Soulstice (25 page)

“Then why—?”

“Why do all this? I’m a scientist, Miss Halloway. And the existence of Vours has proven to be one of the most fascinating
discoveries in our world’s history. They want to know the same things I want to know, so it is a unique partnership, you see.”

“Why didn’t they Vourize you?” Reggie rasped.

“I think they find it, shall we say, advantageous to have a few like-minded humans in their fray. Tracers, for example, would
not come after me—even the most cursory investigation would prove I was human. I can carry on my work,
our
work, with impunity. But that is enough chatter. The hour is getting late, and we have much to do.”

Unger clapped his hands, and the lights in the cavern grew brighter. Reggie could see more clearly now; she was in an underground
chamber shaped like an octagon, and stone slabs like the one she lay upon stretched out in rows in front of her. Comatose
humans were strapped to these, all with needles jutting out of their heads, and these were connected to each other with tubes
and wires.

Reggie followed the length of the wires with her eyes and saw that they flowed to her bed, and that she in turn was attached
to a series of television monitors. Each monitor showed a live scan of a brain.

“What are you going to do to me?”

“It’s not what I’m going to do to you. It’s what you’re going to do to
him
.”

Unger gestured to the cavern entrance, where two hospital orderlies were supporting a body into the room.

“Quinn! Our loyal soldier!”

The orderlies led Quinn up to Unger and Reggie, and at first, Reggie thought the light must be playing tricks on her. Quinn’s
skin looked blue, almost purple, and his eyelashes and nostrils were covered with little crystals. He was so weak he could
not stand on his own.

“Y-y-you s-s-on of a-a b-b-b-bitch,” he stuttered through chattering teeth. “F-f-freezer… l-l-eft me th-there…”

“Yes, of course. How else will Miss Halloway enter your—what does she call it? Your fearscape.”

Quinn shrank away, but the burly orderlies held him fast.

“W-why? I h-h-helped y-you.”

“Yes, you did. And now you’re going to make the ultimate sacrifice for the good of your kind. They’ll write sonnets about
you, Quinn—that is, they will if there are any humans left who know how to write them.”

“Omelets and eggs, Quinn,” Reggie muttered.

The orderlies strapped Quinn to his own berth right next to Reggie’s, then jabbed a needle into his forehead. Quinn screeched
in pain, and even Reggie shuddered as she heard the point crack through his skull. She thought of the needle in her own head
and felt faint. But why did they want her to go into Quinn’s fearscape? Did they want her to fail and die? Or did they want
her to succeed?

Unger seemed to read her thoughts.

“There is something special about you, my dear. To have ingested that poison and not been driven completely insane—I don’t
know how you did it, but I know that it makes you the key. Your ability to pass through dimensions whenever you choose—it
is remarkable. The Vours have been trying to do it for years. Now you will show us how.”

He undid the cord around Reggie’s lifeless hand and pressed her fingers to Quinn’s wrist, right on his pulse. Then he retied
their hands together that way, securing them tightly. She could not feel Quinn’s icy skin, but her eyes lost focus as her
mind tumbled down into the realm of nightmare…

  
20
  

… and she was standing on a narrow, cracked sidewalk just a short distance outside Cutter’s Wedge Elementary. The grassy fields
that sprawled around the real school did not exist in this realm. Instead of plants and shrubs, dense and motionless blobs
surrounded the building. There was no playground, no parking lot, no grove of tall pine trees in the distance—only layers
of thick, bland gunk that looked like cake icing polluted with molten lead.

Just off the path, a long wooden board with a cracked red seat and plastic handle poked out of the gunk like a utensil in
a jar of gray honey. Other playground objects had been caught in the substance as well—a tetherball pole, a swing set, a faded
basketball backboard. Nothing moved.

Reggie walked slowly down the path to the school’s front entrance, the once concrete sidewalk squishing beneath her feet like
moss. Something about the nature of this place was different from the outer layers of Henry’s and Keech’s fearscapes. Reggie
did not sense immediate fear here. She’d learned enough from her previous jaunts into these forsaken places to trust her instincts,
but right now her psychic compass was unresponsive. This outermost region of Quinn’s fearscape seemed no longer
functional
.

Small, colorless hands reached out from the goop near the stone steps leading to the front doors of the building. Reggie knelt
in front of the stairs and saw the remnants of faces swirled and frozen inside the strange matter like paint strokes. Everything
here had come undone.

Reggie stretched out and touched the grayness beyond the sidewalk, and the tips of her fingers bled out all color and went
numb. She withdrew her hand and held it up to her face. The color returned to her fingertips and she could feel them again.

“It’s like he’s forgotten this place.”

At the sound of her voice a barely perceptible tremor pulsed through the sidewalk. One of the tiny hands in the ooze twitched.
She stood again carefully and climbed the steps, avoiding the few gaps in them that revealed more gray substance below.

Reggie stepped inside the doors. Square gray tiles covered the floor in this version of Cutter’s Wedge Elementary. It looked
like a photo negative of reality with light and dark reversed. A monochrome banner hung at the corridor’s end, tattooed with
the giant face of Bucky, the cheery pirate mascot that Reggie remembered from her school days here.

The banner was emblazoned with rows of jagged and indecipherable symbols in place of school spirit slogans. At the far end
of the hallway, she saw the distant double doors of the gym. The walls of the hall were syrupy and looked as if they were
quietly melting away. The same strange, gray matter covered them, but inside the building the gunk was not entirely static.

