The Sound

by James Sperl

  CHAPTER 9

  It took forty minutes for the first police officer to arrive. A second one showed up a swift five minutes later.

  The landlord had to let them into Geoff’s apartment.

  Clarissa made the decision to call the authorities when she returned home from her shift to find Geoff’s car still in the parking lot. A quick palm to the hood revealed that the engine was cold.

  Something wasn’t right.

  Was she being ridiculous? Could Geoff just have spent the day away from home, perhaps with the imaginary girlfriend Clarissa had created for him? Sure. It was possible. And had it been any day of the year other than the one where tens of thousands of people had gone missing worldwide, she might have accepted it as likely. But too much had happened in the past forty-eight hours to ignore it.

  Officer Grant Alphers exited the apartment not three minutes after he entered it. Clarissa waited for him outside, having held a vigil at Geoff’s door with her arms crossed protectively over her chest.

  Grant Alphers. It was strange to think of him as a cop now. He was only a sophomore when Clarissa graduated high school. He was a stick of a boy and about as burly as a fence post. But the years had been good to him, and he had grown into a solid, dependable police officer that people respected. She was glad he was the one who responded to her call.

  “Well?” she said upon seeing him.

  Alphers shrugged, as he crossed over the threshold. “There’s no one here. TV was on, and the bed was unmade. There’re some dirty dishes in the sink, and your basic bachelor clutter, but nothing that suggests a struggle or foul play.” Alphers looked over his shoulder into the apartment at the other officer, who continued to poke his nose around Geoff’s things. He turned back to Clarissa. “What was it that prompted you to call us again?”

  Clarissa found the tops of her shoes before looking up and responding.

  “Just silly neighborly thoughts, I guess. Geoff can barely sit still, he’s so busy. He’s almost never here, and he’s almost always gone before me in the morning. So when I saw his car this a.m. and then saw it was still here when I got off work…I don’t know. It seemed odd, uncharacteristic.”

  Alphers put his hands on his hips and let his body slump. Clarissa didn’t think it had anything to do with irritation. If she had to guess, she thought Officer Grant Alphers looked exceedingly tired.

  “Are you good friends?”

  “No…not really.”

  “So how do you know what his schedule is?”

  Clarissa tried not to bristle. Alphers was just doing his job asking questions.

  “Because I’ve lived here for seven years,” she began, “and Geoff’s been here for three of them. People tend to notice the habits of others after that sort of time. And this is not usual.”

  Alphers nodded. “Any chance he went away for a couple of days and didn’t say anything to you?”

  “Certainly that’s possible, but every time he took a weekender before, he’d asked me to water his plants and get his mail.”

  “So you are friends.”

  Clarissa searched the air. “I guess when you put it like that.”

  Alphers bobbed his head and inhaled deeply.

  “Well, there’s not much we can do right now. Like I said, there’s no sign of foul play, and until we can establish a timeline as to his whereabouts, I’m afraid all you can do is just keep watch and hope for the best. He'll probably just turn up, but with the way things have been lately…”

  “Yes.”

  Alphers dug out a memo pad and pen. “You said he worked a lot. Do you know where?”

  Clarissa searched the sky. “He does a lot of freelance web stuff, but I know his full-time job is at a design house called Two-Bit Graphix. And he waiters a few nights a week at, I believe, Nuncio’s.”

  Alphers scribbled into his pad.

  “Place is clean,” said the other officer, as he stepped through the door. Clarissa glimpsed “Juarez” on his name patch.

  No sooner did Alphers turn around to acknowledge him than his and Juarez’s radios crackled. A garbled voice rambled off something unintelligible, but Juarez apparently understood it. Lifting his shoulder mic to his mouth, he gave Alphers a sharp head bob and moved away to respond.

  Alphers dialed down the volume on his radio then shook his head. “Before that blessed noise the other morning our walkies barely made a peep throughout any given day, but now they seem to squawk nonstop.”

  Clarissa winced. “Is it getting bad?”

