Last Halloween (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 2)
Author: Richard Estep
Date: 2016-03-27 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Paranormal fiction - ghost story

Contents

Title Page-1

Copyright-1

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Last Halloween

The Deadseer Chronicles - Book II

Richard Estep

Copyright © 2016 Richard Estep

All rights reserved.

For my Asylum 49 family,

You guys are the best.

CHAPTER ONE

Man, I love October…the nights draw in, and the sighing of the wind through the trees sounds just that little bit more sinister than it does the rest of the year.

What better time to be poking around the burned-out ruins of an abandoned old sanatorium…that also happened to be very, very haunted?

(I’m guessing that you can sense the sarcasm in my voice, even though you can’t hear a word of it.)

“Danny, come see this! This used to be the laundry room, remember?” Becky was gesturing excitedly from behind the crumbling remains of a brick wall maybe twenty feet away, beckoning for me to join her. Putting on a smile that I hoped at least looked genuine, I turned up the collar on my jacket to ward off some of the cold and wandered on over to join her, thrusting my hands deep into my hip pockets.

November would be here in a little over a week’s time, and the early evening air was already starting to drop well below what I’d feel comfortable describing as ‘chilly.’ It was dusk now, but quickly turning toward full-on dark, and the sun was sinking low behind the Rocky Mountains in a spectacular spray of gold and pink light. The shadows were getting longer — my own stretched way out in front of me as I picked my way carefully through the ruins. After darkness fell for real and the night really set in, the temperatures were going to drop even further towards freezing. I really didn’t want to be here when that happened.

To tell you the truth, I really didn’t want to be here at all.

“What’s up?” I asked, feigning an interest that I certainly wasn’t feeling. “Did you find something?”

Becky had a knitted woolen hat pulled all the way down over the tips of her ears, which somehow managed to make her look way older than fourteen. Not that I could talk; I was only a month older than she was, and I had only just begun to shave back in August. The results of that were less than stellar — every three or four days, which was as often as my chin needed to be scraped clean of fluff, it looked like I had been attacked by a madman with a meat cleaver.

Maybe things would have been different if my Dad was still around to teach me how to shave, like every other boy at my school. They were learning it all at first-hand, being taught all the little tricks that seemed to be so obvious once you knew them, like running the blade along the length of the grain instead of at an angle across it. I didn’t have that luxury. Mom was still single and seemed pretty much happy to stay that way, so there was no father figure around the house to demo guy stuff for me. I didn’t have any uncles or grandfathers either. That meant that I had to fall back on my only Plan B: the Internet.

No wonder my chin was cut to ribbons. The cold air was making the fresh shaving rash I’d made earlier that day throb and ache angrily, and I resisted the urge to massage it with my hand. That would only make the pain worse.

“It’s a washing machine,” Becky said, pointing at a mangled lump of rusted old metal that had also been dealt some serious fire damage. “Wonder if it still works…”

“I doubt it.”

I stamped my feet irritably, hoping that she’d take the hint. I was cold, tired, and really just wanted to go home. We had both taken the bus from Boulder up to Nederland, and then hopped in a taxi-cab from there, traveling north along the Peak-to-Peak Highway until we reached a driveway that was set back a little from the western edge of the road, and was almost hidden by tall trees on either side. The taxi driver had dropped us off just outside the rusting iron gate. Its padlock had been smashed off a long time ago, and the gate swung freely now, back and forth in the wind. From the screech it made, I guessed that the hinges could have done with a little WD40. Becky paid the driver and, as she tipped him, she asked him to come back at seven o’clock tonight to pick us up. That gave us a good three or four hours to poke around up there before the weather turned really harsh.

Man, but the time was really dragging…

I don’t usually wear a watch, so I pulled out my phone and thumbed the ‘on’ switch. 5:32. Still another hour and a half of this crap left to go.

Looking around at what was now basically a giant landfill, it would have been almost impossible for anybody who hadn’t seen this place when it was still standing to picture Long Brook Sanatorium as it used to be; my mind was already starting to fill in the blanks, though, translating the dark and shadowy ruin of brick and cement into the ominous edifice where so many poor unfortunate souls had suffered and died over the years. Most of them had died coughing up blood, caught in the grip of tuberculosis, but not everybody there had died of natural causes; some had been murdered by the lunatic doctor that had overseen the place, a card-carrying maniac by the name of Marko von Spiessbach, who had experimented on his patients in all kinds of grim and grisly ways. It turned out that Spiessbach was a Nazi war criminal who had chosen this obscure little corner of Colorado to hide from the forces of justice, and when the Israeli Mossad had finally tracked him down to his little mountain hideaway, he had put the barrel of a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger rather than stand and face the music — which was all well and good, except for the fact that the cowardly little turd hadn’t wanted to go alone, and so he had gone from room to room in the sanatorium and put a bullet into pretty much everybody that worked for him…including Becky’s grandmother, Jennifer, who had been working there as a nurse.

If you’re thinking wow, this guys knows way too much about this place, then you’d be right. After all, Becky and I are the main reason that it burned down.

Let’s back this truck up and start over.

My name is Danny Chill. I’m fourteen years old, the nerdiest nerd that ever nerded out (Star Wars is my absolute favorite, but I’m an equal opportunities geek) and the type of person that those few who were in the know would call a Deadseer. If you’ve never heard that phrase before, nobody could really blame you. Unlike the flashy so-called ‘psychics’ you see on TV, we’re the real deal: people that can actually see and communicate with the spirits of the dead. As such, we tend to keep ourselves to ourselves most of the time. We’re few and far between, and take it from me, being able to look beyond the veil of physical life and into the next world isn’t nearly as much fun as you might think it is.

A few months back, Becky somehow managed to talk me into joining her and another kid named Brandon Monroe into taking a trip up to this old sanatorium. She was heavily into the whole ghost-hunting thing (I know, I know) and had seen this place on one of those dumb reality TV shows — you know, the ones where they run around in the dark with hand-held cameras and wearing Go-Pros, screaming and swearing every time a floor-board creaks? Normally I would have just laughed it off, but I’d had a secret crush on Becky since…well, since forever, and there was no way I was going to turn down the chance to get into her good books, so like a loyal and lovable puppy I just wagged my tail and nodded my head and said “Sure!”

I’ve done dumber things…but not that many.

We arrived on a balmy Saturday afternoon and started to poke around the place, exploring all of its deserted rooms and corridors. I’ve got to admit that it was actually pretty fascinating at first. I found the whole experience of getting a window into the past to be pretty cool. The old operating theater was still there, full of creaking metal lights on swivel-arms and rusty surgical beds. But it wasn’t long before the sanatorium’s ghosts started coming out to play. Many of them were former patients, most of whom were less than happy at still being earthbound in such a miserable place years after they had died, and although some of them were a little frightening and scary at first, none of them meant us any harm…they were every bit as afraid as we were.

The reason for their fear was the spirit of that evil murderer Marko von Spiessbach, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Years after he ventilated his skull with a bullet, von Spiessbach was still top dog at the sanatorium, using a good squad of ghostly nurses and assistants to keep the spirits of his former patients earthbound, still suffering as the subjects of his twisted medical experiments.

Needless to say, the man was a total whackjob. As if all that wasn’t enough, what we really hadn’t bargained for was the meth lab that two dudes were running down in the basement. Understandably, they didn’t want us sticking our noses into their little criminal enterprise. Things got rough when they opened fire on us, but where things really got nasty was when one of the drug dealers got on the bad side of the sanatorium’s resident inhuman guardian spirit — a big hulk of a thing named Mister Long Brook by the young girl that it seemed to have taken a shine to — and ended up falling through a hole in the floor and breaking his neck.

The guy’s name was Jake, and even though he had acted like a world-glass jerk when he was chasing us around the building and taking pot-shots at us, I actually developed a little sympathy for him right after he died. Von Spiessbach and his cronies put his spirit on one of those operating tables and sliced his chest open. Make no mistake, spirits can feel pain, even though they don’t have material bodies like we do. They could probably have heard his screams all the way out there in Nederland.

Jake…

I winced, my mind rushing back to those screams. I could still hear them now, cutting through me like a knife wielded by a madman; like the scalpel wielded by von Spiessbach as he sliced open Jake’s helpless spirit body, right up there in the operating room. I looked upward on reflex, but all that was left now were dark grey clouds.

It was gone now. He was gone. They all were: von Spiessbach, his demented staff, and all of the patients he’d kept prisoner. They had moved on into the next life, each and every one of them entering the spirit portals that had blossomed all through the building that night. Without going into too much more detail, my spirit guide Lamiyah managed to bring my Dad back from the afterlife. I’d say it was like the cavalry turning up at the end of one of those old Hollywood westerns, except for the fact that Dad was a proud U.S. Marine (is there any other kind?) and he’d never much time for the cavalry. If it wasn’t the infantry, which was his chosen branch, then he really didn’t pay them much attention. Grunts win wars, Danny, he had always used to say with a cocky smile that I missed more and more with each passing day. Everybody else is in the rear with the gear!

The battle lines had been drawn then. It was us versus them, the forces of darkness in a standoff against a tiny army of light. The meth lab down in the basement had gone up in flames during our escape, and had taken pretty much the entire building along with it in a giant tower of flame that could be seen for miles around.

Even von Spiessbach had finally accepted the inevitable, though he had gone kicking and screaming toward what he must have thought would be his final judgment, and an eternity of damnation and hellfire. The spirit world doesn’t actually work like that though. Nobody is irredeemable in the end, although it could take hundreds, sometimes even thousands of years for a soul to see the error of its earthly ways and truly begin to rehabilitate itself.

I had a feeling that Marko von Spiessbach would be working on that for a long, long time to come.

Long Brook Sanatorium had burned to the ground. Once the fire department from Nederland (along with plenty of backup from the rest of the county) had done their thing, all that remained were a few structural walls standing here and there like broken teeth, and scattered pieces of the stuff that had once filled the ground floor rooms… like the scrap washing machine Becky was suddenly so taken with.

The cops had asked us a whole bunch of questions about the fire, mostly centered around just what exactly three teenagers were doing poking around in a run-down old sanatorium on a Saturday night. They seemed to have basically bought our story about being wannabe ghost hunters — well, it was actually true, as far as it went; we just left out the part about what we had found up here, except for the meth lab and the two bad guys who were cooking down in the cellar.

Although…looking back on it now, I’m not sure that either of them really were all that bad, not deep down to the core anyway. Yes, Jake had come after us with a gun, something which still sends a shiver down my spine whenever I get to thinking about it, but when he suddenly fell through that hole in the floor above and died, we all got to see a different side of him…a more vulnerable one, I guess. He became just like a frightened little kid who just couldn’t understand what was going on.

I didn’t know anything about Jake’s background or his childhood. Maybe the gun had made him feel a little like he was in control. I don’t know how he got into cooking meth, which is a pretty nasty way for people to royally screw up their lives, but I don’t think that he was actually a bad person, or that he truly meant anybody any harm; I think that he was just scared and lonely, exactly like the rest of us.

In the end, Jake had gone through one of the portals too, so he’s most likely undergoing some major-league spiritual reeducation even as we speak. Hey, come to think of it, I should probably ask Lamiyah to look in on him and let me know how he’s doing.

Jake’s partner in crime was Tony. Tony actually survived the night at Long Brook, despite the place literally coming down in flames all around us, and it genuinely seemed to have changed him. It’s hard to blame him for looking at the world differently after what he went through: I mean, wouldn’t you see things in a new light if you were suddenly given incontrovertible proof that ghosts were real and that someday, you yourself were going to become one?

True to his word, Tony bit the bullet and ‘fessed up to everything when the cops took him into custody. He took full responsibility for the meth lab and for causing the fire down there in the basement, and the cops took him at his word. After all, why wouldn’t they? Brandon, Becky and I breathed a sigh of relief when we heard that. That meant we were off the hook. The cops threw the book at Tony though, even though nobody was living in the building at the time — for some reason, they take arson pretty seriously — and he’ll be behind bars until 2020 at the very earliest.

Tony underwent a form of…I don’t know exactly what to call it, so let’s go with the term ‘spiritual awakening,’ I guess: the sheer craziness of what he saw that night broke something inside of him, something that could never be properly mended again…at least, not in the same state that it had started out in. Tony really fell on his sword when it came to what happened at Long Brook though, and everybody was happy enough to believe him — especially Mom, and not to mention Becky’s and Brandon’ parents. All three of knew how lucky that made us, because none of them would have believed a single word of the real story.

So we just let it drop, allowing it to drift away into the background of everyday life as things slowly went back to normal.

I thought long and hard about telling Mom the truth. Really, I did. Never mind von Spiessbach and all of the stuff about the haunting: as far as I was concerned, all of that was just background noise when you compared it to the real issue.

Dad had come back from the spirit world.

How did you even begin to have a conversation like that? See, Mom, it’s kind of like this. Ever since I was younger, I’ve been able to see ghosts. See them and, you know, talk to them sometimes. When I was up there in that burning sanatorium — which was totally packed with them, by the way — Dad came back from the Summerland…huh? Oh, that’s the name of the place where most of us go when we die. Gotta say, you’re taking this really well. Anyway, Dad came back through a portal, along with my spirit guide…she’s a young Indian girl from a couple of hundred years ago, her name’s Lamiyah…

See what I mean? She would either send me to a padded cell, or hate me forever for trying to play the cruelest practical joke ever.

On the other hand, I didn’t think that I could just keep it from her either. Dad’s death had torn Mom’s heart right out from her chest, and although she seemed to be coping pretty well these days, deep down I knew that she was really just taking each day as it came, dealing with the pain as best she could. At least she wasn’t trying to kill it with liquor or anything like that.

As I was drifting off to sleep one night, I asked for Lamiyah to come and visit me in my dreams, which was how we usually communicated with each other. She came, which I had expected, but she also brought Dad along with her, which I really hadn’t. Dad had spent a lot of time in one of the houses of healing on the other side — they’re kind of like hospitals, but they heal the soul instead of the body — which is much, much harder work, by the way. The war had messed him up pretty badly, and years had passed before the first time he ever came back to visit me. Fortunately for me, that happened to be the time when I most desperately needed his help, up on the roof of a burning building and surrounded on all sides by dark entities.

“Dad, I don’t know what to tell Mom about all this,” I said after he released me from a bear hug that had nearly crushed my ribs flat. “She seems fine, but I know that underneath it all, she’s still heartbroken.”

He extended his arms out to their full length, a big beefy paw on each shoulder, so that he could look me up and down and study me a little.

“I know, son. She’s putting on a front to try and keep you from figuring out just how hurt she really is. But you have to trust me when I tell you that now is not the right time to try and break this to her.”

“Couldn’t you, you know, visit her in her dreams and let her know that you’re still around?” I pleaded.

“Danny, I do,” he smiled back at me. “More often than you realize, in fact. We walk arm-in-arm together in the fields and meadows of the Summerland, just like this one.” Dad opened his arms and gestured all around us at the broad expanse of wild green grass that we were standing in. Just the very thought of that brought a tear to my eye. “What you have to understand is, she thinks that those visits are just dreams. When she wakes up in the morning, she feels worse than she did before.”

“Huh? How would a visit from you make her feel worse?” I didn’t understand.

“Because when the sun comes up, she feels as though she has lost me all over again,” he explained.

Lamiyah nodded sadly in agreement. She was standing several respectful paces back from us both, kindly allowing us to have this father-son moment all to ourselves. “You know that it is often this way, when a non-seer receives a visitation from one that has passed across to the other side of the veil.”

She was right; I did know that. Most people woke up after a sleep visitation with tears streaming down their faces, convinced that they had just been in the physical presence of their loved one; but that feeling tended to fade away with the arrival of morning, and by the time the toothpaste cap was back on, they had usually written it off to simply being a really lucid dream.

That’s what Mom must have been doing, every time Dad came to visit. No wonder she was walking around in a daydream half the time.

“I’ll tell her one day,” Dad promised me, trying to cheer me up with a smile. “When the time is right.”

In the end, we decided to leave it at that. I totally trusted him to do the right thing, and if he said that the time wasn’t right yet, then I guessed that the time really wasn’t right yet…but I hoped that time was coming soon.

CHAPTER TWO

Before we knew it, the summer was gone and fall had arrived. Everybody went back to school. Becky and I started spending a little more time together, but neither of us ever brought up the “d’ word…neither of us actually came out and said that we were dating. I don’t know why Becky didn’t say it, but I can tell you my reason for sure: I was scared. Scared that she was going to laugh at me, or reject me; scared that she would say we were just friends, and nothing more. That would mean I was locked into the friend zone for all time, like the bad guys trapped in the Phantom Zone by Superman. Once you were imprisoned there, you could never get out again.

We hung out all the time, at first. Sometimes the three of us — Becky, Brandon, and me — would get in his car and head up Boulder Canyon, always headed for the same place: the Peak to Peak Highway, and Long Brook. It was almost as if we were obsessed with the place, trying to make sense of everything that had happened on that crazy night of darkness and fire. Becky admitted to me in private that she was frightened that her grandmother, Jennifer, might still be earthbound, maybe trapped and haunting the burned-out old ruin. Every time she said it, I pointed out to her that we had seen her stepping inside her very own portal up on that burning rooftop. That seemed to calm her down for a while, but it wasn’t long before the anxiety was back again.

Finally, I told her I’d speak to Lamiyah and ask whether my spirited guide would check up on Jennifer for her.

“Just as you suspected,” Lamiyah told me the next time she came to me in my sleep, “Rebecca’s grandmother did indeed cross over of her own free will. I have spoken with her spirit guide. She is now spending what passes for time in the Summerland in deep spiritual contemplation and learning. Apparently, Jennifer felt a great deal of remorse for what she had done during her time at Long Brook; she must take into account, however, the fact that much of that was done under duress, and that much of it was due to the malign influence of another, one who was steeped in genuine evil.”

She meant von Spiessbach, but didn’t seem to want to say the name.

“What about…him?” I asked hesitantly. Hey, I was curious. So sue me.

Lamiyah paused for a moment before replying, as though searching for the words that would allow her to frame her answer perfectly. “He, also, is a student,” she said at last, her voice carrying an undercurrent that I found just a little bit ominous. “Although I think that he will find his schooling to be significantly more…challenging than Jennifer will.”

A shiver ran through me. I had heard other spirits talk about how it felt to confront their own inner darkness, along with the true horror of some pretty horrific actions such as murder and physical abuse. Maybe Marko von Spiessbach would be redeemed one day, but the chances were that it wasn’t going to be any day soon.

Becky had been moved to tears when I called her the next morning and gave her the good news. “I thought she was suffering,” Becky told me between sobs, “suffering for helping him.”

I hesitated, not really knowing what to say. I’m pretty awkward around girls at the best of times — even around Becky, who doesn’t cross the street to avoid me like most of them seem to do — but I just don’t handle tears very well, no matter who they’re coming from.

“Aren’t you going to say anything, Danny?” she cried after my silence had stretched out for long enough to be called ‘awkward.’

“Uh…” was the best I could come up with.

In a fit of sobbing, she hung up.

Looking back, I think that’s when we first started drifting apart.

Not only that, but over the course of the next few months, Brandon started to drift away from us. It’s not as if we had a falling-out or anything like that; he just told me one day that he was “through with all of that weird crap” and was going to focus on the more important things in his life.

“Like what?” I asked him skeptically.

“Like…sports, for starters. The Broncos. The Nuggets. The Avalanche. Then there’s girls. You know,” he finished airily, “the important shit.”

The important shit. Right.

I sighed inwardly. Brandon must be the only human being ever to walk the face of the Earth who, when confronted with definitive proof of life after death and a universe that was suddenly so much bigger and stranger than he could ever possibly have imagined, decided to put it all out of his mind in favor of the Denver Broncos and the Colorado Avalanche. First I shook my head in disbelief. Then I shook his hand. We parted ways amicably, each of us going off to do our own thing. Each of us, I suspect, secretly feeling sorry for the other.

That was last month, and though we’re still friends on Facebook, I haven’t heard a word from him since.

A rhythmic clackety-clack sound brought me back to the here and now. It was my teeth chattering in the cold night air.

Becky had brought a little something along with her for Jake; nothing special, just a cheap bouquet of flowers. The first thing she did when we arrived was to lay them gently on the spot where he had died, or at least as close to it as we could figure, when taking the massive devastation of the building into account. I could have sworn that there was a tear in her eye as she knelt and laid the bouquet gently in the middle of the floor, carefully clearing away a few small chunks of fallen masonry and rubble first to make a clear spot.

I glanced over toward them. The flowers were still laying there, with a little ambient light glinting from the protective polythene wrapper around the stems.

Bored now, I was asking myself for close to the hundredth time just why I was freezing my butt off out here in the middle of nowhere, when I could just as easily have been curled up at home watching a few episodes of The Clone Wars…but the truth is that I already knew the answer to that question.

It was to please Becky.

She was obviously still fascinated with this place…I mean, it seemed like she dragged me up here every single chance she could. Knowing that her grandmother wasn’t haunting the burned-out shell of the old sanatorium had been a huge relief, but it hadn’t dampened her enthusiasm for visiting the place one little bit.

“I just feel…I don’t know, drawn here,” she had told me awkwardly after our last visit. It had only been a week ago. “It’s as if there are answers that I’m somehow supposed to find somewhere around here.”

So here we were again. Something else that hadn’t put her off was the total absence of ghosts. Long Brook had been packed full of them when we arrived for our first adventure here, but I hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of an earthbound soul — not even a good old classic residual apparition, non-intelligent and dumb as a box of rocks — on any of our visits since. There was only the ruin, the wind, and now the bone-chilling cold.

“The taxi will be back pretty soon,” I hinted, gesturing towards the shadowy tree-lined driveway, “and we’re really starting to lose the light.”

“There’s no need to rush, Danny. He’ll wait.”

“I just don’t see why we’re poking around in the middle of what’s basically a burned-out barbecue pit,” I countered irritably. I knew the second the words came out of my mouth that I’d said the wrong thing.

“Danny…people died here. A lot of people died here. Good people. At least one of whom I really care about.”

Looking back now with the benefit of hindsight, I can see just how easy it would have been to do the right thing. All I’d have had to do was admit that what I’d just said was in really poor taste, and follow it up by admitting that I was cold, tired, miserable, and perhaps even a tad creeped out. In other words, an apology. I was starting to get to know Becky fairly well as a person; she’d respect the honesty and integrity that it would have shown for me to make a difficult admission like that.

Instead, I doubled down. Because I’m a moron.

“Yeah, but those people are long gone,” I pointed out doggedly. Stupid stupid stupid, a voice in the back of my mind was hissing before the words even left my mouth. There’s no way that this is going to end well if you keep on pushing her buttons like that. “Even the ghosts are gone. It’s all just ash now. We’re stupid for even being up here.”

Becky shot me a look that wouldn’t have been out of place on Medusa. It’s a miracle that I wasn’t turned to stone right then and there.

“Stupid,” was all she said, echoing me softly.

I had nothing to say to that. That inner voice was screaming at me now, raging at me like Kirk raged at Khan, telling me to take back what I’d just said while there was still time to make it good, or at least salvage something from what was quickly becoming a train wreck.

Stubbornly, my mouth stayed silent. That’s what happens when you let your ego into the driver’s seat, kids. Learn from my mistake.

The taxi ride back to Nederland, and then the bus journey back into Boulder both seemed to take an eternity, mainly because they took place in absolute silence.

Things only got worse from there.

CHAPTER THREE

We sat on separate seats on the bus heading home. The central aisle felt like a massive invisible barrier that was keeping us apart, like The Wall from Game of Thrones. Well, the air around Becky was frosty enough that it really did feel as though winter was coming. She was angry at me, royally pissed, and deep down I really couldn’t blame her. I knew that I’d acted pretty badly up there, when all she had wanted to do was poke around a little, satisfy her curiosity, and maybe even spend a little quiet time with me…and what had I done? Said something epically crass, and then shown about as much patience as a baby with a poopy diaper.

Sometimes I really, really can’t stand myself.

“Maybe there are still spirits there,” she said after a while. The bus had just reached the outskirts of Boulder, passing the library and heading downtown.

“Huh?” I grunted, taken a little by surprise. I hadn’t expected her to start speaking to me again.

“You’ve said it yourself, Danny: you’ve been seeing fewer and fewer of them these days.”

That was true. I had been seeing them less. It was something else that had been on my mind lately. Were my abilities starting to fade as I got older? I wondered if maybe it was because I was starting to go through a growth spurt, and the hormones were messing with my Seer abilities.

“Maybe. Or maybe there just aren’t any. Maybe the place isn’t haunted at all any more. Which do you think is the more reasonable answer?”

I was being difficult just for the sake of being difficult — I knew that. You see, there was something really, really wrong with me, and it had nothing to do with being able to see the dead: it was something far, far worse than that.

Slowly but surely, one day at a time, I could feel myself turning into a complete tool…and worst of all, I didn’t know why.

This is how a friendship dies. One petty cut at a time.

Flash back a few months to a time before all of this began, before we had ever gone up to Long Brook for the very first time. I’d had a massive crush on Becky, even back then. Yes, it’s a cliche, but I really had worshiped her from afar, daydreamed about her in the daytime, and even had a few real dreams about her at night — and no, I’m not going to talk about those ones, before you even ask.

Until that day on the sidewalk when I was confronted by Brandon and his gang of bullies, when the spirit of his dead grandmother had gotten in his face and slapped him when Becky just happened to be watching, the object of my affection had never so much as looked at me twice. Then, when she finally gotten proof of my Seer abilities, she had latched onto me and flirted just enough to wrap me right around her little finger and do what she wanted.

All of us have a place, deep down inside of us, somewhere below the hundreds and thousands of tiny little lies that we tell ourselves each and every day just so we can get through this miserable physical life, where we keep the pure, absolute truth. Whoever said “the truth shall set you free” was full of it, so far as I’m concerned. Because I know my truth, and knowing it doesn’t free me at all, not one little bit…and knowing that truth makes me sick to my stomach.

Becky was too darn good for me, and there was no way in hell she was ever going to stick around for the long haul.

And that cold, hard truth terrified me. It was like an icy knife in my belly, an eel slithering around in my guts and making my stomach churn out of pure fear.

Just looking at her took my breath away. She was tall and slender, with green eyes that you just wanted to fall into forever, and straight red hair that fell down past her shoulders, which was usually gathered up into a ponytail.

A beautiful, no, gorgeous girl like Becky was never going to end up with a gangly hundred-pound nerd like me. Not in a million years.

Sooner or later she was going to dump me, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

So what did I do about it?

I got snarky. I became an even bigger A-hole than usual, in some stupid, moronic, passive-aggressive way that makes me blush now to even tell you about. A shrink would probably have said that I was subconsciously sabotaging my own happiness, setting up my own self-fulfilling prophecy that was meant to push Becky away from me and thereby bringing about the one thing I feared above all others.

Maybe they’d be right. Push her into breaking up with me sooner rather than later.

“You’re acting like such a jerk, Danny.” She said it so softly, and I’m pretty sure that none of the other passengers on the bus heard it over the noise of the engine…but those seven words couldn’t have cut me any deeper if she had screamed them at the top of her lungs.

I opened my mouth to answer her, without having even the slightest idea of what words were going to come out of it…so, pretty much business as usual for me. Becky didn’t give either of us the chance to find out, though. Shouldering her backpack, she got up and walked to the front of the bus. The glow of the streetlights and storefronts streaking past outside the steamed-up windows told me that we were almost at her stop. My mind raced, running through all the things I ought to be doing: dash to the front of the bus and hug her, say that I was sorry, let her know that yes, I was being a jerk, but it was only because I was afraid, absolutely terrified, of losing her, and it was driving me halfway out of my mind. Then she’d hug me back. Maybe there’d be tears and maybe there wouldn’t, but all would be forgiven. We’d laugh and maybe even hold hands for a while, and Becky would tell me to stop being silly…perhaps even tell me that she wanted to be more than just my friend.

I just sat there. Silently. Not moving.

With a hiss of brakes, the bus came to a stop. The driver opened the doors, and just like that she was gone. Out into the night.

From where I had been sitting on the left side of the bus, I couldn’t see much of anything over on the right side. Quickly, I butt-bounced once, twice, and then scooched across the aisle and dropped into the seat that she’d just been sitting in. It was still warm. Trying not to be too obvious about it, I wiped a small spiral clear of the fogged-up glass, the condensation caused by the driver and the eight of us remaining passengers breathing.

Becky was taking long strides and not looking back. Without even thinking about it, my hand clenched into a fist and slammed into my thigh hard enough to hurt.

What did you have to go and say that for? I raged at myself, feeling my already-simmering anger starting to rise higher. You are such a freaking idiot.

I kept watching, looking out past my own anguished reflection in the small circle of window that I could see out of. The sidewalks on Broadway were already pretty busy, full of university students out for a few drinks on a Saturday evening, or people just generally enjoying the Boulder weekend nightlife. Just before she disappeared into the passing crowds, something weird happened. A man fell into step behind Becky. He was tall and lean — as in, really, really thin, eve for a Boulderite. Boulder was an outdoorsy town where a lot of the resident measured their body fat in microns and Whole Foods was hands-down the biggest retailer.

I hadn’t noticed him before, but when the bus started moving again we soon caught up with them both and I got a much better view. The man was dressed very formally, as though he was going to a wedding or an awards ceremony, something like that; his suit looked like it was expensive, and yet at the same time very old, like the outfits you would see the actors wearing in historical movies like Lincoln or Tombstone (I don’t like westerns much, but that last was one of Dad’s favorite movies). He wasn’t wearing a hat though, and I could see dark hair combed neatly and carefully across the back of his head, with not a single strand out of place. He had taken up a spot on Becky’s left side, and there was just something that felt a little…I don’t know, off about him.

The thin man reached out with his arm and draped it gently around her shoulders. It might have been my imagination, but I thought I saw her shiver just a little. She didn’t turn to swat him away or anything, though, and I wondered if she really knew what he had done. From where I was sitting, it looked as if the arm was resting there very lightly, with the fingers of a black leather-gloved hand pushing their way creepily through her long red hair.

How on Earth was she not noticing that?

And then it hit me. It was so obvious.

The man wasn’t a flesh and blood man at all. The man was a spirit.

The bus put on a sudden burst of speed. For just a second we were parallel with them both, and then the next they were both behind us as we headed north on Broadway.

That was when I saw it.

I rose up out of my seat with a sense of growing horror, gripping the back of the one in front to support myself — not because of the bus bouncing on every pothole along Boulder’s busiest street, but because my legs were threatening to buckle.

Becky’s eyes were downcast, and looked as though she was on the verge of crying. She was walking quickly, in that way that people do when they’re angry or upset and allowing it to bleed over into their pace. She still wasn’t reacting to the stranger’s arm around her shoulders. But that wasn’t what had sent the jolt of fear down my spine.

It was the ghostly man’s face…

…because he didn’t have one.

There was just a black, oval mist where the face should have been. Two blue-and-white circles shone out of what, on anybody else, would have been the eye sockets.

Then he turned his head and they looked straight in my direction.

The man — no, the thing — smiled at me. It saw me, somehow, and stared directly at me through my little circle of de-misted window.

Don’t ask me how I know. I mean, the thing had no mouth, a black face, and to cap it off, it was night. But somehow, I could just tell that this hideous creature was smiling at me, leering at me from somewhere beneath those shining, malevolent orbs of light.

I was stunned. I couldn’t move. My legs were rooted to the floor. All I could do was watch as a distraught Becky made her way through the bitter cold, with a phantom passenger clinging to her and keeping up with every step she took.

Then the bus took off, leaving them both far behind us in the cold October night.

CHAPTER FOUR

When the bus dropped me off just a short distance from home, my hands were still shaking.

Carefully, I pulled out my phone and punched in the four-digit security code to unlock it. Becky was top of my Recents list of contacts. With trembling fingers, I tapped the button that would dial her number.

It rang straight through to her voicemail.

“Hi!” said her breezy, cheerful voice coming out of the speaker. “You’ve reached Becky, and you know what you do. Kaythanksbye!”

Beep.

“Becky, this is Danny. Please call me back. It’s important, OK? Like, really important. Call me. Please. As soon as you can.Thanks.”

I hung up.

She never called back.

I tried twice more on the walk back, but there was still no answer. It wasn’t a long journey back to the trailer park, but it sure felt like it was to me. I tried texting her next. Same deal.

Silence.

Because it was Saturday, Mom was enjoying a night out with her friends. The house (yeah, I know it’s a trailer, but Mom and I have always called it the house) wasn’t totally quiet, though. Although Mom didn’t know it, Dad had sent us a very special gift directly from his new home in the Summerland — Moggie. Moggie (real name Magua, but also known as Magua the Jaguar) had been my cat when I was growing up. He had developed a brain tumor, and the vet told us he was going to die within a few weeks. One screaming and wailing fit from me later, Mom and Dad went up to their ears in credit card debt and took Moggie to the very best specialist vets in the world, up at the University of Colorado School of Veterinary Medicine. They zapped the tumor with a precisely-targeted radiation beam, and just like the Death Star obliterating Alderaan, the beam left left nothing behind it apart from a few scattered bits and pieces of matter. Moggie was left with a shock of brilliant white hair running from his jet black forehead, down between his eyes, and ending just above his little button nose, where the beam had gone in and done its thing. If anything, it made him look even more handsome than he had before the procedure.

The chubby little black cat who was only supposed to live on for just a few weeks more, actually ended up living a few years more instead. The Mog finally passed away peacefully in his sleep at the end of my bed one night a couple of years ago, having taken full advantage of the chance to become fat, dumb, pampered and happy until the end of his days.

Dad knew how lonely Mom and I were these days. He was fully aware of how hard it was for us to go on without him. I had always taken comfort in knowing that all of our pets, whether they’re cats, dogs, horses, birds, heck even the snakes, basically any animal that was ever loved by a human, has a place in the next life, not to mention there being no shortage of people to fuss them and play with them; but it was one thing to know it intellectually, and a whole other story when my boy The Mog strolled nonchalantly in through the front door one day (without opening it first) and greeted me with his customary miaowf.

Moggie wasn’t solid in his spirit form, so I wasn’t able to scratch behind his ears or administer the belly rubs that he had always loved so much. He had always been pretty much his own cat, but as aloof as he could be, I also knew that he secretly loved having some human company about the place. I might have been able to see through his body, which was permanently outlined in a luminous blue glow like the force ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi, but other than that he was still the same old Mog, and it always made me better to see him strutting about the place.

“’Sup, Mog?” I asked, closing the front door behind me and making my way across the living room of our double-wide trailer and into the kitchen.

“Miaowf.”

Bless Mom. She’d left me some lasagne in the microwave, along with a note telling me she’d be back pretty late tonight. Well, good for her. She worked really hard to keep us both afloat, and she deserved to cut loose every once in a while if she felt like it.

I hit the start button and tried calling Becky again while the lasagne was warming up. Still no answer, damn it.

Now I was starting to get worried. That spirit with no face — there was no way something like that could have been human — had to be something dark. Worse, it was probably an inhuman entity. The very few human spirits I’d encountered who seemed to have a truly evil nature still had human-like appearances; heck, even that monster von Spiessbach had possessed the face of a man. Whatever this thing was, it had probably never walked the Earth in any sort of living, breathing body at all.

Every faith and culture around the world and throughout human history has got a name for entities like that. Christians called them demons, of course; to followers of Islam they had many names, including jinn and shayateen, to name just two. They’re said to be much older than humanity, and a thousand times nastier — which, when you take a look at some of the heinous things that people have done to one another over the years, is saying quite a lot. I tried asking Lamiyah about them once. Her manner turned steely and cold in a heartbeat, and she shot me a look that told me in no uncertain terms to drop the subject, because there are some things I wasn’t ready to know yet.

So I dropped the subject. Lamiyah has a way of being really persuasive when she wants to be.

Duh duh duh duh duh duh...

The theme music from Star Wars suddenly started playing in my hand, which meant only one thing: a text message. I swiped eagerly at the phone. It was from Becky.

Quit bugging me Danny. I really don’t want to talk to you tonight, OK? We can talk later. B.

I blew out a massive sigh. Usually she signed off with an X or two.

Could I have been wrong about the dark entity — could I have imagined the whole thing? I certainly didn’t think so. But she had gotten home safely, at least, and it didn’t sound as though she was anything other than justifiably angry and in need of a little personal space. Frankly, I couldn’t find it in me to blame her for that, not even a little.

So what were my options now: keep calling and acting like a…like some kind of freaking stalker? That would be like upending a gas can over a burning barbecue grill. I could call a taxi and head over to her house, try to reason with her — but that would be basically the same thing, wouldn’t it? I just had to accept the fact that she didn’t want to talk to me right now, and it was as simple as that. As mad at me as she was, I might end up in some real trouble if I pushed things any further tonight.

The microwave pinged. I grabbed the plate of lasagne, threw in a Blu-Ray of The Clone Wars, and threw myself down onto the couch. For the next couple of hours, I tried to lose myself in the adventures of Obi Wan, Anakin, and Ahsoka. By the time that the fourth episode rolled around, I was yawning for all I was worth — and it had nothing to do with the show. I loved Clone Wars. It had been a long day, at the end of a long week, and I was feeling pretty darn fried. When the end credits rolled, I flipped the TV off and decided to call it a night.

When my teeth were brushed, I tossed my clothes on the back of a chair and crawled into bed. For just a few seconds before I turned out the light, I thought about picking up a graphic novel from the beat-up old bedside table, but I was so tired that I knew I didn’t even have the energy to read a couple of pages of something awesome.

I had no way of knowing that it wasn’t going to be a restful night.

CHAPTER FIVE

When I visit with Lamiyah, or pretty much any other spirit that isn’t earthbound, I do it in my sleep. It happens during what would look a lot like a lucid dreaming state, if a doctor happened to be running an EEG on me at the time.

These aren’t exactly your garden variety dreams. They just feel different to me somehow. It’s hard to put into words, but a pretty good analogy would be the difference between watching a movie in 3-D IMAX compared to watching an ordinary 2D version on your home TV. Spirit visitation dreams are way, way more vivid and spectacular, the colors being brighter and more vibrant; the sounds are also sharper and clearer, but perhaps the biggest difference of all is that you just know, deep down inside yourself, that this is all actually happening.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t quite one of those dreams…but it wasn’t the ordinary kind either.

This was more like a movie that had been directed and edited by a madman.

It started out with an old building, set high up on a hill. From a distance, it was squat and menacing, and speaking of movies, it wouldn’t have looked much out of place in a horror movie. A tall brick chimney towered over the rest of the single-story brick structure. As I got closer — which was weird, because I couldn’t actually feel myself walking — I noticed that two ambulances were parked outside on a concrete platform, surrounded on three sides by a wrought iron fence.

The night was overcast, the low grey cloud layer letting through practically no light from the moon and stars. Don’t ask me how (because I had no sense of temperature) but somehow I knew that the air was cold. Perhaps it was the frost that was already forming on the windshields of those two ambulances. Then I was past them, flying (for lack of a better word) between them both and through the black iron railings toward a set of metal-framed glass doors at the speed of a fast walk. I could just make out a sign above them that said “Emergency Room,” though it was halfway covered in dirt and shadow.

I was more worried by what looked like two bloody hand prints on two of the tinted windows; it looked to me as if somebody with a pretty bad injury had tried to push their way either in or out of the place, though I had no way of telling which it was.

Just as it looked as if I was going to smash into the doors, they both flew open wide, slamming back forcefully against their frames. They hit so hard, I was amazed that the glass panes didn’t shatter. Now I found myself in some kind of lobby or entrance area. The floor was tiled, and off to my right were some glass display cases whose shelves were stocked with souvenirs and keepsakes along the lines of folded t-shirts, mugs, glasses, and other stuff like that. Directly in front of me was a set of closed double doors, and to the left was a long hallway which stretched away further than I could see — the far end of it was just one big pool of darkness.

