by J. Thorn
The thought of him made her break out in a cold sweat, and she could feel her respiration increase as she started to panic. She almost had a heart attack then, as the door tore open with a shriek of twisted metal!
But it was only Sheriff Meeks. "So sorry," he said. "So sorry. I just...I just...." He didn't finish the thought, but took a knife from his belt and stabbed her air bag. It ripped open and a blast of warm air hit her in the face, but in a second the air bag hung like afterbirth from the dashboard and she had enough room to remove her safety belt and get out of the truck.
Moving was painful; she was sure she had bruised some ribs in the crash. But she made no murmur of complaint. She could see that the sheriff was grappling with something terrible right now, something that must have to do with that dead woman they had seen - Elizabeth, he had called her.
But there was no time to ask him what had just happened, what it was he knew that she didn't. Because in that instant she saw where they were.
"Jesus," whispered the sheriff. And she didn't get the feeling that he was swearing, more that he was uttering a short prayer. Nor could she blame him when she saw what they had crashed into.
It was the general store. They had smashed halfway through the plate glass window at the front of the store and then must have careened into a load-bearing wall with a thick steel core, because the front of the truck had crumpled and they had stopped moving fast enough for the air bags to go off.
"This is impossible," said the sheriff as he looked at the front of the store. "We were outside of town. We were outside of town, so how could we crash into the general store on Main Street?"
"Well," said Lenore, trying to muster enough courage to speak without crying. "We're not outside town anymore."
"No," agreed the sheriff. "We're right back where we started from."
"Guess whatever is doing this doesn't want us to leave," she said. Then she shouted and pointed into the store.
The sheriff stepped gingerly through the broken window and into the store. She followed him a moment later, walking into the bright store and staring at what had made her shout.
It was Ox. He was laying facedown on the tile floor next to a small footstool. Blood pooled all around, and the floor had shattered around him in a crazed fashion, spider cracks running through the tile and allowing her to see that even the concrete below the tile had been smashed.
Sheriff Meeks leaned down next to Ox and touched the big man's neck. He yelped as he did so, and pulled his fingers back as though he had been burnt. "What is it?" asked Lenore.
"Soft," answered the sheriff.
"Soft?"
The lawman nodded. "He's soft."
Lenore noted then that the body looked strange: lacking shape, somehow, like it was a bag and not a human being made of muscle and bone.
She reached out a trembling finger to touch the big man's arm. Her fingers sunk in like she was touching putty, and she too yelped and pulled her fingers back - but not until they had slid into his body up to the knuckles.
"Where are his bones?" she asked, aware that she was sounding for all the world like one of her third-graders and not caring in the least.
The sheriff didn't seem to mind, either. He just stood up and looked over the store. The aisles were full of debris, she saw: items knocked off shelves, plaster dust everywhere, even some tiles from the ceiling were strewn about. It was as though an earthquake had struck the store, and somehow she knew that the destruction was not the result of their crashing into the place.
The sheriff looked back at the big man then. "Like he fell," he murmured.
The lights went out then, flickering once and then plunging them both into darkness. Mist curled in over the broken window, crawling into the general store like a living being.
It covered Ox. Lenore looked away. "What now?" she said.
Suddenly, she could hear something in the mist. Screams. Faint, but screams.
Sheriff Meeks stepped toward the window to leave. "Where are you going?" she asked.
"We have to find out what's happening to the town," he answered.
Dread filled her belly. She knew he was going to say that, but it tore her apart inside nonetheless. "Can't we stay here?" she pleaded.
The sheriff looked at her with a concerned expression, and she could tell he was weighing his words carefully, trying to spare her any unnecessary pain. "We can't," he finally said. "If we stay here, then we're just going to end up dead like everyone else. We have to find out what's happening and try to stop it." He held out a hand to Lenore.
She hesitated. Then took his hand.
He helped her over the dangerous shards of glass that still clung like witch's teeth to the windowpane of the general store, and then kept on holding her hand for a moment.
