The view was the same as I’d seen from my window earlier that morning. The street was covered with snow, and there was absolutely no sign of life. Then I noticed the tracks leading from our front door to the house directly across the street.
“Upstairs window,” Floyd said, crouching down at my side.
I focused on the upper story, slowly scanning from one room to the next. All the windows were shuttered save the biggest one, just above the front door. There was movement there, on the other side of the glass. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like somebody pacing back and forth.
“It’s Devon,” Floyd whispered conspiratorially. “I’ve seen him over there before, but I’ve never been able to figure out what he’s doing. Sometimes he’ll go over there and we won’t see him for days.” Floyd let out an annoyed grunt. “And when I ask him about it, he won’t tell me shit.”
I went back to my room and got my camera, then returned to Floyd’s side. I raised the camera to the sill and zoomed in on the window across the street.
I hadn’t noticed the electric-blue light, dwarfed in that world of startling white snow. But now, magnified inside my camera lens, it became obvious. An eerie blue glow illuminating one side of Devon’s face. The light moved across his features as he paced back and forth, striding quickly from one side of the room to the other. Every once in a while, he raised his hands in a gesture of apparent frustration.
I couldn’t tell what he was doing. Did he go over there to vent? I wondered. Is he just storming about in an empty room, blowing off steam?
As he passed in front of the window, Devon paused suddenly and looked our way. There was a strange expression on his face—a look of both fear and annoyance—and for a moment, I thought we’d been caught in the act of spying. But I quickly realized that that was impossible. We were hidden in Floyd’s dark room, staring out through a tiny crack in his blinds. There was no way he could see us here, not from that distance.
Then I noticed Devon’s lips moving in the faint blue glow.
“Is he alone over there?” I asked. “Have you ever seen anyone else in that house?”
“No,” Floyd said, a hint of surprise in his voice. “We’re the only people on this entire block.”
I started taking pictures, snapping off a long series as Devon abruptly looked back over his shoulder toward the far corner of the room. He once again raised his hands in frustration.
He was still talking. Explaining. Arguing.
“What’s he doing?” Floyd asked. “I can’t see shit.”
I turned away from the window, putting my back against the wall and sliding down to the floor. I handed the camera to Floyd, and he raised it to his eye. After a moment of silence, he lowered the camera and took a step back from the window. There was a shocked look on his face.
“What’s going on here, Dean?” he asked, his eyes wide, his voice wavering. “Who’s he talking to? Who’s he meeting? And why there, across the street from our own house?”
And what about that blue light? I recognized that color. It was the same shade I’d seen between the walls of the apartment building on Second Avenue, glowing deep down in the heart of the building. Beneath that horrible disembodied face. The memory of that face—that frantic, pleading eye—set my skin shivering.
“There’s only one person who can answer those questions,” I said. “And he’s waiting for us right across the street.”
It took us a couple of minutes to get ready, to throw on our coats and lace up our shoes. I strapped the camera across my chest and led the way, anxious to find answers, to find the link between this place and the apartment building downtown. And Devon. I needed to know what he was doing over there, what his connection was to this whole thing. To the city. To the face.
Floyd seemed far less eager. “There’s only one set of tracks,” he said, pausing in the middle of the snow-covered street. “Whoever he’s meeting … either they came in another way or they were there before the snow started to fall.”
“Only one way to find out,” I said, glancing up at the house’s now-empty window. “So move your ass.”
The front door was unlocked. I tried to keep it quiet as I eased the door open, but the hinges let out a loud, painful groan. I paused before crossing the threshold, listening for Devon up on the second floor, but couldn’t hear a thing. There were no arguing voices, no pacing footsteps.
We stepped into the foyer, and I shut the door behind us.
