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Pebbles skittered off my windshield as I spun my cruiser around the bend, coming way too close to plummeting off the edge. I yanked the wheel to the right and tried to steady the car. I could hear my tires chewing up the dirt, feel the rumble as the cruiser left man-made pavement for the crude rocky soil of the mountain path.
“Hannigan, if you try a maneuver like that again, I will fucking murder you.”
I lifted the radio to my mouth. “Roger that, sheriff. I'll leave the fancy tricks to the pros.”
“I want to catch this guy as much as you, Hannigan,” said Marconi’s crackly voice. “But if it comes down to his life or yours, I expect you to choose your own pasty ass. Capiche?”
“Loud and clear.” I placed the radio down and tried to focus on the road ahead. Barlow’s car had a few hundred feet on mine, but I could see it each time I rounded another corner of the mountain: a beaten blue Ford slipping between the trees, rumbling like its engine was stuffed with rocks. It was a miracle the piece of shit hadn't fallen apart by now.
I rumbled over the bumpy trail as fast as I dared. Marconi was right - it wasn't worth it to blow a tire or go careening into a tree for this guy, no matter what he'd done. There was only one route up Mount Palmer anyway. Sooner or later Barlow would run out of road, or gas, or that rust bucket of his would finally go wheels up, and we'd have him. That was the easy part. Taking down the thing inside of him was another story. Marconi was only a few minutes behind me, so if I could hold Barlow off for long enough, at least I'd have backup.
I just hoped it would be enough.
I rounded the corner, the mountain plateaued, and a building rose up suddenly in front of me: a ruin of blackened stone towers, like a castle in miniature. Three spires at the corners jutted up into the open sky. The fourth had collapsed on itself in a spectacular pile of rubble. All the windows were smashed except one. It was a stained-glass depiction of a woman in a nun’s habit, her outstretched hands covered in what looked like blood. With no light to shine through, every pane in the window was a deep obsidian black.
The tilted sign above the entrance read MOUNT PALMER INSANE ASYLUM.
“What the hell...?” I muttered.
Then Barlow’s car barreled out of nowhere and smashed into my cruiser, knocking me sideways. The seatbelt dug into my neck and squeezed the breath out of me. I spun the wheel and tried to mash the brakes, but we were spinning out of control now, dirt whipping in furious clouds around us. I fumbled for the radio to call Marconi. When I glanced out the window again, I found myself staring at the pitch black - and rapidly enlarging – stained-glass woman.
“Fucking shit,” I said.
Then my car collided with the window and sent the glass shattering inward. My head bashed against the side window. Darkness bloomed behind my eyes, eating at the edges of my vision, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t fight it. I collapsed onto the steering wheel.
The last thing I saw before I checked out: a shimmering in the air, like water rippling across the sky, and a figure in a flowing black outfit approaching me. Its head was oddly shaped, like it was wearing an angular hat with a long, heavy veil. I closed my bleary eyes as the figure knelt down and peered into my windshield.
“Well now,” a harsh voice said. “This won’t do.”
The rest was darkness.
* * * * *
I WOKE TO A SOFT, MADDENING glow, a buzzing strip of light that sent barbs of pain through the front of my skull. I looked through squinted eyes at the source of the brightness. It was a medical lamp, like the one at my dentist’s office, but stained a deep yellow and spotted with the corpses of tiny flies. In the darkness outside the light’s reach, I saw three figures: one perched in a chair by my side, one bustling back and forth with sharp, pronounced footsteps, and one standing utterly still by a black shape that could have been a doorway. Awareness crept over me, but slowly.
There was an accident. Barlow’s car. Marconi must have taken me to the hospital...
I shifted where I was lying, wincing as my brain prickled with pain. “Where’s Marconi?” I asked the sitting figure - presumably the doctor. The voice that slipped out of me was faint and dry, barely more than a croak.
The doctor leaned over, so that the lamplight fell over his face and gleamed off of his thin glasses. Tufts of gray hair sprouted around his ears and in patches along his balding scalp. I couldn’t see much of his nose underneath his medical mask, but what I could see was red and scabby. The mouth beneath the mask curled up and crinkled the blue paper.
“My, my,” he said in a surprisingly silky voice. “It awakes.”
The rapping footsteps approached us. “Finally,” said a sharp, familiar voice. I peered through the lamplight and made out the vague outline of a woman in a nun’s habit. At first I had the baffling impression that the top half of her face was missing. It took me a few seconds to realize she was wearing a black veil over her eyes. The eyeless nun tilted her head and tsked down at me.
“Sister Martha found you in the yard,” the doctor said. “A rather unfortunate accident. Your car struck the side of our building and broke a valuable stained-glass window. We’ve moved the vehicle to avoid disturbing the other patients.”
“He destroyed the image of Our Lady Dorcas,” Sister Martha fumed. “I know you could hardly care, doctor, but our glorious Lady is now in pieces across the kitchen floor. All because of some... some deranged hooligan in a Flash Gordon costume.”
“What?” I said, still groggy. “But Barlow... Marconi and I were chasing Barlow up the mountain.” My head gave a particularly sharp throb. “He looks like a man but he isn’t. He has these, these suckers for fingers, and he sticks them to your head and sucks out your brain until you go totally crazy.”
