While Ernest and Holt were tracking down Kathy Ryan, and George Evers was lost to the blight spreading down his residential street, the Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital was settling in for the night. The overnight staff at CNH was a skeleton crew, to say the least. Budget cutbacks and restructuring had left the administration, beholden to shareholders’ interests, with something of a fluid plan for the hospital coffers. After the nightmare at Bridgewood up in Massachusetts and the ugly rumors about Haversham down in New Jersey, Dr. Wensler was careful about where he meted out the funding and why. There was never a shortage of meds to calm the residents, nor the latest medical technology to impress the mayor and councilmen and women. There was, at times, simply a shortage of personnel to hand out said meds or use said technology.
Officer Luis Vargas always took the post in the lobby, standing guard as the administrative secretary, Margaret, finished up her paperwork and gathered up her things to go. In all the years they had overseen the setting of the sun at CNH, she had only ever asked him to walk her to her car once, and it had been earlier that very night. Something had spooked her prior to his arrival, though she was a tough old nut and not one to share such frivolous feelings with the night guard. It didn’t seem his place to ask, and she didn’t answer, but seemed grateful and honestly relieved when she unlocked her car and slipped inside.
As Vargas had crossed the dark parking lot back to the front door, some lone bird chittered into the night. It sounded like hysterical children laughing; that was the thought that came immediately to Vargas’s mind, though he couldn’t remember ever having heard such a thing before. Vargas was from the city, and though he’d spent the last ten years in Newlyn, the variety of odd sounds nature made all around him still perplexed him. What night birds sounded like that, like children laughing, their fragile sanity thin to the point of cracking? He didn’t know. It came again, carried on a light breeze, and it gave him chills, and he walked a little more quickly back to the lobby.
Two other guards on Vargas’s night team, Ted Luftan on the third floor and JoAnn Reuger on the fourth, were already at their posts. Reuger was new, and new guards unnerved the inmates as much as inmates unnerved the newbies, so he’d put her up in the administration area. Teddy Luftan, on the other hand, was a power-tripping dick. He insisted on handling both the second and third floors while they were short-staffed, though not through any sense of protection of the inmates. When those “baby killers” got out of hand, Luftan smacked them back down into place. The guards couldn’t have guns on the hospital grounds, but Luftan didn’t need one. What he was going to need, sooner or later, was a good defense lawyer; the cops had already questioned him a few times in the last day or so about his distaste for his charges. Still, what Vargas didn’t see wasn’t his problem.
Vargas buzzed in the orderlies working that night’s shift, nodding and offering a tightly polite little smile as they walked by, laughing with each other about some private experience among them. He didn’t know their names and didn’t much care to, but they seemed okay enough. At least one of them was big enough to keep Luftan from getting too rough, and Vargas appreciated that. They grew quiet, though, as they passed through the doors into the corridor leading toward the hydrotherapy room. Vargas watched them. Even their body language changed; he’d seen it in cons when he’d worked as a prison guard at Endleton State. It was like a light frost of uneasiness had settled on them. People who worked closely with inmates, he found, could sense when things were out of whack with them. Lord knew he could feel it, and he wasn’t even near them. From the reports of inmate anxiety, though, that Luftan was sending over the walkie from the second floor (“Must be a full moon, man, ’cuz the baby killers are fuckin’ howlin’ and jibberin’ tonight”), there was certainly something in the air.
Nighttime lockdown hadn’t been without its ugly incidents the last few weeks, and that was on Vargas. He, Reuger, and Luftan had been given a pass so far, but the hospital couldn’t be racking up any more bodies on his time. Until Hadley, Wensler and the other admins had been content to write off the last few deaths as accidents and suicides, and after all, why not? Those inmates, in their plain prison beds dreaming of kiddie diddling or whatever they thought about, were violent and unstable. That was why they were in CNH in the first place. Now, the last guy, Hadley…a few of them had jumped him on Vargas’s watch, and that was sure to bring some heat—not just to Luftan, who had been assigned to his floor, but to Vargas himself. He couldn’t quite believe that Luftan had heard nothing that night—Vargas had seen those crime scene photos of the body, and a man screamed when someone did things like that to him. As if Hadley wasn’t bad enough, apparently some nutjob had walked through a locked door and kicked another inmate’s ass badly enough to put him in the infirmary. Luftan swore he’d heard nothing then, either. It didn’t seem to be washing with the cops any more than it was with Vargas, but that was the story Luftan was sticking with.
