by Brian Harmon
But he was beginning to wonder why there always seemed to be creepy, abandoned structures on these strange journeys. It was as stubbornly reliable as the stupid cemetery and the scary-as-hell villain with the insane, supernatural powers.
Charlotte shivered as she looked around. “It never occurred to me that there might be something down here.”
“Is your gift telling you anything?”
She stopped and looked around. “Yeah… It’s telling me I should be scared.”
Eric nodded. “I get that all the time.”
“It almost never gives me all the information. I have to work for it.”
“I know how you feel.”
“What’s going on out there, anyway? You said something about imps and ogres? I thought they were near impossible to summon.”
Eric glanced at her. Once again, he was struck by how much these girls all knew about the rules of magical monster summoning. “Clearly not. He has an army of them. We’ve been attacked everywhere we’ve been today.”
This clearly concerned her. “That’s not good.”
“Not at all.”
His phone chimed in his pocket. A text message from Isabelle: THE END OF THE HALL
“I thought you said I couldn’t use my phone in a hospital.”
YOU’RE NOT IN A WORKING AREA OF THE HOSPITAL
Eric scratched at his chin. “Okay. I guess that makes sense. What am I looking for?”
IT’S HARD TO EXPLAIN. IT’S SORT OF LIKE A TENDRIL SNAKING THROUGH THE BUILDING
Eric looked around. “I don’t see anything.”
IT’S NOT PHYSICAL
Eric frowned at the phone. “What do you mean ‘not physical?’ Is it magic?”
IT’S PSYCHIC
“Are you sure?”
I’M POSITIVE
Eric stared down the dark hallway. “So what does it mean?”
I HAVE NO IDEA
Charlotte was fiddling with her necklace and watching him. “What’s the deal? Who are you talking to? How are you talking?”
“Isabelle,” replied Eric. “We have a psychic connection. She’s in my head.”
She stared at him for a moment, digesting this strange bit of information. “But you need a phone to talk to her?”
“I need a phone to hear her. She’s in my head. I’m not in hers.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Sounds crazy. I know.”
Charlotte held up her hands. “Hey. I’m a witch. You’ve got an Isabelle in your head. To each his own.”
“I kind of like working with witches,” Eric decided. “You’re a very open-minded people.”
VERY CONVENIENT, agreed Isabelle.
“So Isabelle knows where this thing’s hiding?”
“End of the hall,” replied Eric. “She can feel it. It’s psychic.”
“Like her.”
“Right.”
Charlotte turned her attention toward the hallway in front of them. “Does she know what it is?”
Eric glanced down at the phone.
NO IDEA. BUT IT’S STRONG. YOU SHOULD BE CAREFUL
“Always,” he promised.
Charlotte glanced at the screen. “You’ll have to tell me how you two met.”
“Holly can fill you in on our way back to Delphinium when we’re done here.”
“Sounds fascinating. Can’t wait.”
“Thrilling story,” Eric agreed.
“I’ve got to be honest,” she said. “I’m kind of scared out of my mind right now.”
“Pretty sure that’s normal.”
The lights were on in the hallway. They appeared to be wired with the lights in the previous corridor. But the rooms in here were all dark. The only light was coming from small, dirty windows. A surprising number of things had been left in here to rot. Each room was still furnished with a bed, a nightstand and even a small television mounted to the wall. A wheelchair stood abandoned in the middle of the hallway.
“No offense,” said Charlotte, “but I really wish Del was here.”
“None taken. I kind of wish she was here, too. Something tells me I’d want her on my side in a fight.”
“She is formidable.”
“What about you? Can you throw spells like Holly and Alicia?”
“Thrusts? Yeah. And I can use it three times if I have to before recharging.”
“Nice.”
“Still not confident about this, though.”
“That’s good. You should stay on your toes. Holly’s thrust didn’t stop ogres.”
“Fantastic.”
