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  What had once been nothing more than a vague glow now appeared as a distinct rectangle of dirty-looking light that continually grew larger as she ran. The woman had been in darkness for so long that even the murky quality of the light pierced her eyes. As she squinted through tears of discomfort, the doorway shimmered like a mirage, threatening to dissipate back into the darkness from which it came.

  There were no more thoughts in Lydia’s head. No emotions or feelings. There was only the grim determination to survive as her feet pounded against unforgiving cobbles.

  The doorway was so large as to be blinding now, but it didn’t matter. Its location had been seared into Lydia’s mind, and even though her eyes were more closed than open, her course remained true.

  Blades hissed at her back, passing so closely that displaced air cooled her sweat-slick flesh with soft puffs.

  A few more seconds. Only a matter of yards until she rushed into the dimly lit room.

  The creature screamed, its shrill wail chopped into staccato bursts as it screeched through a flurry of whirring blades.

  Close. So close to the door. Too close to die, still within the darkness.

  A slash of white-hot agony burned across the woman’s right shoulder, accompanied by a short-lived sound that was something between a squish and a rip. Blood oozed from the throbbing wound and streamed down her back, triggering waves of vertigo as she toppled forward with a shriek.

  Instinct took over as the woman turned her fall into a dive. Tucking her chin against her chest, her shoulder hit the floor and she rolled, springing into a crouch with more grace than her conscious mind could have ever invoked. A new flash of memory burst into her mind: a little girl with her hair pulled into a bun, tumbling across thick mats in a leotard while an older woman with glasses and a silver whistle berated her for bad form. The memory flashed out of existence and she found herself entirely within the room and facing the entrance. Lydia curled her fingers into claws, ready to rake and scratch her way through one final stand.

  But there was nothing there. The doorway through which she’d dove was a slab of darkness so complete that it was as if reality no longer existed across its threshold. With her heart hammering in her chest, she watched for the slightest sign of movement, prepared to pounce if so much as a shadow passed into the room.

  By the time sweat had dried cool against her skin, Lydia accepted that the creature—whatever it had been—was truly gone. There were no more sniffs in the darkness. No scuttling. No blades jangling cruelly off one another. Even the stink had dispersed, replaced by the musty scent of mildew. Rising to her full height, Lydia retreated slowly, still not entirely comfortable with turning her back to the darkened doorway.

  My back…

  Reaching over her shoulder, the woman touched her injury tentatively, wincing in anticipation of pain. Yet there was none. In fact, there wasn’t even any blood. There was only a slight tingling, as if the patch of skin had been partially numbed with anesthetic.

  Twisting and contorting, Lydia’s hands patted every inch of flesh they could reach, certain that the cut had to be there. She’d felt it. She knew she had…but there was only unbroken skin beneath her probing fingers.

  What the fuck?

  Was she dreaming? It wasn’t the first time the possibility had crossed her mind. A world of utter darkness, an unseen creature that ran on multiple legs, yet somehow managed to use bladed weapons; all the surreal hallmarks of a bad dream were there. But if she were going to jolt awake with a gasp, wouldn’t it have happened by now? Surely her subconscious would have wrenched her from danger long ago. And besides, as bizarre as this world was, it still felt like reality. She couldn’t prove it, of course, but Lydia’s gut told her this was no nightmare. At least not one from which she could awaken.

  Instead of driving herself insane with unanswerable questions, the woman looked around. The room she’d fled into was an old bathroom. The floor tiles were cracked and chipped with mold darkening the grout bordering them. This mold bled onto the ceramic squares, discoloring them with coffee-colored smudges that crept up the base of a toilet. Though the commode’s lid was closed, dark stains cascaded over the rim, implying that filth had once streamed down its sides like a polluted waterfall. Across from the toilet were the remains of a sink. Rusted pipes poked out of the rubble of chunks of porcelain, and a brown roach skittered up the faded toile wallpaper behind the mound. The wallpaper was blemished with water stains that spread to an embedded medicine cabinet whose door dangled from a single hinge. There was no trace of the mirror that once fit into the door, but above the cabinet was a single lightbulb, coated so thickly in dust that the light filtering through it was tinted brown, explaining why the glow had looked so dingy as Lydia had ran toward it.

