Fearscape

by Simon Holt

  “Henry!”

  The word was curt and perhaps too loudly spoken for a library. Aaron knew the voice. He turned around to see Thom Halloway standing behind him, his arms folded across his chest. He glowered at Aaron.

  “I thought I made it clear that I didn’t want you talking to my son.”

  “I was just saying hi,” said Henry. “Aaron didn’t do anything.”

  “Then you can say goodbye now,” Mr. Halloway replied.

  Aaron reached toward the bookshelf and pulled out The Secret of Wildcat Swamp, then handed it to Henry.

  “This was one of my favorites,” he said.

  “Thanks, I haven’t read it yet.”

  “Henry, why don’t you go check that out?” his father said. “I’ll meet you at the car.”

  “I’m serious, Dad. Aaron was only helping me pick out a book.”

  “And that was very thoughtful of him.” Mr. Halloway’s tone and gaze left no room for argument. Henry offered Aaron a weak smile and headed off toward the front desk.

  “See you, Hen,” said Aaron.

  “No, you won’t,” said Mr. Halloway. “I don’t want you anywhere near him.”

  Aaron’s eyes narrowed and he returned the older man’s hateful look.

  “How’s Reggie doing?”

  “She’s doing much better now that she doesn’t have you filling her head with lies and conspiracy theories.”

  “So you’ve seen her, then? Your daughter will be coming home soon?” Aaron’s voice dripped with disdain.

  “Dr. Unger is happy with her progress.”

  “But you haven’t actually spoken to her, have you? You haven’t seen this ‘progress’ for yourself—you’re just taking Unger’s word for it.”

  Mr. Halloway took a step forward. Aaron had grown quite a bit in the last year and was now pushing six feet, but Mr. Halloway still loomed over him, and he was twice Aaron’s girth.

  “I trust a professional, celebrated psychiatrist who is considered an expert in the field more than a deranged kid who preyed on an impressionable girl.”

  Aaron felt the wrath building inside him.

  “If you think Reggie’s impressionable, you’re even more blind than I thought.” He shook his head, disgusted. “Just try to see her. Go visit her—see if Unger lets you. I bet you all your good intentions he’ll give you the runaround, some excuse why you can’t be in the same room as her, why you can’t even look at her. He’s keeping your daughter away from you, Mr. Halloway, but once you figure that out, it’ll be too late.”

  “You’re insane,” Mr. Halloway seethed. Both of their voices had risen, and other library patrons were starting to give them looks. “You stay away from Henry, you hear me? You stay out of my family’s business. You’re never going to see Reggie again.”

  “At this rate, neither are you,” Aaron shot back.

  Mr. Halloway’s hands balled into fists, but at that moment a librarian appeared behind him.

  “Excuse me,” she said firmly. “I’m going to need to ask both of you to leave. Now.”

  “Just about to,” said Aaron. As he pushed past Mr. Halloway, he added quietly, “Try it. See what happens. Then give me a call.”

  That Saturday, despite the freezing rain, Aaron pedaled his bike out to the neighboring town of Wennemack. He pulled up to an apartment complex in the shadier part of town and dragged his bike down the steps to the garden unit. He knocked on the door, and it was answered by a short, attractive African-American woman.

  “Hi, honey, come on in,” she said.

  “Hey, Crystal. I didn’t know you’d be dropping by today.”

  “Just delivering a little goody bag.”

  Aaron followed her back inside and wiped his wet shoes on the doormat. He left his soaked coat by the door and entered the small but cozy ground-floor apartment.

  A man with cropped brown hair and a full beard sat at a kitchen table cataloging some pretty serious–looking weaponry, including guns, grenades, and other specialty items. With his new facial hair, hair color, and wardrobe, he didn’t look much like the man who had taught Reggie and Aaron Shakespeare the previous year, but he was.

