“Deliver what?”
She hisses through a chuckle. “You, of course. The prized part in exchange for bringing you to us. We made the deal on the day of her audition, while she was walking the beach, just like Harlan did all those years ago.” She looks up fondly, lips pursed. “But she obviously didn’t have the guts for it. So we let you keep the role and took a different payment.” She opens her hands, and thunder shakes the tunnels, dropping debris on Rina’s head. “But we still demand a real sacrifice. A human to appease us. Blood in the bay. Do that, and all your wishes will come true.”
Rina hardly believes it when the words, “Which human?” leak out her lips.
A grin consumes Tiffany’s milky face and she wheezes in amusement. “Oh, I think you know who won’t be missed.”
Hatred blooms for new reasons now. From the rotten garden in Rina Bestler’s soul, weeds spread like cancer, coiling around her heart until only one unblemished spot remains. It’s the part of her that put on skates because she wanted to, the part that pored through college catalogs and dreamed of an entirely different life, the part that was overjoyed beyond belief when Victoria Fell took a chance on her. It’s small, but the fact that it’s there after all the mandatory rehearsals, competitions, and collisions means it’s the strongest part of all.
She says, “No,” and Tiffany’s face falls dead. It doesn’t even twitch before her hand flies to Rina’s throat and closes tight. She pushes Rina through the kitchen, but the skater wraps her fingers around a cabinet handle at the last second and rips the door off its rusty hinges. The force jostles both women, and Rina reels around with the door in hand. When she smacks Tiffany in the face, the ice-blonde stumbles backward, babbling, and covers her cheek. There’s no blood, though. No bruising. But when Rina drops her hand, the nest of white crustaceans in her skull writhes in screeching fury.
Rina screams, tripping over her feet as she retreats backward, and crashes to the floor. The wounded hyperia drop like sloppy pearls from Tiffany’s malformed head, but other areas of her body lose integrity too. Her shoulder slopes, then dissolves into scores of tiny arthropods that skitter down her legs as she clumsily advances. More and more hyperia fall with each step until there’s nothing left of Tiffany but her voice. Like mimetic shrimp, they’re copying her still as they cluster in corners, flood over cabinets, and from all directions chant, “Make a wish, Rina. Make a wish.”
Trying to track them dizzies her so much she has to lie down. Covering her ears, she yells to drown out Tiffany’s voice, but it’s on the inside now, and it has friends: steel slicing ice… the soft smack of rose petals hitting her boots… a crowd cheering her name… and then silence. Even when she uncovers her ears, she can’t hear anything. She screams but can’t hear her own voice. She smacks the floor and can’t feel it. She’s numb. She’s broken.
When someone suddenly touches Rina’s shoulder, she jerks as if out of a deep sleep. She gasps for air and stares wide-eyed at Vic and Raymond standing over her.
“What happened? Are you okay?” Raymond asks.
Rina shakes her head, her voice a frantic whisper, and Vic crouches in front of her with a mostly empty bottle of stale water, which she downs in one gulp. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s going on.”
It feels like a brood of cannibalistic moths are doing battle in Vic Fell’s chest, preventing her from speaking in a steady voice, but she’s able to muster something comforting enough to coax Rina into lifting her head.
“We’re here now,” she says, “and we’re not going to let anything happen to you.” It comes so naturally off Vic’s tongue she wonders if one of the rescue crew said it to her the day after the Ghost. “As best you can, tell us what you saw.”
“Tiffany—” The misshapen teeming skull flashes into Rina’s mind and she shudders. “There were things inside her. Or she was made up of them. They started pouring out of her and then… then she was just gone.”
“What sort of things?” Raymond asks.
“I’ve never seen anything like them. Crabby-spidery things with crazy camouflage. Hyper-something.”
“Hyperia,” Vic says flatly.
“Wait.” Raymond lifts his hands. “What are you saying? These are the same monsters you saw when you were a kid?”
“The word ‘monsters’ doesn’t really do them justice,” Vic replies. “Hyperia can imitate anything, and they can give you anything, and they use those powers to convince you to kill people for them. I don’t know why. It seems like they’re pretty good at it all by themselves. They made me and the rest of the world think I was crazy, but they killed all those people. Everyone in the tunnels, everyone in the park.” Vic rolls her gleaming eyes to the ceiling, her chin dimpled in sorrow.
“You mean these hyperia things caused the Ghosts?”
She shakes her head and whispers, “They are the Ghosts. I don’t know how, but what you saw, Rina, aren’t even half of what the hyperia are. There’s something in the Chesapeake, something big along the cliffs, and it’s been there forever, waiting for desperate people like my father.”
Rina’s lungs empty in grief. “Like Tiffany. And me.” She pushes herself up and glares at Vic Fell. “And you opened a theme park on top of it. You knew they were here, and you had us dancing around like fairies and forest animals!”
“I didn’t know they were real!” she screams. “I spent more than half my life believing that I hallucinated everything I saw down here. And even then, believing I invented everything, I couldn’t trust that Harlan wasn’t those things in disguise. You saw how they mimic people. You can’t know. So I left. I put it behind me. I got better. I remade my life.”
“But you still came back here. Back to them!”
Raymond steps between and eases them apart. “How about we just calm down and get back to the others. We can talk this out together and find a reasonable solution.”
Thunder rolls, ferocious, and shakes the earth, knocking the trio to the ground and raising an ear-splitting alarm from the group in the lounge. They scramble down the corridors, twisting and turning toward the lounge, but despite the persistent howling, there’s no one in the passage before the break room. In the break room, either. But blood drips thick from railings and the bunk beds are festooned with sinew, from which glistening hyperia hang like Christmas baubles.
Vic spins out of the room and claps her hand over her mouth, but the vomit comes anyway, spurting between her fingers as she crumples to her knees.
“It’s happening again,” she mutters as Raymond wipes off her face with a scrap of sleeve. “And there’s nothing we can do to stop it. They can take us down whenever they want. Just like that.”
“Yes,” the voices cry. “Just like that. Just like the two dozen people you watched die thirty-five years ago, Victoria. You had the power to stop it then, and you had the power to stop it this time. But you were selfish, always selfish.”
Rina whispers, “Vic—” and the woman peeks around the corner to see lumps of meat and bone sprouting legs and crawling across the floor. They join, grow, and they shift into malformed but seamless amalgamations of her employees. The disproportionate, patchwork bodies shamble toward them, hissing and chanting, “Make a wish! Blood in the Bay!”
Rina scrambles from the room, grabbing Vic by the arm and following Raymond as he races down the main corridor. There are suddenly thousands of hyperia on the walls beside them, a swarm that is sometimes invisible and sometimes a frothy wave, complete with shadows of fish caught up in the tide. The longer the walls resemble the churning bay, the slower Raymond runs. His flesh turns green and he starts wobbling to one side. His knees eventually weaken entirely, and he collapses to the floor in a nauseated daze. When hyperia swarm over his body, Rina and Vic kick and smack them away, but there are too many. They each grab a leg as the creatures begin towing and then rushing his catatonic body to the rusted grate that once opened in the face of Calvert Cliffs. Vic falls when Raymond’s shoe pops off in her hands, and Rina hangs on only a few seconds longer, dragged several feet and scraping up her chest.