Always Beside You

DEDICATION

For my grandmother.

CONTENTS

DEDICATION

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Riley was my second reader and first editor for Always Beside You, and provided crucial feedback while sparing my fragile ego. My dad read a raw early draft and had encouraging things to say about it. As usual, Bootsy supervised the writing and editing process. This book was five years in the making, and every little bit of encouragement helped along the way. Any errors are mine alone.

A big thanks to Mike Evans and the team at Grinning Skull Press for crafting the manuscript into publishable shape.

I have taken liberties with the geography of Boston and the state of Massachusetts, for which I apologize. The town of Covenant, MA, is, to my knowledge, entirely fictional; the abandoned subway tunnels beneath Boston are not. Parts of the Tremont Street subway system are still used by the MBTA, and some of the older tunnels are rumored to be considered for rehabilitation. All I have to say to that is proceed with caution.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

-But who is that on the other side of you?

– T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems

Prologue

Trapped inside his own mind, the man clung to his despair, the last surviving fragment of his identity.

Years had passed since his incarceration in this gray, shapeless place. Long enough for the man to forget his name, his former existence, everything that had once made him who he was. The body that had once belonged to him had grown old and feeble, locked away from the outside world. His consciousness was hidden as if behind a bank of storm clouds through which glimpses filtered like sparse sunlight, splintered images and memories that tormented him without offering closure. Within those clouds, something vast moved, a presence that had fastened upon him, burrowed inside him, fed on his thoughts and desires, eating away all sense of himself.

But his awareness, or what remained of it, wasn't a blank slate. For when he tried, the man could remember—not always coherently, but with awful clarity. Blood and fear and pain, vivid images of horror and destruction. Snippets from a life taken away from him, or from a dream, but nevertheless real, seen through the eyes of another. Hidden from him by that shapeless cloud, by the intruder who now occupied the space of his mind, extinguishing him one piece at a time. Immense and cruel and pitiless, unbound by space or time.

Once upon a time, the man had sought it out, had welcomed the intrusion. Forgone his thoughts and emotions, opened himself up to serve its unknowable desires in return for the promise of power. The why and how of it were lost to him now; only regret remained. There had been others, a joining of bodies and minds, eager to contain the entity, to subjugate it to their will. They had thought themselves gods, or the equals of gods, all but immortal. By the time they realized what it wanted with them, by the time they had tried to take it back, they were no longer its masters. They could no longer stop it.

Sometimes the man could hear those others, or sense them in the inchoate darkness. He felt their horror and agony as the presence claimed them one by one. Their physical deaths, and what came after. What they could no longer deny.

Yet the thing had needed them as much as they had relied on its powers. They were its doorways into reality. Denied gratification, it had fallen victim to its own fury, become a prisoner in this world, entombed in this decaying pile of meat and bone.    

Waiting to be set free. To break through where the boundaries were thinnest.

Now, something had changed. He could feel the intruder stretching to fill the forgotten corners of his head, filling them with alien thoughts and yearnings. Flexing muscles shrunken and wasted with age, cracking stiff joints that no longer worked how the man remembered them working. It had festered in this uncertain place, writing, growing, gathering strength for one final effort.

The body and face it had borrowed for a mask wouldn't survive this final indignity. Soon it would be over for the man. He would be bound to whatever fate awaited beyond.

But that would come later.

Right now, the nightmare was just beginning.

Chapter 1

Bobby Miller bumped the double doors open with his hip and wheeled the cart through. The small nighttime noises of the hospital faded away behind him. Ahead, the empty corridor stretched like a monstrous, bleached throat. It was late, and the guards had already changed shifts, the nurses clocked out for the night, no one bothering to linger and make chitchat. Bobby couldn't blame them. He had every intention of following suit as soon as possible.  

