by Simon Holt
But Aaron didn’t look at her. Instead, he turned his eyes to something moving a little way away. Quinn rose to his feet. His missing fingers grew back like the spindly arms of a starfish. He waggled them back and forth, grinning.
“That’s more like it.” Black smoke spilled from Quinn’s eyes and mouth as he spoke.
Aaron jumped to his feet, brandishing the tire iron.
“Take a step closer and I’ll beat you senseless.”
“Yeah, I’m shaking.”
“Guys, this isn’t real!” Reggie insisted, but Macie only laughed.
“They can’t hear you anymore. They think you’re unconscious. Don’t you understand yet? This is a fear construct, one of my expanded powers. I can create whole worlds.”
“They’re false worlds.” Reggie stamped her foot. “This is a wood floor, not ice.”
“Perception is reality, dearie,” Macie replied drily. “They’ll each see the things they’re most afraid of here, and that will be their reality. Aren’t you dying to know what those things are?”
Quinn circled around Aaron; the latter stayed close to the prostrate bodies, always keeping himself between them and the Vour. They were oblivious to the real Reggie and Macie.
“Please, hear me, Aaron,” Reggie pleaded. “You know what’s real and what isn’t. You can fight this.” But Aaron didn’t even glance her way, so focused was he on what he thought was his enemy.
“What do you want?” Reggie demanded.
Macie shrugged.
“I want to see who wins.”
Every detail was so crystal clear, so perfectly re-created—even though she knew it was fake, it was hard for Reggie not to believe they weren’t out on that lake again. She was even shivering from the cold.
If she couldn’t make Aaron and Quinn see reality, she had to stop the vision at its source.
The cold. Perception was reality. But did the perception extend to Macie’s own mind?
Reggie glanced at her watch. Twenty minutes to midnight. Maybe there was still time….
She whirled around and dove at Macie, knocking her onto the ice. The Vour was momentarily stunned and cried out as her skin touched the frozen water, but in another instant she was back on her feet and had pushed Reggie to the ground. Despite her aged body, she was very strong, and she knelt down on top of Reggie, holding her by the throat. She leaned down so close that her steamy breath brushed Reggie’s cheek when she spoke.
“You think you can overpower me? Foolish girl. I can crush your windpipe with my thumb.”
“You should see what I can do with my thumb,” said Reggie, and she gripped Macie’s cold wrists, pressing her fingers against the Vour’s pulse. The last thing she saw was Macie’s surprised expression before the black closed in around her.
Macie wasn’t the typical Vour, and Reggie knew not to expect to fall into the typical fearscape. But nothing could have prepared her for the place she was about to enter.
When Reggie traveled between worlds, there was always a vague tug on her body before she woke up in a fearscape, as though ocean waves were pushing her about. It wasn’t really her body, of course, but her consciousness that crossed deep into the mind of the person she was trying to save. The sensation had taken some getting used to, but it wasn’t painful—more akin to unnerving motion sickness. Darkness would envelop her momentarily until her mind settled into the manifestation of her body in the fearscape. When she opened her eyes and first took in her surroundings, she never knew what she was going to see, but wherever she was was the starting line. For her brother, it had been a horror-filled carnival. For Quinn, a decaying elementary school. She had seen untold terrors come to life in the hundreds of fearscapes she’d now visited, nightmares that could strip the sanity from a mind, black holes of dread that sucked in and destroyed all sense and reason, leaving the innermost parts of a human naked, torn apart, and splayed out for all to see, like an autopsied corpse.
Through it all, it was up to Reggie to be the light in this darkness, to be the ember of hope in a landscape that had driven hope away. It was her gift, she knew: what she could be that others couldn’t. She had struggled, she had come to the brink of insanity herself, but she had kept going, because in a fearscape, she was always herself.