He wasn’t surprised when Reuger radioed down that someone had pushed the emergency stop on the elevator—an inmate shirking the lights-out rule, she suspected—but he was uneasy. He shoved off the wall on which he was leaning and walked over to the elevators and sure enough, one of them was stopped on the fourth floor.
“No problem,” Vargas called back on the walkie. He pulled the key ring from his belt and pushed through the door to the stairwell. “I’m on my way up. I’ll bring the keys up and we’ll manually open it.”
“Okay,” Reuger said. She sounded nervous. “Just hurry, okay?”
“You scared, Jo?”
There was a crackling of static that might have been a huff. “No, of course not,” she replied. “But the noises the guy’s making in there are just kind of freaky, you know?”
Vargas smiled as he climbed the stairs. “What kind of noises? Like ‘oh, oh, oh baby, ohhhh, oh JoAnn, do me!’” He laughed.
“No,” she said, sounding flustered. He could almost feel her blushing over the walkie-talkie. “Like…like animal noises.”
“Like I said—”
“No,” she repeated more firmly. “Like whip-poor-wills, kind of. Like if they could laugh. Long, eerie whistle-laughing. It reminds me of…” Her thought, wherever it was going, trailed off. “It’s just creepy. Why would he make noises like that? Can’t you hear it? I’m holding the walkie up to the door.”
Vargas listened for a few seconds, then radioed back. “Can’t hear it, Reuger. Sorry.”
“You can’t hear that? Are you fucking with me? You’ve got to be fucking with me, right?”
“Sorry, I can’t,” he protested with a chuckle. “Look, I know it can be a little unsettling walking around a nuthouse at night, but I really think—”
“Wait, the door’s opening,” she said, her voice nearly a whisper. “It—” Then she began to scream.
“Reuger? Reuger, what’s going on? Reuger!” He bolted up the stairs, taking two and three at a time. He nearly took a spill on the second-floor landing but caught himself and leaped toward the next flight of stairs.
He was breathing hard when he broke through the stairwell door into the fourth-floor corridor. He skidded to a stop just before the blood. It was everywhere in front of the elevator—on the closed elevator doors, the walls, the waxy leaves of the plastic potted plants to either side of the elevator…and the floor. It was thick on the floor, its heavy, coppery taste coating the back of Vargas’s throat.
Vargas pulled out his Taser. Slowly, his gaze panned the hallway. The silence was as thick and cloying as the smell of blood. The office doors were all closed. Small droplets of red had managed to reach the nearest ones, dark against the polished honey oak. There was no sign of Reuger anywhere—no sign other than the blood, assuming it was Reuger’s blood. Even her walkie was gone.
Vargas glanced up at the digital window over the elevator. It reflected back a frozen red 4. The elevator was still on this floor…and whatever had been inside, whatever had made Reuger scream, was just behind those metal doors.
Should he call on the walkie? Try to use the silence to his advantage? He wasn’t sure.
“Shit,” he whispered to himself. “Shit, shit, shit.”
He decided to back out into the stairwell and call Luftan. He was pretty certain prying open the door was the way to go, but he sure as hell wasn’t about to do it by himself.
“Luftan,” he said into the walkie in a hushed voice. “You there?”
No answer.
“Luftan,” he said, a little louder. “Ted, where are you?”
The walkie didn’t so much as chirp. Vargas was about to head back down a floor when a crackle of static made him jump. It was all he could do to keep from tossing the walkie in surprise.
“Yeah, Yeah, I’m here. Checking out the solitaries on two. What’s up?”
Luftan sounded guarded…not quite afraid, but on alert for sure.
“It’s Reuger. She’s gone.”
“Like, took off?”
“No, like missing. There’s blood everywhere. I think she…I think whatever took her is still in the elevator. Up here.”
“Whoever.”
“What?”
“Don’t you mean ‘whoever’?” Luftan asked.
“Yeah, sure. Just get up here, okay? It’s a mess.”
“Well, shit,” Luftan responded. “Gimme a minute. I’ll come up.”
A few minutes later, he heard Luftan’s footsteps echoing through the stairwell and saw his tall, lanky shadow jogging up the wall. He appeared a second later with a club in one hand and a Taser in the other.
“So what’s goin’ on, boss?” he said in a low voice, joining Vargas by the stairwell door.
“I don’t know,” Vargas whispered back. “She called me on the walkie and then started screaming, and I came up and found…that.” He gestured toward the door.
