Nightmare

by Robin Parrish

  Yet there was no air that I could find, nor was there any need for it. We were ensconced in a thicker atmosphere, almost fluid, like milk.

  I looked down at myself and saw that I was an indistinct solid, more or less human in shape with a head and shoulders and body. But few details.

  Then I discovered that my appearance was malleable. I was made out of energy, wrapped in thought. I held out a wispy hand in front of me and watched as it responded to my thoughts, dissolving into nothing but mist. I thought of it re-forming into something more solid, and it did. I looked down at my body and transformed it into a translucent smoke, and then resolidified it into a solid representation of how I looked on the mortal plane. I even had on the clothes I'd been wearing before I underwent the procedure.

  This giant room was a little different than the one above. The walls were solid white, and though they had the same symbols etched into them as the rest of the building, they weren't on fire.

  Another thought occurred to me. "You know ... I don't see anything affixed to you. Like a curse, for example."

  Jordin threw me a knowing look but tabled that conversation for more pressing concerns. "Carrie!" she shouted, looking out into the ghostly crowd. "Carrie Morris!"

  I looked around, as well, and couldn't see Carrie anywhere.

  Jordin shook her head, sending tendrils of smoke and mist curling off into the thick atmosphere. "I lost her again...."

  I watched Jordin's actions with curiosity. "Lost her?"

  "It takes tremendous strength of will to keep from losing yourself here."

  "Why?"

  "The ones who still have something to live for are the ones that seem to be able to hold on to themselves. It's a magnification of the condition of the heart at the time of death-or in our case, at the time of the procedure. Those who were wicked and unrepentant appear here as vile, sickening beings. The pure, good hearts become more ... luminescent, you could say. The ones like Carrie, who were lost in life, are even more lost in death. Carrie lived a very frivolous life, a life with no substance, so she has none here. I remind her of who she is all the time, but she keeps forgetting. She just can't seem to cling to what makes her Carrie."

  I thought of my observations of apparitions as a paranormal investigator, and how so many ghosts seemed stuck in one place, unwilling or unable to leave. Derek had just asked me about this very thing recently. I wondered if something similar to what Jordin just described was the reason so many ghosts seem to linger in one spot. Were they simply unable to remember who they were and why they were there? Doomed to roam around their old stomping grounds, searching for a life they can never fully recall?

  "What is this place? What are we doing here?" I asked.

  "This is where they keep us. Corralled like cattle, until they have need for us."

  "Need? Like what, scaring people at Ghost Town?"

  "DHI sends us there sometimes, and other places, too," she replied. "They use us to add extra chills to the rides and such. It's a way for them to observe and record the extent of what we can do, how we can interact with the mortal world. I had no idea you would be at the park that night. I was as surprised to see you as you were to see me."

  "They can make you do things?"

  "Some things," she said. "They give us directives, and then leave us with some free will in choosing how to do it."

  "But Derek saw you at his dorm...."

  "I had to fight their control pretty hard to get to him that night, but it's not perfect. Still, I couldn't hold out for long before they came for me."

  "'They,' " I repeated slowly.

  Jordin pointed to one side of the room, where a group of spirits much darker than the rest of us stood and watched. They were dark gray, almost like shadow people, but I could see some details in their forms, which were burly and clearly meant to inspire fear. "They're the prototype `souldiers' DHI has been working on. They're spirits just like us, but they're not victims. They're volunteers plucked from various military outfits."

  They were the ones that attacked me in my dorm, I realized. And they probably came after me and Derek at the cemetery.

  "Why do they look different?"

  "They've been given enhanced strength on this plane,"Jordin explained, "making them more powerful than the rest of us."

  "How is that possible?"

  "It's that symbol, the glyph," she told me. "It's evil. Seriously, I think it originates from inside hell. It has power, and it's the key; without the glyph, DHI couldn't do any of what they're doing."

  Thoughts that might never have occurred to me before came very naturally and easily in this place. I could almost see visible connections between this and that, lines connecting one thing to another.

  "What if we took the symbol out of the equation?" I asked. "Destroyed the glyph on our necks somehow?"

  "No!" Jordin cried. "The symbol tethers us to the earth, remember? If the symbol's broken, then you'd better be ready to meet your maker. Literally."

  I looked around this crazy, hyper-real space. "There has to be something we can do!"

  The building continued to tremble around us, though it was nowhere near the intensity it had been on the top floor, where that abominable thing had been unleashed. As I glanced around at the sea of spirits floating through the giant room, the lights flickered for just a moment. When the lights went out, I saw words written on the darkened walls in a terrifyingly bright shade of blood red. The words were splashed onto the walls like graffiti, and they read, "The nightmare is coming."

  The words were everywhere in that split second-not just all over the walls, but on the ceiling and the floor, as well.

  "Jordin," I said slowly, my words coming out in that strange, hollow way that all sounds reverberated here, "how do we get out of this room?"

  "We don't. There's no way out unless we're let out. It's those symbols plastered everywhere. They're derived from the same language or whatever as the glyph, and they have power. Wherever they appear, we're under their control."

  "We have to get back inside the Body Chamber," I said, scanning the exits.