  But what really drew her attention was the claw-foot bathtub lurking in the far corner. Corroded spigots protruded from the walls and drops of rust-colored water grew pregnant on the spouts’ lips, swelling until they could no longer resist gravity. They plopped into the tub with a steady rhythm: drip…drip…drip…

  The bathwater was so murky as to almost be opaque and strands of hair fanned across its surface, wavering like seaweed in a poisoned ocean. Forcing herself to take a step forward, Lydia glanced into the depths. Something bloated and pale floated beneath the surface, swollen so much that it was wedged within the confines of the tub. The muddy looking water hid most of the body from view, but Lydia knew that was precisely what the thing was: a corpse.

  Even so, for a moment Lydia was transfixed by her own reflection; it floated ghost-like in the dark water, its features pulled and distorted by ripples from the dripping faucet. She knew she should have been repulsed by the submerged corpse. Like the creature that had chased her through the corridors, it was something that seemed to have been birthed in a madman’s nightmares. People simply didn’t stumble into decrepit restrooms where dead bodies festered in a tub. Though she had no memories to back this up, Lydia was certain it was a fact. After what she’d just been through, she should have, at the very least, felt twinges of fear.

  Instead, she chewed on her bottom lip and craned her neck as she watched her reflection shimmer. Were her eyes green or brown? Did she have freckles? At times, she thought her nostrils appeared impossibly wide, only to have them shrink to mere pinpricks with the next undulation of water. How big were they really? With no recollection of life beyond these walls, any concept of self-image was limited to the parts of her body that she could actually see. The woman knew her legs were long and sinewy, that her pubic hair shined like freshly stripped copper wire, and that one breast was slightly larger than the other. Her face, however, had been a mystery that even exploratory fingers couldn’t entirely crack.

  “Lydia.” Her voice was barely a whisper, softer even than the water dripping into the tub. “Do I really look like a Lydia?”

  It was hard to tell. The water was choppier now, so much so that she couldn’t even tell her face was a face. Frowning, Lydia leaned even farther over the tub, certain she could combine the disjointed features into cohesion if she squinted enough. But the concentric ripples were more like waves now, lapping against the sides of the tub and creating the illusion of movement below; the body’s left hand looked as though it were bobbing up and down, rising rapidly toward the top of the tub only to sink again seconds later.

  It had to be an illusion, though, because there was nothing that could have set that hand in motion. The only true movement in the bathtub was the drips from the leaking faucet, and those wouldn’t have been enough to create such a disturbance on their own.

  Lydia’s stomach felt queasy, and she turned around, half-expecting the door to have magically disappeared. But it was still there after all, as dark and foreboding as ever.

  If she stepped over the threshold, how long would it take for the creature to return? Was it still out there, skulking in the shadows and waiting for another chance to cleave her bones? Lurking in complete silence. Luring her into a false s
ense of security.

  But why was she even thinking about leaving? She was safe here, after all. The creature obviously couldn’t—or wouldn’t—come into the light or it would have finished her off when it had the chance. However, the woman knew she couldn’t stay inside the bathroom indefinitely; sooner or later she’d have to find the courage to go out and search for another room. One with food and drinkable water. But for now she had sanctuary…didn’t she?

  Lydia’s gaze jumped from the door to the remains of the sink. The slabs of shattered porcelain could be used as weapons if it came down to it. There were a few that were roughly the size of her fist, just right for bludgeoning an aggressor. If the mirror had broken first, perhaps there were even shards of it buried beneath the rubble. Ones that could be fashioned into a makeshift knife.

  “There’s plenty of time to figure all this out,” she reminded herself. “You’re safe. So chill the hell out.”

