"You think this is a good idea?" Trip asked, sensing my hesitation.

"No, not really," I snapped. "You got a better idea?"

He shrugged. "Well, if you're going to do it, do it before Franks comes back." Trip was right. I didn't want the government to know that I had inherited any abilities from the artifact.

"Do what?" Doctor Joan asked, concerned for her patient.

"Owen can read minds," Trip said, then held his finger in front of his lips to indicate that it was a secret.

"Really?" Lucius was fascinated, probably sensing another paper.

"I don't know how it works. It isn't every time I touch somebody. It seems to be a combination of when they're thinking about a particularly strong memory while I'm also interested in that same memory. I think...I picked this up from the Old Ones somehow."

"Well, scientifically, that sounds like a crock of s.h.i.t," Joan said.

"But we've seen some weird things," Lucius added. That was the beauty of working with former Hunters-very flexible minds. "Is it dangerous?"

"I have no idea."

"If they need to be remembering, how's that supposed to work with somebody who doesn't think about anything?" Joan asked sensibly.

I didn't really know that either. Maybe if I wanted that memory enough for both of us...

"Franks is coming back," Trip said.

Aw h.e.l.l. I touched Carlos' skeletal hand. I touched Carlos' skeletal hand.

Well, this is certainly different.

The world was vast, only there was no world. Just a void. An infinite s.p.a.ce of nothingness. The void had no boundaries, no beginning, no end. There was no light, no dark, no color. Infinity stretched on forever.

"Who are you?"

"I'm Owen," I answered. "With MHI. Who are you?"

"I don't remember," the voice was male. "What are you doing here?"

"Where is here?"

"I don't remember that either..." the voice answered, confused. "But I'm not alone. It It lives here too." lives here too."

"Carlos, is that you?"

But then that first voice was gone. And something hideous took its place. This voice was different, screeching like bagpipes made out of rotten entrails and filled with broken gla.s.s. My mind rebelled against the unnatural force.

THIS IS MY Sh.e.l.l. FIND YOUR OWN.

"What are you?" I challenged.

No answer.

Talk about weird, but I didn't have time for this. I needed to find information on Hood. Just having that thought seemed to cause the world to change. "I know that name," said the first voice. "I know Hood Hood."

Now I could see; there was light, s.p.a.ce, dimensions and gravity, as a blurry scene unfolded before me. A group of people, obviously Hunters, though their gear was outdated and their team patch was unfamiliar. There was no sound, but the scene was obviously one of welcome, as the group greeted a new member. The extraneous details of the scene were fuzzy gray blotches. The Hunters' faces were just...blank. Pasty blurs of flesh where their features should have been. Only one of the men was clearly visible, the new guy, and the scene focused in on him. He was an overweight young man, with a mop of curly hair, wearing a vest that barely fit over his stomach. His att.i.tude was jovial as he smiled and laughed with the others. The scene slowed, the Hunters' movements became sluggish, until they quit moving entirely.

I had a physical form again. I walked between the frozen Hunters, a three-dimensional snapshot from time. Stopping in front of Hood, I studied him. I recognized him from Dorcas' memory. He had acne scars and looked nothing like the tough guy who had attacked me. In fact he didn't look like much at all, just a fat, goofy dude about my age.

"I remember this..." said the voice, and this time it came from directly behind me. I turned. One of the Hunters in the scene was speaking. Unlike the others, he still had details. His armor was olive drab, crisscrossed with leather bandoleers of shotgun sh.e.l.ls. He was fit, strong, with a skinny beard and a thick head of dark hair just peppered with gray. Hispanic, probably about forty, he was a handsome man, but his eyes were sunken, haunted. I could only barely recognize him as the fragile person who I had met in the real world. "I remember this. It hasn't taken them all away."

"What hasn't taken them?"

"Feeder," he answered, as if that were obvious. "Are you here to help me?"

"Yes," I answered, not having any clue how I was supposed to do that. "Where is this Feeder?" Carlos held one finger up and placed it against his temple. I nodded.

"Don't worry. It'll come for us soon. Whenever I remember something, it comes and eats it. I have almost nothing left."

"It eats eats your memories?" your memories?"

