IT’S 7:23 PM on Sunday, June 18, 1989, in Windale, Pennsylvania. On the west side of town, Deputy Rebecca Conner stands by as the only paramedic for the Windale Medical Center, Dean Harris, pushes the stretcher carrying Ricky Montoya’s body into the back of the ambulance. Rebecca refuses to go back into the video store by herself, but she is holding on to the one piece of evidence she found—the VHS tape that Ricky had in his hand when she discovered his body.
On the other side of town, Chief of Police Jack Albright ushers Gabe and Sonya into the back of his patrol car. They slide in, already protesting, already trying to explain to Jack what they’ve seen, what they’ve found. But they don’t have to explain anything, and they quit talking as soon as they realize that someone else is in the passenger seat of Jack’s sputtering Crown Victoria.
“Dad?” Sonya says.
On Dagger Hill, Colonel Higgins climbs into a jeep, feeling more confident than she has all weekend. She’s ready to swoop into town, find those three kids, find the anomaly that she lost when the plane crashed, and then get the fuck out of Dodge.
In the Triangle, at the police station, Alice Kemmerer sits at her desk, her knees pulled up against her narrow torso, weeping quietly into a tissue. A headache forms behind her eyes, and the pain gets worse with every blip and squawk of the dispatch radio—the chief communicating back and forth with Rebecca. Alice hasn’t called either of them about Mel yet, just can’t bring herself to do it.
Downstairs, in the dungeon, one of Higgins’s soldiers stands watch over the holding cell that still contains Deputy Mel O’Connell’s body and the elderly June Rapaport, who is not weeping but smiling. She stares up into a corner of the cell, where the painted bricks converge and form a little wedge of shadow. Her stereo is still on, spewing only fuzz now. Her eyes are wide, empty circles. A thin runner of drool dangles from the edge of her lips.
Across the street, Charlie Bencroft is making his way inside the King Street Diner, moving slowly but steadily with his crutch and his broken leg. Don Cranston and Captain Jake Rinaldi are with him. They keep looking around, expecting to be seen, expecting to be arrested. But so far, they’re in the clear. They have a lot to tell.
A few blocks east of Windale High School, the shell that used to be Chet Landry is pulling into the parking lot of the old Army-Navy thrift store. He’s just a marionette now, but flashes of anger still linger—the slamming of his truck door, the hard shove as he pushes into the store, irritated by the little bell that jingles over his head. He scratches behind his ear, like a dog with an itch, until the sound dwindles.
The kid behind the counter has seen Chet in here before, pays him no mind. Near the back of the store, inside a long, lit glass case, Chet finds what he’s been told to get. He punches a hole through the top of the glass with a bare fist, takes what he needs. The kid yells something about calling the police, but Chet ignores him.
On his way out, he makes a quick stop in the apparel section to grab some extras—a black leather jacket, gloves, black jeans, a gas mask.
Back at the strip mall, the ambulance finally pulls away. Rebecca climbs into the driver’s seat of her patrol car and tosses the VHS tape onto the seat beside her. The words scrawled in bright red marker on the white label of the tape send an icy ripple down her spine.
IT KNOWS YOUR FEAR
Rebecca drives away, heading back to the police station to meet up with the chief.
Inside the darkened hollow of Ricky’s Video Rentals, all the electronics are switched off and silent. Rebecca made sure to power everything down before locking the business up with a set of keys she found in the back office. There wasn’t much she could do about the scene inside—there was no way to cover up the windows. If anybody walks past the storefront later this evening or tomorrow, they’ll get an eerie eyeful.
But now, in the unsettled stillness, a bluish light appears amid the collapsed wrecks of shelving units on the sales floor. A TV set has just come to life. The screen is projecting nothing but static. And just like on Saturday morning, when Ricky Montoya entered this place as himself for the last time, there’s a face etched in the snowstorm. Its features are carved from subtle shadows in the lost-signal haze. The eyes have no pupils, and the mouth is turned up in a snarling grin.
Connected to the back of the television, a dense cable winds through the store, disappearing into the drywall and looping up along the side of a support beam to the roof, where it reemerges and makes S shapes across the gravel, eventually meeting up with the metal structure that Ricky erected not long before his death. From that strange antenna, a signal begins to pulse, echoing out across Windale in bursts. A terrible, unheard sound.
In every Windale home, people are clicking on TVs and radios, computers and video games, popping movies into VCRs, dancing to Mick Hucknall singing, Just get yourself together or we might as well say goodbye. Invisible tethers begin to latch themselves onto those electronic vibrations, feeding an undercurrent through them, a secondary sound that carries with it that strange little verse: A song sung one, a song sung two, a song sung three, a song sung four.
All outta time.