—
“Where are we?” Ray asked.
He was standing in a void of thin, gray smoke. The trance induction had transpired remarkably quickly—one second he was sitting with his eyes closed listening to the hum of the copter and Claire’s soothing voice, and the next he was here, in this bland, empty, horizon-free nothingness. The vastness was terrifying.
“I’m here,” Claire said. And there she was, a little hazy, but standing right next to him. She was in her Brotherhood robe again, not the bulky Russian snow gear, and her hair was down around her shoulders. “We’re in the Void. Everything physical has its counterpart here.”
“This is weird,” he said, looking down. It was as if he was standing on a clear piece of glass over an infinite emptiness. He felt suddenly nauseated.
Claire reached out and took his hand. She felt solid and warm. “Now we’ll set our intention. Where our will goes, we’ll go.”
She squeezed his hand. “Keep hold of me. It will bind us so neither of us will get lost. We don’t have a lot of time, so let’s go now.”
The gray mist morphed and twisted around them, and again Ray felt the sickening vertigo. Then the Void shaped itself into three-dimensional outlines that gradually bloomed with color and texture. They were standing on a snowy plain surrounded by craggy blue-gray mountains. In front of them stood a complex of squat, utilitarian buildings, just like those in Burnham’s photos. A tower rose from the center of the compound, and in the distance a black dome was silhouetted against the sky. Dancing around the entire compound, from just above the ground to above their heads, were evanescent symbols—translucent lines and shapes that sparkled as if electrified.
“What are those things?” he asked.
“Wards,” Claire said. “Let me see if I can get through them.” She let go of his hand and walked up to one of the symbols. She raised her hands and began moving them in patterns—star shapes, circles, triangles—chanting softly as she worked. The lines she traced became visible, golden strands of light, and after a few minutes the original symbol simply faded away under her complex pattern.
“Come with me,” she said. “That should hold for a while, I hope.”
They were moving, but his feet weren’t making noise or leaving prints in the snow. In the distance, a man walked with a leashed German shepherd. He had a rifle slung over his back. “Can anyone see us?” Ray asked.
“No. Not unless they are exceptionally gifted or traveling themselves. But they may sense our presence.”
“I want to find Ellen,” he said. And in an instant the vertiginous sensation overcame him. It was like being sucked through a long tunnel and then just as quickly he was standing still as the rest of the world snapped into place around him. He was in a dimly lit room. Light entered through a tiny, rectangular window. There were two beds, one empty, one occupied.
“Ellen,” he said.
She was lying on the bed, eyes closed and rimmed with tears. He was shocked by her appearance. Her hair, splayed across a pillow, had grown wild, with only the ends still dyed blond. Her shape looked so thin under the covers he was worried she might be sick. But her arms sticking out from beneath the thin blanket were taut and muscled. By her shaking he realized she was sobbing quietly.
“Oh, Ellen,” he said, reaching out to touch her face.
Claire stopped him. “Don’t touch. You’ll frighten her.”
He started to protest but pulled his hand back. He couldn’t stop staring. This was really happening. How could he not touch her when she was right there?
“Be careful what you say or think the next time,” Claire said. “A strong intention will take you right to where you want to go. And if we hadn’t been holding hands we would have been separated.” She wandered around the room and looked through the glass window in the door. “This building is in the center of the compound, I think. There are two guards at the main door. Cameras everywhere.”
Ray barely heard her. He knelt next to Ellen, moving his face close to hers. It was really her. He felt tears rolling down his cheeks. Her face was so thin, her skin unnaturally pale. This was torture. To be so close but unable to speak to her, to hold her, to console her and tell her everything was okay, that he was coming to get her and William and take them far away from this horrible, desolate place.
He gasped. Her eyes opened. At first she looked right through him, but then her eyes seemed to focus and widen.
“We need to find the children,” Claire said. “Come with me.”
“Ray?” Ellen whispered. Her eyes widened even more, shining in the light from the window.
“Take my hand, Ray,” Claire said. “We don’t have much time.”
