EVERYBODY CROWDS INTO the main office of the police station—me, Sonya, Charlie, Dad, Dr. Gutierrez, Don Cranston, and Colonel Higgins and a gaggle of her men. Each of them has a rifle in their hands. For now, the barrels are aimed at the floor, but I’m afraid to move too quickly, breathe too loudly. I stand with my hands tucked into my pockets. My left arm feels stiff and uncomfortable like this. But then, that’s the way all of me feels right now.
From downstairs in the basement, where the holding cells are, we can hear Rebecca wailing softly. Dad wouldn’t let us down there, but from what I overheard Alice telling him, June Rapaport murdered Mel. Which doesn’t make any goddamn sense.
“I don’t get it,” I murmur to Sonya. Dad and Dr. G are talking in low whispers on the other side of the office—Dad looks grief-stricken, his face on the verge of erupting with emotion. Higgins is quietly ordering her men near the front entrance, directing them to different parts of town. She already has men investigating the incident at the diner. Don and Alice are sitting together on either side of her desk, cups of coffee between them going untouched. They both look gaunt and overtired, like they’ve been awake for days but just can’t find the will to sleep.
“What don’t you get?” Sonya asks. “She’s framing us. I hacked into TerraCorp’s database. They have that data recorded somewhere. She’ll find a way to make this whole thing our fault and … and our lives end right here, tonight.”
“Whoa, easy does it, Sone,” Charlie says. “We don’t know what’s going to happen, okay?”
“Exactly,” I tell her. “And that’s not what I was talking about. You said Mrs. Rapaport was the one who led you to Kimberly in your nightmare. Why would she…” I have to swallow a lump that forms unexpectedly in my throat. “Why would she murder Mel?”
“The same reason Chet tried to murder me,” Charlie says. “He was an asshole, but he wasn’t a killer. The guy that I saw back there at the diner…” He shivers, wraps his arms around himself. “That was just a ventriloquist dummy that somebody dressed up to look like Chet.”
“You think the same thing happened to Mrs. Rapaport?” Sonya asks.
Charlie nods. “She may have opened up some kind of back door for you. Let you into the space where the Dagger Hill anomaly works, to try to help you find Kim. Maybe it figured out what she was up to.”
“And then the Bug Man got me out of there before it could do the same thing to me.” Sonya’s eyes are round and red. “Which means that I probably led the anomaly right to her. It knows where she is now. She might already be—” She buries her face in her hands, her words cutting themselves off.
I wrap an arm around her, startled by how easy that is to do after we talked at Kimberly’s house. It’ll only get easier from here as long as we survive this, I think. I reach out and take Charlie’s hand, squeeze it. He drops me a wink, and again I’m astounded by his fortitude. Charlie is full—I keep telling myself that. He has a reserve of strength that seems bottomless. I don’t know what I’d do without him.
Colonel Higgins emerges from the entryway, her hands clasped behind her back in that cold, indifferent way.
“The Windale Police Department is officially closed until further notice. The United States government will be handling any and all incidents of criminal activity in this town until our investigation is closed. I am implementing a mandatory curfew, which you are all in violation of right now.”
“You’re talking about martial law,” Charlie protests. “You can’t do that.”
“Correction, Mr. Bencroft,” Higgins says icily. “I am exactly the person who can do that. And we were already most of the way there, anyway. Closing off the town was only the first step. I thought you people could cooperate, but obviously you are incapable of doing that. So here we are.”
“You can’t just snuff this out, Higgins,” Dad says. “It’s all of our words against yours.”
“He’s right, Audrey,” Sonya’s dad says. He nudges his glasses back up on his nose. “Just let this go. The further down this path you get, the harder it’s going to be to keep your story straight. There are too many variables. Too many people to keep quiet. There’s all of us, plus everything that Claudia has seen.”
“Oh, I took care of Dr. Reed, Alvaro,” Higgins says, and Dr. G’s face spasms with shock. “Just like I’ve already taken care of anyone else in this town who thinks they know what happened better than I do. By the way, you all will have to get your burgers from someone else going forward—Clark Webber’s farm is, uh … closed indefinitely.”
“You’re a fucking monster,” Sonya says. Even from six inches away, I can feel Sonya’s body seizing up like a rusty engine. She balls her fists at her sides and bites at her lower lip until tears show in her eyes.
“No, the monster is out there,” Higgins says, jabbing a finger toward the front doors. “It’s running around your town making people murder other people.”
