All around him, there was movement, shadows dancing on the walls and ceiling, mounds of cloth and bedding creeping over the floor. Wincing in pain, the blood streaming down his leg, Cooper hobbled toward the door.
But the door closed before he reached it, and at the same time the light went out. No illumination shone from outside because the windows were blocked by piles of blankets. He was enveloped in softness as supple pillowcases and silky sheets and downy bedspreads wound themselves around him in the dark, sliding up his legs, dripping on him from above. He was held gently in place, and for the first few seconds the sensation was comforting.
Then a towel wrapped itself around his head and what felt like cloth fingers pushed themselves against his nose and into his mouth. He was unable to breathe, but he was also unable to fight back, and as the pain in his constricted throat and lungs grew greater than the pain in his leg, he thought he heard Amy’s voice, filtered through fabric.
“Can you hear me?”
“Can you hear me, Coo?”
“Coo?”
SIX
AUSTIN, TEXAS 2003
The world had changed. And Alex wasn’t sure when it had happened. He’d been in the army for four years (stationed in Germany, thank God), and he’d kept abreast of everything going on, knew the music and the movies, certainly knew the politics, but when he got out and decided to resume the life he’d lived before enlisting, he found that that life was gone. A new generation had come up, with new interests and new definitions of hip, and his former peers had disappeared from the landscape, seamlessly blending into mainstream society, vanishing into families and careers.
Wanting to get back into practice, he thought he’d check out a few poetry slams, jump in and throw it down—
(A dirty dong
Dingle dangling
Feed it to your sister! Feed it to your mom!)
—only there were no poetry slams anymore. People didn’t seem to do that these days, and he wondered when that change had occurred. People weren’t even buying CDs much, he discovered, not the way they still did in Germany. Instead, they were downloading their music off the Internet. He felt lost in this new world, out of place, out of time. Everything he knew and loved seemed to have faded away. He found that he missed Germany, and if there hadn’t been a good chance that he’d be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan, he would have up and re-enlisted yesterday.
As it was, he needed to find a job, and while soldiers were always being portrayed as heroes, their virtues constantly extolled in the media and by politicians, here on the ground it was damn near impossible for a vet to find work. He finally ended up at a temp agency—a Kelley girl!—working a week here, a day there, mostly for minimum wage.
It was at one of those jobs, a two-day stint as a carpet cleaner, that he first found evidence of The Conspiracy.
He was on his break, smoking outside in the patio of the office building where he’d been assigned. Two other men were on their breaks as well, drinking coffee at a table, and one of them was talking about the body of a strange white-skinned creature that had been discovered behind the wall of an old house that was being renovated on the south side of town. “They’re keeping it quiet. Someone posted a picture, but it was taken down almost immediately, and all photos have since been destroyed or deleted.”
“Enough with the X-Files crap. Every time you—”
“I told you before; this has nothing to do with aliens.”
“But there’s still a big government cover-up of mysterious events...”
“There’s a cover-up all right, but I’m not sure it has anything to do with the government. I don’t think the government even knows about it. In fact, I think these things are being covered up to keep them from the government. The government and the public. So there’s no accountability.”
“Who is it, then? An evil corporation?”
“Possibly. I don’t know. All I know is, these things are happening. And that white creature was here in Austin, but it was hushed up, so you’re never going to hear a word about it except from me. Keep your eyes and ears open, bud. Keep your eyes and ears open.”
Alex remembered the conversation because it was so strange, but he didn’t believe a word of it. There were a lot of wacky people out there now. He’d known some of them in the army: Art Bell listeners, conspiracy theorists, people who believed the government was behind the September 11 attacks, people who thought the president was some sort of Muslim Manchurian candidate. Such craziness was par for the course these days.
But…
As he traveled from temp job to temp job, he heard more. Whispers of things that shouldn’t be, that couldn’t be. Unrelated, all of them, but when taken together, they formed a sort of tapestry that seemed a little harder to discount.
Although he still wouldn’t have believed any of it had he not come across an example of it himself.
He was working that week as a file clerk in the corporate office of a six-store chain of Texas supermarkets. It was an old school filing system—they actually had files. In folders.—and he was sorting through a batch of complaints while everyone else was at lunch. As a temp, he was allotted only a half-hour to eat as opposed to a full hour for actual employees, and since the office was empty, he took a moment to open the folder in his hand and glance at the complaint.
The referenced store was the original Austin branch, just down the street from where he lived, the place where he usually bought his groceries. Curious, Alex sorted through the papers in the folder. A sales clerk and a customer both claimed to have been attacked in the men’s restroom by a skinny gorilla with the head of a dog. A gorilla with the head of a dog? How could such a thing get into the bathroom? How did it get out? Because there was no mention of it being seen by anyone other than the two victims, and no indication that law enforcement or animal control were notified. There must have been wounds sustained by the clerk and the customer, however, because there was a recommendation attached to the complaint that generous money should be offered for a settlement before either issue was pursued through legal channels.
