by Simon Holt
Unger clapped his hands, and the lights in the cavern grew brighter. Reggie could see more clearly now; she was in an underground chamber shaped like an octagon, and stone slabs like the one she lay upon stretched out in rows in front of her. Comatose humans were strapped to these, all with needles jutting out of their heads, and these were connected to each other with tubes and wires.
Reggie followed the length of the wires with her eyes and saw that they flowed to her bed, and that she in turn was attached to a series of television monitors. Each monitor showed a live scan of a brain.
“What are you going to do to me?”
“It’s not what I’m going to do to you. It’s what you’re going to do to him.”
Unger gestured to the cavern entrance, where two hospital orderlies were supporting a body into the room.
“Quinn! Our loyal soldier!”
The orderlies led Quinn up to Unger and Reggie, and at first, Reggie thought the light must be playing tricks on her. Quinn’s skin looked blue, almost purple, and his eyelashes and nostrils were covered with little crystals. He was so weak he could not stand on his own.
“Y-y-you s-s-on of a-a b-b-b-bitch,” he stuttered through chattering teeth. “F-f-freezer… l-l-eft me th-there…”
“Yes, of course. How else will Miss Halloway enter your—what does she call it? Your fearscape.”
Quinn shrank away, but the burly orderlies held him fast.
“W-why? I h-h-helped y-you.”
“Yes, you did. And now you’re going to make the ultimate sacrifice for the good of your kind. They’ll write sonnets about you, Quinn—that is, they will if there are any humans left who know how to write them.”
“Omelets and eggs, Quinn,” Reggie muttered.
The orderlies strapped Quinn to his own berth right next to Reggie’s, then jabbed a needle into his forehead. Quinn screeched in pain, and even Reggie shuddered as she heard the point crack through his skull. She thought of the needle in her own head and felt faint. But why did they want her to go into Quinn’s fearscape? Did they want her to fail and die? Or did they want her to succeed?
Unger seemed to read her thoughts.
“There is something special about you, my dear. To have ingested that poison and not been driven completely insane—I don’t know how you did it, but I know that it makes you the key. Your ability to pass through dimensions whenever you choose—it is remarkable. The Vours have been trying to do it for years. Now you will show us how.”
He undid the cord around Reggie’s lifeless hand and pressed her fingers to Quinn’s wrist, right on his pulse. Then he retied their hands together that way, securing them tightly. She could not feel Quinn’s icy skin, but her eyes lost focus as her mind tumbled down into the realm of nightmare…
20
… and she was standing on a narrow, cracked sidewalk just a short distance outside Cutter’s Wedge Elementary. The grassy fields that sprawled around the real school did not exist in this realm. Instead of plants and shrubs, dense and motionless blobs surrounded the building. There was no playground, no parking lot, no grove of tall pine trees in the distance—only layers of thick, bland gunk that looked like cake icing polluted with molten lead.
Just off the path, a long wooden board with a cracked red seat and plastic handle poked out of the gunk like a utensil in a jar of gray honey. Other playground objects had been caught in the substance as well—a tetherball pole, a swing set, a faded basketball backboard. Nothing moved.
Reggie walked slowly down the path to the school’s front entrance, the once concrete sidewalk squishing beneath her feet like moss. Something about the nature of this place was different from the outer layers of Henry’s and Keech’s fearscapes. Reggie did not sense immediate fear here. She’d learned enough from her previous jaunts into these forsaken places to trust her instincts, but right now her psychic compass was unresponsive. This outermost region of Quinn’s fearscape seemed no longer functional.
Small, colorless hands reached out from the goop near the stone steps leading to the front doors of the building. Reggie knelt in front of the stairs and saw the remnants of faces swirled and frozen inside the strange matter like paint strokes. Everything here had come undone.
Reggie stretched out and touched the grayness beyond the sidewalk, and the tips of her fingers bled out all color and went numb. She withdrew her hand and held it up to her face. The color returned to her fingertips and she could feel them again.
“It’s like he’s forgotten this place.”
