| |
I knew I was in trouble when Nico Sanchez appeared in the door of my office and said, “You’ve gotta see this body, Hannigan.” Never a good way to start a conversation. I looked up from my paperwork to see the officer hovering in my doorway. Sanchez had kind of a blanched look on his face, although that didn’t mean much - the guy had never had much of a stomach when it came to dead bodies. Probably not a great quality for a cop to have, but hey. Nobody’s perfect.
I was the one people usually came to with weird shit, and if Sanchez wanted me to come look at a corpse, there must have been something funky about it. Joy upon joys. Still, the alternative was sitting here going through autopsy reports, so any kind of distraction was good in my book. I got up and followed him down the hall to the mortuary.
“Who’s the vic?” I asked.
“Name’s Harvey Jackson. Found dead in his apartment this morning. The coroner doesn’t think there’s any foul play involved but they’re keeping him on ice in case the autopsy reveals drugs in his system or something.”
“I take it you suspect differently,” I said, “or we wouldn’t be talking right now.”
“Don’t know what to think, honestly,” Sanchez replied. “But I think you oughta have a look.”
We reached the mortuary doors and strode inside. Harvey Jackson was laid out on the examiner’s table, pale and scrawny and buck naked. His eyes were closed and I was struck, as usual, how much the dead looked like they were just sleeping. The ones who died peacefully anyway. At a certain point a body can only get so mangled before that illusion of sleep goes out the window.
Sanchez approached the cadaver with some hesitance. The pale operating lights didn’t do either of them any favors. Jackson had the complexion of a stained white blanket and the officer looked positively sickly. You could tell Sanchez had been fit at some point, but the years had given him a bit of a gut, and his once-chiseled jaw was rounded by baby fat. He scratched at his stubble and stared down at the body.
“So gross,” he said. “You seeing this, Hannigan?”
I stepped around the table to get a closer look. The body itself was in decent condition – for a corpse at least – but its left ear was splattered with a viscous gray substance that looked like chunky glue. As I watched, a stream of the stuff burbled out of the ear and dripped onto the table. I stepped back before any of it could splash onto my uniform.
“Is it supposed to be doing that?” Sanchez asked.
“The body’s been in the cold chambers since this morning, right?” I said. “Any excess bodily fluids should have dried out by now. This... this stuff is fresh.” I looked up at Sanchez. “How did our victim die again?”
“Aneurysm, supposedly. The coroner seemed kind of distracted when I was asking him about it. I guess he’s never seen anything like this either.”
I glanced down at the puddle of gray goo. It had stopped bubbling, but the surface was still wet and slick. Something inside this guy’s skull was leaking and I was pretty sure I knew what it was. I looked over at the medical tray, picked up the bone saw, and gave the button an experimental press. It whirred to life with a soft mechanical whine.
“Get the coroner,” I told Sanchez. “I think we’d better crack open this melon.”
Jackson’s eyes snapped open, wide and blood-red, and a hand shot out to seize my wrist. The bone saw clattered to the floor, scraping noisily against the tiles. I cried out as the vise-like grip left bruises on my skin. Sanchez stood there, too shocked to make a move, as the dead man heaved himself off the table and lifted another hand to wrap around my throat.
“Sanchez!” I managed to gasp out. “Fucking do something!”
His cop instincts finally kicked in and he grabbed the metal tray, sending medical instruments flying as he raised the plate and bashed the corpse across the head. More of that gray substance sprayed from its ear as the body let go of my throat and staggered off to the left. Its eyes were wide, but dull, and I wondered if it could feel pain. It scrabbled against the wall of drawers, struggling to maintain its balance.
I reached for the gun by my side, but a loud bang suddenly echoed in the tiny space, and I figured Sanchez had beaten me to the punch. It was a damn good shot – the corpse’s head exploded on impact, strewing chunks of gray across the wall and all over my uniform. I clenched my eyes shut and prayed that none of it got in my mouth. When I opened them again, the headless body was jerking on the ground, goo gushing from the hole in its neck. A few seconds later and the dead body went back to being dead again.
“Nice shot, Sanchez,” I said. But when I looked over at my fellow officer, he was still standing, dumbstruck, clutching the medical tray in his stiff hands. The shot had come from somewhere behind him. Light footsteps clacked on the tiles, and a slender figure stepped out of the darkness, gun still raised and smoking. Or maybe that was the eternal cloud of smoke billowing around his thick cigar.
“Inspector,” I said, massaging my throat. “You’ve got impeccable timing.”
* * * * *
SANCHEZ RAN OFF TO get the coroner, for all the good he could do at this point, while the Inspector knelt by the corpse and examined the gooey splatters. I half expected him to stick one of those abnormally thin fingers into the puddle and taste the gunk, but he just stared down at it. In complete defiance of the laws of physics, tendrils of smoke drifted down from his cigar and hovered above the body, as if to get a closer look.
“I was wondering if this might be your kind of thing,” I said. “I mean, before headless wonder there tried to kill me. His brain –”
“It’s been liquefied,” the Inspector said. He rose from the body, all seven feet of him, and stared thoughtfully at the wall of drawers. “Something got into his ear canal and turned his cerebral cortex to mush.”
A week ago I would have called the man insane, but brain-melting ear slugs were far from the weirdest thing I’d seen in the Neverglades. “Do you know anything that could do this?” I asked.
“That’s the problem,” he said. “This could be any number of entities. You saw with Ellory that human vessels don’t endure possession well. In his case he was sucked dry by the time-eater. For our poor friend here...” He gestured toward the grisly puddles. “Whatever was squatting in his skull was too much for his brain to handle.”
