by Rysa Walker
When Chase reaches his brother, Ben falls to one knee and grabs the boy by the shoulders. He studies the kid closely from head to toe, like he’s worried that Chase has been injured.
“Are you okay?” Ben asks, looking like he’s on the verge of tears.
“What happened?” Daisy asks once Chase has assured Ben that he’s fine.
Ben doesn’t answer. He simply gives his brother a tight hug and then stands back up, wiping at his eyes.
Tucker clears his throat. “You look like hell, man.”
Ben turns toward him. His body is taut, ready to bolt at any second. Is he on something? Tucker thinks it’s entirely possible.
“What happened up there?” Daisy repeats. “Where’s Marybeth?”
“Marybeth?” Ben sounds dazed as he repeats the name. “Um…I don’t know. Guess she’s still pissed at me. She wasn’t home when I went to pick her up.”
Daisy frowns. “Really?”
“Yeah. I went up to the Grimshaw house by myself. Had to walk back. Truck wouldn’t start.”
Ben shuffles from foot to foot as he talks. A bead of sweat runs down his face.
“You want me to go take a look at your truck?” Tucker asks. “See if we can get it running?”
A look of fear crosses Ben’s face, and he shakes his head. “No. I’ll wait ’til morning. That road is a bitch in the dark. I need to get Chase home, though. Maybe you could give us a lift?”
“Sure.” Tucker turns to Daisy. “You ready to go?”
She glances back at the bonfire. It’s impossible to even pick Dani out of the crowd from this distance. A bitter look crosses her face. “Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”
They hike back to the car, and Chase crawls into the backseat with his brother. As Tucker drives away, the wicker man becomes smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror until he turns a slight curve, and it disappears altogether, and not even the glow that they saw above the corn while driving into the field remains. Even the moon seems to have vanished.
The silence in the cruiser is heavy, crushing almost, and the trip into town seems to take forever. Tucker glances back at Ben every few minutes, the guy’s strange behavior gnawing at his subconscious like a rat. What’s most odd is that after being so worried about Chase, he hasn’t looked at or even spoken to his brother the entire drive. It’s like his mind is somewhere else entirely.
As they glide slowly up the hill toward Ben and Chase’s trailer park, Tucker can’t take it any longer. “Did you see something up at the Grimshaw place, Ben?”
Ben’s head jerks up. “What? No.”
Tucker exchanges a look with Daisy and then catches Chase’s eyes in the mirror. “It’s just…there’s been a whole lot of strange stuff happening around town today. You wouldn’t be the first to—”
“I didn’t see anything, okay? Went up there, put the pumpkin on the porch, and then the damn truck wouldn’t start. So I walked back down the hill to the party. That’s it, Tuck. That was my night.”
They pull up next to the trailer. A single light is burning in a small window that Tucker assumes looks into the kitchen.
“Hey, kiddo,” Ben says with a smile that seems a little forced. “Looks like Mom’s home. Maybe she’ll make you some hot chocolate.”
“Yeah,” Chase says flatly. “Because she always does that.”
The sarcasm is thick, but Ben just nods and bails as soon as Tucker opens the back door. As Chase walks away, Tucker taps him on the shoulder and sticks out his hand.
“Thanks for your help tonight. If you need anything just—” He’s about to say just call. Force of habit, and totally meaningless tonight. Chase gives him a weak smile and shakes the offered hand.
“If you need anything,” Tucker continues, “I’m half a mile down the road.”
“Me, too,” Daisy says. “Julie Kennedy’s house is even closer.”
Chase winces slightly when Daisy says Julie’s name. Tucker makes a mental note to check in on her before he goes off duty. Maybe check on Marybeth Jenkins, too. And definitely check in at the station. See if Marty needs a pillow or anything, since he’s probably back at the desk again, sound asleep.
“Chase will be fine,” Ben says with a touch of annoyance. “He just needs sleep. We both do.”
