“Mr Shanahan?” Alex called. “My name’s Dolan. I’m from Sioux Crossing.”
“You sure don’t sound as if you’re from Sioux Crossing,” the voice called. It sounded weak and reedy and far-away.
“I’m living there at the moment,” Alex said. “In your old house.”
There was no reply to this. After a while, Alex heard someone moving around deeper inside the apartment, and a few moments later a figure appeared in a doorway, supporting itself on a Zimmer frame. “That house is cursed,” said the figure.
VERN SHANAHAN WAS only a couple of years older than Alex, but he looked about a thousand years old, nothing but yellowish skin stretched tightly over bone. His clothes were about two sizes too large for him. His feet, stuffed into worn slippers, were swollen, and Alex could see the loop of a Hickman line taped to his chest.
“Liver cancer,” he said before Alex said anything.
“I’m sorry,” Alex said. He’d brought some of the Shanahans’ junk mail with him, as camouflage, but it stayed stuffed in his coat pocket. The apartment was too hot, and it smelled of antiseptic and sick.
“It’s been eight months,” said Vern. “They gave me six, so.”
They were sitting in the apartment’s living room. Beyond the windows, Alex could see neat formal gardens. Vern had one of those old person’s chairs, built up to make it easier to sit and stand. On a little table beside it were various bottles and boxes of pills, a jug of water and a glass. On the floor under the table were a little stack of disposable cardboard sick-bowls and a lidded metal bucket.
Now he was here, Alex had no idea how to proceed. “Is your wife about?”
“She went into town to pick up my meds. Not that they’re going to do any good.”
Another blond boy came into the room with a mug of coffee, handed it to Alex, and left again. These would be Ralph’s nemeses, the Shanahan Boys, dog shooters. They seemed harmless enough, but there was an atmosphere here, a sense of waiting, of a death which had not happened yet.
He said, “What did you mean about the house being cursed?”
Vern snorted. “How long have you been there?”
“About nine months now.” Alex tried the coffee. It was monumentally strong.
“You work at the collider?”
“Kind of. I’m a journalist; I’m writing something about the project.”
Vern shook his head. “We were there three years and we weren’t happy a single day. Haven’t you noticed there’s something wrong about it?”
“How do you mean, ‘wrong’?”
“Something uncomfortable. Like the house didn’t want us there.” He looked at Alex. “I know how that sounds. The neighbours were all assholes, especially that poisonous old bastard next door. Always coming round and banging on the door to complain about something. I hadn’t mowed my front lawn, my car was blocking his driveway, the boys were making too much noise.”
“Right.”
“I mean, they’re boys,” said Vern. “Boys make noise. And he doesn’t even have a car.”
Alex heard the front door open and close, and a moment later a small woman with a pinched face and weary eyes came into the room and stared at him.
“This is Mr Dolan, Pam,” Vern said. “He’s living in East Walden Lane.”
Pam stared at Alex a few moments longer, then she held out a big white paper bag. “Here’s your medication, Vernon,” she said. Then she turned and left the room.
“It’s hard on Pam,” Vern said, setting the bag down beside his chair. “Well, it’s hard on all of us, but her in particular.” He settled back against the cushions. “Of course, it’s hardest on me, because I’m the one who’s going to die.”
Alex was beginning to regret coming here. It was impossible to decode the situation. He said, “Why were you in Sioux Crossing?”
“We worked at the SCS.” Vern saw the look on Alex’s face. “Oh, we’re not scientists. We got a tour of the collider when we arrived, but that was the last we saw of it. We worked in admin.”
“And you left when you got ill?” Alex felt uncomfortable about that. The Shanahans didn’t seem to have been well-treated by the SCS. The apartment was less than half the size of Number Twenty-Four.
“No, I got sick after,” said Vern. “A month or so after we moved up here.”
“Why are you here, Mr Dolan?” Pam asked from the doorway.
