by Brian Harmon
Eric wasn’t sure how to respond. Sure he’d made some discoveries, but it was Aiden who understood what was going on here.
“That kid has Normer’s research, but we’ve been watching him since we first arrived in this town. He didn’t make any headway until you showed up. I don’t think he’s the one who’s going to find it. I think it’s you.”
Eric stared at him for a moment, considering. “Even if that’s true, I don’t know where to go next. Aiden’s gone. Spooked bad, if he’s anything like me. I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again. And your fat friend just ran off with the only clue we had anyway.”
“Leave that to me. I’ll get it back.”
“Leave it to you? I don’t even know your name.”
“That’s true.”
Eric waited. When it was obvious the man wasn’t going to say anything more, he said, “And you’re not going to tell me, are you?”
“Technically, we’re not supposed to tell anyone outside of the organization our names.”
“You just told me Normer’s name.”
“Normer isn’t a part of the organization anymore.”
“I guess you’ve got me there.” Eric recalled his encounter with the mysterious foggy man the previous year. He, too, refused to give his name, although he never told him why. More and more it was looking like this was the same organization. He’d hoped not to be dealing with the same people. He did, after all, have something to do with the death of one of their men. Also, he possessed sensitive information about another rogue agent still on the run, a Mr. William Loneskey, better known to Eric as Father Billy.
But then again, he supposed it was far better that there weren’t two such terrifying organizations out there.
“What about the aura plasma?” asked Eric. “If that guy can spy on anyone, couldn’t he be listening in right now?”
The man gave him another of those smug grins. “Don’t worry about that. I found a way to block him for short periods of time. He won’t ever know we had this talk.”
Eric wasn’t sure about this.
“We’re on the same side,” promised Pink Shirt. “You just have to trust me.”
Eric considered his options. He didn’t have many. Begrudgingly, he nodded. “Okay.”
“Excellent. I’ll get back your clue. You see if you can find that kid again.”
Without waiting for a reply, the man in the pink shirt walked past him and disappeared into the woods.
When he could no longer hear him moving through the brush, Karen’s cell phone alerted him to a new text message.
YOU DON’T REALLY TRUST HIM
It wasn’t a question. She could read his mind.
Some of what that man said had rung true, but Eric sensed strongly that he was still lying about something. Maybe most things. “I don’t.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
If the noise from the industrial center was coming from the direction Pink Shirt went, then Eric wanted to go in the opposite direction, hopefully back toward the creek. Paul must be wondering where he’d gone by now.
I CALLED PAUL WHEN YOU BLACKED OUT
“You did?”
I WAS SCARED FOR YOU
Eric imagined that she was. From her unique perspective, it must have seemed that he had just vanished from her thoughts, as if he’d died. “Sorry.”
NOT YOUR FAULT
“Where’s Paul now?”
HE WAS LOOKING FOR YOU, BUT I TOLD HIM TO STOP AND HIDE WHEN YOU CAME TO AND I REALIZED WHO WAS WITH YOU
Eric nodded. “Good. And good job not showing yourself back there. That was some smart thinking.”
THANKS. GLAD TO HELP. YOU SHOULD CALL YOUR BROTHER
“I will right now.” But before he could begin searching Karen’s address book for Paul’s number, the Spice Girls began playing again. He thought for a second that Paul had grown impatient and beaten him to it. But the call was coming from his own phone again.
“Hello?”
“Find the boy! Before it’s too late! Time is running out!”
“Time is running out for what?”
“Turn back the clock and spiral down.”
“I don’t understand what that—”
“Sixteen.”
“Sixteen. Right. Because that makes any kind of sense.”
“Hurry!”
“Can I have my phone back?”
But the mysterious caller had already disconnected the call.
“Okay then. That’s a no. I guess.”
THAT WAS FREAKY WEIRD
“Just the kind of day I seem to be having.”
WANT ME TO TRY TEXTING YOUR NUMBER? SEE IF I CAN TALK TO HIM?
“No. I don’t know who that is. I don’t want anyone knowing about you. I worry.”
AW. YOU’RE SWEET
Eric felt himself blush a little. But it was the truth. If the wrong people found out about Isabelle, they might try to find her. And then they’d take her away from him. People like Pink Shirt’s mysterious organization, which may already know about her, since the cowboy’s creepy goo had apparently been spying on him all day.
He hated that.
He found Paul’s number and called as he made his way back in the direction he hoped would return him to the creek. He answered on the first ring.
“Eric?”
“Yeah. I’m here.”
“Thank God. Isabelle said you were attacked.”
“I was. That damned cowboy.”
“Is Aiden with you?”
“No. I lost track of him. I was hoping he’d made his way back to you.”
“I haven’t seen him.”
Eric cursed.
“Where are you?”
“Still in the woods somewhere. I got turned around. But I know I’m moving away from the factories.”
“Listen for this.”
Eric heard the phone crackle as Paul covered it with his hand. An instant later, a loud, piercing whistle sounded from ahead of him and to the left.
“Did you hear that?”
