Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (64 page)

“She doesn’t get to
decide
that,” Spencer said.  “Guilt and shame don’t work like that, little girl.  She was raped and you weren’t!  The reverse of survivor’s guilt! 
Trust me!
  I’m never wrong about people, especially not when it comes to their emotions.”

“
NO!
” she screamed.  “You don’t know anything about emotions!  You don’t have any to—”

“Does a fucking marine biologist need to
be
a whale in order to know its mating habits?  Now stop arguing with me and fucking
move
!”

“Shannon’s not the Prisoner!”

“I’m not sure she is,” he said.

“Then what is she?
  Who’s the Prisoner?”

Spencer opened his mouth to answer, but just as he did, someone behind them said, “
Chto eto?
”  Both stopped, turned, and faced three men in black dress suits.  Two of them could have been twins, both with blue eyes and blonde hair in a tight buzz cut, only one was much taller than the other.  The man standing between them was tall, with a head shaved to a gleam and a face carved out of stone.  The two blondes had pistols drawn, and were aiming them at Spencer.  The bald man had a pistol, too, but it was at his side, relaxed.

There was a moment when no one in the hall moved or spoke.  Spencer’s Coke bottle-tipped gun was aimed at Shannon, not at the newcomers. 
Kaley could tell by Spencer’s surface thoughts that these were the other not nice men.  She could also sense that all Spencer’s planning had now gone out the window.  The keycard he found was useless.  Instead of sneaking in on these thugs, they had crept up behind them.  The men had heard them arguing, and she could sense they were riding the knife’s edge on whether or not they would kill or take hostages.

The bald man spoke first.  “Mr. Pelletier?”

Spencer sighed, and nodded an amiable greeting.  “Comrade Zverev.”

Zverev’s eyes were cast slowly down at the floor, to the blood trail between Kale
y and Spencer’s feet, and finally back up at them.

Kaley looked between all the monsters in the hall, back at Shannon.

Another elevator door chimed down the hall.  Everyone turned to look.  The doors parted, and out stepped a stocky, blonde-haired fellow wearing a gray jacket and a surly look.  The man started towards them, then saw the scene in front of him, and stopped short.  Kaley knew him at once, even though she’d never seen his face.

Spencer looked at the newcomer, and smiled.  Kaley could sense intense glee within Spencer, and grim satisfaction within the surly-faced man.

Now no one spoke.  The hallway was dim and frozen, and Kaley could swear she detected the cold winds from outside moving up and down the corridor.

“K
-Kaley?”

The men hadn’t seen
Shannon.  None of them had noticed the diminutive little girl in the middle of the dim hallway, so focused were they on Spencer and Kaley.  At the sound of Shan’s voice, the two blonde men jumped.  The one on the left turned his gun on Shannon suddenly.  Kaley felt his trepidation, his nerves like a live wire, jumping and snapping at anything.  She also felt his trigger finger about to squeeze.

Kaley shouted “No!” and flung herself
between the gunman and her sister.  The gun went off, and Kaley felt something punch her in the gut.

Spencer stood there watching it all happen.

Spencer remained perfectly still.

Watching Kaley Dupré fall back on her ass, watching the slightly stunned look on her face, Spencer made the decision to simply not move.  He’d let go of her shirt and let her fall, and remained motionless.  Somehow, he knew it was the right thing to do.  Like a man in quicksand, the smart thing was to not make any sudden movements.  Spencer now turned to the blonde-haired fool that had jumped the gun, and the other blonde man that had pointed and nearly fired, but exercised more restraint.  Then he looked at Zverev, who’d clamped his hand on his man’s wrist and called him a fucking idiot.

Spencer remained perfectly still
.

He stood at the center of the hall, Zverev and his people to his right
, standing at the T-junction, and Kaley and Shannon to his left.  His first thought was to lunge at the shooter, or to shoot him where he stood. 
No one kills Kaley Dupré but me
.  But for once, that urge was easy to set aside.  Other things were at stake here, just no one knew it yet.  Still, he marked the thug’s face, and vowed to watch him die.

“
Freeze!” someone called.  “Drop the gun!”  Spencer, Zverev, his two goons, and the sour-faced fucker stepping out of the elevator turned to look.  And, to beat all else, there stood one of Atlanta’s finest, Detective Leon Hulsey.  Spencer recognized him from news reports on corruption in Atlanta, and on the story of that night on Avery Street.  The man was sweating heavily, and was standing in a ready stance with a pistol leveled at Zverev and his goons.  “Drop them all,” he said.  “Now.  Right now.”  Spencer looked at Hulsey’s gun.  It was shaking.  The man’s eyes were wild. 
He’s seen it
. 
It’s already started
.

Spencer remained perfectly still.

Zverev stared at the detective and smiled.  “What are you doing with a gun,
shahktor
?”

