by Simon Holt
Quinn’s fingers brushed his own scar on his cheek, and he touched the two stubs on his right hand.
“I don’t want you to leave,” he conceded. “I know it might not seem like it after tonight, but things changed for me when you moved in. They got easier, because I finally didn’t feel like such a freak.”
Reggie let out a short, bitter laugh.
“In comparison to me?”
“No! No, that’s not what I meant. When I came back, everyone expected me to be this guy, this guy who I didn’t know at all. At first I was just a seven-year-old in the body of a seventeen-year-old, which was weird enough, but then when the memories started to return and mix together—I didn’t know how I could go out in the day, how I could talk to people without screaming or curling into a ball or… or even hitting them in the face. It’s like sometimes I still feel this sludge inside me….”
“Like it’s infecting you? Making you a different person?”
“Exactly. Do you think it will ever go away?”
“I don’t know,” said Reggie. “Too bad they don’t make soul colonics.”
They both smiled grimly, and the teakettle began to whistle.
17
Quinn and Reggie strode down the sterile white hallway. It had been a couple of days since Reggie had discovered Quinn’s scarscape, and now she was going to try to enter another mind.
“I really hate hospitals,” Reggie muttered.
“No kidding,” Quinn replied.
They reached the room the nurse had directed them to. Aaron was pacing back and forth, and Machen sat in a chair by the window. He got up when he saw them.
“Hey, guys, come on in.” He hurried over and shut the door behind them.
Both Reggie and Quinn gawked at Macie lying in the hospital bed. She was so frail that her body barely left an outline beneath the blankets. Her face was covered with wrinkles and liver spots, and an oxygen tube was shoved up her nostrils.
“She’s dying, isn’t she?” Reggie asked.
“I’m afraid so. The doctors say it’s only a matter of time.”
“So you should get in there while you can,” Aaron said. “What do you need from us?”
“Just some quiet, and if you can make sure there are no interruptions…”
“No one will interrupt.”
Reggie nodded and sat down next to Macie’s bedside. She glanced back at the three anxious men hovering behind her.
“Well, here goes nothing.”
Reggie took Macie’s hand, concentrated, and pushed into the old woman’s subconscious. The familiar tunnel opened, and she traveled down it, farther than she’d ever had to go before. It got very dark, and very quiet, and it felt a bit like she was floating in some kind of inner space. There was the feeling of emptiness all around her, as though she were traveling through a land that had been erased. Macie’s consciousness was buried deep.
And then, in the distance, she saw a spark. Where before it had felt like she was drifting in nothingness, now the air grew cold, a biting winter cold, as she neared the flash of light. It rose in the darkness, bright and orange, flaring and flickering, but it was not a friendly fire. The tongues of flame lashed out like angry, cracking whips, lacerating the black, scarring the night.
She felt solid earth beneath her feet—very solid, frozen solid, in fact. Ice coated the ground, glinting off the dancing firelight ahead. A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature speared up through her body. She thought she knew where she was.
The fire was eating up a huge cross that stood in the middle of a cornfield. And then a piercing shriek filled the air. A body was tied to that cross, and it screamed into the dark.
“Macie! Macie! Cut me down! They’re coming! They’re coming for me!”
Smoke as black as the night around it billowed up, swirling around the boy, quenching the flames. As the fire died, the smoke seemed to take on its violent nature, moving like a living beast.
“They’re coming!”
The smoke attacked the boy, surging into his mouth, smothering his words. It flew into his nostrils and out of his ears, in through his lips and out from his eyes, choking him, blinding him. It enveloped his skin like an oily blanket, seeping into his pores and turning his veins black. His skin withered and wrinkled like a prune until it was no more than a flaky casing for his bones. His eyeballs gorged with black fluid until they exploded out of his eye sockets. His brain turned to mush under the devouring vapors and leaked out of his ears onto the ground. He no longer screamed, his tongue now eaten away completely by the toxic smoke.
After all this time, after all the horrors she’d seen, Macie’s greatest fear was still the sight of her brother, Jeremiah, being taken over by a Vour. In a fit of drunken rage, her father had strung the boy up on a scarecrow’s perch one Sorry Night, and his terror had called to the Vour like a siren song. Unable to help him, she had watched the transformation happen. This was how her mind had corrupted the scene, into a gruesome snuff film.
Reggie heard a wail, higher and weaker than Jeremiah’s had been, and saw a tiny lump on the ground near the base of the cross. It was a small girl lying in a heap, weeping softly.
“Macie?” Reggie said. Her voice echoed in this psychic space, and the girl looked up, shocked and terrified. Only it wasn’t a girl after all. It was an old woman, wan and wrinkled, with long, straggly gray hair and limbs so emaciated they looked like toothpicks.
The woman scrambled backward, but Reggie held out her hands.
“Don’t be afraid. I need to talk to you.”
“Who are you?” Macie asked.
“My name is Reggie. Are you always here? Do you always have to watch Jeremiah?”
“Always. It’s always the same. I can never save him. But how did you know—?”
