by Lee Dignam
It sounded like, somewhere above her, someone wearing a pair of heavy boots was walking briskly and with intent. She scanned upwards, as if she would be able to see through the floors, but saw only the snake-like tubes running along the ceiling. A cloud of dust trickled down and danced in the flashlight’s beam. The footsteps faded, but when she traced the direction the footsteps were going with her flashlight she came upon a set of stairs leading upwards.
Her heart wasn’t just racing now, it was hammering; and the skin all along her arms and hands had started to prickle all over—a sensation which, upon coming into contact with her scarred back, went from tingly, to painful. She glanced at the open window leading outside and considered, for an instant, a question she should have considered before having even set foot in this building.
Do I call and wait for backup?
But she hadn’t called for backup the first time she set foot into the Cinema Royale either, and back then she hadn’t known the truths about herself she knew now. The footsteps she had heard upstairs may have been caused by a human, or they may have been caused by something else. If that something else turned out to be one of Nyx’s Pain Children, then it was possible the thing didn’t know Alice was even here. None of the others had, either. Alice had caught all of them by surprise. If she hung around down here and waited for backup, and the thing wizened up to her presence and fled, Alice wouldn’t be able to forgive herself.
She was here now, and if a creature of the Void was calling this place home, it was up to her to find it and destroy it.
Alice turned to look at the set of stairs heading to the next floor up and began her approach. She pulled her backpack around and opened the main zipper. Reaching inside, her hand closed on Trapper’s cold, plastic case, and she pulled the Polaroid Instant Camera from her backpack. She fastened the camera’s strap around her neck and let it hang loosely over her chest, then zipped the backpack up and slipped both of her hands into the straps.
She put a boot on the first step and shone her flashlight up along the length of the staircase with the crumbling walls.
CHAPTER 5
Fifteen Spirits
It’s often said of old buildings, from landmarks to lowly bookstores on obscure streets, that they have character. That, oh, if only these walls could talk. As Alice wandered the long, debris ridden halls of the old City General Hospital, now affectionately dubbed Hell’s Toilet, she figured the people who said such things had never been to this one.
This building moaned under the weight of its years, the floors croaked as if they were too weak to support even a slight woman’s weight, and the ceilings dripped with dirty water filtering down through cracks all the way from the roof. If this building could speak, it would howl, and anyone stupid enough to be trying to listen would be driven mad by the sound. As Alice picked her way over small heaps of fallen masonry, pipes, and the kind of waste only human beings were capable of producing, she was keenly aware that the hospital itself had taken issue with her presence.
Open doorways yawned, their frames jagged and rotten to the point where they resembled crooked teeth. The rooms beyond these doors were all empty, jaundiced husks reminiscent of the patients who once spent time here. Beneath peeling layers of once cream paint, the walls were red, making Alice think of open wounds on wrinkled skin. When she cast her eyes down the hall, it seemed at once to stretch for miles and contract around her, with almost nauseating results.
Alice closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and steadied herself. She had come up here because she had thought she heard footsteps, but the stairs were far behind her now, and she hadn’t encountered a soul. At least, not one she could see with her own eyes. Twice she had thought of using Trapper’s REF setting to stare into the Reflection, but both times had decided against it.
Not yet, her gut said, and she trusted her gut.
She was walking along a corridor when she heard a metallic squeak followed by a loud bang and a rattle. Alice froze and swallowed the sudden burst of fresh unease. She was walking down a long corridor which ended in a set of double doors quite a ways down, but about ten or twenty feet from where she was, the corridor broke off to the left. The sound had come from there, she knew, and unlike most normal humans, she didn’t immediately believe the wind had caused it.
Alice walked further along the corridor, keeping a wide berth from the opening to her left as she came up to it. A window to her right was pockmarked with holes, likely from thrown rocks, allowing a cool breeze to thrust its way into the corridor Alice was about to turn into. She wasn’t sure what she would see down there—a vagrant sleeping on an old gurney, some kid pushing around a wheelchair, or maybe a ghost or a Pain Child thrashing around to pass the time—so she swapped hands, holding her flashlight with her left, and resting her right hand on Trapper.