The doctor turned his glasses to Sister Martha, who shook her head disapprovingly. “Dangerous and utterly mad,” she said. “I don’t know where you keep finding them, Dr. Renfield.”
The lamp flickered and buzzed as Renfield turned back to me. “Well,” he said softly. “I suppose, given time, all madmen find their way to our doors.”
“I’m not mad,” I insisted. “Christ, get Marconi, she’ll explain everything. Who the hell are you people anyway?”
Sister Martha strode forward and struck me across the face with the back of her hand. “Hush your blasphemous tongue,” she seethed.
I lifted a hand to touch my stinging cheek, or at least I tried to - when I looked down, I saw that my limbs were bound to the table by a series of crude metal shackles. Cold soberness washed over me. I jiggled my arms inside of the shackles, but they were locked up tight. The metal dug into my wrist and left an ugly red welt.
“There’s something rotten in this one,” Dr. Renfield said in that unsettlingly quiet voice. “A little touch of sickness in the brain.” He traced my forehead with a cold finger. I tried to wriggle away from him, but the shackles kept me from getting far. He found a spot on my temple and tapped it three times.
“Nothing a few snips won’t fix,” he mused. “Deacon! Get my tools from the office, if you please.”
The third shape, who hadn’t moved so far, opened the door and disappeared down a dark hallway. I could see a single electric torch set into the wall before the door swung shut and brought darkness rushing back.
“It’s a simple enough surgery,” the doctor said to me, withdrawing a pen from his pocket. He removed the cap, licked the tip, and leaned in to scrawl a tiny X on my forehead. I winced as the point of the pen dug into my skin.
“We just make a tiny incision - here,” he said. “Then we drill into the skull and carefully remove the diseased brain tissue. It’s a tried and true method. Once the source of the madness has been excised, you’ll be on the road to recovery in no time.” His voice was low and soothing, as if he was casually discussing the weather instead of how he was going to fucking lobotomize me.
“What kind of crack doctor are you?” I croaked. “Did I take a wrong turn and wind up in the fucking Twilight Zone? I need a bandage and a shit ton of ibuprofen, not brain surgery. Let alone brain surgery that went out of fashion in the fucking thirties.”
Sister Martha struck me again, this time across the mouth. Pain blossomed in my jaw and joined the incessant throbbing in my head.
“I don’t care what you say, Doctor,” she said in disgust. “There is no curing madness like this. It would more merciful to send him to his Maker.”
“Why Sister Martha, I’m surprised at you,” the doctor said. He leaned in closer and peered at me, staring down over the top of his scabby nose. I still couldn’t see his eyes in the glare of the lamp, and suddenly I was struck by a horrible thought. When Marconi and I had found Barlow in the midst of one of his “feedings,” he’d been crouched over a prone body, suckers out and slurping the sweet sanity out of his victim. I’d startled him with a warning gunshot, and when he looked up, there was no humanity in his eyes - just discs of spinning orange, like slivers of molten lava.
We already knew that entities from beyond the rift could hop from vessel to vessel, wearing out human bodies like a pair of old jeans. Had the thing inside Barlow jumped into Dr. Renfield? If I couldn’t see his eyes, how could I know for sure?
“Don’t fucking touch me,” I said. I struggled uselessly against my restraints, but it didn’t matter - the doctor was reaching over to me now, his knobby fingers tracing the bumps on my forehead. I pictured the horrible suckers on the tips of Barlow’s fingers and wondered if that was coming next, if the doctor’s light touch would transform into something a hundred times more monstrous. I closed my eyes and took in a rattly breath.
There was a sudden boom as the door flung open. I lifted my eyelids a crack to see the third shape bursting back in, slumped over and out of breath. “Doctor! Sister Martha!” he wheezed. His voice was young - probably still in his teens - and it carried the slightest trace of an accent, although I couldn’t quite place it.
“What is it?” the nun barked.
“There’s - there’s been a row,” the boy stammered. “Merrow got loose in the east wing and punched out two orderlies. Now the patients are fighting. It’s horrible, Sister, just horrible. I think I heard a bone breaking.”
“In the name of all things holy,” Sister Martha said. “I don’t care how mad they are, I will not tolerate this behavior. Not in my asylum.” She strode past the boy’s shadow and slipped into the hallway, her habit flowing out behind her.
“You ought to come too, Dr. Renfield,” the boy said shakily. “It sounded bad. I think you may need to treat the wounded.”
The doctor’s hand lifted from my head - with some reluctance, I thought. “If you say so, Deacon,” he said. He rose from his seat, stretching almost six feet tall, his frame stooped and bony. For a second I was reminded of another tall slender figure, and I shuddered before I could stop myself. I watched as Renfield, in no apparent hurry, passed Deacon and disappeared after Sister Martha.
I expected the boy to go rushing after the others, but he just stood there, a solitary figure in the dark. I lay on the medical table and listened as the footsteps grew fainter and fainter until they faded entirely from earshot. At once Deacon rushed forward and produced a tarnished silver key, which he began jiggling in the lock of my foot cuffs.
“Are you hurt?” he whispered. The accent in his voice had disappeared. “Did the doctor start operating on you?”
“No, I’m fine,” I said. “What are you...?”
“I don’t think you’re mad,” Deacon replied. “I’m going to get you out of here before those monsters come back.”
“Oh thank god,” I breathed. “Did you start that fight?”
