Behind him, the office door slammed shut. He had not closed it after walking in, and he was near enough that it hit the pinky edge of his left hand, the force of the contact making him cry out.
The statue laughed.
It wobbled again.
Jesse fumbled behind him for the doorknob, unwilling to take his eyes off the statue for even a second. The doorknob would not turn, and the statue lurched forward. There was no movement in its legs or stubby arms, no change in the cast expression on its disturbingly peculiar face. The entire object pushed itself across the wooden floor toward him, almost as though there were a person encased inside who was attempting to maneuver despite the limitations of cement imprisonment.
He looked around for some sort of weapon.
Nothing.
He had a toolbox behind the counter, and there was a hammer in it that he could use to smash the shit out of this damn thing, but the statue was between here and there, and though its movements were slow and jerky, he was afraid to go around it.
Logically, there was not much the statue could do to him even if it did reach him. It stood slightly higher than his waist, so he was much bigger than it was, and it could not move its arms. He could knock it down and it would not be able to get up.
But there was nothing logical here, and that reasoning did not apply.
Na-ta-whay.
He tried the door again. Still locked, still closed. The lights went off.
In the darkness, he heard the squeak of movement and the subtle lilt of laughter.
He jumped out the window.
Or rather he tried to. In his mind, during the second in which he’d come up with the idea and acted upon it, he’d seen himself leaping heroically, jumping out amid the broken glass, rolling on the dirt outside, running away to safety. But it was a double window, divided into two by a metal frame that slid open and shut on the right side. Even in his skinniest days, he’d been larger than the space it afforded him, and he jumped headfirst, hands out, feeling the pain in his fisted knuckles as they broke through the glass and were sliced, followed a split second later by even more excruciating pain as the glass cut into his face.
And then he stopped, his midsection denting the metal of the sliding right window but not breaking it. He was halted in midleap by the too-small frame digging into his gut and forcing the air out of him. The remaining shards of glass cut into his sides, slicing open skin and muscle, as his head and upper torso flopped over and smacked the outside office wall beneath the window.
From the stomach down, he was still inside the office. And he felt the statue shove itself between his spread legs.
The wind had been knocked out of him and he could not scream, but the force of the cement smashing into his groin tripled both the pain and the need to express his agony verbally, and he gasped like a fish, feeling like he was suffocating as the contradictory impulses that made him need to both scream and breathe collided somewhere in his airless lungs and throat.
His survival instinct was strong, however, and though he was still gulping air and exhaling it too quickly, his chest feeling as though it was about to burst, he marshaled enough of his senses to move his arms and legs. He kicked out at the statue at the same time he tried to position his hands against the bottom of the windowsill.
At least the statue was limited in its movements and could only lurch forward or backward. At least it was not truly sentient.
He tried to wiggle out, using his hands as leverage against the outside wall of the office.
And then he felt cement hands grabbing his feet and pulling him back inside. He kicked, struggled, tried to grab hold of the windowsill, but it was no use.
His death was slow.
Very slow.
And bloody.
4
It was the first concert she’d attended in nearly a month, and Deanna picked a seat that was near the front so she could see the performers, but next to one of the wooden posts so she wouldn’t have to share a table with anyone. Paul was going to be working the soundboard—the kid he’d hired part-time had called in sick—and she didn’t want to sit with anyone else.
The concert tonight was by a singer from Benson, an older woman heavily into Patsy Cline. She’d never really been a big Patsy Cline fan, and she doubted that she would like this woman all that much, but Paul had been so loving, caring, and attentive the past few days that she wanted to reward him, and when he’d asked her to come and help fill out what was sure to be a less-than-sellout crowd, she had happily obliged.
Besides, she didn’t want to break this mood, and she figured the best way to keep it rolling was to spend as much time as possible with him.
They’d had a little makeout session in his office before the singer and her band showed up. Paul had wanted to do it on the floor, but she’d drawn the line at that. The floor was filthy, and despite their desire, they weren’t the hormone-enraged adolescents they had been in high school. They could wait until later to consummate their evening. It had been a hot and heavy petting zoo in the office, however, and they’d both come out feeling high. Even though they were adults, it still got the juices flowing to be doing something slightly forbidden, and she was already planning what would happen when they got home.
Around her, the seats began filling. Either the singer or Patsy had a bigger fan vase in McGuane than Paul had thought, and pretty soon nearly all of the chairs and tables were taken. Only two waitresses were working tonight, and they were earning their pay, taking and filling orders that would have kept four girls running.
Deanna sipped her coffee. She was glad things were back on an even keel. It had been a rough couple of weeks. She didn’t know what was wrong, didn’t know what had happened between them, but there’d been a chill, a kind of emotional estrangement, and they’d fought a lot, for no reason, though it never seemed to be the fault of either of them.
Julia had seemed somewhat distant lately, too, and it occurred to her that the problem lay with herself, not her husband or her friends. She was the nucleus around which this was occurring, and it was only logical to assume that she was somehow the cause.