  Arthur Machen had shown up in Cutter’s Wedge with the specific purpose of keeping an eye on, and then killing, Regina Halloway. Posing as a high school English teacher, he had actually been a member of the Tracers, the same league of assassins to which Eben had belonged. The Tracers would break any moral or ethical code if it meant protecting the greater society from the Vours, and this included murdering humans who got in their way or posed a risk. Reggie had done both. She disagreed with their lethal methods, and they saw her powers as a threat to the balance between worlds. Machen had been sent to eliminate her, but in the end he had defied his orders and gone into hiding. Reggie was unaware of his transfer of allegiance, but he was now Aaron’s only ally in his quest to rescue her.

  “Wow. That is quite the arsenal,” Aaron said, approaching the table.

  “Specially modified by yours truly,” said Crystal. “The ultimate in anti-Vour technology.”

  “You’re the best, Crystal. This is perfect.” Machen rose from the table and walked her to the door. “You’re sure you’re not sticking your neck out too much, getting this stuff for us?”

  “It’s worth it, baby. We all play our part.”

  Machen smiled at her and surreptitiously handed over a wad of bills.

  “Plus the cash doesn’t hurt,” Crystal added. “Let me know how things go, and when you need another shipment. And be careful.”

  “You too.”

  “Any new deserters?” Aaron asked as Machen closed the door behind Crystal. After news of Reggie’s power had spread among the Tracers, some of them, like Machen and Crystal, had balked at the group’s unbending way of battling Vours, now that there was another option that didn’t require killing the human victim trapped in the fearscape. The league had lost many members, but Aaron’s question was purely rhetorical. Machen never shared the names of Tracers, current or former. The only reason Aaron knew Crystal was because she had walked up and introduced herself to him.

  “You bring your gloves?” Machen asked. Aaron grinned at him.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  The other thing Aaron had done over the summer was start a training regimen with the ex-Tracer. Weight lifting, boxing, even some martial arts work. In only a handful of months, his beanpole frame had developed muscles he hadn’t even known existed, and he could now actually run a few miles without getting winded. His entire life, Aaron had been the hacker guy, more known for his computer skills and nerdy exploits than an ability to bench-press something more than just the weight bar. But Aaron never wanted to be the weak, gawky kid again.

  After a sparring match, which Machen won handily, Aaron pulled out the new information he’d gotten at the library, as well as the letter he had found among Eben’s personal files.

  “Do you think it’s significant?” Aaron asked Machen after he had read it. Machen scratched his beard.

  “You’re sure this refers to Macie’s journal?”

  “It must. I don’t think Eben received any other diaries by mail. Plus it talks about a special ability, and Macie had that Vour confined behind the wall in her basement. Sims must have been an old Tracer buddy of Eben’s, but they had a falling out when Eben quit the group.”

  “That’s a logical deduction. But I don’t see how it can help us now. The house burned down, didn’t it?”

  With Reggie almost trapped inside, Aaron thought.

  “Yeah, and from this it sounds like the Vours did get their hands on the old bat after all. Poor crazy Macie.”

  They moved on to the newspaper stories, which they cross-referenced with the files Machen’s contacts had recovered from the Tracers. After deciding which seemed like probable Vour cases, Machen added pins to a wall map where the crimes took place; a heavy concentration of the pins were already stuck in the area surrounding Cutter’s Wedge.

  “It’s like g
round zero,” Aaron said, standing back and examining the map. “Why do you think that is?”

  “I wish I knew,” Machen replied. “I spent years following orders, killing whom I needed to kill, never asking the bigger questions. There didn’t even seem to be bigger questions, because Vours never seemed organized—they could only act one by one. Now I feel like a real idiot.”

  “So the Tracers really never knew about Unger or the experiments or anything like that?”

  “It’s possible that they did and I wasn’t privy. We operated like sleeper cells, to keep our identities as secret from the Vours as possible. I could be sitting next to another Tracer on a bus, in a bar, wherever, and neither of us would know what the other was. At any rate, we all worked on a need-to-know basis, and if the Tracers were aware of Unger and his activities, I didn’t need to know about it.”

  “And we’re left with nothing.” Aaron sighed. The frustration was almost unbearable.

