Shadow Land

by Adam J. Wright

  “Mr. Harbinger, it’s Dr. Campbell at Butterfly Heights Hospital.” There was a touch of anxiety in his voice, just enough to let me know he hadn’t wanted to make this call but had been forced to for some reason.

  “How can I help you?” I asked him.

  “Well, it seems your visit today had quite an impact on James Elliot. He’s managed to lock himself in one of the storerooms and he’s refusing to come out unless he can speak with you.”

  “On the phone?”

  “In person.”

  “Okay, I can be there in half an hour.”

  There was a pause, and then he said, “I thought you would be on your way back to Dearmont.”

  “I’m in Greenville at the moment.”

  Another pause and then, “All right, let’s see if we can resolve this situation quickly. Then we can all get back to how things were before you arrived at Butterfly Heights.”

  “Half an hour,” I said, ending the call.

  When I got back to the cabin, there were fires blazing in the fireplace and the wood stove. The slightly sweet smell of burning birch wood hung in the air.

  Felicity appeared from the kitchen, saw the pizza boxes in my hands and grabbed them, sliding them onto the dining table. “They smell amazing!”

  “Yeah, but we don’t have much time to eat them. We need to go back to Butterfly Heights.”

  “Back to Butterfly Heights?”

  “Dr. Campbell called me. James has locked himself in a room up there and won’t come out until he can speak to me.”

  “Oh no, I hope he’s all right.”

  “Me too. I guess we’ll know when we get there.”

  “The pizza can wait.”

  “I was thinking the same thing. We can grab a slice for the road and eat the rest later.”

  We wolfed down a slice each on the way out of the cabin and climbed into the Land Rover.

  10

  Dr. Campbell led us along a corridor past the day room to an unmarked door. Two security guards were leaning against the wall, looking bored.

  “James,” Campbell called through the door, “Mr. Harbinger is here as you requested. So you can come out now. Everything is going to be okay.”

  “Mr. Harbinger?” James called. “Are you really there?”

  “I’m here, James. And call me Alec. What’s the problem? Why have you locked yourself in there?”

  “They wouldn’t let me call you. After you left, I saw you on TV. You were helping a woman whose son was attacked by a monster, because that’s what you do, right? That’s your job?”

  “That’s right. I’m a P.I. A preternatural investigator. I help people who are in trouble.”

  “I told them I wanted to call you but they wouldn’t let me.”

  “We can’t let our residential patients call just anyone,” Campbell said to me in a low voice.

  I turned my attention back to the door. “What do you want to talk about, James?”

  “I want to hire you. I need your help.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  He didn’t say anything but slid a piece of paper under the door. I bent down and picked it up. It was neatly folded in half. When I unfolded it, I saw a charcoal drawing of a dark, menacing figure holding a meat hook. The face was a simple black oval with no features at all.

  “I want you to kill him,” James said through the door. There was a pause and then he added, “He makes me see things I don’t want to see.”

  “James,” I said, “you don’t have to hire me to kill him. I’m already looking for him. He hurt someone I care about.”

  “You mean Mallory,” James said matter-of-factly.

  That took me by surprise. “Yes, Mallory. Do you know her?”

  “He doesn’t know her personally,” Campbell whispered to me. “He knows the details of all the Mister Scary murders, the names of the victims and the survivors.”

  “Mister Scary doesn’t like Mallory,” James said. “He doesn’t like her at all. I’ve seen her in the shadow place too.”

  “She’s in the shadow place?” Could that explain why I hadn’t been able to contact her or was this just part of a fantasy James had created? I had no way of knowing but based on the fact that James seemed to be able to see things that happened in Shadow Land, I couldn’t afford to ignore this new information.

  “Please tell me you aren’t buying in to this,” Campbell said. He sighed and shook his head. “Bringing you here was obviously a mistake. I thought we could get James out of there without the use of force and maybe learn something that would aid in his treatment but you’re just fueling his delusional state.”

  He turned to the guards. “Break down the door.”

  “I’ll get the battering ram,” one of them said, pushing away from the wall and sauntering away.

  “James,” I said, “you should come out. They’re going to break the door down. I promise I’ll help you if I can.”

  Silence.

  “James?”

  “He does this sometimes,” Campbell said. “He’ll probably sink into a depression and stay quiet for a few days.”

  “Is there anything in there he could use to hurt himself?”

  He shook his head. “No, it’s an old storeroom. We haven’t used it for years. That’s how he was able to get the key unnoticed. No one even knew it was missing. He’s probably had it for a while, waiting for the right time to use it.”

  The guard returned with a metal battering ram. “Stand back,” he said. He swung the ram at the door and the wood splintered but the door remained closed. “These old doors are tough,” the guard remarked. He swung the ram again. This time, the lock broke and the door flew open.

  The room was in darkness. By the light spilling in from the corridor, I could see shapes beneath sheets, shelves running along the walls. The dry smell of dust was almost choking.

  The guards rushed in and I heard James shout out as they grabbed him. They dragged him out of the room and into the corridor by his arms. His eyes were wild and scared. “Kill him!” he shouted at me. “I don’t want to see those things anymore!”

