by Tim Curran
As he crept toward the nearest of the heads, which belonged to a young, possibly once-attractive woman, he drew his phone from his pocket, only to find no service. For the assignment he had just put to bed in Charleston—the busting of a deadly arson ring—he had opted to drive, rather than make the O’Hare–Yeager roundtrip, because he had wanted to stop in on his brother in Cincinnati. At the last minute, Jim had canceled because of a strep infection. Now this.
Unable to suppress his reporter’s instincts for capturing a story, however ghastly, he braced himself and snapped several photos of the heads. If it came down to an assignment, though, he hoped Sibulsky, his editor, would put someone else on this one.
Fat chance.
Blair had witnessed many horrific sights in Iraq—particularly the bodies of children torn apart by shrapnel from homemade explosives and bullets from automatic rifles. But somehow these remnants of lives ended so brutally hit him like a vicious punch to the gut. It was the awful awareness in their eyes, he decided, both heart-wrenching and terrifying, as if the dead gazes portended for him an imminent, equally dreadful fate.
This place felt sick.
He had seen evil, especially overseas. People anywhere and everywhere were evil. But no location in his experience had ever felt like this—drenched in some tangible, noisome horror.
Photos done, he slipped his phone back into his pocket and returned to the car. He had a duty to turn this matter over to the local law, and he would. At this moment, to his profession, he felt considerably less committed.
As he started the LaCrosse, for a second or two, he thought he glimpsed something beyond the old barn: a hovering patch of darkness in the sky, like a hole punched in the fabric of the world.
A dark cloud.
No.
A black hole with soulless, spying eyes.
“What did Sibulsky say?”
“I didn’t tell him.”
“You serious?”
“Very.”
Debra’s hands on her hips, her head cocked quizzically at him, indicated that she thought his brain stem must have snapped. “You called the State Patrol and vamoosed? You?”
“I couldn’t stay and deal with that.”
“After the things you’ve seen?”
“This was the worst.”
“Is it on the news?”
“Not that I know of.”
“But you’re checking on it?”
“Diligently.”
Blair stepped around the wet bar in the corner of the living room and poured a second martini, very dirty, from the shaker. Debra followed and held out her glass, which he filled before turning to the window, wondering if he might again glimpse the strange image that had drifted into his field of vision several times since his discovery of the Hinton Heads. His 30th-floor apartment overlooked the Kennedy Expressway and the northern Chicago skyline, now ablaze with brilliant, kinetic light—a view that, as far as he was concerned, justified his spending more than a third of his income on his residence. He saw nothing unusual, other than a single, brilliant star in the sky, which must have been Mars or Jupiter, since no other celestial bodies besides the moon had the candlepower to cut through the city’s canopy of smog and light pollution.
“Why do you keep looking out there?” Debra asked as she half-danced over to him and slipped an arm around his waist. “You’re so preoccupied.”
“I’m looking for a message from God,” he said, with an ounce more solemnity than she would understand. “He doesn’t seem to have left any lately.”
“Something to ease the memory?”
That wasn’t exactly what he was getting at, so he shrugged. “I think God’s stopped watching because the movie’s too nasty.”
Debra’s amber-brown eyes blinked away the remark. Every now and then, some remnant of her mostly forgotten Christianity asserted itself. “He doesn’t stop watching.”
There. At one o’clock. In the general direction of Lincoln Park.
A dark splotch. A black hole drilled in the midnight blue sky, from which something peered out at him, unseen except for a few barely discernible bubbles of color, a hue he couldn’t quite describe, vaguely resembling a spider’s bulbous eyes. As before, the thing existed for three seconds and then was gone, but his sporadic glimpses were just distinct enough to convince him it was not an optical illusion. The fact it had first appeared in Hinton might be coincidence or it might not, but somehow, insidiously, it brought to mind the dark days of two summers ago, when he was firmly entrenched in the atrocity that was the Persian Gulf.
