A yellow legal pad was found during an inventory of the items inside the Chevy Tahoe belonging to James “Big Jim” Sullivan after his disappearance. The following was handwritten on the first page. It appears to be part of an unfinished novel titled Jameson and the Invasion from X’all’th’thu’”thuuu. No other pages from this work have been discovered.
she held the blade before him and in the torchlight Jameson could see it was incredibly sharp and haunted with the ghosts blood of countless slain Terrans. Jameson stared into the wicked beauty of the woman before him, the one blue eye that was not hidden behind an eyepatch shined like a shiny blue jewel.
“Xorox,” said Jameson. “I should have known it was you. I could smell your evil before you came in the door!”
“You should not talk so, when it is I that hold this incredibly sharp blade!” And it is you who are She slid the slender razor-sharp blade lightly up Jameson’s bare thigh. Jameson strained against the chains that bound him to the wall and gritted his teeth in rage.
“The mighty Captain Jameson,” said Xorox, “bound in my dungeon while my mighty army amasses for the invasion of Earth!”
With a flick of her delicate wrist, she cut Jameson’s loincloth, which fell to the floor. Her eyes grew at the sight magnificence of Jameson’s exposed naked body, his exposed manhood a thunderclap of flesh.
“Mighty army?” said Jameson with a sneer. “I have slain larger armies
“Insolent dog!” She held the blade at Jameson’s scrot groin. “If I did not require your seed to infiltrate Earth, I would cut off your manhood and mount it like a trophy over my throne!”
“My seed?”
“Ha ha ha! You still do not get it, dog! With the seed of your manhood in my womb, we shall breed a race of Terran and Reptillian hybrids that cannot be detected by even your most sensitive R-Meters! They will walk among the earthlings as my agents, and not even they will know that their true loyalty is to me! Until the day when they strike! Now you will make love to me, or die!”
“No!” “Never!”
Jameson gathered his strength and pulled free of his chains. He seized Xorox’s wrist in the iron grip of his right hand and tore it free of her body as blood spurted like a fountain. He then stabbed Xorox in the belly with her own hand.
[insert Jameson one-liner here]
MY MEMORY OF the next few months after Vegas is spotty. I know John went to jail for a couple of weeks that winter. It was because of a fight over a girl or something, no big deal. Jennifer moved out of my place and then moved back in because of a fight we had over something or other. My roof started leaking and I learned about the joys of home ownership when a bill for four thousand dollars showed up in my mailbox after I got it repaired. On my birthday I went and visited my adoptive parents and it was a little awkward, as always. But they’re good people. My birthday gift from John was an envelope full of baked beans.
Jen and I didn’t talk about Vegas. We didn’t talk about Big Jim and all the things we saw and did over those two strange days. That’s why she never got along with John, I think, because John loved to talk about it, loved to read about ghosts and dimensions and demonic conspiracies. He was soaking this stuff up from the ’net and telling us all about it over empty beer bottles and greasy pizza boxes. He’d talk and she’d fidget, change the subject. I usually took her side.
But I still made a habit of watching, looking for alien white insects zipping around outdoors, studying the shadows for the dark figures we saw float out from that portal to who-knows-where. I kept a lookout for, well, anything. And I saw things from time to time. Or maybe I didn’t. A dark shape slipping around a corner, a pair of lit eyes like burning coals, floating through the night. Always out the corner of my eye or in the reflection of a window. Or in the paralyzed state between deep sleep and wakefulness in those dim morning hours. Nothing you could trust, nothing you could admit to seeing.
John got me alone one night, I guess it would have been that next spring after Vegas, and asked me straight up if I ever saw anything strange. Because he did, he said. All the time, he said. He got a job working as a janitor in the Undisclosed Courthouse and he said he saw an old man walking around the basement, a ghost, semitransparent but very real and “There, man. Just there, there as a brick wall. I mean, he was just, so incredibly there.” John rattled off more stories, told me he watched a baseball game on TV and the announcers made some comment about how the stands were half empty, how the team was having trouble selling tickets. “But man, the stands were full, Dave. I’m tellin’ ya, to my eyes every seat was filled and I think it was the undead, I think I was seeing thousands of walking souls that nobody else could see, watching the game. Isn’t that bizarre?”
I told him the truth, sort of. I said I didn’t see spirits or demons or walking shadows or anything that couldn’t be written off as a trick of the eyes. I told him I thought the soy sauce made us see all that and it had been months since we’d ingested it and no matter what the stuff was or where it was from, surely it had worked itself out of our systems by now. An awkward silence followed, John letting the implication of that statement hang in the air. Without coming out and saying it, I had just told him I thought he was either full of shit or losing his mind.
A week later I was in John’s apartment, flipping through a magazine while he sat on the couch playing some game or another. I glanced at the TV and it looked like one of those first-person shooting games where you wander around hallways looking over the barrel of your gun, tearing bad guys in half with splashes of digital blood. I was never that into them.
“You still got that pill bottle?” John said, trying to sound offhand while he hammered a control pad with his thumbs. “You said you went back and found it at Robert’s old trailer, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And was there still sauce in there?”
“No. It had two-capsules, or whatever they were-in it originally and I had taken them both.”
“Oh.”
On the screen, John shot and killed some kind of demon creature and a little box fell out of him. The screen displayed, YOU’VE GOT A BOX OF SHOTGUN SHELLS.
It wasn’t until later that I realized, with amazement and disgust, what John was saying: he would have taken the fucking soy sauce again if I had any left.
I started avoiding John after that.
JOHN DOESN’T MAKE avoiding him easy, though. He kept showing up at my house with a video game console curled under one arm, kept calling me to come play basketball, kept asking me if I was avoiding him. He was “let go” from his janitor job and he asked me if I could get him back on at Wally’s. I did and then I saw him every day whether I liked it or not. But when he tried to bring up anything vaguely spooky, I did what Jen did: I changed the subject.
And then, one day at Taco Bell there was this old woman sitting two tables away from John, Jen and me. The old woman isn’t eating. Just sitting there, both hands holding her purse in her lap.
A group of four college kids come in, frat guys, and they sat right at the old lady’s table like she wasn’t there, one guy sitting right on her. Through her. He’s sucking on this Burrito Supreme with this old woman’s elbows sticking out of his torso the whole time. Finally she just sits up out of him and daintily walks out through-literally through-one of the glass doors.
All three of our heads were fixed right on her, even Jen’s. There was no pretending we didn’t see it, we were all staring. It was the pink elephant in the room, the thunderous fart in the elevator. Denial would have been ridiculous. We finished our food and walked out and piled in my car, then Jen put her face in her hands and cried. John had this satisfied look that I wanted to punch off his face. He knew better than to say anything.
I decided right there that I could outlast it, ignore stuff like that for the rest of my life if I had to.
I was wrong, of course.
In the summer John read on a Web site about a lady in a neighboring state who claimed she had bloodstains that kept coming back and back in this one spot in her carpet. She had it steam-cleaned back to bleach white, but a week later, there was the stain again. Then they replaced the carpet. The stain came back. They had video and everything.
John told me about it and I blew him off. Then he got me drunk and told me about it again and suddenly I was fascinated. We called the lady, told her we were experts in new carpet-cleaning techniques and asked if we could come up to take a look. So based on one moment of drunken curiosity, we wound up burning up a whole Saturday making the seven-hour drive to go check out the magical carpet stain.
We heard screams from inside the house as soon as we pulled into the driveway. We banged on the door and were greeted by a six-year-old girl holding one of those sippy cups. We walked in and saw the parents watching some award show on TV while in the center of the room lay a screaming man, a flow of crimson running from his groin and staining the carpet underneath. The mother, a pleasant, heavy woman in her forties, pointed to the shrieking man and said, “That’s the stain.”
We told her we had to get some supplies from my car, then drove away. We did a search at their local library-that is, John did a search while I curled up in a chair and went to sleep-and found a story from a few years before where a man had died after getting his penis caught in a spring-loaded mole trap he was working on. He bled to death. We went back to the house the next day, asked the family to leave the room and tried talking to the bleeding guy.
We told him it wasn’t his house any longer, that his wife had sold it, that he was staining the carpet from beyond the grave. He didn’t react to us, just kept screeching and thrashing around and clutching his groin. But after about an hour of us badgering him, he vanished. Off to wherever they go. No more stain.
The carpet family was so impressed they apparently told everybody they knew about it. They knew it wasn’t some magical detergent, either.
After that we got about a dozen calls and e-mails asking us to come check out some situation or other. We thought only one was worth checking out because it mentioned “shadow people,” but it turned out to be bullshit, a college kid with a budding case of schizophrenia. In fact, of the contacts we got over the next three months, exactly one of them turned out to be a real haunting-type thing and that was Frank Campo, the guy with the spidery car. We fixed him just by telling him that he wasn’t crazy, that the horrors he was seeing were real. He seemed oddly comforted by that. He was a lawyer.
But the rest were nothing, scared and lonely old ladies and attention seekers who thought it was better to be crazy than unnoticed.
But John and I saw things. Oh yes. By then, just walking around and going about our lives, we saw things. There seemed to be a knack to it, a tuning of the eyes. Like focusing on the dirt on your windshield instead of the road outside.
I woke up one morning to find four pairs of huge eyes peering over my bedspread, inches from my face. Short little dwarf people, standing along the side of the bed with eyeballs three times bigger than a person’s should be. I blinked. They were gone. I didn’t tell Jennifer. I didn’t tell her about any of it. I told myself it was just one more thing to adjust to. That’s what life is. Adjustment.
Then, in the fall, everything went to hell.
IT WAS RONALD McDonald’s eyes that haunted me.
I had gotten hungry for bratwurst and had been walking toward the entrance of one of the four McDonald’s franchises in Undisclosed (if you think it’s weird getting a bratwurst from a McDonald’s, then you’re not from the Midwest). I glanced at the cartoon clown logo in the window and let out a scream.
Just a little scream, and a manly one. But I still frightened one little girl on the sidewalk so badly that she screamed, too.
I couldn’t help it. It was one of those clear plastic static signs, pressed to the inside of the glass with the cartoon image filling most of that pane. The cloud of red hair, the size sixty red shoes, the yellow suit, and the, well…
I reached out and brushed my fingers over the glass.
The image is so perfectly drawn, I thought. So vivid.
Other late-night customers brushed past me and cast quick, stealthy glances my way, looking at the crazy man with the beard stubble and the ruffled dark hair. But they didn’t see what I saw, I was sure of that.
No, they saw the happy clown with his arms spread wide, one leg cocked at a forty-five-degree angle with one red floppy clown shoe tipped up into the air, big smile spread across his red-and-white face, welcoming paying customers into his burger factory. I remembered it from the last hundred times I had been here.
What I saw at the moment was a clown standing there with his gut split raggedly open, as if cut with a dull utility razor. He was-how can I put this delicately? In this perfectly rendered and shaded cartoon he was using his own white-gloved hands to feed a rope of his own intestines into his mouth.
Detailed. Yes. It was very, very detailed.
But it was those eyes that got me. His expressive cartoon eyes pulsed with a terror about to boil over into madness. Tears streaked his face, sweat beaded his forehead. Those eyes pleaded with me, looked right into me and screamed to be put out of his misery. Those eyes told a story, not just of a man eating himself, but of a man being forced to eat himself.
And only I saw it.
I closed my eyes, looked again. Still there. Not shimmering like a mirage in the desert or some blur out the corner of your eye. It just clung to the window in its brazen thereness, real right down to the little plastic corners peeling up from the glass.
I turned away, tried to clear my head, to concentrate. Then I spun back at the image. There. For just a split second, I saw the normal logo, the way everybody else saw it. Happy corporate clown. Then it blurred back to the corrupted version again. This time there was text.
The usual MCDONALD’S-I’M LOVIN’ IT! slogan was replaced by a jumble of crazed red letters saying,
MCWONGALD’S-SHIT LUNCH TURDWOMAN
Some would have doubted their sanity at this point, but by now the part of my mind that issued doubts about my sanity had melted from overuse. I went back to my car and just drove around town for several hours, my appetite gone.
It had my fucking name in it. McWongald’s. What the fuck.
They haunt minds.
Someone was talking to me, from that other side. I pictured floating black figures and eyes like cigarette embers. I pictured a single blue eye in the darkness. I felt sick.
My orbit around the town finally degraded and I crash-landed at John’s apartment. I told him the McWongald’s story, hoping he’d say something like, “That’s some weird shit” and start untangling two controllers from one of his many game consoles. Instead, he said, “Get up.”
I stood and realized I had been sitting on a stack of three cardboard boxes. He opened the flaps on one to reveal that it was full of hardback books.
“Wait, what’s all that?”
“Dr. Marconi’s book.”
“You have a hundred and fifty copies of it?”
“Oh, right. You don’t remember. In Vegas, we were walking out the back and Marconi makes some comment about how we should read his book. You were all ‘fuck you old man’ and I said sure. Then I grabbed a dolly and wheeled out a whole stack. Just staring at him coldly the whole time I was wheeling them backward out the door. Daring that fucker to stop me.”
“Why?”
“They were free, Dave. Anyway, he says something in here…” John flipped pages. “It’s around the beginning somewhere. I don’t see it right now-maybe it was in a different book-but anyway he says that when you read the Bible, the Devil looks back at you through the pages.”
“What, like his Bible was possessed? Holy shit, he must have been the worst priest ever.”
“No. He says when you’re dealing with any kind of supernatural beings, Gods and Devils and angels, you tend to think about them like hurricanes or earthquakes, some kind of mindless force of nature. But if they’re real, then they have minds. They know your name. So even reading about the Devil tips him off, he knows instantly he’s being read about and that you’re somebody he may have to deal with. And I’m thinking what you did in Vegas went way, way beyond that.”
“What ‘I’ did? What about us? We were both there.”
“Yeah but I cut my hair since then. They probably think that was a different guy.”
I closed my eyes and collapsed onto John’s futon. I said, “The thing. The wig monster. Does it still come around?”
“No, haven’t seen it in months. Except about three weeks ago I was eating a corn dog, the thing appeared, snatched it out of my hand, and disappeared again. Never saw it after that.”
“No more of this. Okay? It’s over. No more chasing after this stuff. They’ve set up camp inside my head, John. It’s gone too far.”
John’s mouth said, “Okay” but his eyes said, What makes you think you can just walk away?
“Let’s order a pizza.”
THE PIZZA TASTED like rotten eggs. Just to me, not to John. The rest of that week, every meal smelled like formaldehyde or paint thinner. I decided it was them, messing with me. Punching random buttons in my brain. When they got bored with that, they switched senses. I would hear my name as I drifted off to sleep, as if spoken six inches from my ear. Over and over again.
Molly started to get agitated, growling at things in the darkness, prowling around our bed at all hours of the night as if keeping watch. Early one morning she woke me up, pressing her wet nose against my elbow. I went to let her outside, and she went sprinting down the street. She didn’t look back.
Not long after that, they-whoever “they” were-tried something new. The radio. I would hear entire songs changed, twisted. I got dancey and lighthearted beats under lyrics about prison rape or incest and, once, a version of “Stairway to Heaven” with my name edited in throughout. This new version that blared over the speakers of a busy shopping mall (though only I heard it, of course) was a list of all my chronic sins and vices, a musical rundown of all the reasons I, David Wong, was destined for Hell. It got to me, I admit. Even if their version of “Stairway” barely rhymed. What rhymes with masturbation?
I slowly came to the realization that these shadowy beings had the crude sense of humor of fourteen-year-olds.
That’s when things started to disintegrate between me and Jen. Our entire relationship had been a process of slow disintegration, I think. She knew something was up, mainly because there were so many more ’80s power ballads around the house than usual. She pestered me until I came clean and told her what was going on.
She nodded and said she understood, then left to go to her friend Amber’s house, ostensibly to help out with Amber’s new baby. She seemed to have taken all of her clothes with her, though, and didn’t come back that night. I sat there, depressed, thinking about coming home to the silent house night after night. Without even Molly for company.
On an evening a few weeks later, I was driving home from work with one thought cycling through my brain: I would go to the grocery store, buy a pie, and just eat the whole thing. In one sitting. A whole pie.
My radio was playing a supernaturally reworked version of an ’80s song by some Duran Duran soundalike band. It was the one with the word “Africa” in the chorus, and this version had been twisted into some kind of a racist diatribe against blacks. I tried to block it out, turning my attention to the call. Toto, that was the band’s name.
My cell phone rang.
Shocked, as always, that I had actually left it on, I fished around inside my jacket for the chirping thing. Caller ID showed John’s number. I punched the button and said:
“No.”
“Dave, glad I caught you. I just got a call from my uncle. He’s asked us to come in on a case. Like consultants.”
“Your uncle? The exotic dancer? Exactly what kind of ‘consulting’ would we be doing?”
“No, no, Uncle Drake. The cop. They got weirdness and they want us to come look at it. The crime scene is at Eight-eighteen West Twenty-third Street. By the mall.”
This stopped me. The cops called us? What, they got a ghost they want us to check out? Like we’re fucking Scooby-Doo?
“No. We talked about this. I’m going home to eat a pie.”
“I think they found Molly.”
“What?”
Molly? What, did she steal another car?
“Come get me. See you in a few.”
“I’m not going, John. I-”
I was talking to a dead phone.
I cursed and rubbed my forehead. The radio sang its bigotry in perfect ’80s pop harmony.
Let’s send ’em aaallllllll ba-ack to Aaaaafrica…
I reached down to the knob, to find the radio was already off.
Here we fucking go.
I PICKED UP John at his building, since it turned out his supernatural powers couldn’t stop the bank from repossessing his motorcycle.
We turned onto 23rd Street, a lineup of perfect new houses with trendy coffee-cream-colored siding and a shiny SUV in each driveway. Finding the house was easy-it was the one with the swirling red-and-blue cop lights out front, the collected cop cars making it look like the ship from Close Encounters had landed there.
One guy tells us to turn back, and we go, I thought as we pulled up a block away from the commotion. Any one of those guys says “boo” and we turn around and never come back here.
We passed a blue Jeep in the driveway, license plate STRMQQ 1. John studied it, frowning a little. Four cops stood out on the front lawn, looking unsure, like they all needed each other’s armed company right now. Eight eyes landed on us.
“Don’t worry,” John said to them. “We’re here.”
Each cop was individually pissed off by that, I could see, and it was only the arrival of John’s uncle Drake that spared us the confrontation with these guys who clearly had no idea who we were. Drake was a big guy, with a uniform that stretched and bulged around the middle. He sported an uneven mustache that I think he grew to cover a scar on his upper lip.
“Hey, Johnny. I really appreciate you comin’ by like this.”
He gave John a hard, manly handshake.
“So what’s goin’ on?”
“Do you, uh, know whose house this is?”
“Strom Cuzewon?” John offered.
A moment of confused silence from Drake.
“Um, no. It’s Ken Phillipe, the Channel Five weather guy.”
“Oh,” said John, seeming unsatisfied. I glanced back at the plates, STRMQQ 1.
“The Qs are supposed to look like a pair of eyes,” I informed John. “The license plate means ‘Storm Watcher.’ ”
John looked at the plates, then back at me, then at the plates again. I noticed for the first time that the big bay window into the living room of the house had been bashed in, the curtains behind it rustling in the breeze. Finally John said, “So somebody killed the weather guy?”
Drake grunted. “Sorta. Damnedest thing you ever saw.”
“I highly doubt that.”
“We ain’t been inside the house yet. There’s this, dog.” To me he said, “John here said he thought it sounded like yours.”
I couldn’t see around the bay window curtains, so I walked up to the front door and peered into the decorative little window, into the living room. A girl sat on an overstuffed leather couch, maybe a few years younger than me, silken auburn hair pulled into a ponytail. Little wisps of bangs drifted down over her smooth forehead, just above her gorgeous almond eyes. She wore cutoff sweatshorts and had the most perfect pair of tanned thighs I have ever seen. I felt my hand instinctively go up to straighten my hair and I was suddenly horribly aware of every physical flaw on my body. Every ounce of fat, the little scar on my cheek.
If I looked like that, I would wear shorts in October, too. I’d quit my job and spend all day at home, gently caressing myself. Did I shave today?
On the floor next to the couch was a bloody dead person.
“That’s the weather guy?” I asked.
“Yeah,” confirmed Drake.
“Do you see the girl sitting on the couch?”
“Look, buddy, I told ya we’ve tried to get to her in there, but the dog…”
“I wasn’t being sarcastic. I just wanted to know if you could see her.”
“That’s Krissy Lovelace, their neighbor. She’s been sitting like that since we got here, frozen. We even tried to signal to her but she won’t respond. Like she’s just blanked out.”
“So she killed him?”
“No, his throat was torn out. By the dog. It’s still in there. That’s the problem. Every time we try to get in, it-”
“Damn,” I interrupted. “It’s too bad this city doesn’t have a special department to, you know, control animals. Oh, wait. We do. It’s called Animal Control. Do you want their number?”
“Wait a second,” said John. “You’re saying Molly did that?” He turned to me. “Dave, we sat there and poked at Molly with a stick for exactly twenty-three minutes that one time before she even growled. She couldn’t do that to a man.”
“No,” Drake said. “You still don’t understand. My guys won’t even go in and I don’t blame ’em. It’s somethin’… unnatural.”
I peered in again. “Well, I don’t see a dog. And I’m not seeing why we can’t just-”
Molly came into view. It was her all right, the rusty coat of an Irish retriever or whatever she was, now shampooed and combed to perfection. Her new owner apparently groomed her more than I had. This combination of girl and dog could make a good living as models in the dog-supply industry.
The only other thing that was different about Molly was the blood staining her muzzle and the fact that she was floating three feet off the floor.
Molly’s legs were stiff below her as she moved, buzzing slowly across the room as if on a track and hung by invisible threads. When Molly came near the door she turned her head my way and in a clear but guttural voice said, “I serve none but Korrok.”
Molly continued to float around the room like a shaggy little blimp.
Here. We. Go. Again.
I TURNED FROM the door. John had this look on his face like this was all routine. Ah, yes, a floating-dog scenario. We have the parts in the truck.
Drake said, “A neighbor saw it, said Krissy was just walking the dog along the street out there and all of a sudden the thing takes off. The damned thing breaks its leash and races across the lawn like it was fired from a cannon. It then jumps through the plate-glass window. She said the dog jumped into the air and tore out Phillipe’s throat in half a second. I guess Ms. Lovelace ran inside after it, started bawling and then she just shut down. Too much for her. I kinda feel like doing that myself. Not the bawling part, mind you.”
I said, “Wait. Did you hear what the dog said just now?”
“Said? She barked…”
“Ah. Okay. And when you look at the dog right now, she’s…”
“Floatin’ a few feet off the floor.”
You’d think the fact that other people could witness the weirdness would have comforted me. It didn’t. It meant the rules had changed already.
“John and I need to have a word about this. We’ll, uh, be right back.”
On the way back to my car, I said, “We’re driving away as fast as we can. Right to the bakery counter at the grocery store.”
“Dave, those guys could see her. All the cops. They saw her floatin’ around and doing supernatural shit. That’s new.”
“That’s new? Why is she floating at all, John?”
“Gotta be the sauce, right? She got more of it than any of us. I was always amazed she survived. Maybe, you know, they got to her finally.”
“After all this time? None of this makes sense.”
“Did you hear what she said?”
“She said, ‘I serve none but Korrok.’”
Speaking that meaningless word made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, though I couldn’t pin down why. My mind almost made a connection, then abruptly steered clear of it nearly hard enough to make the train of thought go flying out of my ear.
“You sure?” said John. “I thought she said, ‘I serve none but to rock.’ I was about to agree with her.”
“Whatever, John.”
“So who’s Korrok?”
“Don’t know.”
And keeping it that way is making my brain’s denial gland work overtime.
“You still got the mints in your car?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
John dug around in the glove compartment and pulled out a little roll of candies somebody had mailed to me a while back. Crazy people mail me things. Most of it I throw on a shelf in my toolshed and forget.
We went back to the front door of the house, and I shook one of the candies out into my palm. I very slowly turned the knob and pushed the door in, just enough to lean my head and my right arm through.
Molly the Hoverdog was about ten feet away, behind the couch and her incredibly hot new owner. I held out the candy, which immediately caught Molly’s attention.
I tossed the candy on the floor and quickly ducked back out. Molly floated over to it, tilted in midair until her snout was just over the white morsel. She lapped it up.
For a moment, nothing. John was about to supply the “it’s not working” when, with a wet, tearing KERRRAAAAACTCH sound, Molly exploded like a meat piñata at a birthday party for very strong, invisible children.
A couple of cops behind us cheered. Drake walked up. “What the hell was that?”
John answered for me. “It was a TestaMint. Little candies with Bible verses printed on them. You can get them at your local Christian bookstore. We were sort of hoping it would just drive the evil out of her, but…” John shrugged, businesslike. These things happen sometimes.
Drake said, “Fine. Now let’s get one thing clear. I don’t want to hear any more about this after tonight. This gets written up as a dog attack. Somebody’ll be here later to clean up the scene and there’ll be a funeral and all of these here men will go home to their wives and try to act like the world ain’t gone crazy.”
I said, “Yeah that’s probably for the best-”
Drake’s head snapped toward me.
“Shut up. I ain’t done.”
Back to John he said, “Between you and me, I need to know some things. That was your dog, right?”
“Well, Dave’s dog. But she’s belonged to several people…”
“Hey. Look in there. He’s dead. You understand me? Now, you and I both know, things… happen around here. In this town. Always have. My daddy wore this uniform before me, he told me stories. But I ain’t never seen anything like that.”
John put up his hands defensively and said, “Neither have we.”
“But the last time things got weird, you were there. With the party and all those kids that died, the detective that left and never came back. Don’t be playin’ games with me. If you know somethin’, tell me. Tell me so I can prepare for it.”
John said, “We don’t know the situation. Not yet.”
On the word “yet” I had the urge to punch John in the kidneys.
“But let us take a shot at the girl.” We all glanced toward Krissy, still frozen on the sofa. “Before the psychiatrist gets here or whoever you bring in to reboot people like her.”
Drake stared John down, then decided to roll the dice. “You got two minutes.”
“Great.” John ducked through the front door. Drake reached out and grabbed his elbow.
“Hey.”
“Yeah.”
“This the end of the world?”
He said it in the earnest, stiff-jawed manner of a middle-aged man asking the doc if it’s cancer. It scared the fuck out of me.
John said, “We’ll give you a call if we find out.”
John went to the couch, but I couldn’t resist stopping by the red, six-foot circle of dog mush.
I found Molly’s collar near her head. The bloodstained tag:
I’m Molly.
Please return me to…
“Good-bye, Molly,” I muttered. “Of all the dogs I’ve known in my life, I’ve never seen a better driver.”
Just before I turned away, I noticed something else. Out of the pile of dog salsa stuck one of the paws, straight up into the air. On the foot, on the pad where the palm would be on a human hand, was a marking, like a tattoo.
It was a little black symbol, something like the mathematical symbol for pi. I pointed this out to John, who suggested I take the severed paw home for further study. I decided it wasn’t that important. Maybe something the breeder put on there, I didn’t know. I hadn’t noticed it before but how often do you look at a dog’s feet?
Krissy Lovelace wouldn’t make eye contact with us and she wouldn’t respond to our voices, but we did get her to her feet and led her outside. We took her to the backyard, saying generic, soothing words to her the whole way.
Once we were out of sight of the cops, John put his hands on Krissy’s shoulders and turned her to face him. He held up his smoldering cigarette.
“Miss? You see this? You start talkin’ or I’m gonna burn you with it.”
No response.
“Ma’am,” I offered. “I’d do what he says. I’m a good guy, a reasonable guy, but my friend here? He’s a wild man. And once he gets goin’ I can’t stop him. Now wouldn’t you rather talk to me?”
Nothing.
John jammed the lit cigarette into the back of her hand with a pssssst sound.
She yelped and yanked her hand back, shaking it madly. “What the heck are you doing?” she screeched.
“Ma’am, we got a serious situation here,” John said, in a voice devoid of sympathy. “We got a dead guy and maybe a lot worse on the horizon if you can’t help us. Now I’m real sorry you saw what you saw but we ain’t got time for you to curl up into some psychological shell. Help us and you can just repress the memory later.”
She looked around for a moment, bewildered. Then:
“Molly!” she gasped. “Molly attacked Ken!”
“Yes, we know,” I said. “But we don’t get why-”
“And you say he died?”
“It’s-yes, he died. It’s a strange thing and we need you to tell us-”
“I’m gonna puke.” She leaned over. “Can I go to jail for this? Because it was my dog? Can they charge me with murder?”
“No. I-look, I don’t know. But we need to-”
“Miss,” John interrupted. “We have reason to believe your dog was possessed by some kind of Hell demon. Has Molly ever spoken to you before?”
Pause.
“Who are you guys?”
“Just answer the question. Please,” John said. “Has there ever been any levitation?”
“What? No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Ma’am,” I said, “if your dog was dabbling in the occult while you had her it’s best you tell us now. We’re experts.”
“What? No, no. I’ve only had her for a few weeks, she showed up at my house and I went to return her to the address on her tag but the owner was this weird girl and she told me to keep her. I was just walking her and we ran into Danny Wexler.”
She said that name like we should know it, like it was a mutual friend or something. She saw the look of nonrecognition on our faces and said, “The Channel Five sports guy. I… know him. He goes to my church. He pulled up alongside the road, like he was gonna stop at Ken Phillipe’s house because, you know, they work together. He gets out and he pets Molly and then he drives off. Just like that.”
I glanced at John, then turned to her.
“Ma’am-”
“Please stop calling me that. You sound like a cop when you do it. Call me Krissy.”
“Krissy,” I said, “tell me exactly what Wexler said to you. Word for word.”
“I don’t think he said much of anything. Just, ‘pretty dog you got there.’ Then he drove away. A second later Molly went nuts.”
“After he touched her?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Just to pet her, though.”
I flashed back to the beer truck, John touching Molly and waking up with a jolt, his soul jumping from her to him like a spark of static electricity.
“And he didn’t say anything else?” I asked. “Didn’t use the word ‘Korrok’ or anything like that?”
“Um, no, I’m pretty sure he didn’t.”
“Okay.” I turned to walk away.
“Wait!” said Krissy. “There’s something else. When Danny drove up, he was wearing a mask. Or it looked like it, all black. But he must have taken it off because when he pulled up it was off. But I know I saw it. That’s weird, isn’t it?”
“Could you see any of his face? When he had the mask on?”
“No, but… it was dark. Why would he do that? Is Molly okay? Do you think they’ll take her to the pound?”
“Uh, if you go around and talk to the police, they’ll explain everything.”
As I walked away, John thanked Krissy for her cooperation and let her know that we would contact her if any more leads developed. He hurried to catch up with me and said, “Fuck! Dave! The shadow people. She saw a fucking shadow people… person.”
“The what people?”
“You know goddamned well. Those things, the men made of shadow we saw in Vegas. They’re here. Or at least one of them is. I’ve seen them, Dave. I’ve seen them around.”
“No, they’re not and no, you haven’t.”
When our butts landed in my car a minute later, John lit up another cigarette and asked, “Okay, what now?”
THE THING ABOUT video game basketball is that the computer decides whether or not the ball goes in when you shoot. So say you’re playing against the computer team, you’re down by one and let’s say you take a last-second shot to win the game. It’s the same program you’re playing against that decides whether or not the digital ball goes through the digital hoop on that final shot. So it can arbitrarily make you lose or arbitrarily let you win. The whole thing is bullshit.
But we were playing anyway, on my sofa. John was Kobe Bryant’s Lakers and I was the Chicago Bulls, led by Pierre Manslapper (you can name your own players if you want). It was an hour after the thing with Molly and the dead weather guy.
“So,” John said, glancing at his watch. “You think the cops talked to Wexler?”
“Who?”
“Danny Wexler, the sports guy? Because of the thing with the weather guy getting killed?”
“The weather guy was killed by Molly. That’s how it’ll go down, dog attack. Case closed. And Molly is dead so…”
“You’re being stupid, you know that? You think we should call Marconi?”
I shrugged. “You do what you want. Hey, did you know that the number-one all-time rated show in Korea was the premiere of that ’80s show Joanie Loves Chachi? It turns out that in Korean, ‘chachi’ means ‘penis.’”
John paused the game.
“It’s after ten. I wanna flip over, see if the news has got anything about it.”
He did, before I could object, and I was immediately reminded of why I hated local newscasts. We sat through a lengthy tribute to the departed Ken Phillipe, showing old video clips of the idiot standing knee-deep in rushing floodwater while wind pummeled his microphone, another shot of a shaky camera trying to track a tornado on the horizon while Ken shouted his report.
They transitioned from that to a scandal at a local nursing home where dishwashers rinsed bedpans and dinner plates in the same load, then to a house fire that wouldn’t have made the newscast at all had their crew not arrived in time to get video of the pretty flames. Then they got to sports and I admit, that part was… different.
The first thing that was strange was when they cut to the two-shot of Danny Wexler and the anchor, Danny’s face was black. I saw immediately why Krissy thought he was wearing a mask earlier. At first glance it would look like he had on a black ski mask, one without the eyeholes.
But when they cut to the closer one-shot of his head, you could see the effect went way beyond that; Danny Wexler appeared to be a statue carved from solid shadow. Only John and I saw this, of course, because the other anchors didn’t react in horror. Or at least, not until Danny Wexler opened his mouth:
“I’m Danny Wexler and this is Channel Five sports! The [Undisclosed] football team has been raped in the ass by fate once again, booted from the first round of the playoffs as they failed to carry their inflatable turd past a chalk line in the grass as often as their opponents did. Here’s Hornets quarterback Mikey Wolford, flopping that right arm around like a retard while he tries to pass to a teammate that apparently only he can see. Aaaaand, it’s intercepted. Nice pass, ’tard! Now here’s Spartans fullback Derrick Simpson, pumping those nigger thighs down the field like pistons on a machine designed for cotton picking. Ooh, nice tackle attempt there, Freddy Mason! I bet you could tackle that fullback if he was made of dick, couldn’t you, Freddy? But, he’s not, so final score, forty-one to seventeen. May every Spartan die with a turd on his lips. All hail Korrok.”
Danny didn’t get to read any more highlights, as the newscast abruptly switched back to a visibly shaken anchorwoman, who announced they would be right back. Commercial.
John clicked off the TV and I let out a long, resigned sigh. Without a word, we put on our jackets and walked out the door. We stopped by my toolshed.
THE MORBIDLY OBESE security guard at the Channel 5 building told us Wexler had left early. We almost gave up at that point, but got a huge break in the case when John thought to look up Wexler’s home address in the phone book.
After getting lost, briefly, we pulled into the lot of Wexler’s building and found a Buick with the license plate 5 SPRTS, which, after some debate, we decided must stand for Channel 5 sports and that it must be his.
“You still got the mints?” John asked as we strode up to the four-story apartment building. “You knock on the door and when Wexler answers, you cram some mints down his throat.”
“If he’s acting normal, we don’t do anything. Just find out what he knows. About Molly and, you know, everything else that’s happening. If it’s something we can fix with a mint then fine. If not, then we leave Dr. Marconi a voice mail and drive until we find a town that doesn’t keep showing up in books with titles like True Tales of the Bizarre. Marconi can come down and do a whole show on it for all I care. Write another book.”
I had my old-school ghetto blaster; John was carrying a satchel containing several items he collected from my toolshed. We didn’t have any holy water. Where do you even get it? Off the Internet?
We positioned ourselves on either side of the door to Wexler’s third-floor apartment. I set down the stereo, facing its speakers toward the closed door. John unzipped the satchel and pulled out a weapon he had made, a Bible wrapped around the end of a baseball bat with electrician’s tape. He brought it up to the ready. I pushed “play.”
The smooth-yet-screechy sound of Cinderella’s “Don’t Know What You’ve Got ’til it’s Gone” filled the hall.
We let it play for the duration of the song, one guy down the hall poking his head out of a door in confusion and then closing it quickly at the sight of John and his bat. Wexler’s door remained closed.
We shut off the stereo, listened. Nothing from the other side of the door. I tried the knob. Unlocked. I gestured to John and he ducked inside, Bible bat at the ready. My gesture had meant, “Wait, we should reconsider this.”
I followed John in, reluctantly. I left the door open behind me.
Wide open.
Lights on, but nobody home. The television was on and I jumped when I saw it was me and John on the screen. Then I noticed a tripod and camcorder facing us from across the room, aimed at the sofa in front of us. It was apparently positioned to tape whoever was sitting there, the TV set to show the live feed. The sofa was empty now.
We split up and quickly searched all five rooms of the small apartment, but the place had an empty feeling to it and my heart had slowed down by the time I peered in the last doorway. Nobody here.
The place was neat but cramped. Furniture too close to the TV, a kitchen table that would have to be pulled away from the wall if you wanted to seat more than two people. Movie posters in the bedroom. Bachelor pad.
“DAVE! IN HERE!”
I ran. I found John lying prone on the floor of the bedroom.
“JOHN! WHAT-”
At the sight of me he sat up and thrust both hands out. In one hand he held a large, folded envelope, ragged where it had been torn open. In the other hand he held a small, silver canister.
Just like mine.
He said, “Under the bed.”
I let out a long breath and said, “Oh holy mother of fuck.”
“Yeah.”
I sat on the bed. I shook my head slowly and said, “Man, we can’t go through this again.”
“Look.”
He gave me the envelope. I flattened it out, saw the address was written in an aggressive jagged scrawl that had to be a man’s.
“ATTN: KATHY BORTZ, REPORTER
CHANNEL 5 NEWSROOM”
… and then the P.O. Box number of the TV station.
John said he remembered her from the newscast earlier, said she was the lead reporter who did the nursing home story. So if you were a citizen and had something big to share with the world, such as a vial of a black, oily goo from Planet X, you’d mail it to a Kathy Bortz. Or, at least, that’s what James “Big Jim” Sullivan would do.
I can say that because his name was scrawled in the return address corner, followed by an address I had seen many times and had long memorized, always following the words, “I’m Molly. Please return me to…”
I rubbed my hand over my mouth, tried to think through it. I said, “Jim had the soy sauce.”
John shrugged. “I guess so.”
“Why didn’t he tell us?”
“For the same reason you haven’t told anybody else. That night, I was surprised Jim hung around as long as he did, even after the needle came out. But, maybe he was there because he did know what it was. Trying to control the situation. And he did try to tell somebody, you know. He mailed it to the damned TV station.”
“Before he died.”
A shrug. “Probably.”
“Son of a bitch. I knew he knew more than he was letting on. We should have sweated him down and got some answers. So he got it from the Jamaican?”
“I guess.”
“Where’d the Jamaican get it from?”
“The wig monsters, right?”
“What, you think Robert Marley had a ranch full of them somewhere? No, I think saying soy sauce comes from those monsters is like saying Pringles come from Pringles tubes. The sauce has a mind of its own, those things are just carriers. And these little silver vials that keep turning up, you don’t buy these at the hardware store. No, somebody was supplying Robert.”
I found myself about to suggest calling Drake the Cop, but I stopped that in midthought. I pictured all sorts of questions about the Las Vegas trip, and the missing detective, and so on. Then I thought again about calling Marconi, but that felt hopeless. John had looked up a number for his office but it wasn’t like that was a red phone that rang at his bedside. We’d get some voice mail tree asking if we wanted to order a copy of his DVD.
I wandered into the living room and sat on the couch, seeing myself do it on the TV screen at the same time. I waved to myself. I looked depressed, rumpled and tired enough to sleep on a sidewalk. People would stop and put change in a cup for me.
John went and did something in the kitchen, banging around plates and opening drawers. A minute later he sat down beside me, carrying a sandwich and a soda.
I noticed a VCR atop the TV was recording the camera’s feed. I hit “stop” on the VCR and then “rewind.”
John reached over to an answering machine on the end table. He skipped through eleven worthless messages before we heard the unmistakable voice of Action Weather Watcher Ken Phillipe:
Beep.
“Danny? It’s Ken. Call me, buddy. What you saw, I don’t want you to misunderstand. Krissy and I, we been neighbors a long time, I knew her mom from way back-look, I want you to know that she and I were talking but we were talkin’ about you, Danny. You got her scared, the way you’ve been acting. Anyway. Give me a call, Danny, and I’ll be over with a six-pack and we’ll shoot the shit. I hope you’re well, buddy.”
Beep.
I started the VCR from the beginning of the tape. Empty sofa. Then Danny Wexler leaned into the frame, glancing over at the feed on the TV. He sat down, looking worn and beaten and drained, in a sweat-stained T-shirt and jeans. The door we had just entered through was visible over his shoulder. He said:
“Hi, honey. Are you there? Answer me if you’re there.”
I looked at John. “Was he talking to somebody behind the camera?” John didn’t answer, just squinted quizzically as Wexler continued.
“Come on. It’s okay.”
A pause, Wexler staring into the camera in silence for a few seconds.
“Just say hello.”
[Another pause.]
“I know. It’s been a rough couple of weeks. Baby, I’ve done somethin’ really stupid. I’ve gotten wrapped up in something. Something you can’t imagine.”
“That’s bizarre,” said John. “It’s like listening to one half of a phone conversation.”
“If I told you the details, you would wish I hadn’t,” he said. “But you know by now that I’m not myself. I come and go, and right now I’m fine, but I have to fight for every second of control. It’s draining. Baby, it takes so much energy to keep myself on top, on the surface, at the wheel. As soon as I relax, he’ll take over. It will take over. And I’ll just be a spectator. Helpless.”
He broke down into sobs.
Wexler babbled on, those long pauses here and there.
I said, “So, he was on the sauce, right?”
“At some point, yeah. Maybe he thought it would improve his sportscast. And now that I think about it, it sort of did.”
“Or maybe he didn’t take it. Maybe it took him. The same way it happened to me. The reporter lady gets the envelope, she glances at it and assumes it’s from a crazy person, she tosses it in the trash…”
John picked it up. “… Then Wexler’s dumb ass wanders along, gets curious and says, ‘What’s this?’ and fishes it out. Horror ensues.”
“Fast-forward toward the end of the tape. See if he mentions where he’s going before he leaves.”
John never got the chance. On the screen, Wexler flinched and looked up. The sound of Cinderella’s “Don’t Know What You’ve Got ’til it’s Gone” filled the room.
Wexler jumped off the couch and walked out of the frame. A couple of minutes later we watched ourselves burst through the door.
John and I leapt up from the couch as if our asses were spring-loaded.
“We just missed him!” John screamed. “We just missed him! Shit!”
On the TV, John and I walked passed the camera, then headed off to search the apartment.
On-screen, a shape appeared above us.
Some kind of creature, clinging to the ceiling.
Wexler.
On the screen, he scrambled upside down to the doorway, clutching the top of the door frame and pushing himself into the hall. Weightless. Moving fast as a salamander, an inhuman blur.
John hoisted the ghetto blaster, punched “play.” “Sweet Child O’ Mine” blasted. He held the stereo over his head like John Cusack in Say Anything and charged into the hall.
We pounded down the stairs, power ballad in our wake, stupidly hoping Wexler had hung around the building.
In the parking lot, a minute later, John spun with the ghetto blaster, warding off the night. No sign of Wexler.
The parking spot was empty. The song ended and we stood there like idiots, chests heaving, chilled air frosting the sweat on my face.
John said, “Maybe he went back to the TV station?”
I shrugged. “Or to Ken’s house. Or Krissy’s house. Or to the hospital. Or that twenty-four-hour tattoo place. Or the airport where he has a flight waiting to take him to Thailand. You know where I think we should check first? The nearest all-night bakery.”
We trudged around the building and back through the row of hedges that separated the visitor’s lot from the reserved spaces. Black as pitch out here. I glanced up and noticed the lights were off in the lot-
– of course they are-
– and there was no moon. Dark as hell. It was chilly, that wet-autumn-night kind of cold, but I knew part of the cold I was feeling was coming from inside. Fear was creeping up on me, working from the guts out.
