Chapter Text
The first thought that came to Elise’s mind, waking up on the floor of a filthy bathroom, was this: Oh, I hope Jack remembers to take Warren for his evening walk.
It was something that they used to do together, but in recent months Elise had found herself walking alone under the stars with their golden retriever, while Jack stayed home and sat in his workshop. She had heard that men had a tendency to slow down after retirement, but she hadn’t expected Jack to slow down quite so much. And Warren would be restless all night if he didn’t get enough exercise.
Elise blinked blearily, trying to make out her surroundings, but the room was dipped in darkness. She was fairly certain it was the smell that had woken her up: typical bathroom effluence overlaid by the far worse stench of death and decay. It took a lot to frighten Elise, who had seen some of the worst monsters of both this world and the next, but she felt panic rising in her throat as she sat up and began to groggily grapple with the questions of where she was, and how she had ended up here.
“Hello?” she called out in a voice that sounded a lot stronger than she felt.
Silence followed. Then, a quiet, morose reply: “Hey.”
“Hello,” Elise said again. “Who is that?”
Her question was partly answered when she turned her head and saw him sitting on the floor not too far away. The rest of the room was pitch black, but he was lit up as clearly as if he’d been under a spotlight. That was the only real giveaway that he wasn’t alive. Unlike the many spirits who became twisted and grotesque in the untethered reality of the Further, this young man looked perfectly ordinary, if a little dishevelled and pale. He was staring at her with dropped-jaw shock.
“Hello,” Elise said a third time, smiling kindly at him.
The young man stood up abruptly and shuffled to his left, and then to his right, testing to see if Elise would hold eye contact with him. As he walked, Elise heard the scrape of metal on ceramic tile and glanced down to see a ghostly chain attached to a shackle on his ankle, the other end vanishing into the darkness. There was a malignant aura to the chain that sent a shiver down Elise’s spine, so she looked back up into his face.
“Oh my god,” the chained ghost whispered, his expression a fierce war of hope and despair. “Can you see me?”
“You’re all I can see right now,” Elise affirmed. “Is there a light switch in here?”
He stared at her in a daze for a moment, then seemed to register that she’d asked a question. “Uh, yeah, it’s on the opposite wall.” The restless spirit pointed a spectral finger and took a few steps in the direction that it pointed, but could go no farther. The chain stretched taut from his ankle, the chains clinking. “Maybe twenty feet away? Or twenty-one feet.” He laughed a little hysterically, though Elise couldn’t fathom why. “Just take it slow, there’s broken glass and chunks of tile and, well, other stuff.”
That warning prompted Elise to realize that her shoes and socks had been taken, leaving her feet bare under a pair of slacks that were probably ruined by whatever was on the floor of this bathroom. She stood up, feeling some of the glass that the ghost had warned her about underfoot as she did so, and began to gingerly move in the direction he was pointing. Away from the light of his lingering soul, the darkness was all-enveloping. Elise could tell that she wasn’t in the Further, but the choking blackness felt uncomfortably similar to that inhospitable realm.
“Reach your hand out, you’ll feel a pipe after another couple of steps,” the dead man called to her. “The lightswitch is just to the right of that. The lights are pretty bright so you might want to cover your eyes at first. And you might want to, um…” His voice grew even more strained. “...Brace yourself.”
From the smell of the room, Elise could guess what she was bracing herself for.
She found the lightswitch with one hand and covered her eyes with the other as she flicked it upwards. Even through her closed eyelids and the shield of her hands, the burning white-blue fluorescent light crashed in harshly. It took a minute or so to adjust to it, slowly opening her eyes in the shade of her hand. She was looking down, so the severed, shrivelled foot was the first thing that she saw, mere inches away from her own feet. Elise took a careful step back from it.
A few more blinks brought the rest of the room into focus: a canvas of filthy, broken, once-white tiles broken up by winding pipes and a handful of dark shapes. A large, dried bloodstain in the center of the room, and three corpses: two lying prone, the third propped up in the corner against some pipes. Peering closer, Elise saw that the upright body had a chain around its ankle that was a perfect twin of the chain holding the ghost here.
With the lights on and washing everything in pale light, the ghost looked much more solid, blending into his surroundings. He could have been mistaken for a living person, but for the sad huddle of his mortal remains in the corner spoiling the illusion. He was sitting on the edge of a bathtub now, as far away from his body as the spectral chain would permit, and he’d averted his eyes – perhaps to avoid seeing the look on Elise’s face when she took in the horror of what was left of him. It was a wise precaution; in her line of work Elise had seen many dead people, but relatively few actual corpses, and she had to cover her mouth to keep her reaction contained.
Once the initial shock passed, and she had tried the door to confirm that (as she suspected) it wouldn't budge, she began to make her way back over to the other side of the bathroom where she’d woken up. As she did so, it became clear that the corpses were not fresh. Their flesh had wasted away, leaving only dry, papery skin clinging to their bones. Whoever this young man was, he must have been dead for months. And – Elise realized, with a great swell of pity – his spirit had been forcibly tethered to his body that entire time, with nothing to do in the dark but watch himself decay.
“Who did this?” Elise demanded, only realizing just how angry she was when she heard it in her voice. She looked over at the ghost, whose head was now bowed miserably at a right angle to his body, and tried to soften her tone. “Honey, who did this to you?”
Who did this to me? her mind echoed, reminding her of her own predicament.
“I only know his first name. John,” the young man answered, finally looking over at her again. She saw his eyes briefly drift to his own body, eliciting a grimace. “But the papers call him Jigsaw. How can you see me? ” He asked the last part in a startled rush, with wide eyes, as if he’d just remembered how extraordinary the situation was.
Elise smiled modestly. “It’s a gift I have. One that I’m very glad of right now. If it wasn’t for you, I’d still be sitting in the dark.” She held out a hand, firm and business-like. “I’m Elise.”
The ghost looked down at her hand carefully and then shook it, gasping softly in surprise at the first solid contact. He stared down at their clasped hands for a moment before looking back up into her face, and with emotion storming quietly across his face, he responded.
“Adam.”
Chapter Text
Elise had known from the moment she first felt Adam's presence that he was a benevolent spirit, but making direct contact with him, via the handshake, brought a flood of more complex detail into her mind. He was simmering hot with anger, and had been for a long time even before he was dead, yet the violence of that anger had mostly been turned inward. Outwardly, it was expressed only in bitter and sarcastic words, not in cruel deeds. He was contemptuous towards those more powerful than himself, but kind to those more vulnerable than himself. And now the storm of self-pity and self-loathing that surrounded him was starting to clear as concern for Elise’s predicament became the focus of his attention.
“There’s an audio tape in your pocket,” Adam told her, relinquishing her hand somewhat reluctantly. “I saw him put it in there.”
Sure enough, a dip into the pocket of Elise’s slacks turned up a small tape with the words PLAY ME written on it. “How am I supposed to play it?” she asked.
Adam’s mouth tightened in anger and humiliation. Avoiding her eyes, he jerked his head over in the direction of his corpse. Elise looked down and saw a tape player nestled in its skeletal hand. If he’d been holding it when he died he would have dropped it as soon as his muscles relaxed, so it must have been placed there deliberately. This Jigsaw character had left Adam here to die, and now he was using his body as a prop. The sheer disrespect of it had Elise trembling with outrage on Adam’s behalf.
She knelt down in front of the body in the same manner that a churchgoer might kneel down at a pew. Now that the initial shock had worn off, there was nothing particularly scary about Adam’s remains. It was like looking at the bones of an abandoned house or the bare limbs of a dead tree: barren, yet beautiful in its own way. What was ugly was the scar that his suffering had left on the world. Adam had died by violence, but his dying hadn’t been quick. The energy in this corner of the room was black and twisted, a permanent psychic wound gouged out by days of agony and torment and despair.
It was hard for someone as spiritually sensitive as Elise to bear, but she stubbornly forced herself to feel it all, until she felt tears begin to roll down her cheeks. Ghosts who had never been properly mourned were often helped by the gesture, and she heard Adam make a soft noise behind her as she wept.
Elise wiped her eyes and looked over her shoulder into his crumpled face. “Is it alright if I touch you, just to get the tape player?”
Adam blinked in surprise at being asked for his permission. After a moment, he nodded.
An image flashed into Elise’s mind of Adam watching with furious impotence as his body was carelessly manhandled and molested by its killer. Righteous fury knotted her brows and twisted her mouth, but she set it aside for the moment. Touching the skin-wrapped bones of Adam’s hand with great reverence, she gently moved his fingers just enough to free the tape player and eased it out of his lifeless grasp. With the right tool in hand, she listened to the message that her captor had left for her.
“Hello Elise. I hope you are not disturbed to find yourself surrounded by the dead. After all, you tell your clients that you see the dead all the time. You have preyed on grieving families, giving them false messages from their loved ones to serve your own ego. Now, I will give you a true test of your so-called psychic abilities. In this room-”
“The key to get out of this room is in a safe. The safe is hidden behind some loose tiles in that wall over there. The combination to the safe is 7-2-9-0-5.”
Elise paused the tape and stared at Adam, who had rattled that information off in a bored, irritated tone. She remembered him telling her where the tape was, and guessed at how he knew all the rest. “You watched him setting the room up?”
“Them. He has these… assistants that help him. When he came back to set this all up he looked like warmed-up roadkill. Couldn’t even lift the safe into the wall. I think maybe he’s dying. Maybe that’s why he’s got such a hard-on for you.” Adam paused and suddenly looked very embarrassed. “I mean, uh, that’s why he targeted, uh…”
Elise took pity on him. “I got it.”
“Sorry. I think I’ve been alone for too long.”
“Is it worth listening to the rest of the tape?”
“Probably not," Adam sighed. "It’ll just be Jigsaw jerking himself off and giving you clues in the form of bad poetry. You don’t need clues.” He stood up, smiled self-consciously, and spread his arms in a half-hearted ta-da gesture. “You’ve got me, baby!”
Some of the fear that had crept into Elise’s bones was chased away by a warm bloom of affection for him, and the reassurance that she wasn’t alone in this nightmare. Elise had no intention of playing any ridiculous puzzle games. She didn’t trust this Jigsaw character to give her a fair trial, and she had committed no crime to be tried for in the first place. She pointed at a spot on the wall and raised her eyebrows at Adam, who nodded to confirm that was where the loose tiles were. Casting her eyes around on the floor for a tool, she found an old hacksaw with a broken blade and used it to break open the wall and reveal a hidden shelf, where the promised safe was sitting.
Elise took hold of the dial. “What was it? 7-2-...?
“9-0-5.”
There was an electronic key FOB inside, and when Elise pressed the button she heard a loud clunk from the door to the bathroom, and a delighted whoop from Adam.
“Oh man! What was that, ten minutes from waking up to escaping? Those assholes spent days setting this all up. He’s gonna be so pissed.” Adam cackled with ghostly Bart Simpson glee.
Suddenly, there was a burst of static through hidden speakers, and then the killer’s voice crackled out over them.
“Congratulations, Elise. You’ve made it out of this room alive, though you’ll bear those scars forever…”
Elise looked at Adam quizzically.
“Oh, the combination was written on the ceiling behind those pipes over there,” he explained. “You would have had to stick your head through the pipes to see it, but there was a hidden razor trap… it was a whole thing.”
“Very creative,” Elise commented drily.
The killer was still rambling on. Adam hadn’t been kidding about the bad poetry. “-do the dead watch us, or do we watch the dead? That’s a question that you’ll have to answer for yourself. In the next room-”
“The next room?” Adam and Elise exclaimed in an almost-perfect duet.
“Oh that’s some bullshit!” Adam continued, alone. He seemed even more angry than Elise herself, and after a moment she understood why. Adam had managed a small, petty revenge on the man who killed him, only to discover that his revenge was incomplete.
“I don’t suppose you saw them setting up the next room?” Elise asked in a hollow voice.
“I couldn’t, I can’t leave!” Adam was pacing back and forth, his chain clinking and clanking along the tiles anxiously. “This is bullshit! ” he yelled again, directing the shout at the broken mirror along one wall. Peering closer at it, Elise saw a red light and realized there was a camera watching them from the darkness beyond it. Her shoulders stiffened and she drew her cardigan tighter around herself.
It didn’t help that Adam’s agitation was vibrating through the air and setting Elise’s teeth on edge, in the same way that a bad smell might assault someone with only five senses. There was no poltergeist activity to go with his tantrum – nothing that the camera would pick up, anyway – but it was unsettling all the same.
“Adam, stop it,” Elise commanded sternly. “You need to get a hold of yourself.”
“But it’s not fair! It’s not fair!” He sounded close to tears. “You got out, you passed the test, it’s not fair.”
“Well, technically I cheated.”
“So what? That son of a bitch cheats too! He cheats all the time. The goddamn games are rigged, it’s not fair, it’s not…”
The overhead lights were flickering. Elise looked up at them nervously. “Adam.”
He whirled on her. He was paler than before, with dark shadows clouding his eye sockets, the eyes themselves flinty and glowing with a strange light. As Elise watched, phantom blood began to stream from Adam's scalp and bloom from beneath one shoulder of his white T-shirt. He marched towards her, forgetting about his spectral chain until it tripped him and he crashed messily to the ground.
“God damn it!” Adam screamed. He wasn’t physically hurt, obviously, but Elise could see his soul tearing at the seams. He clawed his hands into his hair and howled, unhinged: “Fuck you! Fuck you! Why can’t you just leave her alone? Let her go, you fucks! She doesn’t deserve this, she’s just a nice old lady, she doesn’t deserve any of this!”
Well. Elise appreciated the sentiment, though she certainly could have done without the ‘old lady.’
She knelt down beside Adam’s thrashing form and pulled him upwards into a tight hug that shocked another gasp out of him. She guessed that he'd tried to punch and kick at his killers when they were in here and had no luck, but the spectral forms of the dead were solid and real to Elise. It was both a blessing and a curse, leaving her vulnerable to the physical attacks of malignant spirits. But for Adam, she could tell it was a sorely-needed comfort.
After a few moments, she felt his cold arms wrapping tightly around her shoulders. The blood stopped streaming from his head and seemed to be reabsorbed into his pores, leaving no trace behind. The crimson patches on his shirt slowly faded back to white. Elise stroked his hair and gently shushed him as she turned her attention to the chain on his ankle.
Adam wasn’t aware of this, but it was his own mind – his own pain – that was chaining him here. Thoughts shape reality in the Further, and Adam had unwittingly become his own gaoler. Elise considered telling him this outright, but she realized it wouldn’t do any good. He couldn’t consciously uncouple himself from his body, because he hadn’t consciously coupled himself to it in the first place. What Elise could do was tell him a story.
