by Ronald Malfi
(I am a violator here, this is sacred)
—and back in the direction he had come.
He shot up in bed covered in sweat and trembling with convulsions of his own.
The remaining two days off from the hospital were spent cultivating what he feared would soon turn into a full-fledged obsession. He found himself walking the streets by himself, or riding buses to nowhere in particular (or so he tried to convince himself), only to arrive outside Nellie Worthridge’s apartment building each time. He’d gotten her exact address from the hospital records, and although it hadn’t been his intention at the time to ever stop by Miss Worthridge’s complex, his mind had miraculously retained the building’s address as if he’d known on some subconscious level that it would be of some future importance.
In the cold, he found himself leaning against the outside of the building and staring up at its array of tinted windows. He watched traffic pull in and out of the Port Authority across the street and thought, Wouldn’t it be something to go in and buy a bus ticket to someplace different, someplace I’ve never been before? For once, just forgetting about everything that I know to be important and just shirking all responsibility. Mamma is right—I work too hard, and now it seems like I am going crazy too hard, as well.
He watched an exhaust-stained Peter Pan bus pull from the Authority and weave through the sluggish traffic of West 42nd Street. He watched arbitrary pedestrians scuttle like crayfish along the gray streets, most of them bundled against the premature cold. Willowy plumes of vapor blossomed from their mouths. Some of them rubbed their hands together to make friction.
Okay, a small voice in his head spoke up, now that you’re here, what are you going to do? Are you going to go inside and find Nellie Worthridge’s apartment and demand she explain how she knew the things she knew? Or will you stand out here and freeze your ass off?
“This is ridiculous,” he muttered—and maybe that was true, maybe he was getting carried away. After all, Nellie Worthridge hadn’t caused his bad dreams; his own overactive mind had caused them. That was all. He was the one to blame, not the old woman. And he knew that.
Still…she knew Julian’s name…and those horrible things she said…
And something else too—something about a dog.
We almost killed that fucking dog.
Yeah. Sure. Fine. Goddamn. But he felt like he was losing his mind.
He spent the remainder of the evening across the street from Nellie’s building in a stuffy coffee shop sipping a steaming cappuccino. When it became dark, the world outside grew alive with the neon lights of countless Chinese food restaurants and 24-hour delicatessens. Cars hurried home and taxis whipped by like greased pigs through fence slats. Windows glowed soft yellow in Nellie’s building across the street. Mendes wondered what window belonged to the old woman. Was she awake now? Asleep? What other secrets did she have?
His reflection stared back at him from the coffee shop window. This is stupid, he thought, ashamed. A young Puerto Rican fellow bumped the leg of his chair with a broom, mumbled something from the side of his mouth. He could smell fresh coffee brewing behind the counter.
It was nearly ten o’clock when he arrived home that evening. Marie was watching television by herself in the cramped little living room, a bowl of ice cream resting on her belly.
“Howdy, stranger,” she said.
“Mamma go to bed?”
“An hour ago. Where’ve you been?”
“Out and about. Library, mostly. And a movie.”
“What movie?”
He didn’t know any movies. “Some mushy romance,” he lied, hating himself for it.
“Oh,” she pouted, “I could have come.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think.”
“That’s all right. You know I hate the movies. I went shopping with Mamma.”
“Her leg’s okay?”
“Just a little sore today. What’s behind your back?”
He showed her what he carried in his hand: a plastic bag of tangerines.
“My favorite,” she said, smiling. “So then you missed me today after all?”
“All day,” he said, which was mostly the truth.
“That’s good. You look tired.”
“A little.”
“Go to bed then,” she told him.
“I think I will.”
“Hot bath first. It’ll feel good. Make your toes tingle.”
He smiled. “I don’t want my toes to tingle. I want to go to bed.”
“You’re very tired?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then no more bad dreams.”
“No,” he said. “Not tonight.”
“Goodnight, Carlito.”
“Goodnight.”
“Leave me the tangerines, sweet.”
He could hear his mother snoring soundly down the hallway. He crept into the bathroom at the end of the upstairs hallway and flicked on the light. For a long time he stared at his reflection in the mirror before undressing and going to bed.