  But she couldn’t. He mind insisted that she needed to take stock, that she had to be prepared. The insistence of these instincts stimulated her pulse and breathing, each doubling in rate as she remembered her ordeal in the corridors.

  “Maybe that voice—the one who called it his pet—maybe he called the thing off. To toy with me.” She thought speaking aloud might help calm her nerves, but the idea only made her more tense. The back of her neck tickled as if brushed by invisible fingers, and a new thought burst through the others crowding her mind, demanding to be heard.

  Your back’s to the tub. Turn around, girl, turn the fuck around now!

  Lydia tried to tell herself that she was simply being childish. The woman in the tub was dead, after all, and posed no threat. Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was creeping up behind her; that even now a slimy hand was reaching toward her, eager to pass the chill of the dead into too-warm flesh.

  Her body wanted to spin around and immediately confirm or deny this apprehension. But giving in to that impulse felt like weakness. Out in the darkness, her fear had been justified; she’d had tangible evidence of the creature’s existence. But this? This was panic fighting for a stranglehold on her emotions. The sense of dread squeezing her stomach was completely unfounded…wasn’t it?

  Lydia’s mind flashed back to the image of the hand rising and falling with the current. But what if the water hadn’t been moving it after all? What if it had actually been responsible for the change in the water?

  A lump formed in her throat and she forgot to breathe. Nothing else had changed. The water dripped with the regularity of a metronome. And if nothing outside the tub had caused the water to become more choppy…

  She didn’t want to turn around. For a cold certainty now constricted her soul: the imagined hand really was stretching toward her…grasping…reaching…

  But she knew she had to. Lydia’s hands balled into fists so tightly that her fingernails dug into her palms as she slowly turned, dreading what she would see. She held her breath, prepared to strike the first blow if given half a chance.

  But there was nothing there. Relief surged through Lydia’s body, flooding her muscles with fatigue as a high-pitched giggle bubbled from deep inside, and she shook her head as her cheeks warmed with embarrassment.

  “See?” She spoke aloud again, her voice tight in the wake of adrenaline. “Don’t be such a damn baby.”

  As if to prove something to the childish part of her that made monsters out of shadows, Lydia stepped forward and leaned directly over the bathtub. Though fear had evaporated the moisture in her mouth, she slid her tongue over her gums, trying to work up saliva so she could spit into the stagnant water. But then, just as she began to salivate, the submerged hand flexed its fingers and Lydia’s scream echoed through the darkened hallways outside the room.

  Chapter 4

  The Sleeper Screams

  Chuck bolted from the couch, pulling the leads from his instrumentation as he scrambled across the carpeted floor. For one insane second, he thought the scream had followed him out of the Crossfade, that it had tracked him across dimensions like a hungry predator; he could still hear the voice, straining with agony, but it no longer seemed to come from deep within his own head. No, it was from a definite direction. From his left.

  Nodens’s hands reflexively clenched the sheets and his body arched over the cot as his neck muscles bulged. With his face screwed into a rictus of pain, the Sleeper’s vocal cords rattled, the force of his scream already lending a hoarse scratchiness to the man’s voice. Sweat rolled down his reddened face and the instrumentation behind him had gone haywire, spiking like a seismograph placed on the epicenter of a major fault line.

  Chuck wanted to run to the man, to hold him down until the spasms and seizures had run their course, to inject morphine into his IV drip and somehow relieve his partner of an agony so intense that Death would seem a welcome friend. The instinct was so strong that he’d actually taken several steps toward the cot, before checking himself.

  Sleepers couldn’t actually feel pain. That was the whole idea behind anesthesia, after all. These were nothing more than involuntary contractions, no different than making a dead frog’s leg twitch with the application of current. And the screaming? That was certainly an anomaly, but chances were that wasn’t actually Nodens’s voice. The man, after all, did act as a vocal conduit for the souls of the departed.

  Even so, Chuck wanted answers. He stormed across the office until he stood just below one of the cameras, glaring up at the lens as he jabbed his finger in the air.

  “What the fuck was that? Can you tell me what the Hell just happened? Please. Because I would really, really like to know.”

