Step.
The shower curtain, too. That was there. Maybe cut into pieces, but there. What would the police make of that? Of her trying to destroy the evidence of a questionable suicide? Someone had stolen the body from the morgue. Would Detective Martini be waiting for her with a warrant and handcuffs when she got out of the hospital? If she ever got out.
Step.
Her friends in the Cracked World Society. Each of them had been haunted by Doctor Nine. None of them had dreamed of him before they met Rain. Their pain was her fault. Maybe their slide downward toward using again was on her. Sure. It was on her. More crimes on her personal rap sheet.
Step.
Dylan. Poor little Dylan. Named for a ray of hope, but now that hope was fading. He was going to commit suicide and Rain—the real-world version of herself—was in a hospital, broken beyond repair. She could not go looking for him. She would never find him in time. All she could hope for was to wait to die so that she wouldn’t have to live with the knowledge that she had failed her son in every single way. All the way to the end. Even if Doctor Nine lost control of him, Dylan was lost, and he would fall. His heart would break, and the light inside of him would finally and completely go out.
Step.
Now she stood only a few feet away from the box. Her Box of Rain. Filled with all these horrors and so many more. It contained all the memories of everything she had done during her years of addiction, of need, of doing whatever she had to in order to guarantee her next high. And the next. And the next.
Step.
Doctor Nine came and stood in her way. Rain thought she could hear sobs in the air around them. Lost and broken people grieving for their own dreams, their own possibilities. He slowly removed his sunglasses, and Rain recoiled from him. Hellish fires burned in the doctor’s eyes, and Rain could actually feel the heat emanating from them. Sweat ran in rivulets down her body, and she could feel it pooling at the base of her spine.
Doctor Nine licked his lips with a long, black tongue. “Are you going to stand there and tell me that you finally got the spine to face the thing you’ve been running from your whole life?”
Rain tried to swallow, but there was nothing but ashes in her mouth. “I … have to,” she said weakly.
“No,” said Doctor Nine, “you don’t. Leave the box closed. Keep it chained. Let it be and I promise you peace.”
“Go to hell,” she said.
She stepped around him and approached the box. The Box of Rain. Pandora’s box. Same thing. Same set of problems. Same horrors lurking inside. After all these years. It squatted there with menacing solidity, no longer a concept in her mind but a devastating reality, and its presence here struck Rain solidly in the gut. Her knees wanted to buckle, her heart hammered in her chest, and she wanted to scream just at the sight of it. She could feel the eyes of all those people watching.
“My God,” she said, and that caused Doctor Nine to laugh. Rain turned to him.
“Yes,” sneered Doctor Nine, “that is your God. Everybody always talks about how God is something so big and powerful that they fear him. It. Whatever. Well, this is something big and powerful, and your life’s been wasted because you fear it. That thing has moved worlds for you. Maybe this is your God, after all. Go ahead—bow to it. Crawl on your belly before it.”
“Just … shut up.” Rain wiped her mouth with the back of a hand, and she was aware that the hand was shaking badly.
She forced herself to move closer until she stood within touching distance, then she turned and walked in a slow circle around it, examined it from every side, marveling at the detail that she had created, impressed despite herself at its apparent reality. No, she corrected herself, not apparent—that was too dodgy a way of thinking about it. No, she was impressed by the reality she had imposed upon it, by the reality she’d forced out of it, and by the solidity she’d forced it to accept.
Yes, she thought bitterly, that was it.
In that box were whole parts of herself that she had roughly cut away with a bloody scalpel or snapped off in desperate haste. She’d used the heat of fear to forge the iron for the metal bands and the chains that held it. With crafty skills learned over years of self-deception, she had constructed the lock and snapped it shut through the links of that chain, trapping and containing all the demons she had conjured. The demons strained continually against the chains, their strength indefatigable—not just to get out, but to drag her inside.
Now it was here, and this was the moment. She had no weapons left with which to fight. All she had with her was the windup pocket watch and the glasses that hung around her neck. Two things that might not even be real.
She accepted that as somehow appropriate.
Rain finished her slow circle and once more stood in front of the box. Then she knelt and reached out a tentative hand, touching the iron bands, feeling their cool, rough surface. She trailed fingers along the wooden sides and then ran them over the knobbed contour of the chain until she reached the steel arch of the lock’s shackle.
“I did a pretty good job on you, didn’t I?” she said quietly. She gripped the combination lock and gave it an experimental tug, but despite the rust and scarring, it was still solidly locked. But nearness, perhaps presence, sent a tremble through the box, and the huge box rattled heavily against the floor as the demons fought to escape. Or maybe they shuddered with hungry expectation. Rain sat back on her haunches for a moment, giving herself time to gather thoughts and courage.
She looked at the digits on the lock and closed her eyes for a moment. It required a combination. A set of numbers. Rain already knew what they were. Or thought she did. She dialed them in. Dylan’s birthday, month and year. And pulled.
The lock held fast. She grunted, and Doctor Nine sighed with real pleasure.
