This time, though, the rule book had been doused with lighter fluid and set to burn.
There were two ghosts in his head, and neither of them had asked for his help. Hoto and the Dylan-to-be. One was mad as a hatter and consumed by guilt; the other was a soulless monster.
Neither of them wanted to be in the same headspace, soulspace, whateverspace with Monk Addison. For his part, he could think of ten or twelve thousand things he would rather be doing. Getting kicked in the balls with an iron boot was on that list. So was being eaten by rats.
Too late, asshole, he told himself as he drove.
He drove badly and way too fast.
CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT
“Oh, Dylan,” said Rain. Now the tears came, and now she felt pain that even the best drugs could not mask. Something ruptured deep inside her heart, and the ache was unbearable. She tried to raise her arms, wanting—needing—him to come to her; desperate to hold this version of her child.
He took a few steps closer, but he did not reach for her.
“Please, baby,” she begged.
“I can’t yet, Mommy,” he said. His eyes really were like Noah’s, but also like her own. The best and brightest parts of each of them. The happy parts. The alive parts.
“Please.”
“Mom,” said Dylan, “listen, we have to go.”
“Go? Go where?”
“To the Fire Zone.”
“But … but I can’t. My legs—”
“Just get up,” he said. “All you have to do is want to and you can.”
Rain looked down at the ruin of her body. Casts and splints, wires suspending shattered limbs, mountains of bandages. “I’m ruined,” she said.
“You’re not,” said Dylan. “Not yet.”
He fished in a pocket and took out a small clock and held it up by its silver chain. She recognized it as the one that had been in her mailbox.
“How…?”
“There’s still time,” said Dylan. He took a delicate silver key from another pocket, inserted it into the back of the clock and gave it a tiny twist. “He’s coming. He’ll be here any second. We have to hurry.”
“But I can’t,” said Rain.
Then she realized that she was sitting up. Kind of.
She was sitting up but also lying there. It was as if part of her, a version of her, was rising from the broken body. It was like seeing a special effect from a movie–with a ghostly astral form rising from the physical body.
Her spirit rose from the bed and turned to look at what was left of Rain Thomas. There wasn’t much. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Dylan quickly as he pulled the door open. “He’s almost here. We have to hurry.”
Rain took an experimental step. There was pain, but it was faint. The ghost of pain. Or maybe she was a ghost. When she looked at her body, she did not see her chest rise and fall. Even the machine noises were muted.
“Am I dead?”
“No,” he said, showing her his clock. “We’re between heartbeats, but time is trying to catch up.”
He went out into the hallway, and Rain followed. Even as a ghost or spirit or astral form—she didn’t know the right word—her legs felt weak, damaged, wrong. They hurried down the hall, and not one person turned to look at them, though Rain noticed a few people shivered as if touched by a cold and unexpected breeze.
Rain realized that she still had the glasses on, but she wasn’t sure how that worked. She wore clothes, too, but they were the clothes she’d worn when she left this morning to meet Sticks. Not her hospital gown.
Dylan ran, and every time she glanced at him, she wanted to grab him, pull him in, hold him. Love him and never, ever let him go. Behind them a door banged open, and they jerked to a stop for a moment to witness something absolutely impossible.
There, in the middle of the hallway, was the Cadillac. It filled the whole corridor, its doors scraping the walls. The Mulatto sat behind the wheel, and he looked exactly as Gay Bob had described him. Dead. Withered. A husk with hungry eyes. He revved the engine, and the roar filled the air. It was clear that the staff did not see the ghostly car, but they all jerked their heads around, looking for the sound.
“Oh, God!” cried Dylan. “He’s coming through!”
The car lurched forward, tearing at the walls, crushing medical apparatus, knocking handles off doors, cracking windows. Rain was not sure if the staff could see the damage, but they all heard the noise. A few stepped toward the sounds, but most of them were frozen in place, confused and frightened.
“No,” murmured Dylan. “It’s too soon. Too soon.”
The engine growled and roared, and then the car began accelerating toward them. One of the nurses was in its way, and the car slammed into her—and through her—leaving her spinning in place. In a movie, it might have been comical, but she staggered and suddenly vomited all over the wall. The young Pakistani doctor was clipped by the car and staggered, blood suddenly spouting from his nose.
“Run!” screamed Dylan. “Mom—run!”
CHAPTER NINETY-NINE
Doctor Nine’s car was gaining.
It ripped its way down the hall, and when Rain and Dylan turned a corner, it turned, too. The physics were impossible, but that did not seem to matter to anyone anymore. People were screaming, and a deafening alarm began buzzing out, then another that was more of a bell. Both too loud. The hospital fire control system suddenly kicked in, and ceiling-mounted sprinklers began whip-hissing as they sprayed everything with icy water.
He’s breaking the whole world, thought Rain as she ran.
Her legs blazed with pain, and fires kept erupting inside her nerves. It was worse than when she was being burned in the Fire Zone. It was a different and more intense pain, because unlike the pain of fire, the nerve endings in her astral form did not die. Instead, they seemed to come more fully alive, and she could feel everything that had been done to her real body during the crash. Every single thing. She could actually feel the broken bones. Each and every one of them. Her stomach and chest hurt, and she knew that it was the mess that was her liver, spleen, and kidneys. And her heart.