  “What things?” I asked, stepping forward. “What does he show you? And what do you know about Mallory?”

  “That’s enough, Mr. Harbinger,” Campbell said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Entertaining James’s delusions isn’t helping anyone, certainly not him.”

  I shrugged his hand away. I wanted to say more to James but the guards had roughhoused him through a door and locked it behind them.

  “It’s time you left,” Campbell said. “Bringing you here was a mistake.”

  “We’re leaving,” I told him, “but you need to listen to me first. What James is experiencing is more than just a delusion. You’re treating him as if everything he tells you is a fantasy or a repressed childhood memory but there’s more to it than that. You need to consider other possibilities.”

  Campbell sneered. “What—that he’s telling the truth? That he travels to a shadow world where a serial killer resides? He guessed correctly when he thought he’d found an ally in you. But you have to believe every monster tale that comes through your office door, I suppose. It’s all in a day’s work for you.”

  I didn’t bother to reply. I turned and stalked back to the exit.

  When we were back inside the Land Rover, the rain drumming on the roof, Felicity studied the picture James had given me.

  “We’ll never get a positive ID from that,” I said, pointing at the black oval James had drawn instead of a face.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” she said. “The face may be missing but there’s something else here that confirms my theory about Butterfly Heights.”

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  “The hook.”

  “The hook?”

  She nodded. “I need to check a couple of things on my laptop so I can be certain but I think I know what Butterfly Heights used to be called and what happened there. It may also explain what’s happening to James.�
��

  I started the engine. “Okay, let’s see if you’re right.”

  During the journey back to the cabin, the picture of Mister Scary lay in Felicity’s lap, the featureless face staring up at me.

  I wondered if we were finally going to catch the murdering son of a bitch.

  11

  The evening was getting gloomy when got back to Pine Hideaway. I threw a fresh log on the fire and opened a couple of beers while Felicity sprawled out on the rug in front of the fire and opened her laptop and began punching the keys.

  I brought the pizzas over to the coffee table and ate and drank in silence, giving Felicity space to do her thing.

  “I knew it,” she said after five minutes. She sat up and grabbed a slice of pizza, eating it while she made notes on a notepad.

  I took a sip of beer, intrigued, but knowing I had to be patient. Felicity would tell me what she’d found once she’d organized her thoughts and was ready to reveal her discovery.

  “Butterfly Heights,” she said after taking a sip of beer, “was originally the Pinewood Heights Asylum. Built in 1894 and operational until 1942, when it was closed down due to one of the patients murdering nine members of staff. The building was neglected for seventeen years until it reopened as Butterfly Heights in 1959.”

  She placed her laptop on the coffee table and turned it so I could see the screen. It showed a grainy black and white photo of a handcuffed man being led into a courthouse by police officers.

  “This photograph was taken in 1929. It shows a man named Henry Fields. He was found guilty of the murder of nineteen teenagers between 1925 and 1928. He killed them with a meat hook and earned the nickname Henry the Hook. You know the urban legend of The Hook or The Hookman?”

  “The one where two kids are making out in a car and they hear about an escaped convict on the loose and he has a hook instead of a hand? And when they drive home, they find a hook hanging from the car door?”

  Felicity nodded. “Yes, that one. Some people believe that parts of that urban legend are based on Henry Fields.” She put James’s drawing of Mister Scary next to the laptop and pointed at the hook in his hand. “This is the person James sees in his dreams, the person he fears in the Shadow Land. It’s Henry Fields.”

  I finished my beer and set the bottle down next to the pizza boxes. “But there’s no face in the picture.”

  “There doesn’t have to be. There’s a connection between Henry Fields and James Elliot, and the connection is Butterfly Heights. In 1929, Fields was deemed insane and was sent to the Pinewood Heights Asylum.”

  “And James is there now and he’s haunted by this.” I pointed at the drawing. “A man with a hook.”

  “I think haunted is the proper word,” Felicity said. “I don’t think James is dreaming all of this, like Dr. Campbell believes. He’s literally being haunted by Henry the Hook.”

  I pointed at the photo of Fields. “Did he die in the building?”

  “Yes, he’s the patient who murdered nine members of staff. When the police arrived, they discovered that after murdering the staff members, Fields hanged himself in the director’s office. He’d carved occult symbols into his body and into the bodies of his nine victims.”

  “Which is what Mister Scary does.”

  Felicity nodded and took a sip of her beer.

  “Okay,” I said, “so what do we think Henry Fields is? A ghost? A demon?”

  “I think it’s much more complicated than that. It sounds like he performed some sort of ritual when he died. He’s probably still alive, perhaps somewhere in the Shadow Land.”

  “There’s probably a shadow version of Butterfly Heights,” I said. “He’s probably there. But how do we get there? The last time I was in the Shadow Land, Leon and I traveled there from Faerie.”

  “But you said Mister Scary used mirrors as portals to this world. Couldn’t they also be used to travel from here to the Shadow Land?”

  “Yeah, I think that’s how he moves between different rooms of the houses when he’s carrying out his murders. He goes back and forth between the real and shadow versions of the house he’s in.”