At the opposite end of the hall, the man that had been pursuing him all night pulled out a pistol of his own, and aimed it fearlessly at Detective Hulsey.

“Just drop the fucking guns!  Kaley?  Kaley Dupré, is that you?  C’mon, girl.  We’re getting out of—” The walls started trembling, as did the floor and ceiling.  Then, Spencer thought he heard running water.  He felt coldness around his legs.  Keeping perfectly still, he looked down, saw water rising up around his ankles.  It was a strange, murky brown water, but also filmy, exactly as Kaley had described to him earlier that night.

Everyone looked down at their feet, even the stocky fellow by the elevators.

Spencer looked up, past Kaley Dupré, who lay dying on the floor, gasping for breath and spurting blood from her chest.  His eyes moved across the trail of blood leading to the elevator.  Finally, his gaze rested on the unassuming little girl huddled near the door.  Shannon’s tears had ceased.  She was no longer crying, but staring wide-eyed at her dying sister on the floor.  Then, slowly, she bent forward and started crawling on all fours, through the water and over to her sister.  She sat beside Kaley, lifted her head and cradled it, and looked into her eyes as she gasped for breath.

Spencer remained absolutely still.

Something licked past his leg.  Spencer looked down, saw a dark shape swimming just beneath him.  Then, the water started climbing the walls.  The guns and the tension in the air was all but forgotten; all eyes followed the water as it climbed.  Spencer looked over at Shannon Dupré, and he saw her rocking back and forth, holding her big sister’s head, the two of them locked in a gaze.  Kaley tried to say something; by her lips it looked like she meant to say
Shannon
but just couldn’t get it out.  Shannon kept rocking.  Her big sister gasped rapidly, faster and faster, then took one last breath, let out a long, long sigh, and breathed no more.

The hallway
quaked again.  Detective Hulsey kept his gun trained on all of them.  “I said drop the guns!”  His eyes touched on Spencer, and for a moment he looked the question at him:
What the fuck are you doing here?

Spencer looked back at the two g
irls.  Shannon was simply staring at the wall, but slowly she turned to face them.  She opened her mouth, and looked like she might scream, but something black was bubbling inside.  It came up out of her mouth, overflowing and running down her jaw, down her neck, pooling on the floor.  Something else moved inside her mouth, swimming in all that oil.  Everyone else was looking at the gravity-defying water on the ceiling, ignoring Hulsey’s pistol.

Spencer looked at the stocky man, then at Hulsey, then at Zverev and his goons.  “Trust me, guys,” he said, stepping
back from the two girls.  “You wanna run.”

16

Shcherbakov kept his gun trained on the black man, but his eyes flitted between the black man and Pelletier.  He was aware of the phenomena happening all around.  The water climbing the ceiling, and strange whispers and even laughter now echoing down the hall behind him.  Whatever was going on, he was certain it a ruse of some kind, some kind of strange gas or water leak, perhaps even orchestrated by Pelletier.  Then again, he was also convinced that something else was afoot.  The laughter…it sounded a lot like the hyena-like sounds he’d heard at the docks.

Finally, he went against his instincts and glanced over his shoulder.  Nothing there.  Or maybe…maybe there was.  Something moving at the other end of the hall.  Indeed, the hall had gone from dim to pure dark, and that darkness was approaching.  Or was it?

Shcherbakov looked back at Pelletier, saw him backing towards the T-junction at the end of the hall.  He turned his gun on him, and said, “Freeze there.”  Pelletier stopped moving, looked at him.  “Drop the gun.”

“We can’t all drop our guns,” he chuckled.  “Matter of fact, we’re all gonna need ’em if we wanna get outta here alive.  I suggest we all work together—”

“Drop the gun,” he repeated.  “Drop it, or I shoot.”

“Brother, what we’ve all got comin’ makes getting shot look like a day at Disneyland.”

“If you don’t drop the—”

“Everybody shut the fuck up!” the black man shouted.  “I’m an officer of the law, and if I say to drop the guns, you’d better know I mean—”

“An officer of the law?” Zverev laughed.  “Who are you joking,
shahktor
?  This is Russia, you fucking idiot, we don’t have any of your kind for hundreds of miles around.”

The black man squinted.  He wasn’t sure of something.  In fact, he didn’t look sure of anything.

Shcherbakov turned his gun back on him, and was about to issue a command to drop his weapon when suddenly there were screams.  Lots of them.  Behind the walls all around them, people in the suites, banging against the walls.  Something slammed against one of the big red doors.  A woman was screaming “Oh God!” and then there was silence.  Then, more screams from other rooms.  A door was flung open behind him, and Shcherbakov spun and aimed his weapon at a middle-aged man staggering into the hallway.  His face…it sloughed off like so much melting meat, and his arms ended at the elbow.  From his stumps, jagged, insect-like appendages were jutting out, clawing at his own body.  Then something like antennae shot out of the back of his head, his skull split wide, and some sort of fat creature fought its way out, and landed on the floor, wailing like a newborn baby.

