Soulstice (18 page)

Reggie sprang up and snatched one of the dolls from the case. She yanked off its head, and the dead blue eyes rolled back
like a shark’s, but instead of quelling the scream it swelled into an ocean of hellish noise. Reggie feared the sound would
drive her insane. Blood dripped from her nostrils, and her vision clouded over as spurts of red sprang from the pores in her
eyes. The pressure building in her head crushed against her skull. Meanwhile, the doll’s needlelike fingernails scratched
at her forearm. She ripped its arm off and black smoke flooded out from the socket. She dropped the arm to the ground.

The dismembered arm scuttled across the floor, crawling on its porcelain fingers like a crab. Reggie threw the disfigured
doll away and snatched up the little hand. It tried to slit her wrist with its nails, but Reggie held it at bay, and stuck
one of the fingers into the trapdoor’s keyhole. She twisted the doll’s hand in the lock and it popped open. The door swung
up.

The screaming continued as Reggie looked down into bottomless darkness. She scrambled around the attic, gathering up the sheets
and curtains and tying them together. Blood cascaded from her ears and eyes now, and she was nearly blind and deaf. But she
frantically worked, praying that she’d stay conscious until she had enough to make an attempt down into the dark. She looped
one end to the front leg of the glass cabinet and dropped fifty feet of makeshift rope down through the trapdoor. She wiped
her eyes once last time, smearing blood across her hands, and climbed down. Five, ten, twenty feet.

The screams faded as she descended, and Reggie began to gather herself once again. The blood stopped flowing, her ears stopped
pounding, and her vision cleared. As she wiped the blood from her face with the sheet, she saw a flickering light above.

Another porcelain doll stood on the edge of the trapdoor, a lit match in its tiny hand. Reggie thought she saw a grin as the
thing released the match and set the rope on fire.

Reggie tried to hurry downward, but the flames moved quickly, slipping gleefully down the fabric ladder. Above her, the little
doll waved. The fire reached her fingers and Reggie let go, plummeting into the black abyss.

She landed with a bone-crunching thud, sprawled across a gritty floor. A flight of rickety stairs rose over her. Groaning,
she sat up, and the surroundings began to take form in the gloom.

She was now in an old-fashioned New England cellar. Cobweb-draped lightbulbs dangled from the rafters, casting a grimy light
all around. Moldering walls of stone rose up from a packed dirt floor. The cellar stretched on into the shadows, and the stairs
led up into an inscrutable darkness.

An elderly woman’s voice screeched from above, “Naughty children stay down in the dark place! You’ll be here until you’ve
learned your lesson!”

A dead bolt clacked into place, echoing down the steps. Reggie wondered what the lesson was. She stood up.

The place was a dungeon. Beads of water dripped down the walls and gathered in rank pools. Reggie’s stomach fluttered at the
sight of little red spiders scurrying in the cobwebs overhead. Melted plastic soldiers, broken cars, and gutted teddy bears
covered the floor. These were the boys’ first victims.

Reggie stepped over them and tried the stairs, but the first step turned to dust under her foot. Soon the entire staircase
crumbled before her eyes. There had to be another way out—an escape other than an unseen door at the top of a disintegrating
staircase.

She searched for clues to understand this fearscape. Mason jars crowded a few dilapidated shelves. She plucked up one of them
and wiped away the dust, preparing herself for whatever horror might be inside. Much to her surprise, she saw it contained
bright orange peaches. After blowing the dust from a few more jars, she found a variety of tasty-looking fruits and vegetables
and tried to twist open a jar, but the lid was sealed too tight.

Keech must have been kept down here for long stretches of time without any food. As a small child, he would have been able
to reach the jars, but not strong enough to open them. And smashing them open probably prompted a severe beating.

She hurled the jar against the wall. Glass shards flew back at her like shrapnel and she ducked. The fruit splattered against
the stone, bursting like organs.

A gory stain oozed down the wall.

A cat’s low meow came from the dark shadows of the cellar. Another replied. The heated panting of a dog joined the chorus,
along with several croaking frogs. Scores of animal eyes, like tiny yellow mirrors, glinted though the darkness at Reggie.
Their paws and flippers, their snake-bellies and insect wings, brought them into the grimy light. These were the twins’ other—later—victims.
Limping, squirming, and dragging, the casualties of the young Kassners’ terrible acts drew closer.

