“What happened? What’s the matter?” Kathy asked.
“Sorry. Sorry. Thought I—you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Thought I saw something,” Bill finished. “In the road.”
Kathy paused. “Something from the Door?”
“Yup.” Bill pulled back onto the road, checking his rearview every so often.
“Want to talk about it?” Kathy watched his expression. He seemed genuinely unnerved by whatever it had been.
“Not…not yet. I’ll tell you. Just not now.”
“Okay,” Kathy said.
He surprised her when, after a few moments of silence, he said, “It was a girl. Met her after the war, after my wife left me. I was drinking a lot then and she gave me drugs. We had sex. I think I might have hurt her.”
Kathy waited for him to continue.
“I didn’t kill her. I don’t think I killed her. She ran away. But I hurt her. And I don’t remember damn near anything about it. I asked the Door for her to be okay.” He paused. “I’ve never told anyone that before.”
“It’s okay,” Kathy said. “Everyone has secrets. Yours isn’t going anywhere.”
“I just wanted her to be okay. And if everyone’s requests are being turned around on them….”
“You tried to do right by her.”
“I can’t remember hurting her. I wish I could take it back.”
“I know, Bill.”
“They call it PTSD now. That and the drugs…and I can’t remember—”
“Bill, it’s okay.” She got him to make eye contact with her. “You’ve got nothing to explain to me. Really.”
That grateful look returned, but there was no smile.
“Has she hurt you?” Kathy asked.
“Physically? No. Not yet.”
“Okay, good,” she said. “Let’s keep it that way.”
They drove on in silence for a few minutes before Bill slammed on the brakes, his arm shooting out in that parental gesture of keeping momentum from hurting the passenger. His wide-eyed gaze was fixed on a figure out in the street.
“Can…can you see her?”
Kathy squinted. The figure standing in the farthest reach of the headlights vibrated so quickly that it blurred. This movement was punctuated by the occasional pause in which the figure became motionless, and in those seconds, Kathy could indeed see it clearly.
“It’s a rotting girl,” Kathy said. “At least the upper half of her is. Blond once, looks like. Not sure what that mess below her waist is. Tentacles, maybe. Is that her?”
“Yeah. You can see her, then.” It was part question and part statement of relief.
“Yes, I can see her.”
“What should I do?” Bill asked. “If she can come at me and you can see her, maybe that means she can come at you too.”
“Hit her,” Kathy replied coolly.
“What?”
“With your car,” she explained. “Hit her. Now.”
Bill turned to Kathy. She could see he wasn’t quite taking her words in.
“She’s not the girl you knew,” Kathy told him. “That girl, I’m assuming, had legs. This thing doesn’t. Kill it.”
Bill turned his attention back to the road and slammed on the gas. When his car made jarring impact with the thing in the road, it popped like a balloon, tiny girl-shards fluttering everywhere. Then it pulled itself back together and skittered off into the night.
“You saw that too, right?” Bill whispered.
“I did,” she whispered back.
Bill started back down the road again, and the two drove the rest of the way to Toby Vernon’s house in silence.
* * * *
Sheriff Timothy Cole had always been a man for whom the cold, factual, logical reality of his job and the ephemeral and intangible nature of the supernatural had never really conflicted. He’d been raised by God-fearing and churchgoing parents who had instilled in him the sense of the spiritual, and despite the mundane horrors of his job, that spirituality had never quite left him. He didn’t talk about it much with the officers under his supervision because it wasn’t any of their business and because he learned early on in his career that rationality went a long way toward earning and keeping respect. Nevertheless, it was difficult to be sheriff of Monroe County, under which Zarephath was part of his jurisdiction, and not encounter from time to time the weird and unexplained.
He hadn’t been thrilled at first about the idea of an occult expert joining them as a consultant, called in by his predecessor, no less. There were plenty of people who claimed to be experts in such things who were little more than dangerous dabblers unable to understand the power behind Zarephath’s Door. Kathy Ryan, however, appeared to be an exception. He had investigated her background as thoroughly as he was able, which was exceedingly more than most, given both his spiritual and law enforcement connections. Hers was a secretive profession, with many of the cases to her credit locked down tight in various records departments. Getting information on them usually required an inside person or a high security clearance. Still, Cole had managed to find out enough to be satisfied that Zarephath was in some competent and capable hands. He respected her because other people who had earned his respect the hard way respected her. They weren’t always at liberty to give details about cases she had worked on with them, but they unanimously agreed she knew her stuff.
Cole wouldn’t have let just anyone go messing around in Zarephath. If it had to be someone other than him or Bill, he supposed Kathy was a pretty good candidate.
During the time that he had spent with her and Bill, he had grown to feel confident in their ability to beat whatever was stalking the residents of Zarephath. He was, by nature, a man secure in his own abilities and not easily frightened. He had to be. He was the law, the guy with the gun, the one that ran toward trouble instead of away from it. But chasing invisible monsters was not the same as chasing perps who had knocked over a liquor store. His gun wouldn’t matter too much and running toward the source of trouble could very well get him killed.
