by H. P. Bayne
Dez’s first thought was, while Sully hadn’t been insane before they’d put him in that place, Lockwood had driven him there. “I need you to slow down and walk me through this, all right? We’ve got time.”
“Not enough. They’re expecting me back there tomorrow.”
“Well, you’re here right now. Talk to me. What’s going on?”
Sully took a deep breath, then a second, and Dez thought he could see the influence of centring techniques his brother had learned from Marc Echoles and Raiya Everton. Gradually, the barely controlled panic fell away, Sully’s features settling into a familiar stillness, allowing Dez also to slip back into calm.
“I know what the Blue Room is.”
Sully’s words relieved Dez of any sense of tranquility he possessed. The rest of it—stories of confinement, injections, forced possessions and psychological torture—had Dez split between struggling not to vomit and wanting to kill someone. Sully had been taken to the room a number of times; he hadn’t been able to say precisely how many. Sometimes, he’d be forced to endure the envisioned murder of one person; other times, he believed he’d experienced as many as two or three in the same session.
“Gerhardt and the others want me to use the spirits to learn things, but what they don’t get is that spirits have a consciousness of their own,” Sully said. “Ghosts don’t care about anyone else’s agenda, they just want me to help them. They show me things, Dez. They make me experience their deaths, and the drug makes me feel like every one is happening to me. One man was stabbed in the gut and took hours to die. He was in agony the entire time. I felt all of it, every minute. And this one woman, she was confined and tortured for three days and nights. I don’t know how time works between these two worlds, but I was her throughout all of it. By the last day, I wanted to die, just to end it all. When I was pulled back into my own body, barely an hour had passed.
“Ghosts have shown me their deaths before from their perspectives, but there’s usually some distance, or it’s short-lived, and it’s usually restricted to visuals. This was different. I could see, but I could also smell and feel. And it went on longer, sometimes what felt like forever. Under normal circumstances, I usually have a sense of myself. In Lockwood, I lost that. I couldn’t pull back, couldn’t separate myself. I wasn’t just seeing them. I was them. I’ve never felt so much pain in my life. I’ve never been so scared.”
Neither, for that matter, had Dez. Only his fear was something else, reserved solely at this moment for the person sitting next to him. Or, if he was honest with himself, for what would happen if he followed through on what he was thinking about doing right now. The last place he’d ever wanted to end up was sitting on the other side of the bars, serving a life sentence for murder, but that was where his thoughts were pulling him.
“Dez? Say something.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“That you believe me. That you won’t let them take me back there.”
Dez turned; Sully stared at him, eyes round as if dreading what the response might be.
“Of course I believe you. And damn straight, you’re not going back there. They’ll need to go through me.”
Sully’s relief was pronounced through a heavy breath, in and out, his eyes sliding shut and pushing another tear past his lashes and down his cheek. Dez dropped a hand on his brother’s shoulder, finding additional proof of trauma in the way Sully flinched at the touch. But Dez didn’t let go, waiting until the tension eased.
“We need to figure something out, Sull. We could go to the police, launch a complaint.”
“No one will believe me. Who’s going to take the word of someone declared mentally ill over a psychiatrist who’s earned all sorts of awards? Then there’s the fact I was the suspect in a murder. I probably still am.”
Dez didn’t respond, which would be answer enough. The clothing they found in the dumpster that day had been checked for anything the lab could use to obtain a DNA sample. They’d found no hair inside the mask, and the sections around the mouth and nose—which could sometimes provide positive hits—came back inconclusive. All the testing had revealed for certain was the presence of gunpowder residue on the coat. The find didn’t provide the proof Forbes Raynor had been after—showing Sully was guilty—but it didn’t exonerate him either. All it proved, the investigator said, was that Sully hadn’t been wearing those clothes when the shooting occurred; his own clothing, after all, had been covered in blowback.
