Strong fingers wrapped around my windpipe, clamped down but not yet closing as that same arm lifted me into the air against the door. He hadn't come up behind me, there had been no sound on the stairs. There had been no one, but now there was Hornswaggle. In the light of day, he was no less fearsome, no less horrifying. His horse-like head inched close to me as his tall form hunched forward, his red eyes both deep and bright, staring me down. He was so close I could see the little dark hairs all over his face and body. I could see his mane, matted and twisted, as if stained with blood or covered with mud. My breaths were barely coming as he held me at the wall, my dangling legs kicking, but I couldn't help but smell him. It was overpowering. Like manure and rot, dead crops and a battlefield in the light of dawn the day after.
As Hornswaggle stared at me, he snorted out of his nostrils, the breath even more foul than the rest of him. A second later came his voice, deep and raspy, like the grate of stone on stone, the high tones squeaked out as if it was his throat that were choked. "Stop digging. You can't stop me."
I felt his grip on my throat began to tighten. I involuntarily tensed and noticed that I still had the small figured in my hand. It was hard plastic, so normally I would need to crush it under my shoe. But desperate times call for desperate measures. Using all the strength I had, possibly all the strength I would ever have should these be my final moments, I closed my hand around that small figure.
As I squeezed, so did Hornswaggle. Pain flared through me, my breath struggled to come, my pulse seeming to explode in me. The world began to fade, starting to go red and blurry. Then there was a snap. I thought it was my windpipe, that this was death. The world spun as I had a feeling of weightlessness, then a sharp pain through most of my body.
But I wasn't dead. My breath returned and the world slowly came back into focus. I was laying crumpled against my door. There were no hands on me and no attacker stood above me. Hornswaggle was gone. There was only the idyllic afternoon, the sound of cars and lawnmower.
I looked down in my hand to find a few broken pieces of painted plastic that once was the Hornswaggle figure. I must have broken it at the last moment and the demon disappeared. I was safe.
And then I heard the distant sound of gravelly laughter.
I tensed, jumping to my feet. I drew my gun and spun, aiming down the steps, to either side, even scanning the apartment roofs. There was nothing, no lurking Hornswaggle, no Seer, not even snipers. As I gasped for breath, I realized that the foreboding feeling was now gone.
Lungs heaving, I relaxed, letting out long breaths. My arm with the pistol fell to my side. I had nearly died, but I was safe now.
The door across from me suddenly opened and I raised my gun, my body tense.
"Hey, John, I heard a noise are you - holy shit!" said Franny, her casual expression going to shock as she saw the gun, involuntarily stepping back. I didn't think her pale skin could have gotten any lighter, but I could swear I saw her freckles more clearly as she backed off from me.
I guiltily dropped my arm with the pistol. "Sorry! Sorry. Sorry."
"Why did you have your gun out?" she said with concern. "What's going on?"
"I... I just... I'm sorry for freaking you out," I said, putting the pistol back in my waistband. I noticed there was some rasp to my voice. Probably because of the choking. "This is... this is a bad case."
"Is it about that young girl? She was by here earlier again. I thought I might have heard someone else, but I was in the bathroom."
I frowned but nodded. The young girl - the Seer. "Yeah, I saw her already. She's bad news. There's a lot of bad news lately."
"Should I call the cops on her if I see her again?"
"No," I said immediately and sternly. "I don't want you involved. If you see someone at my door, you leave them alone. Consider everyone dangerous. I trust of all of one person right now, and he's a cop, so his identity should be obvious... Just don't get involved, okay? I may already be in over my head, no need to drag everyone else down with me."
"John, are you sure you should be involved?" she said with concern.
I grinned weakly, still feeling pain on my neck from where Hornswaggle's fingers had held me. "I don't even know anymore."
