Darkness Falls: Jigsaw of Souls Series, #6

Prologue

The walls of Broomfield Asylum sagged as though the weight of simply existing had become exhausting. The paint had long since decayed and been stained black by years of mold and mildew. Huge gaps in the drywall exposed the skeleton of the building here and there, and even the brickwork had begun to crumble with age. It was an uncared-for relic of a bygone era, a place where terrible things had happened, and those who had survived hoped the memories would remain entombed.

For all its years of neglect, for all the holes that time and nature had eaten through the floors and walls, the asylum was no longer a forgotten ruin of past horrors. New life breathed through the foundation, cold and unnatural. The power of Chaos magic surged and pulsed like a thing alive, or at least a perversion of what it meant to be alive. Something stirred in the very fabric of the building. In its essence, as much as its physical structure. Something gave life to the memories and the pain and the nightmares that had torn the place apart so many years earlier.

Broomfield had been divided into wings back when it was a working hospital. Patients in the West Wing were low risk, mostly functional, and not considered a danger to themselves or others. These patients adapted well to various therapies, including medication and behavior modification. But the patients in the East Wing were different.

East Wing patients were erratic and sometimes violent. They had harmed themselves and others, or had the potential to. They resisted therapies and often were unresponsive to medication. Usually, treatment choices were limited, and doctors had shown some success with more extreme options. In particular, electroconvulsive shock treatment. Sometimes even lobotomies. The East Wing was a place of pain, which was why the demon had chosen it.

The killing spree at Broomfield resulted in the deaths of numerous patients and staff. It was the end result of Dr. Mason’s singular brand of psychiatric care. He had come to believe that anesthesia was a crutch that diluted the effectiveness of electroconvulsive therapy. He would administer treatment without it, secure in his opinion that pain helped clear the mind of the mad. He tortured hundreds in this manner over the years. Until one of them took his life.

The latent energy in Broomfield Asylum buzzed even after all these years. The living who entered the building would feel it in a way that was difficult to understand or describe: a sense that they were being watched; goosebumps on their arms or neck; a sinking feeling in their stomachs. An overall sense of unease. Not a true haunting, though; at least, not until the demon came and infused its Chaos into the core of the place and wrenched the spirits through time and space to recreate what had once been there.

Now, the demon was gone, its energy obliterated and sent back into the Dimensional Rift from whence it came. But it had left something behind. A small repository of power, no more than an afterthought. The discarded refuse of an abominable and almost unknown ritual. A piece of Chaotic rebirth left to rot in the old hospital, under the stained and decayed ruins of a patient bed.

The demon had been using Vincent Donnelly. Vincent was a conduit for power, and the demon siphoned it from him like a dying man in the desert who were handed a waterskin. It slurped and gulped that energy with glee, and the very thought of being cut off, of being left hungry and unsatiated, was a great fear indeed. So terrifying was the idea of losing its power source that the demon plunged deep into the sources of ancient Chaos when it felt it was losing its hold.

Vincent Donnelly had died. A true death from which there was no hope of resurrection. All mortals face such demise at some point. It is, after all, the defining characteristic of mortality. But the demon, with its child-like mind and lust for all the power it could consume, could not accept that Vincent was gone. It had used unnatural power, twisting Chaos to do things it was not intended to do. It had reinfused true life back into Vincent’s body once more.

The process was unlike that which could be done with powers like biomancy, blood, or primal magic, which could grant true life again if the wielder knew how. With Chaos, the caster had to make an exchange. Life had to take the place of death. And the death could just be discarded. But it had to be contained. It required a vessel capable of holding mortal death. And what better vessel to hold mortal death than a mortal body?

The demon, in its rage and haste, had not thought to take a pre-existing mortal body to complete its task. It didn’t feel the need to. Because creating a human body was easy. They were things of meat and bone, after all. They were primitive machines that flop and scamper about. Was a rat so different from a man? Not anywhere in the universe besides the world on which humans exist.

On the south side of the East Wing, a massive hole had been torn in the hospital wall. It led into a patient room, decayed and black as all the rest. A hospital bed sat in the corner, festering with mold and fungus. In one dimension, this bed and this room had not been used by living souls in decades. But thanks to the demon’s influence, and the life it brought back to the building, the room had seen use. It had belonged to Vincent Donnelly. It was the room in which he had taken his own life. And the room in which the demon brought him back.

Vincent was gone now, rescued by his companions and out in the world beyond the hospital. They were searching for an escape now, searching for a way back to the world they knew. Vincent had overcome the demon. Not only that, but he had also freed his mind and his soul from every invader that had taken possession of it—the necromancer, the witch, the cultist and his djinn, the Fortean, and the demon.