A skinned cat crept out from the shadows, its vertebrae like long white caterpillars tied together with oily thread. A puppy
with only a lower jaw blindly stumbled after, the top of its head pulped like a melon beneath a hammer. Its tongue dangled
from its roots over the side of broken teeth. A burned raccoon peered out through wet, empty sockets from behind a broken
barrel. Frogs and toads with torched skin, wingless moths, bisected worms, and other tortured things writhed toward her.

Reggie wondered if the Vours appreciated the irony. They enjoyed such brutality, but the Kassner boys must have committed
these atrocities
before
one of them fell victim to a Vour. Keech had lashed out against innocent animals because he’d been tortured himself as a
child, and now his victims had come back to haunt him in his fearscape.

“Poor creatures,” Reggie murmured.

The flayed cat hissed. All of the animals’ eyes burned with hate. It wasn’t pity they were after.

It was revenge.

Reggie backed away, desperately searching for a way out.

A dime-size speck shone to her right in the gore stain on the wall. It was a hole, and light came through the other side.
The animals dragged themselves closer. Reggie balled her hand into a fist and punched the wall as hard as she could.

Her fist landed solidly on the small hole. Pain reverberated up her arm and shoulder, but a large crack formed from floor
to ceiling. The tide of crippled bugs and mangled frogs boiled at her feet. The skinless cat crouched to pounce.

Reggie stepped back from the crack, took a breath, and charged the wall with her shoulder. It gave way with the roar of an
earthquake just as the cat leapt through the air, its skin trailing behind it, its bloody claws barely missing her. She charged
through the dusty rubble and burst into the bright light.

When she looked behind her, Reggie found none of the nightmare creatures. In fact, there was no trace of the cellar at all.
A bright gold savannah stretched out to the horizon. Beautiful but barren, it looked like the sort of landscape she’d seen
in
Animal Planet
documentaries about Africa. This was a far more desolate version, though. No trees offered shade, no bugs whirred and buzzed,
no birds flew or chattered.

Reggie surveyed the vast scrubby nothingness spreading out in all directions. The sun blazed directly overhead. It was a lonely
and hostile place, without direction or comfort.

This must be how the young Keech saw the world.

The relentless sun beat down on her. Her mouth grew dry, her feet throbbed, and the acid from the horse’s tongue had eaten
deeper into her palm; she held up her hand to shade her eyes, and light poured through a thin membrane of skin.

The cellar had been cold and damp, and she immediately longed for that darkness. The heat was torturous and she could do nothing
but move forward.

And that was precisely what the Vour wanted, exactly how the fearscape had been designed. Once the victim was trapped inside,
he would have no choice but to let fear and pain drive him deeper and deeper into the nightmarish prison.

In the distance, a pair of brown rock outcroppings jutted from the plain. They offered no shadow from the harsh and unmoving
sun, but they were a change in the landscape. Reggie trudged toward the massive towers, and as she approached, she realized
they were identical. They stood like twin stone giants. She passed between them, looking up for any dangers that might lurk
overhead, but she saw nothing save the blinding sun.

Her throat burned with thirst, and the first strains of panic stirred inside of her. She could combat dolls and animals. They
had scope and size that she could fathom. But how could she fight an enemy like desolation?

There was no escape from the sun, and no visible end to the desert in Keech’s mind. All Reggie could do was put one foot in
front of the other. She pulled the crayon drawing from her pocket with her wounded hand. The lone ember of hope in this forsaken
place gave her little reassurance now.

Though Henry’s fearscape had been terrifying and dangerous, the tokens of hope in his nightmare world felt immediate, guideposts
leading to a frightened soul that had moved deeper into the fearscape only hours before she’d arrived. But Keech had been
gone for years, and as far as Reggie knew, he’d lost his way in the desert of his fears long, long ago.

The rock towers faded into the distance behind her, but nothing appeared on the horizon. Sand, sun, empty sky.

Scalding. Hopeless. Terribly, horribly alone.

Reggie quickly grew delirious from heat and dehydration. It no longer mattered what was real and what was nightmare; her body
was reacting to the experiences of her mind—and her mind was dying.

