by Shaun Hamill
When he finishes his partial confession, Megan takes his hand, and an hour later the two of them are in Ellen’s living room for an emergency meeting of the Fellowship of the Missing. The room looks a lot more cluttered than the last time Noah was here. It turns out that the entire Fellowship has been staying at Ellen’s for the past few weeks. They mostly communicate through their message board online, but once a year they make a point of meeting up to talk shop and to be together. From the bowls of popcorn and the paused frame from The Sixth Sense on the TV, Noah guesses that he interrupted movie night.
Noah repeats his abridged tale to the gathered members of the Fellowship. Josh gives him the stink-eye the whole time, but doesn’t ask any questions. He sits and listens, and even takes notes.
There’s only a week left before Megan has to return to school in Chicago and the rest of this chapter of the Fellowship scatters back home. Unable to make himself return to his mother’s house, Noah stays with the Fellowship at Ellen’s, sleeping on a pallet of blankets on the living room floor. He and the group spend the days and nights going over and over his story, looking for clues. Noah doesn’t give them any more information, sticking to his version of events with such rigidity that he can almost believe it himself. The Fellowship is simultaneously frustrated and thrilled. Noah does not share their excitement. He’s not interested in knowing more about the creatures, or the City. All he wants is to get away from his life and this place. When the week ends and Megan invites him back to Chicago with her, he agrees at once.
He tells his mother about the move over the phone. She’s cool and rational about it, but warns Noah that no one person can solve everything for him forever.
Noah doesn’t tell Eunice about it at all. They haven’t spoken since the day after Hubert’s bachelor party.
When Megan drives out of town, Chicago-bound, Noah rides shotgun in her car, the two of them trading nervous but encouraging looks. All he’s brought with him is a suitcase full of clothes and a copy of The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Tales that was given to him by Eli, the youngest member of the Fellowship. It sits on his lap like a talisman as Vandergriff speeds away outside the windows, the car rumbling and squeaking, rain pattering against the roof.
When they get on the highway, however, the sound drops away altogether. It’s like the world is on mute. Noah turns to look at Megan, to see if she’s hearing this anomaly, too, and sees the parachute drop at Fun Mountain through her driver’s side window.
A flash of light splits the gray day, a bolt of lightning seeming to strike the park. In that instant, the parachute drop takes on the visage of a colossal, ink-black tower, smooth as volcanic glass and reaching into the temporarily illuminated heavens. Its surface shines like fresh tar, oily and slick.
As the image fades, sound returns. The world shakes with the growl of something massive, one long ridge of sound that moves the earth. Noah grinds along its edge, teeth clenched, terrified of falling off into some abyss, where he’ll be alone with—with—
He manages to look at Megan and sees that she’s tossing worried looks at him. She’s slowed the car down. The vibrations fade and the audible world returns all at once, a volume knob turned too loud too fast.
What’s wrong? she’s saying, the sounds scraping his brain. Should I pull over?
He realizes that he’s pressed against the passenger door, arms braced against the dash and his headrest.
He unclamps his jaw with effort. No, he says. Don’t stop. Get me out of here.
In Chicago, he finds a tiny one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a drafty old building. He shares a bathroom with everyone else on his floor. It’s awful, but it’s all he can afford on his savings while he hunts for jobs. Megan stays in her dorm, but visits almost every day and sometimes stays the night. He finds a job at a Barnes & Noble near the university. Although they give him only twenty hours a week to start, he spends his off days there as well. It’s warm and well lit and he gets 50 percent off coffee, which makes it preferable to his increasingly frigid apartment. Best of all, although the eye patch still garners looks from strangers, people don’t treat him like something to be afraid of. To the people of Chicago, Noah is just another bookseller.
For a few months, nothing happens. Noah does well at the store, gets more hours, and gets to know Megan outside the wide shared terrain of grief and loss. She’s kind, but there’s something flinty at her core, the strength of someone who had to deal with too much pain too early in life. It’s the strength he wishes he had himself.
