by Lee Dignam
“Wait, you’re gonna go through it?” Cora asked.
“Through the fence? Fuck no, I’m not scratching my car. Silver, think you can open that up for us?”
“It’s on wheels, so maybe it’s powered,” Silver said. “Give me a second.”
Silver stepped out of the car and into the blustery night. He stalked across the road and toward the fence, becoming little more than a suggestion of a human moving around in the darkness. When he reached the fence, he tugged on the sword in the sheath on his back and pulled it out an inch or two. The blade began to glow the same color as Isaac’s bangle—soft blue—and with his other hand he touched the fence. A moment later, the fence started to roll on its wheels, clearing a path for Alice to slip the Mustang into the construction site.
Using his sword to provide a little illumination, Silver walked alongside the car and helped Alice navigate the area. The entire site was cluttered with machinery, long tubes stacked on top of each other, and massive pallets stacked with cinder blocks. There were trucks parked in here, as well as forklifts and diggers. The small huts pressed up against the inside of the sheet metal perimeter were all dark.
Alice stopped the car and rolled down her window. Silver approached. “I think I’m going to take a walk,” he said.
“We shouldn’t split up,” Alice said.
“No, but if she’s right and there are Pain Children in there, we stand more of a chance of catching them by surprise if we split up.”
Alice’s head dropped and she shook it, defeated. He had a good point, but their group was small as it was. Splitting up wasn’t something she particularly wanted to do. “Alright,” she said, “But try to keep us in sight if you can. If you see Pain Children, draw them to us and we’ll hit them together.”
Silver nodded, stepped away from the car, and jogged toward the base of the building. A moment later, the glow from his sword disappeared, and Silver was gone. Alice turned to Cora. The rain hadn’t let up, and the wind was still bearing down on the place, causing clanking, rattling, and banging sounds with no identifiable origin to surround them.
“Do you think she’s here?” Alice asked.
“Nyx?” Cora asked. She shook her head. “I like to think we’d know if she were here.”
“Maybe she’s just good at hiding. She’s been almost completely hidden from us for the last three months.”
“But she’s not anymore. I think she’s getting cocky. I’ve watched a lot of crime shows and the serial killers sometimes get bored or like to play games. Subconsciously, it’s because they want to get caught. They want the challenge, the pressure.”
“That means she’s ready for us.”
“Yeah, maybe, but does it matter?”
Alice shook her head with a smile. “No,” she said. “I’m tired of this whole thing. One way or another, I’m going to get back to my normal life.”
“Me too,” Cora said. Her smile lingered, and despite the darkness, Alice saw her own potential future reflected in those dark eyes. Alice’s life was hunting. It was what she was good at, and she didn’t want to give that up. If she gave it up, she was nothing. Cora just wanted to live a normal life— a life away from the responsibility of the powers she had unwittingly inherited, or a life without powers altogether. There was merit to that dream, and for an instant Alice found herself considering it.
Only, what would a normal life even look like for Alice? Her and Isaac married, with kids? Would she join the force again or would she be a mom? That’s what passed for normal these days, wasn’t it? It would take some getting used to, but she didn’t think she would hate a life without the responsibility of having to hunt down troublesome supernatural creatures. What worried her was the idea she wouldn’t be good enough for that life. Being a mom wasn’t easy, and working for the police hadn’t been easy either—but she had loved doing it.
The worry was moot, however, because the real question was if, with all the things she knew about the world, she would be able to give up her powers and go back to being a human. Go back to sleep. Because that was what being human was like. They were all asleep, and she was awake. She knew the secrets, knew the truth humans didn’t. Did she have what it took to put all that aside and go back to a life of ignorance?
Or worse, have to live pretending the dark wasn’t full of monsters?
Probably best not to worry about that, she thought, and she pushed the ideas to the back of her mind. She had a job to do—a hunt to go on. Alice reached into the back seat, pulled her backpack up, and set it on her lap. She then produced Trapper out from inside, hung the camera over her neck, and handed a heavy-duty flashlight to Cora. “Ready?” Alice asked.
