Chapter 6 – In The Asylum
Sunny Acres, despite its name, was dank, gloomy, and claustrophobic.
The full name was Sunny Acres Center for Treatment of Disorders of the Mind. Staff called it Sunny Acres. Neighbors called it the nut house.
Dirk Smith shuffled down a shadowed, dripping corridor, mumbling "acres" over and over under his breath, trying to remember the rest of the name. It was a kind of game he played. He got a pill each morning and each night. Right before he got the next pill was always the time when his mind was clearest. It was also the time when his demons were at their most fierce.
Was it morning now, or night? A distant corner of his mind was embarrassed that he couldn't remember. Then the orderly at his elbow guided him into Dr. Andy's office and he saw the young doctor outlined by brilliant sunlight. It was morning, then.
A vision flashed through his head, Dr. Andy screaming and screaming as something with no physical existence devoured him from within, leaving his flesh intact while it consumed everything that made Dr. Andy who he was. Smith scrunched his eyes shut, not that it helped, and waited with numb desperation for his pill.
"How are we today, Dirk? Sleep well?" The doctor kept right on chatting, not waiting for an answer. Dirk let the words wash over him, waiting with all the patience he could muster for his pill.
"Dirk? Dirk? Hey, Dirk, you in there?"
Smith opened his eyes reluctantly. A paper cup was crumpled in his fist. Did that mean he'd just taken his pill? He looked up at the doctor.
"You have a visitor, Dirk. It's that nice young lady. Colleen? I wish I had a pretty girl like that to come visit me!" He laughed with a gratingly false heartiness, and the small part of Smith's mind that remembered the man he'd been wondered why he put up with this crap. He ran a hand through his hair, and his fingers felt ridges of scar tissue from when he'd banged his head against the wall of his cell, over and over, until they'd physically restrained him.
Okay, so maybe he'd put up with the crap for a while longer.
More of Dr. Andy's chatter washed over him. He missed almost all of it. Then the orderly led him out of the office and down the hall to a meeting room.
Smith was never quite steady on his feet these days. He saw a chair, and gave all his attention to getting himself seated. Finally he looked up and took in the rest of the room.
There was a scarred wooden table, ugly beige walls, and a young woman sitting in a chair across from him. She wore the same bright smile as Dr. Andy, but he could see concern in her eyes. She was quite pretty, with blonde hair drawn up in tight braids, and she seemed hauntingly familiar.
"Hello, Dirk."
He stared at her.
Her forehead puckered. "It's me, Colleen. Colleen Garman? We met in Toronto, and again in Victoria?"
Something inside him cringed. Bad things had happened in Victoria. Things that had scoured his mind, demolishing months of memories. Scraps came to him. Colleen was a clockmaker, or she had been until she ran afoul of the cult. Now she used her skills to make weapons for the team.
"Listen, Dirk. Try to focus. Carter is in trouble, and I need your help."
Memories came flooding back to him. Philip Carter, the tough Bureau of Investigation agent, had been his partner in a hundred desperate adventures. They had gone head to head against the mysterious, nameless cult that was spreading like a dark stain across the continent. In the face of overwhelming odds they had somehow survived, cheating death a dozen times, winning small victories, always knowing they were doing no more than holding their fingers in the holes in a rapidly disintegrating dike.
He owed Carter his life, even if that life had become a burden to him now. He straightened in his chair and made himself focus on the girl. What was her name again? Colleen. In a voice raspy from disuse he said, "What can I do?"
"A lot has happened since you were – since you've been in here. We found a place called Tanathos, and we dug up a strange stone. We didn't know then what it was, but it's a portal stone. If you have nine of them, you can open a portal to... another place."
The room seemed to spin around Smith. Tanathos. Katharis. The other place, where nothing was quite right, and the cold malice that was enough to-
He gripped the edge of the table and squeezed until his hands hurt. The taste of blood in his mouth told him that he'd caught a bit of his cheek when his teeth clamped shut. He took long, slow, deep breaths and forced his jaws to relax. Finally he opened his eyes. Colleen was staring at him, alarmed.
