Fear: 13 Stories of Suspense and Horror (23 page)

Bobby's voice reached her through tiny speakers built into the goggles. “Soo, wave your arms for me. I want to make sure the computer is properly capturing your motion.”

She obeyed, feeling silly.

“That's it! Perfect calibration. I'm activating you now.”

The test pattern in her goggles dissolved away, and she found herself staring into a new world. It appeared as if she were standing in front of an easel in the middle of a meadow brimming with wildflowers. Butterflies fluttered among the blossoms while birds spun and twittered. She raised an arm to block out the sunlight—only it wasn't her arm that rose in front of her, but a computer-generated facsimile.

“Is it too bright?” Bobby's voice whispered from tiny speakers in the goggles. “It's hard to judge from the monitor.”

“Yes . . . a little too much glare.”

“I'll adjust.”

Soo-ling squinted into the meadow. The sun suddenly sank toward the horizon, shadows stretching.

“How's that?” he asked.

“Much better,” she said. “But what do I do now?”

“Paint your tag, Soo. That attracted the beast before. Call him into the virtual world. I'll record from here.”

Steeling herself, she inhaled sharply and reached for the paintbrush and palette of oils. Though nothing was truly in front of her, the motion and response was so perfect that it made her feel like it was. She swore she could almost feel the brush in one hand and the palette in the other.

After a few fumbling attempts, she fell into her usual rhythm. She dabbed her brush into the oil and tentatively drew her first stroke, a slash of crimson on the white canvas. The remaining thirteen strokes completed her characteristic tag in a few breaths.

Clutching her virtual paintbrush, she waited.

Nothing happened.

“Bobby?”

“Did you paint it correctly, Soo?”

She studied her work. It was perfect.

Then it dawned on her. She reached a finger through empty air, while in another world, a computer-generated finger rose and reached for the center of the painted glyph on the canvas. As contact was made, a familiar tingling surged up her arm. Soo-ling tensed, holding her breath. She waited for several heartbeats.

Still nothing.

She started to drop her arm when a stabbing cold seized her wrist. She wanted desperately to pull away like before—but she knew this time she must stand firm, hold fast, not disgrace the family as her ancestor had done so many centuries ago.

Foreign memories suddenly flooded into her consciousness, like dreams long forgotten slipping back into focus again. She remembered Shandong Province with the sun rising over the Yellow Sea; she remembered fishing with her brothers, cherry blossoms floating on the water; she remembered her first love, Wan Lee, turning his back on her after her shame.

“Soo?” Bobby had an uncertain edge to his voice. “What are you doing? There's this old woman dressed in a robe on the screen where you're supposed to be.”

Soo-ling barely heard him, floating between past and present. She began to understand as more ancestral memories filled her.

“She's a friend,” she finally mumbled, knowing it to be true. “I don't know quite what's happening, but your hunch was right. It's coming. I sense it. Like electricity before a thunderstorm.”

The cold crept up her arm, seeking her heart. Dusty laughter, old and cracked, followed and crumbled into words. “I have found you at long last,
siu far,
my little flower.”

Distant memories intruded. A foggy glen, surrounded by towering trees, the lowing of cattle from a distant rice paddy, and a creature of nightmares crouching, its voice mocking.

Soo-ling's lips moved, but she did not know who spoke: herself or her ancestor. “
Gui sou
.”

More dark laughter. “Ah, you know my name. You have hidden well over the years,
siu far
. But now it is time to be plucked. I shall wear you as an ornament once I am free. Free to stalk the world of man.”

A mist rose from the meadow floor and coalesced into an ancient face, yellow and wrinkled like a dried apricot. The face split into a leer, lined by fangs. The fog continued to encircle her, forming the coils of a snake—along with a reptilian claw that gripped her wrist.

Old fears arose, like smoke from an extinguished fire.

Her head throbbed, and the world began to tilt, eyes blurring.

“Soo-ling!” Bobby's voice jolted her to the present. “I can see that monster on the monitor. Get out of there!”

The spiked and scaled body of the beast appeared in the mist. She began to yank her arm away when a foreign thought intruded.

“Soo, I'm ending the program.”

“No, Bobby!” she yelled. Understanding dawned in her. “The circle isn't complete. It will follow me out.”

“Let it try!” Bobby said. “I'll take care of it.”

His words—full of bravura and love—conjured more recent memories.
Running the back alleys with Bobby. Fleeing police and gang members, laughing. Planting tags throughout the city. My city! Our city!

“Just do as we planned,” she said. “Complete the circle.”

The
gui sou
leaned closer, suspicious, its breath stale as an open grave. “Who do you speak to, little one? Prayers, perhaps? Do not bother seeking aid from your puny gods. Prayers will not save you.”

“Who needs prayers, when you've got friends who love you?” And she knew it to be true. “Now, Bobby!”

“Engaging copies!”

The empty meadow suddenly filled with thirty-four other easels, exact copies of her original. They encircled the field. Disembodied arms, floating free, repeated what she had painted earlier. Thirty-four arms picked up brushes and palettes and painted identical symbols in unison. Then they all reached forward to touch the center of their glyphs.

A flash of confusion swept over the creature's jaundiced features. Its fiery eyes darted everywhere. The claws gripping her hand faded back to mist. Snaking coils dissolved back to fog. The mocking face leaned close. “What trick is this, witch?”

She knew the answer. “A spell broken long ago is woven again.”

“Impossible. There are no other guardians. What trickery is this?”

The
gui sou
collected its mists, like a woman gathering her skirts, and glided across the meadow. It tried to break out of the circle but was stopped by an invisible wall of force. It flattened its mists against the barrier, probing for an opening. With a shriek, it thrashed back and forth across the meadow, flinging itself against the sides of its new prison.