“Is it gone?” I asked. “Did you kill it?” We both eyed the corpse warily, as if it could get up again at any second. I imagined the stump of its neck gushing all over the place as it heaved itself off the ground and tried to pick up where it had left off. But the body remained slumped, cold and pale, any dregs of life drained and gone.
“This one won’t bother us anymore,” the Inspector said at last. “But these are almost never isolated incidents. If there’s some kind of hive out there infesting people’s brains, we need to track down the source and destroy it. So keep your ear to the ground. I’ll scour the town and see what I can find.”
Just then Sanchez returned with the coroner, who saw the mess and promptly lost his lunch. I helped the man get to a trash can before he could empty the contents of his stomach onto the already goo-stained floor. When I looked up again, the Inspector was gone. There was only a little wisp of smoke hanging in the air where his cigar had been.
* * * * *
I WAS IN THE PROCESS of searching the death records in our databases for similar cases when my cell phone buzzed on my desk. I grabbed it before it could vibrate too long and stared down at the screen. Olivia Marconi was calling.
“Shit,” I mumbled. I leaned back in my chair, answered the call, and braced myself.
The first words out of her mouth: “Do we need to have a talk, Hannigan?”
“About what?” I asked. I minimized the file I was reading.
“Sanchez has been blubbering to me all morning about the walking dead, which ordinarily I wouldn’t give two shits about, but he says a corpse woke up in the morgue and tried to strangle you. You want to verify that account with me?”
“Come on Marconi, you know Sanchez. Have you ever heard of that guy being a reliable witness?”
“Answer the question, Hannigan.” Marconi’s voice grew low, and for the first time I thought I heard a trace of concern. “You have a habit of getting involved with some weird shit. No offense. I’m not saying the dead are rising but if something strange happened in that morgue, I want to know.” A pause, and then: “Is this another Inspector thing?”
“Who?” I asked, too casually.
“Don’t pull that shit with me,” she said, back to being all business. “You know exactly who I’m talking about. The federal agent who showed up on the Pickett case.”
“Oh yeah. Him.” I brought up the file I’d been reading and rocked back slightly in my chair. “He may have shown up.”
“Jesus, Mark.” Marconi was practically shouting. “You couldn’t have opened with that?”
“I didn’t want to bother you if it turns out to be nothing,” I said. “Okay, sure, we had a dead body that wasn’t quite as dead as we thought. But this isn’t another Skokomish Bluffs situation. The Inspector and I can handle this one.”
“Like hell you can.” Marconi was silent for ten solid seconds, and then: “As soon as you learn anything, you call me. Understand? You boys aren’t walking into another situation like last time without my backup.”
She hung up without saying goodbye. Not that I expected her to.
* * * * *
IT WAS LATE IN THE afternoon when my cell phone buzzed again. “Inspector,” I said, bringing the phone to my ear. “Tell me you’ve got good news.”
“I’ve got a lead, at least,” he replied. “Jackson’s last known location was the Mountain Ridge Country Club. He and several other men gathered there last night to watch the Seahawks game. Apparently Jackson made it back home before morning, but none of the rest did. I’ve checked with all of their families and we’ve got ten missing people on our hands.”
“You think their brains turned to mush too?” I asked.
“I think we should check the country club, at any rate,” the Inspector replied. “I’m on my way there as we speak.”
“Likewise,” I said, grabbing my jacket. “I’ll be there in ten.”
I’d never been to the country club before, but I had a rough idea of where it was located; it was one of those fixtures I always drove past during my patrols in the outer reaches of the Glade. As I wound my way through the streets of town, orange sunlight glared off my windshield and turned the forest backdrop into a silhouette. The Inspector, too, was barely more than a shadow when I met him in the club’s parking lot. Only the speck of his cigar glowed in the darkness.
“You feel it, don’t you?” he said by way of greeting. “There’s something wrong here.”
I looked up at the squat one-story building. It was unassuming enough - a yellow structure with a chipped paint job, front porch, and pair of bronzed rifles hanging above the door - but I knew what the Inspector meant. It was too quiet here. The blinds were down and I couldn’t hear a single sound, not even a bird chirping in the eaves. It felt like the two of us had stepped into a circle where nothing moved, nothing breathed. My hand drifted toward the pistol at my waist and hovered there.
“Well, no point in waiting around,” I said. “Let’s case the joint.”
The lights were off when we entered the country club, and only the barest of dying sunlight poked through slats in the window blinds. I tried the light switch and only met with a dull popping sound. There was power somewhere in the building, though; I could hear the staticky voice of a radio host from the other room. It sounded like your standard sports broadcast.
The Inspector lifted a thin finger to his lips, and I nodded. We crept through the darkness toward the sound of the radio. The floorboards creaked under our shoes, so any element of surprise we’d started with was gone. I could only hope the worst thing we’d find was a bunch of guys gathered around a handheld radio, waiting to hear who’d scored the latest run.
Dozens of animal heads sprouted from the walls, and in the dark they had an uncanny look of liveliness about them; they might have just been sticking their necks through narrow windows. The wall space between the animal busts was filled with countless photographs and certificates, none of which I could make out clearly. There was a pile of construction materials strewn across the floor near us. I nearly tripped over a stack of planks as I followed the Inspector toward the soft drone of the radio.
The subsequent clatter was louder than I would have hoped, and seconds later I heard another creak of the floorboards, this time from across the room. I grabbed the Inspector’s shoulder and forced him to stop. We grew quiet, listening, waiting for the sound to come again. Nothing but the radio. I began to wonder if it was just the building shifting, old as it was.
