by Tim Waggoner
“What the hell was—” He broke off as he saw his wife lying on the foyer on the other side of the family room, Ashley and Billy standing over her body. He didn’t look at Joanie, and she had no idea if he was aware of her presence at all.
Dad was a tall man, lean, clean-shaven, with prematurely white hair. He liked to joke that he spilled a bottle of drain-cleaning chemicals on his head when he was an apprentice plumber. He wore an old brown flannel shirt and ragged pair of grease- and oil-stained jeans.
Ashley and Billy turned to face Dad. Ashley’s grin was as wild and mad as Billy’s. Billy cradled the shotgun in the crook of his arm, the barrel pointed at the floor.
“You shouldn’t have tried to control me, Glenn.” Ashley sneered as she said Dad’s first name. “Now you’re going to get what she got.” She half turned toward Mom and nodded at her body. For a moment, Joanie thought she might give her another kick, but she didn’t. Joanie guessed it was because she didn’t want to take her eyes off Dad.
Joanie got off the couch then and, moving slowly, started toward Dad. His gaze flicked to her for a split second as she passed him, but then he looked toward Ashley and Billy again. Joanie couldn’t see it, but she had no trouble imagining Billy raising his shotgun and aiming it at her father. She continued through the dining room and into the kitchen. She heard yelling. Daddy, Ashley, Billy, too. She couldn’t make out what any of them were saying, but she supposed it didn’t matter. She walked to the counter and removed a long, sharp knife from the butcher block. As the metal blade slid free of its wooden slot, a second shotgun blast roared, followed by a thud she knew was the sound of her father falling to the family room carpet. She gripped the knife handle as tight as she could, then started walking again. She headed for the foyer, intending to enter the family room from the other side—the side Ashley and Billy were on.
“That was cool as fuck!” Billy said. “My cock is so hard right now, I could drill a hole through concrete! You care if I fuck your sister?”
“Don’t be gross,” Ashley said. “She’s just a little kid. You can fuck her after you kill her if you want, though. It’s not like she’ll give a shit then.”
Joanie stepped into the foyer. She saw her mother’s body, blood spreading out from her chest wound on either side of her, like red liquid wings. The shotgun blast had ripped through the shirt she’d been wearing, exposing her right breast. Or rather, what was left of it, as the flesh had been shredded into bloody raw hamburger. Her lips were parted, her mouth forming a little O of surprise. Her eyes were dead as a mannequin’s, and Joanie experienced an impulse to kneel down and close them, like people did in the movies. She’d always thought people did that out of respect for the dead. Now she knew they did it because they couldn’t stand seeing those dead fish eyes gazing at them.
She looked up from her mother’s corpse and saw that the front door was open. She could run outside, scream for help, keep on running until someone heard her and came to see what was wrong. Billy and Ashley wouldn’t come after her then. They’d be too afraid of getting caught. Billy might have had a gun, but he didn’t have enough ammunition to kill the whole neighborhood. He and Ashley would be forced to let her go, and she would live, and Billy wouldn’t get to stick his thing inside her.
She was tempted. But this was her home. Ashley and her fucked-up psycho boyfriend had destroyed her peace, her placidity. She couldn’t let them get away with that.
She stepped around her mother’s body, careful not to slip in blood, and entered the family room. Billy stood at her father’s feet, laughing, while Ashley, straddling Dad’s crotch, rode him like he was a dead horse.
Joanie calmly walked up to Billy. He’d put the shotgun on the floor and had unzipped his pants. He was stroking his thing—which really wasn’t as long and scary now that she saw it—with rapid motions while Ashley ground on their dead father and made exaggerated moaning sounds. A thought drifted through Joanie’s mind then, spoken in the older woman’s voice.
Entropy sucks.
Joanie wasn’t sure what entropy meant, but she agreed with the weary emotion beneath the woman’s words.
She stepped in front of Billy and jabbed the knife into his thing with four quick motions—stab-stab-stab-stab. He howled, blood gushing, and hunched over and dropped his hands to his crotch in a useless attempt to keep his blood from leaving his body. Ashley, still straddling their father, turned around to see what her sister had done.
