The Gatekeeper Trilogy, Book One - OUT of the MADHOUSE

by Christopher Golden

  Still it came at her, darting forward, biting the air as she flung herself to the floor, rolled, then flipped to her feet.

  Where was the other? Her eyes darted around, trying to keep a fix on both of them. Gray stripe could just be distracting her, setting her up for his big brother to come in for the kill.

  “Buffy!”

  It was Giles.

  She called, “In the corridor!” and realized how stupid that was. This place probably had a kazillion corridors. “Stairway!” And a bazillion stairways. “Panthers!” Maybe he had found a map of all the rooms.

  * * *

  Bemused, Giles stood before the door and placed his hand on the knob. From the sound of Buffy’s voice, he could swear that she was on the other side. But was it a trick of the house? Some mismatched set of magickal variables he would be mortally sorry he had trusted?

  If he opened this door, would something else try to kill him, and very possibly succeed?

  He pushed up his glasses with a philosophical shrug. That didn’t matter, did it? If there was the least chance that his death could save the Slayer, then he would die. It was that simple. One shouldn’t take foolhardy chances, of course, but when faced with the possibility that one’s sacrifice most likely would produce the end result, then—

  “Giles!”

  He opened the door.

  The big panther merely watched as Buffy fought gray stripe; the Slayer understood it was waiting for her to get tired. Once she was worn out, it might join in. Or maybe it would simply claim the larger portion of the spoils, it being the big kahuna and all.

  Buffy had no time to wipe the blood and sweat from her face. Nor the tears of frustration. If there’d only been this one panther to battle, she would have pulled it off. But there were two. Which meant, in reality, that sooner or later she was going to die.

  Behind the beautiful cherry-wood door stood another beautiful cherry-wood door.

  Giles was reminded of those American game shows where the picking of doors provided the highlight of the entire tawdry and tedious event. Or perhaps, more prosaically, of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. So he opened door number two.

  Covered from head to toe in blood, Buffy was struggling with an enormous black jungle cat.

  Giles murmured, “Good heavens,” stepped over the threshold, and grabbed her by the back of her shirt. He said, “Buffy, it’s me,” just as she whirled on him, prepared to defend herself.

  At once she bounded toward the door, knocking him over the threshold and landing on top of him.

  Then she jumped to her feet and slammed the door shut just as the enormous cat caromed into it. The door shuddered and bowed inward. Then all was still.

  “Nice of you to stop by,” Buffy said.

  “Buffy, are you . . . injured?” he asked, horrified, his heart pounding with his fear for her.

  “What? Oh.” She looked down at herself. She was covered in blood, and there was a gaping wound just above her knee. The panther bite. Lucky thing he hadn’t had a chance to really sink his teeth into her.

  “I’ll be okay. Eventually.” The bite was starting to burn, now that she had the luxury of feeling pain. No joy there.

  Giles cocked his head. “Do you smell smoke?”

  “Something’s burning,” Buffy said worriedly.

  “We’ve got to find Xander and Cordelia.” She started forward, then stopped and frowned at Giles. “Where are we?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve absolutely no idea.”

  “What should we do?”

  He thought a moment. “It seems that our presence has imposed some modicum of order upon the Gatehouse.”

  “Just a little, though,” Buffy said.

  “Yes. That is the meaning of modicum.”

  “Uh-huh.” She straightened her shoulders. “I knew that.”

  “It also seems that the house has been trying to reassert its disorder upon us.”

  “Drag.”

  “Buffy.” He sighed. “I know you’re trying to maintain your equilibrium, and I—” He blinked. “Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps we need to establish even more order. You know, when I ran away to London to protest my destiny, we did quite a lot of, oh, meditating and such. Have you ever heard of transcendental meditation?”

  She nodded brightly. “They played once at the Bronze.”

  “Just so.” He managed a brief grin at her. “I do enjoy your sense of humor, Buffy. It’s your timing I often object to.”

  “That’s a load off. Okay, so trans and dental meditation, and I’m saying, ‘huh?’”