Then something moved in the shadows, and suddenly a figure in spattered overalls was rushing at us, eyes vacant. My hand shot to the gun at my hip, but the Inspector was faster. He grabbed a shovel from the construction heap and swung it at the man’s chest. It collided like a dusty sack of bricks. The man kept coming, arms extended, and the Inspector wound back for another strike. This time he aimed for the forehead. The entire head detached from the body and rolled into the corner, joining the collection of hunting trophies hanging from the wall.
“Shit!” I said, pistol in hand. “Whatever got to Jackson got to him too.”
Another man leapt out of the rafters, this one wearing a plaid shirt and grime-encrusted cargo pants. He fell on top of the Inspector and nearly knocked him to the ground. The two of them grappled for a few seconds before the Inspector swung the body around and into the wooden paneling, headfirst. I couldn’t tell if the Inspector was just strong or if the man’s head really was that brittle; it popped on impact like a water balloon, spewing gray gunk across the wall.
“Mark, behind you!” the Inspector shouted.
I whipped around and fired three shots at the approaching figure. The first two went wild, but the third clipped him in the temple, sending a spray of hair and brain particles flying. The body continued to stagger toward me, so I placed another shot right between the eyes. Bang. This time the body fell forward and slumped onto the floor, its head disintegrated.
More were coming now, emerging from the darkness where they’d been crouching. They moved quickly, but clumsily, like toddlers learning how to walk for the first time. I picked them off from a distance. Headshot after headshot, they went down, their neck stumps bleeding gray goo onto the wood. Soon there was a pile of headless bodies lying strewn across the floor. I waited for more to come, breathing heavily, but it seemed we’d gotten the last of them. The Inspector stood in the corner, brushing the sticky substance off his hands.
“Did we just slaughter the entire country club?” I asked him. My pulse was racing a little too fast for comfort and I felt unable to lower my gun.
“Those things we just killed – they weren’t men,” the Inspector said. “Not anymore. Whatever parasite wriggled into their brains made sure of that.” He stopped wiping his hands and looked at me. “You’re not a murderer, Mark. You were just cleaning up an infestation.”
I knew he was right, but still, I’d blown the heads off a dozen men today and it was going to take some time to get that image out of my head. I looked away from the stack of bodies and turned toward the other room. The door was hanging wide open, and the sportscaster droned on behind it, oblivious to the massacre that had just taken place.
“There may be more of them back there,” I said, lowering my voice. I clenched my gun and nodded toward the open door. The Inspector said nothing in reply, but he glided past me to peer into the shadowed space. I noticed for the first time that his footsteps were silent. He could have been hovering a few inches in the air for all I knew.
“I don’t hear any movement,” he said. “But keep your weapon drawn, just in case.”
He slipped inside, and I followed him, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. The windows on the far side of the room were boarded shut so even less light could get through here. I could tell at least that an open bar stretched across one of the walls, and there was a pool table in the corner, a single cue stick leaning up against it. There were plenty of round tables strewn throughout the room, although most of the chairs were lying on their sides. It looked like there had been some sort of scuffle. The place was deserted now, though, near as I could tell.
The radio we’d heard since we walked in was sitting on the closest table. It was an old thing, probably manufactured in the 90s, judging by the pair of tape cassettes. The antenna poked up at a haphazard angle. I listened vaguely as the announcer went on about who was at bat and which teams were expected in the playoffs this year. Part of me wondered why this device was still running when everything else about the place seemed to be so dead.
“I think we got them all,” I said, holstering my gun. “They must have –”
“Hush.” The Inspector lifted a hand and pointed at the radio. The sound grew louder at once, although the static was worse than before; it sounded like the scrabbling of a thousand rats across pavement. In the midst of the noise I heard what the announcer was actually saying, and the flesh crawled on my neck.
“The Angels have given up three runs trying to get home again, but don’t worry, listeners – there’ll always be a place in Hell for our feathered friends.” It was a man, or at least it sounded like a man; he had the same drawl as those old-timey announcers you always heard in vintage movies. “In other news, Santiago is off of the pitcher’s mound with a broken wrist, and Williams is a dirty fucking cunt who’ll be the first to die when the cleansing comes.”
“What the hell?” I muttered.
The voice cut out, replaced by an ululating sound that reminded me of a garbled war cry. It was so loud I could actually see the speakers trembling. Then it died as quickly as it had arisen, replaced by a gentle hum and the sound of women laughing in the background.
“You’ve been listening to SPORTS,” a new voice said, clearly female. “Stay tuned for your daily horoscope.”
“Inspector –” I tried to say, but he gestured for me to shut up. A third voice had joined the chorus, this one a low, sultry baritone, like a man trying to talk up some pretty young thing in the back room of a bar. A theremin played lazily in the background.
“I want you to imagine a man, listeners,” the voice on the radio purred. “A man who loves you very much. A man who wants nothing more than to enfold you in his scaly wings and squeeze you with the force of his love. I want you to breathe in his scent until you have no reason to breathe at all. I want you to crane your neck until it breaks and howl at that blood red moon. Can you do that for me, listeners? Can you howl at that moon with me?” Then the radio erupted in a screech that couldn’t possibly have come from a human throat. I could feel my eardrums throbbing and I clapped my hands over them to block out the awful sound.
“It’s the radio!” I shouted to the Inspector, my voice muffled. “That’s what’s melting people’s brains!”
The Inspector wasted no time darting over the fallen chairs and picking up the radio. He turned the machine off, but that inhuman screech still issued from the speakers, so he tore the thing in half with his bare hands and flung both pieces against the wall. I lowered my hands, numb, as the inner mess of machinery sparked a few times and went dark. The nightmare shriek faded out with a diseased sort of blip.
