Soulstice (26 page)

Reggie reached the edge of the hanging carnage and gazed out in desperation at the utter destruction of downtown Cutter’s
Wedge. Entire buildings had been reduced to smoldering piles of steel and stone, fires burned inside guts of cars, and the
sky above glowed a deep, frightening crimson.

Reggie thought of the things she had seen. The bear, a subject of a frightening nature show. A boy whose body parts had been
replaced with dangerous, violent tools. A meat locker. A war.

Real terrors a young boy had feared many years ago, and here they converged into one jungle of pure mayhem.

A dozen or more “survivors” stumbled into the street in front of Reggie. Men, women, and children, they looked like walking
corpses, burnt skin suppurating from their bodies and dripping onto to the glass-littered asphalt. Their eyes had been melted
away, their sockets bloody and filled with pus as they staggered toward Reggie.

“Help me…”

“Please…”

Suddenly, the mutated bear-thing stomped on a burning car behind her. Reggie ran to the curb as the beast pounced upon the
gaggle of walking dead. It snatched up a child and devoured it. But before it could catch a second meal, the other victims
fell upon it and dragged it to the ground. Reggie did not stay to see the slaughter, nor what new abomination would arise
from it.

She hurried off down the scorched street and soon saw the double doors of the school gymnasium ahead of her. They seemed to
be the only symbol of some perverse continuity.

Enter those doors and find a deeper fearscape layer.

Go deeper, and you get closer to Quinn.

She heard footsteps behind her: the new mutation, this one part human, part bear, part buzz saw, sped toward her. It ran on
legs half covered with fur, half with blackened, peeling skin, its saw hands spinning, its bear fangs gnashing. Reggie threw
open the doors and dashed onto the cool gymnasium floor. The doors slammed behind her just as the new beast banged into them.
It could not enter; it had reached some invisible boundary. Like the killer clown and the surgeon from Henry’s fearscape,
monsters from the domain’s outer layers could not break from their psychic tethers and cross over here.

Should she fail in her attempt to save Quinn, Reggie imagined the gym she now occupied would also merge into the outer layers
beyond and add to the chaotic canvas of mixed fears.

For now, she was the only one who could pass, and she had just entered a deeper and more defined level.

A washed-out sepia tone bathed the entire gym. Pudgy and awkward boys dressed in oversized uniforms ran laps around the basketball
court. Huge wind-up keys protruded from their backs, constantly rotating in gaping red wounds between their shoulders.

An enormous man dressed in dark green bike shorts, black wrestling shoes, and a yellow windbreaker stood in the center of
the gym, his broad back to Reggie. He stood in the middle of a blue wrestling mat that was covered in hundreds of tiny, sharp
spikes. He blew a loud and shrill whistle, and the jogging children froze and huddled together on the perimeter of the court.

“Eagan! Lindsay! Get your sorry asses out on the mat!”

Reggie recognized the voice, even though she couldn’t see his face. Mr. Banner had spent decades as the Cutter’s Wedge Elementary
gym teacher before finally being fired for slapping an asthmatic student who refused to run. Reggie was a first grader at
the school when Banner had been terminated; she’d barely known him. Quinn, on the other hand…

“Let’s go!”

Several of the boys squirmed and bustled before expelling two peers out from their midst. One was squat and doughy with short
blond hair, the other one lanky and pale with big ears and shaggy brown locks. The whistle blew again.

“Move it! Don’t make me get out the medicine ball again, boys! You remember what happened to Hyatt, don’t you?” The coach
pointed to a large puddle of dried maroon fluid that stained the wood floor beneath one of the baskets. A flayed body dangled
upside-down from the rim above.

“Move your lazy tails!”

The two boys walked onto the mat, shooting one another nervous glances. The coach put his hands to his hips.

“You two are buds, aren’t you? Little playmates, right? Don’t think I don’t see you giggling like girls and playing grab-ass
in my class. I don’t take kindly to gigglers and grab-assers. Assume the position, girls. Eagan, down!”

The skinny boy slowly dropped to his knees, the little spikes of the gym mat pushing up into them. He grimaced and placed
his palms down after, and Reggie heard the sickening squish as the points penetrated his hands. She knew the boys didn’t exist—they
were grotesque figments of young Quinn’s imagination, but they had been molded from the clay of actual memory. Somewhere,
sometime, there was a real Eagan who suffered torment at the hands of Coach Banner while Quinn and others watched.

“Top, Lindsay. Get your flabby butt in position.”

The chubby boy sank to one knee, wrapped his left arm underneath the other boy’s stomach, and placed his right hand on his
opponent’s right elbow.

“Wrasslin’, girls! This is what it’s all about! A true man’s sport! Now when I blow the whistle, you two best go at it full
boat until one of you scores, you hear me? I catch either of you grab-assing out on my mat and I will tan some hides! Am I
clear?”

The whistle blew a third time, and the chubby boy yanked hard on the skinny boy’s arm. The elbow bent out at a frightening
and distorted angle, and the boy tilted and collapsed on his side. The spikes pierced the full side of his emaciated body,
and rivulets of black ooze poured out of dozens of puncture wounds around his ribs and hips. The chubby boy hesitated.

“Come on, Lindsay! Show us you’re not a wuss!” The gym coach kicked the boy in the backside. “Take him! Pin his scrawny butt!
You want to be an athlete? You want to be a man?”

The chubby boy’s lips quivered.

“Where the hell is Waters? Quinn Waters! Get your butt out here and show these nerds how a champion competes!”

