Midnight Ruling (3 page)

Susan lead the way to the first door, never keeping her full back to us—like a woman who’d dealt with plenty of psychos in her day. As she punched in a password, she was careful to block the pad with her body. The door shrieked a
buzzing
sound until she pulled it open and we stepped in after her.

“Eleanor hasn’t has visitors in a very long time,” Susan said, looking at us and ahead in her half twisted walk.

“Not surprising,” I muttered.

Susan must have excellent hearing, because I heard her chuckle. Susan was pretty; the lack of make-up didn’t disguise that. Also, she had a distinct sway to her hips. I realized I almost looked to Aidan to see where his eyes were. Which was ridiculous.
He’s not your boyfriend
, I reminded myself. I immediately thought of the near-kiss and felt my face warm, which was worse. It wasn’t like I was still a virgin blushing over boys.
No, but it’s been a few years though
, said the nasty voice in my head, which I thanked.

“You know,” Susan said, interrupting my thoughts, “she’s been here since I started. That would be almost ten years ago.” She blocked the next pin pad with her body. “Well, except for those two days she was missing.”

The shrill door-buzz mimicked my surprise.

“Missing? She went missing?”

“Yes,” Susan said gravely and opened the door. “About five years ago, our Miss Fuller escaped. She was only gone for thirty-eight hours. Nothing became of it. A police officer found her in a suburban neighborhood near Leland.”

Aidan squeezed my arm, perhaps in an attempt to calm me. No one told me this!

Susan proceeded before us again, allowing the door to shut securely before leading us down the next hallway. This one had people in it; mostly, they were white-cloaked nurses and doctors.

I tried to wipe the idea from my mind. My parents never told me.
Why wouldn’t they have told me?!
Nell was found near Leland. Did that mean she was coming to find me?

“I was just curious what brought you here?” Susan asked with a half smile, oblivious to the impact.

Aidan cleared his throat and said, “School project.”

“Oh?” Susan said, not hiding her disappointment. “They said you had the last name as Miss Fuller,” she said to me. “I thought…you need a family member to…”

“It’s okay,” I said before Aidan could talk again. “I’m her niece. But it’s also a school project for us. We’re researching patterns in ritualistic sociopaths.” Oh, it sounded good.

Susan’s pace quickened again, and we veered down a new hallway where we had yet another coded door. “I should warn you though.” She glanced over her shoulder at me. “She probably won’t talk.”

After taking an elevator and two additional coded doors, we finally came to the hallway where they kept Nell. The downside was that patients roamed the hallways here as well.

One pajama-dressed man began walking alongside us as if he knew who we were. He didn’t speak or even look at us; rather, he kept pace until Susan shooed him into another room. Most didn’t acknowledge our existence as we made our way to Room 427.

Pausing outside the door, Susan turned toward us fully and offered the false smile. “This is where I leave you. There is a time limit, as Miss Fuller is due to take her meds, and she gets rather sleepy after that. So in about twenty minutes, we’ll be coming in. If you’re done before that, just knock on the door.” At her hip, she pulled a key, which had been attached to her belt.

“We’ll be locked in there with her?” I asked, feeling the nerves.

“Mmhm.” Susan pushed the key into the peculiar lock and twisted. “But don’t worry, her legs are tied down. Don’t stand too close to her, though I don’t think you’ll have to worry about this one.”

I felt my heartbeat begin to pick up its pace. Taking out the key, she entered one last code into a keypad out of our sight and turned the knob. At this point, it all felt very real. Walking with Susan had been the easy part.

I had to face off with the woman who’d abducted me and my sister when we were little. She was responsible for Neive’s death. It wasn’t just her death that infuriated me; it was everything afterward. We’d moved to Leland, taking with us the gravestone to put in the local cemetery outside of town. My parents only allowed one picture of her in the house, and it was in the darkest hallway where no guest would see. Because of Nell, my mom cried a lot, my dad was rarely around, and I was in a psychiatric facility for a year as a kid. The threat of divorce was a fog until my sister Mona was born seven years ago, then again before Caitlin was conceived.

Feeling my cheeks flush with fury, Miss Susan mistook it for girlish excitement. “Don’t worry, everything will be fine. She’s normally quite calm.”

“Then why tie down her feet?” Aidan asked.