“What if you could come with me?” she asked softly in his ear.
“I can’t,” was Adam's immediate, despairing reply. “I’ve tried everything. I can’t get this stupid chain off my leg.”
“But I can. If you give me permission to touch your remains again, I can take the chain off your foot.” Elise diplomatically avoided saying that it would be quite easy to remove now that there was no flesh holding it in place.
She could practically hear the gears turning in Adam’s head. “Would that work?”
Elise chose her words carefully. She couldn’t lie to him outright, but she could be selective in how she told him the truth. “Your spirit is still tied to your body. Your leg in this realm is chained because the leg in the mortal realm is still chained. And because you haven’t been laid to rest, you’re compelled to watch over the body you once lived in. To protect it.”
Adam drew back from her, drawing his knees up to his chest and folding his arms on top of them, wrapping his hands over his own shoulders. He rested his head sideways on his arms and looked directly and unflinchingly at his own body for the first time since Elise had woken up here.
“I tried to go back in,” he said in a small voice. “After... When it first happened, I thought I was just having one of those out-of-body experiences, you know?”
Oh, I know, Elise thought wryly, but she chose not to interrupt.
“So I thought, wow, OK, this was a super weird trip, but I should go back now. And I tried sitting down, sort of, inside my body. Tried to match up my arms and legs and everything. But it was like I was trying to force a puzzle piece in where it didn’t fit. I just couldn’t lock in, you know? And after a while my body started to go all stiff, and really pale in some places and really purple in other places, but I figured that was just, like, bad circulation, and I just needed to move around a bit.”
Elise turned her head away slightly so that Adam wouldn’t see her face crumple. But he was lost in his memories anyway, and his own composure was starting to slip.
“Even when… even when I started to look really bad, I thought, ‘Well, it’s not too late. I’ve seen junkies who look worse than that.’ And then my ear fell off and I thought, ‘It’s fine, I can live with just one ear.’ And I was still waiting for Lawrence – that’s the guy who was in here with me, Lawrence, he got out, that’s his foot over there – I was waiting for Lawrence to come back, ‘cause I figured he was a doctor, he would do CPR or something, and then I’d jolt right back into my body. But he never came back, and my body was starting to get really gross, and I didn’t like looking at it, so I started going longer and longer without looking at it. And then one day I looked at it and it just hit me, like, ‘That’s not even a person any more. No one alive could look like that.’ And that’s when I knew I couldn't ever go back. That's when I knew I was-”
The last word broke off and bled into a cascade of sobs, which were quickly muffled as Adam hid his head in his arms. Her heart breaking for him, Elise shuffled closer again and leaned against him, rubbing her hand soothingly over his shuddering shoulders.
“I don’t wanna be dead,” Adam mumbled, almost too quietly for her to hear.
Elise looked at him appraisingly. His skin still had a youthful smoothness to it, and even with his face hidden she could see the faint ghost of puppy fat clinging to his features.
“How old are you, Adam?” she asked, quietly appalled.
“Twenty-five.”
“Motherfucker!” Elise exclaimed, unable to obtain her anger any more. The word startled Adam out of his reverie and he lifted his head up, gawping at her as she stood up and began pacing in the same way that he had a few minutes ago.
“And what was your crime?” Elise demanded furiously, whirling on him. “This... this 'Jigsaw' put me in here for supposedly being a fake medium. What did you do to piss him off, hm?”
Adam shrank beneath her rage as if it was directed at him personally. “I don’t know, I don’t know! He just um…” She could see him searching his memory for the details of his own tape. “He said I was pathetic, a pathetic person, that I wasn’t doing anything with my life, that I wasn’t grateful to be alive…”
“Oh, horseshit,” Elise snapped. “Being careless with your life is what your twenties are for. And pathetic? I don’t know what you were doing with your life, Adam, but I’m damn sure it wasn’t more pathetic than locking strangers up in bathrooms and lecturing them over an intercom.”
Up until now, all the video camera would have picked up of their conversation was the faintest whispering from Elise. Whenever she spoke to spirits she was halfway out of her body, with one foot in the Further, and only faint echoes of those interactions appeared on the surface. But with those last few words, and the next few, Elise made an effort to speak them loudly in her mortal voice, glaring fiercely at the red dot of the camera.
“I’m not going to die in this place. I am leaving,” she declared. And then, just to Adam, she added, “And I hope you’ll come with me. I might need your help again.” She nodded at his mortal remains. "Do I have your permission?”
He was staring up at her wide-eyed, looking somewhat terrified. It took a moment for Adam to remember what she was referring to. “Oh yeah, sure. Knock yourself out.”
Elise took a few deep breaths. She needed to be calmer than this to show Adam’s bones the respect they deserved. She approached them slowly, but paused at one of the two other bodies in the room.
“These people, did you know them?”
Adam’s gaze skittered away from hers. “Only one of them,” he replied cagily. “The other one showed up after I’d already been dead a while. After he was killed I thought maybe I saw him – saw his ghost, I mean – but he lit out of here pretty quickly.”
“And this one,” Elise pressed, indicating the corpse at her feet.
A long silence.
“I killed him.” Adam followed up the confession with a rush of words: “He had a gun, I thought he was Jigsaw! He was trying to…”
“Stop, I understand, it’s alright.” Elise was getting a headache from the combination of her own stress and Adam’s second-hand stress. She didn’t need him to tell her that he’d killed this man out of desperation; she already knew it as well as he knew it himself. “Did you see his spirit, after he died?”
Adam shook his head mournfully. “He was already gone when I… he was already gone.”
“Did he deserve this?”
“What? No! I mean, I only met him for like a minute, but I think he was just scared.” The defensive tone bled away and Adam repeated, in a hollow voice: “He was just scared. He didn’t want to die.”
Elise looked down at the sad, limp pile of bones. “What kind of a man was he?” she asked.
“Like I said, I didn’t really know him. And even if I did, who the hell am I to judge him?” Adam shuffled his feet, the phantom chain clinking. “I just know his name was Zep. Shepherd. Shepherd Hindle. People called him Zep. He was an orderly, at a hospital, so I guess he helped people. He did some bad stuff because Jigsaw made him, but he didn’t deserve this. No one deserves this."
Elise considered touching the corpse of Zep Hindle to try and learn more, but decided against it. She sensed a long and taxing day ahead, and she couldn’t sense a spectral presence attached to any of the other bodies in this room. Whoever they might have been in life, they’d already moved on. Only Adam was still stuck here.
She knelt down beside Adam's body and looked into the ruins of his face for a moment. Then she carefully cupped his heel bone, lifting the chained leg off the floor. The bones in his leg creaked and cracked, spitting dust and threatening to break apart. Elise heard Adam choke behind her.
“Sorry,” she said gently.
“It’s fine. Keep going.”
Fortunately the flesh of his leg had shrunk enough that she could slip the shackle off without the metal making contact with his bones at all. She carefully set it aside, and then regarded the body thoughtfully. Burial or cremation wasn’t exactly an option right now, but she could at least take him off display.
“Can I lay you down?” she asked. Glancing over at the bathtub she added, “In there, maybe?”
She looked up at Adam, who was hovering anxiously over his body like a parent watching their child dangle from the playground monkey bars. He looked in her eyes and nodded silently.
Elise gathered up the body gently in her arms. Some of the bones separated, but she made sure none of them dropped to the floor. She carried what was left of Adam over to the bathtub (he weighed almost nothing now) and gently lowered the bones into it, curled up in a fetal position. Feeling a need to do something more, Elise shrugged off her favorite blue cardigan and placed it over him like a shroud, covering his face and most of his body. It was a far cry from a proper burial, but it would do for now.
“Don’t you need that?” Adam asked in a trembling voice. “Won’t you get cold?”
“You need it more than me.”
A tear slipped off the end of Elise’s nose and landed in the soft fibers of the cardigan, turning the blue a shade darker.
“You know, you don’t have to come with me,” she told him, eventually. She looked down at Adam’s spectral legs, now completely free of any shackles or chains. “You’re free now. You can go anywhere you want.”
“Fuck that. ” Adam slung a friendly arm around Elise’s shoulders and squeezed her reassuringly. Already, he seemed more cheerful. “I’m getting you out of here. And then I’m going to haunt that old bitch until he dies. And when he’s dead I’m going to kick ten shades of ghostly shit out of him.”
"That's the spirit."
Chapter Text
Amanda walked back to John’s workshop slowly. The hairs were standing up on her arms. She hated for him to see her in a state of weakness, but the shame of delivering bad news – not to mention the eeriness of what she had just witnessed – was making her hands shake and her chin quiver. A few deep breaths helped her rein in the worst of it, and then she steeled herself to face him.
To an outsider, he wouldn’t cut an intimidating figure: hunched over in his chair, tethered to IV fluids, his eyes a little unfocused from the painkillers he had finally relented to taking. But those eyes snapped up sharply as Amanda approached.
“Is Elise awake?” John asked her in a gravelly whisper.
“Yeah, she’s…” Amanda cleared her throat. “She’s unlocked the door.”
John’s gaze bored into her own, and despite the circumstances she felt that blessedly anchored state of being that kept her in thrall to him: the only peace she had ever really known. “She works fast,” he murmured at last, with begrudging approval. “How much blood has she spilled so far?”
Amanda hesitated, then admitted in a rush: “None. She never looked at the numbers. She didn’t even listen to the whole tape. She just walked right over and found the safe like she knew exactly where it was. And she already knew the combination.”
Amanda watched John silently digest this information. It was so hard to tell what he was thinking, and she now lived in constant terror of him expressing the mildest disappointment in her. She fled from the feeling by continuing to babble.
“She doesn’t even seem that scared! And she keeps…” Amanda heard her own voice shaking and silently cursed the sign of weakness. “She’s just whispering. The whole time, she’s been whispering. Whatever she’s saying, it’s too low for the microphone to pick up. It’s creepy as hell.”
John narrowed his eyes at her. “Did you remember to empty her pockets?”
Amanda felt the deep burn of humiliation in her gut at the unspoken reminder of her previous screw-ups. “Yes,” she insisted, hating the defensive tone in her voice. “I would have noticed if she had an earpiece. I would have found a phone.” She started frantically casting her mind around for a scapegoat to take the focus off herself. “Mark! What if Mark got cold feet? He knew the safe combination, he could have slipped it to her while we were setting up.”
“Hmm.” John didn’t seem to be listening to her. His hooded gaze was drifting across the tools of death that littered the room. Amanda clenched her fists until the trembling stopped.
“Should I call Mark?” she pressed at last. “Get him over here, ask him to his face if he sabotaged the trap?”
“No. I’ll do it.” (Another sting of misery in Amanda’s stomach at the implication that John didn’t trust her.) “Get back to the monitors. The next test won't be so easy to evade.”
Once the initial elation over being freed wore off, Adam became somewhat quiet and pensive. Once Elise finished searching the room for anything that might be of use, and came up short, she turned back to find the ghost crouched down by the severed foot near the door. His head was cocked to one side as he studied it, and a troubled look was furrowing his brow. But when Elise approached the door, he was shaken out of his reverie.
“Hold on!” Adam said sharply. “They rigged something by the door as well.” He walked over to it and peered suspiciously, but nothing was visible on this side. Then a thoughtful look crossed his face and he closed his eyes and took a few steps forward - through the door.
A moment later, Elise heard an excited whoop from the other side. Despite the circumstances, she smiled. Not all spirits could move through walls, which presented a psychological barrier even when they no longer presented a corporeal one. But unbinding the chain from Adam’s ankle seemed to have freed him from other constraints. That would certainly prove useful as they pressed forward through this house of nightmares.
“Oh yeah, there’s some bullshit out here,” Adam called through the door. “Let’s see… a gas canister, and there’s a string attached to it, leading to the door… I think it triggers when the door is opened.”
“I’ve been kidnapped by Elmer Fudd,” Elise commented drily. “Is there any wiggle room for me to slip out?”
“Yeah, there’s some slack. Try opening the door, just a little?”
Elise did so, until she could see a sliver of Adam on the other side. With him guiding her, as if she was backing into a tricky parking space, Elise managed to get the door open just wide enough for her to squeeze through, but not so wide that it would trigger the release of the gas. Adam shouted his encouragement as she flattened herself through the gap, and pulled her into a hug when she finally made it.
She could feel some of his coldness sinking into her bones as he embraced her, and she knew that he in turn would be soaking up some of the warmth of her life. It was an important reminder that Elise needed to be careful. Spending too much time among the dead had a tendency to sap her strength. And no matter how friendly Adam seemed or how good his intentions were, she had something that he craved: a living body. She gave him a brief squeeze, and then kindly but firmly extricated himself from his grasp.
If Adam sensed her discomfort, he didn’t show it. He seemed distracted by something. Elise followed his gaze to the ground and saw a dark stain at their feet, trailing from inside the bathroom and continuing up the dank, industrial-looking tunnel ahead of them. Adam followed the trail with this eyes, then looked around as if searching for something.
“Lawrence?” he called, barely above a whisper. Then again, in a stronger voice: “Lawrence, are you here?”
Elise remembered the name, and the foot, and connected the two things with the dark trail on the ground. She shuddered at the mental image the connection conjured. But there was no response to Adam’s greeting. Looking at his face, it was hard to tell whether he thought this was a good thing or a bad thing.
Finally, he turned to Elise. “Are there any other ghosts here, besides me?”
It was a difficult question to answer. The whole place was awash with so much dark, twisted energy that spiritually it was like peering through thick fog. Elise reluctantly reached out with her astral senses, but recoiled from the fierce echo of agony that radiated off the blood trail.
“If there are, they’re hiding,” she replied, hugging her body tightly and wishing she still had her cardigan.
Adam’s mouth twisted, and he looked up at the tunnel again. It went on for some distance before turning a corner. “Lawrence!” he called again, his voice shuddering on the space between the two syllables. But there was no response.
“If he’s not here, perhaps it means he’s still alive," Elise suggested.
Adam didn’t look comforted by the thought. In fact, he scowled. Then crouched down and touched his fingertips to the bloodstain.
“What happened, Lawrence?” he asked in a small, hurt voice, like a kid with a grazed knee. “Why didn’t you come back?”
Something caught Elise’s eye. There was another tape with PLAY ME written on it, hanging off a piece of string that was tied to a pipe running along the ceiling, turning slowly with the movement of air in the tunnel like a small white flag. Elise took a couple of steps towards it, then realized that she’d left the tape player in the bathroom.