“You’re not real,” Ellen said, her face twisting into a pained grimace.
“I am real, Ellen, I swear. I’m coming for you. I promise.”
But she closed her eyes, as if to block him out. Squeezed them shut tightly. No, her lips said. No no no.
Claire’s hand tightened around his. “Let’s find William,” she said. And like that, they were gone. As if they had never been there at all.
—
They both felt it right away: a deep, thrumming energy. When he held out his hands, they wavered as if underwater.
“Oh my,” Claire said.
They were standing in the shadows at the back of a classroom. Nine children stood in a semicircle in the center of the room, their arms and hands outstretched. All of them were dressed the same, in long white T-shirts over white pants and white Nikes. He spotted William right away. The boy was in some kind of trance, like the rest, eyes wide, face slack. Over each of them, inches above their heads, hung balls of soft blue-white light.
“What are—”
Claire shushed him, laying her fingers across his lips.
“Breathe in” came a voice from the far end of the room. A teacher stepped from the shadows, a very large woman in a long dress. The balls of light above each of the children flared. As the children inhaled, streams of what looked like steam flowed from the orbs down into their heads.
Ray’s breath caught in his throat. One of the children, a boy of about eight, had something huge and bulbous hanging on his back. Like a giant tick.
“Now form him,” the teacher said.
The room grew brighter. Energy was coming out of the children’s hands and condensing in the center of the room. A cloud, like a puff of smoke, came into being out of nothing. It thickened, then pushed out into a fleshy-colored blob the size of a basketball.
Claire’s hand tightened on Ray’s shoulder.
A pair of wings emerged from the floating blob, with knobby skin like that of a chicken. They unfolded, extended fully, then drew back. A head grew from the top of the winged torso, extending into a short, hairy snout. The head of a dog, like a terrier, with pointy ears and black eyes. The wings flapped, and from the creature’s bottom sprouted the hind legs of a goat. It wobbled unsteadily. The dog head barked three times, then started to yowl a mournful, pained cry.
It was too much. “No,” Ray whispered. He felt the wave of his negativity rush from him and slam into the thing in the center of the room. The goat legs scrabbled, the wings flapped wildly, and the dog head turned to look directly at him. It bared its teeth and barked.
And then it just popped out of existence.
The children were all staring at him. William’s face lit up.
The teacher walked toward them. She saw them, too. “Well, isn’t this interesting?” she said, eyes wide.
Ray pushed his thoughts like he had done before. I’m coming.
I know, William pushed back.
The teacher reached out toward Ray’s face.
“Outside,” Claire said, squeezing his hand.
He expected to feel the woman’s fat fingers but they never came. They were outside again, in the spot they’d left, his stomach rolling from the abrupt transition. The cold hurt his bones. It hadn’t been cold earlier.
“Look,” Claire sa
id.
In the distance, the black dome’s exterior was swarming with what looked like thousands of enormous insects and writhing, pale larvae.
“Parasites,” she said, her face twisting into a grimace.
Ray shivered. “Why is it cold now?” he asked. Claire didn’t answer. Then her eyes and mouth widened. “What is it?” he asked.
“Shit,” Claire said.
The German shepherd, off its leash, was running at them from the distance, barking and snarling. The soldier ran after it, looking around as if puzzled, and unslung his rifle. He didn’t seem to see them. The dog most certainly did. And it was closing.
“We need to get back to the copter. To our bodies.”
Everything around them was fading, losing all color. Lines became less defined. The sky turned back into the milky gray mist of the Void. But the dome pulsed with greenish light beneath the ever-moving swarm of parasites crawling on its surface. It was growing more distinct, more real as everything else melted away.
“What’s happening?” Ray asked. He felt stuck. He shifted and his feet crunched in the snow. They were nearly numb from the cold. “Where are we going?” Gray snow blew in his face and it felt like slivers of glass. And the barking grew louder and closer.
“The copter, Ray,” Claire screamed above the noise of the sudden wind.