From the front of the building, Alex heard the voices of workers returning early from lunch, and he quickly closed the folder and continued with his filing.
He was curious, and he stopped by the store on his way home, ostensibly to buy milk and orange juice, although the real reason was to see where this bizarre attack had occurred. Pretending he had to use the restroom, he asked a cashier how he could find the men’s room. A strange look came over the girl’s face, and she said nervously, “It’s, uh, closed right now. I mean out of service. For repairs.”
“Thanks anyway,” he told her.
He wandered up the nearest aisle as though he were shopping for groceries. Supermarket restrooms were usually located near delivery entrances, adjacent to storage rooms or loading docks rather than in the central part of the store, so he made his way to the rear of the building. Spotting an unlit corridor next to the butcher’s counter that headed back into an area not open to the public, Alex walked in a few steps and saw a door in the left wall with a mounted plaque that read Women, as well as a door next to it marked Men. Beneath the word Men, someone had used masking tape to affix a handwritten sign stating, “Closed for Repairs.”
Alex tried the restroom door. It was not locked, surprisingly, and before anyone told him he could not go inside, he pushed open the door and entered.
Like most such facilities, the restroom was small: a sink, a urinal and a single enclosed stall. He didn’t see how a gorilla-like animal could fit in here, let alone hide and jump out at a person, and he started to think that the two attacks were part of a scam—
Until he heard a low growl coming from the stall.
Before he could back up and exit, the creature had slammed open the stall door. It was an impossible animal—if it even was an animal. Yes, there were elements of German
shepherd in the snout-like protrusion of its mouth, and the hairiness of its anthropoid form did resemble that of an ape. But even a quick glance revealed human components in its makeup, particularly its hands and eyes, and from the top of its head protruded a series of reptilian spikes.
Alex stumbled backward, pulling open the door and falling onto the floor of the corridor outside. He expected the beast to burst out and tear him apart, but the men’s room door remained closed, and the only noises he heard were the sounds of rattling shopping carts and fragmented conversations from the aisles of the store. There were no growls coming from the bathroom, no sound at all.
He wanted to peek in there again, wanted to check, but he was afraid to do so and quickly hurried back out into the store.
Why wasn’t there anything about this on the TV news or in the papers?
Because the company was paying out hush money.
The Conspiracy.
He sped out of the supermarket and back to his car, not realizing how frightened and rattled he truly was until he tried to put his key in the ignition. His hand was shaking so much it took him over a minute to get it in and get the car started.
He kept his ears and eyes open after that, even more than he had before, and in the margins of the workaday world he encountered a supply room in an insurance office that everyone in the company was afraid to enter; a photofinishing department in a chain drugstore that was closed because all of the photos it developed were of the same smiling old lady; a radio that played even when it was unplugged and its batteries removed; an air conditioning system that remained off because every time it was turned on the voices of dead people could be heard in whispered discussion through the vents.
He actually discussed the haunted air conditioning with another temp from the agency, an older retired man named Bud who was working part-time in order to supplement his Social Security income. Bud, too, had seen things he wasn’t supposed to see, and, like the man at the office where he’d worked as a carpet cleaner, Bud firmly believed that there was a well-organized conspiracy to keep such things from the public. Alex found that he believed it, too, and the more places he worked, the more he encountered, the more he saw evidence of The Conspiracy.
He started asking questions casually, obliquely, surreptitiously, and word must have gotten back to someone because, at a wholesale nursery where he spent the day loading citrus trees onto landscapers’ trucks, he was approached by a gardener who told him that a man named Frank Wheatley wanted to meet him to talk about some things he might have seen.
Alex had built up The Conspiracy in his mind until he was convinced it was made up of a cabal of the nation’s most powerful men. So it came as something of a surprise when the gardener’s directions led him not to some rich businessman but to a nondescript construction worker in striped overalls installing window boxes at a remodeled cottage. Unsure of how to approach the man, Alex stood on the lawn in front of the cottage, cleared his throat and said, “Excuse me, are you Frank Wheatley?”
The construction worker did not turn around. “I am.”
“I’m Alex Kroeger?” (Why was saying that as though it were a question? He was Alex Kroeger.) “I was told you wanted to see me?”
The man finished tightening a screw before silently turning toward Alex and walking onto the lawn. The screwdriver he’d been using was held out in front of him almost like a weapon, and when he finally spoke there was an undercurrent of menace in his voice. “So what is it you think you know?”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” Alex said, but he did.
“You’ve been asking about things, I hear.”
“Like what?” Although his impulse was to run, he was determined to stand his ground.
The man—Frank—crooked his finger and bade Alex follow him into the cottage. With only a slight hesitation, he did so, walking through the front door into an empty living room.
Where the corpse of a Corgi was splayed, its furry limbs screwed into the wall.
Smiling, Frank used the screwdriver to gesture toward the dead animal’s body.