Luftan looked at him a moment, then eased open the door. “Jesus,” he breathed. “One of the baby killers did that?”
“I don’t know,” Vargas repeated. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
The two crept into the corridor, inching up to the blood on the floor. It had begun to congeal, though instead of turning a rusty brown, it looked threaded through with stringy veins of blue so dark it was almost black.
“What is that shit? The blue shit in the blood? Is that some kinda chemical or somethin’?”
Vargas didn’t answer. His gaze was fixed on the elevator doors. They kept opening just enough to flash a large, bloody pile of rags and then closing. Open and close, open and close, open and close, each time with a cheery little ding that ratcheted up Vargas’s unease.
The rags inside were the same color as a night guard uniform.
“Gotta get those doors open,” Luftan said. As he crossed through the blood puddle, his boots made sticky crackling sounds on the floor.
“Luftan, man, seriously?”
Luftan looked confused, then glanced down at his shoes. “Oh. Yeah. Right.” He turned back to the elevator doors and shouldered them open a little farther, then worked on wedging his nightstick in between them.
He happened to look down into the car. “Oh, fuck!” He stumbled backward, nearly slipping on a still-wet spot on the floor. Luftan, whose face never wore any expression but vaguely sadistic amusement, looked genuinely scared. His chest was hitching with deep breaths and he’d lost both the Taser and the nightstick. His wide eyes were staring at the elevator doors, now completely closed, as if he could see right through them, and what lay beyond was getting worse.
“What?” Vargas took his shoulder and shook it a little. “What did you see?”
“That was Reuger,” he said. His voice had taken on a simple, amazed quality, like a child’s.
“Teddy, is she alive?” Vargas asked calmly. He didn’t feel it, but he was afraid if he lost it, Luftan would go careening over some unseen edge into a place where whatever was on the big screen in the theater of his mind’s eye would keep playing over and over on a loop for the rest of his life.
“That was Reuger,” Luftan repeated. “That was her head. Where’s the rest of her, Vargas? Where the fuck is the rest of her?”
“I don’t know, buddy,” Vargas said.
“We have to find the rest of her…”
“We will. We will. First, we have to get everything on lockdown. And right now, I need you to go down into the lobby and call 911. Tell them we have a staff death here at the hospital, okay? Can you do that?”
“Of course I fucking can,” Luftan muttered, but there was no fight in his words. He looked somehow shocked soft, shocked thin. He shuffled toward the stairwell and paused so long at the door that Vargas thought he might have forgotten where he was supposed to be going.
“Ted?”
“There’s more in there,” Luftan said. He turned to look at Vargas. “Moving parts…that aren’t JoAnn. I don’t know what they are.”
“Parts?”
“They were wearing her head.”
Vargas frowned, shaking his head. “I don’t understand.”
Luftan turned back to the door. “You have blood on your shoes,” he said softly, then pushed through into the stairwell.
Vargas watched the space where Luftan had been for a few seconds, listening as the echo of the guard’s footsteps faded. Then he turned his attention back to the mess in front of him.
The digital number 4 still reigned over the elevator doors. Whatever lay behind them waited soundlessly for his next move. He circumvented the blood as best he could, inching his way toward the doors. That close to them, he could hear faint singing, punctuated by loonlike laughter. Reuger had been right; they did sound like whip-poor-wills. They also sounded like hysterical children laughing. They sounded like strings of nerves untangled from the body and stretched so tightly that they were on the verge of snapping.
Suddenly remembering the row of offices just down the hall, he glanced in their direction, their own doors like cool, polished oak shields against the horrors just a few feet away. There was always someone working late—Wensler, Dr. Ulster, somebody—so why weren’t they poking their heads out? They had to have heard the commotion, and Dr. Wensler would never have put up with such a ruckus on his nice, quiet floor, sufficiently removed from the unfortunate and unavoidable dregs of his workplace.
He made his way back around the blood and moved down the hall toward the offices, stopping at Dr. Wensler’s first. He did not relish the idea of reporting yet another messy death to the director, but it had to be done anyway. Taking a deep breath, he rapped on the door, then waited.
“Come.” Dr. Wensler’s command, even muffled through the door, had authority.
Vargas opened the door, words of apology already on his lips.
