The Narrows

by Ronald Malfi

  That’s what is out there now, she thought. The thing that fell out of the sky, just like in that song. The thing I hit with the car.

  It had come back for her. She was certain of it.

  No…please…

  She hurried up and down the halls, closing and locking the windows and turning off all the lights. Whatever was out there, she didn’t want it seeing into the house. After she had locked up all the windows, she returned to the door that led to the backyard and peered out the crescent panel of glass. The floodlights were still on. She looked frantically around the yard but couldn’t see anything.

  That wasn’t a child you hit, said that evil voice in her head. That was something else. That was the thing that fell out of the sky.

  She shook her head, clearing it of the voice. She’d suffered the voice when she was younger, right after high school, and for whatever reason, it had returned to her now. No, she thought. Get out of my head.

  The foundation creaked and she could hear the beams in the ceiling groan in the strong wind. Maggie held her breath. Across the room, she could see the hallway and, beyond, the closed door that led down to the basement. To the shotgun.

  You do horrible things, this is what happens, said the voice.

  She went to the basement door, pulled it open. A mineshaft of blackness appeared before her. Feeling along the stairwell wall, she found the light switch and flipped it on. Weak, yellow light appeared at the bottom of the rickety basement stairs.

  Thunder boomed, shaking the house.

  Maggie hurried downstairs two steps at a time and went directly to the wall where the shotgun hung from its lacquered plaque. She yanked it down and it was heavier than she would have thought. Turning it over in her hands, she looked at the wooden stock, the sleek black barrel, the sliding bit of metal that ran the length of the barrel. She had seen enough movies to know how shotguns worked, but when she attempted to slide the movable bit which opened the chamber, it wouldn’t move.

  “What the hell,” she muttered.

  She continued to turn the shotgun over in her hands. At one side of the trigger was a circular button that protruded. There was also a lever beside the trigger. She pulled back the lever and found that the slide engaged and she was able to move it up and down the barrel. Sliding it opened a chamber in which a shotgun shell could be loaded.

  The shells—they were in the bottom drawer of Evan’s workbench. She set the shotgun on the floor and went quickly to the bench, pulling open the bottom drawer. There were two boxes of shotgun shells inside—one labeled Buckshot, the other marked as Slugs. Slugs sounded more dangerous, so she emptied the contents of the box onto the floor. About a dozen plastic tubes rolled out, each one capped in a helmet of brass. She had no idea what she was doing.

  Maggie gathered up the shotgun slugs and dumped them back into the box. Then she took the box and, scooping up the shotgun from where she’d left it, carried both items back upstairs.

  The house seemed like a different place now. She went to the crescent window in the back door and looked out upon a misty rain. The floodlights lit the grounds like a rodeo.

  A blank-faced cadaverous figure crouched on the roof of the Pontiac.

  Maggie shrieked and turned away from the window, throwing her back against the wall. The box of shells dropped from her hand, and a number of shells spilled out. A few rolled under the couch.

  It fell out of the sky, Maggie thought frantically, bending down and snatching up a handful of shotgun shells. Crouching to the floor, she fumbled around until she found the lever on the gun again, depressed it, and managed to pull the slide back. The chamber opened on the side of the gun, just the right size and shape to accommodate one of the shells. How many of the damn things did the gun take? There were about a dozen in the box. Maybe she could load all twelve into the shotgun? Did they file down into the barrel? No, that didn’t make sense…

  Rain lashed heavily now against the windows. Her breath came in panting, rapid gasps. She took one of the shells and slipped it into the opening at the side of the shotgun. It just sat there.

  “Come on!” she shouted at it.

  Think, she thought. Think about what makes sense here…

  With her thumb, she shoved the plastic cylinder up into the barrel until she heard and felt a click. When she withdrew her thumb, the shell was gone, having vanished up into the body of the gun.

  Yes. That’s it.

  She tried to stick another shell into the chamber but the previous one prevented it from moving forward. She was doing something; she wasn’t thinking. Her hand on the slide, she jerked it and heard a solid clack. Suddenly, the gun felt dangerous in her hands.