Then there were the pills seized from Sully’s apartment, the ones said to rest somewhere on the spectrum between psychotropic and psychedelic. Having spoken to Lowell, Forbes had determined Sully must have got them on the street; hallucinations were possible with high doses, further rendering Sully’s story suspect.
In the end, the only benefit to Sully’s committal at Lockwood had been the barrier it had created for Forbes.
If Gerhardt came out of this with one item in his favour, it was that he’d provided a report to the police that he didn’t believe Sully capable of murder. At the time, Dez had been grateful to the psychiatrist for that assessment. Now, with Sully’s claims, Dez saw it in a new light. Had Gerhardt suggested Sully could be responsible for Betty’s shooting, he might have lost one of his prized psychics to an arrest warrant and, ultimately, to the correctional system.
Dez prided himself on his role as a support and a protector for his family. He was good at problem-solving, could usually see his way through to a solution, or at least the start of one. This time, the way out eluded him.
But with his brother’s life at stake, failure was not an option.
“I’ll sort this out, kiddo. Give me the night to come up with something.”
“I think you already know what we need to do. There’s only one way. I need to disappear. All you have to do is turn your back.”
“Where are you going to go?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere. Anywhere. Anywhere is better than going back.”
“I’ll talk to Bulldog. He’ll have ideas about where you can lie low.”
“I can’t drag him into this, Dez. Not you, either, for that matter. No one can know about this.”
“Hang on. When you were talking about disappearing, you didn’t mean from us, right? We’re your family. You need us. Hell, we need you.”
“Not forever, okay? Just for a while—long enough to figure out a way to expose Gerhardt and the others.”
“I don’t get it. I mean, why? Why would these people do all this? I get it that Gerhardt wants to know what happened to his son, but you mentioned some guy in a Halloween mask. And they’re giving you objects to draw you into more deaths than just the doctor’s kid. For what purpose?”
“I’ve been thinking about it, and I keep coming back to one thing. There’s money in secrets, and unsolved murder is the biggest secret anyone can hold onto. People will do anything to avoid having their crimes exposed. Even kill. Other people will do anything to make money, and what better way to do that than by blackmail? Whenever it’s just Gerhardt in the Blue Room, everything is about his son. But when Mask Man is there, it’s always about someone else. That’s when they hand me trigger objects, and I get pulled into all those other deaths.
“I keep thinking if I can figure out who the guy in the mask is, I can find a way to end this. Not just for me, but for anyone else who gets pulled into that room.”
“Are there others?”
“There was Harry. Snowy. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m sure there are. And if there’s no one right now, there will be eventually.”
“I don’t know, man,” Dez said. “The way you’re describing this, it’s big. Bigger than what you and I can handle on our own.”
“I know.”
Dez faced front, a brief slowing of the rain clearing the windscreen enough to bring the campsite back into focus. He didn’t share his brother’s psychic abilities, but he had his own ghosts in this place and his own way of seeing them. His memory conjure
d an image of his father, sitting on his favourite camping chair, feet up on the extendible canvas footrest while he listened to one of the few real arguments Dez and Sully had ever had.
Looking back, Dez couldn’t remember what it had been about; all he recalled with any certainty was his father’s response once he’d finally broken in with a firmly spoken, “Boys.”
“The two of you are going to figure something out pretty quick in life. Maybe you’ll get lucky and you’ll find yourselves a buddy you call family, but chances are better there’s no one out there who’s going to be a better wing man than your own brother. You two go ahead and fight if you think you need to, but just remember when push comes to shove, you’d damn well better be at each other’s backs, not at one another’s throats. The older you get, the more you’re going to appreciate the fact you two have each other. Look after one another and on your crappiest day, this world will feel a whole lot less lonely.”
Dez had hit a point in his life where every one of his days battled it out for the supreme position of “crappiest.” Now he had only to figure out how to put the rest of his father’s advice into practice.
“I know you’re asking me to turn my back on you, Sull. But I can’t. You can’t ask me to do that.”