“You little—”
Joanie darted forward and swiped the blade through the air in a wide arc. A line opened on Ashley’s throat, she made a wet clicking sound deep inside, and then the blood began to flow. Joanie, still holding tight to the knife, went over to the shotgun, picked it up, and carried it out of Billy and Ashley’s reach. The older voice, the one that called itself Debbie, had advised her to do so.
Dying people have nothing to lose, the woman had said. They’ll try to take you with them if they can.
Joanie slid the shotgun behind the TV stand, and as Ariel sang the notes that would cause her voice to leave her body and go to Ursula, she watched her sister and her boyfriend fall to the carpet and bleed to death.
* * *
It had been years since Joan had allowed herself to remember that night. Really remember it, as if it were happening again. Usually when she thought about it—which wasn’t often—the most she would allow herself to do was recall the basic facts, almost as if she were reading a dry summary of the event written by someone with no emotional attachment to it. But this time the memory had come back full force, so strong that she had to pull into a strip mall parking lot and wait for it to pass, teeth gritted, hands tight on the steering wheel, almost as if she were having some kind of seizure. After it was over, she opened the car windows to let in fresh air and sat for a few more minutes, shaking and drenched in sweat. When she thought she had it together again—together enough, at any rate—she backed out of the parking space, pulled onto the road, and continued heading home. Her home. The home that nobody or nothing would be able to take from her.
Ever.
* * *
“Why are you taking so long?”
Kevin walked down the sidewalk a block east from Joan Lantz’s house. He wore a long-sleeved blue work shirt and darker blue jacket with a power company logo sewn on the left side of the chest. Jeans, brown work boots, and—most important of all—a clipboard completed his disguise. Along with his ever-present smart glasses and earpieces, that is.
He took a phone from his pants pocket and held it to his ear. He didn’t activate it, though. He was using it as a prop, another element in his disguise. It wouldn’t do for someone—a housewife, third-shift worker, or retiree—to look out their front window and see him walking through the neighborhood while appearing to hold a conversation with himself.
“I like to get a feel for the general environment before making an initial approach.”
“Looks to me like you’re stalling. Maybe Deanna should’ve placed you on leave. After all, you did lose your partner less than twelve hours ago.”
She was implying… No, she was coming right out and saying that he wasn’t ready to return to duty. And she might be hinting that, as far as she was concerned, he’d never been suitable for his job in the first place.
“I’m not the only one who’s lost a partner recently,” he said, his tone cold.
“True. But the difference is that I know his death wasn’t my fault. Can you say the same?”
“Admit it. You’re a robot, aren’t you? No one can be that big of a bitch unless they were programmed to be.”
No response.
The silence stretched on for several minutes until finally he sighed. “I’ll head over to Hollyhock Avenue and get started.”
She didn’t acknowledge this, but he had no doubt she was still there, sitting in the van a couple blocks away, listening, recording, and judging.
There wasn’t anything special about the homes on Hollyhock. They wer
e newer by a decade or two than the houses in Harris’s neighborhood, and they were for the most part better maintained. Certainly there were no outside signs of corruption on the houses or the properties. Yes, the sidewalk was cracked in numerous places, and there was a hint of sourness in the air that reminded him of an empty garbage receptacle badly in need of being cleaned. But these details, unpleasant as they might be, were hardly out of the ordinary. Then again, the first indications of corruption were often subtle.
The house that Olivia and Kevin had come to observe was number 552, and according to the information supplied by the Researchers, it had been newly purchased by Jon and Joan Lantz. They’d moved in less than a month ago, after having purchased the house from friends of theirs named Wes and Allison Bishop. Kevin hadn’t said anything to Olivia when they’d received the case file, but he’d been surprised that she had detected any negative energy here. People were usually excited about a new home purchase and because of this, they brought a lot of positive energy with them when they moved in. It was possible that the Lantzes’ relationship was dysfunctional and toxic—although there had been no indication of this in the file. He supposed there was a chance that it was a Fissure, one of those areas where reality was more fragile than in others, allowing unnatural energies to bleed through. But if that was the case, wouldn’t one of their vans have detected it during a routine scanning patrol long before now? It wasn’t as if Fissures popped up overnight like mushrooms after a heavy rainfall.