Dylan kept running ahead, outpacing her, then turning to wave her on. Several times he almost—almost—reached out to take her hand, to pull her, but each time, he snatched his own hand back. Clearly afraid of something. No—terrified.
“Through there!” cried Dylan, pointing to the wide double doors at the end of the hall. It was maybe twenty yards but looked like it was a mile away. Rain was stumbling now. Her body felt heavy and ready to collapse. She wondered what all of this was doing to her body—was the stress of running undoing all the surgeon’s work?
Yes, whispered the parasite. You’re dying, and he’ll feed on your soul.
She ran anyway.
Behind her, the car was cracking the walls of the hospital. Acoustic tiles fell from the ceiling as the aluminum frames twisted out of shape. Fluorescent lights exploded, showering Dylan and Rain with sparks. Nurses and doctors ran screaming, hysterical because they could not see what was causing it. Maybe they thought it was an earthquake or a terrorist attack. Rain knew that either of those things would have been a mercy compared to what was really happening.
The Mulatto gunned the engine again, and now it was a monster roar so loud that windows shattered, filling the air with a storm of glittering shards. Rain felt them razoring into her, but she did not—or could not—actually bleed. They slashed through Dylan’s hoodie, and he staggered, crying out, and fell to his knees with such force that he slid forward ten feet. Rain screamed and staggered over to him, but he waved his arm frantically to fend her off.
“Don’t!” he cried. “If you touch me now, it’ll break the spell!”
“What? Are you … are you a dream?”
He actually smiled. Or maybe it was a wince. “I’m real,” he said, “but you’re not.”
The car was moving slowly but inexorably down the narrow hall, an
d the whole building was cracking open like a walnut.
“C’mon, Mom, we need to get through those doors,” he gasped as he climbed back to his feet. He was bleeding from a dozen small cuts, and there was one long gash on his forehead that sent lines of bright red blood running like tears down his face. The water from the sprinklers washed it to a pink paleness. “Please … the second is almost up.”
Rain forced herself to move.
The car was destroying the hospital to catch them. Maybe it was destroying the world. Rain did not know and could not understand what was happening. He was no longer coming for her. Doctor Nine was here.
The Cadillac seemed to bound forward as it broke past another doorway. It bucked and lifted and the bumper struck Rain in the back with all the force of a runaway train. It broke something inside. More than just bones. She felt her spine explode within her as she was lifted and hurled.
She hit the door with shocking force.
If the door had been one that opened inward toward the hall, it would have ended right there, right then. Finally. All hope crushed beneath those wheels.
The big double doors yielded to the force of her impact and swung outward on silent, well-oiled hinges. As Rain hurtled like a rag doll through the doors, she saw, there, unmistakably on the wall of the hospital, a huge, red, flashing neon hand.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED
Monk Addison drove through the storm with a carful of ghosts.
Mr. Hoto sat in the back seat, his face turned away, hands over his eyes, weeping. Thirteen-year-old Dylan crouched in the shotgun seat beside Monk, teeth bared, face and hands covered with new burns, his clothes singed and blackened.
“Doctor Nine will eat your soul for this,” snarled the teenager.
Monk believed him. He had no choice. When the tattoos had been finished, the connection between Monk and the dead was made. He had not only relived the sad, desperate death of Mr. Hoto, but he had been inside of the mind of Dylan, and there was so much to see. To know. Too much.
All of those years with Doctor Nine and the nurse. The lessons and cruelty in the basement prison. The abuses heaped upon innocent flesh. The torture of the pure mind of a child in an attempt to subvert the emergence of a new ascended master. It was all so big. Bigger than Jonatha had said, because it wasn’t merely preventing the world from shifting back to some kind of balance. This was going to tip things all the way toward chaos. It made the lines of an old poem ring with new and terrifying meaning.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned …
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Maybe this was what Yeats was seeing when he wrote those words a century before. Not the coming of an antichrist but the coming of Doctor Nine. It was not the Beast who would launch a war against mankind and challenge heaven itself. No, Doctor Nine was subtler than that. And much more dangerous. He was the enemy of hope itself. It was like the devil tempting Jesus during his trial in the desert, but instead of offering him riches and power, he put him in a Nazi concentration camp. Like that.
The boy had been broken beyond repair. That much was evident. The version of Dylan that had attacked his mother remembered his torture and hated Doctor Nine and the Shadow People for it, and yet he was now complicit in the goals of that experience. His hope had died so thoroughly that the light of mercy had gone out of his life as well, leaving only a hungry thing that believed his nourishment could come from feeding on his mother’s life force.
Was that how essential vampires were born? By crumbling under the weight of their loss and clutching at something to fill their void? Monk thought so. He wondered, then, how Doctor Nine came into being. The Mulatto, the nurse, all the Shadow People who had fallen under Doctor Nine’s spell had been human. Had the doctor ever been that?