The darkness closed in as it always did, but right away Reggie knew something was wrong. Her mind was ripped from her body like hair wrenched from a scalp. She felt herself flip and tumble in space, and then it was as though a thousand sharpened icicles were driven into her psyche. Warmth and hope seeped out of the gashes, leaving a ghostly cold that seemed to pierce the deepest part of her. It sprouted, and tendrils of despair grew outward, replacing the blood in her veins with ice. She couldn’t breathe; she choked on the frost in her esophagus.
Concentrate! a small part of her screamed. You don’t need your breath. Whatever this place is, it isn’t real.
But the cold was more real than anything she’d ever experienced before. And somehow… horribly familiar.
A chill wind gusted all around her, through her, as though she were no more than an empty husk. Screams—from the wind or something more monstrous, she didn’t know—filled her ears. And then the memory, like déjà vu, of where she had last felt this kind of coldness fell on her, and the horror blossomed fresh.
It had been in Quinn’s scarscape, when she had looked through the encased wall and known that she was on the edge of not a fantastical hell, but a real one. There she had seen the portal where the monsters entered, had felt the presence of the Vours in their true form, separated from her by only a thin membrane of psychic scar tissue. The despair had been almost overpowering, and she had only just been able to get away from it. But now there was nothing between her and the abyss. The fear was like a swarm of bloodsucking spiders crawling all over her skin, injecting her with a venom that left her aware but unable to move. She knew where she was.
She was on the other side.
She had come into the realm of the Vours.
23
She was huddled down, trying to protect herself from the wind that lashed at her hair and skin, to close her ears to the shrieks that penetrated her bones. Dread had settled on her like gooey filth, gluing her eyes shut. As long as they were closed, maybe she could go back, maybe she could wish this world away. But this wasn’t a fearscape. The many months spent battling through those worlds had taught her to trust her instincts, and now they were telling her that this wasn’t an imagined land that could be defeated with courage. This place was real, whatever it was. The only thing she could do was face it. Step one: opening her eyes. Never had such a simple task seemed so difficult.
Just open your eyes, Reg. One step at a time, she told herself. Get them open, then we’ll think about moving around.
With the utmost will, she forced her eyelids to flutter and open. If there was any part of her heart left thawed, it froze now.
She appeared to be in some kind of corridor that extended as far as she could see in both directions. But everything: the floor, the walls, the ceiling, the very air—if air it could be called—was a murky, wispy gray of morphing and undulating edges. The only variation in the foggy mire was rows of glowing doorways that ran the endless length of the hallway. Most of them were a faint, sickly green, but a handful shone more brightly and were tinged with red around the edges.
Gusts of frigid wind continued to whip past her. Reggie turned her head slowly to look at the doorway nearest her. It was really more like a window, with green light spilling through from the other side. It was one of the more luminescent ones, and a dark, heatless flame licked the edges and seared inward.
Suddenly a black form, like a shadow made of ink, rushed past Reggie’s face and beat against the window. The thing threw itself at it again and again, as the bloody fire ate away at the barrier shielding the opening. And then Reggie felt a burst of heat as though a furnace had come on, and the film covering the window melted away completely. There was a scream unlike anything Reg
gie had ever heard before, like the sound of a thousand people burning to death, and she cowered, sure that her eardrums would burst.
The shadow rushed through the window, and all at once it went black. The screaming stopped, and the heat disappeared, leaving Reggie even colder than she’d been before. But then, farther down the hall, another sharp screech started and stopped as a shadow broke through the portal. Reggie noticed for the first time that all around her the lights from certain doorways were winking out as the black shades pushed through them.
Sorry Night.
Terror dawned in her anew. It wasn’t wind that she was feeling; the gusts were Vours, in their true forms as living shadows. They were flying all around her—through her—like ghostly bats, up and down this hellish corridor. And the windows were entrances to human brains.
This was how the Vours got in. Somehow, by entering Macie’s hybridized mind, Reggie had bypassed her fearscape altogether, landing instead in the place where the Vours gathered to cross over into the human realm on Sorry Night. What she was witnessing right now was Vours ripping through the boundaries that separated the two worlds; the reddish openings were the minds of frightened humans, those that were vulnerable to the Vours this one night of the year.
