by Brian Harmon
But it was also so very peaceful. And that kind of made up for it.
“I never went to high school,” said Holly. “It’s kind of hard for me to imagine being here.”
“You don’t have a diploma?”
“Grandpa didn’t think he could protect us as well if we were in school every day, so he tutored us. Sort of.”
“‘Sort of’?”
She shrugged. “He didn’t think all the subjects were important enough to take away from our training.”
He walked past Chad Whelt’s classroom and then stopped and backtracked. He’d expected Chad to be long gone, but there he was, head down, poring over Terence Gawes’ life’s work.
Chad looked up when he heard Eric knock. “Hey! You’re back!”
“Just for a minute. I thought you were leaving for the day.”
“I was going to, but right after you left I hit the jackpot.” He gestured at a pile of papers on his desk. “Terrence had another book manuscript in here.”
Eric crossed the room and leaned over the desk, looking over the piles of paper. “No kidding?” That was a great find.
“It’s not finished, but it’s close. And all his notes are here. I might even be able to finish it.”
“That’d be great.”
“Wouldn’t it? It might be just the thing to finally get my own book off the ground.” He’d been talking about writing a book for years now. He had an interest in some of the lesser-known native tribes that once lived in Southern Wisconsin.
“That’s awesome,” said Eric. He was happy for his friend, but he didn’t have time for an extended conversation. “Listen, as long as you’re here, I have a sort of random question for you.”
“Sure, no problem.” He glanced past Eric then and said, “Oh. Can I help you with something?”
Eric turned and looked. Holly was hovering in the doorway. She looked up at them, surprised. “What? Oh. No.” She gestured at Eric. “I’m with him.”
“Oh.”
“Yes,” said Eric. “Sorry. This is my friend, Holly. She…uh…works with Karen.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I thought you were a student.”
To Holly, Eric said, “This is Chad Whelt. History teacher. Literature hater.”
“Sticks and stones,” returned Chad. “You just keep wasting your time on all that made-up nonsense. It’s nice to meet you, Holly.”
“You too.”
He turned back to Eric again. “What’re you two doing?”
“Huh? Oh.” He glanced back at Holly, unsure what to say. “Uh… We were…making some deliveries for Karen.”
Holly nodded. Yep. That was it.
“Ah,” said Chad. “Because of her car trouble?”
Eric stared at him for a second. “Yes.” He’d forgotten about the excuse he made for leaving early. “Exactly.”
“It put her way behind schedule,” agreed Holly.
“We just stopped off here because I forgot some stuff in my classroom.”
“I see. Well I hope everything works out.”
“I’m sure it will,” Eric assured him. “It just messed up her schedule was all.”
Chad looked up at him again. “I’m sorry. You were about to ask me something and I interrupted.”
“Oh yeah. This is kind of random, but does the name Rossetter mean anything to you?”
“You mean as in the Rossetter Psychiatric Hospital?”
Eric raised an eyebrow. “Psychiatric Hospital?” Julian Berchey mentioned a psychiatric hospital, didn’t he?
“It was built in the fifties, if I remember right,” continued Chad. “It was a state-of-the-art facility for its time. It took in patients from all over Wisconsin and Illinois.”
Including those from Soman Sanatorium before it was converted into a nursing home and later into Berchey’s Aberration Station? “Whatever happened to it?”
“It was eventually demolished, I’m sure. Even newer state-of-the-art facilities have been built since then. But I’m not entirely sure when it was torn down or even exactly where it used to be. Why the interest?”
“No big reason,” he lied. “I just came across the name and couldn’t place it. I’d never heard of it before.”
“The place housed some pretty dangerous people for a while. There were lots of rumors about the place when I was growing up. Some real horror movie fodder.”
That sounded like just the sort of thing he usually ended up dealing with. Fortunately, it didn’t exist anymore.
He nodded. “Thanks. We should get going. I have…stuff…I have to do.”
“Sure thing. I’ll see you on Monday, right?”
“Of course.” He gestured at the clutter on the desk. “You have fun.”
“Thanks. I will.”
Eric stepped back out into the hallway with Holly and walked away from Chad’s room. When he was out of earshot, he said, “Rossetter Psychiatric Hospital. No way can that be a coincidence.”
“Probably not,” agreed Holly.
“The gray agents were planning something at the Goss Building,” he recalled, going over everything he’d learned. “Now there’re monsters roaming the halls over there. Those same agents said they were staying at a nursing home. The Soman Sanatorium was functioning as a nursing home at that time, having transferred its patients to a new psychiatric hospital. Rossetter Psychiatric Hospital. The Soman Sanatorium is now the Aberration Station, where I ran into that steampunk character. Also, Goss and Soman were both owned by Gardenhour. Plus, the guy who tied me up in those tunnels wanted me to tell him about Rossetter. And he was at Goss the same time Karen and I were there.”
“So how does that bungalow and your number one fan fit into all of this?”
Eric ignored the sharp accusation in her voice and shook his head. “I have no idea. Except it was used by agents in 1962 and today. Maybe the nameless organization owns it. That psycho woman did call it a ‘company safe house’.”
