The Midnight Ground

by Eric Dontigney

  “Well, now what?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I leave town. Try to get Paul to take Abby and go. It’s the only thing that will even kind of protect her at this point.”

  “What if he won’t leave?”

  I turned my head even more toward the window. “Then, Abby dies.”

  Chapter 36

  Patty didn’t say another word on the ride. I couldn’t tell if I’d disappointed her or she didn’t know what to say, but she just dropped me off at my car and drove away. I felt lousy. The sheriff was interpreting it as me leaving them in the lurch and it was hard to blame him for that. I knew it looked that way from the outside. I tried to shrug off my guilt as I drove to the cabin. Once I was there, I pretended that Lil wasn’t giving me reproachful looks as I packed my things into a little nylon bag. I tried to convince myself it didn’t bother me that a bunch of innocent people were going to bite it. I reassured myself that I couldn’t help them as I put the hard case next to the nylon bag on the bed.

  “There’s nothing I can do,” I said to Lil.

  She blinked at me, turned her back, and curled up.

  “I can’t help them,” I said to the motionless gray form.

  Lil said nothing. She didn’t look at me. I sat on the bed and did my best not to count the minutes. Several million years later, there was a knock on the door. I went over and let Helena into the cabin. She took two steps in, saw my meager belongings on the bed, and stopped. She turned to look at me.

  “What’s this?” She asked, waving a hand at the bed.

  “We need to leave.”

  “Just like that.”

  “Yes, just like that. We need to try to get Paul to take Abby the hell away from here. Even if we can’t, though, we need to leave. We can’t help them. We can’t help anyone who lives here.”

  Helena gave a derisive sniff and toss of her head. “You’re such a drama queen sometimes. I’m sure we can do something.”

  I grabbed her arm, hard, and almost screamed. “It’s Midnight Ground, Helena! We can’t stop this. We can’t beat it. We can’t even fight it. This was over before it started. And we need to go!”

  Helena’s mouth opened and closed a few times, but no sound came out. Her eyes were huge in the dim light of the cabin. We stood like that until she gave her head a firm shake.

  “You’re hurting my arm.”

  I looked down at my hand around Helena’s arm. It was shaking and the knuckles were white. I made myself let go. She took a few more steps into the cabin and rubbed at her arm. I tried to get a grip on my terror, on the overwhelming impulse to go, and forced my arm to close the door. Helena pushed her hands into her pockets and studied the floor.

  “Midnight Ground,” she said, voice flat. “How sure are you about that?”

  “I’m certain.”

  “How?”

  It was my turn to study the floor. “I went to the school.”

  “What? I thought you didn’t…” she blinked. “You chauvinistic son of a bitch. You always planned to go in there. You just didn’t want me to go in there with you.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that,” I objected.

  “Do tell,” she said, crossing her arms.

  “It was just a theory. If I was wrong, there was no point wasting your time.”

  “And if you were right?”

  “Then taking you in there would have been,” my mind flashed on the sense of wading through rotted meat, “unconscionable. It was,” I swallowed a surge of bile, “everything I could do to walk through the place. I’m not exactly the sensitive type and it was God awful. For you, it’d have been like taking a swan dive into a pit of fire.”

  “So you decided for me,” she said, the anger almost visible around her. “You didn’t have the right.”

  I met her eyes. “Maybe not, but I did have the experience to know. Have you ever been on Midnight Ground before?”

  She gave me an expression of equal parts annoyance and anger. “No.”

  “I have.”

  That caught her off guard. “What? You never told me that.”

  I shivered. “It’s not the kind of thing you want to reminisce about. Do you know Miguel Ortiz?”

  “Is he that guy in southern California? Guides people on vision quests and that sort of thing?”

  “That’s him.”

  “I’ve heard of him, but we haven’t met. Why?”

  “He taught me some stuff a while back,” I said. “He took me to a tiny patch of Midnight Ground, deep in the Mojave Desert.”

  “What possible purpose could that have served?”

  “He told me that I should know what real evil feels like, then he pushed me onto it. Made me stay on it for five minutes.”

  “That’s a harsh way to teach.”

  “The burned hand and all that. It worked. The point is that I didn’t make the decision based on nothing.”

  “I should still kick your chauvinist ass,” she said, but it wasn’t convincing. “I guess that answered my next question. You know what it is, for sure. It isn’t just a guess.”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “You’re wrong, though. It can be fought. Obviously someone fought it here.”

  I shook my head. “Fought, maybe, but they didn’t win. It was a flawed attempt from the start and the price was way too high.”

  “Price?”

  “They did a bloodline binding. Thirteen people offed themselves to seal the deal. And their descendants have been paying the price ever since. Abby’s mother isn’t the only soul in that graveyard trapped in a smoke binding. There’s got to be a couple hundred of them. Even if I thought it would work, I don’t have the stomach for mass suicide. Besides, we don’t have the volunteers.”

