Glimpse

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Okay,” she said. It sounded very manly and bully-bully, but it was also a bit of a comfort. Rain stroked Bug’s head. The dog was wide awake and listening because Rain had the speaker on.

  Monk said, “The good news is now that we’ve shared everything, none of us are alone anymore. We got your friends, you, and me. That’s a lot more than we had this morning, right? We may not be a full army, but we’re a squad, a team.”

  “The Cracked World Society,” she said and explained what that meant.

  Monk laughed. “Yeah, that’ll do. So it’s the Cracked World Society against the Shadow People. Two sides. That makes it a war. Now we build our intel. I’m going to call Jonatha tonight and wake her up. She’s used to that.”

  “That’s great, Monk, and tomorrow, I’m going to go out with Sticks and try to find Boundary Street and—”

  “You’re going to find what?” Monk shouted it into the phone.

  “Boundary Street. Wait, didn’t I tell you that part of it?”

  “No, you goddamn well did not. How the hell do you know about Boundary Street?”

  Rain explained it to him.

  “Listen to me,” he said when she was done, “and don’t freak out, okay?”

  “You say that and I immediately want to freak out.”

  “Don’t. This is good. Maybe it’s good, I’m not sure. I know how to find Boundary Street,” he said.

  “You what?”

  “This is going to sound crazy or it’s going to make sense, but I think there’s a Boundary Street in every town. Everywhere. I think there’s always a Boundary Street.”

  “Sticks said that, too.”

  “He’s right,” said Monk. “The first time I found Boundary Street was when I was in Shanghai. And I found it again in Cairo and in Tehran. And a dozen other places. I always find it.”

  “Then you’ve been there.”

  “No,” he said heavily. “I’ve never been there. I live down in the shadows along Boundary Street. Sounds poetic, but it’s not. It blows. The kind of work I do doesn’t get me an invitation to go up the hill. You say you’ve been in the Zone? Shit. That’s pretty amazing. That makes me want to cry. Sticks has been there, too? Disabled vet? Maybe that’s part of it. Maybe you have to lose something, or maybe you have to care for something or care about something, to be clean enough to go up that hill.”

  “But you’re helping me, Monk,” Rain said.

  “I’m on your side, but don’t make assumptions about me. You don’t know the things I’ve seen. You don’t know what I’ve done. If I go up that hill and stand in that light, it would all be there to see. And … I guess I don’t want that. I’m not ready for that. I’m not one of the Shadow People, whatever they are, but there’s this darkness that’s down deep inside of me. I need it. It still has a purpose to serve, and as long as I need it, I think it’s best if I stay down on this side of Boundary Street.”

  “Monk, I told you everything about what’s going on with me. More than I’ve told anyone. More than I told my friends at the diner tonight. But you keep talking about your darkness and you aren’t anywhere near as freaked out about all this as you should be. Why not?”

  He cursed softly. “You really want to hear it?”

  “I think I have to.”

  “It’s going to scare the shit out of you.”

  Rain almost smiled. “I think it’s too late for that.”

  And so he told her his story. It took a while, too. When he was done, Rain sat there, holding Bug, crying softly.

  “I’m sorry the world’s like this,” said Monk. “For you, for your friends. For all of us. It’s real dark out there, but you’re not alone out here. Maybe I’m not, either. So believe me when I tell you we’re going to fight this. Whatever it is, we’re not going to just roll over and take it. That’s not who I am, and I don’t think it’s who you are. Maybe before, but not now. Am I right?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “We’re going to fight?”

  “Yes.” Rain did not wipe at her tears. “We have to. Not for me. For my son. His name is Dylan. It means ‘ray of hope.’”

  She heard a sound. Maybe it was a sob; it was hard to tell. The line went dead.

  INTERLUDE NINETEEN

  MONK’S STORY, PART 5

  It took me two days to run it all down. The girl misremembered the license number, so that killed half a day.

  Then I put the pieces together. Bang, bang, bang.

  Once that happens, everything moves quickly.

