To my surprise her eyes started watering, from sadness or from fear I didn’t know. I had forgotten how terrifying all of this could be if you weren’t used to. Hell, I had never been in a situation like this before. Ghosts I could handle, but this was something so beyond my understanding that I didn’t even know how to combat it or if it was even possible. It was larger, and deadlier, than anything I’d known.
She sniffed and it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen my mother cry in a long time. With a thin, shaking hand she wiped away a tear and said. “I’m sorry, Perry. For everything.”
Oh, and now she was going to make me cry. Of all moments, she was choosing this one.
“Mom, it’s okay,” I said, my eyes imploring her to stay calm and focused. “I just need you to leave and go find dad. Bring help, bring someone, but you have to get out of here and now.”
“I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you,” she said, her voice cracking, more tears spilling down her cheek. In the shadows of the room they looked like they were rivers carving out her skin. “More than that, I am so sorry I didn’t believe my mother.”
I softened, feeling a pain in my gut. Pippa.
“I wish she was here right now,” she whispered. “I would tell her so many things. I keep waiting for her to show up but she hasn’t.”
“I know,” I said gently, rubbing her back with the butt of my palm. “I do too. But I think she’s gone to a better place. It’s what she wanted and what we wanted for her.”
The knock resounded again on the door. I didn’t want to turn around and look. It was far too solid and coming from a higher place on the door for it to be Michael.
At least, not Michael as a kid.
“Guys,” Ada said. “Seriously, let’s go.”
I nodded and ushered them to the window. Ada pushed up the bottom with ease and it rose soundlessly. Even though the roped ladder was attached to two solid hooks, I still held the end while Ada climbed over the edge.
“Take care of mom, okay?” I whispered to her.
She nodded and looked down beneath her. It wasn’t a far drop and unlike the garbage cans under another window, there was nothing beneath us but the brick path between this house and the neighbours. “You’re coming right after, aren’t you?”
I nodded. “Hell yes I am. As soon as I get Dex and Maximus, we’ll be right behind you.”
Ada raised her brow, as if she didn’t believe me. Or maybe it wasn’t that, it was that it seemed impossible at this point. Then she dropped the five feet to the ground, landing on her two feet with ease.
“You’re next,” I whispered urgently to my mom.
“Perry,” she said, paused at the sill, “this doesn’t make sense. You should go next. I’ll find Dex.”
I shook my head. “This isn’t your battle mom. You shouldn’t have even been here in the first place.”
Her eyes grew frenzied. “And yet I came,” she hissed, holding on to my shoulders. “I did come here because I felt I needed to. Why was that? Why did I need to come here, what did I need to find, to see?”
“Maybe you needed to see that you’re just like me,” I said, full of hope and doubt at the same time. “Maybe you needed to see that you’re not alone.” She breathed out heavily and I continued. “Maybe you just missed your mother and wanted to see a part of her life.”
She put her hand on my cheek. “I am sorry,” she said. “I’ll never doubt you again.”
I debated whether this was the time to bring up the whole switching pills thing but decided against it. There was too much going on as it was. I didn’t even know why a demon would bother knocking but it was obviously waiting for me.
A loud, guttural cry interrupted our moment. It seemed to come from within the house, within the walls. The door to the hallway flew open and I saw the silhouette of a beast standing on two legs, the same beast we saw in the hotel. It cried again, a horrible scream that smelled like death and brought slivers into your ears.
“Go!” I screamed at my mother, practically pushing her out of the window. She fumbled for a moment and I thought she was going to fall but the ladder began to swing with her weight. There was a second of uncertainty and then I heard her land on the bricks below and Ada’s hushed cries.
The window shut behind her with a deafening clatter and I felt like my last tie with the real world had been severed.
Now I was facing a beast, a blackened shape of evil with eyes that glinted white. I could feel the frustration coming off of him, knowing it was all for me. Something had happened. I had ruined something.
That was good, at least. I smiled at the beast.
I expected the monster to start charging toward me. I expected to have to fight and to have to die.
But that didn’t happen. The beast remained in the doorway, its head coaxed to the side as if it were listening.
Then it screamed again, this one worse than the first. It ran off down the hall, turning into a pool of liquid smoke that slinked through the air, leaving hate behind.
I stood there, afraid to move, unsure of what to do. Then I turned around and frantically tried the window. It was sealed shut, like it had been glued and the glass had been replaced with black ooze. I couldn’t see my mother and Ada and couldn’t hear them either. They were out there, hopefully going for help, hopefully making it out into the city of New York.
And I was in here. So was Dex. So was Maximus.
So was Little Michael. So was a beast.
And I had a feeling, a million other horrible things.
I took in a deep breath, wishing I knew what was going on, what I was fighting, wishing I had some mode of defense. But I had nothing.
Well, almost nothing.
Once my heart rate slowed down enough for me to catch my breath, I closed my eyes and started to yell for help inside my head, all while trying to prevent my thoughts by being read by anyone else.
I yelled for Maximus. I yelled for Dex like I’d never yelled before.
