by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)
“Who else is here?” said the woman.
“Well,” said Channing, gesturing at the rest of the crowd. One of the other figures, a man, turned toward him and said, “Do you know why I’m here?”
“There’s only me,” said the woman, facing Channing. Her face was drawn and gray, the lines of her jowls heavy striations that pulled her mouth down into a shape like a smile turned in on itself.
“No,” said Channing, and then the man called over to him.
“Who are you talking to? Can you please be quiet? I can’t hear properly with you talking.”
Channing didn’t say anything. Others in the crowd had started to turn toward him, their faces catching shadows as they fell from the sun, the noise of their movement a whisper of cloth flapping and feet shuffling around. They were old, mostly, except for the ones he had spotted earlier—younger, like him, their hair less gray, their skin less lined.
“Who’s there?” asked someone.
“Can you help me?” said another.
“What’s happening?” asked a third, and Channing backed away. The crowd wasn’t moving, not exactly, but they were leaning and twisting, as though trying to spot him through gloom rather than see him in sun. The woman nearest him said, as though no one else had spoken, “It’s so confusing. I don’t know where I am.”
“I’m sorry,” said Channing, backing farther away.
“Please,” said the woman, holding a hand out, her sleeve flapping back from a wrist whose skin was wrinkled and marked with liver spots. She sounded desperate, on the verge of tears.
Behind the woman one of the younger men stepped forward, pushing past her without looking at her. “Can you tell me why things have changed? Why they aren’t the way they used to be?”
Channing took another step back and then caught, on the edge of his hearing, a fragment of music coming from a place that seemed oddly distant. It was discordant, notes laid over notes, but the effect on the crowd was immediate. They turned, ignoring him, and faced back to the stage. There was still nothing to see on the wooden platform, but now one or two of the crowd started to smile, and after a moment one or two of them began to shuffle, shifting from side to side, feet and hands tapping inaudible beats against the air.
Channing turned and walked away, and the boy holding the blue balloon standing by the slide watched him go.
That night, Channing looked in the local newsletter (The Gentholme Gazette, a single-sheet photocopied list of events and developers’ news distributed to every occupied house in the town) for information about what he might have seen in the park but found nothing. There was very little happening, if he was honest; the Gazette mostly consisted of lists of roads completed, roads half done, buildings growing from the earth week by week, of sales figures and reassurances that Gentholme’s future was bright and secure. There was a website address at the bottom of the newsletter and, bored, Channing visited it, looking at the full list of buildings completed and sold. There were the promised doctors’ offices and the hospital, pharmacists, several different denominations of church, schools, a library, ranks of shops, offices, town hall, and a dentist, most marked as “Development agreed; opening soon.” He was looking for any kind of nursing home, or community facility, that might explain the presence of the old man at the park’s wall or the group by the bandstand, people who seemed confused and lost, but there was nothing.
“Perhaps they were brought in on a day trip or something,” said Miranda later, as they lay spooned in bed. “You know, like a day out for them? Besides, why does it matter? They weren’t doing anyone any harm, were they?”
“No, it was just—” He paused, feeling for the right word. “It was just strange.”
“People are strange,” she said, and began to hum a song Channing couldn’t immediately place. “It’s the Doors,” Miranda said after a moment, knowing without him telling that he’d be struggling to recognize the tune. “ ‘People Are Strange,’ and they are, aren’t they? I mean, look at you and me. We up stakes and move to a brand-new town, before it’s even built, I relocate my job to a new office, and why? Because we wanted a change, because we needed a fresh beginning, something new. Most people would just decorate their living room or book a vacation.”
“You know why we moved here,” he said, and then regretted it as Miranda stiffened against him. He waited, holding her, letting her work it through inside herself, Miranda’s way, not interrupting her, not disturbing her.
“I do,” she said, finally relaxing, softening back into him. He kissed the back of her neck, thinking, People are strange.