He dreamt of going to Nellie Worthridge’s apartment building. Only in his dream he actually went inside the building, found a narrow staircase beneath a fire exit, and began to climb the risers. The stairwell was ill-lit and several times he checked over his shoulder for approaching unseen figures he was certain were there. After what seemed like a hundred flights of stairs, he reached a solid white door with the words CARRY-OUT SPECIAL and FREE DELIVERY written on it in neon lights. He pushed the door open and stepped into a darkened hallway with closed doors on either side of him. At the end of the hallway was what looked like a sliding subway door with a cartoon picture of Peter Pan on it. Only this Peter Pan seemed to be scowling, his eyes a deep crimson, his pointed ears more closely resembling horns. The crotch of Peter’s pants was saturated with blood, Carlos saw, and the lower half of Peter’s abdomen was swollen to a bulge.
Carlos Mendes walked down the hallway toward the sliding subway doors. Each closed door on either side of him also had words written on them, only in blood. OPEN 24 HOURS, said one. BUSES 5, 7, 9 TO UPTOWN, read a second. ABORTIONS HERE, exclaimed a third, OUR DRS WORK 4 U! As he walked, he could hear each door that he passed rattle and slowly creak open, could hear muffled footsteps pooling out onto the hallway carpet behind him. He didn’t turn to look, suddenly too afraid. There was a stink in the air, some offensive concoction—the warm, thick stink of fresh blood and hot urine and methane.
Ahead of him, the subway doors at the end of the hall slid open, splitting the obscene Peter Pan in half. A dull red luminescence pulsated from within. Something moved in the midst of that red light—something serpentine and stimulated, snake-like—and he nearly recoiled at the first glimpse of it.
A cluster of small hands at his back urged him forward.
To his left and right, more doors creaked open. Now they were opening faster than he was walking, and he was able to catch glimpses of them slowly opening from the corners of his eyes. There appeared to be children on the other sides of those doors—countless small children, still mostly cloaked in shadow, all curiously stepping out into the darkened hallway.
The tip of the snake-like entity within the red light inched just a bit outside the gaping subway doors. It was a tentacle, he saw, or some vein-riddled proboscis the thickness of a grown man’s wrist. He felt a scream creep up from his throat, threaten his lips…but he could make no sound.
More small children joined the gathering in the hallway. He felt added sets of tiny hands at the small of his back, his buttocks, even the backs of his legs. Pushing.
The tentacle bent and touched the hallway carpeting. It was dripping a reddish fluid too viscid to be blood. Like an enormous lethargic snake, the tentacle eased from left to right, left to right, probing its new surroundings and leaving a gelatinous webbing on the carpet. After a moment’s hesitation, the tentacle appeared to come to a decision—it began twisting toward him, the width of its body growing greater and greater a
s more of it withdrew from behind the subway doors.
It wasn’t a tentacle at all, he suddenly realized, feeling that quaking scream brewing up inside him again.
It was an umbilical cord.
Again the following day, he found himself standing outside Nellie Worthridge’s apartment complex. But this time he stood in the rain and knew he was more conspicuous. Knew too that he was one step closer to the edge of his mind than he had been yesterday. A young woman and her small child nearly ran into him while hurrying along the street just as the rain started. The woman shot him a what-are-you-doing-here? glance, which he turned away from, embarrassed.
I must look like a psychopath, he thought. Not for the first time, he wondered if he was going crazy, genuinely crazy. Was it possible Nellie hadn’t said anything at all? Even now, the tape of Nellie’s words—his only proof—had been mysteriously erased…
Or had those words even been there at all?
No, I’m not going crazy, not losing my mind. I know what I heard.
Again, he looked up at the apartment complex. In his head, he could clearly recall the telephone conversation he had had with the woman Nellie claimed she played bridge with on Wednesday nights. None of them had ever even heard of the old woman.
I didn’t dream that part up, did I? I didn’t just dream up a bunch of names that actually live in the city, one of whom lives in the building next door to the old woman, did I? No—that’s impossible.
