by David Wong
He studied my face. I grasped the situation, with growing horror.
“John,” I said, eyes pleading. “Please.”
All I needed was for him to turn his back. I had the utility knife. Just hide it in my hand and, with a quick and decisive move, I could slit his throat. Use him as a shield, get the pistol away from the girl. After that, then she’d do whatever I wanted under the barrel of a gun.
Everything would be fine.
John took Krissy aside. They whispered to each other while she kept the gun on me, the barrel tipping up and down in her delicate hand.
I tried to move my legs. I could feel them but couldn’t make them obey me. I ground my teeth so hard I felt like they would shatter.
Gotta stay cool. I couldn’t hear, but the girl was doing all the talking now, the bitch trying to convince John to do something. He finally agreed, and came back to face me.
“Dave, here’s what I think. I think the thing that was in Wexler was in you. Maybe it still is, maybe it isn’t. Now, we’re gonna do something here. Krissy’s gonna give me the gun and I’m gonna put it on you, it’s nothin’ personal. And on top of that, she’s gonna press the zappy thing against your skin while she does this. So do not move. You know I won’t kill ya, Dave, but you jump or grab for her or anything, she’ll zap you and I’ll shoot you in the thigh. Then I’ll come over there and kick you in the crotch repeatedly.”
I showed no emotion, just nodded.
Get the arms moving, get them moving now. You get the Taser away from the girl and immobilize John with it. Move move move . . .
Feeling rushed into my right arm, I could flex the muscles all the way up. I was sure I could get it to respond.
I focused everything on readying the limb for a quick, violent move. A chop to the throat, make her drop the Taser.
Krissy handed the pistol to John. She came around me, pressed the Taser against my shoulder with her left hand.
With her right, she reached around her neck and took off her gold necklace, the one with the dangling cross.
What the—?
She dropped the necklace over my head at the exact moment I swung my fist—
My stomach clenched, my hand frozen in midair.
It’s poison. They’ve coated it with some kind of toxin that can seep through my skin like a nicotine patch, into my bloodstream, eating through my lungs and liver like acid . . .
I thrashed away from her and got my hands up, but my coordination was even more screwed now than from the Taser. I fought like a toddler. My body convulsed, organs thrashing around inside like they were making a jailbreak from my gut.
I fell, hard.
Hands on my arm.
Soft hands. The girl.
Everything stopped.
The seizure, or whatever the hell it was, ended abruptly. I was tired, confused. I blinked, trying to take in my surroundings.
I sat up and saw the girl stumbling as if she had been cracked over the head with a pipe, dazed, out on her feet. She bent down at the waist, breathing hard. She vomited on the floor.
I felt like doing the same. I had this greasy feeling like I was rid of something unclean, like I had just passed a tapeworm. And there was this lingering, sick shame, the feel of a man who sobers up just enough to realize he’s been making out with his best friend’s mother.
John stared at Krissy, terrified. He turned on me, questioning, suspicious.
“What are you looking at me for?” I shouted. “Go help her, you ass!”
John nodded, apparently convinced that I was fine. Krissy was not fine. Krissy was screaming. She went to her knees, then thrashed onto her back. I scrambled to my feet, moved toward her. John grabbed my jacket, holding me back.
“No!” I screamed. “It’s in her! The thing is in her! Let me touch her, let it pass back into me and then shoot me in the temple.”
“Not today.”
“It’s killing her!”
“No. It’s not. She’s killing it.”
“What?”
Krissy looked up at us with eyes that had turned bloodshot pink, sweat-soaked hair hanging down in strands. There was a deep, black hatred in that stare so profound that it was like a punch in the gut.
I had never seen anything approaching that look on a human face before. The intelligence behind it was so hateful it was alien, unfeeling, unreasoning, infinitely terrible.
I serve none but Korrok.
A blue eye, in the darkness.
He controlled you just like the cockroaches.
