by Adam Dark
It was a little after eight in the morning again when he’d sent that text, so he didn’t really expect anybody to get back to him quickly. Even at noon when he ate the sub sandwich he’d ordered for delivery, they still had plenty of time to get back to him. But nobody had yet. That threw him off just a little, and he turned on the TV to try distracting himself with the nature channel and a documentary about turtles. Riveting stuff. Somehow, it just didn’t make the time go by any faster.
At 2:30 that afternoon, Ben was starting to get just a little nervous that no one was going to answer—or come with him. The last thing he wanted was to set foot inside Richard Monday’s house again by himself. An image of his own body strapped to that giant version of the demon-stone cabinet in Richard’s basement lab flashed through his mind—the glowing blue cables wrapped around his neck and throat while Richard, Rufus, and Anita stood there studying him like a bug on a spreading board, grinning.
‘Dude, I get where this is coming from,’ Ian said, ‘but I seriously think you’re getting ahead of yourself.’
“Am I?” Ben flipped to the next channel on the TV, which just so happened to be the news. Yeah, that never made anyone feel better about anything, even normal people with their normal lives. He changed the channel again and lurched backward into the corner of the couch. He could have sworn he saw the rag-demon in his actual TV, of all places, those fluttering bits of shredded cloth flapping around in so many pixels of color. Nope. Just one of those inflatable tubes with arms and a face dancing around in front of a car dealership, falling and jerking up and falling again. Then he realized this was a commercial for Mergile Ferrari itself, the sign above the building screaming its name in the same font and colors as on Rufus’ business card. Jeeze, was nothing sacred anymore?
‘You don’t even watch TV that much.’
But when he actually wanted to, Ben would prefer the demon-involved parts of his life stayed out of the television, at the very least.
His phone buzzed on the couch beside him, and he opened the message from Peter sent to the group text.
—I hate that place.—
Join the club, Pete. It was one thing that the guy had replied to Ben’s message at all, but Ben really hoped that this wasn’t Peter’s passive-aggressive way of saying, ‘Never mind. Count me out. No way am I going back there as a willing prisoner again.’
Just after 3:00, another text came through.
—Don’t worry, Peter. You can have my lasagna this time.—
That one was from April, and Ben might have laughed at her joke if he wasn’t so busy feeling more relieved than he should have right now. They still had to go have this meeting first before anything could happen—before he made his decision one way or the other. And neither option was especially amazing.
Chase replied shortly after that with a thumbs-up emoji. Super cute for a guy who apparently spent all his time typing code or whatever behind the biggest home-office setup Ben had ever seen. Well then, that meant they really were doing this. Ben had to prepare himself for the definite possibility that whatever the Sectarian Circle wanted with him, he might never come back to even this version of his own life.
“Crap,” he muttered, feeling awful for not having thought at all about how his looming decision might affect the people he hadn’t seen since November—since he’d closed one massively terrifying door on his past, for the most part, before opening the new, bigger, much more potentially deadly door of the very near future.
‘Yeah, that’s a good idea,’ Ian said. ‘I’ll stay out of this one.’
With a deep breath, Ben pulled up the number on his phone and made the call. She picked up rather quickly.
“Hi, Ben.”
“Hi, Mom.”
“How are you doing?”
Boy, wasn’t that the million-dollar question? “I’m fine. Just… you know, working on my dissertation.” Lies. All lies to his own mother.
“Oh, that’s right. How’s it coming along?” She sounded especially distracted, which wasn’t really anything new. Ben hadn’t called home much even before the voices and the demons came blasting back into his life four months ago. That had hardly changed since.
“Honestly, it’s kind of kicking my butt,” he said, staring at his closed laptop on the coffee table.
His mom chuckled. “I remember having to write mine. It still surprises me that I even graduated after that.” There was a long pause, mostly because Ben just had no idea what to say to her as a goodbye-maybe-not. He shouldn’t have called. “How’s April?”