Something else told me that I wasn’t having a lucid dream: usually, I could control my actions as much as I wanted to, walking (sometimes flying if I felt like it) wherever I wanted to go, and much faster than was possible in the waking world. Not this time, though: someone else was doing the driving. I pivoted to my right, cutting around the display cases and pushing through a pair of hanging curtains that were thick and heavy enough to keep out most of the light.

I was in a dark corridor, standing still for a moment and perhaps giving my eyes an opportunity to adjust. I couldn’t see anything to either side of me, but there seemed to be a source of dim light coming from somewhere not too far up ahead. I could just about make out the edges of the narrow corridor that surrounded me. It was fairly narrow, and the roof was low enough to make me feel a little claustrophobic, so I did my best to shove the idea toward the back of my mind and willed myself to move forward somehow. No matter how much I tried to walk, scoot, or fly forward, the end result was always the same: I just stood there, motionless and helpless.

Waiting.

Time must have passed, but I have no idea how long I spent waiting there. Everything was completely silent. I couldn’t even hear the sound of my own breath rasping in my ears, or the thud of my heartbeat inside my chest. An eon could have passed without me knowing it, or maybe just a few minutes — there was simply no way to tell.

A high-pitched scream made me want to jump halfway out of my skin. It was coming from somewhere up ahead, and from the sound of it, it was a female voice.

Suddenly, I was moving again, floating forward toward whoever had just cried out. The corridor was changing too. There were floor-to-ceiling mirrors on both sides of me, and I was able to turn my head to look at my reflection: yep, I was still me alright, wearing the same shorts that I’d worn to bed. My hair even looked mussed from the pillow. But that was as much control as I had, the ability to turn my head and look around. Apart from that, I seemed to be as powerless as a puppet on strings, dancing to the tune of some invisible puppeteer as I was moved further along the mirrored corridor. The path twisted and turned, sometimes seeming to double back on itself, and at other places even forcing me to swerve around mirrored outcrops and sidesteps. This was all starting to feel like some sort of maze.

I sensed it rather than saw it, at first: there was something else in here with me, and whatever it was, it most definitely wasn’t the source of the scream that I had just heard. That person had been frightened and vulnerable, if my ears weren’t steering me wrong. This thing, whatever it was, wasn’t frightened at all: in fact, it felt downright predatory, because I was getting a definite feeling of malicious glee radiating out from it. What’s more, it felt as if it was a direct response to that same sense of fear.

Looking to my left and right, I caught sight of something in the mirrors on either side of me. At first it was just brief flashes, indistinct but definitely there, lurking somewhere off in the background as the mirror images stretched away into infinite versions of themselves. They sort of reminded me of the opening sequence for the Tom Baker run of Doctor Who.

Then I worked it out. They were figures — human-shaped figures, shadowy and indistinct, a bunch of silent observers who seemed to be every bit as curious about me as I was about them. I kept moving forward through the darkness. Heads peeked around the edges and corners of the mirrors, watching me silently. Some of them were at the height of a grown adult, but others were low enough to the floor to make them either children or very short adults. As I moved from one mirror to the next, some of the shadow forms dashed to keep up, and I caught glimpses of shadowy arms, legs, and heads…but I couldn’t make out any facial features, or any real detail at all. They were more like rough sketches drawn by an artist who was in a serious hurry to get the picture done.

Another scream, closer than the first and a whole lot louder. It sounded like the same voice. Whoever it was, she had to be right up ahead. I could hear the sound of footsteps coming toward me, the hard slap of boots on the wooden boards of the maze floor.

Then I saw her.

Becky.

She came barreling around the corner, running away from something that I couldn’t yet see. Her chest heaved as she gasped for air. I had seen Becky frightened before, back at Long Brook, but she hadn’t been screaming then; she had seemed doggedly determined to see it through, despite the paranormal dangers and the very real possibility of suffocating or burning to death that night.

Becky was a fighter, not a screamer…so what had terrified her to the point of screaming now?

There was only one answer: the dark and predatory presence that I could sense, still lurking out there somewhere in the blackness of the maze, and obviously getting off on her state of fear. I could feel an overwhelming sense of glee emanating from it, and knew that it was getting closer to Becky, drawn to that same sense of fear like a moth to a flame. It was much nearer to us both now, and I was becoming convinced that it was getting stronger and more powerful by the minute.

“Becky!”

She was totally oblivious to my presence. I flinched as she came straight at me, her eyes wide with panic, but instead of barreling into me and knocking me to the ground, she passed right through my body. It was the weirdest feeling…I turned stone-cold, shivering as our bodies shared the same space for a split-second. Then she was out the other side, and tearing down the corridor; Becky was so frantic to escape that she wasn’t paying any attention to what was right in front of her. I winced as her head slammed into one of the mirrors with a thud that took the wind out of her sails, forcing her to sink to her knees.

Gathering up every ounce of mental strength that I could find, I willed myself to move forward, and this time, amazingly, my dream-body obeyed me, allowing me to follow in her panicked footsteps. It only took a few seconds for me to catch up with her. After the bump on her head, Becky must have gotten confused, because she had managed to take a wrong turn in the maze and had run into a dead end. She was slapping her palms against the mirrors on either side of her as she attempted to grope her way out of the trap that she now found herself caught up in.

Behind me, I could sense that the dark presence was still closing in, like a shark homing in on blood in the water.

The first thing to emerge was a hand. Six feet in front of Becky, a set of smoky black fingers began slowly pushing their way out into the corridor from inside one of the mirrors. The hand flexed its fingers into the shape of a claw, and was followed by a rake-thin arm and then the shoulder that it was attached to. Next was a head, which seemed to struggle to push its way out from behind the glass and into the ‘real’ world — if that’s where we were. The head slowly turned toward Becky, who was now trying to pull herself back onto her feet using a pair of mirrors for leverage, and I swear — I swear — I saw it grin when it caught sight of her.

After the figure had managed to free itself completely, standing in front of Becky and towering over her as she kept struggling to find her feet, still more shadow people began to emerge from the mirrors all along the hallway. At least two of them were child-sized, no bigger than a six or seven year-old at most, and the pair ran excitedly around the feet of the taller figures as though they were playing some kind of game.

“Becky, run!” I yelled, but she didn’t react to me at all; in fact, she hadn’t even looked at me since she had first rounded that corner. I didn’t think that she could see me, and I also didn’t think that she could see the shadow people either, based on the way she was acting. Becky was back on her feet at last, and although she seemed a little on the groggy side, she looked determined to get out of here. Her face was more fight than fright now, much more like the old Becky that I knew and crushed on in a major way. Her hands were balled into fists, and her mouth was set in a determined line. It was as though she knew that the shadow people were out there, but not exactly where. Her head was on a swivel, but her eyes never seemed to fix upon any one of them.

One of the children suddenly darted forward, coming around the leg of the biggest adult and swiping at Becky’s face with its hand. The shadow child jumped backward just as Becky brought a hand up to protect her face, which had an expression somewhere between amazed and fearful now. She had obviously felt the touch of the spirit on her skin.

Even in the super-dim light, I could see that although Becky’s body was reflected in all of the mirrors, the shadow people not only cast no shadows themselves, but they also weren’t showing up in any of the mirrors at all — except for when they first pulled themselves out of the glass and emerged to stand alongside one another inside the maze.

Becky reached out with both hands, and her questing fingers passed straight through the large shadow man that had been the first one to try and back her into the corner. Moving with incredible speed, the big figure decided to return the favor, lashing out with both arms and slamming an incredulous Becky backward into one of the mirrors so hard that the glass cracked and spider-webbed on impact.

You have to give her credit. Almost anybody else in her position — me included, probably — would be hollering the place down by now, but it looked to me as though Becky’s screaming days were over. Taking three uncertain steps forward, she punched out at what must have seemed like empty air in front of her. For the second time, her fist passed straight through a shadow figure, which was the same man (I was guessing from his build) that had just pushed her backwards.

How can you fight something you can’t hit?

All the hackles suddenly went up on the back of my neck. I spun about, glad that this dream-body was now somehow obeying my mental commands, and then —

Oh, crap.

At the far end of the maze corridor, the same one that Becky had just practically flown down, I could finally see what she had been running from…and I really didn’t like it, not one little bit.

I could tell from the cold blue glow which outlined its lanky frame that it was a spirit, not a living human being. From the set of its shoulders and the way that it moved, I also felt pretty sure that the tall dark figure was a male rather than a female. There was something…I don’t know, something familiar about him, the way the man looked and carried himself: it reminded me of the Slenderman that was cropping up all over the Internet right now. It took me just a few short seconds to realize exactly what that was.

I had seen it before, from my seat on the bus window earlier tonight.

It was the spirit that had draped its arm around Becky.

Just like it had before, it looked me in the eye and smiled at me, its mouth a gaping black chasm set in a dark face with no other features. It was as if a deeper black hole had somehow opened itself up out of the blackness, and wanted to swallow us both whole.

“Why, hello Danny!” The voice was soft, cultured, and…holy crap, British? Like one of the dudes from Downton Abbey, that PBS show which Mom was practically addicted to. It actually sounded friendly and welcoming, a pretense that the spirit was talking to an old friend that it hadn’t seen in a long time. Somehow, that managed to make it sound even more sinister.

The thing kept gliding toward me on long black legs that didn’t move a fraction, floating two or three inches above the ground.

“Isn’t she just magnificent?” the entity went on, sweeping out a hand toward the place behind me where I assumed that Becky was facing off against the clustering shadow figures. I risked an uber-quick look and saw that I was right. Surrounded on three sides by mirrors, she was lashing out at the dark spirits that penned her in on the fourth. When my head snapped back to face him again, I flinched; the Dark Man (as I was starting to think of him) was only a few feet away from me now, floating forward slowly in a manner that suggested he had all the time in the world.

I tried to back away, but my legs were suddenly refusing to move again, rooting me to the spot. All I could see was that cadaverous black grin looming at me out of the shadows. Then we were nose to nose — though this thing didn’t even have a nose — and I smelled something…weird, like the musty odor of a second-hand bookstore, all old, stale paper, wrapped up in the musk and history of hundreds of years and thousands of lives.

“I really do think that I’m going to have to keep her for myself,” the Dark Man continued, his voice taking on a confidential air. “All for my very own. Yes, I do believe that I shall.”

The featureless black face regarded me impassively. I thought that I saw the smile widen just a hair, but it could easily have been my dream-eyes playing tricks. Unless I was mistaken, he also seemed to be speaking slightly out of synch — it reminded me of a foreign movie that had been badly dubbed.

“Becky might have something to say about that, and I sure as hell will.”

“She’s certainly wasted on you, young man,” the Dark Man sneered, and there it was again, that weird time lag between the thing’s mouth moving and the words coming out.

“Kiss my butt,” was the best retort I could manage. Hey, cut me a little slack…how much wit would you be capable of drumming up if you had a malevolent spirit entity jamming its faceless face right up against your nose? I think kiss my butt was actually pretty damn good, all things considered.

The thing laughed, and suddenly the friendly tone was dropped, shown for the fake that it really was. No human throat could ever have uttered a laugh like that. Just the sound of it made me want to puke.

“If you don’t mind, I shall decline your most generous offer.”

What is it about the English that they can be so freaking polite and so freaking rude at exactly the same time? They must learn it in school or something.

“That’s too bad,” I grunted, trying desperately to get my legs to move; they had quit obeying my commands, no matter how much I strained and willed them too. This on-again/off-again control of my dream body BS was getting old. Perhaps it was because this was only a nightmare, and I was traveling as a passenger in my own dream-body, instead of being in the driver’s seat. That was the only thing that reassured me a little. It didn’t take a genius to work it out. I was terrified of losing Becky. Suddenly I’m dreaming about shadowy figures coming out of mirrors and chasing her through a maze. A shrink would have a field day dissecting this one, wouldn’t they? Fear of loss; fear of rejection; fear of Becky running away from me and never coming back.

It all made perfect sense.

Except…

Dreams and nightmares don’t appear on Boulder sidewalks and put an arm around the girl who just stormed away from you, did they?

Realization hit home with the sickening force of a hammer to the guts.

I had been fooled into thinking that, just because I was unable to make my body do the things I wanted it to do, I must be dealing with something kicked up by my over-active subconscious, rather than interacting with genuine spirits.

This wasn’t a regular nightmare at all.

This was one hundred percent real.

“She’s not going to run away from you.” The Dark Man broke my train of thought with a voice that had gone back to pouring honey into my ear again. “No, no, no. Nothing so simple as that. You see, I’m going to take her away from you. Because I want her. For my very own. Forever. Unless, that is, you are man enough to put up something resembling a fight.”

With that, the thing slid forward once more, moving into and then through my body. I went cold for a second time, but this was a different kind of cold from the one that Becky had caused when she went straight through me. I could feel the panic rising within me now, and struggled with every fiber in my body to turn it around, to make it face the Dark Man and his entourage of mirror-spirits through sheer force of will...but I couldn’t move, not so much as a dream-muscle. I couldn’t even twitch now. For lack of a better expression, I was being totally controlled, though I had no idea by who or by what.

From somewhere behind me, Becky screamed again.

I could only imagine what the shadow people were doing to her back there.

CHAPTER SIX

I woke up with a start, my bed linens drenched with sweat and clinging to my lower body. All the classic signs of a brain-bender of a nightmare.

Kicking the sheets off, I swung my legs out of bed and groped for the Nalgene water bottle that I always kept on the bedside table. It was still half full. Unscrewing the lid, I took a long, welcome swallow of tepid water that had been flavored with caffeinated cherry sweetener.

My heart was pounding away like a jackhammer inside my chest, and I was breathing so hard it practically ached. Spirit-Moggie was nowhere to be seen, so I could only assume that my nocturnal thrashing session had made him say adios and probably go off to sleep with Mom. She couldn’t see him, of course, but knowing that he was most likely in there keeping her company made me feel just a little better. That cat had raised his game of comforting his adoptive humans to the level of an Olympic sport, even when one of us wasn’t aware of his presence. In fact, Mom swore that he gave off sleep pheromones every time he plopped his hairy black butt down on the comforter next to her.

I picked up my phone (no returned calls or texts, dammit) and swiped to find the time. Six thirty-seven on a Sunday morning.

Becky.

That one thought suddenly leaped out in front of all the others, grabbed me by the shoulders and yelled for me to pay attention. Was it too early to call her? I wavered for a minute. Not only was it early, but for a Sunday morning it was zero-stupid-early.

But she was in danger… after the dream, journey to the spirit world, whatever the hell it had actually been, I felt that now with total certainty.

The Dark Man was real, and he wanted her. I had believed him when he said it to me there in the mirror maze, and I believed it now, sitting her on the edge of my bed.

Screw it.

Punching in the four-digit security code, I brought up Becky’s contact number and pawed it.

Amazingly, she picked up on the fourth ring.

“M’hello?” Becky must have answered by reflex, because judging from the sound of her voice she was still pretty much asleep.

“Uh, hey Becky. It’s me. Danny.” Crap. I hadn’t thought this far ahead. To tell you the truth, I hadn’t expected her to pick up at all.

“Danny…” She seemed to struggle with the concept for a few seconds, then asked me what time it was.

“Nearly seven,” I hedged, thinking that nearly seven sounded marginally less insane an hour to call at than six thirty-eight.

“What do you want, Danny?”

I tried to read her voice. Was she still angry with me after last night? At least she was safe, which was the main thing. Upset, I could handle. Under threat, I really couldn’t.

“I, uh…” Before I said it, I knew how lame it was going to sound. Even forming the words in my brain was making me wince. But what else was I supposed to do…lie to her? “You’re in danger,” I began awkwardly.

“Danger,” she repeated, still a little groggy but coming out of it pretty fast. A word like that would have that effect pretty fast.

“Yeah. Look, about last night…”

“Yeah, about last night,” she cut me off. “You acted like a real jerk, Danny. You do know that, right?”

I paused and didn’t say anything, trying desperately to figure out the right thing to say. Which was, apparently, the wrong thing to say.

“Because I’m still processing what happened to us up there at Long Brook. That’s why I keep wanting to go back”

“I—” was all I could get out before she cut me off again.

“It’s OK for you, Danny. You can see the dead. You can talk to them and visit them in your sleep whenever you feel like it. Getting answers is a whole lot easier for you. Some of us have to work through this all on our own…”

“Becky, you’re not alone—”

“Yes I am, Danny. Yes. I. Am. Because you’re forever acting like you can’t be bothered to spend any time with me up there.”

Now I was starting to get resentful, maybe even a little angry myself. I kept the volume down so that I wouldn’t wake up Mom, but I could hear the heat starting to boil up in my voice. “What answers do you expect to find up there anyway? It’s just a ruin now. The spirits are long gone. The only things that haunt Long Brook Sanatorium now are rabbits and coyotes. But that’s not why I called…”

“You’re so freaking sure of yourself Danny!” She was getting angry too. Fighting fire with fire. There was no way this was going to end well.

Instead of de-escalating, I was stupid enough to try and play the trump card. “Well, why shouldn’t I be? Like you just pointed out, I’m the Seer. Not you.”

“Oh, and I’m just the tag-along little sidekick, is that it?”

I didn’t answer. Turns out that silence was still the wrong thing to say.

“That is it, isn’t it, Danny? That’s how you see me…”

“Hey, that’s not fair—”

“It’s totally fair!” Becky’s voice was raised now. I’d seen the size of her house though. It was a McMansion, as Mom called anything that cost more than three hundred grand and had more than two floors, and Becky could probably holler her lungs out from her bedroom and not wake her parents up. The place was huge. You could have built your own Death Star in its triple-berth garage. “Just because not everybody has your special gift, it doesn’t mean that you can look down on them Danny.”

Look down on them? What was she talking about? Part of me, the calm, rational side that was keeping an eye on the conversation from the perspective of a detached observer, could see how badly things were going off the rails. It started to warn me — just gentle nudges at the back of my mind, trying to get my attention — that we both needed to calm things down and really talk about this, instead of just yelling at one another. That rational part of my brain kindly pointed out that close to seven o’clock in the morning was probably not the best time to expect good communication skills from either of us, but I just told it to shut the hell up. I was angry, and do you know what? I was pretty much sure at that moment that Becky was the cause of it all.

“Hey, I called you up to help you! I didn’t ask to get yelled at!” I was seeing red, and the desire to make things right with Becky was slipping further and further away from me with every passing second. “I’m not the bad guy here, and if you think I’m going to just sit here and take this—”

“You called me, remember?” Yep, now she was yelling, and so was I. I thought I could hear Mom stirring in the next room. The walls of our trailer were basically paper-thin.

“Yeah, and I’m starting to wish that I hadn’t!”

“That’s easily fixed.” Her voice was suddenly cold, flat, and almost scarily calm.

She hung up.

“Dammit!” I curled my fist up in sheer frustration, then threw the phone down on the unmade bed.

Why did she have to be so maddening? All I had wanted to do was to warn her that she was in danger, and she hadn’t even let me get a word in. Well, that was it. If that was how she wanted it to go, then it was just fine with me.

Ping.

It was the phone. A text. I looked down.

It was from Becky.

I’m blocking you, so don’t bother calling or texting me again. EVER.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I’m usually not much for swearing, but the only word that really works to describe the week that followed is “shitty.”

I spent most of Sunday stewing. No, that’s a lie. I spent all of Sunday stewing, although I half-watched A New Hope for the thousandth time (by “half-watched,” I mean that I watched all of the movie but my mind wandered right back to the Becky situation every time I tried to focus on it).

Just who the hell did that girl think she was? All I was trying to do was to protect her, to warn her of a possible threat from a dark spirit that seemed to be attached to her. I wasn’t the one who was acting like a jerk here…right?

It took until Thursday for the doubt to really creep in, sit down, and make itself at home. Even Mom started to pick up on my mood, asking politely at first but with increasing concern as the week wore on, whether I was doing OK. I just bit my tongue and mumbled that everything was fine, thank you very much for asking.

By Friday, it really did sink in.

I had been a jerk, and not just a jerk — a world-class jerk.

It didn’t hit me all at once; this was more of a gradual realization, probably caused by my mind replaying the events of the last few months over and over again, looking for even more fuel to keep my anger at Becky burning.

When did I start hating on Becky so much…and why was I actively trying to keep that anger going? That wasn’t like me at all…not the real me, anyway. I’ve always had a temper problem, what the shrink liked to tactfully call “anger issues,” but Becky was the last person on the planet that I wanted to push away from me.

Now look what I’d gone and done. My anger had basically pushed her away with both hands.

Fear leads to anger, a certain green philosopher had said in the movies, anger leads to hate…

Reaching up, I slapped myself hard in the center of my forehead with the palm of my hand.

Dude, you have been such an idiot…

It might have taken the best part of a week, but it was all becoming clear to me now. Becky needed — and deserved — my support and compassion. What she’d gotten instead had been a mixture of judgment and snarkiness. I really couldn’t blame her for not wanting to deal with that any more…and it was all because I was scared, I realized now; scared of rejection, mostly, and scared of losing Becky as both a friend and perhaps as something more (as long as she only got a clear look at the me I wanted to become, rather than the real me.) I was terrified that once she saw me for who I really was, she would want nothing to do with me, and would run off to be with someone else…probably someone who could bench-press two-fifty and actually understood the rules of football.

Danny, what on Earth were you thinking?

I don’t remember a single thing we covered in school that Friday. The whole day was spent going over and over everything in my head yet again, but this time, I was seeing things in a new and a totally different light. Although I wasn’t quite sure how, I had somehow gone from being the good guy in this mental movie of my life, to being the villain.

It was time to do something about that.

I sat down at an out of the way table at lunchtime, keeping one eye out for anybody who might try to look over my shoulder. Pulling out my phone, I logged into my Gmail account and began putting together an email to try and explain my feelings. It wasn’t going to be a masterpiece — I’m a Seer, not a writer — but it would hopefully say what I wanted it to say. What I needed it to say.

Dear Becky,

It’s really tough to know how to begin this email, so I’ll just start at the beginning and give it my best shot.

I’m really, really sorry. I’ve been a jerk and I see that now.

I’m going to save the rest of the apology for when I can give it to you in person. Things got really out of hand when we talked last time, and I don’t want that to happen again. I called you because I’m worried about you. I think that there’s some kind of dark spirit attached to you. I don’t know who it is or what it wants, but you can bet your life it won’t be anything good.

Please get back to me.

Danny.

I hesitated, then thought better of it and typed a single ‘X’ at the bottom and hit send.

Letting out all the air from my lungs in an epic sigh, I locked the phone and slipped it back into my pocket.

There was nothing left to do now but wait.

I didn’t hear anything back from Becky for the rest of that day.

That night, I had the dream again. If anything, it was even creepier and more intense than before. The contents were pretty much the same: flying towards the old building on the hill, through the double doors and into a dark tunnel that opened out into a mirror maze. That feeling of there being something twisted and evil was back, only this time it was much stronger. Becky was still screaming, and she came running around the corner and passed through my helpless body just like she had in the first go-around of this particular nightmare.

The mirrors were still full of shadow people, and once again they managed to somehow free themselves from the glass and break out into the physical realm. Becky found herself pushed into the same dead end, trapped by the shadow figures and fighting desperately to fend off their attacks.

He was back too.

The Dark Man floated up to where I stood. Just like the first time, I couldn’t move my legs. I felt totally powerless. The fact that even if I could get control of my body back, there wasn’t much I could actually do to help Becky…that made me angrier than anything else.

“Let her go, you son of a bitch!”

Laughing, the Dark Man planted his face right in front of mine again, until I could see nothing except for the shape of a dark head outlined against the slightly brighter blackness of the maze — and two coldly burning eyes.

“And what if I don’t?” he asked playfully, cocking his head to one side like a dog reacting to a whistle. God, but that British accent was so freaking annoying. It made me want to punch him in the mouth…if I could find it. “What will you do, young sir?”

“I’ll make you sorry you were ever born.” Even to me, the threat sounded pretty weak.

The Dark Man leaned in closer to whisper in my ear, his breath (if that’s what it really was) cold and frigid on the side of my neck. “What makes you think that I was ever born in the first place?”

A chill ran through me, one that I couldn’t even begin to disguise. He must have noticed, because he laughed again. There was no genuine humor or amusement in that laugh at all; it seemed affected, like an actor putting on a performance. I got the feeling that the Dark Man had no understanding of what laughter truly meant, or what the point of it was.

Could he be telling the truth? It was certainly possible. There was no shortage of inhuman spirits to be found out there. Perhaps this was one of them. Maybe the Dark Man had never walked the Earth in human form at all.

Then again, dark spirits were liars whenever it suited their purpose. It was at the very heart of who and what they were. I would be mad to trust a word he said.

“Go to hell.”

“I am very well acquainted with the place,” he shot back snidely, “and to tell you the truth, it is really rather over-rated. I much prefer Tyrant’s Grove.”

“Tyrant’s Grove?” I was confused. What the heck was Tyrant’s Grove - a rock band?

Another laugh. Annoyance was starting to compete with fear inside me now. If only I could slam a fist into that formless black face…but I couldn’t even curl my fingers to form a fist.

“Oh, you shall find that out soon enough, my dear boy. Soon enough.” A sneer, heard but not seen. “Soon enough indeed.”

Behind me, Becky screamed again.

The Dark Man simply laughed.

CHAPTER EIGHT

This time, I woke up angry rather than scared.

Whoever he was, this Dark Man — and I wasn’t at all sure that I was dealing with a ‘he’ at all, as opposed to an ‘it’ — was deliberately playing games with me now: sick and twisted games, for what I assumed was his own sick and twisted amusement. Well, that I could handle. What I couldn’t handle was seeing him use Becky as some kind of pawn in the game. I didn’t know for sure whether the nightmares were just that — dreams — or whether they were actual spirit travels. Based on the fact that I’d seen the Dark Man on the sidewalk in Boulder as plain as day, I was guessing that this was much more than a bad dream…but then, why couldn’t I control my spirit-self, as I could normally? What was keeping me frozen in place when I so desperately wanted to go and help Becky?

It looked as though I’d kicked the comforter off in the night. It was Saturday morning. I picked up my phone and checked the time: 8:28 on October 31st.

Halloween.

Then I did a double-take. There was a “new email” alert on the screen. I punched in the four-digit code and brought it up.

My heart was suddenly pounding hard in my chest.

It was from Becky.

Hi Danny,

Look, I’m sorry that we fought. I really appreciate what you wrote in your email. I’m not going to say you were a jerk, but if you want to say that, who am I to argue? :-)

You have to admit though, things have been…difficult lately. I’ve been having bad dreams. Mostly they’re about Long Brook, and poor Jake, and about what happened to my grandmother. Some nights, I dream that I’m back, walking through those corridors and hearing the screaming of the patients while von Spiessbach cuts them up on his operating table. That’s why I kept wanting to go back up there at the weekends. I was looking for…something. Answers, I guess. Maybe closure. I’m not really sure. I keep waking up screaming, and it’s freaking Mom and Dad out even more than it is me.

Mom and Dad are starting to think I have issues, so we’ve all agreed that I need a little space to clear my head…you know, some time for me to think things over. My cousin Jessica works at a haunted house attraction up in the mountains, just out past Sterling. It’s a pretty cool place called the Snare of Souls, Danny, an old community hospital that was shut down years ago. Now it’s full of skeletons and zombies and all kinds of fun stuff. I came out here last weekend, mainly to stay with Jessica and decompress a little, but I’ve kind of gotten caught up in volunteering at the Snare. I’m dressing up as a zombie nurse (yeah, I know!) and helping to scare the crap out of the customers.

It seems like forever since I’ve had this much fun.

The plan is for me to stay until Halloween is over and done with tomorrow night, then come home sometime next week…maybe Monday or Tuesday. I love this place, Danny…it’s hard to explain, but it feels like I’ve finally found a place where I really belong. Well, except for the mirror maze. That place freaks me out! The other volunteers all say that it’s supposed to be haunted. It gives me the creeps so much, it’s even giving me a whole new set of bad dreams to enjoy. They’ve taken over from those about Long Brook. I’m not sure whether that’s an improvement or not! Anyway, I just stay away from there, and it’s all good.

We can talk when I get back next week. Until then, take care.

Becky.

There were, I couldn’t help but notice, no kisses. Not even one. But that wasn’t what bothered me the most.

My eyes kept going back to the same parts of her email.

Well, except for the mirror maze

And

…it’s even giving me bad dreams.

Yeah, I just bet it was.

I went over to my computer and shook the mouse to wake it. The monitor came alive right away. Opening up a browser window, I went to Google and searched for Snare of Souls. The first few hits were all for a grunge band out of Salt Lake City, but after that I started to see links that looked more promising. I clicked on one at random, and brought up a web page for what looked like the right kind of place, if their image gallery was any kind of accurate reflection.

Latex werewolf heads growled back at me out of darkened old hospital room doorways.

Click.

Zombies chowed down on the rubber heart, lungs, and guts of a helpless man, his body frozen in a wordless scream.

Click.

Two rows of white-sheeted human figures, sitting side-by-side on what looked to be church pews. Their hands looked to be made of kitchen gloves.

Even knowing that it was fake, the figures were still creepy. Snare of Souls was, said their mission statement on the “Contact” page, a full-contact haunted house which was intended to offer up thrills and chills only to those older than thirteen years of age.

My eyes scanned down to the business address. I checked it twice, my jaw gaping.

140 East Street. Tyrant’s Grove. Colorado.

Tyrant’s Grove…

“Mom, I have to talk to you.”

She took a deep breath, and gave me a look that was somewhere between worried and cautiously optimistic.

“Of course, honey.”

Mom poured her first cup of morning coffee into her favorite mug, then walked across our small kitchen into the living room. She sat carefully down in her favorite recliner, which was getting a little threadbare. She nodded toward the couch. Reluctantly, I took a seat across from her. She looked at me expectantly, warming her hands on the coffee cup and waiting for me to begin.

But where on Earth should I begin?

I couldn’t tell her about the Dark Man. It would sound much too crazy. She thinks the world of Becky, and she knows that we’ve both been having problems. Start there. Mom was still convinced that I was actually dating Becky, and I hadn’t the heart to tell her that I seemed permanently stuck in the friend zone.

“Mom, it’s about me and Becky…” I paused, searching for the right words. None came. Finally I cleared my throat and started over. “I’ve been kind of a jerk to her lately…”

That was when something weird happened. I’d been putting together a story in my head, something half-way between the truth and a…not exactly a lie; more of a white lie, to spare her from the freaky facts of the Dark Man and the danger I just knew he posed to Becky. I still left out all of the paranormal stuff, but to my total surprise I found that my mouth was suddenly starting to run away with itself. One minute, I was talking cautiously about how I was feeling really, really terrible for having treated Becky so badly (which was totally true, by the way) and the next, the dam of truth had burst, flooding the conversation with way more truth than I was comfortable revealing.

But I couldn’t stop.

“I didn’t mean to treat her like that, Mom, I swear. I was just scared.”

“Scared of what, honey?” From the sound of her voice, Mom already knew the answer. I needed to remember that this wasn’t exactly her first rodeo.

“Scared that she’s going to dump me,” I admitted, my shoulders slumping in defeat. “I mean, what does a girl like Becky want with a geek like me? She’s friends with guys on the football team whose arms are thicker than my entire chest! I can barely even do a push-up! She’d be the laughing stock of all her friends if we were dating for real.”

Mom’s expression was one of total sympathy. She reached out a hand and squeezed mine. Normally, I’d have yanked my hand away like it was burned, just from the sheer embarrassment factor — but somehow, that simple human touch shot me with a big boost of compassion and support that brought a tear to my eye. I hadn’t realized, up until that moment, just how badly I had needed it.

“Honey, have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe, Becky sees something in you that’s much more important than your build or how fast you can run? Or how much weight you can lift?”

Uh, no. Not really. I haven’t.

“Like what?”

“Like you, sweetheart. Like who you are, deep down inside where it really, truly matters.”

I really didn’t think so. Becky was a teenage girl. Most teenage girls were pretty shallow and superficial, based on my (admittedly very limited) experience of being around them. Shallow was practically part of their job description, wasn’t it?

Then a voice in the back of my head, something far smarter and wiser than the everyday smart-ass me, piped up: judging each and every teenage girl by the same stereotype, Danny? Now who’s being shallow and superficial?

Ouch. Zing.

The voice had sounded suspiciously like Dad’s, which was probably why the sudden realization that it was right and I was wrong hit me like a slap in the face.

“I guess, maybe…” I stammered, caught off-guard.

“Maybe, nothing,” Mom said fiercely, leaning forward with a look of grim determination in her eye. I knew that look only too well. I’d seen it before a hundred times, maybe more. Every time since Dad’s death that she had been forced to do the work of both parents, raising me on her own and making more than one decision that she knew full well was going to make me resent her, even as she knew with every bit as much certainty that it was for my own good…that was the look Mom had given me. Every single time. “Daniel, Becky is an incredible special young lady. She’s one in a million. Don’t ask me how, and don’t ask me why, but I have this…sense about her. Mothers simply know, although I don’t expect you to understand such things.” She frowned, which made her face look even sterner. “But you are right about one thing, at least.”

“What’s that?”

“If you keep treating her like this, you are going to lose her. Whether as a friend or as a girlfriend, either way.”

I let out a long, slow breath. Neither of us broke eye contact. Finally I said, “I know.”

Mom nodded, seemingly satisfied with the admission.

“Then the only question now is: what are we going to do about it?”

Without meaning to, I broke into a broad grin. Mom had said “we.” We. Not you. We.

Mom and I were in this together, just like we were with everything else. I don’t think I’ve ever loved her more than I did just then.

“I need to tell her how I really feel about her, Mom.” My cheeks flushed red with embarrassment, but I kept on going regardless. “I need to make it up to her. And I need to do it right now. Today.”

“Yes, you do,” Mom agreed.

This was where it got tricky. I didn’t want her to feel like I had ambushed her or anything like that, but if I was going to go and help protect Becky from the Dark Man, I knew it couldn’t be done without Mom’s help.

“But I can’t get to see her, Mom. She’s staying with her cousin and volunteering in a haunted house.” I explained to her all about Snare of Souls and that Becky was doing it to help her come to terms with what had happened to us up at Long Brook.

I don’t know that she was buying it one hundred percent, but it seemed to make at least some kind of sense to her. “How far away is Tyrant’s Grove?” she asked at last.

“Three, maybe four hours drive.” I had mapped it already online.

Mom sighed, then finished the last of her coffee and set the cup down firmly on a coaster. She stood up.

“You’d better throw a change of clothes together pretty quickly then. We’ll need to be on the road before lunchtime if you want to catch her before dark.”

Man, I could have kissed her.

So I did.

CHAPTER NINE

We were on the road in twenty minutes.

“We’ll find a nice hotel and stay for the night,” Mom told me as she hit the accelerator and guided the Prius onto the Interstate by way of an entrance ramp. We blew past a huge Safeway truck as if it wasn’t even there, quickly moving into the far-left lane. Mom set the cruise control for eighty, five miles an hour above the limit and about as fast as she could get away with if a friendly neighborhood State Trooper decided to pull us over, she always said. I was impressed that a Prius could even reach eighty, and when I told her, I had to duck a friendly swat.

“Are you sure we can afford it?” I asked, feeling a little guilty about making Mom part with her hard-earned money for gas and now a hotel room too. I knew she wasn’t made of money — that was why she worked two jobs, just to make ends meet.

“You let me worry about that,” she answered firmly, her eyes flicking up to the rear-view mirror in annoyance toward some jerk in an F-150 who was tail-gating us. “Some things are worth it,” she added under her breath.

I couldn’t have agreed more.

Normally, I’d have dreaded taking a road trip with Mom — something else I should probably have felt guilty about, because once you got past the whole “Mom” thing, she was a really awesome person in her own right. Now I was kicking myself for ever having forgotten that. We laughed and talked and told one another stories. Some of them involved Dad, and the laughter was mixed with a tear or two for each of us. We both really missed him. I hoped that some day soon, he’d be able to make contact with Mom in her dreams and take away some of that brutal loneliness I knew she was feeling — loneliness which she mistakenly thought she was hiding from me so well.

We took a break once along the way, at a small truck stop just outside of Sterling. While she gassed up the car, I bought Mom a pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks, and a hot chocolate with whipped cream for myself. Heading east on I-76, it was mostly flat plains and scrubland, broken up every few miles by another small little town. If we’d kept going on the Interstate, I-76 would have merged with I-80 (at least, that’s what the mapping app on my phone said) and taken us all the way into Nebraska; instead, we took the exit for Highway 6 just outside Sterling. The towns got smaller, and the emptiness separating them got bigger.

It was just past three o’clock in the afternoon when we finally arrived at Tyrant’s Grove. Although it was a small town, it was a little bigger than I was expecting for something this far out of the way. The imaginatively-named Main Street was home to a few stores, including a 7/11 and a Denny’s. There was also a gas station and a post office, though it wasn’t nearly big enough for a Walmart or a Target. Then again, it’s not like we were here to do any retail therapy; this was just a flying visit to see Becky, give me the chance to apologize and to warn her about the Dark Man, and then hopefully (if she saw sense) boogie out of here just as soon as I could talk her into it. I already had a bad feeling about the town, but I couldn’t come up with a single good reason as to why.

I mean, it’s not as though everything was dark and foreboding. It was a cold but clear day, typical for late October in Colorado. We were lucky not to have snow. The sun was riding high in the sky, and thanks to the relative dryness of the air, you could actually get away with wearing just a T-shirt outdoors for ten or fifteen minutes at a time if you felt like it. Tyrant’s Grove itself looked really fairly nice to me, and nothing like the sort of place where the locals hunted down strangers and newcomers in horror movies for their own evil ends.

So why did things feel so…wrong?

“Where to now, honey?” Mom asked, breaking my train of thought. She glanced expectantly at me from the corner of her eye. Hurriedly, I glanced down at my phone. The moving dot indicating our car was moving slowly from left to right along the thick line which represented Main Street. I scanned for the red pin I’d dropped to mark the location of the Snare. It was seven or eight blocks ahead of us and to the north, our left. Just past it was a Hampton Inn and a Best Western.

“Which one’s closest to the haunted house?” Mom asked, keeping her eyes on the road. There were a ton of construction signs and workers splitting Main Street in half. They seemed to be digging up the south side of the street. I had no idea why. I looked back at my screen and squinted.

“The Hampton. It’s just a few blocks away.”

“The Hampton Inn it is, then,” Mom decided, seemingly on the spur of the moment. “Lead the way!”

We went east for another ten blocks and then I told Mom to hang a left. Although the front part of the Hampton Inn looked out onto Main Street, the parking lot was at the back, according to their website. This was more of a hotel than a motel, and I was pretty stoked to see that they had a pool…not that I’d have much time to use it, knowing my luck.

Heading further uphill, the road dead-ended at the gates of a massive cemetery. When I say massive, I really do mean it: this place was huge, sprawling out for a good quarter-mile or more. It was set back from the road behind a black-painted iron fence, and a good third of it looked to be unused, completely empty of grave markers, benches, or flowers.

Why does a town this small need a graveyard this big? I wondered, marveling at the expanse of neatly-trimmed grass in front of us. Mom signaled and turned right, going one block further east and then dog-legging around to follow a bend in the road, until it finally led us into the parking lot of our destination for the night.

There were plenty of parking spaces to choose from. Mom tucked the Prius into a spot at the back of the building, which was just a stone’s throw away from the cemetery fence. I popped the rear door and grabbed my backpack and Mom’s way-classier little roller suitcase. It trundled along behind her as she walked towards the Hampton.