“Dr. Wensler, I—”
Dr. Wensler wasn’t there. Confused, Vargas scanned the room. It wasn’t that big, though it was, of course, the biggest office. It was tastefully decorated in muted modern furnishings and bland water paintings representative of nothing. The oak desk dwarfed nearly everything else in the room, including the expensive leather chair, the throne from which Dr. Wensler asserted his dominion. The gold plaque on the desk informed visitors of the director’s position. To the left was a door that Vargas believed led to a small personal employee bathroom, and behind the desk chair was a large window looking out over the hospital grounds, but there was otherwise no place for a grown man to have gone.
Vargas slipped into the office. “Dr. Wensler?” he directed toward the closed bathroom door, in case the director had stepped inside. “You in here?”
This time, there was no answer. Vargas crossed around behind the desk to make sure the man hadn’t fainted or found himself in the sudden grip of a heart attack. The floor was bare, other than the tidy carpeting. Just to be on the safe side, he peered out the window. The ledge outside beneath the window frame was two, maybe three inches wide. There was no way Dr. Wensler in his expensive shoes could have stood on it, and there was, to Vargas’s relief, no body on the ground below, either.
He headed to the bathroom door and opened that, flipping the switch on the wall just inside, but the little room was empty. It was, in fact, a bathroom, and bigger than he’d imagined. It even had a small shower stall next to the sink. Vargas had no time to admire it, though. He flipped off the lights and closed the door.
“Dr. Vargas?” he asked the empty room, but it didn’t answer. Whatever he’d heard, or thought he’d heard, either hadn’t come from that room or wasn’t there now.
Vargas emerged into the hallway again and looked at the elevator. A trail of footprints followed him down the hall. They didn’t look like blood, at least not human blood; they were a dark bluish-black, with three foretoes and one on the heel, like some large bird.
Like a bird, maybe, that made horrible child-laughter whip-poor-will noises.
His gaze followed the trail, which appeared to have paused before the room he had just been in and then turned off and disappeared under the door of an office across the hall. The name by the suite number read “Pamela Ulster, MD, Developmental Psychology/Psychopathology.”
Vargas’s stomach dropped. Not all of the doctors were friendly with the non-medical staff at the hospital, but Dr. Pam had always offered warm smiles and friendly interest in Vargas’s well-being. He liked her and hated to think whatever had gotten to Reuger had gone after her, too.
He stepped around the footprints and eased open Dr. Pam’s door. It was dark inside, and as light from the hallway spilled in, Vargas thought he saw movement.
Vargas flipped on the switch and poked his head in. Dr. Pam’s office was like a smaller, less ostentatious version of Dr. Wensler’s, with tidy desk and chair, some soothing prints of non-things hanging on the walls, and a soft-looking couch and big easy chair. Dr. Pam wasn’t there, and neither was anyone or anything else living, so far as he could tell, except for a little potted plant in one corner.
Confused, Vargas closed the door. Where was everyone? And where was Luftan with the damn police? When he turned to the hallway, the footprints had multiplied, creating frenzied spirals and crisscrosses all over the floor, walls, and ceiling. They were everywhere, including the doorframe right next to where his hand was resting. He jerked it back.
“Fuck this,” he muttered to himself, and took off for the stairwell. He had made it just about halfway when the elevator doors opened. He skidded to a stop.
A thick black mist streamed into the hallway, spreading out without really getting any thinner or lighter. It moved quickly, pouring itself onto the floor as if filling up invisible people-shaped glasses. When the smoke had resolved itself into four distinct human silhouettes, each of them opened their eyes. Four pairs of glowing almond shapes bored into him, watching him.
From the elevator car behind them, beyond the open doors, he could hear metallic grinding and soft rustling, something that might have once been an end table sidling out alongside an odd lamp-shaped bird. He saw an arm in a dark blue sleeve waving what Vargas thought was a thick piece of fabric at him until he recognized one of Luftan’s chest tattoos. The source of the arm was out of view in the elevator, but a fleshy tendril where a head might have been dipped and wavered around the door.
“What the fuck are you?” Vargas whispered.
The mist people tittered and giggled, and the sound was very much like the way children must sound as the breath is being squeezed from their tiny little throats.
It was, in fact, the way Vargas’s screams sounded, once the mist people and their odd furniture descended on him.