At the sound of her voice a barely perceptible tremor pulsed through the sidewalk. One of the tiny hands in the ooze twitched. She stood again carefully and climbed the steps, avoiding the few gaps in them that revealed more gray substance below.
Reggie stepped inside the doors. Square gray tiles covered the floor in this version of Cutter’s Wedge Elementary. It looked like a photo negative of reality with light and dark reversed. A monochrome banner hung at the corridor’s end, tattooed with the giant face of Bucky, the cheery pirate mascot that Reggie remembered from her school days here.
The banner was emblazoned with rows of jagged and indecipherable symbols in place of school spirit slogans. At the far end of the hallway, she saw the distant double doors of the gym. The walls of the hall were syrupy and looked as if they were quietly melting away. The same strange, gray matter covered them, but inside the building the gunk was not entirely static.
None of the levels of the fearscapes she’d seen yet had this appearance, this feeling of nothingness just beyond the immediate sights. Reggie wondered if it had been years since the Vour had scared a young Quinn deeper into the pit, and if these layers were degrading with time.
A low groan echoed behind her, and Reggie looked back.
Bucky the mascot’s huge, disembodied pirate head floated down the hallway toward her, its chin a few feet over the tiles, the top of its hat barely clearing the ceiling.
The eye patch on the pirate’s giant face had fallen, and the gaping eyeless hole opened and closed like a primitive mouth. The effect was almost comical, but it would have mortified an eight- or nine-year-old child, and that raw fear gave it power.
She ran, grabbing and pulling on classroom door handles as she passed, and each one crumbled or broke off in her hand. One near the end of the hall opened, and Reggie rushed to get inside, realizing too late that there was no room beyond the door.
Instead the floor dropped away into an ocean of gray. Reggie grabbed the doorframe just in time, catching herself before she plummeted off the edge. Then something snatched her right ankle and dragged her back into the hall.
An oily creature like a gigantic earthworm slithered out of the pirate’s eye, and now its pin-teeth bit down on her leg. Reggie twisted her torso to face the worm and kicked its maw with her free foot.
The greasy thing let up and Reggie yanked her leg out of its mouth, tiny black teeth ripping from the soft tissue and clinking on the tile like loose change. She scrambled backward, rushed to her feet, and raced to the next door in the hall.
When she pulled it open, the space on the other side was solid, and she stepped onto cool, wet grass. The door slammed shut behind her and disappeared.
A ferocious growl shook the air, and two massive paws tromped down in front of her. Reggie looked up at an enormous bear standing at its full height, its thick, dark fur bristling and its razor sharp claws dripping with black ooze.
A disembodied voice seemed to echo from the sky.
“The western grizzly shows no mercy to its prey, preferring human flesh above all else,” the voice said, and Reggie dimly recognized it as the narrator from PBS nature documentaries. “It rips its victim’s skin from its body, and eats the still-living tissue beneath. If there are cubs, they too will feed.”
The beast lashed out at her. Reggie rolled to the side just as the bear’s front paws slammed to the ground and gouged out a chunk of dirt. She clambered toward a tattered tent, the only object in sight that coul
d serve as a potential portal to a deeper fearscape region. The bear lumbered after her, but she reached the tent in time and dove through the dirty nylon entrance.
Inside, a small child huddled in the corner, wrapped in a threadbare blanket with his head bowed. Reggie crouched down and approached him.
“Quinn?”
At the sound of her voice, the blanket flew off and what Reggie thought was a boy jerked its head up to reveal a horrific face. Two drill bits protruded from where the thing’s eyes should have been, whirring in the ragged sockets. A buzz saw had been affixed with leather straps to the stump of each severed wrist, and rusted spikes protruded from various holes in his chest. A giant fly’s mandibles twitched in place of lips. Reggie cupped a hand over her mouth and slowly backed out of the tent.
The landscape had changed again, and she stood in a chamber of limbless and headless human torsos that had been gutted, cleaned, and now swayed from meat hooks on chains that led up into darkness. Fuzzy clumps of mold formed on the slicks of blood across the floor. The warehouse was a boiling cloud of flies; filthy legs and wings tickled her skin.