  She repeated the process, shoving shells into the gun, until it would take no more. Four, she thought. It holds four. Remember that.

  Shaking, she stood and again peered out the crescent of glass in the door. Outside, the floodlights made the rain shimmer. The black Pontiac looked sleek as a shark.

  The figure was no longer there.

  Things from space can read your mind, said the head-voice. It knows you’re armed now and it’s being careful. It’s being sneaky.

  “Shut the fuck up,” she told the voice.

  The sound of her cellular phone trilling from the couch caused her to jump and sob. Still holding the gun, she rushed over to it and answered it without checking the number.

  “Hello?”

  “Where’d you go, darling?” It was Tom. He sounded drunk and a bit irritated.

  Maggie closed her eyes. Suddenly, the shotgun seemed to weigh about two hundred pounds. Around her, heavy rain played a tattoo against the living room windows.

  “There’s someone outside the house, Tom,” she said into the phone.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, simultaneously thinking, It’s the thing that fell out of the sky, just like John Fogerty said. It landed in Stillwater and I hit it with my car and now it’s come back to get me.

  “You want me to come out there?” Tom said.

  She considered this. Maggie Quedentock, formerly Margaret Kilpatrick, formerly a pot-smoking high school student who had lost her virginity at the age of twelve to seventeen-year-old Barry Mallick. Maggie Quedentock, who had displayed a track record of poor decisions and self-destructive behavior…

  Into the phone, she said, “Yes. Come over.”

  3

  After leaving the Crawly house, Ben stopped at the Dandridges’ where he summoned old Delmo Dandridge to the door. Delmo looked less than pleased to find Ben Journell on his front porch at that ungodly hour. Delmo had suffered his fair share of run-ins with the police sergeant in the past, having been arrested by Ben on at least two occasions that Ben could recall off the top of his head. In an easy tone, Ben apologized for knocking on the door so late then explained the reason for his visit. Delmo grunted and told Ben to come in.

  The house was a pigsty. He had to navigate a maze of upturned furniture, towers of bound newspapers, and random electrical appliances in various stages of disrepair, while following Delmo into the small, foul-smelling kitchen.

  “Beer?” Delmo said, and since he didn’t move from where he leaned against the kitchen counter, Ben knew he was being a smartass.

  “You’re familiar with the Crawly boy who lives down the road?” Ben asked.

  One of Delmo’s eyebrows arched. “The crawling boy?” he said, wiggling his fingers in the imitation of a scampering spider.

  “Matthew Crawly,” Ben clarified.

  “Yeah. He’s Dwight’s friend. His sister was here earlier looking for him.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Shit if I know.” Delmo was wearing sweatpants cut off at the knees and a tight undershirt that did his bulbous midsection no favors. “He gone missing?”

  “Yes.”

  Delmo’s wife, Patti, appeared in the doorway, a cigarette jutting from between two fingers, wearing a flimsy ribbed undershirt that clung to her sa
gging, generously nippled breasts. A large German shepherd sidled up beside her, its silvery eyes locked unwaveringly on Ben. He’d shot and killed a dog once before, as it charged him from across a barn. He had no qualms about a repeat performance if it came to that.

  “What’s this?” Patti rasped. She eyed Ben in the same suspicious and distrustful manner as the dog.

  “He’s here looking for the Crawly boy,” Delmo informed her.

  “Matthew?” She cocked one eyebrow.

  “Do you recall the last time you saw him?” Ben asked. A second dog paced back and forth across the hallway behind her.

  “Lord,” she said, blowing a streamer of cigarette smoke up over her head where it seemed to collect like gossamer in the ceiling fixtures. “Maybe a week or so ago. Did something happen to him?”

  “He’s gone missing,” growled Delmo before Ben had a chance to answer her.

  “Is Dwight available to speak with me?” Ben asked instead.

  Patti Dandridge’s other eyebrow went up. “Now?” She made a big deal of looking at the wall clock over the stove.

  “I know it’s late,” Ben said, “but it’s important.”

