Nightmare (39 page)

This giant room was a little different than the one above.
The walls were solid white, and though they had the same symbols etched into them as the rest of the building, they weren't
on fire.

Another thought occurred to me. "You know ... I don't see
anything affixed to you. Like a curse, for example."

Jordin threw me a knowing look but tabled that conversation
for more pressing concerns. "Carrie!" she shouted, looking out
into the ghostly crowd. "Carrie Morris!"

I looked around, as well, and couldn't see Carrie anywhere.

Jordin shook her head, sending tendrils of smoke and mist
curling off into the thick atmosphere. "I lost her again...."

I watched Jordin's actions with curiosity. "Lost her?"

"It takes tremendous strength of will to keep from losing
yourself here."

"Why?"

"The ones who still have something to live for are the ones
that seem to be able to hold on to themselves. It's a magnification of the condition of the heart at the time of death-or in
our case, at the time of the procedure. Those who were wicked
and unrepentant appear here as vile, sickening beings. The pure,
good hearts become more ... luminescent, you could say. The
ones like Carrie, who were lost in life, are even more lost in death.
Carrie lived a very frivolous life, a life with no substance, so she
has none here. I remind her of who she is all the time, but she
keeps forgetting. She just can't seem to cling to what makes her
Carrie."

I thought of my observations of apparitions as a paranormal
investigator, and how so many ghosts seemed stuck in one place,
unwilling or unable to leave. Derek had just asked me about
this very thing recently. I wondered if something similar to what
Jordin just described was the reason so many ghosts seem to
linger in one spot. Were they simply unable to remember who
they were and why they were there? Doomed to roam around
their old stomping grounds, searching for a life they can never
fully recall?

"What is this place? What are we doing here?" I asked.

"This is where they keep us. Corralled like cattle, until they
have need for us."

"Need? Like what, scaring people at Ghost Town?"

"DHI sends us there sometimes, and other places, too," she
replied. "They use us to add extra chills to the rides and such.
It's a way for them to observe and record the extent of what we
can do, how we can interact with the mortal world. I had no idea
you would be at the park that night. I was as surprised to see you
as you were to see me."

"They can make you do things?"

"Some things," she said. "They give us directives, and then
leave us with some free will in choosing how to do it."

"But Derek saw you at his dorm...."

"I had to fight their control pretty hard to get to him that
night, but it's not perfect. Still, I couldn't hold out for long before
they came for me."

"'They,' " I repeated slowly.

Jordin pointed to one side of the room, where a group of
spirits much darker than the rest of us stood and watched. They
were dark gray, almost like shadow people, but I could see some
details in their forms, which were burly and clearly meant to
inspire fear. "They're the prototype `souldiers' DHI has been
working on. They're spirits just like us, but they're not victims.
They're volunteers plucked from various military outfits."

They were the ones that attacked me in my dorm, I realized.
And they probably came after me and Derek at the cemetery.

"Why do they look different?"

"They've been given enhanced strength on this plane,"Jordin
explained, "making them more powerful than the rest of us."

"How is that possible?"

"It's that symbol, the glyph," she told me. "It's evil. Seriously,
I think it originates from inside hell. It has power, and it's the key; without the glyph, DHI couldn't do any of what they're
doing."

Thoughts that might never have occurred to me before came
very naturally and easily in this place. I could almost see visible
connections between this and that, lines connecting one thing
to another.

"What if we took the symbol out of the equation?" I asked.
"Destroyed the glyph on our necks somehow?"

"No!" Jordin cried. "The symbol tethers us to the earth,
remember? If the symbol's broken, then you'd better be ready
to meet your maker. Literally."

I looked around this crazy, hyper-real space. "There has to
be something we can do!"

The building continued to tremble around us, though it was
nowhere near the intensity it had been on the top floor, where
that abominable thing had been unleashed. As I glanced around
at the sea of spirits floating through the giant room, the lights
flickered for just a moment. When the lights went out, I saw words
written on the darkened walls in a terrifyingly bright shade of
blood red. The words were splashed onto the walls like graffiti,
and they read, "The nightmare is coming."