He would remember why in his own sweet time.
He opened the sliding glass door and stepped out to what he called the Afterdeck: the sole remnant of a long-disassembled fire escape, a four-by-eight rectangle of iron grillwork anchored to the building’s superstructure by a few bolts that looked rusty enough to pop under little more than his weight. Debra wouldn’t set foot out here, but he had outfitted the platform with a table and lounge chair, and on pleasant evenings, he enjoyed reclining with nothing but 300 feet of turbulent air between him and Monroe Street. She knew when he went out there he had entered his own private world, and she let him be, if sometimes with more than a touch of anxiety.
Sipping his martini, he fixed his eyes on the northeastern horizon and the countless glittering towers that soared out of the sizzling ocean of light, hoping to take a bearing should the ghostly image appear yet again.
A steady breeze from Lake Michigan swept away the humidity before it could turn his skin to moist clay and, along with the alcohol, lulled him into a contemplative stupor. Every now and then, the grillwork platform would shift subtly, just enough to induce a touch of vertigo, and he wondered how long those old bolts in the wall would continue to hold. However, he enjoyed the thrill of the wind’s tug and the perception that he was actually floating on a current of air, so the danger was more alluring than daunting.
He closed his eyes to enjoy the invigorating sensation, and when he opened them again, the moon had risen and the sound of traffic on the expressway below had changed from a slow, steady rumble to the occasional swish-thrum of vehicles passing by at high speed. His martini glass, empty, lay on its side on the metal latticework beside his lounge chair, and his chest felt heavy, as if something were pressing insistently down on him. Glancing northeastward, he half-expected to see a gaping pit in the sky, barely visible globular eyes peering out, their inscrutable gaze weighing on him like frigid stone. But there was nothing.
Except stars.
Holy God, the sky was full of them. Brilliant, multicolored jewels cutting through the greenish haze like smoldering embers that stretched from horizon to horizon. He’d never seen anything like it—at least, not in the city. Maybe in a far, distant desert, some years ago.
He sat up and nearly choked, and he realized the pressure in his chest was from a horrible, gut-wrenching stench, which hovered like a layer of thick, sulfurous smoke just above his reclining body.
“Fucking awful,” he muttered, wondering what kind of hellish atmospheric cocktail had wafted to this altitude. He picked up his glass and returned to indoors, now dark and silent. Apparently, Debra had already gone to bed. The kitchen clock read 1:09 AM; five hours had flashed by since he had ventured out to the Afterdeck.
Age, alcohol, and fatigue, he thought. Traveling long distances wore him out more than it used to, and lately he’d been aware of a low, slow burn inside as the stress of endlessly delving into man’s inhumanity to man took its toll on his mind and body. Lots of newsmen burned out quickly, especially now that the world had shrunk to the point that there was simply no such place as “over there.” It was all one big mass of humanity on an aging, cancer-riddled sphere edging ever closer to its final days of existence.
He’d smelled something like that stench out there once before, he thought. But somewhere else, back in the past, never in Chicago.
He went to the bar, made himself a nightcap—a thing he had lately come to cheri
sh like little else—and returned to the window to marvel at the inexplicable, star-stippled sky.
Two Summers Ago:
A few glimmers of light cut through the pulsating darkness that had become his entire field of vision, and, finally, he began to hear the sounds of mass confusion around him: haranguing voices, none in English; the grating rumble of HUMV engines; the distant, arrhythmic thuds of artillery fire—whether from the Americans, the Islamists, or both, he couldn’t tell. It was heavy and constant. So it must be ours, he thought.
He was lying on his back on a rough, uncomfortable surface. As sight and hearing slowly returned, he took stock of every sensation, praying he hadn’t been ripped half-apart by the nearby mortar blast. His back ached, but he didn’t feel any other focused pain. He found he could move his hands and feet—thank God! —and apart from a dull pounding in his temples, he counted himself little the worst for wear. Overhead, he saw a cracked plaster ceiling; to his right, an open window, through which a few wisps of smoke trickled in; and to the left, a cracked wooden door, slightly ajar. There were no furnishings, and the walls were bare. At the moment, he appeared to be alone.
