Chapter Twenty-Seven
I can’t manage a word, a sound. I feel like my feet are stuck to the concrete below me, like I’m rooted into this tower and
lost in all the blackness that presses in on me.
His voice is mocking. Mean.
I’m standing here staring at some evil version of kind old Harrison, and I can’t make sense of it.
They must have gotten to him, I think. The slurping is everywhere and it’s making my skin crawl and my blood run cold inside
me, but maybe this is what the slurping does. Is he possessed? Should I expect his head to start spinning and there to be
a whole foaming-at-the-mouth thing?
If I’m going to need to find a priest, that might take a minute.
A minute I would gladly take rather than accept what’s happening right in front of me.
“You should have told me about the dreams, Lexi,” Harrison says, through that alarming viscous grin. “That wasn’t very good
of you.”
The dreams. My dreams.
I don’t understand what’s happening but I still can’t manage to speak through the horror of it.
“You should have told me you knew about the rock. Things would be very different then.” Harrison is shaking his head and it
sounds like him again.
Cheerful and kind—but everything about him is wrong, and the shadows that dance around him are worse. I wonder if this was there the whole time and I just didn’t see it, too
busy being bored while he was doing demon things right in front of me.
Especially when his smile fades at the edges, caving to that blackness. “You should have told me you’d gotten your Darling
hooks into my grandson. Things would be so different. But now we have to do this the hard way.”
I shake myself a little and try to think critically, past the horror and my agitated pulse that feels like a cardiac harbinger
all its own. If he’s been somehow possessed or taken over, maybe the real Harrison is still in there. Maybe I can get him
out.
But first, I have to know how bad this is. “Where’s Jack?” I ask him, and it’s a fight to keep my voice calm. “Where’s my
brother?”
Did he hurt them? Or is it me he’s after?
He chuckles, that kindly old laugh that sounds sharp and mean here in the echoing center of the clock tower’s foundation.
“Not here.”
“Where, then?” I ask.
He keeps going with the chuckling and there’s not one part of me that thinks that I’m dreaming this. I know I’m not. I know
this is real, and as horrifying as this is, it feels like a kind of progress. It allows me not to cringe or cry in the face
of this. To stand straight as this person I thought was not only harmless but an ally, even a friend, turning out to be . . .
neither of those things.
Oh, Jack, I think, and it feels like anguish. This is going to kill you.
“Harrison, what is this?” I ask calmly. My pulse is still on high alert, but I’m keeping myself together. After all, I’ve
spent a lot of time finding myself thrust into upsetting circumstances. Maybe the dreams were training me for the real shit.
“What’s happening? Why did you bring me here?”
I bear down on certainty, on strength. I am the harbinger. A herald of things, a tool to help—like Jack said. Jack, who loves me. As I am.
Not if I get psychiatric help or become less dramatic. Not if I stop being too loud or too flashy or too much.
He loves me exactly as I am, here and now. So I owe him this. I owe myself this. I need to stand my ground, not run. I need
to summon my strength and save the grandfather he loves. If I can.
I couldn’t save Cleo because I wasn’t awake. But I am wide-awake now.
“Harrison, I know this isn’t you,” I tell him, very seriously. Because surely the good man I’ve gotten to know over the past
few weeks is inside whatever evil mask he’s showing me right now.
He throws his head back and cackles.
I swallow back the sick tide of horror that wants to rise inside me and pull me under. I force it down.
“Not me?” he echoes. And when he looks at me again, there’s nothing kind about him at all. It’s all cruelty and cunning, and that tide
rushes toward me again. “You’re so easy to fool, Lexi. Is it the outsider in you? Or the Darling? Did your father raise you
to be this stupid?” He laughs again, and it keeps getting worse. The chuckle has evolved into a horrible, nasty laugh that
scrapes like knives against my skin. “I bet he’s the one who convinced you that you were crazy, didn’t he? No wonder you’re
such a disaster.”
It’s appalling that these words come from Harrison, who I spent all those mornings with.
Who taught me about the history of this place and made certain I wasn’t affected by the drafts from outside, and insisted that Jack bring us coffees to keep us warm.
This kind old man, who felt like a sort of homecoming and told me the truth about myself that I wanted to believe so much that I convinced myself I must have dreamed it. And him.
The man I think I must have decided was a stand-in for the grandmother I never knew, because I trusted him.