* * * *
Dr. Pam Ulster had finished her therapy appointments for the day—eight individual counseling sessions with her regular patients, as well as three group therapy sessions, two of which she covered for Dr. Wensler. He had left early that afternoon, around 4:00 p.m.—a descent from on high to attend some board meetings or some such thing. She didn’t really care; the hospital as a whole breathed a collective sigh of relief once he’d left the premises. He wore about him like a vampire’s cloak an air of constant scrutiny, fringed with disapproval, which Pam found exhausting. She had once harbored a hope that the old man would retire, but she knew now he would not. They’d have to pry the hospital out of his cold, dead, iron grip.
She’d had therapy sessions until eight that night and then she’d spent the next few hours catching up on paperwork. There was always a lot of it—session notes to type up for the file, billing and insurance paperwork, treatment forms. It seemed to multiply like rabbits on her desk, and she was glad for those few quiet hours in the evening when she could get it down to a manageable and acceptable level.
It hadn’t been so quiet that evening, though. During the last of the individual therapy sessions, around 7:30, it had sounded like the walls were groaning, and the lights flickered, threatening for several seconds to plunge her and her patient, Gina Maldonado, into another blackout. Around 8:15, Pam had heard footsteps, which in itself wasn’t unusual except that they sounded like they were climbing the walls. At 9:00, she’d heard a shout in the corridor outside her door. Frowning, she pushed back her desk chair, slipped those murderous heels back on her feet, and went to the doorway to investigate.
The sound was unlikely to have come from a patient; they were all in overnight lockdown on the floors below. A security guard, then? If the security staff were screaming, that was probably not a good sign.
She peered up and down the hallway over her thin, fashionable reading glasses, but it was empty. Its unearthly quiet had settled again like a layer of dust on the place. Whoever had shouted was gone now.
She returned to her desk and the file lying open on her blotter:
BANKS, HENRY
Age: 28 years
Birthdate: November 2, 1990
Height: 5’8’’
Weight: 185 lbs.
Eye Color: Blue (left)/Green (right)
Hair color: Blond
Former Residence: 82 Crownwell Street, Newlyn, CT
Family
Father: Joseph Orrin Banks (deceased)
Mother: Eleanor Maisie Banks (deceased)
Grandfather: Marcus “The Viper” Banks (deceased)
Aunt: Lydia Banks (deceased)
Uncle: Frederick Edgar Banks (deceased)
Diagnosis: Undetermined. Psychotic features, possible DID. See Abuse and Family History, p. 7.
Pam sighed, pulling off her glasses to pinch the bridge of her nose where a headache was forming. She was at a loss as to what to do for Henry Banks. She took pride in the fact that while many of her patients couldn’t get much better, they didn’t really get any worse. Henry, on the other hand, seemed to be steadily declining. His delusions were taking on more import in his mind, more substantiality. The delusions in particular about a trio of friends and an outlier entity who he claimed had been responsible for the killings were very strong; in fact, they seemed to be having a mass delusion effect on some of the other patients, as well. She hadn’t wanted to put him in isolation just yet because they felt it really benefitted Henry to interact with other people and she didn’t believe in her gut or in her professional opinion that Henry was a physical threat to anyone. She had no doubt the police were right and someone had murdered Ben Hadley and Martha and maybe even the others, but it hadn’t been Henry who had done it.
That it had been his delusions was a notion so laughable that she’d naturally dismissed it when the other patients first brought it up, but now, after Kathy Ryan’s visit and a thorough review of Henry’s file and her own notes…
Well, the truth was there. It was between the lines, but it was there, and once she’d seen it, she couldn’t unsee it. Delusions, by their very definition, weren’t really there. Henry’s friends, on the other hand, most certainly seemed to be. In that context, he was a danger to others, but only if those…things…were doing what Henry commanded, and not, as Kathy Ryan suggested, taking the initiative to kill on their own.
If Kathy was right, then Henry was just as much in danger as everyone else in the hospital.
Pam got up and wandered to the window. It was dark already. Those pre-summer evenings when the end of the workday meant crossing a dark parking lot alone after leaving a mental hospital for the criminally insane always set her on high alert. She wasn’t afraid per se, but she certainly kept an eye out for anything unusual, even before she left the building. It was, maybe, that awareness that drew her attention to the odd pulsing glow a couple of acres away, over one of the hilltops. She tilted her head, surprised. What was out that way? Utility buildings, she thought. Maybe an old toolshed the landscaper used. She supposed he might have been burning leaves or other yard debris, though she couldn’t imagine why the fire glowed green like that, or changed color. Green pulsed to blue, blue to purple, purple to white, white back to blue, blue to red, red to yellow, and back to green again. It was kind of pretty, how the glow slipped and slid over the hilltop like liquid light, like dripping paint in a pastoral landscape. She smiled…until she noticed that the glow was flowing toward the hospital.
