Dark Siren (16 page)

Whoever she had just seen had to have been one of
them—
one of the dead
—
only this was also not possible because Alice, as far as she knew, wasn’t able to see them with her own eyes, only feel their presence on her skin. But her skin was wet, and maybe this was inhibiting her ability to feel anything at all. It was possible.

Walking toward the open door, images of a man standing in her apartment last night came to her mind. She wondered if the person she had seen walking across the open door was the same man. Maybe she would find him standing in the kitchen, looking out of the window as he had been the night before. Or maybe he would be picking plates out of the sink, deciding which one to smash on Alice. The dark silhouette wouldn’t speak. Instead it would turn its head and stare at her from behind a pair of cold, dead eyes, and then it would attack because she was weak, and it knew she was weak.

With her camera in her backpack, across from where she was standing, she was defenseless. If there was anything worse than not being able to defend yourself, it was being practically naked as well as defenseless. Nothing to do now but to turn the corner and take a peek. But the kitchen was empty. There was no man standing there, no clouds of darkness, no gas mask man. It hadn’t gotten out of confinement. It couldn’t. None of the spirits could. Sure, they could occasionally knock about in the hours after their imprisonment, but none of them had ever gotten out. She was seeing things. It had to be that.

Still, she crossed the open space and pulled Trapper out of her backpack. Having the machine in her hand made her feel more comfortable, much in the same way a cop in a rough neighborhood feels comfortable with their gun or baton at their side. They hope they don’t have to use their weapons, but simply having them instills a bit of confidence in them—enough to delude them into braving the darkness.

But she didn’t turn the camera on and look through it. Instead she circled in place, using her own eyes, her own senses, to try and get to the bottom of what was going on. She realized then, as she handled the camera in one hand, that she hadn’t pulled the last shot she had taken from out of the front slot. The picture sat there, lolling like a slack white tongue, almost comically.

Alice pulled the still unformed Polaroid from the slot and shook it—the pictures didn’t form unless she shook them—but she didn’t get to finish what she was doing. Her insides pulled in a way they weren’t meant to pull. She doubled over, dropping the camera and picture, and fell to her knees. It was as if someone had struck her in the back and knocked the wind out of her lungs.

She breathed quick and shallow breaths to try and quell the throbbing ache pulsing from her back and spreading all over her body. The painkillers had either failed, or some invisible phantom with an aluminum baseball bat and a grudge really
had
hit her. It wouldn’t be the first time. She tried to stand, but her back refused the command and screamed out in agony. Submitting, Alice let herself slip to the floor and pressed her cheek against the cool laminates. This was a comfort that allowed the moment of pain and breathlessness to pass.

When it did, Alice pushed herself off the ground and stood, but she staggered and had to reach for the back of the couch to steady herself. Her back was in a world of hurt, and though she had regained her ability to take deep breaths, the world seemed to swim around her, as if she had fallen into a lake.

The gas mask man,
she thought,
is it him? Did he just hit me?

He couldn’t have. He was trapped, wasn’t he? She reached for her backpack, fumbled around inside, and found the shimmering Polaroid, cursing herself for not having stored it immediately after getting home. Forget the picture on the floor—she needed to see this one, needed to know if the gas mask man was still where he was supposed to be or if it had somehow managed to get out. The light inside the frame shimmered. Alice waited with a held breath until the dark man standing in the center of the frame appeared and turned to face her.

“Yeah,” she said, taunting it, “How do you like being in there? You sack of shit.”

The dark figure lunged at Alice, as if to try and get out of the photo frame, but he smashed into an invisible wall and fell back. If it was speaking, or more likely swearing, Alice couldn’t hear it.

Finally, she marched toward the closet door, to the place where she kept her Chest of Haunts. She grabbed the key, undid the padlock, and swung the door open. When she saw the symbols on the inside of the door, she was instantly reminded of what she had seen drawn into the trapdoor at the Cinema Royale. In fact, she couldn’t believe she had forgotten.

The markings were identical, with one exception.

Alice remembered one of the symbols on the trap door at the theater had been a circle with a spiral inside it. Her own ward, however, had a square shape with the likeness of a person scratched into it. She hadn’t drawn these pictures into the closet door—they had appeared there the day after she had received the Chest of Haunts. The Chest, which along with Trapper had been a gift from an unknown benefactor, had similar markings inside. Where the Chest had come from, who had drawn the markings, or how her camera worked, she didn’t know.

Whoever had drawn the markings into the Chest could have been the same person responsible for the etchings in the trapdoor back at the Cinema Royale. She didn’t know how she felt about this. Alice had always thought she was unique, an unknown and unknowable species of supernatural creature. Maybe she was just such a creature, or maybe there were more of her somewhere.

This thought
really
unsettled her. More people who eat souls?

Alice bent over, unlocked the Chest of Haunts, and flung it open. A cold breath of stale air came up, rushed past her, and she heard a drawer in her kitchen swing open on its own, cutlery rattling inside. She took the picture of the gas mask man and dumped it in with the rest. But then she picked it up again, her brows furrowing, and examined it carefully. The pain in her back was still there, dull and quiet for now, but present—like a coiled snake ready to strike again at a moment’s notice.

She considered the shimmering light, and the dark, humanoid shape, and her stomach started to grow cold. Like a human who had been left to starve for days and had just been presented with a piece of raw, bloody meat, her body was betraying her logical mind and preparing itself to feed. This was how it started. The pain would come, then the cold, and then her hunger would manifest itself in the flesh and take over completely. This was something that hadn’t happened to her yet, but she knew it could.