“It doesn’t take much to set Merrow over the edge,” Deacon said, wrenching at the cuff. “I pushed his buttons a little until - he - snapped - there!” The shackle on my left ankle came away with a clatter. The boy hurried around the table and began working on the other foot. In a minute or two I was free and rubbing at my tender wrists.
“Come on!” Deacon said, grabbing my hand. The lamplight fell over his face for the first time, and I saw a young face - not quite a kid, like I’d suspected, but a guy in his early 20s or so. He had messy brown hair, cheeks dotted with dark freckles, and a pair of milky white eyes that stared at my face without seeing me. My rescuer was blind.
I swung my legs hastily over the hospital bed and let Deacon drag me to the door. Despite his lack of sight, he moved with sureness in each step, not even bumping into the door frame as he pulled me into the hallway and led me past the line of electric torches. The bulbs flickered as we passed them. I looked around, hoping to get my bearings somehow, but there was nothing distinctive about this hall - just cold gray bricks and a series of dark doorways.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Sister Martha’s office,” he answered. “It’s the only room in the entire asylum that has a phone. We’ll need to call for outside help if we’re going to get out of this place.”
“Music to my ears,” I muttered. “Hey, how’d you know I’m not crazy?”
“Because you’re like me,” he said. “You’re not from this time, right?”
“Excuse me?” I said. But on some level, I did know what he was talking about. I think Sister Martha’s “Flash Gordon” comment had gotten the ball rolling, but it wasn’t until the doctor had started his whole lobotomy shtick that it had really struck me: I’d crashed through another portal and gone tumbling back in time. Crazy in theory, but hey, crazier things happened in the Neverglades all the time.
“I came from the year 1986,” Deacon told me. “I was hiking the mountains with my friend Meg when we found the ruins of the asylum. I couldn’t see them, of course, but Meg described them to me. She’s always been my second set of eyes. We thought we’d explore the place, you know, just for fun, but when we got inside we were surrounded by voices. I didn’t know what was going on. Meg started freaking out and somebody ripped her hand away from mine, and then my eyes were gone. I was totally in the dark.
“I stayed quiet, mainly because I had to. I guess they assumed I wasn’t crazy. Dr. Renfield saw I was blind and kind of... took me under his wing. He never asked where I had come from. I pretended to be a foreigner so it wouldn’t draw too much suspicion if I said anything strange, you know - anything that would be out of place for the time period. The doctor let me be, as long as I carried his tools and cleaned his chambers and whatnot. When I had time to myself I felt my way around the asylum, looking for Meg.”
Deacon went quiet for a moment. “That was three years ago,” he said. “They took my friend away and I haven’t heard from her since. She could be dead for all I know.”
“Jesus,” I said.
For the first time, I heard the sounds of distant screaming: high-pitched, miserable wails, echoing off the walls. The screams of the mad. I thought of Barlow’s victims, how they’d been found slack-jawed and rocking by themselves in the corner, mumbling nonsense under their breath. Even in our day and age, there was no cure for that kind of madness. I couldn’t imagine how these kinds of people were treated in an era when brain surgery was a totally acceptable substitute for therapy.
“When are you from?” Deacon asked.
“Um,” I said. “Twenty first century. I’m a detective. I was chasing a - a criminal up into the mountains. He crashed his car into mine and I ended up here. No clue where he went.” Even as I said it, I could feel the cool tickle of Dr. Renfield’s fingers tracing my forehead.
Deacon stopped suddenly outside a door that looked no different from all the others, bar a spiky black crucifix dangling from a nail in the center. The implication was clear: stay far the fuck away. I didn’t want to think of how that spiteful old woman would react if she caught us snooping up here. It wouldn’t be pretty.
“I’ve been here so long I know almost every nook and cranny, but beyond this point I really am blind,” Deacon said. “You’re going to have to take it from here.”
“What am I looking for?” I asked, placing my hand on the door.
“This is the early 1900’s, so try to find a rotary phone,” he said. “Just dial the operator and phone the police. I don’t know if they’ll take us seriously, but if we can get friends on the outside, we may stand a chance.”
“Gotcha,” I said, looking over my shoulder. The lights flickered and the air was heavy with distant screams, but it didn’t sound like anyone was nearby, and that was good enough for me. I pushed open the door and slipped inside the room.
For an office, the place was pretty barren. A desk with a plastic placemat and an old ham radio sat in the middle of the room, surrounded by wooden chairs and a few sparse bookshelves. There was a slight crackle in the air, and it took me a second to realize the radio was on. The static filled my ears as I approached. The sound got my head throbbing again, so I adjusted the frequency until the static became nothing but low background noise.
I’d just drawn my hand back from the dial when another sound cut through the soft wall of static: a child’s singsong voice, reciting a nursery rhyme. Or what sounded like a nursery rhyme. My hand froze, and chills skittered up and down my arms.
“Sticks and stone may break my bones,
swords and spikes impale me
insects crawl inside my throat
and eat the soft tissue of my belly
leaving sticky webs with clumps of eggs
to sprout inside me and burst out
in swarms of spiders from my eyes
and mouth and ears and every imaginable
orifice, until my bloated corpse splits
at the seams.”
The voice stopped, and I reached out with a trembling hand to turn off the radio - but then a piercing giggle issued from the speakers and stopped me dead. “Remember me, detective?” the voice of the legion laughed.
