Kathy sighed, running her hands though her hair. She pulled it back and twisted it up into a messy bun held by a pencil, then went back to her searching.
She almost missed the link on one of the poorly designed metaphysical websites, with its clashing fluorescent colors against a pink and turquoise background. Amid the claims of angels’ love and guidance and the power of auras and their emanations, she found one sentence that stood out to her:
…takes the will, in the form of entities subservient to the determined and hateful, to pervert gifts our higher selves are meant to claim.
The phrase “entities subservient to the determined and hateful” contained a live link, and she clicked on it. A new web page opened that evidently required an approved user name and password to access. Its URL, she noticed, showed it was part of the Hand of the Black Stars member website. The title of the article under lock and key was “Dissipating Summoned Entities—Demons, Elementals, Tulpas, and Ghosts.”
The author was Toby Ryan.
Kathy felt sick to her stomach. That son of a bitch knew what Henry Banks was capable of all that time. He knew how dangerous Henry’s “friends” were, and he’d done nothing. Well, of course he’d done nothing. He was a psychopath.
His lack of human empathy just then paled next to the bigger implication: Toby knew how to stop tulpas that had become too strong to control, or at least thought he did. She’d take his theories over nothing at all. The trick was getting him to share what he knew.
Kathy hacked into the article, a little trick she’d learned from a fellow Network colleague. When it opened, she saw a black screen. She tried bypassing it, assuming it was some kind of security measure. She tried highlighting over the black in case the article was hidden with black font. She tried pretty much every hacking trick she knew, but the screen remained black. No nonsense words, no symbols, no code…nothing.
“Dammit!” She slammed her nearly empty glass of vodka down on the desk. The file was corrupted. She’d have to ask Toby herself.
The doorbell rang and Kathy heard Reece padding across the floor from the bedroom to the front door to answer it.
“Sure,” Reece said. “She’s here. Come in, I guess.”
A moment later Reece came up behind her in the living room, and she turned to face him. He was holding on to the towel wrapped around his waist, and his hair was still wet from his shower. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder and said, “They want to talk to you. Work, I’m guessing.”
She peered around him and saw a worse for wear Detective Holt and an older black man, both of whom looked exhausted and a little beaten up.
“Kathy Ryan,” Holt said, “looks like we’ll be needing your consulting services now.”
Reece nodded. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get dressed.” He slipped past Holt and the other man and headed off toward the bedroom.
Kathy sized up the rumpled men in front of her, then gestured for them to sit down on the couch.
“You two look like you could use a drink,” she said, standing.
“You got vodka?” Holt asked.
“A man after my own heart,” she said with a small smile, holding up the bottle on her desk. After retrieving two more glasses, pouring them each a double-shot’s worth, and handing the glasses over, she asked, “So what can I do for you?”
She waited for them to gulp their drinks and gave them refills. They seemed to pull themselves together after that, and finally, Detective Holt spoke.
“You were right. About that Banks fella, I mean. About those…what did you call them? Tulpas.”
Kathy nodded.
“We seen ’em,” the other man said. It was the first he’d spoken since he arrived. He looked pretty shaken up, but he was holding it together admirably.
“This is Ernie Jenkinson, a custodian at the hospital,” Holt said, nodding toward the other man. “It’s been a tough night. He’s had some run-ins with these things. We both have.”
“Nasty goddamn beasts,” Ernie added. His hand shook just slightly as he raised the glass of vodka to his mouth.
“I’m not sure if you know a George Evers at the hospital? He’s a groundskeeper,” Holt said.
“I don’t.” Kathy filled her own glass of vodka and sat back in her desk chair.
“I’m guessing he might have been one of the first to run into these tulpas. I think something got inside him. He looks…” Holt searched for the words.
“It ain’t him no more, is what he’s tryin’ to say,” Ernie broke in. “I know George—known him almost my whole life. That shamblin’ shell of a man ain’t George any more than I’m the Queen of England.”
