Toby considered that for a moment, then nodded. The three got into the truck and Bill headed for the Heritage Center.
“Just go slowly,” Kathy said. “Start at the beginning and talk us through it.”
“Okay,” Toby said. “Okay. Well, it started when I went to check in on him tonight.”
* * * *
Toby had gotten to Ed’s around seven in the evening. Toby had been making it a nightly thing, sometimes staying the night, since the town meeting. Ed had been having a hard time of things lately, since the Door had gone bad. Toby hesitated, then explained it simply as, “He was being harassed. He couldn’t see who was doing it, but it had escalated to violence in the last few days. Ed’s an old man. He can’t be getting the shit kicked out of him on a regular basis, you know?”
Kathy and Bill nodded noncommittally from the front seat and waited for Toby to continue.
When no one answered his knocks on the front door, Toby had let himself into Ed’s house and found the old man half-drunk on his couch.
“You okay?” he asked.
Ed nodded miserably. “They were back tonight.”
Toby looked around the room. “Are they still here?”
“No. I think they cracked a rib.” He groaned as he shifted on the couch.
“We have to get you out of here,” Toby said. He’d brought an empty gym bag and began looking around the room for things to pack. “Ed, this isn’t safe. Look, come stay with me. I have the room. We can fight them off together.”
“Maybe I deserve it, Toe.”
Toby stopped stuffing the folded blanket he was holding into the gym bag and looked at Ed incredulously. “What?”
“I’ve been thinking about it. Maybe this is how it ends for me. I sat here counting last night and I’ve hurt twenty-three people since I was sixteen. Twenty-three people and never felt a single consequence, not once. It ain’t natural to keep karma from coming around and making things right.”
“You’re drunk,” Toby said uncomfortably and finished packing the blanket. “I’m going to grab your clothes and stuff from your room.”
“You oughtta go,” Ed said sadly. Even from the other room, Toby could sense the mixed feelings in the suggestion. “You ain’t any safer here than I am.”
At this point, Toby blushed deeply. Kathy saw it in the rearview mirror, where she’d been steadily watching him as he talked. After a few seconds of silence, Kathy gently urged him to go on, reminding him that they weren’t there to judge and certainly not there to compound his problem. He and his secret were safe with them.
Toby looked out the car window. It had begun to drizzle and the moonlight through the droplets on the window created tiny, strange shapes on his face.
He had not answered Ed then because it wasn’t really an arguable point. Toby had had his own issues, as he fully intended to tell the trio of interviewers the following day. He was nervous about that and those nerves probably didn’t contribute any to his mood as he swept around Ed’s house, scooping up toothbrush and hairbrush, shirts and pants, socks and underwear for the old man. When he came back into the den with the gym bag packed, Ed was peering nervously out the window.
“What is it?” Toby asked.
Ed held up a finger and the two waited in expectant silence for several seconds before Ed whispered, “The woods are glowing.”
Toby joined him at the window, searching the tree line anxiously. There was indeed a faint glow coming from between the trees, a soft bluish-green that morphed to yellow and back again. He also saw movement, though it was hard to discern what, exactly, was moving.
“You see that?” he whispered. “There—something’s moving.”
“What is it?” Ed whispered back.
Toby squinted. Against the glow, tiny, human-shaped silhouettes were marching into view. “Looks like…people.”
That it was people coming for them from the glow in the woods terrified them more than some hulking, slithering, flapping thing from behind the Door. They had both, in their way, been expecting angry mobs their whole lives. Angry mobs were the boogeymen of their adult dreams, and had been built in their minds into torturous, berserk hordes far more capable of atrocities than the unseen, unknown stuff of closets and the undersides of beds.
“We’ve got to go,” Toby said. “Now, Ed!” He grabbed the old man by the arm and dragged him out of the house and toward the car.
The angry mob was still a ways off, but Toby could see now that they were children. If he had to guess their ages, he’d have said they ranged from eight- or nine-year-old boys to twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls.