Just go back, man. Go back home, to the warmth and the light. You did your best. Now it’s over. You won’t find him. And dark like this, true dark, belongs to bats and rapists. You did what you could.
I walked on, feeling already like this was wrong, totally wrong, my car keys clutched in my hand like a rosary, our shoes crunching dead leaves with each step.
Crunch… crunch… crunch…
I blinked, trying to adjust to the dark, failing. Eyes watering from the chilled air, a little soreness in my knees from bouncing down the steps, a tickling around the hairs of my ankles. Every nerve alive and standing at attention.
I blinked and could see a little now, my Hyundai just twenty feet away, one of two cars in the lot. The low, cloud-filtered gloom made the blue compact appear a few shades too dark.
I suddenly had this flash of visual memory, the glimpse of parking lot as my headlights swept across it when we pulled in. Flat asphalt under circles of lamplight. That memory knotted in my gut for some reason, something I couldn’t put my finger on. We walked.
Crunch… cranch… crinch…
Something’s wrong.
Seeing it again, the lights flashing across the lot as we turned in, a newly paved lot with fresh, dark pavement against sharp, yellow lines…
Crunch… cree-unch…
… and completely devoid of fallen leaves.
Cruuuuunch…
That tickling at my ankles again. I stopped, looked down.
From behind me, John screamed.
The ground was rippling.
Pulsing, as if pelted by a heavy rain.
Twitching.
Cockroaches.
My legs were covered with them. I squealed and crazily slapped at my pant legs, trying to knock the things off me, dropping the duffel bag and my car keys in the process. If this was one of our patented hallucinations, it was a five-senses hallucination extravaganza. Once, while half asleep, I had a cockroach crawl across the back of my neck. It’s quite the unique feeling and hard to mistake.
This was real, quite real, so very tinglingly and itchingly real, and my heart was pounding, my skin crawling and I mean literally crawling. In that instant I was sure the insects were not only on my skin but under it, burrowing through muscle tissue, spindly legs flicking over nerve bundles.
Every thought was blown from my mind.
You would think that under those conditions nothing would surprise me. You’d be wrong. I was quite surprised, for instance, when I looked down and saw that my fallen car keys were running away from me, floating as if carried downstream.
They’re taking my keys! The roaches are stealing my car keys!
I trotted toward the car, itching in a hundred places. I saw then that it wasn’t the autumn night that made the paint appear darker. It was the couple-hundred-thousand roaches swarming over the body.
I took off my jacket and used it to sweep the bastards away from the door and window. I yanked open the latch, squishing a roach between my fingers and the handle as I did. I swung the door open-
There were a lot more roaches on the inside than out. They had puddled in the floorboards and they poured out onto the pavement like the jackpot from the Devil’s slot machine, the bugs raining down with a sound like frying bacon.
There was a lump on the driver’s seat, invisible under a rippling blanket of roaches. But then the lump grew and pulsed and I realized the lump was roaches. They scrambled over one another, twitching legs entangling and knotting, piling higher and higher.
You see people in horror movies standing there stupidly while some special effect takes shape before them, the dumb-asses gawking at it instead of turning and running like the wind. And I wanted to run, to do the smart thing. But this was my car, dammit. My only car. I’d be damned if I was gonna walk to work every day.
The roach pile in the seat grew and grew until it was a grotesque, lumpy column two feet high. Bugs were pouring around my shoes like floodwater, flowing up the tires and across the fenders and into the driver’s seat. Their stampede made a soft sound like someone crunching cereal from across the room and I could smell the things, an odor like an old fryer full of dirty cooking oil.
In the seat, two smaller columns jutted from the base of the bug pile like tree roots, hanging off the front of the seat, building down toward the floorboard. The lump now had legs.
They were, I saw, forming themselves into a human figure.
Hey, why not?
Arms formed a few seconds later. Finally, a head. A full replica of a man sculpted entirely from cockroaches now sat comfortably in the driver’s seat.
The compacted ball of roaches that was its skull rotated toward me, as if it had turned to look me in the eye.
It spoke.
“A cockroach has no soul. Yet it runs and eats and shits and fucks and breeds. It has no soul, yet it lives a full life. Just like you.”
Time froze. I was locked in this moment, with this thing. I spoke, but I don’t think my mouth ever moved.
I said, or thought, “Who are you?”
“Who are you? Who are you to one like Korrok, who fills his belly with great men, swallowing them as a whale swallows swarms of krill? The desires and ambitions of men who towered over you are, in Korrok, digested over eternities, fermenting into an anguish that exceeds the sum of all of living mankind’s suffering through the ages. Populations of worlds roil in his guts, the mad screams and desperate longings of seven trillion souls escape every time Korrok farts. And he does fart. So let me repeat my question: who are you, you shit-spewing crotch-fruit?”
“I’m nobody,” I found myself saying. “I’m nobody. Why not just leave me be? I have nothing you can take.”
“Korrok enjoys bitter food, and he has decided to let you rest on his tongue. Then, he will swallow. You wish to be left alone? You will get that wish. You will die alone, with shit in your pants. That is a prophecy.”
I blinked, and realized that the time standing still wasn’t an illusion-no time had actually passed. The whole conversation was relayed directly to me via a conduit the soy sauce granted me all those months ago.
The roach man raised its hand. My car keys. It started the Hyundai. Its other arm clasped the open door with fingers of knotted insects, and pulled it shut.
The roach man shifted into reverse, backed out of the space and drove to the parking lot exit. It signaled a right turn, then drove off into the night. I looked down and saw the lot was now clean of insect life.
John threw away his cigarette and said, “Shit. I knew that was gonna happen.”
Shakily I said, “What now?”
“You okay?”
“It… spoke to me. I think.”
“What’d it say?”
“Just… I don’t know.”
“Man, how are you gonna report this to your insurance company?”
We heard an engine from behind us, a white Ford Focus rolling into the parking lot. Out the side window popped the pretty head of Krissy, the girl from the couch at the crime scene. I stepped closer and saw that, yes, her body was attached.
“Hey, I’m glad I caught you guys. Did you see that newscast?”
John trotted up, carrying his satchel. “Yes. Wexler’s gone. We need your car.”
“What? Why?”
John circled around to the passenger-side door and said, “Car chase.”
She smiled. “Cool. Hop in.”
“Wait,” I said, digging out my roll of TestaMints. “Here. Eat one of these.”
“And who are you, again?” she asked.
“I’m the only man here who has his head on straight. This ain’t a situation for the dogcatcher anymore. There’s something else, something dark. We’re talking every bad thing you’ve ever thought didn’t exist, demons and witchcraft and gremlins and Sasquatch and I don’t care if you believe or-”
“All right, all right. Stop talking. I know what I saw tonight.” She reached into her sweatshirt and pulled out a gold cross dangling on a thin chain. “See? Could I wear this if I were some kind of a devil or vampire or something? Now are you getting in or not?”
I studied her as best I could, judged her on the spot. I got in the car. The tires chirped as she pulled out of the parking lot, turning the same direction roach man had gone.
Traffic was dead at this hour and we hummed along with the speedometer hovering just over the seventy-five mark.
So freaking dark. No moon and no stars and we’re all on our own down here-
“There!” said John. Taillights way up ahead. Small and close together. It was my boy, all right. It was at this moment I realized we, again, had no plan for what to do once we caught up to it. The same thing apparently occurred to Krissy, who asked, “What do we do now?”
“Get up alongside,” said John. “And then ram it off the road.”
“I’m not doin’ that! Who’s gonna pay for the-”
She cut off her words with a scream. We were close now, close enough for her to see the driver. “What is that thing?”
“You don’t wanna know,” John said. “But don’t be afraid. Get up close again, I got a plan.”
She looked confused, but faced forward and pressed the Focus up to eighty. We ran up alongside the blue compact. “Keep us even,” John said as he rolled down the window. Roach man had his window down, too, one roachy elbow resting outside the window like a trucker. The occasional roach dripped off his arm like candle wax, flicking off into the wind.
John started to climb out of the window, wind whipping his hair around his face and I had the crazy idea that he was going to try to fling himself over to the other car like Bruce Willis. Instead he leaned his torso back against the car and braced his knees against the inside of the door. He unzipped his pants.
Roach man turned his roach head toward us just in time to take a windblown spray of urine to the face. The creature flailed and convulsed; the Hyundai wobbled in its lane. The little tires lost traction and the car went soaring off the side of the road. It plowed through weeds and tipped nose-down over an embankment, landing in a culvert with a white explosion of water.
Krissy pulled over and we all spilled out.
“What was that? Huh?” I screamed at John. “What the hell was that?”
“Hey, we stopped him.”
“The goal was to get the car back. My car. Intact. And not splattered with urine.”
“Look! Oh, man-”
A dark shape.
Floating up from the Hyundai.
A black plume of smoke.
With two glowing eyes.
I felt it. It was as if the shadow man had reached out to me, cold fingers running through my skull and down my spine.
Then, it was gone, slipping soundlessly off into the night. I heard a breathy sound from Krissy. She had slapped a hand over her mouth, eyes wide.
John said, “They’re here, Dave. They’re here. They’re here, they’re here, they’re here. Shit.”
I hissed, “What are they?”
“Don’t know. It’s probably in Marconi’s book but I can never finish it, it gets so slow after the first two chapters.”
To Krissy I said, “Don’t worry, it looks like it left. You saw it?”
She shook her head. “I felt it. It just ran through me, this sort of heavy feeling like-like there was nothing here. Like everything was nothing, everything everywhere. There’s like molecules and stuff but behind it, nothing. Just cold and dark…”
She fell into silence.
I said to John, “When it spoke to me, it mentioned Korrok. Just like Molly.”
“Was that thing Korrok?”
“No. I’m sure of that.”
Krissy wasn’t following this conversation at all, and instead focused her attention down toward the crashed Hyundai, two-thirds submerged in the standing water, its rear stuck into the air like the Titanic.
“Ew! What’s that?”
A layer of cockroaches two inches thick floated out from around the car like an oil slick, clumps here and there still holding the shape of limbs. A half dozen old fast-food bags floated up from the interior and hung nearby like buoys.
“Roaches,” I said. “You can see them?”
“Yeah. Where’d they come from?”
“My car was really dirty.” I turned to John. “What the shadow guy here did with the bugs? I think he did the same to Molly. Just reached out and took over.”
John said, “And Wexler, too, I guess. So. They can do that.”
“This is indescribably bad. What now?”
Krissy asked, “Are they, like, demons?”
“Well, they’re evil,” said John. “You just saw one of them steal a car.”
“Molly!”
Krissy, pointing down the road.
Sure enough, the dog that was standing about twenty yards away, it was either Molly or an exact replica.
To me John said, “Ghost?”
“Krissy can see her.”
“Zombie then. Well, she’s earthbound, that’s a positive sign.”
Molly barked, trotted off down the road, then turned and barked again.
John said to Krissy, “She wants us to follow her.” He said it to her, not to me. Leaving me out of the decision. Asshole.
I glanced at my watch. “Anybody want to go to Denny’s? Maybe this thing will sort itself out.”
They both went to the car. I started listing all of the things that were retarded about this plan, and by the time I reached the end we were all rolling down the street with the copper dog in our headlights.
After a few minutes, the dog, looking perfectly healthy despite having exploded in half earlier that evening, turned and bounded off the road. She streaked across an expanse of weeds, gravel and busted concrete.
We were at the Mall of the Dead.
That’s what we called the half finished and subsequently abandoned Undisclosed Shopping Centre. The city sank forty million dollars’ worth of tax breaks and infrastructure into getting the thing built before three of the five investors disappeared (I always imagined that all three simultaneously shot each other, like in the movie Reservoir Dogs). Now, three years and thirty lawsuits later, raccoons nested in the one hundred and fifty empty store slots and rainwater puddled in the halls.
It lay there in the darkness, broken and rotting like a decomposing animal carcass that was slowly picked apart by scavengers.
Molly zipped off toward the building and was swallowed by the darkness.
Krissy said, “Do we follow her in there?”
The radio kicked on, mandolin plucking the intro to an early ’90s song by REM called “Losing My Religion.” John and I reacted, Krissy didn’t. It only took a few seconds for me to realize this was not the song as Michael Stipe had written it.
“Oooohhh, knife
plus nigger
Equals you, and Jews are dead meat…”
“I know people around here,” John said, “who would like the song better that way.”
“You can hear it?”
“Yeah.”
Krissy said, “Hear what?”
“Never mind. Look over by those Dumpsters,” John said. “Wexler’s car.”
5 SPRTS.
“Well,” I said. “Nothing to do now but wander the fuck into that abandoned building, totally unarmed.”
John opened the satchel and drew out a long, metal flashlight, clicked on the beam to confirm that it still worked. Then he pulled out a wadded-up hand towel and handed it to me.
I unwrapped it and found myself holding the stainless-steel automatic pistol I had stolen from the pickup during the Las Vegas thing. I had planned to ditch it, to throw it into the river or something. Not only was the weapon stolen, but for all I knew it had been used to hold up four liquor stores and shoot two policemen before I got hold of it.
“Why do you still have this? I thought you were gonna make it disappear.”
John shrugged. “Never got around to it. I keep it hidden. And I scratched off the serial numbers there. Should be safe.”
I ejected the magazine.
“What? Why is it loaded?”
“Oh, Head bought bullets for it. He borrowed it a month ago, I think he had to threaten a dude with it. Brought it right back though.”
Krissy said, “You’re not going to shoot Danny, are you? If he’s possessed or whatever, you know that’s not his fault.”
“You belong to a church, right?” I asked. “You know anything about performing exorcisms? That sort of thing?”
She shook her head.
“You know your Bible?” John asked. “You could show us the part that’s got the spells and incantations and stuff and read them right from there.”
She just stared at him. She heard the chorus as the bastardized song continued. Chorus now.
“That’s me in the porno
That’s me in the spotlight
Losing my religion
Tryin’ to beat a tight-assed Jew…”
Krissy dug into her purse and pulled out a little black plastic thing that I thought was a flashlight but when she pressed the button a blue spark jumped across the end.
“It’s a Taser. A, uh, stun gun. I don’t think I’ve got anything else in here.” She sifted around in the purse. “Nail file…”
“No, let’s go.”
Our hearts hammering, the three of us approached the sprawling building, none of us making a sound other than the crunching of gravel under our shoes.
I made my way to Wexler’s car, edged toward the window with the gun.
Nobody inside.
Ahead was the tall, rusted metal framework that I supposed was going to be a fancy awning for the main entrance. Beneath it was a row of huge windows and a bank of doors, all boarded over with plywood.
Among the graffiti, something had been painted in bold letters two feet high. On closer inspection we saw the letters were twitching, moving ever so slightly.
Slugs.
A couple hundred of them had slimed their way up the boards to spell out a phrase that I was certain was right from “Korrok,” whoever he was:
YOUR DOOMED
His spelling, not mine.
One panel of plywood had been pulled partially off its frame, presumably by Mr. Wexler.
John said, “Dave, you got the gun. You should go in first.”
“You got the stereo! Besides, if I go in and get killed right off the bat, you’re all fucked. But if you get attacked I can rescue you with the gun.”
“Maybe Krissy should go, like as a decoy.”
She moved toward the opening but I shouldered her aside.
The stink hit me one foot inside the place. Rot and mildew and dead rodents.
The empty storefronts were boarded up, giving us a single, impossibly long corridor. The floor was littered with paper cups and candy wrappers and cigarette butts and other teenager droppings. I saw a used condom under my shoe.
Our only light was from a huge skylight running down the length of the building. Parts of it had been boarded over, other sections were spiderwebbed with breaks and clouded with mounds of accumulated dead leaves. When we walked under the boarded-over sections of the glass we found ourselves in pools of absolute blackness.
John lit the flashlight. He fired up the stereo.
“Home Sweet Home” by Mötley Crüe.
We plunged ahead, a creeping pool of light and music in the dead space.
A sound.
Shoes scraping on floor tile.
I raised the gun.
“Wexler?!”
No answer.
We reached a bend in the mall, the hall taking a ninety-degree turn to the right. Blood was pumping in my ears. Palm sweat greased the handle of the gun.
Ahead of us, shoes scraping tile.
A shadowy shape.
Not shoes.
Hooves.
Moving fast.
It was as tall as a man. It passed into a shaft of moonlight.
John screamed a profanity.
I squeezed the trigger.
Gunshots hammered the air.
Krissy shrieked.
Yellow flashes from the gun barrel. Glimpses of brown fur and antlers in the darkness. A deer?
Maybe it had been one, once. This creature had grown several new sets of eyes. Each of its antlers ended in a snapping set of lobsterish claws. It looked like it had a novelty chandelier from a seafood restaurant on its head. Looking back, I have to say it was the stupidest-looking thing I had ever seen.
It stumbled as it got close and my wild shots started to land, blossoms of red opening up on the beast’s chest and neck.
It tried to turn away, showing me its rib cage and taking several broadside shots for its trouble. The mutated deer collapsed, thrashing on the dirty floor tiles and leaving red smears like a child’s finger painting.
It twitched one last time, and was still.
My hands were shaking. The gun looked broken, the top half of it pushed an inch from the rest of the mechanism. After fiddling with it for a few minutes I realized this is what the gun naturally did when it was empty. I pushed in the button to release the empty magazine. Great job conserving ammo so far.
We approached the fallen was-a-deer, kicking brass casings as we went. I pushed at its furry hide with my foot. As solid as a dead deer. I turned to Krissy, asked, “You see it?”
She nodded, eyes still wide.
“Oh, look!” yelped John. “Look at its ass!”
The deer’s ass was melting, puddling on the floor like candle wax. In less than a minute the entire hindquarters were a brown pool on the floor, the ribs quickly caving in like a punctured balloon at a Thanksgiving Day parade. As the front legs and head flattened, the liquid residue from the hindquarters dissolved before our eyes, leaving dry floor behind.
There was one part that didn’t melt, a section in the middle of the animal that protruded from the pink and brown slime. Square. A box about six inches to a side.
I scooted it away with my foot. Heavy. When the goo dissolved from it, I saw that it was a green-and-yellow box marked…
“Shotgun shells,” John said. “Too bad we don’t have a…”
His voice trailed off as his gaze shifted to a lone wooden crate over by the wall, presumably full of floor tile or coils of electrical wiring and other mall fixin’s.
John delivered a series of hard kicks to the side of the crate, cracking and splintering the boards. He plunged his hands into the opening and pulled out a dark length of plastic and metal that I had already guessed was a shotgun.
Growls emerged from the darkness, followed by the scratches of claws. Many claws.
I clenched the empty gun in my hand, pointing it stupidly into the darkness. John frantically loaded the shotgun.
“WHOA, LOOK AT the time!” said Arnie, standing to leave. “Mr. Wong, it’s been a hell of a lot of fun talkin’ to you. But I should start my drive back; I got six hours ahead of me. The piece may not run next month, but soon. They may want to run it on Halloween, you know.”
“Arnie, please. You came all this way. Don’t walk away thinking what you’re thinking.”
He dug his car keys from his pocket. “I’m not here to judge, I said that already. The shotgun, hey, the roofers could have left that behind. And maybe that deer got fed up with the local hunters and ate one of them, including the shotgun shells the poor guy had in his pocket.”
He pulled out a cigar from an inside pocket and jammed it into his mouth.
“No, it’s nothing like that. The thing in Wexler, it had the power to call up on these things I guess, to try to kill us. But I think Wexler was still inside there, too, and he was working from the other end, helping us out. He was on the sauce, you know, and he used it.”
“After you told me the part about Las Vegas, you know how I said it was the stupidest story I had ever heard?”
“You didn’t say that.”
“Well, I was thinkin’ it. But I’ve decided I owe that Las Vegas story an apology because this last thing made that one look like The Grapes of Wrath. I’ll see ya around.”
Arnie walked toward the exit. I followed, stopping quickly to pay the lady at the counter.
“Wait,” I stammered as he pushed through the door. “I got, you know, all that paperwork on the Hyundai and the accident and all that. The insurance company, they took pictures of the scene and, well, you can’t really see anything but they describe the scene in the report, the dead roaches and all that. I went back that next morning and I got a hand, a clump of the bugs in the shape of, of the fingers. I got it at home…”
Nothing from Arnie. He didn’t even nod.
“In my toolshed, in a jar. I can show it to you. I mean, what kind of a person would fake that, would sit at home and glue a bunch of roaches together? ‘Honey, what are you doing?’ ‘Oh, I’m making a roach hand. You know, to aid my credibility with the press.’”
Arnie said, “The kid you say you killed during the Las Vegas thing? Fred Chu? Say I go looking into that, his disappearance.”
I hesitated. “Do it. Those records are out there. I’ve been honest with you, I keep saying that.”
“So you admit killing him?”
“Off the record, yeah.”
“And the other kid that died, Big Jim-”
“He’s really dead, too. You can look it up.”
“I already did. But Big Jim, he would have gone to the cops about Fred, wouldn’t he? That you shot Fred? He didn’t seem too happy about it.”
“I-I don’t know. We’ll never know.”
“Worked out pretty good for you that Big Jim died then, didn’t it?”
“Fuck you.”
“Don’t you see? You got all this ridiculous shit swirling around in your story, Wong, but then you got the parts that are real, the parts that can be verified. And they’re all felonies. A dead kid. A missing kid. A missing cop. So why don’t I do both of us a favor and pretend we never talked? Because I’m not sure I wanna hear the rest of it.”
He unlocked the door to a white Cavalier and ducked inside.
“Wait!”
I jogged up to the car and circled around to the passenger side. I gently smacked the window with my palm. Arnie hesitated, then reached over and unlocked it. I leaned in.
“Can I sit down?”
He paused once more, not wanting to prolong this but not quite sure how to get rid of me. Maybe he was afraid I was dangerous, liable to fly into crazy-man violence if turned away. He used both hands to scoop up a bundle of notebooks and folders from the passenger seat. I ducked in and arranged my feet around a pile of recording equipment and cassettes on the floorboard.
“Here,” I said. “Look.” I pulled a single folded sheet of paper from my pocket. “It’s been in my pants all day so it’s kind of wrinkled and, uh, moist, but read it. I copied that from Dr. Marconi’s book.”
PAGE 192 SCIENCE AND THE BEYOND DR. ALBERT MARCONI
leaving it looking like a jar of pickled eggs that had been eaten and then vomited by a gorilla.
The strange ritual was done in service to a deity who to my ears sounded like “Koddock” (the tribe had no written language). I was told that each member bore the mark of this god and I was allowed to witness the branding ceremony each member undertakes at the age of manhood.
The young man was forced to lay facedown on a mat, naked. The priest then brought out a clay jar containing the writhing maggots of bot flies. The larvae were placed on the back of the young man, arranged in the shape of Koddock’s symbol. The maggots then chewed through the top layer of skin, digging holes a half-inch deep. I was told the larvae would, according to ceremony, be allowed to remain in their warm, wet tunnels in the young man’s back for seven days. If the young man succumbed to the itch and scratched the spot, he would fail the test of manhood and would have to wait a year before attempting it again.
On the seventh day the larvae are extracted by the priest and the wound treated. What remains will be the trails of scar tissue, following the paths eaten by the worms. These scars would form the “brand” of Koddock. The priest showed me the finished symbol and the pipe literally fell from my mouth.
Once more, it was like the symbol for pi, only rotated ninety degrees to the left. The same symbol I had seen a Manchester toddler draw in his trance state months before.
As soon as I got back to Lima, I phoned Dr. Haleine, the Egyptologist. Shouting to each other over a poor connection, he described for me again the hieroglyph he had discovered in his dig, nearly 7,500 miles from where I stood.
I was so stunned by what he told me that I could not keep my feet. Sitting on the floor of my hotel, I pondered the enormity of the revelation and sought out my flask.
Haleine explained that there was an Egyptian god named Kuk, who was already known to Egyptologists (in the Ogdoad cosmogony, Kuk
PAGE 193 SCIENCE AND THE BEYOND DR. ALBERT MARCONI
was a frog-like god who represented darkness and chaos). Haleine, however, believed he had stumbled upon a cult that worshipped his rash and destructive son, Kor’rok. This god was represented symbolically by a man punctured by two spears, one in the mouth and one in the groin, the twin centers of desire for mankind.
In the cult’s mythology, Kor’rok was a reckless and cruel slavemaster, who used men’s bodily desires to lure them to their destruction for his own amusement.
Dr. Haleine’s hieroglyph and the symbol of “Koddock” I had copied in my note pad, when laid over one another, were nearly identical in shape. Here we had now three peoples, living on opposite corners of the planet, separated by oceans of water and time, independently identifying the same deity.
It was the single best piece of evidence for the supernatural ever discovered by science.
Another day of travel took me back to the village. I arrived in such a state of excitement that the priest had me restrained by several strong men and forced me to drink a potion to “cool the embers in my head.” After some time I got alone with the priest and asked him about Koddock and the symbol.
The symbol, he told me, was a representation of the god Koddock himself. Koddock was a young god, he told me, hotheaded and prone to fits of rage if not pleased. The vertical line was his body. The top horizontal line was a stream of vomit, the second horizontal line was a stream of urine. For, you see, the tribe believed Koddock liked to drink to excess, and when he was intoxicated he interfered with the affairs of man and caused great destruction. This was the tribe’s explanation for all suffering and misfortune in the world.
Arnie skimmed over it, then let out a long sigh.
“See? That’s Korrok. That symbol, that’s what was on Molly’s foot, it’s what’s on… look, you’re a journalist, these are independent sources here confirming the same thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s crazy, this is evidence, right?”
“What am I supposed to say, Wong? What do you want from me?”
“I need somebody to know about this. I have to get this out. Before…” I shook my head. I ran out of words.
“Before what? A monster catches you in an alley and eats you?”
Tell him about Amy.
“No. It’s nothing like that. Well, I mean, that’s a possibility, but it’s bigger than that.”
Arnie let out a sigh.
“Just listen,” I said, begging a little. “Just listen a little bit longer and then everything will be clear. You’ll understand how much is at stake here. Seriously.”
Arnie sighed and looked off across the parking lot. “I ain’t got much time, Wong. It’s getting late.”
“I know. Just… I need you to drive somewhere. We go there and I can show you. Everything will be clear, you’ll know what’s true and what isn’t.”
“Where?”
“The mall. The mall.”
He gave me a long, hard look. He was probably sizing up his ability to take me down if I went nuts on him and tried to bite through his neck. He apparently judged his physical prowess to be superior because he twisted the key and revved the engine to life.
“Turn right out of the parking lot here.”
THE SKITTERING FOOTSTEPS grew louder in the mall’s cavernous hallway. John pumped the shotgun and raised it.
“Sister Christian,” by Night Ranger, slowed, garbled, ground to silence. The last of the juice in the ghetto blaster’s batteries.
Scratching claws.
Approaching fast.
Two gray blurs.
They were coyotes, muscular, with matted fur and red eyes. They both skidded to a stop at the sight of us, took in deep breaths, and breathed plumes of fire.
The three of us dove behind the crate. John leaned over with the shotgun, fired and tore a fist-sized chunk out of the first coyote head. He fired at the second one, missed.
Pumped.
Fired.
Missed again.
The beast lunged at me, knocking me over like a linebacker. It stood on my chest, its breath smelling like burnt electrical wires. It sucked in a huge breath that I knew would take the flesh off my skull.
A hand shot out.
Punching into the coyote’s side.
Krissy hit the Taser.
Blue sparks flew.
The coyote’s abdomen, swollen with flammable breath, exploded like the Hindenburg. Furry chunks hit me in the face, a beautiful orange fireball rolling up toward the glass ceiling.
I scrambled to my feet, my face hot and tight, brushing slimy red chunks of animal off me and cursing. I wasn’t sure if it was coyote blood or my own piss on my pants.
Something heavy bounced off my shoe. John shone the flashlight, revealing a box of bullets.
Laying next to it was a key with the number “1” etched into it.
“A key,” said John, clicking shells into his shotgun. “Good. Now, if I know what’s going on here, and I think I do, we’ll have to wander around looking for that door. Behind it we’ll meet a series of monsters or, more likely, a whole bunch of the same one. We’ll kill them, get another key, and then it’ll open a really big door. Now right before that we’ll probably get nicer guns. It may require us to backtrack some and it might get really tedious and annoying.”
“Oh, fuck you,” I said. “I’m staying here.” I sat on the ground, pulled open the box of bullets and tried to put one in the pistol. It fit. Hey, why the hell not. I started pushing rounds into the pistol magazine one at a time. “You go find the door.”
A metallic thunder filled the hall.
We all flew into action, bullets spilling off my lap and rolling in every direction.
Ahead of us something huge dropped from the ceiling, blocking our view. The clanking roar finally ended in a crash that made all three of us jump.
We advanced, guns drawn. It was one of those enormous drop-down gates that malls use to button up at closing time.
“Well,” Krissy said, “I guess this is the big door. There’s a keyhole at the bottom, near the latch.”
“All right,” said John, nodding. “All right. Big door. Sooner than I expected, but whatever. Now, that means there’s a boss behind there. A huge bad guy.”
He focused on Krissy. “I want you to be prepared for this. This evil that has Wexler, it’s impossible for us to imagine what form it’s taken with him. Expect tentacles. And a whole bunch of eyes. Or just one eye. I don’t know what exactly to expect but I know it’ll be a way bigger asshole than we faced out here-”
“Krissy!”
From behind us. We spun on the voice and I involuntarily squeezed the trigger. The gun clicked. I hadn’t chambered a round.
It was Wexler, trudging up in the shadows behind us. He looked pale but perfectly human. I posed casually with the gun, so as not to be too blatant about the fact that I had almost killed him with it just now.
Krissy moved toward him.
“Don’t,” he said. “Stay away from me. He’ll be back. Any second now, he’ll be back.”
He bent over and broke down in a coughing fit. Blood splattered the floor.
“Dude,” said John, “let’s get you to a hospital, we’ll protect you and-”
“No. Listen. I’m falling apart. I’m falling apart inside. When he comes back, I won’t hold up. Now, how much do you know about this place?”
“If you’re talking about this town in general,” John said, “don’t even get us started. We’re the experts.”
“No. No. I’m talking about the doors. This building-”
Coughing fit.
“-the doors, under it, or somewhere. I don’t know where. Hidden. This building and others, I think.”
“We can go over all that later,” I said. “Where’s the shadow man? The, you know, the thing, the one who’s possessing you? Where is he now? Is he behind that gate?”
“He’ll come back here. Let him. Let him enter me. Then kill me-”
Krissy screamed, “No! Danny!”
“-Kill me and burn my body. Then burn this place down on top of me. Find the other doors if there are more, and burn them down, too. In fact, just burn the whole town. Just to be safe.”
“Doors? I don’t get-”
Danny coughed, spat, then coughed and coughed some more, hacking until he finally passed out.
Krissy ran to him, but couldn’t get him to respond. He was still breathing, though, so we dragged him over to the wall, leaning him against it.
John and I trained our guns on him, and waited.
Krissy looked back and forth at us and said, “What are you guys doing?”
John and I glanced at each other.
“Well… you know,” I said meekly. “We’re waiting for the thing to come back into him so we can, uh…”
“We are not doing that.”
To me the guy looked to be on his last legs anyway, so this really did seem like a more reasonable plan than getting eaten by whatever monstrosity waited behind that gate. Shouldn’t we honor his final wishes?
We were unable to convince Krissy of this. She took the key and started working at the lock of the huge gate.
I sighed and went to her, the pistol clasped in both hands. John nudged her aside and knelt with his hand on the gate handle.
Krissy pulled the Taser from her pocket.
John looked up at us and said, “We stay together. Look for a weak spot, like an eye or something. If there are crates around the room, cover me and I’ll open them, see if there’s a rocket launcher or something in one of them. If either of you find a big, green, polka-dotted mushroom, set it aside. We may need it later.”
The blood, pounding through my ears again, my skull sounding like the inside of a seashell. I blinked hard to try to clear the spots pulsing in front of my eyes.
I knew this was the thing to do, but every fiber screamed to retreat and try again some other day, when we had more on our side, when I wasn’t so tired, or so nervous, or so fat. I struggled for something to cling to, the way soldiers in foxholes picture their families, or a flag.
My car, I thought crazily. This fucker crashed the Wongmobile. And for that, he must taste death.
It would have to do. I reminded myself to breathe. John pulled up the gate, rolling it up on its tracks with a sound like tank treads.
We entered a huge octagon of a room, more storefront blanks where food counters were to go. There was some broken glass and dead leaves on the ground, where one of the panes in the overhead skylight had broken out.
Nothing else.
John gestured to our left and said, “Check it out.”
It wasn’t a monster. But still I stopped in my tracks, let out a long breath and said, “Shiiiiiiiiit.”
There was a painting on one wall to our left. On the wall, on the ceiling, on the floor, on the two-by-fours stacked next to the wall. I recognized the style.
The painting was abstract, yet strangely realistic. It was a three-dimensional picture of a ring intersecting another ring in a way that seemed to shift as you looked at it. Like the landscape I saw in Robert Marley’s bedroom, it seemed to draw you in, to take on complexity as you stared.
It’s a picture of time.
I tore my eyes off it and said to John, “I think your Jamaican friend was here.”
“I think he was actually living here.”
He nodded toward a nearby nest made up of an ancient sleeping bag and about half a dozen plastic milk crates. The surrounding floor looked like the aftermath of a bloody battle between empty Captain Morgan bottles and faded candy bar wrappers.
I thought about Wexler, ranting about hidden doors. Now here was where our guy, our Patient Zero, had set up camp all those months ago. I felt like there were dots that I was intentionally not connecting. I wanted to go somewhere warm and bright to think about all this. Or, even better, not.
I wandered out to the center of the floor, crunching glass and leaves underfoot. John lit up a cigarette and said, “Man, if you could flood this place in the winter and let it freeze up, you’d have a kick-ass place to play hock-”
A shriek, from behind me. Krissy, screeching my name.
A shotgun blast split the air.
I spun, scanning the room through the sights of the automatic.
John screamed my name, bellowing instructions I couldn’t make out. Then I saw it, the black shape zipping through the air, like a Hefty bag blown around in a hurricane. I spotted it, lost it, caught it again, then-
It vanished. I spun around. No sign of it. John and Krissy were staring at me, horrified.
“It’s okay! I’m okay! Where did it go?”
I was okay, now that I thought about it. Felt great, in fact. The adrenaline must have been working because all the fear evaporated in an instant.
A veil lifted from over my thoughts.
John and Krissy. Two of six billion humans on the planet. One American, I heard, consumes enough calories to keep forty African children alive.
John routinely burned half a gallon of gasoline to get a pack of cigarettes. The girl bought special shampoo for her dog while Somali children starved. She warded off her guilt with a gold symbol around her neck, the intersecting strips of gold the last thing millions saw before their limbs were ripped from their bodies in medieval torture machines. Two locusts, standing before me, blazing through resources by the ton.
I had been such a fucking fool.
“Uh… Dave?”
John dragged me here for one reason: his attention span demanded new and loud experiences, links to add to his chain of distractions until the day he would finally drink himself to death.
And the girl, I could save her life a dozen times over in this room and she would still climb into bed with the guy with the great eyes and the promising TV career. She could never contaminate her precious genetic material with mine.
When was I going to stop letting the world bleed me dry?
“Dave, can you hear me?”
Without a word, I took a step toward the pair. I kicked something metal. It was a rusty utility knife, an inch of blade protruding from the end. I stuffed it in my pocket, thinking I would need it later.
The gun aimed nonthreateningly at the floor at my side, I strode toward the girl and was pleased to see a look of crippling fear ooze into her eyes, an expression that broke those sculpted porcelain features like a hammer.
Have you ever been truly scared of anything, princess?
I had a second to look over Krissy from the neck down, those perfect thigh muscles, soft curves under softer skin. The hint of perfect little breasts hiding under the sweatshirt. I suddenly had an idea for this girl that would win my dick the Nobel Prize.
Footsteps.
John, running toward me.
I spun.
Raised the gun.
Shot him in the head.
He tumbled forward, spray of blood droplets arcing through the air as he fell face-first onto the floor.
I moved toward him, to put a second and third and fourth round into his brain.
Movement behind me-
POP! POPBZZZZZZPOP POP POP!
Pain.
A crackling sound, like popcorn.
Every muscle in my body first clenched, then went slack. The tiled floor rose up and smacked me in the face.
I lay there, plywood pressed against my cheek, a bug’s-eye view of the world. I was paralyzed, my brains scrambled.
Looks like Krissy needs new shoes. Hey, look! A smashed cigarette butt!
I felt the gun twist out of my fingers. With a huge effort I turned my head enough to look up and see Krissy holding the gun on me while she inspected John. He shifted and moved, sitting up.
He took off his flannel shirt and pressed it against a wet wound on his scalp, his hair matted with blood.
She helped him to his feet. They towered over me, Krissy with the Taser in her hand.
I strained to move a limb. Random muscles started to flex under my command again, but I couldn’t organize them.
John, bloody rag pressed to his skull, looked me right in the eye.
“David, if you’re still you at all, you know why I’m doing this. Are you in there?”
I met his gaze. I tried to talk, tested a few words to get my lips moving.
“John… John, I understand, and I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me just now. Really. But I’m thinkin’ clear now. It’s me. Don’t let her shoot me, okay?”
He studied my face. I grasped the situation, with growing horror.
“John,” I said, eyes pleading. “Please.”
All I needed was for him to turn his back. I had the utility knife. Just hide it in my hand and, with a quick and decisive move, I could slit his throat. Use him as a shield, get the pistol away from the girl. After that, then she’d do whatever I wanted under the barrel of a gun.
Everything would be fine.
John took Krissy aside. They whispered to each other while she kept the gun on me, the barrel tipping up and down in her delicate hand.
I tried to move my legs. I could feel them but couldn’t make them obey me. I ground my teeth so hard I felt like they would shatter.
Gotta stay cool. I couldn’t hear, but the girl was doing all the talking now, the bitch trying to convince John to do something. He finally agreed, and came back to face me.
“Dave, here’s what I think. I think the thing that was in Wexler was in you. Maybe it still is, maybe it isn’t. Now, we’re gonna do something here. Krissy’s gonna give me the gun and I’m gonna put it on you, it’s nothin’ personal. And on top of that, she’s gonna press the zappy thing against your skin while she does this. So do not move. You know I won’t kill ya, Dave, but you jump or grab for her or anything, she’ll zap you and I’ll shoot you in the thigh. Then I’ll come over there and kick you in the crotch repeatedly.”
I showed no emotion, just nodded.
Get the arms moving, get them moving now. You get the Taser away from the girl and immobilize John with it. Move move move…
Feeling rushed into my right arm, I could flex the muscles all the way up. I was sure I could get it to respond.
I focused everything on readying the limb for a quick, violent move. A chop to the throat, make her drop the Taser.
Krissy handed the pistol to John. She came around me, pressed the Taser against my shoulder with her left hand.
With her right, she reached around her neck and took off her gold necklace, the one with the dangling cross.
What the-?
She dropped the necklace over my head at the exact moment I swung my fist-
My stomach clenched, my hand frozen in midair.
It’s poison. They’ve coated it with some kind of toxin that can seep through my skin like a nicotine patch, into my bloodstream, eating through my lungs and liver like acid…
I thrashed away from her and got my hands up, but my coordination was even more screwed now than from the Taser. I fought like a toddler. My body convulsed, organs thrashing around inside like they were making a jailbreak from my gut.
I fell, hard.
Hands on my arm.
Soft hands. The girl.
Everything stopped.
The seizure, or whatever the hell it was, ended abruptly. I was tired, confused. I blinked, trying to take in my surroundings.
I sat up and saw the girl stumbling as if she had been cracked over the head with a pipe, dazed, out on her feet. She bent down at the waist, breathing hard. She vomited on the floor.
I felt like doing the same. I had this greasy feeling like I was rid of something unclean, like I had just passed a tapeworm. And there was this lingering, sick shame, the feel of a man who sobers up just enough to realize he’s been making out with his best friend’s mother.
John stared at Krissy, terrified. He turned on me, questioning, suspicious.
“What are you looking at me for?” I shouted. “Go help her, you ass!”
John nodded, apparently convinced that I was fine. Krissy was not fine. Krissy was screaming. She went to her knees, then thrashed onto her back. I scrambled to my feet, moved toward her. John grabbed my jacket, holding me back.
“No!” I screamed. “It’s in her! The thing is in her! Let me touch her, let it pass back into me and then shoot me in the temple.”
“Not today.”
“It’s killing her!”
“No. It’s not. She’s killing it.”
“What?”
Krissy looked up at us with eyes that had turned bloodshot pink, sweat-soaked hair hanging down in strands. There was a deep, black hatred in that stare so profound that it was like a punch in the gut.
I had never seen anything approaching that look on a human face before. The intelligence behind it was so hateful it was alien, unfeeling, unreasoning, infinitely terrible.
I serve none but Korrok.
A blue eye, in the darkness.
He controlled you just like the cockroaches.
I wanted to curl up into a fetal position and start sucking my thumb, let my tears and dripping saliva pool under me.
Sorry. I tried living, tried being sentient. Can’t do it. Can’t live in the same universe with that.
She screamed again, loud. Opera-singer loud. Impossibly loud. She clutched at her hair and pressed her eyes closed. A sound erupted in the air around us, a long roar like an ocean wave crashing against a dock. Flecks of glass smacked me in the cheek.
A hundred panes of glass skylight exploded at once, a circular wave of airborne shards overhead, spreading like a ripple in a pond. Glass poured down around us, a high-pitched ringing as shards pelted the floor, raining down on our heads and shoulders.
Silence. She lay still.
Whoa. She’s dead.
No… chest moving. Breathing.
“MOVE! MOVE!”
John, pulling at my sleeve, lifting Krissy to her feet.
A metal beam crashed down behind her.
The room was coming apart. We ran, half dragging her out of the food court. Ceiling trusses and light fixtures and cables and boards and glass came down in an avalanche.
We tumbled through the gate and into the hall, falling on our asses. The entire food court ceiling collapsed behind us, debris piling in front of the door, a wave of compressed air and dust rushing past us like a sandstorm.
Krissy tried to sit up, looking utterly exhausted. She wiped grit from her eyes.
I took the necklace from around my neck and handed it to her. She took it without hesitation, put it on.
“She broke it,” John said. “Like a fever. It passed from you into her, but it couldn’t live in her.”
He turned his attention to the girl.
“How do you feel?”
“Like I could sleep for a thousand years.”
MY BULLET HAD creased John’s scalp and he said he was okay but, damn, did it bleed a lot. The wad of shirt he held against it was soaked.
We wandered around the mall looking for Molly and any additional monsters. Nothing on both counts.
Krissy stayed with Wexler, calling for an ambulance on her cell. She insisted he was alive, though we could see no sign of it. Then, as the first sirens faded in from the distance, Wexler climbed into consciousness long enough to smile at Krissy, brush a strand of hair out of her face with his fingers. He said something to her that we couldn’t hear and wasn’t any of our business anyway.
Paramedics arrived, with many, many questions. John told them the truth. And I mean he literally told them I was possessed and that killing the demon destroyed the food court. He refused treatment.
After the ambulance left we made our way out to Krissy’s car. She asked John, “Are you going to get your head looked at?”
“Nah, it’s just a cut. I was gonna shave my head anyway. Are you gonna go see Danny in the hospital?”
“Yeah. But… there’s something I’m supposed to do first. He asked me if I had watched the tape. Do you know what that’s about?”
I said “no” and John said “yes” simultaneously.
“The video he was shooting,” John said. “In his apartment.”
A HALF HOUR later, Krissy sat down on the couch in Wexler’s apartment while John rewound the tape and let it play. Wexler, looking tired and beaten, appeared on the screen as before.
“Hi, honey. Are you there? Answer me if you’re there.”
Krissy looked at us, confused. We had no answers. She turned her eyes back to the screen, waiting.
“Come on. It’s okay. Just say hello.”
“Um, hello,” said Krissy, looking embarrassed. A tear ran down her cheek. “Danny. You look awful…”
“I know. It’s been a rough couple of weeks,”
Danny said, replying to the camera a full three hours before Krissy made that comment.