“There are a bunch of different types,” Holt continued. “Some look like shadows, like, uh, smoke or something. Others crackle like lightning. And then there are…I don’t know what you’d call them. Their hounds, maybe. Things cobbled together from tools and machines, from clothes, even. I saw one that looked like a nightshirt strangle a dog to death in an alley on my way to the car. And so far as I can tell, they travel in packs. Now, I’ve seen them at least as far from the source as George Evers’s house, which is real close to the hospital. Maybe they’re spreading out or maybe they only came after George. The way they operate, I suspect there’s some organized plan at work, so that means someone is calling the shots. If not Henry, then some King Tulpa. I don’t know, something like that. I think the main threat—the ground zero, if you will—is somewhere on the Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital grounds, and I think the hospital staff and residents are in danger. I also think you’re the only one who knows enough about whatever the hell these things are to stop them. So what I need is for you to tell me how and why the fuck Henry Banks is making them happen, if you’ll pardon my language, and how to stop them.”
“Where’s your partner?” Kathy asked suddenly. It had taken her a while to notice that the younger detective wasn’t with the men. She thought she knew the answer as soon as the words were out of her mouth.
Holt replied, “Last time I saw him, or what was left of him, he was in a crumpled heap just outside the steps of the building. Doubt he’s there now, though. These things, they tend to recycle whatever they can to form bodies, including other bodies.”
“Why didn’t they get you, too?” Kathy asked, although it was more to herself than to the detective.
“He don’t bend,” Ernie said softly.
“Pardon?”
Ernie looked her in the eye. “That’s what George told me. He said they took the ones that could bend, that could be, I think he called it being ‘rearranged.’ He was afraid to go into his house, that they’d ‘rearrange’ him again. And he said they’d just want to kill me because I don’t bend right. I’m figurin’ he meant they couldn’t do to me what they did to him.”
“Yeah,” Holt agreed, “I’d figure that to be about right. Some big ugly took my partner, and I followed them up to the roof. After George tossed Farnham over the side,” Holt’s voice hitched, “I just kind of stood there for a few minutes, just in shock. And…well, I heard a girl’s voice say, ‘He won’t bend. Kill him.’ Just like Ernie says.”
“And what happened?” Kathy finished off her vodka and poured another. She offered the bottle to Holt, who declined with a small wave, and Ernie, who held out his glass to her. As she poured, Holt spoke. His voice was low and serious, a fallback to training as a police officer, Kathy supposed.
“Well, this man stepped out of the dark. He was tall, very tall, and he wore a black cowboy hat, black jeans and boots, black shirt and leather jacket. He also wore sunglasses, which I thought was odd because it was nighttime. He had tattoos on his neck, on his hands. And a scar running through his bottom lip, down into his chin.” He glanced up at Kathy awkwardly at the mention of a scar. Kathy did her best to hide it behind her vodka glass.
Holt continued. “So this guy whistles and the
se black-smoke people appear behind him. And they bring the lightning people. Next thing I know, these bolts of electricity are whizzing past my head and this black fog is rolling in and I’m running. I couldn’t go back the way I came and they were blocking the door to the other stairwell and…and I jumped. I didn’t think about it; I saw shrubbery over one side of the building and I jumped. Thought I’d broken something for sure, but…” He shrugged.
“Anyway, that’s when they called their hounds on me. I can say in the three decades I’ve been a cop that I never before tonight had to fight off a vending machine, a lawn mower, a rake, three hospital nurse’s scrubs, and flying bolts of lightning. And that smoke—whatever it touched just resurrected the things. I barely made it to the car and off that property in one piece.
“I mean, if what you’re saying is right, that these things, these tulpas, are thoughts summoned into being, then I’d bet the farm they don’t just want to be thoughts anymore. They want to be living, breathing things free to run amok all over my town. And they’re taking what they find here, and I’m guessing molding it to be like the bodies they had, or the bodies they’d like to have. What I don’t have a fucking clue about is how can one man create monsters capable of…of infecting people—and objects—to create other monsters? How can one man do that with his mind?”
