by Dan Rix
Well, if I ever got bored . . .
At the nightstand, I sifted through the knickknacks, finding nothing of interest. Just jewelry and a few framed photographs, which I avoided.
One last place to check. I got down on my knees and peered under the bed.
A row of shoeboxes.
I pulled out the first. Art supplies. Ink quills, watercolor palettes, acrylic paints. A brush caked with hardened red paint. Onto the next one.
Candles, matches, a cigarette lighter. All junk.
But the third one contained something very valuable. Bags of trail mix, cans of food, bottled water—I uncapped one and took a swig—real water. Heart racing, I piled the goods next to the juice boxes. I’d stumbled on her survival stash.
Where had she gotten this stuff?
I checked the last two shoeboxes. More of the same. Water, food, candles.
But no diary.
I straightened up and peered around the room.
My cell phone screen dimmed, plunging the room into a gloomy dusk. A quick tap brought the light back to full, but the battery indicator had already fallen a quarter. I needed to conserve.
My gaze rose to where the window should have been. All boarded up. Planks crisscrossed each other haphazardly, the rusty nails bent in half and pounded clumsily into splintering wood. Hammered right into the walls.
She’d done it herself.
Maybe I could let in some moonlight.
Letting my cell phone go dark, I hooked my fingers under the planks and gave a firm tug. The boards squeaked, but held. I pulled harder, braced my palm against the wall for leverage. The tendons strained in my forearms, feeling like they were about to snap—
With a wrenching squeal, the plank pulled loose and tumbled to the rug, along with bits of plaster.
A silky strand of starlight shone in.
I pried the rest of the planks loose one by one and leaned them against the wall, widening the cone of light. Facing east, Ashley’s window had a bird’s-eye view of downtown Santa Barbara, the harbor, Stearns Wharf.
All dark, all still.
Why had she boarded up the window? The views were incredible from up here on the Mesa.
My palms pressed against the glass as I took it all in. The harbor was dark, a graveyard of sailboats floating on glass. The hillside of the Riviera, normally lit up with mansions like so many glowing embers, now loomed over the city like a burnt out cinder—
A pinprick of light winked in my periphery, swimming among a sea of dark homes.
My breath misted the glass, fogging up the view before I could focus in on it. Heart slamming, I smeared away the condensation. But when I tried to find the light again, it was gone. My hopes fell.
The hillside was dark.
I must have seen the reflection of a star off a distant window. Yeah, that had to be it. There was nothing else out there.
Nothing but ash and darkness.
I sighed and turned away from the window. Maybe Ashley had boarded it up for that very reason. So she wouldn’t be reminded of what was out there, so she wouldn’t get her hopes up at every tiny flicker of light or movement.
Behind me, a patch of starlight fell on the box of candles, gleaming off the wax.
Speaking of light . . .
It was worth a shot. I stooped over the box and lifted out one of the candles. Then I dug around for the matches—
A scratching noise drifted out from under the bed.
I froze, my heart leaping up my throat.
Uh . . . what was that? I gulped down a swallow.
I grabbed my cell phone, fumbled for the power button. Finally the screen flashed on. I swung the beam toward the bed and swept it along the eight-inch gap above the carpet, unable to breathe as I backed against the opposite wall.
The scratching began to scurry toward the baseboard. There was something moving under the bed, something alive. Her corpse . . . her rotting corpse would scuttle out like a giant spider and latch onto me, eat me alive.
I knelt and shone the light under the bed, my pulse rising into a crescendo.
A tiny ball of fur quivered along the back wall.
Reflected in the light, its two beady eyes stared back at me, whiskers twitching as it nibbled on a crumb.
Ashley’s pet mouse.
Living off her leftovers.
I exhaled my relief and slid to the floor. As long as the mouse left me alone, I would leave him alone. I returned to the candle and the matches, still buzzing from the encounter.
The matchbox rattled. Several left. I picked out a match, and with shaky hands, pressed the tip to the striking surface. Then I struck it.
Blinding light flared on the match tip, hissing and crackling as it settled into a wobbly yellow flame. I held my breath, didn’t dare move a muscle. The flame dimmed to a tiny blue globe . . . but miraculously, it stayed lit.
I could make fire!
They were real matches.
The candle wick lit easily—a real candle, too—and a warm glow filled Ashley’s bedroom. I lit another candle, and another, propping them up on the bureau, the nightstand, the shelves.
Soon, a cozy orange glow shimmered on the walls, forcing away the last of the shadows . . . and illuminating something in the room I hadn’t noticed before.
Tiny red specks splattered the rug. I leaned closer, picked at one of them. Hard, almost like . . . like drops of paint.
I stood and studied the splatters, which formed some kind of drip pattern. Hmm. I scanned her room, looking for an easel or something she might have painted on. A folding stepstool—also crusted with red paint—leaned against the dresser. I stared at it.
A stepstool.
Paint drips in the middle of the room.
No sign of what she’d painted.
