Seconds later, the disintegration began. Millions of black particles began to break away from the hole and vanish, one after the other. It brought to mind a picture of raindrops rising back into the clouds to regroup again in some other place, at some other time.
The hand released its clamp on the metal frame and disappeared into the blackness.
The last of the hole vanished.
The aluminum legs of the gurney came back into view, the beige wall followed.
Will released a breath that felt as if it had been burning a hole in his lungs. He slumped back against the wall, his hands on his knees, trying to calm himself. A cold sweat had broken out across his forehead. He wiped away the perspiration, still working at getting his breathing under control.
He had seen what he had seen, and now he knew – it was real.
Oh, God, it was real.
7.
He considered it, but in the end, Will decided not to say anything to Rachel. It was too easy to recall the look on her face in the hospital. She might not have felt sorry for him, but she had felt concerned. He had seen it in her face.
For a day or two after he returned home, she hovered over him, mothering him like she had when they had first started going together. It would have been better appreciated, he supposed, if he had been able to keep his mind off what had happened. But by the second day, he was growing more and more irritable, and Rachel began to pull back.
"What's gotten into you?" she asked him after he had snapped at her about leaving the dishes in the sink to soak. "Are you sure you're all right?"
"I'm fine. I'm just tired of seeing the dishes stack up."
"Then maybe you should think about washing them," she said, standing at the kitchen doorway. "I thought we agreed that Chantal came first over everything. That you and I were going to put all our efforts in getting her back ... careers and housework be damned."
"We did."
"Then what the hell's this all about?"
It was about little black, watery holes that unfolded here and there and wherever in the fabric of space and time. It was about not being sure that when he closed the door if there was really a door there at all. It was about being ... terrified.
"I don't know," Will said apologetically. "I guess I haven't been feeling quite right since the accident."
"You want me to call the doctor?"
The doctor had asked him to make a follow-up appointment in two weeks, just to make sure all the synapses inside his skull were still firing the way they were supposed to. Will, though, had no intentions of ever returning to that hospital again. Not if he had any say in the matter.
"No, I'll be all right."
8.
Maybe eventually he might have been all right ... if that had been the end of it. But the next day, while sitting in the den, he became aware of what appeared to be a hot spot forming in the book case across the room. It started out a soft, glowing red, the color of charcoal briquettes when they've finally started to produce some heat. The glow turned bright, then seemed to bum itself out, leaving in its wake the one thing Will was hoping he would never have to see again ... another black, watery hole.
The opening grew to a span that ran from floor to ceiling, maybe three or four feet wide. A doorway of some sort, he speculated. Or a general fault in the operating system of reality. He wanted to laugh at that analogy, but couldn't bring himself to smile. Jesus, it was happening again. And this time, it was happening in his own house.
He didn't know how long the aberration—if he could still refer to it as such—held him there, frozen. But eventually he was able to stand up and push the chair away. He crossed the room, only distantly aware of the stiffness in his legs, and pulled a book down from the shelves. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, a volume he sometimes used in his writings.
The blessing, he supposed, at least at this point, was that nothing had come clawing its way through. After that little episode with the hands at the hospital, he had spent endless hours wondering what lay on the other side. He had also wondered, though it had been brief and mostly ignored, if the holes were somehow related to all the recent disappearances.
He stood to one side, trying to peer into the glossy, black vent, and found it impossible to see beneath the watery surface. Exactly what the book was going to prove was anyone's guess; but as he stood there, he could feel a draft, slightly on the cool side, flowing silently through the opening. In his mind that proved one thing at the very least ... a minimum of three dimensions were involved. The book was not going to bounce back.
Not unless someone—or something—threw it back.
It was a heavy volume, a hardback, five or six pounds if he had to guess. He stared down at it, then said a silent prayer. The worst scenario to scamper through his thoughts—his synapses were working quite well, the doctor would be pleased to hear—was this: just before the book arrived at its destination, a hand would reach out from the other side and catch it. That was not what happened, thank God.
He let the book sail and it was swallowed in one huge gulp.
Gone.
Just like that.
Not even a noticeable disturbance in the watery surface.
It was true then – this vent, or whatever you wanted to call it, was some sort of doorway between the here and now and ...
And what? he wondered.
And whatever was on the other side.
Will leaned back against the window sill, his stomach clenched in a knot. He had been saving a place in his mind for a chance that the book might simply pass through the vent, bounce off the case behind it, and the aberration would vanish into a cartoonish puff of smoke. No such luck, though. This was the real thing.
What was on the other side? he wondered.
He had a caught a glimpse of it, he supposed. Those metallic-like hands that had reached out of the blackness from beneath the gurney at the hospital, they were on the other side. And whatever they were attached to. But what else?
Just go ahead and do it before it's too late.
"Why not," Will whispered.