“Thanks.” Chase leans in as Ben walks away and adds in a whisper, “He doesn’t want to hurt anyone.” Then he follows his brother into the trailer, stopping on the bottom step—the one Aileen Rey claims broke her rib last year—to give them a final wave.
Tucker and Daisy get back into the car.
“Do you think he means Ben or this Raum guy?” Daisy says.
“I don’t know. Starting to wonder if they aren’t one and the…same.” He pauses before the last word because a phone is ringing. Daisy’s. She gives him an astonished look and then pulls it out of her pocket. Dani’s name and face flash on the screen.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” she says, grinning. “We’re back in the twenty-first century. The only question now is whether to answer it or just let her bitchy ass stew for a while.”
After a couple of seconds, she answers, as Tucker knew she would.
“What the hell do you want?”
It’s not on speaker, but Tucker can pick up Dani’s end of conversation anyway, partly because Dani doesn’t have a volume setting below nine.
“I’m sorry, okay? I’m really, really sorry. It was the beer talking, and I’ve been missing Mom all day. You know how much she loved Halloween, and I got depressed. And I’m worried about Dad now, too, so… Anyway, I was a bitch to you, and I’m so, so sorry.”
His eyes stay on the road, trying to give her a bit of privacy, but Tucker can feel Daisy’s resolve and anger melting away. It was a physical presence, taking up a good half of the front seat as soon as Daisy saw her sister’s face pop onto the screen. And now it’s gone. Vanished.
“It’s okay,” Daisy says. “I understand.”
“Are you at the house?” Dani asks.
“Not yet. We just dropped Chase off. I’ll be there in like two minutes, though.”
“Good. I’m heading home, too. I’m going to make a big batch of chocolate chip cookie dough and eat it straight from the bowl. Want to share?”
Daisy laughs. “Yeah. Sure. Hey, at the party, did you—”
The line goes dead. Daisy tries to redial. Then she tries another number. Tucker knows without asking that she’s calling her dad.
“And Verizon is a graveyard again. Zero bars, no voicemail. Damn it.”
“Well, at least Dani was able to reach you,” Tucker says. “Listen, I need to check on Julie Kennedy. Make sure she made it back okay. And I should drop by the station.” He doesn’t mention Marybeth. Daisy’s got enough stressing her out without him reminding her that MB’s boyfriend is acting very suspiciously. “I take it you want me to drop you off at the house first?”
There’s a flicker of hesitation, but she nods. “Yeah. Dani and I have some patching up to do.”
Tucker thinks most of that patchwork needs to be coming from Dani, but he’s smart enough to keep that opinion to himself. A wise man does not step into a sister squabble, and he’s pretty sure that goes double for twins.
“Looks like we beat her home,” he says when they pull into the driveway. “You want me to wait? Given everything that’s going on, I could even come over and sleep on the couch if you guys want.”
“It’s okay,” she says. “Dani will be here soon. Go check on Julie. Tell her to stop by in the morning, because we need to compare notes. Figure out how to…fix…whatever this is.”
He walks her to the door and insists on checking the place out, even giving the attic a quick pass with the flashlight. It feels silly, because the gun he’s wearing would be no match for that giant ant they saw biting through the screen. How do you even fight an opponent who can shift your perception of reality?
As they’re coming back down from the attic, his flashlight catches a gleam from the mirro
r in the second-floor hallway. He stops and turns back. The frame seems oddly familiar. It takes a moment for him to place it, and then he gives a bemused chuckle.
“Is that just for Halloween, or do you leave it up year round?”
Daisy, who is already halfway down the stairs, gives him a confused look.
“The mirror,” he says. “Didn’t know you had a replica. It’s from that movie you recommended, right? I don’t think it was on The List, but you mentioned you saw it on Netflix. Octo…something?”
