“I’ll go first,” I said, taking the lead, hoping Nose would follow.
He nodded and went over to the shelf were he’d left his gun. He picked it up and came back to me.
I hiked my leg over the freezer’s edge, and slid down onto the top step. I descended to the next, and the next, bending my head a little when I came even with the freezer’s lower edge. I heard Nose climb in behind me, his shadow falling across the stairs and blocking out most of the light from above. And there was no light coming from below.
“What’s down there?” Nose asked. It sounded like his tongue was doing a lot better.
“I don’t know. I can’t see. Don’t close the lid yet,” I whispered, pulling my glove off and jamming it in my pocket. Marcus had warned us not to reveal our PSS, not to use it, but there was no way I was going to walk blindly into a dark room under Mike Palmer’s garage.
I took the last step down and held out my ghost hand.
Light sparkled back at me, hundreds of spots of light, my PSS ricocheting around the big empty room I was standing in. The light danced, strobing off the tiny metallic rectangles hanging from the ceiling, looking like some long abandoned rave. The effect was almost enchanting, if you could ignore the fact that the things hanging from the ceiling doing all the twinkling were the razor blades I’d pulled out of Passion Wainwright. But there hadn’t been that many, had there?
“It’s an empty room,” I told Nose, which wasn’t totally a lie. He was still at the top of the steps holding the freezer door open a crack.
I couldn’t tell what the razor blades were hanging from, maybe just dark-colored wire. They were strung at various heights and distances across the entire room, and it looked like they got closer together in the middle of it. The Dark Man had been doing some nasty little arts and crafts project, it seemed. Palmer had said he was experimenting.
On the far side of the room there was a door, a thin line of yellow light seeping under its threshold.
“Come down,” I called up to Nose.
“Okay,” he said, pulling the freezer closed, the rubber seal making an odd sucking noise like some strange monster smacking its lips. Nose’s descent wasn’t exactly quiet. His boots scraped loudly on the stairs. At one point his gun clanged against the metal railing. Even his breathing was loud. Then, when he finally made it to the bottom, he reached out and groped at my chest.
“Hey, watch it,” I said, redirecting his hand into mine.
“Sorry,” he whispered, looking up. “Oh, whoa, what is this place?” he said like a little kid.
“Those are the blades, the ones that jam minus meters. At least, some of them are. There weren’t this many.”
“What the hell are they doing up there?”
“I have no idea,” I said. But I could guess. “Come on,” I said, pulling Nose forward before he had time to guess too. “Just don’t touch them, and hurry, and we should be okay.” Nose didn’t know about the zapping, and I was hoping to keep it that way.
“Where are we going?” Nose protested as I dragged him along, weaving between dangling blades.
“The door across the room.”
As we worked our way forward, the blades grew thicker and it was harder to dodge them. Some hung at eye level, some at chest level, some as low as our knees, and now I could see they were hanging from hair-thin transparent cord, its ends glowing wherever it was laced through the razors. In a few places we had to get down and crawl. It was like running a maze or a hanging labyrinth. When we got to the middle of the room there was a thick wall of razors, like one of those beaded door curtains. I was trying to see a way through, thinking maybe we were going to have to backtrack and find a different route when a sound came from behind the door we were heading toward. A voice calling out “No!” A voice I knew, begging for mercy. Marcus’s voice.
I didn’t even have time to warn Nose.
The air exploded with sound, with a buzzing so loud it rattled my teeth in their sockets and made me clutch at my ears.
The blades rose up, coming alive, whipping this way and that, slicing at my clothes, my skin, my hair, my face. One bit into my cheek and I yanked it out, raising my arms to defend my head and eyes, but I could still feel them battering at my forearms, tearing into my shirt sleeves like mad hummingbirds.
And then the screaming started. And the Pain. The pain in my ghost hand was so excruciating that I suddenly found myself on the floor, curling my body around it. I didn’t know where Nose was, and I didn’t care. Didn’t care where I was, or what I was, or who I was. Barely noticed that someone was kicking me in the head because it was nothing compared to the piercing, cutting, fiery, agony of my hand. Even the screaming. I was screaming. Someone else was screaming. Everyone was screaming. If I could have cut my own hand off, I would have. If it would make it go away. I’d do anything. Just stop. Just make it stop. Please, make it stop.