They approached the end of the hall. Another set of double doors waited for them. A sign above them informed them that they were approaching the intensive care unit. But someone with a morbid sense of humor had spray-painted the word “morgue” over the top of it.
“Cute,” grumbled Eric.
IT’S IN THERE, Isabelle informed him.
Eric wished he had Delphinium’s dagger, but he’d left it in the minivan, under the seat. He hadn’t dared try to sneak it into the hospital. That had seemed like a good way to get arrested.
The old ICU was dark and dreary. The floor was covered in grime. Mold grew on the walls and ceiling in dirty patterns. Most of the furniture had been removed from this room, leaving the space mostly empty.
Eric and Charlotte stood in the doorway, peering in.
There didn’t seem to be any kind of monster lurking in the room.
THE BACK CORNER. TO THE LEFT
“There’s nothing there,” said Eric.
YES, THERE IS
“I can’t see anything.”
GET CLOSER
“Do I have to?”
YES
He sighed and began walking toward the far corner of the room.
He couldn’t see anything. He tried squinting, glancing from the corners of his eyes, even opening his eyes as wide as they would go, but the place was empty. Clearly, he didn’t have psychic vision.
Charlotte shuddered. “Cold in here.”
It was. It was also damp and drafty. But he thought it should be warm and humid given the weather outside.
He fixed his eyes on the far corner. There was nothing there. And yet Isabelle insisted that there was. What couldn’t he see?
He crept closer. Ten paces from the corner of the room. Five paces.
STOP
Eric froze. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
ABOVE YOU
Eric’s heart leapt. He lifted his eyes to the ceiling. At the same time, he ducked down, half-expecting something to lash out at him from above.
But still there was nothing. Only a gaping hole in the ceiling tiles, revealing an empty plenum space above.
FEEL IT
“What?”
YOU CAN’T SEE IT. YOU HAVE TO FEEL IT
Eric closed his eyes. For a moment, there was nothing. But then he did begin to feel it. Something was there, hovering right above him, a great, dark mass of…something… It reminded him of every kind of thing that had ever made his skin crawl, from snakes and spiders to scorpions and leeches. It made his stomach roll over. All he wanted to do was turn and flee the room, to get out of this basement as quickly as possible.
But when he opened his eyes, there was still nothing there.
Had he only imagined it?
IT’S REAL, Isabelle assured him. AND IT’S EATING SHONDRA LOWE FROM THE INSIDE OUT
Eric shivered and took a step backward. How was he supposed to kill something he couldn’t see?
Charlotte stepped up beside him, her eyes fixed on the exposed plenum space above them. “It’s there, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “Definitely.” It was growing out of the ceiling like a tumor. He could almost feel it pulsing. The picture in his head was of a blob with long, snake-like tentacles, but he had the distinct feeling that it was probably much more complicated than that. It was probably as close as his mind could come to comprehending the thing. After all, if it was a purely psychic creature
, it wouldn’t necessarily need to conform to physical laws of nature.
“What do we do?”
But Eric didn’t know. He’d never encountered anything quite like this before.
SPELL? offered Isabelle.
Eric showed her the screen.
Charlotte read the word and then looked up at the ceiling again. “Worth a try.”
The two of them backed away and Charlotte thrust her hand toward the missing tiles. She gave a fierce grunt, as if she’d just pushed a very heavy object, and five invisible projectiles shot from her fingertips.
Eric didn’t see any such projectiles. They were invisible, after all. But he felt that warm breeze move through the room and saw five gory craters appear out of thin air.
A great, bulbous shape rippled into view for a moment, shrugging outward and knocking down several more tiles that fell to the floor with a loud clattering.
He could almost have believed that he’d only imagined it, that she’d merely knocked down the ceiling tiles with the spell. But before he had time to doubt his eyes, he realized that he could sense the thing’s tendrils. Dozens of them snaked across the ceiling and down the walls, like a network of veins. Each one pulsed grotesquely.