  “Based on these pins, we can make the educated guess that wherever Unger has Reggie, it’s relatively close, probably within a two- to three-hour drive. Whatever it is about this area, he most likely won’t want to be far from it.”

  “So she’s probably not in Tacoma. Wonderful. We still need a way to narrow it down.”

  “And we will.”

  “How?” Aaron found himself asking the same question Henry had. “We’ve been at it for months now, and gotten exactly nowhere!”

  “Not nowhere.” Machen crossed to his desk and pulled a manila envelope out of a drawer. He tossed it down in front of Aaron. Aaron flipped it open and examined its contents.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Crystal. She’s good at tracking things down.”

  “And you think it’s for real?”

  “It’s the best lead we’ve had so far. But we should get visual confirmation.”

  “Can you give me a ride to the station? Looks like I’m headed to New York.”

  Reggie wobbled on one bare foot atop a pedestal that was no larger than ten square inches. Her toes had curled around the edge of one side and gripped the dais so hard that her entire foot had turned purple. Gray clouds surrounded her, their dampness soaking her skin and making the bottom of her foot dangerously slippery. As Reggie teetered on the pedestal, the inside of her calf aching with a hot, stabbing pain, the clouds parted.

  She stood atop an impossibly tall and thin makeshift tower comprised of desks, chairs, rickety ladders, and other nondescript furniture and junk. The ground was so far down that cars on the streets looked like ants crawling in single file. She was too high up to make out any people.

  Unger had shunted her into the fearscape of Trevor, a man who was about thirty, and whose body, in the real world, was covered in bedsores from months of inactivity. This early layer revealed his fear of heights.

  The pace of Unger’s wicked experiments upon Reggie had only accelerated during her captivity, and at times she could feel that her mind had started to unravel. Her ability to distinguish between wakefulness and dream, between reality and fearscape, was disintegrating. For all she knew, Unger was trying to break her, to crack open her mind and drive her insane.

  If this was his objective, he was close to accomplishing his goal.

  The atmosphere up this high was almost too thin to breathe, and Reggie was getting light-headed. Fright seized her heart as she wobbled on the tiny platform. Falling likely meant failing—she’d be kicked out of the fearscape, and Trevor would be left in hell.

  “Trevor!” she called out into the atmosphere. If he could hear her, maybe he could send her a sign. She needed to know how to get to him, where he had gone in this nightmare. “Trevor!”

  Frigid winds lashed across her body, swallowing up her voice and making her sway precariously in the wet, gray sky. Lightning crackled in the distance, and thunder rippled low and raw like the growl of a waking demon. The Vour knew she was here.

  It wasn’t just facing fear after fear that was getting to her; it was also the exhaustion of having to put the puzzle pieces together and find the way through. She had to be brave, but also smart, wary, and, most difficult of all, optimistic. It was such a burden, and a joke, trying to muster optimism in the face of so much horror. The toll this pressure was taking on her mind was far greater than that on her body.

  “Trevor!”

  A bolt of lightning streaked down and hit the platform, just missing Reggie. But an electric shock surged through her body, frying her skin, and she lost her balance. She toppled over the side of the platform, just managing to catch the edge with her fingertips before she could plummet to the ground miles below.

  There she dangled, her fingers gripping the ledge with the last of their strength. But they were wet with dew and sweat, and they were slipping….

  Would it really be so bad to fall? To fail? Reggie wondered. Maybe she couldn’t beat this one. Maybe this was one she just couldn’t save.

  “Trevor!” she called again, less sure now.

  The ground had disappeared, replaced with swirling gray mist. The emptiness tugged at her.

  Reggie strained to hear something, anything that might give her hope that the person she sought felt her presence. But aside from the whistling wind and the boom of closing thunder, the only voice she heard seemed to reverberate from within her.

  Give in….

  She was so tired. Everything ached, her muscles and her mind.

  It’s okay. Give in….

  She hadn’t asked for this. Why shouldn’t she give in, just this once?

