They reached the closet. Lexie looked at him expectantly, so he went along with it and peered inside. No cat. What was she getting at? She nodded, eyes wide. Still not getting it, he leaned inside, reached out to balance himself, and put his hand through a hole in the wall.
He jerked his arm back.
Bigger than a hole. The back of the closet was missing.
When he dared to peer closer, he saw shreds of plaster on the floor and long claw marks along the massive opening. Shadow was his first shocked thought, but an ordinary housecat never could have ripped through the closet wall. Something with thick claws must have worked away at the plaster hour after hour until it made a yawning opening from the condominium next door. Faint streetlight cast enough light to make out the shapes of overstuffed furniture and a hall mired in darkness.
Horrified, he moved back.
“Ian could be in there,” Lexie said, and stepped through the wall.
Without stopping to look for a weapon he went after her.
Chapter 21
Wicked Things
On the other side of the wall Travis caught Lexie’s arm. She wheeled around, gripping the Nikon, eyes wide. The wind blowing through the dark rooms said the place was probably abandoned, so he took one more uneasy step to stand by her side.
Ian, are you in here?
As if in answer to his thoughts, pale drapes billowed into the room, swayed, and blew out through the open balcony doors. A faint rap rap sounded, a hollow, ghostly tapping, but when the tapping repeated itself, he realized the wind was knocking the balcony doors against the building. Sleet blew across the floor and fluttered through the pages of a magazine at his feet.
They had stepped through the closet wall into a living room filled with massive white couches and chairs, serpentine-patterned pillows, and glass-topped bamboo tables, as though the owner once lived in the tropics and had tried to import the flavor to chilly Washington, D.C. Behind the couch stood a screen painted with brilliant parrots, ebony macaws, and other exotic birds that were so realistic their eyes seemed alive. A series of handsome photographs ringed the wall: herons fishing at twilight, a woodpecker on a limb, a hawk waiting for its prey.
Whoever lived here was a bird lover and an expert photographer, but the overturned lamps, slashed cushions, and scattered books and mail told an ominous story.
Rap rap came the knocking from the balcony.
The drapes floated in again.
When Lexie tried to turn on the Nikon, Travis shook his head and whispered, “Broken.” He picked up a heavy walking stick. It would probably be useless as a weapon, but it was better than nothing. They found more madness in the small galley kitchen: broken vodka and tomato juice bottles, overturned trash, and shattered dishes, but there was nothing to indicate Ian had ever been there. Then they crept down the narrow hall to a bathroom and turned on a lamp shaped like a fleeing seagull.
Bloodstained tiles. Bloody towels on the floor. Travis fought the urge to dry heave. To his horror a pair of forlorn, dust-covered tortoiseshell glasses lay in the sink. Ian wore glasses, but they weren’t his. He had wire-rims.
Two closed doors remained in the hall. Travis opened the first to a musty linen closet. Behind the last door they discovered an empty bedroom littered with broken glass and trampled sheets. Something had ripped the curtains down and smashed the long window over the bed. Everything smelled of damp earth and leaves, and forest shadows roamed the walls. Sleet blew through the broken windowpanes as if nature was determined to tear down every last vestige of civilization.
“Ian?” Travis whispered, but he had to face facts. Ian wasn’t there. They’d gone through all the rooms. Time to get out, and get out fast. They headed back, but when they came to the couch Lexie knelt down, sifted through a pile of debris, and handed him a framed photo.
The pale drapes billowed in again.
They were wasting precious time, but to please her he glanced at the picture. It showed a group of people standing around in the woods on a foggy morning. Educated, polite faces, the kind of people you would see wandering through a museum on a Saturday morning. They all wore field hats and hiking boots and carried cameras and binoculars. A birding club. He shrugged, wondering why Lexie had picked it up. He was about to put it down when a stout woman with pale blonde hair caught his eye. Her hiking boots, chambray shirt, and khaki trousers peeked out from under a short gray cape, a poncho she’d probably worn to ward off the rain. Like the others in the group, she carried a fine camera.