When they have sex for the first time, it’s gentle and sweet. It doesn’t end in a flood of golden light, a fracturing of consciousness or transcendence of time and space. Instead it’s a series of pleasurable muscle spasms and a collapse into a muddled grouping of limbs.
Megan touches his cheek as he rolls off her, and finds his tears. What’s wrong? she says.
I’m just really happy, he says, because he wants it to be true. He wants to feel uncomplicated about what has just happened, like he hasn’t just committed infidelity. He tries to push Leannon from his mind’s eye. That part of his life is over. For the sake of his sanity and his soul, it must be.
The next day, something happens when he’s walking home from Barnes & Noble. He turns left at the corner of Blevington and King, and instead of emerging on a wide, busy street, he finds himself in an alley between two anonymous brick buildings he doesn’t recognize. A metal door bangs open on his right and a bearded, tattooed man walks out carrying two garbage bags. He wears jeans and a T-shirt and pauses to stare at Noah’s coat and scarf. Noah suddenly feels too hot in his clothes.
You lost? the man says.
Noah doesn’t answer, but turns around and walks back the way he came. When he comes out the far end of the alley, he’s on a wide street lined with sagging buildings made of a brick that seems desaturated somehow, like someone used a straw to suck out most of the color. The windows are dusty and cobwebbed, and there are no other people around. He looks back toward the alley, but it’s gone. He’s standing before a blank wall.
He stops beneath the street sign and raises his head to read it. It’s written in a language he doesn’t recognize, and the sky beyond it is pea-soup green. A startled sound—almost a laugh—escapes his throat. “Huh.” The sort of sound you might hear from a craftsman surprised and impressed by another’s work.
Hello? he calls. If anything is listening, it doesn’t respond. And then, in a change so quick it makes a blink look long, Noah finds himself back at the intersection of Blevington and King, the leafless trees shivering in an arctic wind, cars parked bumper to bumper at the curb. The street sign has put back on its everyday face, and people jostle him as they hurry past.
He considers telling Megan, but what good would it do? It would worry her, or worse, it might push her away. If she knew, might she not give him up as a lost cause?
So he says nothing that day, and he says nothing about the nights when he awakes around three in the morning, convinced he can hear a woman humming in his ear. And he tells himself that he’s not happy about these things, not intrigued by this strange, otherworldly come-on.
In the spring, after midterms, Megan receives a call from her father’s lawyer. The execution has at last been scheduled. She and Noah scrape together enough gas money for the drive to Texas.
When they arrive, the prison reminds Noah of his high school: the same painted cinder-block walls and fluorescent lighting, the identical sense of industrial indifference. The only things missing are trophy cases and pep rally banners.
Megan is on James O’Neil’s approved visitors list, and goes in to speak to him alone. When she emerges, her face is puffy and she says nothing. She and Noah are ushered into a small room with two rows of chairs facing a plate-glass window. They sit in the front row and the attendant explains that the glass is a two-way mirror.
They will be able to see in, but the condemned will not be able to see out. A newspaper reporter and Maria Davis’s parents arrive not long after. Nobody from Brandon Hawthorne’s family comes. Noah can feel the rest of the room watching him, and his skin crawls. He makes himself face the glass and takes Megan’s hand. It rests limp in his, a cold, dead thing.
James O’Neil is wheeled in on a gurney, wrapped in restraints. His right arm is strapped to an extension so that it stands apart from his body, making him look lazily crucified. He’s clean-shaven and bald now, his face ragged and pockmarked. His eyes are thoughtful and subdued, lacking the manic energy Noah remembers.
When one of the prison officials behind the glass asks O’Neil if he has any last words, he only shakes his head. Maria Davis’s mother begins to cry as a hooded man administers the injections and James O’Neil at last looks away from the ceiling and at the glass. He seems to see beyond it, seems in fact to have singled out Noah for his final sad, distant stare.