I stabbed at the OFF button and the machine went dark. I backed away from it, shaking, debating whether I should pick up the damn thing and smash it against the wall. The voice in the radio was supposed to be dead. I’d seen the Inspector... I’d seen the thing’s beating heart destroyed in a wall of fire. Had my little time slip brought it back somehow? Was this a version of it from an earlier time period? But then how could it remember who I was? The wound on my head resumed its dull, painful throbbing, pulsing with each pound of my heart.
I jumped as the door creaked open and Deacon poked his head inside. “Any luck?” he whispered.
I opened my mouth, but whatever I’d been about to say dried up - because the radio was gone. Instead, the desk now held a yellow rotary phone, a bucket of paper clips, and a stack of lined paper held by a stone angel paperweight. Hesitantly, I lifted the phone to my ear, but there was no sound on the other end of the line. I tried dialing 9-1-1 but my fingers got caught in the rotary, and when I finally managed to get the right numbers, I was rewarded with more resounding silence. I placed the phone back and tried to steady my breathing.
“The lines are down,” I heard myself saying. “We’ll have to try something else.”
Deacon swore. “There may be a way out in the service tunnels,” he said. “It’ll be a long walk back to town, assuming we get past the guards and the doctor and Sister Martha without getting caught. But one step at a time.”
I opened one of the drawers with numb fingers and found myself staring at a pile of yellowed papers. It looked like a stack of patient files. I picked them up and leafed through them, not sure what I was looking for. Grayscale photographs stared back at me from each sheet: pairs of tiny black eyes, some angry, some morose, others just empty. I stopped at a photo of a young woman with frizzy hair and a wide, terrified expression on her face.
“Your friend,” I said to Deacon. “Is her name Meghan Rosenberg?”
“What?” he said. “Yeah, it is. Why?”
“Because I think I found her file,” I replied. I traced the lines of printed text with my fingers. For a few uneasy seconds it looked like the letters were skittering under my touch, like tiny black insects, but I blinked a few times and the sensation passed.
“It says here that she’s in room 37,” I said.
“That’s in the east tower,” Deacon said. “I never had access to the upper stories so I couldn’t check those rooms.” His voice grew quiet, and I turned to see that his face had gone pale. “Detective... I can’t just leave her. Not if I know where she is.”
I looked back down and found myself staring at another open drawer - one I could swear I hadn’t touched. Nestled on a blanket of velvet was an old-fashioned revolver. I reached in and touched the sleek, black metal. It was cold. I lifted the gun and examined it in the lamplight. There was a tag dangling from the barrel, so I flipped it over and read the single line of scrawled text:
you get three shots. use them well.
I blinked, and the tag was gone.
“Detective!” Deacon hissed. “The doctor and Sister Martha are going to be back any minute!”
I came to my senses with a jerk. “Right,” I said. I tucked the revolver into the empty holster on my belt. It slid in snug and easy, as if it had always belonged there. My nerves on edge, I closed the drawer and followed Deacon out into the hallway.
“Let’s find your friend and get out of here,” I said in a low voice. “I don’t like what this place is doing to me.”
Deacon nodded and set off down the hall. His footsteps were barely audible, despite his hurried pace. I followed him, hand playing nervously at the holster of the stolen revolver. My head was aching again and every shadow seemed to slip away from me when I turned to look. I just wanted to find Marconi and get the hell out of this place, but there was no chance of me getting anywhere without Deacon’s help, and no Meg meant no Deacon. So this was a necessary detour. Hopefully it would also be a quick one.
* * * * *
THE WAILS GREW LOUDER the further in we went. Each patient’s cell had a small barred window in the center, and hands would emerge from the darkness as we approached: some reaching out for us, others rattling the bars as if they could snap them in half. I saw a few grimy faces peering out at us, their eyes wide and bloodshot. One person - the long scraggly hair made me think it was a woman, but I couldn’t be sure - grinned at me with yellowed teeth, then lobbed a hunk of bloody mucus through the bars. I veered toward the middle of the hallway to avoid the ensuing splat.
Deacon led me up a few short flights of stairs, winding through hall after identical hall, until at last he stopped at a small wooden door. “The east tower,” he said under his breath. “But it’s locked, and I’ve got no idea where we could find the key.”
“Stand back,” I said. I drifted back a few inches, tensed my legs, and launched a kick at the space above the doorknob. The door wasn’t nearly as sturdy as it looked. My foot smashed through the wood with a loud splintery crack, leaving a hole just big enough to fit my hand. I stuck it through and jimmied the lock from the other side. The door came loose and opened with a tremendous creak.
“Someone’s bound to have heard that,” Deacon said nervously. “We’ve got to hurry.” He squeezed past me and stumbled up the flight of stairs, his fingers scraping against the wall. I placed a tentative hand on the revolver and hurried after him.
The stairs wound up in a haphazard spiral before opening up into a large circular room. Dark cell doors surrounded us on all sides, broken only by the occasional stained-glass window. Each one depicted a hunched figure in various states of agony or self-flagellation, watched over by a horde of robed men. My skin crawled at the sight.
“I can’t read the numbers,” Deacon said frantically from the center of the room. “Help me find her, Detective.”