A gray cape. The giant. It couldn’t be her, but yet it was. Her smiling face sat in proportion to her natural looking neck and shoulders. The blocky shape of her face said she had eastern European heritage, maybe ancestors who’d once owned German or Austrian farmland.
Human. And worst of all, she looked nice.
He knew they should hurry, but the life force brimming from the woman stunned him. Instead of impossible meaty appendages, her large-boned hands seemed clever and capable. Instead of a swollen monstrosity, her thickset body looked normal. She was tall, but there was nothing unusual about her height. Her spirited eyes said she got up to film the dawn and walk down country lanes. She must have taken the photos of the birds lining the living room walls, waded out in far-flung streams to get the right shots.
And somewhere along the line, she had been swallowed whole.
“It’s her, the way she used to be,” Lexie whispered over his shoulder.
He picked up a piece of mail. “Her name was Jane Fogg.”
The mysterious initials on the camera bag he’d found in the woods finally had a name. He looked at the photographer who’d taken the pictures of the black triangle, the birds, the woods, and finally the thing that copied her form. She must have been desperate when she shot the last one.
Time to go. He put the photo down, startled by two gleaming eyes in the hall. Shadow. So the missing cat had gone through the wall after all. The cat sneezed, twitched its tail, and slunk into the closet.
“The cat,” Lexie whispered.
“Let him go,” Travis whispered back. “Let’s get out of here.”
“No, we can’t leave him,” she insisted, moving toward the closet. The drapes floated into the room. Outside the same hollow rap rap sounded as the wind knocked the balcony doors against the building. Then something else made a soft thump.
Travis froze. He waited, rooted to the floor, but the thump didn’t repeat itself. Maybe the storm had blown a branch against a window. The pale drapes billowed in and out, pulled by the wind. The hole in the living room wall was twenty feet away. They could make it if they ran.
But Lexie must have heard the soft sound, too, because she went the other way, slipped inside the closet and peered around the door, frantically gesturing at him to join her. There was no way he could leave her by herself. He silently swore, squeezed in beside her, and left the door ajar since they’d found it that way.
The walk-in closet turned out to be surprisingly large. Jane Fogg was a packrat who’d jammed it with coats, hats, boots, weathered luggage with stickers from foreign airports, a small dresser, umbrellas, and other flotsam and jetsam, but the suitcases bore claw marks and the coats had been ripped from their hangers. So many clothes lay at the back of the closet that they couldn’t see the floor. The cat had disappeared.
He stiffened at another faint sound from the balcony. Sleet hit the windows and gusted across the floor.
A terrible shape moved behind the drapes. When the storm gusted again, the shape came through the billowing fabric into the room. Past a lamp, brushing it aside like doll furniture. Glass tinkled as the blub shattered on the floor. Past the shadowy chairs, dwarfing the couch and tables.
The drapes floated outside again. Travis held his breath. The creature’s blank eyes didn’t seem to see them. In the next moment her crablike gloves rose to her collar. Going to open the cape, his terrified mind rattled. Going to uncover the body she’d been hiding for days.
The creature squ
atted by the couch and gurgled deep in her throat. Then in some unearthly sorcery, the cape itself began to swell. It bulged near her head. Folds and creases smoothed themselves out like hot wax. Fleshy buttons grew to the size of mushrooms and dissolved into underlying flesh. Buttonholes shrank, became shallow dimples, and disappeared as fleshy seams strained and bubbled away. Skin that mimicked cloth rippled into mounds of muscle. The edges of the pretend collar oozed into huge shoulders. Fat fingers merged together as her hands disappeared.
Her arms changed shape, grew longer, swept back.
She grew a fan-shaped tail.
The alien gurgled again. Thousands of tiny bumps erupted from the uppermost membrane of skin. The bumps lengthened into ridges. More ridges appeared out of the spines of the ridges, thousands upon thousands, dividing and growing, until the creature writhed with transformation.