None of the levels of the fearscapes she’d seen yet had this appearance, this feeling of nothingness just beyond the immediate
sights. Reggie wondered if it had been years since the Vour had scared a young Quinn deeper into the pit, and if these layers
were degrading with time.

A low groan echoed behind her, and Reggie looked back.

Bucky the mascot’s huge, disembodied pirate head floated down the hallway toward her, its chin a few feet over the tiles,
the top of its hat barely clearing the ceiling.

The eye patch on the pirate’s giant face had fallen, and the gaping eyeless hole opened and closed like a primitive mouth.
The effect was almost comical, but it would have mortified an eight- or nine-year-old child, and that raw fear gave it power.

She ran, grabbing and pulling on classroom door handles as she passed, and each one crumbled or broke off in her hand. One
near the end of the hall opened, and Reggie rushed to get inside, realizing too late that there was no room beyond the door.

Instead the floor dropped away into an ocean of gray. Reggie grabbed the doorframe just in time, catching herself before she
plummeted off the edge. Then something snatched her right ankle and dragged her back into the hall.

An oily creature like a gigantic earthworm slithered out of the pirate’s eye, and now its pin-teeth bit down on her leg. Reggie
twisted her torso to face the worm and kicked its maw with her free foot.

The greasy thing let up and Reggie yanked her leg out of its mouth, tiny black teeth ripping from the soft tissue and clinking
on the tile like loose change. She scrambled backward, rushed to her feet, and raced to the next door in the hall.

When she pulled it open, the space on the other side was solid, and she stepped onto cool, wet grass. The door slammed shut
behind her and disappeared.

A ferocious growl shook the air, and two massive paws tromped down in front of her. Reggie looked up at an enormous bear standing
at its full height, its thick, dark fur bristling and its razor sharp claws dripping with black ooze.

A disembodied voice seemed to echo from the sky.

“The western grizzly shows no mercy to its prey, preferring human flesh above all else,” the voice said, and Reggie dimly
recognized it as the narrator from PBS nature documentaries. “It rips its victim’s skin from its body, and eats the still-living
tissue beneath. If there are cubs, they too will feed.”

The beast lashed out at her. Reggie rolled to the side just as the bear’s front paws slammed to the ground and gouged out
a chunk of dirt. She clambered toward a tattered tent, the only object in sight that could serve as a potential portal to
a deeper fearscape region. The bear lumbered after her, but she reached the tent in time and dove through the dirty nylon
entrance.

Inside, a small child huddled in the corner, wrapped in a threadbare blanket with his head bowed. Reggie crouched down and
approached him.

“Quinn?”

At the sound of her voice, the blanket flew off and what Reggie thought was a boy jerked its head up to reveal a horrific
face. Two drill bits protruded from where the thing’s eyes should have been, whirring in the ragged sockets. A buzz saw had
been affixed with leather straps to the stump of each severed wrist, and rusted spikes protruded from various holes in his
chest. A giant fly’s mandibles twitched in place of lips. Reggie cupped a hand over her mouth and slowly backed out of the
tent.

The landscape had changed again, and she stood in a chamber of limbless and headless human torsos that had been gutted, cleaned,
and now swayed from meat hooks on chains that led up into darkness. Fuzzy clumps of mold formed on the slicks of blood across
the floor. The warehouse was a boiling cloud of flies; filthy legs and wings tickled her skin.

Reggie frantically pushed her way through the hanging meat slabs as the insect-child clacked its mandibles and followed, its
bristly insect mouth buzzing. Swarming mites roiled around her eyes and mouth, and she gagged on their little bodies as she
scrambled away. The monster’s fly mouth undulated, and the eye socket drills whirred left and right as it pursued her.

She hit a dead end and turned around just as the buzzing saws of the monster’s arms sliced the air in front of her, but before
it could cut her, the bear appeared between them and swiped at the child-thing with its mammoth paw.

The bear shredded the insect-thing to pieces, and black, greasy liquid sprayed out of the mutilated body. The bear then grabbed
the decapitated insect head, opened its huge, salivating mouth, and swallowed it whole.

Within seconds, the animal’s face contorted, and the bear unleashed an ear-shattering howl as it morphed into a new demonic
entity. The drill bits pushed out through the bear’s eye sockets with disgusting pops and whirs. The clicking mandibles cracked
through the jaw, and the claws of the beast split open to make room for the whirling saws that grew out of its paws. The transformation
was so shocking that Reggie stood frozen for a few seconds, before running back through the dense grove of body parts, trying
not to scream.

As horrifying as Keech’s and Henry’s fearscapes had been, Reggie had navigated her way through both by finding a pattern,
some internal and disturbing logic that tied the elements together.

But what was
this
?

First a wasteland outside the school, and now a layer inside the building with severely disjointed imagery and mutating, cannibalistic
things. The fearscape was literally
eating
itself.

And as the deadly mutation chased her, tearing down torsos from chains as it stalked its new prey, the revelation struck her
like lightning.

Quinn’s fears here are merging.

The outermost layer had atrophied and simply stopped moving. Whatever fear had created the schoolyard environment, it had
long been forgotten. And now this inner realm was blending together. She was not inside one layer but
many
, and over time they had bled into each other the same way human memory was prone to do. There was no twisted logic, no demented
sense of order here. Quinn’s brain had combined diverse layers of his fearscape and created a new breed of horror, one ravaged
by absolute chaos.