General Squeak burrowed into the sheets and vanished.
“What —?”
The approaching footsteps echoed in the hall.
Reggie sank her fingers into the blood-soaked linen, gagging against the warm wetness on her skin. She tossed them aside, uncovering a laundry chute built into the wall.
The surgeon rounded the corner. Her mask was gone, and beneath her eyes was only a black pit that billowed smoke. One of her rubber-gloved hands raised a bone saw, and the circular blade whirred to life.
There was no other way out.
Reggie took a deep breath and dove into the chute.
Beneath the roar of the depths, and through the blood ringing in his ears, Aaron heard the sound of laughter. Quinn’s laughter.
A Vour’s laughter.
He fought to listen. He forced himself to
hear
the monster’s cruel delight.
That’s it, you bastard. Keep laughing.
Aaron stroked his arms through the water and propelled himself upward, the pressure in his ears lessening as he rose faster and faster toward the surface. The laughing grew louder and closer, and the smell of bubble gum overpowered the fish and seaweed. He broke the surface of the water in his mind.
Aaron breathed fresh air and recovered himself, but he kept his eyes shut and feigned unconsciousness. Slowly, he reached into his jacket and clutched the ice cubes in his pocket. He just needed to reach Quinn’s cheek, his neck — any exposed skin . . .
He swung his arm and pelted Quinn’s cheek with ice. Startled, Quinn let go of Aaron and stepped back, but something was wrong. Quinn did not scream in excruciating pain like Henry had done; his skin remained pale but normal-looking.
Quinn felt his cheek and saw the ice on the ground. “Ice cubes? What’s next on your weapons list, geek? A snow cone?”
Aaron tried to get to his feet, but Quinn pushed him back down.
“Yeah,” Quinn said, wiping water from his face, “Henry told me about you pelting him with a snowball. Really freaked him out. But then again, he’s just not used to his body yet. Me? I’m much more adapted. See?” Quinn reached down and picked up a handful of snow. He rubbed it across his face without a flinch. “I’ve taken worse hits on the football field.”
Aaron noticed that tiny, spidery black lines etched the skin where snow had touched the bloody gash on Quinn’s forehead. He curled his fist around a handful of snow.
“The last thing that bitch will see is this face.” Quinn bent over Aaron and stared into his eyes. “How does that make you feel, hero?”
“Human.” Aaron shoved the snow directly on Quinn’s gash, grinding it into the swollen wound. Quinn dropped to the ground, clutching his face.
Aaron stood and kicked Quinn in the side of the head, the toe of his boot clunking against the skull. Quinn lay dazed, but the monster would be on his feet in moments.
On his
feet
. . .
Aaron opened the SUV’s door and grabbed a Swiss army knife from the glove compartment. He returned to the Vour moaning on the ground, and yanked off Quinn’s shoes and socks, leaving his bare feet exposed. Aaron flicked open the blade and sliced open Quinn’s feet, from toe to heel. Quinn screamed as Aaron mashed snow into the cuts.
“You know that expression people use when they get scared, right?” Aaron stuffed the socks inside the shoes and dangled them by the laces in front of Quinn like dashboard dice. “They call it
cold feet.
” He hurled the shoes as far as he could into the snowy woods.
“You’re done,” Quinn growled. “You and your girl. Done.”
But Aaron was already racing down to the lake. From the shoreline, he could see the two bodies sprawled at the lake’s center in a serene embrace. Neither Reggie nor Henry moved, but Aaron knew his best friend and her little brother were fighting a battle more harrowing than he dared imagine. He had to reach them before Quinn overcame his temporary handicap.
Aaron stepped out onto the lake. Most of it was covered with white frost, but in a few places the ice was clear, and he could see the deep water below. If the ice cracked, he’d drown for real.
Where could they go that Quinn wouldn’t find them? And if Quinn was a Vour, certainly there were others. But how many? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?
The headlights of the truck started to dim, the battery draining. Soon the lights would die, and Aaron would be left in pitch black, stranded out on the lake with two comatose bodies and a Vour lurking in the darkness.
The ice crackled on either side of him. He stopped and drew a breath.
They lay just ten feet away from him, but to Aaron it might as well have been the other side of a chasm. When he saw the hole in the ice and the dark water that rippled beneath, his knees almost gave out. But the two bodies beside the hole kept him focused.