“Oculus.” Daisy joins him in the hallway, and she’s saying something else, but he doesn’t hear her. His attention is focused on the mirror. The reflection ripples slightly. He still sees himself, and Daisy, too, but everything has changed. He’s behind a glass wall now, staring at the room he saw in the vision earlier. Daisy is seated in the chair, with blank eyes and a slack jaw, like she’s drunk. Or drugged. Chase sits across from her, tapping the heels of his orange sneakers together as his thumbs travel across a computer tablet. Beyond them, a cluster of young people sit in front of the TV watching a game show. Macy, who has a vicious temper, has just snatched the remote from the new girl, who responds with her fists.
He has to get in there. Break it up. And then on the way out, he’ll stop and say a few words to Daisy. See it he can snap her out of it.
And then it’s gone. He’s back in the second-floor hallway. When he starts to look back at the reflection, Daisy yanks his arm, half pulling him down the stairs.
“You’re right,” she says. “I couldn’t place it earlier, but that’s the mirror I saw this morning. It’s the one from the movie.”
“What do you mean, the mirror you saw this morning?”
“All I saw a minute ago was a plain rectangular mirror in a gold metal frame. The mirror I’m pretty sure has been in that hallway since we moved into the house. But this morning, I saw the mirror from the movie. The reflection was…different.”
“Yeah,” he says. “For me, too.”
There’s a long pause as he debates whether to tell her what he saw. Maybe she’s debating the same thing. But is this really the right moment to tell her he just saw her as a patient in what he’s pretty sure is a mental hospital? He’s seen as many crazy things as she has today, and yet he was on the other side of the glass door, in a security uniform.
“Maybe…um…maybe you shouldn’t go back upstairs,” he says.
“Yeah. I was okay earlier. I just didn’t look at the thing. But you’re right. Maybe I’ll convince Dani to camp out down here with me. We can pull out the sofa bed. Eat cookie dough and have a slumber party while we watch TV.”
“Are you sure you’ll be okay?”
She pushes him toward the door. “Go. Do what you need to do, Tucker. Then get some sleep. Dani will be here any minute, and we’ll be fine. Just…could you do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Drive by and check on MB? I know it will mean possibly incurring the wrath of her dad if he’s already asleep, but—”
“I was already planning to stop by. Ben seems…off tonight. And I knew you’d be worried.”
Daisy takes a step closer, her eyes shining softly as she looks up at him. “You’re pretty damn awesome. You know that, Tucker Vance?”
A cloud covers her face as soon as the words are spoken, and Tucker is taken aback, wondering if he did something—or didn’t do something—that erased her smile. But then she leans forward, presses her lips briefly against his, and closes the door.
Six
ZOPHIEL
The cat shivers beneath the porch of the small house. It’s partly due to the cold, but also from sheer exhaustion. Zophiel is beginning to worry that she’s wearing the creature out. Not just from the physical effort, even though she doubts that the cat usually covers anywhere near as many miles as she’s put on its paws today. While it’s somehow appropriate for the cat to be stalking a bird, tracking Andras all day, following him from one act of malice to the next, has the cat’s muscles aching. But the cat is also struggling with the mental stress, if you can call it that, of accommodating Zophiel’s presence. Of sharing its brain with a usurper.
Andras is nearby, though. She can sense him, although she’s not sure if he’s wearing the crow now or one of the men. He’s been flitting in and out of the beings in this town on a whim, shedding them like snakeskins along the way.
On the other side of the portal, Zophiel doesn’t have to deal with this sort of frustration. She can take any form she chooses, or none at all. All it takes is the mere thought of any location within her territory, and she’s there in an instant.
But this is not her world, as Raum correctly noted. In here, she could get lost among the gyri. Tangled up in the neurons. Having a corporeal form keeps her grounded, keeps her from floating away like an untethered balloon.
She feels caged inside the cat, though. Constrained.
She can almost hear Raum saying, Welcome to my world, Zo.
It’s a fair point. For the first time, she truly understands the limits Raum has endured, even though she has no idea what else she could have done. This was the only option she’d come up with at the time. All these years later, it’s still the only way she knows to maintain the balance.
She needs to find another host. Something, or more likely someone, who can get her back to the portal at the top of that enormous hill.
