The second person to disappear was Emily Sanders, the town librarian. She had moved to Kingston Mills in 1972, having gone back to school and received a degree from San Jose State after her children had grown and left home. She was forty-two, married to a trucker who spent most of his time on the road, and her favorite activities outside of the library were karate (which caused her to make the long drive into Redding twice a week, usually after nightfall) and mountain climbing (the reason she and her husband had moved to Kingston Mills in the first place).
Emily disappeared on a Wednesday, two days after Elmo.
Robert Underwood had walked her out of the library that night, a little after it had closed at nine o'clock. It was overcast, he remembered, because she had been disappointed in the absence of the stars. They were her reminder of her place in the world, she had told him. Like the stars, even though she was just a single flicker among billions, she had her own shine—we each had our own shine—and there was no telling how far out into space it traveled.
She was in good spirits that night, he said. Looking forward to spending some time with her husband, who was supposed to return the next weekend after a cross country haul to New Jersey. Robert dropped Emily off at the front door of her house a little before nine-thirty, he guessed it was. He watched her go in, watched the lights inside go on, and then went about his way.
It was the last time anyone saw Emily again.
The third disappearance came in broad daylight less than eighteen hours later. It was by far the most puzzling of them all, though there were at least half-a-dozen witnesses who swore they saw exactly what happened.
Two of those witnesses, Judy Landers and her husband Tom, were out running errands during Judy's lunch break from the Five and Dime, where she worked as a bookkeeper. They had stopped to pick up a pie from Sandy's Coffee Shop on Main Street, only four doors down from the Mills Hardware, where Elmo had disappeared. Out front, they had bumped into Lily Hanover. Lily, who had just celebrated her fifty-fifth birthday the week before by jumping out of an airplane at 10,000 feet for her first ever sky dive, was excited about her second dive, which was planned for the upcoming weekend.
"You couldn't get me up there," Judy said. "Not if my life depended on it."
"Oh, God, you have to try it, Judy. Just once."
"I'd pee my pants."
Tom, who was holding the door open and only listening with half-an-ear, impatiently nudged Judy with his elbow. "Don't forget we still have to get over to the market before you go back to work."
"I know," Judy said. Later, she would confess that she had seen a glow in Lily that she had never seen before, and that in the back of her mind, she was actually wondering if maybe she should try a dive of her own, just for the boldness of it. But Tom was at her elbow and they were in a hurry and ...
... and then Lily seemed to lose her feet all of a sudden. She stumbled backwards toward the door to the coffee shop, the door that Tom was holding open, her arms whirling in the air like an acrobat trying to keep her balance, and in the blink of an eye, she was gone.
Judy remembered a moment of complete dumbfoundedness, when she looked at Tom to verify what she had seen and he looked back at her with an astonished, unbelieving expression on his face. They were both stunned beyond imagination. It wasn't until Martha Haberstein came running across the street, squealing with excitement that they finally snapped out of it.
"Did you see that? Did you? She was right there one second and the next thing—poof!—she was gone. Like it was magic. Like one of those silly little coin tricks you can buy for a quarter over at the Five and Dime. Now you see it, now you don't. Absolutely incredible! My heart's pounding a thousand beats a second."
Martha had seen it.
Judy and Tom had seen it.
Two kids from over at the high school, playing hooky for the day, had seen it.
And there were others.
Lily Hanover had disappeared right in front of all of them.
And she wasn't the last. Three more people disappeared before Will's daughter joined the exclusive club. There was Adam Walker, 28, the postal carrier for Kingston Mills; and Teresa Saunders, who was raising two boys after their father had been killed while working for a logging outfit somewhere in Northern Oregon (her boys were staying with their Grandmother, a little closer to town these days); and then there was David Winters, who had sat on the same stool at the end of the counter at the Stop Over Bar just outside of town for nearly everyday of his adult life.
They had all disappeared.
And then one day Chantal had joined them. She had taken the bus home from school, gotten off at her usual stop, and had been walking along the gravel road that ran perpendicular to Bakker Street at the northern edge of town. She was with her best friend, Amy, talking about what they were going to do for Easter vacation, which was only two weeks away.
Exactly what happened, Amy couldn't say. She remembered feeling a chill pass through them as if a sudden gust of wind had kicked up, only it was more like walking into an air conditioned room in mid-August. It was almost as if they had passed through a wall of cold air, she said. Chantal zipped her jacket up and said something about how creepy it felt. And then she was gone.
Just like that.
One moment there, the next moment gone.
Will Cassidy heard about what had happened from his wife, Rachel, who had been home at the time and had heard it directly from Amy only a few minutes after the fact.
It might as well have been hours.
Chantal had joined the missing.
3.
For the next six weeks,, almost nothing in Will's life seemed focused. There was a soft, blurry edge to all the questions, to the day-by-day routines that had to be done, like it or not, to everything except Rachel. She had become the only clarity in the foggy haze, the only person who seemed to be able to navigate her way through what had happened and set about trying to do something to get Chantal back.
