We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories

by C. Robert Cargill

  The tenant in 302 is a problem for him. A tough case. The first he’d chosen not to eat. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. The creature is foul, to be sure, but it understands the nature of what it is and how it came to appear. And the Superintendent just couldn’t eat it. It was the first—the genesis of all this trouble.

  And now it has to die.

  He spins around the door, gun trained, finger on the trigger.

  Nothing. Nothing but a chair in the corner and three shattered mirrors. There is no telling how long it’s been in there, how hard it focused to stay quiet, or how powerful it’s grown in the subsequent weeks. All that is certain is that it is loose, either prowling these halls or upstairs with Burke. But which?

  It only takes three breaths to get his answer.

  The hallway grows ice cold, the lights dimming, a sloppy, congealed mess of blood slithering across the walls like creeping moss. The blood has a texture to it as if it’s been drying in the sun but is still wet and sticky to the touch. Black masses of curdled blood and tumors form static waves as fresh blood oozes onto every inch of wall.

  Then comes a sudden skittering across the ceiling—like a thing with more limbs than it should have, all of them made of claw and bone.

  The Superintendent spins around, trains his gun at the sound, breath coming out in pillars of steam.

  Nothing.

  Then a hellish giggle from behind him.

  He spins. And he sees it. Standing on the ceiling.

  Four feet tall.

  Overalls stained in blood.

  Blond bowl cut falling on his face as if he were standing upright.

  Little Jamie Osmunt. Eight years old. Fresh from the second grade. Eyes glassy black, mouth wide in a hellish scream, shark’s teeth lining his mouth in numerous rows.

  He wasn’t eight when he died, but he was eight when he damned himself. And that’s how Hell spits you back out—the way you looked the first time you dipped your toe into its fires. For a moment the Superintendent recoils at the flood of memories from the first time he killed Jamie. The image of Jamie’s five-year-old brother at the bottom of a ravine, skull crushed beneath a large rock, made to look like an accident. That was how the Superintendent had envisioned the girl Burke raped—pieces of skull in pooling blood with a small boulder mashing in a pulp of gray matter.

  But the images don’t stop there. He remembers Jamie’s years of cats and dogs. The first girl Jamie drugged at a bar and left in the woods. The seventeen girls who followed. The feel of the cop’s bullet as it tore through Jamie’s chest, snuffing him out. All of that races in and out again in the span of a hot, steamy breath.

  And he regrets, more than ever, never having eaten the small boy.

  He fires and the child leaps out of the way, falling sideways to land flush on the left wall.

  Jamie runs, barreling at him, 102 demon teeth bared and snarling.

  He fires again, winging it in the shoulder.

  The beast flips, bellowing, landing on its feet, still sprinting without missing a step. Clawed hands reach out, grasping, paces away.

  He fires once more. The bullet strikes true, tearing a hole between Jamie’s eyes, blowing out the back of its skull like smashed melon.

  The child falls limp and broken at the Superintendent’s feet, still reaching, claws inches away from his toes.

  There is no time to drag the body back into the room. He has to get to the fourth floor. Has to stop Burke before he unleashes any more of these monstrosities into the building. But that means he has to take the stairs. Again.

  The Stairs

  The desert. But not like last time. It’s still dark and there are howls in the distance. Behind him the Humvee crackles, upturned, tires shredded, bodies hanging out of it just as he remembered. And on the ground, Burke, gurgling his last breaths.

  He needs to wait for the choppers. He needs to hide from enemy fire. But he can’t. He has to walk. He has to walk sixty-three steps. These are the stairs. The desert is an illusion. It’s all in his head. He knows that now. It doesn’t make the fear any less real, doesn’t make his heart beat any softer, doesn’t make the staccato of gunfire any quieter. But it makes it easy to ignore Burke as he reaches out to him, gasping for him to stay, and it makes it easy knowing the thing bounding out from the dark doesn’t want him. Not yet. It’s not his time.