“Baby, I’ve done somethin’ really stupid. I’ve gotten wrapped up in something. Something you can’t imagine.”
“What?” Krissy said, sobbing. “What did you get into?”
“If I told you the details, you would wish I hadn’t. But you know by now that I’m not myself. I come and go, and right now I’m fine, but I have to fight for every second of control. It’s draining. Baby, it takes so much energy to keep myself on top, on the surface, at the wheel. As soon as I relax, he’ll take over. It will take over. And I’ll just be a spectator. Helpless.”
He broke down into sobs. So did Krissy, sounding utterly drained.
“Are you okay?”
he asked, through hitching breaths.
“Were you hurt in all of this?”
“I’m fine. I’ll be fine. This is so strange.”
“I don’t even know how I’m doing it, any of this. Right now. I see things, I hear things across time and space and… it’s better if you can put it out of your head, Kris. It’s better to live the rest of your life believing things like this aren’t possible. But there’s other things I need to tell you. Things I’ve been wanting to say for a long time. And if I’m still alive, I probably won’t have the courage to say them in person. But first…”
Wexler’s eyes shifted slightly. A chill ran down my spine.
He was looking at me.
I shifted to my left a couple of feet, and his eyes followed me.
He said,
“You’re David Wong?”
No! Say no!
“Yeah… I guess.”
Video conferencing across time. Man I need pie, and fast.
“I don’t know all the details, things are… confused in my mind right now. But you’re under the eye. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”
I found I couldn’t answer. My mouth had gone so dry it had glued shut.
“David, you alone fully understand what is at stake here.”
A thousand questions popped into my mind but all I could do was peel my lips apart and say, “But… I don’t…” before trailing off.
“Kris and I need to have a private conversation now, okay? Glad you made it out alive.”
I BEGGED OFF from John’s offer to stay the night at his place and drink many beers with him. I was hungry, and had something else to take care of first.
I took a cab to McDonald’s and had it dump me in the parking lot.
I took a deep breath, steeled myself and approached the sign. I prayed I’d find it back to normal.
Nope. There was Ronald, cutting himself, gutting himself, eating himself. I felt something rigid in my jacket pocket and pulled out a rusty utility razor I didn’t remember putting in there. I dropped it like it was a rattlesnake, then picked it up with two fingers and threw it in a trash can.
I stared down the poster again.
I was hungry.
The inside of the restaurant was closed but they did have a twenty-four-hour drive-through. I walked up to it and, shivering in the chill of the autumn air, ordered two bratwurst.
I sat on the curb across the parking lot and, looking right at the sign the whole time, ate them both.
ARNIE ROLLED TO a stop in the weed-and-dirt field that would have been the mall parking lot had they ever gotten around to paving it.
“So,” Arnie said. “Christian mints, crosses, Bibles. This whole long story is just an elaborate setup to get me to subscribe to Guideposts, isn’t it? You’re gonna leave me with pamphlets with pictures of Jesus, then go start telling this whole story to the next sinner? Got to be less roundabout ways, Wong.”
“No. That stuff, the crosses and all that, either it works because we think it works, or because the bad guys think it works. Or maybe there’s some power everybody can tap into if they just know how.”
“It’s Scientology, isn’t it?”
I said, “We never saw Krissy or Wexler again. Not even on TV. They moved out of town as soon as he got out of the hospital. Together. So, yeah, he was porking her.”
He squinted at the sprawling skeleton of the mall and said, “This is the place?”
“You think a town could have two places like this?”
I ran my hands through my hair and stared at the darkened sockets on the decomposing mall where windows should have been. I heard the faint sound of a plastic tarp snapping in the breeze somewhere. “You scared, Arnie?”
“Should I be? Is this place haunted?”
“Nothin’ so simple as that. I wish it were. You say it’s haunted and you picture the ghost of some old lady wandering around aimlessly. The things that come and go around here, I don’t know that they were ever human. Or maybe they just don’t remember it. Try to imagine a Hitler or a Vlad the Impaler or even the nasty old man at the dump who steals people’s cats and buries them alive. Now imagine those guys but strip them of all their limitations. No bodies, so they never die or run down or get tired. Give them all the time in the world. Imagine that malice, that stupid black mass of hate drifting through eternity, just burning on and on and on like an oil well fire.”
Arnie waited for me to go on. I didn’t.
I was realizing all of a sudden how hard it was going to be to tell this next part. I thought it would feel good to unload the whole tale on somebody. But this next bit, this felt more like a confession.
I got out of the car and walked toward a concrete ramp, a would-be loading dock for a stillborn mall department store. I heard Arnie’s door click and thunk behind me and knew he was following.
I said, “There was a girl here in town. She disappeared last year. It wasn’t a big story, but you can look it up.”
“Let me guess. You were the last person to talk to her.”
I didn’t answer. I climbed up the loading ramp and reached a doorway, greeted by the familiar smell of mildew and urine.
I tore aside a strip of yellow warning tape and stepped into the cool darkness within.
“Now, this is going to sound crazy…”
IN THE SUMMER of the year after the Wexler thing, I realized someone was watching me through my television.
I could sense it, the way you sense someone staring at your back. A presence behind the screen, a pair of watching eyes.
I ignored it as long as I could, telling myself no one would want to secretly watch a single twenty-three-year-old on his couch eating Taco Bell bean burritos day after day (eighty cents apiece, two and a Coke for three bucks). But I knew better, of course. There were, apparently, parties who had a very good reason to keep eyes on me at this point, aside from my perfectly-sculpted Statue-of-David buttocks.
One night, with the television on some History Channel special about history’s Top Ten Deadliest Warships or some shit, I turned away from the TV and toward the mirror on the far wall. I went to pull a brush through my knotted hair and froze.
I had glimpsed the TV, playing in the reflection over my shoulder.
A face.
It was an oddly shaped face, with features that were human but off. A Michael Jackson face, a face like a mask. Wide, too-large eyes, a nose not quite centered. Looking right at my back from the TV, plain as day.
I spun on the television, the hairbrush flying from my hand, a terrorized breath sucking through my teeth.
Back to normal now, the Bismarck getting sunk in a plume of smoke.
Again, I suppose most people would have feared a mental illness at that point. By now, though, mental illness would just mean some tests and a prescription. Big deal. No, my fear was of somebody actually watching me through my fucking television.
I told John about it and he came right over, as a best friend would. We cursed at the television for half an hour, then he dropped his pants and pressed his balls against the screen. Like he said, there was no need to change our routine. He suggested I get some rest, that I was stressed because of Jennifer, who had moved in and then moved back out again twice in the last six months. Then we drank and played PlayStation hockey until the sun came up.
That became my routine for weeks after, sleeping too little and drinking too much and playing too much hockey. Things started to spin out of control. Soon we were playing without the goalies, skating six on six and scoring games 74 to 68. Finally, when we started both playing on the same side (Red Wings) against an inept team controlled by the computer AI and winning the games 126 to zero, I knew I had hit rock bottom.
I also knew I was still being watched. I knew this was a bad sign, that things were moving again, that I had to get my head on straight.
I threw out the bottles and shaved my face and even considered cleaning the house. I started ironing my shirts again. Somebody mailed me a little bottle of what they claimed was holy water and I kept it on my nightstand. I hung a garage-sale crucifix from my front door.
Then, just after Christmas, things got weird again.
THE END BEGAN when I came home from work on a frigid Friday night. I was plowing my truck through the worst winter storm the area had seen in years, the world looking like the aftermath of God’s sno-cone machine explosion.
I pushed in through the front door, snow melting off my leather coat. A prickly feverish sweat was breaking out all over me as my skin adjusted to the fifty-degree temperature difference between my living room and the night air outside. The wind shifted, the whole house creaked, there was a tinkling of ice chips flicking off the windows.
I had just left a nightmarish sixteen-hour, soul-numbing double shift at Wally’s Video Rental Orifice. The night manager had claimed she couldn’t get out in the storm and asked if I could please work for her, saying that she owed me big-time, that I was such a sweetheart and that if I ever needed anything, anything at all, just let her know. I don’t think she meant that. But I put my head down and plowed through a one-thousand-minute, dead-quiet, customer-free battle against exhaustion and my urge to beat my coworkers to death. Now I just wanted to dry off and curl up in-
I saw something out of the corner of my eye that stopped me in midthought. I leaned back to see through the open door of my bedroom.
The drawer on my nightstand was open.
The drawer where I keep my gun.
My butt cheeks clenched so tightly that not even light could have escaped. I listened for burglar sounds. Dead quiet. I took a soft step forward, wondering if I could fake kung fu if I had to. I once saw Arnold Schwarzenegger kill a man in a movie by grabbing his head and twisting it until the neck broke. Was that difficult? Could a man do it without a lot of practice?
I keep the gun in a hollowed-out copy of the Koran that John got me for Christmas. And there the big book was, tossed on the bed, open and gunless. Nothing else disturbed. They actually checked my Koran to see if there was a gun inside. I knew I was dealing with a sick son of a bitch.
I stepped carefully and quietly through the bedroom doorway, glancing this way and that. Nobody here. I checked under the bed, the sheets still smelling faintly of girl even now, months after I’d spent my last naked night on them with Jen. Or maybe it was my imagination.
Either way, you should probably change those sheets…
Nothing under the bed. I checked the other rooms in the dark little house, stepping slowly across the carpet. Somebody had called, I noticed, the little red “new message” light on my answering machine blinking in the darkness like a time bomb.
Nobody here. I wandered toward the answering machine, my gut full of snakes. Snow melted in my hair, a droplet of ice water running into my ear. I reached up to brush it back-
And sucked in a shocked breath.
I had found the pistol.
It was in my motherfucking hand.
I dropped the gun like it was made of bees. It bounced onto the sofa and I stared stupidly at it, then stared even more stupidly at my empty palm, fingers pink from the cold. What the-
Now that you ask, it’s a whole ten-foot walk from your heated truck to your front door. Why does every inch of exposed skin feel windburned? Why do you seem to have a pint of snow in your hair?
There’s that feeling again, that fluttery feeling of mental weightlessness, like the times when you wake up in the dark, on the hood of a car, a bottle in your hand, no idea what day it is, some girl shouting at you in Arabic.
I tried to collect myself. Tired. Tired like a zombie. An overworked zombie, one who got hired as a salaried assistant manager at a zombie video store, only to find out “salaried” just means he doesn’t get paid for overtime. My skull pounded, my knees were ground glass. I sat heavily on the sofa and stared vacantly at the little beads of water standing on the sleek, chrome surface of the Smith. I glanced at my watch. Right after midnight.
Okay. You got off at eleven. You came straight home. It’s a twelve-minute drive, figure maybe twenty for the weather. You came right in. So where did the other half hour go, Dave? Did you maybe take a detour and shoot your boss?
No, if I’d shot Wally’s manager Jeff Wolflake, I wouldn’t have deprived myself by repressing the memory, would I?
I picked up the gun and ejected the magazine. Still heavy with bullets. I sighed with relief. If I had indeed stopped by Jeff’s house to murder him, I would have emptied the gun. I reinserted the magazine.
This was no way to start the weekend. I punched the “play” button on the machine, listened to the message. It was John. It finished, I hit “play” again, listened closer, then hit “play” again. By the fourth time I was pretty sure that John had said, “bag full of fat.”
I decided to try once more:
Beep.
“ Dave? It’s me. Amy’s missing and we got what looks like a bag full of fat here. It’s weird. And I mean ‘bad’ weird, not ‘clown’ weird. It’s almost midnight and-I guess you’re not home yet. Or maybe you’re in bed. You’re not in bed, are you? I know you haven’t been sleepin’. Are you there? Wake up, David. Wake up. Okay, so you’re not there. Call me when you get this, I don’t care how late. Oh, and when you come over, watch out for a jellyfish. See you.”
Beep.
Bag full of fat. I picked up the phone and dialed John on his cell. One ring, and then-
“I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE, VINNY!”
“John?”
“Oh, Dave. Sorry. I had been having a heated argument here on my phone and then I hung up in disgust. Then when the phone rang I just assumed, without checking, that it was the person I was having an argument with, so I just blindly shouted insults into the phone. How embarrassing.”
“I’m getting sick of that one, John.”
“Are you on your way over?”
“I, uh, got somethin’ going on here.”
“What’s your thing?”
“I’ve got a-”
I paused, made a decision.
“-batch of brownies in the oven. I don’t want them to burn, or else they get gummy.”
“Yeah, they’ll stick, too. Did you grease the pan?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Good. Anyway, Amy is missing and the scene is weird as shit. The situation has a real Lovecraft feel to it. Though, you know, if you come over it’ll be more of an Anne Rice situation. If you know what I mean.”
“Who’s-”
“Because you’re gay.”
“Who’s missing, John?”
“Amy, Dave. A-M-Y. I think my signal’s breaking up-”
“I don’t know any-”
“Amy Sullivan? Big Jim’s sister?”
That stopped me.
Memories of an entire day spent locked in the back of a truck, sick with fear and boredom. A promise made to a dead man. I hadn’t thought of that day in months.
“Oh. You mean Cucumber.”
“Do you not feel the need to learn people’s real names, Dave?”
“We called her that in school. She was in that Special Ed class, always throwing up for some reason.”
A silent pause on John’s end.
“You know, like a sea cucumber? They’re these eels that-”
“Anyway, Dave, we’re at her house now. The cops, too. How soon can you be here?”
How about June?
Even that wasn’t going to be enough time to piece this together. I pictured Big Jim on his back, a crimson stain across his neck and the floor like a scarf. The dead man had circled back into my life somehow. I glanced at the gun, trying to make it all fit and failing.
“What’d you say on my machine? Bag full of-”
“I can’t hear you, you’re breaking up. Just get here as soon as you can, we gotta go deal with this flying jellyfish thing.”
A pause on my end now.
“What?”
“See you in a few-UNDER THE CABINET! NO, THE CABINET! THE-HERE, LET ME-”
Click. Doooooooooooooooo…
I disconnected and did what I usually do after hanging up with John: sat in dumbfounded silence and contemplated all of the poor choices in my life.
I shrugged out of my coat, pulled off my Wally’s shirt, smelled it, then hung it back in the bedroom closet.
As I pulled on a new shirt I grabbed a bottle of caffeine pills from my desk drawer. I washed down four of them with a warm, half-empty bottle of red Mountain Dew I found on the kitchen counter.
I pulled on the coat and, after a moment’s hesitation, dropped the Smith & Wesson in the pocket, the weight pulling the whole left side of the coat down on my shoulder. I felt like Bruce Willis.
Is it just me, or is the barrel slightly warm?
I pushed through my front door and plunged into the cold, but made it no farther than the doormat.
Footprints.
The thin blanket of white across my front lawn should have been clean, save for a single trail of prints from the driver’s side of my Bronco to the spot I was standing. Instead, there was a haphazard circle of tracks in loops around my front yard, then trailing off around the back of the house. The trail of prints emerged from the other side and eventually led to the front porch, where I was now.
I stepped off the porch and into the crunchy snow/ice shell that coated the ground. I leaned down, squinting against the storm. Boot prints, zigzag treads. I had a very dark, very lonely realization.
The prints were mine. All of them.
I glanced around in the darkness, seeing nothing but sparkling flecks of ice passing through shafts of street light. I made the silent decision to never tell anyone about this, and got in my truck.
Missing time. That’s what they call it. John’s got a missing girl, you’ve got a missing half hour. Shit.
I twisted the ignition to life, thought for a moment, then pulled the Smith from my pocket. I pressed the button on the handle and again popped out the magazine. I made a little pouch in my lap with my shirt and, with my thumb, flicked out the bullets one by one. I counted as I went, hoping-no, praying-that none were missing.
One, two, three, four…
The bullets were, uh, unusual. The heads were silver with a bright-green plastic tip. A guy had mailed me these, anonymously. They were lined up in rows in a heavy white cardboard box, a tag on the inside typed with bullet jargon I didn’t understand. Something about “proximity fuses” and long serial numbers. John and I test-fired them, shot a pumpkin and watched it explode into flaming bits of blackened shell.
… seven, eight, nine…
That’s what people do these days, they mail me things. Crystals. Shrunken heads. Doctored pictures of angels in clouds and of bleeding statues. Bundles of blue-lined notebook paper full of scrawled, rambly stories about Satan sending hidden messages through mass e-mail subject lines. I’ve gotten chunks of stone stolen from haunted castles in Scotland, hunks of supposedly cursed black volcanic rock from Hawaii, dried Bigfoot turds. John and I have this reputation now and everybody wants to help.
… thirteen, fourteen…
I let out a long breath.
One missing. One.
THE TWO-STORY PSYCHO-STYLE house “Big Jim” Sullivan had lived in with his mentally handicapped sister would have cost most of a million dollars had it not been run-down and located in a weedy, desolate section of town a block from a chemical-drain-cleaner factory. I guessed the sister, Amy, lived here by herself now that Big Jim was deceased under circumstances I am rarely able to adequately explain in mixed company.
I swung my headlights into the yard of the Sullivan Psycho house, between John’s 1978 Caddie (bearing the cryptic license plate, CRKHTLR) and an Undisclosed cop car that was parked along the road.
It really was a shitty, shitty neighborhood. The next house over looked empty. The neighbor down the hill on the other side was an expanse of white parking lot dense with a wormy pattern of tire treads. It led to the ass of a huge building lined with a row of roll-up garage doors. The rear trucking entrance of the Drain Rooter plant. There was a single semi backed into one of the stalls, bearing the logo of a cartoon plumber with a big red “X” through him. I wondered if the bathroom drains at the plant ever got clogged to the point that they had to call in a plumber and, if so, if anyone was able to make eye contact with the guy while he was there.
Through my windshield I saw two figures in the front yard. One was John, arms jammed in his pockets, the stiff breeze sucking away cigarette smoke in a horizontal stream. The other was a bear of a man who I recognized as John’s uncle Drake, still the only cop in town with whom we were on a first-name basis. Drake spoke, John nodded, the ember of his cigarette bobbing slightly in the darkness. John was growing a beard. He had been working construction off and on after having been fired from Wally’s a year before. He had gotten caught bootlegging DVDs and giving them away to customers, right there at the store. Not selling them, mind you. Giving them away. I climbed out and was immediately assaulted by the freezing wind.
The looming house didn’t just look empty, it looked abandoned. It had gone downhill since I had last seen it on the night I tried to return Molly. Peeling paint, filthy windows, no tire tracks in the driveway.
Big Jim had looked after Amy in the years since their parents died, but I don’t know who was looking after her now. Apparently nobody, since she was lost and all. Man, was it cold.
Drake looked shabbier than I did, the man inflated in full cop uniform and parka, complete with one of those navy blue fur earflap hats. The blue blimp of weariness.
“Wong,” he said, with a lack of enthusiasm usually reserved for door-to-door Mormons.
I don’t enjoy our little encounters either, Drake. But here we are, just the same.
“How long’s she been missing?”
“Don’t know. Neighbors saw her dog walking around the neighborhood this afternoon. They tried to return her and couldn’t get anybody at the door. I came by and saw the-”
A skipped beat, a quick glance at John.
“Uh, I thought you guys might know something.”
Tell him about your missing half hour!
I pushed that thought from my head and pretended it had never been there. Besides, I knew exactly where I had been during my missing time. Walking around and around my yard in circles. Right? Perfect sense.
John flicked away his cigarette and crunched toward the front door. “Drake is gonna see if Amy is at a friend’s house. She knows the Hoaglands, so he figures maybe she got scared off by the, uh-”
The two of them shared a second “let’s not discuss this now” glance. Opening the door to his cruiser, Drake said, “You find anything, you call my cell, right? Then I handle it.” Making it clear that we weren’t cops, that a missing person was still a cop thing no matter what weird-assedness lurked inside the house.
John tipped a finger at him and said, “Yep. Thanks for calling us, Drake. You’re the kind of man a man wants when a man wants a man.”
Just inside the door was a little entrance hall with a black-and-white tiled floor, like a chessboard. There was a plate-sized chunk of tile missing near the wall and the bare wood had been painted in to match the pattern with what looked like Magic Marker and Wite-Out.
I glanced into the kitchen.
I froze.
Molly.
No question it was her. A red Labrador whatever, fast asleep on the linoleum. I had the same thought from when we glimpsed her outside the abandoned mall that night.
No way. Just another dog of the same breed. Surely.
“Oh, that’s her,” said John. “Go look at the collar. Got the address on there and everything.”
“But… how?”
“Don’t know. She answers to Molly, though. Or at least as well as she ever did.”
I wanted to go look closer but, I admit, I was afraid to. Something coming back from the dead was almost always bad news. Movies taught me that. For every one Jesus you get a million zombies.
“So the dog we saw explode, that wasn’t Molly?”
“Don’t know.”
“Or maybe that was Molly and this is, what, an imposter?”
He shrugged. “You should have seen me, when I saw her here. I freaked out.”
“You think she’s responsible for what happened to Amy? Maybe she, I don’t know. Ate her.”
“Withhold judgment until you see the jellyfish.”
I didn’t ask. I reluctantly turned my back on the resurrected dog and we pushed through a living room with a green couch that looked to be from 1905. Up a stairway, into a darkened hall. There was an unlit light fixture on the ceiling and one of those old brass switch plates on the wall, the kind with the black buttons. I punched the top button, nothing happened.
John stepped carefully down the hall, squinting into the darkness. He turned and said, “No, that doesn’t do anything. Hand me the flashlight.”
“You didn’t tell me to bring a-”
He held a hand out to shush me and ducked into a side door. We both stepped into a large room that, in the dim glow from the window, looked like a library of shelves mostly filled with odd shadowy shapes that were not books. I saw what looked like a bundle of cobweb hanging from the ceiling and reached out to brush it aside-
POP!
A shower of blue sparks flashlit the room. A bone-rattling electric sting flared up my elbow.
The fixture on the ceiling blinked once, twice and then bathed the room in light. About a foot in front of me was what looked like a bundle of wet string, suspended in the air by nothing at all. It didn’t look so much like a jellyfish as a man-o’-war, the slimy things that float lazily on the ocean surface and let their stringy tentacles hang down in the water. The creature drifted slowly up to the ceiling, toward the light. It wrapped its tentacles around the fixture and, to our utter astonishment, began frantically humping it like a puppy on a bunny slipper.
The lights dimmed, finally flickering out to darkness again. The room was silent except for the soft rattling of glass vibrating against metal with each of the creature’s spastic thrusts.
“You ever seen one of those before?” John whispered, somewhere in the darkness. Above us, a little blue spark jumped from one noodly tentacle to another with a soft FZZZZT sound.
“I like to think I would have mentioned it if I had.”
“Uncle Drake shot it, didn’t seem to bother it much.”
“He could see it?”
“Yeah. It’s real.”
So that put it in the category of the mutants at the mall, and not the wig monsters and shadow people. I’d have to make a spreadsheet somewhere to keep track.
And don’t forget, just because Drake can see it, doesn’t mean another stranger from around town would. Lots of chances for a cop to get infected in this town. Ask Morgan Freeman.
Now there was another train of thought badly in need of derailing.
I said, “You got your lighter?”
John flicked his Zippo and cast a pool of weak yellowy light around us. I glanced around, saw that only a couple of the shelves contained books, worn paper backs with white fold lines. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, somebody named Terry Pratchett. Babylon 5 novelizations. The first, third and fourth Harry Potter novels. Jim must have figured three was the most he could allow without risking turning Amy to witchcraft.
The rest of the shelves were crammed with stuffed animals and junk. I saw a row of plates on little wire stands painted with the faces of Star Trek characters.
The creature on the ceiling didn’t react.
“Well,” I said, letting out a tired breath, “I was hoping it would attack your hand. I guess it’s the electricity it likes and not the light.”
John slapped the lighter off and said, “I thought about opening a window and just shooing it outside.”
“Uh, that doesn’t seem like such a good idea.” I thought for a moment, wondering vaguely if I had remembered to turn on the porch light back home. “Can it, like, pass through walls?”
“It hasn’t yet.”
“Follow me.”
We stepped out into the hall and I closed the door behind us.
“Okay,” I said. “As long as nobody ever opens that door…”
“Right. We’ll put a sign on it or something,” John said, the first problem solved. “The weird thing is down here. Check this shit.”
We went across the hall and he gestured into an ancient bathroom, complete with enormous cast-iron tub and a yellowing vanity with a cracked mirror. A steady stream of drips plunked from the faucet. A pair of scissors were wedged under one of the knobs, presumably to keep the valve from running freely. He punched the switch and the light flickered on, this one apparently unmolested.
On the floor was what looked like a clear plastic bag, filled with a marbled pink-and-yellow substance, about the size of one of those giant bags of dog food. There was writing on the side in an odd, angular font.
John said, “That lock was bolted from inside. We had to jimmy it to get in here. Water was running in the sink, toothbrush laying on the counter with dried toothpaste on it. That window is painted shut, so there was no way out of the room. So she was in here and then she wasn’t. And she never left the room. Right?”
The lock was one of those little slide bolts like you’d see on old public toilet stalls. The “jimmy” of the lock had been accomplished by smacking the door, probably with their shoulders, until the little metal loop on the door frame popped out of its screw holes. I leaned over and inspected the window. It looked to have been sealed long before I was born. Not that it made a difference; even if Amy had locked the door and crawled out of the window for some reason, dropping fifteen feet or so to the ice below, how would she have gotten the window shut behind her?
“Can you think of a way that somebody could get that door locked from the other side? Like if they snatched her and then slid the bolt closed behind them?”
What you’re asking, said the irritating voice in my head, is whether or not you could have done it, Dave.
Bullshit. Forget that. I was sure my bout of missing time, during which a bullet had left my gun, had nothing to do with this person who suddenly went missing on the same day. Two completely separate events. In fact, the event I was repressing was probably Amy coming to my house to borrow a bullet, and me calmly handing it to her.
“Sure,” said John, “you could probably get the bolt slid in there with the door closed. Give a guy twenty minutes, a bent wire coat hanger. Let him try it about forty times. What would be the point, though? Just to mess with us?”
I nudged the bag on the floor with my foot. Dense liquid, a bag of sludge. He said, “The writing on the bag, that’s a weight, right?”
“I guess.” I leaned down. “Forty-four-point-four-two kilograms.” I scratched my head. “I give up.”
“You, uh, think that’s her? In the bag?”
“Ew. No, let’s assume not for now. That’s just gross.”
“You think the jellyfish ate her?”
“Bones and all?”
“We’re talking about a tentacled flying lamp fucker, Dave. What are you prepared to call unlikely?”
I stepped out of the bathroom and wandered down the hall, passing a room stacked with cardboard boxes and some broken chairs. There was another door that had been nailed shut, that seemed to lead out into midair.
John said, “You know what that is? They used to build these old houses with doors that just led to a big drop, to fool burglars. They’d label that door TREASURY or something like that. The guy busts through the door and finds himself falling straight down. They’d put spikes or something down there. They used to call it an ‘Irish Elevator.’ ”
“Or, John, they tore a balcony off here years ago and just never bothered to take out the door.”
We passed a bare guest room that smelled of dust and old varnish, then at the end of the hall came to a door standing open with a band poster stuck to the inside, a group called VNV Nation.
I leaned into a chaotic bedroom, crammed with furniture and carpeted with wrinkled clothes. Posters on every wall, bands I’d never heard of and one of a shiny Angelina Jolie as the Tomb Raider. There was a very nice laptop computer, a Mac, propped up on a pillow on an unmade bed.
“The computer,” I asked, “it was like that when you got here?”
“Yeah. We didn’t touch a thing.”
On a nightstand off the bed there were four empty plastic bottles with orange juice labels and half a dozen brown prescription bottles. There was a box of Froot Loops on the floor, open.
I saw all this from the doorway but didn’t step inside. I felt dirty just for peeking my head in, invading this person’s space. John pushed past me, though, and I realized we probably didn’t have a choice if we were serious about this. Cops do this every day, rifling closets and digging through your dildo drawer. I noticed the bed laptop was on, ironically in sleep mode, a single power light glowing along one side. I tapped the space bar, the screen fading up from black to reveal a white screen with blue text scrolling down.
“Check it out.” John nodded his head toward a dresser, one drawer half open, a couple of bras trying to escape. Atop the dresser sat a little black object, round and not much bigger than a roll of film. A lens in the center.
“A camera,” I noted.
“It’s one of those wireless camera deals,” he said. “For the computer.”
“What, like a webcam?”
“Yeah, or something.”
“Was this Jim’s old room?” I asked, for some reason having trouble picturing Amy “Cucumber” Sullivan knowing how to shop for and use computer gadgetry. Before I encountered her while trying to return Molly a few years before, my only memory of Amy was from the Life Skills class at the Pine View Alternative School for Mentally Fucked Students where I had spent my senior year. She always had her head down on her desk, asleep, to me just a mop of red hair spilling over bony forearms.
I think I only heard her say a dozen words my whole time there and most of them were “please move or I’m going to puke on you.”
John muttered, “dunno,” in the way that people do when you ask a useless question that deserves nothing more. I glanced around and saw a second camera, a square one, sitting atop a shelf on a department store sortawood computer desk across the room. It wasn’t aimed at the chair in front of it like you’d think a webcam would be, but sideways, toward the hall.
“This camera is aimed over at the door,” I deduced. I looked up and saw a ceiling fan with a set of four little canister lights aimed around the room. Taped to one canister was another of the wireless cameras. “And another one,” I said. “Aimed right at the window. All the entryways covered, like a security system.”
A little tingle of ner vous ness rose in my gut for reasons I couldn’t wrap my sluggish brain around.
“Okay…” John said, moving toward the laptop. “You know, I just thought about something. Why would she lock her bathroom at all if she lived here alone? You’d just poop with the door open, right?”
I nodded and said, “So maybe she was already scared. If this were an episode of Law and Order we’d have a nice shot of her getting abducted right on camera. And yes, before you give me that look of yours, I do realize whatever happened, happened in the bathroom and not in here. She didn’t have a webcam in her bathroom, did she?”
“I want you to think about what you just asked.”
John picked up the laptop and sat down with it in the computer chair.
“Well,” I said, “she could have caught somebody in the hall.”
That feeling again. It was like a faint alarm in the back of my skull, like the creeping sense that you’ve left something important at the house just as you’re leaving for vacation.
He’s going to look for the webcam stills on there.
So? I shoved my hands in my pockets and wandered around the room, wondering how our getting first-look at the evidence would fuck up a prosecution should this turn out to be a run-of-the-mill kidnapping and murder, flying jellyfish notwithstanding. Welcome to Undisclosed.
I fingered a loose key in my pocket that had apparently fallen off the key ring. I ran my other hand through my hair, which was drying in a mushrooming Carrot Top spray. I said, “Is there any place open in town that sells that red Mountain Dew? I had some today, it’s like somebody melted a box of cherry Jolly Ranchers and stirred in some crack cocaine. Is that one convenience store on Lexington a twenty-four-hour deal?”
John wasn’t listening. He was studying the flat monitor on the laptop.
FOR THE WEBCAM STILLS. TO SEE WHO TOOK AMY.
My mouth was going dry, my heart thumping just a little too fast. The caffeine, probably. I leaned over John’s shoulder and saw the phrase MY CAT PEED ON MY BED at the top of the screen. It was a series of broken lines, each beginning with a name in brackets. I knew the format.
That’s a chat log. She was on there when she got up to brush her teeth. Then somebody took her, maybe somebody or maybe some thing. But the key is she knew they were coming, somehow. She knew because she set up cameras so she would have evid-
OH, SHIT .
I stood bolt upright.
WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO SAY IF THAT’S YOU ON THE CAMERA, ASSHOLE?
That thought-like a hammer to the balls. John actually glanced over at me and I suddenly felt naked. I tried to remember what my body language looked like when I was at my most casual and innocent, then the whole effect was ruined when I pulled my other hand from my pocket and saw what I was holding.
It was the key to the toolshed in my backyard.
I normally keep it on a nail near my back door. I do not normally keep it in my pocket.
Oh, what did you put in your toolshed, Dave?
I held up a declaratory, “I’ve got an idea” finger and said, “Wait.”
John turned to me, his sudden attention like a heat lamp on my face. I realized I had absolutely no idea what I was going to say next.
“We shouldn’t, uh, we shouldn’t do that yet.”
“Okay. Why?”
“Because, uh, I think it would be better if-look, we have one witness to this thing, right?”
“We do?”
“Yeah, the thing. The jellyfish thing. I mean, we’re up here dicking around with computers and that thing could take off in the meantime, go back to wherever it goes. The computer isn’t going anywhere.”
John glanced into the hallway and said, “You think it talks?”
I looked him straight in the eye and said, “I think you can make it talk. Whether it wants to or not.”
He scratched his chin thoughtfully, then said, “I’ll need a toaster.”
“I saw one in the kitchen. Here, hand me the laptop, you go beat some information out of that slimy bastard.”
John strode out of the room with newfound purpose. I took his seat. The desktop wallpaper on the laptop was a photo of Orlando Bloom, in full Lord of the Rings costume. I waited until I heard John’s footsteps clomping down the stairs before I started clicking through folders, as fast as my fingers would go. Sweating a little now, my heart thumping against bone, my knee bouncing.
I eventually stumbled across a folder full of little icons that came up as grainy camera stills. I clicked on one, saw a dim image of a lump sleeping soundly under the covers of the bed. Another, same thing. A third, a shot of an empty bed. A fourth, the lump again. There were hundreds.
I heard John stomp back up the stairs and I glanced toward the hall, not returning to my task until I heard him open the library door.
I was stuck. Deleting the pictures was out of the question. I was not covering up a crime here and at that point I fully intended to tell John if it somehow turned out I was the culprit we were after. But I wanted him to find out my way. I needed time to figure it out, to pro cess it, to have some control over the revelation. I needed options.
I cut the whole folder of pics and moved them to the most obscure location on the hard drive I could find, inside a subfolder of a subfolder of a subfolder of a subfolder of printer drivers. I closed up the computer and leapt out of the chair, suddenly a bundle of nervous energy.
You’ve got to get home. You’ve got to see what’s in that toolshed.
Yes. That was right. I plunged a hand into my pocket and clutched my car keys so tightly they etched marks in my palm. I strode out and down the hall, feeling a cloud of guilt around me like a stench. I passed the library just as John came flying out, slamming the door behind him.
He said, “That dangly bastard knows something. I can read it in his body language.”
I said, “I have to go.”
“Why?”
“I just have to run home. I’ll be back.”
“Yeah, you probably gotta check on the brownies. Can you get me some rubber gloves while you’re at it?”
“Okay.”
He opened the library door again and said, “Where’d you go, asshole?” then once more closed himself inside the room.
I fled.
DRIVING AGAIN. DEFROST heat blowing on the windshield, ice crystals melting on contact with the glass, swept aside by the wiper blade a second later. Wheels floating under me, no traction in the ice. The roads all to myself.
If there’s a body in your toolshed, say, of a skinny, retarded redheaded girl, just come clean. To John first. Tell him exactly what happened. No need to plan beyond that. Gotta see what’s there first. Gotta see…
I turned on the radio, looking for something to blast the thoughts out of my head, hoping the moist nighttime air would blow in a rare non-country station. I ground through static and static and static, then recoiled at the shrill, choking sound of a man apparently squealing through a crushed larynx. After a moment I realized it was simply Fred Durst and the group Limp Bizkit-Shitload’s favorite band. They’re the ones who invented the musical technique of feeding a list of generic rap phrases to a goat, then reading its turds into a microphone over heavy metal guitar.
This was the song “Rollin’,” judging by the fact that the chorus was Fred saying that word several dozen times. Perfect. Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’…
Just tell the truth, that’s all I had to do. Just tell the truth. If I did it, I did it. I blanked and found a dead girl. No cover-up, no hiding the body or any of that. Just face the consequences.
Sure. Your “dad” will fly up and he’ll tell you not to talk to anybody and he’ll make noise about your record of mental illness and use lots of big words. You’ll get off, because he’s damned good at getting people off, and instead of jail you’ll get a stay in an institution smelling of ammonia and spoiled food, surrounded by people mumbling to themselves and smearing feces on the walls. It will work. It worked for the Hitchcock thing. No, don’t think about that. Keep rollin’, rollin’, rollin’…
From the darkness behind me, a very cold and very bony hand reached up and closed around my mouth.
The hand squeezed, pulling my head back.
I expected a blade on my throat.
Instead, something long and cold and wet and twitching slid across my neck and down my shirt.
I cranked the wheel and clawed at the hand. The truck skidded in the snow, jumped a curb and smacked a newspaper machine with a crash of ruined metal and glass. With a jolt, the front tires blasted through a snowdrift and landed back on the street, wheels spinning, grabbing, then spinning again.
The thing on my neck snaked across my collarbone and slid down my shirt, something with the texture of a slug or a leech but long, its tail snaking up from my chest around my collarbone. A cool, twitching, itching weight on my skin.
I screamed. I admit it. I blew through an intersection blinking yellow lights, I stomped around with my feet until I found the brake and went into a powerslide, the rear of the truck trading places with the front.
“No, no. Keep driving,” said a soft voice in my ear. “She will not bite if you keep driving.”
Fuck that. Fuck that idea like the fucking captain of the Thai Fuck Team fucking at the fucking Tour de Fuck. I stomped the brake and cranked the wheel. We skidded to a stop and-
I screamed again. A terrible, pinching pain pierced my breastbone. It was unreal, like my bones were sprouting razor blades. I screamed again and grabbed at the monster on my chest. A hand reached around and snatched my wrist with a quick, clean move.
“Be calm,” said the voice. “Drive. Just drive. She will leave you alone. If you drive.”
I didn’t even hear this, not really. I got my other hand into my pocket and clawed free the pistol. A pain ripped through my chest again, unimaginable, like being torn in half. It crippled me. All of my limbs stopped in protest.
The hand reached up from the backseat and very slowly took the Smith. Once more he said, “Drive. Just drive.”
The pain relented. Huge gasps of breath tore in and out of my lungs. I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them again, and eased my foot onto the accelerator. I tried to look down at the thing that had me, its tail sticking out of the neck of my shirt. It had inch-long stalks all along its back, each ending in what looked like a small black eye. Several of the stalks tickled my chin as it wormed its way around, the end of the creature resting over my shoulder, squirming gently back and forth on the leather of my jacket. I heard the figure behind me shift on the upholstery, as if it was sitting back in the seat. I drove into the night, desperately trying to remember where I was going. I felt a drop of some kind of liquid crawl down my belly.
I tried to say something cool, wound up stammering something like, “WANNA YOU WANNA WEENIE ME?” The end kind of trailed off in a shrill, choking warble.
“Just be calm. You’re doing fine. Now tell me what you were doing before I made myself known.”
“Who-who the fuck are you?”
“My name is Robert North.”
“Congratulations. Now who are you and what’s this fucking thing you-”
“Please answer my question. Where were you going in such a hurry?”
“Home. Why? What’s it to you? What’s happening to night?”
I reached up and adjusted the rearview mirror to see in the backseat. It was just a man, thin, in his thirties. Brown hair, buggy eyes and a beak-like nose. Looked sort of En glish, but no matching accent. He spoke robotically, with difficulty. It’s the way some deaf people talk, not able to hear their own inflection. He was wearing a white, furry woman’s hat, what looked like a blue Wal-Mart vest with a little plastic toy sheriff’s badge tacked to the breast.
He nodded toward the rear of the vehicle, where the stereo speakers were. “That man, in your, whatever you call it, your communicator. Does he need help?”
“What?”
“He sounds wounded. Does he need your assistance?”
“You’re not from around here, are you?”
“Why do you not respond to my questions directly?”
“That’s just Fred Durst. On the radio. He’s not talking to us.”
“Are you certain? It sounds as if he is crying out while someone is strangling him.”
“I know. That sound is entertainment to many of us. It’s called a ‘song.’ ”
“I know songs. But-I thought they rhymed.”
I looked back again and saw the man was holding my gun by the barrel, studying it with detached curiosity. He had never held a gun before.
I said, “I’m turning off the radio so we can hear each other. Look.” I very gingerly reached out and clicked off the power button. “Okay. I’m driving home. I live there. Can you tell me who you are, and where you’re from? Or even better, who sent you?”
“I’m from right here, so far as you know it. Who sent me means very little right now. Why you are travelling home with such urgency, in these conditions, is of great importance.”
“Did I kill the girl?”
“I do not understand the question. My interest is only in you and in your desperation not to answer my question. I assure you that your own safety depends on your honesty.”
The thing on my chest began pulsing gently, making gulping twitches.
Okay, this bullshit has got to end. I’m neither brave nor reckless, but this was simply pissing me off too much.
“I’m going to reach out again,” I said, “to make an adjustment to the heat in here. Okay?”
I very slowly and nonthreateningly punched in the cigarette lighter.
“Now,” I said, “I am going home to check something. In my toolshed. The, uh, the little building behind my home where I store things. Okay?”
He stayed silent for several seconds. A quick glance in the rearview showed a very grave expression on a bony face bathed in shadow and flickers of passing streetlights. The look of a man who’s going to have to put his dog to sleep.
“Fascinating.”
“What?”
I glanced down at the lighter. The slug on my chest slowly curled its tail around, coming to rest along my neck and earlobe. It gave a little shiver.
North stared off into the passing night and said, “They harvest insects here, do they not? For their honey? Do the bees know they make the honey for you? Or do they work tirelessly because they think it is their own choice? Have you never noticed that, after hearing a new word for the first time in your life, you’ll hear it again within twenty-four hours? Do you ever wonder why sometimes you’ll see a single shoe lying along the road?”
A single tear rolled down his cheek. It occurred to me that the man was batshit insane.
The lighter clicked. My heart leapt with anticipation and I realized, with disgust, that the slug thing could feel the change. It twitched and fluttered as if it were feeding off the excitement.
Or the increased blood flow.
I shifted my hands, the left on the wheel, the fingers on my right resting on the knob of the lighter.
North didn’t seem to notice me plotting my escape, but said, “I am at a loss. I have been watching you for some time, but there are great gaps in my knowledge. You know, I observed a man who masturbated until he bled. Did he want to do that? And you, when you were alone you-”
I yanked the lighter free, the coils orange with heat. I slammed on the brakes and cranked the wheel with my left hand. With my right I jammed the lighter onto the lump in my shirt where I guessed the creature’s head would be with a sharp hiiiissssss.
The slug thing shrieked and thrashed wildly inside my shirt. The truck spun and tilted up on two tires for a sickening moment.
The truck fell back down on four wheels with a thud. The lighter tumbled to the floor, a streak of orange in the darkness. A small yellow flame danced around a hole in my shirt where I had singed it with the lighter.
I grabbed around for the slug thing and for several terrible seconds I felt its teeth brushing against my skin, jaws working, struggling to grab on. I wrestled it free and suddenly I had it tight in my hands, slimy and writhing, slipping under my fingers. It had a little circle of tiny teeth, each curled and needle-sharp, like fishhooks. There was a thin, straw-like appendage emerging from the center, about as long as my finger and whipping around, flecking little droplets of blood.
I took one hand off it and opened the driver’s-side door. I flung the flopping thing out into the snowy middle of the street.
I spun around in my seat and saw Mr. North pawing around the floorboard, the gun nowhere to be seen. I threw a wild punch at his face. North flung himself back in an effort to dodge it and gave me a shot at the gun, laying half under the seat below me.
I threw my torso back there, my feet kicking around at the windshield. In a scramble of elbows and hands I grabbed the pistol and twisted my body around. I jammed the barrel under his chin.
We sat like that for a long moment, both of us breathing puffs of steam as the icy wind poured in the open door. I thought I could hear a soft thumping sound, our slug friend trying to deal with life in a world of ice.
“Okay,” I breathed. “Okay, okay. This thing I’ve got pointed at you, you know what it does?”
He nodded, said, “I believe I have an idea, yes.”
“And have you ever heard the old human saying, ‘I want to shoot you so bad, my dick’s hard’?”
“I have not. But I believe the context makes its meaning clear.”
“Shut up. Don’t move.”