The house had been stripped bare. The owners must have moved fast, I thought. From what I’d seen, most of the houses in the area weren’t this clean; most showed signs of life forced to an abrupt stop. The owners must have hired moving trucks and fled the city as soon as the weirdness started, back in July or August, before the mad rush of evacuations had forced people to flee with whatever they could fit in their cars. I started sticking my head in through open doorways. I found an empty living room, an empty dining room. The house had nice hardwood floors. It reminded me of the place my father had bought with his third wife, down in southern California.
As I surveyed the empty rooms, Floyd moved deeper into the house. “Dean,” he hissed after a handful of seconds. “Come here!” I followed him into a bright yellow kitchen.
“Look,” he said, pointing toward a pair of sliding glass doors. He kept his voice low. “There’s nothing in the backyard. Not a single footprint.”
Floyd was right. There was nothing but pristine white snow out there, stretching across the entire yard. Whoever was here had been here for a while. And they hadn’t had time to flee.
Floyd met my eyes, his bottom lip trembling slightly. He pointed up toward the second floor. His expression was easy to read: They’re up there. Waiting.
And, no doubt, they’d already heard us coming.
We returned to the foyer, and I nodded up toward the second-floor landing. “You and Devon are friends, right?” I whispered. “Call up to him. Let him know we aren’t a threat.”
Floyd nodded, his eyes still wide. “Devon?” he called. “You up there, man? What are you doing?”
We both held our breath, waiting for a reply. After a half minute of silence, I gestured toward the stairs. Floyd shook his head and backed away, making me take the lead.
The upstairs hallway was dark. Most of the connecting doors stood wide open, but the windows in each of the rooms had been boarded shut, blocking out the snow-white light. After my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I poked my head into a couple of rooms, finding them just as empty as the rooms downstairs.
Floyd put his hand on my shoulder and pointed to a door up ahead. It was the only closed door on the entire floor, and its position put it even with the downstairs entrance. It was the room we’d been watching from across the street. Devon’s room.
Floyd stepped up to the door and knocked. “Devon?” he called. “Seriously, man, what is this shit? What’s going on?” There was no reply. As the silence started to stretch, I watched the expression on Floyd’s face morph from tentative discomfort all the way to annoyance. “Fuck, man, we know you’re—” Floyd’s voice was cut short as he threw the door open, revealing yet another empty room.
The unshuttered window gave entry to a blinding white light, and I was left momentarily dazzled, trying to blink away the starbursts in my eyes. Floyd stepped into the room, looked left, then right, and immediately stormed out again. I could hear him rushing from room to room along the upstairs hallway, looking for Devon.
For my part, I turned slowly just inside the door, studying the walls, trying to figure out where that eerie blue light had come from. There weren’t any visible problems with the room—no ragged holes punched into the walls, no disembodied limbs—but that didn’t stop my heart from thumping hard inside my chest. I turned to my right and ran trembling fingers along the nearest wall. I didn’t know what I was feeling for. Something horrible. Something I couldn’t see.
“He’s not up here,” Floyd said, rushing back into the room. “There’s nobody
up here.”
I stepped over to the window and stared out at the bright afternoon. “Is there an attic or a cellar?” I asked. My hands were still shaking with adrenaline, but I could feel my heartbeat starting to slow. “Is there someplace they could hide? I mean, they have to be here, right? We saw Devon just a couple of minutes ago. And that blue glow …”
“Hey, hey, hey!” Floyd exclaimed, a hint of surprise in his voice. “Did you see this?”
I turned away from the window and found him moving toward the far side of the room. There was something tucked away in the corner, something I hadn’t noticed earlier: a small metal console, about the size of a shoe box.
“It’s a radio,” Floyd said, settling down in front of the box. He hit a switch, and it hummed to life. A bright digital display illuminated the front panel, and static crackled from its speaker. “Some type of CB radio. Battery-powered. And that’s not all.” Floyd reached behind the radio and picked up a pair of binoculars. There was a worried look on his face as he handed them over; his eyes kept darting back and forth between my face and the sleek black piece of equipment. He understood exactly what the binoculars and radio meant.