A shadow passed over the room. Or sped around the room. There was a brief diminution of light, and Alex might have ascribed it to a cloud passing over the sun, but it happened too quickly and was accompanied by a localized sense of movement. Chills surfed down his arms. He had never been so frightened. Not because of a physical threat but because this—whatever it was—went so far beyond the merely physical. Maybe there was a Conspiracy and maybe there wasn’t, but whatever was going on, this Frank was at the center of it.
“Leave,” the man said, as though reading his thoughts. “And make sure you stay away from my business. I don’t want to have to see you again.”
Alex left as quickly as his legs would carry him. His knees felt weak, and his mouth was drier than it had ever been. He realized he’d been given a second chance, and he practically ran out to his car, locking the doors the second he got inside and speeding away down the street.
He was done with this, he decided. He was going back in the army.
Even if it was to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Because things there were a lot less dangerous.
SEVEN
From The Arizona Republic:
Body Parts Found in Abandoned House
Workmen made a gruesome discovery Wednesday at a condemned house in South Phoenix. The severed limbs of at least three individuals were found within the walls, floor and ceiling of the structure by a demolition team that had been hired by the city to tear down the house.
The body parts had been incorporated into the construction of the building, police reported, with legs and arms hammered into the frame of the house in place of boards, and peeled skin stretched over a hole in a shower stall…
From The Fresno Bee:
Rash of Pet Kidnappings in East Fresno
The sixth pet kidnapping in as many days has east Fresno residents up in arms. As reported previously, a rash of dog and cat abductions has targeted the residential neighborhood, with animals being stolen from fenced yards in broad daylight.
Although there have been no witnesses to any of the abductions, home security footage of the most recent dognapping—a pit bull named “Pit bull”—appears to show a bald man wearing overalls carrying the animal in his arms as he walks toward the street, according to Fresno police. The dog’s owner, Oscar Hijo, 39, expressed surprise that someone was able to pick up his pet. “Pit bull’s a fighter, and he don’t like anyone but me,” Hijo stated. “Someone must have drugged him.”
Police are searching for a white male, medium height, medium build…
From The Salt Lake City Gazette:
Unlicensed Contractor Sought in Fraud Investigation
An unlicensed contractor accused of bilking senior citizens out of thousands of dollars is being sought for questioning by Salt Lake City police. According to a police department spokesman, Frank Wilkins has been named by eighteen elderly homeowners as the man who conned them into paying for home remodeling work that he never performed.
Wilkins, who is suspected of using an alias, allegedly provided free estimates for home improvements, convincing those residents planning to have work done to pay him half of the amount ahead of time with the balance due upon completion. Wilkins never showed up to perform the work.
“He gave me a receipt,” said Ida Castle, 79. “I thought it was real.”
The address Wilkins provided homeowners turned out to be that of an abandoned gas station, and police are currently looking for…
From The Albuquerque Journal:
Son Accused in Parents’ Homicide
Blames ‘Ghost’ for Murders
Francesco Covarrubias, 22, of Albuquerque, claimed in court Monday that the gruesome dismemberment of his parents last April was performed by a “ghost” that killed his mother and father while he
was forced to watch.
In an attempt, prosecutors claim, to lay the groundwork for an insanity plea, the accused asserted that he was held in place by “invisible hands” while an unseen assailant used tools from the family’s garage to torture, mutilate and murder his parents “before my eyes.”
Covarrubias broke down crying in court and his lawyer asked for a recess while the accused murderer composed himself…
EIGHT
DOUC SONG PROVINCE, VIETNAM 1966
PFC Tex Henderson stood within the perimeter, looking out at the jungle, wondering if he was going to die today. He wondered the same thing every day, and it was not an idle worry. Fully half of the men who’d flown out with him six months ago were either dead, injured or MIA, and he was acutely aware of the fact that he could join them at any time. The training they’d received back in the States had in no way prepared them for this, and it was only through sheer dumb luck that he was still in one piece.
He remembered what the CO at the camp had said to him on his first day in country, after they’d drawn fire and a kid who’d flown over with him on the transport had fallen at his feet, a bullet in his head, his blood pumping into the mud. Tex had knelt to pray for the boy after the shooting stopped, but the CO had pulled him to his feet, saying: “Don’t waste your time. There ain’t no soul there to pray for. There’s only alive and dead, and anyone who’s ever killed a man’ll tell you the same.”
That was blasphemy as far as Tex was concerned. He’d been brought up Baptist, had always said his prayers and trusted completely in his Lord and Savior. His daddy had died when he was ten, and he and his momma had known ever since that the old man was up there in heaven, smiling down on them. He’d never questioned that or any other aspect of his faith until he’d come to Nam, and he’d been shocked when he’d been told not to pray for the boy.
But all these months later, he’d come to learn that the CO was right. He’d seen a lot of men die, and when they did, they just shut off. Their spirits didn’t leave and go to a better place; they just stopped living, and that was the end of them, like machines that suddenly quit working.
The Handyman Page 23