Shutter

by Courtney Alameda

  The sun was setting. Up ahead, the Bay Bridge’s lights looked like they’d been photographed on soft focus, diffused by fog. Ryder revved the bike, ducking downtown. Black-eyed skyscrapers rose around us, their doorsteps dead, save for some homeless men talking outside a twenty-four-hour pharmacy. A few cars dotted the roads, but the Friday night bustle retreated behind locked doors and steel grates. I spotted another empty coffee shop, the third one in the last block, its doors barred with trash cans. Ridiculous barricade, but fear screwed weird ideas into people’s brains.

  We passed a Catholic church with its doors thrown open and its bells ringing down the day, priests standing guard at the doors. Parishioners streamed inside. At least people heeded the lockdown, even if I wasn’t sure if a curfew would protect anyone from a murderous ghost.

  Heading uphill, we bounced over trolley tracks and passed Victorian residences with grates barring their doors. Exhaustion tugged at my eyelids, but I knew the only recharge I’d be getting came in a twenty-four-ounce cup with an effing mermaid on it. I rested my good cheek on Ryder’s back. At the next stoplight, he turned his head and said, “Hey, there’s a first-aid kit in the saddlebag. You should ice your cheek.”

  “It doesn’t hurt so bad.” But I lied. Dad hit like a jackhammer and broke more than blood vessels.

  “Maybe not on the outside,” he said.

  The light turned before I could answer him, and he’d never hear a word over the motorcycle’s throaty growl and the wind’s whip. I watched the city blur past, counting the hours we’d already used up, wondering if we’d find enough evidence at the hospital to track our ghost. If not, we could press Father Marlowe for every scrap of information he possessed, or even obtain an antimirror and ask another ghost for help. Worst case, we’d break into the forensics lab on the island and have Jude read a victim’s blood. I shuddered at the thought, but chalked it up to the cold wind digging its fingers into my skin and pulling on my ponytail. I would do what it took to survive.

  More than anything, I needed a clue to the entity’s motive. Unlike the corporeal undead, ghosts weren’t often killers. They preferred to possess their victims, to slip in and steal lives rather than end them. So why the hospital, why the rampage? And maybe most importantly, why the soulchains? If I knew why the ghost wanted to kill, I could better predict its movements in the future, track it, and perhaps even use its motivations to make it slip up in a fight.

  We rode for fifteen minutes before Golden Gate Park emerged from the fog, a tangle of shadows and foliage. Passing Stanyan Street—and St. Mary’s—we turned into the park. Ryder hung left, pulling off the road and riding over the grass until the vegetation swallowed us whole. He killed the engine when the hospital’s edge came into view.

  I slid off the bike, taking in a breath of the eucalyptus trees’ spicy, earthen scent. We could stay here and monitor the hospital until Jude and Oliver arrived. Luckily, I didn’t see any Helsing vehicles in the vicinity, just hazmat vans and fire trucks, sprinkled with a couple of police vehicles. Both parking lots looked empty, though I couldn’t see the garage. Hopefully they’d evacuated the patients and were getting ready to abandon cleanup for the night. With the night lockdown, I doubted anyone would stay past full dark.

  Stars clawed their way out of the reddened sky, and dusk already swirled and eddied around our feet. Ryder rummaged around in the bike’s bags and removed an ice pack, kneading it until it broke out in a sweat. He handed it to me, and I took it without complaint or comment. The cold dulled the ache in my cheek.

  “Think they’ve figured out we’re missing yet?” I asked.

  Ryder pulled out his phone and showed me the screen. My father’s name sat atop his Missed Calls list, right beside a x21. “What’s your damage?” Ryder asked.

  I’d turned off my phone in the tunnel and hadn’t thought about it since. When I took it out and flipped it on, it buzzed for almost a full minute, downloading missed call after missed call.

  “So?” he asked.

  “Fifty-three missed calls, twelve messages.” Dad’s probably getting angrier on each message. A second later, my phone burred in my hand.

  Dad.

  I let it ring.

  He hung up. Called again.

  I turned off my phone.