  One. Two. Three. Four.

  401. The Black Oak Door

  The Superintendent skulks out from behind the door, shaking off the last shivers of his memories. He glances up at the elevator’s arrow and sees it still pointing at 4.

  Burke is here, somewhere in the halls. Somewhere waiting to ambush him. His fingers squeeze the grip of the gun.

  He rounds a corner. Rounds another. Winds through a sharp, abnormal series of twists and turns. Finds himself staring down another long hallway. At the end, Burke.

  Unlike any of the other doors that open off the sides of a hallway, the black oak door sits at a dead end.

  Burke is fumbling for the right key to open it. But there are too many keys, too little time.

  He tries this key, then another. Then he stops. He knows he’s being watched. Knows the Superintendent has the drop on him.

  “Did you find our friend on the third floor?” Burke asks over his shoulder, not turning around.

  “Yep.”

  “So you brought the gun.”

  “I did.”

  “And have you figured it all out?”

  “What do you mean?” asks the Superintendent.

  Burke turns around slowly, hands held open, up just above his shoulders, key ring dangling from around a single finger.

  “This,” he says, motioning to the building. “Have you figured it all out? What it means? What is really going on?”

  “I know what’s going on.”

  “You think you know what’s going on. But do you really? Or are you still accepting everything at face value?” He looks around. “This place isn’t what you think it is. It isn’t a building atop a crack in the world. Those aren’t magical wooden bullets and hallways don’t rearrange themselves of their own volition. And you, you’re not who you think you are. Do you even remember your name?”

  “Yes. Yes I do.”

  “No you don’t. You know how I know?”

  “How?”

  “You keep calling me Burke.”

  The Superintendent narrows his eyes. “Because your name is Burke.”

  “You were right when you said I wasn’t Burke. That I was something else. I am something else. A shadow. A reflection. Of you. You’re Burke.”

  “No. Fuck you.”

  “You said it yourself—you get confused sometimes. Things don’t make sense. The logic of this whole place vexes you, twists you around so you can’t tell day from night or remember when you last ate. How long has it been since you last saw me? A few minutes? A few hours? Days maybe? Does anything about this place make sense to you? It’s all phantoms. This is Hell and you think yourself some punisher of the damned, condemned to consume the sins of others because you refuse to face up to your own sins. Acknowledge that it was you in the desert who died in the dirt. Who raped that girl and caved in her skull with a rock. Who did oh so many terrible things that you don’t even want to think that it was you who did them. All that. Have you figured all that out yet?”

  The Superintendent stares down the hallway at the shade glaring at him, gun trained, sights set. His finger twitches on the trigger, confusion and regret setting in. “No,” he says.

  “What a sad and lonely Hell you’ve created for yourself.”

  He thinks back, back to the desert, back to his father in the chair, back to things in the darkness and the Landlord by the fireplace. And he tries to picture the girl, see her face. He can see her breasts, her brown sausage nipples, the sweat on her body as she pushes into him, crying. But he can’t see her face. Because none of it is real.

  It’s conjured. Fragments put together from other memor
ies as told by Burke. He remembers the desert all too well. The smell, the stink, the howls. It is real. All of it. None of what Burke said is true. This is no Hell. He is not Burke. This is something else. He is something else.

  “Bullshit,” he says. “The dead lie even more often than the living. You only tell enough truth to keep yourselves from being predictable liars. I’m not Burke. I never was. Nice try.”

  Burke raises his hands a little higher in the air, smirking. “I had to try. You gotta give me that.”

  The Superintendent pulls the trigger.

  Burke’s back explodes, showering thick black hellspit over the walls and door. He slumps slowly to the ground, bleeding out.

  The Superintendent advances slowly, gun at the ready to fire again. Burke clutches his wound, his smile eroding quickly.

