“What is ahead of us?” I said, not unreasonably, I thought. “What the hell has happened in Ward 12 bloody A?”
“Something got loose,” said Benway, in a voice like the end of the world.
We rounded a final corner, and there at the end of the corridor before us was a heavily reinforced steel door, marked simply: 12A. Two young men in white doctor’s coats were barricading the door with everything they could get their hands on. Furniture, medical trolleys, even a Hot Drinks! Machine that they were man-handling into place. They suddenly realised they weren’t alone. Their heads snapped round, and they both let out girlish shrieks of alarm. They started to run, only to stop immediately as Dr. Benway yelled at them.
“Dr. Burke! Dr. Rabette! Stand right where you are!”
And they did. They turned immediately to look at her, ignoring Julien and me, as the three of us finally came to a halt before the door to Ward 12A. I had black spots dancing before my eyes, my ribs ached, and I had to lean against a wall while I concentrated on getting my breath back. Julien breathed deeply a few times, then strolled forward to observe the barricaded door with a keen interest. Dr. Benway put her hands on her hips and rotated her back a few times. I heard bones creak and crack. She glared at the two young doctors standing uneasily before her, then glared at me.
“These two young fools are supposed to be in charge here. On the grounds that I can’t do everything myself. Talk to me, Burke, Rabette! What’s the situation?”
The two young doctors looked at each other guiltily. The older of the two was barely into his midtwenties, and they both looked shocked as well as scared as they glanced at the barricaded door. Finally, the older one, Burke, swallowed hard.
“The door is locked and sealed. It can’t get out. But we can’t go in there! It’s too dangerous! Who are these two?”
“Julien Advent and John Taylor,” said Benway.
“I think I felt safer before they got here,” said Rabette in a high, shaky voice. He smiled quickly, to show it was meant to be a joke. “We’ll take all the help we can get, but I don’t know what you can do. I don’t know there’s anything anyone can do. All hell’s breaking loose in there.”
“We should get the hell out of here!” said Burke, actually wringing his hands together.
“Shut up, both of you!” snarled Benway. “Call yourselves doctors . . .” She turned her back on them and marched over to stand before the barricaded door. She started to push the drinks machine out of the way, then found she couldn’t. Julien and I had to help her. Burke and Rabette reluctantly shifted everything else they’d piled up against the door, revealing a portholelike window in the top third of the steel door. Benway walked right up to it, listened carefully for a moment, then peered cautiously through the porthole. I looked at Julien and gave him my best hard stare.
“I think this would be a really good time for you to fill me in on what’s so important about Ward 12A, don’t you? What do they do in there; what kind of patients do they treat?”
“Ward 12A is reserved exclusively for those unfortunate enough to have been damaged by coming in contact with forces or beings from Outside the realms we know,” Julien said quietly. “Remind you of anything?”
“The Entities from Beyond,” I said.
“Exactly,” said Julien.
I looked at the very solid steel door and hoped it was as locked and sealed as the young doctors had said. “You think . . . maybe the Sun King is in there? Could he really have got here ahead of us, that fast?”
“Who knows what he’s capable of, now?” said Julien. “But let’s not add to our problems until we have to.”
“If you two have finished muttering secrets to each other, perhaps you’d like to take a look,” Benway said acidly.
Julien and I moved forward to join her. Burke and Rabette seized the opportunity to back away. Benway had her face pressed up close against the porthole, so Julien and I moved in on either side of her, our heads pressed close together. All I could see were flaring bright lights, sharp and intense, so bright I couldn’t even be sure what colours they were. The glare didn’t simply blaze through the porthole; it outlined the steel door itself. Great, angry, roaring sounds rose and fell on the other side of the door, none of them in any way human. I glanced at Benway.
“What exactly have you got in there? What’s wrong with these patients?”
“In Ward 12A, we deal mainly with possessions and abductions. Men and women, and sometimes children, unfortunate enough to have attracted the attention of forces from Outside. We try to treat people who have been taken and changed, physically and mentally, to adapt them to live on other worlds, or in other realities. Places where merely human forms couldn’t hope to survive. Of course, after these beings have finished with their experiments, they abandon their victims and dump them back where they found them. They never bother to undo the changes they’ve made, don’t care that the poor bastards have been altered so much they can’t cope with Earth conditions any more. Some of them end up at the Fortress, but the most damaged, or dangerous, are brought here. We do what we can for them, but mostly they’re contained here, in a secure facility. Ward 12A.”
“And the others?” said Julien.
She looked at him, then looked away. “Some things you don’t want to know, Julien. Unless it’s your job and your responsibility. Doctors deal with death and worse, every day. It’s the part of the job no-one else wants to hear you talk about.”
“How dangerous can these patients be?” I said, as a particularly loud roar made the steel door tremble in its frame.
“Some patients have been here for years,” said Dr. Benway. “Some of them are more alien than others. Some contain whole worlds, other realities, inside them—living gateways to other places.”
“Think of the Trojan horse,” Julien said to me.
“We’ve spent years developing ways to help these people,” said Benway. “Of freeing them from the terrible burdens placed upon them. We use surgery to undo physical changes, telepaths to undo mental changes, and now and again we get our hands on some discarded alien tech that we can use to drag alien booby-traps out of human minds and souls. But sometimes the beings behind the changes fight back. Burke, Rabette, what have you . . . Dr. Rabette, you get your cowardly arse right back here, right now! And tell me what, exactly, is going on inside Ward 12A? Which patient is responsible for all this?”
“We don’t have a name,” muttered Rabette, not even trying to meet her gaze. “He’s John Doe X number 47.”
“Something inside him, or beyond him, is fighting to break through,” said Burke. His face was white with shock and wet with sweat. “Some other reality is using him as a gateway, to get to ours. And I really don’t think it’s any kind of reality we would want to meet.”
I looked sharply at Julien. “A hellgate. They’re talking about a hellgate, draining someone’s soul energies to create a doorway between one reality and another. Open a door and send through an army. Sneaky.”
Rabette broke and ran, and, a moment later, Burke was off and running, too. Julien shouted angrily after them but stopped when Benway put a hand on his arm.
“They’re only interns, Julien. Only been on Ward 12A a few months. This is way above their pay grade. Let them go; they wouldn’t be much use anyway.”
“Don’t you have any experienced security people to deal with situations like this?” I said.
“Of course, ex-Fortress, mostly. But the security doors are down, remember?” said Benway. “Security are trapped on the other side of the Hospice.”
“Well, why don’t you keep some here, on hand?” I said.
“Budget cuts,” said Dr. Benway, not quite looking in Julien’s direction.
“All right, the committee were wrong, and yes, you did warn us,” said Julien. “I promise I’ll bring it up at the next meeting! Can we concentrate on the problem in front of us, please?”