  He pushed up his glasses. “What I mean is that we should establish in our minds a sense of peace and calm. That we stand in the center of order and harmony. Perhaps this will radiate to the house long enough for us to find Xander and Cordelia.”

  “And put out the fire,” she said urgently.

  “And find the Gatekeeper.”

  “Who can put out his own darn fire.”

  “Are you with me?” he asked her, closing his eyes.

  “You’ve got to close your eyes and center yourself, listen to yourself breathe.” He frowned. “You’re breathing awfully hard, Buffy.”

  She gave him a tired half smile. “That’s the Giles.”

  “Oh, dear.” He looked worried.

  She patted his arm with her bloody hand. “But don’t let it ruffle your feather. We’ll calm it down, okay?”

  “All right. Close your eyes.”

  STILL IN THE FUZZY STRIPED SWEATER AND YELLOW corduroy overalls she had worn to school, Willow met Angel a short way from her house. He was dressed for the night air in a black turtleneck sweater and his duster.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “My father wanted to talk about my future again. I’m more interested in making sure there’s going to be a future.”

  “I had no patience with my father’s lectures when I was young. He didn’t like my friends, either,” Angel offered. “However, since most of them were drunken louts living off their inheritances, he might have had a point.”

  “Well, the closest thing Oz has to an inheritance—and he got it from his cousin—is three nights a months, he’s a werewolf,” Willow said defensively. “The other twenty-seven, he’s a musician. Which may qualify him as a lout. But he doesn’t drink.”

  Her flashlight off, Willow moved through the darkness beside Angel, melting into the shadows, waiting. It seemed strange to her, being here with him. In addition to the horrors he, or the thing inside him, had perpetrated on her and those she loved, there was the feeling that she was here only as surrogate for Buffy.

  Willow didn’t like the way that felt. But with the others gone, she and Angel were all Sunnydale had left. She would do everything she could to make that count.

  They crouched behind a large row of manzanita bushes. Beside her, Angel shifted his weight. He half turned, listening intently. In the yellow moonlight, his face was pale and his eyes brown, nothing like the savage face that it became when the bloodlust was upon him.

  He blinked and touched her hand. Then he pointed to the deserted building they were observing. They were on the grounds of the ruined Delta Zeta Kappa fraternity house, where Willow recalled that Buffy had once gone partying with Cordelia, with disastrous results: the two of them had nearly ended up as sacrifices to the frat house’s reptile god. The creepy thing had lived in the basement. Once Buffy killed it, the fraternity was disbanded; most of the current members went to jail and a large number of the alumni died mysterious deaths or killed themselves.

  All in a day’s work for the Slayer, Willow thought.

  No one wanted the house itself. The college had let it go to ruin, ignoring the fact that they might get sued if somebody fell through the floor, and then someone had finally set it on fire. Now it sat like a blackened skeleton, hulking in the gloom beneath the full moon’s glow. Ghost stories had sprung up around it, of course. Lots of them.

  Stories Giles compiled faithfully, cross-referencing and cross-chec
king them to his heart’s content.

  “I swear there’s something in there,” Angel said. “Shambling around.”

  “Maybe it’s, y’know, just kids or homeless people or . . .” Willow paused, looked at Angel hopefully, and then sighed. “Okay, it’s some huge ravenous beast. But I can still be optimistic, right?”

  Within the dreary ruins of the fraternity house, something snapped. Willow and Angel tensed. Tree branch. Could be a raccoon.

  Beside her, Angel was on full alert. Willow rose up slightly, to get a better view. Mentally she ran over the binding spell she had been practicing. It was new, and it should work more quickly on larger things. Just to be on the safe side, though, she slid a stake from her belt and held it at the ready. Angel nodded, smiled grimly, and pulled one from inside his jacket.

  There came a sudden flurry of noise, then a short, piercing scream. Then silence.

  Angel said, “Let’s go. Carefully.”