In spite of their predicament, in spite of all the danger, in spite of everything that had happened that night, she felt warmth bloom where he touched her. It spread up her arm and into her chest, touching her heart and making it beat faster for a wonderful moment.
Then he let go, and she thought she saw something - was it guilt? - flash across his face.
"Come on," he said gruffly. "We have a town to investigate."
***
Hours later she was on the verge of falling over from exhaustion, and they had found nothing useful. Just empty house after empty house. Half-eaten meals, clocks that were strangely out of focus and impossible to read, dim screams sounding all around them...and the shadows. The phantoms in the mist that seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Never touching them, always moving too fast to be followed. Not always, but often when a shadow passed, the sheriff's walkie-talkie would blast out a high-pitched whistle, and he joked in a low voice that at least they had an early warning system.
She did not laugh. The shadows were too frightening to laugh about, with their horned heads and glassy eyes.
They stepped out of one last house, and she bent over to rub her aching calves, wishing she had some other footwear than the heels. She had toyed with the idea of taking some other clothes from one of the houses, but immediately discarded it: she would not steal from the dead. Nor was she about to go back to her own house; not with what had just happened there. She only felt safe next to the sheriff, and so she would brave the blisters that the heels gave her, knowing that to have no footwear in this mist could prove dangerous since they could barely see the ground ahead of them. She thought about what her feet would look like if she had stepped out of the sheriff's truck without shoes when they were surrounded by broken glass at the general store, and shuddered.
The mist surrounded them as always, and Lenore whispered, "What now?" The sheriff held up his hand, motioning her to silence. "What is it?" she said after a long moment.
"Listen."
"I don't hear anything."
"Neither do I," said Sheriff Meeks. "The screaming's stopped."
The mist was thick, but she realized that the shadows were nowhere to be seen, either. As though they had done their work and gone. "We're all alone," she whispered in a frightened voice. Somehow, the silence was as terrifying - if not more so - as the screams had been.
"Should we try to leave?" asked the sheriff.
"No," she answered. "It's not over. Can't you feel it, Sheriff?"
"Call me Jason," he said, and tried to grin. "I hoped that feeling was just my underwear being too tight."
The mist billowed around her and the sheriff - around her and Jason, she corrected herself. "It's not over," she whispered again.
Then a deep, dark voice, a voice that had been to Hell and taught the devil about fear, sliced out of the mist. "No," said the voice. "For you, it's just beginning."
Lenore felt herself turn inside out.
It was him.
***
TWENTY ONE
***
Jason didn't know who the man was, but knew that he had already killed him once tonight. And of all the things that had happened, of all the phantasms and ghosts that
this misty night had brought, somehow the man that stood before him was the most impossible of the sights. Lenore screamed, and Jason pulled his gun out and shot without thinking, as sure in his gut that the man before them was evil as he was that she was good.
The man went down, swallowed instantly in the mist.
But Jason had no time to revel in the win, had no time to even think because in the same instant Lenore screamed again. Jason swung around and saw that the man had reappeared behind him. The man's knife glinted in the mist as he ran toward them, coming at them like an unstoppable leviathan; a juggernaut born of the mist and not capable of being defeated.
"Come on!" shouted Jason. He ran full bore, hearing the man's cry behind them: an animal sound that writhed within him like a serpent, driving him onward faster and faster. "Hurry!"
A shape loomed in the mist before them: a house. Jason acted without thinking, barreling at the door without slowing. He hit it at top speed, felt the hinges crash inward before him and was grabbing at Lenore's hand almost in the same instant, pulling her deeper into the house, pushing her behind him.
He stood in the doorway, his gun drawn and ready, waiting for the man with the knife.
The man did not come. No intruder came out of the mist. Indeed, the opposite happened: the mist suddenly withdrew from the house, pulling backward as though sucked up by a vacuum cleaner, forming a perfect wall of fog about twenty feet away.
As though it was waiting.