Zverev’s people gasped.  The black man screamed “Fuck!”  Shcherbakov backed up, aiming his weapon at the body.  Zverev himself said, “What…what’s going on?”

“Two separate worlds shaking hands,” someone was saying.  It was Pelletier, speaking as calmly as you please.  “Stuff without geometry, or reason.  No boundaries.  Summoned by a little girl’s hate and shame.  Some of it’s her, and some of it’s them.” 

“I told you not to move,” Shcherbakov warned.

He snorted mirthlessly.  “I’ve been in this wilderness before, boys.  Trust me, Toto, we ain’t in Kansas anymore.  You wanna run.”  He started backing up again.

“Stop moving.”

More screaming from all around.  Behind him, the man with the insect arms fell to the floor, and a set of false teeth fell out of his face, grinning up at them.  The arms tried to climb the wall, and splashed into the water there.  Soon, something came out of the water.  It was large and gray and veiny and akin to a Venus Flytrap, only large enough to swallow a man whole.  It folded its lips slowly around the man long ways, lifted him, and then squeezed its teeth tight.  The man’s spine crackled as it was bent backwards, and he was finally squeezed enough that he popped like a packet of ketchup, his viscera spewing down into the thing’s gullet.

“God help us,” hollered one of Zverev’s comrades.

Something was beginning to stir inside of Shcherbakov.  He came to realize he had been in a kind of mild shock and denial.  He couldn’t be seeing what he thought he was seeing.  But, like a nightmare, it no longer mattered how unlikely it all seemed.  An inborn fear of the shadows and things without definition began to climb up inside his brain.  Adolescent fears that had been put aside thirty years ago now returned like old friends, or, more exactly, like old bullies.  You thought you were finished with them, but no, never finished.  Never for good.

The elevator chimed, and when the doors parted, Shcherbakov turned his gun on the thing stepping out.  A woman, skinned alive, staggering around and shrieking like a banshee.  Something was crawling either into or out of her vagina, and it whipped around like a cat’s tail, only about nin
e feet long and edged.  She fell right in front of him, splashing down in the foaming water, and sank.

“God help
us!  God help us!  God help—
ack!
”

Shcherbakov turned, and saw the man to Zverev’s left being lifted off the floor.  Something had come up from that churning water all around
his feet, slithered up his pant legs, and now blood was gushing out of his mouth.  Zverev and his comrade turned and fired on the writhing tentacle, the latter firing twice before turning to flee.

Shcherbakov started towards them to help, but then heard something laughing behind
him, and it was running quickly on heavy feet.  Instincts of self-preservation took over, and before even looking he leapt into the elevator, just as the doors were shutting, and hit the button for the bottom floor.  There was water in the elevator, too; on the walls, floor, and ceiling.  And things…things swam all around him.  It was like being at an aquarium, inside the transparent tunnel that went under water and allowed you to view all the marine life from within.  Only this water was murkier, and he couldn’t quite make out what he—

Something splashed on the ceiling, trying to leap out.  A creature with a long, cylindrical head, with dangling chunks of what looked like moppy hair and a chattering mouth with bleeding guns and hideous fangs.  The mind boggled, yet still Shcherbakov knelt, took aim, and started firing.

It was a
strange and almost humorous sight.  Spencer stepped back as Zverev and his pal started firing on the tentacles that had a hold on their dying man.  What was so funny was that Detective Hulsey, out of sheer terror, had leapt back against the far wall and started firing along with them.  In an instant, they had all just joined the same team.

They didn’t see what he saw
, though.  Long, slithering serpents had climbed out of Shannon Dupré’s mouth, down her shirt, onto the floor and were now pushing her up, lifting her off the floor.  The tentacles were now her legs, and she dangled from them by her mouth like a ragdoll, or like a dead trout hanging by the hook that caught it.  More tentacles protruded from her mouth.  Six.  Now seven and eight.  Now nine.  Now an even dozen.  Shannon still hung lifelessly from them as this new organism came shambling down the hall towards them.

Spencer fired in retreat, trying to hit Shannon but only managed to clip the tentacles that suddenly flailed in his way.  Behind him, Zverev and his last remaining guard were disappearing down the hall, towards their room, and Hulsey was
right behind them.

Spencer took a potshot at the one that had shot Kaley, missed, then turned and ran in the other direction
as more flailing tentacles rose out of the water, cutting him off from the Russians and the detective.  Something massive and dark swam in the water on the ceiling, and a long, lethal blade came lancing out at him.  Spencer moved in time, fired wildly with the Coke bottle still attached.  If his mind-map was accurate, there was a door at the end of the hall that had to be a staircase.  Spencer burst through it, not knowing what waited for him on the other side.

