White haze washed over Opal Larkin’s body. She sat in a wooden chair. Her legs spread apart. How long had she been sitting here? Staring down at the faux wood grain on the laminate floor, she attempted to follow a single dark line from wall to wall. It should have been easy. But she got mixed up somewhere along the way. Her focus shattered. Confused by a swirl, or tangling up in a knot. She returned to the wall again. Starting over.
The haze began pulsing like flashbulbs. Between the bursts of light her skin turned a luminous green; it reminded her of the glow- in-the-dark prizes you found in cereal boxes. Was there something wrong with the kitchen fixture?
Maybe the light had nothing to do with it.
The glow faded.
Vanished.
She’d been living in a haze.
I’m not crazy, she thought.
The sad truth was she didn’t know anymore. Losing her mind was a real possibility. It wasn’t Alzheimer’s or a brain tumor.
It was a bullet.
As she thought the word “bullet,” she tasted it on her tongue. The rounded nose of the slug, not much bigger than a Good &c Plenty, rolled oily in her mouth.
The scent of blood exploded. Her nasal cavity plugged with blood.
Opal opened her lips, pressed them gently into her palm.
No bullet. No blood.
Yet, the thing tasted real.
You’re a miracle, she reminded herself. Adam was a miracle, too. Born against the odds, finding life after that shooting gallery at the Pie Stop. All those poor people died for no reason. She’d almost been lost herself. She had no memories of the rampage, only knew what others told her. Wyatt was a hero. Jesse Genz had snapped and gone crazy. Maybe it was from something the army did to him? They didn’t have anything to say about it. It was anybody’s guess. People she’d lived around her whole life doing things she never expected. Shootouts in broad daylight. Thrill killings. Friends and neighbors, eating lunch one minute, turned into casualties the next.
Casualties.
Wasn’t a random killer the epitome of casual? Flipping lives from on to off like light switches. Good night. Good night. You go dark. Go dark. Evil itself walked in the door that day. That day as it rained . . .
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Opal had good years. Many, in fact. All of Adam’s childhood and the buying of this old roadside motel from the Houlihans, who’d owned the place for ages. They were nice enough people but not very business-minded. The motel was almost beyond salvage. Yet she and Wyatt did it. Working their butts off day after day, and actually loving it. Those were the great years, really, but they seemed like mirages. They trembled in the distance. She couldn’t remember details. If she really tried and spent time on it, she’d dig a few up. Concentration yielded results. What lay ahead was more important.
Moods flowed through her; they changed her inside. She didn’t like her temperament being so elastic. It freaked people out. She
had her visions, too. Once or twice after the shooting, then not for years, and now they’d come back.
With a vengeance.
Since Adam left for college she’d had them almost every day. How could she deny it? They snatched her up and dropped her down and said, Now listen. They demanded attention. It was like the voice of God. Prophets had similar problems: anxiety, total loss of control, an invisible force taking over. She lived knowing self-control was an illusion. The awareness was the worst—the whole time feeling she was being used in an impersonal, tool-like way. And it could happen again at any second. No warning. She was powerless.
Opal had never been very churchy. She was a lapsed Catholic. There wasn’t any special reason to believe God would talk to her. But, by God, these visions were terrible and strong.
She didn’t really suspect God was behind it. The visions didn’t feel holy. More like the opposite. It wasn’t aliens, either. No little green men or skinny bald ones with giant liquid eyes. She wasn’t stolen out of her bed at night and floated up to the mothership for a 3 a.m. probing.
Maybe these were seizures she’d been having. No one understood the human brain. Opal had learned that much from her neurologists. Those guys were quick to admit it. We’re operating in murky waters here, Opal, they said. Mind, brain, soul—it’s all there inside your skull. That and a bullet. Well, not a whole bullet but a fragment. Sucked up in the middle of her head like a droplet inside a sponge. They showed her an X-ray. There it was: a jagged white star. Her big gray brain surrounded it. The latest doctor thought she might be experiencing Moving Bullet Syndrome. The old fragment was traveling. Along the way, it was wiping out cells, erasing memories, and intermittently destroying her sense of reality. He compared her new films with ones taken the night after the shooting. Opal, Wyatt, and the doctor stood in front of a wall of lights, looking inside her head.
“Slight movement,” the doc said, touching his thumbnail to the
nova in her brain. “But it’s been in there so long .” Twenty years. He wasn’t seeing any significant migration. Do doctors think it makes patients feel better when they admit their own bafflement? He didn’t advise taking the fragment out. “Come back in six months. Call if you have any unusual problems.”
She and Wyatt bundled up, climbed into their truck, and drove home.
What would she do without Wyatt?
He was her lifeline.
Since she’d started having these visions, he’d taken over more than his share of the duties at the motel. She saw the exhaustion in his face.
“Let’s give it time,” he told her. “The worst will likely pass.”
It hadn’t yet.
Mostly, Opal thought she might be crazy.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
What the hell was that?
It was too cold for rain, yet something was hitting the window panes. Pebbles?
Opal stepped over to the kitchen sink. She unlocked the window and tried lifting it. Iced in place, it wasn’t budging.
Tap. Tap.
She tilted her head to the side. The roof? Snow melting through the shingles? Was there pattering up in the attic? There were no puddles on the floor, no stains on the ceiling. She shut her eyes to focus on the sound.