The ridges sharpened. Long quills emerged. Layers of gray feathers formed. Broad wings sprouted from impossible shoulders. The half-formed creature flexed her claws, still growing, swelling over eight feet high.
Her skull shrank, lost its forehead, became a stump.
Beady eyes formed behind a sharp bill.
She grew the breast of a great bird, a broad breast covered with dusky, slate-colored feathers. A hawk, he thought, stunned. Her scaled legs and murderous claws fit her new shape. When her bone structure completed itself, she flapped her long wings, hopped on the couch, and sank her claws in the cushions. As her final feathers emerged, the last pieces of the puzzle fell into place.
That’s how she flew to the housetops. She grew wings. I couldn’t see in the dark.
Jane Fogg, the real one, the adventurous birder, must have stumbled on the terrible creature after she photographed the crash, or the creature pursued her, chased her through the trees, killed her, assumed her identity, and kept little bits of her memory, enough to figure out where she lived. It moved into her home and took her name and her clothes and her life. So far it had mimicked her with great success, a bad version of a human being in a city where strangers didn’t look twice at each other.
And the thing must have come across a gray hawk in Rock Creek Park, or killed one. Mesmerized, Travis stared at the monstrous imitation in front of him. What else had she killed? He couldn’t bear to think about Ian’s fate.
The creature gurgled. More tiny feathers spread across her head. Maybe, just maybe, if they were quiet, she would leave the way she came, fly on her terrible wings down the side of the building into the night.
The cat hissed behind them, knocked over a small suitcase, and bolted out of the closet. The alien whipped her head in their direction and made a low, reedy shriek.
“No, damn it, no,” Travis shouted. He slammed the door and shoved the dresser over. All the air seemed to leave the closet. Seconds later, the door shook with a bone-jarring thud. He pulled the string for the light and a bare bulb clicked on overhead, lighting up the terror in their eyes.
“Oh, my God,” Lexie gasped.
Another horrible thud hit. The door trembled. When it shuddered again, Travis braced himself against the dresser. He was completely inadequate to stop what was going to happen. The pecking began. Merciless, relentless pecking, pecking, pecking the door. The cruel beak broke through, splitting the grain, coming after them.
Peck, peck, peck, coming to peck you to death.
“Help me hold the door,” he shouted.
“I’m trying!” Lexie screamed, striking the beak with a boot.
The door groaned. “It’s going to get me first,” Travis said between his teeth. “And whatever happens next, I’ll be waiting for you on the other side.”
“Travis, no.”
The door split open. They both screamed. The horrible bird head forced itself through the split, stabbing at the wood, stabbing at the air, stabbing at their arms, stab, stab, stab. Splinters flew. The split widened. The head pressed in, one heartless yellow eye staring at them, and then the shattered door fell away. The monster blotted out the light in a mass of gray feathers and beating wings as she squeezed her flesh inside.
Lexie screamed and threw herself under the hanging clothes into the farthest part of the closet, but with another sudden shriek, she disappeared feet first through the floor. The beak stabbed again. Just as the creature forced her whole body into the closet, Travis rolled after Lexie and landed in a pile of boots below, jarring his teeth and smashing his shoulder. They’d fallen to the eighth floor.
Incredibly, they found themselves in another dark closet jammed with coats and suitcases. The bird head burst through the ceiling snapping her beak. They scrambled to their feet, jammed a chair under the doorknob, and ran through a living room Travis immediately recognized. A wall hanging with three elephants hung above overturned lamps, ripped furniture, and smashed Hindu sculptures. Gupta’s place.
Lurid lights flashed across the walls. Travis wheeled around to the window. A tow truck was pulling a car away from the hydrant.
He grabbed Lexie’s arm. “There goes your car.”
The closet doorknob shook.
“It’s in the closet,” Lexie gasped.