Reggie frantically pushed her way through the hanging meat slabs as the insect-child clacked its mandibles and followed, its bristly insect mouth buzzing. Swarming mites roiled around her eyes and mouth, and she gagged on their little bodies as she scrambled away. The monster’s fly mouth undulated, and the eye socket drills whirred left and right as it pursued her.
She hit a dead end and turned around just as the buzzing saws of the monster’s arms sliced the air in front of her, but before it could cut her, the bear appeared between them and swiped at the child-thing with its mammoth paw.
The bear shredded the insect-thing to pieces, and black, greasy liquid sprayed out of the mutilated body. The bear then grabbed the decapitated insect head, opened its huge, salivating mouth, and swallowed it whole.
Within seconds, the animal’s face contorted, and the bear unleashed an ear-shattering howl as it morphed into a new demonic entity. The drill bits pushed out through the bear’s eye sockets with disgusting pops and whirs. The clicking mandibles cracked through the jaw, and the claws of the beast split open to make room for the whirling saws that grew out of its paws. The transformation was so shocking that Reggie stood frozen for a few seconds, before running back through the dense grove of body parts, trying not to scream.
As horrifying as Keech’s and Henry’s fearscapes had been, Reggie had navigated her way through both by finding a pattern, some internal and disturbing logic that tied the elements together.
But what was this?
First a wasteland outside the school, and now a layer inside the building with severely disjointed imagery and mutating, cannibalistic things. The fearscape was literally eating itself.
And as the deadly mutation chased her, tearing down torsos from chains as it stalked its new prey, the revelation struck her like lightning.
Quinn’s fears here are merging.
The outermost layer had atrophied and simply stopped moving. Whatever fear had created the schoolyard environment, it had long been forgotten. And now this inner realm was blending together. She was not inside one layer but many, and over time they had bled into each other the same way human memory was prone to do. There was no twisted logic, no demented sense of order here. Quinn’s brain had combined diverse layers of his fearscape and created a new breed of horror, one ravaged by absolute chaos.
Reggie reached the edge of the hanging carnage and gazed out in desperation at the utter destruction of downtown Cutter’s Wedge. Entire buildings had been reduced to smoldering piles of steel and stone, fires burned inside guts of cars, and the sky above glowed a deep, frightening crimson.
Reggie thought of the things she had seen. The bear, a subject of a frightening nature show. A boy whose body parts had been replaced with dangerous, violent tools. A meat locker. A war.
Real terrors a young boy had feared many years ago, and here they converged into one jungle of pure mayhem.
A dozen or more “survivors” stumbled into the street in front of Reggie. Men, women, and children, they looked like walking corpses, burnt skin suppurating from their bodies and dripping onto to the glass-littered asphalt. Their eyes had been melted away, their sockets bloody and filled with pus as they staggered toward Reggie.
“Help me…”
“Please…”
Suddenly, the mutated bear-thing stomped on a burning car behind her. Reggie ran to the curb as the beast pounced upon the gaggle of walking dead. It snatched up a child and devoured it. But before it could catch a second meal, the other victims fell upon it and dragged it to the ground. Reggie did not stay to see the slaughter, nor what new abomination would arise from it.
She hurried off down the scorched street and soon saw the double doors of the school gymnasium ahead of her. They seemed to be the only symbol of some perverse continuity.
Enter those doors and find a deeper fearscape layer.
Go deeper, and you get closer to Quinn.
She heard footsteps behind her: the new mutation, this one part human, part bear, part buzz saw, sped toward her. It ran on legs half covered with fur, half with blackened, peeling skin, its saw hands spinning, its bear fangs gnashing. Reggie threw open the doors and dashed onto the cool gymnasium floor. The doors slammed behind her just as the new beast banged into them. It could not enter; it had reached some invisible boundary. Like the killer clown and the surgeon from Henry’s fearscape, monsters from the domain’s outer layers could not break from their psychic tethers and cross over here.
