Napoleon knew he wasn’t alone, that The Gray Man was with him and had practically enveloped him somehow, but that didn’t make it any better, and he regretted his choice to come here the moment he saw the wall.
It was massive, enclosing a domain bigger than any city in the world he’d left behind, stretching as far as the eye could see, a red wall that was smeared with black and gray.
Even from a distance, as they slowly glided in somehow, Napoleon could see them: arms and legs, akimbo, sticking out of the wall, embedded there among a sea of round stumps.
There was a sense of deep apprehension to this whole place, so much so that he gritted his teeth despite the scorching heat that made it hard to breathe.
He squirmed in The Gray Man’s grip, his lungs shriveling as he gasped for air, terrified by what he was seeing.
My God. It’s real! Hell is real.
It was all he could think, over and over, the words on a frantic repeat as he tried desperately to comprehend what was happening.
A stiff wind swept over them, pushing them closer to the wall, and he heard The Gray Man grunt as he struggled against it. Napoleon instinctively looked up and saw a pair of gray wings spread out over him, cutting and folding into the air to control their descent. At least one of them could fly, but if The Gray Man should drop him, Napoleon was a dead man.
That is, if he wasn’t dead already.
The wind bounced against the wall and ricocheted back at them like the air from a blast furnace. Napoleon screamed, but the majority of the heat was deflected somehow, up and away from them. The Gray Man again. He must’ve had something to do with that. Good. We can still get out of here somehow…
But just as Napoleon’s confidence was building, they began to lose altitude again.
His back was clutched against The Gray Man’s chest and they were pitched at such an angle that Napoleon couldn’t see The Gray Man’s face. The fall lasted a good three seconds before their direction reversed a bit and they returned back to the gliding pattern they were in before.
Nevertheless, the wind had made things worse in two ways: first, it had blown them closer to the wall, revealing that the stumps that Napoleon had seen earlier were not stumps at all. No. They were heads, with faces moving in a gallery of horrors, woes and agonies.
The second nightmarish development was the appearance of what at first seemed to be black tar, smeared across the wall in odd streaks and formations, as if the wall were oozing waste. But the illusion held only briefly, and then gave way to movements and separations. As they moved even closer to the wall, Napoleon could make out clear clusters of beaks and wings, undulating and alive.
It wasn’t tar, but crows; millions upon millions of them, nesting in cracks or holes in the wall.
And they were feeding.
Feeding on the heads.
Napoleon’s terror overwhelmed him. “Get me out of here! I want to go back!” Napoleon screamed. He couldn’t help himself. And it appeared that this had been a big mistake.
Because, along the wall, his scream had been heard.
First one human head, then a thousand, looked towards them, their bleeding, pecked-at eye sockets filled with rage and madness. A chorus of vile shouts and screams erupted from their mouths, and Napoleon watched in dismay as the emaciated arms in the wall began to lift and, before long, a countless number of hands had their bony fingers pointing at him and The Gray Man.
The crows turned in unison, the red of the sky glinting off their tiny marble eyes, blood and flesh dripping from their beaks.
He heard The Gray Man speak for the first time since they’d arrived here. Be ready.
This time when Napoleon spoke, he was so close to speechless that he could barely manage a whisper. “For what?”
The Gray Man didn’t have to reply. Napoleon found the answer to his own question when the crows peeled off the wall in wave upon wave, and headed directly towards them.
Wings spreading, they rode a gust of wind, outward, upward and over them.
Then they dove.
Upon the wind came their sounds—cawing and cackling, screeching with hunger, distantly at first, then building to such a volume that Napoleon’s ears hurt. Crows. His grandmother had always said they were a bad omen. Napoleon had always hated crows.
I know. The Gray Man’s said, in his head again. That’s why they’re here.
“What?”
The Gray Man dove suddenly, curving off to the left and away from the massive flock headed their way.
I’ve heard that many things about this place are consistent, The Gray Man replied, like the wall. But others are customized for each new arrival. For you, it’s crows. For a woman who spent many hours as a young mother irrationally terrified that her children would drown in the bathtub? When she gets here, she will be stuck in a bathroom with an overflowing bathtub, every hour of every day, for eternity.
Napoleon still couldn’t see The Gray Man’s face, but the voice in his head was shaky. It was not a good sound.
“Why?” Napoleon managed to ask.
There was silence at first as they curved up to the right and then down again, the formations of crows now falling in behind them and giving chase. Because that’s what this place is: your worst horror, lived forever. It never used to be this bad, but then he went mad.
The Gray Man was taking more and more radically evasive maneuvers, sharply to the left and right and back again, their speed increasing to the point that Napoleon was sure that, with just one more sharp turn, The Gray Man would lose his grip and drop him.
“Who? Who went mad?” Napoleon asked frantically, trying to distract himself.
The crows were gaining and then, as if by teleportation, they were on them, around them and smothering them.
The last thing that Napoleon heard was The Gray Man’s reply.
You know who.
Flapping wings, rank and smelling of mold, beat against Napoleon’s face before he felt sharp stabs at his cheeks.
Then… darkness.
