Kathy and her ragtag team made it to the recreation room on the third floor without incident. They had heard some banging around in the art therapy room, but Ernie had been quick; he’d locked the door from the outside before anything in the room knew they were there. Although they crept past the door as quietly as those echoing halls would allow, Kathy couldn’t help feeling that the things beyond the locked door could feel them. A partly mechanical appendage slapped the little glass window, and ivy-like tendrils hissed and wiggled at them from beneath the door.
In the rec room, they barricaded the double doors with what little furniture was left. One or two of the couches were missing, as were the chess and checkers tables. Gone, too, was the vending machine that had once delivered candy bars on a credit system to patients who maintained good behavior. Kathy thought there might have once been a pinball machine and an arcade game against one of the far walls, but they were both gone, as well. The thought of having to go toe to toe with a Space Invaders cabinet was so absurd and so surreal that it was both laughable and terrifying.
They set up folding chairs in a small circle—like group therapy, Henry commented—and sat down, with Toby at the head of the circle. He probably would have enjoyed holding court like that, but his face was etched with pain and he talked through gritted teeth. He grunted as he shifted forward on the chair.
“As I was saying, the best way to dispel tulpas is for their creator to deconstruct them. However, as my dear sister pointed out, we might just be beyond that point now. These tulpas have used very powerful spells to assure their place in this world. And these spells aren’t easily undone, I can assure you. Still”—he leaned back stiffly in the chair—“there are ways.”
“And you,” Holt said with equal measures of incredulity and distrust, “you know these ways?”
Toby fixed a stare on Holt that spoke of his own mistrust of police. “It was once my job to know, so yeah.”
“What do you need from us, Toby?” Ernie appeared to be genuinely interested.
That hard, black hole of a stare loosened a little on Toby’s face, and he said, “First, Henry needs to be on board with making them go away.”
The others turned to Henry. Kathy could see he looked genuinely scared. They were asking a lot. She knew that. From a psychological standpoint, what they wanted Henry to do could very well break his mind irrevocably. Kathy struggled with that, but not nearly as much as she thought she should. It made her more uncomfortable to imagine she shared even the slightest sociopathic streak with her older brother.
Henry took in the expectant faces around him and with a sigh, finally nodded. “Okay. Yeah.”
“You can’t back out no matter what they say to you,” Toby warned. “I’m serious, man. If you hesitate even for a second, they’ll know and they can take advantage of that.”
“I know,” Henry said with a defensive twitch of the shoulders. “They have to go. I know.”
“Okay,” Toby said, accepting Henry’s acquiescence. “Then we’re going to need some of the usual things. I assume you brought the usual items?”
Kathy held up her bag. “Orgonite with black tourmaline, white sage, a black candle, chalk for the triangle, and a lighter. And I figured some more exotic items might be useful—a Key of Thniaxom the Traveler and an Artifact of Iaroki, in particular.”
Toby looked impressed. “Way to think ahead, little sis. Now, we’re also going to need sleeping pills, a sharp knife or dagger—or maybe a scalpel if that’s all you can find—and that small black bag behind the loose piece of wall in my room. Anything else we may need is in there.”
“Okay, so pretend half of us in the room don’t have any idea what you two are talking about,” Holt said. “What exactly are we doing?”
“We’re going to create a way to fight back. An egregore.”
“A what now?” Ernie asked.
“A manifestation of our own collective will—a kind of tulpa, only less conscious, less aware of itself. Think of it as our creating, say, an arsenal and not a being. I’ll show you how to do it. We’re going to use the arsenal to…well, to strengthen us, for starters, and then to weaken and destabilize Maisie and her friends. Then Henry is going to wish them away, right, Henry?”
“And if that doesn’t work?” Henry asked.
“Then we move on to plan B. If we can’t make them disappear on their own, we’ll force them to go someplace else.”
Holt shrugged. “I know I’m out of my depth, here, okay? I don’t know anything about this voodoo shit, but if Kathy is okay with everything, then just tell us where to stand and when.”
Kathy thought he looked clearly uncomfortable at having to put any of his trust in a serial killer. Holt, of all people, wasn’t about to forget what Toby was.
She tried to allay the man’s fears. “From what I know and what I’ve researched, I think this is the way to go.”