Should she fail in her attempt to save Quinn, Reggie imagined the gym she now occupied would also merge into the outer layers beyond and add to the chaotic canvas of mixed fears.
For now, she was the only one who could pass, and she had just entered a deeper and more defined level.
A washed-out sepia tone bathed the entire gym. Pudgy and awkward boys dressed in oversized uniforms ran laps around the basketball court. Huge wind-up keys protruded from their backs, constantly rotating in gaping red wounds between their shoulders.
An enormous man dressed in dark green bike shorts, black wrestling shoes, and a yellow windbreaker stood in the center of the gym, his broad back to Reggie. He stood in the middle of a blue wrestling mat that was covered in hundreds of tiny, sharp spikes. He blew a loud and shrill whistle, and the jogging children froze and huddled together on the perimeter of the court.
“Eagan! Lindsay! Get your sorry asses out on the mat!”
Reggie recognized the voice, even though she couldn’t see his face. Mr. Banner had spent decades as the Cutter’s Wedge Elementary gym teacher before finally being fired for slapping an asthmatic student who refused to run. Reggie was a first grader at the school when Banner had been terminated; she’d barely known him. Quinn, on the other hand…
“Let’s go!”
Several of the boys squirmed and bustled before expelling two peers out from their midst. One was squat and doughy with short blond hair, the other one lanky and pale with big ears and shaggy brown locks. The whistle blew again.
“Move it! Don’t make me get out the medicine ball again, boys! You remember what happened to Hyatt, don’t you?” The coach pointed to a large puddle of dried maroon fluid that stained the wood floor beneath one of the baskets. A flayed body dangled upside-down from the rim above.
“Move your lazy tails!”
The two boys walked onto the mat, shooting one another nervous glances. The coach put his hands to his hips.
“You two are buds, aren’t you? Little playmates, right? Don’t think I don’t see you giggling like girls and playing grab-ass in my class. I don’t take kindly to gigglers and grab-assers. Assume the position, girls. Eagan, down!”
The skinny boy slowly dropped to his knees, the little spikes of the gym mat pushing up into them. He grimaced and placed his palms down after, and Reggie heard the sickening squish as the points penetrated his hands. She knew the boys didn’t e
xist—they were grotesque figments of young Quinn’s imagination, but they had been molded from the clay of actual memory. Somewhere, sometime, there was a real Eagan who suffered torment at the hands of Coach Banner while Quinn and others watched.
“Top, Lindsay. Get your flabby butt in position.”
The chubby boy sank to one knee, wrapped his left arm underneath the other boy’s stomach, and placed his right hand on his opponent’s right elbow.
“Wrasslin’, girls! This is what it’s all about! A true man’s sport! Now when I blow the whistle, you two best go at it full boat until one of you scores, you hear me? I catch either of you grab-assing out on my mat and I will tan some hides! Am I clear?”
The whistle blew a third time, and the chubby boy yanked hard on the skinny boy’s arm. The elbow bent out at a frightening and distorted angle, and the boy tilted and collapsed on his side. The spikes pierced the full side of his emaciated body, and rivulets of black ooze poured out of dozens of puncture wounds around his ribs and hips. The chubby boy hesitated.
“Come on, Lindsay! Show us you’re not a wuss!” The gym coach kicked the boy in the backside. “Take him! Pin his scrawny butt! You want to be an athlete? You want to be a man?”
The chubby boy’s lips quivered.
“Where the hell is Waters? Quinn Waters! Get your butt out here and show these nerds how a champion competes!”
Reggie felt her heart race from her perch behind the bleachers. Was Quinn really that close? The gym teacher, the mat, the court, the boys in the class—all seemed to be well intact, suggesting enough of Quinn’s essence was somewhere near. His living fear fed this scene enough to let it play out again and again in the fearscape. But Quinn did not appear.
“Damn it! Waters, I know you hear me! You goddamn quitter! Just like your old man! All the talent in the world and no guts!”
Reggie felt a twinge of pity, guessing that a young Quinn Waters had been pushed and pressured by adults around him to succeed as an athlete at any cost.