Dark Siren (14 page)

“Wait,” Isaac said, and she yanked her hand away as if the metal had been red hot.

Alice’s heart was beating fast and hard. She hadn’t even noticed until now, like she had been caught in a trance. “What is it?” she asked.

“There’s something down there. I can sense power rising from it, like heat from a vent.”

“Or cold from an ice-covered lake,” she said, staring up at him. Funny how they sensed things differently. Her eyes settled on the trap door again. “I think the shadow woman lives in here. If she has Emily, this is where she’ll have taken her.”

“Then we should be ready,” he said, and he set the flashlight down on the ground. “Back away.”

Alice felt the warm finger of excitement trail down her back and did as she was told, clearing the way for whatever Isaac had in mind. She watched him bring his right arm to chest level, felt the air itself vibrate around him as he summoned his magic from wherever it came, and with no light show this time, the latch on the trap door flipped with a clack, and the hatch slowly creaked open.

She imagined a woman rising from the small square, her long, dark hair hanging loosely over her face, her face twisted with hate and anger. Alice wondered what the woman might sound like when she screamed—
like nails on a chalkboard
—and prepared herself for what that might feel like on her ears.

When nothing came screaming out of the hole, Alice approached and knelt before the hatch, grabbing the flashlight and peering into the space. The compartment was a shallow one. She figured if she stood inside it she would only be knee deep, and there were boxes down there—at least two of them, maybe more—filled with shiny metal film cases.

“Just more storage,” Alice said, reaching for one of the cases, “More film reels.”

But when her fingers clasped one of the film reels, Alice’s entire body began to tremble and she jerked up. The film reel came up with her hand, catapulted into the air, and struck Isaac hard on the head with a loud thump. Isaac grunted. Alice felt something warm sprinkle her cheek, and then she heard the metal case hit the floor with a heavy clang, catching a glimpse of it as it rolled into the darkness of the projection room.

“Isaac,” she said, “Oh my God, are you okay?”

Isaac had jumped away from the store room and was hunched over with his hand to his head. She shone the flashlight on him just in time to see his hand come away from his temple wet with red blood. Her stomach went cold at the sight of it and she stood up.

“Christ!” Isaac said, touching his hand to his head a few times. Each time it came away with more blood on it. “That hurts.”

“Turn around, let me help.”

When Isaac turned around, half of his face was already dripping crimson from a deep gash just above his left eye. The film reel had caught him with its edge and bitten into his skin. He pressed his hand against his head to create a tight seal and held it there.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“I’m sure you didn’t, but that doesn’t help me, does it? What the hell happened?”

“I grabbed it and it was like… like an electric jolt. I lost control of my nerves for a second.”

“Did you see where it went? I think I heard it roll.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Alice spun around, flashlight in hand, and threw the beam of light into the darkness. She looked across the floor, beneath the projector, and under the table on the far side of the room, but she couldn’t see the film reel. They had left the door to the projection room open, and besides the projector being in the way, it was almost a straight line between the store room door and the red door. It would have been a tough shot, but the thing could have rolled out.

“We have to get you to a hospital,” she said.

“No. Just keep going. I think I saw something on the trapdoor.”

It was difficult to ignore the urge to help Isaac, to fix the damage she had done, but she forced herself to turn around and look. A set of ornate symbols had been drawn into the inside of the trapdoor. For a moment she couldn’t quite identify the shapes, so she took a few steps closer and shone the full beam of her flashlight on it. The markings consisted of a number of small, hand-carved etchings arranged into a circular shape. In the center of the circle of symbols there were another three arranged in a triangular fashion. One of them looked like an upside down stickman without a head, the other resembled a trident with the middle prong missing, and the third was a near perfect circle with a spiral pattern inside of it.

When Alice didn’t say anything, Isaac spoke. “Do you recognize them?” he asked.

She did, though she couldn’t vocalize it. In fact, she didn’t just recognize the designs, she was
intimately
familiar with them. The placement of each individual symbol, both big and small, the circular pattern, even the smoothness of each line, they were the same ones which had been drawn into the closet door where she kept her Chest of Haunts, and the same ones carved into the inside of the chest itself.

But that was impossible.

The projection room suddenly flooded with a sound like a hundred hissing cats. Alice dropped the flashlight and clasped her ears, screaming to try and drive the painful sound away. Isaac grimaced and staggered toward a wall, propping himself up against a nook with a second tinted window. But the hissing was invasive, seeming at once to be coming from outside and inside Alice’s own head. Then it stopped, just like that.

Alice let go of her ears. The ringing made it difficult to hear what Isaac was saying, but he was pointing at the window in front of him with some urgency so she walked toward it, rested her hands on the ledge, and looked out. There was light hitting the screen from the projector, but the screen was white, as if each negative square was blank. This brightness made it easy to see the three shadowy figures standing at the foot of the screen, to see how real they were.

The ringing in Alice’s ears cleared with a pop, and she heard Isaac say “We have to leave!”

This time she was in no position to argue with him. Alice turned on the spot, grabbed the flashlight, and tossed it to Isaac. She grabbed her backpack and swung it over her shoulder. Just as she was about to make a dash for the red door, she spotted the open trap door with the familiar engraving on it. The projector cut out, and what little ambient light there was died with it, leaving only the orange glow of the flashlight for illumination.

Darkness pressed around her, and she sensed its malice like a cold, putrid breath on the nape of her neck. She had one chance to run toward the trap door and grab a film reel, one she could take apart and study, but the dead silence which had fallen around her wasn’t only total—it was unnatural. Dangerous. Filled with the promise of pain beyond any kind of mortal comprehension. She could taste the way the properties in the air had changed, how the emotional resonance in this room had gone from calm to furious in the space of seconds.