“You don’t understand what’s happening here,” Charlie protests. “You have it wrong.”
“I want everyone to kindly shut the fuck up. Right. Now.” Higgins’s voice is as sharp as a razor’s edge, and just as cold. “Here’s what’s going to happen first. We’re going to watch the tape that Mr. Montoya left us.” She took the tape from Rebecca right after we arrived, and she holds it up now. I give Dad a look, but I can’t get his attention—he’s watching Higgins, listening for once. Words scribbled on the tape’s label send a cutting chill through me: It knows your fear.
“After we watch the tape,” Higgins goes on, “everybody—and I mean everybody—is going to tell me what they know. Or so help me god I will throw every single one of you in jail until I get the truth. That is what you want, isn’t it? The truth. To know what happened to your friend. Where she is, what she might be doing, if she’s even alive.”
Sonya tenses again, and I look at her. My heart still thuds an extra beat when our eyes meet—I can’t help it—but I no longer see the future I wanted for us. All I see is a person I can’t live without. Like Charlie and Kimberly, my parents, maybe even this whole town. So many places here are painted with the memories of our friendship, like stamps in a passport. I feel the need to protect that with a force equal to the one compelling me to find Kimberly.
“Yes,” I say weakly. “That’s what we want.” I look around at my friends, my dad, Dr. Gutierrez. I focus on him as I say, “We want the truth. And we’ll cooperate to get it.” I ignore the looks of defeat on Sonya’s and Charlie’s faces and redirect my attention to Colonel Higgins. Nobody else protests, because they all know that the only way out of this is to let Higgins lead the way.
“Good,” she says. “Someone get me a television and a VCR. Now.”
A few minutes later, Dad and Dr. Gutierrez emerge from a storage room at the back of the police station. They’re rolling a tall metal cart into the office. There’s a TV on top, and on a shelf just below that, a VCR.
Once the pair are plugged in, Sonya has to show them how to eject an outdated training video that Dad ordered from a police academy in New York State years ago. The label on the tape reads FIREARMS: A PRIVILEGE, NOT A RIGHT as it pops out of the machine.
“Nobody says a word until it’s finished,” Higgins warns us. “After it’s over, we’ll talk about what information you all have that you’ve been keeping hidden. And what the phrase ‘obstruction of justice’ means.”
Charlie opens his mouth to argue. But Higgins stifles him with a raised finger before he can utter a single syllable.
“Not a word,” she says again.
We gather up, and Sonya positions Ricky’s tape inside the mouth of the VCR. She glances at the words scribbled on the label, and I watch a shudder pass through her. Then she nudges the tape, and the VCR slurps it up, and this is what we see:
A brief haze of static that cuts to a black screen.
Except it’s not just black. There are fuzzy shapes moving in the darkness.
The volume is up on the TV, and there’s a muffled thudding sound: fingers brushing the camera mic.
Something pulls away from the camera, and what was an obscure shot of dark, blurry, indiscernible shapes becomes one big thing.
It’s the unlit outline of someone’s face. A person without a mask, because there are eyes and a nose and a mouth, and they’re all moving.
The eyes especially. They keep blinking in a nervous, agitated way.
“Where’s the goddamn…,” a voice says quietly. Ricky’s voice. All the ticks and liquid pops of his speech are enhanced by the camera’s microphone.
The screen flashes white suddenly, then the light quickly begins to fade, leaving only a wide, brilliant spot in the center of the screen. It looks like an atomic explosion.
Instead of a mushroom cloud, what’s left in the aftermath is the brightly lit profile of Ricky Montoya.
He’s looking over his shoulder.
“I don’t have much time,” Ricky says, still looking behind him. He’s huddled somewhere dark, hiding in a closet or a crawl space, maybe.
Ricky looks full-on at the eye of the camera then, and we get the sight of a young man who has been terrorized so deeply that his body has aged in a single day.
Ricky Montoya’s eyes are hollowed-out peach pits, with tiny, glimmering gems resting inside them. His cheeks are pale sheets hung on the hooked corners of his cheekbones. His lips are chapped—he keeps licking them, over and over—and his hair is mussed. He blinks once, then again, then again, then again. Again, again, again. Twelve blinks in five seconds.
Sonya puts a quivering hand over her mouth.
Her father wraps his arm around her shoulders and squeezes her close.