I crawled back into the front seat, keeping the sights on him until I dropped my legs out of the driver’s-side door and stood up into the wind. I looked around the street for the squirming monster. It had crawled all the way to the sidewalk.
I crunched over toward the creature, lifted a boot and stomped on it. I grunted random curses under my breath as I pounded the thing, again and again, hammering with my boot heel. The slug exploded in a spray of brown and red. The red blood, I assumed with disgust, was mine. I kept stomping, little flecks of ice spraying with each impact, until the monster was a wet, twisted stain.
I kicked the shredded remains into a sewer grate nearby, then stomped back toward the truck. Sweat freezing on my face, my nose running freely. My teeth were clenched, my hand squeezed on the gun so tight I could feel the pulse in my palm. From a few feet away I could see that the back door of the truck was open now and when I got there I was not surprised to see that North was gone. I slammed his door. I got in. I drove home.
I SAW JUST one other vehicle while I was out, a snowplow. I passed a cop in a convenience store parking lot, messing with the chains on his tires. He shot me a look as I passed, like I was insane for even leaving the driveway in this mess. I had to pull over once and go over my windshield with my ice scraper, the wipers unable to keep up with the storm.
I pulled alongside the road by my house and left the engine running. I crossed the yard, the network of footprints now just soft craters under new snow and ice. I clasped the toolshed key in my left hand.
You have an alibi. You were at work, all day. Alllllll day. Right?
Sure. Yeah, that’s right.
But who knows when she actually went missing. It could have taken days for anyone to notice. Even if it was last night…
I was in bed last night. Eleven P.M.
Were you? Can you account for every minute you think you were asleep? There’s one period when you distinctly remember being a pirate, raiding a cruise ship full of naked women. Could you have been up and prowling and imprisoning a girl in your toolshed?
No. No way.
Maybe you had her tied up out there all day and you came home and decided you finally had to get rid of your plaything? Or put it out of its misery? So you came in and got your gun and-
I suddenly pictured the answering machine, on the little table by my front door. John had called, the red light blinking, slowly.
Slowly.
The new-message light blinks fast, like a strobe. The machine to night was signaling a saved message. One already played.
No. I’d remember.
Would I? I thought of last summer, a month after Lopez and I broke up; she showed up at a bar where John’s band was playing. I had drunk, oh, probably seven hundred beers. I wound up back at her place, a rented house she shared with some other girl. The night was a lost blur. I remember sweat in my eyes, my own breath blowing back to me off her neck, damp sheets. And a fly. This fly that kept buzzing and landing on my back and my neck, tickling me, waking me up again and again through the night. The rest is lost. Days later it gets back to me, through one of Jennifer’s friends, that I had gone on a drunken, tear-filled rant about how Hell was waiting for me and there was nothing I could do to avoid it. I said it was bullshit, that Jen had made it up to make me look stupid. But had she? How would I know? Some memories bury themselves so, so deep…
And just like that, flashes of memory came pulsing in, like forgotten fragments of a dream.
You do remember. You remember rushing into the house and digging out the big book from the nightstand. You yanked the gun free and plunged out into the cold-
With the key clasped in my hand, I crossed the yard, continued around the house. The trail of prints that led back there were gone now, the space between the houses a wind tunnel that seemed to burn my ears right off my head. The Andersons lived next door; they were in Florida. The next house over was vacant, a Realtor’s FOR SALE sign buried under snow in the front yard. A single gunshot, carried by the wind? Who would call the cops? You wake up and you’re not even sure you heard it.
In the backyard now, dimly lit by a dusk-to-dawn light off my back door. Just enough light to see the pool of pink slush right in the middle of the snow. A metal wire tightened around my gut.
Did you actually feel sorry for yourself a few minutes ago, having to live your life in an institution or jail? That’s an actual girl’s actual blood, Dave. She was warm in her home and ready to curl up in bed and next she was wrestled away or knocked cold. What do you remember? You remember the flare of light and the gun jumping in your hand, then digging around the snow for the brass casing and not finding it, night-blinded from the muzzle flash, ears ringing with the sound. And just like that night with Jennifer, you knew it was the last thing you wanted to do but still you did it and did it and did it. You never stop, Dave.
I reached the door and tried to wedge the key into the frozen padlock, my fingers shaking. I dropped the key once, twice, then wrapped the frozen lock in my palm to warm it. Finally I got the key in and twisted it and popped the lock free.
A burst of fire in the darkness, the sharp crack of a gunshot, night blindness, panic, frozen breaths, blue canvas-
I pulled open the door, scraping it along the frozen ground. The piano wire around my gut tightened again and I thought I would have been sick, had I eaten anything.
I have this tarp, a blue one, one I always used to keep my firewood dry before I ran out of firewood. Right now it was in a loose roll along the gravel floor of my toolshed, above another frosted stain of cranberry-colored slush. There was something wrapped in the canvas, something the size of a body, something I knew was a body, rolled up like-
A murder burrito!
– a gutted deer in the bed of a pickup. I could have confused this for a slain young deer, in fact, had there not been three pale fingers extending just over the edge of the canvas.
I turned away, stepped outside, put my hands on my knees.
Breathe.
Slow, deep breaths. I stood upright, let the steam rise past my eyes, my soul making a run for it. Knees felt like Jell-O. I lay back against the door frame of the shed, then felt it sliding against my back. My ass was cold suddenly. Snow soaking in. I was surprised to see I was sitting, legs splayed out in front of me, no strength to stand.
You guys know my sister, who’s back home at this moment. In that big, old house.
If one of you makes it out of this instead of me, I want you to look in on her, make sure she’s taken care of.
She ain’t never been on her own.
I want you to promise me.
In the end, the people riding in the back of that beer truck couldn’t protect her. They couldn’t protect her from me.
There was no question in my mind I had done it. I didn’t want to do it, to be sure, but I had done it just the same. And the thought, the gargantuan thought that swallowed me the way the impossible idea of eternity will swallow me upon arrival in Hell, was that nothing would ever, ever, ever be right again.
Christ. The weight of it.
No shit, asshole. That’s why you have to act. She’s dead, you’re not. Think. Do you know what they do to guys like you in jail? The river isn’t frozen over yet, just take the body and dump it, cut off the head and the hands and dump it. This isn’t your fault-
No. I wouldn’t do that. I had a vision of friends and family-and she had to have family, somewhere-living the rest of their lives not knowing what happened to Amy Sullivan. No, they deserved to know. They deserved to know I did it and to see me strapped to a table with a needle in my arm.
I made myself breathe. One step at a time, that was the only way to handle things after they spun out of control. Step one: breathe. Step two: stand up. Go inside the shed, take a look, make sure it’s her-
Oh, hey, that’s right. You might have a whole collection of corpses stacked around here-
– then go to Amy’s place and tell John. Just tell him, no bullshit. Then call Drake and show him the body. Tell him the truth, tell him I blanked out and there she was. Let’s face it, if I’m this dangerous it’s better that I be locked up. For everyone’s safety.
I climbed to my feet, put my hand on the door-
Okay, fine, just go in and unwrap her and face this thing, just face what you did
– and closed it. I snapped the padlock shut, then trudged inside the house.
LOOKING BACK, IF I had gone in and seen what was in the toolshed, I would have put a bullet in my own skull one minute later.
I FOLLOWED MY own tire tracks as I made my way back through town. I kept the dome light on and threw nervous glances behind me every four seconds or so. At Amy’s house I found John hunched under the hood of his Cadillac. I walked past him, the horrible news coiled inside me like one of those chest-bursters from Alien. I said, “Your battery dead?”
“I hope not.” I noticed a set of jumper cables coiled in the snow around his feet. Hooked around one elbow was a knotted string of what looked like Christmas tree lights. “Christmas is coming late for that motherfucker. As soon as I find it. You got my gloves?”
“Uh, no.”
“Okay… can I have a brownie?”
He caught a glimpse of my face as I passed. He stood upright, alarmed. “Dave? What’s up? Did you change your shirt?”
“Put that stuff back. I, uh, think I got it figured out.”
“What? You do?”
I stepped into the warm house, thinking this was going to be another of life’s little awkward conversations. I absently rubbed the cold from my fingers. I heard John approach the door and suddenly ideas hit me, quick and desperate. Panicked wild fastballs of thought.
I could tell them it was an accident.
Yeah. You can make it work. You can march people up to testify about the time you severed an artery in your arm trying to carve a pumpkin. You can pull the emergency room records from the time Jennifer had to rush you to get half a cup of candle wax scraped off of your scrotum. There was the hot glue-gun incident. People would believe it, would see that you’re not a murderer but are merely an incredible dumb-ass. You see, officer, I was driving past the house and I observed through the window what appeared to be some kind of shaved baboon, apparently escaped from a nearby circus. The animal was clearly thin and malnourished, which I believed made it an even greater threat to the inhabitants of the home. Naturally I produced a weapon and subdued the creature with a single gunshot. Now, interestingly, it was at this moment that my penis accidentally fell out and I found myself-
CRUNK. CREEE-UNK.
Above me.
Creaking floorboards.
I stopped, held my breath, listened. The wind? Above me, a door clicked shut.
I stepped quickly and softly toward the stairs, eyes on the darkened doorway at the top. I glanced back at John, the startled look on his face told me he hadn’t invited any company over. I pulled the Smith from my coat and pointed it up the stairs.
Come on down, fuckers. Come on down. Come see David on the worst day of his life, destined for forever in jail or worse, still with fourteen bullets left to spend. Whatever you are, you picked the goddamned staircase on the wrong goddamned day.
Come on down.
I heard another door open, then close. Are the most dangerous creatures the ones that use doors or the ones that don’t?
I eased myself up the stairs one at a time, softly. My feet hit the creaky wood floor of the hallway. Every door in the hall was closed but one, the bedroom. The library seemed like the logical one to check first. I quietly cranked the brass knob until the door clicked free. Nothing but darkness. I tried the light and it came right on.
No jellyfish.
I backed out, took a step and tried the door on my right. The bathroom. No need for the light. I could see right away that the room was empty and-look at that-the fat bag was gone.
Toward the bedroom now, the gun in front of me in both hands, arms rigid, like the turret on a tank. The old sensations again, blood pumping past my ears, sparks flying in my brain, that cool sweat again. My clothes must have stank of it.
Something moved in the shadows.
A thin figure, almost as tall as a man.
A gray torso, like a rhino.
It saw me and froze.
A trickle of sweat crawled down my forehead, landing as a burning speck in my left eye.
Holy shit! It’s a shaved baboon!
Through the sights of the pistol I saw a young, very thin and pale girl draped in a gray University of Notre Dame sweatshirt that she wore like a dress.
I said, “Oh! Amy! Hey!”
An avalanche of relief buried every thought in my mind.
Amy took several steps backward. She was holding a toothbrush and was nervously rubbing the bristles with her thumb as she retreated toward her door. Her other arm ended in an empty sleeve.
“Hi,” she said, in a too-loud squeak. “Can I, uh, help you?”
“No, no. It’s fine. We were just worried about-”
I made a huge mistake. I reached out, casually, I thought (it’s hard to come off casual with a gun in your other hand, I guess) to take her arm. I had to see if it was her, if she was solid.
I wrapped my fingers around a very solid and very real forearm, but then she pulled away and when I went to catch the spot where her hand would be, I grabbed only air.
She ducked back through her bedroom door and slammed it shut. I looked stupidly down at my empty fingers and realized two things:
Amy Sullivan was alive, and she no longer had a left hand.
“Wait! Hey!” I said, screaming and pounding on the door while wielding a handgun, in exactly the way an armed rapist would. “It’s me!”
“Okay!” She said as I heard something scoot across the floor and jolt the doorknob. She had braced the door with some piece of furniture, probably the chest of drawers.
“No! It’s fine! I’m not armed! I mean, I’m armed, but not in a bad way. We’ve been looking all over for you.”
“I’m here!” She said in the artificial-sweetener tones you’d use to soothe a rabid dog. “You can leave!”
I stuffed the gun in my jacket pocket and leaned toward the door. “Hey, where have you been?”
Nothing from inside. I could hear her talking faintly in there, like she was mumbling to herself. Poor kid.
I wandered back to the stairs, one question answered with several dozen new ones replacing it. First off, who did I kill?
John came up the steps, saying, “Who was talking up here?”
“I found her. She was in her bedroom.”
He glanced that way and said, “Damn. You’re good. So, she was here the whole time? Like, folded up in a desk drawer?”
“I don’t know, John. And I don’t care. She wants us to leave.”
“You sure?”
“John, we have to talk.”
I turned him around and we stepped down into the living room, just in time to see red-and-blue lights pulsing across the bay window. We reached the front door just as Officer Drake pushed his way in.
“What’s the deal?” Drake said, brushing snow off his shoulders. “We got a nine-one-one call from Amy saying there was an armed man in the house.”
DRAKE WENT UPSTAIRS to calm Amy down while John and I waited down at the diner-style chrome-and-green table in her kitchen. John pulled out a small package of what looked like tobacco and asked, “You think she’d mind if I smoked in here?”
“John, I killed somebody.”
As the words hung in the air I had a split second to wonder how many people had ever uttered them and still gone on to live happy lives.
I said, “There’s a body in my toolshed.”
“Is it Jeff Wolflake? Does that mean the manager job is open?”
“No. A guy showed up, a guy but maybe not a guy, on the way home. He put a thing on me like a slug or something and asked me a bunch of questions.”
“And you killed him.”
“No, no. He got away. I killed some other person, completely unrelated to that guy apparently. I was just putting that out there.”
“Okay, so who is it?”
“Dunno. I didn’t check. I remember doing it, though, sort of. I shot them with the Smith. There’s a bullet missing and everything. I remember doing it but I don’t remember wanting to do it.”
John eyed me carefully. He looked away and pulled his hair back, then tied it with a rubber band. He pulled out a small box and shook out a rolling paper, then opened the tobacco.
He said, “You think it was like the thing with Danny Wexler? The demon thing we ran into at the mall?”
At the mall, he says. Like we saw it folding pants at American Eagle.
I serve none but Korrok.
“You know,” he said, “the way they could take hold of people, move them around like puppets? Then you shot me?”
“You gonna bring that up again?”
“You think it was Jennifer you killed?”
I hadn’t thought of that.
“No, I… I mean that was amicable, right?”
He didn’t answer.
I pulled out my cell phone and pulled Jennifer Lopez’s number off my speed-dial menu. One ring. Then three. Then six. Eight. Finally…
“Mmmm… hello?”
I knew the voice. Sleepy and drunk, sure, but hers. I broke the connection.
“She’s there,” I said.
“Well, that’s everybody you know.”
“But if it was… that thing controlling me, it wouldn’t be somebody I wanted dead. It would be somebody it wanted dead.”
Holy shit, this is madness.
John said, “So it could happen again?”
I opened my mouth to respond, then closed it. I actually hadn’t thought of that, either. John started laboriously sprinkling tobacco onto a cigarette paper.
I said, “She may not want you to smoke that in here, John.”
“Eh, I gotta make them ahead of time anyway. I get the urge to smoke, I don’t wanna sit and mess with it. You get the tobacco too clumped in the middle and it doesn’t stay lit. Rolling is a pain in the ass.”
“You know, I think you can buy them now where they’re already made.” He started rolling the thing, unrolled it, tried again.
I lowered my voice and leaned in. “Hey, John, when I saw Amy, I think her hand was missing.”
“Well, yeah. It’s been like that for a long time. She was in an accident.”
“Oh. And she lives here alone?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“There’s nobody who, you know, comes by to take care of her?”
John studied me for a moment, then said, “Well, Dave, I think one of the neighbors comes by to put out food and water in a bowl for her. Let her out, you know.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
We snapped into silence as Drake appeared in the doorway, Amy barely visible behind him. She squeezed around him, the girl now fully dressed in street clothes and even shoes. She wasn’t going anywhere, not at this time of night and not in this weather. Must be her hosting outfit. She had chin-length copper hair that looked like she had cut herself. Something weird with her eyes. The wrong shade of green.
On top of all that, she still didn’t have a hand. As she came into the room I averted my eyes from the handless arm that didn’t swing quite right when she walked, then realized it was becoming obvious that I was averting my eyes, so I looked at the scarred stump where her wrist ended, then it became so obvious I was looking at it that she actually folded her arms, her wrist disappearing behind her shirtsleeve. She glanced past me and said, “Hi, John!”
“What’s up. This is Dave, the one you saw in your hallway. He’s not a psychotic killer or anything,” he lied.
“Oh, I know. We went to school together.”
Yes, Amy, let’s reminisce about the Pine View Behavior Disorder Program. “Remember that time they had to restrain schizo Bobby Valdez and one of the aides broke his arm! Hahahahahahaha!!!”
I said, “Hey, I’m sorry about the, you know. Almost shooting you. We just have some questions and we’ll leave you alone.”
She looked at me with the too-long stare of someone with no social skills or diminished mental capacity. Like John said, I knew she had been in an accident as a kid. Brain damage? Was that her thing? I thought about the pills on the nightstand.
She held her gaze as she said, “It’s okay!” She waved a dismissive hand in the air and smiled. “So are you guys with the police or what?”
Damn, you’re cheery. Does one of those pill bottles contain Vicodin, dear?
“Oh, no. John knows Officer Drake here and he just called us to help out. We’re, uh, sort of experts on-”
“Oh, I know,” she said brightly. “I’ve read about you guys. There’s this Web site I go to, like a News of the Weird sort of thing. I think you guys are mentioned in every other article. The thing with Jim, when Jim, well, you know. I did a lot of reading. Do you want something to drink? I have, um, cranapple juice and…” she spun and opened the fridge, “… and… water. And pickles.”
“No, thanks.”
She closed the refrigerator and took a chair at the table opposite John and me. Drake said, “She doesn’t remember a thing. She lost about twenty hours, as far as I can tell.”
I said to her, “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Brushing my teeth. I had the brush in my hand, I had gone downstairs to let Molly out so she could pee and roll around in the snow. She likes that. I came up and was putting toothpaste on the brush and then, the light was off. All of a sudden, just like that. The toothbrush was back on the shelf and the water was off and I don’t remember anything in between. Then I heard somebody in the hall and it turned out it was you.”
“And you were on your computer, right? Before you went in?”
Hesitation. Hiding something?
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Nothing strange happened?”
“When?”
“That night, the nights leading up to it.”
“No,” she said, studying my face as some bad liars do, always seeing if you’re buying it. No practice, this girl.
“Are you sure?”
On cue, John stood up and moved toward the door, saying, “I’ll be right back.” I turned to Drake and said, “Well, no crime committed here, right?”
He fixed me with a dismissive glance that told me he was the cop and that he’d leave when he damned well felt like it and not a moment sooner.
Amy said, “I’m okay, really. Just tired.”
Drake and I stared that way long enough for him to establish that he would indeed leave but that his dick was still well bigger than mine. He grabbed his hat off the counter and pulled it over his ears. “Yeah, I gotta get back.” To Amy, “But you tell me if something like this happens again. You got that?”
Emphasis on “me.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
With the slam of a door and a puff of frigid air, he was gone. I experienced the unique awkward silence that comes from being alone in the room with someone for whom you once made up a humorous nickname behind their back. Sea cucumbers, you see, vomit up their guts to distract predators, and around the third time she threw up on somebody’s desk we… well, I think I mentioned that earlier. Anyway.
She studied the scratched surface of the kitchen table and drummed her fingers. My eyes bounced around the room, from the calendar on the fridge (monkeys posed in Victorian costumes) to the stump where her hand should be to the sleeping dog on the floor apparently indifferent to both its own resurrection and the return of its master, to the package of plastic picnic cups on the counter and finally back to Amy’s missing hand. What the hell was taking John so long?
Amy leaned forward and said, “So, like, what’s the creepiest thing you’ve ever seen?”
I thought, then said, “I was at Cracker Barrel the other night. And two tables over from me, there’s this group of four old women. They’re all wearing big, red hats. Red hats and purple coats. I keep glancing back at them and they’re all there just drinking coffee, not eating. So I get up to leave, right-”
“You were eating by yourself?”
“Yeah. So I get up to leave, right, and I pay, and on the way out the door I see another table and there’s another group of women there in red hats. Purple jackets.”
Amy thought about this for a moment, then said, “Weird.”
She looked down at the table, then said in a low, conspiratorial whisper, “Have you ever heard of spontaneous combustion?”
“Yeah.”
“I have a friend, Dana, who was in the grocery store one day, and her arm, like, bursts into flame. Just like that. Just her arm. And she’s screaming and waving her arm around and around, flames shooting everywhere. Finally the cops showed up and arrested her.”
“Arrested her? Why did-”
“Possession of an unlicensed firearm.”
A great, heavy silence settled over the room. She looked down at the table again, a smile playing at her lips, looking extraordinarily pleased with herself.
I said, “You know, in the Middle East a woman can be flogged for telling a story like that.”
John burst in at that moment, carrying a plastic squeeze bottle that used to hold dishwashing liquid but now held a clear, thick substance that might have been mistaken for hair gel, though if you did you would likely never have the chance to mistake anything for hair gel again.
I stood up, John next to me. Interrogation mode.
“Okay,” I began, “we know you knew something was going on. You knew something was coming and you had your room wired up to catch it on camera.”
Long, long pause from Amy.
Finally she said, “It’s happened before.”
“Missing time?”
She nodded. “At least half a dozen times, that I know of. I’m sure it’s more. Little things, starting probably two weeks ago but who knows, you know? I’d turn on bathwater, blink, and it’s all over the floor, the tub overflowing in two seconds. Once I woke up in a different room, another time I was suddenly in bed, my shirt turned around, backward. I had been up watching TV and then a second later there I was, lying down.”
John said, “And you never see anything?”
“No.”
I said, “What do you think it is? UFO?”
“No, no. No. Sleepwalking, you know. Blackouts. I thought something with the medication maybe.”
I’m sick of your lies, scumbag!
I said, “John?”
He pulled a saucer from a strainer in the sink. He squirted some of the fluid from the bottle onto it, then found a spoon on the counter.
He said to her, “Imagine something. A physical object.”
“Like what?”
“Anything.”
She actually smiled, amused, ready to play along. She pushed her hair from her forehead and I noticed that, tragically, her bangs were the exact length to fall right into her eyeballs. She squinted into an almost comical expression of concentration. The gel in the saucer began to bubble and rise, twisting and spilling upward like the wax in a lava lamp. At the top it slowly spread outward, like a mushroom. After a moment it held the shape of a tree, six inches tall, like one of those little crystal sculptures some old people keep on their shelves.
Amy was impressed. “How…”
“We have no idea,” I said. “Somebody mailed it to me. Guy said he worked for an oil company and they found the stuff stuck to the end of a drill bit that had been about a thousand feet down. They thought it was lubrication or something, like they had a leak. Until the stuff killed one of them.”
The tree was already beginning to melt and puddle back into a gel pool. John held the spoon just above it and said, “Yeah, it’s pretty impressive that it can do anything at all, considering it’s just a big faggot.”
The gel turned bloodred. The shape shifted, grew a hole in the center. Spikes emerged from the edges. Teeth.
“Ooh, you don’t likes that, do ya?” John taunted. “I’ve seen gel that could make shapes twice the size of you. If you’re so special why don’t you go out and get a job, you pus-”
With a blur and a clink, half of the spoon was gone. The gel creature had it in its jaws, bending it and crunching the metal shard like a dog on a bone. A chair clattered to the floor and suddenly Amy was standing, arms wrapped around her abdomen.
“Just wait,” John said. “It always calms down after a second.” The color of the thing faded from crimson to pink and back to clear again. It eventually settled into a puddle, the chunk of bent spoon wading in the pool.
I said, “We got a whole collection of weird shit like this at home. The stories you heard about us? They’re mostly true. This is what we do. We have a talent for it. We have seen shit that would fuel your nightmares. So you need to understand, Amy, that there is nothing you can say that will make us think you’re crazy. But we need to know everything if we’re going to help you. Do you want our help? Because weird things are happening tonight. Big, weird, stupid things.”
She brushed her hair from her eyes, nodded, then said, “Okay.”
“Talk to us.”
She said, “The basement.”
THE DOOR TO the basement was hidden behind a shelf. Not a cool pull-the-book-off-the-bookcase-to-make-it-swing-open Batman secret passage, but a regular old bookshelf that somebody had set in front of the slim door in the storage room to discourage strangers from going in. Strangers, or a thin girl without the upper-body strength to move a bookcase. It took John and me both to scoot it aside, even without a lot of books on the shelves.
Amy shoved open the door, then reached around in the darkness until she found a pull-string for a dangling lightbulb, the once-white string now a greasy brown.
Cobwebs.
Bare brick walls.
A smell like a pile of wet dogs.
I realized about halfway down the creaky stairs that we were letting the girl take point on our adventure into the dark basement and how utterly unheroic this was.
I reached out and, with a small move of my body, did something that would change my life forever. I gently moved Amy aside and stepped down ahead of her, putting myself between her and the shadows.
Cold down here. I saw little rectangles of white floating in the darkness to my left, ground-level windows buried under snowdrifts.
Around a corner I saw something long and jagged poking out of the darkness, like a tree branch. In the dim light my imagination went wild, seeing razor-sharp claws on the end.
I stepped around the corner, blinking to get some night vision back. In my adrenaline-charged state, I saw a monster, the “arm” ending in a squat body, covered with pointed plates like an alligator’s back, tall legs like a grasshopper, jointed backward and sticking up in the air, giving the creature a “W” shape. The head had twin bundles of eyes, clustered like an insect, which wrapped around to the back of a narrow skull. The mouth was long and equipped with mandibles that ended in points as sharp as hypodermic needles.
I stared at the thing, blinking, thinking it would reveal itself to be, I don’t know, a hot-water heater or something. Then I realized the monster-shaped shadow was, surprisingly, a monster.
Amy rounded the corner. I screamed “GET BACK!!!” and threw out a hand to stop her, catching her right in the face. I had the gun in my hand, yanking it free and firing in one motion, the sound deafening in the basement. I was sure the shot was wild, as likely to hit my foot as the beast.
The creature’s shoulder exploded in a shower of yellow sparks. The extended arm flew off, tumbled to the ground, the jagged end aflame.
I kicked the creature in the chest, knocking it to the floor. I picked up the severed arm and clubbed the beast with it over and over again, screaming at the top of my lungs over the thunk thunk thunk of the beast’s own limb smacking its crotch.
After a moment it became apparent that the monster was not fighting back. It lay there, its limbs splayed stiffly into midair, as if petrified. I gave it seven or eight more thumps with its arm and then dropped the limb on the concrete floor with a thud. I sucked in huge breaths of dank, moldy air, trembling.
John approached, looking down at the broken beast. He said, “It wasn’t very agile, was it?”
“Guys…” Amy pushed past us. She squatted and picked up the monster, setting it on its feet again.
“It’s not real, you guys. It’s a model. A prop. Jim made it.”
She balanced the thing on its feet, then stumbled past some strewn cardboard boxes and found another switch. This one turned on a fluorescent shop light overhead.
The creature was actually a lot more horrifying under the glaring lights. The other arm was curled at its side, with talons that looked like they could cut down trees. I could see my reflection in each of the hundred little bundled eyes, a kaleidoscope of my own very tired and pale face.
I said, “Oh. I’m, uh, sorry about that.”
She turned to me, eyes bright, looking like that was just about the most entertaining thing she had seen all year. I looked the monster over. It was, at the very least, an astonishing work of creature art.
John said, “Look at that. At the arm, the tendons and all that.”
I examined the broken arm on the floor, the wound ending in a frayed spray of torn bone and connective tissue. Big Jim had sculpted the inside of this thing, the musculature, tendons, bone, presumably organs as well. Impossible.
“He was into that stuff,” Amy said. “He had all of those sci-fi magazines, and he used to have subscriptions to magazines about makeup and effects and all that stuff. Always mixing big buckets of latex. He wanted to do that stuff when he grew up. This one took him two months. He would come down here after work and just stay. I wouldn’t hear him until early the next morning. Just hours and hours…”
She trailed off, the memories of her dead brother taking her mind elsewhere. It seemed like a bad time to mention that I thought it would take a six-man crew from Industrial Light & Magic to make a prop like this, on a budget of a quarter-million dollars. This was soy sauce craftsmanship.
Jim, you crazy fucker. I’m starting to think we could have been friends.
“Come on,” she said. “Over here.”
She went through a short doorway that John had to duck through, a corner of the basement that may have been a coal room decades ago. She knelt down and plugged in a yellow extension cord, bathing the room in a harsh glare of light. Two halogen work lamps stood on thin metal stands, illuminating a small work space including two folding metal tables and dozens of jars and tubes, dye and latex and plaster and every other thing. White five-gallon buckets were piled high in one corner.
Amy said, “He had boxes and boxes and boxes of sketches and notes. He used to write these science fiction stories, really bad ones. He wouldn’t let me read them but I’d sneak looks and the hero would always wind up tied up and naked and at the mercy of these beautiful female alien princesses who would ‘torture’ him. Jim, you know, he kind of went a long time without a girlfriend.”
She was kneeling over a stack of cardboard banker’s boxes. She pulled the lid off one and brought up a series of sketch pads.
“He was doing something bigger, a novel or a screenplay. I’d tell him that they wouldn’t let him do his own props and write the movie both. He said James Cameron did his own designs and models for the robot in Terminator, though. You know that scene in The Matrix where they’ve got a shot of Keanu reaching out to open a door and you can sort of see the reflection of the camera crew in the doorknob? Jim saw that the first time he watched it. Just a total expert. He had all these plans, always talking about selling the house and moving and…”
She shrugged, cutting off the words, I think, to keep tears spilling out with them. She handed me a bundle of four or five art pads. I flipped through them, saw sketches of joints and muscles and hands and claws and eyes. I flipped further and saw something that caught my eye.
It was a group of men, walking with three beings that were not men. They were pure black, their limbs represented on the paper by heavy swaths of charcoal. Drawn like they were men made of shadow.
The men in the picture were in a small room, at a doorway. One of the dark creatures was reaching out as if to open the door.
I flipped more pages. I saw another sketch of a doorway; this one was familiar. I had just seen it an hour ago. It was the abandoned balcony door upstairs.
I glanced back at the broken sculpture and said, “All this, that thing back there, Jim said it was for a story he was working on?”
“He never talked about it. But I saw his notes. You know, after. He kept a journal with all that stuff and I had to sort through everything.”
She wiped at her cheek with her sleeve and I felt like an ass for asking. We didn’t ask another question, but she said, “It was parallel-universe stuff. Typical sci-fi, alternate reality and all that. I think his story was about the people on an Earth, a parallel Earth, you know, that was real close to this one and they were trying to build some kind of bridge between the two. Then they would… you know-invade.”
“And that creature back there?” I asked. “How did that figure in?”
She shrugged. John said, solemnly, “I’m gonna guess that was the thing that tied him up so the naked alien women could interrogate him.”
Amy laughed and I suddenly remembered why I keep John around. I glanced back again at the one-armed creature and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
I COULDN’T HAVE known at the time, right? That maybe all of our answers were there, in Jim’s stuff? That maybe he had pieced the whole thing together?
At that moment, on that night, I just wanted out of there. The rotten smell of guilt hung over every thought. Especially on the subject of Jim.
So, yeah, we clomped up the stairs and flipped out the lights. All of Jim’s materials were thrown under a blanket of darkness, never to be seen by human eyes again.
I never went back down there, from that day until the day we burned the house to the ground.
BACK UPSTAIRS JOHN asked Amy if she had ever seen a jellyfish-looking thing around the house or a huge bag full of what looked like butcher trimmings. To my complete lack of surprise, she said she had not.
She also said that she had never caught anything on the webcams, that they were set to click on at the sign of movement.
“It’s always just me rolling over,” she said. “I move around a lot in bed because of my back and all that.”
“The other times you went missing,” John thought to ask, “how long ago was it?”
“It happened for sure Sunday night, then Tuesday night. Then last night, you know.”
“Every forty-eight hours,” John observed. “As far as we know.”
“But it’s not usually as long. The most time I had lost up until now was about six hours, from midnight until early morning. This is the first time I lost a whole day.”
“Is it always around midnight?” I asked.
“Yeah, I guess.”
Amy declined our offer to help her stay and sift through her webcam photos from last night. I was desperate to see what would show up but this was her bedroom and I suppose she had a reasonable fear of two creepy males clicking through shots of her dressing and doing the things girls do alone in their bedrooms. Lighting farts or whatever.
She promised to look through them and let us know. I told her that I was pretty sure I had moved the photos to a folder buried in printer drivers. On accident. John volunteered to stay the night and stake the place out, but Amy recoiled at that idea and said the night was mostly over anyway.
And so, feeling like men trying to work a jigsaw puzzle blindfolded and using only our butt cheeks to grip the pieces, we left.
I CAME HOME to see 3:26 A.M. on my wall clock. I turned on every light in the place, checking every room for any damned thing at all. I finally collapsed into a chair, thinking there was no way in hell I was getting to sleep that night. Too much adrenaline, too many nasty dreams waiting for me behind my eyelids.
I fell asleep.
THE ROOM CAME back into focus. How much time had passed? I tried to move my arms, found that I could not. Somebody here. Footsteps behind me. Tried to move again. Limbs not responding.
I’ve had this dream before. Just got to-
OH SHIT.
A thin face appeared, leaning down in front of me. Huge nose. My friend Robert North, from my Bronco.
He asked, “Can you hear me?”
I couldn’t answer. I was paralyzed, a brain inside a statue.
“Blink your eyes. Blink if you can hear me.”
I blinked, not to answer him, but to see if I could blink. I could. Is there a way to kill a man using only your eyelids?
He said, “Good.”
He walked out of view, then came back and extended his palm to me. On his palm, something was moving. He held it up to my face.
A spider.
Huge, a body the size of a chicken egg.
Black legs with yellow stripes.
It looked to have been bred for war.
North offered it on the palm of his hand and said, “I want you to eat this.”
I was able to move my lips enough to say, “Fuck you.”
“I’m going to say some words. I need you to listen very carefully. Tractor. Moonlight. Violin. Clay. Thumbs.”
This went on for several minutes, North rattling off dozens of words. Maybe over a hundred. He held the arachnid up, legs twitching.
“Red. Sandstone. Trombone. Stain. Linger.”
And just like that, I was dying. I could feel a poison living in my body, shutting me down, rotting my guts, burning my veins. And there was only one cure-the thing in North’s palm. Suddenly the spider was my salvation, the narrow, bright window out of this dark room. I gathered every ounce of strength and leaned forward with my head-my hands still numb and useless-and then I sucked the spider into my mouth with greedy lips. I chewed through rigid, wiry legs and felt a hot, salty fluid burst into my mouth when I bit through the body. I quickly choked down the bitter bundle of legs and gristle and-
I SNAPPED AWAKE and leapt out of my chair. Alone. Still dark.
The clock on the wall said 6:13 A.M. I ran a hand over my mouth, a lingering bitterness on my tongue. I whipped my head around, confirmed that I was alone.
That was a dream, right? Eating a spider? What the hell did that symbolize?
Look at the bright side. At least it’s not a workday.
My phone rang.
I WOULD LIKE to pause for a moment, to talk about my penis.
My penis is like a toddler. A toddler-who is a perfectly normal size for his age-on a long road trip to what he thinks is Disney World. My penis is excited because he hasn’t been to Disney World in a long, long time, but remembers a time when he used to go every day. So now the penis toddler is constantly fidgeting, whining, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? How about now? Now? How about… now?”
And Disney World is nowhere in sight.
Thus, one of the many awful things I can admit about myself is that the two years I spent with Jennifer live in my mind mostly as a series of frantic, breathy memories. Clawing hands tugging off clothes, heartbeat thumping in my ears, fingernails digging down my back, salty tastes lingering in my mouth. It’s biology. It’s hormones. As time passes I can recall fewer and fewer of our conversations and I couldn’t give you the details of our five most-fun dates (though I have a fairly graphic vision of how each of them ended).
If upon hearing this you pump your fist and wink knowingly, you can kiss my ass. She was a good friend to me. She put up with my bullshit and at times not even I can put up with my bullshit. But all that is gone and what is left is a big, black hole where the sex used to be.
The thing with Jen ended with a pregnancy scare. She had seen my world and didn’t want to bring a baby into it. This led to some violent arguments during which I pointed out, loudly and in sprays of spittle, that if she got an abortion the fucking unborn fucking fetus would likely fucking haunt us-I mean literally haunt our home-until the day we died and possibly beyond. It turned out that was the wrong thing to say.
It also turned out the pregnancy was a false alarm but I was spooked after that, found myself backing off more and more, making excuses because, gosh, I gotta get up real early in the morning and it’s gonna be a busy day with inventory and all that and I’m just not in the mood right now, Jen…
We slowly went hands-off after that, Jen thinking this had something to do with me not loving her anymore, though the loving part of me and the penis part of me rarely speak to each other. She cried a lot. She slept a lot. We argued a lot. She left.
So I had been off the sex wagon for six months as I stood there at the counter of Wally’s Videe-Oh!, having dragged myself in for yet another unexpected shift on yet another frozen morning. It was going to be a bad day. The hormones come and go like the tide and some days it’s no big deal and some days it’s like being fifteen again. The other night a coworker had insisted I take home a movie called Ghost World, which turned out not to be about ghosts at all, but was instead some kind of coming-of-age story about a girl who, I noticed, had a fabulous collection of very short dresses. All I remember from the plot is two hours of Thora Birch’s bare thighs.
But I digress. It had been my coworker Tina on the phone this morning, asking if I could cover her morning because, gosh, even though the roads have been scraped clean she hears there’s supposed to be more snow today and she doesn’t want to get trapped at work, and I’m just the nicest guy ever, she really, really owes me. Tina, by the way, is short and blonde and bouncy and full of cheerleader energy. So I got dressed and drove in, cruising on those few hours of fitful chair-sleep. Tina is also engaged, by the way, with a kid. On days like this, Mr. Penis isn’t big on logic.
How about… now?
I folded up this morning’s newspaper and dropped it in the trash can at my feet. I had scanned it for news of a missing person, a manhunt, anything of the sort. Nothing. The front page was a shot of kids playing in the snow. The person in my toolshed was apparently not noticed missing yet, or they were such a total asshole that the town had gotten together overnight and decided that it was better left unsolved.
Three hours passed without a single paying customer. I looked down at one point and noticed the newspaper had fallen onto the floor. The day before we had put balloons up around the store for a promotion and during cleanup one of my coworkers had stuffed a balloon into the little trash can. Inflated. It literally filled the whole container, so that no more trash could be put in. This fascinated me for some reason. I heard the door open.
Officer Drake sidled in the door the way cops do, still in uniform. He sidled all the way across the floor and desidled near the counter. I found my hands clenching a nearby DVD case.
Tell me, Mr. Wong, you wouldn’t happen to know about a guy from across town who went missing last night? Your name was written on the wall in blood and a pair of your gloves was left behind and we have video of you killing him.
Instead he said, “That’s downright beautiful, isn’t it?”
I had no clue what he was talking about. He turned and looked out the glass doors and nodded. Out there was the aftermath of the ice storm, a world coated in crystal. The little landscaping trees in the parking lot gleamed with branches of blown glass. It was still sort of dark when I came in and I hadn’t noticed.
“Uh-huh. What’s up, Drake?”
“Haven’t been sleeping,” he said. “Neither have you, from the look of it.”
“Yeah.”
He shrugged. “Eh, probably just need a new mattress, right? Maybe one of those machines that make soothing noises. Like the sound of a waterfall or a jungle, something like that.”
“Jungle sounds?” I said, my face taking on great weight. “I don’t think the jungle sounds would help me sleep. Reminds me a little too much of Vietnam.”
Drake didn’t laugh.
“Me, it’s my little girl that’s been keeping me up,” he said. “She’s four. Wakes up every couple of hours, crying about a doll. We come in and ask her about the doll and calm her down. So two nights ago, I’m walking past her room, she’s not in there at the time and I see this doll. I never saw it before, a big china-doll lookin’ thing, the kind with the glass eyes, big, puffy dress, you know. And it’s sitting on the edge of the bed. I figure my wife bought it at a garage sale, because I ain’t seen it before then. Then I walk back by and look in there, not two seconds later, and there ain’t no doll there. Just an empty bed. I ask my wife about it, and she says she’s never seen such a doll. Never.”
“Yeah,” I said, as if that shed some light on it. What did he want me to say?
“You figure out what that thing was, floatin’ around in the Sullivan house?”
“I don’t know any more than you, Drake. Just weird, that’s all. This town, you know.”
“You know there was a cop, a detective that went missing a while back? Name was Appleton? Black guy? Started ranting about the end of the world, then vanished like a puff of smoke?”
“I think I heard about that.”
Drake said, “You know who was the very last person he interrogated before he went missing?”
“Me?”
“That’s right. That’s right. And they never found him.”
Being a cop in Undisclosed is not a path to long-term mental or physical health, Drake. Check the suicide rate. And I’ll tell you something else, too. The look I saw in the eyes of that guy before he went off the edge is the same look I see in yours now.
Out loud I said, “Why are you here, Drake?”
“I need a movie,” he said brightly. “Gonna stay in tonight.”
“Okay.”
“Why don’t you recommend something for me? Something fun.”
I reached over and plucked the first movie off a pile of returns to my left. Mulholland Drive, some David Lynch movie I had never heard of. There was no anti-theft tag on the case of this one. Almost like we wanted it to get stolen.
“Here,” I said. “This is a good one.”
“It’s something my kid will sit through?”
“Sure.”
I rang him up and he sidled from the counter. Drake put his hand on the door as I picked up another DVD and let out the breath I had been holding. Then, just as he was stepping out into the cold, I heard myself say, “There wasn’t anybody else reported missing today, was there?”
He stopped, and turned. He let his gaze stay on me for a moment before saying, “No. Why?”
He’s gonna remember you asking when somebody does come up missing, you stupid fuck.
“No reason,” I said. I recovered with, “Whatever happened to Amy, I didn’t want it to happen to somebody else.”
“Yeah.”
He waited for a moment, like he had something else to say, but turned and walked out instead. My cell phone rang. Everybody had taken to downloading songs to replace the ringers on their cell phones but me; I just set mine to ring again. One less thing to worry about. I pulled it from my pants pocket and saw John’s name on the display. I answered, “Hello?”
“I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE, VINNY!”
“You called me, John.”
“That’s right. Sorry. Have you seen the trees? Isn’t it pretty?”
“That guy came back, John. The guy who showed up in my car last night. He came back and I thought it was a dream but I’m starting to think it wasn’t.”
“Did you kill him?”
“No, John. And thank you for asking me that over a cell phone.”
“Speaking of which, did you find out about the you-know-what in your toolshed? As in, a name?”
“No, the dead body in my you-know-what is still a mystery. I have to get back to work. What do you need?”
“You gotta leave the store.”
“I can’t, I’m the only one here.”
“Close the store, then. Close the store and get outta there.”
“What? Why?”
“You’ll see. Meet me at the safe house. Noon. You’re not gonna believe this shit.”
“THE SAFE HOUSE” was our code name for Denny’s.
I arrived and saw John at a far corner booth, a bundle of papers in his hand, a pair of boobs next to him attached to a girl. This wasn’t Crystal, the tall girl with the electric blue eyes and short hair and the peasant skirts, nor was it Angie, the sexy librarian girl with the dark-rimmed glasses and ponytails and capri pants. It wasn’t Nina, with the criminally short skirts and green streaks in her hair, or Nicky the Bitch.
This one was Marcy. Oh, Marcy. Contrary to the wisdom of the gay men who run the fashion industry (who, coincidentally, prefer their female models to look like thin males), the hottest girl I ever saw in real life weighed probably one hundred and fifty pounds. And her name was Marcy Hansen. And she was John’s girl. Rusty reddish-brown hair, about the same color as Molly’s, wide cobalt-blue eyes that looked at you like you were the most important person in the world.
I sat, we greeted each other. Out of the corner of my eye, off to the left of Marcy’s boobs, John waved around the papers and said, “You gotta read this.”