“I’m sorry, I know how much you wanted it. How much we wanted it,” he said, the unspoken thing hovering around them.
“I know,” she said, “and it’s okay. Really. I know you’re sorry, I know it’s what was meant to be, I know why we came here, and I know we’re happy. Mostly, though, I know you think too much about things that don’t need that much thought. I know you, my love. Now let’s go to sleep.”
Channing, breathing in her smell, mumbled his agreement into her neck and drew an arm across her, trapping her warmth to him. In the bedroom darkness she was right, it didn’t seem that important, and he let the thoughts of people with their hands stretched out to him tumble from his head and he slept and he did not dream.
—
Channing took to going to the park every day after that. He would eat his lunch sitting on the hill, using the quiet and the fresh air to give him space to think. He felt his mind unravel into the space about him, letting the looseness give him solutions to problems and ideas for developing his business. Sometimes the crowd returned to the bandstand, sometimes they stayed away, but he did not try to speak to them again. Usually, when they came, they stayed for an hour, but no concert ever took place and no one ever climbed onto the bandstand itself. Occasionally, he thought he heard snatches of the music again, as distant and discordant as that first time, but usually the crowd and the day around them were silent.
Each day, Channing began walking to and from the park via different routes, watching Gentholme uncurl and take its first breaths around him. One day he found a street of houses half done, façades of brickwork waiting for their smooth outer skins of plaster and paint. At the end of the street, an excavator sat motionless, front shovel and backhoe throwing shadows out, resting and weary. Another day he discovered a horseshoe street of newly minted shops, each blank and empty. Ducking under the fluttering yellow construction tape, he peered in through each glass shop front, seeing nothing but counters and bare floors. He found a set of plots, churned earth bisected this way and that with ropes anchored through metal poles, setting out the bones of the houses to come. At the development’s far edge, two workmen in gleaming fluorescent coats were marking more shapes, driving a stake into the ground and threading a rope through its twisting upper loops before stretching it to the next point. Channing watched, fascinated, for several minutes as the layout took shape in front of him.
The following day, he saw the bicycle and its rider.
The man was standing in the doorway of a building that backed onto the far side of the park, a sign proudly proclaiming that it would become the Gentholme Civic Center. Its brickwork was old, reclaimed from some Victorian town hall, the space before it made from equally old flagstones, creating a public space lined with benches and gaps into which trees would presumably be planted. There were no doors in the entrance yet; it was simply a stone mouth set into the wall in which a man in cycling gear stood and watched Channing as he walked past. His bicycle was lying on its side by the curb, one wheel spinning slowly. Channing raised a hand to the man, who didn’t respond but instead stepped farther back into the doorway and let himself be swallowed by the building’s interior.
Had the man been crying?
Channing crossed the space in front of the building to the doorway and peered inside. Unfolding before him was a long corridor, its walls partly tiled with a delicate, swirling marble pattern. No, he r
ealized, not a marble pattern: these were marble tiles. There was a stack of them inside the door, and they were old, Channing realized; their backs held the ghosts of old plaster, ridges and whirls of thick gray adhesive visible at the edges of the squares. Looking around, Channing saw a sign reading “A Gentholme Community Trust Project.”
“Hello,” Channing called, “are you okay?”
No response.
“Hello?”
The sound of footsteps, soft and gritty, receding, and another sound, a faint tinkle like water rolling over pebbles. A bell?
A bicycle bell?
“Are you okay?” he called, but received no response. Channing waited a moment and called again. There were no workmen about that he could see, no supervisor he could talk to, and he didn’t want to enter the building without someone knowing; it was a building site after all, and he didn’t know what work, if any, was happening inside. He called again, a last time, and decided that if the man wouldn’t respond there was nothing he could do. He glanced at his watch: nearly lunch. Time to go, his gentle slope awaited him—and then there was a noise like the tearing of metal and a shriek of grinding and shattering.