“Forget about it,” said Adam. He had dragged his attention away from the blood trail and was now standing again, frowning at the wall directly opposite the bathroom door.
“It might have something useful on it,” Elise ventured, without much conviction.
“Doubtful. Hey, come back here and look at this wall. Does it seem… off to you?”
Elise joined him and stared at the wall. It seemed fairly innocuous, albeit as filthy and dank as the rest of the place. “What am I looking for?” she asked.
Adam’s eyes narrowed with conviction. “This wall wasn’t here before,” he declared. “I saw the tunnels when he left, and again when they came back. This wall wasn’t here.” He stepped up close to it and pounded his fist against it. Instead of the expected dull thumping sound, there was a booming echo on the other side. Elise wondered if the people watching them could hear it. She hoped so. They could do with a scare.
“Drywall,” Adam concluded with a triumphant gleam in his eye. “It’s fake. He’s trying to corral you up that way…” He pointed in the direction that the blood trail led. “Into the next trap.”
“I don’t take kindly to being corralled,” Elise said grimly.
She cast her eyes around the floor until she spotted an area where the pipes were broken, with one slightly thinner than her forearm drooping loose from its connecting hinge. It was old and rusted, but with some concentrated twisting and elbow grease Elise managed to work it free. As she stood up, she spotted the red light of another camera hidden among the pipework in the ceiling, and glared at it.
In a voice loud enough to be heard by the living, she added: “And I don’t like being spied on.”
“Don’t you fucking dare,” Amanda seethed as Elise Rainier’s upturned face got larger and larger on the monitor with her approach to the camera. “Don’t you dare… ”
The pipe swung. Elise’s face disappeared, along with the rest of the tunnel, and was replaced with snowy static.
“Bitch! ” Amanda howled, forgetting to control her volume until too late and wincing at the thought of John hearing her lose control. She clawed her hands into her hair and paced back and forth rapidly in front of the monitors, trying to calm down. John had trusted her with this, with his legacy, and she was screwing it up. It had barely begun and it was already falling apart. This was her most important test, and she was failing it.
Amanda glanced back at the dead monitor, and saw Adam glaring back at her.
The blood looked black on the monochrome feed, covering his face like a mask. His eyes stood out in it, bright with hate. His mouth was stretched open, screaming with no sound. So Amanda screamed for him.
Pulling up outside the Gideon Meatpacking Plant, Detective Mark Hoffman heard the scream through the open window of his car and scowled. Clearly they needed to do some more work on the soundproofing if they were going to keep testing people here.
Several miles away, in another part of the city, Dr. Lawrence Gordon stared at his own pale, sweat-pocked face in the bathroom mirror. His forearms were propped on the edge of the sink, keeping him balanced on his one remaining foot. His hands were shaking violently.
“It was just a nightmare,” Lawrence insisted out loud. He was trying to sound stern. But it came out sounding like a prayer.
Chapter Text
Mark was smirking at the static-filled monitor. Amanda wanted to scratch his eyes out.
“I should have been here,” he said to John. It might have sounded like contrition to anyone who didn’t know him, but she heard what he was really saying: Amanda isn’t competent enough to run a test by herself. You need me more than you need her.
“Why?” she snapped. “So you could give her more codes? How about a map of the building and a set of keys?”
Mark rolled his eyes. Amanda had started firing off accusations as soon as he walked in, and he’d already dismissed them in his infuriating, laconic way. “You’re really stuck on that, aren’t ya?” he sneered. “Almost like you’re trying to deflect. You’re the one with the soft spot, Amanda, not me.”
Amanda whipped a screwdriver out of her belt and jammed the rusty point of it against his throat. “Keep talking. I’ll find all your soft spots.”
To her chagrin, Mark didn’t even move to defend himself. He just grinned like he knew he’d won.
“Enough,” John wheezed, and Amanda felt the screwdriver drop back to her side as if her arm had independently obeyed the command. Guilt washed over her as she looked at John in his wheelchair, body tight with pain that had been exacerbated by the journey to examine the monitors. The camera showing the nailgun trap room was still active, but the trap was conspicuously empty. Elise Rainier hadn’t moved forward. They had no idea where she was.
“Let me clean this mess up,” Mark implored John. “I’ll go down there, knock her out, put her in the next trap, get her back on track.”
John looked at the monitors dully, like he didn’t even care. That, more than the physical deterioration, was what filled Amanda with the most anxiety: John’s growing apathy towards the tests and their outcome.
“Her objective was to get out alive,” he said at last. “That was the test. We can’t intervene just because she’s in danger of passing.”
“But she’s cheating!” Amanda seethed.
“Perhaps.”
“Of course she is! There’s no other explanation.”
Silence fell over the three of them, the buzzing of the electricity through the monitors suddenly seeming very loud as they each thought of another explanation, but didn’t speak it. Mark, in particular, looked suddenly torn between anger and a desperate, sickly hope.
“Keep watching the monitors,” John said at last, to Amanda. “Come and tell us if she reappears. Mark…”
“I got you,” the detective said, gently grasping the handles of the wheelchair in his big mitts and maneuvering John away. Amanda braced her trembling hands on the desk as they left, and bowed her head.
Elise looked like a ghost herself after breaking through the drywall. Adam, unable to help, had simply stood back looking somewhat impressed by her efforts, though he’d climbed through the hole first and then held out a hand to help her through.
“What a gentleman,” she quipped, running a hand through her hair to dislodge the plaster dust.
“I think that’s the first time anyone’s ever used that word to describe me.”
They proceeded up the dripping tunnel, searching for any glimpse of a ladder, a door, even a grate above them – any sign of access to the outside world at all. None presented itself, but as they walked Elise did feel something. It was like they had just waded into the waters of a great, freezing lake, and with every step it was rising up higher around their ankles. And as they pressed forward she began to hear a noise further up: a cacophony of screeching and growling and unintelligible voices.
Adam heard it too, stopping and instinctively extending an arm in front of Elise, forcing her to stop too. “What is that?” he murmured, brow furrowed.
She closed her eyes and reluctantly reached out with her senses, then recoiled with a small gasp.
“Elise?” Adam prompted, alarmed, as she clutched at her chest.
“I’m alright,” she reassured him shakily. “There are some more spirits up ahead. Several of them. They’re angry, they’re doing something, but I can’t quite…”
She couldn’t see them yet. They were around the next corner, and from here all she could sense was a rumbling mass of hunger and rage, like a tank of piranhas at feeding time.
“I’ll go ahead, scout it out.” Adam said, deepening his voice and puffing his chest out a little. “I can’t die again, right?” He took a step forward, then deflated slightly and turned back to Elise with a worried brow. “Um, right?”
She nodded jerkily. “Right.”
His shoulders sagged with relief and he padded up to the corner, peering around it. Elise saw his face twist in disgust and confusion.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Uhhh… good question. It’s safe to come forward, I think.” He beckoned her. “They’re pretty distracted.”
That was an understatement, Elise learned when she rounded the corner herself. The ghosts were gathered against a wall, clawing at it with single-minded determination, snarling and swearing and roaring. It was hard to even count how many there were – perhaps half a dozen. And they were so closely packed together that it took a while for Elise to see what they were scratching at.
“A door!” Adam exclaimed loudly, spotting it at the same time as her. He clapped a hand over his mouth, but none of the ghosts seemed to have heard him. “Are they trying to get out too?”
Elise shook her head. “I think they’re trying to get in. ”
They approached slowly, sticking close to the opposite wall, Adam instinctively moving in front of Elise to shield her from any sudden attack. None came, though the noise of the ghosts was almost unbearable as they hurried past. Adam was staring at them with a horrified fascination, so Elise saw the blonde woman first.
She was dead, like the rest, but she’d abandoned their frenzy and was slumped against a wall, dull eyes watching the boiling cauldron of spiritual energy. Elise touched Adam’s arm to get his attention. He did a double take when he saw the lone ghost, and then immediately darted forward to crouch down in front of her.
“Hey,” he said anxiously. “Are you OK?”
She rolled her skull against the wall to look up at him, rolling her eyes at the same time.
“I mean, aside from the obvious,” Adam amended with a sheepish grin. He was on the verge of flirting, Elise realized, amused by it despite the circumstances.
The ghost finally spoke, her voice forlorn and croaky. “I’m just tired. We’re never getting through that stupid door. Honestly, I don’t even care that much about getting to him anyway.”
“Getting to who?”
She flopped her hand vaguely in the direction of the door. “The cop.”
“There’s a cop behind that door?”
“Yuh-huh.”
“Alive or dead?”
“Alive.”
Elise looked up sharply at the door. There was a man alive in there? How long had the ghosts been trying to claw their way in? Even for someone totally blind to the other world, the effects of that much spiritual rage in such close proximity would be torturous.
“Who is he?” she probed, taking a step closer to the woman, who looked up at Elise like she had only just spotted her.
“He’s the reason we’re all in here,” the woman sighed drowsily. “It was never even about us. It was always about him. We were just… accessories to his test.”
A dark look clouded Adam’s face.
Elise felt a familiar anger rising in her as she looked as this poor young woman. The same age as Adam, more or less, and equally robbed of her chance at a full life. When she’d first discovered her gift, Elise had thought she’d eventually grow inured to the pain of seeing people whose lives had ended too soon: tragically, cruelly, abruptly. But it never did get any easier. The only balm for it was helping their shades move on to what was, hopefully, a kinder world.
“What’s your name, sweetheart?” Elise asked gently.
The woman opened her mouth, then blinked, and frowned.
“It’s alright,” soothed Elise, who had seen this loss of identity in ghosts many times before. It was to be expected, once the spirit came unstuck from the body it had lived in. “Take your time.”
Long seconds of silence followed. Out of the corner of her eye, Elise saw Adam’s eyes flitting over the woman in rising panic, could almost hear him thinking: Is that going to happen to me?
Yes, Elise thought sadly. Eventually it happens to all of us.
“Laura?” the ghost whispered at last. “Laura,” she repeated, more confidently.
“Hi, Laura,” Elise said, beaming kindly at her. “I’m Elise. This is Adam. He’s like you.”
“Dead,” Laura clarified dully, glancing at Adam only fleetingly before dropping her gaze back to the ground. Elise saw him flinch minutely at the single, harsh word.
“Adam was stuck here,” Elise continued. “But he’s not stuck any more. We’re looking for the way out. You should come with us.”
Laura let her head loll back against the wall so that she was looking up the tunnel, away from the snarling ghosts. She raised a pallid arm to point. “Way out’s right there,” she murmured.
Elise blinked in surprise and looked up in the direction Laura was pointing. There was nothing there: just darkness and, in the distance, a T-junction in the tunnel.
With a rising suspicion, and no small amount of hope, Elise leaned closer to the wall until her head was positioned just behind Laura’s. It was tricky, like trying to find the right angle to peer through a pair of binoculars. When Elise lined her sight up just right, though, a sudden flare of light filled her gaze and a door materialized at the end of the tunnel. Light was spilling through the cracks around it and a bigger shaft of illumination sliced through where it was slightly ajar.
“Where?” Adam demanded, agitated, peering desperately up the tunnel. He couldn’t see it.
“That’s your way out, Laura,” Elise told the young woman. “We can’t go that way. But you should go, while the door’s still there.” Ethereal doors were devilishly fickle.
“I’d love to,” Laura drawled, dropping her arm and her gaze. “ He won’t let me.”
“Who won’t?”
A deafening, horrendous snarl right by Elise’s ear, and then Laura was jerked away, a large hand squeezing her bicep cruelly and dragging her along the floor several feet. Elise heard Adam yell angrily in protest and then say, “Oh fuck,” his voice turning tremulous.
A hulking ghost loomed over them. A big man in life, grown bigger in death. His teeth were bared and aggression was pouring off him in sickly waves that commanded Elise to cower.
She refused.
“Let go of her!” she snapped, outraged, standing up to confront the ghoul. She barely came up to its shoulders.
The malevolent ghost regarded her with cold eyes, then opened its blackened mouth and said, in a voice that cracked like breaking teeth, “Eight.”
“Oh shit,” Adam gasped. “I remember this guy.”
“Leave me alone,” Laura whined, shoving at her captor ineffectually. She didn’t seem panicked, and Elise suspected they’d done this dance many times before.
The ghost yanked on her arm, dragging her a couple more feet closer to the door. “Six-teen,” it enunciated in its stilted, crunchy voice. “Nine. E-lev-en.”
“It’s pointless,” Laura shot back. “We’re never getting in there. We- oh shit.”
The last part was an expression of weary surprise. Adam had taken a running leap up onto the huge ghost’s back and now had his arms wrapped around its neck, valiantly attempting a headlock.
“Hey, Godzilla,” he taunted. “Why don’t you pick on someone…” Adam paused, considering. “...A couple inches closer to your own size?”
“Two,” the ghost growled irritably, keeping hold of Laura’s arm and reaching back over its shoulders with its free hand to grab a fistful of Adam’s hair. This elicited a yelp (ghosts, Elise had learned, were not immune to the pain they could imagine for themselves) but Adam clung on stubbornly.
Not about to be left out of a scrap, and knowing that her living strength made her far more of a threat than Adam, Elise stepped forward and slammed the palm of her hand against the bullying ghost’s muscled chest. “Look at me!” she commanded, glaring up into the creature’s twisted face as it slowly turned its head to meet her gaze. She could see a faint shadow of a person in there, but she knew there was no chance this ghost remembered its name. All that was left of its former identity now was rage, and hate, and a scattering of random numbers, their meaning probably long forgotten.
Laura slipped a little way out of the ghost’s grasp, but it caught her by the wrist and redoubled its efforts, yanking brutally at her arm. Elise concentrated on the freezing place where her fingers and palm were connected to the spirit and pushed energy into it.
“You can’t keep her here,” she told him, willing it to be true. “She’s stronger than you are.”
And she was. Laura still remembered her name. She could speak in full sentences. She might be physically smaller than her captor, but that didn’t matter much on this plane of existence. And she seemed emboldened by Elise’s words, tugging angrily and folding up her fingers until she slipped free of the beast’s grasp and staggered away. She hesitated then, looking up at Adam and Elise with teary eyes.
“GO!” Adam yelled, his legs wrapped around the hulk's sides now to keep himself from being bucked off.
Laura looked at Elise, who smiled reassuringly, keeping the big ghost held in place with one hand. “Go on, dear. We’ll be fine.”
