The Ferryman Institute (39 page)

Except Charlie acted first.

With the help of Javrouche's partial lift, he was able to spring off with his good leg in a pseudo dive. As he stretched out in midair, he swung something metallic-looking in a long but improbably quick arc. Despite the speed at which things were happening, Alice determined it was her cleaver from earlier. It must have popped out of her hand when she'd been pushed away from the taxi.

Just after the glinting flash of the knife, Javrouche's pistol was falling. Well, actually, Javrouche's hand still gripping the pistol was falling, most likely because Charlie had just cut it off. The Ferryman's dive didn't take him very far, but he twisted his body so that he would land on his left shoulder. This opened up a path for his knife to find its way almost completely through Javrouche's right knee. With the sudden loss of support from his right leg, the Inspector crumpled wordlessly to the ground.

Alice could only watch in awe as Charlie scampered along the ground to Javrouche's now free gun. He didn't have time to remove the Inspector's severed hand from the pistol, so instead, he rolled over on his back and depressed Javrouche's finger. Two muffled gunshots fired in turn. With the oncoming men less than ten feet away, Charlie had aimed for their heads and, sure enough, the
two officers tumbled to the ground, much like Charlie had in her bedroom.

The officers who were waiting along the sidewalk began making their way forward, but cautiously. Alice took a step toward Charlie and nearly stumbled, but managed to hold steady. He, too, was finding his own feet. His leg had apparently healed enough that he could stand on it, even if she could still see it mending before her very eyes. He stood for a moment with his back to her, gun pointed menacingly at the targets in front of him, switching his aim every second or so. Then he turned to her.

His expression could only be described as animalistic. Spittle flew from his lips while his eyes, round as she had ever seen them, tried to lock on to her own but vibrated with a frantic energy. He was screaming at her, she realized. It was easy enough to read his lips:
Get out of here!
he was yelling, mixing in a few
Run!
s for good measure. The moment only seemed to last an instant before he turned around again. In the nick of time, too—a Ferryman officer was charging Charlie's momentary blind spot, but he dropped the man with another well-placed shot to the skull.

Charlie began shouting at the men in front of him in a rabid frenzy unlike almost anything Alice had ever seen. Who was this guy, and what had he done with Charlie? This couldn't be the same person. This man . . . scared her. Didn't he understand that they needed to leave together? Wasn't that the whole point? Now that they had the gun in their possession, it wouldn't be hard to run again. It took most of the danger out, anyway. She had a few cuts and bruises, sure, but she'd be able to move, and Charlie was almost completely healed again. They were running out of time, though—Javrouche was rising up like a wounded viper while the two officers Charlie had shot moments earlier were also beginning to stir.

She needed to get him to stop, needed to get his attention. He was shuffling backward, drawing closer to her. He changed the target of the gun at a blistering pace, shifting his focus almost neurotically, the quintessential cornered animal. She took a step forward and grabbed his shoulder. Now was their last chance. They needed to run and—

Charlie wheeled around with uncanny speed, the gun pointed at her below her right shoulder.

P-tink!

A small flash jumped from the end of the silenced pistol, and immediately, Alice felt her body spasm. The world seemed to stop moving. She went to take a step back but found her feet glued to the ground. A small, distant pain in her chest floated to her mind. She put her hand to where it hurt. A small hole perforated her shirt somewhere between her right breast and shoulder. When she put her fingers to it, they came back stained red. With blood. Her blood.

Oh
, she thought.
That's a problem.

The pistol fell from Charlie's hand. He slowly began to reach out for her, but a group of officers seized the moment, three of them tackling him. Not that they needed to—Charlie had gone full rag doll. Alice watched as Javrouche's men loaded Charlie into a van parked in front of the Tick Tock Diner, his eyes staring into hers the whole time. Her vision started to tunnel before her legs gave out from under her. Despite falling heavily to her knees, she felt no pain. With Charlie successfully inside the van, Javrouche took one final, pitying look at her. He moved on, slamming the door closed. Slowly, slowly, her vision continued to fade. The rest of her body hit the ground. Alice felt so incredibly tired. All she wanted was to sleep . . .

A man. There was a man standing over her. It was the man
who'd been running toward her before. He looked like Cartwright, but he looked so forlorn, so upset. He smiled at her. She tried to return the gesture, but it was hard. She felt so weak. He was saying something now. She wondered what it was. She couldn't hear the words, and now the sounds of the world seemed so very far away. Slowly, slowly, she closed her eyes and her world became nothingness. There was no light, no pain, no sound.

Just nothing.

H
ow many hours had it been? Charlie didn't know. He wanted to guess somewhere in the ballpark of twenty, but it could've been an eternity, given how long it felt. He found it slightly amusing that, as far as the human condition was concerned, being happy or in love or experiencing whatever other sappy emotions there were made hours fly by in minutes, while his current emotional condition stretched minutes into days.

Charlie opened his eyes, though he might as well have kept them closed for all the difference it made. The cell was perfectly dark and, save for his pathetic self, completely empty. At one point, he thought he could faintly make out the outline of his hand held two inches from his face, but as he flexed his fingers, he realized it was all in his head. He leaned up against what he assumed was the wall—his body merely stopped, with no tactile stimulation to tell him why.

The Institute called it Purgatory. It was a uniquely Ferryman punishment, the cells having been specially crafted—some said with the same magic that had created the Ferryman Keys—to be
devoid of any and all external stimulation. A prisoner in Purgatory was essentially left to rot.

Except the body of a Ferryman prisoner didn't waste away. Just their mind did.