I took the binoculars back over to the window and raised them to my eyes. I scanned across the front of the house, spending brief seconds on each of the upstairs windows before finally panning down to the open living-room blinds. I adjusted the focus, zooming in on the sofa. It was a good pair of binoculars. Staring through those high-quality lenses, I could make out the stains in the sofa’s upholstery. Hell, I could count the number of crumbs trapped between its cushions.
I spent two nights on that couch! I thought, letting out a frustrated grunt. Somebody could have been watching me the entire time.
I lowered the glasses and returned to Floyd’s side, giving him a faint head shake as I crouched down on my heels. He took the binoculars from my hand and set them back where he’d found them.
“I thought radios didn’t work here,” I said, nodding toward the console. “I thought the military was jamming all of the channels.”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were keeping some frequencies open so they could communicate with each other.” He frowned. “But they’d be monitoring those lines, keeping it all military all the time.”
“Do you think this is military business, then?” I asked, pointing to the radio.
“Devon? Military?” Floyd grunted in disbelief. “No way! I just can’t believe that.”
“Then who?” I asked. “Who was he talking to?”
Floyd shrugged and leaned forward, studying the radio more closely. There was a large “transmit” button on the front of the console, and the frequency was set to double zero. Floyd leaned over the top of the box and began running his hands along its back side. “Wait a second,” he muttered beneath his breath. “What do we have here?” He got up into a crouch and started moving his hands across the wall behind the console. “There’s a wire here, coming out of the radio.”
“An antenna?”
Floyd shook his head, more interested in following the line than answering my question.
I got up off my heels. I could see the wire now, a thin white line pressed into the angle between floor and wall. Once he got to the door, Floyd stood up straight, following the wire as it continued up along the outside of the door frame. The thin white line touched the ceiling, then continued down the length of the hallway, back the way we’d come.
“It’s held in place with staples,” he said. “We’ve got to follow it, find out where it goes.”
“Hold on a second,” I said, turning back toward the room. “We left the radio—”
I halted, shocked motionless before I could take a single step back into the room. The console was still lit, illuminated by the sharp digits glowing bright on its face. Double zeros, drawn out in glowing blue lines.
The light was bright enough to bathe the entire room in eerie electric blue.
I groaned, suddenly feeling very, very stupid.
It’s nothing but coincidence, I chastised myself. The glow in the apartment building, this room … it’s just a fucking color.
I shut off the radio and followed Floyd out of the room.
Floyd had a tiny flashlight on his key ring. He focused its narrow beam on the wire, tucked up against the ceiling, and started following it down the length of the hallway.
“Tell me about Devon,” I said as we followed the tiny white line. “I’ve barely seen him. It seems like he’s gone all the time.”
“Yeah, he hasn’t been around much. Not since you got here.” We reached the stairway, and Floyd traced the wire back down the wall, where it disappeared over the edge of the landing. “He’s always been a bit of a flake, but …” He stopped in his tracks and turned back toward me, a perplexed look appearing on his face. “Actually, he asked about you last night, asked about your photography. He wanted to know what you were planning to do with all of your pictures.”
Uneasy gooseflesh prickled up along my back. My pictures. Was that it? Was this all about me?
“What did you tell him?”
“Nothing. I told him the truth: I have no idea what you’re doing.” Floyd paused for a moment, his face contorting as he tried to piece it all together. “What’s going on, Dean? Why’s he spying on us? And who’s he talking to on that radio?” He held out his hands, then looked left and right, a gesture that encompassed the entire house. Then his voice dropped down to a whisper: “And where’d he go?”
“I don’t know. I’m new here, remember?”
Floyd stared at me for a couple of seconds. His eyes were cold and accusing, like he didn’t quite believe me.
“Really, Floyd,” I assured him. “I’m as lost as you are.”
Finally, after a couple more seconds, he nodded, relenting. Then he turned and started down to the foyer.