“Someone’s been eating their Wheaties,” I commented, but the Inspector wasn’t listening to me. He leaned down and picked through the wires, frowning. The smoke billowing from his cigar had taken on a peculiar shade of orange.
“It’s in the radio waves,” he said at last. “That much is obvious. But where’s the source?”
“Unless it’s a private broadcast, it’s got to be down at the community radio station,” I said. “Pacific Glade isn’t that big. If you get your news via radio, it’s not like you’ve got many options.”
“Then we need to get there as soon as possible and stop this broadcast,” he said. “Or we could be dealing with a whole town of brainless corpses before long.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” I replied.
* * * * *
THE INSPECTOR RODE with me to the radio station - whatever vehicle he’d used to get to the country club seemed to have vanished into thin air - and we spent most of the trip in silence. Being some kind of otherworldly, interdimensional being, he probably didn’t have much use for small talk. He didn’t say a word until we arrived at the station and got out of the cruiser, slamming the doors behind us.
“We don’t know what we’ll find in there,” he warned. “Whatever you do, Mark, don’t let go of your gun.”
I nodded and patted my holster. The doors opened for us automatically, and we strode into a cool, spacious lobby, with a receptionist’s deck and a few cushioned chairs. Photos of smiling radio execs lined the walls, along with a few pieces of Pacific Glade memorabilia: news clippings about local heroes, pictures of Lake Lucid at sunrise, even an old ham radio perched on a little shelf by the window. The floor was carpeted in a blue-and-white checkered pattern. As we approached the desk, the receptionist looked up from her computer and smiled at us.
“Can I help you, gentlemen?” she asked.
In response, the Inspector lifted a badge – no idea where he’d gotten that from – and shoved it in the woman’s face. “FBI. We have a reason to believe one of your stations is broadcasting terrorist propaganda and we want it shut down. Now.”
The woman looked up at him, raising a quizzical eyebrow. I fully expected her to protest or make a fuss. Instead, she asked, “What frequency is it?”
I shared a look with the Inspector. In the confusion back at the country club I don’t think either of us had taken a closer look at the radio’s call letters; we were too focused on shutting the damn thing up. Thankfully the Inspector spoke up before I could think up some half-assed explanation.
“The signal’s been bouncing from station to station, near as we can tell. It took us a long time to track it back to the source.” He stowed the badge back in his pocket and said, “Ma’am, this broadcast is a domestic threat. Several people have already been killed because of it. We need to shut it down before it can hurt anyone else.”
Damn, he was good. The woman still had a puzzled expression on her face, but she seemed to believe us, at any rate. She rose from the desk and led us over to a side door. We followed her into a dimly lit hallway with a few dark doorways and a single window at the end of the hall. A neon red ON AIR sign hovered above the first two doors. The receptionist brought us to the door at the far end, this one devoid of any sign, and rapped a few times on the frame. “Marcy!” she called softly. “There’s a couple of men here to see you.”
Light spilled into the hall as the door opened and a woman’s face peered out at us. It looked like we’d caught her in the middle of filling out paperwork. A decorative lamp on the desk lit up her dark skin and vivid blue business dress. She eyed me and the Inspector with some unease.
“Yes?” she said. “I’m wrapping up for the night. Is there something I can do for you?”
The Inspector flashed his badge again and recited the same bullshit story he’d told the receptionist. I expected her to get indignant and demand that we leave at once, but Marcy surprised me. “Terrorist propaganda,” she said, with a snort of laughter. “That’s a new one. Do you boys want to hear what we actually broadcast here?”
“Of course,” the Inspector answered, glancing warily at me. Marcy brought us to one of the ON AIR rooms and pushed the door open quietly. The space inside was divided by a large pane of soundproof glass. Behind it, two men in flannel shirts and headphones were having a conversation into a set of mics. Their voices issued from a mess of buttons and speakers on our side of the glass. Neither voice matched the sports announcer or the sultry baritone we’d heard at the country club.
“So, Alan, I heard you met a pretty young thing down at the Hanging Rock. Care to elaborate for our eager listeners?”
“Let me tell you, Joe, I haven't been this disappointed since Barbra Streisand didn't swallow.”
“You always were a nasty old dog, Alan.”
The older of the two men, Alan, made a jerking off gesture with his hand - presumably for the benefit of his costar, since of course the audience couldn't see it. Joe burst into a fit of laughter and said something about freaky women, but at that point my cheeks were red and I was trying not to listen.
“It may be garbage, but it’s harmless garbage,” Marcy said. She closed the door on the two men. “I don’t know where you got your information, officers, but we’re not broadcasting propaganda here. Just good old-fashioned bathroom humor.”
She went on, but I wasn’t listening. I’d just seen something through the window that had made my blood run cold. The Inspector hadn’t spotted it yet. He was staring at the closed door as if he was trying to burn holes in it with his eyes. Hell, maybe he was. I had no idea what he was capable of. His cigar smoke had taken on a shade of deep, cherry red.
“Did you used to have another station?” I cut in.
Marcy paused. “Ages ago, yes,” she said. “There’s a radio tower about a mile away. But it hasn’t been operational for almost ten years now. There was something wrong with the building - asbestos, I think.”
“I don’t know about asbestos,” I said, pointing to the window, “but I think you might be wrong about that tower.”
Everyone turned to look. In the distance, just close enough to see, a steady red light was blinking in the darkness. Beside me, I felt the Inspector tense up, his fingers growing tight around his fake badge.
Marcy frowned. “That can’t be possible,” she said. “We moved all the equipment to this station when we switched locations. There’s nothing left to broadcast over there.”