Beneath her fingers, the picture seemed to almost vibrate. Alice’s mouth began to water, and she swallowed hard. Her hand trembled as she held the picture within her fingers and considered making a mistake and consuming the spirit of the gas mask man. His energy would sustain her, yes, but it would also change her for a time. For how long, she couldn’t say. And in what way, she didn’t know. But she suspected an angry, strong spirit like this one may be too much for her own psyche to bear, too strong for her to contain.

More so than even the poltergeist.

But, by the same token, the longer she waited the more chance she stood of hurting someone she didn’t mean to hurt. The people who deserved her camera’s dark embrace were thieves and criminals, those who would cause pain and grief to other people for selfish reasons. She was no vigilante, but if she could take the life force of a person who had dedicated themselves to inflicting suffering on others, trap it with her camera, and eat it, she would.

All she had to do was take their picture, and then suck the soul right out of the Polaroid. It was as easy as taking a sharp breath of air, and when the soul came free from the picture it would be pulled into her throat and chest where it would stay forever. Alice didn’t know a soul’s fate beyond this point, but if you believe in purgatory, then those who have sinned would not fare well in there.

Better, then, that she should consume the souls of people who deserve it rather than take the soul of a good person, even if they did sustain her for longer. But pickings had been slim in this quiet neighborhood, and Alice hadn’t had a chance to go hunting for one lately. She had never gone this long without feeding. She knew she was pushing it, only she didn’t have a choice.

It was either eat the essence of the gas mask man, or find a human soul to eat. But if consuming a human soul was similar to eating a beautifully cooked steak, then eating a spirit’s essence was like trying to put a live cow in your mouth. Spirits put up a fight, fought back, resisted. Consuming them wasn’t easy, or comfortable. Alice’s willpower needed to be stronger than theirs, otherwise… well, she didn’t like thinking about the possibility of letting some entity
take the wheel
.

It was this thought that made her say “No,” to the picture in her hand, and then toss it into the chest. After she locked the closet door, she stood with her aching back pressed against it for a second, eavesdropping on a meeting of whispering conspirators taking place on the other side. One particularly loud, raspy voice was taking the lead, and the others were listening.

Alice crossed into the kitchen with the towel carefully clasped around her. She looked for the open drawer, but could find nothing out of place. Then the realization, like a flash of inspiration, hit her. No one had walked around her house, no one had opened or closed any doors, and no one had hit her with an invisible baseball bat. All of these things were in her head, figments of an overactive imagination spawned and fueled by a terrible, supernatural need to feed. But hunger kills everything, and it could kill her if she wasn’t careful. Her body would betray her before then, though. Hungry animals don’t allow themselves to die of starvation if they could help it, and she had her camera, her power.

She could help it.

The cold sensation in her stomach persisted, and she felt every groove and elevation of the scars on her back thanks to the constant throbbing. Her hands were starting to shake, too. She was just about decided on getting dressed, fighting back sleep, and going to hunt for a soul when a sharp pulse of pain suddenly hit with all the force of a pair of hands, shoving her into the fridge. She lost her balance and went down with a crash, landing hard on her elbows. Her back pulsed with pain like white fire scorching her entire spinal cord, but it wasn’t fire—it was
cold
.

Slow
, she thought,
don’t let it get the better of you.

She pulled herself to her feet, using the walls for support, and made it to the bathroom sink believing at any moment she would begin to hurl. Thankfully, she didn’t. But the pain was so intense her head felt like the inside of a washing machine filled with rocks. The dry heaving stopped, but the panic hadn’t subsided.

Alice stared at herself in the mirror and tried to control her breathing, repeating the words “Oh fuck. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck.”

She had to feed, but didn’t have anything to feed
on
. It had been left too long, her need had gone ignored for too long, and now the hunger was coming and she couldn’t stop it. Her mind was racing, and her heart raced with it. Alice opened the cabinet above the sink, but this didn’t make any sense. What did she think she would find in there? What she needed couldn’t be found in a drug store; it needed to be taken from someone, and she didn’t have the time to go and take it. Not before she lost control of herself completely.

Alice noticed something else, now—something new. The cold feeling in her stomach had spread into her chest and out toward her arms and fingertips. When she looked at her hands she thought they looked different, somehow brighter, stranger. She turned, reached for the bathroom light, and shut it off. Her hands were glowing, and tiny lines were appearing on her skin, as if her veins were filling with black ink.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and noticed her eyes were bright spots of shifting light—orange, purple, blue—in the darkness. When she opened her mouth to gasp, or speak, or scream, wisps of shifting light and smoke illuminated the back of her throat. The light was beautiful, mesmerizing, but also terrible. The cold fire was coming, her curse manifesting in the physical. It was time to act now, or not act at all.

Alice steadied herself and steeled her nerves. She took a breath, marched toward the bathroom sink, grabbed it firmly, and slammed her forehead into the ceramic.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Duty Calls

When Isaac awoke his head felt three sizes too big. The morning—it was about eleven, give or take—swam before his eyes like a dizzy blur, giving him the sensation of being underwater with his eyes open. He had been dreaming about the night, about darkness itself. The Good Doctor had been in the dream, its long, pointed mask gleaming like a knife in the dark. It had arched its head back and pecked Isaac on the forehead like a woodpecker striking a tree, and the sharp pain had shot him into the morning with a start.

The world came into focus like an elastic band snapping into place. Everything made sense now. He had been dreaming, but the wound on his forehead was real. He remembered having been struck with a heavy, round, metal case above the left temple. The stitches hadn’t come loose, the bandage around his head remained secure, but thinking about the hit, the way his head shook when it was struck, caused the wound to throb.