Cora nodded, and Alice stepped out of the Mustang with her backpack over her shoulder and her car keys in her hand. She locked the car, stuffed the keys into her pocket, and ran across the construction site, toward the side of the building opposite to the one Silver had disappeared into.
The gale pulled at her hair and seemed to push against her torso as she ran, almost as if it didn’t want her getting close to the building. All around her, the muted sounds she had heard in the car a moment ago seemed to have had their volume dials cranked all the way up to ten. The clanging of metal on metal, the whoosh and howl of the wind, the incessant whispering of trees were all so loud she couldn’t hear her own footsteps on the gravel. Up above, loose attachment cables were dangling from still, towering cranes. One of these sets of cables had a large slab of concrete attached to it which was whining and groaning as the gust kicked it around.
Alice searched for a break in the ground floor wall, and after finding it, she slipped inside. The wind followed her, only in here it seemed to swirl like a whirlpool, snaking around bare columns and pillars to strike every inch of the place from every direction. Cora dashed into the building only a moment after Alice did and, like Alice, she pressed her back against the outer wall. The flashlight revealed little more than the detritus left behind by construction workers scattered around the ground floor, but the light did fall upon a mostly built staircase.
“That’s our way up,” Cora said.
“Can you feel its presence?” Alice asked. “Is the surgeon here?”
Cora closed her eyes and cocked her head. She grimaced and then opened her eyes again. “No,” she said, “But picking the surgeon out of all the static isn’t an easy thing. We’ll have to go higher.”
Alice nodded, pushed herself off the wall, and headed for the staircase. The building was entirely hollow and featureless inside. The floor, as well as the pillars and external walls, was made of concrete that hadn’t been covered up. There were some internal walls, too, though none of the wall sections added up to a complete room so they seemed to have been placed where they were at random.
She looked up when she came to the set of stairs, and déjà vu crept into her body causing the flesh on her arms and the nape of her neck to prickle. The injury on her arm suddenly started to throb dully, not enough to debilitate her, but enough for her to notice the pain was there.
“You okay?” Cora asked as she came up beside Alice.
“Yeah,” Alice said, “It’s nothing.”
Cora nodded. “Let’s head up a couple of floors and get a better look outside. There’s still a chance this isn’t the place I saw.”
“How much of a chance?”
“I don’t know… thirty percent?”
“That’s pretty high, but if it isn’t this building, then we’re fresh out of leads.”
Alice started up the stairs with Cora at her side, shining her flashlight around. They climbed another set of stairs, and then another, and another. Every floor they passed seemed to be less complete than the others, and by the time they reached the sixth, they noticed how many of the outer wall sections hadn’t been complete. Another couple of floors up and none of the outer walls had been done. Instead of walls there was green mesh—flimsy green mesh.
“Here,” Cora said, and instead of climbing to
the eleventh floor she headed toward the nearest outer wall and looked across the expanse of open air.
Alice followed, batting away a number of flapping white sheets that had been put into place for reasons she couldn’t entirely understand. “What do you think?” she asked.
“It’s darker than it was in my visions. It’s difficult for me to say if this is exactly the building I saw…”
“But?”
“That thirty percent has become fifteen.”
“That’s good. Means it’s more likely we’re in the right place.”
Alice glanced upward and scanned the ceiling on this level. A pinch of panic seized her throat, though she had no idea why this had happened. Maybe it was the lack of light, maybe it was the howling wind, or maybe it was the thought that she and Cora were alone, and there could be Pain Children hiding all around them, clinging to the darkness like spiders.
She clasped Trapper almost instinctively, turned to find the stairs going up. “We’d better keep moving.”
“You don’t know what we’re looking for,” Cora said.
“We’re looking for the surgeon. For Nyx. They could be anywhere.”