Sheriff Floyd Conch of the Beaury Sheriff’s Department stood outside Robert’s Liquor & Deli with Vance Esguerra, the store’s owner and the missing girl’s uncle. It was ten in the morning and Conch felt like he was still two cups of coffee shy of a full deck.
“Who saw her last?” Conch asked.
“I dunno. When I called her mom to tell her to get down here she mentioned that she’d swung by last night to pick up some pillows for her new apartment.”
“Was she with anyone?”
“No. Her mom says it was just her.”
“Was anyone waiting out in the car for her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where’s her mother?”
“On her way now. She just left work,” Esguerra said, his hands on his hips as he looked off into the distance and shook his head.
Conch waited a bit, letting the situation percolate in his mind. Young girl goes missing. First one to call it in is a family member, and a male. Crimes were like Monopoly. You always started on “Go” and after that? It was just counting off the squares, one at a time.
After a few moments he continued, “You said you have her on the store video?”
Esguerra nodded. “Yeah. She opened the front door and came in to do inventory and stock the shelves at 5:30 a.m. You can see her clear as day.”
“Did anyone come in with her?”
“No.”
“Did she lock the door behind her?”
“Yes. You wanna see the tape?”
“Later. Is that the only camera?”
“No. There’s one over the register.”
“So she didn’t let anyone in after her?”
“No. I watched both tapes, faster than normal speed but still clear enough to see: no one.”
Conch had his iPad out and was taking notes. It was a silly contraption. Paper and pen had done fine by him for twenty years, but his wife, Mandy, had gotten it for him for Christmas, so he had to use it. “You got a camera out back too, right?”
Esguerra cursed under his breath. “No. I shoulda spent the extra money, but I figured I wouldn’t need it.”
“Why?”
“The roll-up door back there is super heavy-duty. Got it on Craigslist from a high security building that was demoed. The back door is heavy-duty too. Figured if anyone was going to break in? The front door and windows were the easiest way. Especially if it was some dumb-ass drunk or crackhead.”
Conch nodded. It made sense. The facts always did. At first.
“Let’s take a walk back there while we wait for her mom.”
“Sure. Should be about ten minutes or so before she gets here.”
The early drunks weren’t up yet, so the liquor store was quiet.
Conch yelled to his deputy. “Hey, Kendall?”
Kendall was chewing a wad of gum too big for his mouth, so when he replied he sounded like he was from Boston. “Yah?”
“I’m going around back for a minute. You cover the front of the store and wait for the girl’s mother to get here, okay?”
“Got it,” Kendall replied with a quick nod.
The sidewalk in front of the store was covered in cracks and weeds. Nearby, a utility pole stood next to an island of newspaper stands, all empty save the silly titty paper that advertised all the local whores. In Beaury, that probably added up to about three, one of whom was old widow Harrison, who was only good for hand jobs at her age. Word on the street was that she was the cheapest, and as long as you closed your eyes, it made no difference. Conch wasn’t buying it, literally or figuratively, and thankfully, he didn’t have to. He just felt bad for Mr. Harrison. Dead three years now, with no kids left behind and a wife who hadn’t handled his death that well and couldn’t make the social security checks last. It was a sad thing for a widow to end up needing to do.
The morning sun was a dull blotch behind an overcast sky. Still, when Conch stepped into the alley behind the store something told him that this was where it had happened.
It was a narrow alley, with plenty of trash bins and piled cardboard boxes to partially obstruct the views from either end. The roll-up door was closed and secure, as was the back door. There were no signs of forced entry. The pavement smelled of cat piss and garbage, their odors held low by the damp morning air.
“Wait here,” he told Mr. Esguerra before walking the alley, up one side and down the other. There were no obvious signs of a scuffle. So the girl ran away, left under duress with her abductor or was incapacitated somehow.
Both her purse, with cash, and cell phone were left on the counter inside. That was a strike against running away. At least at first glance. Once they got into her apartment to look for a diary or letters, scanned her Facebook and Instagram accounts, pulled her text messages and talked with her friends, they’d know more. But something in Conch told him, bluntly, that this was no runaway situation.
The vic’s name—and Conch noticed he was already starting to call her a “vic”—was Ashley Barton. She was a fixture in town: a high school cheerleader who’d graduated two years ago. A dead-end sort of thinker, she hadn’t followed any of her friends over to junior college in Bennett or even to Vegas, the trendy move these days for pretty girls looking to make bank in the casinos, dancing half-naked on poles over the blackjack tables while they told themselves they were just saving for nursing school.
Conch had actually busted Ashley once, back when she’d been in eighth grade, for smoking pot and ditching school. He hated to say it, but she was the kinda girl who was trying to get by on her looks. If she was in trouble now, she was probably wishing that she’d left town with her friends after all.
He sighed, took off his hat and rubbed at the crown of his head, which was mostly bald.
This week there’d been far too much action for his little town. Twice now he was dealing with odd shit. Earlier, the accused killer Kyle Fasano had been through here, on the run from those detectives from Los Angeles.
And now, as if by happenstance, Conch had a missing girl on his hands too?
He hoped he was wrong.
But what if Fasano had come back through here on the run again? And, this time, decided to take a hostage along with him?