should, but it doesn’t feel like it’s moving at all in between. I’ve timed it before; it takes forty seconds once the doors have closed for them to open again. That’s a long time for an elevator—especially when there are no numbers for any intervening floors. It feels like a prop from
This morning I stepped into it, the doors closed, and—time passed. A lot of time. Longer than forty seconds, by the time I started counting again, and longer than twenty seconds after that. The lights went off, and my badge began to glow.
The elevator dinged. I jumped backward and crouched in one corner. The interior lights came on, blinding me, casting whatever was outside the doors in black.
“Come out, human,” said a voice. “We will not harm you.”
The voice was fractured and disjointed, like an approximation of human voices, gathered up piece by piece and rudely taped together for a TV serial killer’s type of prank.
“Who’s we?” I shouted from inside.
“You know who we are,” it said.
I was afraid they were right.
Chapter Thirty-One
I leaned forward and hit the “door close” button repeatedly.
“Come out,” the voice repeated more sternly.
I cast one arm up over my eyes to let them adjust. Outside looked like a cave, with an arched ceiling, and a velvety black floor. When I stepped out, the elevator’s doors began to shut behind me. I whirled, and shoved my hand between them, where the motion sensor ought to be, but they were determined to close. I yanked back just in time. The elevator sat there, out of place at the bottom of a shaft of rock.
“Where are you?” I called out and took a step forward. The carpet beneath my feet rippled and deformed. Oh, God, it was water. Or worse. “Shadows?” I yelled, my voice rising.
As my eyes got used to the dimmer light, illumination blossomed up from the ground, faint and delicate, crazy jagged lines and solitary winking lights. They came into resolution in the same way that sometimes you can’t see the stars till you’re out of the city, and then you wonder how you missed so many of them before. Farther out, in what I guessed was the middle of the cavern, was a solid mass of glowing light, a little flat sun. It pulsed.
“You brought me here—why?” I asked aloud.
“This is our home,” the voice said. I heard the sound of liquid pouring next to me and I turned to my right. Twenty feet away stood a creature made of the dark liquid, still streaked with luminescent stars. It looked like the Blob, and it extended a pseudopod toward me.
I stepped backward, holding out my glowing badge. “Send me back to the lobby, now.” The memory of them crawling over me, touching me, made my skin shiver. I didn’t want to go back to wherever they’d sent me inside myself. Helpless, lost, unwhole.
I didn’t want a Shadow touching me. Not ever, ever again.
“I will not touch you here, human. Not yet.”
“Keep out of my head.” I kept my badge out, for whatever good it was doing. “Why’ve you brought me here?”
“Because we have need of you.”
“What, you want to tell me how worthless I am again?” I let my badge drop against my chest. “I remember what it felt like last time, don’t need a repeat performance, thanks.”
The creature rippled and deformed, snaking in and out of itself, shimmering lights playing across it.
“If we wanted to destroy you, we would have already. So believe us that you still have some use.”
I crossed my arms, suddenly aware that it was freezing down here, wherever this was, and my coat was still in the elevator. “You’re going to have to explain more than that if you want me to agree.”
“We could crawl inside your head and make you but a shell of yourself, a puppet of meat, for which we keep the only strings.” It paused to let the impact of this settle in. “Please stop trying to be brave, and become the pathetic creature we both know you to be.”
My short nails bit against my arms. “Fuck you.”
The Shadow-thing laughed with other people’s voices, loud and long, before continuing. “This hospital is built on a place for gathering powers. Before it was a hospital, it was a church. Before it was a church, it was a burial ground. And before that, perhaps even passing dinosaurs walking above dipped their heads in sorrow.”
I nodded like I understood—but really I just wanted it to stop talking with that broken voice. “So?” I asked, when the last reverberation had gone away.
“There are lines beneath the County, Nurse Spence. They channel what we use as food into us, here. For us, they are like the circulatory system you know so well.”
“You don’t send out oxygen or nutrients or unicorns or rainbows. You’re a bottom-feeder, and you only send out shit.”
The Shadow let loose another mocking laugh. “Then think of us as a sponge, or a parasite, or even a baleen whale. Whatever you require in order to understand.”
Halfway through its speech I put my fingers in my ears. It only let me better hear the pounding of my own heart and didn’t block the Shadow-voice out at all. I gave up. “What’s this have to do with me?” I prompted.
It extruded an arm and gestured to the floor. “This is a map of all available energies.”
All I could see were stars and whorls and bright excited jumping lines. They looked like words written in an ever-changing language that I would never learn to read.
“A man dies near Broadway, shot by his ex-wife.” A lit spot on the floor, no wider than a pencil, rippled and raised. “A political rally, where people hope and hate in equal measure.” A thicker piece of light pulled up from the floor, maybe the width of my fist. “And lastly, here. County Hospital. Two thousand people—not so very many—but they are always in perfect agony, hoping not to die, and dying regardless.” The flat sun I’d seen before rose up like a tombstone. It beat like a glowing heart.
I stepped backward and the floor rippled. Like a heavy stone dropped into a still pond, those ripples carried out and over to the short pillar of light, coursing up its length on one side and down on the other, in blissful ignorance of physics.
But not everyone at County died. Surely not— “You don’t change patient outcomes, do you?”
“We don’t need to. This is the County’s hospital. The people who come here cannot go anywhere else. They wait too long for medical attention, and when they receive it, even should they live, they often wish to die along the way.” The creature made its way out, warping the field of lights along the floor—lights that I now understood represented combined pinpricks of human suffering and pain. “It is not a thick conduit—not like a war might bring, or the weight of crushing tyranny—but it is steady. It has lasted so far. It will continue.”
“So why do you need me?”
“We would like you to transport us.”
I took another step back and looked at the elevator behind me. “You’re not getting inside my head again.”
The creature chuckled. “There are other ways.”
“Why should I help you?”
“We will be able to find the vampire girl you seek. Surely she is currently experiencing a certain amount of pain.”
I nodded. Of course, when she’d been biting Mr. Galeman, she’d been causing him a certain amount of pain too. Realization dawned on me. If what they were saying was true, the Shadows had everyone coming
