by Shaun Hamill
There were no police cruisers in the driveway or on the street, but there was yellow tape across the front door. I ducked under it to try my key, which still fit the lock. I left the lights off once I was inside. I didn’t want the neighbors to see anyone was here. Instead I swiped past any notifications on my phone’s home screen and used its flashlight to look around.
The house had obviously been combed over for evidence and then abandoned. The cushions had been pulled from the couch, and all the kitchen cabinets hung open, the contents left on the counters and floor. It reminded me of Leannon’s house after the earthquake.
Aside from the mess, little had changed. The same curtains hung in the windows and the same table sat in the dining room. The place smelled musty, the air stale, as though the inhabitants were past their sell-by date. I went upstairs to my old bedroom. With the tossed bed and laundry all over the floor, it looked as though nineteen-year-old Noah would return at any moment. The same posters hung on the wall, and the same stack of books sat on the nightstand: The Bloody Chamber, Ghost Story, The Ceremonies, and Memnoch the Devil.
I found a piece of paper that had been left on my desk to gather dust for over a decade:
Noah,
I came back for an encore at The Wandering Dark tonight, but they told me it was your night off. Sorry I missed you. Anyway, if you want, you should come to a get-together with me and some friends tomorrow night. I’d love to talk more.
xoxo—Megan
I felt a guilty twinge and started to open up my missed notifications screen but stopped myself. I had to get through this next part before I could worry about Megan. I crouched in front of the desk and opened the bottom drawer. It was stuffed with old high school homework projects, spiral notebooks, and comic books. I shoved my fist past all the paper and groped until my fingers closed around what I was looking for. I pulled it out and looked at it in the dark bedroom: a small, smooth black stone. My key to Leannon’s world, abandoned here eleven years ago, still right where I left it.
I closed my fist around it, squeezed my eye shut, and pictured Leannon’s house in the black forest, the miasmatic sky and the thick, humid air.
I opened my eye and found myself still crouched in my old bedroom. It hadn’t worked. Why hadn’t it worked? Had all its power run out? Had its batteries died after years of disuse? I turned the stone over in my hand. It didn’t look any different than I remembered it.
There went my one big idea. Still, I wasn’t quite ready to give up and head back to Hubert and Megan and the kids.
I dropped the stone in my pocket and finished searching the room, but I found nothing helpful. Same with Eunice’s old bedroom and the “home office” at the end of the hall, where Sydney’s high school portrait still sat on top of a filing cabinet.
I went downstairs to canvas the first floor. Nothing seemed unusual or out of place in the kitchen or living room. The bed in Mom’s room was stripped bare, all the clothes and shoes a mess on the closet floor. I was about to give up my search when the beam of my light passed something small and brown, pressed up against the back wall. I knelt and saw a cardboard box, so old and faded that it was almost yellow. I pulled the top flaps apart. It contained a single, ancient three-ring binder, fat with aged yellow paper. A title page had been tucked into the plastic of the front cover, written in faded pencil, the letters blocky like the writing on the cover of an old Superman or X-Men comic:
The Nameless City
By Harry and Margaret Turner
It looked like something a kid might draw in study hall, and it told me a lot about my parents: the father I would never know, and the version of my mother who had died along with him. Playful people. Fun people.
A photograph had been taped beneath the title, the one described oh-so-many pages ago: my parents crouched next to the FREE HAUNTED HOUSE sign, smiling and proud of their creation. (This was, and remains, the only picture of my father that I possess, a cherished thing still kept tucked into its plastic sleeve.)
I took the binder back to the bed and opened it. As the cover promised, it contained the plans Mom and Dad drew before his death—the ones Sydney and I had wanted to get our hands on. Mom claimed to have thrown them out, but here they were, designs for a massive attraction revolving around three hotels: the Gilman, based on the seaside town of Innsmouth from H. P. Lovecraft’s novella; the Glitz, an Overlook-style hotel with a hedge maze and brass fixtures; and Ma’s, a bed-and-breakfast with a black wrought-iron fence and a cemetery in the backyard.
Radiating out from the nucleus of hotels was, as near as I could tell, an actual city, with office buildings, shops, and restaurants, all rendered in exacting detail. From page to page, though, the layout of the city changed. It was impossible to find an anchor point from which to map it consistently. I paged back and forth, but the more I looked, the more it all appeared to be random, just like the layout of the City as I had experienced it myself.
I didn’t have much time to ponder the new discovery and how it might help my quest to cross over to Leannon’s world. I heard the front door open and the sound of muffled voices in the entryway. Someone had come.
“Noah?” Megan called. “Come on out. We’re here.”
7
When I emerged from the living room into the entryway, I found Megan with Josh, Eli, Hector, Laura, and Sarah. Despite my requests, she’d called the Fellowship and brought them with her. They’d turned on the lights.
“How did you know where to find me?” I said.
“There were only two places I could think of that you might go,” she said. “I made a lucky guess on the first try.”
“I told you I didn’t need the Fellowship’s help,” I said.