An icepack on my throat, two ibuprofen downed, and three kitty head scratches later, I was on my couch, trying to relax. But how do you relax after some horrible demon tried to kill you at your front door? Or knowing that some seemingly unrelated cult wants you dead because of some fantastically inevitable doom?
Whiskey, that's how.
Through whiskey, my panic was reduced to anxiety, the questions of my survival pushed out back where I could deny them or think about them less emotionally. The biggest one was that it seemed my home, or at least my front door, might not be safe anymore. I had been lucky in my life that my work had never followed me home yet. So far, the jealous husbands looking to deliver an asskicking had only ever waited at my office.
With Mr. Smith in my lap, I decided to call Charlie. I figured his shift might be over.
When he answered, his voice was tired. "Hello?"
"You sound as terrible as me," I said, my voice still raspy.
"Six days of shifts in a row and whatever that was last night will drain you," he said.
"That does sound terrible."
"You do sound horrible too, by the way," he said. "On the plus side, it means three days off. So what have you turned up? I figure that's why you're calling."
"Well, good news, I found Jennifer Daw."
"Oh yeah? Well, let's go talk to her. Is she in town? Just give me half an hour to shower and get some food."
"Yeah, that's the bad news. She's close, but she's not in town. She's not quite as accessible as we thought. She's in the Bell County Psychiatric Hospital."
There was a pause. "No shit? That does complicate things."
I ran over what I had learned about Jennifer Daw.
"So I figure I need to head over there and see if I can meet with her," I said reluctantly.
"To find out what Nick learned from her?"
"And more, if possible," I said. "I might ask better questions than Nick. Or learn things Nick wasn't able to tell us."
"When are you heading over there? It's my weekend now, so I have a few days off. I'll go with you."
I had no idea the feeling of relief I would have hearing him agree to go with me. "Of course! I'm heading up there tomorrow. The sooner we figure this out, the better. And... well, you need to start watching out. A little while ago I was... attacked."
"Attacked?"
"By Hornswaggle." I gave him a description of the monster's brief assault.
"Shit, that's messed up," said Charlie. "Why didn't you start the conversation with that?"
"I'm still a little in shock," I said.
"Yeah, I could see that. Damn. I'm glad I didn't have a trap waiting for me."
"I'm not sure yet how they knew," I said. "They shouldn't know my real name. The only one at the studio who knew it was Meredith, and she was on my side. So they shouldn't have been able to find my home address unless she told them or they followed me. But why follow me? Why distrust me so soon?"
"You're looking for logic by pretending they're like you," he said. "They probably aren't. Maybe they saw you as an outsider and had you checked out. Or maybe Meredith did tell them. Or that demon thing did something to their heads. I don't know. There's too much unknown to really guess what they know."
"True. But as a precaution, you should check around your door," I said. "In case their ways of knowing are beyond what we expect. You could be in danger."
I heard him get up and walk across the room. The door swung open audibly, then a few moments later it closed. "Nothing here, as far as I can see."
"So they don't know where you live or don't care," I said, tapping my whiskey glass in thought. "The demon was only on the roof, and he only got there through my phone, if we consider the 'rule' true. So maybe they didn't know he was using Lin
dsey's apartment?"
"Maybe, but I'm going to stay on my guard and not assume."
"I think that's a good idea."
"Are you going to be safe there?" said Charlie. "I still have my couch if you want to crash."
"I think if I'm inside, I'm fine," I said. "And at this point, I'd need to leave the apartment to get to you anyway, so same risk as tomorrow. I also wonder if that was just a message, a warning. Maybe the life attempt was just extra credit."
"That sounds stupid," he said. "Why warn you? Why not just kill you and be done? And even if you're right, we're going to just go digging tomorrow. So you're going to piss it off."
"Right, well..." I said, trailing off. "I still think I'm safe inside. And if I need to defend myself when I leave tomorrow, I will. But right now I'm getting drunk."
"That doesn't really sound as safe as you think."