  I ran the guy through the databases we PIs use, and after an hour, I knew everything about him. I had his school records and his service record—one tour in Afghanistan, one in Iraq. Made me hate him even more. He was divorced, no kids. Parents dead, his only living relative was a brother in Des Moines. I figured there were bodies buried in Des Moines, too, but I’d never know about them. He owned three Jack in the Box franchise stores and had half interest in a fourth. Drove a hybrid, recycled, and had solar panels on his house. I almost found that funny.

  I was in his Netflix and Hulu accounts, his bank account, and everything else he had. If there was a pattern there, or a clue as to what he was, it wasn’t there. He was very smart and very careful. No cops were ever going to catch him.

  I parked my car on the route he took to work and waited until I saw him drive past on his way home. Gave him an hour while I watched the sun go down. Twilight dragged some clouds across the sky, and the news guy said it was going to rain again. Fine. Rain was good. It was loud and it chased people off the streets.

  Lightning forked the sky, and thunder was right behind it. Big, booming. One second, nothing, and then it was raining alley cats and junkyard dogs.

  I got out of my car and opened an umbrella. I really don’t give a shit about getting wet, but umbrellas block line of sight. They make you invisible. I walked through the rain to his yard, went in through the gate, up along the flagstone path, and knocked on the door. Had to knock twice.

  The guy had half a confused smile on his face when he opened the door, the way people do when they aren’t expecting anyone. Especially during a storm. Big guy, an inch taller than me, maybe only ten pounds lighter. His debit card record says that he keeps his gym membership up to date. I knew from my research that he’d boxed in college. Wrestled, too. And he had army training. Whatever.

  “Mr. Gardner?” I asked.

  He said, “What do you want?”

  I hit him. Real fucking hard. A two-knuckle punch to the face, right beside the nose. Cracks the infraorbital foramen. Mashes the sinus. Feels a lot like getting shot in the face, except you don’t die. He went back and down, falling inside his house, and I swarmed in after him, letting the umbrella go. The wind whipped it away and took it somewhere. Maybe Oz for all I know. I never saw it again.

  Gardner fell hard, but he fell the right way, like he knew what he was doing. Twisting to take the fall on his palms, letting his arm muscles soak up the shock. His head had to be ringing like Quasimodo’s bells, but he wasn’t going out easy.

  He kicked at me as I came for him. A good kick, too, flat of the heel going for the front of my knee. If he’d connected, I’d have gone down with a busted leg, and he’d have had all the time in the world to do whatever he wanted. If he’d connected. I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night. I bent my knee into the kick and bent over to punch the side of his foot. I knew some tricks, too.

  In the movies, there’s a brawl. A long fight with all sorts of fancy moves, deadly holds, exciting escapes, a real gladiatorial match. That’s the movies. In the real world, fights are, to paraphrase Hobbes, nasty, brutish, and short. He had that one kick, that one chance. I didn’t give him a second one. I gave him nothing. I took everything.

  When I was done, I was covered in blood, my chest heaving, staring at what was left of him there in the living room. I’d closed the door. The curtains were closed over drawn shades. The TV was on. Some kind of CSI show with the volume cranked up. Outsid
e, the storm was shaking the world.

  Gardner wasn’t dead. Mostly, but not entirely. That would come a little later. He wasn’t going anywhere, though. That would have been structurally impossible. I went into the kitchen and found a basting brush. Slapped it back and forth over his face to get it wet, then I wrote on the wall. It took a while. I made sure he was watching. I wrote the names of every girl he had killed. Every one that I’d met there in the darkness of Olivia’s hell. Gardner was whimpering. Crying. Begging. When I was done, I unzipped my pants, pulled out my dick, and pissed on him. He was sobbing now. Maybe he was that broken or that scared. Maybe it was his last play, trying to hold a match to the candle of my compassion.

  Maybe.

  But he was praying in the wrong church.

  Gardner managed to force one word out. It took a lot of effort because I’d ruined him.

  “P-please,” he said.

  I smiled.

  “Fuck you,” I said. The storm was raging, and I stood there for nearly an hour. Watching Gardner suffer. Watching him die. Judge me if you want. If so, feel free to go fuck yourself.

  That night, I got drunk. Because it’s the only reasonable thing to do.