"Great," whispered Lenore behind him. "What now?"
"Something fun, no doubt," he said back.
They waited. And waited. And waited. Then Lenore shouted from behind him and Jason spun around, almost squeezing off a round before he realized that the madman had not materialized behind them again. Instead, it was a smaller, rounder figure. A teenager that Jason had seen around town, though the boy's name escaped him for the moment.
"Albert," said Lenore in a relieved tone.
The teenager stepped closer to them, and his lip quivered. Jason could see he was trying not to cry, and couldn't blame him. "Are you real?" the boy asked. He was holding a video camera, clutching it to him like a high-tech security blanket.
"Yes, sweetie," said Lenore. "We're real." Jason saw tears well in the boy's eyes as well as in Lenore's, both of them obviously glad to have found even one other person alive.
Jason closed the front door. A large bay window nearby allowed a view outside. The mist was still in its holding pattern. Still waiting. But not coming any closer.
"What happened to my parents?" asked Albert. Jason experienced a flash of anger, of irritation that this boy should come out of nowhere and ask for an explanation, as though any of them knew what could be happening.
Lenore was apparently made of better stuff, however, for she tried to comfort the teen. "They're probably just waiting for you at home," she said.
The boy's expression fell. "This is home," he said. A moment later he looked at Jason. "They're dead, aren't they?"
Jason had no answer to that. He looked out at the mist again, then at Albert. "Is there somewhere safer than this? Somewhere we can defend? Basement?"
Albert nodded, and motioned them to follow him. The teen led them down a stairwell in the kitchen. "After I ran..." he said haltingly.
"Yes, Albert?" said Lenore. Again Jason marveled how soft her voice was, how caring her tone. She seemed to have put the night away from her in the last minute, focusing all her energy not on panic or worry for herself, but on concern for the chubby kid who now led them into his family's basement.
"I was hiding out," said Albert. "Dunno how long. Hours, days, it's hard to tell in the mist, isn't it?"
"Yes," soothed Lenore as the boy's voice started to crack. "It is hard to tell."
"Everything went crazy," he said.
"Did you see anything?" asked Lenore. Jason was silent. Lenore was asking all the right questions and was doing it with far more composure than he himself would have, so he was content to let her conduct this investigation for now.
"Just mist," said Albert. "And...."
"And what?"
"You'll think I'm nuts, just like everyone," he said.
"No, we won't," insisted Lenore.
"You will," he said again. He laughed hollowly. "Shit, I think I'm crazy."
Jason somehow intuited what Albert was going to say. "Ghosts," he said to the boy. "You saw ghosts." It was not a question.
Albert stopped walking, staring at Jason. "Yeah," he finally said. "Shapes. And then I heard screams everywhere. So I ran home." He sniffled and wiped a hand across his eyes. "The kids at school are right: I'm just a big fat baby."
"No," said Lenore. "We all ran tonight. We all panicked. With all the weirdness that's going on, no one blames you for what you might have done. No babies here."
"Were your parents here when you arrived?" asked Jason.
Albert shook his head.
"No. They were gone."
They walked the rest of the way to the basement in silence, and Albert shut and locked the door that was at the bottom of the stairs behind them, securing the area for now. If anything was secure. Jason remembered that Amy-Lynn had disappeared from a closed room, and doubted very much that the small lock in the door would deter whatever was out there from getting in if it wanted to.
Jason looked around. He saw a heavy supply cabinet and moved it in front of the door. It probably wouldn't make any more difference than the pitiful door lock, but it made him feel a little better.
As he moved the cabinet, he glanced around the basement and saw that he was in geek-Heaven. Comic books were piled in huge stacks everywhere. One corner held a television with various video game systems hooked up to it, and another corner was full of video equipment and editing paraphernalia. The last wall had a refrigerator and a shelf full of snack foods on it. Albert apparently saw him looking around because he grinned in a self-deprecating manner and said, "Welcome to the clubhouse." He grabbed a handful of chips from an open bag and began crunching them loudly. "I've been mostly down here," he said. "It feels safer."