Strangely, the tendrils and the body of the thing weren’t actually connected. It was as if they were separate entities, but he could feel that they were one and the same.
He didn’t have time to ponder this bizarre fact further. One of the tendrils shot out from the wall and struck him in the chest. Instantly, he fell backward onto the floor, his entire body twitching. Pain filled him, as if a fire were raging through his entire nervous system. He cried out and tried to grasp the thing that was attacking him with his hands, but there was nothing to grab. It still wasn’t real…
Things were crawling over his skin, but he couldn’t see them. When he tried to brush them away, his hands passed right through them.
Something wormed its way into his mouth and passed right through his clenched teeth. He couldn’t even bite it.
The room grew darker around him. His vision blurred. In another few seconds, he was going to be just like Shondra Lowe, unconscious, helpless and at the mercy of this monster.
He heard Charlotte calling out to him. He tried to respond, tried to warn her of the danger, but it was too late.
Darkness closed around him, swallowing him.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
There was no peace in this darkness. As he sank into a murky abyss, Eric found himself not drifting away into slumber, but into something like a nightmare. The pain didn’t dull as the world faded. It sharpened. It intensified. Fire burned inside his veins. Acid bubbled in his guts. His eyeballs throbbed. There was a screaming in his ears.
That sensation of things crawling on his skin became more real. He could almost see them, tiny, slimy things swarming over his body, crawling into his nose and ears, scuttling beneath his shirt, searching for the folds in his skin, warm places to make their nests and lay their millions of vile, pulsating eggs.
He wanted to retch, but his body wouldn’t respond. He felt as if he were falling, plunging into a cold, damp darkness.
Hours seemed to pass. Days. Weeks.
For a while he thought he was screaming, but there was no sound but that agonizing wailing in his ears.
Something was wriggling in his throat…squirming upward…
He wished he could die.
Then he realized that he was no longer alone. Someone was there with him. A woman was looking back at him in the darkness. He couldn’t see her face, exactly, but she was there, her nose almost touching his.
She wasn’t remarkably beautiful, but she was pretty, with blonde hair and a spattering of freckles across her cheeks and nose. He didn’t know how he knew this, since he couldn’t actually see her, but he did. She had two different colored eyes. One was dark brown. The other was a pale blue.
“Save me,” she breathed.
Eric wanted to respond. He wanted to ask her how. But he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t even lift his hand to touch her.
Then she was gone.
He was still in pain. His eyeballs were still throbbing. Things were still crawling on his skin. Something was still wriggling its way up his throat.
Then the world was ripped open before his eyes. Pale light flooded over him, washing away the squirming things on his flesh. Whatever was working its way up his throat vanished. The pain subsided. The screaming in his ears quieted.
He was lying on the filthy floor, gasping for breath.
Above him, he could see a great, bulbous thing hanging from the ceiling, oozing foul, gory secretions. It was torn almost completely in half. A single tendril was twisting in the air, seemingly untethered, spouting bloody bile that didn’t vanish like the blood of the imps and ogres, but never seemed to reach the floor, either.
Charlotte stood nearby, her body tense, her hand stretched out toward the thing on the ceiling. She’d used a second thrust. A more powerful one, it seemed, or at least a better aimed one. This time she’d delivered it a mortal blow.
Eric scrambled to his feet, brushing away the foul tendril that had anchored itself to his body. Even as he did this, he realized that he couldn’t see or feel it. He only knew that it was there, lying over him, slowly wilting, melting into the shadows.
“Are you okay?” asked Charlotte.
“That was awful!” he gasped.
“It was scary!” she agreed.
“How long was I out?”
She glanced at him, surprised. “You lost consciousness?”
He blinked, confused. “I thought I did.”
“It was only a second or two, then.”
