by J. S. Volpe
Hell, he wasn’t sure of anything at this point. He wasn’t sure if he was still under suspicion; he wasn’t sure if he should try to dump Emily’s body; he wasn’t sure if Emily Faux would ever return; he wasn’t sure what she was or why she had helped him. His uncertainties immobilized him. He felt like a blind man in a room full of bear traps.
“I can help you solve your problems,” Emily’s voice said behind him.
Roger spun around. Emily Faux sat on the couch in the spot where Agent Rowan had sat yesterday afternoon.
“Where did you go?” Roger said, his voice surly. “You disappeared.”
“I had things to do,” she said. “Responsibilities. But I’m back now. To help you. Now please sit. We need to talk.”
She gestured at his recliner with one small, slender hand. Her nylon jacket rustled with the movement. Her long glossy black hair swayed gently. He could see the lifeline and loveline creasing her open palm. She seemed perfectly real in every way, yet he knew with absolute certainty that if he tried to grab her, his hands would close on empty air.
“What are you?” he said.
“Sit,” she repeated.
He stared at her a moment. He wanted to refuse. He wanted to deny all of this. He wanted none of this to be happening. But it was.
Scowling, feeling resentful and manipulated, he sat.
“What are you?” he asked again. “You’re not Emily. She’s dead. She’s in the basement with a hole in her.”
One of her eyebrows rose slightly.
“How do you know I’m not a ghost?”
“I…” He had been about to say, “I don’t believe in ghosts,” but he foresaw the philosophical sinkhole that would lead to. He was already granting credibility to apparently clairvoyant intangible entities. That wasn’t really very far from ghosts, was it?
“You’re not her,” he said. “You don’t talk like her.”
She nodded as though pleased. “No, I’m not her. You’re right.”
“Then why do you look like her?”
“To show you what’s possible. To show you what you can have again.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m here to help you bring her back.”
“What?”
“If you do what I tell you, you can bring her back. She can be alive again. Real. Fleshy.” Her lips spread in a slutty smile that made Roger’s penis stir despite the weirdness of the situation.
“Fleshy…” he muttered, hypnotized by the train of thought that word and that smile had set in motion. Then he frowned, realizing she had set that train moving on purpose. “And how exactly do you propose to bring a corpse back to life?”
“Magic.”
Roger barked out a laugh. “Riiiiight.” He began flinging his hands about like a hammy magician poofing things into existence. “Presto-chango! Abraca-pocus! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my ass!”
She simply watched him with a small, patient smile. In the face of it, his excitable behavior made him feel foolish and juvenile.
“Magic is very real, Roger,” she said.
“Bullshit,” he snapped.
“I’m proof of it, aren’t I? I’m here, I’m real, but only you can see me. I’ve told you things you couldn’t have known on your own.”
“Maybe.” He folded his arms and glowered at the TV as if he were hoping this inane conversation would end soon so he could watch something. In the TV’s blank gray screen he could see the hazy, distorted reflection of her body perched on the edge of the couch. Her face was only a pale featureless blur, but he knew she was watching him.
“The magical worldview is equally as valid as the scientific one,” she said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Roger said, turning to glare at her. “They’re opposites. They can’t both be true.”
“Black and white are opposites. They cannot coexist in the same space. If they try to, they become something else. And yet neither black nor white is wrong or false in any sense. They simply cannot coexist. Likewise, a mind can hold a scientific view of things, or a magical view of things. Never both. Alternatives exclude.”
“That’s nonsense. Science has proofs. Tests. Empirical evidence.”
“And magic has its own proofs that are equally valid for those who view the world through its lens. Science says Emily is dead and gone forever, but magic proclaims otherwise. If you choose to, you can bring her back. To be yours to do with what you will.”
Roger eyed her narrowly.
“Why would you even want to help me? What’s your angle? And what the fuck are you, anyway? You never really answered that.”
