Sean didn’t know what was happening, that much was clear. His eyes were completely white, his arms slack. Even when the closest child reached for his hand, Sean seemed oblivious. If anything, he almost seemed to grab it. At the same time, Carson went to his other side, and he too squeezed Sean’s hand.
“No!” Robert again tried to pull away, but now there wasn’t just one person holding him, but three.
“Robert, it has started. You can’t stop it now.”
It was a gravelly voice, the voice of the Cloak. He didn’t turn to look at him.
Instead, his eyes were locked on the scene before him, reminiscent of his time at Seaforth.
“Yes! Yes!” Carson screamed. “It’s happening! Daddy’s coming home!”
Sean’s body seemed to stretch like warm taffy, and the clouds above started to swirl again. In a matter of moments, the ceiling was gone, disappeared, and the clouds were back. Lightning illuminated the sky like Fourth of July fireworks.
And then, amidst the sound of children’s laughter, Sean started to be pulled apart.
Light shot out of his ancient eyes, mouth, and nose.
But the largest beacon was from his chest, which spread wide.
Robert knew what was coming next. Carson had found his Guardian, and unlike at Seaforth when he had bound Father Callahan to the dead woman and his own living body, this time was different.
This time he had bound a Guardian to the dead, to quiddity of dead Guardians, and to himself, Carson, who was also a Guardian.
The rift opened much quicker than it had at Seaforth. Without the child, it couldn’t be kept open, the two worlds would still remain separate, but Robert knew there was something different about this time. This time it might just remain open long enough for someone, or something, to come through.
And he wanted that one person to be Amy, needed it to be her.
He saw the waves inside the beach-ball-sized hole in Sean’s chest first, and then he screamed when he saw the hat.
In addition to Leland, there were others on the shore, one of whom he recognized immediately.
“Amy!” he screamed, thrashing against the arms that held him with all their might. “Amy! Come out! Come through! Come back to me!”
There were two others on the beach: one was a guard from the prison and the other was Allan Knox. Robert stretched his hand out, tears streaming down his face.
“Come! Amy! Amy!”
Two hands gripped the sides of Sean’s ribcage, but they weren’t the small, delicate hands of an eight-year-old girl. They weren’t Amy’s hands.
They were weathered.
And then a wide-brimmed black hat peeked through.
“Robert, please! We have to go! I know a way out! Please, Robert! Come with us!”
Before he could respond, Leland pulled himself out of Sean’s chest, and into the world of the living.
At first, Robert saw a massive, winged beast covered in thick, leathery scales, talons that reached high, nearly to the ceiling that no longer existed. A forked tongue, feet like hooves.
But then the beast shuddered and shrunk back into a human form. Slowly, almost mechanically, Leland raised his gaze.
And once again, it was Robert’s face that he saw staring back at him.
Only his reflection was smiling, while Robert was weeping, crying for his daughter miles below in a land that he could never reach.
Epilogue
THIRTY-ONE YEARS AGO
“Sean! Grab the boys! Grab them!”
Sean didn’t need any clarification as to who of the nineteen children the woman was speaking of.
She wanted him to grab her boys.
Sean didn’t hesitate. He ran into the room, encouraging all of the children to get up as he passed them.
“Get up! Come on, kids! We have to move, now!” Sean didn’t know what he had to say to get them moving, but his current approach didn’t seem to be working; the children seemed rooted in place.
There’s no time for this.
“Robert! Get up!”
Sean knew that, unlike his brother, Robert hated to be singled out, and as predicted the boy’s head was down when he got to his feet and didn’t even see him.
“Come with me! Everyone follow me!” the woman cried from the door.
When Robert started to head in her direction, Sean grabbed him by the collar. Then he grabbed his brother with his other hand.
“No, not that way,” Sean whispered. “We’re going this way.”
Robert finally raised his head to look at Sean. His eyes were wide, and he struggled against his grip on his shirt in silent protest.
“What about Mom?”
Sean turned his head to look at the woman. Chloe Black had initially been opposed to the idea of collecting all of the future Guardians in one central location, for fear that their concentrated meditations would alert Leland to their position. But she had eventually acquiesced, as it was the only thing that made logistical sense to Sean; at the rate that the other Guardians were being hunted down and killed, they didn’t have much time—they needed to train the children as quickly as possible. But now, seeing Chloe standing by the doorway with her arms outstretched, sheltering them like some sort of mother hen, he knew that she had been right all along.
His plan had been too hurried, too risky.
Too dangerous.
They locked eyes for a moment, and he saw a deep sadness in those hazel pools.
He knew what she wanted him to do, and while Sean had planned for the possibility of Leland finding them, he had never expected it to happen. And her look told him it was time to enact the plan.
A plan that didn’t involve Chloe. They both knew that this was probably the last time that she would ever see her boys alive.
A quick nod from the woman, and Sean turned, pulling her boys with him. While the other children went out the door that Sean had burst through, they went the other way.
