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“AJ!” Kevin yelled, tearing down the hall. The deserted hall. “Somebody help!” he cried as he ran, Howie and Brian at his heels. “Please!”

But no one came.

What kind of hospital is this?Kevin wondered vaguely, as he turned a corner. We’re in the ICU, and there’s not even a nurse around?He didn’t have much longer to consider this, for at that moment, he reached the door to Nick’s room and burst in. Inside the room, he stopped dead in his tracks, staring in shocked silence. He was hurtled forward as Howie and then Brian slammed into him from behind, but he never broke his gaze.

Following Kevin’s line of sight, Howie let out a horrified gasp and pushed past Kevin. “AJ!”

AJ lay flat on his back on the floor at the foot of Nick’s bed, completely motionless. His eyes were squeezed close, but his mouth hung slightly open, as if frozen in mid-scream.

Howie sunk to his knees beside AJ and grabbed his friend’s wrist, terrified that he was dead. But he could feel AJ’s pulse racing and hear his breath. “He’s alive,” Howie said hoarsely to Brian and Kevin, who had come up behind him to look down on AJ.

Kevin knelt down beside Howie. “AJ?” he asked hesitantly. “AJ… can you hear us?” He gingerly reached out and touched AJ’s shoulder very gently. When there was no response, he gripped it harder and gave AJ a little shake. “AJ!” he cried out more urgently. “AJ, open your eyes!”

But there was no reaction. AJ did not open his eyes, nor did he even flinch. He stayed motionless, almost lifeless, except for the slight rise and fall of his chest as he breathed.

“What happened to him?” Brian asked, his voice small and frightened. “It… it sounded like he was being stabbed to death or something!”

At these words, Kevin’s eyes traveled up and down AJ’s body, looking for some kind of physical injury. But, as far as he could tell, AJ’s body was in perfect condition, not a mark on him.

“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “But I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.”

“We need to find a doctor,” said Howie. “Get him checked out.”

“I’ll go,” Brian said immediately, backing away from them. “This is freaking me out.” He darted out of the room without another word, leaving Kevin and Howie behind to puzzle over AJ’s mysterious condition.

***

Brian jogged through the halls, his heart pounding with anxiety, searching frantically for a doctor, nurse, or anyone who could help him. Finally, just when he was beginning to think something was very wrong at this hospital, he saw a woman towards him. She was dressed in blue scrubs.

“Oh, thank God,” Brian panted when he reached her. “Excuse me, miss, but my friend… well, I don’t really know what happened to him, but he’s unconscious, and he needs help.”

The woman stared at him. She had piercing blue eyes that seemed to bore right through him. They made him very uncomfortable, though he wasn’t exactly sure why.

“Miss?” he asked hesitantly. “My friend…”

“Yes,” she said briskly. “You friend. Where is he?”

“Come on, I’ll show you,” said Brian, starting back to Nick’s room. “We were visiting our friend Nick – he’s here in the ICU – and my other friends and I just heard him screaming, and when we got to Nick’s room, he was lying passed out on the floor. But we don’t know what happened to him.”

“I see,” said the woman, following him.

“Are you a nurse?” Brian asked as they walked along, glancing back at her.

“Yes,” said the woman, pointing at the nametag clipped to the pocket of her scrub top. Desdemona Aden, R.N., it read.

Brian nodded, feeling a little bit better. At least there was one certified employee on this floor. “Right in here,” he said, as they made it to Nick’s room. He led her inside, where Kevin and Howie still knelt on the floor beside AJ.

“Oh good, you found someone,” said Kevin, when he saw Brian and the nurse come in.

“Yeah. Here he is,” Brian said to Desdemona, pointing to AJ.

“I see,” the nurse said again. Howie and Kevin moved out of the way, and she knelt down beside AJ, taking his pulse and lifting his eyelids. Then, abruptly, she stood up. “Would you three please step out of the room? I’m going to call a doctor in to examine him.”

Brian, Kevin, and Howie exchanged glances. Then Kevin nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “Come on, guys.” He led the other two out of the room, Brian casting one last wary look over his shoulder at Desdemona. She just smiled, those penetrating blue eyes flashing, and turned away. Tearing his gaze from her, Brian followed Kevin and Howie out of the room and closed the door behind him.

As soon as he heard the door close, the man lying in the bed opened his eyes. Nick had pretended to be unconscious the whole time his friends had been in the room, although it hadn’t really made any difference this time – for once, Kevin, Howie, and Brian were too busy fretting over AJ to even notice him.

“Some friends. They deserve to die,” he muttered.

“Then why didn’t you kill them. Why didn’t you kill him?” a voice from across the room asked sharply.

Nick looked over at Desdemona and glared, his eyes alighting with fire. “I tried,” he said. “But they came too quickly. I couldn’t finish.”

Dancing flames flickered in her blue eyes as well, and a grin spread slowly over her face. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll have another chance. There’s always a second chance.”

Nick’s lips turned up maliciously. “Good,” he said.

Desdemona’s smile grew wider. “The others will be pleased with your newfound enthusiasm. Just see that you don’t fail us again.”

“Oh no,” said Nick. “Next time, I will not fail.”

***

“Yes… he will not fail again. Next time, he will kill your friends. All of them. And you… you will be powerless to stop him.”“No!” Nick cried out, but the voice only laughed at his misery.

