by Grant, Ann
Nikki and I drew closer to the Grasslands and came to a chain link construction fence that had to be seven feet high. I wasn’t about to climb over it and leave her behind, but I squeezed through a gap and forced the fence open for her. The hair on her back bristled.
“What do you see, Nikki? You see something?”
She pricked her ears toward the Grasslands and growled.
My flashlight still couldn’t pick up any little flags. In a few minutes the huge dome loomed above us. Darkness pooled over the walls. The terrible whispering grew louder. I stopped to listen and saw a river of black smoke streaming out of the vents near the roofline.
“What is that?” I asked Nikki and put a hand on her collar. The same black smoke I’d seen in the ruins? Smoke or shadows or something else, I wasn’t sure. But I had all my senses now, and wasn’t in a dream state, and didn’t smell smoke or anything else that would signal a fire.
I was wrong about the black shadows.
They weren’t flowing out of the vents. They were flowing in.
Nikki bared her teeth at the walls.
I stood there for a full minute, staring at the black stuff rushing over the ground and shooting up through the vents. I was afraid to put my hand in it.
Nikki growled at the air. Her lips curled in a snarl.
“No, don’t,” I hissed, dragging her away as I looked around for a way to see inside. We turned a corner and found a wall of pale green frosted glass that faced the parking lot. The wind blew with full force across the silent construction equipment. My heart raced. I touched Nikki to keep her quiet, cupped my hands around my eyes, and pressed my face against the glass, trying to see what was in there.
Something was moving around. My heart leaped.
The shapes flowed and twisted, almost human, but not quite. Shapes that resembled heads and arms and legs, merging and flickering until they became so distorted that they lost their forms. Desperate hands reached out and drifted apart. Hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, flowing and twisting.
“What the hell?” I stared at the outside walls again. The black river of shadow was still flowing up into the vents. Still being sucked inside.
It was coming over the field toward the building.
I could hear the whispers, almost like urgent voices, the same voices I’d heard on the island.
Nikki snarled at the window. My pulse pounded. I began to feel sick. I had to get out of there. I grabbed Nikki’s collar but got no more than ten feet away from the building when I saw a dark panel van with the lights off.
It hadn’t been in the parking lot before.
Somebody was inside, watching us.
Chapter 15
I ran faster than I’d ever run in my life, through the river of shadows streaming toward the building, over the dark ground and the frozen grass to the fence, and through the gap. The chain links caught my sleeve.
“No,” I screamed and ripped free.
Nikki snarled at the shadows. I grabbed her fur, dragged her through the gap, and ran again, panting. We scrambled up the embankment where Ben had died. I choked back my grief, hurried past the little cross, leaped into the Jeep with Nikki, and slammed the locks.
The headlights on the van flashed on as it moved toward us.
“Hold on, Nikki,” I said, wheeled around, and floored the Jeep down the narrow road, which was as black as the bottom of hell.
Forty miles an hour, fifty, through a curve with my boot on the gas, trees flying by us. I prayed that I wouldn’t hit a deer. One mile, two miles, with the van still after us. We finally reached the main road, ran the light to Cashtown, and then I floored the Jeep again. We were flying, bombing down the Chambersburg Pike.
The van came after me. I took a side road into a dead end, saw the van, tore across the grass, and raced down the Chambersburg Pike again.
The van was gaining on us. The headlights filled my rear view mirror and flashed three times. If it was John Savenue, he was crazy if he thought I was going to pull over.
I pushed the Jeep to eighty miles an hour. We passed a dirt road to a dilapidated barn, a pullover with a rusted trailer, more roads over railroad tracks and past black cornfields to nowhere. I had to find civilization, a gas station or a store with lights and people, but there seemed to be nothing around except endless road.
And then I saw it. An auto parts store with floodlights. I jerked the Jeep over the gravel side road, screeched into the lot, and was about to run to the doors when my headlights caught the CLOSED sign on the glass doors.
The van pulled over. I grabbed my cell phone to call 911 when the driver got out.
Mike. Of all people. Mike, the saintly do-gooder. My blood began to boil. It would have boiled out of my nose, eyes, and ears if it could have. Mike. Of all the creepy things in the world for him to be doing, he must have stalked me out there and watched me the whole time while I cried over Ben, struggled down the embankment, and tried to find a gas line.
Mike. I hated the very sight of his stubby nose, his dumb mouth, his stupid, hopeful eyebrows, and dumb, hovering concern.
I got out of the Jeep and glared at him. He got out, too, and to top it all off, he ran his hand over his buzz cut, as if I cared what he looked like. The store lights cast sharp shadows that gave him a deranged look.
“How dare you.” I clenched my hands into fists.
He circled me. “Listen, I tried to call you, but your cell’s off—”
I circled back. “No, you listen, you sick freak. You were stalking me.”
“No, I wasn’t, I was just worried about you—”
“Worried for what, creep?”
“Because you were out there in the middle of the night. I didn’t know what you were doing—”
“I went out there to see where Ben died,” I screamed at him. “And it’s none of your fucking business what I was doing.”
