Firewalkers

by Chris Roberson

  “That’s where he is now,” Regina said.

  Patrick grabbed his own phone out of his pocket, and reached out to take Regina’s from her hands.

  “Can I borrow this?” he said perfunctorily, already taking it from her. Then he brought up the camera app on his own phone, took a quick photo of the display on the girl’s phone, and then added Hector’s phone number to his own contact list. He handed Regina’s phone back to her, stuffing his own back in his pocket. “Thanks. Now, listen. I’m going there right now, okay?”

  “Are you going to arrest him?” Her voice sounded small and afraid, tinged with guilt at the thought she might be getting her brother into trouble.

  “No,” Patrick said, already turning to hurry off. “But hopefully I can stop him and his friends before they make a huge mistake.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Izzie and Joyce were just walking up the sidewalk toward the Northside Community Living Center, warm cups of coffee in hand, when Joyce’s phone rang. She hooked the handle of her cane over the elbow of the arm holding her coffee cup, and with her free hand pulled the phone out of her pocket and glanced at the screen.

  “It’s Patrick,” Joyce said, and then glanced over in Izzie’s direction as she tapped the screen to answer. “Hang on a second.”

  Izzie just nodded and took a sip of her coffee, turning to look up the street while Joyce held the phone to her ear.

  “What’s up?” Joyce said, and even from a few feet away Izzie could hear the faint buzzing of Patrick’s voice from the other end of the call, talking urgently and without pause, though she couldn’t make out what he was saying from that distance.

  “Okay, but . . .” Joyce began, and then the buzzing cut her off as Patrick kept on talking.

  Joyce looked over at Izzie and mimed a silent grimace.

  “Understood,” Joyce finally said as the buzzing came to an end. “Keep us posted.”

  “What was that all about?” Izzie asked while Joyce pocketed the phone. “Sounded pretty important.”

  “He said that some kids from his neighborhood are apparently about to take Ink for the first time, at a house over in Hyde Park, and he’s trying to get there in time to stop them.”

  “Oh.” Izzie blinked.

  She could easily understand the sense of urgency. Once they injected the Ink into their systems, the loa would have its hooks in them, and there would be no turning back. Or at least, that was what they had assumed. But what about the two kids that G. W. Jett had pulled out of the Eschaton Center back in the seventies?

  “Hey,” Izzie went on, turning to Joyce, “didn’t Jett say that the runaway kids that he saw on the street, the ones that he was going to the Eschaton Center to find, showed signs of being Ridden? That they had the halos of shadows or whatever they were around their heads?”

  Joyce was looking at her over the rim of her coffee cup, and nodded slowly as she lowered the cup from her mouth. “I think so, yeah. Why?”

  “Well, the loa must have had its hooks in them, assuming that it worked the same way then that we’re seeing now.” Izzie chewed her lower lip, thoughtfully. “But they both lived for years after Jett pulled them out of there—maybe not happily or well, but they lived—and didn’t seem to show any of the symptoms of being Ridden in all that time.”

  “Not based on the evidence that we’ve found so far, no,” Joyce answered, shaking her head.

  “So . . . how did he manage that, exactly?” Izzie asked. “Is it possible to make someone, I don’t know, un-Ridden?”

  Joyce raised her shoulders in a shrug.

  “I don’t know.” Then she raised her cane and pointed toward the visitor’s entrance of the community living center. “Why don’t we go back to the source and ask him?”

  The receptionist at the front desk saw them as they entered, and waved them over with her free hand while she held the handset of her desk phone to her ear with the other. Izzie and Joyce walked over and then waited while the receptionist wrapped up her phone call.

  “You were here before to see Mr. Jett, right?” the receptionist said as she set the handset back in its cradle. “I’m guessing you’re back to see him again?”

  When they nodded, she picked up a handwritten note from the desktop beside her elbow.

  “He’s finished up his P.T.,” she read aloud from the note, “but he’s a little worn out so he’s resting up in his room. If you want to go up and talk with him there, though, I can print you out a couple of visitor badges. You’ll need them to get into the residential floors.”