  As previously planned, Willow snaked to the left while Angel moved to the right. Keeping to the overgrown landscaping, they closed in on the house in two semicircles, moving into the darkness until neither one could see the other. Hopefully, no one else could see them, either.

  Angel reached a stand of trees, rose up in their concealing shadows, and dashed toward the dilapidated structure. He ran up to the rotted porch, skirting a number of holes. What had once been the front door was now a gaping, charred maw that he ducked through, constantly testing the footing as he went.

  Willow rushed up behind him. He raised his hand slightly to let her know he was aware of her, and together they charged into what had once been the living room. The back wall was completely gone. Tree branches draped with vines and deerweed bushes had grown into the space. If something was hiding from them, this was a good spot for it.

  Back to back, they searched the room. Their shoes kicked up dirt and ash, and Willow had to fight not to cough.

  After the circle was complete, Willow said, “Anything?”

  “No.”

  They looked at each other. Angel was in full vamp mode, his eyes a golden yellow, his mouth drawn up in the rictus of a grimace.

  “Well, something screamed.”

  Angel nodded and walked to the northwest corner, sifting through the debris with his boots as he made his way past the remains of an overstuffed chair. He bent down and mid, “It was a raccoon.”

  “Was?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Big was.”

  “Anything I need to see?”

  “Naw. But I’m going to boil it up for dinner later, if you’re interested.”

  He rose.

  Willow flicked on her flashlight. “Whatever killed that raccoon knows we’re here,” she said. “We might as well see where we’re going.”

  She aimed the beam at the staircase that led to the upstairs bedrooms. For the most part it was intact, though several of the stairs and the railing were gone.

  A loud crash from the basement made them both freeze.

  They looked at each other, then moved toward the nearer of the two doors leading to the basement. The stairs had been carved from rock, as had the entire cavernous basement, and Angel half-ran, half-flew down them. Willow trailed behind him. The ground was littered with debris.

  Something smelled very rotten.

  He growled and assumed a fighter’s stance, saying, “Dead ahead.”

  “I see it,” she said, capturing a figure in her flashlight beam.

  It was vaguely human-shaped, crouched low. From the position of its hands and feet, it appeared to be facing them, but its face was in shadow. She advanced on it very slowly with a stake raised in her right hand—just in case—and Angel flanked her, shadowing her every move.

  Lifting her hands, Willow began to chant.

  They were almost on it when it bolted into the air and whirled around, flying straight at Angel. Its mouth was filled with fangs, its face was bloated and red, and its eyes glowed a sickening green. The way its head met its body didn’t look right, as if the thing had a broken neck, and it stank like vinegar. The teeth flashed as it went for him.

  Angel roared as he went for the thing. Somehow it evaded him and hopped onto the crumbling wall of the deep stone well where the reptile god had lived. It bounced again, springing into the air, its teeth snapping.

  “Is this thing a vampire?” Willow asked, staring at the monster.

  “It’s a pennanglan,” Angel told her. “Similar, but not quite a vampire. I’ve never heard of them outside of Malaysia. It sucks the spinal fluid—”

  The thing flew at them, and Angel and Willow split up, dividing the pennanglan’s attention.

  “More than I need to know,” she snapped. “But what’s it doing here?”

  “Looking for dessert?”

  Willow chanted more loudly and held the stake in front of her.

  “Stakes work?” she asked.

  “You have to destroy the head,” he replied.

  “I’d rather not have to get that close.” She took up her chant again, though it didn’t seem to have much effect.

  It launched itself at Angel again. He dropped, and they both watched as the pennanglan sailed over his head and ricocheted off the opposite wall. Willow’s eyes darted around the room, until she noticed that the chains the frat boys had used to bind their victims still hung from the rock walls. She scrambled over, grabbed a chain by its iron cuff, stood with her boot against the wall for more leverage, and pulled as hard as she could.

  To her surprise, the chain loosened from the wall with no effort at all, and she tumbled backward onto her butt, then slammed onto her back, the wind momentarily knocked out of her.

  “Willow!” Angel cried.