Cora turned around with her flashlight in her hand. She was about to speak, but the radiant glow of the light touching her face revealed how her expression suddenly shifted from one of calmness to a wide O of terror. She screamed for Alice to get down. Alice threw herself to the floor, hitting it hard without needing to be told twice, just as something large and fast bowled over her. She couldn’t see where it had gone because when she went down her face had twisted the opposite way, but when it passed she turned her head to look at the other side and saw what had only just missed her.
It was a naked old man, with wispy white hair, long, thin limbs, and eyes as black as coals; it was the poltergeist, and now that it had missed Alice, it was going for Cora.
Alice sprang up to her feet, grabbed Trapper, and pulled it up to snap a shot of the Poltergeist before it could hit Cora, but she was too slow. The moment of impact resounded with a loud, bone crunching crack which sent Cora flying right off the edge of the building and into the night. Alice’s chest suddenly tightened, her body went cold and numb, and her eyes remained fixed on the back of the poltergeist’s body—its wispy hair being tugged at by the wind. She wanted to yell out for Cora, but the words wouldn’t form.
Then she heard the metallic screech of the surgeon’s scalpel fingers scraping on a concrete column. It was here too, and she was alone.
CHAPTER 26
Hello, Alice
Alice’s heart was pounding in her chest, and if it had a voice it would have been repeating the word Cora, Cora, Cora. Her cheeks had gone ashen white; her hands were shaking. As the poltergeist slowly turned to look at her with its wispy hair caught in the wind, and its lanky body a stark silhouette against the charcoal sky, she found herself less and less able to take in a complete breath.
She almost couldn’t see the poltergeist, couldn’t hear the surgeon approaching from the darkest corners of this husk of a building. All she could see was the beam of Cora’s flashlight, spinning wildly as it was knocked out of her hand at the moment of impact. Alice had experienced the poltergeist’s power before and knew, the way she had been pushed, that her speeding body would have ripped right through that green netting even if it had been present to stop her fall. Hearing a crash may have given Alice closure, but with this wind, she had heard nothing—not a yelp or a gasp for air, only that sickening crack when the poltergeist had hit her.
Get up, she thought, get up and fight.
The poltergeist had started to walk, its naked feet making slapping sounds as they hit the floor. The surgeon hadn’t yet come out of the dark, but it was there somewhere. Watching. Waiting. The surgeon wouldn’t attack if it didn’t think it had the upper hand; it would come when she was distracted or had her back turned. She would be able to keep her front to it if only she knew where it was, but it was dark as pitch in that building.
Alice planted her hands on the ground and hoisted herself to her feet. The poltergeist stared at her, cocking its head to the side. Maybe it was grinning; maybe it was smiling or scowling. She couldn’t tell. But it was advancing, and it was doing so slowly. It knew what she could do, had seen it first hand when she destroyed the gas mask man with the very thing hanging from her neck. Had the situation been different, this thought would have given her a moment of pause, of hesitation, but it didn’t.
The poltergeist jerked. Instinct took over, and Alice pulled Trapper up and, without aiming, pressed the red button in the poltergeist’s direction. Her body vibrated as the camera used her energy to discharge its power, and then there was a whumph, and bright blue light. She saw the poltergeist in the instant the flash went off, saw it put its lanky arms up to protect itself from the camera’s awesome power, saw the arms blacken and singe as Trapper’s energy burned its gray flesh, and heard its demonic cry of pain ring out in all directions.
Alice took a step back as the flash recharged and heard the poltergeist flailing madly. The camera made a whirring sound and spat a Polaroid from out of its front slot. Her head spun around this way and that, searching for the surgeon, but she couldn’t see it and it had stopped scraping the columns with its fingers. She was too far out in the open here. Her back was exposed, as were her sides. She needed to get to a floor with walls, or better yet, get out of this building entirely. Silver was around, and he would have sensed Trapper’s initial discharge.
Or maybe he wouldn’t.
She snapped another shot with Trapper, and this time used the illumination provided by the bright, loud flash to find the stairs. There, she thought, and with the image imprinted in her mind she began to run. Forget the darkness, forget the debris; her only concern was reaching those stairs and getting the hell down them.