But it had felt like…
Eric shook away the thought. It didn’t matter. He backed toward the doorway, his eyes sweeping the room. It was empty again, but with each frantic beat of his racing heart, his wide eyes pulsed slightly and he glimpsed just a flash of the room as it really was. The thing was slumping downward, oozing out of the plenum space, sagging toward the floor. Foul fluids pooled beneath it. The tendrils on the wall were drooping. Strange, pulsating shapes that he hadn’t noticed before now sagged from the walls and ceiling. He had the strangest feeling that these were some kind of organs. Eyes maybe. Or ears. Or things unimaginable.
But the horrors were past.
It was dying.
YOU DID IT, Isabell told him.
Charlotte glanced over at him. “Did I get it?”
“I think you did.”
She relaxed a little. “Good.”
Eric looked down at the phone again. “What happened there?”
I’M NOT SURE. I THINK IT PUT YOU INTO A DREAMLIKE STATE
“More of a nightmare.”
I KNOW. I CAUGHT SOME OF IT. SUPER CREEPY. THAT MUST BE WHAT SHONDRA’S BEEN EXPERIENCING THIS WHOLE TIME
The thought gave Eric a shiver. He’d only been there for a few seconds and it had felt like ages. How long did it seem to Siena’s mother? He had to force the thought away and focus on something else. “Who was the woman?”
WHAT WOMAN?
This surprised him. “You didn’t see her?”
NO
Eric stared at the phone. The woman with the odd eyes… Surely he hadn’t just imagined it. And even if he had, shouldn’t Isabelle still have seen it. She was connected to his thoughts.
I SEE HER NOW, she told him. IN YOUR THOUGHTS. BUT I DIDN’T SEE HER WHILE YOU WERE DREAMING
“How’s that possible?’
I’M NOT SURE. MAYBE IT JUST HAPPENED TOO FAST. IT WAS ALL KIND OF A BLUR TO ME
“Maybe…” But time had never been much of a factor for Isabelle. She was trapped in a state outside of time, aware of it because of her psychic connections to him and her parents, but otherwise completely unaffected by it.
But she was also human. Maybe she just couldn’t comprehend so much in such a small span of time.
Charlotte was watching him curiously. “What’s going on? Who
’re you talking about?”
He shook his head. “It’s complicated. We don’t have time right now. Let’s get out of here.” He walked to the door and pushed it open.
She didn’t pursue the subject. She was clearly happy to be leaving the old ICU. She stepped backward from the room, reluctant to turn her back on the invisible thing that was still oozing down from the ceiling in the corner. She still couldn’t see it, but she thought she could smell it. A foul, sulfur-like stench.
There was none of that black smoke, Eric realized. This thing, whatever it was, was different from the imps and ogres he’d been encountering all night. It wasn’t fading from this plane of existence, as those other monsters did.
He wondered what that meant.
They pulled the doors closed between them and the dying monster and turned back to the hallway leading out.
Charlotte let out a startled shriek.
There, at the end of the hallway, looking back at them, was a single imp.
Eric sighed. “Okay. Here we go again.”
“What is that thing?”
“Imp. They’re not too tough, but there’s usually more of them.”
But the imp looked strange. It wasn’t charging after him, like the others. It stood slumped over, as if sick, regarding them with its huge, black eyes.
“Save your spell,” he warned her. “You might need it for something else.”
Charlotte nodded.
There was an old, rotten mop lying on the floor near his feet. He picked it up and held it out in front of him. As far as weapons went, it pretty well sucked. But it was all he had.
He could always channel his inner Toxic Avenger, he supposed.
“I got this,” he assured her.
But then something bizarre happened. The imp let out a shriek. It dropped to the floor, writhing as if in pain. Its body split open. Smoke poured out of it.
Then it began to change.
Its arms and legs began to stretch. Its claws grew to the size of carving knives. Its mouth opened wide, splitting its face from ear to ear, and its needle-like teeth grew six inches, transforming its tiny maw into a great, toothy trap. Horns sprouted from its body in strange places. Its eyes bulged even more.
When it stood up, it was no longer smoking and it was six feet tall.