I wanted to curl up into a fetal position and start sucking my thumb, let my tears and dripping saliva pool under me.
Sorry. I tried living, tried being sentient. Can’t do it. Can’t live in the same universe with that.
She screamed again, loud. Opera-singer loud. Impossibly loud. She clutched at her hair and pressed her eyes closed. A sound erupted in the air around us, a long roar like an ocean wave crashing against a dock. Flecks of glass smacked me in the cheek.
A hundred panes of glass skylight exploded at once, a circular wave of airborne shards overhead, spreading like a ripple in a pond. Glass poured down around us, a high-pitched ringing as shards pelted the floor, raining down on our heads and shoulders.
Silence. She lay still.
Whoa. She’s dead.
No . . . chest moving. Breathing.
“MOVE! MOVE!”
John, pulling at my sleeve, lifting Krissy to her feet.
A metal beam crashed down behind her.
The room was coming apart. We ran, half dragging her out of the food court. Ceiling trusses and light fixtures and cables and boards and glass came down in an avalanche.
We tumbled through the gate and into the hall, falling on our asses. The entire food court ceiling collapsed behind us, debris piling in front of the door, a wave of compressed air and dust rushing past us like a sandstorm.
Krissy tried to sit up, looking utterly exhausted. She wiped grit from her eyes.
I took the necklace from around my neck and handed it to her. She took it without hesitation, put it on.
“She broke it,” John said. “Like a fever. It passed from you into her, but it couldn’t live in her.”
He turned his attention to the girl.
“How do you feel?”
“Like I could sleep for a thousand years.”
MY BULLET HAD creased John’s scalp and he said he was okay but, damn, did it bleed a lot. The wad of shirt he held against it was soaked.
We wandered around the mall looking for Molly and any additional monsters. Nothing on both counts.
Krissy stayed with Wexler, calling for an ambulance on her cell. She insisted he was alive, though we could see no sign of it. Then, as the first sirens faded in from the distance, Wexler climbed into consciousness long enough to smile at Krissy, brush a strand of hair out of her face with his fingers. He said something to her that we couldn’t hear and wasn’t any of our business anyway.
Paramedics arrived, with many, many questions. John told them the truth. And I mean he literally told them I was possessed and that killing the demon destroyed the food court. He refused treatment.
After the ambulance left we made our way out to Krissy’s car. She asked John, “Are you going to get your head looked at?”
“Nah, it’s just a cut. I was gonna shave my head anyway. Are you gonna go see Danny in the hospital?”
“Yeah. But . . . there’s something I’m supposed to do first. He asked me if I had watched the tape. Do you know what that’s about?”
I said “no” and John said “yes” simultaneously.
“The video he was shooting,” John said. “In his apartment.”
A HALF HOUR later, Krissy sat down on the couch in Wexler’s apartment while John rewound the tape and let it play. Wexler, looking tired and beaten, appeared on the screen as before.“Hi, honey. Are you there? Answer me if you’re there.”
Krissy looked at us, confused. We had no answers. She turned he
r eyes back to the screen, waiting.“Come on. It’s okay. Just say hello.”
“Um, hello,” said Krissy, looking embarrassed. A tear ran down her cheek. “Danny. You look awful . . .”“I know. It’s been a rough couple of weeks,”
Danny said, replying to the camera a full three hours before Krissy made that comment.“Baby, I’ve done somethin’ really stupid. I’ve gotten wrapped up in something. Something you can’t imagine.”
“What?” Krissy said, sobbing. “What did you get into?”“If I told you the details, you would wish I hadn’t. But you know by now that I’m not myself. I come and go, and right now I’m fine, but I have to fight for every second of control. It’s draining. Baby, it takes so much energy to keep myself on top, on the surface, at the wheel. As soon as I relax, he’ll take over. It will take over. And I’ll just be a spectator. Helpless.”
He broke down into sobs. So did Krissy, sounding utterly drained.“Are you okay?”
he asked, through hitching breaths.“Were you hurt in all of this?”
