Orphans of Wonderland (23 page)

Chapter Twenty-Three

The eye. It blinks. Slowly. Watches him. Stares at him through the strange keyhole shaped like a pyramid. Fading…blurring…the keyhole vanishes little by little until it has dissolved into nothing, revealing two dark eyes and a woman's face. She stands watching him, adorned in an unusual but striking piece of jewelry strewn across her face like a web, all of it black and connected, a single piece. As she moves closer, the thin chains and small stones, circles and triangles and complex butterfly wings just above either eye come into clearer focus.

Her eyes, heavily made up with black liner and shadow, only add to her wildly exotic look. Her beauty is as startling as her sudden presence in the room, and leaves him breathless and uncertain. There is something at once alluring and frightening about this woman, something not quite…
right
…about her.

Voices…so many swirling around him at various volumes. Human voices, yet they sound robotic and monotone, as if they're reading from a previously prepared text. One male voice in particular is the loudest. It sounds as if the man has swallowed crushed glass or hot coals, his words too grumbled and distorted to understand. The voice circles him, as if from everywhere and nowhere, blending with the others…

At the very edge of his hearing, the gurgling voice becomes clear enough for him to finally understand, albeit only in short spurts.

“Sexual abuse is paramount, as it breaks the subject down and brings about the compartmentalization. Once programmed to forget such abuses, subjects can be more easily programmed to forget other things as well…”

And then he's running. He's running as hard and as fast as he can across an open field, the sun on his back and dark clouds gathering up ahead, just above the trees in the distance. Free of the strange, dark room and the woman, he can smell the air and feel the warmth of the sun, the scratching of the grass as it brushes against his legs. There appears to be nothing chasing him, but he runs as if there is.

“What we're talking about is a type of structural dissociation where the occult is assimilated into the equation in order to bring about compartmentalization of the brain. During this process, satanic rituals must be performed so that specific demons may be attached to the subjects and alters as well.”

By the time he reaches the trees, the sunshine is a memory, back there in the field. Here, just beyond the tree line, it is darker and colder and frightening, because these are not friendly woods. These are deadly woods, haunted woods like in the fairy tales his mother used to read to him.

“The shattering of a personality brings about compartmentalization of memory, of trauma too horrifying to grasp or process. The result is dissociative identity disorder.”

Disoriented and alone, he stumbles about between the trees.

“All it's about—all it's
ever
been about—is harnessing the power of darkness.”

Where are the voices coming from?

“Our darkness…and theirs…”

And then it is quiet…too quiet for any of this to be real.

A forest is never this quiet.

Unless there is a predator nearby…

Horrible screams shatter the silence. Cries—the cries of children—send him running again, deeper into the forest until his foot catches on something and he vaults forward, free of the earth and soaring through the air, the forest around him rushing by in a blur as the screams fade, swallowed again by eerie silence.

He lands hard, on his stomach and chest, knocking the air out of him. As he lies on the ground, writhing about for breath, he sees the others standing between the trees up ahead.

Lonnie. Sal. Dorsey. Standing in a line, staring at him with blank expressions. A fourth person, partially obscured by the trees, is there too.

They're nude—all of them, nude—but why?

He crawls toward them but the forest falls away. Like a painting rinsed from canvas in the rain, it all slides off into oblivion and becomes a long, narrow alley, dark and filthy and dangerous. Water drips from somewhere overhead—from rusty fire escapes and battered drainpipes—mixing with a steady downpour of dirty rain.

As the others walk away, through the alley, he follows, crawling on his belly.

The alley empties into a long street, dark and filthy, with fires burning in the night from barrels, spraying sparks to reveal condemned buildings falling apart all around him.
A war zone,
he thinks,
an apocalyptic warzone.

To his right is a large lot surrounded by chain-link fence, but he cannot see beyond it in any detail. Something moves behind it, but he can't quite make out what.

There are others, more children scattered about the street and lots, all of them terribly filthy and neglected, dressed in grubby rags and looking as if they've lived under these horrible conditions for a very long time.

Sitting in a diseased puddle, the rain falling all around her, a sad little girl he doesn't recognize paws dirt and rainwater from her face with equally wet and dirty little hands. “No one will ever come, will they?” she asks, her big brown eyes blinking slowly at him, eyes that were once innocent and adorable.

He keeps crawling, and though he wants to stand, he can't. He barely has the strength to drag himself across the slick and slimy cement running with rainwater and trash and debris.

“No one's even looking,” says the little waif. “Are they?”

“What am I doing here?” he gasps. “What are any of us doing here?”

The little girl places a hand over her left eye, then presses the index finger of the other to her mouth. “Shhh.”

He crawls through another puddle as the rain continues to pummel him. Such filthy water everywhere. To his right, someone or something grabs hold of a length of chain-link fence, shakes it violently and lets out a guttural growl.

Light from a nearby fire reveals more hopeless children huddled in the darkness, watching him. There is a particular kind of evil in this horrid place.

And it is pleased.

More screams of agony echo through the darkness and rain.

The others—his friends—are still there and still nude, but they stand at the end of the street now, wearing intricate and frightening headpieces depicting odd hybrids of animals and demonic faces.

And they are all covered in blood.

From somewhere behind him, a voice whispers a single word.

“Rebirth…”

Joel saw him well before he'd reached the car. Fleeing the grave and whatever was watching from the forest, he was halfway down the hill when he noticed an aged and rugged-looking Jeep Wrangler parked behind his car. A thin man in a long black duster, boots and a black knit hat leaned against it, arms folded over his chest, dark clothing standing out against the sea of white.

Joel was still several feet away when the man raised his head.

Trent.