I tore my eyes away from the windows and approached the closest cell door. A flat white panel on the front read 31. Nothing stirred inside, so I left it alone and hurried past the next several doors. When I reached number 37, I placed my hand on the cold metal and peered between the bars. There wasn’t much light up here, but I could make out a young woman with frizzy hair slumped in the corner, rocking back and forth. She was moaning, so low and deep I almost didn’t notice it at first. Her bloodshot eyes stared at a fixed spot on the far wall.
“I found her,” I whispered to Deacon. “But she doesn’t look pretty.”
“Just get her out of there,” he pleaded.
There was no padlock or anything on the cell, just a large bolt driven into the door frame. I yanked it loose with a loud scrape and opened the door ever so slightly. Meg apparently hadn’t noticed the sound; she just continued to rock in place, moaning under her breath. I was just about to step inside and drag her out when a sudden hiss of outrage stopped me in my tracks.
I turned and saw Sister Martha standing at the foot of the stairs, her habit spilling around her feet, her eyes still hidden behind that loose black veil. She advanced toward us, her mouth set in a hardened line. I reached absurdly for the revolver for a moment, then lowered my hand. Deacon, pale and sweaty, stumbled away from her.
“I never did trust you, you little wretch,” the nun spat at him. “God knows what the old doctor saw in you.” Her head whipped up to look at me, and I could feel the rage burning in her unseen eyes. “And you. The doctor’s latest little project. Thought you were going to get free reign of my asylum, did you? That you were going to free my wards, have yourself a nice little riot? Oh no, no, dear Lord, not while I’m alive.” She pointed at the closest stained-glass window with a crooked finger. “Your punishment will make theirs look like the sweet grace of God.”
I took a step forward. “What are you gonna do to me, you old bitch?” I said. “Slap me again? You don’t have your shackles anymore. Any power you had down there is gone.”
An angry cry rose in her throat. She stormed over to me, habit flapping, and reared back to give me another almighty whack. I leaned to the side and avoided it easily - but then her hand swung back around and struck me square in the jaw. My head exploded in pain again and I staggered back a few inches.
She advanced on me again, but before she could strike, I grabbed the folds of her veil and ripped it clean off. Underneath, one hazel eye glared back at me. The other was gone. A charred and wrinkled cavity was the only thing left of her left eye socket. She snatched the threads of the veil out of my hand and gave me a violent shove back, her withered lips curling into a snarl. I stumbled and went sprawling against the door.
Deacon appeared in front of me, his small frame standing between me and the fire-scarred nun. He lifted a hand to fend her off, but he couldn’t see her coming, and she dodged his reach with the speed of a much younger woman. Then her hands closed around his neck and the young man started to sputter. I felt ice trickle through me as I saw Deacon’s veins pop in red rivers underneath his skin, as something silver - not orange - started to spin in Sister Martha’s eye.
Bang!
I hadn’t even realized I’d raised the gun until the kickback bashed my skull against the door. Pain swam in my eyes, but I could see enough to make out Sister Martha staggering backwards, hands pressed against a seeping red hole in her gut. Her mouth was open in an O of surprise, her one remaining eye wide and hazel - no gleam of silver anywhere. I lowered the revolver and tried to fight the churning in my stomach.
A screech came from the cell behind me, and I was shoved aside as the door flew open, a hunched, frizzy-haired shape lunging out from inside. Meg. She continued to shriek as she charged at the staggering nun, her fingers spasming. Sister Martha couldn’t even lift her hands to defend herself. Meg slammed into her and began railing on the old woman, driving her back, striking at her arms and head with clawlike hands. The nun wailed and clutched at her wound. I tried to heave myself off the floor to get between them but promptly tripped over Deacon, who’d fallen prone to the ground, gasping and wheezing.
I scrambled to my feet. Meg had launched herself at Sister Martha, sending both women crashing against - and through - one of the large stained-glass windows. I could only watch as the glass exploded outward, as their flailing bodies flew together into the stormy sky, before gravity took hold. I didn’t run to the window to watch them fall. I only stood, numb, waiting for the inevitable crunch of bones against pavement.
I didn’t have to wait long.
“What the fuck was that?” Deacon screamed.
I reached down and lugged him to his feet. He had started to shake and I tried to tell him to get it together, but then the wind whistled through the shattered window and something papery brushed against my hand. I looked down and saw that the little tag had reappeared on the barrel of the gun. The wind whipped it back and forth, and I saw that the line scrawled across it had changed:
you get two shots. down one shell
“Come on,” I said to Deacon. “Come on!” I yanked at his arm and turned him to face me. His milky eyes spun in his skull, staring everywhere except at my face. I slapped him and barked, “We have to go!”
His trembling abated, at least somewhat. He took in a few struggling breaths and stared blankly at the wall.
“The service tunnels,” he mumbled. “That’s our only shot.”
“Can you get us there?” I asked, fighting the impulse to shake his shoulders.
“Yeah,” he said. “But if Renfield gets wind of what happened to Sister Martha he’ll have them locked down tight. We have to hurry.”
A sob broke from his throat, but I didn’t give him the time to mourn. I simply grabbed his arm and dragged him down the spiral stairs, through the splintery door, and into the dim hall of cells. Back into the heart of that screaming madness.
* * * * *
DEACON LED ME DOWN more twisting passageways than seemed physically possible; the ruins of the asylum hadn’t looked nearly this big on the outside. Eventually the cells gave way to offices and storage closets and that awful incessant wailing receded into the background. We clambered across chipped gray bricks and down a few narrow flights of stairs. I didn’t like the idea of going further underground - it felt too much like descending into a tomb - but if there really was a way out down here, I could put aside a little claustrophobia and suck it up.