They fled the condo as the closet door gave way. Down the long hall, past walls of locked doors, toward the elevator. As they ran toward an ornate mirror, they could see the alien coming after them, beak outstretched, gigantic wings sweeping the walls. Around a corner, around a second corner. Their lives were dwindling to a few fragile seconds. Travis wrenched off his shoe, threw it down the stairwell, and pulled Lexie into the empty trash room, clasping his hand over her mouth, terrified to let the air out of his lungs, terrified the thing would sense his pounding pulse. The trash room was a miserable, lightless closet that stank of grime, old newspapers, and disinfectant. Enveloped in darkness, he held her close and watched the slit of light under the door.
The shoe tumbled down the stairs.
Then silence.
A low gurgle.
Claws moved past the door.
Don’t move.
Metal hinges groaned. The creature had fallen for it. Heavy wings rustled. Another low reedy sound. Looking for them down the stairwell. The stairwell door shut with a heavy click. Seconds later, a distant purling shriek sounded as the creature flew down to the floors below.
Travis met Lexie’s eyes. “The elevator,” he whispered. “Lisa and Ian’s car is in the garage.”
They cracked the metal door to an empty hall and crept to the elevator under the glaring lights. Travis pressed the button, a soft bell pinged, and to his relief the doors slid back. Once the heavy doors closed, their frightened, disheveled images filled the mirrored walls. He pulled up her coat’s bloody sleeve. The creature had ripped open the muscles in her arm.
“We’ve got to get you out of here,” he said.
“You should have helped me all along, helped me get more photos, gone back with me. None of this would have happened to us, none of it.”
“I was going to call the cops tonight,” he said. “I had this whole plan to set her up. That’s why I came in here by myself. Nobody was going to get hurt. That was the main thing, to be smart about it, to outthink her. I thought I had the condo where she was hiding, but I was wrong. I didn’t know she broke through to another floor.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“I couldn’t take a chance it would go wrong.”
“Everything went wrong, Travis.”
“Where’s your cell phone?” he asked her.
“I left everything in the condo. All I have is the camera.”
He took the camera bag off her shoulder and pulled the tracker from his coat. The tracker changed in his hand. Light glimmered across the surface for twenty seconds and died out.
“What’s that?” She pushed her hair back with a bloody hand.
“I stole this from the black triangle,” he said. “I think it’s a tracking device, some kind of a GPS, but something happened to it. It should show us where she’s hiding if I can get it to w
ork again.”
“I thought you were making that up. I didn’t believe you.”She reached out to steady herself and smeared blood all over the brass rail.
When he put his arms around her, she leaned against him and squeezed her eyes shut. “I don’t want to fight with you,” he said. Whatever stood between them, with a nightmare outside the doors, it didn’t matter anymore. The elevator began to descend.
The bell gave a soft ping when they reached the lowest level. Travis felt his heart turn over, but he couldn’t do anything about the sound. Seconds later, the doors slid open with a mechanical hum and threw a rectangular patch of yellow light across the gloomy concrete floor. The garage was bigger than he’d expected. Cavernous. Dark windshields as far as he could see. The ceiling was so low it gave him an irrational urge to duck. Anything could be hiding behind the pillars.
The elevator doors slid shut. Deep quiet settled over the garage.
The painted numbers on the parking spaces matched the condos, but where did Lisa and Ian park their car? Then he thought he saw their silver Honda by the far wall and began to cross the long corridor with Lexie. He kept his arm around her and wondered how much blood she’d lost.
Their shadows lengthened and shortened under the fluorescent lights. They were less than fifty feet from the car now. The quiet magnified the scuffs of their shoes and became so oppressive it seemed to take on a life of its own. Deeper shadows lay between the cars.
Travis braced himself, expecting the creature to spring out at any moment, but the quiet only grew. Twenty feet from the Honda. He was right, he realized with frightened relief. The condo number was on the concrete. He could see the university parking decal in the window, Ian’s travel mug from Barnes and Noble in the front, and Lisa’s hunter green fleece jacket where she’d tossed it over the seat. Ten feet away, he unlocked the car. The orange parking lights flashed as the door locks popped open.
Lost Cargo Page 21