And then there was one other—the one Vincent had called Fix.

Vincent was alone now. Just his own soul in his own body. A mortal man like so many others. And Fix was free, if only for a moment.

The demon had made a mortal body of pure Chaos to steal the death away from Vincent. To bring him back to life in his real body, the demon had created this false body that sucked the death from him like a leech sucked blood from a wound. And then, that unneeded body was cast aside. It hit the wall and then rolled slightly to come to rest under the hospital bed. Vincent hadn’t seen it, and the demon hadn’t cared about it after it was gone. But Fix had seen it. And Fix cared.

The body on the floor was shaped like Vincent Donnelly. It was, in simple terms, a shadow of him. A sort of placeholder that lacked definition. Like a mannequin in a store, it was shaped like a person but lacked any spark. But for it to work, the demon had to make it complete. Inside, it held all the parts of life that any other human body held. There were bones and blood. There was a heart and a brain. It was human but not a person. It had no soul.

Fix was not a soul. Not a mortal soul or even a truly living thing the way anything else might define life. But he was a thing that existed and had power. He just had no body.

The dark body of the homunculus stirred. Muscles twitched beneath the glossy, ebony flesh. Nerves sparked and sent ripples through the form from head to toe. It shuddered and twitched. Spasms racked the body. The lipless mouth parted in the first gasp of life. Air sucked into newly formed lungs and inflated the chest. The heart began to beat. Blood pumped through veins and filled gaps and channels all through the body.

The eyes opened. They were pale and blind at first, but slowly, they gained definition and color, just as the black flesh began to bleach and change. The flesh gained texture. Hair grew from the head and on the arms and legs. Lips and nostrils formed on the face. Prints embedded themselves in the fingers.

When the body rolled aside from under the bed, crushing old bits of debris and trash beneath itself, it was pulsing with life and warmth. It used unsure hands and arms to steady itself. It rose up on shaky legs, truly controlling a physical body for the first time in its infinite existence. The eyes regarded the room, which it recognized from its time in Vincent’s real body but seen with new eyes in a whole different way.

I’m alive, Fix said to himself.

He raised fingers to his lips and spoke the words again.

I’m alive.

He laughed, feeling warm breath on his fingertips. He touched them, feeling the plumpness of the flesh, and pushed a finger into his own mouth. He felt the hardness of his teeth, the dampness of his tongue. He tasted the sour taste of the mold he’d touched on his fingers and laughed again.

Fix touched the body, looking down at it in the dim light provided by the hole in the wall. It was familiar yet new. He had spent all of his time in this mortal world inside Vincent’s identical body. But this body he was in now, there was a sense of comfort and hominess to it. It was his body. His way to navigate this world, and that was good.

"It’s good," he said to himself.

He had never experienced good before, not really. Good. It felt good. He had never really felt before. While inside Vincent, Vincent felt everything. Fix merely experienced it second hand. He watched, and he heard.

But that was no longer the case. His plan had finally come to its end. He had left the Dimensional Rift. He had been born to a body. He was in and of the world.

Fix walked to the hole in the wall, feeling uncomfortable bits of old drywall and stone rubble underfoot. The sensation was pain. Only mild pain, not significant. He understood that. He knew there were degrees of pain. He had seen that in Vincent as he accomplished his goals. He had seen Vincent maimed and battered and even killed. But he never felt it himself. Now he could experience all of that as well. But first…

A tiny ripple of power emanated from him and in an instant, shoes covered Fix’s feet, clothing covered his body. These things protected one from the elements, he knew. They would keep him warm and prepared as he ventured out into the world. They would keep him protected when he started his hunt.

Fix stared out of the hole at the woods. Vincent was out there somewhere. So were the others. So was the entire world. The entire universe. Everything existed right on the other side of that wall. And now, for the first time in all of eternity, Fix was free to taste every bit of it.

There had only been four places Fix had ever existed. This new body represented the greatest freedom he had ever personally felt. Perhaps that was due to him never having personally felt anything before. Fix had never been an individual until now.

Before Vincent, there was the Dimensional Rift. It wasn’t always called that, though. It wasn’t called anything for the longest time. It predated languages and even the beings who spoke them. For much of the time, it was not a place with a name or any ideas associated with it at all. It was just where he existed.

Fix wasn't even a ‘he’ in those days—in the days before worlds and mortals and those that would give him names. He was not anything. He just was. And while the Dimensional Rift had existed since time began, it was still not Fix’s first home. Not the place where he started.

