by SM Reine
But when Isobel wanted to dress like a normal person, she looked amazing in an entirely different way. Think hip-hugging black cotton. Think slinky. Think modestly cut, but leaving absolutely nothing to mystery.
Isobel was as graceful in heeled pumps as she was in bare feet. She stood beside me on rocky ground, smoothing her hands over her hair—which she hadn’t been able to resist decorating with feathers and beads—as she studied the retirement village.
Mourners were moving from the parking area toward the recreation hall in the back. I hadn’t seen that many people wearing black ever since I staked out a Black Death concert to pick up some lethe-stoned witches.
“Don’t you think that having a group service where the mass murder occurred is kind of…tacky?” Isobel whispered.
I thought it was tacky as hell, but what could you do?
“Our priests cleansed the place. An exorcist didn’t find anything to exorcise. There’s nothing dangerous here. So yeah, it’s tacky, but that’s all it is—tacky. Anyway, everyone died in the house. Service is in there.” I nodded to the rec hall.
She rubbed her upper arms like she was cold. “Tacky and morbid.” Despite being a death witch, Isobel wasn’t much of a fan of dealing with the dead. I sympathized. Really.
“I told you that you don’t have to do this.”
“And you don’t need to protect me.” A smile crept over her full lips. “I appreciate it, though.”
I offered my hand to her. She looped her arm through mine.
Impressively, Isobel didn’t lean on me at all as we walked across the grass and uneven paving stones. Don’t ask me how women can manage to look composed, even graceful, while wearing stilts for shoes. It’s got to be some kind of inborn power for the female species. I would have broken my ankle in three steps or less.
A little girl played on the lawn. She was wearing a white dress, kinda like a nightgown, and her hair looked like it hadn’t been brushed in weeks. That never would have flown in my house as a kid. Pops had always been after my sister’s hair with combs and scissors. Used to say that an unkempt kid reflected an unloving family.
Maybe this girl did have an unloving family, since she was ripping grass out by the fistful and flinging it at the empty house. Her fingernails were dirty. She made little growling noises as she rampaged through the garden.
“Classy,” I remarked. “Bringing a monster to a group funeral. Real classy.”
“What?” Isobel looked too distracted to notice the kid’s behavior. Her fingers were digging into my arm.
“Never mind.”
Everything about the recreation hall was as cramped, old, and dreary as the house itself. The chairs looked like antique torture devices. Nobody in the early twentieth century knew anything about ergonomics, let me tell you. Ten minutes sitting in one of those tiny seats with a rigid back and I’d be more uncomfortable than a thirteen-year-old boy at a nude beach.
Bouquets of lilies and white roses decorated the aisles, roped together with gauzy white material leading to a pulpit. There was no priest in sight. A few family members stood against the wall talking, and half the chairs were filled.
When Isobel and I entered, the conversations died off. Dozens of eyes turned on us.
There was no way that any of those people could have recognized me. I’d never seen any of them before, and they’d never seen me. Even if some douchebag had given them my address for an invitation, I was a spook, like Herbert had said.
But they still looked accusatory. Hateful.
Angry.
I felt real conspicuous as I moved to sit in the back row, but Isobel stopped me. “Where are the bodies, Cèsar?”
I looked again. There were no caskets for viewing anywhere in the room where the service was being held.
Weird. The invitation had said the memorial would include a viewing of the bodies.
I patted my pockets down for the invitation. I found it inside my jacket.
The crumpled card was blank. No time, no address, no list of events. Both sides were as clean as though they’d never been touched by a drop of ink.
My heart rate jacked into high gear. “What the fuck?”
My cell phone rang and the tone sounded distorted, as though it were ringing from inside a toilet bowl. Fritz’s name blinked on the screen. But when I pressed the button to answer it, the screen went black, as though the battery was dead.
Just like Fritz’s phone had drained in the basement, too.
“Cèsar,” Isobel hissed.
I punched the power button, trying to get my phone to turn on again. “What?”
Finally, I looked up.
We were alone in the rec hall. The chairs had moved from organized rows in the center of the room to stacks along the walls. They were piled up against the windows as though waiting to be burned on a pyre.
I hadn’t heard them move. Not even a scrape of wood.
Isobel was starting to hyperventilate. I pulled her to my chest. I wasn’t sure if it was to comfort her or me.
The flowers wilted around us. Petals shriveling, falling to the uneven floor like brown snow.
Dense fog pressed against the outside of the recreation hall, blotting out our view of the canyon walls, the grassy lawn, the house, the press waiting by the dirt road.
Suzy had been right. I never should have gone to that memorial.
It was a trap, and I’d dragged Isobel right into it.
“Let’s get out of here.” I hooked my arm around her shoulders and turned to the door.
A man stood in our path, greasy hair caked to his scalp, scrubs covered in muddy handprints. His skin was the same color as the fog, but dotted with black pustules. His lips were swollen sausages.
I’d been looking at this guy’s autopsy photos a lot over the last week.
It was the orderly, Nichols.
You know, the person that Suzy had shot in the head.
“Hope.” His shoulders trembled as he extended his hands toward us. A line of black blood trickled between his eyebrows and down his nose to touch his chin. “No hope!”