“It’s very possible,” the Inspector muttered. “And I think it’s safe to say we’ve found the source of the signal.” He stowed the badge in his coat pocket and strode off down the hallway, leaving me to hurry after him. I took a second to glance back at Marcy. A strange sheen had come over her eyes, and her face had grown solemn.
“Be careful over there,” she said.
Her concern caught me off guard. Even though she couldn’t know the truth, she could at least sense at the shape of it. Like anyone who grew up in the Glade, she understood that there was something fundamentally different about this place. Something... off. And she knew that whatever was behind that signal was bad news.
“We’ll be okay,” I replied. “Just doing our job.”
* * * * *
NORMALLY I WOULDN’T let another soul touch the wheel of my police cruiser, but the Inspector was already in the driver’s seat when I joined him outside, and I figured, what the hell. I wasn’t going to pick a fight with Detective Lovecraft. There was a lot more at stake tonight.
The Inspector pulled out of the parking lot, tires skidding, and sent us rocketing down the road toward the distant blinking tower. My seatbelt dug harshly into my shoulder blades. I pulled my phone out of my pocket, fully prepared to call Marconi, but found my fingers typing out another number instead. My wife answered on the third ring.
“Hello?”
“Hi honey, it’s me.” Tires rumbled in the background, and I asked, “Are you driving?”
“Um, yes,” she said. “I took the kids out for ice cream. I hope you don’t mind – you’ve been out so late, you know, and they were getting antsy.”
I could hear Rory arguing with Stephen in the backseat: the soundtrack of my life these days. But that wasn’t the only thing I heard. There was another voice in the car. A smooth, male baritone announcing tomorrow’s weather.
“Do you trust me, babe?” I asked.
A pause. “You know I do.” Another pause, longer this time, and then: “Are you about to do something dangerous?”
“Don’t worry about me.” I glanced up at the radio tower, now looming closer than before, growing steadily in size as the car shot through the forest. “Just listen – turn off the radio and drive the boys straight home. Lock the doors and grab the baseball bat we keep under the bed. And whatever you do, don’t turn on the radio. I can’t stress that enough.”
My wife said nothing for a few seconds, and I wondered if she thought I was crazy. Then the announcer’s voice went dead. Rory and Stephen kept up their banter, oblivious to what was going on in the front seat.
“We’re almost home,” Ruth said. “I’ll make sure the boys stay inside. And Mark? Stay safe.”
“I always do,” I replied. It was a lie I’d uttered many times before, and would no doubt utter again. But that was just part of the job. We’d accepted a long time ago that tomorrow was never guaranteed.
“I love you,” she said, and the phone went silent in my ear. I lowered it to my lap and stared through the windshield. The tower jutted out from the trees before us like a great skeletal finger, stabbing at the clouds. The red light at its tip pulsed brightly in the growing darkness.
“We’re here,” the Inspector announced, and the old wooden structure appeared suddenly among the trees. Its windows were boarded up and most of the paint on the paneling had peeled away. By all rights the place should have been dead, but there was still that glowing light up top. It flashed in and out as it broadcasted its deadly signal across the Neverglades.
The Inspector brought the car to a stop, and I stepped out, slipping my cell phone into my pocket. Ruth and the kids would be all right. I was the one who needed to watch his back.
The front door was boarded up with a set of planks, but the Inspector tore them off with his bare hands, the rusty nails squealing as they came loose. He tossed the boards casually aside. I watched them as they flew through the air, struck a tree, and tumbled to the forest floor in a heap.
“You know, you’re awfully strong for such a scrawny guy,” I said. Even as the words left my mouth, I saw the Inspector’s body ripple, his true form flashing into view for a second. It was like getting blinded by a thousand-kilowatt camera flash. I had to blink a few times to clear up the afterimage.
“Let’s go,” he said, ignoring me. “We can’t afford to waste any time.” He forced open the door with his shoulder and hurried inside. Pistol raised, I followed him into the gloom.
So far, so good – except for one big fuckup. In my concern for my family, I’d forgotten to call Marconi.
* * * * *
IF I HAD ANY DOUBTS that we were in the right place, they evaporated the second the Inspector and I stepped inside. The supposedly abandoned station was teeming with machinery. Cracked, rusty consoles sat on every spare surface, vines poking through the holes in their screens. Or at least they looked like vines. A closer look revealed that they were actually thick, tangled wires. The wires sprouted from the walls, too, stretching across the ground in spiral patterns, each cable heavy with purple moss.
“I wouldn’t touch anything,” the Inspector said, ducking underneath a hanging wire. “That kind of moss doesn’t usually grow this side of the rift. I have no idea what it’ll do to human skin.”
I inched forward cautiously, being careful to tiptoe around the fuzzy purple wires. They gave off a slight metallic stench with a tinge of ozone. There was a faint humming in the air, almost imperceptible, and I realized the wires were vibrating. The closer we drew to the next room, the stronger the vibrations grew. I could feel the sound jostling around my skull.
“It’s an organism,” the Inspector muttered. “Not just a radio wave. And its heart is close by. You can hear it.”
I hissed out a warning as he placed a hand on the door, but the Inspector pushed it open anyway, revealing a flickering space the size of a small studio. The wires grew dense and more tangled than ever as they retreated into the dark space. The Inspector brushed them aside and entered the room. I followed him, gun raised, keeping a wary eye on the dangling cables.
The space behind the door was another recording studio, bigger than the one at the community station, but utterly devoid of people. Tiny portable radios lay in piles on the floor, all tuned in to the same staticky channel. Every so often I heard the occasional blip of a voice but couldn’t make out what it was saying. A single outdated TV set sat on a table behind the soundproof glass. The pane itself was shattered, wires stabbing through the holes, but the curved screen of the TV was intact. A dark shape lurked behind the static. I could barely make out the outline of a human face and neck.
