He smiled back and offered an awkward little wave. “Hi. I’m Ray.”
“If you’re up to it, we’d like to ask you a few questions,” the detective said.
She nodded again.
“Can you give us your name?”
“Chloe,” she croaked, then cleared her throat. “Chloe Wells.”
“Nice to meet you, Chloe.” The detective smiled at her, scribbling her name down in a little notebook in his lap. “Do you have any family in the area? Anyone you’d like us to call?”
She considered it, then slowly shook her head. “No one.”
The detectives exchanged glances. Behind them, Ray looked sympathetic. The doctor’s face betrayed no sense of his thinking at all.
“Are you sure?”
A flicker of thought brought the faded images of Phyllis and Frank to mind. They had fed her, given her a room to rent when she’d first moved to Wexton, even knowing she didn’t yet have a job. But they had not been parental – even her own parents hadn’t been that – and her empty room, her quickly scrawled note, and her last installment of rent pretty much had severed any tie there.
To Ray, she answered, “My parents died three years ago. Car accident. My brother when I was a kid – overdose. I just moved here. There’s no one. Please stay with me.” It took effort to get out that much explanation, effort that made her head throb. In the sympathetic silence that followed, she swallowed the dryness in her throat and it stuck there.
“When Ray brought you in,” Detective Davenport finally said, “you had no purse, no ID, nothing like that. Were you robbed?”
“N-no. No, my purse is back at the cabin.” She felt a strange pang of loss at that, like losing a faithful pet. She’d never go back there to get it, and couldn’t bear to have anything from that cabin near her now.
“What cabin is that?”
“The Shining Life cabin – over by the lake.”
Detective Davenport consulted his notes. “That was the wellness retreat being run by Lance Gilray, correct?”
“Yes.”
The detective nodded.
Chloe thought of Audrey Fairlong and tears blurred the faces in front of her. “They’re all gone, aren’t they?” Her hand, feeling dissociated from her, fluttered to her face to wipe clear her vision with the cold side of a finger.
Detective Davenport looked her squarely in the eye. “Do you think you can tell us what happened to you?”
She groaned softly, turning her head away from him.
“Ms. Wells,” Detective Davenport said in that same soft tone, “we did a sweep of the woods after you were brought in here. We found the cabin. The blood. The pieces of metal. And...” He glanced at Ray, then at Ed, who offered the tiniest nod, a system of subtleties in understanding developed no doubt over years of working together. “...And the, uh, the cell, if that’s what it is. We need to understand, and we have very little time.”
Where do you belong?
Chloe shivered.
“Can you tell us what happened at that cabin, Ms. Wells? And where all the others are?”
She considered the effort of telling the story. It wasn’t just the physical making of words that hurt, but the words themselves. She knew what they had found, what they had seen, would be hard to believe. The streaks and smears, splashes and puddles, the handprints, the trails of dragged bodies, the hastily scrawled question of the weekend, all in blood.
Chloe wasn’t sure what the detective meant when he had said they had very little time, but she suspected it had nothing to do with visiting hours or shift changes. What they had found in the woods would bring government people, the military, the news people. Maybe the CDC. Or maybe, he had been referring to how quickly what happened to the others could happen to the town, the state, whatever.
Maybe their whole planet was spinning on limited time, the human race working and sleeping and cooking dinner and playing with their kids and reading The New York Times and watching American Idol, unaware of what was spreading out among them, set on changing and distorting them. Could it be stopped? Contained? If faith in her government would help that heavy dread in her chest dissipate, she was willing to believe so. Whatever it took to sleep at night.
Except that she wouldn’t sleep well, even with the drugs in her system. She knew that.
She told them anyway, beginning very slowly.
III – Chloe’s Story
Where do you belong?
