Chapter #17Arbol Comes to Oswego by: Seuzz   You pick your way carefully across the carpet of the forest, trying not to make any noise as you sweep over dry twigs and leaves. It's not really a forest, just an incursion made by the surrounding woodland into the outskirts of the town. But it's better to approach from this angle than from the road. It's dark, but wherever your eye falls the landscape springs out clearly. The colors are all wrong, of course; under the light of Arbol, the nighttime landscape glows with a neon intensity. But you've long practice at seeing a darkness illuminated by your second ousiarch.
You follow the bend of the hill, and your destination looms over the trees. The long-abandoned State Hospital for the Criminally Insane is a gaunt shadow, a livid bruise against the innocent night. The dark stonework is unbroken by even a single window—
No, that's not right: There's one window, high up, and in it you can see a solitary figure gazing down. The patch of ground between the woods and the walls is brightly lit by the Moon, and there's no way you'll be able to hide from him. But it probably won't matter, not if it's true that to be forewarned is to be forearmed.
There's another figure, standing fifty feet below the other, huddled under the asylum walls. That'll be Shackelford. You step into the clearing, and when you're ten feet from him he turns at the sound of your approach. "About fucking time, Medoff," he hisses.
You shrug with pretended helplessness. "I snuck through the woods. Took me longer than I thought. Those guys here yet?"
"No," he says. "You were cutting it close, though. Come on."
You shrug again, and ignore the lie that has skittered over his face, like a wash of yellow. He's been entirely, even painfully truthful up to now; but you'll have to go with him if you're to learn why he is lying now.
He leads you along the wall, crouching and feeling at the tall weeds. You see it long before he does: a dark, basement window. It squeals as he pushes it open and squeezes through. "Come on," he calls, and you follow.
He has a flashlight; you don't need its beam to see by as you follow him through the abandoned office and into a dusty, airless hallway beyond. At the far end, a set of winding steps take you up to the first-floor atrium. "There's an operating theater that way," he says, indicating the end of a hallway.
"How do you know?"
"I broke in earlier this afternoon." The floor creaks as you approach a pair of heavy doors. Before you reach them, though, you throw your cloak over Shackelford, and step back into the doorway of a nearby room.
Shackelford goes into the theater, but reappears a moment later. "Medoff!" he hisses. "Medoff!" You say nothing, and smile to yourself as his flashlight plays in your eyes. He mutters and searches the hallway, calling your name. Frustrated, he returns to the theater.
A minute later he reappears in the company of five other men, and from your hiding place you sweep them all into your cloak. You step aside and catch one from behind with a touch to the neck. He goes limp, and you catch and noiselessly lower him to the floor. You follow the rest at a distance, picking them off one by one as they spread out to search the building.
You save Shackelford for last. "There you are," you say as you step into the hallway next to him. He jumps and spins around. "I got lost."
He stares at you, eyes wide. "Bradley!" he shouts. "Rocheford!"
"They're not coming," you say. "It's only you and me." You stretch your hand to his face. "So how about you tell me--"
He seizes your wrist, and swings at your face. Stars explode in your head.
* * * * *
You waken to a throbbing jaw and temple. Shackelford is pouring cold water over you, and you blow and snort it water from your face.
"It's almost ready," Shackelford says as he casts the water bottle aside. "Wakey-wakey."
You're in the operating theater, bound at the wrists and ankles to a chair. There's a table nearby, with a tin urn atop it, and you don't like the way it's glowing. Shackelford crosses over to it. "Only one more ingredient," he says softly. "Last of the original batch. I wish they'd used it on you first."
"Used what on me?"
"The drug. They only had enough to make three doses." He opens the top of the urn and dumps a jar of white powder in. "They used the first on that man in Binghamton, to get the special meth they needed. They used the second on Shackelford, when they found the whole stash missing." He puts a Styrofoam cup beneath the urn's spigot. "The third is for you. You'll bring me what you stole. I can only hold three at a time, but with the right three, I'll never hibernate again. You will be one of my three." He flips the tap, and a thick, viscous fluid, like gravy, pours into the cup.
He brings it to you. "My health," he toasts, then seizes you by the throat. Foolishly, you gasp, and he tips the contents into your mouth.
* * * * *
Shackelford unties you, and you stand. You stretch, and crack a kink from your neck, and smile. Your legs carry you toward the doors. Your mind is blissfully empty as you follow Shackelford.
Except it isn't. Medoff's mind is empty, spinning out of your control. You yourself are just along for the ride.
This better work, you think to yourself, and rip Medoff's imago away and pull Frank's on. You stumble in mid-step, and stop. "The fuck is going on here," you say aloud with quiet deliberateness.
Shackelford swings around. Again, he throws a fist at you. But this time you're ready, and you catch his fist in mid-air, twist him around, and with no hesitation break both his arms, then his ankles for good measure. He doesn't howl, though, and only quivers on the ground where you drop him.
You stalk back down into the operating arena, to the urn. You lift the lid and look inside. For only a fraction of a second does the thing inside blight your eyeballs, before you slam the urn shut. You grit your teeth, count to ten, and look inside again. Then you put in a call to Rick.
* * * * *
"They ain't pretty, are they, squirt," he says as he lugs the urn out to his car. He drops it into his trunk with a grunt.
"Is that really one of the things that you, uh—?"
"One of the smaller ones. You don't wanna see the big ones. This'n—"
He looks back at the asylum and sucks on his teeth. "A hundred years, and hundreds of patients? Was that enough madness and despair to suck on, until it was solid?" He muses for a moment, then grunts again. "Eh, probably still not enough. Probably they just built this place on an old Indian burial ground."
* * * * *
"Is that really the way it would have happened?" you ask when the session is over. You try not to sound skeptical, but something like skepticism must have come through.
"You don't like the way you still got cold-cocked, do you?" Reilly says. His smile is very tired; the man himself is slumped back in the parlor sofa, and he balances a coffee mug on his knee. "I can only war game it so many ways. What would you have liked to see happen?"
You grimace. "I'd like to think I'd have seen something was wrong with Shackelford."
"Don't be greedy," Charles says with a chuckle. "Isn't enough you only got punched once instead of being roughed up by the gang?"
"Sure. But—" You sigh. "Well, hindsight is twenty-twenty. But the other me should've gotten inside Bradley's head, seen what exactly they were planning. How they were trying to use that thing to mind-control people. Then I'd have seen that that's what they did to Shackelford, and not got caught by him."
"Well, like you say, hindsight is twenty-twenty," Reilly says. "Still, you would've handled it better than you did in this world."
"Would I handle all my jobs better with a second ousiarch?"
"Certainly," Charles says. "You'd have more tools. With Arbol, as you saw, you'd be able to penetrate deceptions more easily, spot the traps, and see the situations."
"Rick would call that cheating. With training, I ought to be able to see them even without Arbol."
"But with Arbol, you'd see them more easily, and with training you'd see them more deeply than you can even now."
"I guess," you admit. "But it feels more like an amplification of what I've already got, what I'm already training for. I think I'd like something that could add to what I do."
"We'll keep that in mind when looking at the other ones," Charles says.
Reilly groans. "But not till tomorrow night, Chuck. I'm beat."
To wake from this reverie: "The Boy from Before Everything, Part 2"   You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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