The words were everywhere in that split second-not just all
over the walls, but on the ceiling and the floor, as well.

"Jordin," I said slowly, my words coming out in that strange,
hollow way that all sounds reverberated here, "how do we get
out of this room?"

"We don't. There's no way out unless we're let out. It's those
symbols plastered everywhere. They're derived from the same
language or whatever as the glyph, and they have power. Wherever
they appear, we're under their control."

"We have to get back inside the Body Chamber," I said, scanning the exits.

"I've been trying to get there for weeks," Jordin said, "but it's
like it's shielded or hidden from those of us on this side of the
veil. I was unconscious when they brought me to this building,
and I woke up like this. I never actually saw the chamber. None
of us did. That's why we're trapped here, why we can't go back
to our bodies."

"Well, I wasn't unconscious when I was brought in. I know
exactly where the Body Chamber is. We just need to get out of
this room...."

With another sickening groan from the building, our prayers
were answered when the power flickered twice, and then stayed
out. The mass of souls seemed to read the opportunity for what
it was, and rushed the exits. The souldiers tried to stop them,
viciously grabbing them, tackling them, throwing them around
like rag dolls. But math won out in the end. There were more of
us than there were of them.

We followed the crowd out into the outer hallway, and I
blindly headed for the elevator before Jordin grabbed me by the
shoulder. She grinned and pointed up at the ceiling.

Of course. What need was there for elevators when gravity
had no hold on us?

Following Jordin's lead, I allowed my body to float up until
I passed through the ceiling. It was exhilaratingly simple.

I lost count of how many floors we went through before we
finally arrived at the top, but I knew we were there, because we
could go no farther. The strange symbol-inscribed walls kept
us from leaving the confines of the structure. The sound of the monstrous creature grew as we ascended, and so did the horrible
shaking that threatened to level the entire building.

We moved quickly around the outer hallway outside the Body
Chamber until we came to the entrance, and peered inside. The
dozens of scientists working within the great room had fled,
from the looks of things, leaving only the hundreds of empty
bodies and-

"Derek!" Jordin cried.

He was still near the middle of the room where the extractor was, but he was slowly inching his way toward the horrible
creature. The beast marched around opposite us on the far end of
the circular room. It was stomping around angrily, and I had the
disturbing theory that it was mashing the dead form of Howell
Durham into the ground, grinding its feet into whatever was
left of Durham, like it was enjoying killing a bug. The monster
was enraged, on a power high, snarling and breathing hot air so
loudly that the sound reached us like tornadic winds.

Remarkably, despite this horrific action the creature was
relishing, we could still see Derek carefully moving closer and
closer to the thing, like a tiger stalking its prey and preparing
to pounce.

What on earth was Derek doing? What was he thinking?

At least the creature hadn't noticed him yet. It was still having
its own fun dancing on Durham's entrails. I was glad I couldn't
see any more than the top half of the thing. With its every step,
the whole building shook down to its foundations.

"Is that what I think it is?" asked Jordin, eying the gruesome
creature with fear.

"I don't know," I replied.

When I spotted Derek, I did a serious double take. I could see not only the solid matter of his body, but his luminescent
soul within, as well. But it was different than any other soul I'd
seen. There was a bright spot glowing in his center mass, and as
I looked closer I saw that it was a burning flame, and it made
his entire form flicker and burn bright. If he'd been standing
in a crowd, he would have been easy to pick out by any ghostly
observer.

I was so startled I glanced at Jordin, and she returned my gaze
with a knowing smile. Whatever I was seeing, she saw it, too, and
she actually seemed ... proud? Was that the right word?

That was when I noticed thatjordin, too, had a light glowing
in her center, yet hers was so much smaller than Derek's, it could
have been microscopic. It was barely there at all.