She blinked her tired eyes and slipped her glasses back on. The glow broke into pieces, and those pieces resolved into figures, but they still glowed, some yellow-white and some faint blue or green. Some, she saw, didn’t glow at all. Rather, they seemed to suck all the light and even some of that pastoral landscape into them like humanoid black holes. Among them were packs of strange beasts that looked kind of like furniture and appliances in some nightmare funhouse. The pulsing colored lights she had seen, alternating hues and intensity, she could tell now were massive clouds of brightness from which myriad appendages waved and flopped, some tentacle-like and others very much like human arms and legs.
All of the things were swarming the hillside, moving like a small army toward the hospital.
Part of Pam Ulster—the logical, scientific, A-type personality part—knew she should be worried. Something very strange and very bad was happening down there, and it was moving closer every second she stood there gaping like an idiot. She couldn’t will her body to move away from the window, though. All she could do was replay the same thought-loop over and over in her head: They’re in my notes. The light clouds are the Others and the black holes are the Wraiths and the beasts are the Little Ones and they’re all in my notes. Henry told me about them and they’re all in my notes.
She began to laugh. It came on her suddenly, and that worried, logical part of her felt trapped and helpless. This wasn’t her. It felt more like the laughter was seeping into her as opposed to coming out of her. She kept laughing, though, and laughed hard, too, and for what felt like a long time. When that crazy mirth had died down to a giggle, she looked out the window again. They were gone. The rest of the laughter in her died at once.
A phantom hand came to rest on her shoulder…or perhaps it had been there the whole time.
They were here. They’d made it to the hospital. They were in the hospital.
And they’re all in my notes…
She turned away from the window. She was alone in the office, or at least, she thought she was. But there were noises in the hallway again, chirps and tweets and a low keening that reminded her of some strange, sad bird.
Slowly—she couldn’t make her body move as quickly as her mind wanted—Pam moved to the door and locked it. Whatever was out there, she wasn’t about to let it in while she had any control of herself left. Scanning the room for something she could use as a weapon, she kept an ear on the noises in the hallway. They were getting closer. That low bird wail sounded like it was right outside the door now.
She scooped up a heavy glass paperweight and turned back to the door. A dark smoke had begun to pour in from the crack underneath, and at first she thought maybe the hallways had caught fire, that they were trying to smoke her out or get her to jump out her office window. Then she realized that the smoke was not formless; it was pulling together, stretching upward as if being poured into a humanoid mold, and when everything from the feet to the top of the head had taken shape, it opened its eyes.
Pam wanted to scream, but the mist was holding out its arm, its hand closed into a fist, and the gesture seemed to be pulling the air out of her. Her hands flew to her throat, clawing at the invisible pressure there. It was coming from the inside where that alien laughter had been. It felt like her vocal cords were being tied in knots, and each knot was squeezing acid down her throat. Pam’s arm flung out in an attempt to grab something, anything, the corner of the desk even, to pull herself away from the force intent on killing her. Objects fell from her blotter, but she barely noticed. Her vision grew fuzzy around the edges.
By instinct, she hurled the glass paperweight at the mist, and as the glass shattered against the far wall, the figure dissipated.
Immediately, the pressure inside her throat withdrew, and she could breathe. Her vision cleared, then grew wet with tears. She leaned over her desk, coughing, gasping, and wheezing for several long minutes.
Finally, her breathing returned to normal and she wiped the tears from her eyes. Her throat still felt a little sore, but she thought she was all right. She went to the small water cooler in the corner of her room and poured herself a small paper cup of water from the cold side. After emptying it over the hot coals in her throat, she felt better, steadier. She crumpled the cup and threw it in the trash. She could think again, and her thoughts, she was sure, were her own.
She had to get out of there. That was all there was to it. Either Henry Banks’s mass delusion was starting to affect her as well, in which case, she might as well pull up a residential bed right alongside him, or…
…Or Kathy Ryan was right, and Henry Banks had been telling the truth, and everything in her notes was fact and not fantasy.
She wasn’t sure which would be worse, though she suspected before the night was through that the latter would prove to be the greater evil.