“Maybe not,” Megan said, voice calm and reasonable and a little sad. “But I need answers.” I could sense something cold and dangerous in her. I had no room to wriggle here.
“Why don’t we all go into the living room?” Sarah said.
Everyone took seats on the couches and chairs, except for Megan and me. We stood in front of the television. As the group stared at me, I felt that crawling sensation I used to get as a teenager, that sense of being exposed, suspected. That sense of being the other, an interloper among normal people.
“What do you want to know?” I said.
“Treat it like a meeting,” Sarah said gently. “Start at the beginning of this latest event and tell us what’s happened.”
I bit back my rage at being cornered like this. I launched into the story of the strange phone call and the scratching at the window the night Eunice and Mom disappeared. I told them about Caroline’s revelation that she had seen one of these creatures. I told them I had decided to see if there was anything I could do about the disappearances, but admitted I was stuck. I showed them the binder from Mom’s closet, but not the black stone. That I kept to myself.
When I had finished, no one spoke for a moment. The members of the group looked at one another or at their laps. Josh finally broke the silence.
“This is such bullshit.”
“Bullshit?” I said.
No one would meet my eye. Even Megan, standing beside me, became suddenly interested in the carpet.
“My mother disappeared when I was eight years old,” Josh said. “She was a freelance journalist in San Antonio. She investigated the underground vampire community—not real vampires, you know, just creepy Anne Rice junkies who played dress-up and drank blood. She was making a name for herself, a career. Do you know what she was investigating right before she went missing?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“Unsolved disappearances.” He paused and looked at me, as if inviting me to comment. I gestured for him to continue.
“A lot of disappearances you can draw reasonable conclusions about,” Josh said. “Sometimes there’s a spouse or an e
x with a history of violence, even if there’s not enough evidence to charge or convict. Other times the missing person has a history of substance abuse or mental illness. Mom wasn’t interested in those cases. She was interested in the strange ones. Like the kid who walked into a g-force simulator ride in Huntsville, Alabama—a closed room with only one door in or out—and who never walked out again. Or the man in Maine who vanished from his locked prison cell in the middle of the night.”
“I suppose she had a working theory?” I said, unable to keep the annoyance out of my voice.
“If she did, I don’t know about it,” he said. “She was just getting started, calling around, following up on leads. Our phone was turned off at the time, so she had to walk to the pay phone down the street every time she needed to make a call. It wasn’t unusual for her to make the trip two or three times a night when she was working. Only this one time, she left and never came back. The police looked. She made the news. Shows about unsolved mysteries have featured the story a few times. Still nobody has any answers. She’s just gone. Most people think that phony vampires got her, but I know better.”
“What does any of this have to do with me?” I said.
“After the rest of your family went missing last week, your name started something itching at the back of my mind. On a hunch I went digging through my mother’s notes for that last, unfinished story, and do you know what I found?”
“No clue,” I said.
“Notes about a woman named Deborah Turner. Sound familiar?”
I shook my head.
“Paranoid schizophrenic,” Josh said. “Widowed, husband killed in Korea. Found walking on the side of the road one night in her nightgown. Tried to fight off the police when they approached, and kept talking about a city. Had a son named Harry. Your father’s name, if I’m not mistaken.”
I nodded. “He died right after I was born. And his mother not long after. My mother never talked about either of them.”
Josh pulled off his trucker hat and ran a hand through thinning blond hair. “It’s strange that your family has such an involved history with these creatures. Every other incident the Fellowship has studied appears to be isolated. Nothing hereditary.”
“That’s news to me,” I said, and that was at least partially true. My grandmother, found by the side of the road? Talking about a City? Did that mean she’d been taken and somehow escaped? Did that mean it could be done after all?
“We let you into our group,” he said. “We shared our stories. Most of us were at your wedding. We accepted your tale about the night your oldest sister vanished. We accepted your story about what happened the night Megan’s father was arrested. We took all of this on faith because we were so hungry for any information about what happened to the people we loved. But it’s weird how tied up your family is with these creatures. We’ve all had a bad feeling about you for a very long time, and now you’re sneaking off at night and lying to Megan about what you know, and trying to prevent her from talking to us. So why don’t you stop bullshitting and tell us the fucking truth for once?”
I shoved my hands in my pockets and tried to think of some new tactic, some way to turn their gazes from me. The fingers of my right hand worried at a scrap of paper, feeling its edges. I pulled it from my pocket. It was Brin’s phone number. I stared at it, the gears in my mind temporarily halted.
I tore my gaze away from the paper to find them still waiting for an answer.
“I—” I started, then stopped and cleared my throat. I closed my eye and saw Brin’s face in the parking lot, lined with years of pain. Brin, who’d been brave and honest with me. Who had taken responsibility for herself and owned what she’d done.
“Everything I’ve told you is true,” I said, opening my eye to start again. “But you’re right, it’s not the whole truth. I first saw one of these creatures when I was six years old. It stood outside my window every night, scratching the glass until I finally confronted it.”
“Then why aren’t you missing?” Josh said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But for the next twelve years, this creature was my playmate, my protector, and eventually, my lover.”