“I wasn’t stalking you. I really wasn’t—”
“Bullshit.”
“No, come on, I wasn’t.” He was almost pleading now.
“You’re disgusting.”
“I was taking the shoes out there.”
“What shoes?” I stopped cold.
“To the Grasslands. They hired me to work for them over the holidays.”
I felt the bottom collapse out of my world. “What’re you talking about?”
“They hired me to the end of the year. I’m working over Thanksgiving and Christmas break. The shoe drive I was telling you about. I’m picking them up around the county from these drop boxes and taking them out there.”
“That guy John Savenue hired you?” I’d seen the drop boxes at the college, but I hadn’t paid any attention to them.
Mike nodded and stared at me with that same dumb look of hopeful concern. My anger was still racing through my veins like flaming gasoline, but I didn’t hate him anymore. He seemed naïve beyond anything I could comprehend. I saw the Grasslands logo on the van and felt my heart sink.
“You don’t want to work for that guy,” I told him. “He’s evil.”
“He’s not evil.”
“Yes, he is, and that place is evil, too. There’s something really wrong out there. There’s a bunch of people inside that horrible building.”
“There’s nobody in there, Amy.”
“Bullshit! I saw them!”
“There’s nobody in there.” He was waving his hands now. “Come on, it’s a job. It pays good money and it helps the poor. It’s a charity drive. There’s nothing wrong out there and there’s nothing wrong with John. And listen, I wasn’t stalking you, I swear to God I wasn’t. I just saw your Jeep and I was worried about you.”
John. So they were on a first name basis. A truck rushed past us and then the eerie quiet returned. I could almost hear the whispering again.
“He said you have something that belongs to him,” Mike said.
The blood roared in my head.
“If you give it to me, I’ll give it back to him,” he added.
“I didn’t give him your number.”
“Somebody’s been calling the house.”
Mike waved his hands again. “They probably found the dog collar. You said it had an ID tag. They’re calling to give it back to you.”
He stunned me. That was it. Luna’s collar had an ID tag with her owner’s name and number. She’d lost her collar and that guy had to find it while he was combing over the battlefield for dead things.
“John thinks you found something that belongs to him,” Mike went on. “You should talk to him about it.” The shadows from the empty auto parts store fell over his shoulders.
We locked eyes for a full minute before I left him on the Chambersburg Pike. He receded in the rearview mirror, still standing in the shadows by the van, until the road curved and he disappeared out of sight.
Chapter 16
I covered the dark miles to Fairfield with Mike on my mind, seeing him on the edge of the abyss that was opening all around us. Woods and shadowy farmland raced by in the night. I was glad my German shepherd was with me. When I pulled into Fairfield and crept up the professor’s driveway, I knew what I would find when I opened the front door. Another hang up from Unknown Caller.
He had the phone number, but he didn’t have the address. How much time did I have before he figured it out? Shaken, I locked up the house and went to the closet where I’d hidden the device.
* * *
The boat creaked. Antoine and the prisoner were still rowing in the fog. I drifted through the air behind the prisoner and wondered if he’d had anything to eat or drink since he found the coconut.
Antoine dipped the oars in the black water. “I shipwrecked on that fucking island. I left El Hombre Gordo, The Fat Man, that’s my restaurant in New York, and flew to Tahiti. My first vacation in years. I booked a charter out of Papeete looking to hook myself a marlin, but on the second day a storm hit and wiped out the crew. Two of us lived through it and we drifted south for days until our sorry asses washed up here.”
So they were in the Pacific. My gut instincts had been right all along.
“We were both burning up with fever. The locals sold us to a six-fingered man and I woke up by myself in a prison with a box on my back. They beat me and sliced off my ear, but I got this guard who spoke some Spanish, so I laid on the bullshit and said I’d bring him to New York and set him up with a car and an apartment, and I kept talking and he bit and I ran like hell. I was waiting for night when I saw something I’d never seen before. A man was standing on the dock and his whole fucking body disappeared except his clothes lying on the ground and then I knew I’d washed up on the island of the damned.”
The prisoner took the oars from Antoine and began to row.
“I stole this ugly baby.” Antoine patted the boat as if it were a dumpy woman he was fond of while the sea sloshed against the hull. He waved at the darkness. “They’re coming through a portal, somewhere out there on the next island. I heard about it in prison. I’m cooking up a sweet surprise, too. I’m going to find the portal and burn it up and send them all to hell. You wait and see.”
* * *
Without warning, a force ripped me back to the couch in Professor Wu’s living room. Nausea whirled through my body. When it subsided, I struggled upstairs for the medicine I’d bought for my hands and was horrified at how purple my wrists looked under the bathroom light. The nausea hit again. I dropped the useless creams and salves all over the floor and struggled to pick them up.
A portal. A wormhole on some obscure patch of sand in the Pacific.
How in the hell could a portal be real? My brain couldn’t wrap itself around the idea. And if it was real, why wouldn’t satellites pick it up? Obsessed with the word, I looked it up on my phone. A door, a gateway, an entrance, but from where? A portal from the stars or from the depths of hell?