"Have you seen anything else? Heard anything other than what you've told us?"
Albert hesitated. "I was...drawing," he said at last. "Sometimes it takes my mind off things. When everyone's being mean or when I'm worried." He chomped some more chips nervously, then continued, "So I was drawing. Or at least, I thought I was."
He opened a tablet of paper. Inside was page after page, each covered with black crayon writing. "cRaK IN the DAm," "it'S StarTInG," "FeAR."
Jason said nothing. He didn't know what to say.
"You think I've gone crazy, don't you?" said Albert. Clearly the kid was more than a little paranoid.
Again, Lenore came to the rescue with her soothing, motherly tones. "No, Albert. We don't think you're crazy. I wrote something similar, myself."
"What does it mean?" asked Albert. He looked at Jason. "Did you draw these things, Sheriff?"
"Yeah," answered Jason. "And I also saw some weird things. Not just the mist and the shadows. On my computer."
"What?" asked Lenore.
"Pictures," he said, unwilling to linger on the hideous images of death and mayhem that he had seen on the screen in his office. "And I thought I saw...." He gulped, then continued. "I thought I saw my wife and son."
"Didn't know you were married, Sheriff," said Albert.
Jason felt his mouth firm into a straight line. "They're dead," he said simply. "But on my computer, I saw them. It looked like they were trying to say something."
"What?" asked Lenore.
"Don't know. There were a lot of things flashing. My family, lots of pictures of disasters, some words."
"What words?" asked the teacher, her brow furrowing in thought.
"Not the same as on the papers," he said. "Not that crazy crayon stuff." He thought back, trying to recall. "I can only remember one: Roanoke." He frowned. "Wait. Harama? No. What was it?"
"I know the word Roanoke from
somewhere," said Lenore. "It was an early American colony, I think."
"What does that have to do with us?" said Jason.
Suddenly Albert spoke up. "Was one of the words 'Harappan'?" he asked.
Jason snapped his fingers. "Yes. How did you know?"
For a moment Jason thought that the boy had gone insane. He tore into a stack of comics with manic fury. "Because I know what Harappan is, and what it has to do with Roanoke," he said, holding out a comic book in a plastic bag.
Jason took it. "'The Disappeared'?" he asked.
Albert nodded. "Limited set. I have all thirty five issues." Then, as though Jason had challenged his choice of collection, he added, "It's an investment." He took back the plastic-wrapped book and looked at it for a long moment. Finally, he said, "Screw it," and yanked the wrapping off the book. Then he grabbed another comic and did the same. Then another, and another, soon accumulating a small pile on the floor.
The overweight kid grabbed one of the issues and handed it to Jason. "Issue eighteen, Roanoke," he said. Then he picked up another one. "Number twenty four: The Harappans."
Jason picked up several other comics. "These were the other names I saw. Chinese Army. Hoer-Verde."
"What are they all about, Albert?" asked Lenore
Albert thumbed through one of the comics, entering power-nerd mode. Jason smiled in spite of himself, remembering for a moment the days when he had collected comics; when he had been so innocent and full of life.
"They're all cities or cultures that disappeared," said Albert. "Roanoke," he continued, gesturing at the first comic he'd given Jason. "You were right, Miss Harris, it was an early American settlement. But colonists who followed them came to Roanoke and found it deserted. Food still on tables, beds unmade, clothing in the houses. Everyone just disappeared."
"And the Chinese army?" asked Jason. "It hasn't disappeared."
"No," said Albert. "But a unit of three thousand soldiers disappeared without a trace outside Nanking in nineteen fifty seven."
"Same with Hoer-Verde?" asked Lenore.
Albert nodded. "The six hundred inhabitants of Hoer-Verde, Brazil, disappeared on February fifth, nineteen twenty three. Police went through the town, and all they found was a discharged gun and a note on the blackboard."