Reggie felt her heart race from her perch behind the bleachers. Was Quinn really that close? The gym teacher, the mat, the
court, the boys in the class—all seemed to be well intact, suggesting enough of Quinn’s essence was somewhere near. His living
fear fed this scene enough to let it play out again and again in the fearscape. But Quinn did not appear.

“Damn it! Waters, I know you hear me! You goddamn quitter! Just like your old man! All the talent in the world and no guts!”

Reggie felt a twinge of pity, guessing that a young Quinn Waters had been pushed and pressured by adults around him to succeed
as an athlete at any cost.

The coach stalked across the mat and shoved Lindsay to the side. Then he lifted his foot and stomped on Eagan’s head, crushing
it like a rotten watermelon. It splintered against the metal pikes, and more oily black fluid gushed across the mat. It wasn’t
blood but neither was it the smoke Reggie found inside the children in Henry’s fearscape version of the carnival.

Perhaps over time, some layers solidified more than others? Reggie wondered.

Banner lifted his foot again to crush Lindsay, but Reggie gasped audibly, and the coach turned to the bleachers. To Reggie’s
horror and disgust, the thing had no face. It looked like someone had taken a surgical scalpel and carved out the fullness
of Banner’s visage, cut through flesh, muscle and bone, drained all blood and mucus, and then scooped out tissue and brain
until nothing remained but a hollowed-out cove.

The only thing inside now was a bright, silver whistle clamped between a set of stained teeth molded to the pulpy back of
his pinkish head.

“Sounds like we got a spy in here, boys!” The teeth opened and closed slightly as the monstrous gym teacher yelled and stomped
toward the bleachers, puffs of unseen air tweeting the whistle a little with every step. “You best come out, dirty little
spy.”

He kicked some of the wooden slats and listened. Reggie stayed deathly still.

“That crotchety, used-up Munson sent you over from Wennemack to scout out my team this year, right? Figures that old bastard
would stoop to cheating. Couldn’t take a Banner crew any season, no matter how many spies he’s got! Boys! You ferret me out
our spy and I’ll cut you loose on laps for the rest of the day!”

The boys murmured excitedly among themselves.

“Get a move on, boys, or I’ll stitch you into the medicine ball!”

The group of timid kids charged at the bleachers like a pack of wild dogs. Reggie bolted out from behind the stands toward
the hallway, but the path she’d taken into the gym had disappeared. There was no exit, and the boys laughed as they surrounded
her.

She darted across the center of the gym, and the spikes of the mat punctured her feet. A couple of the boys tried to follow
her, but they tripped and landed on the spikes with dull, wet splatters.

“That girl is schooling you, Tolin! Get your ass in gear, boy! Don’t let her touch my medicine ball!”

Reggie reached the equipment closet and found it unlocked. She yanked the door closed behind her and wedged a hockey stick
against the handle. The boys pounded on the door. She had only moments to find a way out before they’d be upon her.

Reggie desperately searched the closet for something useful. She clawed through the carts of basketballs, rows of orange cones,
stacked floor-hockey nets, and grabbed hold of an aluminum bat. It felt solid and heavy in her hand.

The boys broke down the door and Reggie struck. Skulls broke open and filled the room with black ooze before bodies vanished
in a poof of smoke. But the children kept coming at her, forcing her to retreat to the back of the closet, where she bumped
into something warm and soft. And wet. It groaned.

Banner’s medicine ball.

The sphere was three feet in diameter, made from a leathery canvas sewn together from the hides of dozens of young boys once
tortured students in Banner’s class. The same fresh black fluid dripped from the seams, and the morbid ball felt torturously
alive.

The coach’s whistle blew so loud and shrill that the heads of the remaining boys exploded in smoke, and their bodies tumbled
forward and dropped to the ground.

Banner stalked inside the closet, his meaty concave head throbbing with anger. He had Reggie trapped.

“You take your hands off that ball, little girl.”

He snatched a hockey puck from a shelf and hurled it at Reggie. The puck slammed into the back wall and cracked through the
other side.

“Roll it to me now and I’ll kill you quick.”

A soft light poured through the rift in the wall behind Reggie. The other side was the way out. She pounded her fist against
it as Banner grabbed a hockey stick with a glinting razor-edged blade.

“Disobey, and I’ll bleed you slow.”

Reggie placed both hands on the medicine ball. Dozens of pained faces, stitched together, stared up at her, and she felt the
children’s skins pulsing hot beneath her fingertips.

She picked the ball up over her head.

“No! Put it down, you little bitch!”

Reggie heaved it into the wall behind her. The barrier bowed and warped before collapsing away. Reggie was bathed in a deep
orange glow, and the equipment closet around her washed away. The screaming gym teacher split apart into strips of clayish
flesh and black ooze, and then Reggie sensed herself falling, unable to see anything but the fog around her.

When the haze cleared, she stood on the edge of a quiet cornfield that extended in all directions for as far as she could
see. Behind her was nothing but swirling gray mist. She stared at the innocent-looking terrain before her.

“So what fun secrets are you hiding?” she asked the stalks. “Killer creamed corn?” She walked into the amber field.

  
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Unger watched with barely concealed glee as the television monitors began to beep and blip with electrical waves from Reggie’s
and Quinn’s brains. Data streamed across the screens and the brain images lit up with color as blood flowed to both their
amygdalas. Quinn moaned and twitched, but the movement was slight, and their hands stayed in contact.