With tears filling her eyes, Laura backed up another couple of steps and then took off sprinting up the tunnel. Elise turned her attention back to the monster in front of her, who struggled comically under her small hand like they were in a wrestling show. He roared, and beneath the roar Elise heard the distant sound of a door closing.
Silence followed, sudden and eerie and punctuated only by Adam’s soft grunts as he clung onto the ghost’s back. Elise looked beyond its bulk and saw that the others were no longer clawing at the door. They were staring up the tunnel, in the direction that Laura had left, their heads tilted in curiosity. Now that they were no longer a single writhing mass Elise could see that there were four of them: three men, and a woman whose long, dark hair hung lankly over her pale face.
The largest ghost twisted his torso around, still pinioned by Elise’s hand, and snarled at them in an incoherent babble of numbers. A couple moved back to the door, reluctantly, and the cowed droop of their heads filled Elise with rage. She poured that rage down her arm, glared up at the twisted shadow of a twisted man, and uttered one word through gritted teeth: “Enough.”
Adam hit the floor in a clatter of limbs and rolled over onto his back, groaning.
Where the big ghost had been, there was now only a haze of dissipating black particles.
The other spirits stared with empty eyes, and then began to drift apart from each other. Sheep no longer corralled by a sheepdog. They wandered up the tunnel in different directions and melted into the walls.
Elise swayed on the spot, dizzy, her arm still outstretched. Her own panting sounded muddy in her ears. Through the haze, though, she heard a voice from behind the now-abandoned door.
“Is somebody there?”
Chapter Text
When Elise opened the slot in the bottom of the cell door, the stench that belched forth made her rear back and gag. It was a lethal combination: human waste; the rotting-meat smell of old blood; layers of stale body odor; and all of it bound together with the psychic reek of misery. She gathered herself as best she could and lowered her face again, peering into the darkness of the cell.
A glint of eyes behind a curtain of lank, tangled hair. Crouched down as he was, the cop looked more like an animal than a man. Each breath was pulled into his chest with a wheeze and exhaled on a groan.
“Oh,” Elise said softly, pity swelling inside her ribcage. She lay down fully by the door, forgetting the smell and ignoring her aching joints, and reached a hand through the slot.
“Elise!” Adam hissed urgently. “Be careful.”
He needn’t have worried, though. The man inside the cell scurried backwards from her outstretched hand like it was a stick of dynamite. Elise heard a metallic scraping on the floor as he moved.
“Who are you?” a mad, hoarse voice demanded from the darkness. Elise could barely see the source of it – just an arm and the side of his chest where light was slicing in and illuminating his orange jumpsuit.
“My name is Elise," she said, as calmly as she could. "I’m trying to find a way out of here.”
She caught a flurry of movement from his greasy hair as he shook his head. “No-no-no. This is a trick. He sent you.”
“No one sent me. Please, just tell me your name.”
The man sobbed, once, and slid down to lie on the floor like his strings had been cut. “Why are you doing this?” he asked in a thin, exhausted voice. “Why don’t you just kill me already?”
Elise decided to give up on trying to get information from him for the time being, and instead fed him her own story. She explained how she’d woken up here, that she’d managed to escape the first trap (though she left out Adam’s role) and break free from the path laid out for her. She told him how scared she was, and heard her own voice break as she did so. As she talked he heard his breathing start to even out, saw the faint gleam of his eyes become less hostile and more curious.
She left her hand inside the cell: an offering of trust. He didn’t touch it, but he inched forward a little closer on his belly, like a beaten dog.
“My son,” was the first thing he said when Elise finally ran out of things to tell him. “Have you seen my son? His name’s Daniel, he’s sixteen, curly hair, dark clothes. Please, have you seen him?”
Elise looked over at Adam. He was sitting curled up with his ankles crossed, arms resting on his knees, chin resting on his arms. He was too lost in his own thoughts to catch her eye.
“I haven’t, I’m sorry,” Elise said. She hesitated, considering telling the cop that his description didn’t match any of the ghosts she’d seen at the door, but decided things were still a bit too fraught to start talking about ghosts. “Can you tell me your name?”
A pause followed, and Elise wondered if the man had forgotten his own name, like Laura had. But eventually he managed, “Eric.” Then, a little stronger: “Detective Eric Matthews.”
“Are you hurt, Detective Matthews?”
“My foot… My foot’s all jacked up.”
“He smashed it with the toilet lid,” Adam mumbled. Elise looked over at him in surprise, but his face was in shadow now and his expression inscrutable. “To get the chain off. Wish I’d thought of that.”
Elise was dying to ask Adam to elaborate, but she didn’t want to have that conversation in front of her new acquaintance. So instead she pulled her hand back and sat up, examining the door.
“Are you still there?” the detective whispered fearfully.
“I’m still here, Eric,” she reassured him. “Just seeing if there’s a way for me to get the door open.”
It didn’t look good. There were sliding bolts at the top and bottom, but they were padlocked in place. And even if she found a way to get past them, there was another lock in the middle of the door. It was steel, heavy, and set in a concrete wall. No pipe would break through this one. And she guessed that the detective had already tried everything he could think of to escape from his side.
A grim truth began to settle over Elise’s mind, but she hesitated to speak it aloud.
“Anything?” Eric Matthews asked, when the silence had stretched on too long.
“No. I can’t see any way to get it open. Not without the keys.”
She looked over at Adam, as if he could help somehow, but he had drawn even deeper into the shadows and into himself. He was barely visible now. Elise steeled herself and said, “Eric…”
“No-no-no, please, no!” he jibbered from behind the door, sobbing wetly. His hand shot out through the slot at the bottom, clawing at the floor with fingers whose nails were ragged and short, the bloody beds exposed. Elise kneeled down, took the hand in hers and pressed her mouth to the back of it, even though he was squeezing her fingers so hard they threatened to break.
“I have to keep looking for a way out,” she told him, meeting one of his eyes where his face was pressed up to the tiny window, tears brimming over the bottom lid and spilling onto his cheek. “The only way I can get you out is by finding the keys, or finding help. I can’t do either if I stay here.”
Eric wailed like a baby then, banging his head against the concrete floor. Elise flinched with every blow and quickly pushed her free hand through the slot, trying to cushion the blows, crying out in pain as her fingers were bruised between the hard surfaces of his skull and the floor.
“Just try to hold on a little longer,” she pleaded with him. “I’ll get you out, I promise.” It was a promise she couldn’t make with any certainty, but she made it anyway.
As if all the fight had suddenly gone out of him in one breath, Eric’s grip on her fingers loosened. His arm slithered back and he was swallowed by the darkness of his cell. If it wasn’t for the harsh sound of his breathing, she wouldn’t even know he was there.
“I’ll get you out,” Elise promised again in a wobbly, uncertain voice.
There was no reply.
They continued on up the tunnel, to where Laura had exited the maze, Elise nursing the sore fingers on both of her hands. Adam was still uncharacteristically quiet. She kept trying to glance over at him but he stayed at the periphery of her vision. Waves of discontent were pouring off him, scratching at the raw patches of Elise’s psyche. She was physically exhausted from breaking down the fake wall, spiritually exhausted from banishing the big bully ghost, and emotionally wrung-out from the exchange with Eric Matthews. Adam’s brooding, on top of all that, was more than she could take.
“Which way, do you think?” she asked in a terse, faux-cheerful voice, when they reached the junction point.
Silence. Then: “You shouldn’t have done that.”
Elise sighed deeply. “I couldn’t do anything for him if I stayed.”
“You shouldn’t have even talked to him.”
“I couldn’t just ignore him, Adam.”
“You should’ve. Now he thinks there’s hope.”
“There is hope. When I get out of here…”
“You’re not getting out of here. No one gets out of here.”
Elise tried to peer at her companion, but it was like he was somehow circling her without ever getting in front of her. “This isn’t helpful, Adam,” she said sternly.
“The only way out is the way Laura got out. You’re going to die down here.”
“That’s enough!”
Elise turned on him decisively then, and bit back a scream when she saw what Adam had become. One of his eyes was sunken in, the other was filled with blood and protruding slightly from his skull where his head had split open down to the eye socket. Blood drifted from it like he was underwater, and spooled in larger threads from a blackened crater that had been punched through his shoulder. His lips were blue, his skin so pale it was nearly the same color, his hair was glued down against his scalp by blackened blood. A dark aura quivered around him. He was glaring at her viciously.
“What are you going to do?” he asked, and there was an underlying rumble beneath his voice, as if someone else was speaking simultaneously. “Make me disappear? Destroy me? What’s left of me? I know you can do it. I saw you.”
His fear and resentment of her roiled off him in stinking waves that made Elise feel nauseated – and furious. She didn’t need this. She’d been flayed raw by the day’s events, and Adam’s breakdown was throwing salt on the open wounds. “Don’t test me, Adam,” she warned.
His gaze wavered. The blood poured more intensely from his spectral injuries. He changed tack, whining now. “How come Laura gets to leave and I don’t? Where’s my door, huh?”
“I can’t open that door for you, Adam.”
“Then you’re useless.” The rage was back again, his voice like the crack of a whip. “You can’t help me. You can’t even help yourself!”
“I thought you were supposed to be helping me.”
“Helping you to do what?” Adam demanded hysterically. “Leave me? Leave me like he left me? He said he would send help but he didn’t. And then she…” His eyes widened, the right eyeball now threatening to spill out onto his cheek entirely. “She said she was going to free me. And then she fucking killed me!”
His howl echoed down the tunnels. The lights flickered and the pipes rumbled and rattled and groaned. Adam barely looked human now. For a single, horrible moment Elise wondered if she was going to be forced to banish him, like she had banished the other ghost. The thought broke her heart.
There was a terrible pressure in the air, like the shift before a storm, that squeezed Elise’s head and made her teeth ache. She clapped her hands over her ears and closed her eyes as if she could somehow shield herself from it. The air tasted of metal. The lights were going insane. The pipes were screaming.
And then it ended, abruptly, like someone unplugging a TV. There was a lingering crackle of spiritual energy in the air, but nothing else. Elise tentatively opened her eyes, squinting past the ache in her head.
Adam was gone.
Chapter Text
John had been in pain for so long now, he’d forgotten what it was like to exist without it. Perhaps that should have made the pain easier to bear. But it didn’t.
He sat at a desk in his workshop, trying to take his mind off it in the way he had throughout his illness: by designing machines of pain and suffering. Machines to wake people up. To force them to fight for life like the precious, fleeting gift that it was. Machines that… that…
John’s hand slipped in a sudden fit of weakness, crudely scoring the page. He bowed his head, breathing harshly, exhausted yet quietly panicking at the thought that even this might be taken from him. What if he had already drawn his last design, without knowing that it was the last? How long would it be before he no longer even had the strength to hold a pen?
He hold out his hand and looked at. The fingers were trembling. John bared his teeth at them.
There was a soft sound in the workshop behind him, and John glanced back over his hunched shoulder. “Mark?” he called softly.
The detective had taken a call a few minutes ago. The disappearance of Elise Rainier had been reported and flagged as a potential development in the Jigsaw case. Mark had left to cover things at that end and lead the investigation astray if necessary, but perhaps he’d returned. Or perhaps not. There was no reply to John's call.
He returned his attention to the notebook in front of him and his breath caught in his throat. He was too weak now to fully jolt back from the desk, which was the reflex that his mind sent to his muscles. Instead they only twitched feebly, but it was still enough to nearly dislodge John from his chair.
The drawing in front of him wasn’t just scored with one line now. There were dozens, perhaps even hundreds of them: thick and black and furious, tearing through the paper to the page below in places, mutilating the design that had been on the page beyond all recognition. They ended in a splatter of ink, and when John looked at the pen in his hand he saw that the nib was broken – snapped out of sheer force – and his fingers were black-spattered too.
John forced his hand to unclench and the pen fell limply onto the desk and rolled off the edge, clattering onto the floor. His mind raced, attempting an instant replay. How long had he been looking over his shoulder? It had felt like just a glance, but it wouldn’t be the first incident of time slipping away from him recently. He couldn’t have done this absent-mindedly; John didn’t have the strength in his hand to do this, not any more. A seizure, perhaps?
He peered down at his hand and his confusion only deepened when he saw a colour on it that couldn’t have been left by the ink in the pen. There were oval circles, sickly yellow-white where the blood had been compressed away, but rapidly turning red in the telltale sign of bruises to come. One on the side of his thumb, others cruelly dug into the divots between his knuckles. John realized how badly his hand was hurting. And looking at those marks, a chill crawled up his spine as he realized what they looked like.
Like someone had grabbed his hand with vicious strength, and moved it for him.
Maybe Adam had been her good luck charm. Or perhaps he’d been right when he said there was no way out of here. Both thoughts crossed Elise’s mind as she stood in the middle of the tunnel looking down at a horribly familiar dark trail on the ground. It emerged from beneath another hastily constructed barrier of drywall, and ended a couple dozen feet later next to a gently steaming pipe.
Exhaustion sank Elise to her knees as she thought about having to backtrack to the last tunnel she hadn’t tried yet. Now that there was no one around to put on a brave face for, her face crumpled and she buried it in her hands. She was cold, hungry, weary, and utterly alone.
“Come on, Elise,” she muttered sternly. “Pull yourself together. Crying won’t get you out of here.”
You’re not getting out of here. No one gets out of here.
“Oh!” she sobbed, and covered her mouth to stifle it. She’d tried reaching out to Adam, even calling to him aloud, but there’d been no reply and no glimpse of him. Only the damp chill of the tunnels. She thought about the cardigan she’d left behind to cover Adam’s body, and though part of her now wished she hadn’t been so generous with it, she could at least pray that it had forged a connection between them. Perhaps it would help Adam find his way back to her, when he was ready.
Elise permitted herself another minute crouched on the ground feeling sorry for herself. Then she set her jaw, stood up on knees that clicked in protest, and set off back the way she came.
Wandering this labyrinth left her damp with exertion, yet torturously thirsty at the same time. Elise thought about how annoyed her captor would probably be if, after all his clever designs, she ended up simply succumbing to exhaustion and dehydration. Her bare feet felt like blocks of ice and began to scrape painfully on the floor as she grew too tired to pick them up. She found the unexplored tunnel and drifted down it as if in a trance, not even looking ahead any more, just trying to keep moving. So when she reached the stairs, she almost bumped into them.
Elise blinked stupidly, trying to figure out if she was looking at a mirage, or if perhaps she had wandered right into the Further. No… these were real, solid stairs – the first thing she’d seen since arriving that unquestionably led up. Elise half-fell forward onto them and sobbed in relief against the dark wood, picking up faint traces of emotional energy as she touched it: fear, anger. They barely registered against the background spiritual radiation of this place.