Or was he something older and stranger? Some kind of elemental force that was beyond any definition of humanity? Monk did not know, because the answers were not in the memories of either Hoto or Dylan. The old Japanese guy believed that Doctor Nine was some kind of dark god. Dylan though he was a demon. Monk could not tell if either of them was close to the mark.
One thing the two of them agreed on, though, was that if Doctor Nine fed enough, he would become flesh. He would become fully alive in this world. At first Monk thought that this was an opportunity. Flesh can bleed, and in his experience, a bullet to the brainpan tended to settle the hash of pretty much everyone.
His gun was in his waistband. He had his knife, brass knuckles, strangle wire, and a lot of hard-earned know-how about killing. He did not enjoy it, but he was good at it. That’s why he had eventually dropped out of the world all those years ago. He’d floated off in a river of blood spilled by his hands.
Doctor Nine, though … if he was a god or demon made flesh, maybe it would take more than a bullet. Fine. Monk would try everything. Hell, he’d burn down the whole hospital if that’s what it took.
The boy, reading Monk’s face, grinned. “He will feast on your—”
“How about you drink a nice fresh cup of shut-the-fuck-up, okay?”
The boy laughed. A high-pitched jackal’s laugh. Mr. Hoto began banging his head against the car window. Monk tried to tune all of that out as he fished inside the boy’s memory for information. For anything he could use.
And it was there.
Memories from three years ago. Or … from now, from days ago. Time was broken, and Monk had to force himself not to get hung up on it. Three years ago from the teenager’s perspective; now from the perspective of the Dylan who was still alive in this world. The ten-year-old, wherever he was. The memories were hidden behind walls of hatred, but they were there. A kid on a skateboard with a backpack filled with pocket watches. Handmade clocks, built in a dark cellar when Doctor Nine and the nurse were not paying close enough attention. Devices constructed in secret, using the twisted science of the lord of the Shadow People. It was how the doctor stole time from people, stole the last moment of hope so they would plunge into personal darkness. The boy had learned the skills like an apprentice, and the thirteen-year-old would certainly have used those skills to do the same unkind, unholy work as the doctor.
Except …
He had not done that. Instead, he had taken great risks. Instead, he had escaped—as he had many times, knowing that he would be caught. Before he was taken back to the cellar, though, he had done something with those clocks. And Monk knew what it was.
Monk turned onto a street and headed toward an apartment building. The teenager’s malicious grin froze as he realized where Monk was going. And why.
“No,” he said.
Now it was Monk’s turn to smile.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND ONE
Rain nearly died there. Right there in the doorway to Torquemada’s, on the edge of the dance floor.
Dylan, bleeding and panting, dropped to his knees near her.
“Mom,” he said. It was all he said.
She looked around her. The club was monstrously huge, with walls that soared up to a ceiling that was either painted to look like the Milky Way or it was that great sweep of the galaxy in fact. Pillars rose around the central floor, but they seemed to vanish into the upper darkness. Starlight and neon light mingled and danced, and, as they had on the streets and in the park, colors burst out of nowhere in the air and then vanished into memory.
There were people in the club. Thousands of them. Some were dressed like her, like ordinary people. Others were in elaborate costumes from different cultures, different times, maybe different dimensions. It was impossible for Rain to tell where reality and affectation ended and impossibility began. Everyone was in motion. Everyone was dancing. The force of all that motion was like a fist, though, that drove the air from her lungs and made her collapse against th
e inside wall. The hammering of the Music was only less explosive than the desperate urgency of her heartbeat. Sweat burst from her pores, and her fevered eyes jumped and twitched as she saw all the things that twisted and writhed within the club. It was too much, and the overload bored holes in her head. Unable to resist, unsure if she wanted to, and yet terrified to let go, Rain stood up, shaking near the door. She felt more than heard the door slam shut behind her with ringing finality.
“God save me,” she whispered, but the Music beat all the tone from her plea. Was this real, or had her mind finally and completely snapped?
Her son was nearby, down on hands and knees, panting and bathed in sweat. His head bobbed, though, as if nodding in answer to a question. Or maybe to the beat of the Music.
Yet … the Music felt real, and the vibrations of the bass notes through the floor felt real, and the lights burned with stinging reality in her eyes. Caught at the deadly edge of the whirlpool, she fought for balance but knew that she would be dragged down if she took even the tiniest step forward. Nothing she could do would prevent that. As she swayed, the rhythms pounded at her, tugged her, enticed her, cried out to her in siren voices, teasing her to succumb, to simply step off the precipice and plunge into the abyss that was the Music.
The Music closed itself as one song finished, and there was a trembling second of relief. Rain felt faint, her face hot and running with sweat. She tried to concentrate, but the whole place seemed to be out of focus.
The door behind her burst open.
And Doctor Nine came in.
He was there. In the flesh. Fully real, and Rain knew it. Tall, thin, dressed in black, smiling with triumph. He still wore his sunglasses, but there was a hellfire glow behind the dark lenses.
The nurse was with him, her uniform stained and torn, unbuttoned to show too much cleavage. The Mulatto, tall and lugubrious, stood on the doctor’s other side, his skin dried to leather. Behind them were other shadows, less clearly defined. His people.