But she knew that was not the case. She seldom listened to gossip or rumor, and almost never believed it, but she was not deaf, and she knew that there were a lot of problems in McGuane right now. Interpersonal problems as well as . . . other things.
And she was not the cause of that.
She didn’t know what was.
But it made her uneasy.
The lights dimmed, and Deanna looked over her shoulder, saw Paul at the soundboard. She gave a little wave, and he smiled and waved back.
The stage lights clicked on, and to the applause of the audience a slightly overweight woman with a lined but pretty face led a group of guys along the open aisle next to the wall and onto the stage.
“Howdy!” the woman announced. “I’m Linette Daniels, and this here’s my band, the Crazies!”
There was a guitarist, a bass player, a drummer, a fiddler, and a pedal-steel player, and they immediately ripped into a typically turbocharged version of “Orange Blossom Special.” Linette did a little buck dance, to the delight of the crowd, and then the musicians downshifted into “She’s Got You” and she started singing.
The woman did a fair Patsy Cline impression, Deanna thought, but it was precisely because of that that her interest began to wander. The monotonous whining and yelping was as off-putting coming from this woman as it had been from Patsy herself, and Deanna found herself reverting to crowd-gazing. There were quite a few people here that she knew, but an equal number that she didn’t. She watched a grossly overweight man awkwardly attempt to dance with a lithe little teenager who looked like his daughter but was obviously his wife or girlfriend. A small section of the café had been cleared and set aside for dancing, but they were the only two on the floor. Her attention wandered to a skinny cowboy sitting alone next to the stage who had what was without a doubt the longest neck she’d ever seen on a human
being. He made Audrey Hepburn look like Stubby Kaye, and his head was rocking back and forth in time to the music, flopping around on that huge neck like a plum on the end of a bendable straw.
It was a peculiar-looking crowd, and she was having fun just watching the offstage show when her gaze alighted on something that made her heart skip a beat.
A shadow.
It was short, squat, almost simian, and she watched it scuttle along the edge of the crowd toward the side of the stage. It was not flat, like an ordinary shadow, but seemed to be three-dimensional, as though it was a being in its own right, which was appropriate, because there seemed to be no original source to which it corresponded.
The shadow started to climb up the metal rigging to the right of the stage, and she saw that it was a self-contained entity. There were no ties to anything else. Its form ended at its feet.
The figure climbed hand over hand until it was at the top of the rigging near the ceiling, but no one else seemed to be looking at it. Even those audience members who weren’t intently watching the singer and her band had not noticed the shadow. Deanna looked quickly around, checked out the waitresses. They were busy running back and forth between the tables and the counter, and they had not spotted it either.
Couldn’t anyone else see it?
She scooted her chair to the left, saw the small figure crawl along the rigging pipes until it was directly above the stage. There was something unnatural about it, a deformity visible even in its silhouetted shape that marked it as inhuman. That made no logical sense, but she knew it to be true, and though she wanted to look away, she did not.
The shadow began fiddling with the center spotlight.
Deanna stood, pointing and screaming, as she realized what it was trying to do, but the concert was too loud, and though a few of the people around her saw her pointing and looked in the direction of her finger, no one seemed to hear her.
The light fell.
It crashed on Linette, the huge, blocky casing landing corner-down on the singer’s bleached-blond head, crushing her skull and shearing off the entire right side of her face. Blood was everywhere—spurting, spraying, misting—and the song ended unnervingly, not with a scream but with a quiet “uh” that cut off Linette’s voice as the musicians continued obliviously for a few more bars.
The shadow was jumping up and down on the rigging in a furious assault, and seconds later the entire thing collapsed, lights and pipes, wires and metal bars falling forward onto the audience.
People were screaming, scrambling to get away. Screeching feedback from the speakers drowned out even the screams, and it was as though the entire scene was taking place in some overloud movie. Deanna’s mind focused on and absorbed individual events, recording them with a clarity she had never known before: the musicians, covered with spraying blood, dropping their instruments, stumbling back; a stray light swinging from an attached cord and smashing into the face of the long-necked man, knocking him flat; an intact section of rigging falling onto one of the big tables, crushing several couples beneath it; a stray bar of metal spearing through the foot of an older woman, pinning her to the floor as she tried to run.
Where was the shadow?
At the same time she was backing up, trying not to be knocked down by the surging, panicked crowd, Deanna was scanning the ceiling above the stage for any sign of the dark figure.
There it was.
She saw it swinging through the rafters like an ape, and then she was knocked to the ground by a screaming old man who did not even stop to see if she was all right but continued running over her.
She struggled to her feet, leaned back against a post for protection and scanned the ceiling for the figure. Her eyes found the place where it had been, but it was not there, and her eyes darted back and forth, searching.
She found it.
In the rafters directly above.
It was looking down at her, and for a split second she saw glowing white teeth grinning in its dark shadow face.