At that moment I realized I was boob-staring and I took the papers from John. Marcy wore tan cargo pants and a skintight T-shirt that said, I SWAM THE NAKED MILE! Marcy was one of those girls who seemed to have an endless supply of stories that involved some kind of hilarious sexual misadventure and/or accidental nudity. I took the papers from John’s hand. I studied Marcy’s boobs carefully. I caught myself, again, and held up the papers to obscure the supple swell of her bosoms. The papers were a printout, a log of the chat Amy was on the night she got abducted last time.
“I saw Amy this morning,” John said. “I stopped by to, you know, make sure she was still there. She was pretty freaked out, reading that.”
I read, but didn’t understand until the last third or so and, at that point, everything changed.
This, I thought, is the end. One way or another, this is gonna be the end.
* JOHNNY_5 HAS LOGGED OUT *
{faierydust} asshole
{MustacheGirl} Still there girl?
{faierydust} hes banned
{EVLNYMPH} dialup sux
{amy_sullivan} still here
{EVLNYMPH} anybody else lagging?
{faierydust} this is the creepiest thing ive ever done
{MustacheGirl} You should look out the window. See if there’s lights.
{EVLNYMPH} stop with the ufo thing
{MustacheGirl} Have you thought about getting hypnotized? They can recall memories of those nights…
{amy_sullivan} no
{amy_sullivan} i don’t even know where ppl go to have that done
{amy_sullivan} sounds like a good way to get molested
{MustacheGirl} Almost midnight.
{EVLNYMPH} iam so freaked out right now i read a book about a navy ship that disappeared
{EVLNYMPH} they found it latr but the crew was all gone and some guys turned up hundreds of miles awy w/no memory
{EVLNYMPH} they think it was sum kind of time pocket or somethin
{faierydust} oh shit
{amy_sullivan} that was a movie. the philadelphia experiment
{MustacheGirl} Yes.
{faierydust} it had tom hanks. the expriment gave him aids
{MustacheGirl} The movie was based on a true story though.
{amy_sullivan} molly is staring
{amy_sullivan} she jumps up on my bed and stares at me til i take her out
{MustacheGirl} I assume the true story wasn’t as interesting.
{EVLNYMPH} im putting on music the quiet is freakin me out
{faierydust} what if its like a wormhole or something
{EVLNYMPH} bob dylan. you gotta serv somebody
{EVLNYMPH} serve
{amy_sullivan} im taking molly outside BRB
{MustacheGirl} AMY!!! Are you nuts?!?!
{amy_sullivan} BRB
{EVLNYMPH} serve
{faierydust} wormhole. i just got the weirdest picture in my head when i thought of that. ugh. worms.
{MustacheGirl} Stupid dog. I’m literally on the edge of my seat and she walks away. This is hurting my butt.
{MustacheGirl} Ew. The cat peed on my bed.
{EVLNYMPH} serve
{MustacheGirl} She NEVER does that.
{faierydust} my science teacher says if all of the worms in the world came up to the surface the world would be buried 20 feet deep in them
{faierydust} he said there are 100000000000000000000000000 sea worms in the ocean 10 w/ 26 zeros
{faierydust} they would flow around the streets like aflood
{EVLNYMPH} serve
{faierydust} there is a world like that i have seen it
{faierydust} people die choking on them
{faierydust} they are consumed from the inside out
{MustacheGirl} All of us find that exact same fate.
{EVLNYMPH} serve
* S_GUTTENBERG HAS LOGGED IN *
{S_GUTTENBERG} HEY GIRLZ!!!!!! I’M TYPING WITH MY COCK. CYBER?
{MustacheGirl} Our race was created as food for worms that do not die. Our eyes are as sweet as candy to them.
{faierydust} eye
{EVLNYMPH} serve
{faierydust} I
{MustacheGirl} None find life outside of the throat. His jaws are like a lover’s embrace.
* S_GUTTENBERG HAS LOGGED OUT *
{MustacheGirl} None
{faierydust} I
{EVLNYMPH} serve
{MustacheGirl} None
{faierydust} BUT
{EVLNYMPH} K
{MustacheGirl} O
{faierydust} R
{EVLNYMPH} R
{MustacheGirl} O
{faierydust} K
{MustacheGirl} It is done.
{faierydust} i just blanked out what time is it KORROK THE SLAVE-MASTER KORROK THE KNOWING KORROK THE WISE KORROK THE LIVING KORROK THE FAMISHED KORROK THE CONQUERER KORROK THE GIVER KORROK THE ALMIGHTY I SERVE NONE BUT KORROK
{EVLNYMPH} faierydust are you o
{MustacheGirl} She’s food.
{MustacheGirl} ///////////
{MustacheGirl} ///////////////////////////////////
{MustacheGirl} ///////////////////////////////////
{MustacheGirl} ///////////
{MustacheGirl} ///////////
{MustacheGirl} ///////////
{MustacheGirl} ///////////
{MustacheGirl} ///////////////////////////////////
{MustacheGirl} ///////////////////////////////////
{MustacheGirl} ///////////
* MUSTACHEGIRL HAS LOGGED OUT *
I FOLDED THE pages and ran my hand over my mouth, unshaven jaw like sandpaper. Korrok the Slavemaster.
A blue eye in the darkness. Populations of worlds roil in his guts.
As much as I hate being right, I hate it even more when John is right.
Marcy said, “Isn’t that just the weirdest?”
I glanced at Marcy, then at John. Keep in mind, these two had been going out all of ten days.
John said, “Somebody’s got to stay with Amy tonight.”
“Oh, and don’t even get me started on her, John.” I tossed the prints aside. “I mean, did you notice that she’s not even retarded?”
Silence from John’s end, then, “Was she supposed to come back retarded?”
“They had her at that school. Pine View. The alternative school, where they put the retarded kids.”
“That would be the same facility where you went to school for a year?”
“Yes. Pine View.”
A pause on his end, then, “Anyway, I was going to stake out her place tonight-”
“Good plan.”
“-but, Steve called and he needs me and the whole crew on a job site. A chunk of roof caved in, from the ice they say-”
“John, you just made me close down Wally’s so-”
“No, listen. Guess where the job is.”
“Your mom’s ass?”
“The Drain Rooter plant. Right next to Amy’s house. We gotta be on site at five thirty in the morning.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Neither do I, but they gave Steve all these requirements about who could go where, what part of the plant we could be in. Sounded weird, all of it. Plus, I really, really need the money. They’re paying triple time. So can you stay with Amy tonight? See if anything horrifying happens?”
“John, did you read the chat log? Do you remember the-”
A glance at Marcy.
“-thing. In my toolshed? She’s not safe with me, John.”
Marcy’s eyes widened. “You mean there’s something in there other than the dead body?”
I closed my eyes and silently counted to ten.
“Dave, we’ve made it this far. What else are we gonna do, chain you up in your room? I got something else to show you. You see it, you’re gonna want in on this. You ready?”
John unfolded a white piece of paper with a color photo in the center. A printout from a color printer.
“Camera still. From two days ago.”
A grainy shot of Amy’s bedroom. Good light, early evening. Amy standing right there in the center, arms held up, bent at the elbows, one foot lifted off the floor. Motion blur.
I said, “What is she doing?”
“Uh, I think she’s dancing. But that’s not the weird part.”
I knew what the weird part was. There was a black shape behind her, standing there, in the form of a man. Like a body painted in tar, head to toe. The now-familiar image of a man who had been neatly cut from reality…
I closed my eyes.
Shiiiiit.
I said to Marcy’s boobs, “What did Amy think?”
“To her,” John said, answering for them, “it’s just a picture of her in the empty room.”
“How is that possible, John? It’s ink on paper. Either it’s there or it’s not.”
“Wouldn’t you be surprised if I somehow knew the answer to that? Marcy doesn’t see it, either. Just you and me. Anyway, I was thinking maybe you could put on a red wig and pajamas and pretend to be Amy. Sleep in her bed, see if they’ll abduct you instead. Will you stay with her?”
Notice the subtle transition from “can you do it” from a few seconds ago to “will you do it.” If I had jumped in and answered “no” to the first one, I’d have been saying I can’t, it’s impossible. If I refuse now, though, I’m saying I won’t do it. I can, but I choose not to because I’m an apathetic asshole. Smooth.
Hmmm… what would Marcy’s boobs do in this situation?
“Fine.”
“And watch out for Molly. See if she does anything unusual. There’s something I don’t trust about the way she exploded and then came back from the dead like that.”
“I gotta get back to work. Good to see you, Marcy.”
I stood, she stood. She leaned forward and, to my utter shock, threw her arms around me and squeezed.
She sat down and smiled and said, “You looked like you needed a hug.”
How about… NOW?!?
“Um, thanks.” I stood awkwardly for a moment, then walked away. From behind me I heard her say to John, “Where was I? Oh, yeah. I ran outside and just then realized I wasn’t wearing pants…”
I WENT BACK to the store and worked the rest of my shift because I’m a huge dork. Jeff came in at six, took one look at the storm that was salting the air and declared the shop closed for the day.
I stopped by the house to change and saw I had a package in the mail, a thick brown envelope, from an address unknown to me. Handwritten, blocky letters. Little kid writing.
I tore it open and found a pair of cardboard glasses with plastic lenses, a Scooby-Doo logo on the earpiece. A prize from a Burger King kids’ meal. It said “GhostVision” in spooky letters on the side. I put them on, saw a faded cartoon ghost smiling at me. There was a Post-it note inside the envelope that said, “HELP IM A GOST LOOKER 2 MOO MOO MOOOOOO FUCKASS.”
Nice.
I flung it in the passenger seat of the truck, then almost fell on the ice four times on my way to my front door. I knew I needed to shovel the walk before the mailman broke his neck.
Sure. The shovel’s right back there in the toolshed…
ABOUT AN HOUR later I emerged from the hardware store with a brand-new snow shovel. It was getting late so I went straight to the Sullivan place.
Amy opened the door with the too-happy-too-see-me look I associate with crazy people and dogs. She wore thin wire-framed glasses-she didn’t have them last night but I guess she didn’t wear them to bed-and seemed to have put a lot of work into her hair. Jeans and bare feet with tiny red toenails. It made me cold just looking at them. I observed that she still didn’t have a left hand.
“Hi!” she sang. “Come in!”
Molly was standing in the entryway, looking at me with utter disinterest. Amy turned around and gestured to me, said, “Look, Molly! David’s here! You remember David!”
The one who made you explode!
The dog turned and walked away, making a sound that I swear was a snort of derision. Amy led me through the living room. The television was on, displaying nothing but the face of a white-haired old man staring quietly at the camera. PBS, probably. There was a picture on the wall, a black velvet Jesus painted in comic-book tones. There was only a lone table lamp in the room, which left about half of the space in shadow.
Of all the creepy places to spend a night…
She said, “You look tired! Your eyes are pink.”
“Eh, I haven’t been sleeping. Got a headache.”
Feels like elves tugging on fishhooks in my brain…
“Be right back!”
Amy vanished into the kitchen, almost bouncing.
Vicodin.
I sat on the couch and glanced at the TV again, same old guy. Odd-shaped face. He leaned over, whispered to someone just out of frame, then looked back toward the camera again. Weird, because he seemed to be looking at me.
Amy bounced back in, a green Excedrin bottle in her hand and a red Mountain Dew bottle in the crook of her elbow. She nodded her head toward the TV and said, “Cable’s out. I hope you brought something to read.”
I looked at the old guy, looking right back at me.
Oh, SHIT.
The screen blinked, went to black, then came up on MTV. Some reality show with teenage girls screeching at each other.
Amy set the bottle in front of me and said, “Hey, it’s back! I got that cherry Mountain Dew. John said you liked it so blame him if it’s not…”
It’s not cherry, dear. It’s RED.
“No, it’s fine, thanks.”
I studied the television. Nobody home but the screeching girls.
Amy said, “It comes and goes. John says that he saw a bunch of birds on the lines and they were flapping their wings but couldn’t take off because their feet had frozen there.”
Without breaking my gaze with the TV, I said, “To John, something being funny is more important than being true.” I glanced at a grandfather clock that was ticking but was off by approximately seven hours.
The television blinked back off, switching to snow.
Amy said, “See?”
I said, “When the TV goes out, it’s just snow?”
“Sure.”
“Never anything else? Like-other programming?”
“No. Why?”
I shrugged. She couldn’t see the old man.
By responding to her attempts at small talk with nothing but ambiguous grunts, I was able to drive Amy back upstairs to her room. I glanced at the grandfather clock…
12:10 A.M.
… realized again that it was utterly useless, then looked at my watch instead:
7:24 P.M.
This was gonna be a long damned night. I thought absently that maybe if Amy got taken at midnight again I’d be able to duck outta here and go sleep in my own bed. Nobody would notice.
There was a coffee table in front of the sofa and I noticed some magazines resting on a shelf on the end of it. I sifted through them. Cosmo. I picked up the top one and flipped through the pages. Topless woman. Another woman, naked, except for some whipped cream on her naughty bits. Two more pages, a naked man’s ass. I had seen less nudity on Cinemax. I glanced up at the velvet painting and suddenly felt sacrilegious ogling naked models. I stuffed the magazine back in the coffee table and nodded an apology to Badly Drawn Jesus. I looked at my watch again.
7:25 P.M.
I leaned over on the couch and put my feet up. Like lying on a pile of felt-covered bricks. I wondered if I could set all of the clocks ahead to midnight, maybe fool them into coming early.
John and I had looked into the case of a Wisconsin guy who spontaneously combusted while driving his green Oldsmobile last year. We had one witness who claimed the flames formed a huge, satanic hand at the moment of explosion. We went up there, talked to a few people, came up with nothing. Eventually we get a call from a goth kid up there who was heavily into Satan worship. The kid said he had made a pact with Satan to kill both of his parents, then backed out of it when his mom unexpectedly bought him a video game console. The kid, as it turned out, also drove an olive-green Oldsmobile.
The avenging demon-or whatever it was-got the wrong car, barbecued the wrong guy. So they can make mistakes. They can confuse identities. The kid felt terrible about it and from then on spent every night on his knees, praying to God for another chance. For my own safety I pray that Brad Pitt doesn’t do anything to piss off the dark realms.
Eyes getting heavy. A shadow moved on the far wall, probably from passing headlights in the street. My eyes closed.
Open again. Darker. Had time passed? Shadow on the wall again, elongated figure of a man.
No, just the tree outside the window…
Another shadow, next to it. Another, a forest of shapes. Moving, slowly. Was I dreaming this? Suddenly there was darkness right in front of me, pitch-black. Two orbs of fire appeared right in the center of it, two burning coals floating right there, inches away.
I flung myself upright, my muscles on fire with adrenaline. The room was normal again. There was still a lone shadow on the far wall, which was in fact just a tree backlit from the front yard. I walked over to it, reached out, and touched it. The shadow didn’t react. That was good.
My watch: 11:43 P.M.
I pounded up the stairs and burst into Amy’s room, terrifying her. She was on the bed with the laptop, legs crossed under her, a handful of what looked like Cheetos frozen halfway to her mouth.
I caught my breath and said, “How can you eat those and type on your computer? Don’t you get that orange shit everywhere?”
“Uh, I…”
“Come downstairs. If this thing’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen. But I want to be on the ground floor and near an exit.”
“Why?”
In case we have to run screaming out of this place.
“And put some shoes on. Just in case.”
11:52 P.M.
The television was back to regularly scheduled programming, the basic cable package of somebody who doesn’t watch a lot of TV. No movie channels. I turned it off and turned to Amy, who was sitting stiffly on the stiff sofa, biting a thumbnail.
She said, “What are we waiting for?”
“Anything. And I do mean anything.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” I stalked around the walls of the room, stopping to peer out of the big bay window. Not snowing, at least.
As long as you don’t bring up your brother…
“You said yesterday that, like, most of what people say about you guys is true. So-there are some things that I’ve read that, you know…”
“What do they say, Amy?”
“That you guys have, like, a cult or something. And that Jim died because of something you guys were into.”
“If that were true, would I admit it?” I glanced at my watch, something that was becoming a compulsion with me.
11:55 P.M.
“I don’t know. You were there, though, right? In Las Vegas?”
“Yeah.”
“And John says he didn’t die in an accident, the way the papers said.”
“What did John say?”
“He said a little monster that looked like a spider with a beak and a blond wig ate him.”
Awkward pause. “You believed him?”
“I thought I would ask you.”
“What are you willing to believe, Amy? Do you believe in ghosts and angels and demons and devils and gods, all that?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. So, if they exist, then to them we’d be like bacteria or viruses, right? Like way lower on the ladder. Now the trick is that a higher being can study and understand the things under it, but not vice versa. We put the virus under the microscope. A virus can’t do the same to us. So if there are things that exist above us humans, beings so radically different and big and complex that they can’t fit inside your brain, we’d be no more equipped to see them than the germs are equipped to see us. Right?”
11:58 P.M.
“Okay.”
“I mean, not without special tools.”
“Okay.”
“John and I have those tools. But just because we can see these things, these odd and weird and horrible things, it don’t mean we can actually understand them or do anything about them.”
“Ooooo- kay.”
“Now let me ask you something. Big Jim, he was into some things, he had unusual hobbies. He built model monsters. But he knew some people, too, didn’t he? Weird people? You know who I’m talking about, right? The black guy with the Jamaican accent?”
She said, “Yeah, I think we talked about that, didn’t we? He was homeless. They found that guy and I heard he, like, exploded. I always wondered about that. Do you think Jim was into something, too?”
There was no short answer to that, so I said nothing. Amy looked at the floor.
11:59 P.M.
Amy said, “So what are we expecting?”
“Anything. Beyond anything.”
She looked very pale. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, rocking slightly.
“What time is it?”
“Almost time.”
“I’m scared to death, David.”
“That’s good because there’s lots to be afraid of.”
I glanced at Badly Drawn Jesus, then pulled the gun from my pocket. On Judgment Day, I’d be able to proudly state that when I thought the hordes of Hell were coming for a local girl, I stood ready to shoot at them with a small- caliber pistol.
I said, “Keep talking.”
“Um, okay. Let’s see. Keep talking. Talking talking talking, doo doo doo doo doo. Uh, my name is Amy Sullivan and I’m twenty- one years old and, um, I’m really scared right now and I feel like I’m going to pee my pants and my back hurts but I don’t want to take a pill because I think I’ll just throw it back up and this couch is really uncomfortable and I don’t like ham and-this is hard. My mouth is going dry. What time is it now?”
I held my breath, my heart hammering. Anything. Ridiculous, the idea that anything can happen. Impossible. But we should have known from the start. The Big Bang. One moment there was nothing and then, BAM! Everything. What was impossible after that?
12:02 A.M.
I glanced back at Amy. Still there.
“Well,” I said. “They’re late.”
“Maybe they won’t come with you here.”
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe their clock isn’t the same as yours.”
Another good point.
She asked, “Are you scared?”
“Pretty much all the time, yeah.”
“Why? Because of what happened in Las Vegas?”
“Because I sort of looked into Hell, but I still don’t know if there’s a Heaven or not.”
That stopped her.
12:04 A.M.
She finally said, “You saw it?”
“Sort of. I felt it. Heard it, I guess. Screams, bleeding over into my head. And I knew, I knew right then what it would be like.” I took a breath and knew I was about to spill a giant load of stark- raving lunacy.
“It was just like the locker room,” I said. “That day at the high school. Not Pine View where we went to school together, but before that, before they shipped me off there. Billy Hitchcock and four friends. Their hands on me like animal jaws, twisting me, pushing me to the ground. So easy. So fucking easy, the way they overpowered me, and that look, that look of stupid joy on their faces because they knew, they knew that they could do whatever they wanted and they knew that I knew. And that fear, that total hopelessness when I realized I wasn’t going to kick my way out of it and the coach wasn’t gonna come in and break it up and nobody was going to come to my rescue. Whatever they wanted to do was going to happen and happen and happen until they got bored with it and they got so high off that power…”
I felt the Smith’s plastic grip digging into my palm, knew I was involuntarily squeezing it.
“Before that, Billy’s neighbor had this little yappy dog, expensive thing. One day the old lady comes home and finds the little yapping thing in her backyard, only it’s not yapping because Billy has taken a hot glue gun and glued its jaws shut. He decided to do the eyes, too, and-look, the point is I think that people live on, forever, outside of time somehow. And I think people like Billy, they never change. And I think they all wind up in the same place, and you and I can wind up right among them and they have forever, literally forever, to do what they want with us. In whatever way people live, maybe you don’t have a body they can cut or bruise or burn but the worst pain isn’t in the nerve endings, is it? Total fear and submission and torment and deprivation and hopelessness, that tidal wave of hopelessness. They never get tired, they never sleep, and you never, ever, ever die. They stay on top of you and they hold you down and down and down, forever.”
I let out a breath.
12:06 A.M.
She said, “Billy Hitchcock. He was the kid who di-”
Her words broke off and she let out an enormous snore, like she’d suddenly fallen into a deep sleep in midsentence.
I turned, and where Amy had been sitting there was now a human- shaped thing with jointed arms and gray rags for clothes, legs sticking stiffly out in front. Like a department store mannequin crafted by a blind man. The red hair looked to be made of copper wire. A hinged jaw clamped shut and the snoring sound was clipped immediately. Two seconds later the jaw yawned wide open again and the enormous snoring sound poured forth-a sound that was more mechanical than human. Artificial.
I got to hand it to them, I thought. I really wasn’t expecting that.
I heard a clump and realized the gun had fallen out of my limp hand. I also realized my jaw was hanging open. I tried to pull myself together, forced my legs to step forward. I reached out toward the thing-
The gun was back in my hand. Amy was back on the couch, sitting bolt upright, looking blankly into space. I immediately looked at my watch-
3:20 A.M.
SHIT.
Amy slowly turned her head, coming to. She saw me, saw the look on my face. Realization washed over her and her hand flew to her mouth, her eyes suddenly wide.
“Did it-did it happen? It happened, didn’t it?”
I said, “Go upstairs and pack as much stuff as you can carry. We’re getting outta here.”
SHE BOUNDED DOWN the stairs seven minutes later, a satchel over her shoulder and the laptop under her arm.
We found Molly in the kitchen, standing on a chair and eating from a box of cookies that had been left open on the table. After some coaxing and threats we got her to follow us out to my truck. We loaded up, the engine growled to life. The windshield was a solid sheet of white.
Amy found the cardboard GhostVision glasses on the dashboard and examined them with a quizzical look. I found my ice scraper from under my seat and jumped out to scrape the ice from the windows. Outside I turned toward the house-
I stopped in my tracks.
I mumbled, “Oh, shit, shit, shit.”
There was a figure on the roof, silhouetted against the pearly moonlit clouds. Nothing but silhouette, a walking shadow. Two tiny, glowing eyes.
“What are you looking at?”
Amy, trying to follow my gaze.
“You can’t see it.”
She squinted. “No.”
“Get back in the truck!”
In a series of frantic bursts I managed to scrape a lookhole in the powdered-sugar crust of ice on the windshield, then jogged around to the back to do the same.
I heard Amy say, “Hey! What’s he doing up there?”
I leaned around the truck and saw Amy was wearing the Scooby- Doo ghost glasses and was staring right at the spot where Shadow Man was standing. She pulled off the glasses and looked at them in amazement, then looked through them again and said, “What is that thing? Look! What is it?”
“What-are you using the damned Scooby glasses?”
“I can see it! It’s a black shape and… it’s moving! Look!”
I did look, long enough to see the shape spout giant black wings. No… that wasn’t right. It became wings, two flapping wing shapes that didn’t quite meet in the middle. It flitted into the sky, a black slip against the clouds, higher and higher until it vanished.
I heard barking. Molly had gotten out of the truck, was at my knees.
Amy kept staring up, her mouth hanging open, steam jumping out in little puffs. She said, “David, what was it?”
“How should I know? They’re shadow people. They’re walking death. They take you and you’re gone and nobody knows you were ever there.”
“You’ve seen them before?”
“More and more. Let’s go, let’s go.”
We climbed in, called to Molly. She didn’t move, stood stiffly, trembling, growling at the sky. I called to her again, got out, picked her up and threw her inside.
I jumped in, floored it.
We fired down the road, fishtailing on the glaze of skating-rink-caliber black ice left over from the road graters. The house shrank in the rearview mirror. Beyond it, the low, flat Drain Rooter factory.
Amy twisted in her seat and peered back through the rear window, then did the same with those stupid ghost glasses. Molly was up and dancing behind us, bouncing around, probably thinking she’d be safer out on foot. Amy squealed, “Look! Look!”
I gave it a glance in the mirror, saw high headlights behind us, probably a Rooter truck leaving with a load. I did something they don’t teach you in driving class, which was to lean my head out into the blistering wind and look up, steering blind with one hand.
Black shapes were swirling overhead, winged things and long, whipping forms like serpents. Swirling, stopping, turning, like bits of debris in a tornado.
They were congregating around the factory.
Most of them were. Some of them were breaking off and following us, dark shapes flitting across the sky and into the shadowy trees and houses around us, vanishing from view. I pulled in my head and focused on the road.
Amy sat forward and strapped her seat belt on, screamed, “What do we do?”
“We’re doing it.”
Another glance into the mirror, headlights closer now. Trucker hauling ass, hauling drain cleaner.
A shadow flicked across the hood.
I stomped the brakes, the Bronco spun out, skidded, plowed ass-first into a bumper- high snowdrift alongside the road. Silence for a second, then the apocalyptic sound of eighteen wheels skidding on ice.
The semi jackknifed, the front end stopping and the heavier rear still pushing forward, toward us. A giant cartoon plumber, a red “X” through him, loomed in the windshield.
The trailer skidded to a stop about six feet from the bumper, then rocked threateningly back and forth, deciding whether or not it wanted to tip, clumps of snow spilling off the roof with each sway.
Silence, save for the tick of the engine and the rushing of the wind. Finally, Amy said, “Are you all right?”
“Uh, yeah.”
I was scanning the sky for shadows. I glanced at the red cab of the semi, could see somebody moving inside. An elbow.
A hand clamped on my arm. Amy whispered, “There. Over there.”
She was pointing, with her handless wrist, God bless her, at a black shape growing on the side of the semi, several shapes, molding together, forming something like a spider. Sitting there on the white wall of the trailer like a piece of black spray- painted gang graffiti.
The little hand clamped tighter on my forearm, hard, like a blood- pressure cuff. A low growl from Molly, who had backed up all the way to the rear wall of the Bronco, pressed against the rear door like she was trying to escape by osmosis.
“David, go. Go.” Amy was whispering it hard, harsh hisses of “GO GO GO GO GO…”
I slammed on the gas. The tires spun. Spun and spun and spun. Four- wheel drive. Two wheels buried in packed snow, two wheels spinning on ice.
The shadow spider moved, blurred, flicked across the length of the tractor trailer and appeared right next to the cab. Just a few feet from the driver inside. I threw the Bronco into reverse, then forward, rocking out of the ruts dug by the spinning tires, praying for traction.
“David!”
I looked up. The spider shape was gone.
I heard screams, curses. Rage. The driver had stumbled out of the cab, a big guy, tall and fat, a goatee.
The man was ranting, spit flying from his mouth, staring us down, fists clenched. Face pink with the effort of it. He turned his eyes on us. A rabid dog. “Cunt blood fucking cunt motherfuckers-”
Maybe he thinks we’re plumbers…
He stomped toward us and I could see them now, shapes moving around him, shadows wrapping around him like black ribbons twisting in the wind. And his eyes. His eyes were pure black now, the pupils and the whites gone in coal- black holes.
A few feet away from us now, trudging toward us like a robot. I slammed on the gas again, spun again, felt the rear end shift and then settle in, the tires making a pathetic, wet whine against the slush. A thin arm shot across my chest and it was Amy, reaching over and slapping the lock shut on my door a millisecond before the truck driver started clawing at the handle.
Crazed curses muffled by the door, his breath steaming up the glass. Tires whirring against ice. “FUCK YOU MOTHERFUCKING MOTHERFUCKERS EAT YOUR FUCKING-” A meaty hand smacked the glass.
The curses were replaced by a long, howling scream. The man stumbled back as if shot, a hand flying to his forehead. He stumbled, went to a knee, screeched like a saw blade on metal plate.
He exploded.
Limbs flew, flecks of red splattered over the windshield, Amy screamed. A head tumbled through the air, landed on the road and bounced out of sight. The tire sounds stopped. I realized I had let off the gas, was gawking at the looping remains of the man’s intestines, steaming in the frozen air.
The shadows, restless again. Crawling over the truck and the snowy ground around us, the things as stark as black felt in the snow- reflected moonlight. A tall one grew in front of us, almost the shape of a man but without a visible head and with too many arms. Molly went wild, barking and barking and barking, then melting into high, breathy whimpers.
I stomped the gas pedal one more time, got the tires spinning, heard bits of ice and dirt smack the fenders. The shape moved toward us, melting into the hood, walking through the engine block, moving across the hood like wading into a pond. It reached up with an arm, an arm as long as a man, then plunged it into the hood. The engine died instantly. The headlights went dark.
Shadow everywhere now. Movement, hints of it through the moonlight. Amy breathing next to me, quick, nervous gasps. For a long time, nothing happened.
She mumbled something, too low to hear. I glanced at her; she leaned in and said, “I don’t think they can see us.”
I didn’t get it at first but it almost made sense. Whatever they were, they didn’t have corneas and pupils and optic nerves. We couldn’t see them, normally. They were sensing us, feeling us out, searching without seeing.
I looked up, saw one shape flit away and disappear into the sky. Another, floating past the semi trailer, crawling over the plumber logo, then dissolving into the darkness.
I nodded, slowly, whispered, “They don’t belong here, in this world. They’re flying blind, with no eyes to-”
A soft thump on the window. Amy screamed.
Outside my window, inches from my face, was the severed head of the truck driver. A six- inch hunk of spinal column dangled from his neck, hanging in midair. His eyes were wide open, no sign of lids, two orbs twitching this way and that, taking us in. Amy was still screaming. Some lungs, that girl.
“Amy!”
The head pressed up against the window, squishing its nose, cramming its eyeball against the glass to get a look in. Its mouth hung open, lips pressed against the glass, teeth scraping.
“Amy! Plug your ears!”
She looked at me, saw me pull out the gun, pressed her forearms over the side of her head. I started rolling down my window.
I created a gap of about six inches when the head tried to ram into the opening, jaws working, teeth snapping. I jammed the gun in its mouth and squeezed the trigger.
Thunder. The head disintegrated, became a red mist and a rain of bone chips. I glanced at the gun, impressed, wondered about the loads the stranger had sent me. I leaned to the window and screamed, “You should have quit while you were a-”
“David!”
I turned. Darkness was falling around us now, pooling, the clouds over us vanishing behind living shadow. Suddenly it was dark, cave dark, coffin dark. I opened my mouth to tell Amy to run, to run and leave me behind because it was me they wanted and not her, but nothing came out.
I twisted the key, the engine turned over, stalled. I tried again, it fired to life, I stomped the gas. I floored it and we went nowhere, nowhere, nowhere and then lurched forward, across an unseen street, smacking into the drift on the other side of the road. I threw it in reverse, floored it again, spinning out and then crawling forward-
We were off. Out of the blackness and into the night, eating up the street, my hands strangling the wheel. The speedometer crept up, tires floating under us, like driving a hovercraft. I felt a hand on my arm again, Amy, breathing, whipping her head around, trying to see everything at once through the ridiculous cardboard glasses.
The night outside got darker and darker, shapes swirling around, blackness closing in, swimming in it, like being downwind from a forest fire.
And suddenly, Amy was gone. An empty seat.
And then I felt stupid.
Of course the seat was empty-I came out here alone and we had never found Amy; the house had been empty and we all knew she was actually wrapped up in a tarp in my-
The darkness swallowed me. The passing scenery outside was gone, no houses or grass or snowdrifts, like driving in deep space.
Shadow poured into the Bronco like floodwater. A blade of ice pierced my chest, cold flowing in like poison. My heart stopped. It was like strong, cold fingers reaching behind my ribs and squeezing.
And then I was gone, out of the truck, out of anywhere. A storm of images exploded in my head, crazed mental snapshots like fever dreams:
– looking down, a black crayon in my hand, drawing pictures of three stick figures. One drawn with long hair, one shorter with a spray of red at the top-
– under my car, my old car, my Hyundai. On my back, another guy next to me, long blond hair. I’m holding up a muffler and he’s threading in bolts, and I tell Todd we’re missing a bolt, that it rolled away, and he’s saying that the jack is tilting and GET OUT GET OUT BECAUSE THE CAR IS FALLING-
– running, breathing hard, through a ballroom in a Las Vegas casino. Chaos, then seeing Jim and knowing what I had to do, raising and firing and watching him go down, clutching his neck-
– blue canvas, knees in the snow, rolling a body, rolling it up because somebody could show up any second and it’s sooooo hard to move the deadweight-
Back. In the truck again, fingers clamped on the wheel. Plowing through deep snow, a mailbox flying toward me.
“David!”
I was driving in somebody’s front yard. I cranked the wheel, ground through a drift and landed in the street again. I saw Amy was back, in the passenger seat, pale as china. I reached over and grabbed her by the arm, pulled her over, like I could somehow stop her from getting sucked out of reality again if I hung on really, really tight. She screamed, “The light! Go to the light!”
No idea what she was going on about. Then I saw it, a pool of light in the pitch blackness just ahead. A flat of parking lot, a hint of an unlit red sign.
It was getting darker, blackness eating up the landscape around me, a power outage during a lunar eclipse. I cranked toward the embankment and jumped the curb, climbed over a little hill then landed with a lurch. I slammed the brakes, spinning on a white plane as flat as a hockey rink.
THUNK!
We smacked a pole, light bathing the interior. I saw out of the rearview mirror the sign for a new doughnut shop, the place still under construction but the parking lot lights on. And then I saw nothing at all, because blackness settled over everything outside the little island of lit snow we had settled in. In a second we were cut off from the universe, nothing in any direction, like we had submerged in a lake of oil five hundred feet under the ocean floor. Just black and black and black.
Silence. The sound of two people breathing. I felt a wet nose at my ear, saw Molly poking her head up, wagging her tail, bouncing back and forth on her paws, growling low under her breath.
Amy said, “They can’t get us! They can’t get us in the light! I knew it!”
“How did you-”
“David,” she said, rolling her eyes, “they’re shadow people.”
She rolled down her window, poked her head out into the night and screamed, “Screw you!”
“Amy, I’d prefer that you not do that.”
She pulled back in and said, “My heart’s going a thousand miles an hour.”
I looked out into the nothing, found the gun in my lap and squeezed it. A good luck charm at this point, and barely that.
Amy said, “Ooh! Look at that. What is-”
Little bits of light, moving around in the darkness in pairs. Twin embers, small as lit cigarettes, floating slowly around us. There were a few and then a few more, until dozens of the fiery eyes were peering in at us. And then, through the windshield, I saw color. A thin line of electric blue across the darkness, like a horizon. Then the blue line grew fat in the middle, expanding, widening like a slit cut in black cloth. It expanded until blue was all that was visible through the windshield.
It was an eye. The eye. Vibrant blue with a dark, vertical reptilian slit of a pupil. The hand on my forearm again. I thought Amy was going to break the bone with her grip. The eye twitched, taking us in. Then it blinked, and was gone.
The shroud of blackness was gone, too. Just the night now, shrouded stars and moonlit snow and a sad, dormant doughnut shop.
Amy said, “Are-are they gone?”
“They’re never gone.”
“What was that?”
Well you see, Amy, it’s like this. We are under the eye of Korrok. We are his food, and our screams are his Tabasco sauce.
Instead I said, “I’m not leaving the light.”
“No.”
Amy craned her head around, looking in all directions again, then took off the cardboard glasses. I looked down at the Smith and realized something, probably several minutes too late. I grabbed the barrel and offered it to Amy, butt- first.
I whispered, “Take this.”
“What? No.”
“Amy, that thing, with the truck driver? You saw how they took him over, used his body? Well that same thing can happen to me.”
And don’t ask me how I know that, honey.
“No, David-”
“Amy, listen to me. If I start acting weird, if I make a move at you, you need to shoot me.”
“I wouldn’t even know how to-”
“It’s not complicated. The safety is off. Just squeeze. And don’t get cute and try to go for my arm or some shit like that. You’ll miss. Just aim for the middle of me, jam it into my ribs. Shoot and get out, run for it. Don’t, you know, keep shooting me. Please, take it.”
To my surprise, she did. She turned the pistol over, the gun looking huge in her little hand. She said, “Well, what if it happens to me? What if they take me instead?”
“I can overpower you if I have to, get the gun away. But I don’t think it’ll happen. Not with you.”
“Why?”
I leaned back, suddenly feeling lighter without the gun. I swear the things generate their own gravity.
“It’s just a theory I have.”
Amy pulled her feet up on the seat and scrunched against me, shivering. The gun was in her right hand, laying across her hip and pointing vaguely at my crotch. There would be some real symbolism there, I thought, if this turned out to be a dream.
I said, “Besides, I don’t need the gun.” I held up my hands and said, “They passed a law that said I couldn’t put my hands in my pockets. Do you know why? Because they would become concealed weapons. I can kill a man with these hands. Or just one of my feet.”
She snorted a dry, nervous laugh and said, “Yeah, okay. I’ll watch out for you then.”
I again gripped the steering wheel with both hands, tendons tensing across my forearms like cables. I sat like that, in silence, for an eternity of minutes. A whole bunch of words trapped behind clenched teeth.
Finally, I closed my eyes and said, “Okay. Look. You need to understand something. About this situation, who you’re trapped in here with.”
“Oookaaaay…”
She twisted around to face me. Those eyes were so damned green. Like a cat. “Don’t, just-just listen. Do you know why I was in the special school, why I was in the BD class in Pine View?”
She said, “Sort of. The thing with Billy, right? The fight you got into with him? And then later when he-”
“Yes, that’s right. Listen. Men are animals. Get us together, take out the authority figures, and it’s Lord of the Flies. Billy and his gang, a couple of guys on the wrestling team, they used to make these videos. The kid, you know the Patterson kid, kind of fat? Anyway, they got him after school and tied him to a goalpost and shaved his head and all that, and it was hours before somebody found him, and by then, you know, the skin on his face was all blistered from the contact with the feces…”
Maybe you can cut back on the details a bit, hmmm?
“… and they have this party and they show the tape, show the tape of them torturing this fat kid and him just screaming. And they sat there with their beers and watched that tape over and over and over and that’s the way it is in high school. Shit that would get an adult put in a straightjacket is just brushed off. ‘Boys will be boys.’ ”
I hesitated, scanned the night for something, anything. I saw a lone bird on a power line, flapping its wings, but it didn’t seem to be going anywhere.
“Anyway, the Hitchcock guys, I had gym with them and they picked me outta the crowd. It became this daily thing. Little shit at first but they kept pushing it further and further and it took more and more to keep them entertained. And the coach there, he hated me, so he would make sure and not be there. I mean, I literally saw him turn his back and leave the room when they came after me one time, made sure I saw him do it. And one day they got on me and took me to this equipment room in back, this little storage area with shoulder pads and wrestling mats stacked all around and it’s hot as an oven and there’s this moldy smell of old sweat fermenting in foam padding. And things got crazy. Like, prison yard crazy. And eventually it ends and they leave me there and they’re walking out through the locker room and…”
Hmmmm… would she notice if I suddenly changed the subject?
“Well, I had taken to bringing a knife to school, not a switchblade or anything cool but a little two- inch blade on my key chain. It was all I had. And I get this blade free and I get behind Billy and I slice him, right up his back, a shallow little cut up his spine. It wasn’t deep but it got his attention and he fell over, thinking he was dead, blood all over the bench and the floor. And I got on him, sat on his chest and I started jabbing at his face, cutting, the blade bouncing off bone in his forehead and blood and…”
I thought long and hard about how to dress up this next part, but couldn’t think of a way. I wondered when the doughnut shop was scheduled to open.
Filling in the silence, Amy asked, “What did they do to you?”
“Let’s put it this way. I’ll never, ever tell you.”
She had no answer, which either meant she was totally unfamiliar with the concept or very well familiar. I pressed on.
“So, I wound up-”
– cutting out his eyes-
“-hurting him pretty bad, he lost his eyesight. I mean, like, legally blind. I wound up getting charged with aggravated assault and several other things that are all synonyms for aggravated assault. The school was talking a permanent expulsion. My dad-my adoptive dad-he’s a lawyer, you know, he had a series of meetings with the school and the prosecutor and it was a mess. They wound up testing me for mental illness, which I knew even at the time was a way to get me off because the case could be made that the school should have protected Billy from me, should have diagnosed me, whatever. I met with a counselor who had me talk about my mom and look at inkblots and role- play with puppets and draw a picture of how I viewed my place in the world…
… and I knew it was a scam, a lawyer trick, but I kept picturing Coach Wilson turning his back, again and again and I figured, hey, screw them. The prosecutor, this bearded Jewish tough guy, didn’t want to push the charges. He said it was a five- on- one fight and shit happens, didn’t want to see me disappear into the jaws of the juvie justice system. The school backed off on the expulsion under threat of lawsuit and, bada- boom, I wind up spending my final year at Pine View.”
A speck of crystal landed on the windshield. A lone snowflake. Another landed a few inches away.
“So,” I said, “four months later Billy is adjusting to life without eyes, saying good-bye to sports and driving and independence and knowing what his food looks like before he eats it and never knowing if a fly has landed in his soup. He takes all of his pain pills at once. Demerol, I think. They find him dead the next day.”
Silence. Desperate to hear her say something, anything, I asked, “So how much of that story did you already know?”
“Most of it. There was a weird rumor that went around that you had snuck into his room and poisoned him or something stupid like that, with rat poison or something, which was stupid because the police would have noticed that.”
“Right, right.”
I started that rumor, by the way.
“You must have felt horrible when you found out. About Billy, I mean. That’d be awful.”
“Yeah.”
Nope.
What followed was the longest and most tense conversation pause of my life, like being stuck on a Ferris wheel with somebody you just puked on. Exactly like that, by the way. The truth was, I didn’t feel sorry for Billy. He teased a dog and got his fingers bitten off. Fuck him. Fuck everybody. And fuck you, Amy, for somehow getting me to tell you this. Sure, yeah, I felt bad about it, Your Honor. And that day years ago when I heard about the kids shooting up the school in Colorado I shook my head and said it was a tragedy, an awful tragedy, but inside I was thinking the look on the jocks’ faces when they saw the guns must have been fucking priceless. So, yeah, as far as you know, I felt just as bad about Billy as a good person would. And I’ll never, ever tell you otherwise. Never.
She said, “Still, who knows what he would have done to somebody else if you hadn’t-”
“I don’t feel bad about it, Amy. I lied about that part. When I heard, I felt nothing at all. I thought I would, I didn’t. The guilt just wasn’t there because I’m not that type of person. And that’s what I’ve been saying, that’s why you’re in danger here. I don’t think those things, those bits of walking nothing can use you, but I think they’d know me as one of their own. So keep the gun on me. And keep your finger along the side of the trigger and be ready to squeeze it as hard and as fast as you can.”
Silence again. Did I say that last silence was the longest and most awkward of my life? The record didn’t stand for long.
I would give everything I own to somehow take this conversation back.
I said, “We have no idea what they were doing to you, Amy, when those things took you all of those times. But they’re not going to do it again. This being scared bullshit, it’s exhausting for me. And you know, I reach a point where I say, you can kill me or tear off my arms or soak me in gasoline and set me on fire, but you won’t keep me like this, imprisoned by fear. Now, after everything I’ve seen, I’m not really scared of monsters and demons and whatever they are. I’m only scared of one thing and that’s the fear. Living with that fear, with intimidation. A boot on my neck. I won’t live like that. I won’t. I wouldn’t then and I won’t now.”
After a long time she said, “What do we do?”
“We sit here. Just keep the gun on me, okay? We’ll sit here and wait for the sun. Then I’ll talk to John. John will know what to do.”