She climbed the stairs slowly, until she reached the trapdoor at the top of them. She gave it a hard shove.
It didn’t budge.
Repressing a sob, Elise pushed again, but she may as well have been pushing a concrete ceiling. She could tell from its sheer resilience and lack of bend that this trapdoor was not held in place by a bolt; there was something on top of it, something impossibly heavy.
Elise slumped and bumped back down the stairs and sat on the bottom one, the hope exiting her body and wracking her like physical withdrawal. In a black moment of despair, she considered simply sitting down in the dark and waiting for it all to be over. Then she revisited the thought from a different angle. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea, sitting down in the dark. In fact, it just might be her best shot at getting out of here.
Freshly invigorated, Elise found a nearby alcove where the harsh electric lighting was throwing a shadow, creating a triangular pool of darkness. She sat down inside it, back braced against a corner. She hated to do this in such a hostile and unfamiliar place, especially with no one around to watch her body, but she didn’t have much choice. She closed her eyes, placed her hands on the knees of her crossed legs, and let her mind drift.
It was hard to describe to others, the feeling of separating her spirit from her body. Out of the various ways she’d tried, the one that had come closest to being accurate was moving parts on a puzzle box: sliding little wooden panels, revealing hidden areas, twisting and pulling until all at once the exhaustion and aches and pains fell away from her. Elise stood up, and her body stayed behind.
Banking on the initial exhilaration of wandering, Elise charged up the stairs and burst through the trapdoor at the top without opening it. She found herself in a grim-looking room with an enormous safe at the center of it, immediately explaining why she hadn’t been able to escape in her physical body.
“There’s a letter.”
Elise turned around at the sound of the voice, and found a familiar-looking spirit in front of her. “Oh, hello again.”
The woman’s face was scarcely visible behind the dark hair that hung in front of it, but Elise could see the gleam of her teeth. Her stance was strange, contrapposto and loose-limbed like a puppet with its strings cut – which, Elise supposed, was what she was. At least she looked a little happier now that she wasn’t being forced to pointlessly claw at the door.
“There’s a letter,” the dark-haired woman said again, her voice hoarse and oddly hypnotic. She turned and began walking towards the doorway, crooking a finger at Elise as she did so.
Elise followed, somewhat warily, as the ghost led her out into a large entrance hall with double doors, presumably leading outside. Elise was about to attempt to walk through them and try to figure out her location, when she paused and considered what the ghost had said.
Suddenly there was a mouth at her ear, whispering gleefully, “There’s a letter.”
Elise startled, and turned around, but the ghost had vanished. They had a tendency to do that here in the Further, being pulled this way and that by the strange tides of this place. But it didn’t matter, because she’d got her message across. Elise looked down at the floor in front of the door and sure enough, there was a letter there.
She crouched down to look at it. Just junk mail, addressed to “The Occupier,” but that didn’t matter. When Elise read the rest of the envelope, she practically whooped with glee.
It had an address on it.
Returning to her body was a lot faster than wandering away from it, akin to letting go of an elastic band. Elise paced back and forth in front of her own seated form, muttering to herself over and over, “7002 Shaw Street, 7002 Shaw Street…” and mulling over what to do with this precious information.
She was wearing her wedding ring, which connected her to Jack, so she could return home. But Jack wasn’t sensitive to spirits at all, and even if Elise could find a way to leave a message, her husband had been so lost in his thoughts lately that she didn’t know if he’d come out of his funk long enough to see it. Her dog, Warren, could see her in this form, but unfortunately he was very bad at reading maps. Elise wished desperately that she had some token belonging to Carl, a fellow medium and friend, but she didn’t, and trying to find him by wandering would be perilously time-consuming.
The elation started to wear off as Elise racked her brains for anyone to whom she could easily reach out through the Further. But she had very little resources, and there was no one alive with a connection to this place except for poor Eric Matthews in his cell. No one had gotten out, Adam had said.
Unless… someone had.
Walking all the way back in her physical body was a truly miserable experience, even buoyed by her new plan. More than once Elise sagged against a wall, her head swimming, the lights of the tunnels swirling around her. When she finally saw the blood trail again she almost wept with relief, which was not a normal reaction to an old bloodstain. But then, very little about Elise’s life was normal.
The area by the fake wall was dark, the nearby lights turned off, perhaps to prevent light from leaking underneath the hastily-constructed barrier and giving the game away. When Elise sat with her back to it she could hear soft, whirring mechanical noises on the other side – presumably the trap that she was supposed to have been corralled into. The sound sparked a fresh burst of anger inside her and she seized upon it as she slapped her hand palm-down on the bloodstain.
“You’d better be alive, Lawrence,” she snarled. “Because I am not doing any more walking.”
After the dank dampness of the tunnels, it was surreal to find herself standing in a brightly-lit, surgically-clean apartment. Elise blinked at a large piece of modern art comprised of three colored shapes. It looked like part of the staging from when the apartment was still on the market, and indeed, as Elise looked around, the whole place looked like a show home. There was very little in the way of personal touches.
But the place was occupied, and its inhabitant was awake despite the late hour that Elise could see on the sleek chrome wall clock. A blond man in expensive-looking pyjamas was sitting on the couch, staring at the shopping channel, which was playing on one of those large, expensive new televisions with the flat screen. He was holding a glass of amber liquid in his hand that he seemed to have forgotten about. It took Elise a moment to notice, since one of his legs was tucked up protectively underneath him, but there was no mistaking the way the leg of one of his pyjama trousers had been neatly shortened, a scarred stump just slightly exposed at the bottom of it.
The man only had one foot.
“Lawrence?” Elise ventured. “It would be really helpful if you could just hear my voice.” There was no response, but she wasn’t surprised. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy.
She stood over him, surveying him critically. She’d half expected to find him locked up in a cell like Eric’s, if he was even alive at all. But Lawrence looked clean, well-fed, and healthy (missing limb notwithstanding). He wasn’t a prisoner. He was sitting here in pampered comfort while Adam decomposed in a bathtub somewhere underground – not only dead, but denied justice and a proper burial. Elise felt indignation on Adam’s behalf rising inside her, and she clenched her fists.
The TV switched channels.
“...issued an alert for missing person Elise Rainier, believed to be the latest victim of the so-called Jigsaw killer…”
Well, that was neat timing. Not for the first time, Elise wondered if someone on the other side was on her side.
“...CCTV caught Mrs Rainier being violently kidnapped by an individual wearing a pig mask, the signature…”
“...Nine carat rose gold with this gorgeous halo design…”
Elise looked over at the TV in disbelief, and then back to Lawrence, who had the remote in his hand. The son of a bitch had switched it back to the shopping channel.
“I’m sorry, am I disturbing you?” she demanded, voice dripping with sarcasm.
It was tempting to get into a channel-hopping war with the man, or maybe to try and break the television entirely, but Elise managed to rein herself in. Affecting the living world from the Further drained her energy, and it was dangerous to let herself become too weak here. So, while Lawrence contemplated nine carat rose gold jewellery, she wandered around his apartment in search of a way to leave a message. She noticed that on the sideboard there was a framed photo of a young girl, one of the only personal touches in the apartment.
Elise hit the jackpot in the kitchen: There were colorful magnetic letters on the fridge. Physically touching solid objects was difficult, and very difficult to do with any precision, but manipulating magnetic forces was much more straightforward. The greater challenge was in finding all the symbols needed to spell out her message, especially since there were only letters on the fridge, and no numbers. But after several minutes of deep concentration, Elise took a step back and admired her handiwork.
⅂oOƧ sHaw sT
A little interpretation required, sure, but hopefully a man with a medical degree would be smart enough to figure it out. Elise looked back at the couch eagerly.
Lawrence was gone.
“Oh god damn it,” she groused. Haunting people was so much harder than it looked in the movies.
The sound of spattering water led Elise to a sleek-looking bathroom, all blue tiles and gold fittings. The door was propped open with a wedge and there was a crutch leaning against the wall next to the shower. She could just about make out Lawrence sitting on a shower chair inside, his head bowed, but she looked away quickly. Elise was a married woman, after all.
She could just leave now, and hope that he saw the message on the fridge sooner rather than later, and also hope that he was curious enough to follow it to the address, also sooner rather than later. But he could just as easily go straight to bed after his shower, and not see the address until the morning, and not go to the address until the afternoon, or perhaps not even go there at all. Elise needed to get Lawrence’s attention in a way he couldn’t ignore.
Fortunately, liquids were easier to move around than solid objects, and a mist had already started to accumulate on the bathroom mirror.
The power shower beat down on Lawrence’s back, shoulders, and head in a way that was physically pleasant, but did nothing to soothe his jittery mind. He had exfoliated his skin with a loofah until it was pink and painful, but he still didn’t feel clean. He felt like Lady Macbeth, scrubbing her hands raw in a futile attempt to wash the blood from them.
What happened, Lawrence?
The voice that had woken him up had sounded so clear that he had been sure there was someone in the room with him.
Why didn’t you come back?
Lawrence rubbed shampoo into his hair, scratching viciously at his scalp in the process. If he scratched loudly enough, he could almost drown out the sound of Adam’s hurt, bewildered voice.
What happened, Lawrence?
Why didn’t you come back?
He gave up scrubbing, letting his hands drop from his head, hot water carrying soap suds down his face until it ran clear. Above the sound of the shower, Lawrence heard a faint squeaking sound outside.
Panic froze his blood. His gun was in his bedside table, far from reach. There were no weapons in the bathroom, unless he used his crutch as a club, and as soon as he did that he would fall over. Lawrence was naked and his prosthesis was still where he’d left it by his bed. Somehow he’d allowed himself to be caught utterly defenseless, again. He peered out pathetically through the frosted, water-spattered glass, but couldn’t see any dark shapes moving around inside the bathroom.
Lawrence reached out with shaking fingers and turned the water off. He used the rail he’d installed inside the shower to lever himself up off the chair and reached out to grab his robe off the towel rail. (If he was going to die or be kidnapped, he at least wanted to be wearing something.) When he peered out cautiously from behind the door, he saw the message written on the mirror immediately.
COME BACK
It looked as though someone had dragged a finger through the misted water droplets to write it, but it may as well have been written in blood given the reaction it triggered. Lawrence’s muscles sagged in shock and he fell, tailbone hitting the floor of the shower. The pain gave his rational mind something to cling to, and after a few deep breaths he gritted his teeth in fury, hauling himself out of the shower and grabbing his crutch.
“We had a deal!” he roared, storming out of the bathroom as fast as he was able, eyes roving around madly. “I held up my end! I have done everything that you asked. You do not get to pull this shit on me.”
No reply. There was seemingly no one in his apartment. No pig masks leering out from the pockets of darkness. No prick of a needle in Lawrence’s neck.
Just a soft, wet, padding sound.
He looked around slowly, heart pounding, throat full of rage… and then he almost fell down again. Fortunately, this time the shock turned his muscles rigid and froze him in place on the spot.
There was a wet footprint from a bare foot on the sleek wooden floor outside the bathroom. A right foot.
Lawrence didn’t have a right foot any more.
When the second footprint appeared out of nowhere in front of it, Lawrence started to feel dizzy. He leaned heavily on his crutch and watched more wet footprints materialize out of nowhere, leading away from the bathroom and towards the kitchen. He followed them in a daze, no longer in control of his body.
The footprints stopped in front of the fridge. There was something written on it, but Lawrence didn’t even have time to read it before two more footprints appeared.
They were turned away from the fridge now, the toes pointing right at him.
“Oh Jesus,” Lawrence said in a faint, quivering voice.
Two more footprints, stepping closer.
Then, a whisper on the air. But not from in front of him. It was coming from behind him.
There was nothing Lawrence wanted less in the world at that moment than to turn around and look at the source of the whisper. But his head turned anyway, craning to see over his own hunched shoulder.
Adam was standing on the other side of the kitchen. His shirt was drenched in blood. His face was masked with blood. He stank of blood, and the stench filled Lawrence’s lungs like swamp water. One of Adam’s eyes was gone, but the one that remained glared across the kitchen, gleaming and bright, pinning Lawrence in place.
Adam’s jaw unhinged on one side with a wet popping crunch, his mouth falling open crookedly, and Lawrence heard a voice inside his own head that ratcheted up to a scream.
Come back. Come back!
COME BACK!!
Chapter Text
Elise opened her eyes with a gasp that rasped its way painfully out of her throat. One hand flew up to touch her neck and then flinched away from where it felt bruised and swollen. There were spots dancing in front of her vision and her head seemed to be full of cotton wool. It was clear that something had happened to her body while she was away from it, and the idea filled Elise with revulsion.
Adam was back. He was huddled next to her against the fake wall, his face turned away and his shoulders shaking. The darkness-defying illumination that had made him so clearly visible when Elise first met him had dimmed dramatically. Now he seemed to fade into his surroundings and Elise could almost lose sight of him if she didn’t concentrate hard enough.
“Adam?” she whispered, wincing as her injured voicebox protested the exertion.
He stiffened, glanced over at her, and then sagged in relief. “Oh thank god,” he whimpered. “You’re back.”
“What happened?”
Adam had his head buried in his arms, which rested on his knees, but he lifted it a little to peer at her with one fearful eye. “There was a woman,” he whispered. “Dead, like me, but strong, and angry. She had her hands around your throat. She was trying to kill you.”
A cold, violent shiver wracked Elise’s body. “Pale face? Black wedding dress?” she guessed.
Adam’s eye widened and he nodded his head inside the cradle of his arms. “You know that bitch?”
“Oh yes. She’s been after me for some time now.” And one day she’s going to kill me, she thought, but decided not to burden Adam with that part. She peered at him in concern. “What happened to you?”
Adam shrank from her gaze. “I pulled her off you. I managed to keep her away from you, for a while, but she went crazy, she just kept tearing at me. She was ripping me apart.” His voice shook. “I didn’t think that was possible. I didn’t think I could get hurt any more.”
Elise took a moment to process that information: The enormity of Adam standing over her body, fighting to keep her from harm, sacrificing the little fragile pieces of himself he had left. She gently laid her hand on his forearm.
“Adam, sweetheart? Look at me.”
For a few seconds, he didn’t move. Then, reluctantly, he lifted his head, keeping his eye downcast. Eye, singular, because the other one was gone. There were deep trenches raked into the skin of his face – claw marks – and one claw had apparently snagged his protruding eyeball and ripped it out. One of his ears was gone too. His jaw hung at an angle, mouth unable to completely close, and beneath it Elise could just about make out dark marks on his neck.