At the back of the classroom was a utility closet, and Sean flung the door open and guided the boys inside. A glance over his shoulder revealed that the others had already fled the classroom. He hoped that they made it, that they escaped, but deep down he had his reservations.
Leland was a—
“Stop,” he scolded himself. Robert looked up at him as he spoke, but Sean shook his head. “No, not you,” he muttered.
The room was small for the three of them, and it was filled with supplies that looked to be straight out of an antique movie set. But the ladder was there where he had left it.
Wrapping his hands around the worn wood, he moved it to the center of the room. Testing it with his hands, hopeful that it would hold, he turned his gaze upward.
“Go on, Robert. You first.”
“Go up?”
Sean nodded and pointed at the air vent in the center of the ceiling. Now it was Robert’s turn to nod. Then the boy, as obedient as he was, started up the ladder, while Sean held the sides as it trembled under his weight.
Robert slid the vent cover to one side, just as Sean had instructed. The boy looked down at him then, and Sean felt what little patience he had left wane.
They were running low on time.
“Go, Robert! Just go!”
Robert frowned, then disappeared into the vent.
Sean turned to Carson next.
“Your turn,” he said.
But unlike Robert, Carson was more inquisitive, less apt to simply follow directions without so much as an explanation. In fact, the only thing that he seemed to share with his brother was the same sad expression.
“Who are we running from?”
There was a high-pitched scream from somewhere in the hallway and Sean gritted his teeth.
“Hurry, Carson! Just climb!”
The boy hesitated, and for a brief, terrifying moment, Sean pictured him unwilling to move. And then he pictured him having to knock him out and carry his body up the ladder. To his surprise, however, the boy stepped to action, giving him a look as
he placed a worn running shoe on the first rung, then the second.
Later, you will tell me everything later, the look said, which was fine by Sean.
If there was a later.
As the boy disappeared after his brother, Sean gave one final look at the classroom, and came to the sinking realization that Chloe had been right all along; it had been a mistake coming here. And whatever happened to those kids…that was on him.
Swallowing hard, he made his way up the teetering ladder and then squeezed himself into the duct.
It was dark and smelled of earth inside the aluminum tunnel, what with the ventilation system not having been used for at least a decade.
Or maybe two.
One of the first things that Sean had done when scouting this place had been to look for passages such as this one, to design escape routes, if needed.
There was only one: this one. This vent, for whatever reason, was just large enough for a full-grown man such as himself to squeeze through.
Which was what he did now.
“Keep moving forward,” he instructed as loudly as he dared. “Move on your stomach…move as quietly as you can. In about fifty feet, you should see a hole going down. Stop in front of it and wait for me. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” a meek voice replied. He didn’t know which of the brothers it was who answered, but he didn’t care, either.
“Then go,” Sean encouraged.
Like some sort of human centipede, the three of them started to shuffle forward, their movements stirring up enough dirt and dust to coat the inside of Sean’s throat.
Sean had only gone about fifteen feet when the real screaming started.
The sounds were muted in the ventilation system, and they had acquired a metallic-like quality to them, but they were still horrible.
There were few things in this world worse than a child’s screams, and there was nothing worse than seventeen of them wailing all at once.
And they seemed to be coming from directly below them.
Sean bumped into Carson’s feet, who had stopped moving. Heart racing, he gave the boy’s sneaker a shove.
“Keep moving! We have to keep moving!” he hissed.
Words drifted up to him, breaking the monotony of the screams.
“Don’t do this! Leland, don’t you do this…these kids have done nothing. It’s me you want. Take me, but let them go.”
Sean heard Leland laugh.
“Let them go? Why would I let them go? Isn’t their ultimate goal in life to sacrifice themselves? Isn’t that what you’re trying to teach them, anyway? To get them to believe that their uniqueness, their self, means nothing? That they should just give up who they are? Well, then, I’m just helping them on their way!”
“Leland! No!!!”
Even in the duct, Sean heard the undeniable sound of a blade slicing through fabric and the skin beneath.
A single tear made a track down Sean’s dirt-smeared face.
He swore under his breath and shoved Carson’s shoe again, but the boy resisted.
“Go!” he sobbed. “We. Have. To. Keep. Moving.”
Carson looked back at him, his eyes the only thing visible in the near blackness of the massive air vent.
“It’s Robert, he stopped.”
Sean ground his teeth in frustration, and was going to call out to the boy when Leland’s voice filtered up at him again.
“Where are my boys? You can’t keep them from me!”
“You will never find them, Leland. Never. You mark my—”
Chloe’s words were cut short, punctuated by her own scream.
Then another.
And another.
“You gonna tell me where my boys are now? No?”
Another scream, this one followed by the sound of something wet sluicing onto the hard orphanage floor. Sean, fully crying now, wanted more than anything to be down there, to help her, to take out Leland.
But he had a job to do, a job whose singular focus was to protect these two boys.
He wouldn’t let Chloe die in vain. It was the least he could do.
Sean grunted and started to crawl again, driving Carson forward with his weight. It made much more noise than he would have liked, but at least they had started to inch forward again.