We cut down along the left side of the hotel, between a row of parked cars and the windows of the ground floor level. Sure enough, there was an indoor pool, just like the website had promised, extending out into the parking lot. The windows were steamed up, but we could see a family of what looked like two parents and a couple of young daughters were enjoying the water. There were also a couple of treadmills and a few other pieces of gym equipment, none of which looked anything like fun to me – they were exercise machines, after all, and exercise has never been something I’ve liked all that much.

“In here,” said Mom, finding a side door that led us into the main lobby. The place was warm and welcoming, complete with a breakfast bar and what looked like a rack of free cookies.

Mom checked us in while my eyes wandered around the room, taking in some historic old photos of the town from way back when. It looked as though Tyrant’s Grove was once a mining camp, based on the clothes worn by the old guys in most of the pictures, and the tools they all carried — mostly shovels and pickaxes. There were a lot of soot-streaked faces and big walrus-like mustaches. Mining was a hazardous job, I knew (mainly from watching the History Channel). Tunneling and excavating killed more than its fair share of miners, mostly because of the dynamite that was so often used.

I wondered how many of them were buried out there in that cemetery, just a stone’s throw from the hotel pool.

“Are you guys here to visit family?” asked the desk clerk with a friendly smile, handing a pair of room keys over to Mom in a little paper sleeve. A golden tag on her right lapel told me that her name was LaWanna.

“Kind of,” Mom said, accepting the keys and inclining her head toward me. “My son, Danny, is going to visit his girlfriend.” I winced as soon as she said the ‘G’ word.

“How sweet,” LaWanna gushed, her smile broadening even further. “Does she live around here?”

Mom looked at me expectantly.

“Just for a while,” I volunteered reluctantly. “She volunteers up at the Snare.” LaWanna looked at me blankly, not comprehending. “The Snare of Souls,” I clarified.

“Oh!” Light suddenly dawned. “You mean up at the old hospital.” I nodded. LaWanna’s expression darkened just as quickly. “Y’all wouldn’t get me in there for a million dollars.”

“Why not?” I asked, interested despite myself.

“Yes,” Mom echoed, turning back around to face the front desk. “Why not?”

“Take it from me, that place is haunted, alright.” LaWanna assumed a conspiratorial air. “In fact, it’s the most haunted building in town. Everybody in Tyrant’s Grove knows that.”

“Oh really?” Mom didn’t sound too convinced, but LaWanna was warming to her theme.

“Uh-huh. Yeah.” She nodded enthusiastically to emphasize her point. “When I was a kid, the place was pretty much abandoned. Me and a couple of my friends…well, we broke in, I’m ashamed to say. Broke in and went on down to the basement…”

“Let me guess,” I interrupted, holding up a hand. “You took a Ouija board, right?”

LaWanna’s eyes went wide. “Now how did you know that?” Mom looked at me with the same question written across her face.

“Oh, come on,” I half-groaned, “haven’t you seen any horror movies? Like, ever?”

Both women looked confused now.

“It’s how like ninety percent of them start.” I knew that I was exaggerating for effect, but I really didn’t care. “A bunch of kids get a Ouija board from somewhere – or make their own – and wind up sneaking into some old, abandoned, and above all off-limits place so they can make contact with the ghosts there. Always ends in tears.”

“Well, it sure did in our case,” LaWanna agreed.

“Do tell.” Mom said. She seemed intrigued. To tell you the truth, I was pretty interested too. I was hungry for as much information about Becky’s new (and hopefully temporary) place of work as I could possibly get.

The receptionist’s eyes darted from left to right, her voice lowering as though she was about to let us in on a huge secret. “So we’re down there in the basement. It was full of dirt and water pipes, just really filthy and nasty. There were spiders, bugs, the works.” She shuddered at the memory. “We found this one room, looked like it had been some kind of office, you know? It had a wooden desk and a couple of chairs, couple of filing cabinets.

“Anyhow, we sat down in a circle on that cement floor — man, it was cold — and we laid that board out in the middle. Melissa had the pointer thing—”

“The planchette,” I corrected. Sorry, couldn’t help it. LaWanna shot me an annoyed look.

“—the planchette, on top and we all put our hands on it. Heather didn’t want to do it at first, but me and Melissa told her she weren’t nothing but a chicken if she came all this way down here and didn’t do nothing, you know?” Mom and I both nodded. “We’d made the board ourselves out of some old plywood and paint. Wasn’t the most artistic, but it had all the letters, numbers, and YES and NO. We had only tried it before a couple of times.”

“And?” Mom prompted, apparently fascinated.

“Nothin’ much, at least not then. But down in the basement of that old hospital was…let’s just say we spoke to something down there. Something…wrong.”

“Wrong?” I asked, pressing her. “Wrong how?”

LaWanna waved her hands in the air, searching for words that did not want to come. “Wrong as in wrong,” she said at last, obviously frustrated. “Whatever was speaking to us through that board was—” Mom and I both waited for her to finish, but she simply shook her head. It was as if she’d suddenly remembered that she was an employee of the hotel instead of a woman caught up in a little gossip, and didn’t want to spook the guests.

“Please go on,” I begged her, but she simply smiled and shook her head politely. Her professional mask had gone back up, and she was all business again.

“I sure hope you have a good time visiting Tyrant’s Grove.” The smile never quite reached her eyes though. For want of a better word, they looked…haunted. “If there’s anything I can do to make your stay more comfortable, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

With that, she disappeared into some kind of back office or storage room behind the reception desk. We could hear her busily moving objects around in there.

“Well, that was interesting,” Mom said with a slightly nervous laugh as we waited for the elevator to take us on up to the second floor. With a chime, the doors opened. She trundled her case along the carpeted hallway, which smelled like fresh paint. We were in Room 206. Mom slipped the keycard into the slot, was rewarded with a flashing green light, and pushed the door open. “Ooooh, this is nice!” she said appreciatively.

The room turned out to be bigger than I was expecting. Two twin beds stood side by side in front of a dresser and a mid-sized TV. Over by the window was a round wooden table with a desk lamp perched on top of it.

I can’t have inherited my OCD tendencies from Mom, because she was pretty laid back most of the time, but she was still a mom — which meant that she did the universal mom thing of unpacking her little suitcase and my backpack right away, putting our single changes of clothes on hangers and tucking them away in the wardrobe. I stayed out of her way, knowing better than to interfere with Mom’s patented system for sorting clothes and laundry.

“There,” she said with a satisfied sigh, stepping back to admire her handiwork. “Now that’s over and done with, would you like to go and find your sweetheart?” She was teasing, but only a little.

More importantly, she was right.

“Okay,” I said, really hoping that I sounded more confident than I felt. “Let’s do this.”

CHAPTER TEN

I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to drag Mom along with me to see Becky, but I just didn’t have the heart to tell her no. After all, she’d just put her entire weekend on hold in order to drive me all the way out here to the back end of nowhere, just so I could put things right with Becky. The least I could do was not leave her behind in a hotel room, no matter how nice a room she thought it was.

We took the rear exit from the hotel, backtracking past our car and turning left at the cemetery fence, then followed it up and over the crest of the hill and down the other side. I glanced at the headstones as we passed. Some of them were really, really old — going back to the late 1800s. Those graves were set further back from the road than the newer ones, and seemed to be less well-tended, which was totally understandable I guess. No family left to take care of them.

The air was starting to turn chilly as the afternoon wore on. It looked like it was going to be a cold night. Mom and I followed the downslope of the hill past an old brick building, not much bigger than a house, at the far edge of the cemetery. A dirt-covered sign announced that it was the medical records building, though it looked pretty much abandoned right now. A couple of the glass window panes had been busted out, probably by the local kids pitching stones because they were bored.

The records building and cemetery boundary fence backed up against a small stand of trees, which were well into the process of shedding their orange and yellow leaves and scattering them everywhere. Looking up, I could just see a brown brick chimney jutting up above the tops of the trees. We were getting close.

And then suddenly, there it was.

The building from my nightmares.

It was built on top of a grassy hill, a single-floored brick structure that I had only caught fleeting glimpses of when I was asleep. The few details that I’d noticed during my dream-flight were turning out to be right on the money, however: there were the two ambulances, parked side by side on the concrete apron. There was the same wrought-iron fence. There were the Emergency Room double-doors that had flown open to suck me in.

I stopped dead in my tracks. Mom didn’t seem to notice; she kept walking forwards into the parking lot, which had a handful of cars taking up about a third of the available spots. She spoke before I did.

“Well this is…different.”

“It’s a haunted house, Mom. What were you expecting?”

She didn’t seem to have an answer for that.

The place had obviously seen better days, but it was still in pretty good shape, all things considered. I walked across the parking lot onto a grass lawn, beckoning for Mom to follow me. We’d approached it from the right-hand side. When you walked around towards the front, it began to look a lot more like an old hospital, a big mash-up of brick walls and glass windows. It took me a moment to realize that every single one of those windows was tinted. There was no way to see inside unless one of the doors happened to be open.

The main doors looked like they were steel-framed. I wandered on over and tried them. They were locked when I rattled them. Those things looked heavy; I guess they liked to build ‘em sturdy back in the day.

The words Snare of Souls hung above the main entrance, spelled out in snot-green plastic lettering about three feet high. If the effect was intended to intimidate potential customers, I’d say they were doing a pretty good job overall. I just hoped that the meaning wasn’t too literal.

That bad feeling in my gut was growing.

Mom kept on walking, circling around to the front of the building. She ran a hand over the brickwork, a dreamy expression on her face that made me do a double-take.

“Mom, are you alright?”

“Hmm? Oh, yes Danny, I’m fine.” She shook her head as if to clear it. “I was just…daydreaming, that’s all.”

“Are you sure—”

I was interrupted by the sound of a door screeching open. Before I even turned, I knew two things for sure. Firstly, it was the thick steel main door; and secondly, that those hinges really needed some WD40. Like, desperately.

Talk about Deja Vu.

I’d heard doors open like that before. So have you. In horror movies, for a start...but also in my nightmares.

But as ominous as the sound of the door was, what I heard next was far worse.

“Good afternoon. How may I be of service?”

The voice sounded pleasant — almost too pleasant actually — but that wasn’t the reason why my hackles went up from the very first syllable.

It was the accent.

The English accent.

It wasn’t quite the same voice from the Dark Man in my nightmare, but the way he pronounced ‘afternoon’ as arfter-noon made my skin crawl.

I turned. What greeted me wasn’t some creepy monster from the mind of Wes Craven or George A. Romero though. The dude peering out at us from around the edge of the doorframe was more like a librarian than a creature of the night.

If you made me guess, I’d have put his age somewhere in his mid-twenties. He was super-thin, and tall to go with it, enough that he reminded me of the reading lamp we had in the living room at home. His neatly-trimmed black hair was swept straight back over his scalp, in the style of men you sometimes saw in old photos from the 1930s and 40s. Two piercing green eyes looked calmly back at me over the top of the sort of wire-framed glasses that you also only ever saw in old photos, the kind that had to be physically hooked up and over the ears.

The man looked at me, clearly expecting an answer. I looked back at him, offering none. Neither of us said a word.

Mom cleared her throat.

He looked at her over the top of those Heinrich Himmler glasses, and suddenly his expression changed: one minute, it was sort of stern and serious, and the next it became polite and welcoming, favoring Mom with a smile that was clearly intended to melt her heart.

“And who, may I ask, might you be, my dear?” he fawned, sounding like Mr. Darcy as played by that Colin Firth guy from the movie Kingsman.

“My name is Rachel. Rachel Chill.” Mom came closer and extended a hand politely. The man took it gently, but rather than shake it, he rotated it instead and kissed it slowly in a way that I can best describe as ‘super-creepy.’

“Charmed, madame.” The dude just oozed Britishness from every pore. Surely Mom wasn’t buying his line of crap.

I looked up at her face and groaned. That was an expression I’d seen before, though not very often.

She was totally buying his line of crap.

Mom giggled. She actually, honest-to-God freaking giggled. I mean, Becky never giggled, and she was half Mom’s age!

Speaking of age, Mom had to have had a good ten years on this guy—not to mention the fact that he just plain looked like a creeper, pure and simple. It was no one thing specifically, but the dude’s slicked-back hair, glasses, Nineteenth Century suit, and a complexion that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a vampire movie, all combined to make me more than a little uneasy.

“My name is Malachai Falconer, and it is a very singular pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Oh for f—I mean, Malachai? Really? What kind of a name is Malachai, outside of the works of Conan Doyle, anyway? This guy was a walking, talking, living, breathing anachronism – and to tell you the truth, I wasn’t too sure about the last part, because his pale, waxy skin looked sickly and…let’s face it, undead.

Alright, look…I’ll admit that I was staring. I just couldn’t help it. The guy looked like a freaking ghoul.

His eyes flicked back towards me. Apparently he must have read something into the way I was looking at him.

“Please don’t allow my appearance to distress you,” Falconer said, his smile dimming several orders of magnitude now that it had switched away from my mom. “We are preparing for opening this evening, and I like to get into makeup early. That also extends to wardrobe,” he gestured down the length of his suit with both hands, which were skeletally thin and tipped with perfectly manicured nails, “because I do tend to find that the clothes make the man. Wouldn’t you agree?”

He looked me up and down pointedly, taking in my battered old sneakers, cargo pants and hoodie. All of them had seen better days, and it was obvious that he knew it. A slight smile at the corner of his mouth suggested that he wanted me to know that he knew it.

What a dick.

It did explain his appearance though. The lord of the manor here was costumed and painted up to look like some kind of vampire, I was willing to bet; it was a pretty good character choice for his face and build, and I say that as a dude who weighs less than the average football player’s right leg.

“You know what they say,” I countered. “You can only polish a turd so much…”

“Daniel!” Mom scolded, swatting at my arm and offering Falconer an apologetic smile and a shrug that seemed to say: kids today, what can you do...?

“Well, quite.” Falconer was still playing the stiff upper lip British card, I guess. He switched gears. “Be that as it may, how may I be of service to you?”

“My…uh, friend works here. Well, I think she’s a volunteer,” I clarified. “We just stopped by to visit with her.”

“I see.” He appeared to digest this for a moment. “And what, may I ask, is your friend’s name?”

His emphasis on the word friend managed to rub me the wrong way – don’t ask me why – but I fought down the sudden urge to pop him in the mouth. Getting on the bad side of Becky’s boss wasn’t likely to help my case any, and besides, as wiry as this guy was, he could probably still take me in a fair fight.

“Rebecca. Becky. Page. Becky Page.” Dammit, why was I suddenly falling all over myself to get my words out? But I already knew the answer. The way this guy was looking at Mom was making my skin crawl.

“Ah yes, Rebecca. My favorite import from…Boulder, isn’t it?” I nodded sullenly. “You are quite correct, young man.”

Young man. Falconer couldn’t have been more than ten years older than me! “Rebecca has indeed been volunteering here for the past few weeks, though I fear that she has not yet arrived for her evening shift. Halloween night is our busiest of the entire year, and who could blame her for making sure that she is properly rested?”

I didn’t like the sound of that one bit. We were nearly out of afternoon. It was already starting to get a little darker, and the evening wasn’t all that far away.

“So she is working tonight?” I asked hopefully. Falconer nodded.

“Indeed she is. Ah, but where are my manners?” he asked, in what had to be a rhetorical way, because nobody could miss the irony there. “Might I offer you a tour of our humble establishment? Gratis, naturally.”

Mom looked slightly confused.

“He means we don’t have to pay,” I whispered, about to accept his offer on behalf of us both. Not that wild horses could have kept Mom away; she was falling for Lord Downton’s shtick hook, line, and sinker.

“My son and I would be delighted to accept your kind offer.” I rolled my eyes. I mean, who talks like that? The dude’s Britishness was rubbing off on Mom now, whether she knew it or not. She was starting to talk like a second-rate Masterpiece Theater reject too.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the whole Brit thing. Doctor Who: awesome. Red Dwarf: double awesome. Sherlock: phenomenal. And that’s before we even start talking about their writers. Pratchett, Adams, Gaiman…the list just goes on and on.

No, my problem wasn’t with the Brits at all.

My problem was with just one Brit. Him.

And I sensed that it was only going to get worse.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I was just reaching the point of thinking that Falconer couldn’t possibly play the gentlemanly Brit card even one iota more, when he stuck out his elbow in a wordless invitation for Mom. Worse still, she took him up on it with yet another giggle, hooking her arm through his, and the pair went arm-in-arm together through the front door.

It actually took me a second to realize that I’d been left behind, standing in the dust, and had to dash forward and grab onto the door to prevent it from closing and shutting me out.

Ducking inside, I found myself standing on the tiled floor of some kind of lobby. It looked a lot like the school cafeteria from hell. There were no lights on, and my eyes took a moment to adjust to the gloom. What ambient light there was filtered in through the tall street-facing windows, which had been papered over in order to keep out prying eyes, I assumed, not to mention maintaining a little Halloween atmosphere.

“Allow me to give you the grand tour.” Falconer cleared his throat, taking in the entire room with an expansive sweep of his free arm. “This is, of course, our lobby. Once the patrons have paid their admission fee, and signed the inevitable waiver—“

“Waiver?” Mom asked. If Falconer was annoyed at the interruption, then that annoyance didn’t make it into his voice.

“Yes, waiver. We are a full-contact haunted house attraction, my dear Rachel,” he explained, “which is a significant part of our…well, attraction, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

They both laughed. Neither sounded entirely genuine, and I wanted to know why. Mom I could figure out…she was probably just enjoying the novelty of a man, even a much younger one, showing any sort of interest in her. She was lonely and unappreciated, so it would be hard to blame her for that. But what about Falconer – what were his motives? As the owner of this place, surely he had a thousand and one better to things to do with his time (especially on Halloween weekend!) than give a guided tour to a couple of strangers.

Surely he couldn’t really be interested in Mom…could he?

I cringed, hoping he was just being polite for the sake of being polite in that way that some Brits seem to have, or perhaps just wanted a distraction from whatever else he was supposed to be doing today. Procrastination – now, that was a motive I could totally understand and get behind.

“My staff are highly skilled at picking out those customers who are in need of…special treatment,” he went on, leading Mom towards the opposite wall of the lobby where two figures were leaning over a third on a hospital gurney. “They tend to single out the biggest, boldest, seemingly bravest personalities.”

The heavy front door clanged shut behind me, making me jump.

“What happens to them?” Mom asked. I couldn’t see them through the back of her head, but from the sound of it, Mom’s eyes were wide as her imagination started to work overtime.

“We put some of them in here,” Falconer said, opening a closet door for her to inspect. Mom peeked inside.

“It looks like an ordinary closet,” she said warily.

“And so it is; but when the customer is shut in there, all alone in the darkness of an enclosed space, I can assure you that they very quickly succumb to the icy grip of fear.”

I rolled my eyes. This guy talks like the villain from a James Bond movie, I thought sullenly. Then I had to stifle a laugh as I realized that he was even giving us a tour of his facility, just as a Bond villain would, although at least it wasn’t a hidden underground lair. If we came upon a huge map of the world during the tour, I’d rethink that, though.

Turning and stepping closer towards the three figures against the far wall, I could see that of course all three of them were actually mannequins; two of them were a demonic-looking doctor and his evil sidekick nurse, and they were in the process of removing latex entrails from the belly of a third, who was wearing the gown of a hospital patient. With a flash of realization, it occurred to me that I had seen these guys before, as photos on the Snare of Souls website.

“Do you like them?” Falconer was suddenly at my side, which was a little freaky because I could have sworn that just seconds ago, he was fifteen feet away and standing next to Mom, who was still distracted by the contents of the open closet.

“They’re OK,” I said with as much boredom as I could manage. For some reason, I didn’t want him knowing that I really though the mannequins were pretty cool, like a scene from a horror movie where somebody had hit the pause button on the Blu-Ray player. I looked the doctor up and down, and then did the same for the nurse. They were superbly detailed: although each of their faces was hidden behind a surgical mask, both sets of eyes – glass or plastic, I assumed – were so realistic that I almost thought, just for a minute, that they were following me around the room as I walked. “What are these?”

“Ah, therein lies a tale,” Falconer answered pompously. I had walked across to the distant wall, where a whole bunch of photos were hung up in two rows, roughly six feet above the floor. He reached out and flipped two switches. Lights sprang on behind them, and I could now see that what I had mistaken for photographs were actually two banks of X-rays. They were lit up from behind on what I was willing to bet was the actual machine that the docs had used to really do this on, back in the day.

Standing on tip-toe, I leaned forward and squinted to make out what was written on one of the images. “Hey,” I said, “that’s a name! Are these real?”

“Of course they are real. When this hospital closed down, the patients were transferred elsewhere. The staff, on the other hand, simply upped and left. They abandoned all of the equipment, locked the doors, and went on to pastures new.”

“Oh, dear God!” Mom had a hand to her mouth. “You mean…they left behind the medical records?”

“Oh yes,” Falconer nodded. “Most of them are still here. The lion’s share remain in the former medical records building, which is located elsewhere on our property, but some few were left in the hospital itself.”

“That’s horrible,” Mom said.

Falconer regarded the illuminated X-rays with his head cocked to one side, like a dog waiting for a treat from the cookie jar. “They add a certain something to the ambience of the place, wouldn’t you say?”

“But what if one of the patients comes back to visit?” Mom sounded horrified. “Or one of their loved ones?”

“That’s highly unlikely,” Falconer dismissed the idea. “this place was abandoned for years before it fell into my gentle hands.”

I ran my eyes along the twin banks of X-rays. There were a lot of ribs, but also more than a few skulls, and one or two wrists and feet. Each image held its own secret story, I knew; each X-ray was a record of somebody’s very real pain or misfortune.

Falconer didn’t appear to care in the slightest. He was already leading us through an inner door, out into a long and very dark corridor. The air out here smelled old and musty, some weird mix of fresh paint that was being used to cover up the odor of rot and decay, and what I felt convinced was the smell of latex. The hallway was quite a bit darker than the lobby, and I wondered how long it would be before Falconer reached out to flip on a light switch, but our guide seemed unaware of just how creepy the semi-darkness made the place feel.

Falconer turned to his left, heading past the sort of standing screen that you saw in most doctor’s offices, and was used to give patients a little dignity while they took off their clothes. This one was a little different; it was splattered with blood, big streaks running diagonally between the corners were accompanied by smaller spots and splashes on the outside.

The screen had been strategically placed at a bend in the hallway. On the other side of it, the shadowy corridor stretched away into total darkness somewhere at the far end. We went another ten steps and found a hospital bed, its white sheets also crusty with long-dried blood. There was a hole at the head of the bed where somebody could poke their head and shoulders through, and then a fake body with the intestines hanging out (that was starting to feel like a common theme here) would complete the illusion that somebody was having their belly torn open.

“One of our devil doctors is positioned in this aisle,” Falconer explained, “and our volunteers will also take a turn in the disembowelment bed. It looks rather impressive, when the victim is positioned properly.”

A big rope of guts was tossed upwards from the center of the bed and dangled from some kind of hook or other attachment point that was hidden in the recessed ceiling. The intestine swung ever so slightly in the breeze, which made it seem even freakier, if such a thing were even possible. I looked closer, and saw that the intestines were made of knotted rubber tubing that had been artfully painted.

“What’s in here?” Mom was standing in an open doorway, tentatively looking inside. Taking three very quick steps – so quick that if I had even blinked once, I would have missed them – Falconer pulled the wooden door firmly shut. The door said ‘Doctor’s Lounge’ in gold-painted lettering. I had caught a quick glimpse of computer monitors before it slammed closed.

“That’s nothing of any importance. Simply my security center.”

Now, wasn’t that a strange turn of phrase? My security center. Not the security center, but my. Maybe I was reading too much into all this, but The Right Honorable Mr. Malachai Falconer was starting to raise a lot of red flags with me.

Something just wasn’t right with him. Something was…rotten.

Could he be the Dark Man from my dreams? It was certainly possible. The flowery language and the accent were the same, but the voice was different. Not to mention the small fact that Falconer wasn’t actually dead, although his Halloween makeup made him look as though he was halfway there. He was solid. Real. I’d seen him touch things, like the switch that lit up the X-ray machine…and while some spirits did have the ability to manifest with a body that could touch things in the physical world, appearing just as solid as you or me, they could generally only do so for short periods of time. My spirit guide always said that it took massive amounts of energy for them to do that, a lot of which came from the environment itself. That was why cold spots were so often reported when spirits were doing their thing – paranormal activity leeches a lot of heat from the location it takes place in, along with several other different types of energy which even the smartest scientists don’t even suspect exists yet.

No, my suspicion was that Falconer was every bit as flesh and blood as I was; but just to make sure, I determined to try and prove it. At some point during the tour, probably at the end, I was going to make skin-to-skin contact with him. After all, it would be rude not to shake hands at the end of the tour, right?

All of the rooms on both the left and the right side of the hallway were filled with a bunch of different mannequins. One of them looked like a Cenobite from Hellraiser, a movie that Mom had only made it seven minutes into – yes, seven – before leaving the room in disgust; another looked like some kind of Banshee, a screaming ghoul with a white face and a white choir boy’s robe to match.

“The staff calls this handsome fellow Elmo, though I really cannot fathom why.” Apparently fascinated, Mom took a closer look at the monster.

“Why is it on rails, Malachai?

“Elmo is powered by pneumatics, my dear. Compressed air,” he clarified, in what I thought was the most condescending manner possible. “When the device is properly charged, he can be triggered to fly out of the darkness into the faces of our unsuspecting – and usually terrified – clientele.”

“Isn’t that a little dangerous?” Mom asked, fingering the hem of Elmo’s dirty white robe.

“Not in the slightest. The rails terminate in the doorway, allowing him to go no further into the corridor than the very edge of the frame. You see — there are safety stops,” he said, pointing to welded blocks at the end of each rail that I had to squint to make out. “Elmo here has given more than one guest cause to scream for his mother.”

“He is pretty scary,” she admitted with a nervous smile. Mom wasn’t a big fan of haunted houses, or of Halloween in general, come to think of it; the games and trick-or-treating kiddos were fine with her, but whenever there was something bloody or gory involved, it made her a little twitchy.

“To say the least.” Falconer leaned in closer to her, dropping his voice to just above a whisper in an I’m about to tell you a secret sort of way. Never mind the fact that the corridor was mostly empty. “You know, we had one young chap who actually soiled himself yesterday, if you can believe that. He actually had the effrontery to ask for his money back.”

Mom looked mortified. I snickered — hey, browning your shorts is pretty funny — and even Falconer managed a dry smile, though it looked as if the effort might tear his face apart. This wasn’t a man who smiled a lot, I was guessing. Why he was making the effort now was anybody’s guess.

“Does that happen a lot?” Mom asked, equally disgusted and fascinated at the same time.

“More often than one would think. We have a strict policy where that is concerned.”

“Policy…?”

“Yes. For the staff,” he explained. “It is implemented on the spot, each and every time a staff member here causes a customer to lose control of a bodily function.”

“You fire them?”

“Oh, heavens no,” Falconer shook his head vehemently. “I give them a fifty dollar cash bonus, immediately. One does like to encourage the next generation of artists, you know.”

I have to admit, I was impressed. Paying out a cash prize to your employees for making the customers pee or crap themselves in fear probably wasn’t something they taught at Harvard Business School, but it was pretty damn awesome all the same. My dislike for the stiff-assed Brit went down just a hair.

We continued the tour. Mom and I fell into step behind Falconer, letting him lead us further along the dark and shadowy hallway.

“These used to be patient rooms, back when this was a functioning hospital.” He indicated the doorways to his right. Rooms that had once been occupied by the sick and frail were now home to mocked-up zombies, demons, and what looked like a huge vampire bat that was perched upright on two legs. It was a pretty cool sculpt, I had to admit. A bright-red tongue stuck out from between the thing’s jaws, which had long white fangs that looked as though they had just drunk the blood of a terrified victim.

“What about this side of the hall,” Mom asked, peeking nervously into a doorway on our left.

“Formerly the obstetrical and gynecological wing.” I hadn’t heard those terms before, and it must have shown on my face, because Falconer went on to explain that it was where babies had been delivered, and where certain female problems were taken care of. He and Mom exchanged an embarrassed but knowing look. I just rolled my eyes. It wasn’t as though I didn’t know what female problems meant. Idly, I wondered if that’s what they had actually called it back in the Fifties and Sixties…come this way, Mrs. Smith. Go to the end of the corridor and turn left. Follow the signs for the Department of Baby Delivery and Women’s Problems…

The hallway ended in a big metal door that was bolted securely in place.

“What’s through there?” I asked, curious.

“Our clown maze. Clowns, after all, are one of the scariest things in the world.”

I agreed with him there. Clowns freaked me out. They always had. How anybody could find them funny or entertaining was totally beyond me. Every time I saw one, I wanted to punch it on that stupid red nose and run as fast as I could in the opposite direction.

Then something caught my eye, a flash of movement that made me look to the room on my right. It was entirely dark inside, and the door was halfway closed. The number six was painted on it at eye level, but somebody had painted on an extra couple of sixes in yellow paint that didn’t quite match, so now we were standing in the doorway of Room 666. Whatever it was had been there for an instant, and then gone. I stared into the darkness beyond the doorway for a second, then took a couple of hesitant steps forward and pushed the door fully open. It allowed a little more light through, but not a lot; there was one window in the room, and it was covered by a set of closed blinds. In the gloom, I could just barely make out a hospital bed, pushed against the back wall at a crooked angle; in front of it was an old TV (the big, square heavy ones that you only ever saw on TV shows any more) and a bunch of old medical equipment and stacked chairs.

“That room is simply junk storage, as you Americans like to put it. There’s nothing of interest in there now, though we do sometimes place a rather ghastly nun in there as part of the haunting experience.”

Nuns. Great, I thought to myself, one of the only things that creep me out almost as much as clowns.

There was nobody in the room…nobody alive, at least. I was sure that I’d seen something move in here, though. Ordinarily I’d have just written it off as my admittedly overactive imagination, or maybe my eyes playing tricks on me, except for one thing — whatever it was that I’d caught sight of was more than just a trick of the light because it had been outlined in dark blue, a thin band of light that Seers like me often saw around spirits whenever they put in an appearance. It had been there one instant and gone the next, but if you put a gun to my head, I would have admitted that it had looked more than a little like a dark head and shoulders peeking around the edge of the door.

Perhaps not all of the old hospital’s former patients had moved on yet.

CHAPTER TWELVE

With Falconer taking the lead, we backtracked along the hallway, past the security room and then the set of double doors that we had arrived through. I didn’t see any other traces of spirit activity along the way, so I wasn’t too worried about the glimpse I’d gotten of the inhabitant of Room 666; if anything, I figured it was just a shy earthbound spirit that had become aware of three living visitors in his or her part of the hospital and had gotten curious, then bugged out when I’d turned my head to look at it. Some spirits were squirrelly like that, preferring to watch the living from the shadows and not be seen themselves. That didn’t mean there was anything necessarily sinister about their motives…after all, one thing that I’d learned from my spirit guide Lamiyah was that physical death changed people, in ways both large and small. Yes, their personalities tended to remain pretty much the same overall, but while some souls became much freer and happier after being released from the grip of a long illness, others found the process of transition to be extremely traumatic; it could cause old, long-forgotten neuroses to surface after many years, or sometimes even create entirely new ones.

If this place had its earthbound spirits, they could be either friendly and well-meaning…or malevolent and down-right nasty.

Caught up in my own thoughts, I’d lost track of Falconer’s rambling. We passed through an open door that looked as though it had been ripped from a church confessional booth, and stopped beside an old-fashioned pipe organ that seemed to have come from the same place. This room had stained-glass windows running down one wall, all of them showing pictures of knights and saints, and all of them were splattered with dried blood. At the far end was a wooden pulpit and an altar. On the wall behind them, a cross was hanging upside down.

“…and this is the chapel,” the Brit went on, walking down the center aisle formed by two rows of wooden benches.

Mom followed him in. I went last. I took a closer look, and saw that the benches were actually church pews: legit church pews, not fake ones that had been knocked together out of wood in somebody’s workshop. The pews weren’t empty either. Each bench had two or three creepy figures sitting on it, silent and still. They were wearing white sheets, and when I reached out a hand to grab a sneaky feel of whatever was underneath, I was pretty surprised to find that the mannequin I was expecting was actually nothing more than a bunch of four-by-four wooden planks nailed together to make a vaguely human-shaped support frame. The arms were filled with a kind of soft stuffing material, and each hand was just a black rubber glove. Simple, but very effective. There were twelve of these bad boys sitting in here, and even though I knew they were just sheets and wood, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that they were somehow watching us.

Watching me.

“Rather off-putting, aren’t they?” Falconer smirked, nodding meaningfully toward his mute audience. “The volunteers do say that every so often, the figures tend to move on their own. Utter nonsense, of course, but I don’t like to stop such stories. More grist for the mill, and all that.”

“People do like their ghost stories,” Mom agreed. “Especially at this time of year.”

“True indeed, Mrs. Chill. It is…Mrs Chill, I assume?” The smirk was even wider now, if you can imagine such a thing. Falconer made a show of running his eyes down to Mom’s left hand, letting his gaze linger on the wedding ring that he found there.

“Yes, that’s right.” She sounded a little uncomfortable now, and I didn’t think it was just the figures in white that were making her feel that way. Mom was a Christian, although she didn’t talk about it much and certainly hadn’t ever forced me to go to church; she and Dad had always given me the freedom to make my own choices in life. I could see how the inverted cross and what was basically a desecrated chapel might seem blasphemous to her, but the way in which Falconer was basically oozing interest in her made him a much bigger creeper than anything else in this room, in my eyes.

“And where is Mister Chill, if I may make so bold?” That same smile was now frozen. Only his eyes were moving, darting back and forth between Mom’s face and mine.

“My husband is…no longer with us,” she answered quietly, with a dignity that made me so proud of her it nearly brought tears to my eyes.

Falconer was about to speak again, but I cut in first.

“My father gave his life for his country. He was a Marine.” I wasn’t quite rude enough to say which is more than you’ll ever be, but I’m pretty sure from the look that crossed his face, that he heard it in my voice anyway.

There was an uncomfortable silence, broken only by an antiquated wooden grandfather clock ticking away the seconds from one corner of the room. My stubborn streak was beginning to surface. Rather than cave in and say something polite, I sat down on a pew, carefully choosing a spot between two of the white-sheeted occupants. The palm of my hand came in contact with the polished wooden seat, and suddenly it was as though I had been struck by a bolt of lightning.

My world went white — a blinding, brilliant white light that exploded behind my eyeballs, totally surrounding me. It was everywhere and yet nowhere, all at the same time. It felt like my brain was caught in a steel vise, giving me the worst headache that you could ever imagine. Actually, no, this wasn’t just pain. This was freaking agony.

And then I was somewhere else.

I raised my hands up to my face, turned them from back to front.

They weren’t my hands. They were an older man’s hands. And they had just the faintest blue outline.

Then it hit me: I could see through them. They were transparent. When I squinted, so were my legs, though they were a little more solid that my hands were; but now that I was actually paying attention, I realized that I could see almost see the pew through my pant legs.

What the…

The walls of the chapel shimmered and warped, like that old camera trick they use in the movies when one of the actors is remembering something from a long while back. This was no special effect though. I was somewhere else now, somewhen else based on my new surroundings, which were starting to bleed in through the Snare’s rapidly-disappearing chapel. It was some kind of bedroom. I knew because I could feel a soft pillow under my head. The mattress was pretty lumpy, sticking into my back in a couple of places. I looked up at the ceiling and saw wooden timbers running across it, connected to thick support beams. More worrying by far was the big splat of bright red blood that was staring me right in the face; more drops of blood drippedslowly down from the ceiling, plinking down somewhere to the left of my head.

So this wasn’t your garden variety house, then, and something bad had obviously happened here. Was it a log cabin in the woods, maybe? Or something much older and more historic?

I was somehow seeing this through somebody else’s eyes, I realized, feeling a weird sensation of suddenly being inside another person’s skull.

Somebody else was in the room with me. I didn’t know who, exactly, and I couldn’t quite see who it was; but there was definitely a presence in here with me. I could sense whoever it was lurking silently behind me, standing out of sight and just…watching, I guess. To tell you the truth, the feeling was starting to creep me out.

As an experiment, I tried to move an arm.

Nothing.

Then a leg. Still nothing.

I was paralyzed. Now I did start to feel panic. What was going on? Starting to pay attention, I soon figured out that I couldn’t even feel myself breathing either, let alone move my arms and my legs. Which meant I really ought to be dead—

Oh.

Then the panic started to set in. But the panic wasn’t mine. It was as though I was riding on the coat-tails of somebody else, sensing their emotions and piggy-backing on their memories.

Somebody was speaking, and I thought it was a male voice, but it seemed a little too high and squeaky to belong to a grown man. There were words and short sentences but I couldn’t make any of them out. I suddenly felt myself rising into the air, drifting, and I couldn’t do anything except watch and ride the waves of nausea that shot through me as I seemed to fly out of my body and float toward a scratched wooden bench at the side of the room. I was in spirit form, there was no doubt about that any more. My spirit essence flooded into the bench, drawn to it like iron filings to a magnet.

Don’t ask me how, but somehow, despite being basically a piece of the furniture, I could still see. I opened my…well, eyes, I guess, just in time to see the indistinct form of a man leaving the room through its only door. A second man, bigger than the first one and a lot bulkier, was walking across the room towards me.

The big man stood over me. From his clothes, it looked like he had walked straight out of some History Channel show about life in the Dark Ages. His face was dirty and had a blank expression on it that didn’t make me feel any more comfortable. Those eyes were cold and dead, lacking any warmth or emotion whatsoever. He stooped and picked up the bench, tucking it under one arm without even a grunt of effort. The bench had looked solid and heavy, so the guy must have been pretty strong.

I could feel him carrying me, feel the rolling rhythm of his feet on the grass.

We were out in the daylight. At first I thought that it was a spirit portal, come to claim me and offer me a way into the next world, but that wasn’t it at all. It was sunlight, and I could see behind me that the building we had left was a wooden house, and a pretty big one at that. It looked old, maybe hundreds of years old if its architectural style was any indication.

Oh, and it was on fire. A tall column of angry black smoke was pushing upward into the clear blue sky. Flames were visible in the downstairs windows, licking at the upper part of the building.

And I was trapped inside a bench.

Someone must have hit the fast-forward switch on their remote control just then, because time started whizzing by at super-fast speed. Scenes from somebody else’s life flashed in front of my eyes. At first they were just fast, but pretty soon the were a blur. My bench sat in the corner of a whole lot of different rooms. Night became day which became night again, over and over, hundreds of thousands of times. I caught glimpses of the decor changing, getting newer and newer; we shot through Great Depression-era furnishings in seconds, then blinked again and it was the Sixties.

Just what on Earth was going on here?

My consciousness went through lifetime after lifetime in almost no time at all. That same dark presence came back to visit me countless times, a shadowy form that simply stood just out of my line of sight and watched me, before leaving again without ever saying a word. I got a sense of intense, burning hatred that was radiating from whoever it was — they really, really didn’t like me all that much, and that was a massive understatement.

In a flash we were up to the 80s…no, the 90s…and time slowed down again. I could see one of those huge brick-sized cordless phones sitting on a side table in what looked like the entry hall to a one big house. It was pretty dark in here: thick purple drapes hung down over the windows and on either side of what had to be the front door.

I was still a silent passenger on the back of whichever soul was bound to the heavy wooden bench. I hated being powerless. Hated it. I couldn’t read the spirit’s mind, but I could kind of guess at its intent, and right now, I was convinced that it intended to burn this place down.

The sense of repressed anger was so thick that I could practically reach out and touch it — if I was in a body that could reach out, or in any kind of body at all, for that matter. But I wasn’t. I was trapped inside a piece of furniture, bound to a spirit that was so pissed off, it was about to turn psychotic.