  “If he can do it, so can we,” she suggested.

  I thought about it for a moment. It made sense but there were a couple of drawbacks. “We don’t know how to open the portal. Leon and I cut our hands and placed them on the mirror in the shadow version of Blackthorn House but I think it only worked because the portal was already activated and had been used before. We have no idea how to activate a new portal.”

  I opened another beer. “And we’d have to use a mirror in Butterfly Heights. I have a feeling Dr. Campbell won’t let us anywhere near the place now.”

  “The Blackwell sisters might know something about activating a portal to the Shadow Land,” Felicity said. “And if we can break into Butterfly Heights without anyone knowing, we can use a mirror there.”

  “It would be risky. There’s a lot of security.”

  “I’m sure we can come up with a plan.”

  I laughed. “You’re very gung-ho about breaking the law. This isn’t like you at all.”

  She shrugged. “This could be a real chance to catch Mister Scary. Think of how many lives we could save. Besides, it isn’t like we’re going to steal anything. We’re just going to use a mirror for a while and then leave. No one will even know we were ever there.”

  “You make it sound so simple,” I said.

  “It is.” She finished her beer. “I’ll ring the Blackwell sisters and you work out a plan to get us inside.” She got up and went to the kitchen. A couple of seconds later, I heard her speaking to Victoria Blackwell on her phone.

  I mentally ran through a list of magical items I owned that could help us break into Butterfly Heights. There were some that could get us inside using force but smashing our way into the building would only get us arrested. We needed to ghost in and out of there undetected.

  What we needed was a teleportation device but I didn’t have anything like that. The last time I’d teleported anywhere was when the Blackwell sisters had sent me to a stone circle in England via an ancient spell. Unfortunately, their spell could only transport people to and from places of worship so it wasn’t going to get us inside a mental facility.

  Or was it? I went into the kitchen where Felicity was still talking and waited for her to pause. When she did, I said, “Ask Victoria if their teleportation spell would work with a chapel inside a hospital.”

  Felicity listened to Victoria for a moment and then said, “Yes, it would.” Understanding dawned on her face and she said into the phone, “If there’s a chapel inside Butterfly Heights, would you be able to get us in there?” She gave me the thumbs-up.

  It stood to reason that Butterfly Heights had some sort of chapel within the building like most hospitals. If the Blackwell sisters could get us in there, Felicity and I could find a mirror and open a portal to the shadow version of the building.

  I wandered back into the living room, thinking about the security I’d seen at Butterfly Heights. There were cameras inside and out so we wouldn’t be able to move freely within the building unless we disabled them somehow. Another problem would be the digital locks on the doors but I was sure I had an item that would take care of those.

  Felicity came into the living room. “Victoria said there’s no problem getting us into a chapel inside the building but she’s not sure how to activate a portal so they’re going to look into it.”

  “Great. So we should be able to get inside just so long as the building has a chapel.”

  “I’m sure it has, considering it was built in the late nineteenth century.” She threw another log on the fire, sat on the floor, leaning her back against the sofa, and opened a beer. “What’s our next step regarding the Sammy Martin case?”

  “I guess we should try to speak to local law enforcement, see if they’ll tell us anything about Ryan’s disappearance that Dr. Campbell may have neglected to mention. I’d also like to speak with th
e security team that followed Ryan to the storm drain that night.”

  “If that team includes Steve from reception, I don’t think you’ll get very far. He isn’t very friendly.”

  “True, and I expect the police to be just as unfriendly. I assume there’s a police department here somewhere so the officers who attended the scene would be based there.”

  “Yes,” she said. “We’re in Piscataquis County and the county sheriff’s department is based south of here in a town called Dover-Foxcroft but there’s a local police station here in Greenville.”

  I grinned. “You know everything, don’t you?”

  “No, not everything,” she said, taking a swig of beer. “When you said we were coming to Moosehead Lake, I researched the area for anything that might help us with the case, such as the hierarchy of the local police. It’s my job to know things.”

  “I couldn’t work this case without you,” I told her. “And tomorrow, when the Greenville police kick me out on my ass, I’ll be relying on you to come up with a new plan to solve the case.”

  She laughed. “You don’t know that they’ll kick you out.”

  “Like I told you earlier, the police hate P.I.s. It’s an occupational hazard. Well, it is for me, anyway.”

  “And as I told you earlier, not everyone hates you. I don’t think even Sheriff Cantrell hates you, really. He just has some issues to work out regarding the death of his wife and his hatred of anything that could even be remotely called paranormal.”

  “I wonder how he is.”

  “Did you ring Amy?”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  I sighed. “She told me to go to hell.”

  “Oh, that’s a bit worrying.”

  “That she told me to go to hell?”

  “No, that she’s not keeping an eye on her father. We have no idea what Excalibur did to him. I hope he’s all right.”

  “Look,” I said, “Amy may have hung up on me but I’m sure she took what I told her seriously. She’ll be watching over her dad, I’m sure of it. And I’m also sure that if anything weird happens, I’m the first person she’ll call, even if it’s just to bawl me out.”