Pam grabbed her purse and headed for the office door. The sounds had died away sometime between when she was choking and that moment when she stood with her hand on the doorknob; probably when the smoke thing had disappeared, so had the sources of those awful noises. Right then was probably the best and maybe the only time to escape.
She eased open the door as quietly as she could and peered out into the hall.
It was empty. It was also utterly silent, but she thought that wasn’t unusual for that floor at that hour, until she realized she wasn’t sure what hour it actually was.
Stepping into the corridor, she was uncomfortably aware of the echo her high heels made on the tile floor. It sounded thunderous to her, and she tried leaning forward on her toes as she hurried down the hall toward the elevator. The button, it seemed, had already been pushed, and the elevator car was on its way up. Although it made her feel vulnerable to be standing out in the open like that, the elevator seemed like a better option than the stairs.
Or was it? Wasn’t there some sage advice about using stairs rather than an elevator during times of emergency? No, that was in a case of fire or power failure.
“What was that?” she suddenly asked the solitude. It didn’t answer. “What was that thing?”
It occurred to her as she stood there waiting for the elevator, still waiting as if it was ever going to come in her lifetime, that she’d been in close proximity to Henry so many times. Countless times, really. She’d been his therapist since before his trial. That meant she had probably been in the room with those things, those friends of his, before they were strong enough to show themselves. She knew Maisie and Orrin and Edgar and even the Viper almost better than Henry did. She knew about the lives and histories of those monsters all the way back when they probably were still fantasies. They had probably touched her shoulder just like some had in her office earlier. And if they could do half of what Henry had ascribed to them over the years…
It was all in her notes. She remembered the way Henry described Maisie’s ability to get into people’s heads, how Orrin was razor sharp, fast as the wind and possessed of a temper like a storm, and how Edgar only had one eye, but he could shoot laserlike fire from it. Henry always seemed to sympathize with Edgar, whom he’d once sketched as being small and gaunt, almost birdlike, with all the earmarks of a fringe outcast. Edgar, Pam believed, was as close to how Henry saw himself as any of those creatures got. Maisie was his dream girl, one who would love and mother him and take care of him while simultaneously needing him in her life. Orrin was in wit and charm, body and soul, who Henry wished he could be. Along with their collection of misty Wraiths and shapeshifting imps and miasmic living light clouds he called the Others, they were an army of defenders in a world so vastly different from the tragic, brutal one in which Henry had grown up. She’d always been amazed by his creativity and attention to detail. She’d even suggest he write and draw comics with his ideas.
He’d laughed at the time and told her he didn’t want to give them a reason to take over the world.
She shivered. Frustrated with the elevator, which clearly wasn’t working (the digital screen above said it was on the sixth floor now, and there was no sixth floor), she turned to the stairwell and headed for the stairs. In that narrower space, her clicking heels reverberated at an almost deafening volume, but she couldn’t wait out in the open any longer. That Wraith thing could come back at any moment and crush my insides, she thought, or the Others could come.
They would come and turn me inside out.
That’s what Henry said they could do. The Others could reach inside like the Wraiths, but they weren’t content just to flatten lungs or crush hearts or squeeze minds to jelly. The Others rearranged people. They moved bones and organs, cells and tissue, rerouted blood. They made bodies never meant to change shape into new and horrible things. It was something Henry had spoken about with awe and tinges of both fear and satisfaction. He claimed it was what had become of his grandfather in the end. It was why they’d never found all of the old man’s body—only what was left, what the Others didn’t need after he’d been rearranged.
She’d reached the second-floor stairwell landing when a glow from a floor below made her heels chirp as she stopped short. The light pulsed different colors, hypnotizing and almost soothing in their hues. She could almost imagine she heard a soft heartbeat with each color change.
She shook her head, her thoughts returning to her original concern. Her proximity to Henry and thus to these creatures might mean she was more susceptible to them. How much of herself had she shared with Henry in an attempt to reach him? How many careless things about herself had she let slip in simple casual conversation? And what did they need to know about her to gain control? She didn’t think it was much. They certainly seemed to be able to come and go inside her head that night almost as freely as in Henry’s.
The glow beneath her seemed to pulse delightedly in response to her thoughts.
She couldn’t go that way. One of those Others was in the stairwell with her. Could it sense her? Smell her? What had her notes said about how they found prey? All she could remember was that Henry thought they were crazy. She’d even helped him find the word to describe them: berserkers, like those wild warriors of old. Manifestations of Henry’s psychopathic anger and desire, she’d thought at the time—his Id-beasts.
