Shadow Land Read online

  “The enchantment is changing,” Devon said, “Evolving. I’ve looked into your father’s mind. He’s gradually waking up.”

  Relief flooded through Amy. “That’s good.”

  Victoria and Devon looked at each other uncertainly.

  Amy’s relief became confusion. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “We’re not sure, dear,” Victoria said. “Your father has become magically bonded with another.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  Victoria placed her hands gently on Amy’s shoulders. “We’ll tell you everything we know but unfortunately, that isn’t much.”

  “The enchantment has bonded your father with another being,” Devon said. “That being was locked inside a slab of ice within a cave. That’s what all this ice is about. At the moment, your father is traversing two worlds, this one and the one where the cave is located. So parts of that world are leaking into this one. Since the bond was formed, the slab of ice that has been imprisoning the being in the other world has been melting within the cave. And that’s why the ice around your father is melting too.”

  “What do you mean a being? A monster?”

  “We really don’t know,” Victoria told her. “But when the ice melts completely, your father will wake up.”

  “But the enchanted bond between him and the other being will persist,” Devon said. “Part of your father will still be locked within the cave.”

  “And part of the being in the cave will come to our world, inside your father’s body,” Victoria added.

  Amy felt hot tears sting her eyes. She was never going to get her dad back. Part of him was going to be locked away in another dimension and the part of him that was here was going to be possessed by a monster from another world.

  “Is there anything you can do?” she asked the witches. “Please, I’ll give you anything you want if you save him.”

  Victoria gave her shoulders a light squeeze. “My dear, I’m afraid it isn’t that simple. If there was anything we could do to help your father, we would have done it already. The only thing any of us can do now is wait.”

  “Wait for him to wake up possessed by a monster?”

  “We don’t know that it’s a monster,” Devon said. “It isn’t clear.”

  “Of course it’s a monster. What else would take over someone like this?” She gestured to the ice. Her dad looked so helpless, immobile on the bed. All her life, she’d thought him strong. He was a big man and with his size came a strength that always made Amy feel safe.

  Now, that was gone. He was gone.

  Unable to look at him any longer, she fled up the stairs and out to her car, where she sat behind the wheel for a long time, weeping for her dad, lamenting what was lost and fearing the monster her father was becoming.

  19

  Felicity and I spent the rest of the day researching magic portals but we didn’t get any closer to finding a way into the Shadow Land. When it finally stopped raining, we took a walk along the lake to clear our heads and get some fresh air. By the time we got back to the cabin, it was getting dark.

  After taking off her boots, Felicity went straight to the sofa and opened up her laptop.

  “Hey, you don’t need to do that now,” I told her.

  “But if we don’t find a way into the shadow version of the hospital, we won’t know if that’s where Henry Fields is hiding. And if he’s Mister Scary, we’re missing an opportunity to save a lot of lives. I don’t like the idea of us wandering in there unprepared.”

  “What do you mean? That’s my usual way of working.”

  She threw a cushion at me. I dodged it and it hit the wall.

  “You know exactly what I mean,” she said. “I like to be prepared, that’s all.”

  “Or is it that you can’t find the information on the portal and that’s bugging the hell out of you?”

  She crossed her arms and rested her head on the back of the sofa, looking up at the ceiling. “Yes, that as well.”

  “Maybe it’s something that only Mister Scary knows how to do.”

  “Well, I’ll be sure to ask him when I see him,” she said.

  “That may be sooner than you think.” My phone had started ringing, displaying Steve’s number. “Harbinger,” I said as I answered it.

  “We’re good to go,” Steve said. “Campbell left ten minutes ago. He went home early today.”

  “We’ll be there soon,” I told him. I ended the call and said to Felicity, “Let’s go,”

  We drove out to the parking lot in the woods and I opened the Land Rover’s trunk. “You want a sword or a dagger?” I asked Felicity.

  “I’ll take a sword, please.”

  I handed her an enchanted sword in a leather scabbard, along with a crystal shard that would glow if it detected magic. She attached the scabbard to her belt.

  I grabbed a sword and crystal shard for myself and picked up another item, wrapped in a cloth.

  “The Janus statue?” Felicity asked.

  “Yeah, if there’s a portal already open in there somewhere, the statue will find it. It’ll also open locked doors, which may be useful if we need to search Campbell’s office for those missing records.” I put the statue into a small backpack and threw a dagger in there as well for good measure.

  I closed the trunk, slung the backpack over my shoulder, and we trudged along the muddy path through the woods to Butterfly Heights. The iron gate buzzed open before we’d even reached it. I guessed Steve was watching the gate on one of the many cameras.

  He was waiting behind the hatch in the reception area when we got inside, a nervous look on his face.

  “You okay?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just the night, you know? It makes me anxious sometimes. The singing is more spooky when it happens at night.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll deal with it.”

  I pointed at the bank of monitors behind him. “I’m going to have to ask you to turn off the cameras for a while.”

  “Why?”

  “Because while we’re waiting, Felicity and I are going to take a look in Campbell’s office.”