Noah is reminded of standing in the City, looking at the man strapped to the chair in the barbershop. He watched through a window then, too, as the chair made that man into something inhuman. Noah barely feels Megan withdraw her hand as O’Neil’s lips part. He seems about to say something, but stops at a sound, one he seems to recognize. Noah recognizes it, too: skritch-skritch-skritch. Skritch-skritch-skritch, like long talons scratching glass. When it stops, O’Neil closes his eyes and they wheel him away. He might not be dead yet, but the show is over.
Noah and Megan don’t touch or speak on the walk back to the car. They both spend several minutes staring out the windshield at the building where a man’s life just ended with clinical precision. Noah can’t shake the old man’s gaze, and the scratching sound has settled at the base of Noah’s skull, sending shivers up and down. He grips the steering wheel to keep from shaking. Beside him, he can feel Megan’s heartbreak. Worse, he can feel a gap opening before him, a hole that he could fall into if he doesn’t watch himself. How long before he’s the one behind the glass, getting the lethal injection?
Let’s get married, he says.
It takes her a long time to turn her head and acknowledge what he has said. Seriously?
Seriously.
Like now?
As soon as possible.
They extend their stay in Texas long enough to throw together a small ceremony at Holy Spirit Church, attended mostly by members of the congregation and the Texas chapter of the Fellowship. Noah doesn’t invite his family, or even let them know he’s in town. Kyle comes to serve as best man. When he and Donna arrive at the church, Donna looks like she has a basketball strapped to her front. She’s due in a couple of weeks. For some reason, this image, this irrefutable proof of the passage of time, makes Noah miss Eunice. He missed her wedding and now she’s missing his.
Noah and Megan spend the night in a hotel near the Fort Worth stockyards, decorated with paintings of cacti and cow skulls. After sex, Megan cries and won’t talk to him. He gives her space and falls asleep on his side of the bed.
He wakes around three, parched. He grabs the ice bucket from the bathroom and ventures out into the bright hallway. He looks for a sign to point the way to the ice machine, but sees only doors and cartoonish southwest paintings stretching away in either direction. Wasn’t there a window at one end of the hall when they came in? He must be misremembering.
He passes a series of doors, catches the hum of conversation, the drone of TVs, a whiff of marijuana. When he turns the corner, he finds a door marked STAIRS. Maybe he’ll have better luck on the next floor down.
His flip-flops make muffled thumps on the carpeted steps, but there’s no door at the bottom of the first flight, or the second. He pauses at the head of the fifth flight and leans over the railing, trying to guess how many are left. A hard ball of mingled dread and anticipation begins to gather in the pit of his stomach. He realizes that this feeling isn’t strange. It’s so familiar that it’s almost a warm blanket. It’s the feeling he gets when he’s finally getting to the good part in a horror story, or entering a new haunted house for the first time. It’s the way he felt the first time he entered the City.
With only one eye and no depth perception, it’s hard to tell how many flights he has left to go. He looks up, but, again, his crappy depth perception must be fucking with him. This hotel is only six stories tall, but there appear to be dozens of flights above him, receding up out of sight.
Something moves up there, black silhouette on gray. He recoils, forgetting the anticipation he felt only moments before—and also that he’s standing on uneven ground. He flails for balance, flapping his arms like a ridiculous bird as he tips and falls down the stairs, each one a bright horn blat of pain. He lands at the bottom in a heap, breathing hard and waiting for the agony to subside. Footsteps clomp down from above, echoing so that he can’t be sure if it’s one set of feet, or several, or many. Clomp-clomp-clomp, louder and louder. The sound grows to a crescendo, and he clamps his hands over his ears. Something closes on his arm.
Don’t! he shouts. Please!
You’re okay. It’s only me. He hears the voice as if it’s coming from inside his head. Leannon, gentle and soothing.
He looks up and sees the pained expression on her human face. She offers him a hand but pauses before helping him up. She runs her thumb along his new wedding band.
Why would you do this? she says. Her tone remains gentle, but pain seeps in at the edges.
Why won’t you leave me alone? he says.