“So what do they want with this school?”
“The agents in 1881 tricked a bunch of kids into summoning the jinn in the basement of the old high school. And according to Hector’s letters, it looks like the gray agents were recruiting kids again in 1962. Maybe they planned to try again in the new high school. If Hector did manage to stop them, then maybe she intends to pick up where they left off. Right here. And we have to assume that she might be recruiting kids to do it for her, just like the others did.”
Holly looked horrified. He didn’t blame her. There was a grim possibility that there were students here at this very school, perhaps even at this very moment, who were in mortal danger.
When he encountered the jinn last year, it entered his mind for a moment. It was a physically agonizing experience. It’d felt like his brains were melting. But in all the chaos, he caught glimpses of the summoning that trapped the god-like being in that place, brief memories of someone who was there that night. One of a group of teenagers preparing to do something incredible. But all they did was unleash the wrath of something terrible. They were incinerated in the fiery blast that brought the jinn to this world, the same fiery blast that blew out the doors and windows of that old school and set the city ablaze.
He couldn’t let that happen again.
They turned the corner and stopped. In front of them was the hallway that led to the gymnasium. He came this way every day—many times a day—to get to the stairs that he always took to his classroom. But there was something there now that had never been there before.
Holly cocked her head to one side as she tried to comprehend what she was seeing. “Isn’t that your cat?”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Big, yellow eyes, thick fur, stout shape. It was undoubtedly Spooky. But what the hell was he doing here?
As they watched, he stood up and disappeared into the gymnasium.
They weren’t all that far from Goss. It had been a while since he lost sight of him there. He and Karen had been to the Aberration Station. He’d explored the o
ld municipal tunnels. And he and Holly had visited the mystery bungalow and gone to pick up Paul and Kevin. With all that had happened, it wasn’t surprising that a cat could make it this far. But why?
There was something peculiar about that cat.
They hurried after him.
“How did he even get into the building?” wondered Eric.
“Open window somewhere?” guessed Holly.
“I guess so… But how does he keep finding me?”
“Maybe he’s not. Maybe he’s just doing the same thing you are.”
“But I don’t have any idea what I’m doing!”
They ran into the gymnasium and stopped. It was empty. The lights were out.
“Where’d he go now?” asked Eric.
Holly pointed to the far corner. “There.”
He looked just in time to catch sight of a long, furry tail disappearing into the boys’ locker room. Again, he hurried after him.
Holly kept up with him. “Isabelle said there was something special about him.”
“Yeah?”
“It was a few days after you found him. We were talking on the phone.”
Isabelle wasn’t usually prone to mood swings. She was frozen in a single state of being. Although she was fully conscious and free to move about within the confines of her strange prison, her body didn’t age at all. She didn’t become hungry or thirsty or sleepy. She was convinced that the only reason she had any emotions at all was because she was psychically connected to her parents and to Eric. She felt their natural mood swings and could react accordingly. Because of this, she had literally endless patience. (She did spend almost four decades locked inside a deranged mansion that didn’t even have any furniture in it; she couldn’t even play that game where you pretended the floor was lava.) But she was, occasionally, prone to feeling bored and lonely. Mostly when those she shared a connection with were feeling those things. At times like that, she would reach out and call Eric or Karen or Holly, just to have a conversation.
“After we talked, I tried asking the water about him.”
He turned and looked at her, interested. “And?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. Not even a fragment of an image. It was weird.”
“Maybe it doesn’t work on cats.”
“Maybe not.”
They reached the doorway to the locker room and turned the corner. “Hello?” he called. “Anyone in here?”
No answer.
Eric stepped into the room and looked around.
Holly followed him. But as soon as she saw where she was, she let out a soft yelp and covered her eyes. “Am I supposed to be in here?”
“You’re fine,” he assured her. “Nobody’s here.” He raised his voice a little and called, “Spooky? You in here?”
Nothing. But then again, the cat didn’t usually respond to him when called. He’d usually respond to Karen, but he mostly ignored Eric.
“Here kitty?”
“Kitty-kitty?” tried Holly. “Come here, Spooky.”
It was worth a try. He seemed to like Holly as much as he liked Karen. But still he didn’t show himself.
“There’s not many places he can go,” Eric reasoned. And yet, he’d said that about the storage room in Goss, too, and still the little beast had managed to escape. “You wait here. Make sure he doesn’t sneak out behind me.”
While Holly guarded the door, Eric made a complete sweep of the locker room. But Spooky was gone again.
“That doesn’t even make any sense.”
“I’m sure he didn’t turn up here by accident,” said Holly.
He was sure of that, too. There was definitely something peculiar about the cat.
They turned and walked back out into the gymnasium. Eric was still pondering the vanishing feline when Holly gasped. He looked up to see one of the creatures from Goss shuffling across the polished floor, its head drooping, its bare feet dragging.