  His brow furrowed. “I don’t know about that. What if he knows you’ve been in there? I’ll lose my job for sure.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” Felicity said.

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  “Why are you so worried about losing your job here if it’s making you this anxious? Why don’t you get a job somewhere else?”

  “I’ve asked myself that question a thousand times,” he said. “The answer is that it isn’t just about me. I can’t abandon the patients. I’m the only person who cares about tackling this thing. Campbell can’t even hear it and the other members of staff either pretend it’s nothing or they leave. If I left too, no one would care enough to hire people like you to deal with the problem and the patients would never get better.”

  “You did the right thing by bringing us here,” I told him. “Letting us search Campbell’s office is also the right thing to do.”

  He sighed in resignation. “Okay, okay. I’ll turn off the cameras for a little while. All the patients are in their rooms anyway.” He went over to his desk and hit a couple of keys on a keyboard. The monitors went dark.

  “We’re going to go to Campbell’s office,” I told him when he came back to the hatch. “If you hear anything strange, call me.”

  He nodded and then saw the sheathed swords hanging from our belts. “Jesus, what are you going to do with those? You’re armed for bear.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” I told him. We headed toward the door that led into the main part of the hospital.

  “Wait a minute,” Steve called, “you’re going to need these.” He tossed us a couple of keycards.

  I looked at the plain white card and held it up. “Will this open Campbell’s office?”

  “No, only the doors in the corridors. All the other doors have traditional-style locks and keys.” He held up a key
ring crammed with keys. “Campbell has the only key to his office, though. And also the only key to the basement.”

  “The basement,” I repeated. “Why would he have the only key to the basement?”

  Steve held his hands up. “Hey, he runs the place. I assume he has personal stuff down there.”

  I looked at Felicity. “We need to go to the basement.”

  She nodded. “My thoughts exactly.”

  “Which way is the basement?” I asked Steve.

  He sighed again, probably resigned to the fact that the chances of him keeping his job were getting slimmer every second Felicity and I were here. “Through that door, turn left, and go all the way to the end of the corridor. Campbell’s office is upstairs—it isn’t that empty room he took you to when you first came here. The stairs are near the basement door. You’ll see them.”

  “Thanks, and remember, if you see or hear anything strange…”

  “Yeah, I’ll call you. But right now, I’m not sure what the point would be. I might as well just let the ghost take me.”

  “Don’t worry,” Felicity told him, “Dr. Campbell will never know we were here.”

  We opened the door and went through it into the corridor.

  As we headed toward the basement, Felicity pulled her sword from its scabbard. The enchanted blade glowed bright blue, reflecting off her glasses and the corridor around us.

  “You expecting trouble already?” I asked her.

  “We have no idea what we’re going to find in that basement,” she said.

  I thought about that for a moment and then drew my own sword.

  20

  At the end of the corridor, we came to the basement door. It was probably as old as the building itself and made of sturdy oak with a brass plaque at eye level that had the word Basement engraved into it. It seemed innocent enough. I tried the handle. Locked.

  I unwrapped the Janus statue and held it up. The two bearded faces, looking in opposite directions, could find inter-dimensional portals and keep them open but the statue could also open mundane locks. The Latin words to activate the statue were inscribed on its base but I knew them well enough to recite them without having to read them first.

  After I said the short verse, the lock on the basement door clicked and I tried the handle again. The door swung inward. Beyond, a set of stone steps spiralled down into darkness. I found a switch on the wall and turned on the lights. As they flickered to life overhead, they cast a weak glow over the steps. What was down there at the bottom of the spiral staircase was anyone’s guess.

  “I wonder how deep this goes,” I said, suddenly realizing that I was whispering.

  “The building sits on a hill, so it could be a long way down,” Felicity whispered back.

  I put the unwrapped Janus statue into the backpack and threw it over my shoulder. “We won’t know until we take a look,” I said, tightening my grip on the sword and stepping down onto the top of the spiral staircase. A sudden chill seemed to fill the air and I got the unsettling impression that something was waiting for me at the bottom of the steps, something that knew I was coming down to meet it.

  Trying to shrug off the feeling, I continued down. “I think you’re right,” I told Felicity, “this goes down a long way.”

  We continued down the steps, the air getting colder the deeper into the hill we went.

  “This is one hell of a basement,” Felicity said. “Why was it built like this? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I guess the people who ran Pinewood Heights Asylum back in the day needed it to be deep underground for some reason.”

  As we finally approached the bottom step, I could see an iron door set into the wall. It was probably locked but as I got closer to it, the lock clicked open thanks to the Janus statue in my backpack. I pushed the door gently and it swung open. The room beyond was pitch-black.

  I reached into the room and felt along the wall for a light switch. When I found one and flicked it, an overhead light stuttered to life. I stepped into the room, followed closely by Felicity.

  The walls and floor were covered with white tiles and an old wooden desk and chair sat by a second iron door on the opposite side of the room. There were no other furnishings but the room did have one other feature: a mosaic of red tiles in the shape of a magic circle high on one wall.