  There was a moment of silence as Chuck breathed heavily through his nose. His neck and shoulders felt pinched and he flexed his hands as though squeezing invisible stress balls. Nodens’s scream was abruptly cut short, and the man’s body flopped back onto the cot with a thump, his readouts immediately returning to normal ranges. Though no longer yelling, the man’s lips moved ever so slightly, broadcasting messages from the very realm from which Chuck had just been pulled.

  Perhaps the end of the scream was a psychological cue that whatever had transpired was over; perhaps Chuck had simply been back in his body long enough to put a little distance between the events he’d experienced in the field and the calming gurgle of the Buddha fountain: whatever the reason, his heart no longer felt as though it were trying to pound its way through his chest and his breathing became more rhythmic and even. This, in turn, paved the way for rational thought.

  He still wanted answers. But he knew he would have to wait. Even now, the data was being studied. His own vitals were being cross-referenced against Nodens’s, equations were being hastily scribbled onto the pages of notebooks, and a thousand different variables explored. He forced himself to return to the couch, where he plopped down and began toying with one of the tasseled pillows. Technically, he should have already begun working on his post-Walk operative report, but this hadn’t exactly been a standard assignment. In this situation, a loosening of protocol adherence seemed in order.

  “Chuck, you need to hear this.” The female voice came from a speaker embedded in the ceiling. The familiar lilt sounded strained, and Chuck envisioned stress creasing a face he’d only ever imagined. “These were recorded just a few minutes ago and…well, I think the recordings will speak for themselves.”

  The woman’s voice was replaced with a faint hiss, almost like the sound of a waterfall in the distance; but wavering in and out of that hiss were voices. Dozens of them, moaning simultaneously through the single mouth of his Sleeper, alternately pleading for help and shrieking wordlessly. Pain, fear, desolation, and abject misery: The voices conjured the basest of human emotions, the dregs left when hope and light had all but faded, leaving only a world of distress and darkness.

  The recording told Chuck all he needed to know. He’d read about the phenomena in case studies, but had never actually experienced it in the field. What the clinical
terms of the studies hadn’t conveyed was how hearing such a recording coaxed chill bumps as the little hairs on the arms and back of the neck bristled; they didn’t explain how the stomach could suddenly feel hollow and empty or how listening to endured anguish could make it feel like nothing would ever be right in the world again.

  “Oh God…oh, my lord…” Chuck closed his eyes and hugged himself, silently praying that the recording would end, that he wouldn’t have to experience another second of the distress these tortured souls were being subjected to. “Those poor, poor people…”

  The handbook called the phenomena a Vertices Collision Scenario, but to a Whisk, it was bad news. When an extremely willful soul got their hooks into a Crossfade, they refused to let go at all costs, exerting their determination as they consciously mold personal realities. These weren’t lost spirits who simply created a way station like Abigail had; they somehow recognized a Crossfade for what it truly was and understood on an instinctive level how to manipulate it. The more convincing the Crossfade became, the wider it expanded, eventually sucking in nearby Crossfades like a black hole pulling in neighboring stars. Textures, tastes, and smells took hold and the illusion of time reasserted itself; if left unchecked, the Crossfade became an entire world with thriving ecosystems and complex weather patterns. Once that occurred, the Crossfade became what the handbook referred to as a Cutscene.

  Part of Chuck’s job was to keep this from happening. He, and other Whisks like him, tried to clean up these transient dimensions before they became too real and the megalomaniac at its core became convinced of his own divinity. This was important because if allowed to grow indefinitely, a Cutscene would draw other souls to it. Maybe they were fooled into thinking it was the Promised Land; or maybe it was simply governed by the laws of attraction. Why it happened didn’t really matter. The point was, once others believed in the reality of this customized Crossfade, they became stuck in its web. It cocooned them within its strands to the point that the souls and the location no longer existed as separate entities, but as parts of a whole. And that convergence is what constituted a Vertices Collision Scenario.