Based on the sparks and the crackling, hissing sounds that came from behind one of the wall outlets, I’d have to guess that it had somehow started an electrical fire. The home looked pretty old, so it wouldn’t be a great surprise if the wiring turned out to be old too. All I knew for sure was that the wall was suddenly engulfed in bright orange flames. Before long, the whole entry hall was fully involved. Great sheets of flame were climbing the walls. First grey and then later dark black smoke began to fill the big room, mushrooming up toward the ceiling and then banking down along the sides, pushing towards the floor until even sitting down on the pew, I couldn’t see anything at all in the blackness. A fire alarm was screaming out for help, and the harsh electronic cries were soon answered. Through what I figured were thin gaps in the curtains, I could see flashing blue and red lights and the outlines of human shapes moving around in front of them.

Several thuds and a splintering crunch later, two firefighters in reflective yellow gear came through the front door. I could hear the high-pitched crackle of a radio, but couldn’t make out any of the words. The firefighters were crouching low, bending at the knees and hunched over. They dragged a length of hoseline with them, but stopped as soon as they cleared the entranceway, both of them looking up towards the ceiling. I did the same. In amongst the thick black smoke cloud, long yellow tongues of flame flickered and danced like phantom snakes, poking their heads out of the darkness for just a second before withdrawing back inside it again.

The firefighter in front pointed the nozzle upward and squirted a jet of water up at the ceiling — not for long, just the barest few seconds. Then he — or she, I never did find out — duck-walked a few more steps and did it again. Step, step, squirt the ceiling…step, step, squirt the ceiling. Maybe they were trying to cool the roof down, though why they didn’t just let it rip with a long stream of cold water beats me. Either way, it wasn’t long before they had made it to the fire’s point of origin. The wall in front of them was totally ablaze. The second firefighter reached for their lapel and keyed up a radio mike, and whatever was said caused the sound of a chainsaw or some very similar high-powered tool to start chewing its way through the roof above us. I could hear it, roaring and whirring far above my head. A shingle dropped down from above, smashing into the floor in front of me.

That must have been the signal that they had both been waiting for, because now the firefighter at the front of the hose opened that bad boy up full-bore. I watched them both brace themselves, squatting down on one knee and leaning backward as the powerful line bucked and strained in their hands. A torrent of water came roaring out of the end. They fought the line hard, and it looked like they were both wrestling a giant anaconda or something just as ridiculous. The firefighter at the front leaned even further backward, and the one behind shoved a shoulder forward to support the air tank on his back. Between them, they played the line up and down the wall, shoving high-pressure water into the gaps and cracks wherever there was even a hint of orange or yellow to be seen.

The smoke turned to steam straight away, and suddenly the giant snake was hissing its heart out, filling the entry hall fit to bursting with a billowing white cloud. The firefighters instinctively shrank away from it, but kept playing the water stream backward and forward across wall. Steam and smoke was venting up and away from the three of us, and now I saw why they had waited for the other firefighters to cut a hole in the roof before going full tilt boogie with the hoseline, because now all of that toxic crap was being sucked upward and out into the night sky above our heads. In between gaps in the cloud, I could just make out the silhouettes of more firefighters, who were poking and prodding at something with long sticks or poles that were tipped like spears. Over their shoulders, I caught glimpses of the stars, looking down on this mess in silent, ever-watchful judgment.

When the fire was pretty much out, the original two firefighters pulled out, leaving their hoseline snaking along the floor toward my bench. More came in to replace them, bringing in bright lights and massive box-shaped electric fans. The firefighters that had cut the hole in the roof had been working to enlarge it. Pretty soon, all of the smoke and steam was gone. I could see again. The building was pretty much ruined, or at least this section of it sure was. What the smoke and flame hadn’t damaged, the water sprayed by the firefighters had really gone to town on. It must have been wintertime, because icicles were already starting to form where it was dripping down from the rafters.

Still I just sat there.

Hours passed. Then days. Workmen came and started tearing the place apart. They ripped out the charred drywall, which looked to be in barely salvageable shape, and began to gut the place. I couldn’t do anything but just be there inside the same bench seat…patiently waiting, caught in a state of limbo between life and death. I hated everyone, and I hated everything.

Time passed, and that hatred grew. It seemed to take forever.

Then, one day — don’t ask me how much time had passed — a tall, thin man stepped into the ruins of the hallway and walked right up to my bench. I recognized him straight away.

It was Malachai Falconer.

Flashing that sickly grin that I was really coming to hate, he leaned in close to my field of vision.

“That was very, very stupid, old man,” he said quietly. His voice sounded calm on the surface, but there was a definite edge of malice hiding just beneath.

Two of what I assumed were Falconer’s employees – I might sound bitchy, but he didn’t strike me as the type of guy who did friendship in any way, shape, or form – loaded the bench up onto the bed of a pickup truck and drove it to a place I recognized immediately: the Snare. Puffing and out of breath, they hauled it into the chapel. It fit in pretty well with the church pews that were already in there.

And still I waited.

I saw a bunch of teenagers bring in the white-sheeted figures and put them in position all around me, making a ghostly congregation to sit and stare silently toward the lectern and the altar. Every once in a while, just to amuse myself, I would reach out and nudge one of the mannequins, causing it to sway as if it was caught in a breeze. Whenever one of the teenagers saw it happen, they’d turn white and beat feet out of the chapel.

Most of the time, I was left alone, though…oh so very alone. The loneliness was crippling. It became my whole world. The kids that came by every once in a while, laughing and joking as they tried to scare each other, made it worse somehow, not better. I hated them, each and every one. They didn’t care that I had died all alone, with nobody to mark my passing. I had been murdered, I had come to find out: killed by somebody close to me. I felt it somehow, and although the spirit that I was bound to knew the murderer’s name, they were careful to never let it rise to the surface of their mind.

Curse those spoiled and ill-mannered children. They didn’t care that I was still stuck here, my spirit trapped between worlds, doing nothing but sit and wait and think and hate.

I sensed, rather than saw, Malachai Falconer enter the chapel. Turning around to look, I could also see that he wasn’t alone. I was with him. Me, Danny Chill, with Mom in tow. I realized that the past was catching up with the present, and felt the haze of bitterness and frustration that I’d been living in for who knows how long now begin to well up inside me, boiling and bubbling like lava inside a volcano.

The me that was Danny Chill came down the aisle and somehow, as if I was drawn there by an invisible force, chose the very same spot to sit down in that the me who was the other me was already occupying. What right did the little snot have to think that he could get away with that?

Then the volcano erupted. Summoning up every last scrap of anger and malice, I screwed it all up into a tight little ball and hurled it at myself. The Danny-me was blasted out of the pew and slammed into the back of the one in front, head-butting the soft cotton back of the mannequin sitting there.

“Get the hell out of here!” a male voice roared. At first I thought it was me, because it somehow felt like it ought to have been…except it wasn’t me, not anymore; we may have just been sharing the same space, but there was a distinct separation between us now: not-me was an older male spirit – I could see him clearly now, overweight and balding with a really bad shaggy haircut — sitting on the pew where I’d just been sitting.

Man, was he pissed.

I got it. Really, I did. Up until we’d separated just now, I was him, and though I didn’t know his name or any other specific details about him up, I knew one thing for sure: he was angry. And he was pretty much angry at everything, but most of all he was angry at the one who had taken his life. The spirit who was attached to the bench felt bitterly betrayed. It had hurt him deeply, this sense of betrayal; hurt him so badly that he wanted to vent it on the closest thing to hand.

Me.

“This is my place! Mine!” He was standing now, screaming in my face from just inches away. Without thinking about it, I took a step backward, the backs of my legs bumping into the back of the pew in front. The man was pointing his finger in my face, emphasizing every furious word with a jab. “Get. The. Hell. Out!”

“Oh dear,” said Falconer, with what I thought was fake concern. “Is something the matter?”

“Honey, are you okay? You seem a little…frazzled.” I had no doubt that Mom’s concern was genuine.

“I’m fine, Mom.” I edged sideways out into the aisle, stepping carefully over the white cotton skirt of the closest mannequin. The last thing I needed now was to fall flat on my face in front of His Royal Highness there.

“Only you seem quite flustered,” he added, favoring me with a sheepish grin.

My eyes tracked sideways to where the dead man still stood, fists planted on hips, giving me a glare that would curdle milk.

“I said I’m fine.” It came out harsher than I intended. “This place just creeps me out a little.”

“Splendid!” Falconer clapped his hands together enthusiastically. “That is precisely what it is intended to do.”

“I think it’s time that we were heading back to the hotel.” There was no mistaking the firmness in Mom’s tone. I’d heard it before, and knew that it meant no arguments.

“I’m sorry that you have to cut the tour short.” Falconer seemed crestfallen. I couldn’t tell whether he had genuinely enjoyed showing off his own little kingdom to us, or whether he was just faking disappointment at us having to leave. Then he looked me straight in the eyes. There was something unspoken there, but I had no idea what. Finally he said, “You seemed to be really enjoying yourself, Danny.”

I wasn’t going to let him push me around, even in a really passive-aggressive way like this.

“I was. I just love this kind of stuff.”

“Then perhaps you should consider joining us as a volunteer…for as long as you’re staying in town, at least…” Was that an implied threat? He reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a business card, which he handed to me smoothly. I took it and gave it a quick glance.

Malachai Falconer.

Proprietor.

The Snare of Souls.

There was no address, just a cell phone number.

“Do please feel free to call me if you are interested in becoming a part of our little enterprise,” Falconer said silkily as he ushered Mom and I out of the chapel, down a long corridor, and out into the street. It was getting dark already. We passed a bunch of kids heading into the Snare, laughing and joking with each other. I guessed that they were volunteers, getting ready to be costumed and made up for the night’s scares.

“Yeah, I might just do that.”

Falconer extended a hand. I shook it awkwardly, then tucked his business card into my back pocket. The hand was cool to the touch, and a chill ran up my arm when our skin made contact. He smiled at me over the rims of those creepy-looking glasses. The smile still never reached his eyes though, which were even colder than his skin had been.

“Madame, it was a great pleasure to make your acquaintance.” I noticed that he didn’t say it was a pleasure to make my acquaintance, but I didn’t say anything as he took Mom’s hand and kissed it. She was still lapping this crap up, after all. This wasn’t just a charm offensive — it was starting to look more like an all-out war.

She giggled. My heart died a little inside.

“Farewell.” Falconer bowed. He actually freaking bowed, then went back inside the Snare and closed the door behind him. I blew out a long sigh.

“What a douche.”

“Daniel!”

“What?”

“Mr. Falconer was really quite gracious and charming.”

“Yeah,” I grumbled. “Tell me about it.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Mom seemed a little annoyed.

“He was all over you, Mom! I mean, kissing your hand and bowing, for—”

She dismissed my argument with a wave of her hand. “He’s British, Daniel! He’s just being British! They’re polite like that.”

“Maybe a hundred years ago they were,” I countered hotly, “but don’t try and tell me that people are walking around the streets of London kissing each other on the hand like that! Besides, how many Brits do you actually know?”

“Well, none,” she admitted, “how many do you know?”

“Uh…”

We looked at one another in silence for a moment. It slowly dawned on us both just how ridiculous the argument was. We were standing in the middle of a strange town, fighting about whether people thousands of miles away kissed each other on the hand or not. Mom and I both started laughing at the same time, cracking up at the stupidity of it all. We hugged. The tension fizzled out and disappeared.

Mom let me go, and suddenly her expression changed to one of recognition.

There, coming towards us with a look of disbelief plastered across her face, was Becky.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Danny!”

It was more of a yell than a question. I could feel my heart surging in my chest when I saw her. Becky was wearing jeans, sneakers, and a dark blue jacket. She had her long hair pulled back into a ponytail that bounced as she walked toward me.

She did not look happy to see me.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded, hands on hips.

“I, uh, well…basically I came here to see you.”

“To see me,” Becky repeated. “You don’t think that’s a little weird? Maybe a little stalker-y?”

“No! It is totally not stalker-y, I promise.” The conversation wasn’t even thirty seconds old, so how was I already on the defensive?

“I said we’d talk when I got back. Nobody asked you to drive all the way out here from Boulder—”

“I know, I know.” I held up my hands in an attempt to placate her. “Look, I’m not trying to creep you out or anything. That’s not it at all.”

“Then why did you come?” she demanded.

“To apologize,” I said loudly, then lowered my voice and added, “and there’s something else I need to tell you, but I can’t do it in front of…” I gave the slightest nod of my head in Mom’s direction. Becky didn’t seem to be aware that Mom was with me, and as soon as we had started talking, Mom had backed off diplomatically to a distance that was almost (but not quite) out of earshot.

That defused some of Becky’s anger. She and Mom got on like a house on fire (as opposed to me and Becky, who seemed to be getting on as though we were actually on fire ourselves these days) and they exchanged a glad to see you smile. Yet another reason I was really glad that Mom had been my chauffeur for the trip.

“Hi Rachel!” Becky rushed over to her and gave her a huge hug. “Danny really dragged you all the way out here?”

“It was no trouble, Becky,” Mom lied, bless her soul, and then leaned in to whisper something in Becky’s ear. Whatever it was couldn’t have been longer than a single sentence, judging from the time it took before they broke out of the hug, but Mom’s eyes had been on me throughout it all and she now had a mischievous smile on her lips that hadn’t been there before. So did Becky, I saw when she turned around; it was as though they had a shared secret, and though I’d probably never find out exactly what had passed between them, I had a pretty shrewd idea that Mom was telling her to go easy on me for this one.

Mom really was the best of the best.

“Why don’t I give you two a little space?” she said, shooting me an unmistakable don’t screw this up look. “I’m sure you have a lot to talk about. Danny, I’ll head back to the hotel. Don’t stay out too late, OK?”

“Mom, hold on. I can walk you back…” I didn’t want her out and about on her own after dark in a strange town.

“Oh, please,” she rolled her eyes theatrically. “It’s only a few blocks,” Mom went on, “and besides, not only am I a grown woman, I’m a grown woman with a concealed carry permit. I pity the fool who tries to get the drop on me!”

Becky and I looked at each other and smiled. Mr. T quotes. She really was one of a kind…and true to her word, she was one of a kind that was packing a Glock somewhere about her person at all times. Dad was a United States Marine, and Mom had still given him a run for his money when they were shooting together on their range “date days.”

“Okay, if you’re sure,” I said doubtfully. Mom waved, and began to walk toward the street. She stepped aside to get out of the way of a car heading into the lot, and as she did so she turned and made the universal call me gesture with one hand. I nodded, getting the message. I’d keep her informed, it was the least I could do for her trouble. In the meantime I hoped she would take the opportunity to treat herself to a hot bath and some much-needed quiet time.

Mom turned the corner, following the cemetery fence, and disappeared into the early evening shadows.

I shivered. The air was getting cold. The parking lot was getting busier, as parents dropped off their kids and some of the older teens who had their drivers licenses parked their own cars there. More came in on foot, laughing and joking. Every few minutes, one of them would exchange a smile and a nod with Becky. I was glad to see how genuinely happy they all seemed to be. It was a far cry from Falconer’s fake smiling and smirking.

“So why did you come all the way out here, Danny — really?”

My thoughts snapped back to Becky and the here-and-now. “Because there are some things I have to tell you.”

“Okay…” She wasn’t tearing my head off. That was progress. There was a doubtful pause. “Let’s go inside,” she said at last. “We can go to the Green Room.”

“The Green Room?”

“Yeah. It’s a movie business term. It’s where performers go when they’re done being made up and are waiting to go on stage. Most of us hang out there before the night starts.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. There would be other kids around, and I really didn’t want to talk about the Dark Man in front of them…or inside the Snare. I hadn’t seen him in there at all, but I knew that he was real, because I’d seem him on the sidewalk in Boulder that night, and I was willing to best every last piece of Star Wars merchandise I owned that he was tied in with Falconer somehow.

“Uh, could we go somewhere else?” I pleaded. She frowned, so I quickly added, “There’s a lot more to this than the apology, Becky. I really think you’re in some kind of danger.”

She looked around. We’d chosen a bad spot to stand, right outside the entrance doors that most of the volunteers were using. “There’s always the cemetery, I guess,” she said doubtfully. I blinked, but couldn’t really come up with a better idea. The old hospital had been built right in the middle of a residential neighborhood, so that would be just about the only place we wouldn’t run into people going about their everyday business. Besides, the trick or treaters will probably be making their rounds soon.

“Sure, why not?” For a second I thought about offering her my arm, but pretty quickly thought better of it. I led the way out onto the sidewalk, following in Mom’s footsteps, and hung a left. It was just a short walk uphill before we came to the main entrance. The gateway was wide enough to drive two cars through side-by-side, and had a rusting iron archway that identified it as the Tyrant’s Grove Cemetery. Becky followed me inside.

“Do you want to have a seat?” I asked, pointing at one of the smooth stone memorial benches that were scattered throughout the graveyard.

Becky bent and touched the marble. She shook her head. “Way too cold. Why don’t we just walk? I only have a little while before I need to get into makeup.”

We walked slowly among the tombstones, keeping close to one another but without actually touching. My head was on a constant swivel. I didn’t see any evidence of spirit activity in the cemetery; the closest thing was a group of kids out on the sidewalk, with what looked to be one of their dads in tow, dressed as zombies and demons. They were stopping at each house they came to, and looked like they were making quite the candy haul from where I was standing.

“So what’s this all about?” Becky nudged me back to the present.

I took a deep breath. “Well, first things first…I owe you an apology.”

“Yeah, you really do.”

My hackles went up a little at that. After all, nobody likes to be agreed with when they admit to being at fault, do they? What we really want to hear is: oh, no way. Not at all. I was just overreacting. Or perhaps even hey, I wasn’t exactly perfect either. I could feel annoyance turning to anger. Then I looked around me, getting a reminder that I was standing in a graveyard over a hundred miles from home in a place that I didn’t know, and all because of the way I’d been treating Becky lately.

Taking a calming deep breath, I shoved the lid down on my temper as hard as I possibly could, hoping that the effort didn’t show on my face.

“I’m sorry,” I began again. She looked at me expectantly. “For…well, for everything, really.”

“For everything?”

“Yeah. For pushing you away when I should have been…nicer. And for giving you a hard time about Long Brook.” From the look on her face, this was exactly what she had wanted to be told. Then she cracked a little smile.

“Are you just blowing smoke, Danny, or do you really mean that?” she asked softly, searching my face with her eyes. I smiled back.

“I mean it,” I told her, and I did. “There’s more to talk about, but I mostly wanted to tell you that up front…tell you just how sorry I am.”

“I believe you,” she said, and surprised me with a hug. This one wasn’t awkward. I hugged her back, and pretty soon we were a boy and a girl bear-hugging one another and giggling in the middle of a graveyard at sundown. Some people might have thought we were being disrespectful, but we really weren’t. Besides, the people who really mattered – the spirits whose graves these were, all around us – were nowhere to be found.

Side note: it might come as a surprise to hear it, but most cemeteries aren’t actually haunted. I know, I know – how many horror movies have you seen where the haunted house is built on an old Native American burial ground? Thank you for that, Mr. Spielberg. A graveyard at night might be creepy as hell to most people, but any Seer knows better. To us, they’re just peaceful and calm places, a good place to go if you want to be alone with your thoughts for some quality quiet time.

Practically nobody ever dies in a cemetery, and when we do pass on, the spirit loses all interest in the physical shell it once inhabited. They’ve pretty much outgrown the body and are ready to move on to bigger and better things. Think about it for a second. Think back to the coat or jacket you wore when you were…let’s go with ten years old. Before too long, you outgrew it and replaced it with a newer one, right? One that fit you better. That’s how it is with moving from the material body to the spirit body. Once the funeral is over (admittedly, a lot of people like to drop in and watch their own funeral – call it morbid fascination) and the body is buried six feet deep in the ground or has gone up the chimney, the previous owner has no more interest in what happens to it than you did with your old coat.

On the rare occasions that I’ve actually seen spirits of the dead in a graveyard, they were following one of their loved ones on a visit to their gravesite. Usually, the spirit was trying to bring some comfort to the grieving mourner, who sadly enough couldn’t see them. I like to think that some of the more psychically-attuned ones would somehow sense the supportive hand on their shoulder, or feel the presence of their loved one’s spirit at their side. I’ve never really made any effort to dig into it and find out more. Note to self: ask my spirit guide Lamiyah about it, next time I see her.

I really didn’t want to let Becky go when she broke the hug first. It had felt so good being close to her…not in a sexual way or anything like that, but just that feeling of warmth and closeness you get when you mend fences with somebody you care about. Maybe it’s the security and comfort of knowing that a relationship you valued isn’t lost forever.

We were both laughing now. Becky wiped a tear from her eye with the back of a sleeve.

“So,” she asked me, “are we good?”

“Yeah, we’re good.”

“Thank goodness for that!” We both laughed again. I couldn’t speak for her, but I already felt better, as though something wrong had been put right. “So what’s the other thing you needed to tell me about?”

And just like that, all the air went out of the balloon again.

“Oh yeah,” I muttered darkly. “That.”

I proceeded to fill her in on the whole Dark Man situation. Her expression became more and more concerned as the story went on. I left aside a couple of key parts – mostly things that the Dark Man had said, and how Becky had suffered at the hands of the spirits in the maze – but I did tell her that I felt she had been hunted, stalked somehow, in amongst those glass corridors and dead ends.

“I know it was just a dream,” I concluded lamely, “but I had a dream like this before…before…”

“Before Long Brook,” she finished for me. I nodded miserably.

She was referring to a dream I’d had the night before we had visited that abandoned old sanatorium up on the Peak-to-Peak Highway. Well, I say ‘dream,’ but nightmare might be a better way to put it. I was walking through the corridors and rooms late at night, wandering aimlessly until I found a restroom. When I looked in the mirror on the wall in there, I couldn’t believe my eyes: I was wearing somebody else’s body, the reflection of a kid much younger than me staring right back out of the cracked glass.

It wasn’t long before I was captured by this hag of a nurse and dragged up to the ruin of what had once been the surgical suite, where von Spiessbach’s ghost had tried to carve me up like a Thanksgiving turkey…all ‘for my own good,’ as he had made a point of telling me.

Now imagine how I felt the next day when the three of us rocked up there in Brandon’s car and I walked along those same corridors for real. The term déjà vu doesn’t even begin to cover how weird that felt. Things got worse when it turned out that the mad doctor and his demented sidekicks were real too. I’d told Becky about the dream, but we hadn’t talked about it too much afterward. I wasn’t sure if I had traveled in spirit to the sanatorium in my sleep that night, or whether it had just been a really, really lucid precog dream (a term I totally stole from the movie Minority Report) that should have warned me against ever actually setting foot there.

“There’s a mirror maze back at the Snare,” Becky admitted, repeating what she’d written in her email. “I’ve been through it a couple of times already, but it just feels…weird. Wrong, somehow, if that makes any sense?”

I nodded. It did make sense. When we’d talked about it, Becky always claimed that she didn’t have anything in the way of psychic abilities at all, but maybe she was subconsciously picking up on there being some kind of malevolent spirit activity there in the mirror maze.

“It’s not just me,” she went on. “A lot of the others avoid it too. We all laugh and joke about it, but you can tell that nobody really wants to end up in there during the haunted house.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, even though there was nobody around to hear us. “Everybody feels as though they’re being watched in there; some of the kids have even seen faces looking back at them out of the mirrors…”

A shiver ran through me. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t the cold night air either. This was something more primal, a fear of being trapped in that maze along with the Dark Man and his cronies…

The Dark Man.

“So, about this big bad,” Becky said, apparently reading my mind. “Is he…you know, like von Spiessbach?” She meant the psycho surgeon from Long Brook. He’d put the barrel of a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger long before Becky and I had ever met him.

I shook my head.

“I’m not exactly sure, but I don’t think so. I mean, he came floating at me like a spirit would, he wasn’t a living being like you or me…but I don’t think that’s he’s dead and earthbound either. He just felt different somehow – I’ve never really run into anything like it before…”

“It?” she asked sharply.

I thought about it for a moment. By unspoken agreement, we were strolling back toward the cemetery gates and their big iron archway.

“Yes, it,” I settled at last. “Whoever the Dark Man is, Becky, I’m not sure that he’s human…at least, not in the same way that we are.”

“Then what do you think he is?” she pushed.

“I don’t know yet. I’m going to ask Lamiyah.” I sighed. “I know, I really should have done it already. I’ve been distracted, though. Worried.”

“Hard to fault you for that, Danny,” she smiled.

“I’m faulting me for that. It’s not a good excuse, but I’ve had a lot on my mind, and, well…I guess it just fell through the cracks.”

“Hey.” She stopped me, resting a hand on my arm. I was instantly buzzed at her touch, almost as though she was shocking me through the sleeve of my hoodie. “You’re only human. Unless there’s something else you’re not telling me.”

We both shared a laugh. It felt good that things were getting back to normal with Becky again. Maybe I wasn’t going to lose her after all. Maybe she didn’t think I was a total idiot. Maybe I was just my own worst enemy. Maybe…

“Nothing I can think of,” I said truthfully. “But Becky, seriously…I think there’s something dangerous happening at the Snare.”

“So you think I’m in danger?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I really do. Can you maybe quit tonight and come on home tomorrow? Mom and I can give you a ride.”

Becky’s mouth was suddenly a thin line. I recognized that look because I’d seen it before. She was about to dig her heels in. I began to mentally rehearse my next argument, trying to make her see that for her to keep working at the Snare was going to expose her to who knew what kind of danger, but she cut me off before I had a chance to say anything.

“There’s just one problem, Danny. I have friends there…people I care about. Hell, what about my cousin Jessica? If this ‘Dark Man’ was a danger to me, aren’t they all in danger too?”

What could I say to that? She was right. I didn’t want her to be, but there was no avoiding it. From what I’d sensed of him during the dream, the Dark Man was pure predator, always looking for something or someone weaker than himself to prey upon; I also suspected that he got off on the challenge of inflicting fear, which was what the whole chase thing with dream-Becky was all about. Becky was no wallflower – the girl had nerves of steel, and I’d seen them at first-hand.

I just knew that not all of her friends would be that way.

“Yes,” I said at last, reluctant to face up to the facts. “I think that some of them – maybe all of them – are at risk from him.”

She looked me straight in the eyes. All of arguments I’d been concocting to get her to quite the Snare melted away with the force of that stare. I could feel my willpower turning to vapor and vanishing with every passing second.

“So you know there’s only one thing we can do,” she said.

“I guess.”

“Danny.” Ouch. That was her Mom-voice. It only came out when she was really, really determined.

“Yes,” I stalled miserably.

“What are we going to do about the Dark Man?” It was couched as a question that she knew damned well I already knew the answer to.

I stared right back into her gorgeous eyes and said the only thing that I possibly could.

“We’re going to find him…Find him, and kick his ass into the next freaking dimension.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The last of the sunlight had finally faded from the sky when we left the cemetery and made the short walk back to the Snare of Souls. It didn’t give me too much time to think, but the way I looked at it, I really didn’t need much time to think. Becky was one hundred percent right. If she was in danger from the Dark Man, as I would have bet my bottom dollar that she was, then yes: it was entirely possible that he might just follow her back to Boulder if she packed up her stuff and came home with us right now, or first thing in the morning. But it was also every bit as likely that he would just switch his attentions to her friends, the kids who lived in Tyrant’s Grove; they probably had no idea that the Dark Man even existed, let alone the fact that he got his kicks toying with those who were weaker than him — which seemed to be pretty much everybody, if the sense of power he’d been putting out in my dream had been even remotely accurate.

I pulled out my phone as we walked, then the business card which I’d stuffed hastily into my hip pocket. Unfolding the crumpled wad of paper, I stopped under a street light so that I could make out the ten digit number written there, and punched it into the phone.

“Mr. Chill,” came the all-too-familiar silky-smooth response at the other end. He couldn’t have been more of a Bond villain if he’d said, I’ve been expecting you. Instead, Falconer simply waited. Okay, I thought, I’ll bite.

“How did you know it was me?”

“Let’s just say that I had an instinct you would be calling.” His laugh hadn’t even a trace of humor in it. It was almost as if an alien had come down to Earth for the first ever time and tried to mimic a real laugh after seeing humans doing it for real, but without having the slightest idea why.

“Then I guess your instinct was correct.”

“They usually are.” Let’s add humility to the list of personality treats that Mr. Chuckles here doesn’t have a clue about. “Be that as it may, Mr. Chill, I am sure that you did not call me to discuss my instincts. How may I be of service?”

By sticking your butt in the oven until it glows so red that everybody starts calling you ‘that baboon dude.’

“That volunteer job,” I said instead, “is the offer still open?”

“But of course. We are always in search of fresh meat for the Snare, Mr. Chill.”

Yeah, I’ll bet you are.

“Then count me in. When do I start?”

Becky threw me a look that was part gratitude, part concern.

“Well, there’s no time like the present,” Falconer said, his tone flat and emotionless. “Did you perchance catch up with your friend…Rebecca, wasn’t it?”

I couldn’t believe he’d actually used the word perchance in a real conversation. I mean, think about it for a second — have you ever heard somebody talk like that who wasn’t on Masterpiece Theatre?

“Yes it was, and yes I did.”

“Excellent!” Now he sounded slightly more enthused. “Tell me, is she with you now.”

“Yes she is.”

“Please be so kind as to inform her that she is assigned to Doctor Stinson for the night. You also may assist the good doctor, Daniel. That way, you may stay within close reach of your…friend.”

I didn’t like the way he said friend, probably because I could actually hear him smirking through the phone. Becky grabbed me by the arm and pulled me towards her. Looking up, I saw that she’d stopped me from walking straight into a gaggle of trick-or-treaters that were coming from the opposite direction.

Friend. I knew damn well what Falconer was implying. More to the point, I knew damn well that he knew that I knew. It had been a verbal jab. Well, it wasn’t going to rattle me. All he’d achieve was to reinforce my idea that he was a complete and utter jerk.

“Great,” I practically grunted. “Thanks.”

“Oh, please don’t even dream of mentioning it. Farewell.”

The call dropped. Falconer must have hung up.

Dream. That was an interesting choice of word…could be perfectly innocent, I thought as we turned right into the parking lot of the Snare; but then again, it could also mean that he knew something about my dream last night.

Was Falconer the Dark Man? It was an idea that had been going round and round in my head ever since I’d first set eyes on him earlier that afternoon.

On the one hand, there were a lot of similarities: the Dark Man was creepy as all hell (check) sounded kinda British (check) and had a tall, thin build (check again); but on the other, the Dark Man was a spirit. I’d seen him appear out of nowhere on the sidewalk in Boulder. He was surrounded with an aura just like the spirits of the dead always were. Some spirits could manifest themselves physically — in fact, most of them could if circumstances were extreme enough or whenever they really, really wanted to — but I could still tell that they weren’t living, breathing people. Falconer seemed different somehow. Leaving aside the fact that Mom and I had both touched him physically, he just didn’t give off that ‘dead vibe’ to me.

Yes, there was something weird about him, but I really didn’t think he was a spirit entity pretending to be a flesh and blood person.

Something else was going on. I wasn’t sure what, but I did know one thing: it was something dangerous.

“This is where we leave our stuff.”

Other than my cell phone and a few bucks, I didn’t have any stuff to leave. Becky and I were standing in the ‘green room,’ which was basically a chill-out lounge for the small army of volunteers that kept the Snare of Souls running. We’d come in by way of a side entrance and taken the first right turn into this room, which was pretty big; maybe thirty chairs and a little kitchenette with a microwave, plus a couple of restrooms. A muted TV was bolted high up on the wall, soundlessly running tonight’s 9-News broadcast, and a soda machine offering Coke products.

Right now, most of the chairs were full of monsters. As I looked around, I had to admit that the makeup crew here was pretty freaking good. Three teenage zombies that were as good as anything you ever saw on The Walking Dead lounged on a battered old couch, talking with a dude who had a latex werewolf mask resting on his knees. Brown fur was sticking out from each sleeve of his tartan lumberjack shirt. He didn’t look nearly as realistic as the zombies, but that was under the bright strip lights of the green room; if he caught you in one of the dark corridors of this old hospital, you’d probably brown your shorts if you weren’t careful.

There was a real medical theme going on: not surprising really, considering what this place had used to be. Lots of doctors, nurses, surgeons, and patients in blood-splattered gowns.

It’s all pretend, I had to remind myself. I’d need to be careful; if I let my mental guard down, I might start having flashbacks from Long Brook.

Becky must have read my mind. “The last time we saw anything like this,” she whispered playfully in my ear, “it was way, way less fun!”

“True dat!” I couldn’t help but laugh. I felt some of the tension dissipate, and we both smiled at one another.

A row of dented old school lockers ran along the back wall. Becky went over to one with a combination lock and spun it expertly back and forth until it popped. Inside was a Safeway bag full of clothes. “The guys with the more elaborate outfits have to keep them locked up in costume storage,” she explained, indicating the zombies and wolf-man with a sideways nod of her head. “Mine’s cheap and simple enough that I can just leave it in here. Gotta go change. Wait here, ‘kay? I’ll be right back.”

Then she was gone, leaving me standing there and feeling just a little out of place. I’m socially awkward at the best of times, and with all this crap about the Dark Man on my mind, this wasn’t exactly the best of times.

“Hey.”

I turned around. The girl couldn’t have been older than twelve, thirteen tops, and she was short along with it, which made her look closer to ten or eleven. She was wearing a nurse outfit, complete with one of those little hats that nurses used to wear sitting on top of her dark brown hair; the costume was torn and ripped in places, and covered in bloodstains and random bits of latex flex.Her skin was deathly pale, and a network of blue veins had been painted on top. The net effect was already pretty freaky, but a pair of yellow contact lenses were the cherry on top.

“Uh, hey,” I said back. Those yellow eyes looked at me impassively. “My name’s Danny,” I said at last, hoping to break the ice. I stuck out a hand politely.

“I’m Rhiannon.” She took my hand and shook it solemnly, smearing my palm with dry blood flakes in the process. She cocked her head to one side and looked at me for a while. “Are you new?” she asked finally.

I nodded. “It’s my first night. I’m a friend of Becky’s.”

Rhiannon smiled. Somehow, maybe because of the yellow contacts, her face looked even creepier than it had before. The black stains painted onto her teeth might just have had something to do with it as well. “Becky’s cool. We like her.”

Returning her smile, I asked Rhiannon what part of the Snare she worked in.

“I work the front line, mostly,” she said, bouncing enthusiastically on the soles of her feet a few times and clapping her hands together in sheer joy. “My job is to pick out the customers for the…special treatment.”

Her answer couldn’t have sounded more sinister if Rhiannon had said that her job was to take people out back, cut their throats, and dice them up into little tiny pieces. Falconer had answered that for Mom already during our tour, but the question was just daring itself to be asked though, and I didn’t want to disappoint an eager little girl, so I went ahead and did it. “Alright, I’ll bite. What’s the special treatment?”

“Oh, you know,” she said, suddenly coy. “We — me and some of the other nurses — walk the entrance line. People have already paid to come inside. Then they have to line up to get in. The Snare is pretty busy, so it can take twenty or thirty minutes to get from the registers to the starting point.”

I nodded. That made total sense. Mom and I had come in through the main entrance this afternoon. The lanes that customers queued up in were made from stained and scuffed metal IV poles that looked old enough to have been original hospital equipment, strung up with plastic IV tubing to act as ghetto handrails. There were enough switchbacks in the lanes that it could easily take half an hour to get from the front doors to the interior if they were full.

“Who do you pick out?” I wanted to know. I fed three quarters into the soda machine and thumbed the button for Diet Coke — not that I needed to lose weight, but I just prefer the taste of it to the regular stuff. After a rattle and groan, a can thumped into the metal tray. It was ice cold.

“It depends. Troublemakers for sure.” She flashed me a knowing smirk. “For whatever reason, a lot of guys like to throw their girlfriends under the bus. Don’t ask me why, but it happens a lot. They see us walking the line, looking for the next victim to pull out, and they’ll use the girl they’re with as human shields. They’ll hide behind ‘em, or take a few steps backwards and start pointing them out to us. Guess they think it’s funny.” Rhiannon’s grin broadened. “We always make a beeline for those guys. Every time. Suddenly they don’t think it’s so funny any more.”

“I’ll bet.” I laughed, picturing some big beefy dude being hauled out of the line by a bunch of teenage girls. “Karma’s never been so fast. What happens then?”

“That depends too. Some of ‘em, we just stick in the closet. It’s dark in there and smells like somebody peed. Actually, sometimes the big guys do pee themselves in there. We like that.”

“You do?”

“Oh,yes. Mr. Falconer pays out a cash bonus for any of the volunteers that can make a customer pee or poop their pants.”

“I’ve heard about that. Fifty dollars, right?”

“Yes sir. Fifty dollars.” Rhiannon agreed.

I asked her if she’d ever won herself, and she nodded enthusiastically. “A couple times now. Last Halloween, I made a big fat drunk guy wet himself. We were pounding on that door so hard, the lock broke. I got a pretty sweet pair of shoes out of it.”

“So that’s the special treatment? Being shut in a closet with nurses hammering on door?” I smiled. “Doesn’t sound so bad.”

Rhiannon suddenly turned serious. “Oh, it ain’t just that.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “See, the closet’s haunted.”

“Haunted?” I tried not to spray soda all over her in disbelief. “I’ve never heard of a haunted closet before.”

She nodded gravely. “Well, this one totally is. Everybody here knows about it, but they don’t like to talk about it much.”

“Haunted how?”

“A lot of people freak out in there for no real reason,” Rhiannon explained quietly. “Sometimes it happens to the cleaners, even one of the volunteers here. But usually it’s the customers. When we let ‘em out, they’re scared out of their minds…talking about being touched in the dark, when we know there’s nobody else in there but them.”

“It’s supposed to be a haunted house though,” I countered, enjoying the role of devil’s advocate. “Maybe their imagination is just playing tricks—”

“No way,” she cut me off. “This place really is haunted. We all know it. Usually the ghosts just mind their own business…well, some of ‘em do like to come out and play when we run the Snare at night, but we don’t mess with them and they don’t mess with us.”

“Sounds like a pretty good deal all round.”

Rhiannon fixed me with those creepy yellow eyes. She didn’t blink much, I noticed. “You don’t believe me,” she accused.

“Sure I do.” I held up my hands, trying not to offend her. “If you say this place is haunted then hey, this place is haunted.”

“Well, I do say,” she pouted, then went on to warn me: “If you meet one of the ghosts, most of them are friendly. Just be nice to them and they’ll probably be nice to you.”

“Most? Are there some not-so-nice ones?”

“Some,” Rhiannon nodded soberly. “But they keep themselves to themselves, as my Daddy likes to say. You just stay away from them, and you’ll be fine.”

“That’s good to know.” I took another sip of my soda, wondering just where Becky had got to. “Do you know where they are? Just so I can stay out of their way.”

“Uh huh. They’re mostly in the mirror maze. You gotta be brave or a real idiot to want to go in there.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

With a cheery wave, Rhiannon was gone in a flash. She left me a lot to chew on though. There it was again: the mirror maze. The more I heard about it, the less I liked it:I hadn’t even physically set eyes on the place yet, but I just knew that if I did — or, let’s face it, when I did — that it would turn out to be just like the maze in my nightmares. As my favorite Corellian smuggler would have said, I had a bad feeling about this…

Becky came back maybe five minutes later. I did a double-take, not recognizing her at first. She wasn’t the beautiful girl of my dreams any more; now she was more of a creature of nightmare, like something Clive Barker would have dreamed up. Her long dark hair stuck up at crazy angles like Albert Einstein’s, as though she’d been struck by lightning or stuck a wet finger in a power outlet. She was wearing pale blue surgical scrubs, the type you saw people wearing in hospitals and clinics pretty much everywhere; the scrubs were matted and covered in freshly-applied blood that was already drying fast, and the piece de resistance was a pair of bright red bloody handprints on the front of her chest, just below her collarbones; it looked as though somebody desperate had grabbed her. I had to admit it was a pretty cool effect.