  Ryder shifted his weight. “We should tell the old man we’re okay—”

  “We’re not okay,” I said, turning back to face the hospital. We’re not even close to okay. As I watched the hazmat team and the city coroners trickle out of the building with the last few body bags, Ryder came and stood so close I sensed the heat radiating off his skin—not strictly touching me, but stepping beyond our barrier again, getting braver.

  “Hey now,” he said, putting an arm around my shoulders. “So long as we’re still fighting, everything’s just right.”

  Tentatively, I reached out and put my arm around his waist, even laid my head on his shoulder. I wanted to believe him, but I knew I couldn’t until I’d beaten the soulchains under our skins.

  “Am I right?” he asked me.

  I nodded. “For now.”

  FRIDAY, 6:38 P.M.

  I SENSED MORE THAN saw the sun set, felt the drowned slip of the light under the horizon. The bruised sky darkened from blue to black, and my senses seemed to sharpen, my confidence returning. The day left me second-guessing myself, but the night would be for hunting. For action.

  The police officers exited the building last, securing the doors. All but two squad cars left the property within minutes, no doubt anxious to vacate the scene.

  I powered my cell phone on. Another five missed calls from Dad, plus a few from Dr. Stoker’s line. Ignoring them, I texted Jude: What’s your status?

  He replied a few seconds later: On our way. Bianca stitched Franken-Einstein back up.

  I frowned, trying to place the name, and nearly texted him Bianca who? but Ryder read the text over my shoulder.

  “Bianca Hsieh,” he said. “She’s tracked for medical at the academy but lives with her parents in the city.”

  “Can we trust her?”

  Ryder shrugged. “As well as we can trust anyone, I’d reckon.”

  “Meaning Jude’s slept with her?”

  He shrugged a second time, breaking my gaze, his jaw clenched tight at the hinge. It summed up how Ryder felt about Jude’s girl habits, no matter what the reasons were.

  “Well, hopefully she’ll keep quiet,” I said. Ryder grunted, and I thought it might’ve meant Nothing we can do about it now. I scanned the hospital’s west flank, looking for an entrance to breach. We needed a way inside, preferably one away from the squad cars sitting in the parking lot. At least we didn’t have to worry about the road, dead with the lockdown. It’d be a day or two before people realized the curfew didn’t kick in until ten o’clock at night, not officially.

  “It looks like that catwalk connects to the hospital proper,” I said, pointing out a glass-enclosed walkway built into the back of the building. A wrought iron fence wrapped itself around the hospital’s west side, but I thought I could see a gate, plus a small outbuilding connected to the catwalk. Perfect.

  I tapped out another message to Jude: ETA?

  My phone beeped. 3 minutes.

  They were close. Meet us on Stanyan, south of the hospital. Don’t pass St. Mary’s. Cops. Will need your lock picks.

  10-4, your Highness.

  “We’re going to break in?” Ryder followed me down the park’s slope to the sidewalk.

  “Jude will leave the locks intact.” I scanned the street for Helsing Humvees. Clear.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” I asked.

  “They’ll look here first, Micheline. The old man’s got to have trackers after us by now.”

  “That’s why we need to hurry.” Without waiting for an answer, I jogged across the street, headed for the fence spanning the hospital’s recessed back lot. Our lives were more important than misdemeanors. We were clev
erer than Helsing’s trackers. I would show my father I could exorcise this ghost and save us better than anyone else. Including him.

  We found the gate locked, but we didn’t have to wait long before Jude’s and Oliver’s shadows appeared around the hospital’s south corner.

  “We’re screwed,” Jude said as he walked toward us. “I know you guys haven’t had a scanner, but the brass sent eight tracker teams after us, including that crazy-ass Harker Elite squad out of Oakland. You know the guys who busted the necrotic fight club in Vegas last year? Yeah, them.”

  “Then why are we standing around talking?” I said, making a yappy gesture with my hand. “Let’s get cracking.”

  Jude snorted, opening his slim-line case of lock picks. “I’m your Swiss Army knife, aren’t I, baby? You just open me up and—”

  I flipped him off. Jude laughed and took a knee, removing a pair of tools that looked like they belonged to a dentist, not a locksmith. Or a criminal, for that matter. The rest of us gathered around, blocking him from sight as he inserted a tension tool into the lock.