“I read your journal. It told me all about Jeremiah, and the Vours, and how to defeat them. How to devour my fear.”
“You read my journal?” Recognition seemed to dawn in the old woman’s eyes. “You’re her. The one who sees.”
Reggie nodded.
“You see, too. You went into fearscapes, too, didn’t you?”
Macie cringed.
“A few. I couldn’t take it. And now I’m trapped here. Is this my fearscape? Am I a Vour?”
“No, no, you’re not a Vour. I think the tests that Dr. Unger did on you split your mind. He tortured you, Macie. He forced your conscious mind deep inside. I think you were trying to hide from the evil outside, but somehow you’re tormented here as well. I’m sorry.”
“Why are you here?”
“I need your help. You told me that I shouldn’t look. What did you mean by that? Shouldn’t look at what?”
Macie began to wag her head back and forth.
“No. No. You don’t want to know these things.”
“I do, Macie. I have to.”
“How do you think I am the way I am?” Macie demanded, grabbing Reggie’s arm. Her grip was like cold stone. “I looked. It drove me here. It split me in two. Do you want to end up like me?”
Reggie took Macie’s hand in her own.
“I have to try. I have to see what they don’t want me to see. Macie, Sorry Night is almost here. We’re running out of time.”
They had wandered away from the cross a bit, and now Macie stopped. Reggie tried again.
“Does it have something to do with the cloud? That cloud that some people see when they defeat their fearscapes?”
Macie sighed and seemed to make up her mind. “It’s your sanity, girl. Yes, it’s a portal. A portal to their world.”
“To the Vours’ world?”
“It’s how they get in. It’s the back door. It leads to a hub that connects all the fearscapes. It’s the birthplace of fear.”
Reggie felt the excitement growing inside her.
“But how do you know this? How could you see it? I can never see them.”
“When a fearscape crumbles, it leaves a void.”
“Yes, yes,
I’ve been there! Afterward. But it’s different.”
“Yes. The void rots away, like a house that no one cares for. The white walls you see when you first demolish a fearscape are just a façade, a coat of paint hiding the scars left over. But that paint chips away with time. The scars are revealed, and so is the portal.”
“So if I go back into a scarscape, I’ll be able to see this back door?”
“But why would you want to, girl? Listen to me—it will drive you mad. It is terror and despair and all the things that drag us into hell. Look at me.”
“Surviving is fighting,” Reggie said. “It’s my turn to fight.”
“Then good luck to you, girl.”
Macie began to shrink away, back toward the cross. Reggie looked up and saw that Jeremiah was freshly hung on it, and the fire was just starting to spark.
“Macie, no, come with me! You don’t have to fear this!”
But Macie had crouched back down by the cross, weeping and wailing for her brother and trying desperately to undo the knots that bound him. Reggie could do nothing to move her.
Reggie blinked and found herself back in her body. Aaron was by her side.
“What happened?” he asked.
“It is the cloud,” she said breathlessly. She explained what Macie had told her about the portal to the Vours’ world. She looked up at Quinn. “I have to go back to your scarscape.”
“No. No way,” Aaron said. “Macie’s right—it’s too dangerous.”
“I have to see it, Aaron. I have to see if it’s a viable way in. Don’t you realize what this could mean? An entrance to their world. We could take the fight to their world.”
“I’m all for new ideas, Reggie,” Machen said, “but I have to agree with Aaron. We have solid evidence that even just looking at this thing could hurt you.”
“This will be a fact-finding mission only,” Reggie said. “I won’t try to go into the Vour world by myself or anything stupid like that. Look, I’ve been there already and I was fine. I just need to go a little further.”
All three of them could see that there was no arguing with her. Aaron knew better than anyone that when Reggie made up her mind to do something, she did it. Finally they relented.
“Fact finding only,” he said to her.
“Are we doing this now?” Quinn asked.
“Yes, immediately. It shouldn’t take long.” Reggie pulled Quinn down onto one of the visitors’ chairs and knelt beside him.
“You said you could feel me in there before?” she asked.
“I think so, yeah.”
“I won’t trash the place, then.” She took his hand and gazed into his eyes, and soon she was back in the cloudy realm of the scarscape.
This time she knew where she was, and she had more purpose.
“Hello?” she called out. Her voice was swallowed up by the churning walls. But then one of the clouds reassembled into a childish face with cherub cheeks and blank eyes.
“Hello again,” it said, sounding like wind through reeds.
“I’m looking for something,” Reggie said.
“What would you look for here?”
“A cloud,” Reggie said at first, then realized that this whole world was clouds. “I mean, a window, a door, some kind of passage.”
“It closed, along with the rest.”
“Can you show it to me anyway?”
The face said nothing more, but pushed along the wall in front of Reggie. It left a trail of vapor, a desperate string winding through a deep labyrinth. It beckoned Reggie to follow.
She did, half walking, half floating along through the ethereal landscape, for what seemed like a long time but could have been only seconds. Time wasn’t a factor here. But as she progressed, her feet felt heavier, and it took more effort to move them forward. She felt pressure in her chest, as though her heart were actually sinking. Finally she heard the voice again.