And then a speaker came crashing down on her head.
Sixteen
1
Julia walked home from the funeral alone, declining to ride with Gregory in the van. She held her breath as a pickup passed by, trying not to breathe until the agitated dust settled.
Moving to McGuane was the biggest mistake they’d ever made.
If she’d thought it once, she’d thought it a thousand times, but it was truer now than it had ever been. As she walked down the dirt road from the American cemetery, she thought of Deanna’s death, thought of Adam at the police station, and knew that it was time for them to admit defeat, give in, call it quits, and head back home to California. Their noble experiment had been a failure from day one, and it was time to get out while the getting was good.
She would have a hell of a time convincing Gregory of that, but she was set on this course of action and nothing could dissuade her. She’d go without him if she had to, although she didn’t think it would come to that. His mother and the kids would jump at the chance to move back to California, and the pressure of all five of them would hopefully be sufficient to convince him to leave.
Because it was getting dangerous here.
That’s what the alarm bells inside her head were saying, and it was not something that she would dispute. She had always felt danger here, from the first day in that dark house, and though she’d tried to rationalize it, explain it away, deny its existence, it had been the one underlying constant in her experience here. She had never felt at home in McGuane, and she knew now that she never would.
It was time for them to cut their losses and run.
Another vehicle passed by—the preacher’s car, she thought—and she moved aside and held her breath until the dust had started to settle. She looked over her shoulder, saw the backhoe filling in Deanna’s grave behind the iron gates at the end of the road, and was consumed with a profound sadness and sense of loss. Deanna had been her only friend in town, and that, of course, had amplified her feelings, but the truth was, Deanna had been a real friend, a person she’d liked immediately, to whom she’d grown close in an extraordinarily short time. Next to Debbie, in fact, Deanna was probably her best friend in the world.
She’d had a tough time maintaining her composure during the funeral service. She’d cried the entire time, but the crying had constantly threatened to erupt into hysterics, and she’d had to hum some goofy old Monkees song in her mind in order to keep from dwelling too intently on the fact that her friend had died.
Been murdered.
She didn’t know that, she told herself. She didn’t know that for sure.
But she did. She did.
These things happen.
Gregory’s mother had not gone to the funeral, had stayed home with the kids instead. She had wanted to come, had wanted the children to go, but Julia did not want Adam or Teo to attend. She remembered her own mother dragging her to church funerals all during her childhood. It was a Molokan tradition, and her parents’ generation thought nothing of it, considered it normal and appropriate, but she had hated spending so many weekends in graveyards, had had nightmares and resulting fears and worries that she swore even back then she would never inflict on her own kids. She still considered it unhealthy to spend so much time glorifying and thinking about death, and she had refused to budge on her funeral prohibition for the kids.
Her eyes were so swollen they hurt, and the dust was not making things any better. She wondered if she should have ridden home with Gregory after all, but when she thought of his blank, expressionless face at the graveside service, she knew she had made the right decision. If they’d been trapped in the van together all the way home, they would have been fighting by now. She needed this time away from him, needed this time to herself.
Maybe she wouldn’t go home at all for a while. Maybe she’d just wander around, walk, think. Give herself the opportunity to really feel what she needed to feel, to sort out her emotions, to dwell on Deanna’s passing
and mourn her friend. Alone. In private. Where she could indulge her own feelings and not have to worry about the needs and feelings of others.
She deserved at least that much.
Yes, she thought. She would walk around town for a while.
She’d just make sure to stay far away from Russiantown.
She and Gregory had not made love in weeks. No, that was not true. They had not had sex in weeks. They had not made love for months.
That record was not broken tonight. She didn’t really want sex, but she wanted someone to hold and hug, a shoulder she could cry on, and Gregory, the bastard, ignored her completely, sitting up in bed and reading his damn Time, the blankets pushed into a little wall between them.
She’d gotten home just before dusk to find that Gregory’s mother had already made nachinke for dinner. They’d all eaten separately—Gregory in the living room in front of the television, Adam and Teo in the dining room, Sasha in her bedroom. Her mother-in-law had sampled as she’d cooked and wasn’t hungry, but Julia was famished, and she grabbed four of the pastries and ate them over the sink in the kitchen.
After dinner she’d taken a hot bath, and by the time she was finished, the kids were all safely ensconced in their separate bedrooms. She had the feeling that either Gregory or his mother had told them to leave her alone, not to bother her, and while she would have preferred some noise, would rather have heard the sounds of talking and laughter and life in the house, she was too tired to make the effort to set things right.
She did not bring up the idea of moving back to California until she and Gregory were both in bed because she did not want to fight in front of the kids, and she knew this would provoke a confrontation. She also wanted a little lag time, a little breather so she could marshal her emotional forces and build up some strength. It had been a long and draining day.
It was an ultimatum she intended to deliver, but she did not want to phrase it as such, and on her first pass the approach was light. “What do you think about moving?” she said.
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