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.
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.”
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.