And then it stopped.
The sound.
The pain.
The screaming.
I was lying on the floor curled in a fetal position.
Someone was moaning near me, up by my head.
Someone was whimpering.
No, that was me. I was making those sounds.
I rolled onto my back and looked up at the twinkling blades against their black ceiling, blinking like so many happy stars in the universe.
I raised my ghost hand and looked at it, surprised that it was still there and intact. I’d expected to find it mangled. Severed. Black. Dead.
From my new angle, the soft blue glow of my PSS illuminated the hanging wires, and I could see that each wire ran from its blade up to the ceiling, those wires connected to more wires imbedded in the ceiling and spiraled across it like some giant glowing spider web.
The blade swaying just above me dripped something wet onto my face.
I reached up and wiped the drop away with my flesh hand, looking at my fingers.
They were covered in gashing cuts and slick with blood.
My forearm was drenched in blood too, ribbons of my shirt and flesh falling away together.
The pain hadn’t kicked in yet, but it would.
How much blood had I lost?
Quite a few of the blades I could see were slick and dark with it.
Of course, some of it was probably Nose’s.
“Nose,” I said, scrambling up to my hands and knees. “We have to get out of here.”
He was lying on his back a few feet away from me. His mask was shredded and soaked with blood, and the PSS from his nose was shining through the slits making him look like some radiant, fissured monster.
“Nose,” I said, crawling to him, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him. “Do you hear me? We have to get out of this room.”
“Yeah,” he said, vacant eyes looking past me. He was conscious. Barely. The pain in my hand had been almost unbearable. Nose had felt that same torture in his head, and he wasn’t recovering as fast as I had.
“Can you crawl? I think we should crawl.” I helped him up on his hands and knees.
We crawled toward the door, hands slipping in our own blood, avoiding blades when we could, plowing through them with our heads down when we couldn’t. It wasn’t like a few more cuts were going to make a difference. The door was no longer just a slit of light. It was the way out of a living nightmare.
When we got to it, I helped Nose stand up. The blades were more spaced out at the periphery of the room, and there were none right near the door.
I looked back across the room, to the shadowy stairs leading back up to the garage, trying to catch my breath. My eyes flicked to something on the floor near the middle of the room where the blades were thickest.
Nose’s gun.
There was no way in hell I was crawling back to get it.
I turned to the door.
“We’re going in,” I said to Nose and opened it.
THE DARK MAN’S LAIR
Whatever I had expected, it wasn’t the room laid out before me.
Marcus was lying in a hospital bed near the far wall, handsome but strangely pale, his eyes closed, white sheet carefully folded at the top and tucked across his bare chest. The only thing that distinguished the scene from every soap opera hospital tableau ever filmed was the gaping hole in the patient’s chest peeking out above the top of the sheet.
Beyond Marcus were two more hospital beds.
Emma was in the closer one, clearly unconscious as well, with a tube trailing from under her sheet to an IV stand next to her bed.
And in the third bed was Passion Wainwright.
She had an IV too. But she was awake.
Passion looked past the tall, lean man standing at her bedside in a white coat. As her eyes caught mine, and a small smile of recognition flitted across her lips. She raised one hand, her wrist crisscrossed with angry, welted, barely-healed cuts, and gave a little wave.
The doctor turned.
Dr. Fineman turned and smiled at me.
“You made it,” he said with the Dark Man’s accent. “I’m so relieved. We were beginning to worry.”
“She’s hurt,” Passion slurred, sounding drunkenly concerned. And then more perkily, “but she brought a visitor.”
“I told you she would,” Dr. Dark Man said.
“You said there would be more,” Passion pouted, flopping her arms a little. She wasn’t drunk. She was drugged.
“Yes, well. It can’t be helped,” the doctor said. “I’m sure the rest will be coming along shortly. We’ll just have to make do with these two, for now.”