“That’s pretty specific,” Bill cut in, and again, Toby flushed a deep red.
“Yeah,” he said. “It is.”
Toby went back to his story without further explanation.
He and Ed got into Toby’s car and Toby started the engine. When his headlights came on, they flooded the driveway ahead of the car. A line of children stood blocking the way. A little boy balanced on one leg. He was missing an eye. The girl next to him stood a little taller and on two legs, but she was missing most of her lower jaw. A clump of her hair was torn out. She did not scare him so much as the girl to her left, a brunette with vomit covering her chin and the front of her nightgown. Her blue eyes glowed, then flashed to yellow. She unhinged her jaw and opened her mouth and more vomit, stringy and gray, spilled out. In its wake, Toby could see spiraling rows of teeth.
“Fuck,” he muttered. Next to him, Ed began to laugh, and the sound was like the cracking of bones in Toby’s ears.
Toby threw the car into drive and slammed on the gas, aiming for the children. The ones closest to his bumper burst into little flesh confetti as the car hit them, then reassembled into the same monstrosities. Toby glanced at them in the side mirror, then peeled off into the street and didn’t look back.
The drive back to Toby’s was relatively uneventful. Ed was lost in his own maudlin thoughts, and Toby was busy with the road ahead of him and the hope that nothing was following behind. When he finally parked in his own driveway, he exhaled a long sigh of relief.
“Come on,” he said to Ed, grabbing the gym bag out of the backseat and handing it to the older man. “Let’s get inside.”
“They’ll find us,” Ed muttered. He took the gym bag with shaking hands and got out of the car. Before Toby could do the same, there was a blur and Ed was gone. The echo of children’s laughter still hung in the air.
Without thinking, Toby got out of the car and searched the property. It only dawned on him as he turned his attention to the skies that whatever had swooped out of nowhere and snatched Ed and his gym bag could do the same to him. He kept looking, though.
That’s when he saw the little girls. There were three of them: a blonde, a redhead, and a brunette. He thought they looked vaguely familiar, though that would have meant they’d be grown women by now. They stood on his front lawn, little hands on slim hips, pale skin flaking off their bodies and the stains of leaking fluids on their clothes. They were barefoot and their feet made odd crackling sounds in the grass as they began to advance on him.
He wanted to move, but couldn’t. It was like a dream he’d had a while back, where he’d wanted to run, to escape the clawing attention of these little girls, and his legs had been immoveable, only this time he was awake and terrified of what they’d do to him when they descended on him.
The redhead reached him first and tried to tear off his T-shirt. She managed a good slash with one of her fingernails before her fingers fell off into the grass at his feet. The blonde, who had come up behind him, grabbed a handful of his hair and yanked his head back so that the brunette could bite at his throat. The redhead, meanwhile, tried to fiddle with the zipper of his pants, but without fingers, she was unsuccessful. The brunette helped, deftly licking his neck while unzipping his pants. They grabbed at him throu
gh his underwear and he tried to scream, “No!” but then the brunette’s tongue was in his mouth and he couldn’t breathe.
Toby lashed out at them, glad to find his arms and hands still worked. He clawed at the brunette. Her face disintegrated into ruddy, wet sand between his fingers and he felt a wave of horrified nausea splash through him. He spit out her tongue onto the grass. Then he swung at the redhead, his fist cutting a sandy swath through her rib cage. Her upper half thumped onto her lower half before toppling over into the grass and coming apart in rough, grainy clumps. He shoved the brunette, blind as she was without a face, and she too came apart upon impact with the lawn. He managed to get ahold of the blonde and whittle her down with his fists. He didn’t remember much more about fighting them off; pure adrenaline kept him pounding them down into clumps and then breaking the clumps into grit that, moments later, sank into the grass.
He still heard them laughing, though. Little-girl laughing, the kind of laughing that accompanied the telling of delicious secrets, still too innocent to be the derisive laughter of women, but heading there.