Ben cleared his throat. His parents had met her back home in Oakwood Valley, when Ben had been in a coma at the hospital and nobody could figure out why. Nobody had bothered to check him for Ian’s disembodied spirit hitching a ride in his body or the pretty serious effects that had had on Ben possibly almost dying after burning that old house down with his bare hands. Literally. He didn’t expect his mom to bring that up now. “Yeah, she’s good. I’m meeting up with her later tonight, actually.” He could have slapped himself.
“Oh, fun,” his mom replied.
Somehow, Ben couldn’t help but think that he’d caught her doing something she’d much rather focus on than this ridiculously shallow conversation with her once clinically insane son—as far as the rest of the world was concerned. “Hey, is Dad with you?”
She paused. “No, Ben. He’s still at work.” Ben shut his eyes and grimaced. Duh. “Honey, I’m about to check out at the grocery store. Was there something you wanted to talk about?”
Oh, just that he might be about to join a secret society of whack jobs who liked putting demons into helpless people just for a change of scenery. “No, not really,” he said. “I was just thinking about you guys. Wanted to say hi.”
“Well, thank you. It’s always good to hear from you. Listen, I’m sure you’re busy, and I’ve got these groceries. I’d say we’ll call you again tonight, but if you’ve got a date with April, I definitely don’t want to interrupt.”
Not a date. The opposite of a date. Why was he having this conversation? “That’s okay,” Ben said quickly. “Just tell Dad I said hi, okay?”
“Absolutely.”
“And I love you guys.”
His mom hummed into the phone. “We love you too, Ben. Thanks for the call. And have fun tonight.”
He could hear her overly cheesy grin through the phone, and it made him feel sick for keeping everything from her like this. Even though the last time he’d told his parents the truth, the only option they’d thought they had was to take him to shrinks and doctors and try to pump the crazy right out of him by pumping the meds right in. And he had to let that go.
“Yeah, thanks. We will.” He almost choked on the words. “Okay, I’ll let you go.”
“All right. Don’t wait so long to call again, okay?”
“I’ll try. Bye, Mom.”
“Bye.”
He almost dropped his phone after that—the dumbest, fakest, shallowest phone call he’d probably ever made in his life. Clearly, he shouldn’t have.
‘Dude,’ Ian said. ‘If I’d had a chance to call my parents…’
The guy didn’t have to say any more than that. Of course Ian never got that chance before the house on Wry Road swallowed him up and the Guardian started a whole new round of sick games with its latest catch. “Right,” Ben whispered. He pulled up his sister Rachel’s number next and decided it was best to text her. He definitely couldn’t handle another phone call like that last one.
—Love you.—
Her reply was almost immediate, which made Ben wonder how much time his married sister with a kid spent on her phone in the middle of the day.
—You okay?—
Well, at least she acknowledged it was a little weird. A phone call would have definitely been worse.
—Peachy.—
—K. Love you too.—
So great. That was done. No big deal. At least if he never talked to his family again after this, they’d kno
w he was thinking about them before the end.
‘Okay, it’s cool to call your mom and everything, but I wish you’d stopped thinking about it like this.’
“I’m just covering my bases,” Ben muttered. Sure, part of him felt like he was overreacting. He knew he tended to do that sometimes. But he still couldn’t get rid of the feeling that something was about to end, in a really big way, and there wasn’t a lot he could do to prepare for it. Plus, what else was he supposed to do for the next two and a half hours before he got in his car and headed out for Charlestown?
‘Seriously, Ben, I have a pretty long list of things I’d like to—’
“No.”
‘Oh, come on. If you’re just gonna sit around here going all doomsday on everything, at least let me—’
“No.” Whatever Ian wanted, Ben really didn’t feel like handing over what might have been the last few hours of his life as his own just so Ian could have some fun driving Ben’s body around like a fun new toy.