I voted for hell, rubbed antibiotic cream on my skin, and went back to the couch. In five minutes I began to dream about the shadows pouring into the vents at the Grasslands until the shadows changed to two men in a tiny boat tossed on an endless black sea.
Heavy panting broke into my dreams. Disoriented, I jolted upright and found Luna near the front door, breathing like a train.
“What’s the matter, girl?” I stroked her head.
She was burning up. Worried to death, I poured some water in a bowl and tried to make her drink, but she wouldn’t touch it. Nikki stared at us. Whatever was wrong with Luna, I hoped it wasn’t contagious.
Morning finally came. The conversation between the two men in the boat about the portal seemed more and more fantastic, but Luna’s nose and face were still hot and alarmingly real. When the clock said eight-thirty, I called the animal hospital on the Emmitsburg Road and begged my way into an emergency appointment. Luna could hardly stand up, but I somehow hauled her into the Prius.
The medicine didn’t seem to be helping my hideous hands. I pulled on gloves to hide my skin, took a shortcut across the battlefield, and reached Steinwehr Avenue, which would turn into the Emmitsburg Road once it left town.
Luna’s rapid panting and glassy eyes were beginning to scare me.
“We’re almost there,” I told her. “Ten minutes.”
Out of nowhere, we ran into backed up traffic. Two cop cars flashed their lights. Wonderful, an accident. Before I got caught in the line, I swung behind a row of restaurants and gunned the car toward Long Lane. A lot of other drivers had the same idea and I ended up trapped behind them at the stop sign.
Everything was screwed up. I should have taken another way. Luna’s panting was slowing down. Maybe she was dying. I rolled the windows down so she would have fresh air.
“Luna, you hang in there,” I told her. “Don’t you quit on me.”
When the car in front of us turned, I reached the place where I’d seen John Savenue for the first time. There was the spot where we’d stopped to talk. The wild, grassy battlefield began beyond the fence and rolled to the horizon, broken up by scrub trees along the creek where he’d dropped the device.
I glanced up at the street signs. Long Lane and Johns Avenue.
Johns Avenue.
John Savenue.
It couldn’t be. Floored, I pulled over to the curb, got out, and stared at the sign. Cold sunlight glinted on the letters. The bumper to bumper traffic crawled by while I stood there in shock but I couldn’t take in anything except the sign. That’s what the bastard did all right. He took his name from a street sign while we were talking to each other.
What was his real name? Maybe I would never know.
Shaking my head, I tore myself away and ran to the car. I had to get Luna to the vet. “Five minutes,” I told her and froze.
The back seat was empty.
“Luna?” I said, horrified. How had she gotten out? She couldn’t have jumped out the window. She didn’t have enough strength and the window wasn’t down all the way.
Or had she crawled on the floor? I peered over the headrest. She wasn’t there. Had somebody stolen her? Who would steal a dying dog? Somebody could have dragged her out as a cruel prank, but no cars had pulled over while I was looking at the street sign.
I hurried around the Prius, even looked underneath it, and sprinted down the block. She wasn’t in the grass along the sidewalk. She wasn’t under the trees that bordered the yards. It wasn’t as if she was a small dog that could burrow under something or hide in the weeds. I should have been able to spot her right away.
“Luna?” I called, frightened.
A chill wind blew across the fields. Rain spattered my face. A storm was coming. The black clouds cast long shadows that raced over the battlefield. She couldn’t have gotten that far. She was too sick. I ran to the fence and searched under the rails, but didn’t see any sign of her.
Frantic, I pulled my jacket hood over my head, hurried to the car, and peered at the back seat again, even though it was no
nsensical, hoping she might have reappeared, hoping I’d missed something. No dog. I looked under the car one more time.
She had to be somewhere. I sprinted past the yards again and ran up the street as far as the Emmitsburg Road.
“Luna,” I shouted.
She was too sick to get out of the car by herself. It didn’t make sense. Somebody must have stolen her. I just couldn’t understand why I hadn’t seen them do it.
Chapter 17
On top of everything else, I’d lost a helpless dog her owners had entrusted to my care. After an hour I started the car, feeling terrible about leaving, but I’d combed the area over and over. I told myself I’d come back with posters and nail them on all the telephone poles.
When I was a few miles down the Fairfield Road, my cell phone rang.
“It’s me, Karin.” She sounded strange, not her usual sunny self.
“Yeah, what’s up?” I swerved around a bend in the road.
“Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“Why do you say that?” What a liar I’d become. In the daylight my swollen hands looked like the hands of a monster on the steering wheel.
“Because this guy came by the house and he said Mike’s working for him so I let him in.” Fear spilled over in her voice. “What I’m getting at is he thought I was you, okay, and he really scared me.”
My skin crawled. “You let him in the house?”
“He was awful, the way he was looking at me. I mean he was really awful. He said you have something that belongs to him.”
“I don’t know what he’s talking about.”