“Down here,” Deacon said, leading me into a dimly lit basement. “Just around the corner and - oof!”
He had collided with a tall, lanky figure that had been crouching at the bottom of the stairs. Deacon only had time to let out a cry of surprise before the figure wrapped him in a pair of spindly arms and dragged him back into the darkness.
“Hey!” I shouted, whipping the gun out of its holster. I clambered down the remaining steps and hurried into the depths of the basement. The figure had stopped by the wall and yanked the chain on a dust-covered lightbulb, spreading a pale yellow wash over everything. In the light I recognized the lanky figure as Dr. Renfield. One of his hands was holding Deacon’s shoulder in a vise-like grip; the other held a scalpel to his throat. Both hands were flecked with tiny spots of blood.
“Sssh!” the doctor whispered as Deacon tried to struggle. “Hush, boy. You made quite the mess upstairs. I had to get my hands dirty picking up the pieces. You know how much I hate getting these hands dirty.”
“Let him go!” I barked. I lifted the revolver, but Renfield only tsked.
“A man in your condition shouldn’t have a firearm,” he said in that infuriatingly quiet voice. “So unstable. You should put that away, before things get even messier.”
“Too late,” Deacon said in a strangled voice. The doctor lifted the scalpel to his Adam’s apple, but the young man kept talking. “You want to see a mess? Go outside. Find Sister Martha. She’s probably just a splat on the ground by now. No picking up those pieces.”
The doctor tried to hide it, but I could see that he was visibly shaken, and the hand on Deacon’s shoulder loosened just a touch. Deacon moved before I could. He elbowed Renfield in the ribs and threw his head back, bashing the doctor in the mouth. Renfield’s grip slipped as he stumbled back, his free hand flying up to his broken jaw.
Deacon took advantage of the distraction to clamber away, and I approached the doctor, who had backed up against the far wall of the basement. Up close, I could see past his thick glasses, and the eyes that stared down at me were a beady black - not orange. Renfield wasn’t the brain sucker. Not that it mattered. I lifted the revolver and placed the barrel in the center of his forehead.
“I can cure your madness,” he said through his bloody teeth. “I can fix you. Why won’t you let me fix you?”
Every instinct in me wanted to plant a bullet in his skull. I compromised by bashing him across the head instead. Renfield hit the wall and slumped immediately, one pane of his glasses cracked. Curled up on the ground, he looked like a marionette doll after a child had dumped it unceremoniously in the corner. I found myself filled with a sudden surge of rage and disgust, so I sucked in a gob of saliva and spat onto his scabby cheeks.
“Get over here!” Deacon called from behind me. “I’ve got the tunnel door open!”
I re-holstered the gun and turned away from the fallen doctor. Deacon had wrestled open a great metal door at the far end of the basement, revealing another set of stairs that led down into a dark, dank tunnel. Even from here I could smell the lovely odor of sewage wafting up from below.
“Don’t tell me how it looks,” he said. “Just help me navigate.”
I nodded, before realizing how pointless that was. “Sure,” I said. I took his arm and guided him down the stairs, so that we stepped together into the wide, low passage. The place was lit up, but just barely, by the occasional electric light embedded in the ceiling.
“I’ve never been down here but I’ve heard that goods from town come up this way all the time,” Deacon said. “It must get out somewhere near the base of the mountain. Just keep heading downward and we should eventually find the exit.”
“Wish I had more than a ‘should’ to go on,” I muttered. Deacon didn’t reply - really, what was there to say? - so I helped guide his hand to the tunnel wall, and we started down the grimy stone path.
The sounds of the asylum had faded to nothing over our heads, leaving only the thunk of our footsteps and a light dripping sound that always seemed to come from just up ahead. We walked and we walked, Deacon keeping his hand on the bricks, and the ground continued to slope downward, and the stench grew stronger with each corner we turned. Every so often I thought I saw a dark shape darting along the ceiling, and I would whip my head around - but if anything else was in here with us, it was faster than my eyes could catch.
I was so focused on the scuttling little things that I didn't notice the low rumbling until we were several hundred feet in. I didn't stop, although I placed my own hand against the wall to feel the tremors. They were quiet, but getting steadily louder. Something was approaching us.
“How big do these tunnels get?” I asked Deacon. “Big enough to fit a truck through?”
“Probably,” he said. “Some of the boxes they lug up here must be pretty big. Why do you ask?”
“There's something -” I started to say, but I was cut off when the ground trembled so much it almost knocked me off my feet. I stood still and stared ahead. This stretch of tunnel ended at an intersection a couple dozen feet away. The source of the noise was close - maybe just around the corner.
Then a looming shadow emerged from the left-hand branch, and a horrific shape squeezed itself into view. I held my breath. Crawling on hands and knees, each movement heavy enough to send chunks falling from the ceiling, was the wendigo Marconi had killed.
Its globular mass of eyes spun and whirled, looking in every direction but mine. My heart leapt into my throat and I flattened myself against the wall. I could hear each thump of my pulse as the being lumbered past the tunnel opening, its bulky shape so big it scraped against the walls and ceiling. I sank to the floor and waited for the tremors to die down.
