John Dies at the End

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, knifeplus niggerEquals 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 pornoThat’s me in the spotlightLosing my religionTryin’ 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 . . .”

CHAPTER 10

The Missing Girl

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.

CHAPTER 11

By the way . . .

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.

CHAPTER 12

Amy

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.

CHAPTER 13

The Chat Transcript

* 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.