  “That would be great, thanks,” Izzie answered, trying not to sound too eager.

  A few minutes later, adhesive badges stuck to their chests, Izzie and Joyce were escorted upstairs by an orderly. As he led them down a long hallway, Izzie felt that the smell of antiseptic and age was even stronger here than it had been in the waiting room, and as they passed open doors she caught glimpses of elderly residents—mostly men but a few women, too—sitting in chairs and staring out windows or just into the middle distance, awake but not exactly alert. Were they lost in their own memories of the past, or waiting for someone to visit, or just patiently idling away what time remained to them?

  Finally, the orderly knocked on a partially opened door with a few raps of his knuckles, and said, “Mr. Jett, you decent?”

  “If I am, it’d be the first time,” came a voice from inside. “Come on in, then.”

  The orderly stepped aside and held the door open for Izzie and Joyce to walk through.

  “Took you long enough,” Jett said as they entered. “Was starting to think you girls had got bored and gone on home.”

  He was sitting in his wheelchair, parked over by the window. The room was outfitted with the same relatively featureless furniture that Izzie had seen in the other rooms they’d walked by, like the kind that she’d expect to find in college dorms or hospital patient’s room. Unlike the other rooms she’d glimpsed, though, Jett’s didn’t have much in the way of personal touches, no framed photos of family members or vases with flowers. The only thing that the old man seemed to have added to the bland anonymity of the room’s fixtures was a battered old wooden footlocker, the olive drab of its covering of paint scuffed and faded, sitting on the floor at the end of the bed. There was a narrow couch with thin cushions opposite the bed, and the old man pointed to it with a knobby-knuckled finger, indicating that they should sit.

  “So where were we?” Jett said as they settled onto the couch.

  “You were on your way up the hill to the Eschaton Center,” Joyce answered. “You said that your sixth sense . . . your knack . . . was telling you that you were walking into trouble, I think.”

  “Was that all the knack was giving you?” Izzie added. “Just an intuition?”

  “At first, yeah.” The old man folded his hands in his lap, his face lined by a deep frown. “But when I drove up there that morning and found a spot in the brush where I could park the car without being seen from the road, I got my first look at the Eschaton Center itself, and it felt . . . wrong. I couldn’t see anything exactly, either with my eyes or with the knack, but I knew something wasn’t right. It was like the whole place was radiating waves of dread. Anyway, I kept an eye on the place throughout the rest of the day and night, watching as folks came and went. Saw some Hollywood stars I’d seen in the movies showing up in limousines, rock stars with their entourages, other folks I recognized from TV . . . the kind of rich folks who I’d have expected to hang around that kind of place. But nobody like the street kids that I’d been following, and no sign of the four kids I’d been hired to find. There were maintenance and custodial employees who were bussed in mornings and taken back to the city at night, though, but they were picked up and dropped off around back at a service entrance instead of the big fancy front gates that the rich folks came in and out of. When a laundry truck came by to deliver laundered uniforms the next morning, I snuck up when the driver wasn’t looking and snagged a janitor’s unif
orm that would fit me well enough. And then when the workers came in a little while later, it wasn’t too difficult to slip in with them and get into the place without being noticed. A black man in a janitor’s uniform was pretty much invisible to those rich white folks, anyway, so I was able to move around the place without much trouble.”

  Izzie thought about her aunts back in New Orleans, who had worked as maids in fancy houses in Bywater and the Garden District or housekeepers in upscale hotels in the French Quarter when she was a little girl, and how they’d talked about feeling like they practically blended into the furniture and wallpaper for their employers and their guests. Unless something went missing, of course, in which case they were the first ones to be blamed.