The dead silence of the place unnerved Bobby, made him jittery. Nothing in his ears but the squeak of rubber wheels on the floor, his own footsteps amplified by the white-tiled walls. He began to hum under his breath, but the tune trailed off and died on his lips. Overhead fluorescents reflected on the polished green linoleum, bathed the white walls in an awful and pallid radiance. He pushed the cart past rows of locked doors, averting his eyes from the narrow glass panes, afraid that if he looked, he'd catch a hint of movement behind them, see a pale, sunken face pressed against the glass, eyes and mouth gaping black holes. Ridiculous, but in the eerie stillness of the corridor, the idea did not seem ridiculous at all.

Bobby Miller was twenty-three, had been an employee of the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution at Waymart for seven months, and hated every minute of it: the hours, the weary contempt of the night-shift doctors, the casual cruelty of the charge guards. The recession had not been kind to fresh-faced college grads with a truckload of debt and med school ambitions. Still, Bobby supposed things could be worse. Hospital aide jobs, even part-time ones in a correctional facility, were hard to come by in this new reality of downsizing and hiring freezes and slashed budgets—many prisons relied on trusties—and he figured the experience would look good on his resume. But at night, when the thick steel bars of the prison gate rattled shut behind him and the shadowy hallways gaped open, when he stepped into the clanking, groaning elevator, cart loaded with drugs and trays of processed chicken and Jell-O, all rationalizations faded into insignificance. The place was a prison, and it made his skin crawl.

Before its takeover by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, the complex had served as a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane. The main hospital building, a fortress-like edifice of red brick, granite, and slate, loomed over the administration wing and its three auxiliary structures. Its interior was a maze of twisting passages, staircases that dead-ended into abandoned annexes, electricity and plumbing systems dating back to the Depression. The wards that housed the inmates formed the outer rectangle, their barred windows looking out on the inner perimeter of the tall wire fence. Bobby found it impossible not to think about the dark secrets the place kept, steeped in nearly a century of madness and violence bottled up within its walls.

Worst of all was the silence: thick and ominous, unnatural. The section that housed mentally disabled inmates—what Bobby privately referred to as the Vegetable Ward—was located in a corner of the old hospital section of the prison. Unlike mental wards in horror movies, it was cold, sterile, and quiet; no one babbling in tongues or banging on the doors, no flinging of excrement and bodily fluids. Yet the absence of sound was even more disturbing. The inmates of Vegetable Ward spent most of their waking hours sitting upright in their beds or lying motionless, like corpses, staring at the walls with wooden eyes. Almost as if they were waiting for something to happen, listening to some voice only they could hear.

Many among them had lost control of the basic bodily functions and had to be cleaned up. Those still ambulatory would at times wander out of their rooms, ghosts milling through the common areas in jerky, puppet-like convulsions, without purpose, their faces vacuous. Scrawny, mottled backs and sagging, old-man rumps flashed under cheap hospital gowns, the remains of their minds afloat on seas of Thorazine-induced calm. Some of the older patients bore the tell-tale crescent scars of lobotomies, faded burns where electrodes had been clamped to their temples during shock treatments.

Lobotomies and shock treatment. Jeez. Talk about the living dead. They weren't allowed to do that to people anymore, but the very thought of it was real horror-movie stuff. Bobby shivered and cast a nervous glance around. The scars made him think of the empty space left behind by the icepick—holes inside those wizened old skulls and what may have slithered in through those holes. Nature abhors a vacuum, he thought for no reason at all, and pushed the cart faster.

Hard to believe, but all these men, these vacant-eyed walking corpses, had committed crimes, some of them violent. Old Harry, the night maintenance man, never missed a chance to remind Bobby of that particular fact.

Killers, degenerates, and rapists, the lot of 'em, the old man would say at every opportunity, rheumy eyes shining with malicious glee and the effects of the best part of a fifth of rotgut whiskey. He would cant his head in mock sympathy and grin, revealing a mouthful of crooked, yellow teeth. Been cooped up in there for years. Bet they get a little hot under the collar. Catch my drift, Bobby-boy? This ain't no place for a good-looking young fella like yourself. This piece of fatherly wisdom would be followed by a shrill, unpleasant cackle as old Harry limped off into the shadows, a self-satisfied smirk on his face, a bundle of glossy porn mags featuring what looked like underage Asian girls in fetish outfits clutched under his arm.