She reached the corridor and, with her back close to the outer wall, turned to look across it. There, strewn around the place like discarded toys, were an inordinate number of gurneys and wheelchairs, any of which could have caused the sound Alice had just heard if it had rolled into a wall. Old cables hung from the ceiling like dead snakes and there was a faint smell of urine that penetrated Alice’s makeshift nose cover. But the corridor was devoid of people, and it was as dark as any of the others. If she hadn’t had a flashlight she wouldn’t have been able to see all the way to the end of it.
Alice placed her flashlight hand beneath Trapper’s body, raised the camera to her eye, and made sure the setting toggle was set to REF. The world swam and shimmered as she looked through the viewfinder, and even when the camera’s obscure power finished the process of piercing the veil separating this world from the Reflection, she saw the people responsible for the crash and rattle she had just heard.
There was more than one dead person in this hall. To Alice it wasn’t as if she were looking through a small square at all, but rather as if her senses had extended to see out of the camera’s lens itself, uninhibited and unrestricted, so when the spirits present in the hall became visible to Trapper, they became visible to her too.
She counted ten. No, twelve—fifteen. Fifteen spirits, she thought. They were mostly idle; some of them were sitting on wheelchairs, others sitting on gurneys. Two spirits wandered aimlessly up along the length of the corridor, in a zig zag pattern to avoid touching other spirits or the objects they were sitting on. They coughed and sneezed and whined as they may have done in life. None of them spoke, but many of them looked at her.
Alice took a deep breath and, recalling Isaac’s teachings –think like a mage, he would always tell her—imagined a shield of shadows and darkness surrounding her, obscuring her from the spirits’ dead eyes and ghostly senses. Her palms pulsed with a soft, cold blue glow, her body prickled all over, and when she opened her eyes the spirits had turned away from her.
A sigh of relief escaped her tightly pressed lips. Alice knew she was a battery for spirits, knew that proximity to her empowered them and awakened them. Once she had even taken advantage of this fact. But tonight she didn’t want them to know she was here, and so far, it was working.
Slowly Alice started to move through the corridor, stepping between the gurneys and wheelchairs to get to the other side like a zookeeper in a den of sleeping bears. To the other side of this hall, she thought, is where she had to go. This wasn’t a thought birthed in logic, but one born of instinct—an instinct she was used to trusting. But as she walked along the corridor of the dead, a thought struck her, and she paused in front of a man whose skin was pulled so tightly around his slight skeleton he looked more like a cadaver than most ghosts.
She circled around him, took another couple of steps down the corridor, and then turned around to look in the direction she had come. The spirits were still there, still moaning, still waiting. The thought of getting them all out of here, of clearing the hall they all seemed to be centered in, crossed her mind, but she couldn’t do that. Right now she had the element of surprise, and setting Trapper off would take
that away from her. She couldn’t afford to lose it this time. Not when she was alone.
Again Alice turned on her heel, only this time she proceeded to walk along the corridor at a more rapid pace. Her heart was hammering in her chest, her body was cold, and her alert level was high, but she wasn’t even looking through Trapper’s lens anymore. She wanted to get through the corridor and away from these spirits to escape the guilt of leaving them there.
Then she reached the end of the hall, and she heard another squeak and another rattle; a series of them, in fact. The sounds occurred simultaneously, creating a moment where the once quiet corridor was filled with discordant scraping sounds. Alice’s arms prickled again, the sensation shooting into her back to cause a moderate amount of discomfort. Slowly Alice craned her neck around to see what on earth could have caused that huge racket.