A sight somewhat familiar, the staircase was a long, veiny throat that pulsed and breathed, only no flames licked out as they had at
the house in Avery Street.  There were angry red bulges along the walls like infected tonsils, some of them oozing, changing shape…and that murky water poured down from the ceiling, through the air, cascading this way and that, as though hitting invisible rocks and forming a waterfall right down the center of the zigzagging stairs.  The water peeled away from the walls, moving weightlessly, expanding in the air, and inside he saw glimpses of motion.  A tear in reality, in the very fabric of space-time.

Welcome to the Hotel of Horrors
, he thought, almost giddy with excitement.

Spencer started down the stairs, and just in time.  The door behind him slammed
open and through it came the long black tentacles, testing the boundaries of the doorway before pulling its body through—its nucleus was Shannon Dupré, still limp and hanging from the tentacles she was vomiting from her mouth.

The stairs were coated with the trickling foam—
The quantum foam between worlds
, he thought, snickering as he slipped and tripped down the first flight.  For a moment, he was lifted off the ground, then slammed back down, then pushed across the floor, as if gravity couldn’t decide which way it wanted to go.  Yet again, he was feeling the effects of the physics of another world filtering through.  The Shannon Monster was coming down the stairs at him, fumbling and tripping over itself, unsure of how to manage in a world with such obstacles.

Spencer whipped back to his feet, and halfway down the next flight of stairs those same geometry-defying limbs as
those on the docks came reaching out.  Sometimes, they more than reached out, they clung to the guardrail and pulled with all their might, bending the metal and no doubt trying to pull themselves through.  The Others were trying to force themselves through the small opening and into this world. 
Taking this world’s virginity
.

Something swam inside the wall.  An immense dark shape.  Spencer stumbled down two more flights of stairs before he heard hyena laughter coming from below.  He looked over the guardrail. 
Ascending the space between each set of stairs was a creature that hurt his eyes to look at.  It was a massive, constantly churning thing.  It spiraled and became other things as it approached—now an octopus, now a spider, now a many-breasted fat woman long spindly arms, now an amorphous pile of sludge.  Above, the Shannon Monster climbed down the stairwell, suspended in the air by its many questing appendages pouring forth from her mouth.

They were cutting off both his exits, top and bottom.

Spencer looked to his right, where a door led to the twelfth floor.  He ran for it, yanked it open, and was immediately pulled in through the hallway by an unseen force, sucked in like a flea through a straw.  He hit the floor face first before flipping over and over.  The unseen force kept pulling him down the hall until he slammed against the far wall.  It knocked the wind out of him, and he dropped his gun.  He stood, snatching the pistol back up, and aimed it all around.  There was nothing on this floor besides the dimness and the water running all around, in the air and on the walls.

The walls…were different.  There were no more red doors with the gold horse emblem.  Instead, there
were classroom-style doors all around, and the white-bricked walls were lined with lockers, some of which had been knocked over.  “What…the…?”  One wall had a poster, reading
YOU MAY LAUGH
WITH
ANYONE, BUT
AT
NO ONE: BULLYING IS NEVER OKAY
.  Another one said
DRUG ASSEMBLY THIS FRIDAY
. “What…the…fffffuck?”  Farther down the hall, there was a banner that read
’CANES GONNA TRAMPLE THE COLONELS THIS WEEKEND!

The ceiling, walls and floor around the stairwell door looked like something had smashed them together. 
Like someone didn’t quite know how an Erector Set is supposed to work, and tried jamming it together with their Legos
.  Two different kinds of architecture at war with each other.

Spencer
heard hacking and coughing.  He turned and saw a woman lying prostrated on the floor, a pool of vomit spreading around her.  The woman had a long, green dress one with a black-and-white-striped blouse, a pile of books dropped to the floor, one of them called
Pre-Algebra Prep
.  Spencer thought,
A teacher?

The woman
tried to sit up straight, then lurched forward and vomited again.  Then, right before his eyes, she was disassembled and her parts hung in the air.  It was sudden; Spencer merely blinked and it had happened.

“
Well, ain’t that a bitch?”  He chuckled.

Another massive shadow passed beneath him through the water
.  Spencer noticed that he had started to sink into that water.  He was up to his shins.  He had a feeling that, the farther he ran, the more he would sink.  But he had to move now, he couldn’t stay here.  He turned and jogged down the hall, where the floors and walls of CES were once again smashed together with the floors and walls of Tsarskiy Penthouses.  He passed a few red doors until he came upon an elevator, and hit the button to summon one, fully expecting it not to work, but it opened immediately.  He stepped inside—almost wading inside, the water now had a definite thickness to it—and punched the button for the lobby.