Gone was the Mohawk, piercings and punk fashion, but the face and sad blue eyes were the same, only older and harder. His skin exhibited the tan and leathery look of someone who spent inordinate amounts of time in the sun, and the lines in his face were deeper and plentiful, the pain in him more profound and obvious than in his youth. Sprigs of hair protruding from the bottom and sides of his hat had turned mostly silver.

“We don't have a lot of time,” he said in the same soft-spoken voice Joel remembered.

“I'm beginning to wonder if we ever did.”

“How's the shoulder?”

“Hurts.” Joel moved closer. “That was you?”

Trent looked past him at the hill.

“You were the one who saved me in the rain?”

“I kept my distance until then, but they would've killed you.”

“You some kind of a badass now?”

Trent pushed away from his Jeep and, without a word, wrapped his arms around Joel and pulled him in close. It took Joel by surprise, but he went with it, hugging his old friend in return. There was nothing else to do.

“Why didn't you come to me sooner?” Joel asked.

“Time had to be right.” Trent released him and resumed his watch of the hill. “You weren't ready for me.”

“What are those things up there?”

“Fuck you think they are?” He started for his Jeep. “Come on.”

“What about my car?”

“Leave it.”

“But—”

“
Leave it
.” He looked back, expression stoic. “We have to move. Now.”

“Where are we going?”

“Right now.”

“My apologies if I'm not in the most trusting mood,” Joel said, shaking from the cold, or perhaps something more. “But I just had a conversation with a woman that died two years ago.”

If this information fazed him, Trent gave no indication.

“So I'll ask again. Where are we going?”

“Little deeper down the rabbit hole.”

“Straight on to Wonderland, huh?”

“Not exactly our first trip,” Trent said, “but you need to know what I know.”

“And then?”

“The Devil needs killing.”

Joel searched Trent's face for some sign of irony but came up empty. Without response, he walked around to the other side of the Jeep, pulled open the passenger side door and climbed in.

They left the cemetery, Trent driving as fast and erratically as Joel imagined he might. The ride was anything but smooth, the old Jeep bouncing them both around and reigniting the pain in Joel's shoulder. The interior was bare bones, hadn't been cleaned in ages and smelled like stale fast food and booze. Whatever was behind the seats was covered in a dark wool blanket.

“Heaters broke,” Trent mumbled, eyes manically alternating between the windshield, rearview and side mirrors. “Sorry.”

“That explains why we can still see our breath.”

The Jeep rocketed through city, which had fully awakened now, and despite the snowfall, the streets were becoming more congested. Trent said nothing else as he drove into the south end.

Joel's gut tightened. “Trent, where are we going?”

“It's okay,” he answered, pulling onto a desolate road near the water.

But Joel knew exactly where they were. The deserted side street littered with abandoned old factories and mills, the road that led to Tuser Industries. “Trent—”

“We're not going to the same place they took you. Relax.”

“You were there?”

“I was nearby and watching what went down.”

“Why didn't you do something then? They could've killed me.”

“If they'd wanted to kill you at that point, you'd have already been dead.”

“Barney…”

Trent glanced at him. “The homeless guy?”

Joel nodded.

“Collateral damage. Nothing I could do.”

“You could've stopped it. You could've saved that old man's life.”

“I told you, the time had to be right. I had to show myself to you when you were ready to see me, ready to believe what I have to tell you.” He pulled into the weed-infested lot in front of an old mill, and then drove around back, traversing the rugged terrain until he'd found a spot sufficiently hidden from the road. “Let's go.” He shut the Jeep off and hopped out.

Joel followed him through a blown-out door at the rear of the building and into a shadowy hallway that smelled like vomit and urine. Shielding his nose, he and Trent climbed a battered staircase to the second floor and into a large room with a row of mostly broken windows along the wall that faced the street. A few old pieces of furniture lay about amid the debris and trash, and Joel noticed a bedroll and pile of personal items he assumed belonged to Trent. Along with a gas-operated hotplate and other camping gear, the items appeared as if he'd been here for some time.

Without explanation, Trent crouched down and began rummaging around in an old knapsack on the floor. He removed a bottle of water, a tin and two metal mugs, and then, using a small cylinder of propane, fired up his hotplate.

“Jesus,” Joel said, his voice echoing in the vast, empty space, “you've been
living
here?”

“Lived in worse.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Since right before they killed Lonnie.” Trent put coffee from the tin into each mug, then filled them with water, stirred them and placed them on the hotplate. “I tried to help him, but…”

“Why'd you come back?”

“Same as you, I didn't have much choice. They only make it look that way.”

“You ran away years ago.”

“Same can be said of you, my friend.”

“I got married, moved to Maine.”

“Only it wasn't that simple, was it?”

“I was trying my best to live my life, Trent, to forget—”

“But you never really did. Neither did the rest of us.” He returned the water bottle and coffee tin to his knapsack, then stood up and wiped his hands on his duster. “I tried the same thing. Got married, did the regular life bit, but I couldn't shake the rest of it. The dreams, the…nightmares…the memories and the fear.”

Joel turned to the windows, watched the snowfall and the lonely road beyond.

“I got as far away from here as I could. Wound up on the other side of the country. I needed to know what happened to us, and why. Fell in with some other people, more victims like us. They've done it to more than you know. And it's getting worse; they've been ratcheting it up for years. Everything was underground back in the day: hard to find, harder to decipher and even harder to prove. Then the Internet came into existence and everything changed. Information, and the exchange of information, became so much easier and readily available. I did my research and followed that rabbit right down the goddamn hole. There really is a Wonderland, Joel. It's covered in fire, and we've been burning in it for years, but it's there.”