25
He pulled up alongside the row of waterfront homes in Charlestown, having to park behind three other cars sitting right there in front of Richard Monday’s house. Now that he was here, it seemed a little ridiculous that none of them had talked about riding here together for the strangest meeting Ben would probably ever have in his life. He definitely expected it to be weirder than his first time here just a few days ago, which felt like forever ago.
When he turned off his car and opened the door to get out, the three other cars in front of him all let out their own drivers—April, Peter, Chase. It was a weird moment of synchronicity, like they’d all practiced getting out of their cars in front of this house a hundred times to make it look this intentionally organized. Ben stuck his hands in the pockets of his jacket against both the weirdness of it and the cold.
Ben slipped between April’s car and his and waited for the others to join him on the narrow sidewalk between the street and the steps up to Richard’s front door. April approached first, giving him a small, nervous smile. Great. If April was nervous, Ben really didn’t have much of a reason not to be. And he definitely was.
Peter shuffled toward them, frowning and hunching his shoulders against the cold. It was almost completely dark now, and in the yellowish light from the streetlamps, the guy looked sicker than his normally pale and weak-immune-system gauntness. Chase pulled on his vape and let out a massive cloud, yellow now in the light too, seemingly oblivious to anything and everything. But at least he wasn’t talking.
“You ready?” April asked.
Ready for what? Ben had absolutely no idea. “Guess I have to be, right?” he replied, offering her the tightest smile he’d ever felt on his own face.
Peter just shrugged, looking a lot calmer than Ben had expected. But maybe that was just the weird lighting.
They turned toward the stairs and the stoop in front of Richard’s front door, understandably without much more to say at all. All the talking would be happening inside, somewhere below them probably, maybe even literally under their feet right now; he still hadn’t figured out the logistics of how far that huge basement lab stretched underground or in which direction. Ben took the first step forward toward what still felt like the end.
Then the ground literally trembled beneath him.
He stopped. “Did you guys feel that?”
“What?” April asked.
“I just feel cold,” Peter said. “Probably won’t even feel that if we stay out here much longer.”
“No, the ground,” Ben said, eyeing each of them before staring at his feet.
Chase stomped his feet a few times. “It sure does feel like the ground,” he said. The guy still had the absolute worst timing with his sarcasm.
“You didn’t feel it shaking?”
April and Peter shook their heads. Chase raised an eyebrow above a smirk. They thought he was stalling.
‘Okay, I felt it,’ Ian said.
Well at least Ben wasn’t imagining it, then, but when Ben and Ian were the only two people who felt or saw or heard something, that was always a warning sign. “Okay, we need to go,” Ben said and hurried toward the stairs.
Before he’d taken two more steps, the ground rocked beneath him, and he stumbled forward. The two streetlamps on either side of Richard Monday’s house flickered in unison, like they were connected to the same light switch. But nobody else seemed to notice.
“Ben, are you—”
At the same instant April’s voice cut out, her face froze. Her entire body froze, right there next to Peter and Chase, who’d both also stopped moving. Chase’s foot hovered above the ground mid-step, and the flashing yellow of the streetlamps blinked out completely. Then they were green.
‘Crap.’
“Ya think?” Ben whirled around and scanned the frozen, silent street turned black-green by the lampposts. His first thought was that he’d entered the spirit realm again, but that couldn’t be it. For one thing, Ian was still in his head, not standing beside him looking twelve. And Ben’s friends were still here too, frozen in time, which shouldn’t have been possible at all in the reality meant for dead people and demonic beings.
So either this was a sick joke and everybody was in on it except him, or this was another one of those unknown firsts Ben really wished he’d stop experiencing.
Staring between the parked cars at the street, Ben wondered for a minute why it looked so wet when he didn’t remember driving through rain to get here. Then that shimmering, wet-looking blackness moved into the circles of green light cast by the lamps that shouldn’t have been that color, and he realized his mistake.
Not rain. Not wet. These were shadows, moving across the street toward him without an owner to cast them.
‘Not quite…’ Ian added.