But the experience with the librarian rattled her. She’d only spent a few minutes in that one, but the poor thing had gone haywire as soon as Zophiel made her exit. To be fair, though, she hadn’t seemed very coherent to begin with. Barb Starrett was little more than a shell, less complex than the cat, even. Just a bunch of behaviors and clichés bundled together and tossed among the shelves of books. Maybe she’d been more complicated a few iterations ago, or maybe she’d always been a cipher. She wasn’t pulled from the memory of one of the five, so maybe she’d always been nothing more than a placeholder. A throwaway character with no need for a detailed backstory. It hadn’t taken Raum long to have her back up and running again.
But he doesn’t have the resources to keep doing that. He’s already cutting corners. Dropping unnecessary algorithms in order to accommodate six mostly independent variables instead of the five he had planned for. Pulling from previous iterations to deal with the addition of the boy, an addition that has twisted his reality inside out, resulting in something like one of those odd M.C. Escher drawings where the staircase appears to go both up and down.
And that’s why Martha Yarn had to go. Raum had taken care to give Martha as much of Maggie Yarrow’s personality as possible. She’d had all the things Maggie had wanted in life. A place of her own, where she could cook and knit. Memories of the teaching job she longed for but would never have been allowed to hold. But all of those details, all of those quirks, were a drain on limited resources.
It had been a bit of sentimentality on Raum’s part, this effort to preserve Maggie’s memory. He’d spent a lot of time and effort on this Martha Yarn character so that she could serve as a memorial to the woman who had been his host for over eighty years. That’s not the sort of thing his father would do. Not the sort of thing any member of Andras’s Council of Seventy Two would even consider. It required empathy, something every single one of his lot lacks.
But Raum has it. Maybe not a full portion, but it’s there. And this gives Zophiel hope.
CHAPTER SIX
One
CHASE
ring at a spot on the wall where the paper is peeling away.
“Jesus,” Ben hisses. “You scared the hell out of me, Mom.”
Aileen doesn’t respond or even look up.
“What are you doing in here?”
Aileen blinks, but her eyes are still vacant, far away. “I can hear them coming. From outside. Can’t you?”
Chase listens, even though he has no idea what she’s talking about. He can’t hear anything but muffled snoring coming from the living room.
Be
n sighs and turns to Chase. “Looks like she’s been drinking again.”
Aileen Rey doesn’t get drunk often, not like Ralph. But she’s been known to have a few shots after a long day. The worst times are when they both drink, because sometimes she forgets to hold her tongue. Sometimes she engages the dragon.
“Don’t call me Mom,” Aileen says in a flat voice, her eyes still fixed on the wall. “You’re a therapist, for fuck’s sake. Can’t you even take your own advice?”
Ben takes two steps back, jerking away as if she slapped him. He’s staring at her as if he’s seeing her for the first time.
Chase looks at Aileen, too, but he doesn’t see anything different. Just a tired woman who might have been pretty once. She’s not even middle aged, really. About the same age as Julie Kennedy. But she looks wrung out.
The words she just said, though? Those are familiar. He’s heard them before. Not in this flat, lifeless tone. Yelling. Angry.
His real mother said those words. Not this woman.
Chase squeezes his eyes shut, blocking out the memory of that argument. The memory of glass breaking, muted by the thicker walls of the house in that other place, but still audible.
The better place, he thinks wryly.
And then glass is breaking for real, echoing his thoughts. The tiny window above Ben’s bed shatters into fragments that rain down on Aileen’s head. A crow falls to the mattress, flops once, and then rights itself.
Chase knows even before the bird’s eyes open that they will be a bloodshot white. They’ll be the eyes of the crow in the library. The eyes of the ants crawling through the screen at the Hart.
And he’s right.
A voice inside his head booms out a warning.
DON’T TOUCH IT.
GET OUT.
The voice in his head isn’t his own, and it’s not that Luke guy’s voice either. It sounds more like the Door Man, the one in the TV at Martha Yarn’s house. Raum, maybe?