The makeup artists had painted her skin the same color of pale white as Rhiannon’s had been, but instead of putting on veins they had gone with three latex slash marks like bloody animal claws, running from the side of her right eye down past her cheekbone to the jawline. The latex was still dripping fake blood. These guys were really good.

“Hey, no contacts?” I used my fingers to pinch open one of my eyes. Becky grimaced.

“Oh, hell no. Can’t stand the thought of anything being contact with my eyeball.”

“But they’re such nice eyeballs!”

“Freak!”

We both laughed.

“Okay, I guess maybe it’s time to see how brave you are.” Becky said with a smile.

“What do you mean?”

“Here.” She handed me a plastic bag. I took it by the handles and looked inside. There was another set of scrubs in there, their green cotton rumpled and blood-stained. “They should be about your size. Go change and then we’ll take you to makeup.”

I shrugged. Maybe this was going to be a fun night after all, despite the danger. I waited until the restroom was free, then went in and changed. My own clothes went in the bag, except for my sneakers, which went well with the green scrubs. They fit pretty good, just a little short in the ankle — not that anybody was going to notice that in the dark: they’d be too busy screaming and freaking out, if we were doing our jobs right.

Becky led me out into the corridor, and we joined the line for makeup. While we waited, I sent Mom a text to tell her I’d be working with Becky at the Snare tonight. I got a quick smiley-face back and a simple don’t mess up to remind me of why we had driven all this way from Boulder. Yeah, if only she knew…

I’ve seen a lot of scary movies in my time, and let me tell you, the small gang of stressed-out folks doing makeup at the Snare could give any big-budget Hollywood special effects crew a run for their money any day of the week. Their room was about the same size as the Green Room, but it smelled a lot more like paint and latex. The line of kids waiting to perform their roles in the haunt snaked down the length of the hallway and out towards the parking lot. After about ten minutes of patient waiting and chatting (Becky was keeping me company) I passed through a set of doors with a sign posted that said Makeup: Line Jumpers Will Be Fed To The Balrog. Huh, I thought with approval, somebody’s a Tolkien fan.

The guys doing makeup were super-focused and intense, running each visitor through like they were parts on an assembly line. How they managed to stay cheerful after working on so many people, I have no idea; but everybody got a “how are you doing?” or a “how did last night go?” along with their newly-paled skin makeup, gross wounds, and last but not least, the blood spray.

“Stand right there,” said the last makeup artist in line. He was about my age, maybe a little older, and dressed like a priest…except that this priest was rocking a set of gleaming vampire fangs. I shuffled over onto the tarp that was laid out on the tiles next to his table, which was cluttered with pots of paint and all kinds of brushes and little plastic tubes. He reached for a squirt bottle full of what looked like red wine. “That’s it. Now put your arms out. Awesome. Close your eyes.” I obeyed. The next thing I new, a sticky cold mist was raining down on me, slapping me in the face. Fake blood dripping from my chin and ran down my neck and chest, soaking into the fabric of the scrubs and adding to what was already there.

Did they ever bother laundering these outfits? I really hoped so. Who knew how many times these scrubs had been worn by somebody else over the years? Over this Halloween season alone? I shuddered, figuring it was best not to think about it.

“Whaddya think?”

I opened my eyes and looked at myself in the mirror behind the makeup chair.

“Wow!” For lack of a better term, I looked pretty freaking demonic. I wasn’t freaked out about contact lenses like Becky was, so I’d let the last makeup guy put in a pair of contacts that made me look like one of the fast-running zombies from 28 Days Later. My pupils looked like they were glowing red and yellow from within. I was covered in so much blood that I looked like somebody cos-playing Carrie.

“I’ll take that as a compliment!” he laughed, putting the spray bottle down on top of the desk. “I’m Chuck, by the way.”

“Danny.” We shook hands. I hesitated for a second, dumb enough to not want to get my spray blood on him, and then saw that his right arm was red all the way up to the elbow. With his center-parted dark hair, Chuck reminded me of Professor Snape from the Harry Potter movies, though thankfully he seemed to be a lot nicer.

“You new at the Snare, Danny?” I nodded. “Glad to have you aboard. Maybe I’ll catch you around?”

“Sounds good. Thanks for the awesome make-up work.”

“Any time, man.”

The next victim in line for Chuck’s bloodbath was starting to get antsy, so I bugged out of make-up and went to find Becky. She was standing in the hallway across from the bustling makeup line, chatting with another girl.

“Danny, that looks great!” she clapped her hands with excitement. “We are going to have such an awesome time tonight.”

“The energy’s pretty high in this place,” the other girl drawled. “It’s building. You can feel it.”

“Oh…Danny, this is Jessica. She’s my cousin. Jessica, Danny. He’s my friend.”

Inwardly, I winced at the word friend.

“Hey,” was the best Jessica could manage. We looked each other up and down, and for a split second I got this stupid idea in my head that we were going to be rivals somehow. It made no sense though: rivals for what, exactly?

Jessica looked to be about eleven or twelve years old, and was obviously a pretty big fan of the Goth scene. She was dressed from head to toe entirely in black; a long black duster, which looked like it had seen better days, on top of black jeans with holes in the knees, and a T-shirt for what I had to assume was a band called The Cruxshadows. Black Dr. Martens boots that were only laced halfway up and makeup that made her look like something out of The Crow completed the ensemble. Weirdly, she had a long scarlet cloak folded over one arm.

Hey, you’re staring…get a grip. I had to consciously remind myself to quit being a douche. I’ll be the first one to tell you that I don’t know much about the Goth lifestyle, other than what I’d seen on TV shows like South Park; but one thing I did know was that the few Goth kids at school had gotten picked on almost as much as I had, so I ought to have plenty of sympathy for Jessica and people like her. Sure, she looked different, but then, so did I to some people.

“If you’re a friend of Becky’s, you can call me Jess,” she said quietly, maybe just to fill the awkward silence. It was then that I realized that I hadn’t said hey back, which was pretty rude.

“Cool,” I replied, trying to sound cool. “My friends call me Danny.”

She took a minute to digest that. Finally she nodded. “Awesome.”

“So what do you do here at the Snare, Jess?” I asked, genuinely interested. I figured there wouldn’t be too much time to ask questions once things got rolling tonight, so I might as well make good use of the down time now.

“I work in the Little Red Riding Hood room.”

“Don’t think I saw that on the tour.” I racked my brains, and couldn’t remember any of the rooms having an all the better to eat you with, my dear vibe to them.

Becky shot me a meaningful look. “It’s a little out of the way…behind the black maze and the mirror maze.”

“Oh.” My mouth was suddenly dry. “We, uh…we didn’t get back there.”

“It’s pretty freaking cool,” Jess said in that same flat voice. If that was how excited she got over pretty freaking cool, then I’d hate to see her reaction to something really freaking tedious. “You know the fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood?” I nodded. “The room is tricked out like the grandma’s cabin. Grandma is a dummy inside the bed, and I’m Little Red Riding Hood.”

“That explains the cape,” I realized, nodding at the bright scarlet cloth she carried. I hadn’t noticed that it had a hood before.

“Do you want to come back and see?” she asked me, her dark eyes sparkling. I wondered if they were naturally that color, because they looked like the blackest shade of dark brown I had ever seen.

“Uh, you probably don’t have enough time before we get started,” I blustered, searching for an excuse, any excuse, not to go back anywhere near the mirror maze. “Don’t you have to get into makeup and costume and stuff?”

Without a word, Jessica slowly and very deliberately let the folded cloak fall from her arm and drop towards the floor. At the last moment, without breaking eye contact with me for even a second, she caught it and twirled it up and over her shoulders until it hung down her back. Pale fingers tied the cloak at her neck, knotting two red lace cords into a bow, and then finally she reached back and flipped the hood up and over her head with a theatrical flourish.

“I’m all ready.”

Crap. So much for that excuse.

“I’m sure that Danny would love to see,” Becky said, seeming as anxious as I was, but showing a lot more courage in the face of it.

“Lead on, please,” I said, feeling as though the words had to be dragged out of me one at a time.

With an enigmatic smile that could have meant pretty much anything, Jessica turned and made her way to the far end of the hallway. It dead-ended in a T-junction, with the scary-as-all-hell chapel on our left. I peeked inside, half-expecting the angry male spirit to still be in there, but everything was dark and quiet in there now except for a few electric candles to add a little atmosphere.

Weaving our way between small groups of kids, all of them chattering away in excitement at the prospect of the night ahead, Jessica led me and Becky to the where the corridor joined with the main hallway and hung a right. A nauseated feeling started to grow in the pit of my stomach as I realized with every sickening step that she was taking us to the same place that I had dreamed about.

There was the gift shop, with the Emergency Room on our left; here was the sneaky little entrance, hidden behind a black curtain, to the mirror maze.

Jessica ducked behind the curtain without breaking stride. Becky was a little more hesitant, but after a brief moment of indecision she just went for it. As for me…I hovered in front of the curtain like a big old ‘fraidy cat, physically wavering when I tried to get my legs to take another step. There was nothing supernatural about it: I was just afraid, plain and simple. Afraid of the Dark Man, and of what might be hiding back there in amongst all those mirrors.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

My hands started to tremble, ever so slightly at first, but more noticeably after I had stood there helplessly for a good thirty seconds.

Come on man, suck it up! I raged at myself, but my legs were still being stubborn, refusing to take me one step further. The anger was starting to rise now. Stupid, frightened little Seer, afraid to go where two girls had already gone.

Maze, the final frontier, Shatner’s voice began to mock me from inside my mind, to boldly go where two girls have gone before…

My cheeks started to flush, burning hot with shame. Was I really going to let a figure out of my nightmares chase me away? What would Becky make of me then?

I already knew the answer: she’d think I was a coward. And she’d be right.

Gritting my teeth, I let the anger and shame build, then turned them loose, allowed them to blast my body out of its paralysis. Without consciously thinking about it, I swept the thin black curtain to one side and took my first faltering steps into the mirror maze – for real.

It was exactly as I’d known it would be, just as I remembered it from the nightmare; every last detail was the same, even down to the way the wooden floor creaked under my sneakers as I crept forward. There was just enough ambient light in the room to let me catch sight of my own reflection out of the corners of my eye, keeping pace with me while I went forward.

After what seemed like a mile but in reality could only have been ten or fifteen feet, I caught up with Becky. She didn’t seem to have noticed that I’d lagged behind. From in front of her, I heard a nervous little giggle that I hoped came from Jessica. My eyes were starting to adjust to the darkness now, and I could just make out the other girls’ silhouette behind her.

“It doesn’t feel so bad in here,” Becky said, sounding pleasantly surprised.

“Just because it feels fine in here now, doesn’t mean squat.” Jessica’s tone held just a hint of warning. “Things are very different in here at night, and it’s already getting dark.”

“Different how?” Becky wanted to know.

“It’s hard to explain, but it just…feels different. As though you’re not alone here, even when there are no customers coming through the maze.”

“Do you think it’s haunted?” I asked, already sure I knew the answer, but curious to know what Jessica’s take on it was.

“Totally,” she said without hesitation.

“You sound very certain,” Becky said, giving voice to exactly what I was thinking.

“I’ve seen them.”

“Them?” I frowned. Jessica wasn’t the least bit fazed at what she had just admitted.

“Figures. You know, people,” she clarified. “In the mirrors. I see them out of the corner of my eye. It happens all the time. Sometimes in the daytime, but usually at night when the Snare is open for business.”

“Couldn’t it just be your eyes playing tricks in the dark?” Becky asked, always the pragmatist.

“Maybe,” Jessica admitted. “But that doesn’t explain the touching. I feel like there are fingers running through my hair sometimes, when I’m all alone in here.”

I shivered at the thought of those unseen hands reaching out of the mirrors in the blackness and touching her.

“Besides,” she went on slowly, “this is an old hospital, remember? It would make total sense for it to be haunted. Lot of people must have died here over the years.”

She was absolutely right.

“Then there’s the graveyard next door,” Becky added. “Seems like that would add a few ghosts into the mix.”

It had been empty when we walked through it – Becky had asked me quietly whether I’d seen any spirits in there, but the only lost souls wandering aimlessly through the Tyrant’s Grove Cemetery had been the two of us.

Though I still couldn’t see much more than a couple of vague blobs in the darkness, the sound of her footsteps told me that Jessica was moving again. Becky tucked in behind her and I followed right along, determined not to get separated from the two girls in here. I wasn’t trying to be chivalrous or anything like that, you understand – I just didn’t want to be on my own in here. I had no idea how Jessica managed it at night. The atmosphere was already heavy and oppressive, which is usually a sign of the psychic energies building; people like Seers who are sensitive to that kind of thing tend to find it a little unnerving, and I was sure as heck feeling that way right now.

Jessica must have spent a lot of time in here, because she picked her way through the maze without taking a wrong turn. No matter how much the path twisted back on itself or dead-ended, she got us through it in less than five minutes: I know because I was counting down on my phone.

I was also trying to count the drops of clammy sweat that started pouring down my spine, but gave up after the first ten.

Don’t look left, Danny. Don’t look right. Whatever you do, don’t look back…just keep going forward. Which is what I did, eyes screwed tightly shut, groping blindly forward with the fingertips of my right hand tracing along the cool glass wall for guidance.

Finally, the blackness all around us was replaced by a lighter grey against my eyelids. I opened them cautiously and blinked a few times. Jessica had led us into what looked like somebody’s bedroom. It was painted in a ‘cheerful’ black color scheme from floor to ceiling. A king-sized bed was the biggest thing in the room, covered in a brightly-colored patchwork quilt on top of a beige comforter. Apart from that and a chest of drawers, the room was empty; it was as though somebody had started to furnish a bedroom for themselves, had lost enthusiasm part-way through, and then given up.

Then I noticed the figure in the bed. It was a mannequin. Only the head and shoulders stuck out – the rest of the body hidden underneath the bedclothes. It – she, I guess – had curly grey hair that was covered by an old-fashioned nightcap, like the one Ebenezer Scrooge wore in the movies. I couldn’t see her eyes, but a pair of wire-framed spectacles gleamed in the light from a single bedside lamp.

I shuddered. Those glasses reminded me of Falconer’s, and I caught myself looking warily over my shoulder towards the door we had just come through…the door that led back to the maze.

“This is it,” Jessica said, without even the slightest trace of enthusiasm. “The Little Red Riding Hood Room.”

“Then I’m guessing that this must be grandma,” Becky laughed, peeking under the mannequin’s nightcap.

“That’s right. She doesn’t talk much.”

“Jessica, did you just crack a joke?” Becky was astonished. I’m not sure if Jessica’s mouth really did quirk up slightly at the corner, or whether it was a trick of the light.

“Happens sometimes,” she shrugged.

I walked around the side of the bed to take a closer look at Granny. My heart was still beating fast, but I was beginning to calm down a little. It was like I was slowly acclimating to the place; building up my fear tolerance. I’d much sooner be here in the Red Riding Hood Room than out there in the maze.

My foot stepped in something soft and squishy, like a strip of Jell-o that had been dropped on the floor. There was a metallic click, and then suddenly all hell broke loose.

With a snap-hiss of compressed air, the top of the bed – including comforter, quilt, Granny, and all – flew up in the air, slamming against the wall behind the bed. The top of the bed was nothing but a big sheet of plywood, sitting on top of a hollow box-frame; the part that would have been the mattress on any normal bed was basically a well-disguised hiding place for a creature straight out of a Hollywood movie.

No sooner had the rubber grandmother hit the wall with a rubbery thwack, I found myself looking straight down the throat of a growling, slobbering werewolf. The monster flew up from under the bed and lunged right at me, hairy claws reaching for my throat, each one tipped with a black talon that looked wickedly sharp. A pair of jaws, full of blood-stained fangs, yawned open in front of my face, more than wide enough to chomp down on my head and swallow it whole in a single gulp.

Okay, I’ll admit it: I screamed.

I screamed like a kid. Just give me props for not peeing my pants too, alright?

Jessica simply said, “Cool, huh?”

Becky fell about laughing, holding her stomach with both hands in case her sides literally split open. It felt so good to hear her laugh, even if the joke was at my expense, and before long I joined in, chuckles at first but then giving way to full-on belly laughs.

Even Jessica was smiling. “Sorry,” she said, not sounding the least bit. She pointed to the squishy floor underneath my feet. “Pressure pad. Whoever steps on it triggers the werewolf. It’s on pneumatic pistons.”

That explained the mechanical noise I’d heard when the thing had jumped out at me. I took a closer look. Sure enough, two steel bars extended out from underneath the werewolf’s armpits. When I craned my neck to look inside, I could see a bunch of rubber hoses and tubes that connected it to a big mechanical box.

“He’s pretty awesome,” Becky said, wiping a tear from her eye with a sleeve. “Does he have a name?”

“Fluffy,” Jessica deadpanned. I had no idea if she was kidding or not.

The werewolf had a pair of massive hairy ears that swept out and behind its head like two crazy bat wings. Its entire body was covered in shaggy fur, light grey in color, and the face had been sculpted out of rubber and then painted by someone who obviously knew what they were doing. The icing on the cake was a pair of mean-looking yellow eyes that stared glassily back at you, reflecting back the orange glow from the bedside table lamp.

“Fluffy,” I imitated Jessica, reaching out and gently patting him like I would a pet dog, or maybe Moggie if he was in the mood for some fuss. “There’s a good boy.”

“The customers have got to love him,” said Becky.

“There are usually screams.” Jessica looked back at me. “So there’s no need to feel too bad.”

“Hey, I—wait, do you hear that?” I cut myself off mid-sentence, holding up a hand for silence.

I could tell by the look on both their faces that they could hear it too.

Footsteps. Out there in the maze.

And they were getting closer.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

My heart was in my mouth again, pounding like a jackhammer.

“There’s somebody out there,” I hissed, shuffling backwards toward the far wall of the room.

“So what?” Jessica shrugged, shooting me a look that seemed to say so what’s the big deal, dude? “It’s just one of the others. They’re probably figuring out where they’re going to be tonight.”

I wasn’t buying that for a second. Those footsteps were too big, too heavy, too downright menacing to belong to one of the kids that worked here. Those were adult feet, and they were heading our way.

“I don’t think it is,” Becky backed me up quietly.

“Why are you both whispering?” Planting both fists on her hips, Jessica managed to look amused and annoyed both at the same time, which is no mean trick to pull off, let me tell you.

“I…” I couldn’t finish. This was getting awkward. And the footsteps were still getting closer.

“There’s nothing out there to be scared of,” she laughed, her voice the loudest thing in the room. I winced. Yes there is, I thought to myself. More than you have any idea about.

“Jessica—” Becky began, but before she had a chance to finish, Little Red Riding Hood was gone, her bright red cape flashing behind her as she went out into the still-dark maze.

“I’ll show you!” her voice said, echoing from the walls. “Like I said, there’s nothing to be—”

She screamed, shrill and piercing. It went straight through me like the wind on a really cold day goes straight through your clothes and chills you to the bone.

“Jess!” Becky ran to the doorway, but hesitated before stepping out into the maze. “Stop messing around! This is so not funny!”

I couldn’t have agreed with her more. If this was a joke, then it was in pretty bad taste, but something told me it wasn’t: the goth girl hadn’t seemed to have much of a sense of humor, though I realized that I might be being unfair to her by thinking that…stereotyping her because of her clothes and makeup.

“Danny, we have to help her!” Becky said, her tone full of indecision.

“I know, but what if…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. What if the dark man’s out there? That was what I wanted to say, but didn’t know how to. How did I admit to Becky that I was afraid of him? No, not just afraid — terrified. That was it. I was terrified. Something about him scared me stupid.

“Danny!” she snapped, her anger starting to show now. She bit off every word. “We. Have. To. Help. Her!”

Then she was gone, out into the mirror maze.

Out into the darkness.

I hesitated, torn between fear and the wretched, gut-wrenching shame of allowing the girl that meant everything to me in the world to go out there and face who knew what dangers alone.

Screw it. I knew that I would rather die than see even a hair harmed on Becky’s head.

I followed her into the maze.

I couldn’t hear the footsteps any longer. The sound of mine drowned them out. I could just make out Becky, maybe ten feet in front of me, and she looked like she was moving fast. Amazing what adrenaline can do.

“Becky, wait up!” I called. It came out as more of a croak.

“Move yourself, Danny,” she fired back. “Jessica’s in trouble. Jess! Where are you?”

A light suddenly appeared up ahead, white and blinding as it reflected off all of the mirrors. It spun round in a circle crazily, as though somebody had moved a lighthouse into this cramped enclosed little space. Then I realized what must have happened: Becky had turned on the light on her phone, and was using it to try and guide her.

The light dimmed suddenly, as Becky turned a corner in the maze. I picked up the pace just a bit, wanting the security that being within arm’s reach of her would bring. This place made you feel so freaking alone, and I hated that feeling with every fiber of my being.

“Jess, where are you?” She was still calling out for her cousin when I caught up with her around the next bend, looking frantically all around her but seeing nothing other than her own reflection.

“If this is your idea of a joke…” I mumbled, but shut up when Becky shot me a pair of daggers from her eyes.

What answered us both was totally unexpected.

It was a laugh.

Not the kind of laugh that came from the mouth of a young tween girl, either. This was throaty and hoarse, and it had more than a little craziness running through it. I’d also heard it before, and I knew exactly where.

It was the Dark Man.

The first sign of his approach was the laugh, rippling and echoing along the glass-filled hallways. We couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from, because the acoustics were so messed up. The second sign came through the mirrors themselves: my hand was resting on one, the fingertips brushing lightly against its surface like so many people must have done before, and I suddenly noticed that they were burning…no, not burning, freezing. The glass was becoming ice cold. I turned my head to look and saw that the mirror was starting to frost over; actually, all of the mirrors were starting to ice up, looking like the windshield of Mom’s car on a winter morning when she made me go out there and scrape it off for her before she went to work.

We could see the breath in front of our face, fogging up the air in a fine mist every time we exhaled. It had felt fine just a minute ago, but now it was turning as cold as a meat locker. Becky began to tremble, but it wasn’t fear — she was shivering. I put my arms around her protectively, and that was when I figured out that I was shivering too. The sweat on my body was turning ice-cold too. It felt as if somebody had poured a glass of ice water down the back of my shirt.

Then the footsteps started up again.

“Danny, is this…”

I nodded, then realized how stupid that was. “Yeah,” I said. “This is the one. It’s him.The Dark Man.”

Becky shrugged off my embrace, standing tall at her full height and taking up a kickboxer’s stance, her fists bunched and ready to lay down some hurt. Damn, but she was impressive. I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of her, not even up at Long Brook when everything was turning into a nightmare and all I wanted to do was get the hell out as fast as my legs would carry me.

She was standing between me and the corridor that we’d both come along, like a bodyguard getting between her client and some psycho stalker. How had I ever let myself get on this girl’s bad side? More to the point, how had I ever been stupid enough to treat her the way I had?

Those footsteps were so close now, just around the corner on our left. It felt as though, if I just leaned out over Becky’s left shoulder, I could reach out a hand and touch him…not that I wanted to.

“Come on then,” Becky said, sounding as brave as anybody could under the circumstances. Her voice cracked a little, but who could fault her for that? I knew that deep down, she had to be as terrified as I was. And cold. Oh man, this freaking cold… “Bring it!”

There was that laugh again, that grating, mocking laugh.

“Very well,” came the reply, and this time I recognized the voice straight away. It sounded as though it came from different vocal cords than the laugh, if such a thing was possible, but also coming from exactly the same place, as though two people were speaking through one mouth. But there was no mistaking that silky, oily little purr, and suddenly my teeth were set on edge from more than just the chattering. It was Malachi freaking Falconer.

The English turd stepped slowly around the corner — at least, his silhouette did — with both arms held out palms-upward on either side of his body in an I come in peace gesture that all three of us knew was complete bullshit. Slowly, he leaned forward and bowed low at the waist.

“Why Rebecca, my dear, whatever is the matter?” The man practically oozed insincerity from every pore. Unfortunately, it worked. Only for a second, but a second was long enough; taken off guard by his faux-polite douchebag move, she dropped her fists just a little, doubt creeping into her body language. She’d been brought up to be polite, after all, and nobody did polite better than the English.

That’s when he struck. It was fast, like a snake uncoiling and lashing out. Suddenly he had batted her arms aside with his own and was crushing her in some weird kind of…I don’t know, bear hug, for lack of a better word, wrapping his long, spindly arms around her and stopping her from struggling somehow.

I saw red and threw out a fist with as much force as I could muster, which wasn’t much even on a good day. This really wasn’t shaping up to be a good day, but the punch connected anyway, scraping off the cloth of his suit jacket. I’d been going for his face, but this was the best that I could do in the dark. Falconer laughed again, and this time it was more of a harsh and guttural bark, the type of voice they give to aliens and demons in the movies. I think I did pretty well not to just pee myself on the spot. Falconer looked up at me from over Becky’s shoulder, and I could see that his eyes were glowing in the darkness, burning a cold, spectral blue fire. They didn’t blink either, just stared at me, and then I was thinking about snakes yet again, and the way their lidless eyes looked at you without breaking eye contact.

Falconer grinned, two rows of unnaturally-straight, perfect white teeth. I know what he was trying to do: he wanted to terrify me with it, reduce me to a spineless puddle of goo with that I’m the predator and you’re the prey move of his, but you know what? It didn’t exactly have the desired effect, or anything even close to it…because he was holding Becky, and I loved her, damn it, and there was no way, no freaking way, that he was taking her anywhere.

I balled up my right fist as tight as I could, keeping it down low at my waist while I worked up the nerve to plant it right on the tip of that smug beaky nose of his.

My back was to the wall, pressed up hard against the freezing cold glass, and that was my first big mistake: for just a few seconds, I’d forgotten that the spirits in this godforsaken place moved through the mirrors. I only remembered it again when a pair of shadowy arms suddenly wrapped themselves around my head, then closed on my throat and began to squeeze. I gasped and choked, spit flying out of my mouth. I could feel my windpipe spasm, pinched off by vice-tight forearms. Falconer was laughing again, cackling so hard that he put The Joker to shame, and began to drag the still-struggling Becky back out into the main corridor.

Still struggling myself, I reached up and swatted at whoever it was that was holding me, but their grip wouldn’t give — not surprising really, because the best I could do was feebly swat and slap at them. It wasn’t dark in here any longer, or so I thought at first, but then I realized what was really going on: there were bright lights dancing in front of my eyes, drowning out the darkness, and I started to feel suddenly faint, as though my head was full of smoke or something. This must be what being drunk feels like, a part of my brain said in amazement, and then the dancing lights were replaced by a deeper blackness that had nothing to do with the outside world. My knees gave out, and I felt my legs buckle underneath me, my back sliding down the ice-cold mirror until I finally lay slumped on the floor. Whoever was choking me out must have squatted to follow me down, because the grip hadn’t eased off one iota.

And then Falconer was back, just standing there right in front of me. Unless you’re hallucinating, I thought, spitting froth out as I struggled futilely to get a breath in. But then he confirmed it, bending down and sticking those glowing blue eyes just inches away from mine, the condescending-but-still-predatory smirk still there as well.

“I’m afraid that young Miss Rebecca is no longer your concern, Mr. Chill,” he tut-tutted, the smile stretching from ear to ear now. “But rest assured, I shall take the very best care of her.”

I spat, which was pretty much all that I could do now. My body refused to move, and it felt as if I was drifting away on a warm, soft water-bed, while somebody went around the room and turning out the lights one by one.

“Now,” Falconer went on, “let me tell you a story…”

The last thing I felt was the chill of his bone-cold hands taking hold of my temples. Then my whole world turned to black.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Have you ever seen some — really seen something — without ever opening your eyes? Let me tell you, it’s the weirdest thing.

Like pretty much every seer out there, my spirit body has left my physical body while I’ve been asleep and traveled to the spirit realms; in fact, that’s how I usually meet up with Lamiyah, my spirit guide (usually in some far-off fantastic place that I’ve never quite figured out is a mental construct or a real, actual alien planet or something). Anyways, this wasn’t that. I had traveled somewhere outside my body, or at least it sure felt like it, but something about this place just felt…I don’t know, off somehow.

I was standing in the middle of a…well, I guess that you could call it a street, even though there was no real road or sidewalk: instead, when I looked down, I saw that I was standing in dark brown mud around the soles of my sneakers. Well, that was a relief at least — I was still the inhabitant of my own body, and not somebody else’s. When I had spirited-traveled to Long Brook Sanatorium the night before we actually drove up there, I had looked in the mirror and seen somebody else’s face staring back at me, the face of a young boy. Creepiest feeling in the world. But this time, even though there wasn’t a mirror handy, I could see my own shoes, pants, and shirt, which meant that if I did look in a mirror, I would probably see my own face. Whew.

The sky was grey and overcast with fat and swollen clouds, which were drizzling down rain into the mud. Little pools and puddles were forming, and I could see people stepping carefully around them so that they didn’t get their feet any wetter than they already were. The road seemed pretty busy; looking from one end to the other, I could see maybe nine or ten people going about their business. One, a tall man wearing a black felt hat, was carrying a struggling chicken under his arm. His expression was somewhere between determined and annoyed as he trudged towards me through the mud, and as he came closer I got a better look at his outfit. He was wearing what looked like some kind of long green smock, and threadbare brown pants that had holes at the knees. The pants were tucked into the tops of some leather boots that had also seen better days — the left one’s sole was flapping every time he took a step, and had to be letting in a ton of water.

When the big man splashed past me, I looked down; the mud splatters that he kicked up went straight through me without leaving a mark, just as you would expect if you were a spirit traveler in some other place where the people weren’t aware of you. But where exactly was I? Along one side of the long street was a huge stone wall, maybe fifteen feet high, that ran in both directions as far as I could see. On the other was a bunch of houses that looked like they had come straight out of a historical movie. Wherever we were, the local people liked to build stuff out of wood. One of the bigger buildings had a sign hanging from a wooden arm just above the entrance. I went over to have a look. It was a painted picture of a gold crown and two crossed swords, along with the words King’s Arms. Was this some kind of military armory then, I wondered?

Curious, I took a few steps inside. My hand passed straight through the door handle, which told me that I was in some place that my spirit body couldn’t physically manipulate anything (that was a new one), but that meant that all I needed to do was walk straight through the thick wooden door…into what I thought, at first, was a building on fire.

Smoke was everywhere. The last time I’d seen anything like it was on the roof at Long Brook, when the whole building really had been on fire; dark black smoke had been pouring out of every window below us, and we couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of our own faces. This was different, though. The smoke was lazier, more comfortable, and nobody was panicking or running around like headless chickens in here. Through the occasional gap in the drifting smoke, I could see a low ceiling with wooden beams running across it. I went further in, and now it all started to make sense. That had to be a bar over there, complete with a fat, scowling innkeeper leaning on it. He was pouring a tankard of something for a skinny little man who was dressed like a farmer…from five hundred years ago.

Was that it — had I traveled back in time somehow? It sure looked like it. From what I could see of the other drinkers at the inn, they were all dressed in a similar way, as though they were extras from Vikings or some similar TV show. There were a few really epic beards on show, long enough to put ZZ Top to shame. Everybody looked totally miserable. The inn was busy though, and people were gathered around tables, talking in hushed tones over their drinks. This isn’t what an inn is supposed to be like, I thought to myself. Not that I’d ever been in a bar or a pub for real, but I’d seen plenty on TV. They were always loud, noisy places, with lots of laughing and joking around going on. This place looked as though somebody had just died.

The front door slammed open against the wall behind me, and I turned to watch as a big, muscular man — he must have been six and a half feet, at least — was framed in the doorway for a second, before taking the steps down into the inn with a confident swagger that screamed I’m the alpha dog around here, and you’d better not forget it. He passed straight through me, which seemed like it should have felt weird but didn’t, and stood in the center of the room, ducking his head to keep from hitting it on the ceiling. I noticed that he was carrying a pair of heavy iron shackles, the sort that looked like they belonged in a dungeon.

The innkeeper, just finished pouring the drink for his customer, looked up and said respectfully, “Constable.”

“Tom,” the big man nodded. Constable. Wasn’t that what the British called their cops? He looked around the inn. Every conversation had stopped. Every man was giving him their full attention. This dude obviously commanded a lot of respect. He took a breath, ignoring the smoke, and said, “It’s time, lads.”

Now the murmuring started up again. Time, I wondered…time for what?

“I’ve been to the magistrate this morning.” The constable took out a piece of paper that had been rolled up into a scroll, and held it up in the air for everyone to see. The drinkers looked up at it as though it was the most precious, valuable thing they had ever seen. “This makes it all proper and legal, like. It’s time to get the job done and be rid of him, once and for all.”

There came a chorus of “ayes,” and one “I’ll drink to that!” to which the constable said, “Don’t you worry, Peter Croft — you can stay here and drink, while all of us younger men do the real work!” He winked at the man who occupied a table by the window, and was now laughing around the lip of his tankard. He saluted the constable with it and took a long swallow.

“How many will you need, constable?” asked the kid who sat next to him. He sounded hopeful. I went over for a closer look (none of them were able to see me) and guessed that he was nine or ten at most.

“No more than six, William — and I’m sorry, but they’ll need to be old enough to actually reach the bar to get served.” The inn broke out in laughter, and it felt as though the tension was slowly draining out of the room. This constable was a likable dude — if this was D&D, he’d be rolling super high on his charisma scores — and he smiled at the boy, who had blushed deep red when the cop had pointed out that he wasn’t old enough to be drinking.

“I’m in,” said a man sitting at a table next to the bar.

“Me too,” said another.

“And me.” A third from an alcove next to the front door. The constable soon had his six volunteers, and was turning down others who were enthusiastically waving their hands in the air.

“Alright,” he said finally, apparently satisfied with his choices. The six men finished their drinks and slammed the tankards down loudly on top of the wooden tables. “No time like the present. Shall we?”

And just like that, a lynch mob was formed.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The constable turned and left the inn, taking his volunteers along with him. When the door closed behind the last man, I stepped through it and followed them out. It was raining harder now, and the street was completely empty. The leader took off with a determined stride, keeping the big stone wall at his left and lifting his boots high out of the shlurping mud with every step. One of his followers got his own boot caught in the mud, his foot coming clear and causing him to lose his balance and fall face-first into the mess. He swore like he was starring in a Tarantino movie, and one of his laughing buddies stuck out a hand and helped him up.

“Keep it together lads,” the constable cautioned, all trace of humor gone now. “It’s not far now, and it’s a serious business we’re about.”

One of the volunteers, a thin man with greasy brown hair, hustled up to walk alongside him. “What’ll we do, constable, if he uses his…” the man dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, and I had to lean in close to hear “…you know, dark magicks?”

“We’ll hit him fast, and we’ll hit him hard. Scaffold’s already standing in the square and waiting for him. His neck will be stretched before noon.”

“There’s to be no trial?” asked the thin man, blinking the rain of his eyes. It was making the dirt run in streaks down his face.

“None needed,” the constable replied firmly. “He’s a warlock, that’s all there is to it. The magistrate agrees. He’s signed a death warrant. Nothing more to be said.”

Seemingly satisfied, the curious volunteer fell back into line behind the cop. We walked for about five minutes to the outskirts of town, past the last house, and then cut off into some dark woods. It wasn’t long before the shape of a shack or hut loomed up out of the gloom, and if I’m honest, I’ve got to admit that I was relieved it wasn’t a gingerbread house. I mean, fairytales happened in woods that looked like this…the hut was actually leaning towards the left, looking as though it could fall down at any moment.

Picking up the pace now, the constable was moving fast but not quite at a run. When he was two steps away from the rickety front door, he pivoted and kicked at it…hard. The door was blasted off its hinges and flew out of sight inside the hut, the cop right behind it. Four of the volunteers followed him in. Two others hung around outside, looking nervous. I felt the same way, but then remembered that nothing could touch me in this place, and that made me pretty much invulnerable, so what was there to be afraid of? Figuring here goes nothing, I pushed forward into the shattered doorway.

Man, this place was a hole. It was basically a one-room shack, with a small fire was burning in the middle of a dirt floor. Smoke was venting up through a hole cut in the roof, which must have let water in whenever it rained…and it looked like rained here (wherever here was) a lot. It wasn’t quite as smoky as the inn had been, though, and there was enough light coming in through the open door for us to see by.

I recognized a bunch of occult symbols scrawled on the wooden walls and ceiling in what I really hoped was red paint and not blood. Then something nasty caught my eye: a pair of what looked like rabbits hung from a hook, halfway-skinned and dripping blood into a wooden bowl on the floor.

Whoever lived here obviously wasn’t much for housekeeping. A wooden plate with some half-eaten…whatever had been tossed in the corner, next to a filthy cooking pot half-full of just-as-filthy water. Even though I couldn’t smell, I almost wanted to gag when I saw the layer of scum floating on top of that cooking water. Gross.

The constable had been looking under the piles of rags and junk that were scattered all around the shack, tossing them aside impatiently when he didn’t find what he was looking for.

“’e’s not ‘ome,” said one of the volunteers. I couldn’t tell whether he was disappointed or relieved.

“We’ll soon see about that,” replied the cop. I was starting to think that I was somewhere in the UK, based on the way these guys spoke; it was kind of gruff though, and didn’t sound modern at all. Not like—

“Falconer!” The constable was bellowing slimy limey’s name over and over again, getting angrier by the minute. He’d looked in pretty much every hiding place inside the hut, and hadn’t found anything more than a few dirty metal coins.

Falconer. That explained it. Somehow I was spirit-traveling to a place that the Snare’s owner had been, or was, or maybe sometime would be…it all got pretty complicated when you were dealing with the spirit world.

“Constable! Out here!” It was one of the two men who’d been reluctant to enter the hut. The constable ducked outside, and I followed him. The fatter of the two guys was standing about twenty feet away from the shack, pointing at something on the ground. When I got closer, I could see that it looked like a freshly-dug grave.

The constable gave a tight smile. “Find shovels.”

After a couple of minutes spent turning the shack upside down and inside out again, the volunteers shrugged and said they couldn’t find anything to dig with.

“Then use your bloody hands!”

The six men hurried to obey, getting down on all fours and scooping out clods of dirt with their hands like puppies digging in a flowerbed. It helped that the soil was damp and soggy from the rain, more sludge than mud, and pretty soon they had excavated down to about three feet.

That’s when I saw the face.

Falconer’s face.

First the nose was free of the dirt (and there was no way I could have mistaken that nose for anybody else’s) and then after two more scoops, the rest of the face was visible. He looked just like he was sleeping, instead of being the kind of asleep that most people were when they were buried in a hole in the ground. He didn’t look dead; his skin was actually pretty lifelike from where I was standing, though it was streaked with mud.

The volunteers were reluctant to keep digging, shrinking back from the body like he was radioactive or something, but after a stern glare from the alpha dog they went back to hesitantly uncovering the body. Falconer was wearing a black robe, just like those that the magic-users are seen wearing in the D&D manuals, though this one was caked in mud and the occasional plant root and twig. His feet were bare, and I couldn’t help but notice that his toenails were super-long, curled up at the end like Aladdin’s slippers. His chest was barely moving, but when I moved closer I could see that he was still breathing,

Got to give the copper his props, he moved fast. He slipped the manacles over the still-sleeping man’s wrists, then used a small stone to hammer a metal pin into place on each one.

“Got you now, you bastard,” the constable grunted in satisfaction, straightening up and standing over the body of his prey. “Now you’ll swing for sure.”