Kathy glanced back at the research file on her computer, minimized it, and sighed. “I can’t tell you for sure yet how he’s doing all of it, but I agree that Henry Banks created those tulpas. I’ve seen children disconnect. They create a happy place to escape to when they’re being abused. They create imaginary friends to protect them from bullies. My understanding of Henry’s childhood was that it was a series of one horror after another—abuse, incest, torture, even a murder right in front of him. And I haven’t even gotten his psych file yet—that’s just what my own alternative sources have provided on him.”
She poured more vodka. Holt reconsidered, holding his glass out with Ernie, and she refilled their glasses. They drank theirs quietly, waiting for her to continue.
“Like other traumatized kids, Henry probably created an elaborate fantasy world to escape to when things got bad at home or school. The thing is, Henry has a kind of ability to actualize what he imagines. It’s rare; I’ve seen the skill before but not very often, and never so intense and all-encompassing. It’s a skill that usually only the strongest and most focused practitioners of meditation and magick possess, and only after years of study and practice. With Henry, it seems to be just a sort of natural talent. Unfortunately, I don’t even think he knows the extent to which he’s lost control of those things. Usually, the one who creates tulpas can simply wish them away, but these particular friends of Henry’s seem to have found a way around that. I think Henry imagined them as unstoppable protectors, but he made them too strong. In his mind, he visualized them with almost godlike abilities, and now I think they want their freedom to create and destroy like gods. Further, I believe Henry is in as much danger from these things as anyone else once they figure out how to become physical entities. Then they won’t need him anymore. And I don’t think he has any idea.”
“So what do we do?” Ernie asked. “I know that boy. He ain’t perfect—Lord knows none of them residents in there are angels, but it wouldn’t surprise me none if the boy’d been tellin’ the truth, that his friends actually done the killin’ of those kids. Bloodthirsty freaks that they are, it ain’t too far a stretch. Maybe he wanted it deep down or thought he did, but Henry ain’t no killer, and he don’t deserve what those ungrateful sons of bitches are fixin’ to do to him.”
“You’re right,” Kathy said. “And I’ll do whatever I can to stop them from hurting him. Hopefully, I can stop them from hurting anyone else. But I need you to get us in there, Ernie. Can you do that? We need to talk to Henry about his friends, all the info we can get, and…I need to talk to my brother.”
“Your brother?” Holt looked genuinely mystified.
Kathy turned a cold eye on the men. “He’s incarcerated at the hospital. He knows how to stop them.”
Holt shrugged. Ernie leaned forward in his chair, recognition dawning on his face. “Wait, Ryan…Toby Ryan, he’s your brother?”
Kathy nodded stiffly, looking into her glass.
“Well then, woman, you just might be the toughest young lady I ever met. Good on you.” He raised his glass to her and finished off the vodka in it.
A tiny smile crept over her lips. “Hope I’m as tough as you guys, up against these things. So you think you can get us inside? Even past Margaret?”
Ernie held up his massive key ring and jangled the keys. “Challenge me, pretty lady.”
She smiled warmly at him. “Good. Let me make a few calls, gather up some things, and we’ll go.”
Chapter 8
While Ernest and Holt were tracking down Kathy Ryan, and George Evers was lost to the blight spreading down his residential street, the Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital was settling in for the night. The overnight staff at CNH was a skeleton crew, to say the least. Budget cutbacks and restructuring had left the administration, beholden to shareholders’ interests, with something of a fluid plan for the hospital coffers. After the nightmare at Bridgewood up in Massachusetts and the ugly rumors about Haversham down in New Jersey, Dr. Wensler was careful about where he meted out the funding and why. There was never a shortage of meds to calm the residents, nor the latest medical technology to impress the mayor and councilmen and women. There was, at times, simply a shortage of personnel to hand out said meds or use said technology.