I brought your junk mail. “I’ve found quite a lot of your stuff at the house,” Alex said carefully. “In the basement, particularly. I wanted to see if I could return it to you.”
“We don’t have room here for all that stuff,” Pam said stonily. “Keep it, throw it away. We don’t care.”
Alex looked from one to the other. “Well,” he said. “If you’re sure…”
“We’re sure,” Pam said. “We just want to forget that place ever existed. And now I want you to leave. You’re tiring Vern.”
Vern didn’t look any more or less tired than he had when Alex arrived, but he’d been in enough interview situations to know when it was time to go. He stood up. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” he said.
“Good to meet you, Mr Dolan,” Vern said, offering a hand that felt like a bundle of sticks.
Alex thought Pam would simply close the door on him, but she surprised him by walking him to the car. “I don’t want anyone else from the SCS coming here,” she told him. “Tell them that.”
“They don’t even know I’m here,” he said.
She glanced at him. “You should get out of there while you still can, Mr Dolan. That place made Vern sick.”
“The SCS?”
“The house.”
They reached the car. Alex blipped the door unlocked, paused with his hand on the handle. “You left in a big hurry,” he said. “You left half your stuff behind.”
Pam sighed and looked about her. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Things were happening there, things we didn’t understand. We kept hearing noises. Knocking sounds in the walls. The place was suddenly full of static; you couldn’t touch anything without getting a shock.”
Alex thought of blue sparks.
“I was in the kitchen one morning and I looked out of the window and there was someone standing in the backyard. I turned and called to Vern, and when I turned back they’d gone.”
“Chief Rosewater said something about a prowler.”
She shook her head. “I only looked away for a moment, Mr Dolan. One second they were standing there, the next they were gone. When we went outside the grass was charred where they’d been standing.”
Alex waited with his hand on the handle.
“One night, a couple of days later, we were in bed and I heard someone walking around downstairs. I thought it was one of the boys—they went through a spell of sleepwalking—so I got up and went downstairs and there was static everywhere. And there was this…” She stopped. “There was someone standing in the kitchen. He turned and looked at me and I screamed and screamed and screamed.” She stopped again, fists clenched. “By the time Vern and the boys came running downstairs to see what the noise was, he was gone. Just vanished, right there in front of me in a cloud of static.” She looked away. “We put the boys in the car and we left right there and then, drove to my parents in St Paul.”
Alex didn’t know what to say.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “But I didn’t imagine it. I know what I saw.”
“Did you tell anyone else?”
“Vern called Chief Rosewater when we got to my parents’. He said he’d check the house. A few days later this Brit from the SCS turned up. Tall guy, sounded like Hugh Grant with a bad cold. He said the police hadn’t found any sign of a break-in and maybe I’d had a bad dream or a reaction to my hayfever meds or something. I just refused to go back and eventually he said he’d get our personal stuff sent on and organise severance for us. He was sorry we felt that way, we were valued employees, and could we sign these NDAs and he’d get our sever
ances processed right away, etcetera and blah blah blah. And that was the last time anyone from the SCS bothered to get in touch with us until today.”
“I don’t really work for the SCS,” he told her. “I’m writing a book.”
She looked at him. “I don’t care,” she said.
“Don’t tell anyone I was here,” he said, opening the door. “Please.”
“Just go, Mr Dolan,” she told him. “Leave us alone.”
HE’D PLANNED TO stop somewhere for something to eat, and then drive straight back to Mason City, but as he worked back towards the interstate he saw signs for Minneapolis and something occurred to him and he drove into the city instead. Pausing briefly to use the burner phone to google the British Consulate, an hour or so later he found himself standing outside a smallish, modern-looking building surrounded by a high brick wall which looked like an addition which had come along with the Global War on Terror.
There was a pair of iron gates at the front, and mounted in the wall beside them was an entryphone panel with a big fat steel button, a little camera, and a speaker grille. He stood where he thought the camera could see him, and pressed the button.
“Yes?” said a voice from the grille.