“Show yourself,” the Inspector said suddenly, scaring the shit out of me. His cigar smoke had turned a pungent yellow. He crossed the room and placed a slender hand on the glass.
“You’ve proven you’re capable of human speech,” he said. “So let’s have a conversation.”
The vibrating hum grew louder, and the image on the screen became less shaky, took on sharp lines and curves. At first I thought I was looking at a silhouette - a person’s face cast in shadow. But the image grew crisper, and I realized, the hairs on my arms prickling, that the figure had no face at all. Just a pure black dome for a head, like a chunk of carefully sculpted obsidian.
The stony face that wasn’t a face cracked at the bottom, stretching into an unnaturally wide smile. The teeth that grinned out at us were pristine white and razor sharp. It was like staring into the maw of a shark.
“Inspector, Inspector, the noble defector,” it jeered. “Come to play with the paramecium, have you?”
It was all the voices we’d heard at the country club mashed into one: man, woman, animal, howling static, an abrasive mix of all the worst sounds you could imagine. Each syllable made my head throb. I wanted to clap my hands over my ears, but that would mean letting go of my gun, and I sure as hell wasn’t doing that. So I stood there and endured the voices with gritted teeth.
The Inspector seemed unaffected by the grating sound. “Why I’m here is none of your concern,” he said to the figure behind the screen. “What I want to know is how you got here, and why you’re killing these people.”
The shark-like smile curved upwards in an arc that would have stretched the limits of any human face. “Because they have hands,” the voice said. “Because they have feet, and tongues, and brains, and I am not so gifted.” Static rushed in, and the voice dropped an octave. “But you wouldn’t know, would you? Mr. Too-Good-to-Walk-Around-in-a-Flesh-Suit?”
“You didn’t answer my first question,” the Inspector said. “How did you get through the rift?”
The figure opened its mouth, but instead of speaking, a chorus of game show bells came ringing out. “Oooh! That is the wrong question!” said a tinny announcer’s voice. “Please step inside the box to await your punishment.” Then canned laughter from an invisible audience.
“Box? What’s it talking about?” I asked.
The laughter cut out. The figure on the screen whipped its head around so fast the image blurred for a moment, and even though it had no eyes, I knew it was looking at me. The mouth opened again and a long, orange tongue licked the tips of those razor-sharp teeth.
“The brave detective,” said a new voice, and I nearly dropped the gun, because it was Ruth. The thing inside the TV had captured her voice to a T. I felt my hands grow numb around the pistol, but I kept it aimed at the screen.
“You’re not my wife,” I said. “You can cut the shit now, because I’m not falling for it.”
“Of course I’m not your wife,” said the familiar voice. “I’m better than her. You love each other but your flesh suits keep you separate. I can be in you - with you - in ways she never could. I can bring you unity. Intimacy like you’ve never known. I can be every rush of euphoria, every surge of happiness. You want that. Don’t you?”
Of course not, I wanted to say, but my lips wouldn’t move, and neither would the rest of my body, for that matter; every muscle had gone rigid. The voice continued to murmur sweet nothings in my ear, and then I felt it - something cool, airy, and sticky crawling into my ear canal, digging invisible claws into the flesh.
“No!” the Inspector bellowed, and the glass pane shattered inward, sprinkling jagged shards across the floor. The TV set flew backwards and crashed against the wall. As the screen cracked, I felt the invisible presence vanish from my ear, and all at once my muscles turned to Jello. My weakened body slumped against the nearest pile of wires. A patch of moss brushed my hand and pain instantly shot down my arm. As I yanked it away, I saw that my skin had become red and inflamed, as if I’d touched it to a burner on the stove.
The overhead lights began to flicker, and a sudden whirring filled the room: the sound of an automatic door sliding open. At the far end of the studio, in a darkened corner we hadn’t noticed, a pair of men lurched out of the shadows. They moved with the same clumsy gait as the corpses from the country club. The Inspector almost didn’t see them in time, but he reacted quickly when he did, throwing the first body against the wall and kicking the second square in the chest. As the man staggered back, I lifted my gun and shot him between the eyes. Gray goo splattered across the wall of wires as the headless body slumped to the ground.
The shadows stirred, and I shouted, “There’s more of them!” I got to my feet and fired another couple of shots into the darkness. None of them hit home, but in the flash of gunfire, I saw about five or six other figures hobbling toward us. The Inspector pulled out his own gun and fired at lightning speed, taking out three of the corpses in less than a second. But they were coming still, even the ones missing chunks from their skull, and our ammo wouldn’t last forever.
“This way!” the Inspector yelled suddenly, grabbing me by the arm and dragging me down a side hall. The wires here were thick as boa constrictors and there were more TV sets strewn across the ground, each displaying the same dark, grinning face. Staticky voices drifted up from them as we passed.
“Barbasol is the number one way to soothe your existential dread of the fleshy prison you call your body!”
“And it’s one! Two! Three strikes you’re dead at the old - ball - game!”
“It’s raining blood and guts out there, folks, chunks of viscera dropping from the sky! Bring an umbrella and a vomit bucket to work.”
“Inspector, Inspector, the monster detector. Does your friend know who you really are? Does he know the things you’ve done?”
The Inspector responded to this last taunt by smashing in the closest TV screen with the toe of his boot. The canned laughter that followed had something dark and heaving in the background, like the sound of a grizzly bear throwing up. I could feel my ears burning again but there was nothing I could do except run, run, run.
Finally the two of us burst out of the hall and into the fresh air of the night. I wanted to book it to the cruiser and get the hell out of there, but the Inspector held me back. “Look!” he said. We were standing underneath the radio tower. Up close, I saw that every beam was teeming with purple moss. Dangling from the center in a sticky blue cocoon was a shape I can only describe as an enormous human heart.