Slowly, my gaze rose to the ceiling. And there it was, right above my head. The source of the paint. But it wasn’t a picture.
It was a message, rendered in perfect red letters.
The answer is hidden in the last place I would ever go.
Chapter 8
A riddle.
Ashley had left me a riddle.
I mulled it over as I explored the rest of the upstairs, searching for any other clues. The last place I would ever go . . . like, a place she really hated? Obviously not.
I carried a candle down the hallway, lighting the doors on either side, one of which was open to the upstairs bathroom.
What had she hidden?
The answer to what?
I crept into the bathroom and shut the door gently behind me, and my ghostly reflection approached in the mirror. A dozen medicine bottles lined up along the bathroom sink, all empty.
I picked one up, read the label.
A prescription for Ashley—Klonopin, some kind of anxiety medication. One capsule before bed to prevent sleepwalking episodes, stated the instructions.
What was going on here?
Would medicine even work down here? Out here . . . wherever the hell this was? I doubted it.
The bathroom had another door. I set the bottle down and continued through the second door into her dad’s office, feeling vaguely uneasy. What was this place? Something didn’t add up.
Fixed to a tripod, a telescope the size of a tree stump dominated the office. I ran my fingers along its length, picking up a layer of dust. I hadn’t seen this last time, but it made sense that her dad would have one.
He had been watching the sky.
The telescope gave me an idea. I could take it up to a high place and peer out over all of Santa Barbara. I might see something.
I left the telescope alone for the moment, and its lens seemed to follow me across the room like a giant unblinking eye. I set t
he candle on her dad’s desk and reclined in the chair, drumming my fingers on the armrest.
Ashley had picked up the sticky dark matter from the pages of her diary, which her dad had brought back from a meteorite impact site, two months before that meteorite landed near Megan and me in the woods. That much I’d pieced together from Emory.
And from this very office, actually.
I tugged open the bottom file drawer and idly flipped through the folder labels—Kaidu River . . . Mali . . . Parque Nacional—the impact sites.
Clearly, dark matter had somehow transported me here. And it must have transported Ashley here months ago. Somehow, she’d escaped . . . because I’d hit her with my car and killed her at the beginning of summer.
The answer is hidden in the last place I would ever go.
The answer to how she escaped?
My thumb stopped at the tag labeled Charleston. I pulled the folder out and opened it under the candle, dusted it off.
Charleston, South Carolina.
Why did I get the feeling there was something significant about that impact site? About South Carolina?
The folder was twice as thick as the others. Longer reports, more data, more photos of rocks. I flipped to the middle of the stack, and a dozen lined notebook pages slid into my lap—Dr. John Lacroix’s handwritten notes.
He’d visited this site himself. I’d already known that. From what Emory had told me, his dad had brought back a diary as a souvenir for his daughter.
An infected diary.
That was how it spread to her. The thought forced a repugnant shiver out of me.
Paperclipped to John’s notes were aerial photos of the crater, still smoking. Probably taken from a helicopter. I studied the photos, trying to get a sense of scale. Lined up along the rim was a row of what looked like scuba tanks hissing plumes of vapor.
I peered closer. No, not scuba tanks.
They were trucks. Huge tanker trucks, dwarfed by the size of the crater. Only then did I spot the workers in hazmat suits swarming around the rim like ants, the fire trucks the size of toys, the charred tree trunks stripped of their branches and flattened like toothpicks, all pointing away from the impact site.
The South Carolina crater was gigantic.
A big crater meant a big asteroid, which meant a lot of dark matter . . .
Growing more curious, I thumbed through the handwritten pages. Completely illegible. Nasty-looking equations annotated with scribbles, question marks, and explanation points. Whatever had been going on inside that man’s brilliant mind was lost on me.
A strange thought occurred to me right then, and my eyes were drawn to the shadows creeping along the walls. How was all this even possible? Here I was raiding the man’s filing cabinet for clues, but I wasn’t even in his office. I was in a copy of his office, off in some bizarre parallel realm. In fact, he could be in his office right now, occupying this very space on Earth, and I would have no idea he was here. He would have no idea I was here.
I shifted uncomfortably, imagining our bodies overlapping in space. Somehow, this entire world existed as a shadow of the real world . . . like an afterlife or something.
A disturbing thought.
I redoubled my focus and flipped back to the beginning of the report, where I finally managed to track down a paragraph remotely resembling English. Some kind of summary, it looked like.
Meteorite struck southern end of Francis Marion National Forest at 09:50 on 21 December. Response unit dispatched immediately from Charleston Naval Weapons Station, arrived on scene at 10:17 to cordon off area. Confirmed element driven deep underground by impact, full extraction unfeasible. Subterranean refinery to be built for ongoing extraction through end of decade. Initial quantities of element relocated to Vandenberg AFB for Project Trojan Horse.
I felt my eyebrows pull together. Clearly whatever had hit South Carolina had been much, much bigger than the meteorite Megan and I found. Funny I hadn’t heard about it. A cover-up.
