by Ronald Malfi
It would only be a matter of time before—
A set of fingers curled around the door, which had opened a crack.
Beside her, Wendy struggled to stand up. Brandy pulled her back down. “No, Mom. Please.”
“Mattie!” Wendy shouted at the bedroom door. Tears streamed down her face. “Oh, Mattie!”
“No, Mom.” Brandy’s hands were slick and red with her mother’s blood. “Mom…”
“Mattie!”
The door bucked again. An arm appeared.
It was then that a part of Brandy Crawly’s mind threatened to break apart and sail up out of her body, dissolve right through the ceiling and up through the roof, and float unanchored out over the house. From there, it could disappear into the storm, leaving the husk of Brandy’s body to whatever fate awaited it. At the last moment, Brandy clamped down and held strong to her sanity, astounded by the sheer practicality of such a feat, as if it were no different than wrapping a fist firmly around a doorhandle.
The desk screeched across the floor as the bedroom door shoved open a few more inches. Matthew’s pale face flashed within the opening, eyes blazing. That single arm shoved blindly against the back of the desk, kicking it forward a few inches more. A moment later, Matthew was in the room. He climbed up on top of the desk, his back arched like a bow, his small face now only vaguely human.
“Stop!” she shouted to the thing that had once been her brother. She was crying freely and uncontrollably now, her body shaken by sobs. “Matthew, please! Stop! Stop!”
Matthew did not stop. He climbed down from the desk and was in the room with them. His white legs were marbled with bruises and streaked with filth. Dried blood clung to his bare stomach and chest. As she stared at him, a tuft of blondish hair liberated itself from his scalp and wafted like a cobweb to the floor.
Brandy screamed and wedged herself into the corner. Her mother wrapped her up in her arms, blood oozing over both of them now from her wound. Panicking, Brandy shoved the bookcase down to the floor in an effort to provide one last obstacle for her brother to tackle before he tore into them. The bookcase cracked when it hit the floor and items blew everywhere. Three plastic cups filled with soil on top of the bookcase flew across the room and one of them landed on Matthew’s bed. An ultraviolet lamp that had been on top of the bookcase struck the floor as well, the light blinking on and casting an arc of radiant white light across the bedroom.
Matthew hissed and backed away from the light.
It took Brandy a moment or two to realize what had happened. Mopping the tears away from her eyes, she reached down and snatched the UV lamp off the floor, then held it out, her arms fully extended, the light shining directly on Matthew. In the garish, overly bright light, Matthew’s body was a hideous mockery of a human being.
He cried out then backed away, crawling behind the desk. Brandy saw the dome of his head retreat back into the hallway where silver eyes stared back out at her from the darkness. Those eyes hung there in the black like stars piercing the night.
“Please, Matthew,” she sobbed. “Please…”
“Brandy,” her mother whispered into her sweaty hair. She repeated her daughter’s name over and over again, as if in prayer against the undead. “Brandy, Brandy, Brandy…”
7
Out along U.S. Route 40, the water of the Narrows rose up to overtake the highway, sending a cascade of cold, black water down into the heart of Stillwater, Maryland.
8
The UV lamp, along with the bedroom light, blinked and fizzed then finally died. Out in the hallway, Brandy heard the smoke alarm beep once then fall silent. The power had gone out.
“Shit,” she said beneath her breath.
Wendy gripped the lamp in Brandy’s hands and shook it, as if such an act would restore its power.
How much time had passed? How long had they been sitting here? Brandy did not know. Her whole body ached and she was rank with sweat. The wound at her mother’s arm still leaked black blood onto the carpet. There were crimson smears along the wall, too.
There were noises out in the hallway. Brandy sobbed and held the useless UV lamp against her chest like a shield. Her mother said, “Shhh…”
“He’s coming back,” Brandy said breathlessly.
“Okay, baby,” Wendy said, smoothing back her daughter’s sweaty hair. Some semblance of her old self had returned, though Brandy was only vaguely aware of this. “Okay. Shhh. Okay.”
The bedroom door swung open and slammed against the desk. The figure out in the hallway grunted. Another arm appeared and found the desk, gave it a good shove away from the door. A second later, a man appeared in the doorway, the badge at his chest glimmering like salvation in the moonlight coming in through the window.
“Someone in here?” he said.
“Help us,” Wendy called.
The man stepped into the room and looked around. He held his shotgun at the ready. “Where are you?” It was dark.
“Here!” Brandy shouted, struggling out of her mother’s embrace. “We’re right here!”
The man clicked on a flashlight and located them in its beam. Brandy winced. She wondered how much of this was actually happening and how much of it was a horrible nightmare.
The man settled down before them on one knee.
“Okay,” he said. The weariness in his voice was all too evident. “Okay, now.”
It was Ben Journell.
9
“Are you hurt anywhere else?” Ben asked. They were still in Matthew’s bedroom and Ben had just finished wrapping Wendy’s wound with a gauze bandage he’d located in the medicine cabinet in the hallway bathroom. A woman was with him, too—Brandy recognized her as the older woman who worked in the police station answering phones. Brandy had seen her the day she had gone to the station to talk with Ben. The day they had driven out to the old plastics factory on the other side of the Narrows…
“I don’t think so,” Wendy said. She turned her big eyes up to Ben. “Did you see him? He’s out there.”