The dog looked more like a wolf now, its pupils rimmed in white. And it was running on two feet. Like a person.
“Let’s go!” Claire screamed. Something was pulling on her; with each jerky movement she was drawn farther into the emptiness. But Ray felt her grip tighten even as he feared she might be torn in two.
The wolf dove on top of him, its hot, meaty breath in his face, and everything blurred into the endless gray expanse.
—
It took several minutes before he realized where he was. From a blur of color and sound, little by little the world reconstructed itself around him, like pieces of a puzzle locking into place. Vinod was holding his shoulders. “He’s back,” he said. Mantu appeared over him, a wave of relief dawning on his face. “Hey, homie. You all right?”
Words wouldn’t form on his lips, so he nodded. He suspected he was okay, but his mind was still struggling to make sense of what had happened, trying to catch up to what his eyes were seeing. “Claire,” he whispered.
“She’s going to be okay,” Mantu said. “She can’t talk yet, but she’s conscious.”
Ray remembered the teeth of the wolf-thing sinking into his throat and shuddered. His voice was hoarse and strained but he managed to say “thank you” to Mantu.
“Don’t thank me, Ray. Vinod pulled you both back. He saw something was wrong and started shaking you like a rag doll.”
Ray grasped Vinod’s hand and squeezed it. “Brother,” he whispered. “Thank you.”
The broad, fake, yellow-toothed smile spread across the man’s face, but this time Ray could see a flash of genuine joy behind it. “Anytime, Brother Ray, my man.”
—
It took Claire nearly an hour to get her voice back. Ray sat with his arm around her while she drank a cup of lukewarm tea Burnham had heated on a hot section of the engine. There were scratches on her neck, but they were slowly fading. When she could finally speak without too much pain, she asked Ray to call over Mantu and Vinod. They all leaned close to hear her over the noise of the copter.
“I’m not sure what is going on there,” she said. “But the artifact—beneath the dome—is so powerful it is warping everything around it.”
“What were those parasites, anyway?” Ray asked. “The bugs and worms crawling all over the dome.”
“The dome protects the artifact,” Claire said, “but its energy draws all sorts of hungry beings. The astral is just like the physical realm. Full of things that need to feed.”
“How about a way of getting in there?” Mantu asked.
Claire rubbed her throat and nodded to Ray.
“We didn’t have much chance to look around. There’s a tower in the compound center, as we already know, so I’m sure there are guards there all the time watching things. But we didn’t see anyone patrolling except for one guy with a German shepherd.”
Claire took a sip of her tea. Her hand was shaking. “The dog was a container for something very nasty. I’ve seen animals harboring entities before, but nothing like that. They are working on a level I have never seen.” She held her hand to her throat.
Ray reached for the photo of the compound. “The kids were here. In some sort of classroom. They were…” He struggled to find the words. “They were creating something. With their minds. Some kind of bizarre creature.”
Claire coughed. “Make no mistake—those children have been well trained and are extraordinarily powerful. Especially as a group. They would put the collective at Eleusis to shame.”
“What’s the bitch using them for?” Mantu asked.
Claire shook her head. “I can only guess. Something to do with the artifact. Maybe she’s using them to activate it. Or maybe she wants to feed them to it. I just don’t know.” She closed her eyes.
“Ellen is there. In this building, I think.” Ray pointed to the map. “She was locked up. And she’s not doing well.” He pressed his fists against his head. “I don’t know what they did to her, but she seemed completely lost.”
“We’ll get her out of there,” Mantu said. Even if he didn’t believe it, he sure sounded convincing.
“It’s not going to be easy,” Claire said. “The energy of that thing is as chaotic as it is powerful, and it’s warping everything around it. We should have become less substantial the longer we stayed, but instead we became more substantial. We were almost trapped.” She gazed at Vinod. “If it hadn’t been for you, brother, we would not have made it back.”
Vinod seemed touched. “I did what I had to do, sister.”
“I’m sorry,” Ray said. “I got stuck. I froze.”