The poster questioning her place in the universe hanging in the main room of the cabin was the only sign she had seen since the highway. There hadn’t even been a street sign to guide her along the road to the cabin, nor had there been, for a number of good reasons, any sign on the cabin itself indicating she had found the right place. But it looked like the picture in the online brochure – the Shining Life Wellness Retreat, run by Dr. Lance Gilray, Psychiatrist and Behavioral Specialist. The website had promised a weekend to reconnect with one’s inner self, to spend tranquil hours becoming reacquainted with it and learning to appreciate and build confidence in it. It was a place, the website said, to find the shine to one’s soul: to have uninterrupted peace, unconditional love, and unflagging support in one’s quest to polish the soul back to its original shine.
The old her would have found that so much bullshit. But the new her, the broken, tentative, lonely, unguided her, thought maybe four days under the care of a psychiatrist spent contemplating her strengths, enjoying the beauty and serenity of the nature around her, and connecting with others who felt that same chilly, empty space in their chests that she did might be just the thing she needed.
For the fee of $150 a night, Friday through Monday, attendees of the Shining Life Wellness Retreat Weekend could expect three healthy meals a day, made only with natural ingredients grown by local farmers. They could enjoy the beautiful sunset views of Lake Beaumont from the rocking chairs on the back porch of a cozy log cabin. They could sleep in, or join the others for group morning wellness exercises at the outskirts of the surrounding woods. After lunch were self-improvement workshops. In the late afternoons, attendees could write, paint, read, pray, meditate, and create, and after dinner, there would be relaxation techniques accompanied by soothing music.
Chloe had understood it all as a chance to purge anxiety without Prozac. It sounded, at the very least, like four days and three nights of structured nothing, as opposed to helplessly haunting a world that didn’t notice her. She’d signed up on the spot.
Where do you belong? the tagline of the website asked her. She had never really known. Evidently, she thought, I belong at that cabin, at least for the weekend.
And it felt right, she told the detective, at least at first. No sign, but the cabin looked every bit as cozy, safe, and secure as the picture, and there were other cars parked in a semi-circle along the dirt driveway out front, so she thought it okay to assume the website hadn’t been some online ruse to lure victims to an unsuspecting demise.
Inside, nothing indicated a check-in area, bathrooms, or meeting rooms; there was only the poster, a backdrop of deep space, of swirling nebulae and stars spilled like sugar crystals across it, and the faintly blue block letters across the top asking her the very question she had come here to answer. The honey-colored wood of the walls seemed to capture the glow from the fireplace in the far right wall, the low crackling and occasional snap cheerful and inviting. A sitting area took up most of the central space of the main room, its large microfiber sofas reminding her of the strong, steady backs of horses, saddled with Southwestern-style crocheted blankets. Beneath an artistic coffee table made of evenly cut and upended logs with a glass top, Chloe noticed a rug of soft browns and muted oranges and reds. To the left was a staircase railed in carved wood, and beyond that, an open doorway.
She had little time to wonder where the owners of the other cars were when an older woman with a silver-blonde bouffant of hair sprayed perfectly in place appeared in the doorway past the stairs. She smiled brightly when she saw C
hloe, and swept into the room Donna-Reed-style to greet her.
“You must be Chloe Wells! How wonderful to meet you! So glad you could come. Please, come in, come in, and put your bags aside, there. We’ll have Marguerite bring them up to your room. This way!”
Chloe deposited her bags beneath the slant of the staircase as instructed and met the woman in the center of the room.
“I’m Lynn,” the woman said warmly. “Lynn Peters. I assist Dr. Gilray in making sure you find the shine to your life this weekend.” She offered a broad, bright smile of perfectly white, straight teeth. A commercial mom’s smile, Chloe thought. The kind of smile you trusted to buy things from. To let take care of you for a weekend while you found the shine to your life.
“Hi,” Chloe said. “Am I late?”
“Oh my, no. The others are out on the back porch. We were just waiting for you to begin.” That same bright smile firmly in place, she turned on high heels and led Chloe through the doorway and down a short wood-paneled hallway to a screen door.