There wasn't much she could do. There wasn't much anyone could do. Because what had happened to Chantal, like what had happened to all the others before her, was a complete mystery.
Still, Rachel didn't let that get in her way. She had posters made up with Chantal's most recent photograph – as well as photos of all the others who had disappeared – and used volunteers to distribute the posters throughout Kingston Mills, the neighboring town of Round Mountain, and most of the outlying areas of Shasta County. When she wasn't dealing with posters, she was on the phone talking to radio stations or newspaper reporters, to anyone who would listen, to anyone who might help to get the word out.
Will had not been as strong as Rachel. The night of Chantal's disappearance, he had returned from a trip to Chico, where he had spent the day at the Chico State Library researching a feature piece he was doing for the San Francisco Chronicle. Rachel had met him at the door with the news.
She had cried openly that night, freely, telling him more often than he cared to be reminded that she didn't think she would know how to go on if anything ever happened to Chantal.
Will didn't know, either.
And he didn't want to think about it.
He had never felt so helpless before in his life.
4.
Several weeks passed, and then Bobby Cutler turned up missing.
Bobby, 9, who walked out of the Five and Dime after buying a pack of baseball cards, had disappeared less than a block away. Once again there were witnesses. And they all told a similar story, the same kind of story that Judy and Tom Landers had told about Lily Hanover's disappearance. Bobby had simply walked into a nothingness and out of existence.
Whoosh.
That fast.
That mysteriously.
And though no one mentioned it, everyone was thinking the same thing: Bobby would not be coming home again. None of them would be coming home again.
5.
Will had begun to spend his evenings at the Stop Over at the edge of town. It was a little a
fter eleven as he sat at the bar, nursing a scotch that was the second of two shots he would down all night. He had never been much of a drinker. Chantal's disappearance hadn't changed that much, though it had changed it some. Two shots of scotch were more than he used to drink in a week.
He finished his drink and the bartender, a man by the name of Buddy Wiser—who endured to no end the lame-brain jokes about his name—brought the bottle over and set it on the counter next to him. "Another?"
Will covered his glass.
"It's on the house."
"Thanks, but I'll pass." He got up, feeling a little lighthearted, though probably not so much by the scotch as by the fact that he hadn't moved from the bar for nearly three hours. "Think it's time I better get home."
One of the reasons he found himself at the Stop Over every night was because he didn't want to find himself at home. The house had grown into a mausoleum, a huge, vacuous space, void of everything beautiful and loving that had made up his life.
Rachel was back with her parents. Not permanently, she had tried to assure him. Just until Chantal came back. Without Chantal, the house was simply too much to bear.
It was too much to bear for Will as well.
But he didn't have anywhere else to go.
He tucked in the tail of his shirt where it had pulled free, then zipped up his jacket and looked from the door to the bartender, wondering—like most of the people of Kingston Mills wondered these days—If he was going to make it all the way home tonight without becoming one of the missing.
"See you tomorrow," he said on his way out.
"I'll be here," Buddy answered.
Outside, Will stood on the sidewalk and gazed down the line of old mercury vapor lamps that cast a soft, ghostly glow over the empty street. There was a cool breeze out tonight. He could hear the rustle through the few remaining leaves on the maple trees in the park across the way. That was the only sound he could hear. The people of Kingston Mills did not stay out at night anymore. No sense tempting the fates as Robert Underwood had put it.
No, no sense at all.
What happened next would never be completely clear in his mind. All he remembered clearly was this: the night sky was all stars, the air was crisp, and he could see his own breath fog up in front of him as he stepped off the curb to cross the street. A cold front had swept down from Oregon the night before, dropping the temperature to an unseasonably twenty-six degrees. The thermometer had battled back to thirty-eight during the day, but when the sun had gone down, the temperature had plummeted again. The street was littered with patches of ice, many as black as the asphalt itself. Will remembered stepping around more than one. And he remembered seeing a car come around the corner in the distance, its headlights on high beam, nearly blinding him.
That's all he remembered, until he woke up in the hospital.
Rachel was standing over him, holding his hand. There were tears in her eyes, though she had managed to keep them from spilling over the rim. "Welcome back."
"Thanks," Will said through the fog. "Where have I been?"
"The Twilight Zone, I suspect."
He closed his eyes again. There was an incredible throbbing ache pounding away at the back of his head. It felt as if someone had cracked a baseball bat over his skull. "And where am I?"
"The hospital."
"How did I—?" He made a feeble attempt at sitting up, then fell back again.
"Take it easy, honey. You need to rest. The doctor said you gave the back of your head quite a whack."
"What happened?"
"Apparently, you slipped on a patch of black ice." Rachel tried a smile, but behind the smile was the unmistakable presence of worry. "Oh, Will, I don't know what I would have done if I had lost you, too."
He squeezed her hand. "Hey, I'm still here, aren't I?"
"Yeah."
"So quit worrying, you're giving me a headache."
Her smile broadened. "Bet it hurts."
"Dreadfully. You can't imagine."
"The doctor says there's no fracture. So at least that's something. I think he was a little surprised by the x-rays. Especially after the way you looked when they brought you in."