I recognized the laughter straight away. I’d heard it before, in the mirror maze at the Snare of Souls. But it wasn’t coming from Falconer, who was still laying in the earth between the cop’s legs; it was coming from somewhere deep inside the woods, which suddenly seemed a heck of a lot more menacing than they had just a few second ago. The laughter was high-pitched and borderline demented.

The Dark Man appeared slowly from between the trees. He didn’t so much walk as glide, and was dressed exactly the same way as when I’d seen him inside the maze. He smiled that same predatory smile as he came forward, and I could have sworn that the soles of his black leather boots weren’t even touching the ground.

“Step back, foul creature,” the constable warned, getting between Falconer’s body and the oncoming threat. “This wretch is lawfully charged and convicted of practicing the dark arts. We have no quarrel with you, but he is coming with us.”

“Oh, I really don’t think so, constable.” The last word was delivered in a way that was obviously meant to mock the lawman. “But I think you may find that you, and your cohort” – he swept both arms out and gestured at the volunteer crew – “might be going with him.”

When the Dark Man moved, he was fast: insanely fast. The skinny brown-haired dude was closest, maybe twenty feet away. The Dark Man was on him in a flash. Wrapping both hands around the back of his victim’s head, the Dark Man leered at him and brought his mouth close to the one that was screaming back at him in terror. I had a hard time believing my eyes when I saw what happened next: even though my gut was telling me that I couldn’t be harmed in this place, wherever it was, I was every bit as frightened as the flesh and blood men when the monstrous creature began to suck the life energy out of his body.

Skinny dude began to spasm and jerk, like a guy I’d once seen having a seizure in Starbucks. The Dark Man was latched onto his face with both hands, pulling the poor guy in closer and closer, until finally their mouths were almost touching in some sick and twisty parody of a kiss. A blinding white light appeared out of nowhere, dancing and writhing in between their two interlocked faces, like some kind of electrical spider’s web. I recognized it as spirit essence, the thing that really makes us us; not the meat puppet that we’re all used to driving around every day, the one that gets sore and tired and eventually just wears out and dies. No, this was the energy that makes up what we truly are, our soul itself.

And it was being stolen.

All of us that were watching stood rooted to the spot in horror, unable to move, even the constable himself who had led us here. The Dark Man’s victim slowly stopped thrashing, going limp in the monster’s arms until he was sagging on lifeless legs, a total dead weight. I know this sounds crazy, but I swear he was actually thinner than he was a few seconds ago, as though more than just the vitality had been drained out of him. He was a hollow shell of a human being, reminding me of those poor concentration camp survivors or end-stage cancer patients.

The Dark Man dropped the lifeless sack of bones into the mud in the exact same way that you would toss the leftovers of your Big Mac Meal into the trash at McDonald’s, and for the very same reason. The skinny dude was a lot skinnier now, and very obviously dead. All the skin of his face and arms was sucked inward over the bones, causing his sightless eyes to bulge out of their sockets. Fat raindrops bounced off them, before running down the sides of his face like tears. The dead guy could only have weighed fifty or sixty pounds at most now that the Dark Man was done with him; he made me look like a muscle-head by comparison.

“Now…who’s next?” the Dark Man asked politely, from behind that sharkish grin.

The five volunteers that were left alive bolted, scattering in every direction. Got to give the cop his due, the man stayed, even though he had to be scared enough to need a new pair of shorts.

“Get you gone, you foul spawn of the devil!” he bellowed, standing his ground over Falconer’s still-sleeping manacled body. “You shall not prevent the justice of the Lord from being carried out this day!”

Color me shocked, but the so-called spawn of the devil just threw back his head and laughed. He laughed so hard, in fact, that if he’d been able to cry, tears would have been streaming down his face. Not deterred in the slightest, the constable reached inside the collar of his shirt and pulled out a small carved wooden crucifix, which hung around his neck on a leather thong. Slipping it over his head, he held it out at arm’s length towards the monster, a protective talisman against his supernatural enemy.

The Dark Man just laughed harder and louder when he caught sight of the cross, holding his sides theatrically as if he was afraid that they would quite literally split apart at the seams. If you watched his eyes carefully though, it was clear that he wasn’t even the slightest bit amused: in fact, I got the feeling he wasn’t even capable of humor, had no idea what the concept even meant. No, this laughter was a tactic, a predatory cruelty like that of a cat playfully torturing a mouse.

“Run, dude! Freaking run already!” I yelled at the constable, as loud as I could manage. He didn’t react, couldn’t hear me at all, in the same way that nobody had been able to see or hear me since I first arrived in the middle of that street. But I had to try…I knew this wasn’t going to end well for the cop if the Dark Man got his hands on him. My mind was firing away on all cylinders, despite the fact that I was quite literally shaking with fear. I still didn’t know just who the hell the Dark Man was. I knew that he and Falconer were connected somehow: when I’d first met him, I was thinking that Falconer and the Dark Man were the same person, but here they were in the same place, at the same time, so that blew away that particular theory.

Or…did it?

What were they both doing here, in what I was guessing was jolly old England from a few hundred years ago? The Dark Man had come creeping out of the woodwork when Falconer’s body was dug up, like a guard dog running to defend his sleeping master against some kind of threat while he was sleeping. Could that be it — was the Dark Man a sort of…I don’t know, supernatural pit bull or something, conjured up by Falconer to protect him when he was most vulnerable?

It made a crazy kind of sense, when you looked at it like that. Even as I stood there, transfixed, watching as the Dark Man slowly advanced towards the constable, gliding smoothly and laughing like a maniac. Yes it was freaking me the hell out, but a tiny part at the back of my brain wouldn’t let go of trying to figure out the link between the two of them. I knew that there were dark powers in the world — Lamiyah had hinted as much, and had taught me a few methods of self-protection from evil spirits and dark entities when I had first started to communicate with her and venture into the spirit realm. Could Mr. Douchebag Abbey be an ordinary guy that had learned how to control those dark powers for his own ends? I thought about it for a second. If that was true, he had to have been alive for a long time, assuming that my spirit body really had journeyed back in time to ye olde worlde Englande, as they used to say: he’d have to be hundreds of years old, at the very least.

“Back! Back!” The constable sounded doubtful now, his faith crumbling with every passing second, and I couldn’t blame the guy in the slightest. The Dark Man was within arm’s reach, and swatted the cross out of his hand with a stinging slap, sending flying off into the undergrowth. Then the Dark Man was on him. Yes, the cop was powerfully built — his biceps were thicker than both of my thighs put together! But it didn’t matter in the end. Though he was stick-thin, the Dark Man possessed super-human strength. When the constable swung a punch at him, the sort of blow that should have taken his head clean off his shoulders, the Dark Man casually grabbed his fist and stopped it cold…and then began to squeeze. Pretty soon the constable was squealing in agony. From the crunching and popping sounds, I was betting that every bone in his hand was now broken.

I fought the rising urge to puke. Nobody should ever be in enough pain to have to scream like that: nobody, and least of all a grown man whose days were spent keeping the peace. The Dark Man was laughing in the face of the constable’s agony, craning his neck to bring their faces in close to one another.

Then he began to feed again.

I started to back away, not wanting to watch another good man turned into a shriveled pile of skin and bones; I just couldn’t stomach it. But then I looked down at the shallow grave in the earth where Falconer was still sleeping. Had been sleeping, I saw now, because suddenly his eyes flew open and he looked straight at me, blinking the slick streams of muddy rainwater from his face as he sat up slowly.

“Greetings, Deadseer,” he smiled coldly. “Fancy seeing you here…”

CHAPTER TWENTY

I didn’t know what to say. Hey, would you?

Having dragged the poor constable away from Falconer’s cosy little hidey-hole, the Dark Man was busily eating his face and draining him of his life’s energy. My fists were clenched at my sides, but I knew that it was pointless. I couldn’t touch anything in this world, so there was nothing I could do to try and stop the murder but yell and scream at the monster responsible…and there was no guarantee that I would be seen or heard there, either. Besides, if the Dark Man was aware of my presence, I felt pretty sure that he would just get off on the idea of my helpless rage anyway. So I kept my attention riveted on Falconer.

“Now this is interesting,” the Englishman purred, climbing to his feet and using a sleeve of the tattered robe to wipe the worst of the mud and rainwater from his face. He looked like a homeless Ebeneezer Scrooge, instead of the suave, annoyingly well-dressed Roger Moore lookalike that Mom and I had met at the Snare. Now that he was standing up, I could see that his hair was quite a bit longer — in fact, it was dangerously close to being a mullet, which actually made me feel a tiny bit better…I mean, who’s going to be frightened of anybody who had a mullet?

Business at the front, party at the back, my friend. I laughed, as much out of nervousness as anything, and Falconer frowned. He drew himself up to his full height and turned to face me.

“What’s interesting?” I asked, fighting the urge to stammer. I didn’t want this dirtbag knowing how intimidated I was of him and his lapdog.

“The fact that you, my young friend, really should not be here.” He took a step toward me, and I took an involuntary one back to maintain the gap between us. He smiled at that, seeming to read my mind, and that made me feel angry at myself for showing even a hint of weakness.

“Mind telling me where here is, exactly?” No harm in trying, I figured.

“And why should I?”

“Because you Brits are supposed to be all about manners, and it would be the polite thing to do.”

Falconer seemed to ponder that for a moment, looking vaguely ridiculous standing in the middle of a muddy open grave wearing nothing but a filthy robe. Finally, he reached a decision.

“Very well. Simply because it pleases me, you understand.”

I nodded. Not that I’d necessarily trust a word that came out of his mouth, but you never knew, I might learn something if I kept my own mouth shut — or as shut as someone like me could ever manage — and just listened.

“Here is really two places, young man…the first of which is, of course, the interior of my own mind. It is a construct comprised of my own memories, if you will.”

“So it’s not real?” I prompted.

“Not strictly, no. But then again, what is real?” Falconer was clearly warming to his theme now. Like every single James Bond villain, he loved the sound of his own voice. “It has no material reality, that I will grant you. But it is as real as any fragment of memory can ever possibly be. These events, such as they are —” he swept out a hand to encompass the hut, the treeline, and the form of the Dark Man hunched over as he finished feeding upon the helpless copper — “were once very real indeed.”

“So all of this actually happened?” I was intrigued, despite myself.

“Oh yes. Can you guess where this little melodrama took place?” He raised his eyebrows encouragingly, inviting me to take my best shot. All right, I thought, I’ll play your little game. For now.

“Somewhere in England.”

“Splendid!” he clapped his hands together gleefully. The Dark Man didn’t so much as look up, his face still enveloped in light while his prey withered away in his grip. “You are absolutely correct. This is England, and the year is…was, 1692. A most remarkable year, as I remember it.”

“Good for wine?” I jabbed, but he fired a shot right back.

“Well, not so good over in the Colonies, where your ancestors were quite happily hanging men and women for witchcraft in a bijou little hamlet named Salem.”

Nice comeback, I had to admit to myself. The Salem witch trials were one of America’s deepest, darkest, most shameful periods of history, when ordinary, everyday men and women could find themselves on trial and executed just because one of their neighbors (or even a total stranger) claimed that they were a witch. We’d read about it in school last year and it seemed ridiculous in the twenty-first century to learn that just a few hundred years ago, people had been so scared of one another that they would convince a judge to have their own friends and family members executed on charges of witchcraft. Hell, the whole stupid mess had gotten so far out of hand that they had even killed dogs because somebody had claimed they were witches’ familiars! The whole thing was completely nuts.

“Yeah, not exactly our finest hour,” I admitted, stealing a line from his fellow countryman Winston Churchill. Now he had been a kick-ass kind of guy.

“Indeed not,” Falconer agreed civilly, “and nor, to be fair, was it ours here in the mother country. For you see, we were no strangers to the persecution of witches and warlocks etcetera ourselves.”

A light bulb pinged on over my head.

“And that’s what was happening here?”

He nodded and held his arms out to either side as if to protest his innocence. “Yes. I was just a humble practicioner of the magick arts, you see. Nothing more…at least, not then. Nowadays it is a different story, but I was young then, and wanted only to be left alone while I advanced my craft.”

“Just a humble practitioner,” I repeated, then added, “who sleeps in a shallow grave outside his own hut?”

Falconer shot me an annoyed glance, but finally conceded, “Well, perhaps not quite so humble.”

“So what were you?” I pressed. What I really meant was: what are you? The more I knew about this douchebag, the better my chances of rescuing Becky would be when I woke up. Whenever that would be…

“Something older and more powerful than you can possibly conceive of, Deadseer.”

“That explains a lot. Usually, the older something gets, the worse it starts to stink.”

He took a step toward me threateningly.

“I would be a little more careful in my choice of words if I were you.”

I wasn’t going to cave and take a step back.

“Well, you’re not me. You’re so much freaking uglier.”

Falconer smiled like a predator eying up a potential victim. “Beauty, as with so many things, is in the eye of the beholder. And you have such pretty eyes…” He reached out a hand toward my face, and this time I did flinch.

The slap that knocked his hand away took us both by surprise. Even more so because it was delivered by a young Indian girl who stepped in between us and shielded me from Falconer’s pure creepiness.

“You will not touch him.”

“Lamiyah!” I don’t think I’ve ever been so relieved to see anyone in my entire life. “What—”

“No time.” She grabbed my hand impatiently, and with a wave of her hand, we were gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“Daniel, are you alright?” She took a knee and reached out to me with a glowing blue hand, caressing my cheek gently. Her skin was cool but not cold when it brushed against my face, which I found pretty comforting. “Has he harmed you?”

“Just a few mind games,” I grunted, struggling to get to my feet. I pushed both hands against the glass for leverage. “Speaking of which – what was that, just now?”

“You had the misfortune to receive a glimpse inside the mind of a very old soul. Old and extremely twisted, I am sorry to say.”

“The Dark Man...or Falconer?”

“One and the same,” she explained, watching with concern as I straightened up and massaged my temples with my fingertips.

“I don’t understand – how can they be? Falconer’s a living, breathing guy. The Dark Man is a spirit: I know, I’ve seen the way he moves, the way his body operates. It’s not a human body.”

“Yes, you are right about that,” Lamiyah acknowledged, “but remember, Daniel, that there are more things in Heaven and Earth…”

“Oh great,” I mumbled under my breath. “Again with the Shakespeare.” From the irritated look she threw me, I guessed that my guide had heard it anyway.

“The Great Bard was quite exceptionally observant, young man,” she lectured me, hands on hips. “I have taken the liberty of looking into Malachai Falconer’s past. What lies there is…let us say, quite disturbing.”

“I could totally believe that.” My eyes scanned the mirrors, hunting for the first sign of moment. All I could see were the natural shadows of the maze, but that could change at any second. “Can we get out of here? This place freaks me out.” Once we were out of the maze, she could chatter on to her heart’s content, but my frayed nerves were right on the edge after what the Dark Man had made me see in here.

“Of course. Come with me.”

I followed the young Indian girl as she made her way out towards the exit, not hesitating for even a second and never missing a turn or stepping into a dead end. Finally we were back out in the concession area, where customers could buy sodas and candy bars that were kept inside a tall fridge, which stood next to a cash register. The ER doors were off to our right, and the long hallway that led to the lobby doors. Shadows moved at the end of that hallway, human-shaped shadows, and I really hoped that it was the Snare’s performers getting into position for the night ahead, and not the spirit followers of the Dark Man.

I could see through the glass doors that it was fully dark outside now, and could just make out a line of people snaking across the parking lot: customers were already queueing to get in, I guessed. A bunch of others were milling about in small groups, just hanging out and chatting to one another. There was lots of muffled laughter, some of it with a nervous edge, and more than a few screams – though whether of delight or genuine fear, I just couldn’t tell.

Letting out a breath I hadn’t known that I was holding, I asked her what the deal was with Falconer and the Dark Man.

“What you saw…no, what you experienced inside Falconer’s head was really nothing more than a very vivid memory, Daniel,” she began, “a window into events of his distant past.”

“But it was interactive,” I argued, “he spoke to me. And to you. And you spoke to me too. And to him! So how—”

“It is complicated.” Lamiyah held up a hand to cut off my objections mid-flow. “Let us simply say that when Falconer laid hands upon you, a contact was established between the two of you – a bridge, you might say – by which the two of you could transmit your thoughts psychically.”

“Like a Vulcan mind meld?” I asked hopefully.

“I have no idea what that is. Probably something from one of those ridiculous films that you are so enamored with?” she asked, exasperated. I flashed her a slightly embarrassed smile and nodded for her to go on. “Based upon the name, you may not actually be all that far from the truth, for a melding of the minds did indeed take place between the two of you.”

“That’s sort of awesome…and sort of disgusting.” If he could do the real-world equivalent of a mind meld, I’d better not let him pinch my neck. “So did he mean for it to happen? For me to see all that stuff? And how were you in there, if it was just a link between my mind and his?”

“As your spirit guide, Daniel, my mind is also psychically linked to your mind.” Which made total sense, now that I came to think of it. “As to his motivations, that’s a little harder to say. Falconer may have been as surprised as you were to find you present within his lucid memory.”

“He sure seemed surprised when he opened his eyes,” I pointed out, taking another look at the line of of customers outside. It was getting longer. My phone said that it was five minutes til seven, so the Snare would be opening in just a few minutes.

“I should imagine that that would be the case. But then again--”

“There you are!”

We both turned.

“Jessica! I thought F…I thought the Dark Man got you!” I corrected myself.

The goth girl looked genuinely pleased to see me, which was a far cry from the studied indifference she’d shown when I first met her a few hours ago. Her hair was mussed into a mess and she was sweating hard. Then again, if you had been stalked in a dark maze by the thing that had just come after us, I’m willing to bet that you’d be pretty frazzled too.

“Is that the one who took Becky?” she asked breathlessly, brushing a strand of hair away from her face. I nodded. “I saw him dragging her away. I tried to go after them, but they…I…I was scared.” She seemed embarrassed, almost ashamed. “I saw his face and it was…wrong. Either that’s really good makeup, or he isn’t human.”

“Tell her that she has nothing to be sorry for, Daniel,” Lamiyah said quietly. “Falconer and his tulpa are both creatures capable of instilling great fear. None but the hardiest souls are immune.”

“That’s really kind of you,” Jessica answered before I could even open my mouth to pass the message on. “My name’s Jessica. Who are you?”

Lamiyah and I looked at one another, more than a little shocked.

“You can see her?” I asked at last.

“Of course I can,” Jessica said, sounding puzzled that I had even asked that particular question. She extended a hand, which Lamiyah took and shook once in that really formal manner she sometimes had. “My name is Jessica.”

“I am Lamiyah, and it is my very great pleasure to meet you.”

“Likewise. Uh…stupid question, I guess, but here goes nothing. What are you?” She was looking my spirit guide right in the eye. To her credit, Lamiyah took it in her stride.

“It would be easiest if you thought of me as a spirit, although Daniel here far too often refers to me as a ghost.” Her nose wrinkled with distaste. Spirits didn’t like that particular word all that much, any more than they liked being referred to as dead or the departed. She had told me many times that they just didn’t like the connotations. In many ways, the people we thought of as ‘the dead’ were a lot more alive than most of us; after all, at least you didn’t see them wandering around in a daydream with earphones in, or going through life with their faces practically buried in the screen of a cellphone.

“A spirit? Cool.” Just like that, Jessica seemed to accept the fact that she was talking to a spirit: in fact, had just shaken hands with one. Which quite frankly was pretty cool, but now that the fog in my head was starting to clear, I was beginning to realize that we had bigger things to worry about.

“Uh, hey, I hate to break up the meet and greet,” I said apologetically, “but we’re running out of time. That creature – Falconer, whatever he is – has got Becky. We need to get her back.”

“No arguments here,” Jessica said brightly, obviously regaining some of her earlier bounce. “I always knew there was something hinky about that guy – some of the other kids used to tell creepy stories about him but most of us just blew them off. I guess they were true after all. Now I say we find that piece of crap and show him what happens when you mess with the Page clan.”

“I can get behind that. Sounds like he’s long overdue for a good ass-kicking.”

“One moment,” Lamiyah held up a cautionary hand. “Think back a little, both of you; think back to how you felt when you last saw the dark entity which accompanies Falconer when he so desires it.”

“Okaaaaay…” I said slowly, not sure where she was going with this.

“What did you feel?” the spirit guide prompted.

What did I feel? Terrified. I felt as though I could barely move. All the worst clichés from bad scary fiction had hit me all at once. My mouth went dry. My heart started racing, pounding in my chest like it was going to burst right through my breastbone and explode in my face. I broke out in goosebumps and a cold sweat, both at the same time. My hands had started shaking, and then the rest of me joined in with the shivering just a few seconds later.

“Afraid,” Jessica answered quietly for both of us. “We felt afraid.”

“And quite rightly so,” nodded Lamiyah. “It has nothing to do with a lack of courage on your part, either of you; it is simply the nature of this particular beast.”

That got my attention. “Beast? Come on, Lamiyah. You said you went back and checked out this guy’s past. Spill.”

“I will tell you what I know, and I shall do so as quickly as possible,” she replied, taking a deep breath, “but I must caution you: this will not make for pleasant listening.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I’ll try to tell it just as my spirit guide told it to us, but please remember that I’m not even half the natural storyteller that she is. Much of what I learned about the pathetic early life of Malachai Falconer was told to me after, when I met with Lamiyah on one of our shared dream-worlds; I only got the high points when the three of us were standing in the lobby of the Snare, getting ready to go and find Becky. Luckily for you, I can give you some more information now than Jessica and I had back then.

Hopefully I can do the story some justice, at least.

Malachai Falconer had been born in a little English village named St. Osyth, sometime around the tail end of the sixteenth century. According to Lamiyah, as a young dude, Falconer had been more interested in learning how to read than he was in playing with sticks or chasing the village girls, as all of the other boys wanted to do. (To be honest, I could totally relate to that part. I pretty much was that kid too, always happiest with my nose stuck in an SF novel; I don’t think I even spoke to a member of the opposite sex until I turned fourteen or fifteen).

Books were super difficult to come by back then, and also really expensive. It’s not like there were any paperbacks, and of course no digital books. In fact, owning books – even owning a book – was a status symbol, a way of saying “hey, look guys: I have disposable income!” to your friends and neighbors. Hand-written and leather-bound books were the bling of their day, I guess.

His mom had died in childbirth, which was pretty common in those days, so young Malachai was raised by his father, who was some kind of merchant. His father did okay for money, but drank away most of the profits; Lamiyah insisted that he had never gotten over his wife’s death, which had turned him bitter and blown up what, under other circumstances, might only have been a little mean streak. When he was wasted drunk, however, the merchant took the pain and frustration out on the only easy target around: his son.

He did it in the only way he knew how: with his fists.

The young Malachai suffered beating after beating, and went to bed with tears in his eyes and blood in his mouth practically every night. In the next room, his father cried himself to sleep for a totally different reason, with only the ache in his knuckles to distract him from the much deeper pain in his heart.

Some nights, when he knew from the drunken snores that his father was well and truly out until morning, Malachai would slip out through an open window and roam the woods and countryside around St. Osyth. When she looked into his heart in that special way that only the most enlightened spirits have, Lamiyah told us that the only time he truly felt free of his abusive father’s bullying was when he was exploring the world under the cover of darkness, with just the moon and stars to light his way.

It was on one of those nights that Malachai had stumbled on something that would change his life forever. Walking in the woods, long after midnight on a summer’s night, he saw an orange light ahead of him, flickering through the trees. Curious, the young man crept slowly towards it, doing his best not to snap a twig or break a branch along the way.

It was a bonfire, he realized when he was a lot closer: and dancing around it were three men and four women.

Oh, I should point out before I forget: they were naked men and women. All of them.

Young Malachai couldn’t believe what his eyes were showing him. He had heard stories of witches and warlocks before, of course, but never thought he would actually see one, let alone seven of them, all at the same time and without any clothes on.

Straining to get just that little bit closer without being discovered, that was when his luck finally ran out. A branch that he was trying to brush lightly aside snapped. Even over the crackling noise of the bonfire, they heard the loud crack of breaking wood.

The boy turned to run, but it was too late. He was a wiry kid and could probably have outrun them all, especially as they were barefoot and he was not, but one of the women made some kind of sign with her hands. Suddenly, Malachai couldn’t move a muscle. He was frozen, caught in the grip of some invisible force that he couldn’t understand and which scared him half to death.

Laughing, the woman twisted her fingers in an intricate pattern, bringing them closer in toward her body. To his astonishment, the trapped boy was drawn closer to her as well, dragged along through the air with his toes trailing along the ground. He was having a hard time breathing until the woman dumped him unceremoniously in a heap at her feet.

All seven gathered around him in a circle. They seemed really tall and intimidating, looking down on him from above like that; but Falconer had withstood beating after beating from his father, and it took a lot more to intimidate him than a bunch of naked people, even if some of them did seem to have almost-magical powers.

“Well, what have we here?” said the woman, in the style of every James Bond movie villain ever. She appeared to be their leader. The boy simply looked back at her silently, not wanting to make things any worse than they already were: that was the first rule of the victimized, he had learned, not to provoke anger if at all possible.

“He has seen us, Mildred,” said a grey-haired man quietly. “He cannot be allowed to take this knowledge back to his family. If the villagers knew—”

“I haven’t got a family.”

“That’s not true,” said a younger man, speaking from behind a scraggly brown beard. “You’re Tom Falconer’s boy, aint yer? I’ve seen yer and yer old man at the market in St. Osyth often enough.”

Now it was the woman’s turn to gaze silently back at Malachai. Even in the dancing firelight, she noticed that he had a black eye.

“He’s no father to me,” the boy answered quietly. “He beats me. Every night, he beats me.”

“Every boy gets beat,” the beard laughed. “That’s just what you do to boys when they gets out of hand.”

“Every night,” Malachai repeated stubbornly. “No matter what. If I’ve been good. If I’ve been bad. If I haven’t even been there. Doesn’t matter.” He lowered his eyes in a calculated attempt to get sympathy, then added in a small, quiet voice, “I still get beaten.”

Their leader had said nothing, just watching the pair going backward and forward talking about beatings. Then she seemed to come to a decision. “It sounds to me as though such a man hardly deserves to draw breath.” Her accent was very different from that of the two men: Lamiyah said that she sounded educated, which was a pretty rare thing for a woman in the 1500s.

Apparently not even the least bit embarrassed by her total lack of clothes, the woman squatted down in front of the boy and asked, “Would you kill him, if you could?”

The venom in the boy’s eyes when he looked back up at her was all the answer she needed.

“Yes,” the boy said anyway, just in case he hadn’t been understood. It was said so quietly that most of the adults could easily have missed hearing it, but the woman was evidently satisfied. Standing back up to her full height, she raised her arm sharply. The same invisible force propelled Malachai to his feet, and left him standing alone in the center of the circle.

There was no way out, he could see now. There was nothing to do but wait until the coven (for that had to be what they were) decided what was to be done with him.

“Do you know what we are, boy?” the woman asked, as though reading his mind.

He nodded slowly. “I think that you are users of the dark arts,” he said carefully. “Warlocks and witches.”

When they exchanged furtive but knowing glances, Malachai knew that he had called it right.

She smiled. “True enough, young Mister Falconer; we do serve the dark powers. And I ask you now: would you like to serve those same masters?”

Malachai opened his mouth to speak but she cut him off with a lightning-fast finger held up to his lips. “Think carefully before you answer, young man,” she warned. “This is a dangerous gift, and one which should not be accepted lightly.”

“It will bring me great power?” he asked eagerly, unable to keep the excitement out of his voice. “Great strength?”

The woman simply nodded, offering him a wan, thin-lipped smile. “It will. But you should know that great power comes only at great cost.”

“What cost?” Malachai’s eyes narrowed, his mind whirling in an attempt to calculate all of the angles here. The answer, when she gave it, was a simple one.

“Your soul.”

Malachai blinked. He thought about it for all of half a second.

“Done.”

The boy spat on his palm and held it out. Looking at the grubby, spit-streaked palm with disdain, the woman instead reached into a leather bag which lay just at the edge of the circle of firelight. Calmly, she removed a small knife with a triangular silver blade that glinted as she raised it to her wrist and made a single, shallow cut.

She maneuvered her arm over the boy’s head and allowed three red drops to spatter onto his forehead and the bridge of his nose. Then she flipped the knife over with her fingertips, and offered it to the boy, blade-first. He took it without a word, simply offering her a questioning look. A nod was all the answer she seemed willing to return. Finally catching on, Malachai drew the blade across his own wrist, once again drawing blood just as the woman had.

Lamiyah wouldn’t give me any further details about the ritual ceremony that followed, muttering darkly that “blood magic is the oldest and most potent of the supernatural powers,” and flatly refused to be drawn into telling us anything else.

“So what happened next?” Jessica was every bit as into this story as I was, and we were both hanging on Lamiyah’s every word.

Malachai had made some kind of blood pact and become a part of the coven, sneaking out at night after his drunk of a father passed out following the hard work of beating his son for some infraction or other, whether real or imagined. Led by the tall woman, the members of the coven taught the boy low-level spells and hexes. He was an eager student, hungrily devouring every last scrap of knowledge that they would impart and then asking for more.

Much to the surprise of everybody, the young boy turned out to be a natural when it came to the dark arts. Before long, he had mastered the basics and was moving on to more advanced concepts such as necromancy – the art of raising the dead.

“Oh, come on!” I said, ready to call BS on this part. “Necromancy isn’t a real thing! Not unless you’re reading fantasy books, at least.”

Lamiyah just looked at me and let the statement pass without comment. She tried to move on, but I just couldn’t let that drop.

“So you’re telling me that, what, Malachai Falconer is some kind of sorcerer that can bring people back from the dead?”

“Not a sorcerer, per se,” she sighed, exasperated at the term I’d chosen. “And just for your information, while what you would call necromancy is possible, it is neither common nor remotely easy. It also becomes commensurately more difficult the longer one’s body has been dead.”

“Go Frankenstein,” Jessica said admiringly, still trying to wrap her head around the concept. I thought about reminding her that ‘Frankenstein’ was the name of the doctor, not the monster, but my guide was already moving on.

“No, Daniel, Malachai Falconer is more accurately termed a lich. As were the other members of the coven that he happened to stumble upon.”

Lich? I’d heard that word before somewhere. I wracked my brains, trying to figure out where. Then it hit me. That was straight out of D&D. When I described the fantastical creature to Lamiyah, I was expecting her to find its source – a role-playing game, of all things – to be pretty amusing. Instead, she gave me a serious look.

“Your facts are essentially correct,” she admitted, which surprised the hell out of me. Score another one for Gygax and TSR. I always said they were ahead of their time. Lamiyah changed gears slightly and fell back into that way of speaking that I always thought of as ‘lecture mode.’ “A lich is a creature which, while not undead, is not truly alive either. Rather, it exists in a state somewhere in between. Liches can survive that way for hundreds of years, if they are careful about it.”

“That’s pretty awesome,” admitted Jessica. “Uh, how do they manage to…you know, keep going? They have to feed on something.” She thought for a moment and then asked whether they drank blood.

“That’s vampires,” I cut in before Lamiyah could answer. For such an enlightened soul, she sure did get annoyed at being interrupted.

“If we could please remain on topic,” my guide said, a little haughtily I thought, “Daniel, you are right: liches do not drink blood, or anything along those lines. They subsist purely upon human life energy itself, the etheric material of which our spirit forms are made…and that is what makes them so dangerous.”

“What do you mean?” I frowned, not quite getting it.

“I mean that once a lich has consumed its fill of etheric energy, they are more than capable of using it for their own ends. Sometimes this can be as simple as influencing objects through the means of manipulating invisible forces, as Falconers’ mentor did when she entrapped him in the woods.”

I snapped my fingers. “Or like he did himself when the villagers came to get him,” I realized, thinking back to the way that he had gone to town on the constable’s bunch of volunteers.

“Yes, precisely. But our energy, our life force if you will, is very potent, Daniel; far more so than most human beings realize. You mentioned vampires? Well, the parallel holds true only insofar as Falconer and those of his kind can sap the very life’s energy of their victims directly from them, simply by coming into direct physical contact with them.”

That would have explained the blinding light I saw when the constable’s party was attacked. Yeah, he was powerful. Look how quickly the hunters had become the hunted then.

“But what about this other guy?” Jessica wanted to know. “The…what did you call him? The Dark Man?”

“He is a tulpa,” Lamiyah said. I’d heard of them before, mainly because I’d read a book about Tibetan mysticism once, but when Jessica gave her a blank look, she explained, “Well, think of a tulpa as a thought-form, for want of a better term. Tulpas are semi-independent creations, creatures made up of etheric energy and then imbued with some degree of intelligence by those who raised them from nothingness.”

“So that’s why the Dark Man speaks English and reminds me so much of Falconer,” I guessed. It was all starting to make sense now. That was why Falconer and the Dark Man could appear together, and why the Dark Man came across as more of a spirit than a physical person. He looked like a warped, even more twisted version of his master. No, let’s call it what it is…of his father.

“You’re saying that Malachai Falconer, the dude who runs the Snare—” Jessica held out her arms to take in the lobby and the ER that branched off from it “—created his own freaking Mini-me?” She cracked up laughing. Then I caught the bug and lost it too. Lamiyah just stood there and watched the pair of us with her usual air of polite calmness, saying nothing while we laughed like a pair of hyenas at a comedy show.

“I must confess to not knowing what a…a ‘Mini-me’ is,” she said at last, just as I was starting to calm down.

“Don’t worry about it,” I snorted. “Movie reference.”

“Ah,” she said, as if that explained everything. “Anyway, as I was saying: think of the Dark Man as a thought-form, but one with a certain degree of autonomy. It is designed to do its master’s bidding, yes, and can even speak and perform relatively complex tasks, but the tulpa lacks any real level of intelligence.”

“So you’re saying that it’s pretty dumb?” Jessica asked.

“That is not a term that I would use. It is perhaps better to say that the tulpa has attained the developmental level of a four or a five year-old, at most. Do not be fooled by the fact that the creature speaks as though it is an adult, for it most certainly is not one.”

“So it’s a big kid,” Jessica shrugged, “but there has to be more to it than that. It knew how to scare us, without even trying.”

“The tulpa radiates raw fear, Jessica,” my spirit guide explained, using her hands for emphasis. “He – or rather it, because despite its appearance, this is no man – is also immensely strong, and completely impervious to pain. You would do well to avoid it, if at all possible.”

“That’s great,” I snapped, then bit back an angry snarl. It wasn’t fair of me to get angry with Lamiyah, of all people. Must be the stress. I took a deep, hopefully cleansing breath. “Except we all know that we can’t avoid it,” I went on, a little more reasonably this time. “Falconer and the Dark Man have Becky, though I have no idea why, and we’re going to get her back, no matter what.”

Jessica looked at me with her head cocked to one side. “That’s a great question. What does he want with my cousin?”

We both looked at Lamiyah expectantly.

“I have my suspicions,” she said quietly, “based upon what I saw in Falconer’s past.”

“Tell us.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

It turned out that the blood pact was only the beginning of it all: the ritual bought Falconer his way into the coven, but it wouldn’t truly make him one of them.

For that, he had to give up his human life and become a creature of the darkness.

He had to become a lich.

Lamiyah wouldn’t tell me where the child’s skull had come from, but I figured I could make a pretty shrewd guess. At that point, Malachai Falconer must have been willing to do pretty much anything in order to get what he wanted. I was pretty sure that murder wouldn’t have been beyond him.

There was another ceremony a few nights later, this one much longer and more complicated than the first ceremony had been. It lasted for most of the night, and involved a whole lot of blood, a bunch of potions, and a lot of physical activity that my guide flatly refused to talk about.

It ended when the sun came up the next morning, and with Malachai Falconer buried in a shallow grave in the middle of the woods.

For three days, the lich coven just left him there, all alone with only the child’s skull for company. It had been boiled and scraped clean, both inside and out.

“This is a phylactery,” the tall woman had told him, just before the ritual began. None of the coven members would entrust him with their names — not until he was truly one of their number. When Malachai looked blankly back at her, she sighed and explained that it was to be a vessel for his soul. “Over the next three moons, we shall transfer your living essence to this,” she said, before adding that this would be equal parts blessing and curse.

“What do you mean?” Falconer asked, confused.

“Part of the compact that you shall undertake with the dark powers involves the willing emplacement of your soul within the phylactery. Each of us has one,” she answered, indicating the six other members of the coven with a nod of her head, “and before you ask their locations, do not waste your breath. The phylactery of a lich is guarded with one’s very life, if for no other reason than that it is their very life…for so long as the phylactery is kept safe, it remains the repository of our soul. We do not age as mortal men and women age—”

“Do you mean to say that we live forever?” Falconer interrupted eagerly, but the woman shook her head.

“Not forever, for there is no power in all of creation capable of granting that particular request; but for every forty or fifty years which passes for an ordinary man, you shall age only one.” She regarded him levelly. “It may not be true immortality, yet it is a very close second. You may live for a thousand years, if you are willing to live…carefully.”

“How old are you?” the boy asked, causing her to laugh lightly.

“Old indeed,” was all she would say in return. He grinned. “There are other capabilities and benefits that you shall gain,” the woman went on, “but only once the ritual has been completed, and the proper forms obeyed. Now, come.”

She had hurried him to the center of the clearing, where the rest of the coven was obviously keen for the night’s festivities to begin.

When the sun finally went down at the ending of the third day, a pair of pale white hands punched their way free of the soil that enclosed them, their fingertips outstretched towards the first faint evening stars that were beginning to emerge in the purple sky above. The hands twisted, scrabbling at the earth to either side, finally finding purchase on harder ground and hauling Malachai’s body free.

The seven members of the coven were waiting in a semicircle to greet the newborn lich when he finally stood up straight, as naked as the day of his first birth, with only a tiny skull to cover his modesty.

He didn’t bother.

Malachai Falconer shook his head, like a dog shaking itself in order to get dry. Mud and soil flew everywhere. He reached down and brushed more away from his body.

“Welcome, brother,” the seven chanted in unison. “Welcome to our family.”

The new-born lich grinned.

Family.

His father was the first to go.

It didn’t happen immediately, of course; first it was necessary for young Malachai to get a schooling in the dark arts. Becoming some sort of creature that was neither truly living or dead had in no way dimmed his passion for learning, and that voracious desire for more knowledge would serve him well over the years.

He was a quick and an able student. In less than two weeks (or what Lamiyah for some weird reason insisted on referring to as “a fortnight,”) Malachai was able to create thought-forms out of nothing but his soul’s energy, which lived safe and sound inside the child’s skull.

Malachai kept the phylactery buried safely in the earth, changing its location every night, and never hiding it in the same place twice. He was paranoid about the tiny little skull coming to any harm, and to be honest, I guess I would have been too – if, that is, I happened to be a raving psycho like he was. I tried to imagine what it would feel like, knowing that my soul – my actual, honest-to-goodness soul—now lived permanently in the really gross Olde English equivalent of a Tupperware container.

Yeah, I’d have been a little freaked out too.

As the days went by, his power grew. The days bled into weeks, passing by so fast that he hardly noticed. He was engrossed in learning as much as he could, as fast as he could.

Finally, on a cold and lonely dawn in December, it was time for a little payback.

The first rays of sunlight were just visible on the horizon when the prodigal son returned to the village of St.Osyth for the first time in months. Following behind him at a respectable distance (but still close enough to observe events) was the rest of the coven, lurking out of sight in whatever shadows were left.

Just as Malachai had expected, his father was dead drunk. Well, that was easily remedied: soon he would be simply dead.

“Wake up.”