No matter how hard Bobby tried to ignore the old man, the words followed him as he made his rounds, dredging up phantoms and horrors from the back of his mind. Killers and rapists. The very idea gave him the creeps. He hated Harry even more than he hated the job, dreamed of coming into work one evening and finding the dirty, old fuck keeled over, dead from a heart attack. Some fat chance. The maintenance man would probably still be stinking up the place decades after Bobby was gone, age and incipient cirrhosis notwithstanding, tormenting generations of hapless night-shift aides to come. Such was the way of the world.

Bobby wrestled the cart around a corner, fighting a stubborn wheel. Metal trays protested; a lid slipped off and clattered to the floor, the noise huge in the silence. He swore under his breath, bent over to pick it up.

A shadow raced across the fringe of his vision.

He looked up, but the corridor behind him was empty in both directions. Nothing stirred behind the doors of the Vegetable Ward. Just a trick of the light. Or maybe old Harry creeping through the shadows, trying to scare him. In spite of his humped back and arthritis-creaky knees, the old bastard was as limber and stealthy as a cat.

Bobby took a deep breath, reached for his keys, and unlocked the first cell on his right.

He worked his way down the corridor slowly, methodically, letting the routine take over and settle his jangling nerves. He changed bedpans, checked for bedsores, passed out pills in small paper cups, and dabbed at corners of mouths. The men went through the motions like jerky automatons, liver-spotted hands picking at the food, toothless jaws chewing and swallowing, lips twitching and, from time to time, grinning as if in response to some private joke. It didn't bother Bobby in the slightest. Once he got started, he found that he didn't mind the mess, the wasted bodies, the smells of stale piss and Lysol. His hands and fingers seemed to move with a mind of their own, gentle but confident, capable. The sense of accomplishment more than made up for the long hours and crappy pay, even for old Harry's antics. Bobby knew he'd make a good doctor someday, and if he had to wipe a few shit-smeared behinds along the way, so be it. If his short stint at Waymart had taught him anything, it was that there were far worse things in the world.

One by one, empty trays stacked up, marking his progress. Another lock clicked behind him, another bolt slipped into place. Bobby glanced at his list, and all his good feelings suddenly evaporated, the awful, heavy silence clamping around his head like a vise. The corridor seemed to elongate and expand. Lumps of shadow pooled on the floor where the overhead lights didn't reach. Bobby swallowed hard. The inside of his mouth felt as dry as dust.

The next door down the hall was Thomas Elbert's.

Say hello to Hannibal Lecter for me, some wit would occasionally yell out as Bobby walked into one of the local hangouts, the remark inevitably accompanied by a gust of moronic laughter. News traveled quickly when it didn't have to travel far. Bobby understood the reference, although he'd never seen the whole Hannibal Lecter movie—an old, spooky flick about a psycho who killed people and served them up for dinner. He chalked it up to small-town humor and responded in a like manner, with a shrug and the time-honored middle-finger salute. But the words, easy enough to dismiss in the warmth and noise of a crowded bar, or with daylight streaming through the windows, came back to haunt him at night, in the silent emptiness of the Vegetable Ward. They dredged up unpleasant associations: winding dark tunnels, locked and barred doors leading into an underground lair, a living, breathing monster crouching inside it, waiting to devour the unwary. No matter how hard he tried to push them away, the images kept coming back, strung together like the ends of broken film.

The Ward hosted its share of murderers. Norman Balfour, a small, affable old man with a shock of baby-fine white hair, had come to Waymart after stabbing his wife fourteen times in an acute attack of paranoid schizophrenia. Jeffrey Doherty, a former accountant with the state revenue service, had gunned down four coworkers after being handed a pink slip. There was a machinist from Pittsburgh who had run his foreman over with his truck following a minor altercation, and a mentally handicapped high school student—now in his fifties—who'd brained his shop class teacher with a pipe wrench. But Elbert's story was the stuff of nightmares: violence without motive, brutality for its own sake, or driven by some darkness too deep for the human mind to comprehend.

