by J. S. Volpe
The Thing in the Alley
Anomaly Hunters, Book 3
J. S. Volpe
Copyright 2015 by J. S. Volpe
All rights reserved.
CONTENTS
Title
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Credits
Also by J. S. Volpe
1
Brad Vallance and Christine Ruddy strolled hand in hand down Train Avenue in Kingwood, Ohio, both of them serene and smiling and basking in the blush of young love. It was the end of what felt like a perfect evening. It had started with dinner at Kiki’s, a local five-star bistro, then moved on to a performance of I Do! I Do! at the Blackhorse Theater, and finally wrapped up with two hours of martinis and scintillating conversation at The Speakeasy Lounge. It had been the best night of their three-month-old relationship, perhaps one of the best nights either of them had ever had, and now, as these happy, healthy young lovers strolled along, the world felt magical and at peace and theirs for the asking.
Halfway between Wheeler Road and Benton Street sat West Train Apartments where Christine lived. Much as they hated to part ways, it was quite late, well past midnight, and Brad had to be up and out the door bright and early in the morning to make the long drive to Massillon to visit his mom, who was recuperating from back surgery and needed periodic help around the house.
The couple stopped at the foot of the building’s front steps and shared a long, lingering kiss.
When their lips finally parted, she smiled and said, “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow when I get back from my mom’s.”
She nodded. “Maybe you can find a way to talk her into letting us use her summer cabin some weekend.”
“I’ll see what I can do. It won’t be easy. She’s really protective of that place. She’s convinced that anyone who uses it is going to, I don’t know, trash it, or burn it down, or call up Satan in the dining room, or something.”
She adopted an expression of mock toughness. “Then we’ll just have to make her an offer she can’t refuse.”
“No problem. I’ll get to work chopping up the dead horse.”
“I’ve got a carving knife you can borrow.”
He laughed. “I really gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
Brad lived two blocks south on Dodge Street, and to save time coming and going from Christine’s he always cut through the alley that separated West Train Apartments from the antique store next door. The alley was murky even on the best of nights, its mouth being equidistant between two streetlights, in the exact spot where the sodium-vapor lamps’ glows dropped off to nearly nothing. And tonight, since only a couple of the apartment windows that overlooked the alley were lit and the moon was currently veiled behind a scrim of clouds, the alley was nearly as black as a mineshaft. As Brad entered the alley, the trio of dumpsters that stood against the apartment’s wall ten feet down were merely hulking black shapes against the column of dim radiance that marked the alley’s far end on Winchester Street, a spot almost as poorly lit as the Train Avenue end. Even the brightest, most colorful swatches of the graffiti that covered the alley’s brick walls were dark-gray squiggles barely visible in the gloom.
Having traveled this route many times over the last three months, Brad gave barely a passing thought to his safety as he strolled along the murky corridor, not even when he heard a faint, furtive rustle from the dumpsters. It was probably just a stray cat hunting for food, or a trash bag settling. This wasn’t a high-crime neighborhood. Frankly, he was far more likely to get hurt tripping over an old pizza box or slipping on spilled coffee grounds than to get mugged or murdered.
When he was about twenty feet down the alley he heard Christine call, “Brad! Wait!”
He turned. She stood silhouetted in the alley’s mouth, waving for him to come back. He trotted up to her.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“I almost forgot: I promised Angie I’d have dinner with her tomorrow night, so we’ll have to make plans around that.”
He nodded. “Okay.” He smiled and patted the oblong bulge in his pants pocket. “You could have just called.”
She grinned. “Then I wouldn’t have gotten to see you again.”
He grinned back, then took her in his arms, and they shared the night’s—and their relationship’s, and Brad’s—last kiss.
“See you tomorrow.” She gave him a final smile and a final wave, then hurried off.
Smiling too, Brad turned around and restarted his trip down the alley.
This time he had traveled almost thirty feet down the alley and had reached its darkest part when Christine’s voice called out again: “Brad! Wait!”
A trifle annoyed now—it was late, and he really wanted to wash up and get to bed—Brad fitted his smile back into place and turned.
“What is it this…” he started to ask, then paused in confusion. The alley’s mouth was empty. “…time?”
He looked around but could make out only the angular shapes of the dumpsters.
“Christine?”
No response. Had something happened to her? Was this some particularly ill-advised joke?
“Christine?” he called again, louder.
For a moment there was still no response, then: “Brad!”
Her voice was coming from the deep shadows behind the nearest dumpster. Peering at that spot, he discerned a hint of movement in the darkness. Something was alive back there. Something large. Much larger than a cat or a rat.
Thinking it must be Christine, that she had been trying to catch up with him a second time and had fallen down or gotten stuck somehow, Brad started forward to help. But then the shape emerged from behind the dumpster, and Brad stopped in his tracks.
It wasn’t Christine. It was some kind of animal, something quadrupedal and surprisingly large, the top of its head nearly level with Brad’s shoulders. A deer, perhaps? Brad had heard that deer sometimes strayed out of the Holly Hills Metropark southwest of here and wound up dashing up and down the city streets in a blind panic. Of course, a deer wouldn’t account for the voice he’d heard, but maybe he’d misheard a yelp, or a whine, or whatever kind of noise frightened deer make.
Brad slowly backed away as the animal approached, its footfalls clocking faintly on the concrete pavement. His heart began to pound as it kept advancing. Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t afraid of him. It was headed straight toward him. Shit, it might be rabid or something. He started to reach for the phone in his pocket.
Then the clouds rolled away from the moon, spilling silvery light upon the approaching figure.
Brad stopped dead, gaping dumbly.
The thing before him resembled no animal he h
ad ever seen. Its body was wiry and sleekly muscled and covered with short tawny fur with a line of black stripes running down its back and along its sinuous cheetah-like tail. Its long, graceful legs ended in cloven hooves, like a goat’s or a devil’s. And its head! Good Lord, its head was a freakish monstrosity, roughly canine in shape, with a pair of pointed ears on top, a pair of faintly luminous yellow-green eyes as big around as a grown man’s fist, and a long snout split by an enormous mouth that stretched from ear to ear in a demented grin like the Joker’s. Instead of normal teeth, this ghastly mouth sported a plate of bone in either gum, hard and straight-edged and sharp as a guillotine.
As Brad goggled in stunned silence, the creature’s mouth moved, its lips stretching around those lethal plates to form words, and in a perfect imitation of Christine’s voice, it said, “See you tomorrow.”
Brad still didn’t move, although by now the creature was only ten feet away. He was immobilized between trusting the evidence of his senses and concluding that this was a particularly weird dream. To his cultured, 21st-century mind, the dream explanation made far more sense. It was a lot easier to believe that he had fallen asleep at the theater and that all of this was an especially bizarre nightmare brought on by some bad shrimp primavera than to admit the existence of talking monsters with cartoon bad guy smiles. Everything he had been taught about reality told him that such things simply didn’t exist.
And yet the evidence of his senses was accumulating too much to be ignored: the way the creature’s ears twitched and swiveled when a car horn blatted in the distance, the crusty specks of what looked like dried blood on the beast’s pale ruff, the scritch and clop of its hooves on the concrete, the faint doggish odor that filled Brad’s nostrils as the creature drew closer.
When it finally sank in that the thing before him was indisputably real, that this could be no mere nightmare, Brad drew in a deep, sharp breath to scream. But by then it was too late. The creature had sprung. There was a sharp clack as its guillotine teeth snapped closed, and Brad’s scream remained forever unscreamed because he no longer had a throat to scream through.