“You!” I blurted, my brain finally grasping onto that one word. This could not be real. It had to be a nightmare. Maybe Nose and I were still knocked out, lying in pools of our own blood in the razor room, and this was the terror my unconscious mind had decided to run with—all my personal fears rolled into one horrible scenario. Emma and Marcus helpless. In a hospital. With an evil doctor who just happened to be the Dark Man. And dating my mother. And, of course, throw in Passion, scarred and smiling at me. This was way too twisted to be real.
“Olivia, I know you’re upset. This must be very confusing,” Dr. Dark Man said. “But you’re bleeding quite heavily. And so is your friend. Why don’t you let me tend to those wounds, and then we can all have a nice, calm chat.”
“Chatty, chat, chat,” Passion said, her head lolling against her pillow as she closed her eyes.
Dr. Dark Man moved in my direction, past the end of Emma’s bed, his empty hands held out to show he was unarmed.
“Stay away from us!” I screamed, holding my ghost hand out in front of me like a gun. Behind me, I heard a noise—Nose sliding down the doorframe, his body coming to rest gently against the heels of my boots. Couldn’t anyone stay conscious long enough to help me even a little? It was like I was living in a world of narcoleptics.
“He needs my help,” Dr. Dark Man said, the picture of concern.
“Fuck that!” I yelled. “Fuck you!” My whole body seemed to be shaking, blood dripping onto the floor. “These wounds,” I said, holding out my ravaged hand and arm, “are because of you, you sick motherfuck.” That word had never seemed more appropriate. “This is all because of you.”
“Really?” he said, crossing his arms over his chest like a disgruntled parent. “This is all because of me? That’s odd. I thought it was all because of you.” His voice ground hard on the “you.” He was losing his phony bedside manner. “After all, I’m not the one who stuck my hand into poor innocent Passion here and pulled out her insides. I’ve been trying to clean up that little mess of yours ever since you made it.”
“I—what—how?
“Oh yes, I know all the mischief you’ve been up to, my dear. First there was the huge PSS spike on our meters, which I traced back to your school. Then Passion came to the emergency room and shared with me, her physician, some very strange “memories” associated with that incident. Sadly, she hadn’t felt she could share them with her therapist—conflict of interest—you understand. And then, lo and behold, your Fire Chief brought me your backpack full of very odd razor blades. Blades that amplify PSS resonance, among other things. It didn’t take a genius, though I am one, to put two and two together. After that, it was only natural that Passion should fall under my specialized care. Her parents seemed quite relieved to have her taken off their hands.”
“Who the hell
are
you?” I said, my head spinning a little.
“I am Dr. Salvador Julian, the world’s premiere PSS research specialist. I’m also the only one who can help you with your hand.”
“Help me by killing me? No thanks.” My bleeding was slowing, and I was feeling a little less lightheaded.
“Kill you?” He seemed startled by the idea. “Why would I want to kill you?”
“You tell me. Why did you want to kill Marc—David’s sister?”
“Danielle?” he asked, sounding almost pained. “I didn’t want to kill her. Nor did I do any such thing. But she died, yes. Leukemia is a truly tragic illness, especially when it strikes the young.”
“Leukemia?” I repeated, glancing at Marcus lying in the hospital bed. What he’d described out there in the sycamore tree, the slow death of his sister; it had sounded just like my dad’s death. Was this another one of Marcus’s well-fabricated lies? Could his sister have died under the care of Dr. Julian, not of PSS extraction, but of leukemia? It was possible; Marcus had lied about everything else.
From behind Dr. Julian, a flash of light caught my eye. In the bed, under Marcus’s sheet, a pulse of blue light flared and went out. He was rebooting. Maybe when he came back to life, he’d tell me the truth for a change.
“She didn’t die of leukemia,” I said, moving a step toward Dr. Julian to keep his attention on me. “You killed her by sucking out her PSS. And you burned down my house,” I reminded him. “I know you tried to kill
me
. I was there.”
“Yes, well, that was unfortunate, but I wasn’t trying to kill you,” he said, dismissively. “I simply arranged for you to end up in the hospital under my care.”
“Arranged?” I choked on the word. “By burning my house down with me in it?”
“That was your overzealous fireman, not me. How was I supposed to know you small town Americans are so barbaric? Still, in the end, it was effective, if not efficient. And everything would have ended there, if you’d only done what was asked of you. If you’d let me run those tests and take my sample.”