Sully didn’t answer him, not right away. A lot went on within the younger man’s silences, a world spinning within a skull that didn’t allow outside bodies into its gravitational field. All you had was whatever Sully eventually chose to share.
This time, Dez found himself hoping his brother’s response wasn’t leaving anything sitting there, waiting between the lines to be read later on.
“Then I won’t ask you to.”
31
One of the park’s hiking trails led to a cave system local spelunkers had once thrilled in exploring. A collapse a couple years back caused authorities to shut them to the public after a seventeen-year-old boy had been killed. With no safe way to excavate, they’d never been able to retrieve the body.
Sully knew it had taken everything for his brother to leave him there, the action contrary to all he stood for. Against Sully’s wishes, Dez had returned with a duffel bag crammed with necessities and supplies, proving his stated inability to simply turn his back.
Whether Sully was repaying the kindness by holding back on his brother about Lowell remained to be seen. Dez would be furious if he found out Sully hadn’t told him, but at least he’d be furious this side of a jail cell—or this side of a grave.
In steering their conversations away from Lowell, Sully sometimes asked about the Schusters.
“Did you find out where Thackeray went?” he asked Dez one day as the two sat deep in the woods, close to the spot Sully had been hiding.
Dez watched him a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t know. He’s gone. Neighbours didn’t see or hear anything. They said his car was there one night, and was gone by the next morning. It never came back as far as anyone knows. Uncle Lowell said Thackeray didn’t give him a month’s notice or make last month’s rent, so he thought that was kind of weird.”
Sully imagined Lowell knew far more than he’d ever willingly let on. “Has anyone reported Thackeray missing?”
“Like who? He’s got no one.” Dez paused, the debate playing out across his face. “I actually filed a report a few days ago. I’m kind of worried he might have gone somewhere to kill himself. He was pretty unstable, and he’s still got that criminal conviction hanging over his head. I don’t know, man. I know he blames Uncle Lowell for a lot, but what if he actually did the things he was convicted of doing? I have a hard time believing Uncle Lowell would be behind something as bad as what Thackeray accused him of.”
If life and death wasn’t enough, Dez had just reminded Sully of the other reason Lowell’s deepest secrets would need to stay buried for now. If Dez had a hard time accepting even that much about Lowell, he’d struggle with the full truth.
This time, Dez provided the subject change. “Do you see Harry anymore?”
Sully shook his head. “I haven’t been able to see any of them since Lockwood. What if I can’t anymore? What if all those drugs and all the stuff Gerhardt did to me made it so I can’t see ghosts without some sort of chemical?”
“Would that be a bad thing?”
“Yeah, it would. I feel like I’m missing a part of myself I might never get back.”
“It would also mean never being scared again like you were with Harry.”
Harry. There had been a time Sully had feared him, had bowed beneath the weight of the terror that rolled off the man’s disembodied spirit. That fear had created certain beliefs—ones Sully had since come to see as baseless and untrue.
Harry had tried to use Sully to prevent Betty’s death and, when he couldn’t, had figured out how to possess him so he could kill the man responsible. In doing that, he could both avenge his wife and son—who had also suffered at Lowell’s hands—and prevent future harms only he could see.
Sully still wasn’t sure whether Harry had intended to kill him that night of the possession-induced suicide attempt at Dez and Eva’s. With no way to see or communicate with Harry, Sully realized he might never know.
As things stood now, Sully had enough of his own problems, a constant toss-up between loneliness, uncertainty and an incessant worry for his family.
Despite Dez’s lousy attempts at denial, Sully knew he had to be taking heat from Gerhardt, Raynor, Lowell and possibly even Mara and Eva. From Dez, Sully learned what the others had been told: that Sully had run from Dez, had gotten away while the two were in the park.