“There isn’t a language in the world that has a word for what I am. You might say I am…an adjustor. A corrector of errors. I am here to make right what was wrong. Emily was not supposed to die. Not then. Not in that way. The error must be corrected. Reality must be reset.”
“Reset? What does that mean? That doesn’t sound like just reanimating a corpse.”
“Time will be reset to the moment of the error, and events will be adjusted to ensure the error does not occur. Emily will no longer be dead. She will be alive. She will be yours. Your slave. Your plaything.”
Roger sucked in a breath at the delicious thought of Emily chained and imprisoned in his basement. But then he gave Emily Faux a sidelong look. “Or maybe you’re just saying that. Maybe she’s supposed to kill me, or something. How do I know that’s not what will happen if I help you to…to reset things, or whatever.”
“You don’t. For that matter, I don’t either. I’m here only to correct the mistake. I’m only a functionary, if you will.”
“Who do you work for?”
She shook her head. “Even I don’t know that.”
He grunted, then just sat there a moment, deep in thought. Emily watched him in silence, her face unreadable.
Finally he said, “If—if—I choose to go along with this magic nonsense, what exactly would that entail?”
“Magic requires balance,” she said. “A life for a life. In this case, though, the magnitude of the proposed changes will require two lives.”
“Whose lives?”
“Two similar and connected lives. You remember those two children you saw Emily with in the park?”
“The boy and the girl?”
“Yes. His name is John Coyote. Hers is Anna West. Both of them must die so that Emily may live again. They must die in the clearing, in the same spot you killed Emily so that their blood may replace hers.” She smiled lewdly again. “You may, of course, do what you wish with the girl before you kill her.”
Roger remembered his vivid dream of raping Emily in the clearing, and then imagined doing the same to Anna West. His cock stirred again.
He shut his eyes, shook his head.
“I’m not killing anyone!” he said. “You’re trying to set me up or something, in revenge for killing Emily! This—this makes no sense! This resetting reality garbage is complete and utter bullshit! Stuff like that just doesn’t happen!”
She smiled. “It happens more often than you might think. Besides, like I said, the magic will reset reality, and none of them will be dead any longer. Not John, not Anna, and not Emily.”
“I have only your word for that.”
“True. But you also have the fact of my existence as proof that there are other realities than the one you know. You have a choice to make, Roger. Take some time to think it through. But don’t take too long. This must be done soon or it cannot be done at all. And by the rules of magic, only you can do it.”
She vanished.
Roger slumped back in his chair and stared out the window. Ms. Souter from down the block passed by, walking her poodle. Her permed curly white hair matched the dog’s fur. The ordinariness of the scene made him ask himself if he had really just been talking to a ghostly entity that wanted him to kill two children in order to reset reality.
But no. He knew better. It had been real, at least in some sense. The offer had been
real.
The question was, what was he going to do about it?
Chapter 20
Reconnaissance
1
Calvin was breathing hard as he rang Mr. May’s doorbell. He had run most of the way here, eager to share his discoveries with Mr. May and Cynthia.
But when Mr. May answered the door, Calvin’s ebullient greeting died on his lips. He could tell from the grim look on the old man’s face that something was very wrong.
“Ms. Crow will not be joining us,” Mr. May said as he led Calvin to the parlor.
“What?” Calvin’s voice was high with alarm. “Is she okay?”
“Her aunt died this afternoon.”
“Oh.” Calvin relaxed, relieved that Cynthia was okay, then felt a stab of guilt that he didn’t feel more saddened about Wendy’s death.
While Mr. May settled into his claw-and-ball chair, Calvin sat in the same spot on the couch where he had sat yesterday. He glanced at the empty cushion where Cynthia had sat. It wasn’t going to be the same without her.
“What exactly happened?” Calvin asked.