The groggy mumble didn’t make for much of a reply. Malachai had been planning this moment for years, obsessively fantasizing about his revenge down to even the tiniest detail. Last night, while running through it in his head one last time and then giving voice to his thoughts in front of the coven, he had briefly considered using a tulpa to take care of his father. After all, he had reasoned, that way he could look anybody in the eye who dared ask about the events that were to come, and tell them that his hands were totally clean, that he had never even touched the man in months.

Yet the more he thought about it and talked it over with his new-found family, the less he found he liked the idea. What was the point of revenge, the tall woman – whose name he still did not know – had asked, if one did not get to savor it like the finest of wines? Malachai didn’t know the answer to that, because the finest wines he had ever been exposed to were the cheap swill that his father drank by the bucketload, but he certainly took her point.

Sometimes, you really wanted to get your hands dirty.

So when the time was finally at hand to tie up this particular loose end once and for all, it was Malachai himself who pushed open the rickety wooden door that led into his father’s home. Just as he had suspected, it wasn’t even bolted: his father usually passed out before remembering to do it.

The snoring was every bit as loud – and as irritating – as he remembered. It stopped just as soon as the young man, who now felt like an intruder in what was once supposed to have been his own home, stepped into his father’s bedroom and began to cast. His fingers danced through intricate patterns, slowly at first, but growing faster and faster until they were little more than a blur. Hundreds of tiny blue lights surrounding them, rising into the air like steam from the surface of a pond on a hot day.

Malachai’s father reached for his throat, suddenly turning purple. His eyes fluttered open and began to bulge in their sockets. Tears were already streaming down his face as his throat began to close up.

The boy just stood there, and smiled.

It didn’t take long. When the big man gave a last gasp, Malachai lifted both arms in the air with a snap, as though raising an invisible box over his head. His father’s body flew up above the bed and slammed into the wooden ceiling with a sickening thump, breaking his nose in a shower of blood. The boy let him dangle there for a good sixty seconds, watching him silently with his head cocked to one side like a dog waiting patiently for a treat. Then he let his arms drop to his sides. The body dropped with them, breaking the bed frame when it hit. Wood splinters flew everywhere, but somehow not a single one managed to hit the gangly young man standing not ten feet away.

If the strangulation hadn’t killed his father, Malachai reflected, then the broken neck would have. He lay on his back in a heap of jumbled blankets and wood fragments, head lolling at an angle that nobody could possibly survived. His dead eyes stared up at the ceiling, where a star-shaped splatter of blood dripped slowly back down on top of him.

It took only a few hours for the dead man’s spirit to rise up out of its broken physical shell. Like so many of the newly-deceased, it was initially bewildered at finding itself awake in a new body made entirely of energy.

“Son...?”

The boy ignored his father’s increasingly desperate pleas, tuning out the cries for help that the dead man wailed with trembling hands. Malachai had come prepared for this. The members of his coven had taught him much about the nature of the afterlife. For many of the deceased, a spirit vortex would open up within the first few hours of death – sometimes within the first few minutes – and convey them on to the Summerland, the next stage of existence in the astral realm.

Unless, of course, somebody interfered.

Malachai had the knowledge to interrupt this natural process, and he used it without mercy. Collecting some of the dead man’s still-warm blood in a container that he had prepared the night before, the younger Falconer spent the next two hours carrying out the ritual of binding which he had spent the past few days so laboriously preparing. All he needed now was…a focus.

Looking around the house, his eyes settled upon the perfect object: a carved and lacquered oak bench seat, which the now-rare visitors to the Falconer household were invited to sit in whenever they stayed for longer than a few minutes. Dragging it through into the bedroom, Malachai was sitting upon it, drinking from an expensive silver cup when his father’s spirit finally separated. The boy had developed a taste for wine during his time with the coven, and a raid on his father’s liquor supply had paid off.

Setting the cup down carefully to avoid spilling even a single drop of the expensive red, Malachai waved his hands in the precise pattern that would complete the ritual and bind his father’s soul to his side for all eternity…or at least, for as long as the physical object that held it remained unbroken.

“No—what…?” The dead man screamed again, drunk now on terror instead of wine. The ability to feel the effects of alcohol were just one of the many things that you gave up when you passed on, and so the brain-fog that Falconer Senior had been in during his death throes wasn’t there to insulate him from the pain any more.

And for a spirit, being forcibly bound to an object was a painful process. Think of how you would feel if a jailer shackled your arms and legs with heavy iron chains, and you still wouldn’t even begin to understand how much the ritual of binding hurt.

Once it was all over and done with, the boy called for help. The sun was fully up now, and yet nobody in the village was out and about. The tall woman had put a low-level glamor on the place, and the villagers would all surface from their beds sometime in the early afternoon, scratching their heads and trying to figure out why they had all overslept.

Jonas, the biggest man in the coven, stepped inside and raised an inquisitive eyebrow. Malachai nodded toward the bench. Jonas nodded silently, tucked the piece of furniture under one arm seemingly without any effort at all, and followed the newest member of the lich family out into the sunlight.

As the house burst spontaneously into flames, Malachai Falconer didn’t so much as look back even once. He figured that he was trading one family for another, and had cut his old family tree off at the root this day, managing to enslave his father, binding him to his side, for as long as his presence continued to amuse him.

All in all, the boy mused, not a bad morning’s work.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Malachai’s adoptive family lasted longer than his biologic one, but in the end he managed to destroy that one every bit as effectively.

Liches were not the most emotionally stable creatures on a good day, and the coven definitely had its bad days. A lot of bad days.

Jonas was the first. The big man had a temper to match, despite the fact that he had had over three hundred years in which to develop a sense of restraint. He had gotten on Malachai’s bad side. It hadn’t even been a big deal, really; just a misunderstanding over a casual remark made in jest. Now a teenager, and still growing – though at a vastly reduced rate compared to normal human beings – Malachai was becoming more petulant and vindictive by the day.

But he was also cunning, and more importantly, he was patient. For days he simply waited, and he watched. Finally, after trailing Jonas into the woods one night at a discreet distance, he found what it was that he had been looking for: Jonas’ phylactery.

I was guessing from what Lamiyah told me that most phylacteries were bones, or part of the human body. Malachai’s was the skull of a child. Jonas used a big human thigh bone – a femur – to contain his own spirit essence. He had buried it in a hole at the base of a tall tree. This was the first night in the space of a week that he had gone back to check on, it as Malachai had surely known that he would in the end.

“Liches are paranoid creatures at the best of times, Daniel,” she explained to me, continuing the story, “most especially where the hiding place of their soul repository is concerned.”

Jonas hadn’t done a good enough job of watching his own back; in the gathering darkness, he had completely missed the fact that Malachai was lurking in the bushes, watching him pull the gleaming white bone from the earth with his bare hands. After examining at it to reassure himself that it was still safe and sound, Jonas took a sneaky look around to make sure that nobody was watching him. The wood was quiet and almost entirely dark. Satisfied, the big man reburied the femur once more, covering it with a mound of soil that he patted down until it was nearly indistinguishable from its surroundings. Then he slunk off into the night.

Half an hour passed. Then a full hour. Finally satisfied that Jonas really had left, and wasn’t simply laying in wait to ambush him, Malachai crept carefully out of hiding. He picked his way slowly from tree to tree, always half-expecting the big man to leap out and attack him…but nothing moved except for the breeze stirring up the leaves and branches. Relieved to have reached the tree in safety, the young lich squatted down and began to dig with his hands, scooping dirt and soil aside like a dog.

There it was: the femur. Jonas’ phylactery.

Wrapping his fingers tightly around the shaft, Malachai rose slowly to his full height. He didn’t care if there was anybody around that could see him now. If the phylactery’s owner had even the slightest idea of what was happening, he would never have let Falconer within a hundred feet of its hiding place.

With a triumphant roar, Malachai swung the femur around as hard as he could, slamming it against the trunk of the tree. Bark and bone exploded, showering him in splinters and chips.

From far away in the distance, an anguished, agonized cry split the night. It was the sound of Jonas. Suffering.

A grin twisted his lips. He swung again and again, smashing the bone, shattering it into a thousand tiny pieces. With every new impact came a fresh scream to match, high-pitched and piercing.

It was the sound of a lich dying.

A cloud of blue and purple lights, hundreds of thousands of tiny little particles, emerged from the ruins of the femur. Malachai held the few remaining intact fragments close to his chest, as though hugging them to give them comfort or to keep them warm. His hands glowed with a cold, pale light. The multi-colored vapor rose up out of them and drifted toward the center of his chest, snaking its way through the exposed skin and disappearing inside, somewhere in the region of his heart.

The life essence of Jonas, an immensely powerful and fairly old lich, was now gone, displaced when its phylactery had been busted apart by the young upstart. But it was not lost; all of that spirit energy, and the power that it represented, had been absorbed into Malachai’s own body, drained like a battery and transferred.

Malachai had never felt stronger. Yet he knew that he would have to act quickly; the death of Jonas, whose body was now reduced to a dried and dessicated husk of its former self, would warn the others. They would come for him, Malachai instinctively knew, the pack turning upon its one rogue member because he had dared strike out at one of their own, and was therefore a threat to them all.

A threat that could never be tolerated.

He had time, Malachai knew, but precious little. One by one he sought them all out that night, hunting each of them down in turn. The short woman named Elspeth was next. She was the toughest and put up the most fight, he was surprised to learn – but Malachai was also stronger than he had ever been, his power boosted by the energy he had absorbed from Jonas. He conjured up a tulpa to fight his battle for him, one that mimicked his own body type…but twisted and distorted, as if it was being looked at through a warped mirror.

The tulpa stayed by Malachai’s side through that entire night of blood and violence. Lich after lich was taken by surprise and defeated, their energy absorbed and consumed in order to feed Malachai’s constantly-increasing strength. When each adversary had been pummeled to the brink of death, he would force them to lead him to their phylactery – and destroyed it.

The tall woman – Agnes was her name, Malachai had finally been told – he deliberately left for last. True, Malachai had felt something quite close to affection for her – but in the end, it hadn’t been enough to save her from his ambition, which was burning like a forest fire and consuming everything in its path. Her phylactery was, appropriately enough, a cured and preserved human heart, which she kept buried on the shore of a small lake.

Malachai and his dark companion stalked her through the dark woods, which were starting to grow lighter with the oncoming dawn. She waited for him patiently, standing on the edge of the water with the relic held loosely in her hands. Her lips were moving ever so slightly, as if she was talking to herself. He could barely see her face at all in the gloom.

He was going to handle this one himself. He felt that he owed her that much, at least; after all, he wasn’t a complete ingrate.

“I always knew that it would come to this.” Agnes sounded tired, completely resigned to her fate. “Since the night of your birth, when you clawed your way up out of the ground into the starlight…I knew.”

The younger lich sneered, but it lacked any real conviction. “Why not finish me before tonight, then?” he challenged. “You might have been able to stop me. Might have been able to save them all.”

She shook her head mournfully. “I think not. You were always more powerful than you ever suspected, Malachai. You have the black heart of a true lich.” Agnes looked down briefly, seeing the heart still cradled in her hands and allowing herself a little smile at the joke. She saw Malachai’s eyes shift downward, taking in her phylactery. “Oh,this? This isn’t the heart of a lich. It’s the heart of my husband. A good man, but also a weak man,” she said dismissively.

“You killed him?” Malachai asked, suspecting that she was stalling for time but intrigued nevertheless.

“My first. I shall never forget.”

“Regret is a weakness best reserved for the living.” Malachai took a step closer toward her. Two. She didn’t flinch or match him with a step backward; the water was at her back, and there was nowhere left for her to run. What’s more, she knew it.

“Perhaps. But then again, so is complacency—”

The attack came in a split-second, almost taking Malachai completely off-guard.

Almost.

Agnes let the heart drop, throwing up her hands palm-first. A torrent of blinding white light flew out of each one, joining together into a single stream about a foot from her outstretched hands and blasting toward Malachai.

It was only then that he realized that she hadn’t been talking to herself at all: she’d been casting, preparing a psychic attack for him in the hopes of catching him unawares. He should have remembered: Agnes didn’t much go in for tulpas and autonomous thought-forms. She was much more of the direct attack type.

Falconer threw himself to one side, hitting the ground with a thud that sent the air rushing from his lungs. The energy burst blasted a tree to smithereens, sending a shower of branches and leaves high into the canopy up above.

Malachai lay on his side, desperately trying to catch his breath. Agnes was on him in a heartbeat, straddling him and slamming her fists into his face, ribs, and any other vulnerable spot that his flailing arms couldn’t cover in time. He yelped, trying to roll away but prevented by the weight of her body pushing down on him.

“How does it feel, Malachai?” She slammed a fist into his face, once, twice, then a third time. He squealed when he felt his nose pop, but it was more of a reflex than anything else. Liches felt very little in the way of physical pain; it was one of the great benefits of being a soulless supernatural creature. “How does it feel to be helpless?”

Malachai looked up and over her shoulder towards the trees and the slowly-brightening sky above the lake. What he saw there made him smile. Agnes didn’t turn; she wasn’t about to be fooled so easily. But her expression changed from vengeful spite to one of total shock when the Dark Man’s long and slender fingers slid around her throat and jerked her backwards, far enough away from its lord and master that she could no longer do any harm.

“No!” Agnes screamed, frustrated and outraged that her victory was being snatched away from her. Falconer smiled, getting slowly to his feet and making a show of dusting himself off. He twitched his nose experimentally, and was pleased to feel it pop back to normal again, a product of his supernatural healing ability. There was no blood, or even swelling; liches didn’t bleed, no matter how hard you tried to hurt one.

They couldn’t be choked to death either, because although most liches seemed to breathe, it was more through force of long habit rather than a genuine need for oxygen. Agnes was struggling hard, reaching up to try and prise her captor’s hands apart. The Dark Man did what she wanted, letting go with one hand and grabbing her by the hair with it instead.

Roaring, Agnes slammed an elbow hard into the Dark Man’s belly. It made contact with something soft but solid. He didn’t so much as flinch.

Malachai wandered across towards the lakeshore. The heart still lay there in the mud where she had dropped it when she launched the surprise attack. Squatting, he picked it up and pretended to study it for a while, secretly watching her struggle from the corner of his eye.

“You heartless little bastard!” Agnes cried, giving vent to all of her rage and frustration. Malachai knew he had to be careful, because her powers of attack were fueled by negative emotions like those. Originally he had planned to draw this out, to savor every last drop of fear that the knowledge of her impending death was going to create, but he saw the danger in that now, and knew that he had to end this quickly before she grew too powerful.

“I am an orphan, not a bastard,” he said conversationally, dropping the phylactery back into the mud once more. “But I am heartless. As are you.” With that, he stamped hard on the fallen heart. His foot went straight through it, cracking and crumpling it on the first strike.

Agnes threw back her head and screamed.

Then she was ended.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“…and that is how Malachai Falconer became one of the most powerful liches in existence,” Lamiyah said gravely, finishing her tale.

“By killing the only living member of his biological family.” Jessica looked disgusted.

“And turning on the people who took him in,” I added grimly. “What a douche.”

“Liches are indeed heartless, sometimes in more ways than one,” my guide told us with a sigh. “As far as they are concerned, ruthlessness is a necessary trait for survival.”

“So let me recap,” I said, pushing all the air out of my lungs in one long, frustrated breath. “Falconer may be wiry, but he’s damn near invulnerable to physical harm.”

“Check,” Jessica said, ticking off on one finger.

“The Dark Man: he’s as dumb as a box of rocks, but fast as all get-out, and pretty much invincible too.”

“Correct,” Lamiyah agreed calmly.

“Check.” Second finger ticked off.

“Point three, and this is the big bad: they could have…I don’t know, between the cemetery and the Snare, practically an entire army of spirits working for them—”

“Not willingly,” my guide butted in. “If that is the case, then those spirits will mostly be enslaved, held in thrall by the lich against their will.”

“Does that make any difference?” Jess wanted to know.

“More than you would think, my dear. You see, serving a dark entity is not even close to being a pleasant thing. Few do it through choice, and even those who do start out by serving voluntarily, tend to see the error of their decision rather quickly.”

“Okay, soooo…” Jess didn’t know what Lamiyah was getting at, but I thought that I could see where she was going with this.

“So, it shouldn’t take too much to get them to rebel,” I finished, thinking out loud. I must have hit the mark, because Lamiyah nodded eagerly.

“Yes, precisely. To borrow a military term, you should think of them as conscripts. If you can weaken their master and gain the upper hand somehow, then you would become a far more desirable alternative in their eyes.”

I folded my arms. “That’s all well and good, but how exactly am I supposed to get the upper hand over someone who can’t be hurt?”

“Think, Daniel,” Lamiyah pleaded. “What is the one weak spot of a lich? Its Achilles’ heel?”

Bingo! The answer popped straight into the front of my brain.

“The skull.”

“Yes!” Jessica said excitedly. “The child’s skull! The p…the ph…”

“Phylactery,” Lamiyah finished for her, nodding eagerly. “The repository of Falconer’s soul. Find and destroy that, and you not only weaken the lich gravely — perhaps mortally — but should also be able to release his subjects from their state of unholy servitude.”

I still didn’t like the odds. “Lamiyah, you kicked the Dark Man’s ass pretty good in that forest. Can you—”

She shook her head, cutting me off before I could finish. “That was a memory, Daniel, not the physical realm. I believe that I can hold off the Dark Man for a short while, and perhaps buy you a little time…but do not expect me to check him completely.”

“I’ll be happy if you can just run a little interference for me.”

“For us,” Jess corrected me. I turned to look at her.

“That…may not be a good idea, Jess. Besides, I was hoping you’d make a run for it and go fetch the police.”

“And tell them what?” she demanded, hands on her hips. “That there’s a five hundred year-old undead British guy down in the basement, holding my cousin and your girlfriend hostage—”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

Jessica shot me a withering look that said don’t be an idiot, and went on, “—holding her hostage, keeps his soul in a kid’s skull, and has an evil spirit for an accomplice?”

“Well, yeah, basically…”

“Grow up. Besides, we don’t even know for sure that Becky’s even in the building still.”

Ah, crap. She had a point.

“She is,” Lamiyah said with a confidence that made me feel jealous. “I can feel her presence.”

“Lamiyah!” I broke into a massive grin. “You just did a Star Wars quote!”

If looks could kill…

“Do you know where she is, exactly?” asked Jess, rolling her eyes at me.

“Not exactly, but I sense that she is beneath us.”

“Beneath us?” I echoed. “Like, in the basement? Is there one?” I didn’t know if hospitals even had basements.

“Of course there is. It’s the one place in the building that’s off-limits to all the volunteers.”

That sounded promising. “How off-limits?” I asked.

“As in ‘the door is chained and padlocked’ off-limits,” Jess answered, “and unless you have some heavy-duty bolt cutters, you’re probably not getting down there anyway.”

“Can’t hurt to look. Is there another way in — like a window or something?”

“To be honest, I’ve never thought about it,” admitted Jessica. “Lamiyah, could you perhaps scout things out? You know, see if there’s a second entrance?”

“Yes.” My guide sounded doubtful. “However, there is another concern that seems equally pressing to me.”

“What?”

“At the risk of sounding alarmist, Daniel…when did you last hear from your mother?”

Mom! In all the panic over Becky, I’d plain forgotten about Mom. I tried to calm the sudden surge of terror that ran through me, my mind conjuring up thoughts of what the Dark Man could be doing to her even now. She was back in the hotel room, treating herself to a hot bath and a few glasses of wine. The hotel room that was right next to the town cemetery…

“I have to go get her!” I was halfway to the door before Jessica grabbed me by the arms.

“Focus!” she hissed, putting her face right in front of mine. “Panicking isn’t going to help anybody.”

“She is absolutely right, Daniel,” Lamiyah said, resting a soothing hand on a spot between my shoulder blades. “I shall go and check on your mother. Above all else, you must be calm. Anger and fear are Falconer’s weapons — any negative emotions are. You cannot afford to make him any stronger than he already is.”

“We can’t just sit here and sing Kumbaya while he’s got Becky, and maybe Mom too,” I shot back, and then added snidely, “This isn’t exactly Boulder.”

My spirit guide sighed. “Jessica was right,” she said at last, “you do need to grow up.”

I opened my mouth to fire something back, but Jessica beat me to it. She let go of my arms and let her hands fall to her hips. “Danny, I get that you’re afraid. I am too! I get that you’re angry. I am too! Don’t you see what’s happening here?”

“Of course I do!” I snapped. “This maniac is going to hurt the two people I love most in all the world—”

“Haven’t you figured out why?” she sounded exasperated at how slow on the uptake I was.

“Because he’s a maniac!” I practically roared. “Because he’s freaking crazy, and that’s what crazy people do!”

“No, that’s not it! Look, Danny, you’re a seer, right? A super-powerful psychic?” I nodded, clueless as to where she was going with this. “So you give off a ton of psychic energy, right?”

“Right,” I agreed blankly. “So?”

“So,” Lamiyah jumped in, “you glow, Daniel. You practically shine with spirit essence. Don’t you see that that is how Falconer found you, and why he wants to provoke you now? Think, Daniel: think! In your agitated state, you are practically a banquet to him!”

Oh. My. God.

She was right. How had I been this blind?

“It’s not her he wants,” I said slowly. Realization was starting to set in. “It’s me, isn’t it? It’s been me all along.”

“Of course,” Lamiyah said in that oh-so-matter-of-fact way that drove me nuts sometimes. “He has an ever-replenishing food supply at his disposal, drawn from the volunteers at this facility…but in you, Daniel, he would find sustenance that could last him for a lifetime — and perhaps even longer.”

“That’s sick,” Jessica practically spat. “Most of us are just kids!”

“I could not agree with you more, Jessica, and that is why he must be stopped.” My guide crossed her arms slowly. I recognized that look. She was gearing up for a fight. “But if you deliver yourself into his hands, Daniel, then the outcome might be immeasurably worse than you can possibly imagine.”

“You’re totally right,” I agreed, “but I can’t just leave Becky down there with him, can I? He could be torturing her, or doing all kinds of sick stuff.” She knew that I was right. What’s more, she knew that I knew that I was right. “Falconer thrives on fear, and what are people more afraid of than pain? If he hurts her, Lamiyah, he’ll make her angry, yeah, but she’ll also be frightened. And that will just make him stronger.”

Lamiyah didn’t have an answer for that.

“So we have to go down there,” Jessica put in, seeing the big picture clearly for the first time. “We have to get her back.”

We all fell silent. Finally, my guide said, “I do fear that you are right. I am not sure that I can see any other alternative.”

“First things first,” I clapped my hands together, making Jessica jump. “Don’t fear anything. If you’re right about Falconer, that will be like pouring gasoline on a barbecue. Jess, the only way you and I have a chance against this creep and his nasty little sidekick is if we put a lid on our negative emotions.”

“Easier said than done.”

“I know, but we have to…otherwise we’re hosed. Fear, anger, aggression…the path to the dark side are they…” I couldn’t help it.

Jessica rolled her eyes. “It’s going to take more than a Star Wars quote to get us out of this, Danny!”

“Nevertheless, they are wise words.” We both looked at Lamiyah in surprise. “Your only chance of defeating Malachai Falconer requires that you maintain a spiritually-pure state of being at all times,” she shrugged, as though stating the most obvious thing ever. “It will require courage and discipline aplenty, but it can be done. Daniel, you have an abundance of the first. As for the second…well, we shall just have to hope for the best.”

“Hey!” I grumbled. “What are you trying to say?”

“That you can be kind of an impulsive jerk sometimes?” Jess smirked. “At least, that’s what my cousin says. Luckily for you, she says you’re a pretty cool guy underneath all of that teenage hormonal crap?”

Teenage hormonal crap? You’re, like, twelve years old!

“Great, thanks,” was what I actually said. Time to put the sarcasm on the back burner; there’s no way it could be thought of as a positive emotion.

She shot me a grin that said “just kidding, but not really.” I smiled back. That probably was what Becky had said about me, and to be honest, she was basically right. I’d been acting like a hormonal jerk, but I was a pretty cool guy underneath it all. No sense in arguing.

Even Lamiyah smiled. The tension bled out of the air just a little: you could practically feel it deflating like a balloon with a slow leak.

I took a deep, calming breath and turned to my guide first.

“Lamiyah, you have to make sure that Mom’s safe. She’s a priority, and I wouldn’t put it past Falconer to send some bad guys her way.”

“I shall take the very best care of her, Daniel,” she said solemnly — then disappeared, just like that.

“Wow,” was all Jessica could manage.

“She does that. You get used to it.”

“So what about us?” she asked, shaking her head and obviously still trying to wrap it around what she had just seen. “Do we just…go down there and get her?”

“Unless you have any better ideas,” I shrugged, because I sure didn’t. Jessica thought about it for a moment and then shook her head. “Alright, the frontal assault it is.”

“Works for me.” Jess laughed a little nervously. “I’m a frontal attack kind of girl. None of this sneaking around crap.”

I laughed too. It felt good, which meant we needed more of it.

“OK, so no matter what happens, we can’t get angry. Or frightened.” I was talking as much to myself as I was to Jessica, speaking my thoughts out loud. “Falconer’s a douchebag.”

“A massive douchebag.”

“Right, a massive douchebag. So he’s going to try to hurt us. Frighten us. Basically provoke us in any way he can to get what he wants.”

“We can’t let him push us.”

“Not an inch,” I agreed. “Otherwise he’ll just get stronger, and it’s game over for all of us.” I opened the door with one hand. “Come on. Let’s go.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The basement. Of course. It just had to be, didn’t it?

At least the door opened smoothly and quietly when I pulled it toward me. Color me shocked: to be honest, I’d half-expected it to creeeeak and groan like the doors in any one of a thousand horror movies I’d seen.

“Do you want me to go first?” Jessica breathed in my ear. Oh yeah, sure; because what I needed right now more than anything else was another reason to feel ashamed of myself.

“No thanks,” I hissed back. “I think I got this.”

“Alright, alright. But we’re not doing this the old-fashioned way.” At Long Brook, we’d spent our entire night there trying to eke out the battery life on our cellphone flashlights. Whatever else Steve Jobs had been a genius at designing, extended battery life hadn’t exactly been his strong point. But the sanatorium had been totally off the power grid, whereas the Snare was right in the middle of a small town. I reached out and flipped on the light switch. About twenty steps angled down ahead of me, bare wooden boards with a chipped metal handrail.

They hardly even creaked as we made our way down. Granted, we weren’t exactly big and didn’t weigh all that much, but I was still more than a little surprised that they weren’t announcing our presence to whoever might be down there.

Whoever, or whatever.

Ah, who was I kidding? There was a lich down here. There had to be. Which was actually kind of okay with me now — just so long as Becky was down here too, and still in one piece, I didn’t care if all the dark spirits in existence were backing him up. And if he’d hurt her…

…well, best not to think about that right now. No good could come of it. Focus on something else. Anything else.

The fluorescent strip lights flickered, taking a minute or two to warm up. The basement floor was bare concrete. I looked around. Apart from the steps, there were two ways out of here, both of them closed doors. Picking one at random, I walked across and yanked it open, then stepped back and brought my fists up. Yeah, I know it must have looked ridiculous, but I was totally expecting someone or something to jump out of the darkness at me. Instead, all I saw was a huge boiler and a room full of pipes. They clanked and popped every few seconds. Nothing else was moving in there.

Letting out the breath I’d been holding, I dropped my guard and closed the door firmly. Then I turned around.

Jessica was gone.

Crap.

The other door was standing open. All I could see through the doorway was shadow.

Something laughed, from deeper in the blackness beyond that doorway. Not a nice and happy laugh: the owner of this laugh wanted to hurt somebody.

Falconer.

Alright, I thought, squaring my shoulders, let’s do this.

It might have been the last thing I wanted to do in all the world, but Dad would have been proud of the way I marched my ass over there. Was I afraid? You’d better believe I wanted to be. But I slammed a lid down on that emotion the second it reared its ugly freaking head, forcing myself to concentrate on something else. I started thinking about plot of an episode of Star Trek, the episode from the first season that introduced the Romulans. It’s called Balance of Terror. If you haven’t seen it, then take it from me: it’s awesome. Mark Lenard guest-stars. He went on to play Spock’s father later on.

I hadn’t gone any further than the Romulan Bird of Prey appearing for the first time, when I suddenly lost the plot…both literally and figuratively. I couldn’t focus on it any more. Becky’s face kept popping up in my mind and getting in the way. All I could think about was how badly I wanted her to be okay, and what would happen if she—

That laugh again. Baiting me. Taunting me.

It knew.

It was inside my head. And it was taking strength from what it found there.

Part of me wanted to get angry. Part of me wanted to be afraid. I had to be ruthless with both of those parts, or it was going to be the death of me. Well, death…or something worse.

I went through that doorway without missing a step. I was proud of that, right at that moment, and I figured that was something I could use. Pride could be a weapon, and depending on how you dealt with it, it could work either for you or against you.

I wanted it to work for me.

Pushing all thoughts of Becky aside, I started to think about my Dad. I was proud of him, and I knew that after I had stood up to the psychotic spirit of a Nazi war criminal back at Long Brook Sanatorium, he was proud of me too. More than anything, I wished that he could be with me right now, backing me up. He wouldn’t have been scared of any lich. Dad had been USMC through and through. The lich would have been scared of him.

Light from the fluorescents wasn’t getting any further than a couple of feet inside the entrance to what looked like a basement full of dirt: and when I say full, I mean full. The roof was maybe ten feet above my head, and the mound of soil reached almost to the ceiling. There was a dim glow coming from the other side of that huge mound of dirt, and I had to figure out a way to get there. Pipes ran along the wall to my left. I reached out and touched one, if for no other reason than a little comfort, and jerked my fingertips away when I felt how hot it was.

I followed the pipe deeper into the dark interior of the basement, until it came up against the sloping mound of earth. Then I saw that the pipe cut sharply to the left. There was a corner, almost invisible in the darkness. I turned left, following the wall and being careful not to burn my arm. All the time I was thinking about Dad, and how proud of him I felt, how proud Mom had been—

Mom.

Oh, crap.

The cackle told me that the lich really was feeding off my emotions. It came from the other side of the dirt mound, and got louder as a spike of worry for Mom broke its way past my guard. I struggled to keep a lid on it, but now my brain was turning traitor on me. It showed me visions of Mom being cornered by the dark spirits that worked for Falconer, helpless and alone there in the hotel room by the graveyard.

No, not alone. Lamiyah had her back. And no matter how badly the world had treated her sometimes, I don’t think that Mom had ever had a helpless day in her life.

“No!”

Oh, yes. I felt the lich lose grip over me, just like that. A sense of warmth flowed through my entire body; not the heat of the basement, which was already making my shirt cling to me, but a kind of spiritual heat. I was suddenly convinced that everything was going to be alright. Following the wall further round, I made it maybe twenty feet before I found a break in the mound. A bare electric light hung down from the ceiling, the source of the glow that I had seen when I first came in. It cast a small circle of light on the concrete floor, and in the middle of it was a chair.

Becky was sitting in it.

Electrical wires looped around her wrists and ankles, tying her securely to the chair. A strip of grey duct tape had been slapped across her mouth to keep her from talking. Her face was covered with dirt and sweat, but she looked pretty much unharmed apart from that. When she saw me step forward out of the shadows, her eyes went wide with…what? Relief? Happiness?

No. It was a warning.

The Dark Man came out of nowhere; well, out of the shadows to my left, which was pretty much the same thing. He didn’t leap out at me like some movie monster though: no, this guy floated serenely without even moving his legs, moving about as fast as a senior citizen with a walker.

When he stretched out his arms like he wanted to give me a hug, I danced backwards, moving to stand between him and Becky. I shuffled backward until I felt my heels scrape against the front of her sneakers.

“Mmmmmmffff!”

There was no way I was taking my eyes off the Dark Man, even for a second, so I reached back behind me with one hand and felt my fingertips brush against something soft and squishy. Whoops. That would be Becky’s nose. Well, it was a place to start, at least. I slid them downward to where her top lip ought to have been and felt something smooth and flat. The Dark Man was closing on me, less than six feet away now and grinning like a lunatic.

Come on, damn it, come on! I could feel the cold sweat breaking out on my forehead. Searching frantically now, my fingertips finally found a corner of the tape and managed to tug it away from Becky’s skin just a little.

I pulled.

She screamed.

“Danny, get out of—”

I never heard the rest. The Dark Man suddenly lunged, and this time I wasn’t quick enough to get out of his way. His body was cold. He had locked his arms around my shoulders and dragged me toward him, burying my face in his shirt…which felt weird, by the way, not like any human-made cloth I had ever touched. It’s hard to describe, but the best I can do is to compare it to touching cold water: having my face jammed into the tulpa’s suit was kind of like sticking it into an unheated swimming pool, especially the way that it rippled across the surface of my skin.

A wave of sickness swept over me, flooding straight from my head down to my feet. I suddenly wanted to puke so bad, I thought it was going to happen right then and there.

“Enough.”

There was a loud click, the sound of somebody snapping their fingers.

Reluctantly, the Dark Man let me go. I wanted to turn around to face the owner of that voice, to square off against Falconer and finish this once and for all. Instead, I bent over at the knees and threw up all over the dirt floor.

Falconer just stood there, right behind Becky’s chair, and let me do it. Slowly, I stood up and wiped the back of my hand across my mouth.

“Feeling better?” the lich asked with fake sympathy.

“I’ll feel better when you’re dead.”

“Oh, how you wound me.” He flourished a hand up to cover his heart. “My dear boy, I already am dead, for all intents and purposes. Either that, or I am effectively immortal. To tell you the truth, one could look at it either way.”

“I know what you are.” I took a step toward him. Then another.

“Danny, be careful,” Becky said, her voice desperate. “He’s dange—”

“Oh, do shut up.”

“Shut up yourself, child.”

The slap across Becky’s face was just hard enough to be humiliating, but it had to sting a little. It was also enough to make me see red. I could feel the anger starting to boil in the pit of my stomach, replacing that I want to puke feeling the moment I saw it happen. Now I wanted to plant a fist in that smug, pale face.

Falconer must have been reading my mind, because he favored me with a knowing smirk. He straightened up to his full height, seeming to grow in stature by about a foot. Then I realized what was happening: I was feeding this jerk. He wanted me to take a swing for him, because the rage that was making me feel that way was sweeter than the finest restaurant meal to him. As I got angrier, the lich was getting stronger.

How had I let myself forget that? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“What do you want?” I demanded.

“I’d have thought that much was obvious, young Daniel.” Falconer spread his arms out to his sides in a manner that said, hey — trust me, because I’m a reasonable guy! “I want you.”

“Me?” I knew it already, but I’d seen enough 007 movies to know that sometimes the best thing for the good guy to do was keep his arch-nemesis running off at the mouth. It would buy me thinking time, which was something I desperately needed right now, and once Mom was safe, it would buy time for Lamiyah to maybe get here with the cavalry…if there was any cavalry.

Besides, where on earth had Jess gotten to?

“Yes, you. Allow me to explain…”

“Go right ahead, Blofeld,” I muttered. The reference must have been lost on him because he just went on talking. Thanks for proving my point.

“From the first time that I ever saw you, Daniel Chill, I knew that you were special. Only one in a hundred thousand souls possess the psychic powers that you do.”

“Huh? Seers aren’t that rare, Falconer.”

“True.” He extended a pointed finger, settling into lecture mode. It felt more than a little weird to get a lecture from a half-dead/undead/whatever-dead creature that was standing just inches away from the girl I loved most in all the world. “But the ability to perceive the spirit world isn’t all that special, in the grand scheme of things. Take it from me…I have lived for more than ten human lifetimes, and such parlor tricks are actually rather commonplace. No, in your case, the power runs far deeper — and blazes so much stronger — than you can possibly imagine.”

I frowned. “There’s nothing special about me, Falconer. I’m just an everyday kid. I mean, yeah, I can see dead people, but I’m not exactly Dr. Strange.” I locked eyes with Becky, willing myself not to think about the angry red flush that marked one side of her face. Hang in there, I tried to tell her without saying a word, it’s all going to be okay.

Don’t ask me how, but I somehow knew that it really would be.

“I am not an unmerciful master, Daniel, nor even a particularly demanding one.” He gestured toward the Dark Man, who was standing silently between us and the basement doorway. The tulpa grinned inanely. “Our friend here likes to go for a little wander every once in a while, and who am I to stand in his way?”

“Yeah, I’ll bet he has a killer social life.”

“You would be surprised.” Falconer raised an eyebrow. “I was most certainly surprised when he returned to me late one night several months ago, and told me of what he had witnessed inside an abandoned old sanatorium named Long Brook.”

What…the…

“Oh yes.” His smile broadened now, probably because he was enjoying the look of disbelief that I must have been wearing. “I was there. Watching you from the shadows.”

“Garbage. Von Spiessbach would never have let you on his turf.”

“Von…oh, you mean the Teutonic psychopath? He had not the slightest idea of my presence. The surgeon may have been the ruler of the roost, as it were, but his powers paled in comparison to mine. And, as it turned out, to yours.”

“I’m not buying a word of it.”

“That is entirely your choice,” the lich shrugged. The sick feeling was back in the pit of my stomach, because in a way, I was starting to believe him. Don’t ask me why, but for the first time since I’d known this douchebag (which admittedly wasn’t very long) I was getting a truthful vibe. “Suffice it to say that I watched with great interest as you — with a little help from your father — not only survived the night, but also managed to liberate a significant number of earthbound souls. Really rather impressive, if I may say so.”

That cinched it. How else could he have known that Dad had come back in spirit to help save my ass? Even Mom didn’t know about that. Only me, Lamiyah, Becky…I looked down at Becky, who gave a little shake of her head. Okay, so Becky hadn’t told him that little nugget.

“If you’re such a big fan of mine, you might have helped out when things went to crap out there.”

“But you were having so much fun on your own!” Falconer laughed, clapping his hands together and making Becky jump. She didn’t get far, thanks to the wire around her wrists and ankles. Falconer patted her condescendingly on the shoulder. “There, there, my dear. It shall soon all be over.”

“You’ve got that right,” I said, with way more conviction than I actually felt.

“But perhaps not in the way that you imagine, Deadseer. You and your young lady friend here cannot possibly think to get past myself and my companion there.”

I realized that he hadn’t mentioned Jess, which meant that she had probably sneaked past him somehow. Maybe she had gotten out of here and was going to call the cops after all, despite what we’d said upstairs. Hell, I’d take pretty much any help now…Lamiyah’s most of all. Just so long as she made sure that Mom was safe though, I’d be okay.

“So what is it that you want, exactly? I’m guessing that it’s to leech away my life energy for the next however-many years until I’m pretty much dry, am I right?”

“No, you are not.” Well, that was a surprise. I was sure that was his gameplan. “I have a more than ample supply of sustenance here, thanks to the children who do so love to volunteer at the Snare of Souls. Aptly named, is it not?” He flashed me another fake smile, and I noticed that his eyes weren’t laughing at all. Or blinking. They were like a reptile’s eyes, and had about as much warmth and mercy in them as something that slithered on its belly.

“Alright, then what?”

“I know that your little Indian friend has traced my lifetime, Daniel. I sensed her doing it, though there was nothing that I could do to prevent it. After all, you know what it is that I am. And so I must presume that she has told you all about the manner of my birth…my second birth, into this new life of darkness.”

I nodded. “Yes she did. I know all about your family; both your families. Neither of them ended well.”

“You make a fair point.” Falconer’s face slackened and his grin became a little sickly, as though it was an effort to maintain it. “However, the third time’s the charm, as they say. The problem with my coven was that it lacked true leadership, you see, and that is why it failed. Such is nature’s way. The weak must give way to the strong, and they were all so much weaker than I.”

“I can see where this is going. You want to start your own lich coven again. Here in Tyrant’s Grove. And I’m guessing that you want me to be a part of it.”