Though Adam was covered in blood, his hair matted down with it, his wounds weren’t actively bleeding. They looked more like the result of rapid decomposition. His clothes appeared tattered and moth-eaten now where they hadn’t before, and hung off a thinner, more angular frame. Elise wasn’t sure how much of this change had been wrought by his earlier breakdown and how much had been inflicted upon him by the bride in black. All she knew was that Adam’s spirit had remained intact for months in that basement and now, within a few hours of deciding to help her, he looked like this.
“I’m sorry about earlier,” he mumbled. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you. I shouldn’t have left. I’m just a fuck-up, I guess.”
His whole body was a sooty gray now, blurring into the wall behind him. He was fading away to nothing. Soon, those bones in the bathtub would be all that was left of him.
No, Elise thought fiercely.
“Oh honey, come here,” she said aloud, holding her arms out to him.
Adam looked up at her fleetingly, surprised, his expression not unlike the guilty-dog expression Warren wore when he’d been caught chewing the furniture. Slowly, he reached out in kind, and Elise pulled him into a tight hug. She rested her own face against the ruined side of his, and closed her eyes, and thought about what Adam had looked like when she first met him. Bright and angry and whole. The contact was sapping what little energy she had left, but Elise let it happen, and as she did she caught flashes of Adam’s life in the backwash.
…A little yellow dog playing in a front yard, spotting a cat and giving chase, both of them going under the wheels of a truck…
…A young boy with scruffy hair, crying into his knees on his bedroom floor, his body tightly curled. A boy the same age, with neater hair, tentatively approaching and wrapping an arm around him. Adam shoving him away so hard that he falls and hits his head on the bedpost. A big gasp of air, then deafening childish wails…
…The clatter of wheels on concrete at a skate park, a mean-eyed boy with dark hair calling him a homophobic slur, then giving him a cigarette, leaning in to light the tip of it with his own. Adam’s eyes saucer-wide, shirt quivering from the pounding of his heart…
…A classroom, a frightened teacher, Adam being hauled out of the door kicking and screaming, his face a mask of rage…
…A silent dinner table, Adam slumped and ignoring his food, a boy with glasses sitting opposite him, shoulders hunched, wolfing down his mashed potatoes as if doing so will somehow prevent the coming fight…
…Adam on someone’s parents’ bed at a house party, losing his virginity to a girl he doesn’t know, his friends listening at the door and jeering…
…Slamming his way out of the house with a ragged backpack in one hand and a skateboard in the other, ignoring the yells from behind him…
…Waking up in a hospital bed after having his stomach pumped, getting discharged and taking the bus home alone…
…Wrapping his hands around his first camera, bought from a pawn shop, looking at the world through a viewfinder to try and make sense of it…
The flashes came faster now, Adam’s life zipping by, as lives tend to do after reaching adulthood.
…Adam wrapping his arms around a girl at a concert and murmuring in her ear… clumsily making out with a guy on a ragged couch… snapping photo after photo after photo… the flash of the mugshot camera at a police station… a room bathed in red light… a screaming fight… a plate smashing against a wall… his mother weeping over Christmas dinner… standing on a high bridge, staring down at the dark, churning water… a cat lapping milk from a dish… a man with dark hair putting Adam in a headlock… a hand with a wad of bills… a parking lot… a pig mask…
…Water covering Adam’s face… an unbreakable chain… the brutality of the bullet in his shoulder… blood on porcelain, screaming rage…
…Darkness… silence… a whisper in his ear… plastic straining over his face…
Elise felt Adam die, and as she did so she felt death pulling at her as well. She couldn’t hold on to him any longer. She gripped his shoulders and gently pushed him away, and as his face came into view again it was pale and shocked, but perfectly intact. No shattered eye socket, no drooping jaw, no missing ear, no blood. Just Adam.
Amanda’s watch chimed with a reminder that it was time for John’s meds, though she hardly needed it. She’d been glancing at her watch for the past hour, waiting for the chime and for a blessed excuse to stop staring at the useless, empty monitors. After seeing Adam’s face on the dead one, watching the screens had felt like being trapped in a horror movie, waiting for the jump scare.
With practiced hands she assembled the collections of steroids, painkillers, anti-nausea medications that were now a routine part of her day. One upside to her history of addiction was that she was well-practiced at finding a vein. Even with John’s shrunken, fragile veins, she could administer an IV without leaving a bruise. He had praised her for skill, once, when she first started taking care of him, and she had floated on the euphoria of that praise for days afterwards. Amanda was useful to him. He needed her. He…
He was lying on the floor.
Amanda almost dropped the box of medications. For a single, awful moment the thought crossed her mind with absolute certainty: John is dead. And to her shame, amid the waves of unbearable grief there was also an undeniable feeling of… relief.
Then he groaned and turned his head. “Jill?” he wheezed faintly.
It was a stab in the heart, but at least it brought Amanda back down to earth. She rushed over to him, placing the box carefully beside him, pillowing his head in her hand, feeling the thinning strands of his hair between her fingers.
John peered at her, blinked. “Amanda,” he corrected, his tone utterly neutral. None of the longing and hope that had been in it when he said the other name. She felt his wasted muscles flex as he strained to sit up.
“Woah, take it easy,” she whispered, helping him to an upright position but placing a hand on his chest to keep him there. “Did you fall? Did you hit your head?”
“I lay down so that I wouldn’t fall and hit my head,” John said, a little defensively. “Just … got dizzy for a moment.”
His voice tells her that he’s hiding something, but Amanda knew better than to press him on it. She helped him into a chair and prepared to administer his meds. When she saw the bruises on his hand, it hit her like a gut punch, making her gasp. “What happened?”
John didn’t meet her eyes, just looked across the room listlessly. He was covering it well, but he seemed shaken in a way that Amanda had never seen before.
“Any sign of her on the monitors?” he asked at last.
Amanda shook her head bitterly. “She should have just faced the traps,” she sneered. “That’s the only way out. All the other entry points are blocked from the outside. She’ll die in those tunnels.”
“Hmm.” John grimaced as the last vial was injected into his bloodstream. “I need to lie down again.”
This was new. He’d never napped through a test before. Amanda stared at him uncertainly, but didn’t want to argue. If he was willing to rest, he should rest. And he was clearly right about needing it, because he was asleep within minutes of her easing him down onto the pillows.
Reluctantly, Amanda began to make her way back to the monitors, but she was interrupted by a sharp trilling. Looking back anxiously at John’s sleeping form, she hurried to find the source, darting around the workshop like a bloodhound and eventually tracking the trilling to the pocket of John’s cloak. She hesitated for only a moment, glancing at the name on the screen and gritting her teeth, before flipping the phone open to answer it.
“He’s sleeping,” she said curtly.
A moment of silence, underscored by the faint sounds of traffic. Then: “What’s at 7002 Shaw Street?”
Amanda froze, a sensation of ice trickling down her spine. “What?” she whispered.
No reply. A distant horn. Lawrence was clearly in his car, driving somewhere.
Amanda lost patience with him, demanding, “Who gave you that address?”
Another aggravating pause. Then, smugly: “So it is an address. Thank you. I wasn’t entirely sure.”
She should have killed him when she had the chance. Rubbed some shit into his festering leg wound to turn it septic. Administered an ‘accidental’ overdose of morphine. Put an air bubble in his IV line. Amanda had considered all of these things when she was forced to play nurse to Dr. Lawrence Gordon, who had failed his test, and didn’t even deserve to live.
Amanda had come closest to doing it the night she put Adam out of his misery. She had staggered back to the workshop with Adam’s blood still warm and sticky on her shirt, his pathetic stifled moans still echoing in her ears, and found Lawrence flopping his arm around and deliriously whimpering for water. A big blond baby who still had no idea how lucky he was to be alive. Unchanged. Ungrateful. He’d been sick all over his pillow, and as Amanda changed it for a fresh one she had paused for a moment, rested the new pillow on his face and started to press down. But then Lawrence had jerked and let loose a muffled wail that sounded so much like Adam that Amanda had recoiled, letting the pillow drop to the floor, and fled to her own bed.
Looking back, she wishes she’d had just a little more steel in her spine that night. But at least one thing had come out of Amanda’s time spent keeping Lawrence alive: she knew which buttons to press. “There’s nothing for you at that address,” she snapped. “Toe the fucking line, Dr. Gordon. Unless you want little Diana to play another game.”
“You people crossed the line first,” Lawrence spat. “I played by the rules, on the condition that myself and my family would be left alone. But somebody broke into my apartment tonight, and they left that address for me to find.”
Hoffman, Amanda thought immediately. She hadn’t thought Hoffman even knew about John’s arrangement with the doctor, but he could be an annoyingly effective detective. She had no idea what we was up to, giving Lawrence the address of that house, but she knew it couldn’t be anything good.
“There’s nothing for you there,” she repeated, trying to sound dismissive through gritted teeth. “It’s just an empty house.”
“Then I guess there’s no harm in me looking, is there?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. The phone went silent, and when Amanda looked at the screen it said CALL ENDED. It took all her self-restraint not to throw the phone across the room. She closed it and put it back in John’s pocket, and then leaned against a countertop, thinking. The house was empty. Too empty, in fact. Hoffman had cleared it of every stick of furniture… with the exception of the safe covering the trapdoor. Which meant that the safe would be all the more conspicuous for having been left behind.
Suddenly, it all made sense. Hoffman had told Elise how to cheat the first trap, and told her about the false wall outside. Then he’d gone to Lawrence’s place to give him the address of the house so he’d go there and set the old lady free. Hoffman had sabotaged this trap, and he was going to frame Lawrence for the sabotage.
Despite her anger, Amanda felt a thrill of vindication. She was the only disciple that was truly committed to John’s legacy. She was the only one he could trust.
And she was going to prove it.
Adam touched his own face cautiously, feeling around his eye socket. He had an expression of awe and fear that was similar to how he’d looked after seeing Elise banish the big bully ghost. This time, though, it dissolved into concern as Elise slumped back against the wall, dark spots in her vision.
“Elise?” Adam whispered.
She waved a hand in a way that was meant to be reassuring, but her inability to form words undermined the effect somewhat. She could see the cogs in Adam’s head turning as he put the pieces together, and when it all clicked, he pulled back in alarm.
“That hurt you,” he said in a small, devastated voice. “Fixing me like that, it hurt you. Hurt you for real!”
Elise attempted a smile, and then some words. “Interacting with the dead… it always takes a piece of me. It’s alright.”
“It’s not alright!” Adam exclaimed, instinctively reaching out to her, and then snatching his hand back in horror. “Jesus fucking Christ, Elise, that is not alright. You shouldn’t have done that. I’m not worth it, I’m already dead, I’m nothing…”
“You’re something, Adam,” Elise said, her head still bleary. She tried again. “You’re someone. And you’re still here.” Then, selfishly, she admitted: “I don’t want to be alone.”
Adam hardly seemed to hear her. He was sitting cross-legged, his head in his hands, mumbling to himself. She catches snippets of cursing and self-recrimination, and then a fragment of a sentence: “...wasn’t even supposed to exist in the first place.”
That caught her attention. “What do you mean, Adam?" she pressed. "What do you mean you weren’t supposed to exist?”
“I was an accident.”
Elise suppressed a dismissive snort. “You mean your parents didn’t plan on having you? Unplanned pregnancies happen all the time, Adam. I’m pretty sure I was… it doesn’t mean those people shouldn’t exist, that’s just silly.”
He shook his head. “The pregnancy wasn’t unplanned. Just me. My parents only wanted one kid. But the egg broke, so when my brother was born, I slithered out after him. And suddenly they had a whole extra kid to deal with that they didn’t want, and couldn’t afford.” Adam sounded like he was reciting something he’d been told many times. “They were planning to move to a bigger place, for the baby. But everything was twice as expensive because of me, so they got stuck in the same tiny house, which was even tinier ‘cause now they had two kids taking up space. I started ruining my parents’ lives from day one.”
Once again, Elise had to use considerably willpower to refrain from pointing out all the nonsense of that logic. After all, it was clear that it wasn’t Adam’s logic. As gently as possible, she asked, “What about your brother?”
“What about him?”
“Did he ruin their lives too?”
Adam scoffed. “Perfect little Stevie? He could never ruin anything. He was the good twin. I was the fuck-up.” His bitterness at least seemed to chase some of the self-pity away. “Though I heard he dropped out of college and moved back into our old room and started spending all his time on the internet. So I guess he wasn’t perfect after all.”
“None of us are,” Elise responded, still exercising considerable restraint. She didn’t have the energy or the qualifications to unpack everything Adam had just said. Instead, she offered, “I haven’t spoken to my brother in a long time.”
He took an interest in that. “How long?”
Elise had to think about the answer, and was shocked by it when she reached it. “Oh, about forty years.”
“Fuck.” Adam’s eyebrows shot up. “You win.”
She laughed weakly. She tried to picture Christian’s face, the last time she had seen him, and was alarmed to realize that she couldn’t even remember it. She’d run away from home without a family photo, and since then she’d put a lot of effort into not thinking about her family.
“You should call him, if- when you get out of here,” Adam said quietly. “Family’s important. Even when your family kind of sucks.” His voice cracked on the next words. “I shoulda tried harder, with Steve. But I just kept pushing him away. And my mom, she…” He choked entirely, unable to finish the sentence. He tried again. “I really wanted my mom. At the end. Just wanted my mom to bring me a glass of cold water, like she used to when I was sick.”
Tears pricked Elise’s eyes. She blinked, and they spilled onto her cheeks. “Perhaps I can talk to her, if I get out of here,” she suggested. “Would she be open to that, do you think?”
Adam shook his head violently. “No, no way. Even if she was, my dad…” She shook his head again. “No, that’s a bad idea.” He paused, considering. “You could… You could talk to Steve. He believes in all that ghost stuff. He has since we were kids." Adam's gaze drifted as his attention became fixed on the past. "He used to wake me up at night, all angry, telling me to stop whispering. And I’d tell him I wasn’t whispering. And then I’d be trying to get back to sleep and he’d start up again. ‘Adam, shut up!’ One night we argued about it so much that we woke Dad up and he came in and started smacking the shit out of me.”
Elise felt a tightening sensation inside her chest. She longed to reach out and touch Adam, to comfort him, but didn’t dare to do so when she was still so weak.