  “I’ll wake him,” Patti said. She moved back out into the hall. At first, the German shepherd remained staring at Ben, quite possibly sizing him up the same way Ben had sized up Delmo Dandridge when he had answered the door just moments ago. But then the dog turned tail and padded down the hall after Patti. The second dog, no more than an indistinct black blur at the far end of the poorly lit hallway, continued to pace like a lion in a cage. The whole house stank of dog shit.

  “Flood sent John Church’s trash can through my basement window,” Delmo said. He leaned his considerable bulk against the stove, his belly jutting from beneath the strained fabric of his undershirt. “Who do I see about that?”

  “See about that?”

  “About gettin’ my window fixed.”

  “I would think your homeowner’s insurance would take care of it,” Ben opined, not without a hint of affectation.

  Delmo grunted while he dug around in one ear with a finger roughly the diameter of an Italian sausage.

  Dwight appeared in the kitchen doorway, shirtless and straining against a pair of striped boxer shorts. His hair was corkscrewed and he winced in the harsh kitchen lighting. Ben nodded succinctly at Delmo then led the boy back down the hall and to the stairwell, where they both took a seat on the third step up from the bottom. Ben asked him about Matthew.

  “We hung out after school yesterday then we went home for dinner. I haven’t seen him since then.” Dwight Dandridge spoke in hushed tones, either because the subject matter disturbed him or because he didn’t want his parents, who lingered down the hall in the kitchen, to overhear. Or possibly it was a combination of both.

  “Thanks, Dwight,” Ben said, and squeezed the boy’s knee before getting up off the steps.

  4

  The rain was coming down in sheets by the time Ben arrived back at the police station. The weather report predicted a second storm, just as bad, if not worse, than the one that had flooded the Narrows and darkened the center of town, and Ben had no doubt of its inevitable arrival. It seemed par for the course—what else could possibly go wrong?

  The station was hopping this evening, at least for a department as small as Stillwater’s. Ben could hear music coming from the Batter’s Box. The soles of his shoes squelching on the tiles, he crossed into the Batter’s Box to find Officers Eddie La Pointe and Mike Keller sitting in their respective cubicles, tossing a handball back and forth. The radio on Mike Keller’s desk poured out a Tom Petty tune, all jangly guitar and harmonica.

  “Hey, Ben,” Mike said, tossing the handball at him. “Where you been?”

  “Over at the Crawly place. Eleven-year-old kid’s gone missing.”

  “Wendy’s kid?” Eddie asked.

  Mike blinked. “Missing? Like…gone?”

  “His mother and sister haven’t seen him all day. I guess he could be at a friend’s house.” In the breast pocket of his uniform was the sheet of paper on which Wendy Crawly had scribbled the names of her son Matthew’s friends—a depressingly short list, Ben had noted. Ben didn’t think that was such a bad thing; in Stillwater, the fewer friends you had, the less amount of trouble you were apt to get into. He fished the slip of paper from his breast pocket and dumped it on Mike Keller’s desk. “First thing tomorrow morning, give the folks on this list a call. See if they’ve seen Matthew Crawly. I’ve just come from the Dandridge house so you can skip them.”

  “Roger.” Mike picked up the folded sheet of paper and looked at the names on it. Mike Keller was a chunky officer in his early forties with thinning blond hair and a cherubic, pleasant face. A lifelong resident of Stillwater, he used to dress as Santa Claus every Christmas down at the Farmers’ Market on Calvert Street, when there still had been a Farmers’ Market.

  Ben tossed his campaign hat onto one of the empty desks. He sat down in one of the chairs with a huff and began unlacing his boots. His feet ached. “Where’re Haggis and Platt?”

  “Out at the Shultz farm,” said Eddie. “Maureen says she ain’t seen old Marty all afternoon and was worried he’d gotten into a car wreck or something out on 40. My guess is he probably went out hunting with some Gentleman Jack and passed out in a tree. Prob’ly wind up falling out of it and breaking his neck.”

  Ben sighed. “Wonderful.” At Maureen Shultz’s insistence, Ben had gone out into the woods to look for her husband before, and wound up finding him in a state not dissimilar to what Eddie had just described.