  Helena sat on the bed. She looked like she might be sick. “Oh my god. But if the binding worked…”

  “It didn’t work. That’s the thing. The bloodline binding did part of the job. Then there was the church on top of it. Holy ground, or as holy as a church on top of Midnight Ground can be. Together, I think it was enough to keep the evil contained. Once the town made the church into a high school…” I held my hands up.

  “They changed its function. They changed its nature. They let it out.”

  “Exactly. So long as faithful, devoted people kept going there week after week, praying, worshipping, being all religious,” I drifted off as the hamster in my head went into overdrive.

  “Are you okay?” Helena asked.

  “Yeah, I just, son of a bitch. I really hate this town.”

  “What?”

  “Cavanaugh. God-damn E.J. Cavanaugh told me what was happening.”

  “I have no idea what you’re on about.”

  “These dreams I’ve been having. I thought they were just random. Talking about mystery schools and economics. Dollars to donuts, it was E.J. Cavanaugh reaching out from his nice, safe little tomb to send a message.”

  Helena gave me a long-suffering look. “Could you at least try to make a little more sense?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ve been having these dreams. It’s always this little guy giving a lecture about mystery schools. What they are, why they fail, that sort of thing.”

  “So?”

  “So, the whole damn congregation was part of a mystery school. Everyone who originally moved here was probably part of it, or the vast majority of them. I’d bet it was at least thirteen families of devotees. People committed enough to sacrifice themselves and their loved ones in the name of the cause. I bet they came here because of the Midnight Ground.”

  Helena lifted an eyebrow. “If that’s true, what happened?”

  “The money ran out or Cavanaugh’s kid left with it. Same end result.”

  “No more money for upkeep and the church gets donated. Then, fast-forward fifty or sixty years and Abby gets a one way ticket to cancer,” finished Helena.

  “Honestly, I don’t know that the binding ever really worked. I think all it ever did
was limit what the demon could do.”

  “Demon?”

  “Demon, spirit of the ground, there’s some kind of consciousness that lives there. Demon is the easiest description.”

  “And your friends said it would take a fourth-order demon or higher to create one of those smoke bindings?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Helena sat in silence for a minute. “You’re right. There’s nothing we can do here, not by ourselves. Maybe, if we had some help.”

  She looked at me with expectation.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “I hear the stories about you. You must know someone who owes you a favor or two.”

  “For something this big? Midnight Ground? Come on, nobody in their right mind would take that on.”

  “Are you saying all the people you know are in their right minds?”

  I opened my mouth and said, “Okay, that’s a fair point. Still, I don’t know anyone crazy enough for this. Do you know anyone that would make a run at Midnight Ground?”

  She shook her head. “If anyone else had asked me that, I might have said you.”

  “Thanks, I think.”

  She gave me a pained smile. “Will getting Abby away really help?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, yeah, I think that would help some. It’ll make it harder for the demon to get at her, but it’s a stopgap, at best. Sooner or later, that damn thing will kill her. Getting her out just buys her some time. Might be enough time for her to go to college, maybe have a family. ”

  “Like her parents?”

  I didn’t meet Helena’s eyes. “Yeah.”

  Something clicked in Helena’s mind. “Oh my god. Oh no.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you see what it did by giving her cancer?”

  “It’s evil. I think we already established that. Demons do evil things to people.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about the chemo.”

  “What about the chemo?”

  “It makes you sterile. She can’t have kids of her own. Not biological children at any rate.”

  “So, she’ll adopt. Lots of people do it. What’s the big deal about biological—” I finally saw what Helena was getting at. “No kids means…”

  “No bloodline to pass the binding along,” she said. “Even if it never does another thing to her, it’s already won. It just needs to wait or move on to someone else.”

  It took me a minute to realize something. “That’s awful, and unbelievably evil, but it’s not our problem.”

  “Adrian!”

  “It’s not! I feel for her. I swear that I do, but we can’t help her with that.”

  I watched Helena grapple with that reality for about the same length of time that I did, before she bowed her head a little. It was cold, that realization, but inevitable. Doctors burned that particular bridge long before we landed on the scene.

  “Look,” I said, “we can keep debating the details, but taking Abby out of here is the one course of action open to us. It’s all we can actually do for her.”

  I saw the frustration in Helena. She was a healer and Abby was in pain. The knowledge, the certainty, that she couldn’t do anything had to eat at her. It ate at me. Even as a middling practitioner, I was still a wielder of significant forces. Wielding power is tricky business. It can make you believe that, push comes to shove, you have the ability to act. It lets you believe that you can alter circumstances to your favor. The damnable truth was that you could a lot of the time, but not always.

  Helena’s experience and knowledge dwarfed mine. It had to make it even harder for her to escape the same trap, because she’d be able to act even more often than I could. Only, there was nothing for her to do. Given some time, she might be able to improve Abby’s health, though I expected that sterility thing was permanent. In the long run, it was just as much of a stopgap as my strategy. Helena wouldn’t be fighting an illness, but the very will of something far older and more powerful and simply more terrible than any lone healer could overcome. I knew it, and so did she.

  “I don’t think your emotional blackmail strategy is going to work on Paul,” said Helena.

  “Why not?”