And hoped they could hear me.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Dex
I woke up to a pounding at the door. It sounded like at any minute, some giant sledgehammer was going smash through it, followed by the face of Jack Nicholson saying, “Here’s Johnny!”
But that didn’t happen. The pounding continued, as did a familiar voice.
“Declan, let me in!”
It was rough, ragged, slurring. It was my mother.
I opened my eyes and saw nothing but blackness at first. After a second, they adjusted to the light coming from a nightlight in the corner of the room.
Holy McFuck, I was back inside my childhood bedroom. I was under the covers, my favorite flannel blankie that still smelled like the lemon detergent that Pippa used to use, my legs hanging off the bed.
I slowly eased myself up, wondering why my head was pounding. How did I end up here?
Images of the day came piling into my brain all at once. Perry, Ada, Maximus, Perry’s mom, dad. Daniel had left us. The rest of us went to the house. We went inside and everything changed. Everything was black and patchy. My memories and thoughts didn’t seem like my own.
And yet now I was here, tripping balls, because how the hell do you end up in the past. Because I was in the same bed I slept in as a child, my collection of cassette tapes were still in the corner, my fencing sword and nun-chucks displayed on the wall, and my mother, my drunken mom, she was pounding at the door, wanting to come in, wanting to terrorize me.
I had no reason to be afraid of her anymore. I was a grown man. I’d overcome my delinquent childhood.
But I was alive and she was dead. So there was that.
There was always that.
“Declan, open this door or I will cut you,” she said. I’d forgotten how literal she was when she was drunk.
“Fuck the fuck off!” I yelled at her.
There was a pause, maybe she was in shock that her young son had used such profanity. Then it started again. The pounding. Her slurri
ng. The doorknob rattled.
This was a house of horror, one created especially for me. But I wasn’t the only one in the house, I knew that. The last thing I remembered was running up the stairs, sure that Michael was there, hiding, and that I needed to see him. I had left Perry and everyone else down below, hopefully where it was safer and there wasn’t some annoying dead French woman trying to speak drunk to them.
I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. I needed to go back downstairs. I needed to get everyone out of this house. I didn’t even know what I had been thinking when I brought everyone here – clearly my thoughts had been compromised.
Then I remembered Perry’s neck, the way her tender skin had submitted under my hands.
It wasn’t just my thoughts. Everything about me had been compromised.
I got up and started for the door, prepared to see my mother again in her most violent form. The last time I had seen her had been in a dream and it went well. She had been sober, coherent, even loving. It would be a shame to fuck that all up again.
I was halfway across my room when I heard a whisper. It was coming from the closet.
I turned and faced it, looking around my room for a baseball bat. I spotted one in the corner, a kid’s version, and picked it up. It was better than nothing. I gripped it hard in my hands and took a step toward the closet.
The closet door slowly creaked open.
The whispering started again.
“You don’t want to go in there,” a voice said from behind me and I whirled around.
Sitting on my bed was a man in a suit. Though I’d never seen him before, I also knew that I had.
I knew it was Michael.
My brother, all grown up.
He was staring up at me with an impish smile on his face. “You really don’t remember?” he asked. “I thought we really bonded the last few days. I mean, literally, bonded to each other.”
I stared at him, momentarily dumbfounded.
Then the bat dropped from my hands as all the memories came crawling back in.
I remembered him showing up in Portland. I remembered that god awful feeling that he was there to kill me. I remembered telling Ada to go and get Perry. Then he did something to her with just a flick of his eyes and she was out cold.
And I, I couldn’t do anything at all. He reached into my brain, into my soul, into my existence and made me move, made me breathe, made me act.
He got me from Oregon to New York without me having a singular, autonomous thought. He controlled me from the inside out.
Then I came back just in time for him to interject himself again. This time, he was just along for the ride, taking over when he saw fit.
Like last night, when I’d nearly killed Perry. It had never been me. It had always been him.
“Very good, Declan,” he said. “Then I guess you know that I was quite pleased you brought them here. You won me some favors.”
I grinded my teeth together. “I had no idea and you know it.”
He cocked his head. “Oh, you must have known that your reasons for coming here were not of the most unselfish nature. But that’s you, isn’t it? A selfish boy. So obsessed with your past and the love you thought you never had, that you were willing to risk everyone’s lives and happiness to come here. That wasn’t me, you see. That was all you. That was just you being Dex Foray, a total, selfish asshole. Just being yourself.”
I quickly bent down to pick up the bat again but instead all I got was a snake, a black, writhing python that I immediately dropped, leaping backward out of the way.
Michael laughed, then grew serious. “Of course, it would have been best if they had been able to stay longer. Your fiancé, her mother, her sister, your friend. If they hadn’t been helped by your actual brother, the conniving little worm, we wouldn’t even be having this little chat right now.” He got off the bed, all elegant, like he was some fucking billionaire playboy. “Having them all here in this house, so close to the gates, enabled me to open the door just wide enough. They were easy to feed off of, all that energy, all that ability, all that fear. They got our foot in the door. But I’m afraid you’re going to have to do the rest of the work.”