The word element . . . I could guess what that referred to.
Dark matter.
A chill lifted the tiny hairs on my forearm.
They were indeed collecting it. And the South Carolina site was their main source, complete with a refinery to extract it from the crater, and an entire infrastructure. Something called Project Trojan Horse. All those tanker trucks . . . they were being pumped full of dark matter.
Oh God.
A thimbleful of dark matter had fused to my skin and brought me here, and had also resurrected a dead girl.
What could gallons of the stuff do?
Even worse, it was all being shipped to Vandenberg Air Force Base, a little over an hour’s drive from here, where they were doing God knew what with it—
The bathroom door creaked.
My head snapped up, and I stared as the door swung open, the moan of metal hinges amplified in the deathly silence. The door coasted to a rickety stop, wobbling in front of the gaping black doorway to the bathroom.
My breath caught, and escaped in a quivering gasp, causing the candle flame to flicker and dim. At once the shadows peeled off the walls and encroached on my tiny bubble of light. I quit breathing, and the flame’s blue-white claws clung to the wick. Don’t go out . . . don’t go out . . .
The office teetered on the edge of blackness.
The flame took hold again and flared back to life, banishing the shadows to the corners, spilling through the open doorway into the bathroom and gleaming off porcelain and revealing nothing at all to be afraid of—
Then I saw it.
A small humanoid shadow retreated into the bathroom, vanishing just as the light reached it. The tremor jolted my heart, left me breathless.
My imagination. A play of light. It had to be a play of light.
There was nothing in the bathroom.
I grabbed the candle and stood up, and the notebook sheets slid off my lap and fluttered to the floor, forgotten. I took a halting step, brandishing the flame like a weapon.
A weapon.
I needed a weapon.
My knuckles closed around the telescope tripod, hefting it at my side. Just throw it at their face. Lugging the telescope, I advanced toward the doorway, and inch by inch the rest of the bathroom came into view. I lunged inside.
The candle sputtered.
Just an empty bathroom. The shower curtain rustled gently from my sudden movement, but nothing else stirred. Nor could they have escaped into the hall without me hearing, because I’d shut that door. I let out a relieved breath, finally satisfied that I was alone—
The door to the office slammed behind me.
I whipped around, heart galloping as the crash echoed into a buzzing silence. Terrified breaths rasped in my throat.
Someone invisible. In the bathroom with me.
Frantic now, I dropped the telescope and wrenched the door open to escape back into the office, stumbling through the doorway into darkness. But four feet in, I slammed into a wall and sent a picture frame clattering to the floor. Confused, I rubbed my shoulder and swung the candle left and right, up and down a corridor lined with doorways. What the heck?
I was back in the hallway.
I turned on my heel and headed back through the doorway that should have led to the office . . . and stepped right back into the bathroom.
The candle flickered under my quivering breath, shimmering in the medicine cabinet mirror. Okay . . . weird.
Where was the office?
I exited the bathroom through the other door and emerged into the hallway, then turned left and walked two feet to the office door, then turned left again and stepped right back into the bathroom, now ten feet away from, and at an impossible right angle with, the first door.
It didn’t even a
dd up to 360 degrees.
The entire space of the office—its volume, its dimensions, its geometry—had simply vanished. Gone. Now the remaining rooms fit together like some kind of nightmare house by M. C. Escher.
The next day, I wiped the dust off the objective lens with the bottom of my tank top and blinked into the eyepiece of the telescope—the only thing I’d saved from John Lacroix’s office before it vanished—and peered out over the deserted city, shimmering in the afternoon sun.
I’d spent the morning hiking up Gibraltar Road to this lookout point, which offered a panoramic view of the entire coastline stretching from Montecito to Goleta.
I’d fled Emory’s house last night and spent the rest of the long night quivering in my own bed, hoping against hope that the world would reset back to normal in the morning.
It hadn’t.
I adjusted the focus, and a hazy street crystallized into view, pinpricks of sunlight glimmering off car bumpers. My hope soared, before I realized they were just parked cars. Abandoned.
This morning I’d gone back for the telescope and Ashley’s food supplies, and now the riddle she’d left on her ceiling flitted through my mind again. The last place I would ever go . . .
I sure hoped she didn’t mean her dad’s office. I tried not to think about it. All those drawers full of clues, all those books, all her dad’s work. Gone, gone, gone. The loss hurt.
Something else had been in that house last night, I was sure of it. Some force had lured me out of that office and then deleted it.
For a reason.
There’d been something in that office I wasn’t supposed to find. Now I never would.
I nudged the telescope, and the field of view panned over a grassy park, tennis courts, a baseball diamond. All deserted. No moving cars, no people. I tilted the telescope toward the ocean and squinted out at the derelict oil rigs, the hazy lump of Santa Cruz Island, then swept across the horizon toward Campus Point, UCSB, Storke Tower.
Nothing out there but abandoned buildings.