There was no hiding this time. It lifted its head and saw them there. Its slack muscles tensed. Its limp hands clenched. Its oversized lips peeled back, revealing sharp, jagged teeth that were visible even from halfway across the gym.
No longer was this thing slow and stupid. It broke into a run and charged them.
It wasn’t remarkably fast, even at a run. It had a strange, awkward gait. But it wasn’t shuffling anymore. It was definitely not the time for a slow retreat.
They ran back through the doorway and shut the doors between them and it.
“How do you lock it?” asked Holly.
“I don’t know if you can.”
They pressed their backs to the door instead.
“What now?”
But Eric wasn’t sure. They didn’t seem to have many options at the moment. They’d already established that there was no way out of the locker room.
Something slammed against the door, nearly knocking Eric over. He cursed. Holly screamed.
He braced himself. The next time the thing slammed into the door, he held his ground.
Holly screamed again.
“Quiet!” hissed Eric. “Someone’ll come.”
“Isn’t that the point?”
“Not when that someone’s likely to get eaten by a monster!”
The creature slammed itself into the door Holly was holding this time, forcing it open a few inches. She screamed again and squealed, “I’m pretty sure this is one of those every witch for herself moments!”
Everything fell silent then. Both of them kept their weight against the door. They stared at each other, listening.
Finally, he turned his head and looked out through the small window in the door.
It was right there, looking back at him, its horrid face only inches from his own.
Its eyes were the same color as its flesh, a deathly gray, like the eyes of a statue, except for the fact that it was clearly focused on him.
A long, black tongue slipped from between its too-large lips and licked the glass, leaving a greasy smear.
“That’s just nasty,” he told it.
Again, the thing threw its weight into the door. He felt his feet slide on the tile. It was stronger than it looked. And considerably livelier than its brothers at the rec center.
“It’s not going away,” screamed Holly.
“I can see that.” And even if it did decide to give up and wander off, where would it go? Out to roam the hallways? They couldn’t just let the thing wander free. It could hurt someone. What if it charged into Chad’s classroom? He wouldn’t know how to handle something like this. With his astounding lack of imagination, he’d probably refuse to believe what he was seeing until it sank its teeth into him.
He looked at Holly. “We’ve got to stop this thing.”
It slammed against the doors again, startling another scream from her.
“Use your thrust.”
“I’m kind of busy right now!”
“I’ve got the doors. You get back. Get ready. When I let it in, you blast it.”
She shook her head. It was a hard motion that sent her pigtails swishing back and forth.
“Unless you have a better idea!”
Again, the creature slammed into her door. It took all her strength to hold it closed. “I can’t! I’m scared!”
“You’re a witch! It should be scared of you!”
As it threw itself into her door again, she screamed, “I’m pretty sure it’s not!”
“Hurry!”
Holly was crying again. “I’m too scared!”
He forced his weight against both doors so that she could let go.
Again, she shook her head. Her pigtails whipped across his face.
“We survived way worse than this in Illinois! What’s up with you?”
“I was scared then, too!” she sobbed.
“Not like this! You’re one of the bravest people I know! Snap out of it!”
The door rattled hard on its hinges. She screamed again, but this time she backed away from the door.
&
nbsp; “Get ready!”
But she was still shaking her head. “I’m scared!”
“I can’t hold it off forever!”
She lifted her hands. “I won’t be able to… I can’t do it when I’m scared…”
“You don’t have any choice!”
The creature slammed into the left door. It opened several inches before he could force it closed again. For a split second, he was staring directly into its hideous face. “Any time!”
She made a noise that was a terrified fusion of a squeal and a squeak. Eric decided that was as close to an “I’m ready” as he was going to get.
He let go of the doors and ran for it, but he didn’t make it far. The door burst open behind him before he could get away.
Holly screamed.
Eric threw himself to the floor and covered his head.
And then the monster was on top of him.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Eric uttered a very unmanly-sounding string of syllables that weren’t quite words and weren’t quite a scream. He crawled forward, clawing his way out from under the monster, desperate to get away before it could sink its jagged teeth into him.
At some point, it did occur to him that the thing was dead. It wasn’t really attacking him. It was only lying on top of him, heavy but motionless. Having been struck down in a single blow by Holly’s thrust spell, it had collapsed into a heap. And Eric, having the kind of luck that he had, happened to be beneath it when it landed. And yet the blind panic that overcame him when he felt the weight of the thing’s lifeless carcass crash down onto his back refused to let up until he was out from under it and on his feet again.
“Are you okay?” gasped Holly. She was breathing hard. A light sweat had sprung up on her skin. That was the second time she’d used her thrust in a short amount of time. She wouldn’t have many left before she became too weak to defend herself.
Eric shuddered hard and backed away from the monster. “Fantastic,” he grunted as he surveyed the scene before him. Her thrust was as devastating as ever. The creature was nearly torn in half. A huge, gaping wound had been carved right through its ribcage, as if it’d been struck with the broad blade of a massive axe. If it had a heart and lungs inside its strange, alien body, and if they were anywhere near where they were supposed to be, they’d surely been decimated.