“I don’t have time,” Ricky says again on the TV. Static lines roll up and down the screen. “It’s going to know what we did. Mrs. Rapaport and I. We tried to help her. We—”
A sharp bang can be heard from off-screen, and Ricky’s head pivots. He gasps, his whole face clenching as he peers out into the unknown dark.
He breathes heavily. Rapidly. Waiting.
Then he looks back into the camera, making eye contact with all of us and none of us.
“I don’t know where she is. I wish I did, but I don’t.” His voice is harsh and ragged. “It knew what we were doing right away, but it … it wants us to fail. It wants us to suffer. He … I mean, it, it, it, goddamn it. It knows what you’re afraid of. It will use that against you. It feeds on every negative thing.” Ricky pauses, short of breath. His face, huge and stark, filling up the screen, jittering back and forth, collapses into sobs. “I don’t know what he is,” he whines. His mouth is a dreadful smile, his lips connected by wet strings of spittle. “I don’t know what I did to deserve what I’m going to get, but I’m leaving this so someone knows … so you know that I tried. I tried to help you. There’s an antenna on top of the video store. He made me build it. It’s broadcasting … I don’t know. Him, I guess. It.”
The anguish in his face spreads out, blasted into wide, terrified features by a new noise in the background.
It’s a small, distant bang, like a door slamming. Except it sounds like a cheap sound effect, like something that isn’t real.
Then it’s a few steady thumps: footsteps, heavy ones.
Then it’s something that sounds like wooden floorboards bowing under a person’s weight. But the video store doesn’t have wooden floorboards.
Ricky Montoya is still looking directly at the camera, his eyes staring out of the screen, pleading.
“He knows,” he whispers, barely even speaking at all. “It knows. It knows, and it’s here. Run. Don’t hide. Because you can’t. Just run.”
A hand appears within the range of the camera’s light, but not anything even close to a human hand. This is a mass of something gray and slick, with long, bony extensions that only kind of remind me of fingers. It reaches out of the darkness and curls around Ricky’s face in less than a second.
In the next, Ricky is yanked backward, sucked into the black void beyond the reach of the light.
His scream is loud at first, but it fades quickly, as if the sound were dropped down a deep well.
There are more bangs and thuds in the background, glass shattering, a garbled cry that might be Ricky or might be something else.
Then there’s quiet.
There’s the sound of plastic crunching.
Then static.
It plays out for what feels like a long, long time. We’re all staring. Charlie, Sonya, and I are breathing rapidly. Even Dad and Dr. Gutierrez seem shaken—I’m not sure I’ve ever seen my father look so pale. The only sound I hear is a steady, metallic rattle. I glance over at one of Higgins’s soldiers with his big automatic rifle. The gun is shaking because the soldier’s hands are shaking, and the clips on the gun strap keep clicking together.
It knows your fear, I think. Just like it knows mine. And Sonya’s. And Charlie’s.
And Kimberly’s.
“Jesus,” Sonya’s dad mutters. “I’ve never seen something so awful in my life.”
One of Higgins’s soldiers says, in an unsteady voice, “What … what the hell did it do to him?”
“You don’t want to know.”
We all turn toward Rebecca’s voice. I didn’t hear her come up from the dungeon. She’s standing with her arms crossed, leaning against the wall. Casual, except for the puffiness around her eyes and the drawn-out look to her face.
Across the office, Dad lets out a long huff, like a sigh and a sob combined. He’s leaning back against a desk—the one that used to be Mel’s—with his arms crossed. His right hand is fussing with the badge pinned to his shirt. The word CHIEF is emblazoned across it. Dad is staring down at the thing as if he might take it off, drop it down a garbage disposal somewhere, and flip the switch until there’s nothing left but gold shavings.
The only person in the room who doesn’t seem bothered is Colonel Higgins. “How did you get the tape?” she asks, aiming the question at Rebecca.
Rebecca’s head tilts up mechanically. “What did you say?”
“How. Did. You. Get. The. Tape.” Higgins stands fully upright, hands behind her back. A few days ago, watching these two square off might have been entertaining. Right now, it’s just scary.
“Montoya had it on his person,” Rebecca says slowly. Her eyes droop into a long blink, then reopen. “I pried it out of his cold, dead hand, if that helps paint a mental picture for you.”
Higgins makes a sound that could almost be a laughing snort. She looks around, distracted. “The damn thing left the tape for us to find,” she says. “It’s fucking with us.”