Adam continued blithely. “Anyway, I took off in my PJs and bare feet. Ended up sleeping in this old abandoned gas station where me and my friends would go to smoke pot. And when I came back in the morning, my brother was at the breakfast table looking all pale and scared. I figured it was because of Dad. But Steve never blamed me for the whispering again, and after that he started bringing home all these library books about ghosts. I caught him using a homemade spirit board once and ripped the shit out of him for it.” Adam groaned suddenly. “He’s gonna be so smug when he finds out I’m a ghost now. He’s gonna fire up that old spirit board just to say ‘I told you so.’”
Elise chuckled, though privately they both knew that smugness was an unlikely reaction to learning that one’s twin brother had died such an awful death.
The vague plans for what Elise would do if she escaped brought her attention back to the escape at hand. “I reached out to your doctor friend.”
Adam’s eyes widened. “Lawrence. That’s who you were talking to? I only caught flashes, I was kind of preoccupied. So he’s alive?”
“Alive and well,” Elise confirmed, a little tersely. She could see Adam’s eyes flitting as he replayed the panicked moments before she’d returned to her body.
“I saw… a fancy apartment. Big expensive kitchen. He… had a cane. He’s not a prisoner?”
“Not in any obvious way,” Elise said, carefully.
To her surprise, Adam didn’t seem particularly surprised. “That motherfucker,” he scoffed. “Sorry,” he added hastily, even though Elise herself had used the same word not so long ago. “Just… what a fucking weasel. ‘I wouldn’t lie to you’ my ass. He got out and didn’t look back. Should have known I couldn’t trust him. I mean, the son of a bitch got free and the first thing he did was shoot me.”
Elise sighed. “Well, I hope he’s a better man than he seems, because he’s my last hope now.” She explained how she’d found the staircase and the trapdoor, how she’d obtained the address of the house, and passed it on to Lawrence.
“God damn,” Adam said, impressed. “You got a lot done while I was having my little freakout. Maybe I should leave you alone more often.”
“Please don’t,” Elise pleaded, anxious even though he was clearly joking. “You actually showed up just at the right time. If he saw you – and I think he did – it could be the push he needs to look for the house.”
“So…” Adam looked thoughtful. “You should probably be under that trapdoor when he gets there, right?”
Ugh. “Right,” Elise admitted miserably.
He grinned at her. “Feel up to a walk?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Atta girl. Let’s go.”
Chapter Text
Making her way back down those wretched tunnels, Elise wished it was possible to detach her mind from her body without collapsing to the ground like a marionette with its strings cut. Unfortunately she had to be present for every stubbed toe and scraped heel. She felt acute exhaustion sinking into her bones as she fought, step by painful step, for every inch of progress. Adam hovered nearby, making aborted movements closer to her with the intention of helping, only to remember that his touch would only weaken her further, and back off again. He looked, if possible, even more miserable than Elise felt.
Her strength faltered. She paused, slumping against a wall, and Adam walked on for several more steps before realizing he was leaving her behind.
“Hey, no, come on!” he prompted, hurrying to her side with a panicked expression. “You can’t give up now. You’re so close to getting out.”
“Just need to catch my breath,” Elise assured him, but even as she said it she felt her knees start to buckle.
Adam bit his lip, glanced over his shoulder down the tunnel. “You got kids?” he asked Elise, turning back to her.
She shook her head wearily.
“You have a husband though, right?” he persisted, glancing down at her ring.
“Jack.” Was he looking for her? Would her disappearance stir him to shake off the fog that had been consuming him lately? Or would he just sink further into it?
“Anyone else? Anyone who needs you out there?”
A face came to Elise’s mind unbidden, and she smiled despite the circumstances. “Warren. My dog.”
“Warren, right.” Adam’s face tightened for a moment, and when he spoke again his voice sounded a little thicker. “He’s gotta be wondering where you are, huh?”
Elise eyed him balefully and Adam grinned, knowing he’d been caught out in his manipulation. Annoyingly, it still worked. She heaved herself upright and put one foot in front of the other, then did it again, and again, picturing the way Warren’s fluffy tail would wave like a flag, long tassels of fur swaying gracefully, every time she got home. Pictured the way Jack would smile behind his beard, catching her eye and sharing a private joke. She remembered the warm, solid feeling of Jack's hand in hers, and the way he would stroke her thumb absent-mindedly with his own.
“Adam,” Elise said, her voice wavering. “Would you hold my hand?”
He peered at her skittishly. “Are you sure? You said…”
“I know what I said,” she interrupted tersely. “But I’ve had a really bad day.”
A few more exhausting steps, and then she felt cool fingers touching her wrist, skating down into her palm, then interlocking with her own fingers. It was different to how Jack held her hand, and the blood in her fingers soon began to cool until they tingled from the slowing circulation, but it was an anchor all the same. Through the contact she could feel Adam’s fierce, unshakable determination that Elise wasn’t going to die down here, and osmosis pulled that determination into the parts of her that had been beginning to give up hope.
And maybe Adam got a little something from her in return, because after a few minutes she felt him slowly start to rub his thumb against hers.
Lawrence parked his car around the corner from 7002 Shaw Street, just in case any of John’s other lackeys were watching the address. He approached the house cautiously, his movements on the prosthesis still somewhat awkward and stiff, even with the assistance of his cane. It was in a bad neighborhood, and many of the houses on the street seemed to be abandoned. 7002, too, looked shabby and nondescript from the outside, but there seemed to be some kind of extra malevolence in its dark windows.
Not for the first time, Lawrence considered just turning back and going home. For all he knew, this was some fresh hellish test that John had concocted, and he was walking into another elaborate trap. Perhaps he’d imagined the impossible things he’d seen in his apartment.
But if that were true, it would mean that Lawrence was going mad. And he refused to accept that. There was an explanation for all of this, and the explanation was inside 7002 Shaw Street.
Taking care not to wake John, Amanda had removed the gun from the safe. She’d always thought it was kind of funny that, in a workshop full of machines of death, John insisted upon safe storage of firearms. He wouldn’t be happy about her using it, if it came down to that. John liked to draw a sharp line between what they did and outright murder. But to Amanda, that line was starting to look a little blurry.
Elise sat on the steps beneath the trapdoor, Adam close by her side and still holding her hand. She let her head loll onto the cool round of his shoulder, feeling the dampness in the fabric of his shirt and wondering idly if it was water, blood, or both.
“Hey,” he murmured. “You sure it’s a good idea for you to be sitting so close like this?”
“Oh, I’m sure that it’s not,” she replied drily. “But it’s nice to have someone to lean on.”
He turned his face away for a moment, hiding whatever emotion was on it. Then he brought it back around to rest gently against hers, squeezing her hand tightly.
After another few minutes had passed, there was a scraping noise overhead. Adam angled his face upwards.
“Did you hear that?” he whispered, in a voice straining against hope.
Footsteps. Uneven footsteps, one heavier than the other, the sound of them punctuated by a soft tapping noise.
Elise eased away from Adam and began crawling up the steps, gravity fighting her every inch of the way. She reached the trapdoor and slapped at it weakly. “Hey!” she called, her voice raspy from communicating only in whispers for the last few hours. “Help me, I’m down here!” She curled her hand into a fist and knocked on the slightly damp wood. But she could tell the sound wasn’t travelling far, instead being absorbed by the heavy metal safe that was weighing down the trapdoor.
The footsteps weren’t coming any closer. In fact, it sounded like they were getting farther away.
“Hey!” Another painful rap of her knuckles. Elise’s voice sounded so wretchedly quiet, but she couldn’t yell any louder. It was like trying to call out inside a nightmare. “Please, help me!” It was no use. She’d managed to get Lawrence here, but she wasn’t strong enough to tell him how to find her. He was going to find nothing in the house and leave. There was no way…
WHAM.
Elise jumped as a hard object hammered against the wood. The footsteps overhead paused too. She looked over and saw Adam, teeth bared with determination, clutching a loose length of metal pipe. He wound up again and slammed the pipe against the trapdoor so hard that a few splinters flew loose.
The footsteps returned, and now they were rapid, and getting closer. Elise almost wept with relief. Adam turned to her and grinned fiercely. Then, using the renewed strength Elise had given him, he hit the trapdoor with the pipe again, and again.
There was the sound of someone speaking overhead. Elise couldn’t make out the words, but she heard the upward lift of a question in the tone.
“I’m down here!” she croaked, slapping at the trapdoor with her hand. It made almost no noise, but Adam backed it up with more hard thuds from the pipe, until they heard the unmistakable sound of metal grinding against wood overhead. A shaft of light appeared at one edge of the trapdoor, growing longer with each squeaking scrape, the noises punctuated by grunts of effort.
It seemed to take forever, but finally the top of the trapdoor was cleared and Elise heard a muttered, “What the…?”
“Help…” she called out one more time, her voice fading.
A beat of silence. Then a sudden burst of light that was warm and yellow, not cold and blue like the fluorescents in the tunnels. Elise lifted an arm to shield her eyes from the light and the falling dust, but she could see two expensive-looking shoes in front of her.
“Good god!” the voice exclaimed. Then, “Here...”
A hand tucked itself under her elbow and Elise gladly used it as leverage to haul herself up into a familiar-looking room. She blinked in the brighter light until a familiar-looking face came into view. Lawrence’s mouth was hanging open in shock, his blond hair dark and damp at the roots with the effort of moving the safe.
“Good god,” he uttered again. “You’re freezing!” Moving on instinct, he shrugged off his smart grey coat and wrapped it around Elise’s shoulders. “What on earth were you doing down there?” he demanded in a slightly scolding tone.
She mustered up the energy for a glare. “I wasn’t exactly down there by choice,” she retorted.
Lawrence’s gaze went unfocused as he pieced the clues together in his mind. When they formed a picture, he took his hands off the shoulder of the coat and sat down on the floor a little distance apart from her, looking anguished. “You were in a trap,” he hazarded.
Elise nodded wearily.
Lawrence swallowed hard. “And did you… pass your test?”
“I didn’t do the stupid test,” Elise snapped.
He flinched, and then glanced around the room nervously. She realized that he was looking for cameras. “I shouldn’t be here,” he muttered. “Not supposed to interfere…” His gaze came back to her, and Elise got a nasty feeling that Lawrence Gordon was thinking about shoving her back down through the trapdoor.
“Don’t even think about it.” It wasn’t Elise who had spoken, but Adam, who had been crouched behind her and was now leaning forward, glaring at Lawrence furiously. His face crumpled for just a moment like he was about to cry, but then he gritted his teeth and steeled himself before speaking again. “Get her out of here, Lawrence.”
But Elise wasn’t ready to leave just yet. She’d made a promise. “There’s someone else still down there,” she said urgently. “He’s locked up in a cell, I couldn’t get to him, but we need to get him out!”
Lawrence had started shaking his head at some point. “No, no, no,” he was saying. “I can’t. You don’t understand…”
“I understand that you have some kind of deal with John,” Elise interrupted briskly. Lawrence’s eyes swivelled to stare at her, wide and shocked. “But there’s a man dying down there. If you won’t help him, just get me to a phone so I can call the cops. I certainly didn’t make a deal with anyone.”
He had stopped shaking his head, but now Lawrence was just sitting very still, not looking at her, and that was worse. Elise knew the look of a man who was weighing his options.
“Motherfucker,” Adam spat. He laid a hand on Elise’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, I won’t let him hurt you. I’ll Poltergeist the shit out of this place before I let that happen.”
“I’m sorry,” Lawrence whispered miserably. “I shouldn’t have come here. My family…”
“Oh, fuck your family,” Adam snarled. The bare, dusty lightbulb overhead flickered.
But Elise wasn’t prepared to give up on this man just yet. Tentatively, she reached out and covered his hand with hers, feeling some of his fear and turmoil bleed into her the second they made contact. “Lawrence, I know you’re afraid…”
He looked up at her sharply, eyes bulging. “How the hell do you know my name?” he demanded.
“There’s an opportunity here,” Elise persisted. “A chance to do the right thing. There’s a man down there who is still alive. He’s cold and alone, and you can save him.” The words prompted a surge of emotion in Lawrence that echoed in Elise’s mind, so she decided to try something risky. “You couldn’t save Adam, but you can save this man.”
Lawrence wrenched his hand away, his face now a mask of horror and outrage. “Who the fuck are you? How do you know-?”
“You saw him at your apartment, didn’t you?” Elise interrupted. “You saw Adam.”
The doctor seemed to deflate. His voice was hollow as he replied, “Yes, I saw him. I see him all the time.” His gaze drifted to the darkness lurking beneath the trapdoor. “I see him every time I close my eyes to sleep. I see him when I’m awake, too. I see him everywhere.”
The righteous anger on Adam’s face was battling with another emotion, his brow wrinkling and flexing in spasms.
“Do you see him now?” Elise asked, curious. But it was clear, when Lawrence looked up, that he couldn’t see Adam. The specter that had been haunting him existed inside his own mind. Still, she decided to tell him the truth. “He’s here, Lawrence. He’s still here.”
“Yeah,” Adam added, voice high and hurt and shaking. “Yeah, I’m still here. Where you left me, Lawrence. Where you fucking left me.”
The lightbulb flickered again, making a sharp fizzing noise this time. Lawrence looked up at it, then at Elise. His eyes were red with brewing tears.
“I shot him,” he confessed. “I shot Adam. Just in the shoulder. I thought I’d be able to bring someone back to help him, but I couldn’t, I lost so much blood. And… and later, I found out there was no point to what I did. It didn't achieve anything. When I shot him, my family was already safe. I did it for nothing. And when I begged John to spare Adam’s life, he- he told me it was already too late.”
Unseen by Lawrence, Adam hugged his arms tight to his body and lowered his head. He was crying, silent sobs that made his shoulders convulse violently. The air in the room was so thick with grief that Elise could scarcely breathe.
“It’s not too late now,” she managed. “If you were waiting for your shot at redemption, Lawrence, this is it.”
He met her eyes reluctantly. For a moment, Elise was sure he was going to make another excuse about protecting his family and fail this test of morality a second time. But perhaps he saw something in her face that made failing seem like a scarier prospect than whatever Jigsaw had threatened him with, because after a second or two, Lawrence Gordon nodded slowly.
“Alright,” he gasped. He stood up, and reached out a hand to Elise, pulling her to her feet, planting his remaining foot to keep them both balanced. “Alright,” he said again, in a stronger voice, pulling his phone out of his pocket. “I’ll call the cops. And you–” He paused and Elise realized he still didn’t know her name, so she told him. “Elise. Right. You look like you need an ambulance.”
“Eric will probably need one too.”
“Yeah, but he’s not going to get one.”