“I’m fine. I’ll be fine. This is so strange.”“I don’t even know how I’m doing it, any of this. Right now. I see things, I hear things across time and space and . . . it’s better if you can put it out of your head, Kris. It’s better to live the rest of your life believing things like this aren’t possible. But there’s other things I need to tell you. Things I’ve been wanting to say for a long time. And if I’m still alive, I probably won’t have the courage to say them in person. But first . . .”
Wexler’s eyes shifted slightly. A chill ran down my spine.
He was looking at me.
I shifted to my left a couple of feet, and his eyes followed me.
He said,“You’re David Wong?”
No! Say no!
“Yeah . . . I guess.”
Video conferencing across time. Man I need pie, and fast.“I don’t know all the details, things are . . . confused in my mind right now. But you’re under the eye. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”
I found I couldn’t answer. My mouth had gone so dry it had glued shut.“David, you alone fully understand what is at stake here.”
A thousand questions popped into my mind but all I could do was peel my lips apart and say, “But . . . I don’t . . .” before trailing off.“Kris and I need to have a private conversation now, okay? Glad you made it out alive.”
I BEGGED OFF from John’s offer to stay the night at his place and drink many beers with him. I was hungry, and had something else to take care of first.
I took a cab to McDonald’s and had it dump me in the parking lot.
I took a deep breath, steeled myself and approached the sign. I prayed I’d find it back to normal.
Nope. There was Ronald, cutting himself, gutting himself, eating himself. I felt something rigid in my jacket pocket and pulled out a rusty utility razor I didn’t remember putting in there. I dropped it like it was a rattlesnake, then picked it up with two fingers and threw it in a trash can.
I stared down the poster again.
I was hungry.
The inside of the restaurant was closed but they did have a twenty-four-hour drive-through. I walked up to it and, shivering in the chill of the autumn air, ordered two bratwurst.
I sat on the curb across the parking lot and, looking right at the sign the whole time, ate them both.
ARNIE ROLLED TO a stop in the weed-and-dirt field that would have been the mall parking lot had they ever gotten around to paving it.
“So,” Arnie said. “Christian mints, crosses, Bibles. This whole long story is just an elaborate setup to get me to subscribe to Guideposts, isn’t it? You’re gonna leave me with pamphlets with pictures of Jesus, then go start telling this whole story to the next sinner? Got to be less roundabout ways, Wong.”
“No. That stuff, the crosses and all that, either it works because we think it works, or because the bad guys think it works. Or maybe there’s some power everybody can tap into if they just know how.”
“It’s Scientology, isn’t it?”
I said, “We never saw Krissy or Wexler again. Not even on TV. They moved out of town as soon as he got out of the hospital. Together. So, yeah, he was porking her.”
He squinted at the sprawling skeleton of the mall and said, “This is the place?”
“You think a town could have two places like this?”
I ran my hands through my hair and stared at the darkened sockets on the decomposing mall where windows should have been. I heard the faint sound of a plastic tarp snapping in the breeze somewhere. “You scared, Arnie?”
“Should I be? Is this place haunted?”
“Nothin’ so simple as that. I wish it were. You say it’s haunted and you picture the ghost of some old lady wandering around aimlessly. The things that come and go around here, I don’t know that they were ever human. Or maybe they just don’t remember it. Try to imagine a Hitler or a Vlad the Impaler or even the nasty old man at the dump who steals people’s cats and buries them alive. Now imagine those guys but strip them of all their limitations. No bodies, so they never die or run down or get tired. Give them all the time in the world. Imagine that malice, that stupid black mass of hate drifting through eternity, just burning on and on and on like an oil well fire.”
Arnie waited for me to go on. I didn’t.
I was realizing all of a sudden how hard it was going to be to tell this next part. I thought it would feel good to unload the whole tale on somebody. But this next bit, this felt more like a confession.