Search parties had been brought in, had scoured the area for signs of the Lockwood escapee. The bark of dogs had Sully shrinking further back into the cave where he’d been taken refuge, but the rain proved a godsend, masking his scent. The animals never came close enough to sense him.
The massive underground cave was nearly impossible to find unless you knew where to look. The brothers had found it years ago on one of their hikes with Flynn, what appeared at a glance as nothing more than a small crevice in the rocky ground. When Dez had agreed to aid in Sully’s escape, it took the two a while to locate the entrance from memory. A tree had fallen across half of it, and moss, roots and dead leaves covered the rest so that only someone deliberately searching would spot it. The cave hadn’t changed much, but they had. Sully was barely able to slither through; anyone bigger was unlikely to fit. Dez certainly wouldn’t. So far, the cave had proved the perfect hiding spot, and Sully had only to question how long he could continue to use it as such.
That first week, Dez visited Sully nearly as often as he had back at Lockwood. But Raynor had come sniffing around, had caught Dez in the area, and had demanded to know why he was there. His explanation, that he was still trying to find his missing brother, was believable enough that Raynor could do little to refute it.
But the confrontation shook Sully, the voices too close for comfort.
On the days Dez used the early mornings to visit, Sully occupied himself the rest of the day by exploring the tunnels branching off of the large cave. A single cramped passage led from it and connected to a series of nature-created openings. Some led nowhere, a couple ran on for some distance. One, he discovered, wove its way underground until, after several hours’ exploration, it emptied into a larger cave that smelled of wildlife and was open to the outside world through a large fissure in the rock.
Given the possibility he might have to relocate his camp, Sully planned to tell Dez of the find.
A far-off rumble changed everything.
Sully’s head snapped up, alert for any further noise before using his flashlight—courtesy of Dez—to find his way to his camp. Moving faster now than he’d come, he scraped his knees and hands as he scrabbled through the passage. Heart pounding, lungs aching from the exertion, he at last arrived back.
His makeshift camp, all of his supplies, were almost completely covered by a heap of rock and dirt.
From above came th
e muffled but frantic sound of Dez screaming his name.
Sully called back, heard the beginnings of a question from topside, confirmation Dez had received the message he was still alive. But a splash of dirt and a spray of stone against Sully’s head, the scrape and rumble of rock on rock, had him scrambling away.
Sully ran, slipped through the passage. He barely made it into a small cavern just the other side when the whole thing collapsed behind him. The sound vibrated around him, the ground heaved, but the rock walls and ceiling held.
Dust swirled through the shattered air. Not until Sully stopped coughing did he realize he could no longer hear his brother.
His first thought was to find his way back toward the other entrance he’d found, the one a few hours from here. Once he was out, he could find a way to alert Dez he was okay. But, as he made his way through the cavern, a flashlight the only possession he had left, another possibility occurred to him.
Dez wouldn’t be able to shift the debris to get to the cave—given the sheer amount of rock, it was doubtful anyone could—and the tunnel through which Sully had just escaped no longer existed. Even if someone managed to get into the now-collapsed cave where he’d been living, they’d never be able to search all of it. And, with no noticeable means for him to have escaped, the conclusions they’d draw were obvious.
Sully had just found the path to the ultimate safety, for him and for his family. If he were dead, he was of no further use to Gerhardt, Lowell or Raynor. Searches would be called off, warrants cancelled. He’d be in the clear to start over, free from being hunted.
Only the knowledge of his family’s pain gave Sully pause, the awareness their grief—still so near to the surface after Flynn—would be reawakened and disinterred. But, he realized, emotional pain was the next-to-last thing he wished for them. The very last was a threat to their safety.
Sully had promised Lowell he’d guard his sins, to ensure the continued safety of the people he loved most. Lowell would have no reason to believe his dark secrets had been shared. And they hadn’t. No one else alive within Sully’s inner circle knew of it and, with Sully gone, no one would have reason to go looking. If Lowell considered himself safe, he’d have no cause to threaten the safety of others.