Alice’s eyes widened and she turned around fully. The corridor before her—the one she had just walked along—was clear of all of the gurneys and wheelchairs. But the derelicts weren’t gone. In defiance of gravity itself, the rusting metal husks had climbed the walls and ceiling and now stood pressed together and suspended on every surface but the floor. Wheels squeaked softly, the metal beds clinked as they touched, and at the end of the hall, someone was standing.
Male or female, Alice couldn’t tell. Their profile was obscured by the light filtering in from the window at their back. But there was one thing about them Alice could see clearly—the eyes. They shone in the dark like tiny lights, shifting and glimmering, giving the dark silhouette a sinister look Alice didn’t even want to look at. And they—whoever it was—had done this. Was it a mage? A spirit? A Pain Child? No… not a Pain Child.
“Who are you?” she said, but the figure at the end of the hall didn’t reply—instead it started to run at her from the other side of the hall.
In a split-second decision between fight or flight Alice chose flight, turning to her right and making tracks along this new, unexplored corridor. There was less debris here than there was in the other one, but Alice wasn’t concerned about that. She was running entirely on instinct now, jumping over toppled beds and chairs with the grace of a stray cat fleeing at the sight of a human. What she needed to do was find the stairs and get to the lobby. That room was large and wide, and if she could get there first this person wouldn’t be able to sneak up on her.
But despite making all the turns she thought she needed to make to wind up right where she had started, she found herself continuously met with unknown corridors leading to unexplored sections of the hospital. Being so aware of the person chasing her prohibited her from thinking logically, the impulse being to keep moving, keep running, but she needed to think. She needed a moment.
When the hall she was running down made an unexpected left turn, Alice took it. Her boots skidded on wet tiles, but she held onto the corner wall and made the turn into this new corridor culminating in a set of double doors. If she was right, this was the way out. The stairs would be on the other side of it and with her pursuer’s footsteps still at her back she knew she would make it first.
Alice shoulder-charged the double doors and they gave way under the force of the impact, but instead of a slightly wider than normal corridor with a staircase set into it, Alice came to a staggering halt in the middle of a dark, windowless room with the skeleton of a large bed frame bolted into the floor and a huge, crooked light fixture hanging from the ceiling. This was an Operating Room, and there was no way out but the way she had come.
The footsteps grew louder. Alice turned, brought Trapper to chest level, held her finger against the big red button on the front of the camera, and as soon as the doors opened she pressed her finger to the button and released Trapper’s necromantic energy. A bright blue flash exploded out of Trapper’s shutter, exposing the moss-covered walls and bringing the crumbling surroundings into sharp focus. Her heart was thundering now with fear and adrenaline. The hit had been good, she knew it had been good, but the person… was still standing there.
Of course it was—Trapper was set to REF, and its power was useless to any materialized or living entities. Alice backed in to the bolted down bed and stared at the person standing by the door with their hands up and crossed in front of their face. She quickly set the toggle to MAT and readied the camera again, but hesitated before pressing the button.
“Who are you?” Alice asked again.
The woman lowered her hands slowly and gazed at Alice from behind a curtain of darkness. Her eyes weren’t glowing anymore. Maybe they never had been. “The flash on that thing is stronger than I remember,” the woman said. “You’ve made adjustments?”
“I’ve made… what?” Alice asked.
CHAPTER 6
The Magic Vault
Jim arrived in his banged up old Chevy only fifteen minutes behind Cameron. Jim, with his thick rimmed spectacles, his scruffy hair, and the week old stubble on his cheeks, looked right at home behind the wheel of this rust bucket with windows. The praetor next to him wearing the dark cowl and the black cape, though, looked like a blotch of black ink on an old photograph.
Though the praetors had made an appearance in force at the graveyard a few months back, none of their faces had been visible due to the magic cowls they wore. The same was true tonight. It was one thing to see a praetor in full garb in their natural habitat, lording over lesser mages in the Throne room, wreathed in cloaks of writhing, cosmic darkness and passing judgments on behalf of the invisible emperor. It was quite another to see one stuffed into an old car like someone being delivered to the set of a movie already in full costume.
