“Dean.”
It was a breathy, feminine whisper, hanging in the darkness above me.
“Please, Dean. Please wake up.”
There was a hand on my shoulder, shaking me gently, trying to pull me up from the depths of sleep. I resisted. I kept my eyes shut and rolled away from the voice, burying my face in the pillow. It was warm there, inside the pillow.
Inside the pillow, there was nothing but heat and sleep and dreams.
“Where is she, asshole? What have you done?”
Mac grabbed the back of my sweatshirt and pulled me off the bed. The sweatshirt ripped at the seams, and I fell to the carpeted floor. My right elbow hit the ground hard, numbing my entire arm.
“What the fuck?” I gasped, pushing the question out through gritted teeth.
He grabbed me by the hair and pulled me across the room, my feet scrambling beneath me as I tried to relieve the pressure on my scalp. He pushed me up against the wall and wrapped his fist around my neck. His thumb dug into my windpipe, making my eyes water; I saw his bearded, frenzied face through a blur of pain. There were tears in his eyes. The muscles in his jaw trembled with seething emotion.
We were alone in the room. Taylor was gone.
“Where is she?” Mac yelled, spraying saliva across my face. “Where the fuck did she go?”
“I… I don’t know,” I managed, my voice a thin croak, barely making it past his clenched fist. I thought he meant Taylor. Did she flee? I wondered. Why? Was it because of our night with Danny? The sex had been dizzying, overwhelming, and I didn’t know what to think of it myself. Or is it because I touched her?
“Mac! Mac! What the fuck are you doing?” It was Sabine’s voice, coming from the hallway.
Without taking his eyes off me, he raised his free hand, waving a crumpled piece of paper toward the door. “She’s gone,” he growled. “And this little piece of shit’s responsible.”
“Calm down,” Sabine said. “Let him go.” Her voice was placating but firm. She moved into my line of sight, pushing her hands up against Mac’s chest, trying to get him to relax his grip.
I was quickly losing my vision; the edges of the world contracted inward, like an aperture sliding shut over my eyes.
“I said let… him… go!” Sabine yelled. She threw her body forward, slamming hard into Mac’s chest and knocking him backward. My head snapped forward as he lost his grip on my throat.
As soon as he let go, I sucked in a great big gulp of air. The rush of oxygen set my sight spinning. My head felt like an over-inflated balloon, ready to float up toward the ceiling. Then my knees buckled, and I slid down to the floor. As I gasped for breath, Sabine stepped out in front of me, holding her hands out toward Mac.
He kept coming after me, but each time he took a step forward, Sabine pushed him back. His frenzied eyes darted back and forth between us, but he seemed reluctant to turn his anger against Sabine.
“Calm down,” she said. Mac took another step forward, and she once again pushed him back. “Calm the fuck down!”
“What’s going on?” Floyd asked. I turned and saw him standing in the doorway. He was rubbing his eyes and yawning. “What time is it?”
Sabine gave Mac one last push, and the strength left his legs. He collapsed to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. His shoulders slumped forward into a defeated slouch. “Look after him, Floyd,” Sabine said. “Keep him away from Dean. Sit on him if you have to.”
Sabine crouched down at my side. She stared into my eyes for a bit, a concerned look on her face. “You still there, Dean? Everything okay?”
I tried to speak, but my voice got caught in my throat. I swallowed, pushing saliva over my freshly damaged larynx, and tried again. “Yeah,” I croaked. “But I won’t be singing… in no choir… anytime soon.”
I glanced over her shoulder and noticed Charlie standing in the open doorway. His eyes were wide, and he wasn’t moving. He looked like a statue, a marble effigy carved into the threshold.
“What the hell was that, Mac?” Sabine growled, turning on her heels. “What the fuck did you think you were doing?”
Mac was sitting like a forlorn lump on the edge of the bed, his eyes pointed down at his stocking feet. Floyd was sitting next to him. There was a piece of paper in Floyd’s hand: the crumpled sheet Mac had been waving around. Floyd started to read aloud: “There’s something I need to do, someplace I need to be. I know you don’t understand. I’m sorry, Amanda.”
