He looked down and saw there was a smudge of something beneath his shoe. Noble moved his foot and saw a muddy footprint on the tile floor.
"Guess it's not quite as clean as I thought," Noble muttered.
He squatted and studied the footprint. It was small. Definitely a shoe print. Noble touched the mud and realized it had probably come from the lawn out in front of the home. There was another one just a few inches in front of that one.
Small.
Like the footprints of a child.
Noble felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He got to his feet and followed the trail of footprints. They extended into the hallway and turned left toward the bedroom. Inside the bedroom, though, they stopped. The footprints just went into the room and did not come back out.
Suddenly Noble really wanted to get out of this house.
He walked back through the kitchen. The footprints had escaped his notice when he first walked in and now they stood out like they had been made in neon. He breathed faster and felt as if he was going to hyperventilate.
He looked at the back door. He wanted to go, but felt the need to check the garage and the backyard. Noble forced himself to head for the back door and opened it. He glanced at the door to the right, but decided there was no way in hell he was going into the basement.
Noble walked into the yard, the sound of those children running through the sprinkler providing some semblance of security for him, at least he knew people were around. The grass was neatly trimmed. There was a patch of dirt to the left as if it had once been a spot where a swing set had been. Perhaps with a prior owner, as Whitlock did not have children and did not seem the time to want them around much.
Noble walked through the grass, past the garage. He peered into the dusty windows on the side. Despite the dust, he could see Whitlock's car was inside. The rest of the garage was neatly stacked with tools and other usual garage-things.
He studied the ground. There were more footprints out there. There were shoe prints in the dirt patch. They were small footprints, just like inside. Had they come from the front and the back? It sure looked that way, an attack on two fronts. Several sets of prints were in the backyard. In certain areas, the grass was tramped down from more small feet.
He walked past the garage and around behind it. At the rear of the yard was a low chain link fence. Noble walked up to the fence and studied the rusted metal. Nothing was evident here.
"What the hell?" Noble whispered.
With nowhere else to look, he looked up into the sky. There were planes flying overhead. Loud. This whole neighborhood was so close to the runways of O'Hare that the planes seemed barely above roof level. How anyone could get used to this noise was beyond Noble. Right now the runway was being used for landings instead of take offs and the planes roared over his head, rattling his brain and vibrating the ground. They seemed so low that Noble could swear that he could see the pilots inside the cockpits.
There was nothing back here except more small footprints.
Black-eyed kids.
What the hell was that about? How were they connected to the shadow men? Where the holy fuck was Charles Whitlock?
Noble headed back for the house. His head was down, staring at his shoes, his brain full of confused thoughts and his eyes looking or more small muddy footprints. He entered the kitchen, gazed again at the basement door and found that he had not gained any resolve that would allow him to head down there and check it out. Images of Charles Whitlock hanging from a beam entered his mind. This was followed by the image of a dead-eyed Charles Whitlock reaching for his legs from under the stairs surrounded by dozens of black-eyed children. All of them, even Whitlock, begging him for help.
Noble decided it was time to leave. This was for the police. Maybe he could talk to his boss and figure out the next move. Maybe he could file a missing persons report. Whatever the next steps were he was not going to do them here in this house.
He walked through the living room. As he neared the door there was a strange sensation in his gut, as if he had dropped from a great height. Just for an instant there was the feeling of his stomach rushing up into his throat, the sensation so great that his eyelids snapped shut.
Then the sensation was gone. Just a fluttery sensation in the stomach and a slight buzzing in the head, but then those faded, too.
Noble opened his eyes. Nothing different in the living room. He was feeling ill now. This entire case was making him sick.
He pushed through the front door and stepped out onto the tiny three-step porch. That was when he looked up into the sky.
It was orange.
The fucking sky was orange.
"What the -?"
Noble looked across the street. The neighbor was there, but he was using what looked like an old push-mower instead of the gas-powered one he had seen upon walking in. He was also dressed in checked shorts and a bright orange shirt. The neighbor stopped his mowing and looked at Noble strangely.
"Mahoot galish? Santo milishka dantoonen," the neighbor said.
"Wh-what?"
Just then the entire ground vibrated and there was a strange humming sound like a giant engine from the sky. Noble looked up and gasped, feeling as if he might fall over. A giant ship was slowly moving over the house. It looked like a giant wing with propeller engines.
"Mahoot galish?" The neighbor repeated.
Noble looked down the street and the kids were there, but now they were running around some kind of device that looked like a robot out of a 1950s comic book. Water was spraying from the robot's hands and face.
He felt as if he were going to faint. He turned and ran back the only way that made sense - back into the house. He smashed through the door. Once he was inside, he felt that strange sensation in his gut again.
Same living room. Same carpet, couch, chairs, entertainment center.
Noble felt faint and sick to his stomach. He didn't want to vomit onto the carpet and leave his DNA here for the cops to find. His heart pounded and his forehead was slick with sweat. What the hell has just happened?