The fires were still blazing in the glass walls that stretched
around the room, and when Jordin and I tried to enter the Body
Chamber, we ran into something invisible that held us back. I
looked up and saw that the entrance was only a six-foot-high
opening, topped by more of the glass/fire walls. The circular wall
was complete. No breaks in it anywhere.

"It's those walls," I said. "The symbols, the fire within. It's got
to be some kind of... I don't know, a mystical security system
or something. Must be meant to keep us from trying to reenter
our bodies."

"If we could put out the fire, you think that might do the
trick?" Jordin asked.

The building shook hard as I looked closer and shook my
head. "That fire-inside-glass trick-it's a perfect circle, all the way
around the room. We might not need to destroy the entire circle,
just break it. Do we have the ability to do something like that?" I hoped that Jordin's weeks of living inside this realm had given
her enough experience and knowledge to help us now.

"Sure," she said, scanning the immediate area. "We just have
to use something from the other side of the veil, from the mortal
world. We can't get inside the room, but maybe we could throw
something tangible in there from here."

I looked down at my billowing form, sure there was no way
I could possibly touch anything solid on the other side of the
veil, much less manipulate it. "But we're powerless. How are we
supposed to-?"

"We're not powerless," she explained reproachfully. "You
just have to believe."

"I don't. .." I hesitated. "I'm not sure I understand...."

Jordin grabbed me by the shoulders and looked at me intently,
urgently. "You have to believe, Maia. This isn't theory anymore.
It's not religious studies classes or your parents' television show.
The human soul is real. That should mean everything. But for
right now it needs to mean you have utter faith that you can
touch the physical world. If you have any doubt at all, you won't
be able to do it."

"My whole life has been about living with doubts. I don't
know-"

Jordin was undeterred. I'd never seen her with so much certainty, and I thought I saw the tiny little flame inside her flicker
as she spoke. "You believe in God, right?"

"Yeah," I said and nodded quickly.

"And you believe we're more than just bodies? There's something crucial in each one of us?"

I glanced at our surroundings. "Duh."

"Then decide, here, now. Trust that in this place, in this form, you're more than you ever were in the confines of your human
body. Have faith in what that means, who it makes you. And who
made you."

Jordin spotted a piece of rebar on the ground that had fallen
out of the crumbling cement ceiling. She leaned over to grab
it, closing her tendril fingers around the thick piece of metal. I
watched her concentrate hard as she worked to heft the thing,
but she only got it to move a few inches off the ground.

"Come on, I need your help!" she said. "We don't need to
move mountains, Maia. Just some metal."

I worked hard to focus, closing off everything around me. I
can do this. I can believe. I can believe. I believe. I believe....

I followed Jordin's example, carefully and intentionally focusing on the rebar. I formed two distinct hands at the ends of
my billowing arms and clutched at the metal bar with both of
them....

And I had it! My surprise made me lose my grip for half a
second, but I recovered before the metal bar could fall.

The two of us lifted the rebar and carried it as close as we
could to the entrance.

"Don't think of this as working your muscles," Jordin said
as we lifted the bar high enough to hurl it. "It's not. Concentrate
on getting it far enough across the room to smash into one of
those glass wall panels."

That didn't sound easy. The curve of the circular room was
wide, and getting a clear shot to one of the panels from this door
meant hurling the rebar more than a hundred feet.

Again, I focused on calming myself and concentrating on
what we wanted to do. Jordin counted to three, and at the end of her count, we lobbed the rebar through the air and into the
Body Chamber.

I bore down as Jordin did the same thing next to me, and
willed the big piece of metal to keep going until it moved far
enough to stick into one of the glass wall panels.

The panel and all of its etched-on symbols shattered into
thousands of pieces. I had no idea how, but the fire inside was
extinguished in an instant. It started with the broken panel and
then snuffed out in a fast succession, all the way around the huge
room, until the fire was no more.