Soon, the shelling stopped, the motors faded, and the voices diminished until all he could hear was the soft whisper of desert wind outside. No further hint of incoming ordnance.
Thus reassured, he relaxed somewhat, a bit nervous about his unknown whereabouts, but still too dazed to worry much about it, at least for the time being. He was alive and seemingly whole.
He had no idea what had happened to Edward Hollister, the British journalist with whom he’d been traveling, or the young Iraqi translator, whose name he couldn’t remember. He’d last seen them just before the shelling started—before the road had been completely obliterated by smoke and every vehicle and person in the convoy had scattered in search of cover.
He didn’t remain relaxed very long. A new chorus of voices rose somewhere just beyond the window, and he sat up, slowly, carefully, wondering whether he had been brought here by friendlies or by murderous fanatics. But no—the window and door were open. If the Islamists had abducted him, they would never have left him unattended.
Or would they? Out there lay only miles of desert. He wouldn’t get very far even if he were to walk out of here unhindered.
He rose to his knees, shuffled to the window, and stuck his head into the arid afternoon air. To his surprise, he found himself looking out over an expanse of blinding white sand from three stories up. Maybe he was in a mosque, or some vacant apartment building. From this vantage point, he couldn’t see any other structures, but off to the right, he discerned a pale, thin ribbon that extended to the horizon, which he figured was the road his convoy had been traveling when the mortars hit.
Something on that horizon—which lay to the east, according to the sun—drew his attention and held it. A long, dark smudge, like a blotch of murky oil paint, had turned a portion of the powder-blue backdrop to yellow-brown soup. For a long minute, he couldn’t figure out what he was seeing until he remembered having driven through western Indiana late one spring and seen something like it rolling across the endless, flat plain.
Dust storm.
A huge one, by the look of it.
A tremor passed through his gut, but he wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t just the approaching sand storm. Something here seemed wrong. Evil, even. As if more than danger lurked somewhere around him, hidden, waiting.
Plotting.
Now:
The next day when he saw the thing in the sky, it lasted for several minutes, occupying that same space above the horizon, becoming more substantial with every passing second, like an onyx-hued moon materializing through a thinning haze.
Debra hadn’t seen it when he’d pointed straight to it. He doubted anyone else would either.
So he went after it.
Like a black star of Bethlehem, it led him northeastward until he arrived in a Wrigleyville neighborhood he passed through only rarely: an attractive, tree-lined residential street, quiet and restful, between Belmont and Addison. He knew when he had reached his destination because of the sudden tremor of cold, pure dread that passed through his body.
The same as in Hinton, Ohio.
And some other, still unremembered time.
An ancient, hulking church stood silently on a street corner, watching over the neighborhood with somber dignity, its tall spire thrusting skyward—toward the gaping black mouth that had climbed to a zenith directly overhead, occasionally revealing a shifting array of oddly colored orbs on which his eyes refused to focus.
He parked at the curbside, got out of his car with his camera and snapped a series of photographs. Hardly unexpectedly, when he looked into the preview pane to see what the lens had captured, he saw only azure blue sky and ruffled masses of a few altostratus clouds.
The implication nearly sent him into a screaming rage. That some portion of his mind had become unhinged and was causing him to hallucinate seemed sickeningly certain.
“What you s’pose that is?” came a cracked, dry voice from behind him.
Blair whirled to regard the speaker: a stooped, gray-haired woman who wore a moth-eaten overcoat and a ratty woolen scarf, even though the morning was already quite warm. A gnarled finger pointed, not to the sky, but toward the distant street corner to the north. At first, he saw nothing remarkable, but after a few seconds, he detected a movement among the tree limbs, just above the sidewalk.