It didn't matter how close he stood, it was impossible to see past the black, watery surface. It was almost as if the liquid-like veil were there to form a seal of some sort. He touched it with the index finger of his right hand, immediately pulling the finger back. Not because he had encountered heat or cold—though it was slightly on the cool side—or even pain for that matter, but simply to make certain that if he was in danger of hurting himself it would be kept to a minimum.
The black, watery vent had swallowed the finger to the first knuckle, and the aberration had felt exactly the way it looked ... as if it were formed of liquid. The interesting difference, however, was that it had left no residue on his skin. The finger had come back perfectly dry.
Will tried again. This time, he allowed not only his finger, but all of his right hand to dip into the liquid veneer. It felt as if he were dipping into a tub of thick shampoo, the viscous liquid closing in around his pores, sealing them from the surrounding air. He stretched his fingers, then closed them into a fist, taking a certain pleasure in the strange sensation.
It couldn't all be like this, could it?
There has to be something besides this damn liquid, doesn't there?
These thoughts crossed his mind almost simultaneously and were quickly followed by the realization that the vent was beginning to break up. Will pulled his hand free and fell back. The aberration's outer edges dissipated into the air, a thousand tiny dots at a time, like the dismantling of a giant jigsaw puzzle.
The cool draft fell still.
The last of the vent vanished.
Will, his back pushed up against the desk, stared at the bookcase with a mix of excitement and dread. There was a chance, he thought, his heart might actually explode from his chest cavity, it was pounding so savagely.
He raised his hand to the light.
Four fingers and a thumb.
Nothing out of the usual.
9.
That wasn't the last of it.
Less than a day later, it happened again.
He had gone into town to see the printer, who had been volunteering both his time and resources to printing posters of the missing Kingston Mills citizens. First, though, Will had needed to stop off to get a haircut, something he had overlooked for nearly six weeks now. He was only a block away from the Four Corners Barber Shop when a new vent opened in the display window of Mary Anne's Department Store across the street.
As Will had learned to do when he first spotted a vent, he stopped and checked the surroundings to see if anyone else had become aware of what was happening. Mrs. Schuster, who sometimes worked as a waitress at the Lakehead Inn, was crossing the middle of the street half-a-block up. Behind her, Terry Bryne and his five-year-old son, Andy, had stopped to window shop at the Book Mark. And there was a car Will didn't recognize, waiting at the stop light at Main and Pine. None of them appeared to be aware of what was going on.
Will stepped to the edge of the sidewalk, his hand wrapped absently around the pole of a street sign which limited parking to no longer than twenty minutes. Only distantly did he become aware of Mrs. Schuster as she reached the other side of the street and started up the sidewalk.
A hay devil—something you rarely saw this time of year in Kingston Mills—swept up several scraps of paper and carried them, swirling into the air in front of the woman. Mrs. Schuster swatted at a candy wrapper near her face, and then...
(just like that)
... it happened.
It happened so fast that at first Will found himself frozen in place, not sure he could even believe what his eyes had seen. What he had seen was this: as Mrs. Schuster went strolling past the vent, something had come out of the blackness and snatched her. Will wanted to believe that it was a man he had seen, but it was like no man he had ever seen before. He was maybe five feet tall, thin, wearing a lightweight jacket over a tee-shirt, both the same color, which was not really a color at all. It was something metallic-like, almost chrome-like, and even more surprising ... it matched the man's pigmentation perfectly. There was one more thing. He was wearing goggles, slightly too big for his face, the frames and lenses shaded in that same metallic hue.
Mrs. Schuster's purse, which had slid off her arm, dropped to the ground with a thud and the surroundings immediately fell silent. Will glanced up the street at Terry Bryne and his son, who were still transfixed by whatever it was on display at the Book Mark. The car at the stop light had turned right and disappeared. No one else had seen what had happened.
Only Will.
He was the only one who could see the vents, the only one who could see what had just come out of the vents, the only one who knew what was happening to all the missing people.
The black, watery surface of the vent had rippled slightly as Mrs. Schuster had been pulled into it, but it was calm now as Will made his way across the street. He stepped onto the sidewalk, without having put what he was about to do into words yet. It was nothing more than a picture in his head, taken from somewhere far behind him.
He brushed his left shoulder against the light pole, took a few quick steps for momentum, and went sailing into the vent, hands out front, eyes closed, anybody's guess where he was going to end up. He did it all in a single movement, without a moment's hesitation, thinking only of Chantal. If he had thought of anything else, he wouldn't have been able to do it.
On the other side, he landed hard against a concrete walkway, rolled twice, and jammed his shoulder into a bench that kept him from rolling into the street. The impact emptied his lungs in one, huge eruption of air. He grabbed for his midsection, fighting to get the breath back, his mouth working the air like a fish out of water. When it finally came, it burned a path down his windpipe and into his lungs. He gasped and sat back, grateful to be alive.