“As a precaution. As I said, she hasn’t had any visitors in…well, a long time,” Susan said pleasantly and opened the door for us.

Before Aidan could make a move, before he could lead the way and play the protector, I stepped inside the room, bumping his shoulder with mine to stop him.

Just within the threshold, I saw her. For an instant, I forgot to breathe.

There was an image of this woman that had always been in my head. We didn’t keep any pictures of Nell anymore. Dad kept most of her things in boxes in the basement. He’d said once that he hoped it flooded down there but never threw his sister’s things away.

Even without seeing her for so long, this wasn’t the woman I remembered.

The years had removed her youth. I don’t know why I didn’t expect that. Her dark brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, streaked with silver at her temple, just like my dad’s. Her round face had wrinkles near her mouth, and her dark blue eyes were dulled. She wore a hospital gown, and the sheets were rumpled on top of her, barely covering the restraints on her ankles.

I saw the Velcro restraints around her ankles, just as the nurse said. It would be easy for Nell to remove them, though she didn’t seem the least bit interested in doing so.

Lying in bed, Nell rolled that clouded gaze to the doorway, seeing me but not quite
seeing
me.

“Eleanor,” Susan said in a gentle tone, “you have visitors today.”

Nell’s eyes passed me over, and she sighed, turning her head to peer out the single window with bars on it.

Aidan slipped in after me, and the door closed with a heavy click.

No chairs were set up in the room, but like Susan said, Eleanor never had visitors.

Apprehensive, Aidan and I stood side by side, just a few feet from the woman, and no one uttered a word.

Swallowing hard, I decided not beat around the bush. I didn’t want to waste time, and the sooner we were out, the sooner I could get our friends back. “Nell?” Her name even sounded foreign to me.

Trying not to grit my teeth, I said, “Aunt Nell, it’s me, Nora.” Interest swiveled the gaze back to us so fast that I swallowed a gasp with great pains. Instead, I said quickly, too quickly, “I need to know how you contacted the Demon’s Grave.”

The haze vanished, leaving a bright intelligence that hadn’t been there earlier. “Demon’s Grave?” The corners of her mouth curled in a crude smile. “To meet the Erebus? To be a Neophyte?”

“Erebus? You mean Damien?” I tested, wondering if she had in fact met the demon himself or if maybe there’d been other demons.

“The Erebus,” she repeated merrily. “One needs to be prepared.”

Pausing, I struggled to remember my questions and pulled the pocketbook from my jeans. I noticed Aidan had the tape recorder out. “Nell, we need to know how to get in.”

“The Erebus needs a Neophyte. You tell him I’m ready.” She swung open her arms, flinging back the sheets from her torso in the grand gesture. Head tilted up to the ceiling, she smiled wide, revealing a missing tooth. She arched her body as if in a crude form of ecstasy.

“Yes.” I felt impatience rising. This wasn’t the dangerous woman I’d remembered. My nerves began to shift into something cruel. I could hurt her much easier now, I realized. Kick her while she’s down and as much as that’s
not a nice thing to do
, I wanted to, very much.

“Do you know how to get in?”

“The marble door, of course,” she chided with a wave of her hand, as if it were a foolish question. “Watch for the Keeper. They are tricky things, yes, yes.”

“You never used the marble door,” Aidan said from behind me. “You made your own portal.”

Nell’s eyes shifted from the ceiling to Aidan. Her eyes grew round as she braced herself against the back of her bed.

That’s when she began to scream.

Nell Fuller’s scream cracked and strained, and despite the tearing that I could hear in her voice, she continued. Her legs bucked for release, as if she might climb up the wall to escape.

Aidan and I froze, unsure what to make of the horrible wailing.

Susan burst through the door to find Aidan and me pressing our backs against the wall. She grabbed Aidan’s arm and pulled him from the room with a strength that I hadn’t expected. Apparently, Aidan didn’t either. He staggered, eyes wide, his free arm that still clutched the tape recorder flailing, before he was flung out the open metal door.

In that instant, Nell quieted and dropped back into the bed, breathing hard. The abrupt silence rang in my ears and gave Susan pause before snatching me from the room as well.

“I have to stay!” I burst before Susan could change her mind.

“That was a Birket,” Nell rasped, spitting the name.