Reggie had collapsed on top of her brother’s body, and her cheek rested against his chest. Henry, splayed awkwardly beneath her, looked like a character in a demented cartoon. His skin was purple and covered in black splotches. The two small toes on his right foot had turned completely black, and the fingers on both hands were darkening in the same fashion. Vour marks or actual frostbite, Aaron wasn’t sure. Henry’s tiny frame convulsed in tense, barely perceptible spasms.
His body was dying.
Aaron took off his jacket and tossed it at him, hoping at least to cover Henry’s body. The jacket landed more than a foot to the right.
“Good thing you’re not my backup quarterback, Cole,” shouted a voice behind him. He looked over his shoulder to see Quinn striding across the ice. “You throw like a girl.”
Aaron turned to face the Vour. In the dimming light, he saw that the spidery mark above Quinn’s eye had spread across the bridge of his nose. The jock had ripped the sleeves from his jacket and pulled them over his bloody feet.
“You’re a wuss, you know that, Cole? Always have been, always will be. But you’re smart, I’ll give you that.” He gestured down at his sliced feet. “Can’t say I saw that one coming. Did your homework.”
“Did yours, too. From now on, I don’t do research papers for Vour cowards.”
“Cowards, huh? Big talk for a kid afraid of his own bathtub.” The Vour hobbled forward, and the ice cracked and moaned under the weight. Twenty feet separated them now.
“Yeah, well. Come any closer and we’ll all take a bath.”
Quinn limped toward Aaron and the ice crackled again. A single, thin rift formed between the two of them.
“I can smell your fear.”
The sarcasm vanished from Quinn’s voice. Pure monster spoke now, a second raspy tone echoing behind Quinn’s own.
“Ever smell a rose, Aaron? Really smelled it? Put your nose into the petals and breathed it in? The aroma is intoxicating. Do you know why?”
The Vour limped forward again. The ice crunched beneath its feet.
“Because if you bury your nose deep and breathe through the life of a rose, through the flesh and the earth and the beauty, you smell the death inside.”
The Vour breathed deeply.
“It doesn’t think, not like humans, but it feels. It feels the end of its life looming almost as soon as it blossoms. And it fears. A rose’s perfume is the terror of its own approaching death. I smell that on you tonight. Thick as blood.”
Aaron stepped backward and heard the ice start to give way behind him. The headlights faded and died.
The dark chute extended for a hellish eternity. Reggie’s mind raced through a catalog of things her brother had been afraid of, and she tried to predict the next layer in this volatile landscape. Would she plummet into some psychotic jailhouse packed with mutant inmates? Splash down in the middle of a black ocean filled with giant sharks? Henry was a little boy; the possibilities were numerous.
Without warning, the chute opened up and Reggie plunged from a vent onto a huge mess of ladies’ footwear. She let out a grunt as the heel of a brown leather boot pressed into her stomach.
This wasn’t quite the hell she’d expected.
She lifted her shirt and examined the red indent, and then chucked the heeled boot across a drab but cluttered stockroom. As she waded through hundreds of shoes, she mused for a moment about eternal damnation amid stiletto heels, riding boots, and smelly cross-trainers.
General Squeak scuttled out of the pile and up Reggie’s shirt. It hid in her collar as she walked past row after row of shoeboxes. Like the hospital, this place felt hopeless and forsaken. She lifted the lids of a few boxes, but found nothing but shoes inside.
She moved out onto the sales floor of a department store. Reggie knew this place: the ladies’ shoe department on the second floor of the Burlington Mall, where Mom took them shopping for school clothes each August. But what frightened Henry about the mall?
As she walked out of the shoe displays and into Women’s Apparel, the racks of clothes began to grow. They groaned and stretched like metal oaks until they towered over Reggie in a twisted, menacing forest, and the scent of sweet perfumes drifting from the cosmetics area turned rank. The pulsing black fog that encased the surreal department store crept in between the grotesque mannequins and mammoth clothing racks, shrouding the world in a suffocating mist.
Henry was close. He had to be.
Nothing else could explain the transformation that took place before her eyes. While the carnival and the cemetery had changed between Reggie’s jaunts into the fearscape, this place morphed fluidly. Henry’s fear was peaking here, and that fear was reshaping the world around them.