“Oh, hello,” he said, trying to appear as British and harmless as possible. “I wonder if it would be possible to speak to Colin? It’s about my visa.”
There was a silence, then the voice said, “Just a moment, please.”
It was, actually, rather more than a moment. He stood there for five minutes before the grille said, “Come in, please,” and the gates buzzed. He pushed them open against their springs and stepped into the consulate compound.
Kitson was waiting in the foyer of the building, a look of fury on his face. “Mr Ross,” he said, approaching across the parquet with his hand out.
It was the first time Alex had heard the name ‘Ross’, but he rolled with it. “Hi,” he said. “Just checking on my visa.” They shook hands. He got the sense that Kitson was struggling not to crush his fingers.
“Certainly,” Kitson said. “I was just going to get myself a sandwich. Perhaps you could walk with me?”
“Of course.”
Kitson waited until they were through the gates and out of sight of the consulate before he said, “What the actual fucking hell do you think you’re playing at?”
Alex shrugged. “I was in town; I thought I’d look in.”
“This way.” Kitson pointed down the street. “You do not just ‘look in’. You are never, ever seen with me. Do you understand? Why is your phone still in Sioux Crossing?”
“I didn’t want anyone to know where I was.”
Kitson shook his head angrily. “Yes,” he said, pounding along the pavement. “Yes. Very fucking funny. Well done.” He stomped to a halt outside a deli and thrust his hands in his pockets. “Do you have any news?”
Everyone’s looking for the secret of gravity and they’re afraid that if word gets out people will laugh at them. “Nope.”
Kitson nodded. “Okay. Look, don’t do this again, Alex, right? I can’t be seen with you, otherwise there will be awkward questions, and neither of us wants that.”
“Do we not?”
“No. We don’t. Now, if you’ll excuse me, please fuck off back to Iowa and keep reporting on your usual schedule.” And he pushed open the door of the deli and went inside.
“Righto,” Alex said to himself with a little smile. He went to find the car.
“PAM SHANAHAN.”
“What about her?” asked Ralph, looking down at the chessboard.
“Someone told me she had a problem. Prescription drugs.”
Ralph grunted. “I heard a rumour she was using painkillers a bit too enthusiastically. Don’t know how true that was. I do know she’s batshit crazy.” He reached out and moved one of his knights. “She’s crazy, Vern’s an asshole, their kids are dog killers.” He took his beer from the table beside his chair and took a swallow. “Whole damn family’s dysfunctional.”
Alex thought of the blond boys at Windy Rivers Apartments. “They didn’t kill Homer.”
Ralph snorted. “Only because they couldn’t shoot straight.”
“Vern has liver cancer,” Alex said.
Ralph looked at him. “How do you know that?” When Alex didn’t answer, he narrowed his eyes. “Ah hell,” he said.
“Why did you do that?”
“I found a gun safe in the basement. There are enough weapons inside to start a small civil war.”
Ralph raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t know Vern had guns. The kids, yeah, but not him. He didn’t seem the type.”
“It sounded as if Pam was having hallucinations while she was here.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. Are you going to move, or are you just going to stare at the board until we both die of old age?”
Alex took one of Ralph’s pawns with his rook. “Why doesn’t it surprise you?” he asked. “Pam seeing things?”
“Not particularly tightly wound, Pam,” he said, taking Alex’s rook with his knight. “Always banging on my door to complain about some damn thing. Check.”
Alex looked at the board. “Bollocks.” He moved his king.
“I’m sorry to hear that about Vern,” said Ralph. “I never liked the man, but liver cancer?” He shook his head. “That’s a fuck of a way to go.”
“Have you ever seen things round here?”
“Me? Like what?”
“I don’t know. Unusual stuff.”
“Like those guys going in to decorate your house?”
“Pam said the place was full of static.”
Ralph thought about it. “Can’t remember anything like that. I told you; Pam’s nuts. She probably took a few of her little pills and imagined it.”
