Phantom File Read Free

were these encounters, the two men were pushed deeper and deeper into the basement of death, away from all others, the most catastrophic cases carried in and dropped all around them. There rose up a constant echo of suffering around Howard and Andrew, beaten back day after day. Many died, but not all, and mostly because Andrew really did have the gift of healing. A spirit resided within him and he had trained it, coaxed it, molded it for just such a time as this.
    Still, there was far more death than life in the dreaded basement where they were left in isolation. If a man was healed, he was quickly drawn away out into the land of the living, but for Howard and Andrew, there was only death upon death.
    “How could I have known?”
    I saw the madness rise in Rainsford’s expression. Did he think he was this man, this brother of the healer who toiled in the basement? Did he think he was Howard? The story couldn’t be true, and so it was clearly the most horrible of tales, where the teller has lost touch with reality. I looked to the door and thought I should leave, run to Percy, but Rainsford’s eyes pleaded for me to stay, to let him finish what he’d started.
    He repeated his words.
    “How could I have known?” Poor Andrew, so long in the desert, was slowly losing his mind. So much death and destruction, so much failure. My sacred brother had come to my aid and this was how I repaid him, by driving him with a whip as he stood by my side, speaking life into men who would surely die if all they had to count on was my earthly skills.
    And then one day the bodies stopped coming. The war ended and I returned to my secret place of work. I expected Andrew to return to the desert, to reclaim the life that was his. But I also wished he would stay and keep me from loneliness. I adored him—he was all I had. He said things I didn’t want to believe, that the power he had might have turned darker than it used to be, but that it was more alive than ever.
    We began to think mad thoughts.
    Rainsford had stopped speaking of Howard as anyone but himself and I was truly terrified of the man before me. Again I thought of screaming or running for the stairs, but something held me. It was his eyes, not violent but despairing, and my own curiosity. I felt the end of the story coming and couldn’t bear to leave it unheard.
    Experiments followed. Many years of tampering with things no man should touch. We had many cadavers, rivers of blood, and unquenchable curiosity. The things we did—to our minds and our bodies—unthinkable. But the further we went, the less we cared. Soon we were at a full boil; nothing was safe from our touch.
    My brother had gone further than any man into the deep realm of the ancients. The darkest place in the universe is at the foot of the Almighty, you see? Andrew had taken on a Godlike complex. I had corrupted him. I brought him back out into the cruel world, but how could I have known? The kind of power he had was made for the desert, not the deadly basement laboratory.
    He had dreams and nightmares all the time, waking in the night and standing at the side of my bed, tapping me awake, saying the same words over and over until I thought it would drive me to the grave. He said:
     
    “And in my dream I saw a beast coming to take me away.”
     
    At long last our paths of knowledge and science and the ancients crossed in the form of the procedure. The procedure, with the power of blood, was the tool I used to extract what had to come out. For you see, I came to believe my brother’s gift had become his curse. Whatever this thing was that found a home inside him needed to come out. What was once a power to heal had become a monster that was killing my brother.
    “It cannot be destroyed,” he told me. “It will find a home.”
    “Better someone else than you,” I reasoned.
    “That’s not how it works,” he assured me. “I give it to whom I choose and I always get it back.”
    A madman!
    We had pushed each