A taxi sped by, dousing him in freezing rainwater.
At dinner, Marie was visibly distraught by her husband’s behavior, although she kept her disapproval to herself.
“You’re not eating,” his mother said from her own seat at the table. “You’re not hungry?”
“I had a late lunch, Mamma.”
“At the movies,” Marie said. There was unmistakable disapproval in her voice.
“I think it’s all this time off,” he said. “I think I get restless and don’t know what to do with myself.”
“Now with this work again,” his mother said, bringing up one hand. “This stress is why you cry out in your sleep last night?”
“What?” He looked from his mother to his wife. Marie only offered the most minimal of glances before turning her eyes toward her mashed potatoes. “I cried out in my sleep last night?” He forced a grin, desperate to make light of the situation. “Did Marie tell you that, Mamma?”
“I heard nothing,” Marie said flatly.
“I don’t need Marie to tell me,” his mother said, “I heard it with my own ears. You woke a poor woman up in the middle of the night! This is what your stress does to your tired old mama. Your Marie is just careful of your feelings, Carlito. You nearly woke the whole city.”
“I cried out in my sleep?” he asked his wife.
Marie only looked at him. “Eat your greens,” she said.
Later that night, with the rain already turned to sleet and whipping against the eaves, Mendes found himself in the kitchen with the telephone in one hand and Marie’s phone book opened to Bruce Chalmers’s home number in the other. After some consideration, he dialed.
“Hello?”
“Bruce,” he breathed, “it’s Carlos Mendes. I’m sorry to call you so late—”
“Is something wrong?”
“No,” he said. Then: “Yes. Christ, I don’t know.”
“Marie?”
“No, Marie’s fine. It’s me. That discussion we had…”
Bruce Chalmers sounded irritated. “You should have let me prescribe you some Zetran.”
“I think I just need to ask you a question, then I’ll be all right.”
“You’re starting to scare me here, Carlos.”
“I’ll be okay.”
The obstetrician sighed. “What is it?”
“The baby,” Carlos said. “I need to know the sex of the baby.”
“You and Marie agreed not to—”
“Marie still doesn’t want to know,” he said. “I do.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. For a brief moment, Mendes thought Bruce Chalmers had hung up on him. Then, with deep resignation, Chalmers’s voice again: “It’s a boy, Carlos. You’re going to have a son.”
Before Mendes’s eyes, the world abruptly went gray and grainy, as if he were no longer on the same dimensional plane as the rest of his surroundings. Objects right in front of him looked impossibly far away. The soft light over the kitchen sink suddenly seemed overly bright, nearly blinding. Even the sound of the sleet patting against the windows behind him sounded like someone dropping uncooked rice into a tin can.
Chalmers’s voice, equally distant: “Carlos? Carlos? What the hell is going on with you, man?”
“I’m here,” he said, forcing himself back into reality. He closed his eyes, no longer willing to look at the cruel world around him. “Just letting it all sink in. I’m going to be a father. I’m going to have a son.”
“Yeah,” Chalmers said, still a bit concerned. “Get that throwing arm in good shape, huh?”
“Right,” Mendes said, no longer hearing the other man’s words.
“Carlos—”
“Goodnight, Bruce.”
He hung up the phone and managed to catch himself in one of the kitchen chairs. He opened his eyes: looked at his hands, looked at the tabletop, looked at the two black windows frozen with sleet.
It’s a boy.
You’re going to have a son.
For the first time in his adult life, Doctor Carlos Mendes was terrified.
Chapter Fifteen
Felix Raintree’s sedan was discovered on North Town Road one day after the detective went missing, several hours after a heavy snowstorm swept through the valley. The car was uncovered by Sheriff Alan Bannercon of Caliban County—a young, southern officer who’d worked most his life in the backwater of Astroville, Kentucky before relocating to New York. Though none of his deputies appeared to have a problem with him, he knew there were some personnel, particularly from the District Attorney’s office, who did. Felix Raintree was one of them.