Something crinkled in my pocket as I pressed against the wall, and I pulled it out into the light. The Inspector’s calling card. I fumbled for my lighter before realizing that the doctor must have confiscated it, and besides, did I really want to use the thing anyway? I folded the card in my fist and slipped it back into my pocket.
“Detective?” Deacon asked. He stopped in place, tilting his head slightly, like he was listening for vibrations. He turned and stared vacantly in my general direction. “What are you doing on the floor? We have to keep moving.”
“You don’t feel that?” I said. “That rumbling?”
“I don’t feel anything,” he said. “Come on.”
I rose to my feet. The wendigo had vanished back into the tunnel, but the rumbling, though distant, still shook the pebbles around my feet. I watched them skitter for a bit, then looked up at Deacon. The guy was looking back at me, his milky eyes blank, his brow furrowed and confused.
“It’s not real,” I realized, and I felt like slapping myself. “None of this shit is real.”
Deacon’s slight frown grew more pronounced. “What are you talking about?”
“This whole time I thought it was the doctor,” I said. “Because he touched my forehead. But you touched me too, didn’t you? You grabbed my hand when we were escaping. That’s direct skin to skin contact. And that’s all this thing needs to work its mojo.”
“This thing?” Deacon said. He took a step back - cautious, slight, but I saw it.
“I’ve been going crazy all day,” I went on. “Watching things change and disappear in front of my eyes. Seeing a whole menagerie of old faces. The time eater. That fucker in the radio. Even the Christing wendigo, but you know what? None of them are real. The only thing that’s real is the brain sucker, and if I kill it, maybe I’ll get my fucking brain back.”
Deacon’s hands began to tremble. “You’re starting to scare me, Detective.”
“Am I?” I said. “Good. Because I don’t have sympathy for alien body squatters hiding behind a blind man’s eyes.”
I pulled the revolver out of my holster, slowly, and thumbed the safety off. Deacon couldn’t see what I was doing, but he heard the metallic click, and his face went deathly pale.
“If you’re still in there, Deacon, I’m sorry,” I said. “But I can’t let this thing escape.”
He turned tail to run, but the second bullet clipped him square in the back - just above his heart. He collapsed onto the tunnel floor. I lowered the smoking revolver and inched cautiously toward his slumped body. Blood seeped into the dirt around him, barely visible in the dim electric lights. With the tip of the gun, I lifted his arm and flipped the body onto its back.
The milky eyes had stopped spinning. I waited for them to flare a bright orange, for the creature inside to make its flight, but the seconds passed and the body didn’t stir. I wondered if I had actually killed the thing after all. If it was gone, wouldn’t my madness be too?
Then a slight draft blew through the tunnel, coming out of nowhere, and I felt something familiar tickle my hand. I looked down and saw that goddamn tag fluttering against my thumb. Lifting it up, I squinted at the tiny scribbled text.
you get one shot. burn in hell
“No,” I mumbled. “No no no no no.”
I fell back on my ass and let the revolver drop to the ground. Bulbs flickered overhead, and the tunnel rumbled with the wendigo’s distant footsteps. Inches away, Deacon’s blood slowly turned the dirt a brownish red. I sat and watched as the dark tendrils seeped toward me like stretching fingers.
“Fuck,” I blurted. “Oh fuck, Deacon. I'm sorry.”
The bloody fingers were splitting into branches now, like some spiky subway map etching onto the soil. I scrambled to my feet and snatched up the revolver. The footsteps thudded again, making the walls tremble, so I picked a direction at random and began to run. The tunnel arched around me, cold and chalky, like a hollowed-out bone. My own footsteps thumped against the dirt, a second out of sync with my heartbeat.
I'm not sure when I noticed the tunnel getting wider, but after a few minutes of running it struck me suddenly that the electric lights were well over my head, when before I could have knocked my noggin against them. The walls, too, were farther away, and the bricks had given way to a smooth gray stone. Was I about to emerge in some sort of reservoir? I wracked my brains, trying to picture the geography of Mount Palmer, but the only map I could form in my head was that crisscross of blood spilling across the ground a few intersections back. I swallowed the image back and pressed onward.
The lights soon grew so high that I could barely see where I was going - each step was lit by a faint yellow glow, but just barely. Eventually the way forward became so murky I had to slow my pace. Which turned out to be a very good thing, because when I rounded the next corner, the ground suddenly dropped away into a gaping chasm. I skidded to a halt and threw myself backward to avoid tumbling over the edge.
I hit the ground with an oof, and for a second I thought I had conked my head, because I was literally seeing stars. But it wasn't just stars. It was moons, and planets, and galaxies, far away but also impossibly close, looming above me in a purplish black abyss. My head throbbed as a large blue planet arced through the closest patch of darkness, its slender rings spinning like razor blades.
I couldn't stare at it, it was going to drive me absolutely crazy, so I pulled myself to my feet and tried to run back the way I had come. But the second my foot touched down, the ground rippled like a pool of shallow water. I had a second to register this as weird before the floor abruptly froze over and shattered into dusty fragments. I tripped backward, and the ground exploded at my step, sending dim shards in every direction. There was no sound, no crash - just the barest of whispers. Each step caused another shatter, and soon I was teetering above that purplish expanse of space.