This is the night before Halloween, something in me whispers. Devil’s Night. He was stalling.
But what’s much worse and far more immediate is the dawning realization that I really can’t move. It’s not just a feeling.
I try to step back and find I physically can’t.
I am frozen in place. I remember, then, what Jack said about being caught in the mine when he was a kid. That it felt like
something black enveloped him and held him. I have to think this is the same thing.
Like I have been surrounded by layers of pure fucking evil, it’s holding me like chains, and there is no fighting through
it.
Panic claws at me, particularly as Harrison moves closer fluidly, without a single creaky joint evident. And as he comes,
I can see what must be his demon brigade all around him. They’re shadows to my eye, always shifting and changing, sickening
dark shapes that my mind can’t make sense of. Though I recognize them. I’ve seen them before.
They’ve been in my dreams forever.
With eyes. And claws. And teeth.
I get the impression that Harrison sees them more clearly—which means I don’t want to look at them directly. For all I know,
that’s how they got a hold on him.
“Jack can help you, Harrison,” I tell him. I’m not sure if this is true, but even if it isn’t, he’s certainly the one who would know where to look for the right information. If anyone could figure out how to free his grandfather from whatever hold the demons have on him, it’s Jack.
“Fuck Jack,” Harrison says with a level of contempt and disgust that shocks me.
And that makes my heart feel like it’s bleeding—for Jack. I’m glad he isn’t here to hear this. I think it really would kill
him. And Harrison doesn’t stop. He keeps going, and it would be easier if he sounded like some kind of unhinged, cartoony
bad guy, but he doesn’t.
The more he talks, the calmer and more sure of himself he sounds, like he’s shedding the skin of the sweet old man I thought
I knew. Like it’s been a costume he’s been wearing all this time, and now he’s free of it.
“Jack should have been dead years ago,” he tells me. He shakes his head as if he still can’t believe his grandchild escaped
the dark fate that would have killed him at four years old. “But your foundling bitch of a mother saved him. And sacrificed
herself. Pointless, but better than my parents who thought they could turn a blind eye. They paid the price, believe me.”
I’m trying to keep my breathing even. Trying to find the way out of this dark tower that hurts everyone the least. “Sure,
it’s hard to watch the people you love die.”
He scowls at me. “You young people with no Feeds under your belt wouldn’t know hard if it sucked your soul out raw. When you survive, you learn. When you learn, you have a choice.”
“I’m not getting the feeling you’re giving me a lot of choices here.”
The now-clearly-evil chuckle is back, and creepier. “Oh, you have a choice, Lexi Darling. One I warned you about. What would
it take, I asked you. What deal would you make?”
I remember that conversation. We all have a weak spot, Harrison had said, and it had rubbed me wrong at the time, though I didn’t know why. It’s best to know it. Otherwise, the Feed could have its way with it, and with you.
“None,” I tell him. “I think of my weak spots as opportunities to grow, Harrison. Not to turn myself over to the slurping
demon dark side.” Because I see what he is now. I know what horrible hurt this will cause.
And I will never give in to the things that have terrorized me my whole life.
He holds up his hands then, high and wide. The shadows undulate in the air around him, and in the space above us, leading
up to that clock face. It feels like there are thousands of them, worming around, shapes I refuse to look at directly.
I can feel them as they brush against me and sharp, painful tingles of sensation branch out from the touch. They are cold
and warm, spongey and fetid, and I am beginning to think that my dreams were a gift—because they kept me from feeling them
like this.
I wait for them to attack, but they don’t. They’re spinning around, slurping and keening a little bit. Lying in wait, I think.
And I get it then.
They’re waiting for Harrison to tell them where to go, who and what to attack first. They’re listening to him because he made
a deal with them. He wasn’t looking through all that history to help Jack beat them and save this town. He learned it all
so he could save himself and make a deal he likes better than the one his ancestors came up with.
He made a deal with demons.
Even if they weren’t holding me in place and jostling into me to keep my panic there in my throat like a lump of coal, I would
think that was a deeply fucked-up choice to make.
It doesn’t matter how scared I am. I would never throw in with the nightmares.
Jack would never do something like this, no matter how many times he lost. No matter what he might have to sacrifice. It makes
sense now that he and his grandfather disagreed. And that Harrison had me reading boring journals about stain removal ideas
instead of pointing me toward things that could have helped.
It all seems so obvious to me now.