“Oh yes, YES!”it bellowed, echoing all around him, a chorus of demonic chants. “You are nothing, Nick Carter, nothing but a lost soul. We have taken over you, taken over your body, and your other side will do what we desire.”Nick did not answer. He clamped his hands over his ears to drown out the reverberating voice, to block its horrible words. He knew what it said was true… he could do nothing to save his friends now. Not since he had succumbed to the pull…


Nick’s eyes flew open, and he sat up with a start. Immediately, his whole body began to throb, the pain starting in his head and quickly spreading downward.“God, what the hell happened to me?” he moaned, rubbing his eyes and feeling extremely disoriented. When he took his hands away from his eyes, he blinked and looked around, suddenly realizing he had no idea where he was. This was definitely not his bedroom, nor the hotel room he had checked into earlier. It was too dark to see much in the room, but he could make out enough to tell that.

His heart began to beat faster with the anxiety of awaking to find himself in a strange place. But that feeling was soon replaced with something much worse – terror. For at that moment, he felt it, the thing he had dreaded ever since he was a little boy.

The pull.

It was coming from beneath him, from under his bed. “There’s no monsters under your bed, Nicky,” his father had told him night after night during his youth. “See?” He had turned on the light and lifted up Nick’s dust ruffle and shown him the bare floor beneath the bed. “Nothing there but dust.”

But there had been something there. There had been a monster, the monster that haunted his dreams, that kept him awake at night. And it was back, here with him in this strange room, lurking beneath this strange bed. It had come for him. And this time, no one was there to protect him. Kevin, Howie, Brian, AJ… they were not there. Not there to do their ritual, to stand back to back in their circle, their hands bound. Not there to block the monster, to deflect the evil force, to stop the pull.

And so it came.

Nick could feel it tugging at him. “Please, no,” he whimpered, feeling like a child, not caring. He pulled his covers up around himself, as if a few pieces of cloth could actually protect him from this unseen evil. But still it came, drawing nearer to him, surrounding him. Nick gasped, suddenly unable to breath. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. The pull was stronger than ever before now, and it seemed to be sucking him in. He could feel himself being lifted up, yanked away from his covers, elevated off the bed. Yet, when he looked down, he could still see himself lying there, motionless, as if asleep.

It was like an out of body experience, as if his soul had been ripped from his body.

And, in truth, it had.

The pull continued to lift him up and then brought him slowly down, down to the floor. And then, as Nick’s terror grew even more, the pull dragged him across the floor, towards the bed. There was no dust ruffle on this bed, nor was there a bare spot of floor beneath it. Instead, Nick saw a light, a glowing red light, which seemed to shine up from some kind of gateway that had opened under the bed. He knew what was coming before it happened, and he clawed frantically at the floor, trying to find something to latch on to. But there was nothing, and helplessly, he was pulled under the bed and into the light.

It had finally happened, the thing he had feared for his entire life.

The pull had won.Yes, after twenty three years, the pull had finally won. It had grabbed hold of Nick’s very soul and torn it from his body. And now, it seemed, there were two Nick’s. One lay in Memorial hospital, plotting the death of his friends, while the other, this Nick, was locked away in this Godforsaken place, the Shadow Land, as he called it, a place that was not quite reality, yet not fantasy… a living nightmare, that’s what it was. Here, in the Shadow Land, he was all alone and all-knowing… he knew what was going on in the real world, knew that the other Nick, the evil Nick, was going to kill his friends, knew that he had already tried to kill AJ. He knew it all, and he could do nothing to stop it. It was his worst nightmare. The other Nick had to be stopped, and he could not stop it.

No,Nick told himself fiercely, it’s not “The Other Nick”. It’s not Nick at all. I’m Nick! That thing up there… that monster… is nothing but a shell… a shell that’s been taken over and possessed by evil. It’s not me, it’s not me doing this, it’s them!But those thoughts didn’t help much. Either way, something was after his friends, and he could not save them. They had always been there for him, always looked out for him, always tried to protect him. And now, when they needed him more than anything, he could not help them.

A solitary tear ran down Nick’s cheek as he thought back to the last real conversation he had had with them…


“You’re late,” Kevin’s voice boomed across the empty arena.

“Yeah, sorry,” Nick said with little emotion.

“Where have you been?”

“My mom called… sorry to keep you waiting with such petty things like my family.”

“Okay, that’s it… I don’t know what crawled up your ass, but I think you need to get over it. We’ve busted our asses while you sit back and pity yourself and treat the rest of us like we’re bothering you.”

“You know what? To tell you the truth, I’m not happy any more. You guys—especially you Kevin—don’t treat me like a grown man. I’m tired of being talked down to and told what to do. You have to face the fact that you can’t control me anymore. After Friday I’m going home and I don’t intend on doing this anymore.”

“Nick-”

“I’ll be here for the show tonight, but I’m not staying here right now.”And he had walked away, stalked off in a huff. He had come back later, as he had promised, and done the show with them. And after the concert, he had gone out drinking without so much as a goodbye to any of them. And then, that night, the pull had taken him. There had been no chance for a goodbye, no chance for him to tell them how much he loved them, how much he appreciated them, despite what he sometimes thought and said, how much he realized they were only trying to be good friends, only trying to watch out for him. He had never gotten to say any of that to them, and now he never would. For the evil had locked him away in the Shadow Land and taken over his body.
And it was going after them next.