And her skin was starting to crawl again.

“Alice!” Isaak yelled, his voice clawing to reach above the chaos.

Fuck research,
she thought, and she grabbed Isaac’s arm and made a mad dash for the red door. The sounds of hissing came again, but this time it was as if they were on top of her, the three things which had a moment ago been standing in front of the big screen in the auditorium were in the room now, she could feel them whooshing past her. But it was so dark she wouldn’t have been able to tell a normal shadow from a living one. In any case, right now that didn’t matter. All that mattered was
out
.

Alice hit the stairs hard with Isaac running at full speed behind her. She leapt down the half-spiral stairs two at a time, her camera safely tucked into her chest with one hand to stop it from bouncing. Something cold and dark rushed at her from below, and with lightning reflexes she threw the camera up, without aiming, and pulled the trigger. A bright white flash filled the room followed by a hiss and a screech which hurt to listen to.

They didn’t have long to go, now. The front door was in her sight, its edges marked by the ambient Ashwood light spilling in from the outside. When her feet met the ground floor, she sped across the lobby with her head down and fumbled, with her free hand, for the key in her pocket. Another shadow stepped in her way. She didn’t see it, didn’t hear it, but her supernatural senses told her it was standing before her, waiting to slice her up and eat her.

Isaac yelled for her to get down, and Alice threw herself into a forward roll. At the same time, Isaac produced a bolt of energy so powerful it caused the entire lobby to tremble as it sailed across the room and slammed into the shadow creature. It made a noise like forks scraping on plates, and merged into the darkness around it.

Using the momentum from the roll, Alice sprang to her feet again, struck the door with her shoulder, and pushed her way outside. Isaac followed, breathing hard and bleeding from his temple. The cold, crisp air was good to her—kind and sweet. Alice finally fished the key out of her pocket, turned toward the door, and was about to close it, but couldn’t. Panic had gripped her, and she couldn’t move, couldn’t act.

The open archway reminded her of something she had only ever seen in dreams since the night she was taken away. It looked like a portal into the Reflection, like a black hole that sucks everything in, and from which nothing can escape. Not Alice, not Emily, not anyone. Not unless the black hole spits them out, and even then, they always come back warped.

Isaac, sensing Alice’s hesitation, reached into the darkness for the handle, pulled hard, and slammed the door shut. The sudden bang pulled Alice back into the moment, and she threw the key into the lock, turned it, and stepped away as if the building were a bomb about to explode. Alice reached for the key again to pull it out, but the lock made a
clack
sound, the key turned on its own, and then snapped in half, falling to the ground with a clink. This was all the motivation she needed. She ran down the street toward her car, pushing as fast as her legs could take her. Alice had accepted the awful subtext beneath what had just happened, the symbolic snapping of the key.

They wouldn’t be getting back in there without a fight.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Stitches

Isaac was holding his hand to his forehead in an attempt to keep any more blood from leaving his system.

“Let me see,” Alice said when they had gotten to her car.

The wound was deep, a dark gash cut into the space just above his eyebrow. By the way he was shaking and the color of his skin, he had lost a lot of blood already. Up to twenty percent, she thought. If he lost any more, he would need a transfusion. Even more than that, he could go into hypovolemic shock.

“You got me good,” he said with a slight tremble in his voice.

The fact he was talking meant he hadn’t yet hit the thirty percent mark. “We need to get you to a hospital. That needs looked at unless you want to die in my car.”

“I’d rather not go to a hospital. This isn’t the way I die.”

“How can you be so sure about that?”

“Felled by a stray metal can? I would be the laughing stock of the community. I’m sure my death will be much more dramatic than that.”

Alice wasn’t so sure. “If you aren’t going to let me take you to a hospital, and you aren’t going to fix it with magic—because you would have already—then let me take a look at it. I have a first aid kit in the back.”

“You’re… going to stitch me up?”

She didn’t answer. In ten seconds flat, she had stepped out of her car, popped the trunk, and grabbed the green kit with the big white cross on it. This was a single item buried amidst a veritable garbage dump of bags filled with all manner of things: clothes bound for the laundromat, boxes half filled with Photo paper and batteries for her camera, and a reflective screen for her windshield—not that it was ever so sunny in Ashwood that one was required.

Alice asked Isaac to sit in the backseat with her and lay his head on her lap. She then set the first aid kit down on Isaac’s stomach and started looking through it. He had gone back to holding the wound shut with his hand, stemming the flow of blood somewhat, but it wasn’t a permanent solution. It needed to be closed. When she pulled a hooked needle out of the box and began to thread it with black thread, Isaac’s eyes went wide.

“Shit,” he said, his eyes fixed on the needle. “You really are going to stitch this wound. Here. In this car.”

“You’re not afraid of needles, are you?” she asked.

“Just do what you have to do.”

She produced a thick piece of cork from the first aid kit and handed it to him. This wasn’t standard issue, but in Alice’s experience, it always helped to bite down on it whenever the situation called for her to perform a little field first aid on herself. Judging by what was left of the black thread, this happened often. There wasn’t much left of it, but she supposed it would be enough to close the wound. Isaac took the piece of cork and examined it as if he had been asked to swallow it. He saw the small indentations—bite-marks—and then stuffed the cork into his mouth, fastening his teeth around it.

First came the disinfectant. She doused a swab into the strong smelling liquid and rubbed it over the wound. It stung like fire and Isaac took sharp, short breaths, but didn’t complain. When she was done, she noticed the wound hadn’t been as deep as she had originally thought. What he needed done, she could do herself.