“I did. Stay there.” He’d always been impressed by Paul’s ability to whistle like that. As a child he’d spent hours trying to mimic it, but he just couldn’t do it. Perhaps it wasn’t a learned ability but a natural one.
He aimed himself in the direction of the sound and shoved his way through the brush.
“I can hear you coming,” reported Paul.
A moment later, Eric caught sight of him, cell phone still pressed to his ear. His pants legs were soaked from dashing through the creek.
“What happened to you?” Paul asked as he approached. “You all right? You’re bleeding.”
Eric glanced down at his arms. There were a few scratches and scrapes, but they weren’t deep. “Thorns, mostly. I’m fine. Which way’s the park.”
Paul turned and looked around. “Um… I think it’s that way.” He waved his hand vaguely toward the trees behind him.
“Okay then.”
“Should we look for Aiden?”
Eric scanned the area around them. He didn’t even know where to begin. Aiden could be anywhere in these woods. But he thought it was more likely that he’d already left the forest and vanished back into the city somewhere. Although it wasn’t likely that he’d gotten far on foot, he was sure they wouldn’t be able to find him if he’d gone back into hiding. The fact that Paul didn’t run into him when he waded up the creek suggested that he hadn’t gone back the way they came.
Not that Eric blamed him. Their experience in the rail car had been terrifying.
He shook his head. “Let’s just head back to the truck. If he’s not waiting for us there, we probably won’t find him.”
They located the creek quickly enough and followed it back to the park while Eric recounted his experiences. He even told him about the helpful, black creature.
Paul listened to the entire story. When Eric was done, he said, “So how do those animal-things fit in? I mean, first they attack you, now they’re friendly?”<
br />
“I don’t understand it, either.”
“They can’t be real, can they? I mean, they must be another of the fat guy’s projections, right?”
“The one that ripped my jeans wasn’t a projection.”
“Neither was that golden stuff, if it did what you said it did.”
“True.”
“Obviously, he was lying to you about how fragile they were. He must’ve made them pop, just to make you drop your guard.”
“But why would he bother showing me the way to that old passenger car? If he knew it was there, he could’ve just taken it for himself.”
“He wanted to hurt you.”
Eric shook his head. “Then why not just set those monsters on me when I was alone in the creek?”
“Maybe he wanted to lure you farther away so no one could hear you yelling for help?”
“I don’t think so,” decided Eric, “it doesn’t make sense. Something doesn’t add up.”
“So what do we do now?”
That was a good question. They were approaching the truck. They could both see that Aiden wasn’t waiting for them there. And there was no reason to return to the library, either. It would take hours to get there on foot and avoid being seen. Besides, there was probably more of that golden liquid waiting for them there, the stuff Pink Shirt called “aura plasma.”
For that matter, there was a good chance there was a drop hidden on him somewhere right now, making everything they said and did instantly known to the cowboy.
Eric couldn’t fathom how he was supposed to beat someone with such awesome power.
“All we’ve got is what Aiden and I found in that box.”
Paul paused as he stepped up to the side of the truck. “But you don’t have it. A psycho stole it from you. Remember?”
“I know it had an A and a G written on it.”
“What the hell does A G mean?”
Eric opened the passenger door and then turned and gazed out at the park. He felt weary. “That’s what we’ve got to figure out.”
Both of them climbed into the truck and closed the doors.
For a few seconds, neither of them saw it. Then they both looked down at it at the same time.
The plastic bag that Aiden retrieved from the motel’s moldy wall, the very one Eric watched him rescue from the “burning” backpack before fleeing the aura plasma, was sitting on the seat between them.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Clearly, Aiden had returned to the truck at some point. But why did he leave again?
As Paul drove south on Allendar toward the far side of town, putting distance between them and Lister Park, Eric examined the lone item he found inside the plastic bag: an old, well-worn notebook.
“What’s it say?” asked Paul.
Eric shook his head. “It’s nonsense to me.” It appeared to be a journal of some sort, but very little of it made any sense. “I think it might be Glen Normer’s.”
“There’s nothing useful in it?”
“Nothing I can make any sense out of. It starts out by saying, ‘The greatest secret of the universe is hidden all around us in plain sight. We’re just too blind to see it.’”
“Deep. So what is this great secret?”
“Doesn’t say.”
“Of course it doesn’t.”
“Well, it does say it’s a secret.”
“True.”
He flipped forward through the pages. “It goes on to quote a bunch of random-looking scripture. Then it suddenly deteriorates into several pages of sloppy, shorthand notes that I can’t read.” Glen Normer’s handwriting was atrocious. Many pages were almost illegible. What he was able to read was little better. “There’s a list of locations. Unseen, I’m assuming. There are dozens of them, from all over the country. Then more scripture… Here’s something about men trying to kill him: ‘Monsters that look like men.’ ‘Terrible, ungodly powers.’”
“Sounds like the kind of people you’ve been making friends with lately.”
“It does.” Eric skimmed on. “This looks like something he copied out of a scientific journal. Some kind of complex formula… Really?”