“Hey, asshole,” I say. “Care to clue the rest of us in?” The words are sharp and pointy, like shark teeth, and come spilling out before I can think twice. The pain and grief have bubbled into a low-burning fury that I’ve never felt before. I suppose it’s been there since I woke up in the medical center. I haven’t known what to do with it until now—I’ve just been tossing it around in my head like a grenade, waiting for someone to lob it at.
“Watch your fucking mouth,” one of the soldiers says. All at once, his gun is raised, the barrel lined up with my chest.
“HEY!” my dad roars.
Sonya puts her hands over her ears.
Charlie jerks and winces.
Dr. Gutierrez rises to his feet beside Dad, glaring at the soldier right with him, a strange, partnership-y thing for him to do.
“It’s okay, Private,” Higgins says. “Lower that weapon. Keep the safety on and your hands off for now.” Her eyes flick to mine. “I have a lot of respect for you people. I didn’t at first. This town seemed like nothing but a rathole when I first arrived. But you have spunk, I’ll give you that.”
I don’t think any of us know how to respond, so we don’t.
“But everyone in this room is going to prison if I don’t get some good intel here in the next five minutes,” Higgins finishes. She flashes a flat-line smile. “Who wants to go first?”
“What does it matter?” Charlie says. “Even if we tell you what we know, which isn’t a whole hell of a lot, you can’t give us any guarantees.”
“Guarantees?” Higgins tilts her head back, as if in laughter. “Kid, you and your friends lost your guarantees a long time ago. Right around the time that TerraCorp Junior here was hacking into her father’s computer.”
Sonya’s cheeks go red with heat. Nobody says a word.
“Nothing we tell you is going to help you find that thing,” I say. “And nothing you tell us is going to help us find Kimberly.”
Higgins levels a glare at me.
Before she can toss more threats at us, Sonya says, “Except … I think I know where we can find them both.”
Everyone looks at her. Her eyes lock onto mine, pleading silently for me to understand. And I think I do.
“The Banshee Palace,” I say. It’s not a question.
“Of course,” Charlie says. He stands up as straight as he can, his limbs jittery with excitement. “The Bug Man and the Dagger Hill monster move around in the same way. At least, that’s the way it seems. The motel hasn’t had electricity in years. It might be the only place in Windale that the anomaly can’t get to.”
“Manipulation of electronic frequencies.” That voice belongs to Sonya’s dad. He looks around at all of us. “The anomalies give off high-frequency audio signatures that allow them to … invade the brain, so to speak. The one on Dagger Hill drew our attention when we were at the height of our climate research. We thought…” He shrugs, looking a bit sheepish. “We thought the earth was trying to speak to us. It didn’t take long for us to realize that it was something different. Over the last twenty years, we’ve continued collecting data on the damage humans are doing to the earth’s atmosphere, but we’ve also been keeping tabs on the anomaly.”
“Do you know what it is?” Don has finally lifted his head, joining the conversation. “The anomaly, I mean.”
Dr. G shakes his head. “Something that never should have been meddled with.” His glare finds Colonel Higgins and stays there. “A little over a year ago, the second anomaly was discovered frozen inside an ice shelf in Antarctica. Its audio signature was so similar to the one here in Windale that the army thought it would be best to bring it here so we could research them together. Something told me it was a bad idea, but…”
Higgins says nothing.
“Dad,” Sonya says, “Charlie thinks that the Bug Man helped us. He took Kimberly to protect us from what the Dagger Hill monster wanted her to do to us. And then to herself.” She looks to Charlie for confirmation.
He nods. “Don could give you the specifics another time, but let’s just say that if there’s ever been a serial killer in Windale, it’s the monster on Dagger Hill. It’s taken a lot of lives over a lot of years. Does that make any sense?”
Sonya’s father is nodding along with him, processing. “The data from the Antarctic research team showed that the second anomaly’s signature was being produced the same way, but the frequency was different. Almost in an opposite range. And when Colonel Higgins described the thing they pulled out of the ice to me, it didn’t line up with any of the information we had on the Dagger Hill anomaly. In fact, we’ve never encountered a physical representation of the Dagger Hill anomaly.” He gestures to the blank TV where Ricky’s video just played. “Until now.”
“You think the … the thing that killed Ricky is the actual monster?” Charlie asks. “As in, real flesh and bone? If it even has those things?” His voice is shaking slightly.