Isobel screamed. “No!”
She shoved the man aside, and he actually stumbled as though she had been able to touch him. When he hit the floor, I heard a wet splat, like he’d landed on balloons filled with blood.
Before I could catch her, Isobel flung the door open and shot out into Paradise Mile canyon.
CHAPTER SIX
NICHOLS WASN’T FAST ENOUGH to keep me from chasing Isobel outside.
Scary as it was to be assaulted by a dead man, I was a lot more scared of losing Isobel.
The air outside the recreation hall clung to my sweaty skin, making my suit drag as though I’d just emerged from a lake. The fog only gave me a few feet of visibility. The world was made of indistinct gray shapes on a paler gray void.
“Isobel!” My voice didn’t seem to travel very far. Her name fell flat.
A feminine figure flashed through the gloom. Couldn’t tell if it was her or the woman with the bad teeth.
Glancing back at the open door, I saw a man moving in the darkness behind me—a pale shape with a perfect circle in his forehead where Suzy had planted a bullet. Nichols was getting to his feet, every motion making wet popping noises. Bones rattled inside the sack of his body.
I really should have brought my gun.
Isobel’s distant cry brought my attention snapping back to her. I chased after her, feet crunching against grass, breath choppy in my ears.
Forget the bodies that should have been on display, forget the dead orderly, forget the fog. I had to catch up with Isobel. Keep her safe in that oppressive gray nothingness.
The same shock of entropy that had screwed up the rec hall had also hit the parked cars. The sports sedan was flipped onto its side. The ragged rubber of its tires looked like clothes hanging off a shambling zombie. Shattered glass sparkled on the lawn.
Another car was upside down; two others had somehow been stacked on each other.
Godzilla would have made less of a mess if he had rampaged through the parking zone.
Even my car—my loyal piece of crap that was well past its expiration date—was gripped in the clutch of the same kind of vines that climbed the canyon walls.
Isobel cried out again. Footsteps slurped behind me. Danger ahead, danger behind.
I wrenched the antenna off of my car, wielding it like a switch. Not much of a weapon, but there wasn’t much of anything to fight, either. I couldn’t whip the fog, couldn’t beat away the creepy silence that had fallen over Paradise Mile.
But I could slap the shit out of Nichols if he caught up with me.
Running blind, trying to follow Isobel’s voice, I had no way to tell if I was actually getting anywhere. The fog destroyed all sense of direction. I’d lost the house and the rec hall. All I saw were trees.
Then my knees slammed into wood. I tumbled over the sawhorses that had held the press back.
My hands slapped against the dirt road on the other side.
The news vans weren’t in disarray like all the cars were, but that was because there were no news vans at all. They’d vanished as though they never existed. No tracks, no oil stains, no imprints on the ground where their tripods had stood.
What the fuck?
Isobel gasped somewhere ahead. I scrambled to my feet and rushed toward her.
She emerged from the fog and bounced off of me.
I grabbed her elbows to steady her. “Whoa!”
Isobel had ditched the stilettos to run barefoot, and now she was covered in dust from the ankles down. Her eyes were wild and panicked. She looked like an animal that had spotted a hunter and heard the click of a gun.
“It doesn’t end,” she gasped, digging her nails into my sleeves. “It just keeps going!”
“What are you talking about?”
She flung her hand toward the road. “There’s no escaping through there!”
“We can’t just run off down the road anyway.” I employed my very best “soothe the crazy woman” voice. “We’re miles outside Mojave. There’s nothing but desert beyond the canyon. We don’t have water, we don’t have food…”
“Fuck food,” she snapped. “You heard what that man said!”
No hope.
“I get that you’re scared, but we can’t just—”
“We have to get out of here,” Isobel said. “We’ll die if we don’t! We’ll be worse than dead!”
She was hysterical, but that didn’t mean she was wrong.
I could still hear footsteps. I had no idea where they were coming from or even if they belonged to Nichols. The crawling sensation at the back of my neck hinted that there might be many worse things out there than Suzy’s victim.
“All right. We can leave.”
Maybe we could flag someone down outside the canyon. Or maybe escaping that creepy fucking house would make my cell phone work again. Fritz would send a helicopter to pick us up if I could reach him.
But I’d only taken a few more steps when Isobel grabbed me again. “Didn’t you hear me? There’s no escape that way.”
“That’s the only way.” I handed her the antenna from my car. “Hang on to this for me.”
She clutched the antenna like it was a teddy bear. Didn’t even ask why I was giving it to her. “Okay. Okay, I can do that. But—”
“No buts. Come on.”
I dragged Isobel down the dirt road, ignoring her protests. I couldn’t blame her for being freaked out. I was freaked out, too. But if she wasn’t going to keep her cool, then I needed to hang on to composure for both our sakes.
The road leading out of the canyon was just as twisting and narrow on foot as it had been in a car. Maybe even narrower. It felt like the creepers were growing thicker, giving us less room to navigate. The fog had definitely become denser again. Made everything feel cramped.
But the exit was wide enough to allow cars to pass. I’d driven through it more than once. We could definitely get through on foot.