“There…”
It dissipated once again in front of what appeared to be a grayish window.
Reggie approached slowly, laboring.
The opening throbbed, a gray maw with a heartbeat all its own. As she peered closer, Reggie noticed that the breach was sheathed in a gauzelike film. She pushed a finger into the film, and a stab of cold ran up the length of her arm like ice through her veins. She drew her hand away but tried again, determined. It gave a bit, stretching like a thin latex membrane. She tried to pull at it, tear it a little so she could see through, but the strange fabric was deceptively strong.
However strong it was, it was translucent enough that she could see through to the other side. Something was beyond….
Reggie ignored every instinct that screamed for her to back away, to leave this place. She needed to see.
With supreme effort, as though she had to fight her own muscles, she pressed her face to the gauze, keeping her eyes open, ignoring the stabbing cold pricks that seemed to freeze her in place. She pushed until she could see details, something to give her a sense of what lived beyond this forsaken place. Nothing moved, but Reggie could feel that the space was alive.
Everything was blurry, but she could see grayish, cavelike corridors extending in all directions. Lining these were doorways—these were the back doors Macie had spoken of. These were the Vours’ access to fearscapes. A shudder racked her body like a seizure as more of the hub came into focus.
A line of shadows reached as far back down the corridors as she could see, each one waiting by a door. Thousands and thousands of them, lingering, waiting, wanting. Malice radiated from them like steam off a morning pond. They were the Vours, and they were preparing for Sorry Night.
Her brain was alive with feelers of fear. Since developing some of the Vours’ powers, it was like she had an extrasensory perception for terror, and it was on high alert now. Not here in the scarscape, but in that corridor beyond. Fear emanated from all those doorways, every kind of fear imaginable. Every kind of fear that one might see in all the fearscapes of the universe.
Now she wanted to run, but she was frozen in place. It was like a black hole had opened in her gut and was slowly drawing the rest of her body into it. It was as Macie had said—overwhelming terror and despair, eating at her like a thousand black worms. Tinges of visions from the world beyond swam scattershot through her mind. Tentacles of blood reached out for her; monstrous claws that dripped black bile tore through the tissues of her brain; and spiders—spiders were everywhere, crawling up across her lips, into her nostrils, laying eggs in the nooks of her ears. And yet she was paralyzed, held in place by the very fears that tormented her.
Bit by bit she felt herself slipping away. Her mind began to crack.
And then, faint as a moth’s wings, she heard a voice.
“Reggie. Reggie, come back. Come back. Follow me back,” the childlike Quinn whispered.
With all her effort, she focused on the voice, and it grew louder.
“Reggie, follow me back.”
She regained feeling in her limbs, and the monsters tearing at her brain withdrew. She stumbled backward, away from the portal, and a little bit of warmth returned to her body.
“It is closed, you see.”
“This one is. There are many that are not.”
Reggie floated back out to her own body.
“Are you okay?” Quinn asked worriedly. “I could feel you… slipping. Like you were leaving us.”
“I almost did,” Reggie said quietly. “But I saw it. I saw them. They’re gathering. They’re waiting for Sorry Night, just on the other side of that wall, they’re ready to pour through. And I don’t know what to do about it.”
She looked from one of them to the next with abject despair.
“I guess you can’t really bring explosives in there and blow the whole thing up,” said Aaron. “Although psychic C4 would be pretty awesome.”
“It’s not funny!” Reggie leaped to her feet, and she could feel tears coming to her eyes. The dread from the place she’d just visited clung t
o her like filth.
“Of course not, I didn’t mean—”
“Reggie, you need to rest now,” Machen said.
“No, we need a plan—”
“Tomorrow. Your body and your mind need a rest after what you’ve been through. Aaron and I will talk about it tonight, and Quinn will take you home.”
18
Reggie sat silently in the car, staring out the window at the darkness whizzing by.
“Are you okay?” Quinn asked.
“No. No, I’m not okay.”
“No. That was a stupid question. I’m sorry.”
Reggie shook her head.
“I thought I could deal with anything they threw at me—the visions, the tests, the torture, the constant hells I traveled through. I even took a kind of pride in it.” She spoke softly, almost to herself, and Quinn had to lean toward her to hear. “My whole life I doubted myself, until I started fighting Vours. And then I started to believe, just a little bit, that there was something in me that made me special. That I had what they lacked, and that gave me this power—and it’s a power that I’ve cursed, but it’s also become a part of who I am. And I thought that it had to do with courage, and honor, and all those other things that make humans great, but now… now I know it was the opposite. They became a part of me. Or I became a part of them. I became less human, not more….” Her voice broke, and she trailed off.
“That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it our DNA that makes us different from spiders or cats or monkeys? Now my DNA makes me different from humans—whatever’s in their cells is in mine, too. I’m part Vour. And, Quinn, what I saw in there, what I felt, I don’t know how I can fight that, especially if it’s in me already.”
“Reggie, there are plenty of people out there with one hundred percent human DNA who do very inhuman things. It’s your actions that determine who you are, not your blood.”