The wire crossed over the side of the landing and proceeded down the wall, continuing to a doorway recessed beneath the stairs. The wire disappeared inside, squeezing between door and door frame.
Floyd nodded me forward, once again making me take the lead. His eyes were wide, and they kept darting back and forth between me and the door. His nerves were contagious. I paused with my hand on the doorknob, suddenly paralyzed by fear and doubt.
Is Devon waiting for us? I wondered. Does he have a weapon?
Or is there something worse in there? The thought made my blood pump cold inside my chest. Something not Devon. Or just part of Devon. An arm or a face, jutting out from a broom closet wall.
I cast the image aside and pulled the door open, releasing a gust of cold air that buffeted my face, making my eyes water. On the other side of the door there was a stairway leading down to a cellar. Only a couple of rough-hewn steps were visible in the dark, and the smell of damp earth gusted up from below.
“Fuck,” Floyd grunted. “Are we really going down there?”
“That depends. Do you want answers?”
Floyd let out another grunt. “I don’t know. I’m getting pretty good at living with mystery.”
“C’mon,” I prodded. “Shine your light on the steps.”
Floyd’s flashlight was tiny, and it barely scratched the thick veil of darkness. I took the stairs one step at a time, pausing to feel ahead with the tips of my toes. Our footsteps did not echo in the dark; every sound was absorbed and consumed inside a heavy, damp silence. I paused when we hit the concrete floor and fumbled my camera from around my neck. I worked the buttons from memory, turning on the LCD display and scrolling back to one of the pictures of Devon inside the house’s snow-shrouded window. It was a bright picture, and it lit the display like a fluorescent panel. I turned the camera around and used it to illuminate our surroundings.
The cellar was only partially finished. The walls and floor on the near side of the room were smooth stretches of dingy gray concrete, and the ceiling overhead was an exposed grid of joists. Three-quarters of the way across the room, the concrete gav
e way to damp earth, breaking off in a ragged arc that surrounded a hole in the far wall. The hole was a gaping dark void—about five feet around—and it absorbed the light from my camera, swallowing every trace like a giant hungry mouth.
“A tunnel,” Floyd whispered in surprised wonder. “A motherfucking tunnel!” I heard his jacket rustle as he sat down at the base of the stairs.
The dirt floor slanted down into the tunnel’s mouth. I panned the light across its width, finally noticing the thin white wire. It entered the tunnel halfway up its wall.
“Where’s the dirt?” Floyd asked. His voice remained a thin, breathless whisper. “The cellar’s empty. Where’d they put the dirt?”
I panned the camera around the room. Floyd was right: there were no mounds of displaced dirt, no equipment, nothing at all to support the logistics of such a massive project. “I guess it’s on the other side,” I said, taking a step toward the tunnel’s mouth.
Floyd was at my side in a matter of seconds, grabbing my elbow before I could even reach the damp earth. “You’re not serious,” he hissed, still keeping his voice low. “We can’t go in there. We have no idea what might be waiting.”
“Devon went this way,” I said. “He had to. There was nowhere else he could go! How dangerous could it be?”
“He could be working with anyone, Dean. And if he saw us, if he knows we’re following …” I heard him choke down a nervous swallow. “And that’s just the human threat. You’ve heard all of the stories. You know what could be waiting for us in there.”
He was right. I clenched my hand around the camera and felt the dull pain of my wounds ratchet into a white-hot bolt of fire. After I loosened my grip, the pain of my wounds continued, radiating all the way up the length of my forearm. The dogs had a tunnel just like this, I reminded myself. What if they’re in there, waiting?
“Just a little ways,” I said. “Just to see where the wire goes.”
Floyd’s hand remained on my elbow, an unyielding vise, holding me in place.
“Don’t you want to know what Devon’s doing?” I pleaded. “Don’t you want to know who he’s working with and why they’re watching us?” After a moment of silence, I let my voice drop down into a whisper: “C’mon, Floyd. He was asking about me!”
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