I can’t believe you just said that.
4:20 A.M.
John had decided to go to the Drain Rooter job site early to get a look around on his own. So while Amy and I sat camped out in my Bronco at the unborn doughnut shop, John was rolling his Caddie up the snowy road past Amy’s house. He didn’t get far, of course, arriving at a bundle of vehicles trying to unstick a jackknifed Drain Rooter semi tractor trailer.
Now, I wasn’t there, so this story is hearsay. If you know John, you’ll take the details for what they’re worth. Please also remember that, where John claims to have “gotten up at three thirty” to perform this investigation, it was far more likely he was still up and somewhat drunk from the night before.
John says he pulled up to the scene, which was roped off with yellow- and-black tape that announced it as a Hazardous Material Area. Several guys in yellow jumpsuits were milling around and cleaning the scene with some urgency, so of course he immediately decided to cross the DO NOT CROSS tape. Two steps in, John found himself standing on a faded pink stain on the snow, as wide as a car. He deduced that this was blood, though the truck driver’s body was gone. He stood over this large bloodstain and said, out loud and in the presence of several bystanders, “This is blood! David must have been here.”
At this point two elderly security guards in parkas, the guys who normally work the front desk at the plant, asked John to step behind the tape. John claims that here he told the guards that he could not speak English and when this failed to persuade them, he faked a violent seizure. I am unclear as to the purpose of this part of his plan. John flung himself down and began rolling around in the snow, thrashing his limbs about and screaming, “EL SEIZURE!!! NO ES BUENO!!!” in a Mexican accent. Half a dozen pairs of boots came mushing through the snow toward him.
From the ground, John saw something that stopped him cold. The semi trailer was, according to him, “bleeding from the ass.” John saw gallons of a red liquid running freely from the rear cargo doors of the truck, pooling on the road below, the stuff almost black in the moonlight. Several gloved hands seized him and dragged him through the snow, men in jumpsuits and protective masks. John squinted through the bustling team of men around the truck and saw several guys haul out a couple of blue plastic barrels, stained on the sides with the red substance that now seemed a little more like transmission fluid than blood. Dark and thick and oily.
Right behind them, several casket- shaped boxes were hauled out, the men carrying them like pallbearers. John stressed that these containers were not caskets but were merely casket- shaped, coated with several stickers that seemed to indicate some kind of biohazard. Not the sort of thing you would use to ship bottles of a household chemical to the local True Value.
Here’s where things get hazy. John claims that the men hauling him away from the scene were escorted by other men carrying submachine guns, though when pressed, he admitted that they may have been flashlights. Either way, John says the men threw him down and intended to execute him, at which point he kicked one of the men in the face and backflipped to his feet. He then wrestled away the man’s gun and “dick- whipped” him with it. I am unclear as to whether or not this means he struck the man in the groin or merely slapped him in the same manner in which he would slap a person with his dick. I never ask John to clarify such things. Anyway, he said he swung again and slammed another man’s skull with the gun, so hard it “made the batteries fly out.”
Next-according to John, of course-in one continuous motion, he “triple-kicked” a third man in the face, while shooting a fourth “right in his damned cock.” John, of course, knew that he couldn’t leave that man just lying there, screaming in pain. So he grasped him by the sides of his face and mercifully snapped his neck with a sharp twisting motion of his bare hands. At this point John says the rest of the hazard workers noticed what was going on and a chase ensued; he escaped by stealing a nearby horse. This is the first inconsistency in John’s account, because when the story picks up he is calmly driving his Caddie back down the road, past Amy’s house and away from the Rooter plant. I suspect that, in reality, either the men at the cleanup site didn’t see John at all or they merely gave him a dirty look until he turned around and drove away. Again, I wasn’t there and I do not wish to cast an unfavorable light on John’s personal credibility.
Undaunted, John turned off on a country road not far from the house. He wasn’t the first to have this idea tonight, he figured, because there were tire tracks in the snow leading up, and John figured the last person who came this way was doing what he was doing: getting around the accident.
A few minutes in he became sure he was right because the road seemed to circle back around to the rear of the old industrial park, which contained the Rooter plant along with an abandoned beans- and- wienies cannery, a Best Buy distribution center and a closed Hanes jockstrap jockstrappery. Just across the highway from that was the abandoned Undisclosed Shopping Centre with its rows of decaying stores where the only inventory was mildew, bats and squirrel families building nests out of used rubbers.
The gravel road and fresh tire tracks that John followed took him through a narrow strip of woods alongside the Rooter property. It was while passing through the leafy darkened canopy that he saw a flickering of lights off to his left, flashing between the tree trunks.
He slowed and stopped, seeing bouncing white beams that had to be men with flashlights, maybe a half dozen or so.
Shots rang out.
The lights vanished and John sat there for a few minutes before he picked them up again, farther down in the trees. He pulled forward a little down the road, peering into the woods, saw the flashlight beams stop and then blink out one by one. Whatever the men were looking for, be it a raccoon to boil or one of the guys’ contact lenses, they had apparently found it. He peered into the trees looking for more activity, decided that the group could have been mere redneck poachers or fraternity scavenger hunters, and stepped on the gas. The big Caddie crested a hill and when John saw what was below, he slammed on the brakes. A truck was down there, a heavy truck that looked military but didn’t have a military paint job. Flat black from head to toe. This was apparently the source of the tire tracks he had been following.
A group of men carrying what had to be rifles stood around the vehicle, and John immediately reached out and punched the switch to kill his headlights. Then it occurred to him that the lights suddenly going off might have been more noticeable. So he punched them back on, thought he saw two of the men turn toward him, and then quickly turned the lights back off again. Now he felt the strobing of his headlights was almost impossible not to notice; in fact, all of the men seemed to be looking up the hill at him. The group might have either pursued him or raised their rifles to perforate his windshield had a gorilla riding a giant crab not leapt out of the woods and eaten two of them.
You heard me.
John said the thing was as tall as the truck and walked on six legs that looked horned and armored like something seen at a seafood buffet. But there was a part that had the feel of a mammal, too, fur and arms. Please remember that from John’s distance the beast would have been the size of a dime, so I won’t criticize his crab- riding monkey description even though we all know it’s retarded.
The thing crawled away-sideways-with the legs of one man still kicking from its mandibles. Cracks of rifle shots rang out and little flares of muzzle flash lit up the snow at the foot of the hill. The men raced into the woods. John waited, then threw the Caddie into reverse and backed far enough down the other side of the hill as to be out of view of the army truck, though he claims that from that vantage point he could still see the truck, so that’s probably physically impossible.
Shots rang out from the woods. An animal screech rang out from the woods. Shots rang out from the woods again. More howls and then more shots, dozens, rattling over each other. Full auto fire. Screams.
There was silence for a moment and then John says he saw a single figure sprint out of the woods and head to the truck. The man jumped into the back, pulled out two small cases the size of lunch boxes and ran into the woods again. After a moment, more shots hammered the night air. The bestial screams again. More shots. More screams. More shots. There was a low, animal moan from the woods. The gunfire fell silent. John threw the Caddie in gear and was prepared to drive past the truck before the men returned, but he was too late because here was the lone man, running back. He was carrying the small cases, which seemed lighter now. He ducked into the truck again, emerged with two new cases, and returned to the woods. Gunshots resumed, followed by the screams of the monkey- crab.
This went on for about half an hour and then finally the noises stopped. Four men wandered out of the woods and mounted up in the truck. The truck pulled away. John followed. He passed a turn that led back to the Drain Rooter plant, probably to the employee lot, but saw that it was sealed off with a chain- link gate. If this had been an action movie, John thought, he would have rammed through it. Unlike a movie prop car, however, John was depending on the Cadillac to get him to work the next morning, and a punctured radiator would cost a week’s pay.
But more importantly, the truck he was following didn’t turn off at the gated road and he was now very eager to see where it went. John hung far back, content to follow the trail of the tire tracks. They kept going through the main access road for the industrial park and across the two- lane highway that intersected the road. The truck had continued onto the white canvas that was the parking lot of the dead Undisclosed Mall. It had circled around to the back of the eastern wing, one fork in the mall’s U-shaped floor plan.
John waited what he thought was a sufficient amount of time for the men in the truck to dismount and go wherever they were going, then cautiously drove around the building so he could see the truck parked near the ramp and boarded-up entrance of what would have been a department store had the mall ever bothered to open. John staked out the spot, saw nothing. He finally grew impatient and, being totally unarmed and without a flashlight or any kind of survival instincts, tromped over to a doorless doorway and walked in like he owned the place.
The cavernous space was as cold as a meat locker. Some moonlight spilled in from a framed hole in the roof, the skylight that had the glass shattered out of it last year. Snow had sifted down through the hole, leaving a coating at the center of the floor like spilled flour. Right across the edge of it were footprints. Five or six leading to an elongated skid that John assumed was created by a guy slipping in the snow and falling on his ass. John didn’t make the same mistake, circling around the dusting of snow and following the direction of the tracks. They led to a metal MAINTENANCE door and John paused to wonder if maintenance on this place was the easiest job in the world or the hardest. He found the door locked and claims he picked it. I’ve never known John to know how to pick a lock but I don’t claim to know all of his secrets. Maybe the guys just left it unlocked.
Anyway, John says he picked it and inside found a small, dirty, windowless room that seemed to be home to a lot of spiderwebs and dark scurrying shapes, but no exits. He flicked on his lighter and confirmed it. No doors, no hatches, no tunnels. Just like Amy’s bathroom, the trail led there and stopped. John turned to leave, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a doorway. He felt like an idiot because, how do you miss it, right in the middle of the wall like that? Tall, arched at the top, ornate. Totally out of place in a room like this. Then he turned to face it and saw that it was only a blank wall again.
He turned to the side, once more saw a blurry glimpse of the big door out of the corner of his eye. There, but not there, like an optical illusion. John went over to the wall and pawed around on the surface by the warm glow of the butane flame, looking for a lever or a seam or hidden hinges or something. After several minutes, he found it only to be a solid wall. He glanced at his watch-
5:06 A.M.
– and realized he had to be at the job site in less than half an hour. He left, guessing-rightly-that he would be back.
5:18 A.M.
I alternately turned the Bronco’s engine on and off so we could run the heater without poisoning ourselves with carbon monoxide, as I heard could happen if a parked car was left on too long. Especially this one, which smelled like rotten eggs from time to time anyway. I had always credited it to some sort of emissions problem, and I was sure it would remain even if I gave the truck a thorough cleaning, though I had never fully investigated that scenario.
Amy’s hair smelled like strawberries. She was leaning on me, her feet on the armrest of her door, the gun pointed somewhere in the direction of the glove compartment. There was a coating of white on all of the glass now, as if a sheet had been thrown over the Bronco. For the second time that night I had the very odd, weightless feeling that we were the last two people on Earth.
I said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Nope.”
“Why were you in Pine View? There’s barely anything wrong with you. And I have a right to know, you know, as a taxpayer.”
“The car accident. I missed school for a few months, had all kinds of problems when I came back. They had me on antidepressants and everything else. Well-butrin. I bit a teacher and wound up with the crazy kids.”
“You bit a teacher?”
She sighed and said, “Okay. One day me and Mom and Dad were driving, going shopping for school clothes. I was fourteen, about to start high school. I fell asleep in the backseat and woke up and felt like somebody was shaking me. Then I was upside down, my cheek pressed to pavement. Glass everywhere, blood every where. Dad had been thrown from the car, he died right there, two feet in front of me. His face was just-it was like a rubber mask. Just, nothing there. Mom was laying there, legs pinned under the hood, screaming. I was mostly okay but my back was twisted around and my legs were numb, my hand was caught under a door and I just laid there and told Mom to calm down, that help would be here soon. We laid there forever. And I could hear cars passing. I could hear them and it’s like, ‘why don’t they stop?’ Somebody, you’d think…”
She trailed off, turned to look out the side window, at nothing.
“They pulled me out and my hand was like, hamburger. Tendons and stuff curling out of it and, just gross. It was just barely on, hanging by like, a little strip holding it to my wrist. They’re putting me on a stretcher and my hand is just dangling, swinging back and forth. Mom died at the hospital. Jim wasn’t there, of course, he had stayed home so he was okay and he was freaking out, like it was his fault. They did surgery on my hand, put it back on. Then they did surgery on my back where I cracked a vertebrae. They put a little metal rod right-” she reached around and pointed to a spot between her shoulder blades. “-there. It made me a half inch taller. Isn’t that weird? I had a lot of pain, they’d put me in traction every now and then to kind of stretch me out and take pressure off it. And so the hand, it was a big problem. It worked for a few years, into high school, but then I lost feeling in these two fingers…”
Amy did something very creepy, which was to hold up her stump and point to a spot in space where the last two fingers would be.
“And they did surgery again. And again. The pain was unbelievable. That and my back, and I was on these pills, pain pills every four hours and they made me sick constantly. So they’d lower my dosage but those would wear off and I’d spend the last two hours counting the minutes to pill time again. So I was having to live with either the pain or the puking and I kind of had to pick.”
Antidepressants. The thought of this girl actually being depressed made me want to grab the whole planet and throw it into the sun. Well, more than usual anyway.
“And I bit a teacher. So eventually my fingers went numb again, almost all of them, and I couldn’t grip anything. I was dropping things. They had me staying with Uncle Bill and Aunt Betty and they were in the process of splitting up and they didn’t want me there. One time I dropped this glass thing, this little figurine, and Bill freaked out. I mean it’s not his fault they didn’t want me but what could I do? He yelled, and anyway the doctors said we had one last shot, one last chance to get the hand to work because the nerve tissue was dying off.”
She looked down and picked something off her sock. “So they did the surgery and I woke up in the recovery room and I was half out of it and I was dreaming that my hand was gone and I woke up and there it was. Gone. Just an empty space, white sheets where my hand should be. It looked so weird. I cried and cried and cried. Just, bawling. For hours. They knew, David, they knew they’d have to take the hand off. And they didn’t say anything. And I was just lying there and I knew, all at once, that I’d never be able to blend into a room again. You know?”
I grunted.
“And, no matter what I did or what I said, it’d always be, ‘Amy, you know, the girl without a hand?’ Everywhere I went. And the worst part is when you, like, meet somebody new and they don’t notice the hand right away, they don’t see it and you sit there talking to them and you’re just waiting, anticipating that moment when they’re going to notice. That look in their eyes at the moment they see it. Like they’re embarrassed for me.”
She went quiet.
I said, “This world kind of sucks.”
“I left. I went and stayed with Jim after that. I can still feel the hand, you know. It’s true what they say about that, ghost feeling in the limb and all that.”
“What, it itches or something?”
“No, it’s, like, clenched. I can feel my hand clenching and I can’t release it. Isn’t that weird?” She held up her good hand, squeezed in a tight fist. “Like this. I can actually feel the fingernails digging into my palm, on the hand that isn’t there. All in my head, I guess, something with the nerves. And it’s like that all the time. If I really concentrate, I can make it let up a little but it goes right back that way a minute later. That little twinge of pain is always there, a couple of inches into space where my hand should be. I wake up with it.”
I thought about telling her my own tragic story of the scrotal candle- wax incident, but figured it wouldn’t impress her. She crossed her arms and rubbed the cold from them and I put my arm around her to help. The gun was on the floorboard.
I said, “You know I was confused when I first saw you, right? At the house? I didn’t know where your hand went-”
“Well, I still had it in school-”
“-but John knew.”
“Well, yeah,” she said. “He used to come by.”
“Let me tell you everything you need to know about John. The reason I was surprised by your hand was because John never once described you as, ‘the girl with the missing hand.’ ”
5:36 A.M.
I don’t know what John did in the intervening time between when he left the mall and when he showed up at the Drain Rooter roofing site, but from past experiences with John I will extrapolate that he told a series of humorous stories about his penis, drank some sort of off- brand alcohol and then had sex with yet another girl who I secretly had a crush on but never got the courage to talk to. At some point he also changed into his roofing clothes, layers of flannel and cover-alls stained with tar.
The semi accident scene had been neatly cleared away by the time he passed it again, only a flat of tangled tire tracks as evidence. Steve the Roofing Guy was already at the rear of the building, talking to a security guard about roof access. This was one of the guards John saw at the trailer crash site. He didn’t know if the guy would recognize him or not, so he took a newspaper from the trash and held it in front of his face as he approached. Again, this is just what John told me, so, you know. Grain of salt. By six o’clock, thirteen men in Steve’s crew were swarming above and below the ragged roof hole, working as snow and ice runoff poured mini- waterfalls into the Drain Rooter break room. The drenched carpet and waterlogged candy bar machine were ruined.
John got on the roof and immediately saw that the hole was no ice collapse. Everything was flung upward, debris and boards and tile scattered on the roof like something blew out from inside. Tyler Schultz, a big blond Nazi Youth- looking kid who had jammed with John’s band off and on, made the same observation and said wasn’t that some weird shit. John told Tyler that frequently during sudden cold spells the warm air inside a heated building will expand, causing a building to partially explode for much the same reason balloons will burst if you fill them with warm air rather than cool. Tyler asked John if he was making that shit up and John said that he could look it up, knowing he wouldn’t.
John then took the stairs down to the wet break room, tape strewn across the hallways to keep employees from wandering in. The first thing he noticed was that the break room snack machine looked like it had been hit by a car, glass smashed in and shreds of candy wrappers all over the ground. While the guys were stomping around above him, getting a tarp set up and shoveling snow away from the ceiling wound, John wandered around and noticed a section of hallway that had been blocked off with the same black- and- yellow DANGER tape he saw earlier.
For the second time that day John ducked casually across some DO NOT DUCK CASUALLY ACROSS THIS TAPE tape and saw another hole, one in the wall, again like something blew through it. Something the size of a car or a giant crab with a monkey strapped to the back of it. And at the edges of the hole, there were scars in the drywall like scratches. Claw marks. John leaned in and peered through the jagged tear in the wall.
He saw a room that was clearly not on the floor plan. It was small, maybe the size of an average living room, and had absolutely no features. Four bare walls. Then John turned away from it and, as he did, saw a perfectly round hole in the floor as wide as the room, going down. Way down. John said it was the kind of chasm thing they have in all of the space stations in the Star Wars movies, for some reason. The ones crisscrossed with catwalks with no handrails.
When he looked directly at it, it was not there. A tiled floor. Just like at the mall. So the crab beast escaped from here, but the crew of guys sent to take it down returned to the abandoned mall. Everything came back to the mall, didn’t it? John thought about Robert Marley, the soy sauce Patient Zero who had squatted in the food court, and about Danny Wexler ranting about invisible doors. John decided this whole thing required a shitload of further investigation.
I SPLASHED WATER over my face and studied my own bloodshot eyes in the mirror. Glad to be back home, back in my bathroom. I pulled off my shirt and felt something catch back there. Something itchy. I turned to the side and looked into the mirror at my back. My breath caught in my throat.
There was something elongated, maybe a half inch long, protruding from my shoulder blade. Thin, like a needle. Pink.
Thump.
A knock at the door.
I leaned in close to the mirror, examining the growth and reaching back with my fingers, afraid to touch it. A shiver of revulsion twitched through my body.
Thump- thump.
A muffled voice, at the door.
“David? Hey.”
John’s voice. What was he doing here?
Thump thump thump.
“Hold on,” I said, pulling up a hand mirror from the drawer in the vanity. “I’ll be out in a minute. I’m, uh, shaving my balls.”
I held up the mirror, angled it to see the thing on my back, and almost screamed. The little protrusion on my back was a stalk that ended in an eye. A tiny black slug’s eye that twitched as the stalk began curling this way and that, as if getting a look around-
I JOLTED AWAKE.
THUMP.
I was cold. A searing pain in my neck. I smelled the sweet but artificial chemical smell of strawberry shampoo flavoring. Come to think of it, strawberries don’t have a smell. They just smell wet like grass.
Focus.
I felt something like a steel cable around my chest. I couldn’t move, a weight holding me flat. I pulled my eyelids apart, saw a set of eyes peering down at me through frosted glass. I blinked, looked down and saw copper red. A head full of red hair on my chest. An arm was around me, squeezing, a fist full of my shirt, twisting it.
I was lying with my head against the door of the Bronco, window roller pressing into my back, feet splayed across the bench seats, boot resting against the door across from me. Amy, however, looked rather comfortable since she had me to use as a self- warming mattress. She was curled up on top of me, breathing erratically, her eyelids twitching. Nightmares.
Get used to it, kid.
I craned my head and saw the blurred shape of John’s face through a hole he had wiped clean of snow. He waved at me, standing there in full work gear. My watch:
8:07 A.M.
My truck had died at some point because the engine and the heat were off. Amy and I untangled ourselves and I pushed out of the door, standing up in the refrigerated air, joints feeling lined with thick steel wire. I glanced back into the truck and saw Molly fast asleep in the back, paws twitching as she dreamed of clawing somebody to death, probably me.
John said, “It’s your first date and you make the girl camp out at the doughnut shop with you? You know they don’t open for three months, right?”
There were five guys standing around aside from John, though Tyler was the only one I knew. They had come in two tall delivery trucks with ANDERSON ROOF AND GUTTER painted on the side. I glanced at the strangers and said to John, “We, uh, had to leave the house. Shouldn’t you all be working?”
John said, “We had to get a load of shit from Home Depot. We’ve been fucking around for two hours. Passed by here and saw your truck. What happened at the house?”
Amy came around then, arms wrapped around that huge parka of hers and immediately pressed herself up against me.
“Hi, John. Ugh, I’m freezing.”
She reached back and pulled my arm around her, saying, “Warm me up.”
“Uh, I’ve got to have a word with John.” I grabbed her by the shoulders and sort of sat her aside, then motioned to John to follow me across the parking lot. We walked around the edge of the lot, me squinting as my eyes adjusted to the light. John said, “You look like shit.”
“I’m burning out, John. Seriously. I don’t know if I’m up for this. I feel stretched out, like too little butter scraped over too much waffle. And then it all falls down into one of the waffle holes and there’s none left for the rest of the waffle and you sort of have to tilt it to make it run out.”
“They got some serious weird shit going on at the Drain Rooter plant, Dave. Mall, too.”
This was when John told me the somewhat dubious story of his experience at the semi crash site and everything that followed. I saw his story and raised him our experience with the shadow people.
I looked back at my truck, where Amy was sitting sideways in the open door and fishing through her purse. She pulled out a brown pill bottle.
“Well there you go, Dave. It looks like the Drain Rooter plant is making more than drain cleaner. In fact, you could say they’re manufacturing evil.”
“No, we couldn’t say that.”
“I wanna see where that hole goes. I think that monster came out of it.”
“We can’t get into the place, John. There’s three shifts at the plant, working around the clock.”
We completed our circuit of the lot and arrived back where Tyler and one other guy leaned against the truck smoking cigarettes and sipping coffee from steaming insulated mugs.
John said, “There may be another way.”
John told me about the mall, and the ghost door that was there but wasn’t there. “Wanna know what I think? I think all those secret doors lead to the same place. Hell, there may be doors like that all over town. Like Wexler said.”
I nodded resignedly, sighed and said, “Well, we’re not waiting for them to just come get Amy again.”
“Absofuckinglutely. We’ll meet at noon.”
“What happens at noon?”
“We’re done with the roof job. They just want us to brace it for now and cover it. Keep the snow out.”
“You’re still going to fix their roof?”
“They paid Steve in advance. Plus, I really need the money.”
I noticed ghosts of exhaust rising from my Bronco; Amy had turned it on to get warm.
I said, “I don’t know what to do with her. That house of hers is eighteen different kinds of screwed.” I glanced at Tyler, saw he was listening intently, and lowered my voice. “She’s got people watching her through the TV, like me.”
Amy saw us and emerged from the truck at that moment, a twenty- four-ounce bottle of red Mountain Dew in her hand.
She came up and said, “Can I have this?”
“You keep that red shit in your truck now?” John asked me. “I think that’s one of the twelve warning signs, isn’t it?”
“I eat all of my meals there at work. If you eat in your car, nobody tries to talk to you.”
John looked at me with something like pity. I said, “It’s yours, Amy.”
She twisted at the cap, shoulders hunched against the cold. Somebody handed John a cup of coffee. John said, “Break time.”
“Shit yeah,” said Tyler, in his dickish way. He was wearing wraparound shades. He watched Amy as she tried to open the Mountain Dew bottle one- handed, trying to keep it still with her elbow. She concentrated on the task, grunting, the wet bottle sort of spinning in place.
I asked John, “Where’s the safest place to keep her while we do this?”
Amy said, “While you do what? Can I come?”
Tyler reacted to this for some reason, looking at John with a “when are people gonna learn” look, and then he spat on the ground. Tobacco spitting is a kind of nonverbal communication in many parts of the Midwest. He must have spilled his coffee a lot as a kid because he had one of those big spill- proof mugs, the kind that flare way out at the bottom. It looked like he was speaking into a megaphone every time he took a drink.
I said, “We’ll talk about it later.”
Amy dropped the bottle, made a frustrated sound like somebody stepping on a cat. I reached out as if to help her and she slapped at my hand, then went back to twisting at the cap.
I continued, “She can’t go back to that house. I don’t know if she has any money but we can work something out. She can sleep on my couch if it comes to that.”
John eyed me as if to say, “really?” but didn’t say anything.
Tyler got a sly look in his eyes and said, “I got an interestin’ story. My brother, he and his wife gave birth to a Down’s kid. He drools all over the place, he shits himself. They made my ma babysit a few times, and then some more times, and then it was every night. Every damned night. You know what happened then?”
“Your brain fell out?” I noticed Amy had stopped messing with the bottle and was sort of just looking at it, frozen. I said, “Look, I gotta-”
“Listen, man. Listen. They left the kid there. At Ma’s house. They come by to visit every now and then. My ma, she’s basically got stuck feedin’ and cleanin’ this thing now, every day, it’s her job. Full- time job. She can’t go to her bingo games or date or any of that shit because she’s got this thing to take care of, because she wanted to be a nice person. It’s like bein’ in prison.”
Amy glared at him, like she really had something killer to say to him, then she got this look on her face, sour, like biting an apple and seeing half a worm. She spun and took two steps toward my truck, then put her hand over her mouth and leaned over.
Tip: if you ever feel a puke coming on, do not, do not put your hand over your mouth to try to catch it. It’s reflex but it doesn’t work at all. Vomit kind of sprays everywhere. So Amy stood there in the snow, leaning over at the waist, her eyes clamped shut, her hand dripping, a puddle at her feet. It was an awkward moment. There were some comments from the crowd behind me. Somebody muttered something and somebody else chuckled.
I walked to her and said, “Over here.” I guided Amy toward the truck and sat her in the open door.
“Don’t move.”
I ran back to the rear door of the Bronco, opened it, reached in and grabbed a red- and- white flip- top cooler. This is my emergency kit. It contained a roll of duct tape, a spare pair of pants, an envelope with two hundred dollars, two bags of dried fruit, two packages of beef jerky, three bottles of water, a roll of those thick shop towels you see mechanics use, a small metal pipe-just right for cracking a skull with-and a fake beard. Look, you never know.
I pulled out a bottle of water and soaked a shop towel. I went to hand it to Amy, realized stupidly that she had no hand to take the towel with since she only had, you know, the puke hand and the nonexistent hand.
“Here,” I said. I took her arm by the wrist and wiped vomit from her fingers. Amy wrinkled her nose in disgust at this, but to be honest I had never attended a party of John’s where someone didn’t either vomit on me or near me. I was kind of inured to it.
As I worked I said, “When I was in seventh grade, I took Emily Parks to the Fall Festival. First time I had ever been anywhere with a girl. We wandered around and ate elephant ears and saltwater taffy and lemon shakeups, all of that festival stuff. We get on the Ferris wheel, and riiiiiight as the ride is about to end I lean over and puke in her lap. The ride slows to a stop, you know, so they can unload all of the riders. And we wind up at the very top. Waiting. She’s sitting up there, with a lap full of vomit, crying. And we’re up there for- ev- er.”
Amy’s hand seemed pretty clean. I tossed the soiled rag in the snow and gave her a new one and the bottle of water. I stepped back and said, “I didn’t ask another girl out until I was a junior in high school. Seventeen years old before I even held a girl’s hand. All because somewhere, in the back of my mind, I knew I would wind up puking on her.”
Amy didn’t react. She drank some water and wiped splatters of vomit off her pants and her shoes, her fingers having to be frozen now doing wet work in this weather. I caught a glimpse of her face and saw that look, a familiar look, a sort of embarrassment that is almost numbing. Like she wanted to dig a hole, bury herself in it and let grass grow over the top.
A warmth spread behind my eyes. Everything turned red in my brain, my skull suddenly filled with Tabasco sauce. There was a tingling in my gut, muscles tensing. I picked up the used towels and walked back toward a trash can in the parking lot, near where Tyler and the guys were standing. I tossed in the towels and Tyler leaned over, whispering, “You’re a nice guy, Dave. So all I’m sayin’ is watch, that’s all I’m sayin’. Watch out bein’ a nice guy because you can get fucked.”
A blink. A searing pain in my hand. Blood.
There were arms on me, grabbing my jacket, pulling me, and there was blood on my knuckles and blood in my mouth. My jaws were clenched, I had bitten my tongue and tasted warm copper. Tyler was on his hands and knees, blood dripping from his nose and mouth, grunting that they had better hold me back because I was a fucking psycho and that I had broken his fucking nose. Then John was there, in my face, saying okay, okay, back off, just go, get outta here. I looked down at my throbbing hands and saw the knuckles were split, like I had been punching concrete. John pushed me back from the group, looked over my shoulder and said, “Get him outta here.”
A fat blond kid was standing over Tyler, looked like a bloated version of him and I realized this was Tyler’s brother or cousin or something. And the fat kid was saying see, see what happens when you run your fucking mouth, Tyler, that one day talking shit was gonna get him killed because he was gonna say the wrong thing and some nigger was gonna shoot him in the back. John turned and joined the group, and I was standing there in the parking lot by myself, lost, disoriented. Tyler outweighed me by seventy- five pounds and, where I spent my days shelving DVDs, he spent his days carrying roofs up ladders. But the strangest thing, the sickening thing, was the urge that flashed through my mind as I was standing over him-
– the urge to BITE-
– and I knew this was it again, that I had lost time, that I had lost myself. Then I felt a pull on my jacket and the unique sensation of a handless arm reaching around my midsection.
“Come on. Come on, David.”
Amy circled around, her hand on my sleeve.
“Amy, I-”
“Come on. It’s okay. Come on.”
She started turning me back toward the truck and I felt everyone staring. She got behind me and started pushing me toward the Bronco.
“Come on, David. Take deep breaths. You’re fine.”
“Amy, don’t-”
“Nope. Come on. Keep going. Vrrrooooommmm…”
That last part was Amy making an engine sound as she steered me toward the truck, like she was driving me. She reached around me and opened the door, then pushed me into the seat like you see cops doing with handcuffed suspects. She slammed the door, circled around and sat in beside me. We sat that way for a moment; I glanced out my window and saw the whole group watching. I reached up with a shaking hand to twist the key and realized the engine was already running. I tried to slow my breathing. I couldn’t keep my hands still.
Amy asked, “Are you okay?”
“Just, give me a second.”
“You kicked that guy’s ass.”
“Amy…”
“Come on, let’s go. Before he gets up and beats the crap out of you.”
WE GOT BACK to my house to find it ransacked. It was difficult to tell because I’m not the world’s greatest house keeper myself, but by the time I was in the kitchen I knew they had been here: I don’t normally keep the oven open. I whipped out the gun and prowled around the house, finding it empty. Amy asked what they were looking for. I dodged the question by pointing out what a pity it was they tossed the place because it was immaculate before they got here and that it was too bad she didn’t get to see it when it was clean. I went to the kitchen and ran water over my bleeding knuckles.
“Look,” Amy said, from behind me. “They threw laundry all over your floor in there.”
“Yeah. And they wore the clothes first, the bastards.”
“And what were they looking for again?”
A pause. I was on the verge of revealing what was probably our biggest and most dangerous secret to someone whom I had known for all of a day. I let out a breath and looked right into her eyes. The irises were too green, that was the thing. Like grass after a week of spring rain. And there was a piercing, electric intelligence in those eyes that I was too stupid to notice before. Seeing right through me. And I suddenly had the very dismaying realization that I probably could not lie to this girl, for one very simple reason. She was smarter than me.
I said, “They were looking for the soy sauce. I know they didn’t find it, though.”
“The what?”
I didn’t answer. I did a walk around the house, saw if anything was broken. It looked like they had taken the batteries out of my clock for some reason, and the glass fixture on my ceiling fan was cracked.
Amy followed me around, pestering me with questions, suddenly desperately curious. The truth was, I wasn’t sure how to explain it. After about the fifth time she turned the conversation to it, I held up a silencing hand, made a shushing sound, and put a single finger to her lips.
“All will become apparent in good time, sweet Amy.”
For a second, I seriously thought she was going to punch me. I went outside and did a walk- around of the house, glancing nervously at the toolshed and praying that the door wouldn’t be standing open.
What are you talking about, dipshit? If they came and took the body off your hands that’d be a blessing.
I noticed the flag was up on my mailbox. This was Sunday. I went over and opened it, found a palm- sized package inside. There was no name, no address, no postage. I stared at it with some trepidation, then peeled it open, thinking it might be the world’s tiniest mail bomb. Inside was a necklace, a little gold cross on a delicate chain. I had seen it before, though seeing it close I noticed that the cross was formed of two tiny nails, bound together by thread-like wire. There was a piece of paper inside, too, a folded piece of stationery bearing a cartoon puppy with a pencil in his mouth. The writing was in sparkly pink:
Hi! I had a dream
& an angel told me to
give this to you!
It’s always brought me
luck!!
God Bless!
(Smiley face)
– Krissy Lovelace
All of the I’s were dotted with big, friendly loops. Everybody wants to help.
When I went in, Amy was in the bathroom running water. She emerged, stuffing Altoids mints into her mouth from a tin. I went to the fridge and said, “You want something to drink? I have, uh, some fruity Leinenkugel’s beer and, uh, some kind of terrible plum- flavored liquor John’s friend from the Czech Republic sent him. It tastes like the juice from a single plum was squeezed into a fifty-five-gallon drum of paint thinner.”
The cans of Leinenkugel’s had masking tape on them with JOHN’S printed in ink. Amy looked around me and said, “John is protective about his beer, isn’t he?”
“I put that label on there. When company comes I want them to know the Leinie’s is his, not mine. Do you want it?”
“Uh, no. I don’t drink,” she said, shaking her head and brushing the hair from her eyes for the four hundredth time since yesterday. “I mean, I drink liquids. Not alcohol. I couldn’t mix it with the pain pills. So who do we tell about the monsters?”
“Uh, what?”
“All this, everything we saw. Who do we talk to about this sort of thing?”
“I think the government has an eight hundred number but you just get one of those automated answering things. No. John and I are going to, uh, look into it. Today. Before they have a chance to come for you again.”
I closed the refrigerator and faced her, then told her an abbreviated and less retarded version of John’s story about the Drain Rooter site and the Mall of the Dead.
She said, “Why don’t we just go? To another town, or state, or Canada. When’s the last time you’ve heard of somebody exploding in Canada?”
I shook my head.
“Why not?”
Because we’re under the eye, Amy.
“There are things you still don’t know. The shadow people… they’ve spoken to me. They know my name. It’s… personal somehow. With them. I think trying to get away from that by leaving-even climbing into a rocket ship and leaving the fuckin’ planet-would be laughable. To them it’d be like watching a hamster trying to escape by running on his little wheel really fast. I picture the rest of my life, running scared, forever. No. I can’t. I won’t. We’re gonna go in there, where they live. And we’re gonna go armed.”
“I wanna go.”
“Amy-”
“No, don’t even try. I want to see. I have a right to.”
“Amy, we’re going into that place with the intention of leaving it as a smoking hole in the ground.”
Praise be to Allah!
“I know.”
“No, you think this is cool, I can see it in your eyes. It’s not cool. We do not have this thing under control. Let me tell you a story. When I was little we had our sewer line back up. Toilet overflowing and all that. So they had to come and root it out, and what they pulled out of the sewer line was a woodchuck. There was a break in the pipe somewhere, two joints that had pulled apart, and this thing had gotten in. Okay? I mean to a woodchuck, this had to be the adventure of a lifetime. Hidden tunnel, seeming to go on for miles. So he’s crawling and exploring and waiting to see the hidden treasure at the end. And then, he gets drowned. In our poo.”
Amy nodded and said, “Well, that’s sad.”
“The saddest. John and I, we’re the woodchuck. See, I can read it on you, that you think you’re really a part of something now, that we’re gonna do something really great today and change the world. Well Amy, understand what I’m about to say. There’s something terribly wrong with us. John and me. Amy, there are days when I’m sure-sure-that I’m stone- cold raving batshit insane. That none of this is happening, that I’m raving about it from a padded room somewhere. And do you know how I respond to that, to that knowledge that I may be delusional and dangerous? I arm myself. With a gun.”
“David, you’re not-”
“Listen. The only reason I’m standing up to these guys now is because I’m in a corner. I don’t have a choice. You do. And if you make the wrong choice, there is an excellent chance that these are your last hours on Earth. All the things you wanted to do with your life, they may not happen. All the things you like to do, all the things you thought you might like to do in the future, all gone. And it’ll be because of me. Because I led you into my turd pipe.”
She said, “Why do you, like, hate yourself?”
“If I knew me as somebody else, I would hate me just as much. Why have a double standard?”
“Well, that’s just stupid.”
I rubbed my eyes and sighed. I reached into my front pocket and pulled out the necklace and held it up.
“Here. It’s good luck. Or something.”
I went to Amy and reached around her neck, clasping the thin chain under her hair.
I glanced out of the window, saw the snow was coming down again.
Facing her, I said, “You deserved some kind of normal life, Amy. I can picture you, in college, a family back home. Maybe you’re working part-time at a music store. Geeky guys coming in and flirting with you at the counter. And I could come in and make some kind of awkward conversation with you and you could keep making excuses not to go out with me and I would just keep coming back and back and then you would get a restraining order against me, and my dad would get it overturned. Finally you would agree and we could go to a picnic or bowling or whatever normal people do when they’re together. What do normal people do when they’re together?”
“I have no idea.”
It’s funny, pretending that it’s normal to have a conversation with somebody standing three inches away.
She leaned in and-
IT LOOKED LIKE the world outside my window had lost its signal and gone to static. Snowing like hell, wind whipping it around. I leaned against my window, feeling the cold glass against my forehead, breaths fogging up a circular patch under my nose. There was a time when I would have found the idea of certain death a little comforting, like being on the last day of a job I hated. A weight lifted. Now, feeling the cold glass on my face and wet hair cooling my scalp and my mouth tasting vaguely like secondhand Altoids and knowing I would never see snow again, I felt a little like crying. But just a little.
I saw the grille of a car emerge like a ghost, headlights faint in the whiteout. The big car swung into my driveway, John’s Caddie. Through the window I watched as John ducked out, wearing an Army- issue fatigue jacket. He circled around to his trunk, popped it and pulled out a canvas backpack. He slung it over his shoulder and then pulled out a large tool that was unmistakably a-
“Is that a medieval battle- ax?” Amy asked from behind me, rubbing a towel through her hair.
“With John, we’ll be fortunate if it turns out to be nothing stupider than that.”
The ax was a leftover from high school, when we used to be big into Dungeons and Dragons. I mean, um, bear hunting. John burst in the door at that moment, dusted with snow, shouting, “We are gonna fuck that place up.”
He tossed down his load with a force that shook the floor, then bent over and hefted the ax that I believe was one of several props he stole from that medieval-themed restaurant he worked at for a while. He paused to let his eyes flick to mine and Amy’s wet hair and presumably asked himself if our showers had overlapped in any way. He was too polite to ask.
Then he turned and stepped past me into the hallway. He studied the wall, then raised the ax and swung it into the wall with a THOCK that sent plaster dust flying.
He swung three more times, then thrust his hand into the hole he had created and pulled out a small object that fit in the palm of his hand. He glanced at it, wiped the dust on his shirt, then tossed it to me. I caught the small canister. Silver, the size of a pill bottle.
Amy saw it and asked, “What’s that?”
“You’ve never seen it before?”
“Why would I?”
“Big Jim had it at one time. We don’t know where he got it though.”
I quickly relayed to her the story of the weather guy and the mall and how we came across the container.
“So,” she said. “What’s in it?”
“VERY SIMPLY,” I said to Amy, “the reason we can see things that you can’t is right there in that bottle. We don’t know where it came from or what exactly it does. But in those first hours after you take it, your brain is tuned in like nothing you can imagine. Eyes like the Hubble telescope, sensing light that’s not even on the spectrum. You might be able to read minds, make time stop, cook pasta that’s exactly right every time. And you can see the shadowy things that share this world, the ones who are always present and always hidden. It’d be like if a doctor could walk around with microscopes strapped to his eyes all of the time, so he could just look and see the sickness crawling around inside us.”
Amy pointed out, “Well, he’d still have to be able to see inside your blood vessels and lungs and all that. A microscope wouldn’t-”
“These microscopes also have some kind of X-ray vision attachment.”
She reached out and picked up the canister.
“Ugh. It’s cold.”
“The container is always cold,” I said. “It refrigerates the contents twenty- four hours a day. And we don’t know how. No batteries, no energy source. And it’s been working for years. The sauce, it has to be kept cool or it becomes, uh, unstable.”
Unstable, in the way that a swarm of killer bees is “unstable.”
“And you’re going to take it again?”
“I don’t want to. But I think we have to. It’ll level the playing field, get us on the same frequency as the bad guys. It’s the reason we’re alive.”
Oh, and everybody else who has ever tried it has wound up dead. The irony.
I said, “When I ran across this bottle, it was empty, just like mine.”
I opened the bottle and shook out the contents. Two capsules, black as licorice.
“I bet you’re wondering where these two came from. We’re always wondering the same thing. The stuff seems to show up when it wants to.”
She said, “You’re not going to let me take any, are you?”
“I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. But you’re not supposed to take it. If you were, there would be three capsules in here.”
John said, “We better swallow these before they attack us.”
We did. We waited.
“Sooooo…” Amy asked, “how do you know when it’s working?”
I said, “You just, uh, start noticing things. It’s hard to explain. Like bits of radio signal coming in through the static.”
With that, a thought passed through my head, a flash like a shooting star. Pro wrestling was real. But not real in the sense that we perceive reality. It was more real than reality. Then, I worked out pi to four thousand decimal places and realized that if anyone ever drew a truly perfect circle it would actually look like a straight line to our eyes. I looked at the silver pill canister and realized it was more than four thousand years old. Or less than four seconds.
I said to John, “You know that if you walked around the world, your hat would travel thirty- one feet farther than your shoes?”
John said, “I dunno, Dave, but before we make a bomb I have to shave half the dog.”
I nodded. He got up, called to Molly and herded her into my bathroom. I wondered when the soy sauce would take effect.
To kill some time, I got up and hunted around the closet in my laundry room until I found my squirt gun. This was one of those huge modern guns, green and with a logo that said BIG GUSHER on the side. It had a separate two- gallon tank with hooks for a belt. The commercials bragged it could spray a soaking, quarter-inch- wide stream of water for fifty feet and that was pretty much true. The gun was sticky from when John filled it with beer last summer.
I hunted around until I found a roll of duct tape and an extended disposable lighter, the kind people light grills with. I gathered three bottles of flammable chemicals that I would mix to form the fuel. I took my armload of items and dumped them on the table.
Amy said, “So, you’re making a flamethrower?”
“Amy, we gotta be prepared. We don’t know what we’ll find in that place, but for all we know it could be the Devil himself.”
“David, what possible good is that thing gonna do?”
“Oh, no, you didn’t hear me. I said it’s a flamethrower.” Girls.
“But if something is from Hell why would you use a-”
Amy stopped, apparently deciding against pursuing that question and instead asked, “What am I taking? When we go? Is there a weapon or something for me?”
“Have you forgotten the woodchuck already?”