I felt the group’s skepticism turn to revulsion. Megan’s nose crinkled as though she’d just smelled something foul.
“I didn’t know what these creatures were, or what they did,” I said. “The creature I knew hid all of these things from me. I was a lonely kid with a magic best friend. Once I met Megan, and all of you, my feelings started to change. I went to the monster’s world using this stone”—I pulled the black stone from my left pocket and showed it to them—“and saw a person trapped there and turned into a monster. I heard the story of how Megan’s father was held in thrall to one of these creatures, driven insane. I didn’t want that to be me. I banished the monster from my life and started my relationship with Megan.”
“If this thing was grooming you, the sex was just another part of it,” Sarah said, voice gentle. “You were manipulated. It’s not your fault.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Megan said. Her hands were balled into fists, and her gaze was steely and terrible.
“Because of the way you looked just now,” I said. “And also because I’d just met you. Do you really go into a new relationship blabbing about all your exes?” But, I realized with a sickening lurch, I was still lying. Even now. I sighed and clenched the black stone in my fist.
“Goddammit, that’s not all,” I said. “Yes, the monster and I were together, and, yes, I banished her. And, yes, I hid it from you because I wanted you and didn’t want to scare you off. But the real truth—the whole truth,” I said, “is that I’ve had one foot in and one foot out of this world for as long as I’ve known you. I thought being with you, telling you and your friends some of the truth…I thought it would change me. I thought if I hid from this part of myself long enough, it would go away. I thought it would save me from ending up like your father. But despite knowing what my monster is and what she does, I still miss her. Despite the fact that she’s hunted me and my family for apparently the last fifty-odd years—God help me—I still love her.”
As soon as I spoke the words, the world went gray. I briefly heard the startled exclamations of the Fellowship, but the sound faded as the air grew thick and humid around me, like a wet blanket. I’d crossed over at last.
8
When I used the black stone in the past, I had always chosen my destination. This time, however, it seemed to choose for me. When the fog cleared and the world coalesced again, I stood in a facsimile of my mother’s living room, dark and emptied of other people. Fog swirled around my feet as I crossed the room to hit the light switch. The overhead lamp turned on, but the darkness remained a physical presence, one that ate light like fire eats oxygen.
I walked to the back door, opened it, and gazed upon a field of black grass, thick with ebon kindnesses. A forest of shadowy trees stood some way off in the distance. I almost stepped outside, meaning to make my way to the forest, to Leannon’s hut—but a sound stopped me. A low, muffled moan, coming from the room right off the living room. Mom’s room.
I went back inside and opened her door. A dim pink glow lit the room. The crib and rocking chair made it look like a nursery, but the framed photos shellacking the walls belied that impression. The moan sounded again, this time from behind me. I turned around as my mother staggered into the room, wearing a nightgown and looking dazed. She’d lost weight since I’d last seen her, and looked skeletal in her billowing nightgown, aside from the perfectly round, protuberant belly. She was pregnant.
“Mom,” I said.
She didn’t answer, but braced herself on the crib railing and lowered herself to her knees. She retrieved another framed photograph from underneath the crib and sat up to look at it. The glass was caked with dust, but I could still make out Mom and Dad on what
must have been their wedding day. Mom wore a green dress, and Dad wore a suit that looked a little too big on him.
Mom ran a hand across the glass of the frame and left streaks in the dust. She massaged her swollen belly and moaned.
I knelt beside her. “Mom?” Still she didn’t respond. I laid one hand on her stomach. It wilted like a trash bag full of leaves, then trembled. I pulled my hand away right before something tore up through the fabric and out of the belly, narrow, black, and moving fast. I ducked away and bumped against the wall. Two black vines had sprung from my mother’s belly. They flailed about like the forelimbs of a praying mantis, stiff and hunting. When the stalks found nothing to pierce or grab, they retracted back beneath the torn fabric of her nightgown.
Mom had no visible reaction to any of this. She remained hunched over her photo, making weak, sad noises in the back of her throat. I wanted to continue trying to rouse her, but I worried that if the black vines emerged again, I might not escape a second time. I got to my feet and staggered out of the room.
I climbed the stairs. The second floor of the house also looked like an inverse of the real thing, a hall lined with closed doors. The door at the end of the hall—Mom’s usually vacant “office”—clicked open. I inched toward it, listening for sounds behind the other doors, wanting to be ready if one might fly open and spew unthinkable horrors. As I got closer, I heard music coming from the open door: “Tubular Bells,” the theme from The Exorcist. It was one of several movie themes we used to play on the PA outside The Wandering Dark. I stepped through the open door.
This next chamber was something like an impromptu DIY music gig or black box theater. A woman on a small stage in front of a standing crowd of people in Halloween costumes. Smoke wafted across the stage and a strobe light flashed, making the movements of the woman on the stage otherworldly, somehow unreal. She wore a black tutu, a perfect complement to her ghostly skin and raven hair. I squinted, trying to get a clear picture of her in the staccato lights.