clean as she could, and found K-49 with her finger. It was coloured differently from the others. It was green.
Valkyrie stepped back. On the floor, there was a faint green line.
She followed it through a series of rooms, and the air began to taste cleaner, fresher, and she kept going, until finally she burst out into the lashing rain and above her the tallest of the asylum’s towers loomed against the grey clouds. K-49.
Valkyrie hurried over. The tower appeared to have only one window, right at the very top. She reckoned she could make it all the way up there before her clothes started to scorch. Probably.
She crouched slightly, and drew in her magic, feeling it in the pit of her stomach. She straightened as she released it and burst upwards, trailing a stream of white energy. The ground fell away and the tower flitted by, and then she was at the window, grabbing the bars with one hand while she sat, one bum cheek on the ledge, letting the energy fade.
The wind pulled at her hair.
Valkyrie prised open the window and slipped inside. A grey-haired old woman sat in a chair beside the bed. It was warm in here, and there was a small music box open on a side table. It played a tune Valkyrie couldn’t place.
It was beautiful. Hypnotic, almost.
She shook her head to wake herself up. “Excuse me,” she said softly. “Sorry. Hello?”
She moved round until she was standing directly in the old woman’s line of sight, but those old eyes didn’t even register her presence.
Valkyrie knelt by her. “Hello? My name’s Valkyrie. I’m looking for something in this room, something that would …” She didn’t know exactly how to put this. “Something that would help soothe a troubled mind. Do you know what that could be?”
The old woman didn’t bother to respond.
Valkyrie knew how she felt. She could have stayed here listening to that music for the rest of her life, too.
But there was something … Something she had to do …
Alice.
Valkyrie slapped herself in the face to wake up, and, as discreetly as she could, she searched the old woman and the chair she sat upon. Next she went to the bed, then the dresser. She picked up the music box, checked it for hidden compartments. It was wooden, and had a studded metal disc that turned in its centre. The lid closed and the music stopped and the old woman murmured.
“Hello?” Valkyrie said softly.
The old woman shook her head and made a noise. An angry noise. Valkyrie felt a buzzing at the base of her skull. Her thoughts clouded.
Then there was pain.
She dropped to her hands and knees, and the music box fell open on the ground beside her and the music resumed playing.
The pain went away and the buzzing stopped, and a moment later the old woman settled down.
Valkyrie stared at the music box, then picked it up and stood. “I’m going to have to take this,” she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to upset you, I don’t want to hurt you, but I know someone who needs this urgently. I’m sure the doctors here have another one they can get for you. You’re going to be fine. You’re going to be OK.”
She went to the window, opened it, sat up on the sill and swung her legs out.
She looked back at the old woman sitting in the chair. “I’m really sorry,” she said, and closed the lid and let herself fall.
Before her magic had a chance to start crackling around her, Skulduggery swooped in, caught her and kept going, rising higher into the darkening sky, leaving Greymire Asylum behind.
Corrival Academy slept.
The floorboards creaked. The ceilings groaned. The classrooms and corridors, the cafeteria and cloakrooms, stood empty and dark, waiting to be filled, and Omen Darkly crept like a fat ninja through the shadows.
No. Damn it. Not fat. That was mean – even he had to admit that. He wasn’t fat any more, for a start. Well, he was, but not as much as he used to be. The word fat was unnecessarily harsh. He had to work at being kinder to himself, that’s what Axelia said, and that started with cutting out the insults his mind lobbed at him when he did stupid things like sneak through school at night.
He knew full well why his mind tossed these words at him. It was all a defence mechanism. He used them so that when other people called him names it didn’t hurt as much. Pretty basic psychology. But that didn’t mean it was any better for his self-esteem. He needed to watch that. His self-esteem was hooked up to life support as it was. It didn’t need Omen tipping it out of its bed.
Corrival was different at night. Without the students, without the constant murmur of conversation, Omen realised just how big the place was. The corridors were ridiculously long and strangely wide. The stairs swept upwards at odd angles. The rooms had a weird symmetry to them, their placement eccentric yet precise. No doubt it was all in order to channel the energies of its students, to focus their minds and their magics, but in the dark like this it was just … spooky.