  “Fuck you,” says Burke, tears welling in his eyes, a bit of black spittle spraying out with every F. “Fffffuck you.” He coughs. “You don’t know what Hell is like.”

  “No. But I have an idea. And I know you have it coming.”

  Burke raises his hand from the wound, sees his own rancid ichor clinging to it. “Why’d you go?”

  “Why’d I go where?”

  “To war, asshole. I know why I went. But you. What? Did you think you’d find the courage to fight your boogeymen or some shit? Is that what it was?”

  The Superintendent nods. “That’s exactly what it was.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “Not there.” He pulls the trigger, sending Burke back to where he belongs.

  He breathes a sigh of relief, says a silent prayer for the part he liked of his friend, then stares at the black oak door. He stares long and hard, thinking about what to do next, thinking about Burke.

  Then the Superintendent rears back, kicks the door in with a single vicious blow, firing wantonly. He doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t fear what might be waiting. This is what he has to do, and it is best just to get it over with. It is going to be a long day . . . or night—he isn’t sure which. But he has two more doors to kick in after this, two more souls that need purging.

  And sometimes the old methods work best.

  The Superintendent’s Quarters

  He eats. He hates every moment of it, but he eats.

  The bodies are stacked awkwardly in an awful pile, one atop another, flesh and oozing black spilling across the hardwood floor, maggots wriggling out of their wounds. The corpses gaze out, eyes lifeless, seemingly begging for mercy. For freedom. But there’s no life left in them. Only sin. Disgusting, filthy, rotten, sour sin.

  The Superintendent sits at the table, fork in one hand, carving knife in the other, slicing pieces of them off and jabbing them angrily into his mouth. He chews, his teeth grinding against fatty tissue, the taste getting worse with every bite.

  He’s lost track of how many times he’s thrown up, stopped bothering trying to make it to the bathroom. Black, fleshy vomit covers the floor beneath his feet, dribbles down his chin and onto his suit. There’s almost no gray left to the suit at all—just black. Blood and puke covering almost every square inch of him.

  He chews. He tastes the sin. Remembers the details. Sees the horrors. And he grows sicker every passing minute.

  He thinks that maybe, if he had more time, he could eat them one by one, taking the time to regain his strength and see out his term as superintendent. Take the time to digest all that sin and seek penance for it. But that ship has sailed. He had that chance. It’s exactly what the Landlord offered. And he had to go and fuck the whole thing up.

  It is on him now. All his fault. Every bite is killing him. Damning it. All the color draining from flesh. There is no other way around it.

  In the corner he can hear it. Scuttling, scurrying, waiting for the right moment to pounce, its pallid skin catching hints of the light, even as deep as it is in the shadow. The Superintendent just waves his knife at it.

  “I’m not done yet. You can’t have me until I’m done.”

  The thing waits. The Superintendent is doomed. It knows it. He knows it.

  So the Superintendent keeps eating, slicing his way through body after body, doing the job he was hired to do. Whether he likes it or not; whether he understands it or not; whether it means anything to anyone else or not. That’s not the point. These things can’t come back. Not again. That’s all that matters now.

  And as he takes his last few bites—hours, days, maybe even weeks after he started—his body failing, eyes bloodshot, arm so weak it can barely lift the fork, he waves his knife at the thing in the corner, the thing waiting for him. He knows what’s next. What’s coming for him.

  He waves at the thing, waving it over, whispering, “All right. It’s your turn. Do what you’ve got to do.”

  He doesn’t scream. Doesn’t whimper. Not even a little. There just doesn’t seem much point to it anymore.

  The Landlord

  The oak door swings open and the Landlord slides the key out of the lock. He offers a carnival barker’s arm to the room, presenting its space and grandeur to a nervous young man. The young man looks around carefully, taking it all in, unsure what to make of it. The hardwood floors have been recently cleaned, but the walls are still stained from years of smoke.

  “So that’s it, then?” asks the new superintendent.