He whirled about, looking back across the plaza toward the road, convinced someone had crashed into the bike, but it was still lying on the edge of the curb, undisturbed. Its wheel had stopped spinning, and in the sunlight it appeared to be leached of color, its frame and handlebars and tires reduced to a pale wash that was only slightly darker than white. Channing turned back to face into the building, wondering if something had collapsed within, half expecting to see a cloud of dust billowing down the corridor toward him, but the space was still and quiet. There was still no one else to be seen, but now there was another sound, a long, wretched wheezing.
Channing stepped into the civic center.
Beyond the pile of reclaimed tiles there was a space marked out on the floor that was clearly for a reception desk. Brackets were fixed into the concrete and white marks joined them with cryptic symbols scrawled on either side of the lines. A door beyond this was closed. The corridor ran back from the desk space, down the side of the hidden office, and it was this way Channing went; the exits to either side of the lobby were closed, neither showed signs of having been opened in the last few minutes, and the floor around them was unmarked. As he stepped from the untiled section to the tiled section, he heard another set of soft, dragging footsteps and a second bout of the ragged wheezing.
“Hello!” he shouted, his voice echoing, bouncing back at him, a hundred fractured versions of himself populating the air about him.
At the end of the short corridor, a pair of double doors stood closed. Their top halves were glass, the panes frosted and reinforced with thin black wires, the light coming through them fragmented and mazy. Channing was reaching out to push them open when something dark passed across the glass on the other side of the doors, the shape hunched and indistinct. He jerked back and then told himself he was being stupid; it was a workman or the cyclist himself, and he had only appeared distorted, his head tilted to one side and irregularly shaped, by the glass.
He pushed open the doors. There was grit in the hinges and they resisted his push for a few moments before yielding, squealing as they opened. The corridor he entered ran at right angles to the one he’d left, presumably following the rear of the center, curving slightly as it fell away from him. The wall facing Channing was filled with windows to the outside, large and without blinds or coverings, and the corridor was full of light. Motes of dust curled lazily in the air, slow, swimming in the light. The near-side walls along the corridor were broken by evenly spaced doorways, none of which currently had doors. Electrical cables sprouted from rough holes, and below each one, lying on the floor, was a lamp and a boxed long-life bulb.
What there wasn’t, however, was a person, or anything to explain the shape that had passed the door.
Perhaps, thought Channing, the sound came from something in the building falling over, made worse, magnified by the space’s emptiness? And the shape could have been a secondary shadow, he supposed, someone passing beyond the outer window, or even a bird, the thrown shade crossing not just that window but the panes in the doors as well? Channing went to the first open doorway and looked inside at an empty office. It was the same through the doorway after that, and the third and the fourth, and at that point he stopped looking.
Through the windows Channing watched as excavators scooped earth into piles and then rumbled over them to compress the soil down, their caterpillar treads leaving tattoo trails in the dark mud. The machines, made silent by distance and the intervening glass, were the only moving thing in Channing’s vision, and he watched them for a few minutes, enjoying the way they balleted around one another, carefully shaping the earth below them into something new.
Perhaps the noise came from outside, he thought, from the excavators. Whatever, there’s nothing here, and I’m probably trespassing. Channing went back along the corridor, taking a last look at the machines and their slow crawl of work, and then went back through the doors and found the cyclist ahead of him.
The man was standing just inside the civic center’s entrance, half caught in the sun and half in shadow, and he was turning slowly around. He gazed at the floor as he turned, scuffing one foot across the tiles with a rubbery, wheezy sound.
“Hello,” said Channing. “It’s a nice building, isn’t it? They’re doing a good job, aren’t they?”
“It’s not fucking right,” the cyclist said.
“Pardon? What’s not right? The building?” Maybe he doesn’t like the way they’ve designed it or something, thought Channing, walking toward the man.
“I said, it’s not right. It’s wrong.”
Not again, thought Channing, slowing. What is it with this damn town? “What’s wrong?”