  "I've been trying to get there for weeks," Jordin said, "but it's like it's shielded or hidden from those of us on this side of the veil. I was unconscious when they brought me to this building, and I woke up like this. I never actually saw the chamber. None of us did. That's why we're trapped here, why we can't go back to our bodies."

  "Well, I wasn't unconscious when I was brought in. I know exactly where the Body Chamber is. We just need to get out of this room...."

  With another sickening groan from the building, our prayers were answered when the power flickered twice, and then stayed out. The mass of souls seemed to read the opportunity for what it was, and rushed the exits. The souldiers tried to stop them, viciously grabbing them, tackling them, throwing them around like rag dolls. But math won out in the end. There were more of us than there were of them.

  We followed the crowd out into the outer hallway, and I blindly headed for the elevator before Jordin grabbed me by the shoulder. She grinned and pointed up at the ceiling.

  Of course. What need was there for elevators when gravity had no hold on us?

  Following Jordin's lead, I allowed my body to float up until I passed through the ceiling. It was exhilaratingly simple.

  I lost count of how many floors we went through before we finally arrived at the top, but I knew we were there, because we could go no farther. The strange symbol-inscribed walls kept us from leaving the confines of the structure. The sound of the monstrous creature grew as we ascended, and so did the horrible shaking that threatened to level the entire building.

  We moved quickly around the outer hallway outside the Body Chamber until we came to the entrance, and peered inside. The dozens of scientists working within the great room had fled, from the looks of things, leaving only the hundreds of empty bodies and-

  "Derek!" Jordin cried.

  He was still near the middle of the room where the extractor
was, but he was slowly inching his way toward the horrible creature. The beast marched around opposite us on the far end of the circular room. It was stomping around angrily, and I had the disturbing theory that it was mashing the dead form of Howell Durham into the ground, grinding its feet into whatever was left of Durham, like it was enjoying killing a bug. The monster was enraged, on a power high, snarling and breathing hot air so loudly that the sound reached us like tornadic winds.

  Remarkably, despite this horrific action the creature was relishing, we could still see Derek carefully moving closer and closer to the thing, like a tiger stalking its prey and preparing to pounce.

  What on earth was Derek doing? What was he thinking?

  At least the creature hadn't noticed him yet. It was still having its own fun dancing on Durham's entrails. I was glad I couldn't see any more than the top half of the thing. With its every step, the whole building shook down to its foundations.

  "Is that what I think it is?" asked Jordin, eying the gruesome creature with fear.

  "I don't know," I replied.

  When I spotted Derek, I did a serious double take. I could see not only the solid matter of his body, but his luminescent soul within, as well. But it was different than any other soul I'd seen. There was a bright spot glowing in his center mass, and as I looked closer I saw that it was a burning flame, and it made his entire form flicker and burn bright. If he'd been standing in a crowd, he would have been easy to pick out by any ghostly observer.

  I was so startled I glanced at Jordin, and she returned my gaze with a knowing smile. Whatever I was seeing, she saw it, too, and she actually seemed ... proud? Was that the right word?

  That was when I noticed thatjordin, too, had a light glowing in her center, yet hers was so much smaller than Derek's, it could have been microscopic. It was barely there at all.

  The fires were still blazing in the glass walls that stretched around the room, and when Jordin and I tried to enter the Body Chamber, we ran into something invisible that held us back. I looked up and saw that the entrance was only a six-foot-high opening, topped by more of the glass/fire walls. The circular wall was complete. No breaks in it anywhere.

  "It's those walls," I said. "The symbols, the fire within. It's got to be some kind of... I don't know, a mystical security system or something. Must be meant to keep us from trying to reenter our bodies."

  "If we could put out the fire, you think that might do the trick?" Jordin asked.

  The building shook hard as I looked closer and shook my head. "That fire-inside-glass trick-it's a perfect circle, all the way around the room. We might not need to destroy the entire circle, just break it. Do we have the ability to do something like that?" I hoped that Jordin's weeks of living inside this realm had given her enough experience and knowledge to help us now.

  "Sure," she said, scanning the immediate area. "We just have to use something from the other side of the veil, from the mortal world. We can't get inside the room, but maybe we could throw something tangible in there from here."

  I looked down at my billowing form, sure there was no way I could possibly touch anything solid on the other side of the veil, much less manipulate it. "But we're powerless. How are we supposed to-?"

  "We're not powerless," she explained reproachfully. "You just have to believe."

  "I don't. .." I hesitated. "I'm not sure I understand...."

  Jordin grabbed me by the shoulders and looked at me intently, urgently. "You have to believe, Maia. This isn't theory anymore. It's not religious studies classes or your parents' television show. The human soul is real. That should mean everything. But for right now it needs to mean you have utter faith that you can touch the physical world. If you have any doubt at all, you won't be able to do it."

  "My whole life has been about living with doubts. I don't know-"

  Jordin was undeterred. I'd never seen her with so much certainty, and I thought I saw the tiny little flame inside her flicker as she spoke. "You believe in God, right?"

  "Yeah," I said and nodded quickly.

  "And you believe we're more than just bodies? There's something crucial in each one of us?"