  “Someone got a flashlight?” Jude asked. Ryder pointed his Maglite at the lock.

  “You know Captain Kennedy’s in charge of the manhunt?” Oliver asked me. “He’s sworn to find you. The story hit CNN while we were at Bianca’s house.” He showed me his phone, which had a picture of poster-boy Kennedy standing at a podium beside my father, the words HELSING HEIR MISSING beneath the image. Kennedy had his good ol’ boy smile on, his charm oozing through the screen. My father, on the other hand, looked like Hades incarnate, without a smile or even a hint of warmth in his eyes. Every inch a killer.

  “Such a white knight, Kennedy,” Jude said. “I bet he’d even die for you, God forbid anything happen to Helsing’s precious little princess—”

  “Can it.” Ryder stuck his hands in his pockets and eyed the street, trying to look casual. Jude glanced back at him, a sly grin on his lips. He knew. Even if Ryder and I never said anything aloud, never hinted, never even touched in front of him, Jude knew. Oliver, however, remained blissfully oblivious despite all of Jude’s banter; he expected Ryder and me to follow the established order, and all Oliver ever wanted to see were his expectations met.

  Jude bit the tip of his tongue as he worked, falling into a Zen mode he reserved for lock picking and premonitions. The pins inside the lock made rusty, creaking noises, which sounded loud on the silent street. Finally, he twirled the torque wrench and the lock popped like a knuckle.

  “We’re in,” he said.

  “Good on ya,” Ryder said, sparing another glance up and down the street. I slipped past the gate and up the concrete stairs beyond, glad for the cover of night. Even if there had been anyone to look, they probably wouldn’t have seen us slipping into the hospital outbuilding.

  Inside, silence gnawed on the sea-foam-colored walls. The place felt like the inside of a cave, the air clinging wetly to my skin, the darkness in the glass catwalk shifting, flickering.

  “What’s the chance that monster will come back tonight?” Ryder asked. He rested his hand on the butt of his gun, maybe semiconsciously.

  “Slim,” I said, running my fingers over my holstered camera. “I don’t think the location is emotionally significant for the entity.”

  “Then why here?” Oliver asked.

  “I think it wanted to make a point.” I motioned the boys forward. We crossed the catwalk and skirted the main hallway, creeping into the western stairwell.

  Eighteen hours ago, I hadn’t known what I’d find on the fourth floor of St. Mary’s. This time was different, with the boys at my back and weak light leaking through the stairwell’s skylights. This time, I didn’t have adrenaline to fuel my nerve. This time, I questioned every step, my audacity lost in the bang and throb in my cheek and the ghostlight growing inside me. This time, I wasn’t looking for a fight but for a why.

  The regular stairwells didn’t have doors, but led straight onto each floor. When we reached the fourth story, I walked in first.

  The hallway stretched silent as a cathedral aisle, dark as a crypt. A day-old, meaty stench coated my throat and lungs, the battered odor of antiseptic and alcohol lingering beneath. They’d removed the dead, but the scene looked just as I’d remembered it, the details sharp and as undeniable as a death sentence. With the city’s coroners done with the place, I wondered if Helsing Forensics had finished their work as well—a lot of their gear still sat at the nurses’ station, including a large antimirror encased in polycarbonate, used for examining the scene’s Obscura side. It swallowed my flashlight’s beam whole.

  The boys flanked me, Ryder on my right, Jude and Oliver on my left.

  “I need to show you how it happened,” I said. “Follow me.”

  We started at the hospital’s east end, retracing my steps. I used Ryder to reenact my bout with the entity in the nursery, right up to the moment it rushed out to attack. Oliver scribbled notes, observing the rooms, absorbing information. Jude listened in silence—something about the place, the memory of the violence done here, stripped the bravado out of him. Out of all of us, really.

  “What I want to know is why,” I said, looking down at the forgotten molars scattered on the floor. I nudged them away with my toe. “Why attack St. Mary’s? Why the maternity ward?”

  Without a word, Jude clamped a gloved hand over my wrist.