“For god’s sake, this place is wrong. It’s here but not here. Not there. Where’s Eleanor?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand; who’s Eleanor?” said Channing, thinking about how often he’d said something similar these last few days. “Can I help you?”
“No,” the cyclist said and stepped back, farther into the shadow. “Stay the fuck away from me. I need to find Eleanor. I’m not where I was but I’m here where I should be and I’m confused and it’s not right, it’s not fucking right at all.”
The man was almost lost in the shadow now, the gloom creeping around the edges of him and making him seem only half there, and it was colder now, the sun not properly warming the air in the darkening lobby.
“I’m not where I was but I’m here,” the man said and held one arm out in front of him, his hand reemerging into the sunlight, pointing at Channing, accusatory and shaking. The man’s head suddenly snapped to one side, twisting as it did so, and he groaned, loud and breathy. His fingers spread wide, clutching at Channing, and then the darkness swelled forward or he collapsed back into it and he simply fell away to nothing. His hand lingered a moment longer, caught by the sun, and then it too disappeared and Channing was backing away on paper legs, stomach roiling, voice untethered and releasing a long drool of sound, and then he turned and he ran and ran and ran.
—
“I’m not sure I understand you,” said the man in the sales office. “What is it you’ve seen again?”
Put like that, Channing thought, I don’t know. What have I seen?
Channing was in the private part of the sales office, having been passed from the receptionist to the younger salesman to the elder, senior one. Channing remembered him from the meetings and pitches he and Miranda had attended, smooth and gray and slick yet somehow insubstantial, as though he were all front but little depth. Maybe that was all salesmen; Channing didn’t know.
“You were in the park and you saw people? And in the unfinished civic center and saw a man on his bike?”
“No,” said Channing, “his bike was outside.”
“Ah. That’s good,” said the man, whose name Channing suddenly
remembered was O’Keefe. “I’d hate someone to be cycling inside the building. Actually, I’m not keen on anyone being in there, bike or no, as it’s not finished and it’s dangerous. It’s still technically a building site.”
O’Keefe leaned back in his chair.
“Mr….Channing, yes? You moved in several weeks ago, one of our very first residents, if I remember right?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve worked on several new developments like this, Mr. Channing. Oh, this is easily the biggest, but I’ve built entire subdivisions in the past. At this stage, they’re odd. They’re empty, and they seem bigger than busy places because you aren’t used to seeing streets without people or cars or shops without customers. Places like this, they’re somehow louder and quieter at the same time. The sound echoes, Mr. Channing. They spook you, places like this. You’ve spooked yourself, Mr. Channing, but as more people move in it’ll get better and you’ll feel better about your new home.”
“I love my new home,” said Channing angrily, “but I—”
“Mr. Channing, I can’t have you going around saying that strange things are happening here,” said O’Keefe, his voice hardening. “Many of our properties are still unsold or the sales aren’t yet completed, and buyers, both private and commercial, are skittish things. If they hear you talk about vanishing cyclists and old people in the park, they’ll run. They’ll run, Mr. Channing, and Gentholme will suffer, and I cannot have that. I cannot, Mr. Channing, do you understand?”
“Yes,” said Channing. “I wasn’t trying to damage things, just to understand.”
“Of course,” said O’Keefe, placatory now. “Perhaps you need to get involved, see more people, see if that helps? The community trust is always looking for able bodies and willing volunteers. Maybe you should go and see them?”
“Yes,” said Channing. “Yes, I think I will.”
Channing walked to the community trust office along streets that were, finally, beginning to show signs of life. Delivery trucks rumbled toward the shops, houses were opening their eyes, family cars were moving along the streets; Gentholme looked more like a city. O’Keefe was right, Channing realized: without residents this place had looked huge and, if not sinister, then certainly off-kilter. Was that what had happened? Had being here spooked him, touching some susceptible part of him that he hadn’t known was there before, making him interpret things the wrong way?