Breathing heavily, the screams from below, as horrible as they were, thankfully masked what must have sounded like a toolbox bolus making its way through the intestines of an iron giant.
And then, when he arrived at the spot where Robert had stopped, he realized with horror why the boy had ceased crawling.
There was a grate on the floor of the vent, a window into the hallway below. And the scene it revealed was one of pure carnage.
All seventeen children were lying on the ground, their bodies twisted into some facsimile of the fetal position.
Their eyes were mostly open, as were their mouths. And they all lay in pools of their own blood.
And then there was Chloe, lying on her side, staring directly up at him.
Her face had been flayed like a country roast, her glistening flesh pulled down in strips like a carnivore cheese-string.
And Robert had seen all of this—his own mother, for Christ’s sake. Even Sean, hardened as he was, felt his stomach lurch at the sight.
Staring down at Chloe’s mangled face, he mouthed the words, I promise, and then he pushed onward.
***
The opening in the duct led to a furnace room, and Sean somehow managed to squeeze by the two boys and then descend into the depths. From there, he was able to help them down next.
He couldn’t look them in the eyes anymore, particularly Robert, knowing what he had seen. Instead, he glanced about the room. The single lone bulb above them, paltry as it was, was so much brighter than the interior of the vent that he took a moment to orient himself.
There.
Sean moved to the far wall, conscious that he must hurry, that at any moment Leland could burst into the small eight-by-eight-foot furnace room and do to them as he had done to the others.
There was a large air filter resting against the wall, and he pulled it away, revealing a crudely carved out opening in the wall. Taking his lighter from his pocket, he held it into the opening, revealing a dirt tunnel that extended into darkness.
Only then did he turn back to the boys.
“Through here. I want you to go through here and run as fast as you can.”
Robert’s face was a shade of white that Sean had never seen on a living being before. For the second time in less than an hour, he thought he was going to have to brain one of the Black brothers and carry them with him. But the boy, as in shock as he was, did as he was ordered, cautiously entering the tunnel before breaking into a run. Carson followed quickly after Robert, giving Sean the same look as he had back in the storage room in the back of the classroom.
One day you are going to tell me everything.
And then Sean hurried after them.
He had gone maybe forty yards when he heard heavy breathing from behind him, and he whipped around. His hands groped for Robert and Carson behind him in an attempt to make sure that he protected them.
It’s that bastard Leland, he somehow found us…after killing all the other kids, now he is coming for them.
But they had obeyed his instructions and had continued to run and his hands found air.
“Lela—” But he stopped speaking when he realized that it wasn’t Leland.
It couldn’t be Leland; the silhouette was too small to be Leland.
Sean pulled his lighter out again and flicked it on.
A little girl with big green eyes and blonde hair shielded her face from the light.
“What are you doing here?” he hissed, the words coming out more angrily than he had expected.
She shrugged, and wiped tears from her face.
“I followed you,” she whimpered. “I saw…I saw…”
Sean held up a hand, stopping her mid-sentence as he mulled his op
tions. Taking the girl with them would slow them down, reduce the chances of any of them getting out of here alive.
And as much as he felt for this little orphan girl, he had made a promise to Chloe—a promise to keep her sons safe, no matter what.
And it was a promise he intended on keeping.
Sean reached out and the girl recoiled. Frustrated, he stepped forward again and grabbed her by the collar.
“I’m sorry, Shelly,” he said softly. Tears unexpectedly burst from her eyes. “I’m sorry that you had to see that,” he sobbed, “no one should have seen that.”
He pulled her on the other side of him, deeper in the tunnel, into the boys’ wake.
He was going to keep his promise to Chloe; he would keep the boys alive. But he wasn’t going to sacrifice this innocent girl in the process.
There had been enough death at Sacred Heart this day to last a lifetime.
As they moved deeper into the tunnel, the air got thinner, their breathing more laborious, and he started to think hard about where they were going to go should he manage to get out of here alive.
He had heard of a church, of a man who helped keep strays, with no questions asked. Somewhere far away.
A priest, one with a penchant for helping those in need.
He would go there, Sean decided at long last.
And when Robert and Carson Black were finally safe, he would be the one to do the tracking.
Leland would pay; the man was going to pay for what he had done here.
That was another promise that Sean Sommers was determined to keep.
END
Author’s Note
The Haunted Series keeps growing in terms of its scope and the number of characters involved. I hope you enjoy the fact that I have brought in several characters from my Family Values Trilogy, and if you did, then you’ll be happy to know that there just might be some guest appearances from my other series’ as well.
Sacred Heart Orphanage is the penultimate book in Season 1 of the Haunted Series. The next book, tentatively titled ‘The Marrow’ will be the Season Finale. This is by no means the end of the series, but represents an end to Robert’s journey from an accountant to a Guardian responsible for the fate of the world. Season 2 will focus on the results of his decisions, both good and bad, and the way they shaped the world.
Sacred Heart Orphanage (The Haunted Book 5) Page 18