The canyon walls weren’t going to close in on us.
We didn’t get very far down the road. I stepped around a sharp corner and found myself staring at the Paradise Mile sign again, now consumed by so many vines that I could only make out half of the words. The house would be hidden in the mist just a few yards behind it.
“Wait.” I looked back the way I had come. How had I gotten turned around?
“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” Isobel said. “There’s no way out.”
A chill crawled over my scalp.
This was too much like the nightmares I’d been having—the weird distortion of reality, the doors that led to the wrong places, hallways where they didn’t belong.
Now the road looped back on itself.
No. I’m not dreaming. This can’t be right.
I grabbed her a little tighter. “It’s just the fog. We got disoriented and took a wrong turn.”
And I started walking again.
Isobel protested as I moved faster, feet scuffing against the dirt.
The vines were definitely covering more of the canyon walls now. The canopy was weaving tighter and tighter. No hint of sunlight could break through to burn away the fog.
There wasn’t a plant on this Earth that should have grown that fast.
I made sure to watch the ground so that I wouldn’t get confused by the turns this time.
Pops used to take my siblings and me to a corn maze every Halloween. The biggest damn corn maze that you can imagine. It had been so labyrinthine that the Minotaur would have gotten lost in it. Pops thought it was funny to drop us in there and let us try to figure it out on our own, while he drank with the farm’s owner.
It pissed me off at the time, but now I understood it was good parenting. What else do you do with three unruly kids on a Halloween sugar high? Throw ‘em in a maze and go drink hard cider until they’re exhausted.
Anyway, I’d quickly learned a trick to escaping that corn maze: just stick to the right-hand wall.
No matter where you’re going, if you follow the same wall, you’ll always get to the exit sooner or later. It worked on labyrinths of corn. It should have worked on the road, too.
Easy as pumpkin pie.
I followed the right wall of the canyon for ten minutes, according to my watch. Ten minutes alone in the fog with just the two of us.
Then we turned a corner.
My knee bumped against the Paradise Mile sign. I almost fell over it the way that I’d fallen over the sawhorses.
I definitely hadn’t gotten turned around that time.
Isobel had been right. The road kept dumping us back there, right in front of that house.
She didn’t rub it in. Judging by her expression, she’d wanted me to prove her wrong. Now we were back at the house and she was on the verge of tears, twisting the car antenna between both hands. “We’re going to die here.”
“No, we’re not,” I said. “Just because the road’s gone crazy doesn’t mean there isn’t a way out.”
Vines groaned, creaking as they shifted.
I glanced over my shoulder. They were crawling across the road now, forming a wall that blocked the exit. They didn’t move when I looked at them, but every time I blinked they were a few inches longer.
Little by little, the road beyond vanished.
It felt like those vines were mocking my forced optimism.
Isobel hadn’t noticed yet. I kept my tone casual as I said, “Let’s try to go in the other direction. Maybe there’s a way out through the back.”
She stiffened when I tried to walk her toward the house. But she was a good foot shorter than me and her resolve wasn’t strong. I practically had to lift her off her feet, but we walked.
There was no sound as we passed the house, keeping our distance from the windows decorated by tattered curtains. The weeds grew long on the left side of the building. They climbed around our ankles, scraped the calves of my slacks.
Call
me crazy, but it felt like the house was watching us as we passed. It made no sense—the windows were empty, nobody should have been inside, nothing was moving in the fog.
But someone was watching us.
I stayed out of arm’s reach of the house’s walls. Just in case.
During my earlier visits, I hadn’t had cause to go behind the house to look around. I knew it was a retirement “village,” not just a home, but I was still surprised to see how many cottages occupied the rear of the canyon. Little ones. Didn’t look like they’d been used this century. The windows were boarded, the doors padlocked.
That was also where I found a garden. At least, I was pretty sure it was a garden. I could make out knee-high wrought-iron fencing and some trees that looked disturbingly human-shaped in the fog.
And were those tombstones hanging out between the trees? I didn't want to find out.
I steered clear of the garden, too.
When we passed that low fence, I could feel that we weren’t alone anymore. The hollowness of the fog had vanished. Isobel’s footsteps and mine were no longer the only noise.
Someone was following us again.
“I hear it, too,” Isobel whispered.
“Don’t be afraid,” I said. “I’ve got you.”
A shadowy figure appeared from the direction of the rec hall.
The orderly.
I moved to put myself between Isobel and Nichols, lifting my hands. I wasn’t sure if it was in a soothing gesture or a defensive one.
How are you supposed to deal with a dead assailant?
He emerged from the fog, just as gray-skinned and dead as he had been the last time I saw him. He was ephemeral, a piece of the colorless nothing surrounding us. Didn’t even make the grass move when he walked through it.
I’d seen zombies before. Hell, I’d given one a freaking makeover, trying to make her look like she was still alive. I knew what zombies looked like.
This guy looked a lot more like a ghost than a zombie.
No such thing as ghosts.
“Hey there, Nichols,” I said.
He wasn’t looking at me. Isobel had the entirety of his attention. “No hope,” Nichols said again. “You shouldn’t have ever come here. You know what has to happen now.”