Scraping footsteps echoed from the hallway behind us. I pivoted and fired a few shots back into the darkness, but they went wild, the demonic voice laughing as the bullets ricocheted off the walls. The walking corpses were almost on top of us and I couldn't understand why the Inspector was holding me still.
“When I say run,” he said suddenly, “I want you to head straight for the cruiser. Do you understand?”
“What about you?” I asked, firing another bullet. This time it sunk into a meaty shoulder, but otherwise did little to slow the body down.
The Inspector spun me around so that we were staring eye to eye. His purple irises flashed an alarming shade of red that I'd never seen before, matching the cloud of crimson smoke billowing from his cigar.
“DO YOU UNDERSTAND?” he barked.
I nodded. What else could I do?
As the walking bodies grew closer, the Inspector stepped away from me and tore the cigar from his mouth. I say “tore” because the thing came free with a great ripping sound, like someone pulling off a band-aid; the noise was so harsh it made me wince. The tip of the cigar ignited like the head of a massive match. Then, as I watched, the Inspector drew back his arm and launched the cigar through the air at the dangling blue heart.
It flew like a torpedo, changing its shape in a subtle way I still can't describe; one second I was looking at a cigar, and the next I simply wasn't. The glowing object struck the center of the cocoon and exploded on impact. Hot white fire spread along the tendrils of moss, turning the tower into a fiery beacon against the sky. Bits of hot debris rained around me, singeing my skin, and I realized the Inspector was shouting for me to run.
I raised an arm to shield my face as I rushed through the blaze. The fire was spreading fast, unnaturally fast, and for a scary moment I thought it had surrounded me on all sides. Then a hole opened in the flames and I darted toward it. The sleeves of my uniform were still alight after I staggered through, so I flung myself onto the ground and rolled back and forth in the wet grass, trying to stifle the flames.
A guttural shriek made me look up from where I was rolling. The radio tower had turned into a blazing white pillar, with the writhing heart caught in the center. There was no sign of the bodies that had been chasing us - or of the Inspector, for that matter. I lay still in the grass as the shriek rose a few octaves, becoming less and less human, before reaching its highest pitch and dissolving into a final mess of static.
That was the moment the radio tower sank in on itself like a drooping wet sandcastle. The flashing beacon at the top collapsed into the center with an almighty crash, bringing the entire structure down, causing great embers to leap outward and spark against the grass. I rose to my knees and felt for my gun. Nothing should have been able to survive that collapse. But if a set of charred, flaming bodies came staggering out of the wreckage... well, god forbid I be caught with my guard down.
I waited for three minutes for something - anything - to emerge from the ruins, but when a shape finally appeared among the flames, I held my fire. It was the Inspector. His seven-foot silhouette melted out of the fire as easily as someone might slip through a light waterfall. Before I could ask him if he was okay, he knelt down and picked something small off the ground. The flames came rushing inward as if sucked by a great vacuum, billowing over themselves until they spiraled down, down into the thin shape the Inspector held in his hand. When he brought the cigar to his mouth again, it was glowing bright - but the blaze behind him had vanished. There wasn't even a single spark left behind.
“Jesus,” I breathed. “Did you kill it?”
The Inspector nodded. Behind him, the crispy patches of purple moss were decaying into puddles of goop, much like the stuff inside the radio victims’ skulls. The bodies that had been chasing us were barely more than charcoal. My own skin was red and inflamed - between the moss and the flaming debris, I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had a few third-degree burns - but at least I’d made it out. At least I was alive. In a job like this, you’re grateful for whatever miracles you can get.
“That fire must have been seen for miles,” I said. “We should get the hell out of here before somebody comes to investigate.”
“Agreed.” The Inspector stuffed his hands into his coat pockets and glided away from the wreckage, leaving me to follow in his wake. This time I was the one to slip into the driver’s seat. I kept the headlights low and stuck to the side roads, and when the trees lit up with the flashing strobe of another police car, I slipped off the curb and waited in the shadows. The cruiser zipped past us unaware, its sirens blaring.
“The broadcast is dead,” I said. “So does that mean this is over? No more brain-melting zombie waves?”
The Inspector frowned. “Yes and no. I don’t think our friend in the TV set will be bothering us anymore. But there’s still the question of how it got here in the first place, which is my biggest worry right now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that old station was supposed to be abandoned - no wires, no speakers, no functioning equipment. But somebody restocked the place since Marcy and the others relocated. Somebody unknowingly - or knowingly - gave that thing a home. A base of operations.” He turned to look at me in the darkness. “If there’s someone out there letting beings through the rift on purpose, and giving them the tools to survive on this side of the veil... we should all be worried. This could be so much bigger than a single rogue time eater or a brain-hungry hive mind.”
The thought had crossed my own mind already, and it only made me more uneasy to hear the Inspector vocalize it. The trees around us burst into flashes of color as a wailing fire truck zoomed past. I wondered what the officers would make of the collapsed tower, the charred bodies, the heaps of old radios and TVs. It must have been like walking into an episode of the Twilight Zone.
“What did that thing mean?” I asked. “The thing in the TV set. It asked if I knew who you really were. If I knew the things you’ve done.”
The Inspector didn’t speak for a moment, but his cigar smoke took on a thin, wispy quality. His eyes had faded back to that unusual shade of purple. He still didn’t look quite human, but something of the monster in him had melted away, and he seemed strangely vulnerable sitting there in the passenger seat.