"True, but I nearly got choked to death. I can have an unreasonable need to get drunk and drown some of the pain and fear I have. Besides, maybe I'll finally get a good night's sleep."
"You can only hope."
Alcohol did not make me sleep well.
Instead of giving me either a blissful sleep or a dead, passed-out unconsciousness, I had a nightmare. Not one of my usual ones - I was neither running through a hospital nor was I being surrounded by an inky black stuff that consumed me. It was a ruddy red dream, everything tinted with frenzy and frustration, the space soaked with the wavering of gasoline fumes. Gravity wibbled and wobbled as if I were on a boat. I knew this all must have been the effects of the alcohol - and that I must have drank far too much if my dreams were also drunk.
In the dream, I was in a room. It was a room in someone's home, maybe an apartment. I didn't recognize the room, but I wasn't focused on the details. I stood in the room, my chest heaving, my arms clenched, my body tensed. My hands were dirty. I felt a mixture of anger, dismay, and acceptance. But those were background, just the scene the dream had set. What the dream was really about was what lay in front of me.
In front of me was a door. A black door. No handles, no features - nothing even to really show it was a door, other than I knew it was a door. It was a black rectangle, a Kubrick-style monolith hovering in space a foot off the ground. It made no noise - no sound nor whisper, but it begged me to open it. To step through, to cross over. It was not the plea of a seducer, of a salesman. No, the door was what I was owed. It was a reward for my action. It was what I deserved.
I'd like to say this dream had an ending, that I walked through the door and I could tell you what was on the other side. I'd like to say I turned away, that I left that place, the door left untouched, unused. I'd like to say a number of things, but I can't. Because none of that happened, and because I didn't know.
For the whole dream I stood there before the door, staring at it as it stared back at me. In the dream it felt like an endless amount of time, but who knows how long dreams take?
There was a knock at the door.
Fourteen
The dream disappeared. I found that the knock I heard was actually on my apartment door. It was insistent, but not aggressive. Even in my half awake state, I got the feeling they had been knocking for a while. The clock said it was 11:47, so calling this "morning" was both technically true and a gross misuse of language. My phone was ringing, but I had left it on silent, so it had vibrated off my night table and was on the floor, still buzzing away petulantly.
The knocking was now getting much more insistent. I pulled myself out of bed, grabbing at the vibrating phone which now was spitefully trying to evade my grasp. The calls were from Charlie. I wasn't surprised, I was supposed to meet him half an hour ago.
As I pulled myself out of the bed and stumbled to the front door, I realized that he must have thought I was hurt or worse. I was lucky he hadn't yet broken down the door.
I unlocked it and pulled the door open to find a tense and shocked Charlie. His eyes were wide, his mustache scrunched into a concerned caterpillar. His gun wasn't drawn, but I noticed one hand positioned near his hip, probably for a quick draw.
"Jesus, John, where the hell were you?"
"Asleep," I said sheepishly.
"Didn't you hear my knocking?" he said, still annoyed.
"Well, I had a little to drink last night..." I said, realizing I had been blessed to not have a splitting headache hangover. I was just sleepy, which might have been due to not having been awake more than two minutes.
"And you forgot we were heading up to the hospital?"
Hearing the hospital so soon was like a cold splash of water. "That was part of the reason I drank so much..."
"You don't like hospitals?"
"I don't like mental hospitals."
"Is there a story there?" he said.
"Not one you're going to get any time soon," I said, walking back into my bedroom to grab some clothes. "But I've never been a patient in one, if that's what you're getting at."
"I wouldn't judge you for that," said Charlie, following me at a distance to keep the conversation going, but not close enough to make it awkward that he was walking into my bedroom.
"Sure you would," I said, pulling on a halfway decent shirt.
"My nephew was in one briefly, there's nothing wrong with mental health if you need it."
"Would you trust him with a pistol?" I said.
"Would I trust him with... why does that matter?"
"Would you?"