The car pulled up beside Cameron’s Harley and came to a squeaking halt. Jim put the car in park and stepped out, pushing his spectacles up on the bridge of his nose. A black pentacle, like the one Cameron was wearing to protect him from the corruptive power of the Void, hung from a silver chain around his neck. The praetor, who wasn’t wearing such a necklace, stepped out and walked around the front of the car. It was a woman, judging by her bust and waist; she was wearing a black cowl and cape over a black bodice and dress. Cameron stared, his arms folded across his chest. Silver, who had returned from his perimeter sweep, also stared.
“Good evening,” said the praetor, her voice sultry and low. “Our Librarian tells me there has been an incident.”
Isaac nodded. “There has. The vault has been breached.”
Jim didn’t have to stick around for this debrief. He walked over to the small door embedded in the side of the warehouse and began examining it closely while Isaac explained what he knew to the magistrate’s representative. The praetor listened and nodded at times, listened intently, and in fact seemed to be ahead of the curve.
“You suspect Nyx is involved,” said the praetor.
“It is too early to tell for certain,” he said, keeping his suspicions to himself, “I would still like to perform a thorough sweep of the interior of the vault. Jim wanted a praetor present to oversee our investigation.”
“I am thankful for the consideration.”
“I understand the magistrate isn’t entirely aware of our operations so we wanted to be transparent.”
She nodded. “Very well,” she said, “I shall unlock the vault.”
Isaac stepped out of her path and gestured toward the warehouse. As she walked, Isaac, Cameron and Silver followed. Jim also stepped aside as she approached the simple, rusty, green metal door on the side of the warehouse. The whole building was falling to pieces; the high windows were mostly smashed in, the metal exterior was covered with brown rust—a process exaggerated by the ravages of the salty ocean spray—and the roof was caved in like it had been smashed by a giant’s hammer. But the exterior of the building didn’t matter. In fact, it was better that the building looked, on the outside, like it could implode at any moment.
This would keep strays away.
The praetor reached with a gloved hand for the green door and pressed her palm against it. The silver ring she wore on top of he
r glove glowed with warm, amber light, and as she began to recite an incantation in Latin, magic symbols etched into the metal doorframe began to slowly rise into existence, glowing with their own amber light. Isaac felt the rush of magic, heard the distant growl of thunder, and thought of the Tempest—that raw, furious, primal place where mages draw their powerful magic from.
Finally there was a click, and the green metal door unlocked. The praetor removed her hand from the door, the sigils around it disappeared into nothingness, and she carefully reached for the knob. After waiting for a moment which seemed to hang in the air, suspended like a baited breath, she turned the knob and pushed the door open.
The space beyond the threshold was darker than night. Not even ambient light could penetrate the open arch. A moment passed, and the praetor stepped into the building only to be consumed by the darkness like a morsel. Jim nodded at Isaac and followed, then Cameron went in, and then Silver. Isaac took a moment to scan the door frame before deciding to step inside as well.
Instead of a level floor and a large, mostly empty building, there was a narrow stone corridor with a low ceiling ending in a descending stone staircase. When the door behind him shut of its own volition, the dark path illuminated enough for each stone step to be identified. Still, walking down them in near darkness with walls pressing around him was unnerving to say the least.
And then there was the constant, electrifying sensation rolling along his arms and the nape of his neck…
Finally, the stairs gave way to a large chamber lit by blue-fire torches that never went out. The walls on either side of the chamber expanded and encircled a huge basilica similar in design to the Throne room with a high, golden ceiling into which images of mages and the Tempest had been painted, and black marble columns placed in a circular pattern around the room. Another slight set of stairs led out of the ante-chamber, beyond the columns, and into the vault proper where a number of tables, glass display cases, and roped off enclosures housed the Ashwood mages’ most prized—and dangerous—possessions.