"More like it consumes, partially digests, and then pukes them back in pieces all over my brain. I've only saved a few. I've forced myself not to think about them, but I know they're there. When I remember something, it's gone forever. All the happy ones are gone." He held up his left hand, indicating a wedding ring. "I was married, I think, but I don't remember her. He destroyed those early, since they were the first ones I thought of when I was trapped. Once those were gone, then he took the regular ones. I couldn't fight him. He's too strong. He's always hungry."

I could only listen, horrified, wondering if my own were in danger while I was here.

Carlos stepped between the frozen bits of memory. His whole body was trembling. "I don't remember any of my life. I know what things are, and what words mean. I guess he can eat the meat, but not the bones. I don't remember ever experiencing anything. I know what food is, but I don't know how it tastes, you know what I mean? I've got almost nothing."

"How'd you save this one?"

"Oh, he let me keep the bad ones, the ones to taunt me, to laugh at my failure. Everything else I've ever experienced is all twisted and broken, but not these. I can relive the mistakes leading up to the end of my life whenever I want. In fact, that's the only thing that I can do. This thing living in my head is a malevolent motherf.u.c.ker, that's for sure. If I could take any joy out of the ones he's left me, then I'm sure they'd be consumed along with all the rest."

"Once he takes everything, what'll happen to you?"

"Maybe then he'd just let me die..." he said wistfully.

This poor man's mind was being devoured, but the thing doing it was leaving the memories about this one particular Hunter for a reason. "Martin Hood did this to you, didn't he?"

He walked past me, through the crowd of distorted figures, and stopped, staring into the frozen eyes of young Mr. Hood. "Will you help me?"

"What can I do?" I asked.

"I'll show you these sc.r.a.ps, these things that Feeder's left to toy with me. In exchange, I want two things. I won't help you until you swear you'll help me."

"Name them." I expected for him to ask me to free him, to destroy this demon in his head, but not what came next.

"Kill me."

I was shocked. That's not why I was here. I couldn't do that. I started to respond, but choked. The frozen Hunters surrounded me, their faces scratched out of existence like a pencil drawing brutally scrubbed with an eraser until the paper tore. All happiness had been blotted from this man's existence, his body was nearly a lifeless husk...No. I understood the request.

I nodded. "And the second?"

He glared at the jolly, fat Hunter so long that I started to think I was another forgotten memory.

"Avenge me."

This was different than the other times that I had lived through others' memories. This time I didn't see through his eyes or feel with his senses, because those were long since muted and pa.s.sed. Carlos no longer knew what it was like to experience such things.

Rather it was like I was a bystander as a partial scene unfolded in front of me. Details were few, sounds were painful and flat. The colors had bled into grays and shadows as even simple things like that had been stolen from him. What a horrible way to exist and this was all that he'd had since 1989. I was watching the welcoming of the new Hunter. Hood smiled and laughed as Carlos' team greeted him, slapped him on the shoulder, and shook his hand. The only two who had faces were my host and his future nemesis.

"He came highly recommended. A good friend of mine said that he was talented, that he would be an a.s.set to our team," Carlos spoke to me, even as he shook phantom hands with Hood. "My friend was a man named Harbinger."

"I know him," I said.

Carlos shook his head. "I don't. I only remember what little bit is connected to these few things. That's all. But I hate hate him for bringing this monster into my life. Feeder let me keep my hate. It makes him warm." him for bringing this monster into my life. Feeder let me keep my hate. It makes him warm."

Then we were in an unknown place, an intersection of two streets. A team of Hunters had taken up position around a few cars and were firing into a crowd of shambling zombies. There were hundreds of undead. It was a huge outbreak. Carlos and I walked between the flying bullets and the crowd of rotting undead. He gestured to where his mirror image was leaning over the hood of a car and blasting round after round of buckshot into the approaching ma.s.s. "Business was really good. I didn't realize at first that it was a little too good."

A zombie made it over the hood of the first car and Hood took it apart in a spray of machine-gun fire. "It had been kind of slow. We didn't really have much to do, and my team was getting the least business of any team in the country. Just bad luck I suppose. But then, within a few weeks of Hood's arrival, we were getting undead outbreaks constantly. Suddenly my team was raking in the dough. We were the stars of the company."

A zombie hit Memory Carlos from behind, taking him hard to the pavement. The nearby faceless Hunters were in no position to help and it looked like certain death. But the zombie froze, an inch from taking a bite out of Carlos' neck. It stayed there for a moment until Carlos could roll over, draw his.45 and put a round into the creature's brain. The splattered team leader caught a brief glance of Hood, hand extended, two fingers pointing at the frozen zombie. Hood went back to the action as if nothing had happened.