“About an hour ago I was having a cup of tea when I heard a siren and a vehicle racing up my driveway. Wondering if I was about to be arrested for some obscure reason, I looked out and saw an ambulance screech to a halt at the end of the drive. Two paramedics leaped out and sprinted into the woods with a stretcher and various equipment. I went outside to find out what was happening. I could faintly hear voices in the distance, in the direction of the clearing. I started to head that way, but I hadn’t even made it halfway there when I nearly collided with the paramedics, who were heading back to the ambulance with Wendy’s body on the stretcher. She was dead. Cynthia and her father were following along close behind them. I’m not sure Hannibal even noticed me—he looked pretty dazed—but Cynthia did. While we headed back to the ambulance, she told me what had happened. They had gone to the clearing to see if Wendy could psychically learn anything about Emily’s disappearance. Wendy had already had a vision earlier, in Emily’s room—an image of a large shiny yellow box, possibly made of metal or plastic. Does that mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“Me either. Anyway, they went to the clearing, and before Wendy even got there she was acting strangely, staggering about and breathing irregularly. She claimed she sensed something up ahead in the clearing, something that was giving off psychic energy like heat from a furnace. When they got there she started babbling about a dome and a sphere and a hole.”
“A dome!” Calvin exclaimed. “The underground chamber Turner May wrote about was a dome!”
Mr. May nodded. “True. But in this case I think it refers to something else, as you’ll soon see. No sooner had Wendy said all this than she had a seizure, just like when she was a little girl. Only this time it killed her.”
“Did she, like, swallow her tongue or something?”
Mr. May shook his head with a small laugh. “That only happens in movies. No, nobody seemed to know exactly why she died. Given her age, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a heart attack or a stroke. At any rate, right after she died, Cynthia briefly saw a faint dome or hemisphere of silvery light in the center of the clearing.”
“Does that mean Cynthia’s psychic, too?”
Mr. May hesitated. “I…I don’t know. Her father didn’t notice anything, but Cynthia said his eyes were shut at the time, so I guess there’s no way to know for sure whether the light was a psychic manifestation visible only to sensitives or just a display of normal energy that would have been visible to anyone.”
“What does it all mean? What do you think’s going on?”
“If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that energy of some kind is manifesting in the clearing whenever…certain events occur there. I don’t want to say ‘deaths,’ given that Emily’s fate is unknown and I would prefer to remain optimistic. Let’s just say ‘traumatic events,’ shall we? Though the light that Cynthia saw didn’t appear to leave any physical traces in the clearing, it’s hardly a stretch to posit a connection between that light and the peculiar burned circle found in the wake of Emily’s abduction. But as intriguing—and worrying—as that is, it’s something we must set aside for now.”
“What? Why?”
“It’s most likely a matter of the macro-level, of the larger patterns at work. As we discussed yesterday, our focus right now needs to be on the micro-level, on finding Emily. On that score, Cynthia managed to tell me one other thing before she and her father headed away. She learned the names of some of the people in the park on Thursday. She learned them from her brother, of all people, who wishes to be included in our future plans.”
“Hm,” Calvin said with a small frown. He knew their goal was to find Emily, of course, but he couldn’t help feeling a bit put out that he and Cynthia would no longer be the only ones working with Mr. May to solve the case. It had been a unique connection between them, setting them apart from everyone else.
Mr. May noticed Calvin’s sudden glumness and raised an eyebrow. “Is there a problem with young Mr. Crow that I don’t know about?”
“Oh, uh, I don’t know. I don’t really know him, but…” Calvin shrugged. “Well, I’ve heard he’s kind of a stoner.”
“Be that as it may, he has helped us immeasurably already. He provided a rundown of people who were in the park, including a couple of actual names. Based on what Cynthia told me, the only one that seems like a viable suspect at the moment is a man named Roger Grey.”
Calvin shot bolt upright. “What? Roger Grey?”
Mr. May sat forward, eyes agleam with excitement. “This means something to you?”
Calvin told him about his talk with his father that morning. When Calvin related how he got his father to identify bank employees who fit the profile Mr. May had come up with, Mr. May laughed.