Rain tried it again, the same numbers but reversed. Year, month, day. Nothing. Another try, this time with Noah’s numbers. The lock did not open. There was another huge pulse in the room as the clock hand ticked off the last second. It was midnight.
Then Rain understood. It was so simple. So obvious. This was her box of horrors. Not Noah’s, not Dylan’s. Their memories were in here, but it was her own private box.
And so she dialed once more as the clock struck the hour.
Her numbers. Year. Month. Day. This was her box, after all.
And the lock opened with a soft click.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TEN
Gay Bob beat the nightbirds back, but he knew that he was hurt. Badly hurt. One eye was blind and the other was veiled by red. Blood poured from a hundred cuts, many of them terribly deep. Through the haze of pain, he saw Straight Bob sinking down to his knees, both hands clamped around his throat in a futile attempt to stanch the sprays of bright arterial blood. The nurse loomed over him, the bloody knife in her fist, her mouth curved into a jack-o’-lantern grin of red triumph.
By the door, Monk Addison brought the brass knuckles down once, twice, three times, and the dead hand holding him shattered. He dropped to the floor, but the Mulatto grabbed him with his other hand. Monk kicked him, driving him back into the doorway, trying to block the other shadows.
Even so, Gay Bob stabbed the key into the back of the clock and turned it. There was a small click that was almost lost beneath the screaming and the screeching of the nightbirds. All of this happened in the single tick of a second. It happened as he turned the key and unlocked someone’s stolen time. He wasn’t sure whose it was.
There was a terrible high-pitched scream, and he turned to see Yo-Yo, bloody and pale, the front of her clothes drenched with blood, collapse backward over Rain’s still form. But standing a few feet behind the nurse … was another Yo-Yo. Now there were two of them. One dying, one not. One bloody, one not.
With a feral snarl, the second Yo-Yo snatched up a visitor chair and swung it with all her strength at the back of the nurse’s head. The metal legs crunched through all those black curls, and the nurse crashed sideways into the bedside ta
ble. Yo-Yo threw a wild look at Gay Bob, raised the chair, and swung it again.
“Holy shit,” gasped Gay Bob as he fished for a second lock and a second key. He turned it, and Straight Bob was there—whole and alive—behind the Mulatto, looking surprised but not stunned by it. He jumped up and wrapped his arms around the zombie’s neck and yanked him violently backward. Monk staggered away, coughing and gasping. He looked at Straight Bob and then over at the other version of the man that was crumpled and still in a corner.
“This is totally nuts,” said Monk.
Gay Bob felt himself fading, going away, becoming nothing. He fumbled for the last of the clocks and clumsied the key into place. With his last ragged breath, he turned it.
A second Gay Bob rose up beside him, snatched up a blood pressure stand, and went charging into the fight.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN
THE FIRE ZONE
Despite all the years of rust, the lock clicked open immediately.
The trembling and rattling of the box increased to a frantic level. Steeling herself, Rain took hold of the chain and pulled the shank through the links, considered the lock for a long moment, then tossed it behind her. The lid jerked up ferociously against the chain, but she held it in place with a knotted fist and all the strength she possessed.
“Please,” she whispered softly, “please, God.”
The whole box jumped and banged; the lid hammered upward against the chain. She took a deep breath and then let go of the chain. There was a single violent wrench against the lid. Then the ends of the chain clattered down and hung limp. The lid did not tremble. The box did not shake. There was total silence in the vast dance hall of Torquemada’s. Rain’s eyes were fever bright as she reached out and pushed the chain through the restraining ringbolts and let it rattle down to the floor. The lid was held down by nothing more than its own weight. Rain took another breath and took hold of the hasp, pulled it up, and braced herself to lift the lid. A shadow fell across the box, but she didn’t turn.
“What do you want?” she asked coldly.
“You sure you want to do this?” said Doctor Nine in a reptilian voice.
“I’ve come this far.”
“You can still lock it back up again. You don’t have to face the demons yet. Numb is better. Numb is safe. Life hurts.”
Rain gritted her teeth. “Go away, asshole,” she said in a voice that was as hard and sharp as the edge of a knife. “You’re standing in my light.”
The shadow wavered for a moment and then receded.
Rain set herself again, took one last steadying breath, and then lifted the lid of her personal Pandora’s box. The lid was heavy, but she had the strength to raise it, and she swung it up and over and let it fall away. The colored lights shone down into the box, revealing the contents.
There was only one thing inside the box.
And it made her scream.
THE HOSPITAL
The fight raged on around the body of Rain Thomas.
Screams and blood. People fighting to save a life that might already be lost. Fighting to save their own lives, knowing that the versions of themselves from the past would catch up to the present, and in the present, they were dying. Or doomed.
They fought anyway.
Hope is like that.
The ghost of Mr. Hoto stood on one side of Rain’s bed, praying for her. Praying for them all.
The ghost of Dylan stood on the other side of the bed. Watching the fight. He was breathing as hard as if he had run up twenty flights of stairs. He looked from Monk and the Bobs and Yo-Yo to the nurse and the Mulatto and the others. To the Shadow People, who were his kin now. He looked down at his dying mother, at the splints and drains and breathing tubes. She was so close to the edge now. If he could only do something.