My host shook his head sadly. "That was my first clue, but in the excitement, I missed it. It went on. Every time we had nothing going on, more undead would pop up somewhere in our region. I was thinking that we had some hardcore necromancer living in the neighborhood, but he was always one step ahead of us. I was too stupid to realize that I saw him every day."

More scenes flashed by. Several months had pa.s.sed since these Hunters had started working together. "By that time, I was a wealthy man, not that I can remember what I did with it. He's let me remember that I was like a d.a.m.n superhero to the other Hunters, just to rub it in. Really, I was just a chump. Hood came across as a nice kid, a real joker, a bookworm, an intellectual, and a dork. Everybody loved him. It was a lie, an act. We didn't realize what he was fixated on." There was a vision of the two men, sitting on a bench on an ocean pier, drinking and telling stories, unwinding after a long day at work. "It turned out that Hood's parents were killed when he was just a boy. They were occultists, and had been messing around with the Old Ones back in England. He confided this to me one night. That's why he became a Hunter. He wanted to fight those things. He was obsessed with them."

"Why'd he tell you?"

My host laughed. "You'll see..."

Hood took a long draw from a cigarette before flicking the b.u.t.t into the ocean. "See, boss, that's what got me thinking..." It was obvious that he'd had too much to drink. "There's a lot of information about the Elder Things floating around. Why not, and this is just a hypothetical, use their own weapons against them? Harnessing magic is no different than harnessing electricity."

Carlos openly scoffed. "That's insane."

"No. Hear me out, mate. You're a smart chap. It's like the war, the big one. My grandmother lived through the Battle of Britain and she told me what those V rockets sounded like when they flew over. Pure terror. Evil stuff, right? But as soon as the war was over, bam, the Allies grabbed up every German scientist they could, right? That's how we put a man on the moon."

Carlos took a long drink. "I suppose."

"This is the same thing. Just because knowledge originates from a bad use, doesn't make it bad. It's still knowledge. We owe it to ourselves to study the Old Ones, not just shun them. Think of what we could do." Hood grew somber. "Imagine if a group of us, people like me and you, who knew what was really out there, worked together and harnessed that power...We could banish death itself!"

"That's not how it works. Anything those things touch is tainted. Stay away from it, Marty." The Carlos of memory tossed his now-empty bottle out into the waves and stood to leave. "You're drunk and talking stupid. I'll call you a cab. Go home and get some rest, man."

"I thought maybe you would understand..." Hood muttered to himself as Carlos walked away.

Carlos continued his narration as the pier dissolved. "I figured it out eventually. Hood had found something in the archives back at headquarters. Some old book, picked up from who knows where." The next scene was in a room filled with many shelves, lined with row after row of books. At first I thought we'd come to a library, but then I realized that it was a small apartment, literally packed with books. The t.i.tles on the spines were all blurry and forgotten. Hood was sitting at a table, giant tome open before him, a single small bulb providing light enough to read by. The book must have been etched into Carlos' memory, because it was crystal clear. A ma.s.sive, leather-bound thing, the pages ancient and covered in symbols and geometries that suggested madness in whoever inked it in blood millennia before.

"Hey, Marty. n.o.body's been able to get a hold of you. I was getting worried so I had your landlord let me in. Are you okay?" Carlos called as he entered the room, only to jerk to a halt when he saw the open book. "Is that- What are you doing with that thing?"

"Learning..." Hood mumbled as if he was in a trance, not looking up as he traced his hands over the words. The crazed scribbling seemed to move. There was a drawing of the monstrous alien tree, branches like twitching cricket legs. A black smear had been rubbed onto the page above it, like a cloud rising from the tree.

"d.a.m.n it!" Carlos shouted as he shoved the book off the table and onto the floor. The pieces had finally clicked into place for him. The book landed with a thump thump, open to a page with a picture of a giant squid thing that I knew all too well. He reached across the table and grabbed Hood by the shirt and jerked him forward. "It's you! You're behind these outbreaks, aren't you? Answer me, you son of a b.i.t.c.h!"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Hood stammered. Then Carlos slugged him in the face, brutally hard. He grabbed the fat kid by his curly hair, yanked him out of his chair and shoved his face down against the open book. Blood dripped onto the pages.