I went to work on the squirt gun. The sound of rustling and growling emerged from the bathroom. Under that I could detect the low hum of my beard trimmer.
Amy put her hand on mine, her other hand balled up in a fist on the table.
“There was a sheep,” she said. “In Scotland, I think. And this sheep escaped from the ranch. And you know they shear sheep for their wool. Well, this thing stayed gone for seven years. Finally they found it, in a cave. And there was nobody to shear the sheep, so when they found it, its wool was gigantic. It was, like, a walking afro. And it wound up back on the ranch, just another sheep, but for the rest of its life it knew that for a while, it was free. It had that and nobody could take it away. Do you understand? I’m like you; I want to face this thing. Whatever it is. We’re like that sheep, taking our shot. If for no other reason than just to say we did.”
“I do understand. Trust me, I do. And it takes a special kind of person to make up something so utterly bullshitty. You know their wool doesn’t just keep growing like that.”
“That’s not even the point, David.”
I went to take her other hand, saw my hand disappear into hers and realized that it was because she didn’t have another hand. But there it was, thin fingers wrapped in a tight ball.
She looked down, curious, not sure what I was staring at. I said, “I think the sauce is working. Go put on the Scooby glasses. I want to try something.”
She got up, found them on the counter, then sat down and I gestured to look at the spot where her hand shouldn’t be.
“Now this time, really concentrate. I don’t know if-”
No point in finishing the sentence. Her jaw hung open.
“Oh! I can see it! How is that possible?”
She tried it with and without the glasses, saw the hand appear and disappear. “Look! My fingernails! I had let them get long and I was meaning to cut them before I went in for the surgery. No wonder it hurts…”
Then she lifted the clenched fist off the table and, very slowly, uncurled the fingers. She laid the hand flat on the table.
“David. This is crazy.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s about the least crazy thing you’re gonna see today.”
The bathroom door burst open, and Molly came trotting out. The left half of her body had been shaved almost down to the skin. The right half was as shaggy as before. John emerged after her, brushing a layer of dog hair off his clothes.
John said, “Well, that’s done.”
Before I could stop her, Amy asked, “Why did you-”
“It was Molly’s idea. She wants to look like two different dogs when she’s coming and going. She thinks it will make it easier for her to steal food.”
He turned to me.
“That’s one complicated dog, Dave. Have you started on the bomb?”
“The what?”
SOCIETY IS DOOMED for one very simple reason: it takes dozens of men working months with millions of dollars in materials to build a building, but only one dumb-ass with a bomb to bring it down. John and I had scavenged the house for bomb- making materials. Neither of us knew how to make a bomb prior to today, but we improvised one by analyzing the molecular makeup of the ingredients. My head was taking on a fiery soreness, cooking like an engine run too long and too hard. I wondered, not for the first time, if using the soy sauce would shave years off my life and I realized that it probably didn’t matter.
So, using a packet of Jell- O and the innards of two smoke detectors and a pack of shredded playing cards and the refrigerant from my truck’s air conditioner and nine other ingredients, we fashioned a sticky explosive clay, mint green in color. We poured it into a tinfoil mold we made in the shape of a dog bone and stuck it in the freezer to solidify. The idea was to disguise it as something that would seem normal being in a dog owner’s front pocket, should we get caught and searched.
I sat at the kitchen table, snapping brass bullets into the one spare magazine I had bought for the Smith.
“Here’s what I think,” said John. “That facility, they’ve got to have some kind of intercom system. We sneak our way to the office where the mic is, and put the boom box in front of it. We go right for the fucking jugular: ‘November Rain,’ on a loop. While they’re all holdin’ their ears and begging for forgiveness, we go find this Korrok fucker and shove this bomb right up his ass. Or get him to eat it, if it turns out he’s a huge dog.”
I nodded and stood. The real plan, the unspoken one that hid between John’s words, was that we would die. But, we would die in the middle of what Korrok’s people would remember as the single most retarded and baffling incident in their history. We would be their Guy Fawkes. They would create a holiday about us. If we were going to wind up in the belly of Korrok, might as well see if we could make him choke on the way down.
Me and John, I mean. Not Amy.
I let out a long breath and put on my coat. I dropped in the gun and the spare magazine. John threw on his Army jacket and leaned over, unzipped the backpack and pulled out a chainsaw. He had tied a length of bungee strap to it so he could carry it slung over his shoulder. He then picked up the homemade flamethrower, not questioning for a moment what it was or what it did. He flicked on the lighter and a delicate tongue of flame licked out in front of the barrel. He nodded in approval and blew it out, then grabbed the battle- ax off the floor and handed it to Amy. She managed to hold it aloft in her one hand for exactly two seconds before she let the head clang to the floor. She let go of the handle, then dug some Chap-Stick from her jacket and smeared it on her lips.
We were loading up the Bronco when John reminded me of the exploding dog bone. I ran inside, pulled it out of the aluminum- foil mold and walked into the yard with it in my hand.
I probably should have seen this next part coming. Molly ran over, half shaved and half shaggy, and snatched the bone from my fingers.
At John’s request I’ll skip over this next part, which involved us chasing the dog around the yard for a very long time and finally John tackling her, prying open her jaws and finding no remnant of exploding bone in there.
I began to walk away from the situation in disgust when a snow- covered John, still on the ground with Molly, said, “Look!”
He was holding up Molly’s front paw. I saw nothing unusual about it, but then realized the pi- like symbol we had seen on the carcass of exploded Molly was missing from this dog’s paw. Molly licked her nose and sneezed. John stood up; Molly flipped onto her feet and trotted away.
I said, “What do you think it means?”
“Hell, I don’t know. We need the bone bomb back. Take the chainsaw and cut open the dog.”
Amy objected to this and came up with what I thought was a far more disgusting plan of trying to flush the bone from the other end of Molly. She went inside and dug out two convenience- store burritos from my freezer and heated them in the microwave until they were lukewarm.
After feeding both burritos to Molly and seeing no immediate results, John said, “All right, let’s go. We’re gonna be late for our certain death.”
WHITEOUT. THERE WAS more snow than air in the atmosphere. We went fifteen miles an hour through town, the whole place shut down under the storm. It was, I thought, an actual blizzard. I had never seen one. About halfway there, John squinted into his rearview mirror.
“What the hell?”
Red- and- blue lights swept across the frosted rear window. We all glanced at each other, figuring we could either pull over or plow through the snowstorm for the slowest police chase since O.J. I pulled over, two tires ramping up onto mounds of roadside snow. A blue, bear- like figure strode up to the driver’s-side door. I rolled down the window and felt freezing bits of snow land on my cheek. A face leaned down. I saw it and felt myself tense, my hand going right to the butt of the Smith.
Oh, crap.
It was Drake. But it was not Drake. His wide face sat there inches from mine, an inhuman blankness in the expression, like that of an embalmed body at a funeral. His eyes were pure black, no whites, no irises. I blinked, and his eyes looked human again. Human, but as lifeless as a doll’s.
Drake’s mouth said, “OUT.” He flung the word at me like a punch. I smelled a puff of breath that was chemically sweet, like a little kid after drinking too much Kool- Aid. Drake yanked open the door and grabbed my jacket, pulling me out. He clamped on my shoulders and spun me around and pushed me toward the truck. I heard the other door open and there was John, standing there, looking at Drake and knowing what I knew. Drake was gone.
The big cop pulled out a baton from a loop in his belt and smacked his palm with it.
“SO,” he said, barking the sound so that it was barely an English word. “So. Big smart guy. Big guy. Dolls and jellyfish and the night comes to life and walks on Mulholland Drive.”
He smacked his palm. His pudgy lips spread to reveal a shark’s grin. I wanted to grab for my gun but a swing with that club could break the bones in my wrist in half a second. I don’t know if I was poised to make my move or frozen in panic. At any second, the Drake thing could end this little adventure before it got started. I glanced at John, hoping he had some kind of plan. The look in his eyes said he was hoping the same from me. I looked back at Drake’s squad car and saw he hadn’t come alone. Riding with him was a muscular black cop who was climbing out of the passenger side of the car now, snow landing on his hat, grinning the grin of the freshly mad.
Drake stepped around to the grille of my truck. He said, “MULHOLLAND DRIVE! SMART GUY! THE BLUE BOX! THE BLUE KEY! THE BLUE EYE!” He swung the stick and a headlight exploded with a crash. Drake smiled again, then bent his knees and leapt six feet into the air. He landed on my hood with a thud that rocked the whole truck on its suspension. I saw Amy jump in the backseat, eyes bouncing back and forth between me and John. Molly barked, but made no other effort to help.
Drake looked down at me from his perch on my hood. He stuck the end of the baton into his pocket, unzipped his pants, and began pissing on my windshield. Urine splattered and yellowed the pile of snow bunched along my windshield wipers.
“HA! KORROK WAITS IN THE ALLEY, SMART GUY!”
Drake’s partner was disrobing. The black cop was flinging clothing into the road, mumbling to himself. He finally yanked off a pair of boxers, put his hands on his naked hips and screamed something like “tubesteak” over and over again to the snowy sky.
Drake finished his pee, zipped up. He lifted one shoe, reached down and pulled it off. He peeled off his sock and raised the foot toward me.
He stood that way for a long moment, foot raised like a photo of a field- goal kicker caught in midkick. I glanced back and saw the other cop was packing handfuls of snow onto his groin.
I looked back at Drake and finally I saw what he was showing me. On his big toe was a tiny tattoo. The pi symbol, just like the old Molly had.
“THIS IS JUST A RECORDING, SMART GUY!”
He lowered his foot and pulled out his baton again. He held it up and pointed at me with his other hand.
“NOW BEND OVER! BEND OVER AND DROP YOUR PANTS, SMART GUY!”
Simultaneously, John and I ducked back inside the Bronco. I threw it into gear and slammed on the gas, Drake still standing on the hood.
The truck lurched forward and we barreled down the road, but Drake stayed planted, crouching like an oversized hood ornament. He bellowed at me over the wind, flinging aside his hat and tossing his hair.
“WHERE YOU GOING? HA HA HA! LET’S GO INTO THE ALLEY! HE’S WAITING, SMART GUY!”
He reared back with the baton, as if ready to smash the windshield. I slammed on the brakes, the truck spun out, Drake went flying.
He vanished behind the miniature mountain range of piled snow along the road. I heard a faint scream that twisted into a howl, a high- pitched sound that human vocal cords couldn’t duplicate. I considered going to help him. The urge quickly passed. I threw the truck in reverse, stepped on the gas, threw it into gear and fishtailed down the road. I peered into my mirrors, looked nervously for him or his naked snow- crotched partner. Their car was nowhere to be seen. Molly stood and stared out the back window, shuddering and issuing a low, rumbling growl.
Amy was asking something, asking what was wrong with him, was he dead, should we go back. Neither I nor John answered. I just drove. Gotta push on, don’t even look back.
Something moved in my rearview mirror, a dark shape against the snow. I looked, thought I saw something, something moving fast. Not a person. Or maybe I didn’t see it.
WE FOUND THE inlet road in the snow, turned in and crept through the mall parking lot. We watched for other parked vehicles, saw none. Our light was fading fast.
We filed out and loaded up and marched across the lot, Molly in the lead, our heads on swivels. Visibility didn’t even extend to the edge of the parking lot, where a white curtain of snow hid the rest of the world. I had the gun in my hand, didn’t even remember pulling it out. A snowflake flew right up my nose. Just before we reached the door I saw John spin around, like he had seen something in the swirling mass of white. I squinted, could see nothing, and we both dismissed it as adrenaline. We should have known better.
We filed inside, using the same entrance John had used earlier that morning. Snow was pouring in through the skylight now, piling an inch high on the floor, drafts of chilled air flowing down from the gap. Once inside and out of the wind, John flicked the lighter that served as the pilot light for the toy flamethrower.
John said, “Drake’s foot. What was the deal with that? I thought he was trying to kick your head and he just missed.”
“He had that symbol, the little pi. Like Molly.”
“What do you think, it’s like a mark of some kind?”
“Of what?”
“Evil?”
Amy asked, “Wouldn’t it make it harder to do evil if they had to carry around a mark?”
John shrugged. “Once they’re barefoot and kicking you, it’s already too late. Follow me.”
We went into the maintenance room. To John and me, the big, decorative doorway stood in the center of the wall to our right, plain as day and as out of place as the face on Mars. Amy saw only a wall. Until, of course, she tried viewing it through the Scooby glasses. I let the little maintenance door close behind me. John looked at Amy and nodded his head toward the other door and said, “Ghost door.”
I said, “Please don’t call it that.”
Molly trotted past me and went right to the door and sniffed at it. Interesting. John said, “I feel like we should look for a save point.”
I saw a long, curved handle on the door. I let out a long breath and raised the gun. John raised the fire gusher. I reached out for the handle and watched as my hand passed right through.
“Shit,” said John. “It’s a ghost knob.”
I sighed and looked at John, was about to suggest heading back home and curling up in front of the fireplace. But then Amy stepped forward, the wet and wrinkled cardboard glasses askew on her face.
She reached out with her left arm, the arm that, in reality, didn’t have a hand. But with the hand that I could see, the ghost of a hand that was no longer there, she reached out and grabbed the door handle that was also not really there. The handle turned.
With a rumbling not unlike the sound in your head when you crunch ice, a vertical slit formed in the wall and then tore open, widening. John and I both crouched into a fighting stance and I felt my bladder loosen a little. The wall melted and peeled back like a curtain until there was a door- sized opening before us with a bunched seam around the edge, rolls of plaster and jutting splinters of wood. Beyond it was a tiny, round room that I somehow sensed was an elevator.
John stepped through the door and looked to his right. He pointed out a number on the wall, in black, that said “10.” After a few seconds, it switched to “9.”
I felt Molly brush past my legs and trot into the open doorway. I turned, put my hands on Amy’s shoulders.
“Go.”
“What? No.”
“You’ve got money, from the insurance? When your parents-”
“Yeah, so-”
“Wait for us, wait someplace light. Give us an hour. Then if we’re not back take my truck and-”
“David, I can’t even drive.”
I dug in my pocket and pressed my cell phone into her hand.
“Then call a cab. I’m dead serious. If we’re not back in an hour, fly. Take the cab straight to the airport and fly away, get on a plane, go to Alaska. Stay far away from this place forever and ever and forget you ever knew me.”
“Alaska? Why-”
“Because it’s always daytime there.”
“No it’s not!”
“Actually, Dave,” John said from behind me, “I think it’s always nighttime there.”
“It doesn’t matter,” squealed Amy, “because I’m not going anyw-”
“Amy, please. This is insane. When that door opened the only thought that went through my mind was that I would be damned for letting you die at the hands of whatever came through it. We’ve gone this far and you’re still okay and I want to do this one good thing while I’ve got the chance. For no other reason than because when I die-and I’m pretty damned sure now that I will within the hour-I want to be able to say I did this one last thing, this one unselfish thing before I went.”
I pulled the Smith & Wesson from my pocket and went to put it in her other hand, realized she didn’t have another hand, then shoved it into her coat pocket instead. Amy started to say something, but was interrupted when the metal door exploded.
The little maintenance door flew across the room and bounced off the opposite wall. We all ducked, and in a cloud of dust I saw something the size of a man but shaped all wrong, backward joints jutting into the air, a tiny brainless head, skin of notched alligator hide. There was a second of brain paralysis when I couldn’t register what I was seeing. But I had seen the thing before, in Jim’s basement. Only this one was moving, crouching low like a predator, turning to look at us.
Amy was on her knees and had opened her mouth to say something, but before she could, a column of flame poured past her face.
“DOWN!” screamed John, about a half second later than I would have preferred. Orange fire licked the creature and the floor and the wall behind it. I thought I smelled my own hair burning. The beast writhed and thrashed about, but apparently its skin wasn’t that flammable because when John let off there were only small tongues of flame licking at its shoulders.
It looked pissed.
John worked the shotgun- like pump on the squirt gun to build up the pressure and fire again. I flung my body aside and plunged my hand into my pocket to get the Smith-then remembered I had given it to Amy ten seconds ago. I pulled out my car keys instead and flung them at the beast; they bounced off its chest with a jingle.
The monster advanced on me, racing past Amy with quick, blurry little steps, moving like it was on fast- forward. I tried to stand but suddenly there were claws around my neck, and a second after that I was flying. A wall pounded my back and suddenly I was in the little round elevator looking up at John; the beast had thrown me like a child’s toy. I scrambled to my feet and this thing was on me again, filling the doorway, blocking us into the little round room. Molly was standing there next to me, sniffing at the monster’s foot and deciding it would be unpleasant to eat.
John was screaming something but then this thing had its claws in my shoulder, pain spilling down the whole side of my body. I leaned my head around the beast and screamed, “AAAAAMMMMMYYYYYY!!!!!! RUUUUUUUNNNNNN!!!!!!”
She stood there behind the beast, petrified for a long moment. The beast was doing something with its other hand, rearing back, probably half a second from ripping my face off. I felt John’s hands clumsily prying at the monster’s claws, trying to get them off me. The beast’s face was two inches from mine, its little eyes twitching, and I could smell the thing and it smelled like Old Spice somehow. From the corner of my eye I saw that the number on the wall said, “2.”
Amy turned to go and suddenly I had a new mission, to keep the beast here, to make it take as long as possible to eat us.
A second beast appeared.
In the ruins of the maintenance doorway, another monster just like this one. As it advanced on Amy I had the crazy thought that the thing had clumps of snow stuck to its crotch.
The number on the wall vanished. The ghost door closed.
Everything stopped. The wall had melted back into place as if it had always been as solid as a, uh, wall.
Suddenly I was looking at the head and shoulders and claws of the monster emerging from the solid wall, as if it were a mounted hunter’s trophy. The ghost door had closed right on the bastard, half on this side and half on the other. After a second, the severed chunks clumped to the floor, leaving red stains behind on the wall. The clawed hand was still embedded in my shoulder, the severed arm hanging off and dripping red on the floor.
John muttered, “What the-I wonder how many employees they lose that way?”
“Amy!!” I screamed into the wall, tearing off the shorn limb and flinging it to the ground with disgust. The claws were still twitching on their own when it landed. Molly was at my feet, barking, yelping. I heard nothing from the other side. I pounded the wall with my palms, then felt the surface sliding under my fingers.
“AMY!!! AAAAMMMMYYYYY!!!”
I punched the wall and thought I broke my hand. I felt motion and knew that we were moving upward, which was impossible because the mall did not have a second floor. I cursed again, put my hands on my knees, realized that every life that touched mine ended in utter horror.
Molly whimpered at my feet. John said something, something about reaching the top and being ready and I got the idea. I stood upright and took the chainsaw from John, trembling all over. I looked over the chainsaw, figuring out how to work it. Could I have gotten caught in this situation with a dumber weapon?
I glanced around and realized the boom box hadn’t made it into the elevator. Man, did any of it matter at this point?
Up and up and up we went. Was the elevator climbing in midair? John held the fire gusher at the ready. He was saying something about how there was nothing we could do and we just had to get in and out fast enough and that we had all the more reason to survive and blah, blah, blah. What ever.
The trip up took twenty damned minutes. Hundreds of feet. Finally we jolted to a stop and an opening appeared in the wall. We were looking at a long corridor, rounded at the top and made seemingly of smooth stone, like marble or polished granite. It was lit with fluorescent lights and decorated with warning signs about contamination and ID badges.
I wrapped my fingers tight around the plastic handle of the chainsaw and stepped into the hall, Molly following a step behind. We went maybe the length of four or five city blocks, John with the little pi lot flame dancing at the end of his flamethrowing toy, me wondering how much noise the chainsaw would make when I pulled the rope thing. Or if it even had gas in it.
We reached a door. Just a regular metal door with a knob. We readied ourselves. John flung it open and we ducked inside.
The floor turned into a metal grate and we realized we had emerged onto a catwalk. I looked over the rail and saw we were suspended over an expanse the size of an airplane hangar, but dimly lit. The floor was populated with people in white, bustling around like a marketplace, swarming around tables and equipment. It was noisy as hell. Machines and grinding and rustling of feet, people working in the dark.
We took a few steps forward and realized we weren’t alone. A man, wearing a white jumpsuit with a hood and a glass faceplate that reminded me of the contamination-free “clean suits” you see people wearing in labs, stood on the catwalk about ten feet away. He had a Subway sandwich bag in one gloved hand and a pack of cigarettes in the other. He stared at us for a long moment, eyes bouncing from Molly to my chainsaw to the finger of flame dancing from a tool that the man probably couldn’t help but think was a flame throwing squirt gun.
John said, “We’re from the fire department.”
The man spun on his heels and sprinted the other direction, feet clanging on the grated metal floor. We gave chase. He passed through a doorway. We followed and found ourselves on a spiral stairwell going down, John shouting at the man all the way, asking to see his flammability permit.
The man hit bottom and threw himself out of another doorway. We followed and found ourselves at ground level on the factory floor, or what ever it was, surrounded by people in white jumpsuits who were doing an excellent job of ignoring us. These men did not wear the face masks and seemed, to a man, to be completely bald.
Dark, dark, dark. Little red lights here and there on pieces of machinery that I couldn’t identify, but no overhead lights and no lamps and nothing but little glowing patches that cast upside-down shadows. The man we were chasing disappeared into the crowded darkness and we didn’t follow.
To my left were blue plastic barrels, rows and rows of them, hundreds. At the edge were two without lids, full of a deep crimson fluid that indeed looked like transmission fluid. Two men were standing over one of the open barrels, dipping into it and collecting samples in vials. One of the men turned to face me, and I saw that he did not have a face.
Or, I should say he had half a face. The forehead curled down over where the eyes should be, joining the cheeks. The nostrils were wide and flat, African. He had a thin, lipless mouth and huge ears. The guy next to him was the same. The four guys down the row as well. Those guys were hefting huge translucent plastic bags, vacuum-packed and shrunk around what looked like sides of beef.
I gawked around like a little tourist kid. Along my left were long glass tanks as tall as houses, something you’d see at a city aquarium. The liquid inside was a cloudy pink. Floating inside were pale blurred shapes that might have been people and other things, smaller lumps that held the shape of small animals, dogs and things like squirrels. I walked down the row, dazed. I blinked, trying desperately to adjust to the semidarkness, trying to take everything in. I had the crazy thought that no wonder they didn’t pay to light the place. Most of the people here didn’t have eyes. No need to pay the extra electric bill.
No matter where you go, management is always a bunch of cheap bastards.
I heard John make a breathy sound behind me, shock or disgust or both. I followed his gaze and saw a wire cage twenty or so feet away, containing a thin, young boy. Maybe ten years old. He stood there, looking terrified, fingers hooked through the wire mesh, staring at me with wide blue eyes. There was a device next to the cage, round and maybe five feet tall. It had a red light glowing on the side. The light flipped to green, an electronic sound emitted. The boy screamed.
The boy’s skin bubbled and wrinkled. One of his eyes deflated and ran down his cheek as a white goo, not unlike semen. Muscle liquefied and fell off his bones. He folded into the ground, left as a quivering lump. The lump bubbled and twitched and took on shape. Two stumpy feet emerged. A cloven hoof. Two more feet, a round body. I heard whimpering behind me, Molly watching along with me. In five seconds, I was looking through the cage at a pink, well-fed pig.
“Mother. Fucker.”
That was John, behind me. The pig trotted calmly over to the wires of the cage, sniffing at me. It put its front hooves on the wire cage and I thought, but wasn’t sure, I saw the same imprinted pi tattoo Molly once had and Drake had and-what the fuck did it all mean? I yanked the pull string on the chainsaw so hard I thought I’d rip it out. The saw roared to life.
John looked down at Molly and said, “You better poop that bomb because we’re blowing this place to Hell.”
“PUT IT DOWN!”
John and I spun to see a man in one of the “clean” suits, maybe thirty feet away, pointing an enormous rifle at us that seemed to have too many barrels. His voice was filtered through a small speaker on the side of the hood and he was shouldering his way past the white-suited workers.
John did not put the flamethrower down. What he did instead was point the flaming end of the thing at the man and say, “You put yours down, asshole.”
I said, “I’d do it, sir. We’re pissed.”
“YOU HAVE ONE SECOND TO DROP THAT CHAINSAW AND THAT… THING.”
At this point, John flung himself to the ground and screamed, “YOU SHOT ME! AAARRRRGHHH!”
Not a shot had been fired. I rushed to John’s side. “You shot him! He has four kids! Or should I say, four orphans.”
The man stepped over, the gun trained on John. The weapon seemed to be from the year 2050, smooth sides and a thin electronic sight that glowed green. There was a small barrel on the bottom and a cavernous one on top that looked like it fired cannon shells.
“YOU. STEP AWAY AND GET ON THE FLOOR OVER THERE.”
I said, “You shot him, you son of a bitch!”
“DO IT AND DO IT NOW.”
I stood and backed away. The man loomed over John and aimed the rifle right at his head.
“YOU’RE NOT SHOT. GET UP.”
Two urges rushed through me at the same moment. There was the urge to surrender, to put an end to the tension and fear and accept my fate. And then there was the urge to do violence.
I don’t remember making the choice. All I know is that my muscles caught fire with adrenaline and I suddenly felt the fear and rage that is the most intense high the human animal can feel. In that split second I knew I was overmatched but I also knew that if I was going to die, this was how I wanted to do it. I wanted to give this asshole a scar with an interesting story behind it.
I flung myself at the man, swinging the chainsaw like a baseball bat. I was aiming high, trying to chop his arm off at the shoulder. I missed by two feet and hit his hand.
It was the hand holding the grip of the rifle. The spinning chain bounced off the gun and the impact made me drop it. The chainsaw fell to the floor, rattling on the ground with the vibration of the motor.
Smooth.
But the man screeched in pain and, to my horror, two of his fingers dropped to the ground in a red splatter. The rifle clattered down to the concrete. I dove for the gun and grabbed it by a handle that was slick with blood. I found the trigger to be where it is on most guns. I aimed it at the man’s chest and climbed to my feet. John stood, looking at the man’s fingerless stumps with disgust.
I said, “Sir, you need to get that looked at.”
The man didn’t move. My heart hammered. I realized I had crippled this man for the rest of his life. John said, “This is the part where you run away and find a first-aid kit, dipshit.”
The man got to his feet and stumbled off. Around us, dozens or hundreds of the bald, faceless workers stood as still as the mannequins they resembled. Everything had come to a stop. Machines were being shut down.
I tried to catch my breath, felt like my bladder was going to let go. I said, “This is going well.”
There was a POCK sound and suddenly one of the blue barrels next to me sprung a leak. John and I looked at it curiously for a moment before we noticed about a dozen men in clean suits racing toward us from just about every direction, each armed, dodging the worker mannequins and toppling equipment.
I raised the rifle, no idea what to do, heard pops of gunfire that seemed faint in the cavernous room. I turned, pointed at the massive tanks of pink fluid and who knows what else, and pulled the trigger.
The gun exploded. Or seemed to; instead of the crack of a rifle shot it let out a thunderous boom that punched the butt of the rifle into my shoulder. The tanks erupted in a spray of glass. Fluid and flailing shapes poured out onto the floor, faceless workers sprinting off in every direction.
Madness ensued. Inhuman screams. Crashing glass, toppling tables. The things that spilled out of the tanks were writhing, thrashing limbs around, and I thought I saw a human face stuck on the body of a hairless baboon. But it was all a dark blur and John took off running. I followed.
We dodged people like running backs, the chaos passing around us. The scenery was a department-store hodgepodge of nonsense, something out of a dream. We ran past hundreds of the walking mannequins, past tables full of clothes and what looked like tailoring equipment and rolls of cloth. A shelf full of underwear. We ran past a section of men working on what looked like dentistry, drilling and crafting bridges and false teeth. We knocked over chairs and tables and filing cabinets. We saw a young woman strapped to a table, her legs missing. We saw racks of fat bags like we saw in Amy’s bathroom, imprinted with numbers. I saw a man chained to a wall who seemed to have snakes for arms, each hand replaced by snapping jaws and venomous fangs.
I saw Molly as a low, running copper streak up ahead and realized with horror that John was following her. I heard more shots and saw two of the mannequin men fall, ragged holes in their backs. My guts turned to liquid and my hands tightened around the bulky rifle, feeling sweat and sticky blood on the trigger. We reached a wall and I saw wide stairs leading to a double door made of brushed steel, like a bank vault. A closed bank vault.
I heard shouts and clanging and saw people on the catwalk overhead, saw white suits circling around us in the crowd and heard orders shouted from every direction. A booming voice emerged from a public address system, announcing things in a throaty language that sounded like Hebrew. I suddenly knew how that woodchuck felt.
I pulled up the rifle, found a little switch next to the handle and flipped it, hoping it would make the other barrel work. I raised it to my shoulder.
So freaking dark…
I tried to get a fix through the glowing green sights. I felt hands on me. I squeezed the trigger and the gun roared, fire erupting, the barrel jumping like a jackhammer. I lost control of it almost immediately, the gun pushing my shoulder back until I was shooting straight up. In three seconds I was clicking an empty gun, night-blinded, smelling gunpowder. I heard a thump-thump-thump and realized it was bodies falling off the catwalk above.
Hands on me again, the worker clones or what ever they were, grabbing my jacket and pulling my hair. The gun was ripped from my hands and I heard a whoosh, a sound suspiciously like a gun being swung through the air. A bomb went off in my skull. Lights flared in front of my eyes and I went down hard. I heard barking and growling, felt Molly thrashing around near me. I almost went out. I heard John’s voice, shouting in the bedlam.
“GENTLEMEN, I WOULD LIKE TO PROPOSE A TOAST!”
And then, the whole world was on fire.
Heat and light and horrible, inhuman shrieks. I got on my hands and knees and saw John hosing everything down, a fountain of orange light glaring in the darkness, a crowd of dark limbs flailing in a pool of flame. A hand grabbed me again from the crowd, its sleeve on fire-
A firearm!
– and I kicked at it, got free. From beside me, John frantically pumped the gun, and again flame poured forth with a sound like rushing wind. Suddenly I was being pulled up to my feet, pulled backward, pulled to the spot where the metal door had been. It was apparently open now because we kept going, into another space, a small area that felt like a corridor.
I heard the heavy clang of the door closing, and suddenly a light flickered on. It was John who had hold of me, a fist full of my jacket in his hand. He spun toward the door and we saw a thin man standing there, next to a metal box on the wall with a series of red buttons.
It was Robert North. He looked us over, then said, simply, “Incredible.”
We were alone in a hallway, an orchestra of sounds from the other side of the steel door. Molly looked that direction and growled. North stepped away from us and strode down the corridor. We followed. I put my hand to my aching skull, pulled away bloody fingers. John took his hand off me and said, “Can you walk?”
“Yeah.”
North led us through one doorway, then another. We finally emerged into an enormous round chamber with steps that led down to a platform, the place set up not unlike a basketball stadium. At the heart of the room where center court would be, there were maybe a dozen tall arches arranged in two concentric circles. It reminded me of Stonehenge. Around the room were beds and examination tables, but nobody was on them. On the floor, on a small platform, sat the fat bag, the exact one from Amy’s bathroom (“44.42 kg” on the side), and not far from that sat the lifeless, copper-haired dummy I had seen appear on Amy’s couch. North led us out of the Stonehenge room, barely glancing at it, and out another door. We went down another hall and into another large, domed room. This one had a cylinder of black glass in the center that rose all the way up to the ceiling.
North closed the door behind us, another sliding double door with metal a foot thick. I saw there were no other exits from the room and what ever comfort I had felt from escaping the mob had vanished. This was the end of the line.
North said, “I have a thousand questions to ask but no time to ask them.”
I said, “We have to get back! To ground level, to the mall. Amy is…”
He turned, like he couldn’t hear me, and walked toward the cylinder. I glanced around and saw that the walls, like all of the walls here, seemed to be made of glass-smooth stone. The door and the controls for the door all seemed to have been added later, the wiring in metal conduits on the exterior of the wall. I wondered again where exactly this place was. Were we still on Earth?
I ran up behind North, said, “Get us outta here. Get us out and tell us where would be the best place to put a bomb.”
John said, “Yeah, the dog is rigged to blow.”
John shook the pink plastic tank of flamethrower fuel on his hip, found it empty. He blew out the lighter at the barrel of the toy, then dropped it all to the floor. I noticed the barrel had partially melted.
North said, “I do not think you fully appreciate what this is.”
I nodded toward North and said to John, “This is the guy, the one who I saw in my truck that night.”
John said, “Okay. Can he explain what the fuck this place is? And what they’re making out there?”
I waved my hand with impatience and said, “He can tell us all about that shit after we’re outta here and after we’ve gotten to Amy. And after we blow this place to Hell. But before those assholes come rushing through that door.”
North said, “I believe Amy is safe. And I assure you, the men outside cannot get in here. I know this facility very well.”
“How do you know about Amy?” I asked. “You’re a part of this? You work for these people?”
North said, “I was born here. And as for what they’re doing out there, well, they’re doing the same thing all thinking creatures do, from the moment they come to life. Trying to change the world as they see fit.”
He looked at the black column.
“What do you think you’re looking at there?”
John said, “You’re gonna be looking at my fist, and then Dave’s dick, if you don’t-”
“Take a moment and try to understand what you’ve seen,” North said. “You will not be angry once you understand. Your anger clouds you.” North glanced around the room. “I was born here, as I said. One month ago. Do you understand?”
I was trying to think up a new threat of violence for North and then I saw John’s eyes go wide. I turned on the black column and saw activity there in the darkness. Swirling shapes pouring through it. Streaks of light. Life.
North said, “Imagine a garment, woven from a single thread. And imagine that after forming that garment, that same continuing thread was used to weave another garment similar to the first. So you have a thread that is simultaneously part of two garments, but at some point the thread stops being part of one garment and becomes part of the other.”
John waved his hand impatiently and said, “Who gives a shit?”
North gestured toward the column.
“This is the thread.”
I said, “Good. John, pry the bomb from Molly’s colon and blow this fucker.”
North said, “The key to saving your friend, Amy, is through there.”
I said, “You want us to go through? What’s in there? Hell? Is that what happened, this thing opened up and a bunch of you monstrous fuckers came crawling in? That’s why we’ve got so much weird shit in this town?”
“No man has traveled through this portal. Though they have tried it.”
“Then what the fuck are you talking about?” I screamed.
John glanced at Molly and said, “Shit the bomb, Molly.”
North said, “No, the only ones who can travel back and forth are the dark men.”
John said, “Blacks? Is that why there aren’t any in [Undisclosed]? They get sucked in?”
This threw North. He recovered and said, “No, the dark men are the ones who lived but have been torn from their bodies, through death and, well, other circumstances you would not understand. They come from all worlds with sentient thought. They are unrestricted by matter and as such, can exist in one dimension and then the next, in one time and then the next, and then, in none at all. They exist in numbers greater than you can imagine, a dark ocean that flows between worlds. And as more thinking beings are born and die, the ranks of the dark men swell like the waters of a flooding river.”
“Okay!” said John. “Then let’s blow it up then.” He leaned down and grabbed Molly by the shoulders. “We need you to shit the bomb, Molly. Shit it! Shit the bomb!”
She didn’t even try.
John said, “Fuck it. Let’s light the dog on fire.”
North said, “You cannot destroy it. If you could, your universe would vanish into it.”
I looked at him, then spun on Molly. “Shit it, Molly! NOW! SHIT IT!”
North seemed to be losing patience and he said, “Through that passage is the only way to save Amy Sullivan.”
I turned on him. “Are you finally getting to the part where you tell us how to do that?”
“You must pass through.”
“You just said-”
“There is a reason why you have drawn so much interest, Mr. Wong. The ones who run this facility, and others, have devoted more time and resources than you can imagine to developing an ability to pass from one side to the next. You and John here apparently can. And we do not know why.”
I said, “I know why. But I’m sure not telling you.”
North said, “If you do not go in, where will you go?”
He had a point. And we had come this far. I looked at the column and said, “Fine. How do we get in?”
“Just decide that you want to get in and you will.”
I reached out a hand and touched the surface, like cut onyx. Close to it I thought I could see color in the blackness, blue with streaks of white. The column felt as solid as stone, but then suddenly I saw my fingers push into it, like it was made of warm wax. My hand vanished up to the wrist and then elbow and then I changed my mind, tried to pull back and realized I had no chance of doing it short of cutting off my arm. I turned to John to tell him to find something sharp, but at that moment blackness fell over my vision.
THERE WAS A period not unlike the half-waking moments between snooze alarms. A timeless, restless void that could have been a second and could have been ten thousand years. I felt air on my face, a rushing wind that pummeled me. I could not see, realized my eyes were closed, and pried them open. My vision immediately went blurry, air blowing the fluids from my eyeballs. I felt like I was falling. I focused my eyes and saw the ground, way down there, hundreds of feet. Lush green grass and tiny pale shapes that could have been people, little dots that seemed to grow almost imperceptibly.
Wait a second. I AM falling. HOLY SHIT!
I started flailing my arms, hoping I somehow had the ability to fly in this world. It was no good. I fell and fell for what seemed like an irrationally long time and then, I wasn’t falling. Instead I was tangled up in something soft and springy like cheesecloth, bouncing twice before landing once and for all.
I laid there for a moment in some kind of netting, dumbfounded, a split second before Molly’s ass landed right on my face.
I struggled to sit up, saw that I was hanging in a piece of cloth the size of a house, suspended high in the air. Above me, a dozen wingless, flying creatures the size of people were keeping it suspended with ropes.
Angels, I thought. I’ve gone to Heaven and I’m being carried on a tarp hefted by angels.
This wasn’t what I was taught to expect in Sunday School, but things are never the way you learn them in the classroom. The cloth convulsed and tossed me again into the air for a dizzying second. John had landed.
We were going lower, down and down. I peered through the translucent fabric, like looking through panty hose. I thought I saw a crowd down there, a flesh-colored sea with a space in the middle. I was half expecting to find gates of carved pearl and a judge waiting for me, half expecting the crowd down there to descend on me, douse me in drawn butter and eat me alive.
We went down and down and down, the air getting warmer and the wind getting calmer. We finally hit the ground with a jolt. I rolled and flailed in the netting, got on my feet, then fell back on my ass. I got a good look at the beasts carry ing the tarp. They were a sort of humpbacked men, emitting a growling noise until the moment they landed. They were naked, with penises I worked hard not to notice, but they wore loose hoods that covered their heads and draped down over their chests.
One of the men walked near, penis flopping with each step; he extended a hand to help me up. I observed that he did not in fact have a humped back, but instead seemed to have some kind of apparatus that was riding on his back with straps made of hard, jointed plastic or something like it.
I let the naked man, hairy as Robin Williams, help me up, and then I withdrew my hand as quickly as possible. He stood back and joined the humpbacks who were forming a loose circle around me and John and the dog. Beyond them, I saw the crowd.
There were maybe a hundred people standing around, every one of them wearing hoods. Every one of them otherwise naked. I observed, with some dismay, that a large percentage of them were el der ly. I noticed that one group of them were holding up a large, colorful banner but I could not make out what was on it.
I said to John, “Oooookay. So, you see Amy here?”
John said, “Dunno.” He scanned the hooded nakedness around us and said, “You know what this is, right? We’re in an alternate universe and this is Eyes Wide Shut world.”
The crowd stared at us in silence. Molly sniffed the air. It was cool here, maybe in the high fifties, a mild winter. The grass around us was still green and soft and the landscape was made of the same low hills that Undisclosed was built on, spilling out around us like a wrinkled green rug. My head throbbed from getting clubbed earlier.
I said, “I wonder what they’re expecting. Are we supposed to fight each other to the death?”
“In Eyes Wide Shut world, we’ll be lucky if that’s all it is.”
From the crowd, a large man emerged, no hood, wearing a pinstripe suit. Or should I say, he was wearing an imitation of a pinstripe suit. It was black with pinstripes that seemed to be about a quarter-inch wide, and a short, fat red tie that only hung down about six inches from his neck. He spread his arms.
“Gentlemen. Welcome.”
His face was human, but off. A Michael Jackson sort of face. I had seen it on my tele vi sion. The man wore no hood but he was wearing something like a latex mask, better than Halloween quality but still obvious it wasn’t his real face. I could see the seams under his ear-the ear was part of the mask-and the hair was unmistakably a wig.
I said, “Where’s the girl?”
The man hesitated, seemed confused. I said, “Red hair? She’s missing a hand?”
“Ah,” he said. “Amy Sullivan. She is very safe. Come.”
The man gestured in one direction and the crowd stepped aside to make a clear path for us. One of the humpbacked men who had carried our net did something with his hands and the apparatus on his back jumped off on its own; it crawled around on the ground on six legs. It was a living creature, I realized, and it reminded me somewhat of a giant beetle. It munched on some grass and softly farted through slits in its hindquarters that I theorized had been supplying the propulsion used to keep it aloft.
The large man walked us through the path formed by the naked crowd. I saw the large banner again and this time could make out the image. It was a cartoonish painting of me, depicted as a muscular warrior with a gushing head wound, Molly at my feet, teeth bared, with the flesh of some slain enemy in her jaws. John was shown bearing a fistful of flame and with an enormously exaggerated crotch bulge.
The large man turned, said, “A select few interested parties were allowed to come and observe your arrival. We asked the ones who came to be considerate. Our style of dress here is quite different than what you are used to. We did not want to cause you stress, so we thought removing the garments would lessen your discomfort. I believe some of the styles would be quite unnerving for a person from your world.”
We were led down the gauntlet of nudity, two walls of flaccid penises and graying pubic hair and bare legs webbed with blue veins. One tall man, I noticed, was awkwardly trying to hide a gigantic erection. Not even eyes, however, were visible behind the slits in the hoods that draped over their shoulders.
“Why the hoods?” asked John.
The large man didn’t hear or didn’t feel like replying.
We came upon a grassy hill, which I for some reason thought would have been the same hill the Sullivan house rested on back on the real Earth. The hill turned out to have a door in the side, a sort of underground building built into the hill. It occurred to me that all of their buildings may have been built this way, leaving the landscape itself uninterrupted.
The door slid to the side and as we passed through I saw that the door and the mechanism seemed to be made of carved stone, something dense and smooth. Maybe granite. I don’t know my rocks. We were led down a hall lined with more hooded nudists. The overhead lights were cut into the ceiling and seemed to emit a perfectly natural sunlight that was somehow soothing. As we passed, the observers nodded and leaned to each other and gestured, noticing things and pointing them out to their neighbor. What was missing from this was any sound. No whispering, no grunting. They must have had specific instructions from the big guy not to speak and I thought maybe they spoke a foreign language when among themselves.
We entered a large, round ballroom-type chamber, and John and I stopped dead cold. In the center of the room was an enormous, flaming, golden statue. And I don’t mean it was painted gold, either. It was gold, a twenty-foot-tall represen ta tion of the image on the banner outside. John and me and Molly, our backs to each other, ready for battle. A fountain of flame poured up from the center of the statue, so each of our backs were to it.
I said, “I think they were expecting us.”
John nodded. “Look at that. It looks like the flame is shooting out of our asses.”
We were led down a hall and into a small, round room with white walls that had a rough texture like stucco. The only furniture was two large, elaborately curved chairs that seemed to be made of uncut wood, as if the branches of a tree had grown into four legs and arms and a back, purely by chance. On the floor was a pillow, presumably for the dog.
The man gestured to the chairs and we sat, dog included. The man walked past me and stopped, observing the blood running down my neck.
“Your injury. Let us tend to it.” He looked out through the open doorway and silently gestured to someone out there.
“Our world,” he said, “is far more advanced than yours. For reasons you’ll understand shortly.”
A thin, bony naked woman entered the room, carry ing two small, white kittens. She sat one of the fluffy cats in my lap and stuffed the other down my shirt. She turned and left.
“There,” said the large man. “The kittens will make your sad go away.”
The man looked back at the doorway we came through and, on its own, a door slid from the wall and clicked closed. The operation of the door was a whisper-quiet SSSSssss-fump. The inside of the door carried the same rough white texture, and the lines of the door disappeared once it was closed. I suddenly had the claustrophobia a bird fetus must feel at the moment before kicking its way out of the egg. The kitten scratched my chest and I opened my shirt to let it flop out onto my lap.