“Then we’ll get you what you’re missing, so we can start,” Ernie said. “The dispensary beyond the double doors out by the nurse’s station has some aspirin, maybe a box or two of Aleve. You want narcotics or even something like Ambien, we gonna have to go upstairs and get it out of the pharmaceuticals closet. Your bag ain’t no thing; that’s right next door. But for something sharp, you can either go down to the kitchens on the first floor or the med center on the fourth. I’m guessing you less likely to run into those things out there moving up a floor rather than down two.”
“I agree with Ernie,” Holt said. “I think Ernie and I should head up to the fourth to get the scalpel and the sleeping pills and, Kathy, maybe you pop over to your brother’s room and get his bag?”
“Works for me,” Kathy said.
“I’ll watch Henry,” Toby offered.
“Someone needs to watch Toby,” Holt said, casting a quick, undisguised glare at Kathy’s brother.
Toby shifted uncomfortably in the chair. “Detective, I’m not in much condition to get into trouble. I think your worry may be a bit misplaced.”
Holt regarded him coldly and seemed on the verge of saying something when Kathy took his arm.
“They’ll be fine,” she said, ushering out the men and closing the door behind her. “I’ll only be gone a minute, and then I’ll be right back here to watch them both.” However, she also felt a flash of unease at leaving her brother alone with Henry. She still didn’t completely understand his motivations in helping her. Ever since the day she’d found his trophy box of finger bones in the back of his closet, she’d made it a point to learn his tells, to figure out what he was after long before she agreed to even continue speaking with him. It bothered her that she couldn’t tell what he looked to get out of helping in this situation. It bred a quickly growing bad feeling that she was only trading on a lesser of two evils, and only temporarily.
“We’ll meet you back here as soon as we can,” Holt said. “If we don’t run into trouble, it shouldn’t take us long.”
“Okay,” Kathy said. “Be careful, guys. If you can avoid letting them touch you in any way, do it. If they touch you, they can feed on your auras and get inside your head.”
The men gave her grim nods and moved off down the hall. She turned to her brother’s room.
In all the years that Toby had been confined to Connecticut-Newlyn, she had only ever seen his room three times. The first had been when he was first committed. The second had been when she’d come to get him for their father’s funeral. The third had been for his thirtieth birthday. They had been three distinctly uncomfortable moments in her life, and she didn’t look forward to adding a fourth.
She took a deep breath and went to the closed door next to Henry’s. Her hand paused on the knob. It was just a door, and not even a very impressive one at that. She’d dealt with worse doors, and worse things behind doors than old ghosts and sour memories. She could handle this.
Kathy pushed open the door, and as she stepped across the threshold, a flood of feelings came back to her.
“Oh, Kat. Silly, stupid Kat. You should have stayed out of my room.”
It had been hot that night, hot and miserably sticky. She’d just wanted a t-shirt. She’d gone rummaging in his closet and found an old Metallica shirt…and his little box of human finger bones. She would have given anything to believe those bones were anything else, meant anything else other than trophies of the women he’d killed.
She remembered how one minute she’d been thinking she had to put the box back before he found out, that he’d be so angry, and the next minute, he’d been pulling her hair hard and dragging her to the floor. She remembered the box flying out of her hand and Toby straddling her, reeking of whiskey. She remembered the storm of hate in his eyes and the shiny new knife.
“You know, I could do you right here. I’ve thought about it, you know. I could fuck you and stab you to pieces and drag whatever’s left of you out into the woods. I’d hide you better than the others. Dad would neeeever find you. No one would ever find you.”
She’d felt sick to her stomach.
“But you’re my sister. I don’t want to kill you—really, I don’t…”
He was so heavy on top of her. His erection cut into her hip. He was so very heavy.
“But damn, do I ever want to cut you.”
Then he’d pressed the blade into her skin just above her left eyebrow and pulled the blade down, skipping over her eye and landing on her cheek just below the eye socket. Then he dragged the blade down farther, all the way to her jawbone.
All that screaming, an echo in the chambers of her mind now, sounded like it was coming from outside her head. Everything had blurred. Toby had done that. The pain and tears and the screaming had made everything blur. She remembered being sure he was going to kill her, that one of her fingers would end up in that little box with all the others. She had been afraid to die back then.
She wasn’t so afraid of death anymore. Death was quick. Death had no memory. Scars, on the other hand, got to be really heavy to carry around after a while.