Bannercon found the car with its driver’s side door half open, the interior light off, the battery already dead. The entire vehicle was covered in snow; yet, there were no footprints in the fresh snow outside the car. Which was a bad sign. The absence of footprints meant Raintree’s vehicle had been abandoned some time ago.
This ain’t good.
Alan Bannercon thought of the missing hunters. It was not a passing consideration; rather, it hit him as if he’d seen a blaring neon sign, loud and clear, and it bothered him to make the connection so quickly. Associating Raintree with those hunters was like dooming the detective from the start. Three hunters mysteriously vanished last month…and now Alan Bannercon sat in his cruiser, staring at Raintree’s abandoned vehicle, with no impressions left behind in the snow. The car must have been there for hours, Bannercon understood, could have been there since last night.
He got out of his cruiser and carefully stepped around Raintree’s car, his eyes sweeping the ground for any sign of the missing detective, any footprint, a popped button from his shirt, a single loose thread. Peering inside the vehicle, he saw that the keys were still in the ignition, though the car had been turned off. Not a positive sign, those keys being there. He reached in and tried the headlights, found them to be dead (they were, in fact, already turned on), and backed away from the car. Looking over his shoulder, he cast a glance into the deepening woods behind him. Clumps of wet snow had already gathered in the branches of the fir trees, and the ground was sufficiently covered as well. Again, no footprints.
No shit, Bannercon thought. There are no footprints because he stepped away from his car before the snow ever started falling.
“Raintree!” His voice seemed to shake the trees. “Felix Raintree! Hello!”
Stepped away, he thought.
And what if Raintree didn’t step away at all? What if he’d been taken away?
But no, that was ridic
ulous. In Spires, everyone practically knew everyone else. Who would attack Felix Raintree? What in God’s name would be the reason? And would an attacker bother to shut off the car’s engine? No, it just didn’t make any sense. There had to be some other explanation for this, for Raintree leaving his car like this…
Of course, there was no explanation for the disappearance of those three hunters last month, either.
Cold, Bannercon hustled back to his cruiser and radioed the dispatcher.
For the next couple days, Kelly spent her time either with Gabriel Farmer or at her sister’s bedside. With Gabriel—Gabe, he liked to be called now—she felt a certain homey quality, a certain welcoming that she did not feel around her parents or inside the walls of her parents’ house. He was quiet and passive in his own sociable way, yet he seemed an attentive listener.
Though Becky still had not woken from unconsciousness, the young girl’s complexion gradually began to return to its normal color, and the bruises and scrapes that sheathed her body had started to fade. In the two weeks Kelly had been at the compound, she saw Becky’s doctor twice. He was an anticlimactic fellow with an enormous brow and quicksilver eyes which lingered just a second too long on the mouth of any person he watched talk. Both times, Kelly watched this Doctor Cavanaugh shuffle into the house, shake nonexistent rain off his overcoat, and nod deferentially at her parents (both of whom seemed not only accustomed to the small doctor’s aversion to conversation but more than willing to follow suit). In Becky’s bedroom, Doctor Cavanaugh huddled over Becky’s slumbering form like a troll looking to steal her breath. He carried with him a small leather satchel, and from it he produced a series of instruments with which he examined the sleeping girl. Cavanaugh checked her blood-pressure, her pupils, her respiration—all with the perfunctory efficiency of an electrical engineer. Kelly’s parents stood behind the little doctor the entire time, their eyes glazed, their faces slack and void of expression. It was like they were here because they knew they should be, not because they actually wanted to be, Kelly realized as she stood leaning in the bedroom doorway. And to her amazement, her parents didn’t ask the doctor a single question, didn’t express an ounce of concern. Their detachment from the situation infuriated Kelly. It evoked images of institutional Christmases where there would be a single wrapped gift at the foot of her bed—a gift from Glenda, she knew, despite what was written on the card; the meals in the enormous, sterile dining room where her parents sat like stone gargoyles at either end of the massive, hand-carved table. Even as a child she had wanted to stand up and scream at them, wanted to burst into a fit and start flinging silverware around the room—anything to break the monotony, and to generate some hint of emotional reaction from her parents.