  I glanced at our surroundings. "Duh."

  "Then decide, here, now. Trust that in this place, in this form, you're more than you ever were in the confines of your human body. Have faith in what that means, who it makes you. And who made you."

  Jordin spotted a piece of rebar on the ground that had fallen out of the crumbling cement ceiling. She leaned over to grab it, closing her tendril fingers around the thick piece of metal. I watched her concentrate hard as she worked to heft the thing, but she only got it to move a few inches off the ground.

  "Come on, I need your help!" she said. "We don't need to move mountains, Maia. Just some metal."

  I worked hard to focus, closing off everything around me. I can do this. I can believe. I can believe. I believe. I believe....

  I followed Jordin's example, carefully and intentionally focusing on the rebar. I formed two distinct hands at the ends of my billowing arms and clutched at the metal bar with both of them....

  And I had it! My surprise made me lose my grip for half a second, but I recovered before the metal bar could fall.

  The two of us lifted the rebar and carried it as close as we could to the entrance.

  "Don't think of this as working your muscles," Jordin said as we lifted the bar high enough to hurl it. "It's not. Concentrate on getting it far enough across the room to smash into one of those glass wall panels."

  That didn't sound easy. The curve of the circular room was wide, and getting a clear shot to one of the panels from this door meant hurling the rebar more than a hundred feet.

  Again, I focused on calming myself and concentrating on what we wanted to do. Jordin counted to three, and at the end of her count, we lobbed the rebar through the air and into the Body Chamber.

  I bore down as Jordin did the same thing next to me, and willed the big piece of metal to keep going until it moved far enough to stick into one of the glass wall panels.

  The panel and all of its etched-on symbols shattered into thousands of pieces. I had no idea how, but the fire inside was extinguished in an instant. It started with the broken panel and then snuffed out in a fast succession, all the way around the huge room, until the fire was no more.

  The invisible barrier keeping us out fell away.

  Demon.

  It was the only word that entered my mind, and the only adequate description of what Jordin and I stared at across the darkened room, beyond the endless aisles of gurney-filled cubicles.

  A real demon was living, breathing, moving, and killing in the mortal realm. Which was impossible, because angels, demons, and spirits were the inhabitants of the spirit realm. As a rule, they didn't get to cross the veil into our world. They could interact with the mortal world, but they couldn't live in it.

  But then, I was a disembodied soul, so I guess most rules didn't seem to be holding at the moment. And I was fast coming to understand that there was a lot about this I didn't know. Not as much as I thought I did.

  The room quaked when the beast's enormous feet slammed into the floor, leaving indentations in the white cement. It continued to grind the last remaining vestiges of Howell Durham into the pavement, and it let out a half growl, half laugh as it did.

  Now that we were inside, we moved closer, and I turned my full attention to this grisly creature, getting my first good look at it. It was black all over, and my first thought was that it was covered in tar. But then I examined it closer and saw that its coarse leathery hide was burned. Charred and ruined, it was impossible to see what it might have once looked like.

  Its obsidian hide was some kind of hard, scaly substance, but there were black craggy bits of burned carcass in every crevice, hanging from its hands, ears, even its chin. It was a hulking mammoth, standing more than ten feet tall upon its two feet. Its frame was more like an ox or plow horse than a man. Yet its movements were agile
and fast.

  Its head was defined by sharp angles, like a skull. It had beady eyes glowing the color of fire, and they showed only contempt and hatred. Its one inhuman facial feature was its nose, which had enormous nostrils that flared every time it let out a breath. It reminded me of a bull's nose, mostly because it was constantly spewing air so hot that you could see the steam. I wasn't sure if the creature was truly breathing or if this was just its way of expelling the volcanic heat that seemed to constantly burn under its smoldering skin.

  "Derek!" Jordin shrieked.

  I saw him, too. Derek was stepping out from behind the last cubicle partition separating him from the demon, and now took a bold stride forward. The distance between them was less than thirty feet.

  The demon noticed him immediately, shifting its gigantic frame around to face him. Amazingly, Derek didn't flinch-not at the sickening attention now focused on him from the demon nor at his proximity to the incredible amount of heat pouring off the creature.

  I was sure that if I'd still had a stomach, in Derek's place right now I would have thrown up.

  "What is your name, demon?" Derek asked. "In the name of the Most High God, I command you to tell me."

  The demon looked at him for a long moment, considering this.

  "He's challenging it?" I asked, incredulous. "What's he expecting to happen?! It's not like he can cast it out. It's on the mortal plane now-it's a physical being, not a spiritual one!"

  "He can't face it alone!" cried jordin in a panic. "We have to help him!"

  I wondered if she'd heard me but didn't get the chance to ask. She was already moving toward her fiance and the abomination.

  A thought struck me. If the demon was tangible now, then that meant it had no purchase on this side of the veil, where Jordin and I were. Which could give us an advantage. At the very least, it meant the creature probably wouldn't be able to see or hear us.

  "I see the light of faith in your eyes," the demon said to Derek, its voice deep and hollow, yet silky smooth. "Come closer so I can pluck them out. I could use a snack, and there is nothing tastier or more satisfying to devour than a believer."