Kathy closed her eyes and counted her breaths. When she’d let the seventh breath go, she opened her eyes again, and the echoes were gone.
When they’d been kids, long before he’d ever cut her, Toby used to hide things from their dad in a hole in the wall in his bedroom. Mostly it was cigarettes or porno magazines or the occasional bottle of booze. There had been a loose piece of Sheetrock behind the headboard of his bed, and he’d gotten pretty good at stashing things there. Kathy knew about it; Toby had always said it was their little secret, and sometimes he’d share a smoke or a sip of the bottle he was hiding when their dad wasn’t home. It had been exciting then, a special string of moments the two of them shared, when he wasn’t teasing her or growling at her or looking at her in that way that made her uncomfortable. He was just Toby, her big brother, and she probably loved him more during those moments than any other time.
Their dad had caught them, and Toby’d made it look like it was only him smoking and drinking. He’d covered for Kathy, and for his trouble, their dad had beat him pretty good. He’d had the beginnings of a black eye and bruises all over his back after that, but he’d wiped the tears away and winked at her after, as if to let her know it had been worth it, and nothing was ever going to change those moments or take them away.
Kathy was pretty sure it was after their dad had plastered and spackled the wall that Toby had taken to hiding things in his closet, but it wasn’t the same. After a while, Toby wasn’t the same.
She went to his bed and bumped the corner of it. It didn’t move. Margaret had told her once that after several incidents of inmates tossing their beds in fits of rage, they had begun bolting them to the floor. Kathy figured that in order to get to the wall behind his bed, Toby would have had to find a way to loosen the bolts without the orderlies who changed the sheets and made up the beds noticing. Nudging one at the head of the bed with the toe of her boot, she saw that it was, indeed, loose. She bent and unscrewed the bolt on that side, then went around to the other side and undid that one. After unscrewing a third at the foot of the bed, she was able to pivot the frame enough to get to the wall behind it. Sure enough, there was a hairline crack outlining a patch of loose Sheetrock about the width and height of a laptop screen. She dug her nails into the crack and wiggled it loose. It was a messy job and if the hospital was still standing in the morning, the staff was sure to find out about it, but she wasn’t too concerned with protecting the integrity of Toby’s hiding places just then.
Tossing the Sheetrock aside in a small white puff of dust, she reached into the hole in the wall. She half expected her hand to graze smooth, stringy, slimy things, the innards of a hospital beginning to change into something else. Instead, her fingers closed around a canvas strap, and she pulled out a small black backpack. On the front zippered pocket was the symbol of the Hand of the Black Stars, a black silhouette of a palm-up hand against red and white, and six black stars, between and surrounding the fingers. It looked like it had been painted on or colored in marker, but applied with careful reverence. Kathy looked at it with disgust.
She gave the backpack a quick shake, and the contents returned a muffled thump. She’d certainly open it before handing it over to her brother, but first, she wanted to get back to him and Henry. The air in the room where he had been imprisoned for almost three decades was starting to get heavy, and she needed to get out of there.
Slinging the little backpack over her shoulder, she nudged the bed back in place and headed for the door. Then she noticed the glow out in the hallway.
She frowned. All over the third floor, it was lights out as usual; the floor was dark, aside from moonlight through some of the bedroom windows and the small oblong lights between the ceiling tiles that ostensibly had been installed in case staff needed to see down the hallway. What glowed just outside Toby’s door now, in that hall space between his room and Henry’s, was too bright for either of those things. The way it pulsed colors was unusual, too. She’d seen those colors before in the ivy outside the building and in Edgar’s eye. These were colors that Henry’s imagination had attributed some meaning, and that meant whatever was in the hallway was going to be a problem.
As if in answer to her thoughts, a sexless voice said, “Kathy, come out. I want to show you things. Beautiful things.”
Kathy didn’t answer. She stood motionless, soundless, with Toby’s backpack on her shoulder and her gun in the holster on her hip.
“Kathy,” it said, “I want to show you Toby and Henry. They’re mine now, and they can see such lovely colors. The colors of Ayteilu. Come see.”
She hoped that was a lie. Whatever was out there might be willing to hurt Toby, but not Henry, not yet…not unless Maisie’s plan was working faster than Kathy thought.