  “The ground floor of the place was pretty much exactly what I’d expected,” Jett went on. “Big auditorium, bunch of meeting rooms, a dining room. I checked out the second and third floors, too, and it was almost like a hotel or a hunting lodge or something like that, with lots of rooms for guests to stay, lounges with couches and chairs, a sauna, Jacuzzi, all sorts of rich white people stuff. But no hippie kids, and no sign of the four kids in particular I was after. The knack wasn’t giving me much, either. I was still getting that same sense of dread, of wrongness, but I wasn’t seeing anything. I knew it was close, though, but it wasn’t until I was checking out the indoor pool up on the fourth floor that I realized that the feeling was getting weaker the higher up I went. I needed to go down. Took me a while, poking around back on the first floor, but I finally found a stairway that led to a basement. At least, that’s what I thought when I started heading down, but it wasn’t any basement that I found.”

  He drew one of his gnarled hands slowly down across his face, blinking slowly and taking a deep breath.

  “That feeling of wrongness, it got stronger every step I took down those stairs, and it was stronger still when I walked out into what looked more like a school or training facility. There was one room where a lady was standing up in front of a big group of folks, talking about wisdom and higher knowledge and truth flowing down into their minds and souls from the higher dimensions. The same kind of guff that the Ridden kids were pushing in the streets, basically. Further down the hall there was another huge room filled with young people sitting in row after row of chairs, facing something on the far wall and chanting in unison. Had to sidle around to see what they were looking at, and then I saw that it was some kind of mandala or something like that, but it made my eyes water to look at, like it seemed to have too many angles to be just a flat image printed on a piece of poster board. All of the kids in the room were wide-eyed and staring at the thing, and I don’t think I saw a single one of them blink while I was standing there.”

  “Were they Ridden?” Izzie asked. “Could you see those . . . those shadows around them?”

  “Nah,” the old man answered, shaking his head. “When I tried to stop using my eyes to see them and start using the knack, there weren’t any shadows on any of them. But I could see that something weird was happening to them. It was like, looking at that thing up on the wall was changing things inside their heads, almost like it was pushing thoughts out of the way to make room for something else.”

  “You could see their thoughts?” Joyce was clearly skeptical about the idea of reading minds.

  “Not exactly. I mean, I’ve heard of some folks who have the knack strong enough that they can hear what folks are thinking, but I never was able to pull that off. It was more like being able to see about how many pages were in a book without opening the cover, just by looking at how thick the spine was. Things were getting rearranged in there, but I couldn’t have said just what it was, one way or the other. When I found out what was happening, a while later, I was glad that I hadn’t spent too much time looking at that mandala thing, though. But I’ll get to that in a minute.”

  Izzie ran through her memories of what she had learned from Nicholas Fuller’s papers and Roberto Aguilar’s journals, trying to see if she could think of anything that would account for the important of some kind of “mandala” in all of this, but came up empty. This was a new piece of the puzzle.

  “I found another stairway at the far end of the hall, leading down deeper still. As I went down the stairs, the wrongness got stronger and stronger still, and the stairs just kept going and going. When I got to the bottom and looked out the door, at first I was expecting more classrooms or whatever like the level above, but this one was more like a church or something. It was one enormous space, with high arching ceilings that had to be fifty feet above the floor, and the whole thing looked to have been carved out of the living rock of that hill. There were rows of pews set up, and some kind of ceremony going on at a dais at the far end of the room. The only light in the space came from bright fluorescents on the rear wall above the dais, and the edges of the room were in near total darkness. I hadn’t seen any janitors or custodial staff since I’d left the ground floor, so I kept to the shadows as I crept closer along the side of the room, trying to get a better look at what was going on.

  “There were people sitting in the pews at the front half of the room, facing the dais, where a white guy dressed in some kind of robes was standing behind a podium. As I got a little closer, I could see that it was Jeremiah Standfast Parrish, whom I recognized from the author photo on the back of his book. He was talking to the folks in the pews like a preacher on Sunday morning, talking about how the hard work that they’d done had made them ‘primed,’ their minds ‘unlocked’ and made ready. Then he started calling folks from the front row to come up to receive their ‘daily sacrament.’ And one by one they knelt in front of him, and tilted their heads back with their mouths open. From where I was standing, it looked like he was pouring a drop from a black pitcher onto their tongues while chanting some kind of nonsense, but as I got a little closer I could see that the pitcher was actually made of clear glass, and the stuff inside that he was pouring onto their tongues a drop at a time was some kind of thick black goo, almost like oil.”