"I'm all right," he said. "Go on."
After a moment she nodded. "Anyway, the cult really wanted the portal stone. In fact, they came after it. They attacked us, right here in Washington. They got the stone, but we went after them. They opened some kind of doorway..."
He looked up sharply. She was staring into empty air. "Hey," he said. "Hey. What happened?"
She shook herself and met his eyes. "We attacked. Some of them ran through the portal. Carter chased them. I went after him."
For the first time, Smith saw the horror in his own soul reflected in someone else's eyes.
"Anyway," she said, "there were these... things in there. Creatures." She shivered. "Carter ran. They were all around the portal. I came back through to this side. And something else came. Something big. It was reaching through-"
Her hands on the table knotted themselves into fists. She took a deep breath. "Anyway, I grabbed one of the stones and threw it out of the circle. And the portal closed." For a moment her eyes squeezed shut. "Just in time." She opened her eyes and looked at Smith. "We left him there. Carter. We left him behind. There was this creature, it came through after us, we had to run. We finally managed to kill it, but when we went back, the other portal stones were gone. So we can't get the door open again. We can't get Carter back. He's trapped."
Smith stared at her, his pulse pounding in his ears. Agitation was rising inside of him, threatening to overwhelm him, and he fought it. At the same time, he felt the familiar tingle in his fingers and toes as his medication started to take hold. His mental clarity, such as it was, wouldn't be with him for much longer.
"What can I do?" he asked.
Colleen visibly composed herself. "We need information," she said. "Nobody knows the cult like you and Carter. Where would they go in Washington? Who would help them? Where would they take the rest of the stones?"
Smith rubbed his temples, trying to make himself think. This was old information, from long before the disaster in Victoria. He should be able to-
"McNally's," he said.
"What?"
"McNally's Occult Bookstore. He's not a member of the cult, not really, or we would have picked him up long ago. But they trust him, for some reason. They must, he knows a lot and he's still alive. He has this filthy little store, let me think, I used to know the address."
He rubbed furiously at his forehead, trying to force back the smothering cloud of tranquilizers, and Colleen reached out and caught his hand. "It's okay," she said. "We'll find the address. It'll be easy, now that you've given us the name."
He nodded, too agitated to speak, and she rose. "I've upset you enough," she said. "And I better get moving on this. Thank you, Dirk. You may have saved the day." Her hand squeezed his. "Again." She smiled, making the dreary institutional room seem momentarily filled with light, and hurried out.
Smith sat staring after her, wishing he could help more, wondering if he would even remember this visit tomorrow.
Chapter 7 - Mean Streets
Colleen slouched in the passenger seat of a nondescript black sedan, watching the front of McNally’s Occult Bookstore. Jameson was behind the wheel, fiddling endlessly with the levers on the steering column, his agitated fingers never still.
"I saw you run into the fog," he said. "Most of those sideshow freaks went running in there too. I figured you and Carter and the other woman, you could handle them. Then I saw one guy going the other way. Into the trees."
Colleen nodded. It wa
s his third time through the same story.
"So I went after him. Chased him for half an hour. It got too dark, though, and I lost him. By the time I got back there you were gone."
"I understand," Colleen told him. Not that it would help. Jameson was going to keep twitching and yammering until he wound down.
"I don’t know what I saw. I don’t like it. I signed up to fight bootleggers, you know what I mean? Counterfeiters. Honest crooks. I never signed up for this."
"What about this one?" Colleen said, nodding toward the store. There was nothing suspicious about the fat woman lumbering down the sidewalk. She just wanted to distract Jameson.
"Nope, not her. No one gets up to any shady dealings in shoes like that. You can’t run in ‘em. Not that she’d be much of a runner." They watched as the woman glanced briefly in the window of McNally’s and kept walking. Jameson nodded in satisfaction.
"Now, this guy is another story. He’s the kind of loser gets involved in something because he wants to be a big man. He’ll be in it up to his neck."