  “Not just yet. Not here. We’ve had some altercations with a select few panicked individuals, but we’re mostly seeing stuff like this.” He motioned to Geoff’s apartment. “Family or friends concerned about someone they haven’t seen in a day or so. We go, check things out, find nothing out of the ordinary, then give them the same hang-in-there speech I just gave you. Makes you feel sort of helpless not to be able to do more.”

  “Yeah, but from the sounds of things, it doesn’t seem like anyone can do more.”

  “Yeah,” Alphers said, his face drooping, dispirited. “Which makes things feel even grimmer.”

  Clarissa swallowed. “Have you…have you found any of the people that have been reported missing in the past couple of days?”

  Alphers fixed his gaze on Clarissa, the despair in his eyes forcing her back a half step.

  “No,” he said finally. “We haven’t. But worse than that…” He looked over at Juarez, who had finished his call and walked a straight path toward Alphers from his position twenty feet away. Alphers lowered his voice. “We’re hearing reports that no one has been found. Anywhere.”

  Clarissa’s eyes filled with involuntary tears. “What do you mean?”

  Alphers opened his mouth to speak, but Juarez beat him to it.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’ve gotta roll.” His eyes darted to Clarissa before landing back on Alphers. “We’ve got another one.”

  Alphers contemplated the ground for a moment then stood tall. He nodded toward Geoff’s apartment door.

  “Can I ask you to have the landlord secure that door for me?”

  “Uh, sure,” Clarissa said, remembering that the landlord had excused himself from the scene after he opened the door so he could return to the front office.

  “Thank you.”

  Officer Grant Alphers tried to smile, but it was the most forced gesture of sincerity Clarissa had ever seen. She changed her previous analysis of him from tired to flat-out exhausted. But something else was there too. What she saw clouding his bright, down-sloped eyes—dare she say it?—looked like fear.

  As both officers made their way back to their cruisers and climbed behind their respective wheels, Clarissa mulled over Juarez’s last words: We’ve got another one.

  She didn’t need to be privy to the call he had just taken to know what that meant. Suddenly, she felt a kinship with Grant Alphers.

  She was frightened too.

  CHAPTER 10

  The images hovered in the background, hazy and nondescript. They wanted to form, to cohere into something recognizable, but what the dark shapes could become in that black space Clarissa’s unconscious mind couldn’t piece together.

  Stranger still was how she felt as if she had some control in that place, that she was somehow aware of what was happening in her mind. She could perceive movement around her, even feel the cold dampness of the air on her skin, but it was all alien dreaming.

  She knew this because her phone was ringing.

  The cell phone chime stripped the troubling images from her wandering brain and thrust her back into consciousness. Her eyes popped open, and it took several seconds to make the mental adjustment that she was in her dark bedroom and not the lonely blackness of her nightmare.

  Is that what you’re calling it? A nightmare?

  The phone rang again. Clarissa rolled over to look at its glowing face on her nightstand. Her alarm clock, which sat beside it, matched the time on the phone to the minute: 5:02 a.m.r />
  She groaned. Who the heck was calling her so early?

  Palming the phone with a limp hand, she dragged it into bed. Clarissa winced at the number on the screen; no contact name accompanied it. She thought of hanging up, but if it was a wrong number, the person might be inclined to call back. Better to deal with it now and squeeze in another fifty minutes of sleep than be prodded awake every five minutes by persistent miscalls.

  She tapped the line open.

  “Hello?” she said groggily.

  “Clarissa? That you?”

  Her eyes widened at the sound of the voice. It was familiar.

  “Yes, this is Clarissa. Who’s this?”

  “It’s Terrance.”

  Clarissa sat up and checked the clock again. Still 5:02.

  “Terrance? What…why are you calling? Is everything all right?”

  “I’m sorry to wake you,” he said, his voice an uneasy timbre. “I got your number off Maxwell’s desk.”

  “Okay.” She ground a fist into her eye and sat up even further. “What...I mean, why? What’s going on? Why isn’t Maxwell calling me?”