Outside on the back porch, Chloe found four women and two men. A dark-haired, long-legged woman reclining on a lounge chair smiled up at Chloe. She had the enviable easy beauty of women Chloe believed never had a bad hair day – or, she supposed, never looked less than naturally lovely, even disheveled. Lynn introduced her as Audrey, and she curled neatly manicured fingers in a wave. A blonde leaning self-consciously against the porch railing tugged at the hem of her shorts, tried on a smile, found it ill-fitting, and looked away. When Lynn introduced her as Selby, she muttered a quiet hello. A middle-aged man with a healthy head of graying hair and a kind, lightly-lined and bespectacled face offered Chloe a jovial wave, then extended his hand, half rising from the Adirondack chair where he was sitting.
“Chris,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise,” Chloe said, returning his smile.
A very thin red-head in hip-huggers and a peasant blouse sat barefoot and cross-legged on the porch near a thirty-something tightly wrapped in a business suit and gingerly placed at the edge of a rocker. They were introduced respectively as Kimberley (amended to Kim) and Jennifer.
The last to be introduced to her was Tim – unobtrusively cute, wiry, with brown eyes and a soft smile that warmed her when they turned her way. He extended a hand, warm and dry, and offered a firm shake. “That’s a pretty name,” he told her.
Chloe felt the blush in her cheeks. “Thanks.”
She met Dr. Lance Gilray later that afternoon. He carried his presence like a tidy shine around his person, his long legs scissoring with purpose while the snap of his creased pants matched that stride. His hair was neatly gelled in a small tidal wave away from his brow, and his calculated casual shirt of grays and browns, both stylish and soothing, rippled over a somehow commercially fit form. He took the seat at the head of the long wooden dining table where they were having a dinner of skinless, boneless chicken breast, salad, and light get-to-know-you conversation. Lynn fairly swooned at his presence. Chloe was instantly put off.
* * * * *
“You didn’t like him?” Detective Davenport cut in.
Startled out of her narrative, Chloe looked up at him. “Well, no, uh...I didn’t. I...guess I didn’t trust him. You know, in my gut.”
Detective Davenport and his partner exchanged glances. The partner – Ed, she thought his name was – asked, “Do you think he knew about the – uh, about what you found in the woods?”
She considered it a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
Detective Davenport wrote something down in his notepad, then nodded for her to continue. She took a deep breath and went on.
* * * * *
That first night there was a group mixer of sorts, a quiet affair on the cabin grounds beneath moon and starlight with soft Tibetan music, virgin umbrella drinks, and hors d’oeuvers. It was a warm night with light breezes and the soft chirruping of tree frogs and crickets. She’d spent the evening talking to Tim, mostly, the two getting to know each other and sipping from dainty glasses of sparkling grape juice and –
* * * * *
“So the bad things didn’t start right away, then?”
Chloe thought the detective’s tone had a touch of impatience to it.
“No,” she answered. “Other than bad dreams that night about...space, I guess. Black holes. Other than that, nothing bad happened. The trouble started Sunday morning, with –”
* * * * *
– the metal room that Audrey found in the woods. The one with the writing on it.
Chloe had been stretched out on the main gathering area’s couch, working on a crossword puzzle, when Audrey burst in and exclaimed, “You guys, you’ve got to see what I found! It’s so cool!”
Chris, who had been reading a Field & Stream magazine, looked up with a bemused smile at her evident excitement. Selby, who had been gazing out the window, turned and frowned at her. It had been clear to Chloe from the mixer the night before that Selby wasn’t much of a people-person, especially when those people were pretty women. People like that – and their sudden outbursts of unexplained and undaunted childish delight – seem to flat-out annoy her. Chloe set aside her crossword puzzle and exchanged glances with Tim, who dropped the feet he had self-consciously propped up on the table to nap and sat up. They both watched Audrey as she ran a hand beneath her nose and sniffed, then swooped down on Chloe and dragged her to her feet. Her eyes reflected a patina of glassy calm, but the rest of her fairly glowed with excitement. Her tanned skin was flushed and vaguely shimmery with sweat. Her fingers wrapped around Chloe’s wrist in an uncomfortably hot grip as their eyes met. “You have to come see.”
“What is it, Audrey? What did you find?”
