Book Eight, Chapter 23: Side Story: The Astralist Part IV

The entrance to the secret passage did not elude Logan, Michael, and Andrew for long. The room was well lit, and very little of it had been touched in months, except for one bottle of wine, which sat on a shelf, dust-free, its green, glassy exterior visible.

As Logan reached for it and pulled on it, he discovered that it was attached to the shelf by a mechanism that caused the wall where the cables had run under to lift up and open a passage.

The men looked at each other. That feeling of worry that had been rising in Logan’s stomach had bloomed into a panic, but he could not show fear. His beloved would need him at his strongest.

“Perhaps we ought not move forward without arming ourselves,” Andrew said, giving a voice to a feeling that all three men had.

They quickly searched for weapons. Michael found a lead pipe, which had once been part of the electrical conduit. Andrew found a wrench in the same spot, while Logan forcefully broke a leg off a table to make a thick, sturdy club.

“Perhaps this will be of use,” Andrew said, pointing to a small stash of flashlights in the corner of the room, hidden by some boxes of wine. “He must keep these here for the occasion that his experiments blow the breaker.”

“Let’s go,” Logan said, without a doubt in his mind that Avery would be at the end of their trek into the dungeons of the castle.

It didn’t take them long in their travels to find a large, meticulously cleaned room at the end of the hall they had been travelling. There was some scientific machinery, and as Logan shone his light around, he realized that there were lights there if they could find the switch. But that was not his biggest concern.

The room was filled with human bodies.

The bodies were not strewn about haphazardly. No, the bodies were at various stages of preservation, as far as Logan could see. Some wore hospital gowns; others were clothed, probably in the same way they had been when they walked into the castle.

Most lay on concrete slabs, while others were attached to equipment, no doubt designed to dehydrate them, Logan theorized. There were over two dozen of them.

“Dear Lord… Simon, no,” was all Logan was able to say in response to the discovery. His old friend had done something monstrous here.

“He did this?” Michael asked. “To all of them?”

“No,” Logan said. “He must have found these bodies, snuck them out of hospital morgues. Look, they’re wearing hospital gowns, and that one there is dressed in his best suit, probably pulled right from his coffin.”

Logan knew he was grasping at straws, for among the bodies they could see exactly zero injuries.

“No,” Andrew said. “These are guests. Staff. All the people that Lila never saw leave because she locked herself away. Simon’s patients.”

There were rows and rows of bodies, some laid out shoulder to shoulder on their slabs.

“Avery is not ending up in this place,” Logan said.

“She’s not here,” Michael said. “She must be further into the dungeons. We need to keep moving.”

The men walked forward, unsure of which direction they should go. They had several options.

Logan was examining any clues he could find to see which path Simon had taken more often, but unlike several rooms in the house above, this room was meticulously cleaned. There was no dirt or dust on the floor. Doctor Halle, after all, was a professional.

As Logan looked for an exit, Andrew’s eyes were drawn to a desk and the books resting on it.

“Hold on,” he said as he focused on one of the larger, older tomes.

He pulled the book toward himself and then shone his light down at the page, flipping back and forth, eyes wide with disbelief.

“Is now the time for that?” Logan asked.

“My God…” was all Andrew could say.

“What is it?” Michael asked, somehow more afraid of what information might be found in the book than he was of the bodies in the room.

“This is an early text about the ancient origins of astral science,” Andrew said. “From back in a time when man thought it to be magic. These entries detail a process by which a human soul can be detached from its corporeal form without inflicting death.”

Logan made his way over to the book and looked at it. He saw diagrams of men and women, some of which were translucent. He couldn’t read the language.

“What is this, some type of spectral dissection? Did these people get their souls ripped from their bodies?” he asked.

That made enough sense to Logan. They were unharmed, and what was more, they didn’t stink.

“No,” Andrew said. “This one is for someone who wishes to straddle the line between life and death. To gain the power of the living and the dead. If he tried this on himself—”

Before Andrew could continue, a faint creak could be heard from somewhere in the room. They shone their flashlights around, but all they saw were corpses hanging limp, lying still.

Yet the sounds persisted, sounds of leather straps being pulled, to Logan’s ears.

“Did that one just move?” Michael asked.

The men seemed to all hold their breath at the same time as they peered around the dark laboratory.

More sounds, and as they darted their lights, they saw the thing they feared most: finger twitches, jaws undulating, toes flexing as if their owners were just waking up.

Rows and rows of bodies began to twist and flex, jerking unnaturally at first and then too naturally as they began to remember how humans moved and stood up.

“Oh no,” Logan said.

Andrew quickly closed the book and grabbed hold of his large wrench.

The others wielded their weapons too, ready for whatever might happen.

“We may need to pick an exit here, boys,” Andrew said.

“Well, we’ve got two ways out of here from what I can tell,” Logan said.

“If we split up, we’re going to die,” Michael said. “We need to pick one and run for it.”

The bodies, which were gradually making their way toward proper locomotion as they tested their limbs, had not yet seemed to notice the men. But that changed all at once as two dozen pairs of shriveled eyes turned and locked onto their prey simultaneously.

There was a stutter, a pause, before they began moving. But by the time they did, the men were running.