  “That’s the thing,” Terrance said. “Max never came in this morning, and he’s not answering his phone.”

  * * *

  Maxwell had never not opened the restaurant.

  This is all Clarissa could think as she sped to work. Aunt Mae’s was as important to him as his grandchildren; some might argue it was even more important. The restaurant was what kept him going. It gave him purpose and quite a fair amount of joy. He loved what he did, and he looked forward to each new day, which for him began at precisely 4:30 a.m.

  The early hour—which he fancied because the restaurant was empty at that time—was a habit he had formed over the years to help him ease into the workday, before employee issues, customer complaints, temperamental appliances, and ill-timed deliveries bombarded him at every turn. Terrance always followed closely behind at 5:00 a.m. to prep for the breakfast rush, and the two often shared a cup of coffee while they Monday-morning-quarterbacked the previous night’s sports upset. Though Terrance had a key to the place, he rarely, if ever, used it.

  Until today.

  Clarissa met Aunt Mae’s cook at the restaurant just before six. Valentina, Mary, and a teenage busboy named Bale joined them at six-thirty to start first shift. Each reacted just as Clarissa had when they heard the disturbing news—with soft frowns that deepened to creased scowls of concern.

  The group made the unanimous decision to keep the restaurant closed for the time being. Mary had even lied to a smattering of customers, who tried and failed to pull open the locked entrance door, telling them that Aunt Mae’s was currently experiencing electrical issues with their kitchen and would reopen as soon as they fixed the problem. Apologies.

  The one person they did allow in, however, was Joe Arlbach, Pastora’s Chief of Police.

  Clarissa and the others watched with diminishing hope as he entered the restaurant, put his head down, and shoved his hands into his pockets. He casually made his way over to the bar, where everyone waited. His slouched posture reeked of bad news, and if that weren’t convincing enough, the fact that he had yet to make eye contact with a single person more than sealed the deal.

  Something had happened.

  “Well,” he said finally, as he came to a stop in front of Aunt Mae’s staff. He looked up and met their eager eyes. “I’m afraid the news isn’t good.”

  Mary moaned. Valentina covered her mouth with both hands.

  Joe proceeded to tell the group what he learned, which wasn’t much, and as he spoke, Clarissa experienced the most distinct sensation of déjà vu she had ever encountered. Joe’s statement was almost word for word what Grant Alphers had told her the previous day regarding Geoff: nobody home, no foul play, everything in order.

  If she wasn’t worried before, she sure as hell was now.

  When Joe finished, the questions came hard and fast. Where would Maxwell have gone? What could have happened to him? Did anyone see anything? Does it have to do with the Sound? Do his kids know? The barrage became so overwhelming, Joe eventually held up a hand to calm everyone; to Clarissa, it looked more like a deflective shield.

  “I wish I had more answers for you,” he said. “I really do. Max is a friend of mine and I…” He put his head down a moment before resuming. “This concerns me as much as it does you.” He walked over to the bar and sat beside Bale. “Max is the second call I’ve gotten like this today, and it’s not even nine o’clock.”

  “Joe,” Clarissa said, clearing her throat, “how many people does that make so far? Here, in Pastora. How many…how many are missing?”

  Joe cut his eyes to each person. “Don’t see any sense in keeping it from you all. It’s going to get reported sooner or later.” He inhaled deeply. “Maxie makes thirty-three.”

  Everyone let out an audible gasp.

  “Thirty-three?” repeated Terrance.

  Joe nodded. “You should hear the numbers coming out of New York, Chicago, and Atlanta. Numbers so high they’ll make your head spin. Know how many missing person reports we took for the entire year last year? Nine. What’s going on now…I just can’t get my head around it.”

  “So what’re you going to do about it?” Valentina said, struggling to keep her voice from shaking. Clarissa moved up beside her friend. “What is anyone going to do about it?”

  “Well, now I’m glad you asked that. We do have a plan in place. I’m not at liberty to discuss it just yet, but I can tell—”

  “Not at liberty?” Mary bellowed. “When in the hell do you think you will be at liberty? After all of us have vanished?”