I had the barest of islands left, so I stayed utterly still, not even daring to breathe. The revolver was like ice in my hand. I stood and stared at the galaxies swirling past my head. Another ringed planet spun in slow circles underneath me, its disc grooved like an old record. I shivered and shivered and clutched the gun and wracked my brain for a course of action, but there was no up or down here, no plan of escape, just the unending cosmos, the cosmos and me: a tiny molecule in the body of something much, much bigger.
My head throbbed as something shifted in the cosmic vastness. The stars slid aside, pushed by a shadowy hand; a vague outline appeared amid the planets, larger than all of them, so large I couldn’t even perceive its bottom. I’d been behind the rift and seen planetary-sized beings, but this new figure dwarfed them in comparison. It was galactic. Its eyes were clusters of purple stars. Wispy galaxies streamed from the area that might have been its mouth - almost like smoke from the universe’s largest cigar.
The cosmic shadow shifted again, more of its form appearing in the blackness: a thin-brimmed hat, lanky arms, a coat of rippling galaxies descending into the abyss with no apparent end. Pain arced through my head, and I lifted the revolver with trembling fingers.
It’s inside me, I realized. I’m the source of the madness. The brain sucker was inside me the entire time.
I cocked the gun and placed the tip of the barrel against my temple. One shot left. One bullet and the brain sucker would be dead; one bullet and this mad universe would be destroyed. I didn’t even care that I’d be going with it. I was diseased, and this was the only cure. Water trickled from the corners of my eyes. It dripped onto my lips and my chapped tongue licked off the salt: one last taste of the world before the lights went out.
I slipped my finger around the trigger, tightened my muscles - and a voice floated from the depths of space. A voice calling my name. A voice I knew. I froze, cold metal still pressed against my temple.
The universe bled away like dripping paint, the planets sagging, the galaxies fading out: a sea of dying fireflies. The cosmic shadow grew blurry around the edges. Its form wobbled and changed shape, becoming smaller, a bit stouter. Weakness swept over me, and I fell backwards, back into the abyss - except my back collided with a cold stone floor. The gun clattered out of my hands and promptly flickered out of existence.
Bricks folded out of space, enfolding me in four towering walls, broken only by a few windows and a single bright doorway. A familiar shadow stood on the threshold. I stared at it, my throat dry, my limbs numb and shaking ever so slightly. The shadow hurried forward and lifted its own gun, but it didn’t point the thing at me - it swept the pistol around the room, peering into every dark corner. Then it lowered the gun and knelt down by my side.
“Hannigan,” Marconi said. “The fuck happened to you?”
I opened my mouth, but the only sound that came out was a dry rattle.
At last, I managed to rasp out, “Barlow?”
“I got him,” Marconi said. “Three bullets in the head. I don’t know how you walked away from that crash, Hannigan, but Barlow was struggling to get out of the driver’s seat when I plugged him. The guy was practically mashed against the windshield. I waited for some sort of slug to slither out of his ear but I think the brain-sucking monster thing inside of him is dead.” She stuck out an arm and helped me up. I got unsteadily to my feet, staring around the empty room. The floor was littered with rubble and shattered glass. I was back in the ruins of the Mount Palmer Insane Asylum.
Dizziness swept over me, and I grabbed onto Marconi’s arm. She held me up and started guiding me toward the exit.
“How did you get away from that mess, anyway?” she asked me. “You’ve got a little blood on your head but I don’t see a scratch anywhere on you.”
I swallowed back a painful lump and croaked out, “Long story.”
We emerged onto the asylum’s front lawn, which was overgrown with long blades of browning grass. I looked to the left and my stomach turned. Barlow’s car had sandwiched my cruiser against the outer wall of the building. My car was a crumpled mess, and Barlow’s issued a cloud of acrid black smoke from its exposed engine. Lester Barlow himself was slumped in the driver’s seat with three puckered holes in his forehead.
“You’re gonna need a new car, Hannigan,” the sheriff said.
I didn’t answer. If Marconi had killed the thing inside Barlow... then it hadn’t followed me into the past after all? Then how could I explain all those objects appearing and disappearing, all those phantoms from my past rearing their ugly heads?
Maybe I hadn’t gone back in time at all. Maybe the whole thing had just happened in my head. Maybe the crash had knocked me into a pocket universe, like the wendigo’s, and my brain had populated the world as I went along - complete with all sorts of glitches and echoes, like a computer program gone bad.
The Inspector would have known. But the Inspector wasn’t here.
Marconi was talking again, something about paging the station to pick up Barlow’s body, but I barely heard. I couldn’t stop looking back at the crumbling ruins of the asylum. The skies in the present day were clear and cloudless, but the sun was starting to sink below the towers, and it glinted off the glass in each shattered window. I stared at the gaping hole in the eastern tower and thought of Meg and Sister Martha crashing through it. Had that really happened? Had any of it?
Marconi helped me into her cruiser and got behind the wheel. The car rumbled forward along the dirt path, but I was looking backward still, back at the decrepit building and all its darkness. The screams of the insane had gone silent years ago. There was nothing but nature out here - nature and this lurking, empty shell, a scar on the face of the mountain.
The towers glowed a soft orange against the sun, like a fire burning on the rooftop. I watched them for as long as I could. Then Marconi’s cruiser plunged into the tree line, and the leaves blocked out the sky, and whatever remained of Mount Palmer Insane Asylum vanished into the murky past.