  Me and Patty, Lefty Wright, and a couple of the others. Ten of us huddled around a couple of tables in a black-as-pockets corner of our favorite bar. Me and my people. No one had to ask what happened. Patty knew, couple of the others maybe. Mostly not. But they all knew something had happened. We were those kinds of people, and this was that kind of town. We drank and told lies, and if the laughter sounded fake at times and forced at others, then so what?

  It was nearly dawn when I stumbled up the stairs, showered for the third time that day, and fell into bed. I said some prayers to a God I knew was there but was pretty sure was insane. Or indifferent. Or both. My windows are painted black because I sleep during the day. Mostly, anyway. I had a playlist running. John Lee Hooker and Son House. Old blues like that. Some Tom Waits and Nick Cave in there, too. Grumpy, cynical stuff. Broken hearts and spent shell casings and bars on the wrong side of the tracks. Like that.

  Stuff I can sleep to. When I can sleep.

  Mostly, I can’t sleep.

  My room’s always too crowded. They are always there. It’s usually when I’m alone that I see them. Pale faces standing in silence. Or screaming.

  Some of them scream.

  I wear long-sleeve shirts to bed because they scream the loudest when they see their own faces. It’s like that. It’s how it all works. When I’m at the edge of sleep, leaning over that big black drop, I can feel the faces on my skin move. I can feel their mouths open to scream, too. Sometimes the sheet gets soaked with tears that aren’t mine. But which are mine now.

  Olivia was there for the first time that night. Standing in the corner, pale as a candle, looking far too young to be out this late. Thank God she wasn’t one of the screamers. She was a silent one. She with her red necklace that went from ear to ear.

  My name is Gerald Addison. Most people call me Monk.

  I drink too much and I hardly ever sleep.

  And I do what I do.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

  Scot Joplin worked late into the night and deep into the new, dark morning. He was on his fifth chain-smoked joint and his seventh beer. Baked and boiled and all the way on the edge. Instead of mellowing him, the weed was scraping him raw and the beer was like salt in the wounds.

  The canvas was wrought with stark colors that lunged at strange angles; colors collided with colors in improbable ways. With each slash of the brush, each cut of the palette knife, the painting seemed to groan. The image he was trying to bring to life eluded him, the composition failing even as he worked on it. Failed for no reason that he wanted to name.

  His mind was a furnace.

  First there had been the horror show of seeing the dead man hanging in the hall. That was bad; that would have been enough to drive his day off a cliff. Then that detective. Anna-Maria something. Treating him like he was a spitty place on the sidewalk. Making him feel guilty by the way she grilled him.

  Then, when the body was gone and the cops were gone, after the blackout and the storm, there was the phone call with the man who owned Human Bean.

  “Mr. Joplin?”

  “Yes, Mr. Vick, thanks for calling. Sorry I didn’t see you at the café.”

  “Maybe it’s better we didn’t, Mr. Joplin.”

  “Call me Scot.”

  “Mr. Joplin,” Vick repeated, “let me come straight to it. I think it would be best if you arranged to come by and collect your paintings.”

  At which point Joplin almost laughed because he thought it was a joke, but after trying to find the punch line, he said, “What? Why?”

  “Frankly, I think it was a mistake. Your work is, um, a little intense for our customers. We’ve had comments. Well … complaints, really.”

  “Complaints about what?”

  “About the themes.”

  “What are you talking about? You said that you thought they were visionary. That’s your word, Mr. Vick. Visionary.”

  “Well, now that they’ve been hanging, I suppose I’ve changed my mind. Please come and get them by Wednesday.”

  “I don’t understand this. What’s changed? Why are you doing this?”

  Vick sighed impatiently. “Do you really want to get into this, Mr. Joplin?”

  “Yes, I think I deserve that much. After all, you said—”

  “I said you could hang your work because I’m friends with your sister, Lanie. It was a favor to her, and I regretted it as soon as I saw the work on the walls. I know something about art, Mr. Joplin. I buy art, and what you hung in my café is—and I’m going to be brutally honest—not very good. It’s cheap and obvious, and it has a juvenile thread of obscenity in it.”