I shook my head slowly. “I am not doing anything for you,” I said, my jaw stiff, my eyes trying to murder him. Now that I knew it wasn’t my brother at all, all bets were off.
His smile was quick like lightning. “But you must. You know you must. You know you have no choice.” He took a step toward me, the python slithering out of the way and to the closet. I eyed the little sword I had on the wall, the one that I took fencing lessons with. It was the real deal and I had never been allowed to touch it and could only practice with the longer, bendy ones, but my father bought it for me just the same.
It could kill a man if you aimed it at the right place.
“I always have a choice,” I said. “As do you.”
He snorted. “You don’t understand a thing, do you? Ignorant human fool. But that’s to be expected, I guess. You never were the sharpest tool in the shed. Declan, what I’m telling you isn’t an option. I will make you bring them back here. I will make you do it again. I can even get a little bit of influence with the mother, her brain is soft, her soul is easy to penetrate. She’s new, you see. She doesn’t know better. Dumb foreigner.”
He sighed, looking down at the ground, as if in regret. I realized that the pounding on the door had stopped and for once I actually wished my mother was on the other side of it. I would have asked for her incoherent help. “Yes, I will try again. And it will work. And I’ll ensure the gates will never close and they’ll never make it out of here alive. They escaped once, but they won’t do it again.”
“They escaped because you’re a fucking douchecanoe,” I told him, edging slightly toward the sword.
His eyes narrowed into snake-slits. “They escaped because they were lucky and foolish and because young Michael showed them the way. This house should have never trapped in his soul like that. It shouldn’t have worked that way.”
“And what way does it work?” I asked, stepping even closer to the wall.
He sighed in annoyance. “I told you. The walls are thinner here. This isn’t a place that even exists in the human world, it’s a floating elevator between time and space and here and now. This is the closest gateway to hell that I know. And once they can all cross over to this side, no one will ever forget my name.”
“Michael O’Shea,” I said.
“That is not my name,” he said, his voice growing guttural and severe, as if grated down with sandpaper. “You will die never knowing my name. But Perry…I’ll make sure she knows.”
I stared at him, at the haze of hatred in his eyes. I wanted to call his bluff but I knew that would be a lie. He already hurt her through me. I couldn’t stand to think what he was going to do next.
“You could just leave her out of this,” I said. “Last night, there was no reason for that, no reason at all.”
He smiled, his teeth sharp. “Of course there is a reason, Declan. The reason is to hurt. To make others hurt. To have them wallow in pain. What greater hate is there in the world than to have someone suffer at the hands of someone they trusted? I loved seeing her agony, her fight for breath, that betrayal in her eyes as she thought it was you. I got off on it.” He paused. “And I will again. More so. I’ll keep her alive for just long enough, just to bring her here, then when the gates are fully open and my job here is done, I’ll make sure she dies thinking that I’m you. At the very least, your face will be the last thing she sees.”
The amount of anger flowing through me was probably enough to blast a hole into the walls with only my fist. But that was what he wanted. He wanted double the pain. He wanted to see it on my face before he saw it on hers.
“Oh,” he said, “and by the way, you’ll be fully conscious and unable to do a thing, while I fuck her with a knife and slice her from cunt to chin. You’ll have to watch it all, watch you do it all. Maybe th
en you won’t feel so fucking smug.” He took a step toward me. “Then, finally, I’ll kill you. But not until then. You’re useless to me dead, unfortunately.”
And that was just as I thought.
Before he could make another move, I leaped to the wall and grabbed the sword off of the molding. My body remembered all my old stances and I had the sword aimed at him, ready to strike.
He laughed, his head rolling back, his hand at his stomach as if to keep it all in. “Oh, Declan, you really are stupid aren’t you? All this time you spent in your life seeing ghosts and filming them and you really think that you stabbing me with a sword is going to do anything at all?”
I shook my head slowly from side to side. “No,” I said. Then I smiled. “This sword is not for you.”
I watched him blink at me in confusion for a moment. Then I turned the sword around and aimed it at the hollow of my throat. It was a place I knew could do damage. It was a place that I knew would kill me. Even for all my strength, the blade in my throat would do the trick.
Before he could do anything but widen his eyes in horrific realization, I brought the tip of the sword toward me, fast and swift.
It was almost an out of body experience as it pierced my throat. Perhaps I died sooner than I thought. It hurt but not that much – just a short but intense jab of pain through my throat. Then the pain subsided and I only felt the pressure of the blade and the sensation that I was drowning.
I was drowning, after all. Blood was pouring down my throat and into my lungs, filling them up, bit by bit. I immediately fell to my knees, sputtering. I wasn’t trying to breathe, to make it worse, but your instinct to live is a strong fucking thing. I kept on trying to get air, even though the whole point was not to live but to die.
I had to die. If I died, I was useless to him. He couldn’t take over me. He couldn’t harm Perry. He couldn’t bring her family here and try and open some fucking gates to hell. He couldn’t do anything if I was dead.