Eight years ago, Thomas Elbert had bludgeoned a family of three to death in some town west of Philadelphia, turned himself in, and slipped into a blank, silent state in which he remained to this day. In all his years at Waymart, he had not uttered so much as a word or shown any reaction to the goings-on around him. Catatonia, the doctors murmured for a while, finally giving up on establishing a diagnosis. A particularly sadistic screw—so the story went—had once snuffed a cigarette on the side of Elbert's neck, just to see what would happen. The long, pallid face had remained expressionless, the eyes glassy like marbles.

Bobby had seen the small, faded, circular scar while changing the old man's bedclothes but didn't put much stock into workplace rumor. Still, it made him feel uneasy. Elbert was a bogeyman, a creature from a scary tale, a malevolent spirit made real. It wasn't hard to imagine those dead eyes staring at the door but seeing some other place. To imagine something ancient and very much alive hiding inside the heap of gray, sagging flesh, licking its lips in hungry anticipation.

Among the prison's medical staff, the consensus about Elbert's condition was some sort of sudden and massive psychotic break, followed by a lapse into catatonia. Harry, of course, had his own view of the matter. He's faking it, he would opine with a superior smirk. Slyer'n a fox, that one, and twice as vicious. Got 'em all fooled—the cops, the judge down in Philly, these shit-for-brains doctors here. He's lying low, watching, resting up for something big. Something that'll make what he done to that family look like a good time. Just you wait and see.

Bobby Miller stood in front of the cell door, a chill working its way slowly from his spine to his stomach, the hairs at the back of his neck standing on end. The overheads hummed and clicked like moths caught in a glass jar. Deep in the walls, a pipe gurgled, a low, chuckling sound. Bobby thought he saw something reflected in the meshed glass, a dissolving, restless outline, bent over, or crouching to pounce.

I won't turn around, he thought, tamping down a fluttering uprush of panic. If I don't look, it can't hurt me. Nothing there; no one could have snuck up behind him. Probably just old Harry creeping through the hallways, setting him up for some cruel practical joke. Probably.

Don't wet your pants, boy.

He gritted his teeth and opened the door.

The light flared and wavered, dazzling, intolerable. Panic gripped Bobby in an invisible vise, his brain refusing to accept the input from his eyes. The old man wasn't in the room; the bed was empty, the sheets crumpled and pushed to one side.

No, just his mind giving a hitch, fear getting the better of him. Air wheezed out of his lungs on a shaky laugh. Elbert was right there, stretched out on the bed as always, a scrawny old man poured into washed-out gray pajamas. His head hung to the side like a drunk's, wattled skin pooling under a loose jaw. A drool stain spread across the pillow at the corner of his mouth. His pupils, dilated and black, stared at the cracked ceiling. There was nothing in them but the dark.

The sight of the old man flooded Bobby with relief and embarrassment. This was no monster, just an old man too far gone to remember his own name, who needed help feeding himself and wiping the shit off his ass.

Evening, Tom, he said aloud, and the sound of his own voice in the silence made him jump a little. There was no response, nor was any expected: Elbert never uttered a sound, not even screams or nonsense syllables. Bobby propped him up in the bed—the old man seemed to weigh next to nothing, a sack of feathers and dry bones—and arranged pillows behind his back. Elbert's head lolled limply on his shoulders, his spotted, blue-veined scalp showing through thin strands of hair, vacant eyes gazing at nothing in particular. Small, rust-colored stains dotted the back of his pajama top. Bobby turned him over carefully and stepped away from the bed. The old man's bedsores were getting worse; he'd have to use antibacterial ointment on him to stave off infection.

He was halfway to the cart when the knock came at the door: three taps, deliberate and measured.

Bobby froze in his tracks, suddenly aware he'd forgotten to breathe. Something scrabbled in the walls, a faint, metallic scratch, like a wire brush on rusty metal. A shuffling, bumping noise from the corridor, soft but insistent, drawing closer. The door smacked against the jamb, then was still.

