by Dan Wells
And it had to be Attina causing the screaming, right? This town had gone for decades without a violent attack, and now they’d had two in less than a week. There was no way that was a coincidence. But Derek Stamper had been killed slowly and in private, and no one had known until the body was found more than an hour later. Did that mean this was a different killer? Or a different situation? What had changed in the circumstances to prompt such a marked changed in the Withered’s methods?
I stood up, shucking the blankets I’d been wrapped in and walking to the window. The floor creaked under my feet, but only softly. I moved a slat in the blinds and looked outside; the world was empty and dark, colorless in the moonlight. I saw trees and houses and parked cars, all motionless in the silence. There wasn’t even wind. I don’t know what I was expecting to see, certainly not some transformed demon killing someone right in front of the—
Another scream, longer than the others. Was the pitch different? I couldn’t tell.
What if it wasn’t a Withered at all? What if it truly was a coincidence, two attacks in less than a week, and this one was just a mugging or an assault, and I could stop it and was too afraid to do so? But I had reason to be afraid, maybe more than anybody else in the town, because I knew what could happen if I was right. I’d seen Withered kill. I’d seen the aftermath, and I’d seen it up close. Worse than the violence, I’d seen glimpses of the minds behind it, tortured by time and warped over ten thousand years. I’d seen them not just take lives but take them over, stepping into people’s shapes and faces and living their lives for them.
Stopping them was what I did. It was my entire life. But running out headfirst was not how I did it.
I waited by the window, watching and listening, but the screams were done. Three short cries, and a life was over.
A few minutes later I heard an engine, then two, three, and who knows how many more. I could see red-and-blue reflections on the houses across the street, but not the lights themselves. Voices shouting. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. A light came on in the house across the street, and then another in the house next to it. I looked at the round clock face on the bedroom wall, squinting to see it clearly in the dark. 1:30 in the morning. There’d be hours before we knew the truth.
Was it worth it to go out and look? Now that the police were there the danger—probably—was gone. And I knew I wouldn’t be the only one stepping out in the middle of the night to rubberneck whatever grim cleanup the police were trying to do. It might even serve as an alibi, in case suspicion ever turned to us—obviously I didn’t do it, I was right there with you instead of running away. Or it might just as easily create suspicion where none had existed, causing the police to remember me when they thought about the crime scene. Guilty parties showed up at their own investigations all the time—not enough to make it suspicious, but certainly enough to remove it as an alibi. More than anything, though, if I went I’d have to take Brooke with me, or risk her waking up in confusion and wandering away. She needed sleep, especially now that she had a real bed for the first time in a week, and she needed to not be traumatized by the sight of another dead body. Better to stay here and wait.
I waited by the window, watching for any new information.
All night long.
* * *
Brooke was still Marci when she woke up the next morning. I explained what had happened, as briefly as I could, and she said I’d made the right decision to stay inside. I don’t know if she believed it or not, but it was kind of her to say. We got dressed, staring at opposite walls in the pink, fluffy room. When we got to the kitchen to help with breakfast, Ingrid was already there, in her bathrobe and curlers, holding the phone and crying.
“Mercy,” she said. “Mercy, mercy.”
“Is everything okay?” asked Marci. She glanced at me, both of us knowing what the phone call was probably about.
Ingrid shook her head.
I stepped closer, trying to sound helpful instead of curious. “Is there something we can do?”
Ingrid looked at the phone in her hand as if were a museum curiosity, a bizarre object that had somehow transported itself magically into her hand. I saw that the screen was blank and black; whatever call she’d gotten was long over, and she’d been too shocked to put it down.
Marci sat next to her at the kitchen table. “We heard something last night,” she said. “Police cars, some kind of trouble. Did someone tell you what it was?”
I would have asked the same question by saying that I’d heard screaming, but I could see instantly that mentioning the police cars was the smarter move. Marci was filling Ingrid’s mind with the most acceptable, approachable part of the story: someone trying to fix it. Mentioning the screams would only have made the story more horrible.
What would I do without Marci?
Ingrid nodded slowly, still sobbing into her hands. She wiped her eyes and sniffed, trying to regain her composure. “You met them yesterday, right? The Butler girls?”
No, I thought, please no. “We did,” I said, nodding slowly. “Are they okay?”
“Jessica,” said Ingrid, and she broke down sobbing again. We could barely understand the next three words: “Just like Derek.”
Marci put her hand on Ingrid’s back, looked at me silently, then wrapped her arms around Ingrid, who hugged her back, and Boy Dog walked toward them, sitting down on Marci’s feet in a gesture of fat, furry devotion. I watched them, thinking.