He turned back to the door, trying to peer outside before exiting. The sky was blue. He could hear the engine of the lawn mower from across the street. Those kids were still screaming.
Noble opened the door and stepped out to a normal sky. There was his car, parked where he had left it when it arrived.
"I am absolutely going crazy," Noble whispered. "I am out of my motherfucking mind."
Noble ran for his car. With shaking hands he got his keys out and into the car door. He was breathing so hard when he got into the car that he thought he might pass out. He got his keys into the ignition and pushed the start button. When the car burst into life, the A/C blew into his face and he laid his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes, forcing himself to calm down until the feeling that he was going to pass out went away.
When he opened his eyes the world was still the same. Another airliner flew over the neighborhood, roaring past, heading for O'Hare. It was definitely a normal airplane, complete with tiny windows, color and logo on the tail. It was just like a thousand others that he had seen before.
"There is no way I can head to D.C. tomorrow," Noble said to his empty car. "No fucking way."
Noble shifted into drive, fidgeted his way out of the parking spot and turned around, and drove away. When he passed those kids in their sprinkler, he determined that it was just in his imagination that they all stopped their frolicking to stare at him as he went past.
"Nope," Noble whispered. "Nope, nope, nope."
He hooked a left at the end of the street and minutes later he was headed back to his office.
He had phone calls to make.
Chapter Five
"Noble, you need to calm down, you sound hysterical," said Dashiell Malmont once Noble got him on the phone. "We need you to be here tomorrow."
"Listen to me, I am having hallucinations or something," Noble said, trying to maintain control of hi
s voice. He was not entirely succeeding. "I'm going crazy and it all started once I got on this case. I'm seeing shadow people and footprints and other insanity. I can't even describe the shit I just saw this afternoon, Dashiell. Look, I just need some time off. I've been working too hard."
Dashiell sighed. There was a long pause on the other end and Noble paced in his office. He was risking everything telling Dashiell. His boss would have every right to fire him for being out of his mind. The pause that Dashiell was giving right now was the kind Noble had heard him give just before he fired someone.
"Noble, have you had a call from Dr. Lance Shaw?" Dashiell said at last.
For a moment it felt as if Noble had been punched in the gut. He thought maybe he was hallucinating again. He spun around in place and sank down into his chair. His head was spinning. Had Dashiell just asked him about a man that he had only heard about this morning?
"What did you just ask me?" Noble said, his voice weak.
"I asked if you had heard or gotten a call from a Dr. Shaw?" Dashiell repeated. "A Dr. Lance Shaw."
"Yes, Dash," Noble said. "He called this morning. I haven't had a chance to talk to him."
There was a pause. More silence that seemed to stretch into infinity.
"What the fuck is going on here, Dash?" Noble asked.
"Just get here tomorrow," Dashiell said. "Get here tomorrow and we'll figure out a lot of this stuff. I promise that. Go home. Get some sleep. Try not to freak out."
“Freak out?” Noble said incredulously. “Dashiell, what have you got me involved in? Who is Lance Shaw and what is happening with Francis Duveen?”
“I can’t explain things to you on the phone, Noble,” Dashiell replied. “You are going to have to try and trust me. I know that’s a tall order right now, but you need to get the hell out of the office, go home, spend time with Olivia, and then get your ass here to D.C. tomorrow. We’ll have more to discuss then and things, I hope, will be a lot clearer.”
“Dash, do you know what’s happening? I mean, do you know what’s going on with Duveen and everyone on Flight-190? Is it connected to me in some way?”
“Just get to D.C.”
With that Dashiell hung up the phone. Noble sat at his desk staring at his cell phone as if it might explode. Perhaps he should throw it across the room. He felt the need to do something. He settled for cursing and then stomping around the office before slamming his hands down on the desktop. It wasn’t quite as satisfying as smashing something, but it would have to do for now.
He sat down behind the desk and shut off the light. He shut off his computer. He verified that he had locked the door. Then Noble leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. It was early afternoon and he had to talk to Heath about the video he had sent him. Then there was the evening meeting with Eveline Paulson.
Dashiell had told him to go home.
Fuck Dashiell.
Noble closed his eyes and let his breathing return to normal and even dozed for a bit. When he opened his eyes, twenty minutes had vanished. He felt a bit better, more centered, a bit more there.
Noble turned on the desk light again and dialed Heath. He confirmed that the young man was at his desk and that he had had a chance to review the footage. Heath also said he found something interesting.
Noble decided that was good enough for him, so he got up and headed out of the office. As he reached the door he had a moment of pure terror streak through his entire body. He was certain that when he opened the door it would be some other office, with strange looking people staring at him, all of them speaking in strange tongues. There would be strange vehicles on the road and robots roaming the hallways.
When he opened the door the same outer office that had always been there greeted him.
Noble breathed a sigh of relief.