A dark shape was gliding slowly earthward: a black cat pawing its way out of the branches and creeping down the trunk, he thought, until he realized, by way of comparing it to the car parked beside the tree, that the thing was easily larger than a man. It had a long, lithe torso and four spindly limbs, but he could discern only a black, featureless silhouette. When it reached the ground, it vanished behind the cars and did not reappear.
“An animal?” he asked, glancing back at the old woman, realizing he had failed to lift his camera for a shot.
“No. It came from outa that, up yonder.” The pointing finger turned upward.
Blair’s blood froze. He tried not to stammer, nearly succeeded. “You see it?”
“You think I’m blind? ’Course I see it.”
Blair squinted, a little suspicious. “What do you see?”
“Don’t get wise with me!”
“You mean the hole in the sky.”
“Yeah. The hole in the sky.”
The old woman’s eyes shifted and turned north. Blair followed her gaze and again saw the black silhouette, almost a man, but not quite, and this time it began to dance.
Jerky, erratic. A puppet on strings pulled by a madman’s hands.
Blair broke into a sprint, something he hadn’t done in too many ages, and his lungs and heart protested after a hundred yards. When he blinked, the silhouette had again disappeared.
“No way.”
As he passed a parked car, something caught his eye, and he stopped. There, half jammed into the grill, half hanging onto the asphalt: a shapeless mass, all pink and red, surrounded by a pool of liquid crimson.
No, it was not a child, it couldn’t be.
A fractured, dripping skull hung from a few peach-colored, fleshy strands, its eyes glistening blue and staring vacantly skyward. Two crooked rows of teeth between bleeding, blistered gums grinned endlessly, and he heard a wheezing gasp, which seemed to come from the ruined figure hanging from the front of the car, though he knew it couldn’t have.
This time he took photographs. Several.
He looked left, across the street, down the alley between two of the houses. From a tree in the backyard, barely visible, something small was hanging from a rope, swinging slowly back and forth, and for a couple of seconds, it appeared to wriggle helplessly.
To his right, from beneath the wooden stairs that led to the side door of a house, a small, ivory-white arm protruded, doll-like, but too clearly not a doll.
The odor that suddenly wormed down his trachea and expanded in
his lungs was like an injection of brimstone. He turned, gagged, and emptied the contents of his stomach onto the sidewalk.
Sometime later, he struggled back upright and glimpsed the black silhouette pirouetting away to the north, where it vanished in the distance.
“You see?” came the voice of the old woman.
It was a little Clark Street tavern; he might have visited it a time or two before. At this hour of day, it was nearly empty. The bartender, a burly young man with a goatee and small but very bright emerald eyes, watched him curiously as he sucked down a bourbon on ice, its burn as beautiful as the caress of Debra’s hand.
“Another,” he said, passing back the empty glass.
“What did you see?” the bartender asked, his small eyes a little too intent.
“What makes you think I saw anything?”
“Intuition.”
“I’ll just bet.”
“Lots of people lately. They see things, they come in here, they drink. Sometimes they talk.”
Blair raised an eyebrow, but then his phone in his pocket burred softly.
“Yeah?”
“Why didn’t you tell me about Hinton?” It was Sibulsky’s voice.
“What about it?”
“You know what about. Did you get pictures?”
“Yeah. I got pictures.”
“Somehow, I have not seen them.”
“You will.”
“I’m wondering why you didn’t bring this to me straight away. And why—if you saw what you say you did—it hasn’t been picked up by any of the majors. Or even social media.”
“How do you know about Hinton?”
“I just talked to Debra. Wanted to know why you hadn’t checked in.”
He sighed. “Look, Ben. Don’t even think of sending me back there. I can’t go. Not now.”
Sibulsky’s voice turned sharp. “If this is something big, it belongs to you, Blair.”
He hated where this train was heading, but there was no way to turn it. “Okay. Here’s the deal. Something’s happening here. In the city. I think it’s part of the same thing.”