Jeremy Robinson - MirrorWorld

But this time, no one is interested in my statue-of-David impersonation. They can see I’m holding something, and I can feel it, still struggling to escape.

“Fair warning,” I say. “There is a small Dread in my hands. I think only one of you should take a look, just in case. Would be a shame if all of you went mental at the same time.”

“Don’t look at me,” Dearborn says, already peeking through his fingers.

“I’ll do it,” Winters says, while she and Katzman lay Mike on the floor.

“Not a chance,” Katzman says. “It’s my job to—”

“You’ve been exposed too many times already,” Winters argues. “I’m your shrink, remember? I know how hard the strain is, and I know more coping mechanisms than—”

Fuck it.

I open my hands.

They all see it.

There is a fraction of a second when everyone leans back, collectively draining half the room’s oxygen, when I think I’ve made a mistake. But they recover quickly, one by one, leaning in to look at the small Dread, whose natural ability to instill fear has been negated by being fully present in this frequency. But it’s also not pushing fear at the moment. There’s no whispering. Maybe that won’t work here, either?

“Why isn’t it going back?” Allenby asks.

“Perhaps the Dread need to be tethered to the mirror dimension.” Lyons looks excited, on the verge of discovery. “Even when they physically attack, they never fully emerge from their world.”

“That would explain why physical confrontations in myth never end with the monster simply disappearing,” Dearborn says. “If they fully enter our world, maybe they’re stuck here? That would also explain why they don’t launch a full-scale physical assault.”

“But I can move between worlds,” I point out. “Why not them?”

“You are no longer just human,” Lyons says. “Though you are no less human than you were before. You are more than human, in tune with multiple frequencies.”

“So it can’t leave?” Katzman asks.

I pinch both of its wings, about to snap the life out of it.

“No!” Lyons says. “Don’t! I need to study it.” He reaches out his shaking hands, and I drop the little creature onto the soft flesh of his palms. It tries to flap free, but he folds his meaty digits over the thing, holding it in place.

“Josef,” Allenby whispers to me. She points at me and then the floor, waggling her finger up and down, without actually looking directly at me. Clothes, right. I quickly cover myself with Stephanie’s lab coat while Lyons heads to the door. Slightly more decent, I take hold of his arm and ask, “What should we do about them?”

“Huh?” He’s lost in thought, more confused by his return to the here and now than I am when I move between worlds. Granted, my quick adjustment to the strangeness that is my life is thanks to a malformed amygdala, but you’d think he wouldn’t have forgotten the angry mob ready to reenact the storming of Dr. Frankenstein’s castle. “Oh,” he says, looking at the large monitor. “Right.”

“Reasoning with them will be impossible,” Winters says. “If they were driven here by the Dread, they’re already beyond logical thought. Whatever fears they might have had about this place already—the strange building with armed guards and an electrified fence—have been magnified to an irrational level.”

“Have we heard from the guards at the front gate?” I ask.

“They fell back to the building,” Katzman says. “Even if they were authorized to open fire on the public, which they’re not, there’s nothing they could have done against that many people. We’re cut off.”

“ You’re cut off,” I point out, and then ask, “How do the Dread operate? To drive a mob of people like a herd of cattle, they have to be coordinated, right? Something is in charge. Giving the orders.”

They just look at me. It was a stupid question. How could they know? They can’t even look at the things, let alone understand their command structure, if there is one. So I offer up my own theory. “On the other side, anytime I’m near a Dread, I hear whispering. But it’s not in my ears. It’s in my head. I also hear it when they’re pushing their fear. I think it’s a kind of psychic communication that’s broadcast out to all Dread, or people, in the area. It might be how they boost fear and direct it. It was the most powerful near the colony.”

“You saw the colony?” Lyons spits the words like he’s just gagged on hot coffee.

“To the south. Like you thought.”

The old man squints at me, looking suspicious. “How many other details did you leave out?”

At least nine small ones, I think, but shrug. “Slipped my mind.”

Katzman sits down at the security console. Mashes some keys. The video feed minimizes, replaced by a map of New Hampshire. He zooms in, zeroing in on the square shape of the Neuro building. “How far did you go?”

“I’m not sure,” I say, “but it was the first real clearing I came to. Never crossed a road. It was a cemetery in the real world.”

“Yeah,” Katzman says. “The colonies you found… before, were built atop our dead.” The map scrolls south. Endless woods, patches of pines, birch, maples and oaks.

“It’s why people feel an impending sense of doom while inside a graveyard,” Dearborn says. “Well, that and all the dead people. We’re not sure why they built colonies on top of cemeteries, though.”

“Stay objective,” Allenby says. “We don’t know if the cemetery comes first, or the colony. It’s just as likely, given the feeling of supernatural dread we feel in the presence of a colony, that we are drawn to bury our dead in the earth where their colonies already existed.”

The satellite view suddenly shifts between fall and summer, the barren trees suddenly full of thick green leaves. I wonder if the foliage will make the clearing harder to see, but then it appears on the screen, impossible to miss, several miles across. The green grass is pocked by hundreds of gray rectangles.

Katzman zooms the image in closer. Gravestones. “Got it.”

I turn to Lyons, who still looks ready to run out the door with his prize. “I think we should hit the colony. If it doesn’t stop the flow of information, at the very least it might distract the mob. At best…”

Whispering tickles my ears.

My eyes snap toward the Dread bat.

Shit .

Before Lyons understands what I’m doing, I’ve crossed the room and crushed the small creature between my hands and his. It’s as frail as it looks, cracking beneath the pressure. The whispers stop.

Lyons reels back. “W—why?”

“Word to the wise, I’m pretty sure they understand English.”

“You think that little thing can speak English?” Katzman says.

“They don’t speak at all,” I say. “Not like us. I said it could understand English.”

“They’re smart,” Dearborn says. “Probably smarter than we think. They just think differently than us. We view them as savages, the same way the first New World colonists viewed Native Americans. But it wasn’t their intelligence that was different. It was culture, and values, and ours most certainly differ from the Dread.”

“Exactly,” I say, offering the lanky man a nod of thanks. “I heard the whispers… in my head. I think it was trying to warn the colony. Or whatever is outside. The bull might have even made contact before the…” I stop myself. There’s no time for an argument. “The point is, if we can disrupt whatever is coordinating the Dread from the colony, they might stop instigating this little rebellion.”

“But there’s no way to test your theory,” Allenby says.