  “Now hold up, Mary,” Joe said, both hands held up. “Let’s just take it down a notch. I’m as freaked out about this as you are, and I want to find out what’s going on just as badly. But we can’t start turning on each other. That’s a surefire recipe for disaster.”

  Mary found the floor. “Sorry, Joe. Didn’t mean to snap. Just flippin’ out a little.”

  “Aren’t we all. Now what I was about to tell you is that the mayor's called a town meeting for this evening. It’ll be held at the high school football stadium. The mayor’s going to speak. He’ll tell everyone what we know, which may be more than they’re saying on the news. Get word out as best you can. It’s short notice, so call people if you have to. We want to see as many people there as possible.”

  Everyone bobbed their heads pensively.

  “Consider it done,” Mary said.

  “Yeah,” Valentina added.

  “Joe?” Terrance began. “Any thoughts on what we should do about today? With the restaurant, I mean?”

  Joe considered this a moment. “I can’t see how anyone would fault you all if you remained closed for the day. With any luck, I’ll get a call from old Maxie this afternoon griping about why the restaurant’s locked up.”

  Clarissa attempted a smile, but it didn’t want to hang around. Joe was trying to be optimistic, but optimism had taken a holiday of late. His suggestion to keep Aunt Mae’s shuttered for the day was a prudent one, but was it the right one? What would she do with herself all day if she wasn’t working? Stay at home and stare bug-eyed at the TV? Scan the Internet and social media outlets every three minutes for updates? She might complain about the daily grind, but sometimes an honest day’s work was just the thing the mind and soul required to maintain sanity.

  “Joe,” she said. “If it’s all the same to you,” Clarissa turned and acknowledged the rest of the staff, “and you guys, I think we should stay open.” She caught sight of Mary scowling before she even finished. “I figure Aunt Mae’s is kind of like the local watering hole. People depend on it. If we close up shop, it might freak people out even more. Besides, by staying open, we can get word out about the meeting a lot quicker.”

  Joe jabbed a finger at Clarissa. “That's smart thinking, Clarissa.” He glanced at the rest of the staff. “Would you all be okay with that?”

&nb
sp; Clarissa anticipated resistance from Mary, perhaps even from Bale, but both nodded agreeably. Mary was already tying on her apron. Perhaps she had considered the alternative to not working just as Clarissa had.

  “Okay then,” Joe said. “The city of Pastora thanks you.” He looked around as if he had forgotten something then simply shook his head. “Well, I better get going. If I hear anything, I promise I’ll make a beeline over here and let you all know.”

  “Thanks, Joe,” Terrance said.

  Joe eyed the half-full coffee carafe behind the bar. “Any chance I could get a to-go cup before I head out?”

  “Absolutely,” Mary said, scooting around the bar to snatch up a paper coffee cup and lid.

  Clarissa started for the door, ready to flip the “closed” sign to “open,” when she was held back by a firm, cold hand on her arm.

  “Max’s missing, Clar,” Valentina said. “Max.”

  Clarissa turned to face her friend, whose eyes were wet with anxiety. “I know, Val. I know. This is some scary shit right now. We’ve just got to keep it together, okay? We’ll learn more tonight.”

  “Will we?”

  “Yes, we will. Okay?”

  Valentina nodded, the gesture an attempt to convince herself. Clarissa took her gently by the shoulders.

  “Look,” Clarissa said, “people are going to need someplace safe and familiar. Someplace reliable. And right now that duty falls to us and Aunt Mae’s. We’re not the only ones starting to lose our minds over what’s going on, but we’ve got the opportunity to make people forget about it if only for a little while. Do you think you can help do that?”

  Valentina stared straight ahead then sniffed and bobbed her head.

  “Good.” Clarissa hugged Valentina, whose body trembled. She pulled back and eyed her. “Everything’s going to be all right. I know it doesn’t seem like it now, but it will. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Valentina said on an exhale.