“I’ve lived a long life, Mark,” he said. “And when you’ve lived as long as I have, you look back on your early days with something less than pride - maybe even disgust at what you were, before you became what you are. You’ll have to forgive me for not wanting to dwell too long on those old days.” He breathed out a single smoke ring. “Not yet, at least.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “But one day you and I are going to have a chat.”
If this prospect worried the Inspector, he didn’t show it. He simply reached into the pocket of his coat and withdrew a rectangular slip of plastic. “Here,” he said, passing it to me. I turned it over in my hands. The surface was reflective, so I could see my own face, but nothing else; the card itself was blank.
“That’s my calling card,” the Inspector said. “I try to keep my eyes open for any sort of disturbance in the Glade, but sometimes I miss things. So if you’re tracking something dangerous - something more than just a human criminal - and you need my help, ignite that card.”
“Ignite?” I said, raising an eyebrow.
“Trust me,” he replied. “I’ll come as soon as I can.”
I shrugged and tucked the card into my pocket. “Hopefully we get a breather first,” I said. “This was a messy one. I don't know how I'm going to explain this in my reports.”
“You'll think of something,” the Inspector said distantly. “If you don't mind, Mark, I think I'd like to walk back on my own. Just to clear my head. You understand.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “It's a long walk back to the station.”
The Inspector smiled. “I think I'll be okay.” He opened the door and stepped out into the night. Before leaving, he placed a hand on the frame and said, “We did well tonight.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “You did well. That thing with the exploding cigar was insane. Maybe one of these days I’ll save your bacon instead of the other way around.”
His smile grew a fraction. Then he closed the door, gentler than I expected, and strolled off toward the moonlit horizon.
Before I revved the engines and began the journey back to the station, I watched the Inspector wander down that stretch of road. Part of me expected his body to just vanish as soon as he got too far, dissolving into mist; but he didn't. He remained a lonely figure with his hands tucked into his pockets and his fedora bowed. And I realized, then, that something the monster had said had struck home with him. It was hard to imagine someone like the Inspector being hurt by such a trivial taunt. But he was hurting. I could see that now.
I wished I knew why, wished I could talk to him, but this wasn't the time to push it. He'd tell me when he was good and ready. In the meantime, there was nothing else to do but get back to my desk and try to bury this whole case in mounds upon mounds of paperwork.
* * * * *
THAT WAS THE PLAN, anyway. When I got back to my office, Marconi was waiting for me by my desk. She was chewing her customary wad of gum so furiously I thought she might crack a tooth.
“Marconi,” I said, wrinkling my brow. “What are you -?”
She slapped me across the face, hard enough to make my jaw sting. I raised a hand to my cheek and half-expected to draw away blood. I’d seen Marconi pissed before, but never to this extent; her eyes burned with anger and her lips were drawn in a definite scowl.
“Hannigan,” she seethed. “I told you to call me the second you got a tip on this case. Now you stumble back in here reeking of smoke with burns all over your skin. You want to tell me what kind of shit you’ve been up to behind my back?”
“Jesus, Marconi, I’m sorry,” I said. Talking was painful; every syllable made my jaw throb. “Things escalated quickly. The Inspector and I were forced to act on a sudden lead and I forgot to call you in the confusion. It’s nothing personal.”
“You think I was born yesterday?” she said. “Much as it pains me to admit, you’ve got a good head on your shoulders, Hannigan. You don’t just forget things. For some reason you’re keeping me out of these investigations and I want to know why.”
I remained silent. My jaw hurt too much to talk and I wasn’t sure I had an answer for her anyway.
“I’m a big girl. I can protect myself,” she said. “So don’t feed me any bullshit about ‘keeping me safe.’ If anything, you need me. You boys would have been toast if I hadn’t stepped in up in the Bluffs.” She took a step closer to me, and I thought I saw some of the anger dwindle in her eyes. “I just want to help, Mark. Why won’t you let me help?”
I met her gaze. It was surprisingly hard; maintaining eye contact with Marconi was like staring into a bright light for too long. “Look, I know I haven't exactly been open with you,” I said. “It's just, these cases, with the Inspector - they're different. Weirder than anything I've ever seen. If you really want in, I guess I can't stop you. But if you open this door, there’s no closing it. And you may not like what you find on the other side.”
She snapped her gum and smirked. “You always had a melodramatic streak, you know that?” she said. “But don't patronize me, Hannigan. I know we're up against some dangerous shit. I saw that thing up on the Bluffs, and if there's anything even half as crazy still running around out there, it's my duty to stop it. It's our duty. So promise me. Promise you'll call me the second this Inspector of yours comes on the scene.”
What could I say? Marconi was one hell of a cop, and truth be told, it was better to have her around. Aside from some archaic sense of chivalry, there was really no reason to keep her out of this.
“I promise,” I said. “But Jesus, Marconi, lay off the physical violence next time. My jaw’s still stinging.”
She smiled and slapped me again - this time on the shoulder. “I’m just glad your sorry ass is still alive,” she said. “Now go home and wash up. You’ve got plenty of reports to file tomorrow.”
“Yes ma'am,” I replied.
Marconi left, leaving behind the faintest whiff of bubblegum, and I decided to call it a night. My body was burnt all over and I was in desperate need of a shower. Plus Ruth and the boys would be waiting for me back home.
I don't get nights off too often, but when I do, it's usually a quiet affair. A beer with dinner, TV with the boys, and maybe a little fun with Ruth if we're both not exhausted from work. Tonight, though, would be different. The thought of doing anything physical made my entire body ache, and after what had happened at the station I wanted to steer clear of television for a while. So maybe this would be a quiet one. Just a peaceful night in with the people I loved.
After such a long, chaotic day, I think I deserved that much.