  “I just have an intuition about it. You might be able to make it work if you had a couple of months to apply reason and gentle pressure. Try straight-up emotional warfare and I think he’ll dig his heels in. He’s formidable, in his own way.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  I actually agreed with her assessment of his formidableness, but I was curious why she thought so.

  “For starters, he’s still alive and sane. He’s been in proximity to potent dark magic for years. It’s taken a toll, no doubt, but there’s stainless steel in that man’s soul.”

  I nodded. That sounded about right. “So what do you suggest?”

  “I think we need to come clean with him, about all of it.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I don’t think he’ll leave if he doesn’t understand the scope of the danger to Abby.”

  “Except he’ll think we’re insane. Hence my not explaining it to him already.”

  She shrugged. “Then we’ll have to convince him.”

  “How do you propose we do that?”

  “Show him something impossible to ignore.”

  “Show him magic, you mean? Just put it right out there in front of him?”

  “Yes.”

  I shook my head. “Do I need to remind you of all the reasons why that’s a terrible idea? Setting aside the whole secrecy for survival thing, he’s not a spring chicken. It could give him a heart attack or an aneurysm.”

  Helena seemed to weigh that one for a little while. “I don’t think it will. And unless you propose to kidnap Abby, I don’t see an alternative with a better chance at success.”

  I ran a hand through my hair to buy myself a second to think. “You’re going to tell him whether I agree or not, aren’t you?”

  “You really are brighter than people think you are,” she said.

  I hated exactly everything about Helena’s plan. Even if we didn’t kill Paul with pure shock, that didn’t guarantee he’d get on board. The more likely result was that he’d tell us to get out and never come back. It’s what any rational, non-magical person would do in that scenario. If he did make the leap to accepting that Helena and I could do magic, it was a much longer step to accepting curses and demons. I hated the plan because I was certain it was doomed to near-certain failure. I really hated the plan because I didn’t have anything better.

  “Damn it,” I muttered. “I guess it’ll be more convincing coming from both of us. Do you want to do the parlor tricks or should I?”

  “You’re better with special effects,” said Helena. “Most of what I do happens inside people, not out in the world.”

  “Fine, I’ll do it. Let’s go.”

  She shook her head. “It’s getting late and they’re releasing Abby in the morning. We’ll go talk to them afterwards. It’ll be easier if we don’t do this in a hospital anyway.”

  I ground my teeth in frustration. A lot of anger and even more fear were pushing me to do things as fast as possible. We needed to get clear. She was right, though. I was pretty sure the volcano of evil under the school, AKA Mount St. Atrocity, wasn’t going to blow its top in the next eighteen hours. The conversation could wait until the next day. I nodded. Helena stood, rubbed at the arm I had grabbed, and went over to the door.

  “Get some sleep,” she said. “You look like you just ran a marathon.”

  Chapter 37

  After Helena left, I sat down on the bed and contemplated sleep. I wanted to sleep. God knew, I needed the sleep, but the idea frightened me. I could protect myself from outside influence, for the most part. I was stuck dealing with whatever was already inside my head. I’d exposed myself to some of the purest, most distilled evil on the face of the damn planet earlier that day. It had played merry hell with me and my memory
of the experience was full of gaps. I didn’t doubt, not for one second, that those gaps were filled with terrors that my conscious mind repressed automatically, violently, and for my own protection.

  My subconscious either held a better opinion of my ability to withstand unbridled horror or it just wasn’t equipped to make those kinds of decisions. If I let something unspeakable past the gates, my subconscious regurgitated it into my dreams. The lesson I never learned was to avoid allowing mind-searing awfulness to get inside my head in the first place. Maybe the nightmares were a drawer-cleaning exercise for my brain, but I believed they were my subconscious punishing me for dumbass behavior.

  The idea of returning to the halls and rooms of the school in a nightmare left me in a cold sweat. My lucid dreaming skills were too rudimentary to escape a nightmare at will. I needed some activity to calm and center my mind. I looked at my packed bags. I hadn’t planned on staying another day, so I hadn’t set up any protections. That would give me something to do that demanded my full attention. I opened the hard case and removed the blessed chalk I’d used in Abby’s hospital room. The blessed chalk wasn’t a requirement. I could have used any writing implement to do what I planned to do, but chalk was easier to clean up.

  I pulled the bed away from the wall until there was enough room for me to walk a full circuit around it. Someone already tried to put me in a psychic headlock. No need to give them a second opportunity while I was asleep and even more vulnerable. I considered the best approach to defense. There were always multiple solutions to stopping magical attacks. It came down to style and preferred consequences. A better person would have thrown up a defensive ring and called it a day. I’m not a better person.

  The essential principles of magic are dirt-stupid simple. Everybody knows them already, even if they don’t realize it. There are four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Those were the building blocks of all magic. I’d heard it described other ways, or with other names, and some systems insisted there were actually five or even six elements. Spirit was a popular fifth element. Some called it divinity or holy light or about any other term you can apply to the transcendent. The sixth element, far less often spoken of and used, was darkness. I wasn’t sure where I came down on that one.