  The pennanglan soared straight at her. The thing was hideous. Even as she struggled to get her breath back, she held the chain down at her side like a bullwhip. As the thing came for her, she stepped back, whipped the chain up and made it whistle through the air. Much to her amazement, her strike was on target, and the links wrapped around the creature’s neck.

  Willow pulled.

  Its head came off too easily, with a sickening, slurping noise as its spinal column came along with it. The links of the chain tightened, then, on the thing’s spine.

  The pennanglan continued to fly. Its body lay on the floor, pumping fluids, but the bulbous, salivating head and spinal column came at her again, teeth gnashing.

  “Angel!” she screamed. “What the hell is this thing?”

  “That’s what I tried to tell you,” Angel said. “It doesn’t need its body. When it hunts, it leaves the body behind. We’ve got to destroy the head.”

  Even as he spoke, Angel moved to block the thing’s path. The chain was still attached, and as it went after Angel, the pennanglan stretched the links out to their full length, like a dog testing the limits of its run. Willow’s stomach was churning with nausea at the sight of the creature, one of the most repulsive things she had ever seen.

  The thing went at Angel, its teeth gnashing viciously. He moved so swiftly Willow nearly missed it. Angel whipped his stake up and slammed it right through the center of the creature’s forehead.

  It fell to the floor and didn’t move.

  Willow hugged herself and stared at it in horror. Angel went to her and put his arm over her shoulder. She twitched a moment, and then surrendered to his gesture of comfort.

  “Buffy would be really proud of you,” he told her.

  “Is it dead?” Willow asked, still staring at the thing.

  “We’d better burn it,” Angel replied. “Just to be safe.”

  They did. The stink was awful.

  CORDELIA HUGGED THE SIDE OF THE CHIMNEY TIGHTLY, tears flowing freely down her face, cutting lines in the sooty grime that had settled there. Above her, the topmost story of the house was ablaze with hungry fire. It licked out of the shattered windows and up through holes it had already eaten through the roof. Black smoke billowed around her. Fire crept down the outside of the house
toward the secondary tiered roof where Cordelia clung, helpless and vulnerable. It slunk toward her, gripping the wood and shingles, as though it hunted her—as though it had a mind of its own.

  A predator’s mind.

  The fire moved closer and Cordelia tried to scream, choked on the smoke, and settled instead for a whimper of despair that verged on surrender.

  * * *

  Buffy and Giles were joined in a kind of circle, facing each other with their hands outstretched and clasped together. They had cleared their minds of fear, of anger, of the chaos of the house, and instead focused on the orderly things of their world. Buffy suspected that Giles was mentally sifting through the library’s card catalog or something. For her, it was the simple act of cleaning her room, just the way she’d done it since she’d been a young girl.

  A place for everything, and everything in its place, her mother would always say. So she focused on that. The ordering of her closet, the folding of her laundry, the making of her bed.

  “Buffy.” Giles voice was weak, as if he’d just woken from a long nap.

  Her eyes fluttered open, and she found her Watcher gazing upward. He glanced around the corridor, and Buffy did the same. But the oddest thing had happened.

  They weren’t in the corridor anymore.

  “What the . . . We’ve been shifted somewhere else again?” she asked incredulously. “I thought this was supposed to make things better.”

  “You misunderstand,” Giles replied. “We haven’t moved anywhere. Rather, it is the house that is shifting. And I believe we are making things better. Can’t you feel it, Buffy?”

  Amazingly, she could feel it. As she looked around at the room—a warmly decorated bedchamber with a brick fireplace on one end, high-backed chairs, and a canopied bed—Buffy had the inescapable feeling that this was right. Out the window beside the bed, she could see down into a large courtyard overgrown with a wild garden. A fountain at its center burbled weakly. The house was even larger than they’d thought—even without magic—for it was made up of an enormous square with the courtyard at its center. The first two stories were somewhat wider than the upper two, and as she looked down, Buffy could see the shingled roof of the lower portion of the house jutting out of the wall beneath her.