After he heard Amanda’s words, Mac’s head shot up, the anger suddenly back in his eyes. “It’s all his fault,” he said, nodding toward me. “They’ve been sneaking around. He’s been feeding her delusions. Fucking wolves, my ass! He’s been telling her all of the things she wants to hear!”
“Amanda’s gone?” Sabine asked, in surprise. “When? When did she leave?”
“She was gone when I woke up. At first, I thought she was just getting food or making coffee, but then I saw the note. Her boots and jacket are gone, but the rest of her stuff is still here.”
“Maybe it’s nothing,” Sabine said. “Maybe she just went out for a walk.”
A cold, bitter smile appeared on Mac’s lips. His eyes remained fixed on my face. “Tell us where she went, Dean. Tell us where you made her go.”
His voice was scary calm. If his earlier assault had been an act of thoughtless passion, this new voice… this new voice promised cold-blooded, premeditated murder.
“I might know,” I croaked, looking away from Mac’s angry eyes. “There’s a place she wanted to go.”
We found her clothing in the park, near the mouth of the tunnel. Each garment was folded and stacked in a neat pile: jacket, sweatshirt, jeans, long underwear, panties, and socks. Her boots stood on either side of the stack like perfectly matched bookends.
As soon as it came into view, Mac darted ahead and knelt down by the pile of clothing. He quickly sorted through the entire stack, carefully lifting and turning each neatly squared garment, as if he were expecting to find Amanda hidden inside some random fold. When he reached the bottom of the pile, he glanced up and stared fixedly at the mouth of the tunnel. There was a line of perfect footprints leading into the darkness.
“No way,” Floyd said, taking a startled step back as soon as he saw the dark hole in the side of the hill. “There’s no way I’m going into that fucking hole!”
“You don’t have to,” I said, my voice low, a damaged rumble. “You can stay out here if you like.”
Sabine reached out and put a comforting hand on Floyd’s shoulder, at the same time flashing me a confused look, surprised at the vehemence of his reaction. Charlie stayed back near the copse of trees, a good dozen feet away.
It was just the five of us.
I’d searched the entire house before we left, but it looked like Taylor had performed another one of her early-morning vanishing acts; she must have left sometime before dawn, as I lay asleep in her bed. And what was that about? I wondered. Why was she constantly disappearing without word or explanation? Frankly, it was starting to piss me off. Maybe it was my fault; maybe I’d scared her away. But after our night with Danny—and I blushed briefly at that thought—it felt like she was toying with me, using me to slake her own inscrutable desires, then disappearing as soon as I needed her leadership and support.
She would have been able to keep Mac in check, I told myself. She would have gotten to the bottom of this.
Sabine lifted my video camera to her eye and started filming, focusing on Mac as he hovered over the pile of abandoned clothing. She’d grabbed the camera as we were heading out the front door; I wasn’t sure why. Did she consider this part of some elaborate art project? Or had she become infected with my compulsion, my need to document and probe the fraying edges of reality?
“She must be freezing,” Sabine said, noting the obvious. “She’s naked. In the snow.”
Mac let out a strangled sob. It was the sound of sudden dawning horror, as if the thought hadn’t yet occurred to him. He let Amanda’s jeans tumble from his fingers, then abruptly bolted toward the mouth of the tunnel.
“Fuck,” I muttered, and started after him. I gestured for Sabine to follow. “C’mon. Before he gets away.”
Mac didn’t even hesitate when he reached the dark hole, plunging headlong across its threshold. We followed twenty feet back.
This time, I came prepared. I paused at the mouth of the tunnel and pulled my flashlight from my pocket. The beam illuminated a wide swath of muddy earth. Here at the entrance, the floor had been worked into a narrow trough, and I could see the imprint of fist-size paws all along its perimeter. The enclosed space reeked of wet, musty fur, a savage primal musk.
Before the thought of those giant sharp-toothed wolves could root me to the spot, I ducked and started forward. Sabine followed at my heels. I could hear her boots squelching in the mud behind me.
“Mac!” I called. My voice was shaky. I wanted to reach Mac as fast as possible, but that desire couldn’t override my fears. There were horrible things living in these tunnels—I knew that—and I could imagine countless eyes popping open at the sound of my voice. Amanda’s oddly jointed wolves. Floyd’s apparition. Other things—much, much worse.