“It was not your fault, Ray,” Claire said. “It was fogging my mind, too. In spite of all my training, it was wearing me down. A few more moments and we would have been lost.”
“Lost? How?”
Claire pointed to her throat, so Vinod took over. “When someone is lost on the plane of vision, Brother Ray, and is blocked from finding his way back, his energy gradually disperses and fades away.”
“Your body stays just like it is,” Mantu said. “But there isn’t any you left in it. Just an empty shell.”
“Christ,” Ray muttered. That had been close.
The copter dropped. Ray’s stomach leapt into his throat and he grabbed Mantu’s arm for stability. Burnham’s voice came over the intercom. “Sorry about that. Winds are getting pretty crazy, so get yourselves strapped in tight. But you might want to take a look out the window first.”
Ray jumped to his feet. He was still a little unsteady. He wiped condensation off the window and whistled. “Damn. It’s really snowing.”
—
Ray tried to sleep, but between the constant turbulence and his racing thoughts it quickly became clear that wasn’t going to happen. He kept replaying the events from his visit to the compound, and every time he closed his eyes he saw Ellen’s pained face. He looked around and saw no one else was sleeping, either. Mantu was strapped into his seat poring over maps, Vinod was staring at the ceiling from within his sleeping bag, and Claire was meditating. Burnham stood in the far back fiddling with one of the snowmobiles. Ray got out of the sleeping bag, put on his coat, and sat next to Mantu.
“Couldn’t sleep either?” he asked.
Mantu rubbed his eyes. “No dice. I keep thinking about what’s ahead of us.”
“Same here. How much longer until we land?”
“I think about three or four hours.”
“Plotting our route?” His breath clouded the cold air.
Mantu nodded and laid his finger on the topographic map. “This is not going to be an easy ride. Once we get through this bit of forest it’s nothing but snow and
ice until we reach an old logging road that runs right up to the compound. But they’ll probably be watching it, and that’s the way they’d expect us to come. I have a feeling we’ll need to ditch the snowmobiles here”—he pointed at the map—“and go on foot. We don’t want them hearing the engines if there’s going to be any element of surprise.”
“And then we get there.” Ray poked the red circle on the map. “What next?”
Mantu shook his head. “Still working that out. And I keep coming back to the same conclusion.”
“And that is?”
“That we’re fucking nuts.” He tossed the map to the floor. “We don’t have the firepower to just go charging in like a bunch of Rambos. We can’t sneak in because anyone in that tower will see us coming for miles. I didn’t see any Superman capes or jetpacks stashed away in the back, so we’re not dropping in from the sky. You have any ideas? Because I am fresh the fuck out.”
Ray didn’t answer. Vinod made a sound like strained laughter.
Mantu gaped. “You find this funny, Vinod?”
“I was remembering your Girl Scout idea, Brother Mantu,” Vinod said.
“Are you imagining me in a Girl Scout uniform?” Mantu asked. “Am I turning you on, you old Hindu pervert?”
Vinod laughed again, a staccato rasp that was so unlike a normal laugh it made Ray snort.
The helicopter dropped. “Whoa,” Ray gasped. In the back of the aircraft something clattered loudly. Claire opened her eyes and grabbed the wall for support.
Konstantin’s heavily accented voice crackled over the intercom. “Burnham, need you up here. Now.”
Burnham ran past them, swaying and staggering as the copter pitched to the side. “Everybody strap in,” he said before disappearing through the cockpit door.
—
Ray gritted his teeth as the aircraft shuddered and rocked. Across from him, Vinod sat with his head buried in the familiar plastic bag. This was the worst turbulence they had encountered by far, and it was getting worse by the minute. Claire sat with her eyes closed, but she cringed with every lurch and shudder of the enormous craft. Mantu’s hands held tight to the straps across his chest. Even over the roar of the engine and the rhythmic thwopping of the rotor Ray could hear pellets of ice smacking against the nearby window. It sounded like someone was spraying the glass with a sandblaster.
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