I got out of the car and walked toward a concrete ramp, a would-be loading dock for a stillborn mall department store. I heard Arnie’s door click and thunk behind me and knew he was following.
I said, “There was a girl here in town. She disappeared last year. It wasn’t a big story, but you can look it up.”
“Let me guess. You were the last person to talk to her.”
I didn’t answer. I climbed up the loading ramp and reached a doorway, greeted by the familiar smell of mildew and urine.
I tore aside a strip of yellow warning tape and stepped into the cool darkness within.
“Now, this is going to sound crazy . . .”
CHAPTER 10
The Missing Girl
IN THE SUMMER of the year after the Wexler thing, I realized someone was watching me through my television.
I could sense it, the way you sense someone staring at your back. A presence behind the screen, a pair of watching eyes.
I ignored it as long as I could, telling myself no one would want to secretly watch a single twenty-three-year-old on his couch eating Taco Bell bean burritos day after day (eighty cents apiece, two and a Coke for three bucks). But I knew better, of course. There were, apparently, parties who had a very good reason to keep eyes on me at this point, aside from my perfectly-sculpted Statue-of-David buttocks.
One night, with the television on some History Channel special about history’s Top Ten Deadliest Warships or some shit, I turned away from the TV and toward the mirror on the far wall. I went to pull a brush through my knotted hair and froze.
I had glimpsed the TV, playing in the reflection over my shoulder.
A face.
It was an oddly shaped face, with features that were human but off. A Michael Jackson face, a face like a mask. Wide, too-large eyes, a nose not quite centered. Looking right at my back from the TV, plain as day.
I spun on the television, the hairbrush flying from my hand, a terrorized breath sucking through my teeth.
Back to normal now, the Bismarck getting sunk in a plume of smoke.
Again, I suppose most people would have feared a mental illness at that point. By now, though, mental illness would just mean some tests and a prescription. Big deal. No, my fear was of somebody actually watching me through my fucking television.
I told John about it and he came right over, as a best friend would. We cursed at the television for half an hour, then he dropped his pants and pressed his balls
against the screen. Like he said, there was no need to change our routine. He suggested I get some rest, that I was stressed because of Jennifer, who had moved in and then moved back out again twice in the last six months. Then we drank and played PlayStation hockey until the sun came up.
That became my routine for weeks after, sleeping too little and drinking too much and playing too much hockey. Things started to spin out of control. Soon we were playing without the goalies, skating six on six and scoring games 74 to 68. Finally, when we started both playing on the same side (Red Wings) against an inept team controlled by the computer AI and winning the games 126 to zero, I knew I had hit rock bottom.
I also knew I was still being watched. I knew this was a bad sign, that things were moving again, that I had to get my head on straight.
I threw out the bottles and shaved my face and even considered cleaning the house. I started ironing my shirts again. Somebody mailed me a little bottle of what they claimed was holy water and I kept it on my nightstand. I hung a garage-sale crucifix from my front door.
Then, just after Christmas, things got weird again.
THE END BEGAN when I came home from work on a frigid Friday night. I was plowing my truck through the worst winter storm the area had seen in years, the world looking like the aftermath of God’s sno-cone machine explosion.
I pushed in through the front door, snow melting off my leather coat. A prickly feverish sweat was breaking out all over me as my skin adjusted to the fifty-degree temperature difference between my living room and the night air outside. The wind shifted, the whole house creaked, there was a tinkling of ice chips flicking off the windows.
I had just left a nightmarish sixteen-hour, soul-numbing double shift at Wally’s Video Rental Orifice. The night manager had claimed she couldn’t get out in the storm and asked if I could please work for her, saying that she owed me big-time, that I was such a sweetheart and that if I ever needed anything, anything at all, just let her know. I don’t think she meant that. But I put my head down and plowed through a one-thousand-minute, dead-quiet, customer-free battle against exhaustion and my urge to beat my coworkers to death. Now I just wanted to dry off and curl up in—