“Mac!” I called again. My voice didn’t echo in the dark.
After a couple of seconds, the walls disappeared on both sides, and I pulled to an abrupt stop. Sabine collided with my back and let out a loud curse as the camcorder made hard contact with her face: “Motherfucker!”
“Shhhhhh,” I whispered, then swung the flashlight left and right.
The tunnel opened up into three different passageways here, and all three looked exactly the same; they were the same size, had the same rough walls, and displayed the same level of use on their muddy floors. Which one leads to Devon’s house? I wondered idly. I glanced around, but couldn’t see a single wire embedded in the walls.
“What the fuck is this?” Sabine asked, a note of awe in her voice. “Out there, I thought it was just a cave, but… fuck!”
“Shhhhhh,” I prompted again, cocking my ear toward each of the tunnels in turn. I thought I heard a scraping sound—a distant sandpaper scratch—down the middle passageway. I shone my light forward and moved ahead.
Mac was running, I thought. He was frantic. There’s no way we’ll catch him.
I was just about to slow down, to reassess the situation, when Mac’s bright clothing resolved in the darkness ahead.
Here the tunnel ended in a wall of dirt, a frozen cascade blocking the entire passageway. Mac was on his knees, digging like a dog; his hands were scrabbling at the cave-in, pulling fistfuls of dirt into the tunnel behind him. He had his ear pressed into the mud, and his eyes were closed.
“Do you hear her?” he asked, his voice a tiny whisper. “Do you hear her singing?”
Sabine and I both fell silent. I held my breath and listened for Amanda’s voice.
There was nothing. The only sound I heard was the sound of Mac’s hands moving in the dirt.
After a tense handful of seconds, Mac jumped to his feet and headed back into the darkness, pushing us out of the way. “There were branches,” he said, his voice filled with terrified urgency, “farther up the tunnel. I’ve got to get around. She needs me!” Then he sprinted back the way we had come.
Sabine and I exchanged a worried look, then followed him into the darkness. He quickly escaped the reach of my flashlight beam. By the time we made it back to the junction, there was no way to figure out which direction he’d gone. On a whim, I chose the right-hand passageway, pulling Sabine along behind me.
This tunnel ended about fifteen feet in. The first time my flashlight beam swept across the cave-in, I thought I saw Mac standing there, his hands pressed up against the dirt. But it was just a momentary illusion. I blinked, and there was nothing there, nothing but dirt and empty space. Sabine and I turned and retraced our steps back to the other tunnel. The left-hand tunnel went about thirty feet in before it, too, ended in a cave-in. Mac wasn’t there, either.
“He must have gone out,” Sabine said, scanning the dirt with the camcorder. She sounded confused, uncertain. “Maybe he missed the junction in the dark and just kept on running.”
I nodded and said “yeah, yeah, yeah,” but I already knew that wasn’t the case. I knew we wouldn’t find him.
I’m not sure where this certainty came from. Maybe it was the flash I saw in the other tunnel, that momentary vision—seeing him standing there at the dead end, his hands up, trying to push his way through the cave-in—but I knew that he hadn’t missed the turn. I knew he hadn’t run outside.
No. Mac had found a way in.
Sabine and I walked the tunnels several times, but we found absolutely no sign of Mac. He was gone. Charlie and Floyd had been standing at the entrance the entire time, and they assured us that he hadn’t made it out.
He was just gone. As far as I could tell, he’d followed Amanda down into the dark.
I failed them. I let them go.
In fact, I don’t think I could have handled the situation any worse. Amanda had come to me in the middle of the night—I remembered that now, putting her face to that faceless voice—shaking me, looking for my help, and I’d ignored her. I’d just rolled over and buried my head in the pillow. And now Mac had slipped right through my fingertips.
I could have stopped them, I was sure. I could have saved them.
But I didn’t.
It was a horrible feeling, this impotence. It seemed like everything I touched turned to shit.
I wanted to bury my hands deep in my pockets and never take them out. I wanted to run away. I wanted to do something to protect the world from my horrible, infectious failure.
We abandoned the search without saying a word. I was so frustrated, I just turned around and walked away.
Sabine, Charlie, and Floyd followed.