  “I’d hardly say ‘that’s it’ about the job,” says the Landlord. “It’s a hard job. An important one. Not a lot of people can do what you do. Most of them, well, they can’t serve out their term.”

  “They leave?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “But if I stay? And fulfill the terms of the deal, I mean.”

  “Then we’ll fulfill our end as well.”

  “A bed with a roof over it. Three meals a day.”

  “For the rest of your life.”

  “And the voices. The . . . things.”

  “The doctors will have pills for that.”

  “One year. That’s it?” asks the new superintendent.

  “One year. That’s it,” says the Landlord.

  “I’m in. Sign me up.” He puts out a firm hand.

  The Landlord shakes his hand, nodding, mood darkening for a moment as he hands over the jangling ring of keys.

  The Soul Thief’s Son

  Author’s note: The following Colby Stevens story both begins a few weeks after the events at the end of Queen of the Dark Things and takes place in the weeks after Colby and Mandu left Kaycee with the Kutji. A glossary follows for those new to Colby’s adventures or for those in need of a refresher.

  Deaths as a Means Rather Than an End

  An excerpt by Dr. Thaddeus Ray, Ph.D., from his book Dreamspeaking, Dreamwalking, and Dreamtime: The World on the Other Side of Down Under

  I died once, as a child. I wouldn’t recommend it.

  I had been left by my guardian to learn the ways of the dreamspeakers and Clever Men of the Outback, and had already spent some time with the man who would be my principal teacher. We’d just lost a friend to the denizens of dreamtime, and the wounds from her loss were still fresh in my mind.

  The events that would follow would lead me to making a terrible mistake, and as with many neophytes first trafficking with spirits, I followed that with an even bigger one in hopes of correcting it. I died so that someone else might live, and neither of us got what we wanted, though both of us, I feel, got exactly what we deserved.

  The takeaway is this. The other side is a dark, treacherous place that our souls spend their entire lives trying to both find and understand well enough to navigate. I wasn’t ready, and odds are good that neither are you. Death should always be a last resort in spirit trafficking, and even then, it should be avoided. Sometimes it is better to accept the consequences of a mistake than to try to fix it on the other side.

  1

  Now

  Colby Stevens stormed up the path toward Mandu’s old house only to see Mandu’s successor, Jirra, sitting with a beer, shirtless, sunning his dark Aboriginal
skin on the front porch. Jirra waved, shaking his head with a shit-eating grin on his face.

  “Jirra,” said Colby bitterly, “we have business.”

  “Too right,” said Jirra. “Was there nothing that deadly old bastard wasn’t right about?”

  Colby looked at him coldly, brushing off his friendliness. “You lied to me.”

  “’Bout what?”

  “About Mandu.”

  “No I didn’t,” said Jirra.

  “You told me it was his time. When I asked how he died, you said it was his time. But he was murdered.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Don’t play with me,” said Colby. “We both traffic in powerful spirits.”

  “Too right. I reckon we do.”

  “So stop playing games.”

  Jirra nodded knowingly. “Both are true. Mandu was ready to go and he was murdered.”

  “So why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “I was honoring the wish of an old friend. And teacher.”

  Colby narrowed his eyes in disbelief. “Mandu Merijedi told you to lie about how he died?”

  “To you, yes. But only to you.”

  “Why?”

  “He said for you to learn what you needed to learn, you had to leave here without hate in your heart. Undistracted. He said you would need the hate for later, but first you were required to get a ring. Did you get the ring?”

  Colby looked down at the Ring of Solomon on the ring finger of his right hand. “So all of this? He saw all of this?”

  Jirra nodded. “And half a dozen other things affecting the lives of this village. He was . . . he was a true dreamhero. We just didn’t know how great a one until he was gone. The ripples of his adventures will affect the waters of my people for a very long time. I’m beginning to doubt that even I’ll live to see out all of his prophecies.”

  “How did it happen?” asked Colby, his eyes both serious and sad.