From a distance, the Lantzes’ house was rather bland-looking, and his opinion didn’t change the closer he got. It was a small ranch, with a black roof, black shutters, and pale yellow siding. It was the sort of muted pastel color you’d expect to find on an Easter egg. The garage was set at a right angle to the house, and the concrete driveway curved from the street, past the front door, to the garage. Both the front and garage doors were white and looked to have been painted recently, certainly within the last couple years. As he drew closer, he examined the yard. The grass could use trimming, but the lawn looked healthy enough and there were no thinning or bare patches, at least not in front. There were flower beds along the front of the house and side of the garage, and the flowers and plants there also looked healthy.
He still had his phone in his hand, and he raised it to his head once again.
“Things look good so far. You see anything that I don’t?”
“Undoubtedly. But nothing that hints at corruption.”
“Very funny.”
He lowered the phone and tucked it into his pocket. He stopped when he reached the end of the Lantzes’ driveway and looked at the legal pad on his clipboard, as if consulting it. He gave a nod in case anyone was watching, lowered the clipboard, and then started walking up the driveway. He tucked the clipboard under his arm and reached into his jacket pocket. He removed a small device encased in black plastic that wasn’t much larger than his phone, and as he walked, he swept it from side to side, keeping a close eye on the machine’s digital readout. The symbols that flashed on the screen weren’t numbers or letters, and they would’ve been meaningless to anyone who didn’t work for Maintenance. The readout came as a shock to him, and he had to stare at it for several long moments as he tried to convince himself to believe it.
“You don’t have to ask. I see it too. And before you say anything, I ran a thorough equipment check before we left. The scanner is working properly.”
“I’ve never seen a reading this high. I didn’t even know it was possible.”
If the reading was accurate, the house—hell, the whole goddamned neighborhood—should’ve been nothing but desolate ruins radiating negative energy. But the house looked normal, and when he stepped away from it—as he did now—the reading dropped quickly. It was as if whatever darkness the house harbored it was, for the most part, managing to contain it. So contained, in fact, it would be hard to detect from the street. It was something of a minor miracle that Olivia had discovered it—and all by herself. He had never encountered anything like this before. It was as if instead of radiating outward, the negative energy was flowing inward, almost as if this house was some kind of sinkhole of corruption.
Kevin walked around the Lantzes’ home to examine it, but because of the intense reading of negative energy it gave off, he kept more distance from it than he normally did when conducting an investigation. He removed several small sensors from his jacket pocket and pressed them into the ground at regularly spaced intervals. They wouldn’t provide as much information as sensors placed inside the house, but they were a good first step. Besides, given the readings they’d gotten so far, he was more than a little reluctant to enter the place.
When he’d finished placing sensors in the backyard, Olivia’s voice sounded in his ears.
“I’ll keep watch while you place sensors inside.”
Kevin wanted to protest that this wasn’t a good time, that one or both of the Lantzes might be home. But according to Research, both Jon and Joan worked outside the home and chances were excellent that they were both gone for the day. Normal procedure would’ve been to inspect the house and yard, place outside sensors, and then continue to conduct surveillance for several days before attempting to place any sensors inside. But given the intensity of negative energy that suffused the Lantzes’ house, this situation was anything but normal. Placing sensors inside was absolutely imperative. Kevin knew this. He didn’t like it, though, and he especially didn’t like Olivia reminding him in that near emotionless tone of hers.
Definitely a robot, he thought.