  “Like ink, maybe?” Izzie prompted.

  “About like, yeah,” the old man allowed. “Well, the folks would just shiver a second or two, then he’d pat them on the top of the head and they’d go on back to their pew. Looking with the knack, though, I could see what was really going on. All of those folks were Ridden, little clouds of shadow trailing from their heads. But every one of them that went up and got that ‘sacrament,’ the shadows around them grew bigger and stronger while I watched, coming up from their heads and shoulders like tendrils reaching up into nothing at all. Like he was pouring more of whatever was controlling them right into their bodies a little bit at a time, strengthening the Otherworld’s hold on them every time he did. And Parrish himself?”

  He shook his head, a pained expression deepening the lines on his face.

  “Him I could hardly stand to look at. The shadows had damn near swallowed that man whole, until there was nothing left of him. The body I could see with my eyes was like a thin shell covering up the darkness inside. I doubted there was much left of the man he’d once been in there at all.”

  Jett drew in a ragged breath through his nostrils and composed himself before continuing.

  “I’d gone close enough to the front of the room that I could see the faces of some of the folks in the pews. I recognized a lot of the kids that I’d been tailing on the street, all of them with the same glassy look in their eyes, zonked out and expressionless, like they’d been hypnotized or something. And sitting right next to each other on the back row, on the same side of the room as I was standing, were two of the kids I’d gone in there looking for: Muriel Tomlinson and Eric Fulton. They hadn’t gone up to get the ‘sacrament’ yet, and there were a couple of rows to go until it was their turn. Judging by the shadows that the knack was showing me around their heads, I could see that they weren’t yet as far gone as some of the others, but it looked to me like another dose or two of that oily junk was likely to eat away enough of them that t
here wouldn’t be any coming back from it. The whole damned place, the entire Eschaton Center, seemed to be nothing more than a factory churning out Ridden, taking in lost and vulnerable young people at one end and pumping out possessed minions at the other. Just what Parrish planned to do with them—or what the force that had taken control of Parrish, I guess I should say—I didn’t know. But I had to do something, and fast. I couldn’t just stand there and watch those two kids give up a little bit more of themselves to that junk while their families were out there waiting for me to bring them home. So, while everyone else’s attention was on the front of the room where Parrish was dosing one dupe after another, I slunk over to where the two kids were sitting, keeping low and hoping nobody looked in my direction.”

  “You were still wearing the janitor’s uniform, right?” Izzie asked.

  “Yeah, and I had that Colt .45 riding in the waistband of my pants, hidden by the shirt’s hem. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to use it, but considering that there weren’t any maintenance or cleaning folks anywhere to be seen on those lower levels, I knew that if someone were to spot me, there was a good chance that I might have to. If I just tapped Tomlinson and Fulton on the shoulder, I figured there was an even chance that when they saw me they might start hollering for help, so instead I leaned in close and, before they’d even had a chance to turn around, I whispered that Parrish needed their help with a special ceremony. They turned and gave me that same zonked out, glassy-eyed stare. They didn’t holler, but they didn’t budge, either. Tomlinson was at the end of the row, so I took hold of her arm and pulled her to her feet, and held on tight so she wouldn’t wander away while I grabbed Fulton and dragged him off the pew, too. As I pulled them into the shadows at the edge of the room, I chanced a look back over my shoulder and saw that Parrish was still occupied with chanting and dosing the kids with the gunk, and hadn’t seemed to notice me yet. So I kept on pushing the two kids toward the back of the room, staying in the shadows as much as possible, keeping a tight grip on their arms. They weren’t resisting, but they were sluggish, dragging their feet like they were sleepwalking or something.”