Officer Luis Vargas always took the post in the lobby, standing guard as the administrative secretary, Margaret, finished up her paperwork and gathered up her things to go. In all the years they had overseen the setting of the sun at CNH, she had only ever asked him to walk her to her car once, and it had been earlier that very night. Something had spooked her prior to his arrival, though she was a tough old nut and not one to share such frivolous feelings with the night guard. It didn’t seem his place to ask, and she didn’t answer, but seemed grateful and honestly relieved when she unlocked her car and slipped inside.
As Vargas had crossed the dark parking lot back to the front door, some lone bird chittered into the night. It sounded like hysterical children laughing; that was the thought that came immediately to Vargas’s mind, though he couldn’t remember ever having heard such a thing before. Vargas was from the city, and though he’d spent the last ten years in Newlyn, the variety of odd sounds nature made all around him still perplexed him. What night birds sounded like that, like children laughing, their fragile sanity thin to the point of cracking? He didn’t know. It came again, carried on a light breeze, and it gave him chills, and he walked a little more quickly back to the lobby.
Two other guards on Vargas’s night team, Ted Luftan on the third floor and JoAnn Reuger on the fourth, were already at their posts. Reuger was new, and new guards unnerved the inmates as much as inmates unnerved the newbies, so he’d put her up in the administration area. Teddy Luftan, on the other hand, was a power-tripping dick. He insisted on handling both the second and third floors while they were short-staffed, though not through any sense of protection of the inmates. When those “baby killers” got out of hand, Luftan smacked them back down into place. The guards couldn’t have guns on the hospital grounds, but Luftan didn’t need one. What he was going to need, sooner or later, was a good defense lawyer; the cops had already questioned him a few times in the last day or so about his distaste for his charges. Still, what Vargas didn’t see wasn’t his problem.
Vargas buzzed in the orderlies working that night’s shift, nodding and offering a tightly polite little smile as they walked by, laughing with each other about some private experience among them. He didn’t know their names and didn’t much care to, but they seemed okay enough. At least one of them was big enough to keep Luftan from getting too rough, and Vargas appreciated that
. They grew quiet, though, as they passed through the doors into the corridor leading toward the hydrotherapy room. Vargas watched them. Even their body language changed; he’d seen it in cons when he’d worked as a prison guard at Endleton State. It was like a light frost of uneasiness had settled on them. People who worked closely with inmates, he found, could sense when things were out of whack with them. Lord knew he could feel it, and he wasn’t even near them. From the reports of inmate anxiety, though, that Luftan was sending over the walkie from the second floor (“Must be a full moon, man, ’cuz the baby killers are fuckin’ howlin’ and jibberin’ tonight”), there was certainly something in the air.
Nighttime lockdown hadn’t been without its ugly incidents the last few weeks, and that was on Vargas. He, Reuger, and Luftan had been given a pass so far, but the hospital couldn’t be racking up any more bodies on his time. Until Hadley, Wensler and the other admins had been content to write off the last few deaths as accidents and suicides, and after all, why not? Those inmates, in their plain prison beds dreaming of kiddie diddling or whatever they thought about, were violent and unstable. That was why they were in CNH in the first place. Now, the last guy, Hadley…a few of them had jumped him on Vargas’s watch, and that was sure to bring some heat—not just to Luftan, who had been assigned to his floor, but to Vargas himself. He couldn’t quite believe that Luftan had heard nothing that night—Vargas had seen those crime scene photos of the body, and a man screamed when someone did things like that to him. As if Hadley wasn’t bad enough, apparently some nutjob had walked through a locked door and kicked another inmate’s ass badly enough to put him in the infirmary. Luftan swore he’d heard nothing then, either. It didn’t seem to be washing with the cops any more than it was with Vargas, but that was the story Luftan was sticking with.
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