Knowing that Olivia had likely already reported the readings they’d recorded so far and Analysts were probably watching his live feed, Kevin didn’t hesitate, although he really wanted to. The house had a door to the sunroom in the back, and there was a separate door next to the kitchen. He decided to try the door next to the kitchen first, and he headed for it. As he drew closer to the house, he expected to feel some indication of the negative energy it was giving off. Queasiness, dizziness, tingling in the extremities, the sense that he was almost but not quite hearing sinister voices whispering… But he experienced none of these things, which in its own way was even more disturbing than if his body had reacted to the house. What sort of force could generate that much negative energy—far more than he’d encountered at Harris’s house—and still control it to the point where only a fraction leaked out? It was a terrifying question, and as much as Maintenance needed to know the answer, Kevin wasn’t sure he wanted to find out. Still, the Analysts were watching, so—after popping a couple antacids—he reached out with a hand as steady as he could keep it and tried the doorknob. It was locked, of course, and although he knew that was no excuse for him to give up, he still felt a moment of relief. But he pushed it aside and took his lockpick kit out of his pocket. Thankfully, the Lantzes’ home wasn’t protected by a home security system. That wouldn’t have stopped him, but it would have been a pain in the ass to work around. Kevin liked to keep things as simple as he could, especially when dealing with a nexus of negative energy stronger than any that had ever been recorded in Ash Creek.
He opened the kit and was about to select a pick when Olivia spoke.
“Come around front. There’s something you should see.”
Her voice startled him, and he nearly dropped his kit. But he closed it, slipped it into his jacket pocket, and headed around the side of the house. He knew the main reason Olivia wanted him out front was to give the Analysts a closer look at whatever-it-was, so when he rounded the corner of the house and entered the front yard, he didn’t look at his clipboard but instead faced forward to make sure the cameras in his glasses had unobstructed views.
At first the only thing out of the ordinary he noticed was Surveillance Van Number Two parked at the end of the street. Olivia had moved the vehicle closer while he’d been in the back. Standard procedure was to keep a van farther away during an initial survey, but drivers had the discretion to move closer if they deemed it necessary,
which evidently Olivia had.
But other than that…
“The mail carrier,” Olivia said with a hint of exasperation.
Kevin didn’t see anyone in the direction of the van, so he turned to look in the opposite direction, and there he was, a half dozen houses away and moving toward the Lantzes’. He was of medium height and build, with a rounded mound of black hair that looked as if it had been sculpted from plastic and painted. He wore a short-sleeved postal uniform and short pants, and his skin had an orange-yellow cast, as if he’d applied spray-on tanning solution. At first Kevin didn’t understand why Olivia had bothered alerting him to the man’s presence, but then he noticed two things. One, the man moved in a way that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t that he limped or swung his arms in strange spastic motions. His legs moved with smooth, sure, almost machinelike precision. But the upper half of his body remained statue-still. The smiling expression on his face didn’t vary either. It was as if his features had been molded from plastic. And while the man wasn’t close enough yet for Kevin to tell, he thought he didn’t blink.
All of that was weird enough, but the second thing that Kevin noticed was equally strange: the man wasn’t stopping at any houses. He wore a postal carrier’s uniform and carried a mail pouch slung over his shoulder. But he didn’t so much as turn his head to look at any of the houses he passed—not that Kevin was certain the man could turn that bizarre waxwork head of his. The man continued moving down the sidewalk at a brisk pace, and even before he started angling his body toward the Lantzes’ house, Kevin knew that was the man’s destination. Really, where else could he be going?
Kevin stood at the side of the Lantzes’ home and watched as the carrier moved onto the grass and made for the white plastic mailbox affixed to the outer wall next to the front door. The man gave no sign that he was aware of Kevin’s presence. He walked briskly up to the door, keeping his upper body motionless and the smile frozen on his face the entire way. He stopped in front of the mailbox, and only then did his upper body move. He reached into the pouch with his right hand, removed a large padded envelope, opened the mailbox with his other hand, placed the envelope inside, and then lowered his hand. The envelope was too large for the lid to close, and it jutted out of the box at an angle. The carrier lowered his arms to his side, paused for a moment, and then turned away from the mailbox and started walking back toward the sidewalk with his eerily smooth stride, upper body once more motionless and rigid, unvarying smile still in place.