Why is he so scared of this place?
Then the memory hit her.
When Henry was four, they’d been shopping at the mall, and Mom and Reggie had turned around in a crowd to find Henry gone. They’d searched everywhere, racing around, yelling his name. Reggie had found him hidden in a rack of wool overcoats in the men’s department, curled up and paralyzed. He was sobbing.
“Mom lost me ... she lost me ... she lost me ... she lost me . . .”
And now they were back here, and Mom was really gone. Wrenched out of their lives like a limb torn from the socket.
“Regina.” A voice echoed through the mist. A calm, familiar voice . . .
Reggie could just make out the curves of the escalator railings and a figure that rode up the stairs from the lower level. She recognized the silhouette before the entire body rose into view.
Mom.
Reggie’s impulse was to run through the mist and embrace the beautiful woman, to feel the ticklish warmth of Mom’s long hair as it brushed her cheeks. But the temperature of the air on the second floor dropped instantly. Frost caked the metal clothing racks as a deadly chill blew through the fog. This thing was not her mother.
“Regina?” it called, mimicking Mom’s kind voice. “Are you up here, honey? I was told you’d be coming to see me.”
Reggie darted behind a mannequin display and watched the woman walk toward the shoe department, the heels of her elegant shoes clacking in steady cadence across the marble floor. The mannequin’s head turned atop the motionless body. Glowing eyes stared down at Reggie.
“Uh-oh,” Mom said. She stopped and turned around. “Are you hiding from me, Regina?”
The mannequin turned at its waist on the pedestal, plastic limbs creaking and reaching out for Reggie. She staggered back as more groans and cracks echoed through the gloom. Every mannequin in the store had turned to face her. They stared down from their platforms, eyes gleaming on expressionless faces.
“I see you, dearest,” the mother-thing called from the shadows.
The mannequins broke from their moorings and stepped down onto the floor.
Reggie stumbled half blind through the congealing fog toward the escalator. Mom’s heels clicked evenly through the mist behind her. At the top of the moving stairs, Reggie tripped and fell, tumbling down to the bottom of the escalator. The lower level of the store was choked in a black, miasmic film.
There was no up, no down.
There was only the dark.
“Henry?” she called out into the black. “Henry, can you hear me?”
From a nearby rack of clothing, she heard muffled sniffling. Reggie ran to the rack and pulled two wool coats apart. Beneath them, curled up in a trembling ball, was Henry.
Reggie swelled with love as she crawled underneath the rack.
“Hey, little man,” she said gently, reaching out a hand to stroke his soft hair. “I found you.” She leaned in slowly and kissed his cheek — he was warm, soft, and good. “I’ll always find you.”
The boy trembled at her touch.
“Talk to me, Henry. Tell me you can hear me.”
“You’re not Reggie,” he whispered. “You’re a monster. You’re all monsters here.”
He clutched a photograph to his chest. It was the picture of their family at the carnival: Henry, Reggie, Dad, and Mom. It was his final sliver of hope, the one bread crumb he refused to leave behind.
General Squeak’s whiskers tickled the back of Reggie’s neck. It scurried down her arm and onto Henry. The boy watched the hamster’s movement and a smile crept across his face. Reggie pulled the koala bear from her pocket and held it out to her brother.
“I’m real, Henry. And General Squeak is real. And Kappy. We’re going to get you out of here.”
“What about Mom? Will Mom come with us? When will she come home?”
“I . . .” Reggie wanted to comfort him, to lie to him, but did not. The fearscape was built out of lies, and she would not feed it. “I don’t know, Henry. I know I act like I’ve got it all figured out, but I don’t. Mom left us, and I don’t know why. I wish I could tell you that it will be better” — her voice cracked — “but she’s gone, Henry. She’s gone and I don’t know if she’s ever coming back.”
“Doesn’t she love us anymore?”
“I —” Reggie choked on her words. “I don’t know. But I love you, Henry. I’ll always love you. And I’ll never leave you again.”
Henry lunged for Reggie and squeezed her tight. Warmth flooded from the little boy and filled Reggie with strength. “I want to go home.”
“Oh, you are home, my sweet boy.” Mom’s voice cut from behind a rack of coats and through the darkness. “You are home with Mommy, right where you belong.”