At the cemetery, I heaved the pot from the back seat, ignoring the dark mixture that lay within it. I dug my hands into the dirt on Sammy’s grave and poured the mixture into the tilled soil. I spoke the words from the sheet, ancient-sounding foreign words I could not pronounce. As I stroked and kneaded the muddy mixture, I shut down my mind. Sense wanted to steal me from this place, demand I return home, hide the evidence and never think of it again.
I read the old woman’s directions.
“The essence must ripen for thirteen hours. Do not retrieve it a second before.”
Sarah
WILL STEPPED CLOSER to the torch.
The doctor frowned and pointed the gun at him.
“You can only shoot one of us,” Will told him, the fire reflected in his green eyes. “I think this book will burn in seconds. By the time you pull the trigger, if you drop me with one bullet, a lifetime of research will be half-burned. Then you’ll have a choice - to fight Sarah, who’ll surely be attacking you to get the gun, or put out the book and salvage a few pages.”
Will pushed the Enchiridion closer, and the fire reached toward the yellowed pages.
“Stop,” the doctor barked. He shifted the gun toward Sarah, as if he’d decided shooting her would somehow serve him better.
“The outcome will be the same,” Will told him, staring hard into his eyes. “You’re outnumbered, man. Even with the gun, you’re losing something here tonight.”
And it was clear he would lose the Enchiridion, perhaps the item he wanted most of all. But Sarah sensed the doctor had gone too far. His intention to kill them both outweighed any ability to rationalize the moment. Will also seemed to recognize the direness of their situation.
Will threw the book as hard as he could at the doctor, and then lunged toward him.
The doctor fired, and Sarah felt a sting as the bullet whizzed by her shoulder.
The man jerked the gun toward Will, but Will was upon him. He shoved the doctor to the ground and slammed him into the stone floor. The doctor butted his head hard, connecting with Will’s jaw. Will grunted but didn’t release the man’s arm. Sarah grabbed the gun and wrenched it away. The man grabbed Will around the throat, and Sarah cocked the gun.
“Let him go, now.”
But the doctor gritted his teeth, stared hard into Will’s eyes, and tightened his grip.
Will opened and closed his mouth, holding onto the doctor’s wrists and trying to pry the man’s hands away.
“Shoot him,” Will croaked.
But she couldn’t. She turned the gun in her hand and cracked the man on the top of his skull. The impact shook her arms, but he continued to squeeze, and then his grip loosened and went slack. His eyes remained open, but shuttered and closed before opening again and blinking into the room.
Will rolled off him, snatched the book up with one hand, massaging his throat with the other.
“Come on,” Sarah said, grabbing Will’s hand and dragging him to his feet.
“Wait.” He dropped next to the man and scrambled to the dirty little fanny pack at the man’s waist. He rifled through and grabbed the long, dark key. They stood and fled back down the dark tunnel and into the night.
CHAPTER 36
Now
Sarah
“I shouldn’t have done that,” Will said, his face pale as he watched Brook bandage Sarah from across the room.
Archie lay curled in Sarah’s lap, licking her hands as if he sensed something tragic had nearly befallen his owner.
“You saved us,” Sarah reminded him. “That doctor would be digging our graves right now otherwise.” She winced as Brook patted the wound with a peroxide-soaked cotton ball. The bullet had grazed her upper arm, tore away a bit of skin, but otherwise done little damage.
“He could have shot you in the head,” Will muttered.
“He didn’t.”
Brook put a bandage over Sarah’s shoulder and wrapped it with medical tape.
“I think you’ll live,” she told her, kissing her bare shoulder.
“Thanks, Brook.”
Brook nodded and sat down in the chair beside Sarah. “So, where’s the book?”
BY THE TIME Sarah’s head hit the pillow, her eyes ached, and her mind swam with a blur of words and images so disturbing she left the light on. The three had stayed awake until nearly two in the morning, reading the stories of experiments committed on patients by asylum doctors for a century. Even after the asylum shuttered its doors in 1989, the Umbra Brotherhood continued to meet in the chamber several times a year, bringing people from all over the country to strap down to the lonely chamber bed and perform all variety of horrors.
“They were like paranormal investigators,” Brook had said at one point, which elicited a snort from Will.
“More like paranormal torturers.”
But it was true. The doctors devoted their studies to patients exhibiting certain abilities, ranging from communication with spirits to the ability to levitate objects. They often used drugs to enhance the subject’s abilities during a presentation in the chamber. Sometimes the patients died. Several patients had additional appendices that spoke of experiences after their treatment at the asylum.
Ethel’s story sat near the start of the huge text. A tiny footnote detailing how she’d burned her family alive was barely perceptible in the cramped writing.
What was clear from the story was that Ethel had gone into the chamber as a little girl, and come out possessed by evil.
CORRIE
I TOOK the chalk and drew a huge pentagram on the dark wood floor. The smell of the chalk reminded me of Isis. In our old home, Isis had a little chalkboard she and Sammy played with for hours. He would draw elaborate monsters, and Isis would promptly scribble over them with her chubby, untrained hands, frustrated when the image in her mind didn’t appear on the dark surface.
In the circle’s center I lay Sammy’s clothes: a pair of jeans worn out at the knees; his Overlook Hotel t-shirt, based on the creepy Stephen King book The Shining; and of course, his fuzzy Bigfoot slippers at the bottom. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine his body filling out the clothes, his shaggy hair sliding through the neckline, his grin emerging from the fabric.
Holding a box of tall white candles, I walked around the pentagram, arranging one at each point, lighting the first and then using the candle before to light each thereafter. I suffered a strange sense of hope and hilarity. This was the kind of thing Sammy and I might have staged for a Halloween party, laughing all the while. As I arranged the items, I imagined Fletcher’s face in the car. His eyes had looked haunted and also defeated. Here was the man who supposedly had done it, and yet…
It didn’t matter. Fletcher’s experience would not be mine. Sammy was right there, on the fringes of every moment. If anyone could come back, it was Sammy.
I took the pot I’d filled with the mixture from Sammy’s grave and I dropped it in handfuls within the circle.
Sitting on my knees in the center of the circle, I held a handful of the mixture against my chest and read the final incantation three times. Closing my eyes, I shoved the dirt and blood and herbs into my mouth, choking them down, gagging but refusing to spit out even a drop.