She followed Jameson’s gaze. A skinny boy in his late teens was slouching up the sidewalk. Everything about him was pathetic, from his crooked face with eyes set too close together under a single long caterpillar of an eyebrow, to his ill-fitting, patched, dirty clothes.
He stared at the ground in front of his feet as he walked, edging away from the fat woman when she passed him. His back was curved forward in a perpetual slouch, and there was something furtive in the way he moved, watching the world around him from the corners of his eyes.
He sidled into the bookstore, and Jameson gave her a knowing glance. "We’ll follow him when he comes out," he said. "See where he takes us."
A couple of minutes passed, and Jameson started to fidget. "Sneaky little bugger like that," he muttered, "he might slip out the back, just on general principles." Another minute crawled past, and Jameson said, "I’m going to take a look."
He left the car and sauntered across the street. He pretended to window-shop before strolling into the store. He was out in less than thirty seconds. As soon as he was past the store windows he broke into a run. He leaped into the car, started the engine, and said, "Sure enough. The little bugger went out the back. If I know Sam, he’s on the kid’s tail, but that little rat’ll spot him in no time."
McClane was posted in the alley behind McNally’s. Jameson brought the car into the alley. McClane was nowhere in sight. Jameson and Colleen got out, standing on the running boards while they peered down the alley in both directions. It was Colleen who spotted a pair of broad shoulders in a dark suit moving down the alley a block away.
Jameson got the car turned around and they raced after McClane. They were half a block behind when McClane broke into a run. "The kid’s spotted him," Jameson cried.
The boy fled like a jackrabbit, straight down the alley. He reached a cross-street and turned, grabbing the tailgate of a passing truck. There was a smirk on his face as he turned to look back at McClane, but he gaped in dismay when he spotted Jameson's sedan.
Jameson slowed, McClane leaped onto the running board, and Jameson sped up. The truck stopped for a red light and the boy dropped to the pavement and ran for the sidewalk, darting between pedestrians to reach the side wall of a hotel. He leaped, grabbed the suspended ladder of a fire escape, and went swarming upward.
Jameson brought the sedan screeching to a halt. "Wait here," he barked. "He might double back." Then he leaped from the car. McClane followed the kid up the fire escape while Jameson ran in the side entrance of the hotel.
The fugitive wormed his way into a second-story window, McClane close behind. Colleen stood beside the car, staring at the building, frustrated. She desperately wanted to follow the men inside. The sedan was parked at a wild angle, blocking half a lane of traffic, and she ignored a constant barrage of honking from passing traffic. The boy wasn't coming back this way. Jameson was being a chauvinist. The sensible thing to do was to go inside and see if she could help.
Her mind made up, she nodded and took a single step toward the hotel. And a noise drew her attention upward. A window on the third floor was sliding open. As she watched, a skinny leg in too-short pants came through the window, the foot probing for the floor of the fire escape. A moment later the boy came into view.
Colleen quickly dropped her gaze and moved away from the car. She leaned against the wall of the hotel, looking nonchalant, tracking the boy's progress by the clang of feet on the fire escape. Finally the ladder dropped to the ground and he came climbing down.
When his feet were still four feet from the ground she grabbed the waistband of his pants and yanked him off of the ladder. He landed stumbling and she shoved him sideways so he sprawled across the hood of the sedan. Then she caught his skinny arms, twisted them up behind his back, and waited for the Secret Service agents to return.
They interrogated the boy at a Secret Service facility downtown. McClane asked the questions while Jameson glowered and looked menacing. McClane did a good job of terrifying the prisoner, telling him that a Secret Service agent had been killed, that he was an accomplice, that he might be hanged if he didn't co-operate.
The boy surprised them by maintaining a sullen silence throughout. They only learned his name by reading the tag sewn into the back of his shirt collar. The shirt looked like a hand-me-down, so Colleen didn't know if Andrew Simpson was their prisoner or the shirt's previous owner. Since it was the only name they had, it was what they called him.