Most of what anybody knew about Purgatory was hearsay. It was an extreme punishment even by Javrouche's standards, which, if nothing else, said something about its efficacy. However, it remained a legal punishment on the books, just one spoken of in hushed voices. Stories circulated about infamous Ferrymen who'd been sentenced to stints in Purgatory—men and women who'd eventually lost their sanity after only a decade, or a year, or a month, or even a day. Charlie suddenly found himself with a much better frame of reference for those stories. Even knowing that he would be taken out of this cell soon for his trial, he could feel the anxiety building in his chest. He'd gone in thinking most of those stories were nonsense. Now he wasn't so sure.

What made Purgatory so frighteningly potent was its ability to turn a mind against itself. Since his incarceration, Charlie had been avoiding a particular thought. But as the minutes in pure darkness ticked away, he found it harder and harder to escape from it. The thought wormed its way into his head, a parasite hell-bent on lodging itself as deeply into his mind as it could. And then, as the parasite took hold, Charlie realized there was nothing more he could do to stop it.

Alice Spiegel Alice Spiegel Alice Spiegel Alice Spiegel . . .

In his head, her name echoed endlessly. Before his eyes—open or closed—it floated, always in view. His lips reminded him what hers had felt like. Her laugh played in his ears.

They'd formed a connection, the two of them. Charlie saw something tremendously admirable in the way that, at her lowest moment, when she was wagering that whatever existed beyond the
mortal world was better than anything life could offer her on earth, she took a chance on him. And in that fleeting chance, Charlie had found somebody with whom he felt so comfortable, so at ease, that frankly he didn't know what to make of it. There was only one person in the world who'd captured his attention so thoroughly, and he'd married her. The fact that Elizabeth and Alice seemed to share so many quirks wasn't lost on the Ferryman.

When Charlie and Alice had exited the passageway underneath the Lincoln Tunnel, he had a profound realization: the answer he'd given her about why he'd saved her was wrong. Maybe initially it was right—it was tough to think clearly walking in that cramped tunnel—but since then, his answer had grown up. Matured. Or, perhaps, come to embody something closer to the truth that Charlie hadn't been able to see.

What he really wanted for her now was to live. For her to fulfill the potential he saw in her. He wanted her to be happy, to have a chance to look back on her life and laugh at the impossibly low lows of it. And frankly, he wanted to be a part of that. He wanted to learn more about her. Laugh some more at lousy jokes. Just
be
together. She would have called that cheesy and corny, probably rubbed it in his face mercilessly, but right then and there he would have given anything in the world for that, no questions asked.

But that chance was gone now, shot and killed as it were by a bullet he'd fired.

A loud
clank
echoed through the room. Blades of light began streaming in, temporarily blinding Charlie.

“Rise and shine, Mssr. Dawson.”

Indistinct shapes picked him up roughly by the arms and carried him out of his cell. Charlie didn't feel much like walking, so he let them drag him along.

“I have to ask, Mssr. Dawson,” came Javrouche's voice from
behind him, “was your taste of Purgatory that awful, or is there something else weighing on your mind? Something to do with killing that girl you were trying so desperately to protect, perhaps?” The Inspector's rhythmic footsteps were unmistakable as he marched at the rear of their group.

“Fuck off,” Charlie muttered, mostly to himself.

“Sorry, what was that? I couldn't hear you.” Javrouche moved in front and stuck his ear in Charlie's face.

Charlie stared at the ear in front of him, then lunged forward and chomped down, ripping his head sideways. He felt the mangled piece of flesh in his mouth, and quickly spit it out.

“I said,
Fuck off.
Did you hear that?” Charlie said flatly.

Javrouche responded by punching him in the face. Not that it mattered—Charlie didn't feel it and the nub that was Javrouche's left ear was already beginning to re-form. Still, he'd goaded Javrouche into losing his cool and that was a small moral victory. The Inspector strode off down the hall, the two guards dragging Charlie along as they followed.

After several minutes of lugging Charlie around like a sack of potatoes, the group arrived at a large set of oaken double doors. The glossy brown sheen from the finely paneled exterior radiated in the obnoxiously blank hallway they'd just meandered through.

Javrouche stood in front of the doors, his hands resting eagerly on each of the handles. His anger had apparently already worn off. “Shall we?” he asked over his shoulder, eyes glittering with excitement.

The doors swung open as Javrouche pushed, and Charlie was pulled into the light of the Ferryman Institute's High Court.

The room itself wasn't overly large, though it was well lit and very formal. The entrance stood directly opposite the Judicator's bench at the opposite end of the room. From what Charlie understood,
individuals uninvolved in the case weren't permitted to attend the hearing, so there was little need for a big space. A few long wooden benches lined each side of the room, separated down the middle by a main aisle inlaid with polished marble. A small stand sat in front of the Judicator, where the accused stood for the duration of the trial. Two antique oaken tables were placed to each side of the stand for a prosecutor and defense counsel, respectively.

Behind the Judicator's bench sat a middle-aged man dressed in a long, flowing black robe. A hood adorned the back but was presently laid down. His hair was a light, hazy brown, shot through with streaks of gray near his ears. An ornate gold placard situated in front of him read,
The Honorable Judicator Joshua A. Dales
.

Javrouche took a position behind the leftmost table, whereas Charlie was deposited behind the stand in the middle of the floor. With that complete, the two guards who'd carried him in claimed spots below Judicator Dales and snapped to with military precision.

The Judicator took a quick survey of the room, his eyes lingering on Charlie with a hint of curiosity, before he rang a delicate handbell with his right hand. It was a tradition, no doubt, but Charlie found it pretentious and annoying. Then again, he probably wasn't going to like much of anything that happened in the immediate future.