It wasn’t Lawrence who had spoken. A chill crawled up Elise’s spine as she registered the form of a pointed gun in her peripheral vision. There was a woman with dark, shaggy hair in the room, a twisted smile on her face, a heavy pistol in her hand.
“So Eric’s still alive, huh?” the woman said bitterly. “Of course he fucking is. It’s always a test, all just a fucking game.”
Lawrence let go of Elise’s hand and raised his own hands slowly. “Amanda, please…”
“Only what kind of game is it if everybody gets to fucking cheat?” Amanda barrelled on, the words punctuated with breathless, angry laughter. “With no consequences. Why the fuck should I play by the rules if no one else does? Not even him.”
“Amanda, you don’t have to do this,” Lawrence said in a tone that was grating and patronizing even to Elise’s ears.
The woman – Amanda – grinned. “Oh, I know. I’m done being told what I have to do. Now, here’s what I want to do.”
She shot Lawrence in the chest.
The sound of the gun was deafening. The force of the bullet took the doctor off his feet, sent him crashing to the ground, the cane clattering to the floor.
Elise was frozen in shock, unable to move. Adam was screaming wordlessly. The lightbulb exploded in a shower of tiny glass fragments that crunched under Amanda’s boots as she walked forward, undeterred, and stood over Lawrence’s weakly writhing form and aimed the gun at him again.
“No,” Elise begged, desperation unsticking her throat. “Please, don’t.”
Lawrence stared up at Amanda, his mouth opening and closing silently. His body slumped down, muscles softening in defeat as he realized it was pointless to plead for his life.
“Game over,” said Amanda. And then she shot him in the head.
Chapter Text
Elise was dragged back into consciousness by aches and pains, which was easily her least favorite way to wake up. Her whole body felt like a bag of stones that scraped and ground against each other with every small movement. Easily the most prominent pain on the pile, though, was the throbbing in her head, radiating from a point near her temple. Dried, crusted blood flaked from the side of her face as she grimaced.
Opening her eyes barely made a difference to most of the room, which was soaked in darkness. The only thing Elise could see, across the unseen expanse of tiles, was Lawrence Gordon. He was slumped against a wall, one knee flopped to the side, his other leg outstretched. For a short, sad second Elise dared to hope that he’d somehow survived the bullets. Then she realized his legs were intact, and the foot that had been missing was now locked into a ghostly shackle.
There was someone sitting next to her as well, leaning back against the filthy bathtub. Elise turned her head with a wince and met Adam’s gaze. He tipped her a melancholy smile, and said:
“Hey, babe. Come here often?”
Elise laughed despite the circumstances, or perhaps because of them. What was there left to do but laugh?
“More often than I’d like.”
She shifted her limbs experimentally, and her left leg made a soft clinking noise when she did so. She peered down at it and saw a heavy metal shankle on her ankle, a chain trailing away from it into the darkness.
“Oh,” Elise said faintly. “Am I dead?”
“Not quite,” Adam replied bitterly. “That bitch Amanda pistol-whipped you and dragged you back down here. I tried to stop her but it turns out poltergeisting is actually really hard.” His face twisted. “We were so damn close. We were almost out, Elise.”
He seemed even more cut up about it than she was. Elise reached over and patted his hand with hers. “We were. Thank you for trying, Adam.” She looked across the room at Lawrence and guilt stabbed at her chest. “Doctor Gordon… I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t be down here.”
His lips quirked upwards in a smile that didn’t meet his eyes, and he shrugged. “I never really left.” His gaze fell on something Elise couldn’t see, but presumably he was looking at the withered physical remains of his foot. “I’ve been in a trap ever since I crawled out of that door. Just a bigger trap.”
Adam filled the silence that followed. “Me and Lawrence, we’ve, uh, had a chance to talk.”
“There was some yelling too,” Lawrence supplied.
“Right. And I maybe might have thrown some stuff. But once we hashed it all out, we ended up agreeing that the only person we should be blaming is the asshole who put us down here.”
Lawrence chuckled, looking at them across the room with a lopsided grin. “You know what I realized?” Without waiting for any guesses, he continued. “My family is safe now. All this time I’ve been worrying about keeping them safe, the only reason they were still in danger was me. John’s been holding them over me all this time, threatening to hurt them if I stepped out of line. But now that I’m dead, they’re free.” His face fell, then, and he surveyed Adam guiltily. “I should have just stayed here with you."
“Nah,” Adam replied. “You getting out of here gave both of us our best shot at survival. Even if it didn’t work out, at least you tried. That matters, I think.” His face crumpled. “I hope.”
“It matters,” Elise concurred earnestly. “I think maybe it matters more than anything else.”
For some long minutes, none of them spoke. Elise closed her eyes. She could feel her body slumping down lower against the bathtub. Her shirt was plastered to her skin by the blood that had poured from her head wound. The cold had seeped into her very bones.
“Elise?” Adam whispered, his voice choked. “Are you…?”
“Not quite,” she replied, opening her eyes again and smiling up at him wryly. “But not long now, I think.”
Adam looked up at the door. “Maybe someone will come,” he said, but without much hope.
“Maybe,” Elise conceded. But probably not, she thought.
Adam sniffed and swiped his arm across his eyes briskly, then continued in a steelier voice. “If they don’t, though, you won’t be alone. Me and Lawrence, we’re going to be right here with you, the whole time.”
“That’s nice,” Elise said faintly. “It always was a comfort… knowing that there’s something after.”
She was too exhausted to stay sitting up, so she carefully tipped herself over onto her side, drawing her knees up and bringing her head to rest on the pleasantly cool pillow of Adam’s leg. She felt his hand touch her shoulder and then squeeze reassuringly. Elise closed her eyes, but was prompted to open them again moments later by the clinking and scraping sound of metal on tile.
Lawrence was crossing the bathroom – still shackled, but apparently no longer bound to his corner. He settled down on the floor next to Adam, and Elise heard the shuffle of him draping an arm around Adam’s back, sensed him squeezing Adam’s shoulder in turn. The younger man stifled a noise at the contact.
It would have been nice to just drift away then. Well, not nice, but the best Elise could hope for under the circumstances. Unfortunately, like Adam had before her, she soon realized that dying from thirst, starvation, and non-critical injuries was an agonizingly slow process. Hours passed, shivering on that filthy bathroom floor, Adam rubbing her back in circles to offer what small comfort he could. She couldn’t even fall asleep, no matter how much she desperately wanted to.
“Oh fuck this,” Elise said abruptly, feeling Adam jump and hearing Lawrence’s shocked huff of laughter. She rolled over onto her back, her head still in Adam’s lap but now looking up at the two of them. “I need a break,” she declared. “You boys mind watching over my body while I stretch my legs?”
“I don’t understand…” Lawrence said, befuddled.
“You’ll see,” Adam replied cryptically, grinning down at Elise. “It’s actually pretty fucking cool. Go on, Elise. Don’t sweat it. If your old friend shows up again, I’ll pop the bitch.”
“Chivalry lives,” Elise quipped deliriously. “Well, in a manner of speaking...”
She let her spirit drift away from her body in the darkness. It was a lot easier than usual, perhaps a sign that she had already been coming loose anyway. As she shook off her mortal form like a lobster shedding its shell, she left her pain and hunger and thirst behind with it. It was an enormous relief, like taking off an overly-tight bra at the end of a long day.
She opened her eyes and quickly shuttered her lids down to a squint as she discovered the bathroom was now flooded with fluorescent light. Peering into the expanse of white tiles, she spotted Lawrence’s mop of blond hair.
“Dr. Gordon?” Elise prompted.
There was no reply, and as her vision adjusted she realized he was lying face down on the floor, apparently unconscious. A noise from behind her caught her attention and Elise turned to see Adam in a similar state, lying face-up next to the bathtub. Only this wasn’t quite the Adam she’d seen just moments before. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt over his white T-shirt now, and there was more color in his face. His chest was rising and falling slowly with his breaths.
Interesting, Elise thought. The Further existed outside of ordinary time, and this wasn’t the first time that she had wandered into the past. Usually it was because some ghost in the vicinity was tied to that particular point in time, agonizing over the what-ifs and if-onlys. With Adam and Lawrence as her guardians, perhaps it was no surprise that Elise had found herself back here – in the last moments before they woke up and their nightmare began.
She approached Adam’s slumbering body, tears pricking her eyes as she observed the softness of his face in sleep. Elise had never had children of her own, nor particularly wanted any, but Adam was around the age that her son might have been if she’d had one. Still just a kid, really. And now he was never going to get any older.
Elise kneeled down beside Adam’s limp body and reached out tentatively to touch his hand, only to find it yanked away from her. She started, and tensed up even more when she looked up into the face of the woman who had killed Lawrence. Amanda had her arms locked under Adam’s armpits and was dragging him up and into the tub, which was already filling with water. This wasn’t the arrogant, hardened woman Elise had seen before, though. This Amanda’s face was a picture of misery: eye sockets blackened with smeared makeup, hair sheared short, guilt and pity contorting her face. For a moment, before she pulled Adam into the tub, she buried her face in his hair and whispered, so quietly that Elise almost couldn’t hear it: “I’m so sorry.”
Amanda was trying not to be overheard. There was someone else in the room. Elise could feel his presence pricking up the hairs on the back of her neck: a bitter, twisted, blackened aura. But she ignored him, refusing to turn around. Jigsaw wasn’t a monster worthy of her attention.
Adam slid into the rising water and Elise followed him, reaching out to touch his hand even though he couldn’t feel it. She looked wretchedly at his relaxed, oblivious face, thinking about what lay ahead for him. Not just an agonizing end to his life, but the torment that would follow: months of silence and loneliness; months with no company but corpses – his own among them.
Suddenly it was all too much to bear. Elise bowed her head and wept, ghostly tears mingling with the water that churned from the tap. She cried for Adam, for his suffering, for the old man he’d never get to be. She cried for Lawrence Gordon, a father who wouldn’t get to watch his daughter grow up. She cried for Eric Matthews, still locked in that cell, waiting in vain for a promised rescue that would never come. Lastly she cried for herself, and for Jack, and for Warren, who even now was probably lying on the hallway rug, head on his paws, watching the door and waiting for her to come home.
Darkness abruptly fell over the room. Elise blinked dazedly and found that Amanda was gone, having apparently shut the lights off on her way out. But there was still one light source in the room, faintly illuminating Adam’s face as he slipped lower into the water. The strange blue light drifted over his chest, and Elise at first mistook it for something of a supernatural source, but when she looked closer she realized that it was a glowing keychain, with a small key attached.
Elise puzzled over the key as small eddies in the water carried it over Adam’s submerged body. Had he had a key all along? Did it unlock the shackle at his ankle? If so, why hadn’t he used it? She strained to recall the flashes of Adam’s last days that she’d seen. He had woken with water covering his face, panicked, thrashed… then, the sound of draining water.
The key slid down the side of Adam’s chest, threatening to disappear beneath his body. Elise reached out instinctively and exerted a little control over the water in the tub, dragging the key back to nestle on his sternum.
A strange, scandalous thrill shot through her. She’d affected the living world from the Further before, but only ever the present. Her glimpses of the past and future had been too brief to try to interfere in any way. She hadn’t even thought it was possible. Some things were surely fixed, and the past would certainly be one of them.
On the other hand, Elise thought. Fuck it!
She was dying anyway. Why not test the boundaries of the Further one last time while she still had the strength to do so, and nothing left to lose?
Elise stirred her not-quite-there hand in the water around the key, coaxing it over Adam’s chest and drawing it towards the breast pocket on his shirt. It was a slow process, and Adam was slipping further and further down into the water throughout. Behind her, Elise could hear Lawrence waking up and starting to call out in panic, but she remained focused on the task at hand.
The water lapped at Adam’s mouth, sliding over his upper lip towards his nose.
Elise gritted her teeth and flexed something inside of her that made her feel thin and faint, but which let her firmly grasp the key in her ghostly fingers. She shoved it into his pocket and, for good measure, buttoned the pocket securely.
The water covered Adam’s face completely now. He began to twitch.
Elise looked down at her fingers and saw through them to the water below. She wondered if, back in the present, her body had already died. She’d never felt so insubstantial before. Elise wasn’t sure what became of spirits who simply thinned out and disintegrated in the Further. Unlike many aspects of the afterlife, it was a mystery to her. But instead of being afraid, she found that she was rather excited to venture into the truly unknown.
Adam wriggled under the water. Elise leaned down and kissed him on the forehead, and whispered, “Good luck, honey.”
He shot up out of the water in such a way that he would have headbutted her if she was still there. But Elise was already gone.
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Hacchi_Macchi on Chapter 1 Sun 04 May 2025 09:12PM UTC
Last Edited Sun 04 May 2025 09:13PM UTC
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polarized_light on Chapter 1 Mon 12 May 2025 03:32AM UTC
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EuXaris on Chapter 2 Tue 01 Apr 2025 09:06AM UTC
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ItsSnailinTime on Chapter 3 Sun 27 Apr 2025 11:49PM UTC
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Hacchi_Macchi on Chapter 3 Sun 04 May 2025 09:50PM UTC
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polarized_light on Chapter 3 Mon 12 May 2025 03:43AM UTC
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Funnylilfella on Chapter 3 Tue 27 May 2025 04:03AM UTC
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infinite_loop_of_silliness on Chapter 3 Fri 13 Jun 2025 10:06AM UTC
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polarized_light on Chapter 4 Thu 29 May 2025 01:03AM UTC
Last Edited Thu 29 May 2025 03:03AM UTC
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polarized_light on Chapter 5 Tue 03 Jun 2025 03:14AM UTC
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IAmNotLonelyWhenIAmAlone on Chapter 5 Wed 04 Jun 2025 01:50AM UTC
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mruczec on Chapter 5 Wed 04 Jun 2025 05:53AM UTC
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LilMiss_Sugar on Chapter 5 Sat 07 Jun 2025 05:18AM UTC
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IAmNotLonelyWhenIAmAlone on Chapter 6 Sun 15 Jun 2025 06:16AM UTC
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polarized_light on Chapter 6 Thu 19 Jun 2025 07:58AM UTC
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polarized_light on Chapter 7 Thu 26 Jun 2025 06:14AM UTC
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Funnylilfella on Chapter 7 Fri 27 Jun 2025 04:06AM UTC
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mruczec on Chapter 7 Sun 29 Jun 2025 02:29AM UTC
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IAmNotLonelyWhenIAmAlone on Chapter 8 Sun 03 Aug 2025 11:00AM UTC
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polarized_light on Chapter 8 Mon 04 Aug 2025 02:52AM UTC
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