"Liar!" Carlos shouted, enraged.

"All right, all right!" Hood cried. Carlos jerked him up and brutally shoved him back into one of the shelves. Books crashed to the floor. "Let go of me, please," he sobbed.

"It was you all along. I can't believe this!" Carlos released him and stepped away, hurt and disbelief obvious in his voice. "Why? Why'd you do it?"

"I had to! You don't understand what's at stake. We have to learn the mysteries or we're doomed."

"You're doomed all right. How many innocent people have died because of you? You know what the Feds are going to do when they discover you've been raising the dead? You're going to prison for the rest of your life."

Suddenly Hood went from simpering to in command. The change was shocking, like somebody had flipped a switch and another personality stepped forward. "Oh, that's where you're wrong, mate. You won't tell the Feds a word." Blood ran down his nose and dripped down the crease of his double chin but he didn't wipe it away. His eyes burned with the fervor of a true believer and for the first time I saw the man who would become the Shadow Lord. "Because you're going down with me if you do. I'll say that you ordered me to raise those zombies for the PUFF bounties."

"Oh, I am, huh?" Carlos responded as he pulled his pistol from inside his waistband. "We'll see about that."

"You won't shoot me," Hood stated flatly. "If I die, then I've left evidence for the authorities that not only did I create those undead, but that I did it on behalf of not just you, but all of MHI. The government will destroy you all for that. You love this company too much."

"b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" The angry Hunter raised the gun and pushed it into Hood's cheek.

"Do it. I dare you," Hood snapped. "Kill your teammate. Murder your friend. Then explain that to the authorities. Explain that to the others while you try to convince them I wasn't making enough zombies to make you a millionaire."

Carlos hesitated, doubt creasing his features. "d.a.m.n!" he shoved the fat kid to the floor and stomped away, trapped. He paced back and forth for a moment. "You idiot. What've you done?"

"I'm fulfilling my destiny. I'm going to stop the Old Ones, once and for all." He finally paused to wipe his nose. "The bounties are funding my research. Animating the dead is letting me hone my skills. This is just the beginning of an epic work. You'll see."

Carlos shoved his pistol back into its holster before grabbing Hood by the neck and dragging him toward the door. "No. You're coming with me. We're going to see Harbinger. He'll know what to do."

We were back in the original void. Darkness in every direction.

"I didn't know what else to do. He was my responsibility and I failed. I turned to the one man who I knew would have the answers. We left that night, me, Hood, and that infernal book, and caught the first flight. I remember that he came along willingly, telling me the whole time about how he was right and how he would persuade Harbinger to see. I think he wanted me to dwell on his argument...When we arrived, there were a bunch of Hunters there, and unfortunately, it was the full moon. I had been too preoccupied to even realize that, so we weren't able to speak to him."

The night Hood died, I thought to myself. I thought to myself.

"Exactly," he answered. There was a terrible, rending sonic wail. It came from the distant void. "Feeder's coming. I have to finish this."

We were standing on the edge of a circle of chaos. The little stone shack, the old slave quarters of the Shackleford family estate, was before us. Hunters were milling around. There was blood everywhere, stark red against the black and white of the rest of the world. Hood's dismembered body was at the entrance. A faceless Hunter was holding the body, trying in vain to help. I knew that the erased man was Myers. Other unknowns attended to a second injured person. A leg, severed at the knee, lay half chewed off to the side.

"He committed suicide."

"So I thought. n.o.body but me knew about Hood's crimes. I felt terrible. I blamed myself for his death and the whole situation. I had failed."

I walked through the carnage. Hood was obviously dead, literally torn apart. There was now a struggle, a fight, between Myers and someone else who could only have been Ray Shackleford. The words were erased, but I knew that Myers wanted nothing more than to avenge his friend's death. "You never told the others."

"No. I didn't. I thought that Hood had killed himself out of guilt. Everyone loved him. What good would tarnishing his memory serve? Plus, I was afraid...somehow I could have done something different, somehow it was my fault. No, it was my secret to bear. No evidence ever arose after his death, so Hood must have been bluffing about that, so I just left it alone. I hid his stupid book."

"You didn't destroy it?"

"I couldn't. It wouldn't burn. I should have tried harder."