So the minds of all humanity are connected somehow in this place, Reggie thought. Under different circumstances it might have been a comforting idea. The heat and light she had felt when the window nearest her had opened had come from a human being—it was what the Vours craved, what was completely absent in this world.
The shadows were in a frenzy now, flying fast and furiously up and down the hallway, bashing themselves against any opening that had the smallest tinge of red. Sorry Night was almost over, Reggie realized. The Vours had only a few more minutes in which to take over a human body, and then her world would be shut to them for another year. But what about her? Could she get out of here? And where was Macie in all of this?
As if something had read her thoughts, she heard a voice whispering close to her ear.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Reggie could have sworn she hadn’t been there before, but now Macie was standing right next to her. At least, it was a kind of version of Macie. Her form was humanoid but strangely translucent, as though she were made of smoke. She brought her face quite close to Reggie’s. Her features were like the old woman’s, but elongated and sharp, like a devil’s. Her eyes were hollow black sockets filled with swirling, glassy ink, and her lips curled into a smile that revealed spiky teeth.
“I’m glad you get to see this,” she said mockingly. “You must be the first human ever to see the Core. It’s the hub between our worlds, the passage we take to get to you. All that hope you bring to fearscapes means nothing here.”
Reggie felt rather than heard her, as though her own body were an empty canyon and Macie’s voice was echoing around inside it. She tried to speak, but it was like something had ripped out her vocal cords, and her lips could only mouth words. Macie laughed at her.
“That would be the despair taking over,” she said. “Fear, real fear, can’t be destroyed. You might as well try to stop the night from coming. Now you see. Now you see how fruitless your sacrifice has been. We are endless.”
Reggie tried to speak again, and managed a gutteral whisper.
“Your… fearscape…” she croaked.
“No, I don’t—or rather, Macie doesn’t—appear to have one of those. Probably because we’re intertwined so, part of each other in a way no Vour and human have been before. I wonder what else is different about me.”
Macie stretched out her arms in front of her and flexed her clawlike fingers back and forth, examining them curiously. They moved fluidly, and smoke wafted off of them; she was something between a gas and a solid, like liquid metal that gave off steam.
“I’ve never had form like this before beyond your world.” She gestured to the shadows that darted to and fro. “That’s what we look like normally. But then, I’m not a normal Vour anymore, am I?”
Reggie was struggling to stand. Her body was so numb that every movement took the utmost effort. It wasn’t just the cold—it was like when her leg fell asleep from being in one position for too long, except that all her muscles were unresponsive and she had no control over them. Macie stopped looking at her hands and glanced at Reggie.
“Such a trouper. Always trying to be your best!” Macie’s arm shot out and grabbed Reggie around the throat. She lifted the girl as if she weighed no more than a feather, and drew her in close. Reggie hung like a rag doll as Macie laughed in her face. “Don’t you see, you little fool, there’s nothing you can do. This isn’t one of your fearscapes that you like to traipse through. You have no power here. But I do. I can feel it flowing through me. I will take back the world for the Vours. I will make all of humanity’s nightmares real.”
The portal lights had dimmed significantly, leaving the Core shrouded in darkness. Now Reggie emitted a sound like a sharp laugh.
“But Sorry Night’s over,” she gasped. “Better luck next year.”
Macie pursed her lips.
“Yes, that’s always the most unfortunate part.” She rose and looked at the thousands of Vours swarming all around them, the unlucky monsters that would have to wait another year before again attempting to take over a human life. “At least, it has been until now.”
Macie’s grip loosened and she dropped Reggie, who fell in a heap on the ground. She could only look on as Macie strode up to one of the portals. The other Vours seemed to feel a shift in the energy of the place, and they surged around her like anxious children.