By some stroke of divine grace, Alice found the first step in her stride and began descending without skipping a beat. She was flying on instinct, now. The darkness wasn’t so much pitch black as it was uncommonly dark—but even uncommonly dark was workable. When she hit the next level down, she grabbed the rough concrete wall, spun around in a hard arc, and headed down the next flight of stairs. Her heart was thrumming hard, her breaths were short and quick, and she could hear the patter of naked feet on her tail, but she was flying. In her element. By the time she had gone down two more flights of stairs, she had figured out that there were eight steps per floor and could get down them without having to see.
She made it all the way to the fifth floor when what should have been an eighth step was a seventh. The final, invisible step threw her system completely off. She missed it, and went head over heels onto the hard concrete, rolling on her shoulder and smashing her back against a concrete column. Bright spots of light were appearing in front of her eyes, her arm was throbbing, her back was on fire, and the poltergeist was still coming. Worse, there was something behind her.
Alice rolled just as a pair of scalpel-tipped fingers came down on where her face had been a moment ago. Sparks flew at the point of impact, and Alice saw the surgeon’s twisted face, its sharpened features, and its black eyes in the glow. All she could hear was her own frantic heartbeat, now. The surgeon was here, it was looking at her, and she was alone. Silver was nearby, but she had no idea when he would get to her.
The fear that came with this thought—of being all alone in the face of such evil—caused her entire body to feel like it had been dumped in an ice bath. In those cold, black eyes she didn’t just see a creature that was ready to slice her up as it had done all those years ago—she saw a clear intent to keep her. It had no intention of saving her for Nyx. Its eyes told her it wasn’t done with her, and that Nyx could come and pry Alice from its metallic fingers if she wanted to. But that wasn’t all. What she also saw now, and hadn’t seen before, was a circle closing. The surgeon had been there at the start, and it was here now, at the end.
She kicked with her feet, backpedaling on her backside and br
inging Trapper up for a clean shot. The surgeon advanced, looming over her and making nauseating, clacking sounds with its razor fingers as it approached. Alice took a deep breath, lined the camera up, and took the shot. The room filled with blue light, and the surgeon screamed a gargling shout. Trapper recharged almost immediately, and Alice propped herself up with her bad arm and snapped another shot of the surgeon.
Her injured arm burned, but Alice pushed through the pain to get to her feet. She couldn’t see the surgeon clearly, not in this darkness, but she could hear it well enough, and that was all she needed. Alice advanced like a rifleman, firing shot after carefully placed shot, waiting between attacks for the camera’s flash to recharge and for the Polaroid to slip out of its mouth and drop lazily to the floor like a bullet casing.
The surgeon continued to scream and shriek as Alice’s strange powers, magnified by the camera in her hands, struck its body over and over. The creature stumbled over a discarded generator and tumbled hard to the ground. Alice followed its movements and watched it crawl, hand over foot, toward a point where there was no outer wall. If it got there, it would be able to flee.
Alice ran up to the surgeon, aimed for where she thought its face would be, and swung her boot into it. The creature groaned, but then it grabbed her foot and sank its metal claws into her calf. Alice screamed as the sudden explosion of pain travelled through her nervous system and manifested in her brain as a sharp, almost unbearable screech. She yanked her foot free from the surgeon’s hand, staggered, and as she went down managed to fire off another shot of power from her camera.
The surgeon exploded into a cloud of dust before she even hit the ground. She felt its putrid essence swirl around her and could almost feel it trying to attack her despite its lack of a physical body. But the Void called to it, and to the Void it returned. The surgeon’s presence vanished, and then both it and the dust were gone.
Can’t rest, she thought. The other one was still out there somewhere. A fresh pulse of pain jolted up her leg and she winced. Alice sat up, reached for her calf, and her fingers came away warm and wet. Blood. But something was different. The pain had, a moment ago, almost entirely destabilized her ability to think, but she was thinking now. Her arm, also, wasn’t throbbing as much as it had been a moment ago.