Why Jessica? Both victims were people we had talked to, the night after we’d talked to them. Was it a message to us? Or was someone actively hunting us, and kept missing? I didn’t know what kind of tracking system might result in that kind of repeated mistake, but Withered powers were virtually impossible to understand without knowing exactly how they worked. The people they killed and their reasons and methods always had perfect internal consistency—even when you disagreed with what they did, you could understand how they got there. They made sense. All you had to do was find the thing that made them all make sense—that secret, supernatural decoder ring that made all the clues click into place. Without knowing how their powers worked, though …
We’d talked to several people while we were in Dillon. Why had the Withered killed these two, specifically? What set them apart? They were both teenagers. They were both people we’d talked to on the street. They were both … And then I felt a sudden rush of relief, realizing a key difference between the two victims: I’d wanted to kill Derek and felt a sense of guilty responsibility ever since I’d learned that he’d died, as if I’d somehow helped to cause it. But I’d never wanted to kill Jessica. Even better, I was actively planning to kill Corey, and he was fine. If my plans for violence had been the root of these attacks, Jessica would have been untouched. I was off the hook—
—well, at least in part. It was still my responsibility to stop this Withered before he killed again.
“I need to call Sara,” said Ingrid, clutching Marci tightly for a few more seconds before pulling away and reaching for her phone again. “She’ll be a wreck.”
“Did she know Jessica well?” asked Marci.
“Oh dear,” said Ingrid, taking Marci’s hand. “I was so broken up I didn’t even tell you about Luke.”
“Her brother?” I asked.
“He tried to save her,” said Ingrid. “He was a hero.”
“Wait,” I said, sitting at the table across from her. “What was Officer Glassman doing with fourteen-year-old Jessica at 1:30 in the morning?”
“He was a hero,” Ingrid insisted, her voice turning hard and angry. “He got cut up too, trying to save her.” She picked up the phone, and I caught Marci’s eye and nodded toward the living room. I left the kitchen, and she followed me.
“What do you think?” I whispered.
“No way Jessica was out there with him willingly,” said Marci.
I nodded. “Do you think…? I don’t know. Can you remember any Withered who were pedophiles?”
She frowne
d. “You think it’s Glassman, now?”
“I still think it’s Corey,” I said, shaking my head. “He’s weird and creepy and that ‘it begins’ looks awfully suspicious. But. None of that is hard evidence, and both victims were teenagers, and Officer Glassman was leering at Jessica like crazy just a few hours before she died. So it’s at least worth a mention.”
“But Glassman wasn’t even here the night Derek died,” said Marci. “Sara told us he’d left the day before.”
“Maybe he faked leaving early to build himself an alibi.”
“A person that careful wouldn’t turn around and kill a girl five hours after all of Main Street saw him talking to her. And then be found at the scene with injuries.”
I sighed and nodded. “You’re right. But what if … I don’t know. It’s too obvious to ignore, even if some of the pieces don’t fit yet.”
“Yet?”
“They might fit better when we learn more.”
Marci nodded. “For now, let’s focus on what we know. Both victims died the night after we talked to them.”
“Even better,” I said, “both of those conversations happened in Corey’s presence.”
“He’s still the best candidate,” Marci agreed. “I just wish we had more evidence.”
“Maybe he recognized us that first night,” I said. “Or he recognized Nobody’s presence or influence or something, and so when we left he killed Derek to try to lure us back. He didn’t kill anyone the first night because he didn’t have a plan yet. He was still thinking. And then the second night he put his plan into motion: It begins.”
“So what’s his plan?” asked Marci.
“I have no idea,” I said, shrugging helplessly. “Maybe it’s a message to us, or to someone else, or … well, it’s definitely about us somehow. Two murders in a peaceful town coinciding perfectly with our arrival is not a coincidence. We need to talk to his parents today, and maybe Brielle.”
“Seriously?” asked Marci. “Her sister was just murdered.”
“Of course,” I said. “You’re right. Maybe Paul, then.”
“It’s going to be hard to talk to anyone if the whole town’s in terrified mourning the whole time we’re here,” said Marci. She grimaced. “How many more do you think he’s going to kill?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.… Wait.”
“What?”
“There’s another correlation,” I said. “We’ve been here three days, and we talked to people on three days, but people were only killed on two of them.”
“Because he was still forming a plan on the first day,” said Marci. “Like you said.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe there’s another common factor we haven’t considered. What did we do on the second and third days that we didn’t do on the first?”
“We … were here during the daytime,” said Marci. “We went to … oh crap.” She looked me right in the eyes. “We went to church.”
I nodded. “Both days.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything,” said Marci.
“Maybe not,” I said. “Maybe it does.”
“We have to deal with stuff we can understand,” said Marci, frustrated. “Actual clues we can actually follow, instead of just guessing at shadows.”
“What, then?”
“We should … go look at last night’s crime scene,” she said. “There might be soulstuff, or claw marks, or some other evidence that the police won’t know is evidence because it’s too weird to be part of a standard murder.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. “We’ll see if we can get close; it might be taped off still. And either way, I think we need to visit the cops.”
“You want to bring them in on this?” asked Marci. “I liked Officer Davis, but he won’t believe a word we say if we try to tell him this was a supernatural monster.”
I shook my head. “I just want to find out what they know—I can’t look at the bodies anymore, like I used to back in Clayton, so we’ve got to get our info some other way.”