A moment later he was standing at Heath’s desk. The younger man was a hipster with a scraggly beard and the kind of clothes that no one with professional aspirations would ever wear. Heath didn’t seem to care and his eyes always glinted as if he were in on some joke behind the round spectacles he wore on the bridge of his nose.
“What did you find, Heath?” Noble asked.
“Well, sir, you have some very odd video, that is for sure,” Heath said. “I can’t quite figure out what went wrong. With the digital stuff, this kind of over-image thing shouldn’t happen. You would get ghost images and things like that with videotape, but this ain’t supposed to be the case with the digital cameras.”
“Show me.”
Heath pulled up the video and it appeared on the giant flat screen monitor on his desk. It was the strange incident when Francis Duveen appeared around the corner. Noble recognized it instantly and remembered how there had been a strange flash of white before Duveen rounded the corner.
“Now, I have cleaned this up as much as I can, but the video is still not great,” Heath said and then pointed to a spot on the screen. “Keep your eye over here.”
The people on the screen began moving again in slow motion. There was the flash of white. The image distorted. Heath slowed the video down even more and, just before the distortion resolved itself, there was an image. It was ghostly, as if two images from two different videos had been merged. However, it was obviously another hallway, from another airport, with a whole bunch of different people all walking down a similar hallway. It was as if another image from a prior day’s video had been quickly and poorly spliced into this tape.
Except that this video was digital.
“What the fuck?” Noble said.
“Exactly,” Heath said. “I took that image and blew it up and tried to clean it up more.”
Heath clicked on the keyboard and a new image appeared on a screen just to the right of the first one. It was the double image, but a bit clearer. Heath zoomed in on the ghost image and the picture resolved. It was a sign.
CUSTOMS.
“Same sign,” Noble said.
“Pretty close,” Heath said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you look closely you can see that the font of the sign is slightly different on one image compared to the other,” Heath replied.
Heath focused on another part of the image. This one showed another sign.
WELCOME TO O’HARE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT.
The font was similar to the customs sign. Similar to the one that Noble had seen in the airport a million times, but just slightly different.
“Check out some of the clothes, too,” Heath said, pointing to another part of the image.
There was Francis Duveen. However, he was next to two women in white. One of them was the woman Noble had been studying when he looked at the video yesterday and he now her knew as Charlette Ridgeway. The other was similar, but different. The woman’s hair was pulled back in the second image. The clothes were close, but not quite the same. In fact, all of the images of the people Noble could see in the second image were close to the people in the first image, but slightly off. A pair of shorts here instead of jeans. Different shoes here. A different top there.
“That is fucking weird,” Noble whispered.
“Yeah, totally,” Heath agreed.
The picture changed. Now Noble was looking at the interrogation room. Francis Duveen was sitting there looking pathetic and lost. Noble was beginning to think that the man might have had reason to be pathetic and lost. Charles Whitlock sat there, as did his boss. This was the point where there was another distortion and Noble had been sure that there were red eyes hovering in the shadows.
“You were not kidding about this part, either,” Heath said. “There definitely is something weird going on in this room. Check out that spot where you saw the red circles.”
There was the distortion. Then the scene went white and just before that distortion resolved, there were the red circles in the corner. Heath paused the image and then shifted that over to another screen.
“I enhanced this one a bit, too,” Heath said. “Get ready for some serious
creeping out.”
The image resolved a bit more. Noble was now looking at what had to have been a man. He was wearing some kind of goggles or mask on his face. Noble could see the red lenses from the glasses and what looked like metal or something down over the nose and mouth. This man also wore a long brown coat like a duster from a Western and a wide-brimmed hat. There were dark gloves over his hands, too.
“That is fucked up,” Noble said, trying not to show his fear. “What could have caused that?”
“You tell me,” Heath said. “That shit is about as fucked up as anything I have seen. I have studied these two frames over and over and I cannot figure out how it happened in either case, nor can I find any evidence of tampering.”
“Shit,” Noble whispered.
Heath sat back in his chair and looked at Noble with a cockeyed grin on his face.
“I have no idea what you have stumbled upon here, sir,” Heath said, “but it is without a doubt one of the weirdest things I have ever seen. I have to think it was tampered with, but it was done in such a way that, other than leaving the image itself, I cannot find evidence of the tampering. No signs of cutting or image manipulation.”
Noble shook his head. “Can you email me those images? I have no idea what the fuck is going on here, Heath, but if I find out I’ll be sure to let you know.”
“Please do,” Heath replied, “because if there is some new tech out there that can do this, I need to know where and what it is.”
“Thanks, Heath.”
“No problem.”
Noble turned around and headed back toward his office. That feeling of uncertainty in his stomach was stronger than ever.
Dash wanted him in D.C.
Dash knew about Dr. Shaw.
Noble felt like his head was about to explode.
***
Noble sat in his office for about half an hour and stared at his blank computer screen. His brain would not settle down. The feeling that he was being set up for something by his own boss was too much to get past. For lack of anything else to do, he fired up the computer.
The Man From Taured Page 7