  “I’ve seen that symbol somewhere before,” I said, searching my memory. “It was on the uniforms of the Midnight Cabal soldiers we met on the island of Dia.”

  “Yes, it was,” Felicity said, looking up at the symbol. “What does the Midnight Cabal have to do with this place?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, pointing at the second door. “But I guess we need to see what’s through there.”

  Felicity nodded and, swords in hand, we crossed the room to the door. Its lock clicked open as we got close enough for the Janus statue to do its job. I pushed the door and it opened onto a corridor that was lit by a row of lights hanging from the ceiling. The walls in here were concrete. Four iron doors were set into the walls on each side of the corridor, with a ninth door at the far end. Each door was numbered and had a hatch at eye level.

  I removed the backpack from my shoulder and put it on the desk. These looked like cells and I didn’t want the Janus statue to unlock the doors and release whatever was inside. At least not until we’d checked them out.

  I went to the first door and slid back the hatch. The cell was no larger than ten feet by six, with a rusted, steel-framed bed inside but nothing else, and certainly no occupant.

  We checked the remaining seven cells on the sides of the corridor. They were all exactly alike, all empty.

  “Do you hear that?” Felicity said as we approached Cell 9.

  I listened. There was a noise coming from beyond the door, a sound like birds fluttering.

  We looked at the door and then at each other.

  “There’s something in there,” Felicity whispered.

  I stepped forward and tried to open the hatch quietly. But the metal grated noisily as it slid aside.

  Unlike the other cells, which had each been lit with a light set in ceiling, this one was completely dark. I couldn’t see anything in there but I could smell saltwater and there had been more fluttering when I’d opened the hatch.

  Now, the occupant of the cell was quiet.

  I could sense it watching me. I stepped back instinctively and closed the hatch.

  “What is it?” Felicity asked.

  “I don’t know, but it definitely isn’t a ghost. There’s something alive in there.”

  “We shouldn’t open the door until we know exactly what it is.”

  “I have zero intention of opening it right now,” I assured her. “Come on, let’s go and take a look at Campbell’s office. Maybe we’ll find something that will tell us what he’s keeping captive down here.”

  We went back to the outer room and closed the iron door.

  “We can’t lock it,” Felicity said. “Dr. Campbell will know someone has been down here.”

  “The Janus statue can lock it,” I said, taking the magical item from the backpack. “I just need to recite the words of the incantation in reverse order.” I had to read the inscription on the base of the statue to do that, so I held it up and read each word from the last to the first. The lock slid home with a click.

  I wrapped the statue so it wouldn’t lock the iron door at the bottom of the steps until we’d passed through. When we were standing on the bottom step, I unwrapped the statue to lock that door. After a leg-aching climb back up the steps, I locked the basement door in the same fashion.

  We walked back along the eerily quiet corridor until we came to the wide staircase that led up to the second floor.

  “At least this isn’t so creepy,” Felicity said as we ascended the stairs.

  She was right. This part of the building was spacious and airy, befitting of a Victorian building built on a huge budget. The stair carpet was dark blue with gray ivy leaf motifs.
Wood paneling lined the walls and the banister was carved ornately into the likeness of intertwined vines. Paintings of rural scenes hung on the walls and expensive-looking dark blue drapes covered the windows.

  The stairs led to a wide corridor with a number of dark wooden doors and the same ivy motif carpet. I found a door where the nameplate said Dr. Robert Campbell and used the Janus statue to open it.

  Unlike the sparsely-furnished office Campbell had taken us to when we’d first arrived here, this room was lined with bookshelves crammed with textbooks and leather-bound tomes. A large mahogany desk sat by the curtained window, its surface buried beneath stacks of books and papers.

  “No filing cabinets,” Felicity said. “He must keep his records in another room.”

  “But I think we’ll find what we’re looking for in here,” I said. “If there’s a separate filing room, it’s probably shared between the medical team. If Campbell has secret documents, he won’t risk them being discovered accidentally. They’ll be in here, in his personal space.”

  “Where do we start?” she asked, indicating the mess of books and papers. To someone as organized as Felicity, this office was probably a nightmare.

  “Start with the desk,” I said, using the Janus statue to unlock the drawers. “I’ll see what’s on these shelves.”

  She began rifling through the papers on the desk, reading them and putting them aside in the same order they’d been before she touched them. I checked the books on the shelves, looking for anything that stood out. Most of them were psychology textbooks but there was also a scattering of medical books that dealt with hematology and cell biology.

  “Perhaps the documents aren’t here at all,” Felicity said. “If they’re so secret he can’t risk them being found, maybe he keeps them at his house.” As she said this, she was opening the drawers and searching through their contents.

  “Maybe,” I said, “but his patients are here. And that…whatever it is…is in the basement here. I don’t think he’d transport his notes back and forth. He’d probably think they’re safe enough here. If I’m wrong, and we don’t find anything, we’ll just have to break into his home. I need to know how much of a part he played in Ryan Martin’s transformation.”