Also, the place played tricks the further Omen crept. He was sure there was someone watching him. Someone following him.
He hurried on.
Up the main stairs he went, on to the first floor. He slowed at every corner, peered round in case a teacher had been working late. For all he knew, some of his teachers lived in their offices. Peccant, for instance. There was a man who slept at his desk, Omen was sure – or, at the very least, hung from his ceiling. He definitely didn’t go home. He didn’t have a wife or kids waiting for him, or a dog that would sit in the hall with its tail wagging whenever it heard his keys in the door. Peccant lived for his job – you could tell from the lines etched into his grim face. Peccant’s very existence was one long experiment to see how humourless a living person could actually be.
Omen turned, frowning into the gloom. He was sure … That time, he was sure he’d heard something.
But, if it had been a teacher, they wouldn’t be sneaking around behind him. They’d be calling his name and issuing a detention. So, if he was being followed, he wasn’t being followed by a member of staff.
Which was a thought that in no way made him feel safer.
He continued on. It might have been a student. Maybe Gerontius or Morven had been awake when he’d sneaked out of their dorm room. Maybe they were both following him, wondering where the hell he was going at this time of night.
That was likely. Well, kind of likely. It’s just that they had both looked sound asleep when Omen had slipped out.
Or maybe it was no one. Maybe it was Omen’s imagination. Maybe he was paranoid because he was doing something that he could get into a lot of trouble for. More than a lot. He was, after all, about to help some actual wanted fugitives.
He slowed down. Oh, God. Oh, what the hell was he thinking?
The classroom was right ahead. Beyond that door was all the equipment he’d need to start forging the documents Colleen and the others were waiting for.
But going through that door, turning on those machines … that could get him arrested. Actually arrested.
He turned. Walked back the way he’d come. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t. They were fugitives. They had thrown their lot in with Abyssinia. Jenan had tried to kill him, for God’s sake.
Of course, he wasn’t doing this for Jenan. He was doing this for the others, who had realised what a mistake they’d made. Everyone made mistakes. Omen made plenty. Was he prepared to point at their latest mis
take and say, This is the one that will define you?
Or was he going to help them get past it?
He had stopped walking. Of course he had. He turned again, muttering to himself, and trudged on to the door. He raised his hand to turn the handle. Such an ordinary door. Such a plain and ordinary door. Beyond it lay unimaginable risk. Beyond it, his freedom hung in the balance – as did the lives of a bunch of people who never particularly liked him, but who needed him right now. Who were depending on him.
All that behind this one, plain, ordinary, boring old door.
Omen steeled himself. Grasped the handle, turned it, opened the door and stepped in.
Nope, wrong door.
There was a buzz of excitement Sebastian hadn’t felt in a long time. Forby had been keeping them all informed over the last few days, detailing how he was closing in on Darquesse’s signal. Sebastian doubted anyone in the group knew what Forby was talking about, but no one was in the mood to complain.
They’d gathered in Lily’s front room. Forby was the only one standing. Kimora was squeezed between Bennet and Ulysses on the couch. Tarry perched on the left arm of the chair in which Demure was curled. Sebastian sat in the other armchair – leaning forward. Waiting.
“Lily!” Demure screeched.
“Coming, coming,” Lily said, hurrying in from the kitchen with a tray of finger food. “Would anyone like some sandwiches? I’ve got ham, cucumber and egg. Kimora, I’ve got gluten-free sandwiches for you. I found this fantastic recipe—”
“Lily,” Kimora interrupted. “Thank you for caring, but I swear to God, if you don’t sit down right this second …”
“Sorry, sorry,” Lily said. She put the tray on the coffee table and went to sit on the arm of Sebastian’s chair.
He leaped up immediately. “It’s your chair – you sit, I’ll stand.”
“Nonsense,” Lily said. “You’re the guest.”
“I prefer standing, honestly.”
“Will you both stop being so damned polite and sit down?” Ulysses barked.