  “What?” But I already knew he’d stopped seeing the world with his eyes—his pupils were blown like a drug addict’s, leaving only a thin blue hoop around black pits. The genetic mutation in the Drake line manifested differently in each individual; Jude’s train-wreck visions shattered his reality. It was like a law of physics—once Jude’s visions were set in motion, they stayed in motion until they burned out.

  I stumbled after him, wading through shredded medical charts, broken glass, and bits of the ceiling tile. The other boys followed us, cautious. At one point I tripped over a black pole, cursed, and recognized my monopod in the mess. Ryder grabbed it off the floor for me.

  Jude tugged me into a patient’s room. Though the bodies had been removed, the stains of lives lost still remained. Shadows knelt over the gurneys and floors, cast by streetlights pressing against the crosses in the windows. Nothing seemed particularly special about the place—it had the same damage and debris as any other.

  “There’s a woman, screaming and crying blood,” Jude said, looking at the empty gurney. Tremors raced through his hand, shaking my whole arm. He breathed like he’d run a marathon, words sticking to his lips. “They came running, of course they came running.…”

  His gaze traced the floor, stopping on long stains. Ryder and Oliver looked down and stepped back as if they’d discovered graves beneath their feet.

  “Can you see why it attacked the hospital?” I asked.

  “I need to…,” Jude whispered, gripping my wrist until I thought it would shatter, his glove twisting my skin in a friction burn. “He’s … I can’t see why, Micheline. I can’t, I’m sorry.…”

  “It’s okay, you’re doing great,” I said. Ryder and I eased him into a shredded chair. Stuffing oozed out like gray matter around his legs. Prying off his fingers, I set his hands in his lap and stroked his bright hair, like I used to do for my brothers when they were frightened. Jude leaned his forehead against my hip, back heaving. I hated seeing him like this: full of visions with their slasher-flick gore but without the fantasy. This was the only time Jude let me touch him.

  “It’s … it’s the mirror, Micheline,” Jude said. Wheezed, almost.

  “Which mirror?” I asked.

  “Bathroom,” he said. “It’s … wrong. Can’t see why.”

  The bathroom door stood closed. “Wait here,” I told him, though it sounded more like an order. Motioning to Ryder, I put my ear to it. Nothing. Unclipping my camera from my belt—just in case—I nudged the door open with my shoulder.

  The room was still. I turned on my flashlight, but nothing seemed out of place—the mirror, wh
ole. The trash can was empty, as was the toilet; and the white tile flooring looked clean … except for the glitter of silver by the open shower.

  Holstering my camera, I knelt and ran my fingers over a rind of metal stamped onto the tile. Hairline cracks spread off the mark, as if the tile suffered a blow from a hammer or a cart—

  Or an antimirror.

  The soulchain twisted in my gut.

  “Micheline?” Ryder asked from the door.

  “Get the antimirror by the nurses’ station.” I glanced back at him. “Hurry.”

  I let my flashlight’s beam spill over the floor. Light winked from behind the toilet, and I found a small, turgid hunk of glass, dirtied with the same oily substance the entity used to infect the boys and me with the soulchains.

  Ground zero. Someone broke an antimirror in this room, maybe even electrified the silver pane to allow the entity access into our world. But why? Had Forensics missed this shard, or found others? Why hadn’t it been removed as evidence?

  The rest of the bathroom looked untouched—save for the tile grout near the shower, which wore black-grime stains and smelled of ammonia.

  “Someone’s worked hard to hide the evidence,” I murmured under my breath. Just not hard enough. I hitched up my flashlight, but found no evidence of tar-pit fingerprints on the walls.

  Ryder came in with the antimirror. I took the pane in both hands, mirror side facing me, and used it to scan the room in the Obscura’s “reflection.” The bathroom looked like a chipped-porcelain version of itself, tame until I turned far enough to catch a black and virulent stain upon a wall.

  “Shine your flashlight into the antimirror, will you?” I asked Ryder. He clicked his flashlight on, and we peered into the pane. Jagged writing covered the wall on the Obscura side, scrawled in charcoal. The Helsing insignia had been scratched into the drywall—perhaps with fingernails—and encircled with an emblem of a dragon painted in coal-black ink.