Now the glow was rising up the stairs. Within minutes, maybe seconds, she’d be able to see the tips of those waving tentacles, the stiff fingers of those mannequinlike hands…
She turned and ran up the steps. The exploding echoes of her heels were like a gunfight all around her. The alien sedation that had been weighing her down ever since the first odd noise in the hallways that evening was finally lifting, and true panic was setting in. Those things were coming for her, coming to rearrange her, and there was no way out.
Once she had burst through the stairwell doors and back into the fourth-floor hallway, she kicked her heels off toward the reception desk and then bent to catch her breath, her manicured nails resting just above her knees. Her panting was loud like the echoes of her shoes had been, and she was sure it was only a matter of time before that glow ascending the stairs engulfed her in its blinding, pulsing colors and—
“Pam,” a soft, sexless voice said behind her. She cried out, nearly falling over in her attempt to stand up straight and turn at the same time. No one was behind her. She felt tears of panic and frustration gather wet and hot in the corners of her eyes, blurring her vision. She staggered away from the sound of the voice and toward the offices again, unsure where to go or what to do next. That haze of thought invasion, that sense of someone else’s calm being forced into her brain, was beginning to return. It made her feel weak, confused, and ineffective. Maybe it was the first step in the rearranging process.
Instead of collapsing through the doorway of her own office, she sagged against Dr. Wensler’s. He always locked up before leaving, and so when her resting hand turned the doorknob and it moved inward behind her into the dark, she was surprised. She caught herself, flipped on the light, and slipped in, locking the door behind her. The last was a reflex, a taught behavior to establish safe boundaries. Locking the door wouldn’t do any good and she understood that intellectually, but it made her feel better to have done it.
She managed to make it to the sofa before her legs gave way, and she sank onto a soft cushion and began to sob. Then she began to laugh, thinking about how annoyed Dr. Wensler would be to learn she was getting tear stains all over a $6,000 sofa there just for show.
The she began to cry again, squeezing her eyes shut tightly. This wasn’t going to end well. She didn’t need the alien thoughts to tell her that. They wanted her, maybe because Henry liked her or trusted her, or maybe because she knew too much about him and his thoughts and feelings. Maybe they wanted everything back that he’d ever shared with her, or maybe…maybe they were angry that it was her professional opinion that had confined Henry, and them by extension, to the Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
She felt the pulsing colored light before she saw it even through her eyelids.
“Pam,” the sexless voice called to her. “Oh, hi there, Pam.”
She opened her eyes. A cloud of light and wispy fog about five feet across hovered at eye level in a far corner of the room. It had turned off the office light; she hadn’t noticed that behind her closed eyes, either, but now, the glow was casting red then blue then greenish-yellow light over Dr. Wensler’s desk and over its softly waving tentacles, which she saw now were about a half foot thick and made of a smooth, rubbery gray skin. A human leg dangled from the cloud, and Pam got the absurd image of a naked man trying to climb out of the endless source of light. An arm, just opposite, waved upward like that of a drowning woman, its long fingernails translucent.
“What are you?” she whispered to it. “How can you be?”
“I am all the things,” the sexless voice responded, and laughed. The sound reminded her of a loon or whip-poor-will, or the broken laughter of a child with all the sanity beaten out of him.
“Are you going to kill me?” Pam wiped the sweat from her palms on her skirt. She was glad to be out of those terrible, painful shoes. No one wanted to die in shoes like that.
“Eventually. After I play.” A lunatic giggle.
“Why do it?” she asked.
“For fun,” the voice said, and the colors pulsed more brightly. “Because I can.”
“Okay,” she said. “Will it hurt?”
“Only until you die. Then the hurt stops…usually.”
“When will you do it?”
“Now, if you’re ready.”
She closed her eyes. “I am.”
“You were his favorite,” the sexless voice said cheerily. “The one who mattered.”
“That’s nice,” she said, and her hands clenched, gathering her skirt in bunches.
“Yes, nice.”
Then the light got bright enough to turn the black behind her eyelids red. She could hear her bones grinding and shifting, actually hear it from inside her own head, and the burning began as tissue ripped and organs stretched. She might have bled, but the sensations on her skin were too strange to classify. She would have screamed, but by then, nothing was left of her mouth.
The last thought she had as Dr. Pamela Ulster was that she was going to leave one hell of a mess on Dr. Wensler’s expensive couch.