“You really are an unpleasant old man, you know.”
“You didn’t have to live next door to them.” Ralph moved his queen. “Check.”
Alex scowled and moved his king again.
“What are you going to do about Vern’s guns?”
“Haven’t decided yet.”
“You should take them to Bud,” Ralph told him, studying the pieces. “Or get him to come out and collect them, if you don’t want to mess with them. I know how you Brits feel about guns.”
It wasn’t that. The presence of the guns seemed to him to be evidence that Stan’s operation was not infallible. The safe was tucked away in a corner of the basement, hidden from view from the bottom of the stairs. He hadn’t seen it until he was almost on top of it. If someone had checked out the house before he moved in, he got a sense that they’d only given the basement a cursory look. He didn’t want shotguns and rifles, particularly, but the fact that they’d been missed was kind of comforting, proof that there were still surprising little hidden corners in his life.
“We’ll see,” he said. “Maybe.”
“Before I forget, there was a guy looking for you the other day, when you were away.” After the events of the previous autumn, Ralph had appointed himself the guardian of Alex’s house.
“Guy?”
“Big guy, white hair, dressed like a clown. Drove a red car.”
Alex winced.
“Sounds familiar?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Did you speak to him?”
Ralph shook his head. “He banged on your front door for a while, then he looked in the windows, then he went away again.”
A lot of the younger scientists at the SCS thought Larry was pretty cool; some of them appeared to regard him as a kind of trickster god. Alex thought that was one of the reasons he hung around the project; that kind of adulation could be addictive. Most of the older staff just thought he was a nuisance, but even they were slightly in awe of him.
“Did you see them go?”
“Who?” Ralph looked at him. “Oh, we’re talking about them again. No, I didn’t see them go. I have better things to do than watch my asshole neighbours. Particularly those asshole neighbours.”
&nbs
p; “They left in a hell of a hurry. The SCS delivered their stuff afterward. The stuff they could fit in their new apartment, anyway.”
“I don’t know about that. I’m just glad they’re somewhere else.”
“I dropped in on Kitson, while I was in Minneapolis.”
“Oh yeah?” Ralph took another drink of beer. “How’d that go?”
“Well, he’s certainly at the consulate.”
Ralph went back to examining the board. “I’m hearing a ‘but’, there.”
“I don’t know.” Alex pondered whether or not to move his queen back down the board. “Something odd going on. He was really pissed off that I’d turned up.”
“As you’d expect.” Ralph waved at the board. “Come on, move already, for Christ’s sake.”
Alex sighed and moved his queen. “It wasn’t that. It was more like he was embarrassed or something.”
“You expected him to offer you tea and cucumber sandwiches? You have a lot to learn about how spies work.”
Alex had been going over and over Kitson’s reaction since he got back. True, Kitson had been annoyed, and it had been worth the trip for that alone, but it had been something more than annoyance, more than professionalism. At the moment, he was working on a theory that Kitson was actually engaged in some kind of private enterprise, something not officially sanctioned, something he’d cooked up in his own time to impress his masters. If that was true, what did it mean? Could Alex just ignore him? If he did that, could Kitson still cause problems?
“It’s all very complicated,” he admitted.
“Well, that’s life for you,” Ralph said. “You’re boogieing along without a care in the world, then some guy comes along and does this.” And one of his rooks came out of seemingly nowhere and took Alex’s queen. “Mate.”
Alex looked at the board. “Fucksake,” he said.
“Hey, you are getting better,” Ralph told him. “You lasted a whole fifteen minutes that time.”
The Raccoon
HE VISITED THE SCS two or three times a week, usually to mooch around and pick up gossip and have lunch with Wendy or one of the other scientists and techs he’d managed to strike up a friendship with. He couldn’t have said, hand on heart, that he had established an easy relationship with the contractors who guarded the Facility, but he was at least a familiar face. Usually all that was required was a quick scan of his phone and he was waved through the gates. Usually.
The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man Page 16