She held her wounded hand up again. The acid had burned all the way through, leaving a quarter-sized cavity in her raw flesh.
Reggie could do nothing but try to ignore the throbbing pain, and tell herself over and over that this wasn’t real. She peered
through the hole in her hand and saw something different now. The change in landscape was subtle, but after the eternity of
broiling sameness, it gave her hope.

Black buzzards circled high above a rocky hill topped with two dead trees. Reggie stumbled forward, tripping over the crags
as she climbed. When at last she crested the mound, the stink of what had drawn the buzzards nearly knocked her over.

The valley below teemed with carcasses: lions, rhinos, elephants, and scores of others. They lay in unmoving heaps, picked
at by vultures. A putrid wind blew in her face, stirring the blankets of flies that covered the dead. She looked around for
what might have killed these beasts, but saw no movement in the bright noon light. Warily she descended.

Some of the bodies had bloated in the heat like balloons, while others rippled with maggots. As Reggie made her way around
the decaying animals, she noticed all had one thing in common. They lay in matched pairs and seemed to have died in the throes
of battle. They were twins.

She passed a disemboweled leopard, rotted with its jaws clamped on another leopard’s throat. Two wildebeests lay unblinking
beside one another, their bodies torn and their tusks bloody. Even a pair of snakes rested in a tangled pile.

Examine the pattern, Reggie told herself. Solve the puzzle and find Keech. Was there a rivalry between the siblings? Was one
afraid he’d destroy the other? The dead twin animals were a mystery that eluded her. The unmoving sun baked their corpses,
and Reggie’s tongue swelled with thirst. Flies buzzed around her as she weaved among the bodies.

A glistening up ahead caught her attention.

Giant palm trees swayed over bright blue water, and tall green reeds rustled on its shore. She staggered through the sand
toward the oasis, and a cool breeze blew across its water. Reggie collapsed on her knees in the shallows, cupped her hands,
and drank. Water leaked through her burnt hand, but she lapped up enough to quell the hot ache in her throat.

The palm trees swayed above, and the reeds rustled. She cleaned the wound on her leg with the clear water. Reggie had no idea
what this place could be.

She guessed the life-giving pool had drawn the animals into the valley. But why they came in pairs, and then killed one another,
she couldn’t understand. This oasis was peaceful.

Reggie looked down into the still pool and saw her reflection. Her dark, sweaty hair formed a tangled halo around her head,
and the desert sun had burned her skin a deep mauve.

She bent down and splashed water in her face, then jerked back. Her reflection did not move in synch with her. Instead it
continued to stare up at her, serious and still. Reggie turned her head to one side, then the other, but her mirror image
remained transfixed.

Suddenly, the figure burst from the water’s surface and grabbed her by the throat. Reggie fell backward, the face she’d always
seen in the mirror now leering and hideous. The copy tightened its hands around Reggie’s neck. She lashed out and hit her
double under the chin. Bright light flashed in Reggie’s eyes, and pain exploded in her own jaw.

The hands released her throat. They both scrambled to their feet.

Reggie and her double circled. Every detail was replicated: her fresh sunburn, her disfigured palm, the doll scratches on
her arms—all of it. Her evil twin glared back, eyes wild and bloodshot, mouth fixed in a snarl. A bruise was forming on its
chin where Reggie had struck it. Reggie felt the ache on her own face as well.

“What do you want?” Reggie asked.

The double lashed out and clawed at Reggie’s face. She backed away, but not quickly enough. The nails scraped down her cheek
to her chin. Reggie felt hot pain, and saw the bright red scratches reflected on the double’s cheek.

Her eyes flitted left and right, trying to find an escape route. There was none, only the water, or the valley where all the
others had died. A rock slightly bigger than her fist lay by the waterside a few feet away. She snatched it up and raised
it like a hammer. The doppelgänger crouched defensively, anticipating the attack.

Reggie didn’t want to kill her twin, but it seemed to be the rules of this place. Survival of the fittest. Reggie dove at
the double, and the two rolled a few feet, scratching and clawing and biting at each other. Reggie ignored the sting of the
wounds, and wrestled the double to the ground, pinning her down with her knees. It glared up at her, its eyes solid with fury,
but said nothing. Reggie held the rock above her, preparing to bring it down hard on her attacker’s head.