“We’ll take the right-hand path,” Logan said. “The left-hand path seems to move away from the castle grounds.”

“Good enough for me,” Michael said.

The three men quickly ran toward their chosen exit.

While the dehydrated corpses didn’t seem to move quickly, there were so many of them, and they were so dispersed around the room, that they were easily able to cut the men off and surround them.

The men swung their weapons, and while the undead showed no pain, they were quite light, with all of the moisture having been wicked from their bodies for preservation.

With a single swing, the men could send the bodies flying backward.

“Move!” Andrew screamed as they ran toward the right-hand door.

And while their attacks were effective, their opponents were completely unfazed and could easily get up from each hit and come right back for more.

Traversing the floor was beginning to look impossible.

Logan smashed his table leg into the skull of one of the mummified assailants, creating a gash and a dent that would have killed a man but had no effect on one that had already died.

“These things aren’t going down,” he said.

“There are too many!” Michael cried out.

“We have to keep going forward,” Logan said. “Just keep powering through!”

But Michael didn’t. He stopped and evaluated the situation.

“Go find Avery and Anastasia,” he said.

“Mike, what are you talking about?” Logan asked.

“You heard me. Move!” Michael screamed as he shoved into the crowd of undead and pushed through, leading them away from the exit.

The zombies were not clever creatures. They followed Michael without a thought as he swung at them with his pipe, clearing the area around him.

Logan stared for a moment.

“Hurry,” Andrew said. “We cannot let his sacrifice go to waste.”

The two men nodded to each other and then ran as fast as they could through the door they had chosen and down the corridor behind it.

As they ran, they did their best to ignore the screams coming from Michael behind them as the undead made good on his decision to sacrifice himself.

–

Avery held Simon’s hand as he recited his vows once more.

“In sickness and in health,” he said. He began to laugh, and Avery joined in.

They had been drinking champagne and talking about what they would do with their lives now that they had them again.

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He said the classic vows with some alterations, such as “in body and in ether, until all the planes of existence fall apart.”

And she repeated those vows, giggling at what she thought was supposed to be a fun, romantic little joke in the eyes of the madman before her, doing her best not to give away that she was not his intended bride.

“Do you, the woman now known as Avery Lawson, pledge to carry our love forward, no matter what form it must take?” he asked.

“I do,” she said.

He placed the ring on her finger, and then they just stared into each other’s eyes.

Halle had been planning on this for quite some time, she realized. He had already written up a death certificate for his wife from a foreign country. Perhaps, she wondered, was it a real death certificate? Had he smuggled her body back into their home for his experimentation after her death?

She didn’t want to think of it. Every ounce of her intentions and efforts went into her performance.

“We will one day have a proper ceremony, my love,” Simon said. “But we will have to be careful at first.” He grabbed her hands in his. “You’ll be Avery for a while longer, living her life as she did. Then you’ll say your goodbyes, end things with Logan gently. People will be sad, but they’ll accept it.”

As he spoke, Avery wondered if he was going to go in for a kiss and whether or not she would go along with it. Perhaps he had lost his inclination to kiss after his wife became a living corpse? What an awful thought.

“Just as we planned,” he said. “Then, at your funeral, you, as Avery, will come to me officially. No one will question a grieving widower finding solace in the arms of a friend.”

His voice cracked as tears filled his eyes.

“We can be happy, like we were, just in a better body, a better life,” he said.

Suddenly, his face changed. He was no longer the affectionate, loving man he had been since she had awoken. Now he was stern, and maybe even ashamed.

“You can come out now, Logan,” he said loudly.

Avery’s eyes widened as she looked around the laboratory.

There was a lot of equipment in that room; Logan could be hiding anywhere. Part of her was overjoyed that he had come to save her, but another part feared it wouldn’t be enough with the dark powers she had seen Simon possess.

“And Doctor Hughes, you cannot hide from me. I see all,” he said.

After a moment, both Logan and Andrew stepped out from their respective hiding places near the entrance.

Avery tried to make eye contact with Logan, but she was afraid that Simon would see and would realize the truth that she was not his wife.

“Simon, what have you done?” Logan asked.

To his credit, Simon really did look ashamed of his actions, Avery thought.

“I’m sorry for the fear I’ve caused you, all of you,” he said. “I never meant for my friends to be involved. I promise I will not experiment on you. I give you my word. But I cannot allow you to leave. I only wish you had stayed upstairs where I left you.”

“That’s magnanimous,” Andrew said, “considering the morgue behind us.”

Simon ignored him.

“Of course, the details must be seen to. I’ll have to fake your deaths,” Simon said as if it were obvious and mundane.

“That’s bold talk,” Logan said, swinging his club. “You won’t even be able to get a hand on us.”

“I don’t have to,” Simon said as he flicked his wrist, and Logan’s club flew from his hands.

“What in the world?” Logan exclaimed.

“Nothing in this world,” Simon said with a suppressed grin.

Andrew wasn’t nearly as impressed. He looked angry.

“You fool,” he said.

Simon turned to look at him.

“You absolute fool,” Andrew continued. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done to yourself?”

“I know exactly what I’ve done,” Simon answered.

Andrew walked forward toward a nearby workbench. There were several iridescent shards of glass on the surface. Andrew stared at them in awe.