She heard the big storm blowing in, revving its engine. The Weather Channel predicted a snowy Armageddon. The gutters vibrated and buzzed. Bedroom shutters whistled. When the temperature really dropped during January or February, the motel’s wooden frame cracked like a bullwhip in the middle of the night. Those were normal sounds to her.
She visualized her ears opening up; eardrums thumping like speakers.
What else did she hear?
There. Not the tapping, or the wind’s effects, but a new sound. It wasn’t coming from the roof, either, but from somewhere downstairs. And it wasn’t rain falling or water dripping. It whined like a fan. No wait. Listen harder. It wasn’t mechanical. A baby crying? Whimpering? Was that a dog?
The Larkins had cats. Three of them. The furry Musketeers.
But no dogs.
Guests traveling with dogs stayed in the motel’s smoking rooms. The office and main strip doors opened to the highway. Thirty steps to the north, the building cornered hard left and a row of double rooms ran back to a patch of gravel where buses and boat trailers parked. They put the dog owners there because it was quieter. Wyatt was painting those rooms today.
He’s smoking, too, she figured, and feeling guilty about it. Wearing that ugly sweater she’d made for him; she couldn’t believe he even put it on to paint.
The whimper.
Stronger this time ... then it trailed off. The pleading notes seeped back into the corners of the room. Wet and alive. Whatever it was, it was suffering.
Opal pulled her robe tighter, cinched her belt. She started down the steps to the office. Tap. Again the whimper followed, definitely growing louder on the ground-floor level. Why was she frightened all of a sudden? Scared to walk around inside the familiar surroundings of her home? Daylight hours. She wasn’t going to find some thief rummaging in the office looking for a safe. They’d still be asleep, wouldn’t they? A hellacious storm kicked up and people dove under their blankets. Wyatt was nearby. In twenty years, they’d never been robbed. Even drugged-out maniacs knew the real dough wasn’t in mom-and-pop motels during the off-season. Tap. This was so stupid. Tap. Tap. She’d march right down there and open the door.
“Wyatt? Are you in the office?”
The doorknob felt hot. She pressed her palm to the door. Warm. She wouldn’t say burning, but toasty like the side of the industrial
dryer they used to launder the motel linens. If the air conditioner was switched off, then this door would get warm ... in the summer. What was it they said about house fires? If a door is hot, then don’t open it.
She opened it.
She found nothing out of order.
The office looked normal.
But she heard a dog crying, crying for real, from physical pain.
Opal could endure a lot, but she could not stand animal cruelty. Guest or no guest. She’d throw them out and call the cops. What was wrong with people these days? They tortured their own pets?
Opal tore through the office. She wasn’t thinking about guests seeing her stomping outside in a robe and fluffy bunny slippers. She needed a key. She went behind the desk where the key hooks were screwed into a white panel board. She ran her fingers over the key tags. They swayed and clacked together. The smoking rooms: two keys were missing. Wyatt had one. The other belonged to a regular guest. She even knew his name: Max Caul.
He stayed with them every Christmas week since they bought the motel.
He was an odd guy, but she never would’ve pegged him for a sadist. He had an Irish setter with him. He’d been bringing her up north since she was a puppy. He took her for walks twice a day and fed her Swiss mushroom burgers from the local Hardee’s. They spotted his battered Volkswagen Westfalia camper in the drive-thru at all hours. He loved that dog.
Max had no permanent address. Retired, he roamed the country, staying in campgrounds and motels, taking in the sights of America. “Choose your own adventure,” he said. “I’ve chosen mine and never once regretted it.”
Decades ago he’d made his living as a pulp writer. He’d been famous in his own peculiar way. He edited ten popular volumes of supernatural stories, Weirder Than You Imagine. Collectors paid hundreds of dollars for well-kept old copies. “Too bad they don’t
u
pay me,” he joked. Now he considered himself a full-time cosmic adventurer. He never mentioned any family. “I’m a natural-born loner. Only two things I find myself needing are a good book and my dog.”
Maybe there’d been an accident. Max had to be in his eighties. Always quiet and polite in an old-fashioned way that seemed to be disappearing from the world, he was easy to overlook. Yet he had the twinkliest, most mischievous eyes; they made Opal think of a six-year-old with a frog stuffed in his hip pocket. Max smoked little black cigarillos with plastic tips. Each morning when he left the motel, leash in hand, his dog trotting at his side, Opal would air out his room and fog it with freshener.
Had Max’s number finally come up?
Was the dog keening over his body?
That could be.
Max was dead. Oh Lord, that was it. The dog was alerting them. What if he had a heart attack or a stroke? What if there was still a chance to save him?
She stormed out onto the motel’s narrow sidewalk. She passed draped windows. Her slippers gliding on the melting ice, she turned and her feet nearly went out from under her. Cigarettes. She smelled them and the paint. The door ahead wasn’t fully closed. She banged her fist on the door, not pausing, but shouting over her shoulder as she readied the next room’s key.
“Wyatt, come on. There’s an emergency. Something’s happened to Max.”
She knew it. A terrible tragedy had occurred, or worse, a crime. Perhaps there was time to stop it. Time to help.
The tapping sounded like a rainstorm. Maybe the sprinklers were on. The room would be damaged. A waterlogged rug never smells right again. They’d have to rip it out and replace it. How could she think so selfishly? If Max were dead, the smell would be the least of their problems.
She had her key in the lock.
She opened the door.
Oh, it didn’t smell like rain. Or wet carpets. Or a dead thing.
It smelled like blood.
The walls, the carpet, the beds and furniture—everything was drenched in blood ... as if a person had exploded.