  Leave….

  Reggie exhaled sharply. She didn’t know if the voice was the Vour’s or her own. If it was the latter, then she had nothing left, and that was far scarier than anything the fearscape could show her. She would not give in. Not yet.

  “TREVOR!”

  A spot of red appeared in the gray, far below. Slowly it grew, rising up on the air currents to meet her, and soon Reggie saw that it was a balloon, with a matching red ribbon trailing along behind it. A bread crumb. He had heard her.

  Just before she thought her arm would pop out of its socket, the balloon floated up past her head. With her other hand Reggie grabbed the ribbon, and she began to slowly and gently descend through the storm, the helium-filled balloon keeping her from falling too fast.

  But as she drifted lower, the air around her grew darker and darker, until she was surrounded by blackness as complete as a starless night sky. She could see nothing, not even the tips of her fingers. She couldn’t tell if she was still floating or not: Her body felt weightless, but now she thought maybe she was lying on her back. She tried to get up, but her legs didn’t move. It occurred to her that she felt weightless because she couldn’t feel any of her limbs. She couldn’t move her legs, or wiggle her toes, or raise her arms. There was no feeling anywhere in her body. Her eyes were closed, and she had no power or control to open them. She had battled against the pull of a gray oblivion, so why could she no longer move?

  She was stuck in some kind of paralytic limbo, and panic gripped her like morning frost. She could feel her heart pound harder and faster, verifying that her body was in some way still here. Did Trevor fear paralysis? No sights, no sounds, no feeling. In her growing catalog of ghoulish experiences, never had Reggie found herself completely without the ability to move.

  But then, as if from very far away, she heard something. It was hard to discern over her racing heartbeat, but slowly it grew louder.

  The arthritic sound of thin metal, stretching and grinding.

  Voices, muffled at first, grew in clarity. Someone approached her.

  Then there was a bang like a door being thrown open, and new, strange voices mumbled unintelligibly all around. She strained to understand, but the voices sounded submerged beneath a rolling tide. Her surroundings bustled now, but she still could not see or feel. She wanted to call out, but she could only listen. The voices finally molded into words she understood.

  “Tumor,” said a gruff
voice. “Routine.”

  “Patient anesthetized. Begin when ready.”

  Oh, God, thought Reggie. No! No, I’m not all the way under! But neither the doctor nor the nurse could hear the screaming in her head.

  Metal clinked and Reggie imagined surgical implements on a tray.

  Scalpels, clamps, staplers. Sharp, cold, and harsh.

  “Sharpen.”

  Sounds of a blade filing down. Zhip, zhing, zhip, zhing, zhip, zhing.

  “Staples.”

  Snap, chink, snap, chink.

  “Staples ready.”

  Help me! Reggie shrieked in her mind. Trevor! Can you hear me? Are you out there—

  Without warning the knife sliced into Reggie’s abdomen. It moved from one side of her stomach to the other, and she felt her guts moving around as the doctor dug around her insides.

  “Prepare for incision.”

  The blade cut into her again, this time a little higher, sawing across her body.

  Again, lower this time. The scalpel dragged across her hip bones.

  Searing, stabbing agony, and all Reggie could do was scream in her thoughts.

  “Scissors.”

  She heard the sickening snip snip snip of the blades as her abdominal muscles ripped like tissue. A monitor in the dark beeped rapidly. A red-hot coal burned inside her chest.

  “Cardiac arrest.”

  The pain was too intense, and she had no idea how to get out of it. How could she move to the next level of a fearscape if she couldn’t move?

  Endure. Endure this.

  That was the challenge here; that was the only chance at victory. Endure. Wait it out, and pass to the next level.

  Reggie concentrated on deep, even breaths. She thought of Aaron in one of his stupid hats, and she felt her bottom lip twitch. The pain washed over her. Her heart slowed. The burning in her chest ebbed.

  Ftwop went the staple gun. Ftwop ftwop.

  Her stomach riddled with holes, Reggie endured.

  Breathe. Just breathe.