Fucking asshole, Bobby muttered, his fear turning to anger. Enough was enough. Harry's boozy, dimwitted pranks were wearing thin, and he wasn't about to put up with them anymore. Suppose the old bastard took it a step too far? Locked Bobby out after his rounds, or worse, threw the elevator switch or a circuit breaker and trapped him between floors, dangling over a drop on a handful of creaking cables? The guy wasn't right in the head. By all rights, he ought to be locked up here with the rest of the psychos.

Yet it wasn't the maintenance man on the other side of the door, and in his heart of hearts, Bobby knew it. The approaching sound was like nothing he had ever heard in his life. Whatever made it was huge, unimaginable. An image came to Bobby, awful in its crystal clarity: a titanic, blind tide of flesh filling the hallway, shambling forward, brushing against the walls. It made no sense, but it was all he could think of. He wouldn't—couldn't—let it come inside, let his eyes fasten on it. To do so would destroy his sanity, burn his mind out like a dead fuse.

He watched his hand reach out, the door swing open.

The hallway beyond it was empty.

Just his imagination clocking some overtime. He had to get hold of his nerves. There was still work to be done, and he couldn't do it with his hands shaking and his mind conjuring phantoms out of thin air. Some doctor you'll make, he thought reproachfully. Afraid of the boogeyman in the closet. Jumping at shadows. He got the ointment from the cart and turned around.

Thomas Elbert wasn't there anymore. In the bed, nor in the room.

Bobby approached the bed carefully, the rational part of his brain expecting the old man to reappear. Surely, this was another trick of the light; there was no way out of the room except through the door, no way Elbert could have snuck past him. He ran his free hand across the mattress, peeling the sheets aside, feeling the warm hollow left behind by the missing body. A glance at the window assured him it was closed, the bars still in place.

Feeling foolish, Bobby walked over, stared through the glass. Nothing outside but the prison building and the floodlit yard, and the black scrim of night hung over the thick walls.

A sense of motion on the other side of the room.

Bobby wheeled around, slowly, too slowly, feeling like he'd just woken from a deep sleep. Elbert was standing by the door, ramrod straight, stained pajamas hanging off his scarecrow-thin frame. His back and leg muscles were slack and atrophied; there was no way they could support his weight, but they did. Bobby thought briefly of the wire-mesh cabinet in the hallway, where the syringes and Mace were kept. He thought about the restraints he was supposed to use, the walkie-talkie he'd switched off and carelessly tossed onto the cart. For all the good they could do in his current predicament, they all might as well have been on another planet.

He raised his arms in what he hoped was a soothing gesture.

Easy, now. All vacuity had fled the old man's eyes; they were now bright and feral, the eyes of a shark. He stared over Bobby's shoulder at the window. Whatever he saw made him grin, and something else grinned inside his wrinkled face, a second set of features hiding behind the ruin of the first, ancient and knowing.

Bobby moved forward slowly, trying to put himself between the scrawny figure and the open door. He wasn't exactly the athletic type, but he reckoned he had a good twenty pounds on Elbert and could use them to overcome the old man, get him into bed and snap on the restraints, if it came to that. There'd be hell to pay if the warden ever found out about this particular breach of protocol, but Bobby still hoped he could salvage the situation.

Let's get you back in bed, he said, reaching for the withered flesh of Elbert's upper arm.

The eyes turned on him, black sinkholes rimmed with cold fire.

Bobby felt himself drawn into the emptiness within them. A strange torpor came over him, carried him deeper and deeper. He shook his head to clear it, tried to look away. His arm, weak as an infant's, slipped from the old man's shoulder just as Elbert's fingers, as cold and hard as iron, wrapped around his own.

The killer's mouth hung open, tendons creaking like hinges. Wide, wider, a hole without end, spilling over the lips, devouring the nose and the chin until all that was left was a black silhouette of the head. Light swelled behind it, erasing the walls and ceiling, leaving nothing but emptiness.