“No,” he said flatly. “I didn’t see him. But I know he’s out there. Somewhere.”
“What…” Wendy began…but the crux of it all was too much for her to formulate into coherence and her question died before it ever truly begun. Her face collapsed into tears while her chest hitched with sobs. The older woman from the police station settled down on the floor beside Wendy and slipped an arm around her shoulders and told her that everything would be okay.
Brandy didn’t know if she believed that.
“Okay.” Ben Journell addressed his flashlight onto her mother’s bandaged wound and nodded, apparently satisfied with his work. “That should be okay for now.” Then he turned to Brandy. “How about you? Are you okay?”
Brandy just stared at him. She was trying to think of the most appropriate response, but just considering it rendered her into stagnation. Like a television set when the cable is out, her mind filled with static.
“Hon?” he said, and placed a gentle hand on her leg.
She said, “The light.”
“What’s that?”
“I scared him off with the light.” She pointed to the lamp that now lay dark and unused on the carpet beside the toppled bookcase.
Ben looked at the lamp then looked back at her. There was a firm expression on his face that afforded Brandy some indescribable comfort. Then he stood and looked out one of the bedroom windows. His shotgun was propped against the wall and Brandy’s eyes fell on it. She felt a contradictory mixture of respite and unease.
“The whole town’s dark,” he said, still looking out the window. The sight of him standing there with his hands on his hips reminded Brandy of—
(her father)
—a marble statue in some museum somewhere. “It’s the storm,” Ben continued. The badge on the front of his uniform glimmered in the moonlight coming in through the window. He turned away from the window and said, “What’s the GPS say now?”
The woman who had come i
n with Ben—Brandy believed her name was Shirley—paused while comforting her mother and began digging around in her purse. She withdrew a small device that cast sickly white light onto her face from an electronic screen. The woman scrutinized it then looked up at Ben. “It’s still moving,” she told him.
He went to her and she handed him the device. Ben’s face glowed blue as he held the device up to view it. The screen was doubly reflected in his eyes. “It’s moving toward the center of town,” he said.
“What is?” Brandy asked.
“The bat,” he said. “We put a tracking device on a bat.”
“The one in the cage at the police station?” Brandy asked.
Ben looked at her. Then he said, “Yes. I think you’re right. I think those bats are…I guess—”
“Harbingers,” said Shirley. “They’re harbingers, Ben.”
Although she did not know what a harbinger was, Brandy said nothing.
Ben took the shotgun up off the wall. “I’m going to follow it,” he said to them.
“No,” Brandy said. They all looked at her. “We should wait, is what I mean. Go in the daytime. I think they sleep in the daytime.”
Ben said, “They?”
“There’s something else out there,” Brandy said. “Something had to do that to my brother.”
“She’s right, Ben,” Shirley said.
“Don’t hurt my boy,” Wendy Crawly said, her voice just a hair above a croak. It hurt Brandy’s heart to look at her, to hear her plead like that. “Don’t hurt my boy, Ben Journell.”
Brandy said, “He’s not—”
“I ain’t hurting no one’s boy,” Ben said, cutting Brandy off while shooting her a sideways glance.
“The fake sunlight scared him off,” Brandy reminded him, pointing to the UV lamp again. “And I think he’s been sleeping in the daytime.” With a sinking feeling in her stomach, she added, “In the garage.”
Slowly, Ben nodded. He glanced back down at the GPS device…then set it down on the desk that sat slantwise across the bedroom floor. He lowered himself to the floor and set the shotgun back against the wall. When he drew his knees up and rested the back of his head against the wall, Brandy heard him release an audible sigh. She could see his hands shaking in the moonlight.
10
“That boy we found down at Wills Creek,” Ben said after the silence became too great. “He had a series of puncture wounds going down his back.”
“Like Matthew’s shirt,” Brandy Crawly said, not missing a beat.
“And the hair had fallen out with both boys,” Ben volleyed. He was disgusted. Tired. He couldn’t stop thinking about how similar both boys had appeared…
“What happened to my little boy?” Wendy Crawly whispered. Shirley was back at her side, her arm around her shoulders again, their heads nearly propped against one another.
“I’m not sure,” Ben admitted. He exhaled loudly. “Something got to him. The same thing that got that other boy.” After a pause, he added, “I think the same thing happened to Bob Leary’s kid, too.”
Brandy said, “Billy?”
“Yeah. He went missing, too.”
“When?”
Ben shook his head. The days all blended together. It could have been yesterday or six months ago for all he knew.
Then young Brandy said something that caused a chill to radiate through the center of his bones: “How many more are out there, do you think?”
Ben did not answer. He took the GPS off the desk and set it in his lap. The battery still registered as full. He asked Shirley how much time they had before the batteries in the GPS and the tracking device went dead.
“Seventy-two hours,” she responded, sounding sleepy and very far away.
“Isn’t that something,” he muttered to himself. “That’s a smart idea,” he told Brandy, “waiting for daylight.”