After a full minute, it stopped and rushed at her. “Drop your arm,
siu far
, break the circle, and I will let you escape again.”

“Not this century,” she sneered.

“You'll never be able to stand there forever,” it warned, rearing up in threat and fury. “You'll tire! Then I will devour you!”

She faced the monster with an arched eyebrow. “Really? Then let me welcome you to the new millennium! You're nothing but a ghost of the past. And the past is where you will remain. Locked forever in
memory
.” She called more loudly. “Bobby,
hit it
!”

“Saving to disk now!”

The world within the goggles pulled away, shrinking smaller and smaller until the digital window was the size of a postage stamp. As it receded, she saw them appear, standing behind each of the other easels: different Chinese women, of varying ages, the murdered provincial guardians from the ancient past. They bowed to her, acknowledging an ancient debt paid in full.

At the last moment, a whisper reached her, full of love and pride.

She knew that voice, those tender words. Tears welled, bursting from her swollen heart.

“. . . Mother . . .”

A warmth filled her as the tenuous connection faded.

Soo-ling struggled to hold it—but it was like grasping smoke. The connection ended, as it must. That was not her world.

Still, the warmth remained inside her.

The true ghost of her mother.

Her everlasting love.

The image of a computer desktop snapped into place inside her goggles. It held frozen the last picture: thirty-five guardians encircling a demon. Then that file dropped away into a computerized folder icon. A symbol of a combination lock overlay the folder. It
clicked
closed.

“We're locked up!” Bobby called out.

Soo-ling took a long, shuddering breath, then pulled off her goggles. She stood again in the empty studio. Behind her, the door banged open and Bobby rushed inside. His expression grew concerned as he saw her face.

“Soo, are you all right?”

She wiped her tears. “Never better.”

And she meant it.

Bobby crossed to her and handed her a recordable DVD. A thin crust of frost caked its surface. “It should be trapped in there, right?”

She nodded and took the DVD. “I hope so.”

“So then we've won,” Bobby said, blowing out his relief.

“The battle, perhaps, but not the war.”

She knew the
gui sou
was only a small part of the Chaos Lord. There was still a wall in Riverside that needed her handiwork—or come dawn, Los Angeles would really rock and roll.

Bobby stood before her. “What now?”

“Time to go to work. Do you have a can of spray paint?”

He raised his eyebrows as if insulted. “Of course.”

She leaned and tipped up on her toes again. This time she kissed his lips. “Then let's go save the world.”

▼ TIM MALEENY ▼

 

 

 

 

 

W
hen you're sixteen you often dream of being a hero, but rarely do you actually get to save the world. Ray just hoped he was up for the task.

His full name was Raymond Gunstein but friends called him Ray, and his dad called him Ray Gun, which he kind of liked. If he really were a hero—a superhero, with a badass costume and everything—that's what he'd want to be called. But right at this moment, hanging from the roof of a speeding train, he had bigger problems than choosing a nickname.

Ray tightened his grip and watched as blood ran down his leg, over his ankle, then vanished in the rushing wind. The train was moving at over a hundred miles an hour, so no matter how much he bled, not a single drop would hit the tracks below. And if he lost his grip, they could scrape a mile of track and still not find enough DNA to identify the body.

It was a new high-speed rail, much faster than the Amtrak commuter train that used to run from New York to Washington. Each car had a door at both ends. Signs all over the train advised passengers to hold on carefully when moving between cars, and a white placard with red letters warned that climbing ladders to the roof of the train was
strictly prohibited
while the train was in motion, even for railroad employees. Ray's mom was a lawyer, so he knew what
prohibited
meant—it meant only an idiot would climb onto the roof of a speeding train.

I must be an idiot,
thought Ray, hanging on to the narrow railing that ran along the roof of the dining car. Ray took a deep breath and tensed his muscles, hoping he had enough strength to climb to the top of the train.

 

 

It all started with a lost lizard.

Ray had been sitting in his compartment across from his dad. They'd left the door open so it wouldn't feel too cramped, and the corridor was empty. Not that Ray's dad would have noticed, his head barely visible above the screen of his laptop.

“That's bad for your eyes, Dad.”

“Mm-hmm.” Ray's dad was named Phil, and he was a scientist, which apparently involved being absent-minded. So Ray already knew what his dad was going to say. “Forgot my reading glasses. Bet they're on my desk at home.”

Ray yawned and took out his iPhone. “Want to play chess?”

Phil Gunstein looked up from the screen and smiled. “I'd love to—
later
—but right now I have to run some numbers.”

Ray was on spring break, traveling with his dad to a scientific conference in D.C. His mom was back in New York, preparing for an important case coming to trial. Something to do with a big energy company, accusations of fraud, and a senator who just got indicted. Unlike a lot of his friends, Ray got along well with his parents, but these days it seemed like they were married to their work instead of to each other.

His dad squinted at the screen. “It looks like the phase induction is a lot bigger than I projected. Could be a problem.”

At any given time, Ray liked to think he understood about half of what his dad was talking about. This wasn't one of those times.

“Does your, um, phasing problem have anything to do with your presentation at the conference?” Ray thought he sounded less clueless than he felt.

His dad scratched his head with both hands, a sign he was struggling to make a complicated idea sound simple. “You know all the buzz about alternative fuels?”

Ray nodded. His school had been on a green crusade for some time. Recycling, composting, homework sent by e-mail to save paper. “Wind power, solar. Renewable energy.”

“Solar, sure . . . or something entirely new.” His dad raised his eyebrows dramatically. “Think
Starship Enterprise
.”