Toby went and sat on the front steps of his house. He almost wanted them to come at him again, to carry him off like they had Ed. Maybe the old man was right, but there was only so much even the damned could take, and Toby had reached his limit. If he was an animal, so be it; he was ready to die like one.
That was when Kathy and Bill had showed up.
* * * *
The truck was silent for several minutes after Toby stopped talking. He had never clearly spelled out what he’d asked the Door for, but it was pretty obvious that it had to do with his interest in little girls. Kathy thought that for Toby’s sake, it was good that Cole, who had four little daughters of his own, was not around to hear the story. Bill’s gaze remained fixed on the road. Kathy surmised that her friend was working through his initial revulsion and instinct to hit the man in his backseat. She herself, while harboring no love for those who hurt children, felt that their current situation did not allow anyone to judge another’s sins or secrets. If for no other reason in heaven or earth, they had to remain united in order to fight off what had come from behind the Door. She thought both Toby and Bill understood that on some level, but she let them process, each in his own way, anyway.
When several minutes had passed, Kathy said, “We’re meeting others at the Heritage Center. We can figure out where to look for Ed from there.”
“Will Sheriff Cole be there?” Toby asked. It was hard to read from his tone if he was frightened or not by that prospect.
“If all went well gathering some of the other townspeople, then yes,” she said.
Toby went back to looking out the window. “Is he picking up Grant?”
“Grant Kilmeister?” Bill asked without taking his eyes off the road.
“That’s the guy.”
“Why would he?” Bill glanced at him in the rearview.
Toby shrugged. “Ed told me the other day that Grant said he had something he had to get rid of. Something to do with the Door.”
“What kind of something?” Kathy turned in her seat to face him.
“I don’t know,” Toby answered. “Ed was kind of drunk, but he said it was something that came from there. From behind the Door. And it was deadly.”
Bill’s truck screeched to a halt. “This might have been useful information to have.”
Toby blinked. “I thought you would have known already.”
“Do you know where this Grant Kilmeister lives?” Kathy asked Bill.
“It’s on the way to the Heritage Center. Looks like we’re making one more stop.”
* * * *
Sheriff Cole had radioed back to the sheriff’s office and informed his deputies to advise the townspeople of Zarephath to meet at the Heritage Center for their own safety. He told them to go door-to-door if that’s what it took, starting with the list of names on his desk of people who were known to have used the Door. Sheriff Cole thought it was in the best interests of the townspeople to stick together, as many as possible, in one place. The forces from behind the Door were no longer just dangerous to those who had made requests of them; now anyone who encountered them could be at risk. Kari was impressed with how authoritative he sounded. Sheriff Cole was clearly not a man to argue with.
When he was finished, she had tried to call Cicely on her cell, but got no answer. They were on Dingmans Turnpike, heading toward Cicely’s house, and Kari was anxious. She watched out the window, wishing the patrol car to move faster. Cicely hadn’t told her too much about her ex-husband, but she’d said enough to worry Kari. If Reggie was back the same way Jessica was, then Cicely was in a lot of danger. The rage of a twelve-year-old girl was one thing, but the rage of a grown man?
Kari shuddered. “You’re the police. Can’t you go faster?”
“Ma’am, I’m going as fast as—”
“There! There she is!” Kari cried. They happened to be passing the Alexia Diner and there Cicely was, in their usual booth by the front window. The patrol car had almost sailed right by her.
“Where?” Sheriff Cole said, turning the car in the direction she was pointing.
“The diner. Hurry!”
Sheriff Cole pulled into the parking lot of the diner. As soon as he parked, he was out of the car. He moved fast for a big man, and was opening her door a moment later. Kari sprung from the car and raced to the diner steps, the pain in her side a knife between her ribs. She pulled open the door, Sheriff Cole right behind her. Her gaze went right to the usual booth where she and Cicely usually sat.