Startled, my eyes snapped toward my aging aunt, and I sidled along the wall, away from Susan. “How’d you know?”

“The Keeper had the same eyes.”

This snagged mine and Aidan’s attention, and at the same time we spoke over each other.

“Keeper?”

“My grandpa?”

I felt Susan touch my arm. “That’s enough,” she said in a hushed tone. “She’s obviously…”

“No!” Nell and I exploded at the same time.

I didn’t have time to argue with the nurse, but this was my only chance.

Susan retracted her arm and eyed us both for several heartbeats, gauging us with suspicion. She finally straightened her spine and said with renewed sternness, “Fine, but he stays in the hallway with me.”

I nodded in agreement, unable to see Aidan from where I stood. Susan gave me one last curious stare before slipping back out of the room. The door closed with a mechanical click.

Aidan’s familiar hum, which had become more of a comfort than a hindrance, faded, and I was left alone with her.

Looking at the feeble woman with her legs strapped to the bed shouldn’t have been scary, but somehow it was. We sized each other up, neither of us speaking while the rumblings out in the hallway continued as if my world hadn’t stopped turning.

If she wanted to, she could unstrap her legs and lunge for me, but that’s not what scared me. Her memory had a dangerous arsenal, and I didn’t want to be around when she started shooting. But here I was, waiting for the first bullet.

Desperate to keep the hysteria from getting in, I shot first. “Tell me about the Keeper.”

At first, Nell didn’t speak. She watched me with a revived awareness.

“Or I can leave you alone again,” I said. I wanted to sound sassy, but I just sounded nervous.

The corner of Nell’s dried lips quirked, but she didn’t smile. “The Keeper is short for Gatekeeper, child. You know of it?”

Remembering the Grave, I nodded. “He guarded against illegal trespassers.”

Nell made a sound of approval, and the little kid in me, the one before all the horror, was pleased. Disgusted, I tugged at my shirt and looked away. “What if there is no Keeper anymore?”

“I saw one.” Nell pointed to the door. “There is always one.”

I didn’t have to look at the metal door to know what she meant. “You’re scared of the Keeper?”

Instead of answering, she asked, “You’ve seen the Darkness?”

Somehow I knew she would know the answer to that, and I countered, “Is the Keeper dangerous?”

Nell’s eyes shifted away and became glassy. “They let me have letters. I got several from a nice girl named Bess.”

Shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, I took a deep breath. “Nell,” I said firmly, and her unfocused gaze shifted to me. Butterflies cluttered my insides. “Why scream?”

After several seconds, Nell said, “Because he might know who I am.”

“Of course he knows who you are. I brought him here. Why would he be the Keeper though?”

Seeing that she had my full attention, she sat up straighter, looking like a human pencil. “The next in line would naturally be children. Children like Bess. However, I know that
his
spawn were so oblivious to the Darkness Between Worlds they wouldn’t be chosen.”

“How did
you
know?”

“Because I met them. Why do you think I spent so much time near Leland?”

I hadn’t, but kids don’t generally pay attention to those things.

When I didn’t speak, Nell continued. “So it would fall upon his grandson…Adam. Was that him? Adam? He liked cars.”

Adam was dead, killed in his Maserati when Aidan was young. If there’d always been a Gatekeeper, that left Aidan, and he knew nothing of the Demon’s Grave.

“Sure,” I lied. “Nell, I need to get into the Demon’s Grave. The marble door disappeared, and I know you created a portal with…” I tugged at my shirt and braced myself. “When you threw Neive into the fire.”

Nell’s eyes dulled. “Pretty name, Bess. She was a pretty girl. Perfect even. I needed her with child, and I could have left this world forever. Forever always forever, eternal.”

Daring a step away from the wall, I neared the repulsive thing in the bed. Her wrinkled face remained frozen, distant, as she faded into silence. Her mouth was moving, but no sound escaped.

“Nell,” I said, loud enough to flinch at my own echo.

Outside, I could hear someone throwing a fuss and shouting profanities that I hadn’t heard since my summer job at a landscaping company. At first I ignored it, focusing all my attention on the withering harpy. “Answer me. This is important. I have to get back in there. Do you understand?” I chanced another step, my legs brushing the sheets of her bed.