“Precisely! But not just you, my dear boy…” His eyes drifted meaningfully down towards the top of Becky’s head. “You see, I really do need the complete set…”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“Oh no. No. Freaking. Way! You leave her out of this!” There it was again: the anger. I willed myself to calm down. Falconer was playing me like an expert, letting me calm down and then dialing up the anger again.

The instant that I raised my voice, the Dark Man began to glide forward. Falconer held up a hand to stop him.

“I did rather hope that you would do this willingly,” the lich said, sounding oh so very Britishly disappointed, “but if you simply must refuse to listen to reason, then we are more than capable of taking what we want by force. It will be less efficient that way. Messier, if you will…but the end result shall be basically the same.”

“I’ll never join you!” It was a total Luke Skywalker steal, but I’d watched Empire Strikes Back so many times by now that I knew practically every line off by heart — and sometimes one of them would jump out of my mouth when it fit the situation.

“You’re not exactly giving him much incentive to play ball,” Becky added. I saw that she was trying to bend back her right hand and work at the wires looped around her wrist. She was keeping it as slow and under-the-radar as possible, but didn’t appear to be having much luck unfastening the loops.

“She’s right,” I agreed. “I’ll tell you what. Let Becky go, and I promise to consider it.”

“There’s not much in that particular deal for me,” Falconer chuckled, in a voice that was no longer silky smooth. “I shall have both of you anyway, whether you choose to cooperate or not. And as for your incentive, well, let me think…” Touching two fingers to his chin, the lich tilted his head back, putting it almost totally in shadow. “Join me as founder members of my new family, and I shall promise not to extend the same invitation to your really rather delectable mother.”

Just like that, I went cold as ice.

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Try me.”

He would dare. I knew it, and what’s more, he knew that I knew it. Dammit, Lamiyah, what was taking you so long?

“I’ve got a better deal for ya.” The voice came out of the darkness behind him. Falconer turned to look, and even Becky turned her head as far as she could and squinted to try and make out the source of that very familiar voice. “How about you let both of them go, and I don’t smash this thing that I’m holding.”

“Who are you?” Falconer demanded, taking a pair of tentative steps forward into the darkness. “Who’s there?”

“My name isn’t important,” Jessica said, her voice coming from even further away and off to our right now. She had moved pretty quickly after speaking the first time, unless the acoustics down here were really jacked. “What’s important is this: you’ve been very, very stupid, Mr. Falconer.”

“Oh, I do rather think that it is you who have been stupid, young lady.” He gestured toward the Dark Man, who floated soundlessly over toward the door and slammed it closed, then planted himself squarely in front of it. Great. That was our only way out. “Now there is no way that you shall leave here alive.”

“Then I guess I’ll just hang out down here…along with this kid’s skull that I found.”

Everything went silent, just like that. All I could hear was somebody breathing hard. Then I realized it was me, and willed myself to slow it down.

After a good thirty seconds had passed, Falconer said quietly, “What did you say?”

“I think you heard me right the first time, Mr. Falconer.” Off to the left now. Jess must be moving around in the dark, to keep the lich from getting a bead on her. Plus, she was on the other side of the dirt mound. Good tactics. “What kind of idiot buries his phylactery down in the same basement as his kidnap victims? A moron, that’s who.”

Just like that, the suave charm was gone. Falconer growled, low and primal,the sound of an animal whose young were being threatened.

“Put it down, child. Now. I will not ask you again.”

“Go jump off a cliff.”

The lich disappeared slowly into the darkness, looking for the oh-so precious container of his soul.

“Danny.”

“Huh?”

“Danny!” Becky hissed. I looked down, saw her nodding meaningfully at her wrists.

“Oh!” I began working on the knots, keeping one eye on the Dark Man; he was still in the doorway and not moving, obeying the last instruction from his master as slavishly as one of Asimov’s robots. The knots came undone in no time, and I moved straight on to the ankles while Becky flexed her throbbing hands in front of her.

“That’s it — the last one. Try standing up.” I held out a hand. Becky grabbed my forearm instead, using it as a fulcrum to come up and out of the chair. “How are you doing?”

“Hanging in there.” She stamped her feet, all the time looking around her into the darkness beyond the tiny circle of light thrown out by the bare bulb. Something hissed out there, something that sounded frustrated as all hell.

“Not everything’s going Lord Snotty’s way.”

“We need to get out of here.” Becky sounded resolute, none the worse for wear despite having been kidnapped and tied up like a prisoner from Gitmo.

“Not without Jess. Besides, we have to get past him first.” I nodded towards the doorway, where the Dark Man was…holy crap, if I hadn’t seen it, I would never have believed it. This supernatural shark, this avatar of dark and malicious spiritual power, was…fidgeting.

Footsteps scrabbled on dirt somewhere out there on the far side of the berm. I squinted, trying to make out just what exactly was going on out there, but it was pretty much pointless. If you’ve ever sat around a campfire late at night and tried to see which animal was making noise out just beyond the circle of light, you’ll know pretty much how I felt…though chances are that a pair of undead nasties weren’t gunning for you.

The roar was triumphant, and took us both totally by surprise. I practically jumped right out of my skin. It was followed almost straight away by a scream: Jessica’s scream. Then Falconer began to laugh, high-pitched and strident, the laugh of a lunatic.

“Not so cocky now, are you, you little shit.” The lich stepped into the firelight, holding a bucking and writhing Jessica to his chest in a bear hug. True to her word, she clutched a tiny human skull in one hand. She was obviously terrified, and fighting hard not to show it, but she couldn’t hide the emotion totally, and it was feeding Malachai Falconer more power.

Suddenly, I knew what I had to do.

“Becky, listen. I have to tell you something.” I took both of her hands in mine. She stared back at me, her eyes wide and bulging in disbelief. It was as though I was on fire, and not in a good way.

“Danny, this is hardly the time—”

“Oh yes it is. It is exactly the time. There’s no better time. Listen…there’s something I have to tell you. Something important, and it can’t wait a minute longer.” I half-expected her to chew me out for cutting her off — that was one of Becky’s hot buttons — but she let it go this time. I looked left. Falconer was dragging a still-struggling little goth tornado toward us. I shut him out, shut everything out: everything but Becky, and what I wanted, no, what I needed to say to her. “Listen, I know that I’ve been kind of a jerk lately—”

“No kidding,” she interrupted, but there wasn’t any harshness in her voice. I plowed on regardless.

“—and I’ve finally figured out why.” I took a deep breath. My hands were shaking, and it was nothing to do was cold; this basement was already warm enough to get me sweating from every pore. Becky could sense my nervousness, and actually gave my hands a supportive squeeze. I could have kissed her for that. If I’d been even a tenth as brave as my Dad, I would have done, right then and there, lich and Dark Man be damned. But I’m not my Dad. My courage has limits. So I did the next best thing.

I told her how I really felt.

The words came so freely and easily then, but I can’t remember even one of them now as I’m writing this all down. It was like a dam breaking, slow at first, the barrier coming down brick by brick, but then suddenly the whole darn thing went ka-blooey, and my feelings gushed out almost faster than I could articulate them. I told her that I had been afraid: afraid that she would leave me any time now, because what would a girl that beautiful see in a scrawny guy like me? Not when it seemed as if half the guys in school were paying attention to her, flattering and schmoozing her with an effortless confidence that I would never have, even if I lived to be a hundred.

Hindsight was twenty-twenty, and looking back on the past few weeks, I could see it all so freaking clearly now. My feelings for Becky were so much stronger than I ever realized, and they were eating away at me day and night. I was too scared to tell her how I felt, because that would have opened the door for rejection; no, so much better to drift along in the friend zone, because at least that way I wouldn’t have to ever hear those words that every teenager dreads hearing from the person that makes their heart pound like it’s having an attack. I just couldn’t take the idea of Becky smiling at me in that way she had, or even worse actually laughing, and telling me that hey, I was a great guy, and she really liked me a lot…as a friend.

It would have killed me.

So how did I handle it? Like an idiot, that’s how. I tried to hold her close and push her away at the same time. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She must have thought I was crazy (yeah, a smile and a nod of agreement — she had) but subconsciously, I was trying to force the issue, too scared to tell her how I felt and dreading spending the rest of our time together as nothing more than her friend. So I snapped at her. Undercut her when she talked. Became a living embodiment of the stereotypical moody teenager. All to try and break out of the zone, one way or the other. I just wanted the misery to be over, but I didn’t have the guts to step up and tell her how I felt—

Then she kissed me.

All the cliches you ever heard, came true. My heart skipped a beat: several, actually. Then I think it fluttered inside my chest, hard enough to put John Hurt’s from Alien to shame. The world all around us went away, just like that, replaced by the reality of an embrace that I had spent every night for the past few months imagining in exquisite, excruciating detail. I could feel her arms around me, and mine around her, the softness and warmth of her body pressed against. Her soft lips…oh my, those lips…

It felt as if I was drowning, or drunk, or drowning drunk, if that makes any sense. I didn’t want to come up for air, not now and not ever again. Every negative emotion that had built up a barrier between us both now dissipated, and that cruel wall came tumbling right on down. The only thing left in me was love: the kind of hopeless, uncontrollable love for Becky that made me want to scream it from the rooftops. It filled every cell in my body, from the hair follicles on my head down to the tips of my toes, filling everything in between with joy and warmth and life.

I knew then, with total and absolute certainty, that we were going to be together forever…and it made my heart sing.

Suddenly I was coming up for air. We separated. A terrible keening screech filled the air, echoing off the basement ceiling and grating my ears like the sound of nails on a chalkboard.

Malachai Falconer was screaming. Hands pressed to the sides of his head, the lich had dropped Jessica and seemed to be in terrible pain. His knees buckled, and the stick-thin figure was bending over at the waist. This wasn’t a cry of anger: it was more the sound of a tortured soul giving vent to something agonizing that was tearing it apart.

“It’s the love,” Becky said, taking my face in her hands and turning it back toward her. “He can’t stand it. Our feelings are weakening him.”

She hugged me again, squeezing me tightly and pressing her cheek against mine. The lich howled as though he was being stabbed. Becky was right: expressing our feelings—

Wait a minute. Our feelings? I mouthed the words and she nodded back, smiling and going teary-eyed all at the same time. She felt the same way. Yes! I exulted, wanting to punch the air in victory. All this time, I had been living in fear for nothing .

Jessica was laughing, standing and pointing at Falconer as his body began to convulse. I saw what she was trying to do, but I put a hand on her shoulder and when she turned to look at me, shook my head in warning. Mockery wasn’t a positive emotional response. Becky and I had just started to cut off the lich’s air supply, and the last thing we wanted to do was turn it back on again. He seemed to be pretty much incapacitated, and looked as if he was trying not to puke. Not so badass now, huh?

“Danny, look out!”

The Dark Man hit me with all the force of a speeding truck. Becky staggered backward, her arms windmilling as she fought for balance. Whether he was acting on some kind of psychic order from his master, or purely upon instinct, really didn’t matter: it cleaned my clock just the same. I hit the dirt pile hard, the breath whooshing out of my lungs in one big gasp. Something hit me hard in the face, once, twice, then a third time. I could already feel my right eye beginning to swell shut. Falconer’s attack dog was hovering in the air in front of me, fixing me with a death’s head grin and drawing back an emaciated fist, ready to pop me again. Throwing up a fist to block, I winced at the bolts of pain shooting along the side of my face, running from the eye down to the jaw — but the blow never landed.

Instead, everything went quiet. Then it was broken by the sound of a child’s skull cracking against the back of a chair. It was still mostly-intact, but fragments of the half-smashed phylactery dropped onto the dirt floor of the cellar. Falconer howled again, but this time, it went up to a whole new level. Lurching upward to his full height, the lich staggered towards the three of us like a drunk spoiling for a fight. His eyes bulged out of their sockets, and his oh-so prim and proper face took on a look of desperation that would have been comical, if it wasn’t also so terrifying. Becky threw herself on the Dark Man’s back and started whaling on him, slamming her fists and elbows into his head and shoulders in a whirlwind of martial arts badassery.

The Dark Man snapped round, throwing Becky off him with a swat of one gangly arm. The love of my life sailed through the air until the dirt berm stopped her with a cringe-making thud. Then the tulpa turned its attention right back to me. I felt my nose break, twin streams of blood running down into my grimacing mouth. Another punch came in from the side, with what felt like enough force to crack the ribs there. Fighting hard to breathe, I spat a thick gob of blood out to clear my mouth. He hit me again right on my broken nose, and now I was competing with the still-screaming Falconer for the title of most agonized yelp of the night.

My eyes were tearing up, a reaction to the pain. I blinked them hard and fast, struggling to see clearly. Now it was Jessica’s turn. She might have been young, but man, that girl was fury personified. She had dropped the skull in the dirt. Its jawbone was hanging off at a sick angle, and a huge crack ran up the front of it from just beneath the nose and all the way up to the top of the skull. Instead, Jess had picked up the metal chair and swung it with as much force as she could muster into the tulpa’s back. He laid off me for a second, turning to loom over the young goth like a creature straight out of nightmare. Gamely, she swung the chair at him a second time. The Dark Man swatted it aside, sending it off to land with a thud somewhere in the darkness.

The tulpa floated toward her, bunching up his fists and pulling the right one back to strike. He was backing Jessica up against the big wall of mud. Just a few more steps to go, and she would be trapped.

Then somebody kicked the basement door in.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“You really, really need to back away from my son.”

Mom wasn’t messing around. She was speaking along the barrel of what looked like a 9mm handgun, which was aimed squarely at the Dark Man. Standing next to her, just inside the doorway, was a second woman, who was also pointing a pistol at the tulpa, which had stopped what it was doing and was looking toward its cowering master. Falconer was now curled in a ball just outside the circle of lamplight, mewing like he had just been kicked in the nuts.

“Mom!” I don’t know if I was happier just to know that she was safe after all, or that she and her backup — whoever the hell that was — had arrived just in time to save the day.

“Honey, are you alright?” Her eyes never left her target for an instant, but her voice was full of concern.

“Yeah, Mom — I’m fine. But I think Becky may be hurt.”

“Becky, are you okay, dear? Because if you’re not, I can promise you that somebody is going to be very sorry for hurting you.”

Becky groaned, both hands pressing against the left side of her chest.

“I’m okay, Rachel.” Becky screwed her eyes up as she rolled slowly to her feet. “I might have cracked a rib, but I’ve been hurt worse at Krav Maga.”

“Me too, Mrs. Chill.” Jessica took three steps to her right, working her way warily around the Dark Man. He hissed at her, but didn’t make a move toward her. I didn’t know if guns could actually harm a tulpa, but I was betting that they were way more likely to be effective now that Jess had smashed its master’s philactery halfway to smithereens. I looked down at the spot where I’d last seen it. Oh crap, I thought frantically: it’s gone…

“That’s good,” said the woman who had come along with Mom. “Now as for you,why don’t you get your lanky butt away from these kids…before we see how good my aim is these days.”

I knew that voice. It was the lady from the hotel…what was her name? LaWanna. The one who had sneaked down here once with her friends and a Ouija board. Although I couldn’t make out much in the way of detail down here in the dark, her body language had changed from friendly and welcoming hotel clerk to gun-toting badass. Hey, I wouldn’t want to get on her bad side: that gun arm wasn’t even wavering.

“Here’s what’s going to happen.” Mom sounded almost conversational, now she knew that the three of us were alright, but her voice was wavering just a little. I knew that waver well. It meant that she was on the brink of becoming super-pissed. “Danny, Becky, and Jessica are going to walk through this here doorway and go upstairs. Then LaWanna and I are going to follow them. As for you two psychos…you’re going to stay right down here and wait like good little boys for the cops to get here. Your only other choice is to see how quickly we can empty a pair of fifteen-round magazines into you both. My guess it, less than five seconds. Children, come on.”

Obediently, the three of us picked our way toward the doorway. Becky and I made sure that we kept out of their line of fire, but I had to gently push Jessica toward the wall to prevent her from crossing in front of Mom.

“Which one of you two clowns is in charge?” Mom demanded, her barrel sweeping from left to right and back again so that she could cover both the lich and the tulpa.

“That would be me, my dear Mrs. Chill. And may I say that it is so good to see you.” Falconer had somehow gotten to his feet, and despite the fact that the skull that had been carrying his soul was now spread in pieces all over the floor, suddenly seemed to be feeling better. Worse still, his right hand was holding the remains of his phylactery. The tiny little skull was glowing an angry red, almost as if it was bleeding sparks of light.

How on Earth had he begun to get his strength back?

Then it hit me.

Mom’s anger. She was like a momma bear whose cubs had been threatened. I could tell from the edge in her voice and from her posture that she was barely reining her temper in — and that had to be feeding the lich up again.

“Mom—” I began, but she put her free hand on my arm and practically shoved me through the doorway at her back.

“Not now, Danny.” Mom’s blood was up, and she obviously wasn’t in a mood to listen to reason. “Get back upstairs. All of you. Now.”

“But Mom—”

“GO!”

She wasn’t taking no for an answer. Turning and grabbing the handrail, I made sure that Becky and Jessica were behind me, and then hightailed it up the staircase.

It was dark in the upstairs hallway. The Snare must have been empty by now, the last of the paying customers and volunteer actors would have gone home long ago. Becky already had her phone out — the time on it was 05:42 — and brought up the touch-pad.

“I’m going to call 911,” she explained, but no sooner had she said it than the phone shut itself down. Becky cursed. “Freaking battery! Danny, Jess, how are yours?”

We checked. Both our phones were dead. Battery drain was pretty common in haunted places; spirits liked to use the energy to help themselves manifest, and there’d been enough paranormal activity in the Snare of Souls tonight to drain a thousand cell phones.

“So what do we do now?” Jess wanted to know, looking at the two of us older kids for some direction. I opened my mouth to answer her, but Becky got there first.

“We run,” she said firmly. “We find the closest 7/11 or motel or anywhere with a light on, and we call the police.”

“Works for me,” I agreed. Nothing even close to a better plan was floating around in my brain right now. “This way.”

The double-doors that led outside were at the end of the long hallway to our left. To our right, the corridor dead-ended in a T-junction…and the chapel. I turned left, jogged my way down to the exit and grabbed the door handle. I cursed and rattled it.

We were locked in.

“Let’s go find something heavy,” Becky suggested, putting a hand on my shoulder and turning to point toward the far end of the hallway. “We can use it to smash the glass.”

“I don’t know, Becky. That’s reinforced safety glass. Look, it has those strands that wire running through it.”

“You got a better idea?”

“Point.”

The three of us did an about-face and made a bee-line for the chapel. Just as we were passing the closed door that led down to the cellar, there was a series of loud crack-pops from downstairs, echoing like firecrackers were going off down there. All of us knew what the sound was, though, and it wasn’t anything to do with celebration: it was gunfire.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I counted five, maybe six shots, before I heard feet pounding on the stairs. The basement door was flung open, and Mom and then LaWanna burst through it.

“What happened, Mrs. Chill?” Becky asked breathlessly.

“I don’t know what the hell is going on here,” Mom said, turning to slam the door behind them. “Those…whatever they are…each of them took a couple of bullets each and didn’t even flinch!”

“Demons is what they are!” LaWanna was borderline hysterical. I guess all the confidence a gun gave you would disappear in a flash when you discovered that your target shrugged the rounds off like raindrops. “We need to get ourselves out of here!”

“Oh Mrs. Chill, do please wait a moment. Your son and I have some unfinished business.” It was Falconer’s voice, faint through the thick wooden door but growing louder as he came up the stairs. The Dark Man had to be right behind him…or in front. Either way, it was going to be ugly. “I am afraid that the die has been cast, and you are forcing me to do this the hard way.”

“Daniel!”

I recognized that voice too. It was coming from somewhere inside the shadows at the far end of the corridor…maybe from the entryway to the chapel.

“Lamiyah?” I hissed in disbelief.

“What’s a Lamiyah?” Mom demanded.

“I’ll explain later, Mom.” Now I wanted to know how Lamiyah had warned Mom that we were in danger, if she hadn’t put in an appearance and talked to her. “Come on. Follow me.”

We were at the chapel entrance in less than thirty seconds, tops. I ushered the four ladies inside, but Mom wouldn’t go without me. Turning, we both watched in horror as the basement door flew open and Malachai Falconer lurched out. He moved like he’d had a stroke, dragging his left leg along the ground. He was still keeping a death-grip on the phylactery, although it looked like the tiny grinning skull was crumbling a little more with every step that he took. The lich was grinning, and even from this distance I could see the light of insanity in his eyes, both of which were jet black. Then I realized that what looked like a third eye was actually a neat, round hole placed just above the bridge of his nose and right between his eyes. Mom was obviously a better shot than I’d given her credit for…for all the good it had done.

“Why, there you are!” Falconer grinned with mock delight. A string of sticky black drool bubbled from his mouth and splashed down the front of his shirt. “Come, come. There really is no need for any further unpleasantness…”

I grabbed Mom by the arm and ducked into the chapel, pulling her along with me. The lights were down low in there, a row of concealed bulbs giving off just enough of a glow to make out the angular lines of the pews and benches. Jessica was jerking her head frantically toward the altar at the far end of the room. I looked and saw the dim outline of two human forms standing there, side by side. They were getting brighter and clearer as I watched, the details being filled in as if by a sketch artist. One I recognized easily — my spirit guide, Lamiyah — but the second figure, taller and bigger-framed, was harder to place. His clothes made him look as though he was on his way to a fancy-dress costume party with a Monty Python and the Holy Grail theme.

Whoever he was, from the look on his face, this guy was even angrier than Mom had been down there in the basement. That was bad news: it could only make Falconer stronger, and speak of the devil, there he was, dragging himself into the doorway with the Dark Man only a step behind him. I looked around desperately for a way out of the chapel. There was none. This was it. There was nowhere left to run.

Alright then. Let’s do this.

Mom raised her semi-automatic and put two more rounds into Falconer. Each flash of light lit up the chapel for an instant. I saw LaWanna’s face, frozen in a slack-jawed expression of terror that told me she had basically checked out of reality for the time being. The first shot hit Falconer high up in the chest, and the second just above it in the shoulder. The lich didn’t miss a step; he just kept step-dragging his way towards us, coming level with the first row of pews already. The Dark Man floated out to his side. Between them, they had the center aisle blocked off. The only way past them would be to climb over the back of each pew.

We were so hosed.

“Have no fear, Daniel. Everything is going to be all right. I promise.” Lamiyah draped her arm around my waist comfortingly. I risked a quick look around. Jess and Becky could definitely see her, based on the way they would shoot furtive glances her way every few seconds, but Mom wasn’t reacting to her presence at all. Huh. Well, I could worry about that later…if there was a later. Mom put in another double-tap. Her arms were shaking just a little now, which was probably part-tiredness and part sheer terror, and frankly I didn’t blame her one little bit; her aim stayed true, though, and that would have made Dad proud. Round one took off the top-left of Falconer’s skull, sending chunks of dry tissue and strands of lank, greasy hair high up into the air. Round two went over his shoulder and punched a neat hole in the tulpa’s throat, passing all the way through and burying itself in the wall outside.

Both of them just grinned even wider and kept on coming for us.

“Stop right there, you miserable, pathetic little runt!”

The roar from just behind my shoulder was so loud, it practically made my ears ring. Suddenly I felt myself being shoved aside, having to grab the back of the pew in front of me to stop myself from falling flat on my face.

“YOU!” Falconer hissed, stopping dead in his tracks. There was a lot of venom injected into that one, single word.

“Yes, boy…me.” Lamiyah’s companion strode forward, putting himself in between the lich and the five of us who were still living and breathing. “After all these years, we’re long overdue for a reckoning.”

“What’s happening?” Mom asked, confused. “What’s going on? Who is he talking to?”

“I don’t know how you escaped from your pew, father, but rest assured that you are going directly back there.” I’d spent enough time listening to Falconer Junior’s hot air today to detect more than a hint of wavering in his voice. Was he actually afraid?

“Oh, I don’t think so, my son,” the man spat. “It’s one thing to take an old man by surprise when he’s sleeping off the night’s drunk; it’s a different thing by far when he has spent the past few hundreds years watching your every move from the prison that you put him in. My new friend over there took pity on me and let me out, and believe you me, I am never going back.”

As quick as a flash, the lich brought his hands up and out, hurling a bolt of blazing purple lightning straight at his father. A wave of ionized air crackled across my face, forcing me to throw up a hand to protect my eyes. I don’t know how Falconer Senior did it, but he not only managed to block the attacking energy, he somehow turned it right back against his son. Malachai clearly wasn’t expecting it, because it took him straight in the belly. He flew backward ten feet through the air, slamming hard into the hallway wall right beneath the hole made by Mom’s bullet.

When the blast hit, flinging the lich back, he lost his grip on his phylactery. The skull was sent spinning up into the air, turning end over end as it went.

The Dark Man launched himself forward, thin lips drawn back in a snarl. Now it was Old Man Falconer’s turn to be taken by surprise, but help came in the form of Lamiyah, who had spent the past thirty seconds with her eyes closed, seemingly deep in thought. Now her eyelids flew open, and she unleashed a torrent of blue light from the fingertips of one hand. The beam shot across Falconer Senior’s right shoulder and punched into the tulpa’s chest and neck, the light scattering in a backwash across his entire torso.

“No!” screamed the lich, from where he lay in a crumpled heap of tangled arms and legs out in the hallway. The Dark Man screamed wordlessly, his face and then his entire head now bathed in a fierce blue flame. The tulpa’s eyes melted from within its skull, leaving empty sockets that blazed with an ice-cold fire. As one, Mom, Becky, Jessica, and I all looked up, following the phylactery with our eyes. A scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey suddenly popped into my head, the scene where one of the apes tosses a long bone up into the air, and it changes into a spaceship. Well, believe it or not, the child’s skull didn’t turn into a spaceship: instead, it just hit the ceiling with a thud, then dropped to hit the floor in a shower of dust, dirt, and bone chips…

…where it shattered into a thousand pieces.

Malachai shrieked, and this one was in a league all of its own. Every light in the chapel shattered at the same time, plunging the room into even deeper darkness. The main source of light was coming from the Dark Man, who was clutching his head in both hands and thrashing as if he was having a seizure. His torso was growing brighter and pulsing, like a star about to go supernova. We all staggered backwards, groping blindly with one hand to keep clear of obstacles, while the other was held up over our eyes to shut out the painfully intense light.

“Close your eyes!” Becky called out. “Don’t look!”

When the tulpa finally disintegrated, I could see the light through the palm of my hand and the inside of my eyelids. It was like looking directly toward the Sun with my eyes shut. Weirdly, there was no noise; just a sudden whump of overpressure, and then everything went black.

CHAPTER THIRTY

It took a couple of minutes and a lot of blinking for the afterimages burned into our retinas to clear. When they did, Malachai and the lich were gone, it looked as if a bomb had gone off all around us in the chapel. The pews were all broken and split, along with the fake stained-glass windows that had hung along one wall. The plywood altar was smashed, and I was amazed that we hadn’t all been peppered with flying splinters and shrapnel; then a knowing look from Lamiyah convinced me that she had had something to with that little miracle.

“…the hell?” mumbled LaWanna, looking dumbfounded as she surveyed the carnage surrounding us. She was still holding the gun, but thankfully Mom had the presence of mind to take it gently out of her unresisting hand, make it safe, and slip it into the thigh pocket of her cargo pants.

“Don’t ask me,” Mom said, letting out a long breath. “I’m just glad you were here to back me up. Thank you, LaWanna.”

The desk clerk offered up a weak smile, slowly starting to regain her footing. “I ain’t gonna lie, Mrs. Chill, we’re all about customer service at the hotel…but this went above and beyond.”

“Rachel, LaWanna. My name is Rachel. You don’t go through something like that and not be on first-name terms.”

“Rachel.” LaWanna clapped her on the shoulder, and Mom responded by wrapping her up in a great big hug. Soon they were both laughing like lunatics, letting off some of the nervous tension that had built up over the past few minutes. Becky and Jess were doing the same thing.

“Can they not see or hear us?” The question came from Old Man Falconer, who was standing in next to Lamiyah and watching the two pairs embrace.

“Daniel and his two companions can,” my guide told him. “They are a little more psychically attuned than the adults are…which usually tends to be the case.”

“So it does,” the spirit agreed. He fell silent for a moment, and then quietly asked Lamiyah what would become of his son.

“When Malachai’s phylactery was destroyed,” she began, indicating the rubble all around our feet, “his soul no longer had a vessel to contain it. The body of a lich gives up its life energy during the unholy ritual of transformation.”

“So that is it. My son is lost forever.” It was said mournfully, which surprised me in light of the five hundred years worth of misery and imprisonment that Malachai had inflicted on his father. All I could think was good riddance.

“Not quite.” Lamiyah’s tone was comforting. “No soul is completely beyond redemption, no matter how far into darkness and depravity it may have fallen. As the years past, your son grew increasingly twisted and evil…but there is hope for him yet.”

The older man frowned. “Then where will he go? To the same place as I am going, perhaps?”

“No.” Lamiyah shook her head kindly. “He has farther to climb up the ladder than you do, because he must begin his journey much closer to the very bottom. But know this: he will climb it, even if it takes a thousand human lifetimes for him to even wish to start.”

Although he lacked a physical body, tears nonetheless welled up in the older Falconer’s eyes. He nodded forcefully, seemingly at a loss for words. A golden light suddenly fell upon his face. It was a light that I knew well, because I had seen it before, and so had Becky. She looked up from her hug with Jessica and smiled, knowing what was coming next. A spirit portal began to open up in the air just in front of the doorway, quickly irising outward until it was a circle roughly six feet in diameter. Mom and Lawanna were totally oblivious to its presence, but the rest of us watched silently as Falconer walked toward it, hesitantly at first, but as he drew closer, the love, light, and warmth emanating from within the portal started to draw him in, until there was a spring in his step when he finally reached it.

At the edge of the portal, he turned and spoke to us one last time.

“Lamiyah, thank you for freeing me from that place of torment,” Falconer said, looking distastefully at the remains of the wooden bench that had been his jail cell for the past five centuries. “It is a debt that I can never repay.”

“You shall have plenty of opportunities to, as the people of today like to say, ‘pay it forward’ when you reach the Summerland,” Lamiyah said gravely. “Please be sure to avail yourself of every one.”

He nodded, and then bowed stiffly in her direction. Then he turned toward me.

“The love of a parent is a wholly sacred and special thing, young man. It has been so long since I have felt anything other than hatred and anger toward another living soul…” Falconer raised a hand and smacked himself on the forehead. “Ah, but I should not have to tell you, of all people, about that, should I? You have experienced my rage at first hand.”

I had to assume that he was referring to the first time I had sat on the chapel bench, not knowing that his spirit was bound to it by dark bonds.

“I can tell you this, in all truth: beneath all of the pain, the torment, and the fury that resulted…I never for one moment stopped loving my son. Never underestimate the power of your mother’s love, young man, nor that of your friends — for it is that, above all else, which has saved you today; has saved us all.”

With that, he turned and walked into the spirit portal, then on out of this plane of existence. The portal irised shut behind him.

“Wow,” Jessica whispered, sounding seriously impressed. “Somebody just saw their last Halloween.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Getting out of the Snare proved to be child’s play. We simply wandered the corridors until we found a fire exit, popped the doors, and headed out into the cold grey light of the brand new dawn.

As we walked past the town graveyard, I could see scores of golden spirit portals winking out of existence, like fireflies hovering above the marble tombstones. All of the spirits that the lich had enslaved and turned into his own private workforce had been released when his soul was separated from its phylactery, and were moving on to the Summerland to begin the next stage of their existence. I felt as if I was watching the world’s biggest jailbreak.

By the time we reached the hotel parking lot, every last one of them was at peace.

“Farewell for now, Daniel. We shall speak more of tonight’s events the next time we meet.” Planting a kiss on my cheek, Lamiyah faded away into nothingness.

The lobby was deserted (what guest in their right mind would have been awake at this hour?) so LaWanna hustled up some coffee, and we all gathered around the gas fireplace to talk.

By the time the sun came up, I had a pretty clear picture of the previous night’s events.

Mom had enjoyed her hot bath and a little wine, then turned in for an early night, just as she’d planned. At first she had slept deeply, but before too long her dreams had been troubled, becoming more nightmarish with each passing moment. A young girl with dark skin and a brightly-colored dress had been trying to tell her something, but Mom couldn’t make her words out, no matter how hard she tried to communicate. One thing seemed to stand out above all else, though: she knew that her boy was in trouble, somewhere deep inside the old hospital.

Finally throwing on some clothes, Mom had taken the elevator down to the lobby. It was there that she was stopped by LaWanna, who (she said) had noticed one of the hotel’s only guests leaving at high speed and in what looked like a real panic. Convincing her to calm down, LaWanna had asked what on Earth was going on. When Mom told her about the nightmares and her total conviction that my life was in danger, LaWanna hadn’t hesitated for a second: ever since she and her friends had broken in there, she had known deep down in her bones that something evil and malevolent haunted that place. What’s more, she knew exactly where it liked to hide: down in the basement. The clerk closed up the front desk with a wildly-optimistic “back in 15 minutes” notice, and the two gutsy ladies headed out into the night. Talking excitedly to one another on the short walk, they found that they each had something else in common: a concealed carry permit, and a fully-loaded semi-automatic to back it up.

Halloween night was long over when they arrived at the Snare: it was All Saints Day, and that seemed like a good omen for two ladies who were out to kick the ass of an evil entity. It took a little poking around the perimeter, but they finally found a restroom window that was propped open. Having the slimmer frame of the two (by far) Mom slithered through it, then looped around to the closest door and let LaWanna in. Despite it having been years since her childhood adventure, the hotel clerk was able to find her way back to the basement as easily as if it happened only yesterday.

And the rest, you know.

“The police are gonna have a field day with this one,” LaWanna laughed, downing the last of her third cup of coffee. “Maybe we’d best get our stories straight.”

“Why?” Mom asked. “We were busy at the time, but I didn’t see any CCTV cameras in there. I still don’t get exactly why those two creepers disappeared, but they seem to be pretty much gone for good. It’s not as though there are any bodies to find. At best, they’ve got a missing persons case on their hands…but I’d say that Malachai Falconer doesn’t have much of anybody left to miss him, so they’re probably not going to look all that hard for him.”

“Speaking of that…who was he talking to, there at the end in the chapel?” LaWanna’s brow furrowed as she thought back just a few hours, but to what was already starting to seem like a lifetime ago. “It was almost as if we were getting one end of a phone conversation.”

“Beats me,” Mom shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I’m still trying to take it all in. Ghosts, evil spirits, dark forces…I always thought the place for all of that was in horror movies.”

“I wish that were true, Mrs. Chill,” Becky said with a shudder. Then she winced, adjusting the pack of frozen peas that LaWanna had liberated from the small hotel kitchen and pushing it a little harder against her ribs. “I guess the world is a darker and scarier place than any of us ever realized.”

I flashed her a smile, and then looked across at Jessica, who was leaning way back on the couch and beginning to snore gently. The fact that she’d made it this far without running out of steam was nothing short of a miracle. Who could begrudge her a few ZZZs now? In fact, now that the adrenaline was starting to wear off, I was beginning to feel dead tired myself.

“So what happens next?” I wanted to know, yawning and stretching my arms out theatrically.

“Sleep,” Mom said, catching the bug and yawning herself. “LaWanna, can you arrange an extra room for the girls? You can put it on my card, of course.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem, Rachel,” she said, getting to her feet and heading back over to the check-in desk. “Let me see what I can do.”

It took me a minute to stand up, because my legs felt about as steady as Jell-O. I offered Becky a chivalrous hand, which she surprised me by accepting. Pushing my luck just a little further (hey, after all we’d gone through tonight and survived, I should have bought a lottery ticket!) I slipped an arm about her waist, and then felt like a billion dollars when she leaned into me and rested her head on my shoulder.

It had been the night from hell, yet somehow I felt more blissfully content than at any other time of my life.

As LaWanna pecked away at the keyboard with a look of intense concentration on her face, Becky and I wandered over toward the fireplace. There were a bunch of framed historic photographs hanging around the fire, most of them depicting scenes from Tyrant’s Grove’s history as a mining town. My eye drifted to one in particular, a sepia-toned shot showing a crowd of miners — roughly twenty or so, each of them holding pickaxes and other tools of the trade — gathered around the camera. Their expressions were grim to a man, and each dirt-streaked face had a thousand-yard stare that spoke of the horrors they had seen over the space of their relatively short lives.

One of the faces stood out. I squinted through tired eyes, craning my neck to look closer.

Well, I’ll be damned.

There was no mistaking it. There, at the very back of the crowd, was the one and only perfectly clean and un-dirtied face in the entire picture. The man’s face was thin, wearing wire-framed spectacles, and stared back out of the photograph with a haughty arrogance that was absolutely unmistakable.

It was Malachai Falconer.

I looked down at the engraved plaque beneath the frame. It read October 31st, 1872.

Well, I’ll be damned again.

Now I knew why those miners really looked as though they had been to hell and back. It wasn’t just the dangers of their chosen trade. The lich had been working his twisted dark magic on the town even back then, well over a hundred and forty years ago.

But not any more. Malachai Falconer’s curse was lifted, and for once, things were looking bright. The two women I loved most in all the world were alive and well, both safely within arm’s reach, and best of all, they loved me right back. All of the spirits who had been forcibly bound to the Snare of Souls by that evil Englishman had been set free, and there was a soft, warm bed with my name on it just an elevator’s ride away.

Tomorrow could look after itself.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

If you have enjoyed this book and would like to see further adventures in The Deadseer Chronicles, dear reader, then I would ask a favor of you, if you would be so kind: please leave a review or a rating on the Amazon.com site from which you bought or borrowed it. After all, the better the series does, the more of Danny, Becky, and Lamiyah’s adventures will follow in future. You have my utmost thanks for parting with your hard-earned money and for taking the time to step into this paranormal fantasy world.

As some readers may already have guessed, the Snare of Souls is based upon a real place. In 2015, I was conducting research for my non-fiction book The World’s Most Haunted Hospitals. During that process, I chanced upon a haunted hospital located in Tooele, Utah, not too far from Salt Lake City. The hospital had been closed down more than a decade before, and it had been purchased by private owners, who set about turning it into a haunted house attraction for the Halloween season.

They named it Asylum 49.

The owners were kind enough to invite my paranormal research team and I to move in for the better part of a week, and to conduct an investigation into the ghostly activity that regularly takes place there. Readers who are interested in the true story behind the Snare of Souls are advised to read The Haunting of Asylum 49 by myself and co-author Cami Andersen. I shamelessly stole large chunks of their hospital (which really is built next to the cemetery, incidentally) as a setting for this work of fiction. Fortunately, Asylum 49 is not the lair of a lich — to the best of my knowledge.

Some special thanks are due.

To my wife, Laura, for helping to proof the manuscript. Thank you for suffering eyestrain in pursuit of finding and eliminating typos.

To the men, women, and children who make Asylum 49 so very special, including (and not limited to) Kimm and Cami Andersen, Dusty Kingston, Misty Grimstead, Cathy Blank, Tyson Lemmon, and the many performers who give up their time and effort in pursuit of scaring the hell out of their visitors. What these guys are doing out in Tooele goes far beyond running a haunted house attraction: they are a true family, and if you happen to find yourself in their neck of the woods, I can’t recommend the Asylum 49 experience highly enough. By the way, they really do offer a cash bonus when a customer is so frightened that they lose control of their bodily functions…

The Deadseer, his friends, and his ghostly enemies, have been fortunate enough to have gotten some real support from some readers who went out of their way to get news of Agonal Breath out to the world. Linda Faye Allen, Lesley Bridge, Shannon Bradley Byers, Dibe Hall, Catlyn Keenan, Doris McCrery, and Katy Wheatley, I thank you!