"I guess it pays to have a hard head after all."
Rachel squeezed his hand this time, then sniffled and wiped away the rim of tears that still hadn't overflowed. She had always been a beautiful woman, from the very moment he had first bumped into her going into the old Cascade Theater in Redding. But she had never been quite as beautiful as she was at this moment, he thought.
"Things will be all right," he said.
"I know."
"It's been a nightmare lately..." He had intended to say something about what a screw-up he'd been the last six weeks, about how he was going to knock off the evening visits to the Stop Over, and about how—from this point on—he was going to do whatever it took to get Chantal back again. But something had caught his eye. Will sat up. "Do you see that?"
"What?"
He pointed to a place on the wall, below the clock, adjacent to the door. He wasn't positive, but he thought there had been some sort of chart hanging there a minute ago. The chart was gone now. In its place was a strange, watery opening, rectangular in shape, nearly as big as the doorway. As he stared at it, Will could see ripples forming across the black surface, like white caps, popping up, then disappearing again. "That!"
Rachel glanced at the wall, unimpressed. "The chart?"
"No, where the chart used to be."
She could have looked at him as if he were crazy and needed a little patronizing. That would have driven him crazy. But she didn't do that. She looked at the wall and then again at him. "The chart's right there, Will."
"You don't see that?"
"See what?"
"The opening in the wall? It's right there for God's sake!"
She checked again, bless her heart. But by the time she turned back to him, the opening had already begun to disintegrate. He watched the black, watery hole evaporate one droplet at a time as if it had been some sort of temporary aberration in the structure of the hospital. Only he thought it was more likely a temporary aberration somewhere inside his head.
A small patch of the wall appeared, peeking through the blackness in a splash of beige paint, first here, then there, until gradually he could see the chart that had been hanging below the clock. It was a life-size chart of the body's circulatory system. Near the heart, the last of the black, watery aberration glimmered, then vanished.
Will fell back against the pillow, meeting with a horrible shot of pain. He groaned.
"You hit your head pretty hard on the road base," Rachel said, moving up to the edge of being patronizing now. He might have even called her on it, but he had hit his head. And though she hadn't accused him yet, he wasn't so certain that he wasn't seeing things. "The doctor said it was a miracle you didn't crack your skull open."
"Yeah," he said lightly, "But you should have seen the pavement."
She smiled uneasily, and they shared a moment of silence that seemed as awkward as the first time he had worked up the nerve to kiss her. He had always believed that she had been embarrassed for him at that moment, and he believed now that she was embarrassed for him again. He had seen something that wasn't there.
Will looked past her at the chart on the wall. No black, watery hole. No opening to who knew where. No hint that anything else had ever hung there.
It hadn't really been there, had it?
That black, watery hole?
It had all been a figment of his imagination, a side effect of the concussion he must have endured when his head had struck the pavement.
Will wanted to believe that.
He wanted to believe it more than anything in the world.
Then why was it so hard?
6.
It was so hard because it hadn't been a figment of his imagination at all. Will Cassidy came to understand this explicitly over the next several weeks.
He was released f
rom the hospital after a little more than thirty-six hours of bed rest and observation. There were still the occasional headaches, though they came less often now and they carried a far more tolerable bang. Besides, he could learn to handle the headaches. It was the black, watery holes that were giving him trouble.
He had detected two more of the aberrations. The first ... in the hospital cafeteria while eating lunch. The hole appeared in the side of the serving counter and ran horizontal beneath the glass sneeze guard. Unlike the first one, this opening—all the while undulating—remained solid for nearly ten minutes as he sat there eating a salad and watching in utter fascination.
The second aberration was a beast of a different nature. He had been walking back to his room after a short tour of duty on the balcony, where for the first time in several days, he was able to breathe some fresh air and feel the warmth of the afternoon sun against his face. The hole appeared beneath a gurney sitting idly in the hallway outside one of the rooms. It was that same black, water-like opening.
He had reasoned endlessly with himself about the holes, arguing on the one hand that they couldn't possibly exist or he wouldn't be the only person who could see them. On the other hand, since he was the only person who could see them, did that mean there was something wrong with him? That he might want to take a closer look at his personal mental hygiene, as he had heard it expressed on the radio once?
But this hole had been even stranger.
Something had poked its hand through the opening.
It was a moment of overwhelming, holy terror. The fear grabbed Will by the heart and shoved him up against the wall and held him there. He watched the fingers flex open, then writhe in the air as if they were trying to gauge the temperature. They were not normal fingers, normal in the sense of being flesh-toned. Instead, they had an eerie metallic, almost chrome-like coloring. Four fingers and a thumb. Everything was there. But it wasn't human.
The hand extended out of the blackness, halfway up the forearm and wrapped its fingers around the edge of the gurney as if it were trying to pull itself free. It seemed to struggle there momentarily. And then another hand, fleshed in the same metallic coloring, emerged from the blackness only inches away. It was this second hand that seemed to sense the hole was going to close. It pulled back almost immediately, vanishing down into the nothingness.
Through Shattered Glass Page 13