It was another thirty-seconds before he was able to take in his surroundings with any measure of discern. The black, watery surface of the vent where he had come through had settled again. Will made note of that before anything else, with a footnote to himself that at least temporarily he still had a way to get back. The strange thing was that he wasn't sure how far he had actually come.
He was lying on the sidewalk in front of Mary Anne's Department Store, almost as if he had bounced off the vent and had fallen to the ground. But he had gone through the vent; he was certain of that. And this wasn't Mary Anne's Department Store. At least it wasn't the one where Chantal had bought her first party dress for last year's Sadie Hawkins dance. It was close, the design, the items in the window, the name, its location on the street. Close. But the store was like everything else here: it had no color. Like the sidewalk beneath him, the bench he had rolled into, the streets, the other buildings, like all of it ... it was a blinding, crippling monochrome.
Same as the man, Will thought.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a movement and tried to pull his feet, which were splayed across the sidewalk, back into his body. It was a boy he had seen, maybe a year or two younger than Chantal. In his hands, he held a comic book, the lettering and illustrations all done in a strange sort of three-dimensional embossing.
That's how they work around the monochrome, Will thought distantly.
He had pulled his feet back, but he had not pulled them back far enough to prevent the boy from tripping over them. It wasn't a bad stumble, just a missed step or two before the boy caught his feet again. Then there was a moment when the boy looked down at Will with annoyance, and Will realized it was the kind of annoyance you shoot at a high spot in the sidewalk. As if the boy had not actually seen him there at all, but had looked right through him.
"Sorry," Will said, startled by the sound of the word as it came out of his mouth. It had sounded amplified somehow, and drawn out, almost guttural. This place was not only different by its lack of color, he realized, but also by the distortion of its sounds.
The boy disappeared down the street.
Heading for The Collector's Corner, Will thought as he climbed to his feet. He brushed the monochrome dust off his jacket sleeves and the front of his pants, then looked up the street, past the Five and Dime at the bookstore (which was called the Book Cover on this side). Beyond the bookstore, he could see the sign for the barbershop, and beyond that, in the distance, just a glimpse of Hattie's Antiques.
Where to start?
The Abductor (as Will had already come to think of him) had taken Mrs. Schuster somewhere nearby. It couldn't have been far, because Will had come through the vent only seconds later. How far could they have gotten in a matter of seconds?
Only two places came to mind. The first was an old warehouse that had been split into a machine shop on one side and a wrecking yard on the other. That place was right around the corner, less than two blocks from here. The other place was the old abandoned railroad station, up the street and to the left. The kids liked to play there. At least they did on the Kingston Mills side. Then there was a third possibility, now that he thought about it – the Haberstock Mill, which had been closed down in the late Sixties. It sat near the edge of town, though, a fairly decent hike from here.
It was the warehouse, then.
That's where he would start.
10.
It was surprising how disorienting the monochromed landscape could be. As he moved down the street, he found it next to impossible to simply put one foot in front of the other without weaving unsteadily. Everything felt slightly off center.
He managed to stay on his feet, though, at least long enough to make it to the old warehouse. The machine shop, a place called Anderson's Tool and Die, was closed on Sundays, according to a sign posted in the window next to the door. Will leaned against the glass, his hands cupped around his eyes, and tried to get a peek inside, but it was too dark to see anything.
Next door, there was a man out front dismantling what looked like an old Ford Pinto. He had just ignited a cutting
torch and had flipped the visor to his helmet when Will walked past him.
Otto's Auto Wrecking was the name of the place. It was not a far cry from the junk yard that sat in the same spot on the pigmented side of Kingston Mills. The same corrugated tin panels (only monochromed, of course). The same caustic mix of oil and gasoline in the air. And while Will had only been there once or twice, he had learned that the only way to find what you were looking for was to start scavenging through the piles one by one. This time, though, he was scavenging for something a little different.
He checked the office first, then a small machine shop in the back, another room that appeared to be used for warehousing small parts, and finally a bathroom where the monochromed dirt, several shades darker, was visibly noticeable. Chantal was nowhere to be found. Neither were any of the other missing Mills residents.
On his way out, it occurred to him that if no one could see him, then he must be to this world what the Abductor was to the colorized version of the Mills ... some sort of invisible predator. He didn't know how he felt about that, but he couldn't imagine feeling good.
At the curb, he stopped to get his bearings and was surprised to discover that a new vent had opened across the street. It consisted of that same black, watery surface, about the size of a doorway, this one overlying the front of a brick building. It had not been there when he had entered the wrecking yard.
He stepped forward, curious. There were the usual questions that came to mind about how long it might remain open. But the question that was most unsettling was this: Did this mean the other vent had closed and he wouldn't be able to get back again?
Through Shattered Glass Page 14