"This is your last chance, Andy," McClane said for the third or fourth time. "Your neck is going to stretch."
Andy stared at the table top.
"Just tell us where the rest of your gang is. They'll never know we heard it from you. Trust me, they're not worth dying for."
He's botching the interrogation, Colleen thought. The problem was that McClane didn't entirely believe in the cult, much less Katharis and the other world beyond the portal. He was treating this like an ordinary criminal conspiracy, where people were motivated by greed or peer pressure or common human passions. He was trying to put pressure on the boy, but he was completely missing the point.
Jameson believed. Colleen glanced at him. Jameson had seen too much not to believe, but he seemed to be fighting the awareness. He was pacing behind Andy's chair, running a hand through his hair in a nervous, repetitive gesture. He knew the truth, but he couldn't face it, and it made him useless in the interrogation.
Colleen stared at the boy, frustrated. She worked with tools, not words, not people. She couldn't make him talk. The only thing that occurred to her was beating him over the head with a wrench until he gave in. Once again she was struck by the irony that the man they were trying to rescue was the only person with the skills they needed. Carter, she was sure, could have cracked Andy in twenty minutes.
So could Smith, she reflected, back before his fall. If only those skills of his could still be tapped.
"Last chance, kid." McClane's voice was low, cold, dangerous. "Give me something, or I'll wash my hands of you."
A long, silent moment stretched out. Andy didn't move, didn't make a sound. McClane threw up his hands, gave Colleen a frustrated glance, and walked out of the interrogation room. Jameson followed. Colleen spent a long moment staring at the top of Andy's head. Then she followed the others.
"I give up," McClane said in the corridor. "I can't read the little bastard at all. And we can't hold him much longer, either. He hasn't done anything."
A cold fist clenched in Colleen's stomach. "How long?" she asked.
McClane shrugged. "Maybe overnight. Tomorrow we'll have to turn him loose." He shrugged. "Maybe a night in a cell will soften him up. It's worth a shot, anyhow. It better work. It's the only idea I've got."
Colleen nodded. Somewhere in the back of her mind, though, she was developing an idea of her own.
Chapter 8 - Hunted
Carter ran, balanced between terror and exhaustion, the awful creature behind him never far behind
, but never quite catching up. He was following the lowest contours of the land, trying to stay out of sight, trying not to attract any more of the creatures. He was also hoping to find water. If he escaped what pursued him, he would still die of thirst before long.
A rock caught his toe and he fell full-length on the ground. Dust rose all around him, most of it from the dead grass that disintegrated with a touch. He lay there panting, weariness and despair sapping the strength from his legs. The tiniest puff of breeze would shatter these desiccated blades of grass. A single drop of rain would do it. It must not have rained here in a very long time. He wasn't going to find water, he realized.
Well, so be it. If he couldn't escape the beast, he'd face it now, while a bit of strength remained. He rolled over and sat up. His pistol was empty, and he took the time now to reload it. Not much ammo remained. Not that the bullets he'd fired had done much good so far.
The beast came over a low crest, running toward him, its strange, nightmare limbs giving it a jerking, unnatural gait. Even now, after endless hours being hunted by the thing, he would have had trouble describing it. It was as if his mind shied away from it, protecting him from the horror of seeing what it really looked like.
It came toward him, and he levelled his pistol. There was no point firing into its body. He'd emptied his gun into the thing twice now, without slowing it down. There were no vital targets that he could see. There was no head.
He made himself examine the creature's limbs. At first all he saw was tentacles, writhing and hideous, but the creature had an almost bounding motion that tentacles couldn't explain. He saw that the rear-most limbs were powerful, almost earthly-looking, like the legs of a dog or a kangaroo. They gave the creature most of its speed.
Carter cocked his pistol, trying to aim past the grotesque tentacles and half-limbs in front, aiming for the creature's right rear leg. There would be no time to reload, and he was too tired to run. He had to make this count. So he waited, while it bounded and writhed toward him. He waited until it was practically on him, and then he waited a moment more.
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