He reached out and touched the morphine drip. His fingers passed through it, but the machine suddenly beeped, and the monitor indicated that a dose had been released.
Dylan stared at the screen, then down at the woman who had abandoned him. He smiled a cruel little smile and reached again for the drip.
THE FIRE ZONE
Rain reached into the box and lifted the object out. The thing was heavy, more than an inch thick, and a foot square, edged by a heavy frame of some dense, overly ornate wood that had been covered with countless layers of cheap paint. Rain rose with it in her grip, feeling its weight, turning it over in her hands and then back again so that she could stare at the face in the frame. It was the face of the person she hated most in the whole world. The person who had profoundly and comprehensively disappointed her and ruined everything. The face of her enemy. She took two wandering-sideways steps and then caught her balance, but only just; clutching the frame in sweating, trembling hands. Here at last was the truth. The monster she most feared, the one who had done all this harm, framed for her to see.
She stared at what she held, at what she always suspected was the chief demon in her Box of Rain.
She stared into a mirror.
That was all it was. A mirror.
Only that.
But it was a mirror whose glass was warped and imperfectly made so that its reflective surface was irregular—concave in places and convex in others, cracked here and there, and covered with dust. Rain gazed down at her own distorted reflection and beheld the face of her enemy.
She opened her hand and just let it go. The mirror fell from her fingers, struck the ground, and shattered into a million fragments.
THE HOSPITAL
Dylan’s ghost brushed through the monitor, and there was another beep as more morphine dripped into the IV tube. On the bed, Rain moaned in her troubled sleep. The other monitors recorded the jump in heart rate and blood pressure as the drug did its work and found a welcoming and familiar home.
THE FIRE ZONE
Rain suddenly staggered and cried out, clutching her chest. Sweat burst from her pores.
“What?” she asked. “I broke it … I understand … I beat the clock…”
Doctor Nine burst out laughing. “You stupid cow, do you think you ever had a chance? It’s midnight, and that is my hour.”
Rain dropped to her knees, gasping as fireflies seemed to ignite all around her. Not the pretty ones from the park but the ones that burst inside her eyes. Far away, she could feel her body twitching. Her real body, the physical Rain. Something was happening to her.
She was dying.
“Mom!” cried Dylan, rushing to her but still not touching her. Still unwilling to break the spell, even now. “Mom, I’m sorry.”
Her sleeping body in the hospital came awake. Not all the way. Enough to see the thirteen-year-old Dylan swipe his hand across the morphine drip.
Again.
And again.
Flooding her with the deadly narcotic. Getting her high once more.
One. Last. Time.
Rain fell forward onto the dance floor, surrounded by the shattered fragments of the mirror. She could see herself reflected in a thousand different ways. Daughter, dancer, lover, mother, friend, addict. She saw one fragment reflecting her true self back in the hospital. Rain made the lips of her real body speak. Not to beg for her life. But to say something, one last thing, that she needed to say.
She said, “Dylan … I love you.”
And then she closed her eyes.
And for the fourth time in her young life, Rain Thomas died.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWELVE
Rain Thomas felt the breeze on her face.
She opened her eyes slowly and stood there, trying to understand.
People walked past her, laughing and talking, following the winding footpaths in the park. The sky directly above was a startling blue, but there were gray storm clouds peering with bad intent over the eastern skyline. The breeze was damp with the promise of rain.
A colored streamer caught her eye, and she turned to watch it flutter. It was one of several that unwound across the sky, twisting like dragon tails, painting the day in
colors of saffron and red and white. Each stream was attached to a tall bamboo pole that swayed above the trees.
She looked down at the immense belly that strained against her maternity blouse.
“What?” she asked.
It was then that she heard a voice speaking or chanting in a low, almost inaudible mumble. A bass voice, and the sound of it rolled through the air and changed the texture of the moment. She moved toward the sound, knowing what it was going to be. In a field, seated on colored mats or embroidered cushions, sat a hundred people in postures of meditation. They were arranged in a half circle around a group of five men in reddish-yellow robes.
“No,” she said, realizing what day it was. Knowing that this was some kind of cruel reset that was going to make her relive everything. Her water was going to break, then she would be in the delivery room. Dying. Being dead. Being alive again. Giving away her baby. Again.
All of it, all over again.
That was a stab through the heart, and sick in soul and body, Rain spun away from the crowd and the monks, needing to escape somehow.
And she bumped into another monk who stood a few feet behind her. The monk stepped back, bowing, smiling. “Pardon, miss,” he said.
She stood there. Unable to speak for a moment. She remembered her lines, her script. Every part of that drama was burned into her memory. She forced herself to say nothing, to delay the inevitable.
The monk nodded to indicate her stomach. “Soon.”
She said nothing.
The monk seemed uncertain, as if he had rehearsed for this but the play had changed. He cleared his throat and nodded at her stomach again. “This is a special one,” he said.
Rain just looked at him.