Soulstice (19 page)

Then she thought of the dead beasts in the desert, the scrapes on the double’s cheek, and the pain in her own jaw. What injuries
one inflicted on the other, they both received. If Reggie smashed its skull, she would most likely bash out her own brains,
too.

The antagonism between the twins destroyed them both. Was that the root of Keech’s fears?

Think
, Reggie told herself. Rivalry. These deaths were about rivalries. She didn’t know what Keech and Mitch’s relationship had
been when they were boys, but here each twin was angry and wanted to defeat the other. And here that was impossible because
of an invisible link between them. Hurting one hurt the other.

She didn’t need to overpower her double—she couldn’t. They needed to be equals—sisters, not enemies.

Reggie threw the stone into the pool and held up her hands.

The double howled and seized Reggie by the throat again. But Reggie did not fight; instead she reached out and put her arms
around her. The twin’s hands tightened on her neck, but Reggie didn’t flinch.

“Stop.”

The hands loosened. Reggie gently pulled the double closer to her and embraced her. Her twin tensed, then relaxed. It smiled
once before dissipating like mist on a cool wind.

Reggie touched her cheek. The scrape closed under her fingertips, though she could still feel the trace of a scar.

She looked down and saw a green crayon sticking out of the sand, the wax miraculously unmelted in the heat. A second breadcrumb.
She was getting closer.

Reggie picked up the crayon and put it with the drawing.

She heard a roar, and the lake began to rotate in a receding whirlpool, like the plug had been pulled from a giant bathtub.
Soon, a field of wet silt was all that remained of the clear blue waters.

Reggie walked out into the drained oasis. There, in its center, was a perfectly circular metal grate. She pulled it open like
a hatch to reveal a round, concrete passage that plunged straight down. Iron rungs protruded from the wall, still dripping
with water. Reggie climbed down into the dark, and the ladder’s passage opened up into a large cavern.

She dropped from the last rung onto a stone ledge, and in the center of the cave was a giant rusty cage, big enough to hold
a delivery truck.

Flickering torches on the wall cast light across the giant thing that slept inside. Creeping closer, circling around the corroded
bars, she took a long look at the prisoner.

It was humanoid, sleeping on its side with a hand over its face. From the way it was huddled inside the cell, Reggie guessed
it would stand over ten feet tall, with blobby arms and legs that looked swollen and tumescent. Reggie thought if she stuck
a pin in the creature it might rupture. It looked like a Kassner, or at least like a demonic form of one with sharp, exaggerated
facial features and skin specked with black. The thing’s breaths came deep and even, and now and then it snored.

The monster stirred as she circled around the cage.

A distended and rumpled wad of flesh grew from the thing’s broad back. Two spindly arms protruded from the lump, twitching
and jerking, and a misshapen head with eyes that appeared sealed behind seamless eyelids.

Reggie stared in revulsion, puzzling over the pitiful abomination.

Who is Keech and who is Mitch?

Only one way to find out.

“Keech,” she whispered.

The lump’s fleshy lids opened, and its gray, watery eyes widened in terror. Reggie squeezed through the bars and tiptoed toward
it.

“Keech,” she said. “It’s okay. We’re going to leave this place.”

The tiny mouth was a crude hole that trembled with a wet slurping sound.

“No. Can’t leave without the big one.”

She reached up and touched his emaciated hand.

“You don’t need Mitch to survive, Keech.”

“Mitch…”

“You’re strong, Keech. And part of you is still good.”

The eyes blinked, and its lower lip quivered. “Bad. That’s why we’re locked in the dark place.”

“Good kids can do bad things,” she said. “But they can make up for it.” Reggie reached into her back pocket and pulled out
the folded-up piece of paper, the cheerful crayon drawing she’d found in the attic. She held it up to Keech and smiled. “Is
this yours?”

The head nodded and stammered, “I like to draw.”

“Would you draw something for me?”

“I lost all my crayons.”

“I found one.” Reggie held out the green crayon and the lump looked with wonder at it. It took it in its nubby fingers and
held it, then it began to color the air with it. Reggie marveled at the green swirls that appeared out of nowhere. They were
faint at first, then grew in vibrancy. With every stroke of the crayon, the figure looked more boyish, until only the thinnest
graft of skin tethered it to the ugly monster. The boy looked a bit older than Henry, and he wore a red baseball jersey and
blue jeans. Reggie took his hands.

And then the hulking beast awoke.

Mitch.

The monster thrashed awake and twisted to face the intruder. Bones creaked and cartilage snapped. The beast howled in agony
and fury. It lunged at Reggie, but she dove and tumbled away, scrambling in the dirt to the opposite side of the cage. The
right arm of the behemoth lodged between two rusty bars of its prison, and it struggled to pull itself free.

“You woke the bad me,” said the boy. “Go. Go before I hurt you like I hurt everything.”

“Talk to Mitch! Tell him to stop!”

“Mitch isn’t here. Just me. Only me.” The boy was terrified. “I lost him a long time ago. I’m all alone here.”

And then Reggie understood.

The doppelgänger in the pond, the identical beasts locked in deathblows, the vast and empty desert. This fearscape wasn’t
about being a weaker sibling. Keech’s deepest fear wasn’t of his brother.

Most of all, he feared himself.

As a young boy his personality had split, the dark half opening a black maw inside him to swallow pain and anger while the
light half withered like rotten fruit. And in this place, all that was good in the boy had been consumed.