He assumed the fact that Kari Martin had called Kathy and not 911 meant that Ms. Martin was not in need of an ambulance or of police assistance. It was not an assumption he felt comfortable relying on, but he did hope that at least he would find her alive. He also hoped to find her alone; if whatever had prompted her to call and confess to opening and closing the Door was still with her, he wasn’t sure what the most effective course of action would be.
Sheriff Cole had never used the Door. He occasionally thought that put him somewhat at odds with a number of the townspeople of Zarephath, who seemed to think of it as almost an insider’s rite of passage. He supposed they thought he might not be inclined to believe their stories about the Door or that he was missing some experience necessary to truly understanding the situations arising from its use. So far, that had never proven to be the case, and he’d hoped to solidify their tentative faith in his ability to help by joining the task force involving Bill and Kathy.
Now, though, he wasn’t so sure their faith was rightly placed. He didn’t like this mantle of self-doubt settling on him. It didn’t suit him.
When he pulled up in front of the house, he was relieved to see the porch light come on. He parked and as he stepped on the sidewalk, the front door opened. A light-haired brunette in her thirties stood there, pretty enough to look at, but beaten up pretty badly. She had a deep gash on her cheek that she was trying to hold together with a bandage strip, and her bare arms had sporadic bruises from shoulder to wrist. One arm clutched her side.
“Ms. Martin?” Cole asked as he came up the walk.
She nodded slowly. “Kari.”
“Are you all right? Is anyone in the house with you?”
“No…no, I’m alone.”
“Do you need medical assistance? Would you like me to
call an ambulance?”
“Did Kathy Ryan send you?” the woman asked. “I called her….”
“Yes, she did. She asked me to pick you up and bring you to her, if you’re able.”
“Oh yes, please. I need to talk to her. It’s really important.”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to take you to the hospital first?” Cole noticed another gash on the back of her head, the dried blood clumping her hair.
“No, please—just take me to Ms. Ryan. I need to talk to her.”
“Come this way, ma’am.” Cole gestured toward the police car.
The crash from inside the house made them both jump.
“Ma’am? Ma’am, I’m going to ask you again. Is anyone inside the house?”
Kari looked confused. “No…I was here alone. I’ve been alone for at least an hour and a half. No one should be in there.”
Cole drew his gun. “I’m going to have to ask you to stay here, okay? I’m just going to go inside and look around.”
“Please don’t,” Kari said. “I just want to get out of here. I don’t know what’s inside—”
“That’s why I need to check it out. I’ll only be gone a few minutes, okay? You can wait by the car.”
Kari looked hesitant as she stood on the porch, hugging herself and shivering. She seemed to concede then, descending the steps and passing him on the way to his car. He followed and let her into the backseat.
“Please be careful,” she said through the window.
“I will,” Cole told her. “I’ll be right back. Please stay put, okay?”
“Okay,” she agreed.
With Kari secured, he turned his attention back toward the house.
The front door stood open and beyond it, he could see the front hallway. He moved cautiously forward, his gun trained on the doorway. Another crash made him flinch and he glanced back at Kari, who was watching him nervously from the car. He turned back to the house and kept going.
The front hall extended toward the back of the house and ended in what appeared to be a kitchen. To the left was a doorway and a staircase leading to the second floor. To the right was another doorway. He stood on the threshold and listened. Banging sounds, more faint now, were coming from upstairs.
With a final glance back at Kari, Cole entered the house.
It was easy enough to ascertain that no one else was in either of the rooms off the main front hallway. With an eye on the stairs, he checked the kitchen, as well as the den and a bathroom at the back of the house, as well. Then he made his way back to the stairs.
Above him, the banging sounds continued. He could also feel a slight, unpleasant hum in his chest, ears, and stomach that was not quite painful, but certainly uncomfortable. With his gun pointed at the darkness of the second-floor landing, he slowly climbed the stairs.
The sound was coming from the bathroom. The door was shut, but there was faint light coming from under the door—a night-light, perhaps. Cole checked the two bedrooms on that floor, one of which Kari was evidently using for an office. Both of those were empty and Cole was glad for that. He could be reasonably sure, then, that whatever he was dealing with was confined to that one upstairs bathroom.
He crept toward the door. His training suggested he identify himself and tell whoever was in there to come out, but his gut told him that this wasn’t the kind of situation covered by any of his training. He hovered outside the door for a few seconds, wiped the nervous sweat from his brow, and then threw open the door.
The faint light he thought he’d seen was gone, so he felt for the light and flipped it on, worrying in those seconds that whatever was in there would bite him or spear him or spit acid or—
Light flooded the bathroom. There was nothing there. Confused, Cole searched the shower and even looked in the cabinets. The window, he noticed, was open, but when he looked out, he could see nothing but a little patch of backyard lit by moonlight.
As much as he was bewildered, he had to admit to himself that he was relieved. He had no game plan for fighting off whatever had come from behind the Door. He let out a low whistle and flipped off the light.
Then he heard Kari Martin scream.
He took the stairs two at a time as he flung his bulk down to the first floor. He tore out of the house, but skidded to a stop on the porch when he saw the thing on the hood of his patrol car.