Voices rasped in Bobby's head, coming and fading like a bad radio transmission. Unable to look away from the hole, he sensed that the corridor was gone, as was the prison. He didn't know what had replaced them, and didn't care to know. A single thought burned in the encroaching darkness, and he held onto it grimly with the panic-tight zeal of a drowning man; as long as he didn't look, he was safe. The thing couldn't make him look. He squeezed his eyes shut.

Bony fingers dressed in parchment-dry skin caressed his temples, pushed into the corners of his eyes, the pressure slight at first, but growing more determined. He tried to brush them away, but his hands could not move, his arms as heavy as lead. Fire roared in the center of his brain, the agony sudden, unbearable. His eyelids fluttered open, driven apart by an immense force.

The old man's face was gone, the raw wound that stood in its place opening and closing, a hungry trap lined with needle teeth. A crack ran through the ceiling, its edges ragged and pulsing. Beyond it lay a warren of alleyways and mazes, a dead city under a sky the color of dishwater, dotted with howling stars.

Something was trying to force itself through the crack, its shapeless, elephantine features clicking and unraveling. Bobby's bladder let go in a gush of warmth, but he was past caring. The thing's gaze touched his own, entered him through his eyes.

A terrible knowledge ignited inside him in an instant. He tried to look away, to turn aside, but his neck muscles rebelled, his vertebrae scraping against each other. The gap pulled his gaze, sucked it in.

Claws hooked under his eyes and pulled. Blood drowned out the world. Bobby tried to lift his head above the rushing tide, to free it from suffocation, and opened his mouth to scream. The fissure throbbed, then closed with a low, sucking sound.

Chapter 2

Are you comfortable, Cathy?

Yes, Doctor.

Good. Pershing Whittaker checked the camera in the corner of the room, making sure that the red light was on. Brushed his hair back reflexively and adjusted the pen and pad on his lap. Open your eyes and tell me what you see.

The woman on the other side of the table drew in a deep breath and did as instructed. The doctor noted her expression of mild and bemused curiosity, the contraction of her dark pupils. A few minutes ago, he had placed her in a trancelike state similar to hypnosis. If it worked as expected, only her body remained in the room; the rest of her was somewhere else, gazing at a window only she could see through.

It's beautiful, she finally said, her voice distant and dreamy. A faint smile touched the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were wide, searching. Breathtaking. I've never seen anything like it.

I'd like you to describe it for me, Whittaker said. The description wasn't important—what the patient was seeing was completely subjective and susceptible to change depending on her mood—but the effort would help her gain a foothold in the space inside her mind. Give it dimension, make it more real. Besides, he enjoyed listening to her descriptions. Cathy had once been an up-and-coming young writer until her drug addiction and mental instability had put an end to her career.

Hard to say. Her smooth brow furrowed with concentration. Colors and textures without depth. Flaring lights—thousands of them. Like falling into a field of stars.

Excellent. The psychiatrist fiddled with his portable recorder, adjusting the volume settings. He couldn't see the others, but he knew they were in the observation room, faces inches away from the one-way mirror, watching in silence. Even the skeptics among them, quick to sneer behind his back, even quicker to claim credit for his discoveries. I'm now going to ask you to visualize something. A long hallway lined with mirrors. Each of the mirrors shows a different reflection of you. Can you see?

Yes, she said. Her smile wavered at the edges. They're moving fast. Too fast.

Slow them down. Remember, you're in control.

The light is fading. It's getting dark. A moment's hesitation. I don't like it here. I should leave.

There's no danger. Whittaker reminded himself to proceed slowly. This was a crucial point in the session, the intersection at which the patient's psyche would split itself into a passive observer and one, or several, acting selves. That was what the mirrors represented. Dreams spoke through symbols; they could heal, they could make the selves whole. In this chemically induced state, patients could dream about their trauma, confront it without threat to themselves or others. Whatever was the root cause of her psychosis—obsession, or compulsion, or a repressed memory—would be put out of action. She could be the real Cathy, the woman unhindered by the trauma. Remember that you're safe. Watching it all from a place far away.

She said nothing, but her breathing slowed. Her eyes stared past the walls, into some unfathomable inner distance.

"I want you to take a look into the