She turned to Tim and flashed him a bright smile. “It’s beautiful. It’s even better than the dreams. Let me show you.”
“Dreams?” Selby’s head perked up in surprise. “Audrey, it’s almost time for the workshops. I think...maybe we should get Lynn or Dr. Gilray?”
“No,” Audrey turned on Selby, the glassiness of her gaze shattered and sharp. “We don’t need them. You need to see this now.”
“Audrey, are you okay?” Chris, who had risen to join the women, touched her arm and then drew back as if burned.
The young woman looked momentarily confused. She sniffed again, nodded, and answered, “I’m fine! Why? Of course I’m fine. Better than fine! Oh, say you’ll come see!”
Something about the fever intensity of Audrey’s demeanor, her persistence, made Chloe uncomfortable. She waited for the others to say something, and when they didn’t, she reluctantly picked up the mantle of answering for them. “Okay,” Chloe muttered.
Her answer seemed to please Audrey immensely; she bounced where she stood and beamed. “You’ll see. It’s amazing. Breathtaking, really.” She bounded away on her long legs, and Tim, Chloe, Selby, and Chris followed after.
She led them from the back porch of the cabin and down the trail to the sandy shoreline where the morning wellness exercises took place, then east along the water’s edge to the tree line again, and into the forest. They hiked about twenty minutes into the thick of it, stepping over large, gnarled roots and ducking arthritically knotty branches. The speckled light that made its way between the tops of trees cast weak sunfade on the trunks of the old trees. Around them, snaps and pops bounced between the tree trunks, and faint sounds like the cries of small children occasionally poked holes in the anxious quiet of their little exploring party. No serenity of a shining life out here, Chloe thought. With each tree root she tripped over and each branch that snapped back and whacked her in the arm or leg, she grew more certain that whatever Audrey so desperately wanted them to see was not worth being lost out there in the chilly wooded shade for. She didn’t know her way around the forest, though, and getting lost trying to find her way back alone seemed like the greater of the two evils just then. So she kept her eyes on Audrey’s red shorts and her swinging black ponytail as she
bobbed and weaved and dipped along the heavy tree- and fern-choked landscape before them.
When they finally caught up to Audrey, she was bouncing excitedly and giggling by a large, narrow shed – at least, that’s what it looked like to Chloe. It leaned at an impractical tilt, but by Chloe’s estimation, the portion still buried beneath the ground must have been significant enough to keep it from toppling. What was exposed above-ground slanted seven feet up, wide enough for three, maybe four people inside, if cramped and close together. The metal which formed the slightly hexagon shape of the sides and the gradually angled roof was possibly some kind of alloy of steel or tin – not that Chloe really knew enough about metals or alloys to identify anything like that by sight. Still, she was pretty sure she’d never seen a metal like that before, with its gradations of silver that sometimes caught up spectra of color between dips and swells, even though there were no evident dips and swells to cause them.
“What the –?” Chris glanced from the structure to Audrey and back again. He reached a tentative hand out toward one of the smooth panels and drew it back. “What is this?”
The flat panel facing them had seams that implied a sliver of opening like a slender window or door soldered shut. Affixed above the upper seam was a plaque with a series of squiggles, slants, and uprights suggestive of old rune languages. She had seen a Discovery Channel show once on cuneiform and hieroglyphs, and what was embossed on the small plaque reminded her somewhat of those old carvings, only none of the symbols suggested any definitive spark of recognition.
Mounds of overturned dirt, rocks, and torn-up grass around the thing, which Audrey easily scaled to be closer to her discovery, suggested it had recently been unearthed, but it was impossible to tell by who or what, or exactly when. Chloe noticed some of the rocks around it had the chalky outlines of fossil plants and those bootprint-like trilobites, but nothing gave evidence of digging equipment or the humans to operate it. If anything, Chloe thought, it looked more like the metal thing – she’d come to think of it as an isolated cell of sorts, a kind of metallic outhouse – had dug its way up through the dirt on its own.
Night Movies Page 17