Macie lifted one of her hands. Talons seemed to sprout from the ends of her fingers, and with a cry of fury she swiped at the door.
The sound was deafening, like the screech of metal ripping apart, as her nails slashed through the membrane protecting the human brain from the Core. And then it was as though a dam had broken: Blood spewed out into the corridor like from a popping blister, and cries of malicious delight seemed to reverberate among the shadow Vours. Reggie saw one of them dart through the gaping hole.
“Yes. YES!” Macie cackled, staring excitedly at her bloodied fingers. She cast one maleficent look back at Reggie, who lay in the pool of blood, then strode off down the hall, her arms outstretched. She tore at each portal she passed, like a tigress ripping apart its prey. More and more blood flowed into the Core, carrying with it other horrors as well—giant flies and maggots, bones picked clean, and tissue that Reggie suspected was brain matter. The devilish shrieks filled the air as Macie shredded portal after portal, and every time one was forced open, a Vour bolted into it.
Reggie couldn’t tell if the blood was real or a manifestation of the terror all around her. The fear and the despair and the unnatural sounds had paralyzed her. Her body was like an empty shell. She could only watch Macie’s form disappearing down the corridor. Unger’s experiments had finally yielded results: He had created a being that could destroy the barrier between worlds. Sorry Night didn’t matter anymore—Macie had the power to open any fearscape she wanted to, and all around her the Vours were flooding into human bodies.
“I’ll make it nice and slow, Cole.” Quinn took another step toward Aaron. The ice crackled beneath his feet, hinting at its thinness. “I’ll let you cry and scream and piss yourself before I snap that twig of a neck and drop you into the lake.” He gestured to Reggie’s still body beside the hole in the ice. “I don’t get why she bothered to give you the time of day. I mean, look at you.”
Aaron glanced down at his body. The lean muscle he had built out over the past six months in his training with Machen dissipated like fog before his eyes. He looked skinny and awkward and weak. The tire iron in his hand trembled.
“You’re no hero, Cole. You’re just a nerd with a crush. She couldn’t care less about you.” Quinn’s smile widened. “You’re nothing to her. Air and noise, that’s it.”
“She cares more for me than she does for you.” Aaron
clenched the metal tighter.
“Really? Is that why she always tries to get me alone? Why she kissed me earlier?”
“You lie.”
“Ha. Hardly. I’m the bad boy, Cole. The one who leaves the good girls like Reggie all aquiver. You—you’re the pimply-faced mouth breather with sweaty palms and bad breath. Good for nothing but some SAT tutoring and a laugh.”
Now Aaron could feel himself shrinking, losing the inches he’d grown in the past year. His arms jutted out like spindly tree limbs, and acne sprouted across his cheeks.
“This isn’t me! I’m not weak anymore!” he yelled. “I changed!”
“Did you, though?”
The familiar voice spoke calmly behind him, and Aaron turned around.
Eben Bloch. He stood on the ice dressed impeccably in a pressed white oxford and black slacks, his cane steady at his side.
“People don’t change, Aaron. Not really. You can fool yourself, but you can’t fool me. And you certainly can’t fool Reggie.”
“Eben—you—you’re dead—”
“Your weakness killed me. Remember?”
Blood slowly flowered out across Eben’s white shirt.
“But we fought together. We saved Reggie—”
Eben pointed to Reggie’s body on the ice.
“Saved? You saved no one.”
“But I remember—”
“Remember what, boy? Remember this?” Eben snapped his own wrist and his flesh tore, exposing blackened bone beneath the bloody tissue. “Do you remember the pain I endured because of you? The bullets that riddled my body in the caves below Thornwood?”
“I didn’t mean for any of that to happen! I just wanted to get Reggie out of there!”
“Yes, you’ll sacrifice everything and everyone for her. And how does she repay you? She falls in love with a Vour.”
Quinn chuckled.
“You know it.”
Aaron ignored Quinn but looked desperately at Eben.