She let the backpack slide down her arm until she could slowly unzip the top.
“Kathy, come out or I’ll kill them.”
“No, you won’t.” She rummaged around, feeling for an object she thought might be in there.
The thing in the hallway laughed. At least, Kathy assumed it was a laugh, although it sounded to her more like the cry of someone about to break.
“You’re feisty,” it said. “You’ll be fun to pull apart.”
She felt something cool and smooth and pulled it from the backpack. She allowed herself a small huff of relief; it was an artifact she had been hoping Toby had. It looked like it was made of shiny black glass or porcelain, but it wasn’t. That substance didn’t come from anywhere in this dimension, nor did its shape, which was something like a three-dimensional, symmetrical kind of arabesque. It was a word in a language no human tongue would ever pronounce, and it was powerful. If Maisie had used certain spells to anchor herself and her army to this world and bring her own bleeding through, then the artifact in Kathy’s hand would most likely be the best weapon Kathy had against that army.
At least, she hoped so.
“Kathy?” The glow waxed closer. “I’m going to hurt your friends. I’m going to break them into little pieces. Come out and watch.”
“I have a better game to play,” Kathy said. The artifact was growing colder in her hand. “How about you come in here and see?”
A hand, stiff and waxy like a mannequin’s, came around the doorframe, its fingers bending with some effort. The glow pulsed a bright blue, then green. A moment later, the lower half of a leg dangling from a useless knee appeared just below the hand, its foot jerking around.
“I like games,” the sexless voice said, and it giggled in that horrible high-pitched, hysterical way again.
“You’ll like this one,” Kathy said. She took several cautious steps closer to the door, raising the artifact like a weapon.
A second later, the glow came into view. Its source was blindingly bright, a cloud of light, threaded with the veins of tiny soundless storms and fog. The light burned Kathy’s eyes, but she couldn’t turn away. The cloud had been right; there were beautiful things to see—endless star-sprinkled space painted with nebulae, black holes swirling into infinity, fountains of blood and shards of bone shooting up into sunset-streaked skies over alien worlds, bodies arranging themselves as they pleased, over and over for eons, the cycle of creation and life, death and deconstruction, and over again, forever…
Before the light could swallow her mind, Kathy thrust the artifact into the midst of it.
At first, she felt nothing. Then a biting cold clamped down on her fingers, her hand, her wrist. The pain was sharp, a hundred ice shards and splinters shot under her skin. She held on to the artifact even though her fingers were growing stiff and the pain was eating into her arm. The cloud suddenly screamed, a piercing wail of pain and surprise, and Kathy was able to turn her head away. Just when it felt like her hand had crystallized and was about to shatter, she pulled back her arm and the cloud exploded.
The force knocked her backward and she fell onto the floor just before the bed. All around her, glinting rainbow particles hung in the air, millions of tiny fragments that had made up cloud and tentacle, hands and legs, and then those particles fell to the ground with an almost musical glasslike tinkling sound. In seconds, the confetti that had been a monster winked out and was gone.
Kathy rose shakily and inspected her hand. The whole area that she had plunged into the cloud’s light was bright red and raw, her knuckles split and bleeding, but otherwise, her hand seemed okay. Her joints were locked, though, and it took a few seconds to work enough feeling back into her fingers that she could pry the artifact out from their grasp and return it to Toby’s backpack.
She was just zipping up when she heard slow clapping from behind her. She turned and saw Orrin stretched out on Toby’s bed. He was still a pale shade of blue, and that black stuff he’d coughed up had dried on his chin and t-shirt. His forearm a few inches above one of his wrist knives had bubbled and peeled some, but otherwise, Orrin looked fine.
“Impressive,” he said. “You killed one of the Others. I was starting to think they were indestructible in this world.”
“No,” Kathy replied, “they’re not. But you’re still going. A little worse for wear, pretty boy, but still holding up, huh?”
“Holding up is what I do,” Orrin said, leaning forward. He fixed his gaze on her. “I’m tough to kill. Maybe even impossible, by the time Maisie’s done with us. Not like the humans here. They don’t bend so well, but wow, how they break!”
“Some people are harder to break than others,” she said.
“Breaking people is also what I do,” Orrin replied, and rose from the bed. “Let’s see how hard you are to break, Kathy Ryan.”