“It is,” she said. “And I’m coming with you.”
He was too tired to argue.
At some point, he slept.
Chapter Eighteen
1
Official sunrise for Allegheny County on Thursday morning registered at 6:29 a.m., but the sun did not begin to peek over the eastern mountain and cast its predawn light onto the town of Stillwater until ten after seven. Ben had woken up around five and had sat in the silence of the bedroom, listening to the others sleep, thinking the same catalog of thoughts over and over while keeping one eye trained on the bedroom windows. The rain had let up to a light drizzle, but he knew it was too late. The Narrows had already flooded and the power would be out for some time yet.
What does it matter? he wondered. What will be left after today? What happened to Stillwater while I sat in this house, waiting out the night?
Waiting for daylight had seemed like the smart move last night, but now he felt as though he’d allowed some virulent strain to work its poison, sickening the veins, ruining the body, corrupting the heart. Had his hometown died quietly in the night while he slept and waited?
Someone stirred across the room just as the eastern sky began to change. It was Brandy. She stretched and made half-sleep sounds before crawling over to Ben. She leaned against the wall beside him.
“I should go now,” he said.
She looked warily out the window and due east. “It’s still dark.”
“It’ll be daylight soon enough. Besides, I can’t sit here and wait any longer.”
“What does your thing say?”
“Huh?” he grunted.
“Your whatsit,” she said. “That little screen.”
“Oh.” In the night, he must have kicked it under the nearby desk. He slid it out and looked at it. The red dot was no longer moving. It appeared to have roosted at the far end of town, in the abandoned section of town beyond Gracie Street.
“Where is it?”
“Off Gracie Street,” he told her.
“What do you think we’ll find out there?” she said, her whispery voice dropping even lower.
Ben grinned with half his mouth and said, “We, huh?”
“Yes. I’m not going to let you shoot my brother.”
He nodded, but thought, It would be doing him a favor, I think, darling. Yet even thinking that made him feel horrible.
Brandy pointed to something on the carpet between them. “What’s that?”
He picked it up and turned it over in his fingers. “A lighter. It was my dad’s. It must’ve fallen out of my pocket while I slept.”
“Your dad’s dead, isn’t he?”
He nodded. “How’d you know?”
“It was the way you said it.”
He handed her the lighter. “Flip it open. Here. Like this.”
He showed her. It took her a few times to get it down, but she eventually did. She handed it back to him and he dropped it in the breast pocket of his uniform shirt. Then he stood up, grunting as his back creaked. Across the room, Shirley said his name in a small voice that was just barely audible over Wendy’s light snores.
“It’s time for me to go,” he told her. “You stay here with Brandy’s mother.”
“And the girl?” Shirley asked.
“I’m going with him,” Brandy said.
Ben put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “She’s coming with me,” he said.
2
Outside, freezing rain drummed against the roof of the front porch. Across the road and in the direction of town, there was nothing but black space where streetlights and house lights should have been. Looking into that emptiness caused Ben’s resolve to weaken. It was as if Stillwater had been erased from the face of the planet in the middle of the night. Pervaded by a series of queasy tremors, Ben wondered just how prophetic that thought was.
Brandy appeared beside him, zipping up a nylon jacket with her name embroidered at the breast.
“Is that a school jacket?” he asked her.
“Yes. I used to be on the track team.”
“Good. Because if anything happens, I want you to run.
”
They made a dash for Ben’s squad car, which was parked at an angle in front of the house, their footfalls splashing through icy puddles while the rain pelted them. Ben secured the shotgun in the trunk while Brandy climbed into the passenger seat. In the car, Ben set the GPS on the dashboard, keyed the ignition, then spun out into the street and headed in the direction of the town square.
“Seat belt,” Brandy said, pulling hers over her chest and clicking it home.
Ben nodded and buckled up. Ahead, the squad car’s headlights chased away a chasm of darkness. The faintest ripple of pinkish light stood off to the right now, just beginning to crest the mountain range. The streets were flooded and driving was treacherous. When they reached the intersection of Hamilton and Cemetery Road, Ben had to detour around the main drag and opted for one of the higher, unnamed service roads that ran behind the cemetery.
“There’s no one on the roads,” Brandy said, her voice small.
“It’s the storm,” Ben assured her…although he did not think his voice sounded all that confident.
“Do you know the Talbots?” Brandy asked out of nowhere. “They live out on Drury.”
“I think so.”
“I was supposed to go to the school Halloween dance this Friday with Jim Talbot.”
Ben said nothing, not sure why she was bringing this up now.
“He’s got a younger sister,” she went on, “and we were making fun of her a couple of weeks ago, teasing her because she said there was a troll living under the Highland Street Bridge. You know, like in that story about the three goats?”
“I know the one.”
“She said she saw a troll living under the bridge when she drove past the Narrows with Mr. Talbot. She’s only seven, so she could have seen anything down there, I guess.” But the tone of her voice informed Ben that she suddenly believed Jim Talbot’s seven-year-old sister, and that there had been a troll hiding beneath the Highland Street Bridge after all.
He cut the wheel and detoured along Schoolhouse Road even though the service road had not yet flooded. Brandy asked him where they were going.