Gwendy’s Final Task

32

WHEN GWENDY GETS BACK to her quarters, the light on her laptop is flashing. Five fresh emails have come in, but the only one she cares about is Charlotte Morgan’s. She pushes aside her paperwork and opens it.

Gwen: I didn’t think this story could get any stranger, but boy was I wrong. You were on the money about Detective Mitchell knowing more than he was telling. Take a look at the attached video and get back to me with further instructions. It’s pretty lengthy—once we got the guy talking, he wouldn’t shut up—but most of what you’re looking for can be found starting at around the seven-minute mark.

I’ve also attached a second, much shorter video that came from the iPhone of an eyewitness to Ryan’s accident (which as you surmised wasn’t an accident at all). The phone belongs (or belonged) to a man named Vernon Beeson, from Providence, Rhode Island. He was on his way to Presque Isle to see his sister. He never arrived. We can’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was now floating around in the Derry sewer system. Mitchell claims a patrolman found the phone in a trashcan outside Bassey Park. Mitchell also claims not to know what happened to Mr. Beeson. All we could get out of him on that subject was “Maybe the clown took him.” Weird, huh?

Very weird, Gwendy thinks, and resists the sudden urge to pull the little chocolate-dispensing lever on the side of the button box. She goes back to Charlotte’s communique instead.

It’s hard to watch, Gwen, even harder to believe, and I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you decided to hit the DELETE button without ever opening it. I might even suggest you do exactly that, but I know it’s not my place. We found Mr. Beeson’s phone locked away in the gun safe in Mitchell’s basement, right where he told us it would be.

Last thing I’m going to say and then I’ll let you get to it. I’ve said it before: please be careful, old friend. I know you must feel as though you’re all alone up there, but I promise you’re not. Sending love and luck your way. Godspeed.

C

The video attachments located at the bottom of the email are labeled MITCHELL and DERRY. Gwendy knows she should open the Ward Mitchell interrogation first—after all, the fate of the world may rest on its contents—but she can’t help herself. Taking slow and steady breaths, like she’s learned from years of yoga classes, she slides the cursor over to the DERRY file and clicks on it. A window opens in her laptop’s upper right-hand corner. She hits the ENLARGE icon and a surprisingly clear wide-angle view of the intersection of Witcham and Carter Streets fills the screen.

On the right side of the video she can see a couple of run-down houses, window shutters hanging crooked or absent altogether, paint peeling in long, curling strips, brown lawns overgrown even in the middle of December. An old bicycle with a missing rear tire leans against one of the porch railings.

Across the street, kitty-corner from the house with the bike, is an abandoned Phillips 66 gas station, the pumps out front long ago removed. Weeds grow in wild spurts between the cracks of broken pavement. Someone has spray-painted DERRY SUCKS across the faded brick façade. Just beyond the boarded-up office, Gwendy can make out the gated entrance to Bassey Park.

Whoever is filming—Beeson, presumably—has the sound turned on and she can hear the loud undulating whistle of a cold late-season wind blowing across the rooftops. A discarded piece of trash tumbles across the sidewalk—Gwendy’s almost certain it’s a McDonald’s hamburger wrapper—and disappears down the deserted street. It’s half past noon on the day after Thanksgiving, but there’s not a single living soul or automobile in sight.

And then there is.

An old Volkswagen Bug, traveling north on Witcham, putters through the intersection. The driver, an older man with a wild tuft of scraggly white hair and round John Lennon eyeglasses, is looking around like he’s lost. And maybe he is; he’s certainly driving slowly enough. Right behind him, riding the VW’s rear bumper, is a black truck with jacked-up snow tires and a full-sized American flag flapping from a metal pole jutting out of the rear of its double-wide bed. She can hear the throaty boom of the truck stereo’s bass even with the dark-tinted windows closed up tight.

Gwendy has just enough time to take it all in and wonder why in the world is the person filming this? when Ryan appears onscreen. It suddenly feels as if all of the air has been sucked from the room. She bites her lower lip and leans closer to the laptop.

He enters from the bottom right corner of the screen, sauntering along the sidewalk with that long confident stride she remembers so well. He’s wearing his favorite winter coat—a long-ago Christmas gift from Gwendy’s parents—and a red-and-white New England Patriots ski cap. Every once in awhile, he sneaks a glance at the row of nearby houses, but it’s clear that the main focus of his attention is the cell phone he’s carrying in his right hand. He’s studying the display like he’s following directions.

Reaching the corner of Witcham and Carter, he stops with the tips of his LL Beans dangling over the curb. He looks both ways, like an obedient little boy who’s promised his mother to always be careful crossing the street, and then down at his phone again.

And then he starts across.

The Cadillac—a garish shade of purple, obscenely wide and long with a pair of dime-store fuzzy dice dangling from the rearview mirror—slams into him before he reaches the street’s centerline. Gwendy hears the meaty thunk of impact, and then her husband is flying through the air. He hits the pavement and actually bounces, not once but twice, before rolling to an abrupt facedown stop at the opposite side of the intersection. A ragged trail of dark blotches tracks his progress across the roadway.

The Caddy keeps on going without even a flash of its brake lights. It’s not until the next day, while showering, that Gwendy realizes she never once heard the sound of the Cadillac’s engine. She could hear the sewing machine putt-putt-putt of the VW Bug, the angry growl of the black pick-up’s V-8, the bass thud of heavy metal from the truck’s sound system, but when it came to the purple Caddy … nothing. Almost as if it had no motor.