There was little distinction between the head and body of the thing; its shape appeared to be a fluid thing, like liquid in zero gravity. Its bones, if that was what they were, swam under the skin, shaping and reshaping appendages it used to smack the windshield. Occasionally, a glowing, yellowish eye like that of a shark would swim up out of the surface of the hairless, brackish, mottled skin, sink back beneath the surface, and reappear someplace else. One fairly constant feature was the abundance of mouths. They worked open and closed but made no sound. Occasionally, one would yawn and Cole could see other mouths inside, an endless fun-house mirror reflection of mouths inside of mouths inside of mouths, endless teeth and long, sharp adder tongues flicking wildly inside.
“Oh my God,” Cole whispered, and began to fire at it.
It stopped pounding on the patrol car’s windshield and an eye emerged to look at him. He stopped shooting, dumbfounded by the alien curiosity of the eye. A number of tentacles formed around it, waving in his direction. Cole thought they might have been sensing or assessing him somehow, even more so than the eye itself, and it made the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stand up.
He fired again, aiming for that one big eye, but the bullets just sank into the amorphous flesh. The eye dove back beneath the skin and a mouth emerged to replace it, opening on an endless gullet of spiraling teeth. That odd hum he’d felt in his chest inside the house assaulted him, not exactly louder but more intense; it felt as if all his internal organs were vibrating and it made him nauseous.
Cole glanced at Kari. She was desperately trying to work the handle of the door and get out of the car, but it was designed not to open from the inside. Cole turned his attention back to the thing on the hood of the car. Keeping his gun pointed at that endless mouth was due more to training than practicality, but it was something between him and that beast, and that was enough to get his legs moving.
He edged toward the car. He’d have to let Kari out himself.
The thing went back to pounding the windshield. Cole heard a glassy crack but kept moving. The metal of the hood groaned under its weight, and he made a mental note that weight meant substance—the thing had to be a solid, physical thing, at least to some extent. If it had a partially solid body, then it might very well have a weak spot, a way to kill it.
He had closed half the distance between the house and the car when the thing turned its attention to him again, a number of eyes surfacing to watch him. He froze.
It formed tentacles on its underside and used them to climb to the roof of the car. The eyes stared down at him, daring him to get closer. The gun shook and it took all the strength in his hands to steady it again. The centermost eye disappeared and a mouth stretched wide, but this time, Cole was prepared for the bone-jarring hum. He fired into the mouth until his gun clicked through empty chambers. The humming sound broke off, a sensation like one’s ears popping during an altitude change, and he realized he had closed his eyes. When he opened them, the thing was folding in on itself. Its roar seemed to be coming from the gaping hole where its mouth had been, and reminded Cole of the rush of air in a wind tunnel. That hole was sucking the rest of the creature into it, bending it and—it looked to Cole—the world around it, into odd shapes before swallowing the last of the creature. A second later, the distorted space above the roof of his car righted itself, and all trace of the creature was gone.
Cole laughed in disbelief. Had he killed it? Sent it back to where it came from? It didn’t matter; the thing was gone and Cole wasn’t abo
ut to wait for it to come back. He jogged around to the driver’s side and let himself into the car. Immediately, he was flooded with thanks from the backseat.
“Oh my God! Oh my God, did you see that? Thank you! Thank you so much! Oh my God, that was in my house! Thank you!”
“Just doing my job, ma’am,” Cole said with a smile, but he was pleased with himself too. He may never have used the Door, but he’d fended off something that had come from behind it, and had discovered some useful information about it to boot. “Now, in your voice-mail message to Kathy Ryan, you mentioned someone named Cicely?”
“Cicely Robinson!” Kari exclaimed. “Please, we have to go see if she’s okay! I—I’m afraid she may be in more danger than I was.”
Cole started the patrol car. “Then let’s go get Cicely Robinson.”
Chapter 12
When Kathy and Bill pulled up in front of Toby Vernon’s house, they found the man sitting on the front steps of his house. He was alone, which didn’t bode well for Ed, in Kathy’s opinion. He rose when he saw them and limped toward the car. Kathy recognized him from the town meeting. His young, handsome face looked pale and terrified, and a large rip across his chest had split his T-shirt in two.
“Ed,” he said. “They took Ed.”
“Toby?” Kathy asked.
The man nodded.
“Who took Ed?” she asked.
He looked dazed, and it took Bill clapping a hand on his shoulder to snap him back to the here and now.
“I don’t know what they were,” Toby said. “At first, they looked like children. Little boys and little girls. But they weren’t children.”
Kathy and Bill ushered him toward Bill’s truck. “They have Ed. I tried to stop them. We tried to run. And I thought we were safe…but then they took Ed.”
“Okay, tell us everything that happened,” Bill said. “Start at the beginning.”
Toby looked at them, a new texture of fear overlaid onto his features. “I—I—”
“We’re not judging you,” Kathy said, trying to curb her impatience. If he clammed up because he was afraid of his secrets being revealed, they might never find Ed. “Right now, we’re only interested in what happened tonight.”
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