  “Anyway,” Mike said, leaning back in his chair, “did you hear that old Eddie has finally figured out what happened with Porter Conroy’s cows? Isn’t that right, Ed?”

  Pulling off one of his boots, Ben looked at Eddie and said, “Yeah?”

  Eddie waved a hand at him. “Forget it. He’s pulling your leg.”

  Mike Keller laughed. “Show him,” he chided. “He solved the case, Ben. Big goddamn detective. Come on, Eddie!” Before Eddie could respond, Mike was out of his chair and digging through the stack of magazines on Eddie’s desk. Eddie slapped his hands away, looking wholly disgusted. “Show him,” Mike insisted.

  “Go sit the fuck down,” Eddie told him.

  Snatching one of Eddie’s magazines off his desk, Mike flipped through it as he carried it over to where Ben sat. Chuckling, he folded the pages back and handed the magazine to Ben. It was one of Eddie’s horror magazines, Ben saw, and this particular article detailed the recent killings in a small Mexican village by a creature called the chupacabra.

  “What the hell is this?” Ben asked, scanning the article.

  “Sure,” Eddie said, “you guys make fun, but that stuff is real.”

  “What is it?” Ben asked.

  “A Mexican vampire. Eats livestock. The descriptions of the attacks are just like what we saw at Porter Conroy’s farm last night.”

  Ben tossed the magazine aside. “We’re not in Mexico, Eddie.”

  Eddie sat up straight in his chair. “That’s just what they’re called. Who says they can’t come north? Read the article.”

  “I think I might head out to Full Hill Road instead,” Ben said.

  “You still worried about what Maggie Quedentock said last night?” Eddie asked. “Ben, you spent half the day today checking out those woods. There’s no one there. She didn’t hit anything. And if she did, it was just a deer, and the fucking thing already bounded off through the woods.”

  Ben nodded absently, frowning. He was thinking about Matthew Crawly.

  Shirley Bennice, the dispatcher, appeared in the doorway. She was a squat woman in her sixties who had the pleasant, comforting face of a grandmother even though she had no children or grandchildren of her own. “You boys afraid of the rain or something?” she said, walking down the aisle of cubicles.

  “Hey, Shirl,” said Eddie. “Do me a favor and tell Ben here how he’s gotta keep an open mind to things.”<
br />
  “Arguably, he kept an open mind when he had the chief hire you,” Shirley responded without missing a beat. She stopped before Ben’s cubicle and handed him a yellow Post-it note.

  “What’s this?”

  “Deets over at the county morgue in Cumberland called for you earlier. He said to call him back when you got in. He said he had a possible ID on that kid that was found in Wills Creek.”

  Indeed, John Deets’s number was scrawled in Shirley’s handwriting on the Post-it. “No kidding? Great. Thanks, Shirl. Anything else going on?”

  “Cumberland sent over some new equipment. Well,” she added quickly, “new for us, anyway. Some handhelds, boxes of ammunition, and a vehicle-tracking GPS.”

  Mike laughed. “For all the vehicular tracking we do, huh?”

  “They’re freebies,” she said. “I ain’t turning my nose up at charity from the county.”

  Ben leaned over and snatched the receiver off the phone, pressing it to his ear. He punched in Deets’s number and listened as the line rang. He glanced at his wristwatch and saw that it was too late and Deets was probably long gone by now. Also, it was Saturday night.

  “You believe in the supernatural, Shirl?” Eddie asked.

  “You mean like ghosts?”

  “He means vampires that eat tacos and shake maracas,” Mike said, grinning.

  “You just wait and see,” Eddie said, tossing the handball back to Mike. “Chupacabra’s responsible, all right. That’s Spanish for goatsucker.”

  Again, Mike Keller laughed. “You’re a goatsucker,” he told Eddie.

  On the line, Ben got Deets’s voice mail. He left a cursory message, including his personal cell phone number, then hung up. Something had settled down into the back of his brain and was now nagging him. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was. He picked up Eddie’s stupid magazine and looked at the glossy photo of what appeared to be a hairless coyote, staring at the camera with golden eyes and ears like satellite dishes. It was most obviously Photoshopped.