  “Obscenity? They’re figure studies and cityscapes and—”

  “And we both know what they really are, Mr. Joplin. I looked at them. Closely. At the brush strokes. I suppose you think you’re being clever and subtle by hiding pornographic images within the brush strokes, but really … it’s not actually all that subtle. People who don’t understand art have noticed, and complained. At first I dismissed it, then I went and examined each picture. I am very disappointed in what I saw. Lanie spoke so highly of you that I expected something more than this. Something better. I’m sorry that I was so wrong about you, and I will have a talk with your sister. And if you’re actually serious about making a name for yourself as an artist, stop with the juvenile tricks. A real artist would be more honest. Try opening a vein and bleeding a little. I know it takes courage, though, so maybe that’s not what you’re about.”

  There was more of the conversation, but that was all Joplin remembered. Joplin could not understand what the man had been talking about. Obscene images?

  Not until he went and looked at the new canvases he had set aside to take to the Human Bean. Six canvases stacked against the side of the couch. He picked up the first one and studied it. A painting of two people dancing in the shadows of an alleyway, lit by a yellow bulb in a wire cage over a back door. A big green Dumpster in the background. The figures could have been struggling with each other, but to Joplin it had been a dance. There was tension to it, not any kind of sentimentality. No sweetness, but certainly nothing vulgar or obscene.

  Except …

  He frowned and turned the canvas so that the lamplight caught on the ridges of paint.

  “What the hell?”

  The composition told one story. The colors told a subtly different one. But the brush strokes, viewed at that angle, revealed a third story. It was not something you could see at all unless you looked at it in this way. And then it was all you could see. It shocked him. Chilled him. Terrified him. Formed entirely by contour but not by color or deliberately painted structure were two figures. A woman in what looked like a nurse’s uniform but with her skirt hiked up around her waist, straddling a short, fat man with a swollen cock. Both of them had t
heir heads thrown back and mouths open. The nurse looked like she was having an enormous orgasm. The man appeared to be screaming. Not in passion but in pain. Or terror.

  Joplin dropped the canvas as if it had taken a bite out of him. He backed away from it.

  “No!” he yelled. The canvas landed on the floor, and the angle showed nothing but two people dancing in the dark. He grabbed up a second one, held it this way and that, searching the landscape of brush strokes. Until he found it. This one was worse. A pregnant woman, her vagina exposed as she lay spread-eagle on a birthing table, her stomach cut open, and from her belly rose a tall, sinister figure dressed all in black. Eyes of flame and a smiling mouth, with a piece of raw meat hung around his neck like some obscene tie.

  The third canvas was the worst of all. In those lines, revealed by the light, a child hung from the pipes, his throat squeezed to impossibility by a shower curtain.

  Joplin had painted that canvas five days ago. Before the boy had killed himself in the hall.

  His legs buckled, and he dropped slowly, inevitably to his knees and then bowed forward over the cramps in his stomach until his forehead was touching the floor.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

  Rain knew that she was not going to ever fall asleep again. Not after the call from Monk Addison. Not after all the things they had said to each other. Not after the ghosts, the masks, the blood.

  Not after the message on the wall near where the boy and Mr. Hoto had both died.

  She called Joplin’s number but got voice mail.

  On impulse, she put on the old lady’s glasses and wore them while she looked around her apartment. Looking sideways out of the splinter hurt her eyes, but it made her see things she could not see without them. More of the maggots from before, hiding under rugs and between floorboards. Bug tried to eat them, but Rain pushed her away, dug the insects out with her knife, and stomped them flat. Bug continued to growl at the spots where the maggots had died.

  Then she went into the bathroom and looked at the shower rod. There were smudges on it that she had not seen before. Like fingerprints, she thought, but when she stood on the rim of the tub and peered closely at them, she saw that there were none of the whorls and patterns of any normal fingerprints. Instead, the pattern was like a beaded mosaic, like lizard skin might make. She got Clorox and a rag and wiped everything down. Bug yelped and fled from the smell. When Rain was done, she stuffed the rags into a plastic trash bag, sealed it, and set it in the hall.