The man came around to the wall in front of us, an excited expression on his face that didn’t translate through his mask that well.
“I suppose you are wondering where you are.”
I raised my hand. “I’m going to say that we’re in an alternate universe of some kind.”
“That is correct. Do not think of it as a physical location. Think of it as another possible arrangement of the atoms in your universe to form something else. Today’s cloud is tomorrow’s puddle.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s much clearer.”
Undaunted, the large man said, “But to perceive one world, and then the next, requires a point of connection or-”
“A wormhole?” said John, hoping to usher the guy along.
“I am unfamiliar with the term. Tell me, what was it like? Passing through?”
I shrugged and said, “I wasn’t really paying attention.”
John said, “Yeah, it wasn’t that great.”
The man waited for quite a long time for us to add something, but we did not. Finally he said, “We have been awaiting your coming, as you can see. We have worked for many years, suffered many tragic setbacks, in order to find and communicate with another plane such as yours. Some thought that travel from one to another was impossible, but here you are. Your world, you see, is a sort of twin to ours, an offspring born of the same litter.”
The man turned and gestured to the wall and the letter “Y” appeared in black. Suddenly I realized that the texture on the walls was moving and twitching and that it was not stucco or plaster. They were insects, clustered together to cover the entire surface of the room. They were the size of dimes and seemed to have the chameleon’s ability to change the color of their shells at will.
“Up until here,” said the man, pointing to the place where the trunk of the “Y” split into two branches, “our histories were identical. This spot represents the year 1864, as you would call it, or Year Minus Sixty-two, as we would call it. There was a man named Adam Rooney from Tennessee. In your world and ours. In your world, he was killed at age seventeen during the Civil War, gored while trying to crossbreed a bull and a Clydesdale. In our world, the man survived.”
The ranks of bugs on the wall changed colors again, turning shades of brown and tan and black, forming a rough portrait of an older man, smoking a pipe and looking out at the viewer through thick eyeglasses. He had a white Col o nel Sanders beard. “Mr. Rooney,” he continued, “was a genius. He went on to perform experiments with what he would call beastiology.”
“Yes,” John said. “People from our South are into that as well.”
The large man skipped a beat and continued, “This is the art of transforming naturally occurring life into forms that can be used by man to better the world. By 1881 Rooney had a self-shearing sheep and a species of snake that could harvest corn. By 1890 his group had an insectile flying machine. In 1902, or Year Minus Twenty-four in our terms, he created a primitive thinking machine from the brain of a pig.”
The image behind the man changed to a color depiction of several men standing over a vat of fluid. Inside it floated a twisted and deformed mass of what looked like brain tissue, about the size of a small dog. The men were wearing lab coats.
“I have studied your world for the last de cade, your language, your history. It is astonishing to me that you went to such unending lengths to build computation machines from metal and silicon switches when you have much more efficient versions inside your own skulls. Did this not occur to your scientists? By your year 1922, we had self-feeding, self-healing, self-growing and self-modifying computers, organic ones, that were approximately ten times as powerful as what you are using now in your world.”
The image shifted again, and this time a group of a dozen very proud-looking men were standing in front of a monster. The thing rose up behind them, no longer confined to a tank of fluid. It looked like a tree carved out of whale guts. It was a hideous twist of meat and fibers and strands that unspooled here and there like spiderweb. It stood as tall as a small tree, maybe twice as high as a man.
I got a dizzy spell, closed my eyes. A concussion? I clutched the kittens, one of them meowed. In just a few moments, I found I really did feel better.
“In 1926, or what we know as Year One, Mr. Rooney passed away. But something miraculous happened with the greatest of Mr. Rooney’s creations, the computation machine that had aided him with all of his other creations. On the very day Mr. Rooney passed, his creation became sentient.”
The large man gave a practiced pause in the middle of what I assumed was a prepared speech. This was where we were supposed to gasp in surprise, I guess. I nodded politely.
“It gave a name to itself,” said the large man, “and expressed desires and emotions. This was an astonishing surprise. This creation carried on Rooney’s work and conformed all of living nature to urge forth the advancement of mankind.”
Suddenly our vision was flooded with a view of an open, muddy field. The entire room had switched to a full-motion image, a panoramic view that made me dizzy. The image zoomed in on a long trench, like those used in World War I. The trench extended off in both directions and standing along the lip of the trench were men and women and children, lined up shoulder to shoulder. Some of the children were crying. Everyone was wearing clothes that were streaked brown and white and seemed to be made entirely of thin strips wrapped around and around their bodies. I thought for a moment that they were all wrapped in bacon.
The people seemed to obey an unheard command and all stepped down into the muddy trench. The children had to be dragged down against their will. Suddenly, puffs of dirt burst up from the ground around their bare feet and then the trench was filling with a dark flood. A close-in shot revealed the flood to be thousands and thousands of spiders, sharp bodies and yellow stripes. Bred for war.
There was a chorus of screams. The spiders swarmed over the victims, burrowing into skin and through ragged holes in muscle. I saw a spider burst out of one man’s eye, a half dozen tearing themselves out of holes in another man’s back, emerging from his gut and carry ing loops of intestine with them. Blood sprayed, limbs fell to the ground, bones were torn from legs and rib cages.
And then, the spiders were gone. The view lingered on the torn and bloodied victims and I realized that none had been killed. Instead, the spiders had left them in piles, hundreds and hundreds in a screaming, red, writhing mass, everyone missing limbs and baseball-sized chunks of flesh, men left blind and deaf and unable to move. No one came to their aid. The shot pulled back to reveal the trench stretched for miles in both directions, and the entire length now ran pink like a highway on a roadmap, the screams swelling up and up-
Then it was gone. The white room was back and the large man was standing before us, beaming with what I was pretty sure was pride. He said, “There are always those who resist progress.”
My eyes bounced around the room and I again had that suffocating feeling. No door. Hell, I couldn’t even point to the spot where the door had been. I looked over at John and he seemed to be trying to figure out if his chair could be used as a weapon. It looked rooted to the floor.
“Now,” said the large man, “knowing your world, this part may be a difficulty for you. Let me give you an example. In your world, as in mine, is it not considered bad to take and use, without permission, an object that another man is currently using or depending on?”
“Yes, in our world we call this ‘stealing,’ ” said John, with some impatience. “It is considered a greater crime, though, to unleash killer spiders on an unarmed crowd. We call that ‘arachnicide.’ ”
“But what if the object that you stole would later have injured or killed the man? Then stealing it would be saving his life. Or what if he had intended to use it as a weapon later, against an innocent person? And what if that weapon would have killed the child who would later grow up to cure a terrible disease?”
John, who had settled right into this conversation, scratched his chin, shrugged and said, “Well, you don’t know but you do the best you-”
“What if you could know,” said the large man. “You already, in your world, have machines that can compute and forecast outcomes and scenarios, that can look at air temperatures and wind patterns and predict the weather ahead of time. What if there was a thinking machine, an entity so powerful that it could foresee the outcome of any action? In it you would have the ultimate morality, the true ability to know which path was the correct one.”
I said, “Well, we have people in our world who believe in a…”
“I am not talking about a belief. What I am talking about exists here and now, in our world. It is something you can touch and see and smell. Something real.”
The lower half of his mask twisted and I thought he was smiling.
“Follow me.”
Mercifully, the door opened. I had the urge to knock the guy down and make a run for it, but where would we go? It was impossible to be farther from home than we were. Our home, in fact, literally did not exist at that moment. The large man led us back into the hallway, now empty of people. He led us to another stone doorway and when the door slid back we were greeted with a shaft, about as wide as the shaft for a big ser vice elevator. It led straight down, a row of lights vanishing into darkness hundreds of feet below.
Thin, black legs appeared over the edge, each as long as my body. I jumped back and heard a squeal as I stepped on a kitten, which was apparently following me. The large man put a calming hand on my shoulder.
The legs belonged to a spider.
A spider the size of a van.
It crawled up the opposite wall of the shaft, its mass neatly filling the entire space as if it were made for it. Its huge, bulbous back was facing us. A split formed in the spider’s body and it opened, revealing a rather clean interior that was a milky white. A light even blinked on in the cavity.
The large man walked inside the spider, there was room to stand up in there. He welcomed us inside and I decided on the spot that I wasn’t doing it, never, ever, ever. But John went in and then the dog and then the fluffy kittens, and at that point I didn’t really have a choice. I got inside the thing and the cavity closed and sealed us in. After a moment the spider jolted and we were riding down.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked John.
“That if Franz Kafka were here his head would explode?”
“Actually, yeah.”
The large man, intent on continuing the tour, said, “We are on the verge of entering Year Seventy-seven of our new era, the era of guidance and enlightenment. We have made great strides. There is little that we need that we cannot extract from the very living energy that is the most powerful force the universe produces. Life is the energy that controls all other energies. Living man can split the atom and travel the stars and, soon, move from reality to reality. But it is life that is the engine at the center of all.”
We rode for several more minutes then, much to my relief, the spider opened and let us out into a large, open room that had a dome shape like the last one and like the underground complex we had left in our world. John nudged me and pointed to a row of windows above us, like the observation areas seen in some hospital operating rooms. Behind it were naked hooded figures, a crowd. I wondered if they had paid for tickets to this. Many people in the front row of the observation deck were pressed nakedly against the glass, producing a squished scrotum effect that I knew I would see in my nightmares. Just below the windows were clear vats, like man-sized Mason jars. They lined the walls and each were filled with deep red fluid. I was about to ask the man what the fluid was, but then he disappeared through another door and urged us to follow. We went through a hall, past another door, then the stench hit me.
Sulfur. A smell so strong it was a solid thing in my lungs. We went through and came out onto a catwalk, suspended in a dark space that seemed to go forever in each direction. I stepped out and stopped. I craned my neck, looking up and up and up, then looked down. I could see neither the top nor the bottom of the thing that grew before me.
Oh, dear Jesus…
“Gentlemen,” said the large man. “You are seeing what only a select few have seen. You are looking at the ultimate manifestation of Mr. Rooney’s creation, which now stands as the absolute wisdom and strength in all of existence. John, David, meet Korrok.”
I hesitate in the telling of the story at this point. When I try to bring up an image of Korrok in my mind I see only the glob of stuff that collects in the kitchen drain, the mass of grease and hair washed by years of filthy dishwater. It was like someone collected all the drain slime in the world and knitted it into something the size of the Statue of Liberty, then brought it to life with the psychotic energy that fuels lynch mobs. There was so much to Korrok that it was impossible to see it, a jumbled mess of exposed organs and fibers and dangling, club-ended limbs, of dripping orifices and slimy orbs and dark, black bulbs with colors that moved on the surface like the rainbows in an oil slick. Every inch of it was moving. I stared and stared and stared, found my brain couldn’t contain it all.
And then, in my head, I heard the high-pitched, cackling laughter of a child.
Welcome, said the alien voice in my head. It sounded like a toddler. Your wiener is even smaller in person.
It giggled. I thought, Is this Korrok?
With a tiny change in your brain chemistry, I could make you a child molester.
What do you want? I asked it, in my head.
Not big, black cocks. So we don’t have that in common.
A long, loud laugh that rattled my bones. I glanced over and saw that John and the large man were talking to each other, oblivious to me.
I thought, Get out of my head. You’re not worth talking to.
I AM KORROK. In the mountains of Uruguay, a goat gets its hoof caught in a posthole and the bone snaps like a twig. The splinter juts from its skin, blood spraying onto white fur. It is stuck like that for three days. Finally, a wolf mother comes along, carry ing her pup in her jaws. She lets the pup feed off the goat, gnawing bits of fur and skin and tearing at muscle. The goat feels it and screams and there is pain and pain and neither the goat nor the wolf nor the pup understand their place in the machine. I stand above all, and call them fags. I AM KORROK.
Fuck off. You’re just something they grew. A big, fucked-up mess. You look like you were made by a committee.
Long, loud, childish laugh.
David Wong, son of an insane prostitute and a mentally challenged Amway salesman. There are worlds and worlds and worlds, an infinity you cannot grasp. You could travel from one to another to another and find me in thousands upon thousands, spreading like stars in the sky from reality to reality. They invite me in. They give birth to me. And soon, yours will do the same, men are working tirelessly toward it. Theybring me into their world because they always want what only I can give. In this place, seven billion men bear my mark. And of the limitless infinity of worlds, I rule over almost half of them.
And then I saw, for the first time, the way the darkness in the chamber moved. The black shapes, the shadow men, the little slips of nothing swirled in this place, covering Korrok like smoke from an oil fire. They moved over and through him, in and out of every orifice and fold of skin. His dark disciples. I heard a sound and realized I was being talked to from the outside. I turned to face the large man.
“… the greatest good for the greatest people,” he was finishing. “So you understand. When Korrok judges, there is no question. All of the human minds who have ever lived in history, all of your thinkers and writers and phi los o phers and teachers, could not equal even one node of Korrok’s neural web. We have learned this the hard way.”
I looked down at Molly, then sort of nudged her belly with my foot. Try to loosen that shit up in there.
The large man said, “Twenty years ago, Korrok foretold your coming. Korrok showed us the way to your world, opened lines of communication. We could not cross to your plane ourselves. We tried. Oh, did we. You see, when a man is transferred to the other plane, the body arrives. But only the body, walking aimless like a cow. The person becomes… detached in the transition. But nonetheless, we worked tirelessly to create in your world what we have here, in preparation for the glorious day when we could overcome these obstacles and set our own feet on the land and see your sun with our own eyes.”
The large man put a hand on my shoulder. I shuddered.
“Your friend, the girl, Amy Sullivan. She is known because she was the first step. She was successfully transported from one location to another in your world, without passing anywhere in between and without harm. Your people did this. Korrok showed them the way. With that, we knew we were close, could see the faint glow of the sun signaling a new dawn. Gentlemen, with your arrival, that dawn has come. What one man can do, other men can do, and you will show us the way to pass from world to world. It is the ultimate good. And it is impossible for it to be otherwise. Korrok told us you would be honored, and well you should be.”
The man craned his neck, looking up in the darkness. He said, “You cannot begin to calculate the wisdom, the continued melding of a billion geniuses. You see, in our world, whenever a man is born with special wisdom and intelligence, he shares his wisdom with Korrok so that Korrok may be greater. Watch.”
A thin structure emerged from the wall about two stories above us. It tilted down and seemed to have no steps, as if it were a chute of some kind. An orifice that seemed to have something like a beak opened on Korrok at the end of the chute. A fat man came tumbling down the slide, his limbs flailing. He wore the same brown strips of clothing I saw in the video of the bug room. Korrok snatched the man into the beak, crunching his bones in a wet, red spray.
I heard a high-pitched laugh in my head.
Mmmmmm! Bacon!
In front of me a slit formed in Korrok and opened wide. An electric blue eye the size of a movie screen was peering out at me. A thin, black, vertical pupil.
I ran.
I sprinted back through the door, off the catwalk, back through the other doors and down the hall and back into the round room with the naked viewing gallery. People were still up there, rustling and gesturing now, excited to see the crazy happenings with the strange visitor. The door out of the round room slid shut before I got to it and I slapped at it in effec tive ly with my palms. The large man called out from behind me and I spun, breathing hard. He held out his hands in a calming gesture.
“We understand. I assure you, we do. I have observed you. You know I have. And you have seen some of our work. We are advancing into your world with astonishing speed. Our workers prepare day and night. There are legions on our side there. And soon all of your turmoil and unrest and confusion will vanish under the soft hand of Korrok.”
A kitten put its paw on my foot. I punted it across the room.
“Just watch,” said the large man. “We can perform what in your world would be a miracle. Observe.”
The floor under my feet vanished. Or, I should say, it turned transparent, like glass. Under me were dozens of terrified upturned faces. They were uncovered and they looked just like people from my world. And right then, somehow I knew that under the large man’s mask I would find something quite different than the wide eyes and unshaven faces I saw now below me. I was looking down at what was a sort of prison chamber on the floor below, each person down there trapped in a hexagonal glass section not much wider than their shoulders, a massive crystalline beehive. The floor wasn’t quite soundproof, because I could faintly hear their screams. I saw John step through the door and stop in revulsion.
The large man motioned with his hand and one hexagon rose silently up from the floor. Inside was a man in his thirties with curly black hair, held there in the glass booth like a museum exhibit. I heard the hiss of the same mechanism raising other pods, and soon we were surrounded by six of the hexagonal glass booths. The large man said, “We command the cell itself, at will. We can turn muscle to bone and back, skin to carapace, fingers into claws. And we can do it in any way we choose. Watch.”
The curly-haired man stared at us in terror, his palms flat against the glass. Then he screamed. It wasn’t immediately apparent what was wrong with him, but then I saw one of his knees bend backward, splitting the flesh. The other one did the same, his legs extending upward, jutting as high as his shoulders. His skin melted from his face and hardened into a small, insectile head and skin that became gray and notched like alligator hide. Molly whined and trotted off into a corner. I wasn’t sure if she was terrified or if the burritos were finally getting to her.
I pivoted around the room and was now looking at a half dozen of the beasts that had chased us here, the beasts from Jim’s basement. Beastments. The glass walls lowered and the creatures were standing open in the room now, facing us in a circle.
“And once the bodies have been changed,” said the large man, “the brains have changed. Memories are only arrangements of neural connections and once altered they can no more resist our commands than a twig can resist the flame.” He studied me from behind his rubbery face, said, “As you know.”
I moved toward the large man, intending to take him hostage and negotiate an exit from this place. I reached for the gun in my pocket, realized I didn’t have it and pulled out the spare magazine instead. I threw it at the large man and he flinched as it bounced off his chest. I lunged.
They moved so fast. In a blur I had a bundle of talons clamped around my neck and arms and legs. Two of the monsters were on me, holding me still as a Ken doll. The large man looked downcast, I suppose. The mask sagged a little. He said, “What we have for you to do is so important. Korrok has seen the outcome. It will happen if you resist or if you do not resist. All that will change is your personal well-being. It is for the greater good. Do you not see that?”
He almost sounded on the verge of tears, crushed by my tragic inability to grasp the obvious. Two of the monsters carried me from the room, dragging me backward down the hall. The other four descended upon John and I heard him cursing loudly. The large man followed me and the door sealed over the sound of John screaming that he was having a seizure and that they should let him go. I screamed, “Light the dog! John! Light the dog!” but I assumed the doors were just as soundproof from the inside as out. I was hauled into yet another small, round room, accompanied by the large man. The door swept shut behind us and the two creatures turned me loose. I saw we were not alone, that there was a small figure huddled against the far wall. Red hair.
“Amy!”
I ran toward her, and was smacked in the face by nothing. I fell to the ground and realized I had run into a glass or otherwise transparent barrier that separated the room.
Amy looked up at me in dull surprise. She looked to be beyond shock. Largeman said, “Our representatives are all over your world. We have been planning this for years and all of the pieces are in place. It is just a matter of clearing the way, of wiping your world clean. Two glasses. Yours with water, ours with wine. To fill the other with wine, the water must first be spilled. Do you not see that the wine is better?”
A door opened on Amy’s side of the room, and two men came in. They were not naked, far from it. They were dressed in what looked like layers of leather half a foot thick, shoulders bulging with some kind of hard padding. They looked like members of a bomb squad. Between them they carried a container the size of a fifty-five-gallon drum. It was red and stamped with an enormous yellow warning label captioned in a foreign language that used lettering like Elvish. They sat the container on the floor and activated a latch. They then turned and ran from the room.
Amy stood and pressed herself against the far wall. The top of the container opened and slid aside. I held my breath, eyes bouncing from Amy to the container, waiting to see what would emerge from the dark opening. I ran up and pressed my palms against the glass, screamed her name. I noticed she didn’t have a left hand.
A single, tiny white insect zipped out of the container. Thin and wingless but flying nonetheless, it streaked through the air and moved toward Amy. She backed away from it, following it with her eyes as it swirled overhead.
“It is a miraculous being,” said Largeman. “It has the mind and instincts and urges of a man, only without limbs or nerves or sense organs. It knows only to fly and to breed, and once it finds its host it will produce twenty thousand offspring in a matter of minutes. They grow quickly in the soft tissue of the host and then they burst forth, each to find new hosts. And so on.”
I knew that already. The insect buzzed around and around and around. Then it landed on her shoulder and Amy swatted it like a mosquito. I screamed at her again, she couldn’t hear me. Then it was Amy’s turn to scream. She was pulling her hand back and looking at it like it had just been impaled on a tack. She shook the hand and rubbed it on the wall and did everything she could to try to dislodge the insect, but it was useless. It had burrowed into her.
I banged on the glass with my hands, looking in, helpless. Amy looked at her hand and at me, baffled, not even sure what any of this meant. I spun on Largeman, said, “Undo it. Give her an antidote, insecticide, what ever kills those things.”
“Any such solution would kill her as well. No, this can end only one way. Korrok has seen it.”
I turned back and saw Amy had slid down and was sitting on the floor again, looking hopeless. Looking like she expected to wake up at any moment, find herself back in bed.
“The future is what it is,” said Largeman. “Your people have been poisoned with the myths of lone men turning the tide, improbable tales of heroes outrunning explosions with their feet. Such tales are forbidden here. Events are laid forth and they cannot be turned. There are no heroes, Mr. Wong. Korrok has computed it down to the atom and we have left nothing to chance.”
At that moment, the door swung open. A slimy spray of brown flew across the room in a wide arc.
JOHN HAD A plan.
If he is to be believed, while I was being hauled into the room with Amy, the four Beastments holding John tried to keep him still as he proclaimed seizure and thrashed his limbs about.
“SEIZURE! I’M SEIZURING HERE!”
This caused a commotion up in the observation deck, with the observers not sure what to do with Largeman gone and the Transdimensional Visitor Festival spinning quickly out of control. Molly began whining in earnest at that moment, quivering all over. John knew that both of General Valdez’s Mexillent Micro wave Burritos were about to make a reappearance.
A door opened and an emergency crew rushed in, four hooded women each carry ing a kitten in each hand. More people filed into the room behind them, and John figured they were from the observation deck and were using this as an excuse to get a closer look. These people seemed to have some authority, and with a gesture of their hands the four inhuman guards let go of John’s arms. He fell to the floor and immediately the girls piled their kittens on his body and fussed over him.
“I must have my medicine!!” John shouted to a small, pale man who he guessed was Asian. Neither the man nor anyone else seemed to know what John was saying. “My seizure medicine!”
John reached into his pocket and several of the onlookers jumped back. John pulled out his tobacco and cigarette papers and held them up to show they were not weapons. The group stood and watched in fascination as John sat and brushed the kittens aside. He gathered all of his concentration and went about rolling the one, perfect cigarette that could save our universe.
He spread the tobacco, rolled, wound up with a cone-shaped tobacco horn that had John cursing in frustration. He tried a second time, almost got it, and then finally a third. Perfect.
He glanced at Molly and nodded. Then, with a squeal and a sound like a hard rainfall, Molly let go. A spray of shit ejected from her hindquarters, and in it was a lump that John instantly recognized as half a dog bone that went undigested since it was an unstable, ultra-high explosive compound instead of the antlers and fermented cow fur that actual dog biscuits are made of. John lit his perfect cigarette, took a puff and nodded his thanks to the group.
John leapt to his feet. He held out his hands to the group of humans and the four monstrosities in the room. He said, “Everybody stand back!” He went to the puddle of feces, grimaced as he fished out the soggy chunk of explosive dog biscuit. He used his pinky finger to dig out a small dent in the half bone, then lodged the unlit end of the cigarette into it. He set the smoking apparatus onto a dry piece of floor, stood, checked his watch, then looked over at the thin yellow-brown stream that was leaking from the dog.
“Molly, it’s time to go bye-bye.”
John picked up the shitting dog, holding her across his chest with both arms, her paws dangling. He sprinted out of the room, screaming “Get out! Everyone get out! It’s gonna blow!”
John hefted the dog down the hall, came to the first closed door he could find. He saw no handle on the door and no buttons or controls. He screamed, “Open, you fuck!” and the door slid obediently open.
John saw Largeman and saw a room imprisoning Amy and saw me looking outraged and decided it was best to turn Molly’s ass toward Largeman and hope she shat on him. She did.
I threw my hand in front of my face as warm shit splattered in a wide stream across the room, the dog letting out an agonized yelp. Largeman was surprised by this turn of events and threw himself to the ground. John let Molly go, pulled his Zippo from his pocket, lit it and flung it at one of the Beastments. The lighter smacked it in the head with a flare of yellow and blue, the thing letting out a howl. John then ran over and administered a hard kick to Largeman’s ribs. In a blur the two Beastments were on him, Largeman telling them not to kill him, everything was under control.
As if to specifically contradict this assertion, I noticed a lump of fairly solid feces on the floor from which emerged another, cracked piece of our dog biscuit bomb. I grabbed it in my hand, ran and dove and snatched John’s lighter from the floor. I saw the group from the hall pushing in through the door now, including four of the Beastments that were tossing naked people aside and imposing themselves into the room. I held up the dog turd and flicked the lighter, the flame dancing an inch away from the explosive excrement.
“There’s enough explosive in this poo to collapse this whole cave. Now back the fuck off.”
Whatever basic English these people knew apparently didn’t include those two phrases. Nobody moved for a long time, the only sound the wet, farty mechanism of Molly’s digestive system.
“NOW!”
Largeman understood perfectly. He stumbled to his feet and nodded to the Beastments in the door. It occurred to me for the first time that the people here communicated with a sort of telepathy. I would have to make some time later to be fascinated by that. At his inaudible instructions the room was cleared and the door was shut. Only John and I and Molly were left, along with Largey Largeman. I turned to Amy, who was looking at us with eyes squinted in a sort of disgusted, accident- scene curiosity.
I said, “Get back! Back against the wall!”
John and I didn’t need to discuss the plan. We got on the floor, dug out the hunk of dog bone from the poo-we had maybe a quarter of the bone-and we used John’s car keys to chip off a tiny hunk the size of a grain of rice. We used some of the dog poo to stick the shard to the glass, about two inches off the floor. John lit the Zippo, leaned it against the glass so that the flame licked the smear of feces.
We threw ourselves to the far end of the room and covered our heads. The sound was massive, a sharp PAKK! that was like nails in the eardrums. There was no sound of shattering glass and I was afraid it had failed. I rose and saw in the clearing smoke that a large, puckered hole had formed in the clear wall, like a hole punched in taffy. Amy ran out and I threw my arms around her.
She said, “Where are we? I don’t know how-”
“Later.” I turned to Largeman. “If you can’t cure her then you get us outta here, get us back to our world. We’ll find a way.”
“Gladly. We haven’t long before she… hatches.”
I said, “And let me guess. If she dies, these things come out of her right away, right?”
He didn’t reply, but I knew I was right.
“Okay, so you got some serious motivation to keep her safe, right? Now get us the fuck out of here.”
John said, “You better hurry, too.”
TWO ROOMS AWAY, an inch of ash fell from a rolled cigarette crammed into a poo-smeared dog biscuit. A faint ember of orange light smoldered away at the remaining two inches.
JOHN SAID TO me, “We have” -he thought for a moment- “five minutes, thirteen seconds before biscuit time.”
I set my watch. I couldn’t find the countdown feature, managed to change the date and the time zone both before I got it set, then had to adjust for the time lost.
4:48.
We burst out of the door, me with my arm around Largeman’s neck, holding the lighter to his cheek.
“Nobody move, or I’ll light his fucking face on fire!” I meant it, too.
Either they took this threat seriously or Largeman was giving them instructions to back off. We pushed him down the hall and he pointed us to an elevator.
4:12.
We climbed inside another giant spider, much to Amy’s horror, and took an agonizingly long, slow ride down. Amy was having trouble standing, squeezing her eyes shut and wrapping her arms around her gut.
Something’s growing in there. Oh, shit, shit, shit.
Down and down and down. These people built their skyscrapers upside down.
1:32.
Finally, it stopped. We emerged in a round, tube-like hallway. We passed through one thick, round door after another.
:58.
We entered an enormous chamber. Organic machines and clear tubes and huge, egg-shaped pods that thrummed with power. I barely noticed any of it. What caught my attention was an enormous creature in the center of the room, shaped something like a huge, elephant-sized toad. It squatted in the center of the room and at the soundless command of Largeman, it opened its enormous mouth wide.
Blackness. Inside this creature was the same swirling darkness we saw in the dark column in the mall complex. I squinted and with concentration I could see light, shapes, a room. A moving figure…
:36.
Largeman stepped aside and pointed us toward the mouth.
“Go. Now.”
I said, “Where does it go? I mean, specifically, where will we come out?”
“Theoretically? You should not emerge far from where you went in. But it is difficult to predict.”
“Amy survived going through. She’ll survive going back?”
No answer. I stepped up to the dark portal and as I got closer I realized I could see faintly through it. There did seem to be a small room on the other side, barely visible. I held my breath and stepped into the mouth of the beast, felt again that disconnected, time-lost feeling of an unexpected nap. I was pitched forward and landed on a hardwood floor. I looked up and saw I was in a hallway, turned and saw an open doorway with a VNV Nation poster on it.
I stood and realized I was looking through the Irish elevator door in the Sullivan house, only instead of open air I was looking into the toad room I had just come from. The door stood open next to me, as if it had been flung open when I fell in.
:22.
Molly leapt through and trotted past me. John pushed Amy through and she tumbled onto the floor and instantly went into a fetal position, face twisted in pain. There was a commotion in the other room now. I could see a dozen of the Beastments in there, wreaking havoc. There was a crowd of naked humanity as word seemed to have spread that things were about to go terribly wrong.
Largeman had ahold of John as they had apparently either changed their mind or had decided to keep him as a souvenir. There was a struggle of flailing arms and kicking feet and John grabbed Largeman’s face and came away with a leathery bundle-the man’s mask.
John froze. The man’s back was to me so I couldn’t see what John saw, but the look in John’s eyes was a sort of sudden blankness. He didn’t scream or puke or react at all; it was like his brain suddenly crashed like Windows.
I heard footsteps in the hall of the Sullivan house. I spun and saw Robert North jogging toward me from the stairwell, wearing a long, tan woman’s overcoat and an enormous feathery hat.
“Hey!” I shouted. “We made it! She’s sick, she has-look, get me some, uh… a cross or some holy water or… oh, get the Jesus picture! We’ll rub it on her.”
:11.
I turned and saw that the man had snatched the mask from John’s hand and was sticking it back on his face. I opened my mouth to scream to John, then wondered if sound would even travel through the rift. Then that question was answered when-
:00.
– a deep, heavy THOOMPH like a sonic boom hammered the world on the other side of the door. The crowd in the room flew into a frenzy. John kicked his way to his feet and ran my direction. He threw himself through, fell into the hallway. I went to close the door, but North calmly strode over. He reached out a hand, stopped the door, and looked in at Largeman. The two stared at each other across worlds and the man on the other side mouthed something that seemed like a bitter insult. Though I couldn’t hear it and I knew neither of these men, the meaning was clear. I should have known you were behind this.
Amy’s skin was bulging and swelling in places. I grabbed her hand and wrapped an arm around her neck and pulled her close, whispered that it was going to be okay, that we would get her fixed right up, that-
BANG!
There was suddenly warm blood all over me and a ragged hole appeared in Amy’s temple. She went limp in my arms.
Standing a few feet away, was North.
He was holding a little silver gun.
A woman’s gun.
A thread of smoke drifting up from the barrel.
EVERYTHING INSIDE MY head turned black as deep space. I just sat there, shirt and arms flecked with red, just looking at her, at her slack face, her mouth hanging half open. And suddenly her body was being pulled from my arms and North was pulling her, dragging Amy by her feet like a rag doll. John just stood there, he just fucking stood there while all this happened and I found I had no strength to stand.
North wrestled with Amy’s body and threw the legs into the doorway, then came around and lifted the shoulders and pushed them through. The crowd in the other world, in the toad room, seemed completely confused by this, a dead body forcing its own way through the portal. But Largeman got it and he screamed. He screamed so loud I could hear it on the other side and soon the people around him understood it and bedlam ensued.
It was too late. Amy’s body ruptured, spilling out a cloud of the swirling white insects. The flying parasites saw a room full of hosts and poured forth into the naked crowd. A stampede ensued. The rest of Amy’s body exploded, bits of blood and bone flying back into the hallway. I heard a metallic tinkling sound like a coin hitting the floor, just as North slammed the door shut. He opened it again and saw only the Undisclosed night sky and a downpour of snow.
I started to stand but North spun and put the pistol on me.
“I know what you are thinking,” he said.
“And you are wrong.”
He started to say something else but at that moment John came up behind him and punched him in the kidneys. North arched his back and suddenly I saw the metallic object I had heard hit the floor. It was a shiny, curved bit of steel, flecked with red. Something a surgeon would use to brace a broken spine.
I picked up the piece of metal and jabbed it into the wrist of North’s gun hand. I felt it go in, punching through skin and popping between the two bones of his forearm. North shrieked and the gun clattered to the floor.
I grabbed the gun, pointed it at North’s heart, and watched him melt. Literally. He fell into a puddle of goo and, from it, emerged a creature not unlike a jellyfish.
A man-of-war, actually…
It floated up, just as we had seen it do a couple of days ago. I squeezed the trigger and sent shot after shot at the thing, chips of wood flecking off the walls. The jellyfish barely noticed. It floated downstairs and Molly ran barking after it.
We never saw it again.
There was a puddle of marbled goo on the floor that seemed to be steaming, dissolving. North’s leftovers.
I took a step forward and yanked open the door, just as North had. A blast of cold air and a dusting of snow blew in; the Sullivans’ backyard lay ten feet below. I was amazed that there was still light outside. The whole thing had only taken an hour or so. I sat down on the hardwood floor, sticky dots of blood drying on my face, snowflakes melting on my knees. I couldn’t think of a single reason to ever stand up again.
WE WENT OUT to my truck, then remembered that my truck was not at this house but was at the mall about a mile away. I also had lost my keys at some point but couldn’t remember when. We set out wading through the storm, not sure if a person could walk that far in ankle-deep snow without getting frostbite. We didn’t care. We plowed through it, not talking. The afternoon was fast fading to evening and what would happen after darkness fell and the shadows grew, we didn’t know. A few minutes into our trip, during which we made depressingly little progress and lost feeling in all twenty of our toes, a pickup came grinding up behind us, pulling over just ahead. The driver leaned out, a young guy with a red baseball cap.
“Yo!” he said, looking over the dusting of snow on our coats. “What’s up? Want a ride?”
We did.
The guy had bucket seats so John climbed into the bed and rode it out back there. I asked the guy if he was going by the old mall, he said he wasn’t, I asked him if he was going south close to my neighborhood, he said he was. I looked around for Molly, saw she hadn’t followed us, and climbed in. We drove.
“This be some snowy shit, yo!” he said. He had a little triangle of hair under his bottom lip. A soul patch, they call it. I said, “Yep.”
“It’s been hella slick drivin’ in this shit. I’m swervin’ and gettin’ stuck here and there. All the other drivers be hatin’ on me.”
I stared at the man.
“Are you Fred Durst? Of the band Limp Bizkit?”
He smirked and concentrated on the road.
Eventually he said, “Gettin’ hella dark out here. I’m thinkin’ you two don’t wanna be around when it gets fully dark, yo. Things be movin’ and suckin’ and hatin’ on everything. But you know that, am I right?”
I said, “And you’re saying that you’re not one of them?” I glanced in the rearview mirror at John, huddled against the wind in the truck bed. I gauged whether or not I could get the wheel away from this guy and shove him out if he should try to eat me or whatever.
Fred Durst said, “Well, I ain’t Fred Durst. You’ll see what you wanna see. If John were in here, he’d see somebody else. But the point is there’s darkness, yeah, but there’s light and it all balances out. Like them yin and yang fishes, forever bitin’ each other’s tails. You know how it be.”
I studied his blue eyes, said, “Why don’t you tell me who you really are before I punch you in the face?”
“Yo, I told you. You just didn’t listen. But I’m on your side. I been watching you. In fact, you could say that I’ve been ‘dogging’ you the whole time.”
“I have no clue what you’re talking about and I’m in no mood to be riddled. Talk straight or shut the fuck up. Are you the good witch? Some kind of angel? Are you Jesus, Fred Durst?”
“It don’t matter. You had a job to do and you did it, even if you didn’t know you had a job to do or that you were doin’ it. The blade that cuts out the colon cancer’s got an ugly job, right? I guess it’s gotta have faith in the surgeon to get it through while its head’s bein’ sliced through blood and impacted shit.”
“You know what? Fuck you. All this, this whole thing, is bullshit from top to bottom. I don’t even know what I believe but I know we killed some ugliness back there. And Amy’s dead because of it and she never hurt anybody. She’s born and she gets shit on for twenty years and then she dies for no reason and I’m still alive and I should have been killed a long time ago. Hell, I’ve considered killing me several times, as a favor to the world.”
Fred Durst said, “Yo, I know it’s hard. You know there was that boxer, back in the nineties, Evander Holyfield. You know he got to be champion and then he had that heart disease. Ended his career, was gonna end his life. He goes to this televangelist, one of those hairspray-and-polyester dudes. Dude prays and dances over him and Evander goes back to the doctor. Doctor says he didn’t have heart disease no more. Holyfield says it’s a miracle but it turned out they had diagnosed him wrong.”
“That could not have anything less to do with this conversation. You know what you people are like, Fred? You’re like the genie from the bottle in those stories. You get a wish and you wish for a million dollars and then it turns out the million is from an insurance settlement because your best friend died.”
“Yep,” said Fred, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “He neeeever had the heart problem. Ain’t that somethin’? Turned out it was a smudge on his X-rays or some shit. Do you wish you had died instead of Amy? Like, if you could do it over again?”
“Fuck off.”
“I’m asking the question, yo. Would you do it?”
“Yes.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“You’d trade your life for hers? So tomorrow David Wong is dead, Amy Sullivan is alive?”
“Stop asking me, Fred. You’re making my head hurt.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, what are you gonna do, shoot me? Shoot me and resurrect Amy? Or tell me that I’ve been dead the whole time like in that shitty Bruce Willis movie?”
“Dude, how would you have gone to work every day if you were-”
“Shut up, Fred. We’re here.”
We rolled to a stop and I saw my little house, all the edges rounded under snow. Fred said, “You know what, don’t be too afraid of the dark, yo. You got a watch on your back now. Okay, dude?”
I had nothing else to say to Fred so I jumped out and trudged to the sidewalk. I heard the truck pull away and John came up behind me. I got halfway to my door and stopped. Footprints. Fresh prints, leading from the front door around back. The back being where the toolshed was.
I had, incredibly, forgotten all about the toolshed and the body within. I went around, following the tracks and finding myself walking slower and slower, shuffling like a man on his way to death row.
I go around that corner, and everything will change. Everything.
I had put it off long enough, though. I should have done this two nights ago. I rounded the corner and saw the toolshed and was unsurprised to see the door was standing wide open. The lock was hanging there, unhooked, and that was no surprise, either. I had put the key back on the nail by the kitchen door and any cop with a warrant could have gotten it. I went to the door, swung it open and saw two things that could not register in my mind.
The first was Amy.
She was standing there, alive, arms wrapped around her parka. She was looking down at the corpse on the floor, seeming totally lost, like something absolutely did not compute. I could sympathize with her. She heard me, looked, had an expression of shock that was almost comical. She looked at me, then at the floor, then back at me.
I said, “It’s me, Amy.”
She didn’t respond. I moved toward her, wanting to squeeze her and take her inside and never let her out of my sight again. She backed away from me, bumping into the shelf full of glass jars. She looked like she was planning her escape. I understood that, too. And that was the second thing:
The body on the floor was me.
I know my own face pretty well, even blue and frozen like a meatsicle as this one was, nestled among the wrinkled tarp that Amy had thrown open. There was a big, bloody hole right in my heart. John stepped in behind me and looked down at the body and then over at Amy, going through the same tangled path of thought I had just tread.
John said to Amy, “Can I see your feet?”
Amy didn’t answer.
John said, “I know you don’t understand this, but you gotta realize that Dave and I saw you get killed not twenty minutes ago. So we got some confusion to sort through.”
Amy nodded and spoke for the first time, saying, “Okay.”
She left the shed and sat on the steps at my back door. With the snow pouring down on her she pulled off her little leather boot and her sock. I watched as John picked up her foot, examined it, then had her do the same with the other one.
He turned to me and said, “They’re clean.”
And with that, everything snapped into place for me. All the pieces of the puzzle. If you figured it out before now, well, go win a Nobel Prize, Mr. Genius.
I said, “They’re stocking the world with their own people, with replacements. Things that can bridge the world between the spiritual and physical, Korrok extending the shadows into our world like fingers, controlling his meat puppets. That’s what they were doing in there, making things that look like people. Monsters, under their control. His control. Like with Drake. So what happened to the real Drake? Dead?”
Amy looked up, eyes wide, understanding where this was going.
John said, “Dunno. Maybe they got him and all the other people locked away somewhere. But I doubt it. You know, these replacements, the copies, they gotta have all the memories of the real people. So who knows how they use the originals.”
I said, “That mark, then, on the foot. That’s their mark. And if we had looked on the other Amy-”
“We’d have seen a mark like the symbol for pi. It’s probably a brand logo.”
“So they made an Amy,” I said. “Probably when they took her. They made a new Amy and infected her-”
“Because they knew if we thought it was her, we would try to bring her back here,” we finished together.
John said, “And that would have been the end. We would have gotten infected when she, uh, hatched, then whoever was nearby when, you know, we hatched…”
“So North knew what he was doing,” I said. “When he shot her, he knew it was the right thing. Because that wasn’t Amy.”
I stood up, took a step toward the toolshed and was stopped. I had a redhead squeezing me. Amy was clamped on with all of her strength, her arms around my ribs, her face buried in my shirt. She was crying, saying she was sorry but I couldn’t figure out for what. I ran my hand through her hair and whispered in her ear that it was almost over, that it really was going to be okay this time and I just had to take care of this one last thing.
John put a hand on her shoulder and pulled her back toward him. A strange gesture, almost protective. But I was free from her and I stepped toward the shed.
I heard Amy behind me, saying through choking sobs that she had lost the gun, that she had shot the monster at the mall and ran and ran and lost the thing in the snow. And she called a cab and-
John shushed her and she went quiet. I moved toward the toolshed, my heart pounding, suddenly feeling lighter than air, a weight lifted from my shoulders. I looked up at the snow pouring down from the night sky and suddenly everything seemed all right. I said, “North knew what he was doing, and I knew what I was doing the other night. When I shot this thing in my toolshed.”
I reached the little building. John didn’t follow, but apparently already knew what I would find. I threw aside the tarp wrapped around the corpse’s feet and began tearing at frozen laces on a pair of black leather hiking boots, just like mine. Even a scuff along the toe, like mine. The body snatchers were insane about their detail. They had to be.
I said, “I came home and I found this thing in my yard, this thing that looked just like me, and I ran in and got the gun and I popped him. He probably would’ve tried to kill me if-”
I stopped. I had pulled off the shoe and peeled off the frozen sock, but saw absolutely no mark on the dead foot. I chuckled, out loud for some reason. I dropped the foot and grabbed for the other one, started to pull apart the laces, lost the grip in my numbing fingers and threw the foot aside, realizing that I was fooling myself.
I stood there, laughing softly, steam puffing into the darkness. Then finally did what I should have done first. I went and sat on the step Amy had vacated. As I passed, John pulled Amy back behind him, backing off from me. Giving me lots of space. I started to take off my right shoe, thought, then went for the left instead. I yanked off the boot and the sock and looked at my big toe. Then I started laughing, laughing so hard I could barely breathe.
John looked at me with no expression because he already knew, looked like he had known for some time. Amy hung back, behind him, looking nervously between us. I brought up the foot and rubbed at the pi symbol on my toe, as if I could make it come off. I knew, of course, that it never, ever would.