“Excellent,” Mr. May said. “Very clever. Very well done.”
Calvin swelled with delight.
After Calvin finished telling what he had learned, Mr. May nodded slowly as if the info confirmed what he had already suspected.
“You think it’s him?” Calvin asked.
“I think he is by far the likeliest candidate. All lines of investigation are pointing his way. He matches the profile to a T. He was in the park at the right time. He no doubt saw Emily fairly often. He has been acting in a peculiar manner recently. He’s on vacation but still chooses to hang around the park, a place he visits nearly every workday.”
“Should we tell the police?”
“They’re privy to most of the same information we are. I’m sure they already know about Mr. Grey.”
“Then why don’t they do anything?”
“I imagine they don’t feel the evidence is strong enough. Which, from a legal standpoint, it isn’t. It’s wholly circumstantial.”
“So what do we do?”
Mr. May said nothing for a moment. He just gazed off into space, thinking.
Then he smiled.
“We look for more evidence,” he said. He cocked an eyebrow at Calvin. “Up for a little reconnaissance this evening?”
2
After dinner Calvin told his parents he was going for a walk, then strode briskly toward eastern May. He didn’t have a lot of time. The sun had set about ten minutes ago, so there was only about twenty more minutes before dusk fell and it got too dark for him to do what he needed to do.
It took him about ten minutes to reach Grace Road where Roger Grey lived. The road was deserted except for a paunchy middle-aged male jogger puffing his way down the opposite side of the street. The jogger looked too busy trying not to collapse from exhaustion to pay much attention to Calvin. Good.
Calvin kept a close eye on the house numbers as he walked along. When number 452—Grey’s address—came into view, he got out his cell phone. He silenced it so it wouldn’t ring while he was using it, then turned on the video recorder. He put the phone to his ear on the side facing Grey’s house and started talking as
if he were having a conversation with someone. He made sure to hold the phone so the camera lens was level with the house.
He didn’t rely only on the camera, though; he took a good, long look at the house out of the corner of his eye as he strolled past. After all, if the video quality wound up sucking, he wanted to be able to give Mr. May a decent description of the property.
It was a simple one-storey white bungalow. The driveway was empty, but the garage door was closed, so the car might be parked inside. All of the house’s windows were curtained tight. A light was on in one of the front rooms. Probably the living room. But the light didn’t mean Grey was home, or even in town. He could be away on a trip, and the light on a timer.
The lawn was green and well-maintained. The high bushes separating Grey’s house from the house on the south were nicely trimmed. The low white wooden fence separating it from the house on the north looked like it had been recently painted. There was nothing here that said “psycho” or “pervert.” It was, in fact, the paragon of suburban normalcy. But outward appearances meant nothing.
Calvin’s heart was hammering as he passed the house, and the phone slid a little in his sweaty grip. He feared that the front door would fly open and Grey would storm out, having somehow discerned what Calvin was up to. But the door stayed closed the whole time, and Calvin saw no signs of life from inside.
Despite his nervousness, Calvin did a good job maintaining his end of the fake conversation. He kept it simple by pretending to be doing most of the listening, interjecting only occasional brief comments like, “Uh-huh,” and, “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too,” and, “So what did she say?” He made sure to move the phone about just enough to get a thorough view of the front of the house and both sides.
That left the back. After he had passed Grey’s house, he pretended to end the conversation, saved the video footage, and then stuffed the phone into his pocket. He strode north to the end of the block, then east down Wilsey, then south down Elmwood, the street behind Grey’s. He walked quickly since it was getting darker by the moment. Too much longer and there wouldn’t be enough light to film anything.
Elmwood Road was slightly busier than Grace Road: An old lady was walking a poodle on the other side of the street, and two little blonde girls were doing cartwheels on the front lawn of a house near the far end of the block. TVs flickered in living room windows. A dog barked somewhere.