She seems to tear her gaze away from the band with great effort, and licks her lips before she speaks. That isn’t how this works. There is much you don’t understand. She reaches for his face, and he jerks away.
Let me help you understand, he says. I don’t want to end up like Megan’s father. I don’t want to end up like Sydney. I don’t want to hurt anyone, and I don’t want to see you anymore. I want to forget I ever knew you.
Leannon si, she says.
Go! he shouts, and as he does, he finds himself facing an open door, through which he sees the hotel lobby. The clerk at the front desk leans forward, giving him a puzzled look.
Everything okay, sir? the clerk says.
Noah sees his ice bucket on its side a few feet away, still wrapped in a layer of flimsy, rattling plastic. He grabs it, waves to the clerk, and walks through the lobby to the elevators. He arrives back at the third floor and immediately finds the alcove with the ice machine. He fills his bucket and returns to his room.
He drinks his water and gets back into the bed. He lies awake for a long time, thinking about Leannon and the City. He works hard to convince himself that he did the right thing, banishing her. That it wasn’t nice to see her again. That it wasn’t exciting to slip into the City’s grasp for a moment, to not know what he might find at the bottom of a flight of stairs, or around a corner.
He and Megan honeymoon in Ashland, Oregon, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The town is small and idyllic, like something from a movie, with wide sidewalks and display windows, stores with names like CD or Not CD, and three different playhouses. It seems like the perfect way to cheer up a theater nerd bride. On their first night in town they see a play called Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. They have balcony seats, and watching the drama unfold feels like spying on colorful neighbors from a high window. The story follows Segismundo, the prince of Poland, who has been imprisoned by his father, King Basilio, because of a prophecy that the prince will wreak havoc on the country. Of course, Segismundo does get free and, in his rage, unleashes rampaging hell before Basilio reimprisons him and convinces him that his brief freedom was in actuality a dream.
As Megan and Noah walk to their hotel afterward, she flips through the Playbill, animated for the first time in weeks, pointing to actors’ head shots, reading aloud trivia from their bios. Did Noah
know that one of the guardsmen played Benedick in last summer’s Much Ado About Nothing? Noah admits he was unaware. It’s tough to speak. The play has pressed itself into his mind like a thumb pressed into a marshmallow, leaving him lumpy and slow to regain his original shape.
Are you all right? she asks, picking up on his mood.
Just thinking about the play, he says.
She takes his arm and leans into him. I’ll protect you, handsome prince. You’re safely trapped in the tower of our marriage. Then she shoves him, and for the second time in a week, he goes pinwheeling off his feet. This time he lands in a hedge at the edge of the sidewalk.
But who will protect you from me? she cries, and runs away laughing.
On the last day of the honeymoon, after a week of plays, tear-free sex, and small-town Shakespearean charm, they eat lunch at a terrible imitation British pub where the food tastes like misery pressed onto a plate. Megan seems subdued again, and Noah worries that the spell of the vacation has been broken.
As she grimaces around maybe her fifth or sixth bite of blueberry chicken, he says, You don’t have to finish it if you don’t like it.
She sets down her fork and touches her napkin to her lips. There’s something prim in the gesture, brittle.
I want to ask you something, she says. Something I’ve been putting off for a while now. And I need you to tell me the truth, even if you think it’s something I don’t want to hear.
Okay, he says, bracing himself.
You heard scratching at your bedroom window as a kid, and then your sister disappeared. Then, ten years later, you saw two of these monster things fight over my dad.
Right.
But as far as I know, that’s it. You haven’t mentioned any other encounters, or sightings, or even general weirdness. So my question is: Was that really it? Has there been anything else? Anything you haven’t told me about?
Heartbreak has written itself across her face. She’s hidden it well for the past few days, but it’s back and it seems like it might etch itself there permanently. He reaches for her hand, and for a second he worries that she might jerk away, and if she does, he knows that he’ll tell her everything, all in one go, every second of the otherworldly he’s experienced since they first left Texas together. He’ll even confess his years-long affair with Leannon.