What remained of Ryan’s shattered body lay halfway on the shoulder of Carter Street, his broken legs splayed at grotesque angles atop a narrow strip of dirt and grass separating the curb from the sidewalk. His ski cap, along with one of the boots and wool socks he was wearing had been torn away by the force of the crash. The boot and sock are nowhere to be found, but Gwendy can see the pale pink skin of Ryan’s left foot resting mere inches away from a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign poking out of the frozen ground. The back of Ryan’s head—as caved-in and lopsided as a pumpkin left rotting in a field—no longer resembled that of a human being.

Gwendy jerks away from the screen, a loud sob lodging in her throat. For one panic-stricken moment, she fears she might actually choke to death on her grief. She sits back and once again focuses on her breathing. The suffocating sensation gradually loosens its grip. Eyes filled with tears, she turns back to her laptop. And gasps.

There’s a car stopped in the road beside Ryan’s lifeless body. It’s not quite as wide as the Cadillac, but it’s sleeker, built lower to the ground, and painted such a dazzling shade of cartoon green that it almost hurts to look at. It doesn’t look real, Gwendy thinks with morbid fascination. It looks like a child’s toy come to life.

She immediately recognizes the car as the same vehicle in which she’d seen Gareth Winston sitting beside the blond man when she touched Winston’s hand outside of the lavatory on Eagle Heavy. He was there, she thinks, squeezing her fists together so hard the color fades from her fingertips. Maybe not in Derry, and maybe not on the day they killed my husband, but the son-of-a-bitch was inside that car. And was he making some kind of a deal? Of course he was, because that’s what guys like Gareth do: they make deals.

“He’s one of them,” she says aloud to the empty sitting room.

As Gwendy watches, the doors of the car (an old green Chrysler, big as a boat, she suddenly remembers from her old friend Norris Ridgewick’s email) swing open and four men step out onto Carter Street.

“What the—” She never finishes the sentence.

The men are unnaturally tall and thin. And dressed identically—wearing long yellow dusters and bandanas over the lower halves of their faces—like a gang of Old West outlaws. They amble to the front of the car and stand shoulder to shoulder, surrounding the body. Looking down, one of the men places a dark-gloved hand on his chest and bends over, howling with a high, barking laughter that Gwendy is somehow able to hear over the whine of the wind. It’s an ugly animal sound, and she quickly lowers the volume on her laptop. The others soon join in, gesturing at the fallen body, hooting and guffawing. One of the men suddenly spins in a tight circle and begins hopping from one foot to the other, performing some kind of lunatic jig, slapping at his thighs with furious delight.

Gwendy abruptly stops the video—and hits REWIND. She doesn’t go back very far, maybe ten or twelve seconds. She isn’t sure if her eyes are playing tricks on her or if what she thinks she just saw is real.

She hits PLAY and watches as the man launches into his bizarre dance, and then it happens again. The man begins to fade in and out—not in and out of focus, but in and out of existence. One second, he’s whole and solid, the next he’s blurry and only partially there.

And then it’s all four of the men.

While everything else in the video remains crystal clear—if Gwendy leans close enough to the screen, she can almost make out the phone number printed at the bottom of the FOR SALE BY OWNER sign—the four men in the yellow dusters have suddenly begun to shimmer. Looking at them now is a little like staring at a heat mirage rising off the highway in the middle of a summer heat wave. This isn’t what they look like, Gwendy thinks with calm assurance. This isn’t what they look like at all. It’s as if they’re wearing costumes and masks to make them appear human, but the disguises are only temporary, and I’m sitting here watching as they fade in and out of reality. Even the goddamn car is wearing one. It’s lost its edges. Its shape no longer looks quite solid.

And apparently she’s not the only one who notices. For the first time since he started recording, Vernon Beeson, from Providence, Rhode Island zooms in for a closer look. The houses and gas station and Bassey Park all fall away. As the front end of the Chrysler, with its acre of shiny green hood, rushes forward and fills the screen, Gwendy suddenly wishes she were wearing her flight helmet so she could lower the visor. Looking at the four men and their funny green car doesn’t just make her eyes want to water, it makes her brain want to water. The camera slowly pans away from the Chrysler and once again finds the men at the side of the road. Even up close, they continue to blur in and out, as if they’re being seen from behind a dirty pane of rain-streaked glass. One of the men is standing directly in front of Ryan’s body sparing Gwendy an up-close and personal look at the gruesome details. She swears if he moves one step to the left or right, she’s going to scream, or throw her laptop across the room, or both. There’s a sudden burst of ear-piercing static and then the screen goes dark. And remains that way for what feels like a long time. Just when she’s convinced the video is over, it sparks back to life again.

In the interim, cameraman Vernon Beeson has given up on the close-up, and is pulling back to the original wide-angle view. As the row of houses reappears on the right side of the screen, the abandoned gas station and Bassey Park creep back into view on the left. The four masked men standing across the intersection gradually regain their focus, albeit from a distance. The static is gone.

Gwendy glances at the time code in the upper corner of the video screen and is astonished to discover that she’s only been watching for three minutes and forty-seven seconds. It feels so much longer than that.

The men in the yellow dusters and bandanas have grown quiet. They shuffle closer to each other, standing with their heads pressed together—palavering, Gwendy thinks—and then they break up their impromptu huddle. Three of the men return to the car. Even with the volume turned down, the slamming of the car doors is very loud inside the small sitting room. The fourth man waits on the side of the road until the Chrysler speeds away—with not so much as a whisper of its engine—and then he jaywalks across Carter Street and disappears into the cold afternoon shadows of Bassey Park.

Ryan’s body remains silent and still on the shoulder of the road.

Nobody else comes, because in Derry, nobody ever does when things like this happen.

A few seconds later, the video ends.