“You’re not alone anymore,” Reggie said. “And you’re coming with me.”

Reggie took the boy’s hands again and heaved backward. Flesh ripped and the skin holding beast and boy together tore apart.
The monster roared in agony.

“Come on!”

Reggie and Keech slipped through the bars as a massive fist slammed against the cage, rocking it back and forth.

Keech stood paralyzed with fear as his monstrous self rattled the bars and bellowed. The roars echoed throughout the cave,
shaking every stone. Boulders tumbled down the walls, and stalactites plummeted like daggers into the floor. The monster bent
the bars of the cage and forced itself through the widened opening. Keech just crouched on the ground, huddled into a little
ball.

Reggie kneeled beside him. “Remember your drawings?” Her voice was thin like a breeze. “Draw a picture for us.”

Keech gazed at the crayon in his hand. He held it up to her.

“Here. You do it.”

The monster was free now and almost upon them. Reggie did not look up at it.

“I can’t.” She smiled gently at him. “I can’t do it for you. Draw what you want to see happen.”

The boy held up the crayon and drew a green lasso in the air. It looped around the monster’s head, and Keech cinched it tight.
The creature gasped and lost its balance. It fell over and landed with a crack, and smoke began to seep out its nostrils.
It writhed violently on the ground, its furious convulsions pulling down the walls of the cave around them. Reggie searched
frantically for another exit, but there was none.

“Keech. Get us out of here.”

He thought for a moment, and the monster wrenched the lasso off its head. It threw it to the side and held a claw out toward
its weaker half. The boy wavered and reached back, dropping the crayon in the dirt, but Reggie caught his hand.

“You can do this!” She grabbed up the crayon and wrapped his fingers around it. Keech nodded.

He drew a rectangle in the air, then a circle in the middle of it. He grasped the circle and turned it; the knob twisted,
and the door out of this hell swung open, revealing a light on the other side. The monster howled and ran at them. Reggie
started through the door, but Keech hesitated.

“What’s over there?” he asked.

She grasped his hand.

“Mitch.”

Hand-in-hand, the two stepped into the light as the cavern collapsed, and the rest of the fearscape fell away into nothingness.

  
16
  

Reggie returned to a groggy consciousness on the floor of the freezer, her head pressed to Keech’s chest. For a moment her
exhausted mind told her she was seven or eight years old and waking up after a nap on the couch in front of the television—a
little child who’d fallen asleep on her dad.

But the piercing cold and rasping wheeze coming from Keech’s lungs made her sit up. The moist and frigid air spun in a frenzied
cyclone over her head, but the vapor was no longer a wispy white. It had turned noxious and inky black.

The expelled monster whipped around the dim pale bulb that dangled from the ceiling, a terrible and wicked thing desperately
hunting for heat. The entity looked like a repulsive comet with an oily tail, and at the head, a disturbing blob morphed and
convulsed.

Reggie could make out the mimicked face of a young Keech in between the erratic pulsations, as if the Vour fought to retain
the innocent boy it had consumed years ago. But it could not hold the human features; the face sagged and dispersed into amoebic
rings. The Vour clung to the edge of existence, and watching it panic in its last throes did not give Reggie the satisfaction
she’d anticipated.

In a final thrust of anger, the unstable monster surged and smashed against Reggie’s face. The putrid mist broke all around
her head, and she smelled the Vour’s fear of death as plainly as the blunt scent of fresh road kill. She thought of Eben,
and she closed her eyes and tried to hold her breath, refusing to inhale the poison.

“Ours…”

The thing spoke like untilled dirt. It had come apart and hung in the cold air for a torturous moment more. The voice emanated
from nowhere and everywhere, and Reggie heard an ancient chorus of evil things echo in her mind.

“You will be ours…”

And then it was gone. A residue of sickly moisture clung to Reggie’s bare skin, but the monster was no more.

Keech coughed, shallow and weak at first, then louder, stronger, as cold air flushed his lungs and the oxygen rushed into
his brain, a mind no longer bound and corrupted.

“Keech…”

Mitch, wrapped in white towels from the school gym, had opened the freezer door and stumbled inside, his eyes circled with
deep black bruises caused by the harsh break in his nose.

Aaron walked inside a few paces behind him, sullen and silent. He looked immediately to Reggie and nodded.

Mitch knelt down next to his stirring brother.

“Keech? It’s me. Can you hear me?”

Keech’s eyelids opened slowly like those of a newborn. He squinted and blinked repeatedly. He licked his cut lip and swallowed,
parched and sore. He touched his brother’s cheek.

“I know you.”

He sounded surprised by the sound of his own deep voice.

Mitch placed a calloused but gentle hand beneath his brother’s head and helped him sit up. And then he lifted Keech to his
feet, absorbing all of his weak sibling’s weight.

Mitch turned to Reggie as Keech sagged against his shoulder.

“Thanks. I owe you.”

The twins walked out of the freezer and into the dark cafeteria. There would be more police tomorrow. School, though over
for the summer, would be shut down and cordoned off. Questions. Media. Another investigation.

But that would be tomorrow.

Now the feeling came back, along with the pain from the wounds she’d received in the fearscape. Her hands, in particular,
ached. She examined her palm where the acid had burned her; grayish scar tissue marred her skin, and when she pressed it black
smoke seeped out. In a twisted way it was like popping a blister. Aaron took Reggie’s hand and examined it.