“I do,” Dr. G says. “If what you’re saying is true, then the anomaly and the Dagger Hill … creature … might be natural enemies. One predator, one prey.”
“And if the monster couldn’t get to Kim or the Bug Man through sound, then it’s trying to get to them in person,” I say, finding my voice again, attempting to process another load of new information. “And it was damn close at Ricky’s video store.”
Sonya turns to me, panic brimming in her eyes. Her lower lip is trembling.
“We have to go,” she says. “We have to go right now.”
“Nobody is going anywhere.” Apparently, Higgins has found her voice again, too. “Do you hear yourselves? Banshee palaces and bug men and monsters? The anomaly we brought back from Antarctica was just a blob. And it stayed that way for as long as it was in our possession. Until we brought it to this godforsaken town.”
“A reactive response to being confronted with its—” Dr. G starts, but he’s cut off.
“I don’t give a damn what kind of response it was, Doctor,” Higgins growls. Her perfect rows of glistening teeth are pressed together in a snarling grimace. “It scared the shit out of us coming down. Then it crashed my plane going out.”
“You mean the plane you were too afraid to get back on?” Sonya asks.
Higgins has no response to that, and I cheer in my head for Sonya’s small victory.
“Can I ask what might seem like a dumb question?” my dad says, raising his hand like a schoolkid. “Why?”
I almost ask him what he means, but the rest is obvious. Why here? Why us? Why did one anomaly use this town as its hunting ground for so long, and why did we get caught in the middle when another of its kind came to hunt it?
It’s Don Cranston who stands and speaks first. “There doesn’t have to be a why, does there?” he says. “Some things are just evil because they are.” His eyes flick to Higgins. “Kind of like you.”
She flinches, her mask of indifference slipping. “I don’t even know who you are.”
“Exactly.”
“We’re wasting too much time,” Sonya pleads. “Those things are going to square off eventually. If she’s still alive, we might be able to pull Kimberly out of the middle of it.”
“Not so fast,” Higgins says, holding up her hand. “People are dead. Government property was destroyed, and more government property is missing. Somebody has to go to prison.”
“The Bug Man is not your property,” Charlie argues.
Higgins goes on as if he hasn’t spoken. “And if your Bug Man and your monster end up killing each other, then any good they might have done us goes right in the shitter. Ergo, somebody needs to answer for what happened here. And it is not going to be me. Any volunteers?”
“Me.” Dad is fully on his feet, chest held high. He looks stronger and more capable than I’ve ever seen him. He also looks wearier and more broken, a man on the verge of collapse. All I want to do is go to him, put my arms around his shoulders, and help hold him steady.
“Dad, no,” I say, feeling my heart kick up a notch.
“It’s okay, son.” He looks at me, smiles an exhausted smile. “I’m really proud of you, okay? I never thought I could be as proud of you as I am right now.”
I fight back the pressure behind my eyes, but it’s too strong. My eyes fill and overflow.
“You’re a good choice, actually,” Higgins says. Her voice drips with ice. “You too, Dr. Gutierrez. The chief of police and the local scientist teaming up to protect their town’s deadliest secret, even if it means killing a few innocent people along the way. I can piece that puzzle together.”
“Wait,” Sonya says. “No.”
Her father stands beside mine, looks at his daughter with tears in his eyes. “Don’t worry, little one. You’re going to be amazing. No matter what you do. No matter where you go. No matter who you love.” Then he winks, and Sonya tries to run to him, but one of Higgins’s soldiers catches her by the arm and holds her back. Two others are already wrapping black zip ties around Dad’s and Dr. G’s wrists, cinching them tight.
“Get them out of here,” Higgins says to the privates detaining our parents. To me, Sonya, and Charlie, she says, “Go home, kids. Grieve for your friend. Grieve for your parents. Wait for those two … whatever the fuck they are to kill each other.” She consults her watch. “In twelve hours, this whole town is going to be a crater, and you won’t have to worry about it anymore.” She smiles a sickly, twisted smile. “I understand this is difficult.”
“What?” Dad hollers. “What are you saying?” He’s jerking and fighting against the soldiers who are half pushing, half dragging him out of the police station. They go right past Rebecca, who just watches with dazed, absent eyes.
“You can’t do this, Audrey,” Dr. G says, fighting his restraints. “You’re talking about two thousand innocent lives. You can’t do it!”
Higgins ignores him, follows them out of the main office. They disappear behind the corner, out into the small lobby, and through the front doors to the Triangle.