There was a long moment where Charlie thought. I think he had the answer sooner than he spoke, because he didn't like his response. "No. But not because of that, because of..."
"The reasons that got him into the hospital?"
"Screw you, John. Why does this matter?"
I picked up my pistol and confirmed the safety was on, almost theatrically, pointing at the wall. "Because I need you to trust me with one."
"You can't take that into the hospital."
"I have an open carry permit," I replied. "A concealed one too."
"It's a state office. They have their own rules."
"I just feel safer having it," I said.
"And I feel a little less safe," said Charlie. "Remember, guns don't work on that demon."
"It's not him I'm worried about. C'mon, let's go."
Bell County Psychiatric Hospital was of course in Bell County, on the far end of Temple, Texas. It was north from Austin; about an hour and a half on a good day, two hours with traffic. I drove, partially because Charlie's car was kind of crappy, and partially I think to punish me for making him wait and worry. We got to shoot the shit during the drive. I learned that Charlie was indeed divorced, for just over a year. She got the house and he bought a condo. I asked if he had a kid, but his response was evasive, leaving me not knowing if there was one. Maybe there had been one, giving reason to the evasion and possibly the divorce.
I talked about myself as well, but I kept Bellingham and my dreams out of it. I also didn't talk about the Seer and her attempts on my life. Instead I talked about my business and how I wanted it to change. Most of what I did was perfectly legal, it was just kind of shitty to most people. I knew that, and I was the one who had to do it. I had plenty of my own frustration to vent, and I figured if I could get a sympathetic ear on the police force, that would be good.
Okay, that wasn't true. Only afterward did I realize that stuff. At the time, I was just trying to get to know Charlie. We didn't know each other well yet, but we were forced to rely on each other to fend off Hornswaggle and whatever plans he had. I needed to trust him and he needed to trust me. Sure, we had a basic sense of that already. But sometimes nothing bonds people more than bullshitting with each other for two hours on a road trip.
We pulled into the parking lot for Bell County Psychiatric just under two hours after we left. I killed the motor and Charlie got out to look at the place. My first impression was that it looked so... normal. After Bellingham, I suspected that all mental hospitals were horribly monstrous pieces of architecture w
here all nightmares are set - because of course, that's where mine were set. My second impression was that Bell County Psychiatric was so... boring.
If you passed by this place, you might not have even realized it was a hospital of any sort. It looked like some unassuming government building. Maybe a big library, maybe someplace where you'd renew your driver's license or get a permit to marry. Most of it was made of red-brown brickwork, an occasional dark brown brick thrown in to break up the pattern. Where it wasn't brick, the building was a creamy beige, particularly near second floor windows. The building was only two floors and it didn't sprawl into many wings. It was just one building, a large amount of landscaped green around it. There was the typical hospital sign, directing where out patients could arrive, where emergency vehicles could drop off, and where visitors like us could park. The entrance to the hospital was even glass, friendly and clean. Sure, this place had the uninspiring design of the 1980s, but it was clean and well maintained. There was nothing creepy or eerie about this place at all.
Which made me immediately suspicious.
"Are you going to get out of the car?" asked Charlie.
I let go of the steering wheel, which I had been unconsciously holding so tightly. "I'm considering it."
"I can go in without you. You can just wait in the car."
"No, I'm coming," I said. I pulled off my seatbelt and got out of the car. Taking another look at the building, searching for some sign of evil, I had to admit that I found nothing to be scared of other than what was already inside me. I took a deep breath and walked with Charlie to the entrance.
The inside was nice too. About as clean and up to date as any government building really. White and beige, the fixtures and desks maybe ten years old. A yellow Wet Floor standee warned us about a portion of the lobby. Comfortable couches sat beside a desk with a plastic windows, protecting the people behind. Currently there was a nice woman, maybe in her fifties, looking at us expectantly. She didn't wear scrubs, so I figured her as permanent front desk or administrative staff.
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