Cicely wasn’t there.
“No,” Kari muttered. “No, no, no.”
“Can I help you? How many?” a waitress asked, looking to seat them.
Kari turned suddenly to her. “I’m looking for someone who was just in here. Cicely Robinson—she’s a regular. An older woman, African-American. Pink sweater. She was sitting right there.” Kari pointed to the booth.
The waitress shrugged. “I’m sorry, I haven’t seen her.”
“Are you sure? She was sitting there. We—I—saw her through the window.”
“I’m sorry,” the waitress repeated. “No one here like you described.”
“She was right there, like, two minutes ago!” Kari shouted, drawing the attention of the few other patrons.
The waitress, a skinny little waif of a thing, looked flustered. “I—I’m sorry. I don’t think anyone’s been sitting at that booth all night.”
“No, that’s impossible. I…I just saw her.”
She felt Sheriff Cole’s arm on her shoulder. “Ms. Martin—”
“Officer,” the waitress said, “I swear, I haven’t seen the lady she’s looking for. Do you need me to get my manager?”
Kari broke out of the sheriff’s grasp and ran to the ladies’ room.
“Cicely!” she called out. “Cicely, are you in here?” No one answered. The room was small: two sinks and three stalls. She glanced in the mirror above one of the sinks and groaned inwardly at her beaten-up face. She looked unstable, to say the least. No wonder the waitress had looked at her like that.
As Kari turned to the stalls, her head began to ache. She was probably overdoing it, considering her injuries, but she needed to find Cicely. If Reggie hurt her, it would be all Kari’s fault and she couldn’t, just couldn’t, be responsible for another death.
The doors of two of the stalls were open, and as she passed each, Kari could see that no one was inside. She approached the third stall and knocked on the door. “Cicely? Are you in here?”
She thought she heard a wet, sloshing sound. In her mind, she pictured some horrid-looking fish, an unfortunate intestinal escapee, a by-product of a questionable serving of diner food, splashing about in the toilet bowl. A hysterical laugh almost broke loose from her.
“Cicely?” She pushed on the stall door, bu
t it didn’t budge. Was someone in there? She tried to peek through the thin crack between the stall door and wall, but could see no one. She bent down, looking for feet beneath the door, and a wave of dizziness caught her and threw her off-balance. She slumped against the back wall, trying to blink that low hum out of her head.
She pulled herself back up, using the wall for support, and the dizziness subsided. The hum faded. She slowly bent again, looking for signs of someone in the stall. Again, that hum forced its way into her head and chest, threatening to drop her in a dead faint. She straightened up, backing away from the stall.
“Cicely,” she muttered weakly.
“Cicely,” a deep, gurgling voice from that far stall repeated. “Ci-ci. Ci-ci.”
“Shit,” Kari whispered.
“Ci-i-i…Ci-i-i…” The voice gargled the word in the thick fluid of its throat, and Kari had to fight to keep the world in focus.
She ducked out of the ladies’ room and hurried back to where Sheriff Cole was talking with the confused waitress. He spotted her and opened his mouth to speak, ostensibly to ask if she was okay. Her nose was bleeding again; she could feel it trickling over her upper lip. She wiped it on her forearm.
“We have to go,” she said, heading for the door.
Behind her, she heard the sheriff apologize to the waitress and then he was behind her, guiding her by the arm through the parking lot and back into the patrol car.
“We have to get to Cicely’s. Something’s wrong. Something’s very wrong.”
Sheriff Cole huffed, exasperated. “What was that back there, huh? What was that all about? You know, I’ve arrested people for less of a disturbance than that.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please, just get to Cicely’s house.”
Sheriff Cole started up the car, put it in reverse, then pulled out of the parking lot. “What did you see in there?” he asked after a minute.
Kari chewed her fingernail a moment, on the verge of tears. The hum had gone away, but her head felt like it was caught in the fist of something big and angry. “I don’t know. I can’t—I don’t know.”
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