The body he had now had a brain made of meat. It was all meat and bone, fluids, and other bits and pieces of life. He had never felt these things this intimately before, and he enjoyed the sensation. But there were limits. The meaty brain in the body he had claimed did not know how to understand what came before. If the Rift had always existed, how could there have been a ‘before’? It perplexed him, and the thought refused to fully form in the meaty mind. It could not make the concept work.

It occurred to Fix that the problem was that the brain in his head was a thing in a space. It had an inside and an outside. It was finite and, therefore, utterly incapable of understanding something infinite and transcendent. The brain in this body would never understand what came before; not in a meaningful way.

The best he could come up with was the word ‘everything’. Before this body, before Vincent’s mind, and before the Rift, he was everything. In everything. Of everything. Now and before and after and always.

The concept sat heavy and useless in his own mind. Everything meant nothing to a finite brain. It was comical in its way. It was a placeholder of a word, a way to brush aside an idea that couldn’t be thought of. Everything meant nothing to mortals.

What an ironic twist, Fix thought.

There was something exhilarating about the thing that he was now. The finite body. The limitations of senses and form. It was the way he imagined a human felt when they finally got to bed after a long day at work. Just tucked in, warm and secure. That was what life felt like to Fix. It felt like a hug. Like he was part of something bigger, instead of being the ‘bigger thing’ that everything was a part of.

And the world outside truly looked bigger. He had never seen a world from a perspective like this before. What a wonder it was. What a thrill to see the trees and feel the air and smell the soil. What a delight to discover how life worked. And how it ended. What a joy to go out into the world one step at a time and savor every moment of it.

He needed it to be slow. Because even time was new in this context. He didn’t need to make anything happen too fast. He wanted to spread out, slowly taking everything in. Each blade of grass. Every bird, squirrel, and fish. Every man, woman, and child. Every planet, moon, and star. Bit by bit and piece by piece, he would spread and consume them all until, once again, he was everything.

His foot lifted slowly. He savored the feeling of muscles flexing and contracting, of the meat in motion. Of being alive. Of being small and simple and regular. Just like every other mortal.

Fix stepped outside of the asylum and into the world. He truly was unbound now. He laughed again, a sensation that came unbidden. Laughter, he decided, was good. He felt good.

He couldn’t wait to tear the world apart.

Chapter 1

A breeze picked up from the north, and the parking lot grew cold. Dezzy Walker stood next to the car, consciously stopping himself from pacing. Vincent was going to come back because he had to come back. They hadn’t come this far for things to just end now.

Vincent had already said his goodbyes, but that didn’t have to mean anything. People said goodbye all the time. It was just polite. It didn’t mean things were over and done with. And if Vincent had already made it past the other four souls in his head and lived, he could do the same to the demon. Besides, the demon was the last one. Once he was gone, Vincent would finally be free. He had to come back.

I don’t know how long it’s safe to stay here, Coulson said, pulling Dezzy away from his own thoughts.

For someone who was not alive, Thomas Coulson was certainly impatient. The ghost of a powerful psychic, he had been the fourth of the five souls trapped in Vincent’s head after a ritual to open the Dimensional Rift to a Chaos dimension. But Coulson remained while the necromancer, the witch and the cult leader, and his evil djinn had all been sent Beyond the Veil. He was so powerful that, even in death, he could root his spirit to the world and interact physically with it. Luckily, he had also been of great help in defeating some of their enemies.

We’ll stay until we know we have to leave, Jillian countered. Jillian had been Coulson’s partner in life, a powerful psychic herself. She was the one who knew what Broomfield Asylum was, having gone there on a haunted tour of America in her younger years.

Don’t worry, Desmond.

Stanley Crisp, Dezzy’s uncle and the mortician of Alder Falls, had come to save their friend Vincent after a demon had kidnapped him and brought him to this asylum, trapping him within and using him as a sort of Chaos battery. The old man had used blood magic to ask for help from two very powerful loa, and that would come with a heavy price tag one of these days. But it was for a friend, and if there was one thing Dezzy knew about his uncle, it was that he was a good man.

It’s just… it seems wrong, ya know? Dezzy said.

His uncle nodded.

Just so. Vincent has battled through much. He deserves a win and a chance to rest, finally.

Don’t count him out yet. Man’s got horseshoes up his butt. I’m not worried, Coulson said.

You just said you wanted to leave, Dezzy pointed out.

Coulson shrugged.

Yeah. We’re standing outside a decrepit, haunted mental hospital that almost killed all of us. I’d prefer to be elsewhere.

The dead man wasn’t wrong about that. The hospital had only recently fallen into its decrepit and ancient state. When they arrived earlier that day, it looked brand new and thriving. There were doctors and patients all over the place—all ghosts, as it turned out. Spirits that