“The cops won’t tell you anything.”
“Not on purpose,” I said. “That’s why we’re going to tell them something—they asked everyone who knows something to talk to them, so we’re going to go do it. We’re going to offer ourselves as witnesses to yesterday’s encounter between Jessica and Glassman. And while we’re in the building, we’re going to eavesdrop on every conversation we possibly can.”
“You’re crazy,” said Brooke. “They’ll ask for ID.”
“And we won’t have any to give them,” I said. “That doesn’t make us suspects, and whatever it does make us they’ll be too busy with the killings to bother figuring out who we really are.” I wavered back and forth, grimacing as I thought. “I’m 99 percent sure we won’t be suspects.”
Marci raised an eyebrow. “Are you willing to risk that 1 percent?”
“To kill a Withered?” I asked. “I’ll risk a lot more than that.”
“We can’t be on camera, though,” said Marci. “This is going to be national news, now more than ever, and we can’t be seen.”
“I know.”
Marci folded her arms intently. “If we get to the station and they have a camera, we come right back. We can’t risk anyone back home seeing us.”
“Obviously,” I said, then paused. “It’s a smart plan, but … you seem more emotional about it as well.”
“The sooner Brooke’s body gets recognized,” said Marci, “the sooner I might get evicted from it.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that.
We set out to look at the crime scene only to find it already swarmed with people pressed up against the line of police tape, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of anything they could. Marci and I worked our way to the front, but other than some plastic tarps that were almost certainly covering blood stains, we couldn’t see anything. A handful of state police were on the scene, working more to keep people out than to actually examine the evidence, and I wondered if they were already done or if they were trying to keep the scene clean for an incoming forensics team. Two grisly child murders in half a week was national news; we might get FBI. I wondered if it would be anyone I knew.
Was that Attina’s plan? To make this so high profile it became too risky for us to stay and hunt him?
We pushed our way gently out of the crowd, waved solemnly at Pastor Nash, who stood near the back of the crowd, and headed toward the police station. Marci started working on our story, conjuring something placating to tell the police if they demanded ID, while I put together the beginnings of a plan to kill Corey. Only the beginnings, though. Killing a Withered was just as delicate as tracking one; if you knew their powers you could do it fairly easily, but otherwise it was all but impossible. We’d have to start the way we always started: the speed-bump test. But how to arrange it? We couldn’t just be in the truck when we hit him—we’d end up in jail or worse—and if he survived we would have exposed ourselves for nothing. It had to be more subtle. But how?
And did we dare to do it in the first place? What if Corey, despite all our suspicion, was innocent? What if he was just a weirdo with poor social skills, and his Facebook announcement was a pure coincidence? “It begins” might just as easily refer to … I didn’t know, a garage band or something. Maybe his mustache was coming in. Maybe he was binge watching something online. I, of all people, couldn’t condemn a guy just for being suspicious and not fitting in.
But how could I know for sure? Every moment I didn’t act was another moment when someone could get hurt. Better to have the plan ready, so I could employ it when the target was confirmed.
Assuming I could get hold of a truck in the first place, how would I do it? Maybe if I aimed the truck just right and stacked a bunch of bricks on the gas pedal? If he was in a specific place, like the tables in front of Kitten Caboodle … but how could I keep him from seeing it coming, and g
etting out of the way? How could I limit the collateral damage? Maybe if I caught him at night, drunk at the drive-in theater, or walking home in the dark. The more I thought about it the more I wanted to do it, like a junkie sitting and staring at a hit of meth—just sitting there, waiting, filling up my entire mind. I looked at every truck we passed, wondering how to steal it, how to rig it, how to clean my own DNA off it.
We arrived at the police station only to find it almost as crowded as the crime scene—though most of the people here were in police uniforms. There were too many just for this department; they had local police, state police, and volunteers from all over the region. Most of them were milling around in the parking lot and by the front door as if they were waiting for something—an order or an announcement.
There was an ambulance in the parking lot. That was new, but I didn’t know what it meant. There were no cameras or news crews.
One of the officers stopped us as we tried to walk to the front door.
“Do you have business here?”
“The officer at the church meeting told us to contact him if we knew anything,” said Marci, putting on her most innocent voice. “We were with Jessica a lot yesterday.”
“And that’s it?” asked the cop. “You hung out with the victim? Do you have more than that?”
“Officer Glassman was there,” said Marci, dropping her eyes. I couldn’t tell if she was really embarrassed or still acting.
“Damn Cuddles,” said another cop, walking up next to the first. “Send them through.”
The second officer motioned for us to follow him. He led us past the crowd of police and into the station itself, where we could hear someone yelling in one of the offices. The cop pointed us to the waiting area: seven or eight plastic chairs, most of them already filled with what I assumed were other witnesses. Marci and I sat down, Boy Dog panting languidly at our feet, and I strained to hear the shouting.
“… another one? How the hell am I supposed to explain this?”
The response was too muffled to make out. The first voice shouted again.
“You’re not getting out of this with a transfer, Luke!”