“Math, too? I’m so out of my league.”
“Here’re the numbers from those symbols we’ve been finding… More shorthand… This part looks like Mandarin or something.”
“Mandarin? As in Chinese?”
Eric shrugged and continued skimming the pages. It was less a journal than a disjointed, paranoid account of a man’s unhealthy obsession with something that could only be imaginary. Except that he’d witnessed some of these things for himself. “Here’s a detailed description of those creatures I’ve been seeing.” There were other monstrous things described in the pages, too, including something that sounded like a bizarre cross between a crocodile and the sarlacc pit from Return of the Jedi.
Eric couldn’t help but wonder if Aiden’s mentor might have been utterly insane. And yet, there were obviously nuggets of truth scattered throughout the journal.
“Anything about AG?”
“Nothing I can see.”
“I don’t suppose it tells us where we should go next, then.”
“That would be helpful, but no. Unless it’s all hidden in here somewhere.” Eric flipped through the journal again. There were at least eighty pages of this nonsense. It would take hours to peruse it front to back. It would take days more to translate the Mandarin and try to make sense of the shorthand and random chunks of mathematical equations.
It was difficult to believe this thing was real.
“According to Pinky back there, this guy was one of them once. Given the crazy stuff we know about that organization, is it possible he just lost it?”
“If this is any indication, it’s not out of the question. Not by a long shot.” Pink Shirt had even told him that men like Normer were known to occasionally go mad in the field. The more Eric looked at it, the more it seemed that was precisely the case.
“So then why did the kid leave it for us?”
That was a damn good question. Another good question was, why was this journal so important that he went out of his way not only to retrieve it from the wall in the motel but also to snatch it out of his backpack before the aura plasma fire could destroy it?
Eric checked the plastic bag again, but nothing else was inside.
What was he missing?
The last few pages were blank. Glen had reached either the end of his peculiar ramblings or the end of his troubled life. (Eric had a dreadful feeling it was the latter.) Leafing through these final blank pages one at a time, he found a single, scrawled note. “Boxlar,” he read. Under that: “One, one, seven.”
“Boxlar?”
“Written in the back. Handwriting looks different.”
Paul looked over at him. “Boxlar Road, maybe?”
“There’s a Boxlar Road?”
“Behind the fire station.”
“Oh.”
“How long have you lived in this town?”
Eric shot him an annoyed look. “Who memorizes all the street names?”
“I’d think it’d just sink in after a while.”
Eric returned his gaze to the book. “One seventeen Boxlar Road then, Map Guru.”
Paul chuckled and turned on his blinker. Circling the block, he pointed the pickup back the way they’d come. “So you think Aiden wrote that note?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. How far is Boxlar from the park?”
“It’s not that close.”
“Could he have walked there by now?”
Paul considered it. “Not on foot. You think we should search the roads between there and the park, see if we can spot him?”
Eric shook his head. He doubted very much that they’d see him if he didn’t want to be seen. “Let’s just go. We’re probably still being watched, so let’s try to get there before the bad guys.”
Paul turned at the next intersection and made his way to the fire station. Within a few minute
s they were pulling into 117 Boxlar Road and parking the Ford next to an old, powder blue Chrysler New Yorker.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” exclaimed Paul.
Eric was thinking pretty much the same thing. There, stretching out before them, were the somber grounds of Donnelfolk Cemetery.
“What the hell are we supposed to do here?”
I was a good question. Was this really where they were supposed to be? All they had was a name and a number in the back of a madman’s journal. And yet, this was 117 Boxlar Road. Those two lines had led them to a real place right here in Creek Bend. It was difficult to dismiss it as a coincidence.
Paul sighed. “Well, let’s get it over with.”
Eric opened the door and stepped out. Get it over with indeed. Shading his eyes with his hand, he scanned the headstones. This was the largest cemetery in the city. He couldn’t see the far end from here, much less the two long legs that branched off to the west. At least three thousand gravestones lay before them. Were they supposed to find something here?
“Maybe A. G. is a person’s initials,” suggested Paul as he examined the neatly mown grounds.
“How many of these stones do you think have those initials on them?”
“Didn’t say it sounded easy.”
“And even if we do find an A. G. in this cemetery and somehow know we’re in the right place…then what? It’s not like we can ask the guy if he knows anything.”
“I sure hope not.”
Eric ran his hand through his hair. Why would Aiden send them here? Did Aiden send them here? Or was “Boxlar one one seven” something else, something that had nothing to do with any of this?
“You think there’s something unseen around here?”
“Maybe. But Aiden said there were only seven of them. Eight, now that we found those rail cars.”
“Maybe he lied. Or maybe he didn’t know this one was here until he saw that rock you guys found.”
“I don’t know. Let’s just have a look around. Maybe something will stand out if we see it.”
Paul nodded and set out into the cemetery without another word.
Eric followed him. This seemed wrong. This wasn’t some cheesy haunted house set. This was a modern cemetery. He’d attended burials here. He had family buried in these rows.