Now Ben recognized his other mistake. These were hands—hundreds of them, clawing up through the asphalt and across it. Toward him. They skittered like so many crabs moving over a beach somewhere, and Ben’s first thought was how the hell he was supposed to get April, Peter, and Chase away from whatever these were if none of them could even move.
‘I have no idea what this is,’ Ian said, and now he sounded scared. ‘Ben, I can’t even go look.’
“What?” Ben took a step backward away from the street, but he couldn’t go any farther than that. He couldn’t just leave his friends standing there, right in the path of all those shadow-hands creeping forward. This had to be real, right? They were still here.
‘I mean no spirit-world jumping,’ Ian shouted. ‘I can’t do it.’
“Then help me out, here.” Ben raised both palms toward the things crawling toward him, readying himself for the itch and then the fiery burn of Ian’s power from the spirit realm moving through him, more or less. But nothing happened. “Ian!”
‘Dude, I can’t!’
What the hell did that mean?
“We told you, Robin son.” The voice from Ben’s dream—or not dream, just like this—echoed all around him from every direction. “You will not stop us. Your friend is useless to you. And we will meet the Gorafrim when they arrive.”
Ben whirled around, searching the row of houses in front of him, the narrow sidewalk and the street in both directions. Now the shadowed hands moved over everything, swarming down the sides of the houses, over front doors and stoops, down stairs. They rose from the ground in every direction and spilled from beneath the cars. All closing in on him in the middle of it, and Ben was apparently now without Ian’s powers and entirely helpless.
Then he glanced at Richard Monday’s house, where he knew the man kept that blue glowing light lining the inside of his basement lab at least. That was supposed to keep demons away, wasn’t it? Apparently, it worked on the whole house. The skittering claws of shadow swarming toward him didn’t even touch the man’s building, which just loomed there in front of him like the most obvious sign in the entire world.
Ben headed that way, down the clear path between the rush of shadow-hands and R
ichard Monday’s front door. He turned back once toward April, Peter, and Chase, shouting when the hands closed in on them too. Only they passed right through his friends, as if they weren’t here at all—as if they didn’t matter. Which he guessed was exactly the point.
“Wherever you go, Robin son,” the voice hissed again from everywhere. “We will find you. You cannot stop us forever.”
Ben hadn’t stopped them at all, as far as he knew, but that little slipup on this demon’s part, wherever it was, was hardly the most pressing issue.
‘Dude, hurry it up.’
“Not helpful!” Ben shouted, darting up the stairs to Richard’s house. The minute he leapt up onto the stoop, the front door burst open in front of him. Ben stumbled sideways against the railing just in time to avoid being barreled over by a guy dressed in all black with hands extended in front of him—pretty much exactly like Ben had just reached out with his own hands. Only this guy’s hands actually did what Ben’s were supposed to do.
Flashes of bright white light shot from the guy’s palms, blasting into the shadow hands faster than Ben could follow. That shrieking wail of wind and nothingness knocked through Ben’s head, and the ground shook again beneath him. The stranger just kept blasting off white light, and the hands were falling back now, those struck by the flashes withering with howls and hisses, those closest either retreating across the ground or sinking back into it.
When the man had cleared enough of a space around Ben’s friends to make it look like Ben had a chance not to get snatched up by whatever was trying to get at him, the stranger whirled around to face him. Ben’s knees nearly gave out beneath him when he saw the guy’s face—not a face at all but this swirling, morphing outline of one, like a pool of oil rippling in a breeze. It wasn’t the green-black sludge of what the rag-demon’s face might have been, but it definitely wasn’t human.
“You are not done,” the man said, his mouth never moving because, as far as Ben could tell, the guy didn’t have a mouth. Or eyes or a nose or any discernable features but the constantly shifting shape of a head. Even his voice sounded weird—echoey, as if the man had shouted at Ben from the other side of the longest tunnel ever. Ben couldn’t even move.