What is he?
Carrie did her research. Rosalia and Juan were indeed qualified to receive health coverage if Rosalia was willing to classify her son as handicapped, and Carrie returned to the tenement building on Thursday to discuss the situation. As before, the bedroom was dark, and also as before, there was no sign at first of Juan. She sat on the same torn couch she had the first time, speaking slowly and carefully so that Rosalia would be sure to understand, and explained the situation in detail, glancing every so often toward the darkened doorway, unable to help herself.
‘‘No!’’ Rosalia insisted in her heavily accented English. ‘‘Juan es no handicap! He do everything all boy do!’’
‘‘I know,’’ Carrie countered patiently, ‘‘but Juan is different, and if you just let me list him as handicapped—’’
‘‘No!’’ Rosalia shouted. ‘‘No es handicap!’’
‘‘I understand. But—’’
‘‘I say no!’’ She started to cry, and Carrie backed off. She felt frustrated in a way that she ordinarily did not, and though it was unethical, she wanted to simply fill out all of the forms herself and then tell Rosalia that the problem had been solved rather than try to convince the woman of the right course of action. She hazarded a glance toward the bedroom door. Juan had crept out from his hiding place once again and was sitting amid the torn newspaper, staring at her. Was there comprehension in those dark animal eyes? She couldn’t tell, but she thought of her dreams and wondered what she would do if he suddenly started scurrying toward her on all fours.
‘‘Just think about it,’’ Carrie told Rosalia, packing up her papers. ‘‘I really don’t see any other way for you and Juan to get medical coverage. Besides, this way, if something should happen to Juan, an accident or—’’
‘‘No,’’ Rosalia said firmly, wiping away the last of her tears.
‘‘Okay, okay.’’ She took a deep breath. ‘‘If you need me, you still have my card, right?’’
Rosalia nodded.
‘‘Call me if you need help or even if you’d just like to talk, all right?’’
‘‘Thank you.’’ The woman’s voice was back to its usual soft tone, her pretty face no longer registering agitation.
Carrie got up to go, and before she did, took one last look at the boy in the bedroom. Juan was standing up now, digging through the right front pocket of his jeans and at that second, he seemed just like an ordinary kid wearing a mask. Then he looked up, and she saw his pointed ears prick up, saw his dark overlarge eyes focus on her, saw a long pink tongue reach between small teeth and lick slimy blackened lips. The sight chilled her to the bone. His face didn’t look quite as much like a llama’s from this angle. It looked more like that of a mutated wolf or some other animal that she couldn’t quite place.
A monster, she thought, but pushed the idea out of her mind.
On her way back to the office, Carrie stopped off at a 7-Eleven for a Big Gulp. The afternoon was hot, her car had no air-conditioning, and after breathing the foul stale air of the Oliveras’ dirty apartment, she needed something sweet, wet and cold to cleanse her mouth.
Carrie never read the tabloids. Even in line at the grocery store checkout, she usually glanced at the covers of the women’s magazines, with their endless prescriptions for better sex, rather than waste her time with the outrageous inanities printed in the Enquirer, the Star and their ilk. For some reason, though, today as she stood behind a hirsute man buying beer and lottery tickets, Carrie bypassed Cosmopolitan and read the cover of the Weekly Globe. PROSTITUTE GIVES BIRTH TO RHINO BOY! the headline screamed. Beneath that was a grainy photograph of a garishly dressed woman holding the hand of a small child with a hairless head and what did indeed appear to be a horn growing out from the spot where his nose should have been.
Carrie’s stomach dropped. More than anything else, it was the grain that got to her, that granted the picture verisimilitude. Faked photos these days were usually much clearer than this. She recalled several years ago seeing a perfectly focused, perfectly composed picture of the president supposedly shaking hands with an alien. Something about both the graininess and the artless composition of this photo, however, made it look as though it had been taken by a hidden camera, without the consent of the subject, and to her that made it seem much more real.
Of course, she thought of Juan. There was no real physical similarity between Juan and the rhino boy, but the parallels were impossible to ignore.
The man in front of her finished scratching his lottery tickets, grabbed his bagged beer and walked away with a muttered, ‘‘Shit.’’ Impulsively, Carrie grabbed the tabloid and popped it on the checkout counter next to her Big Gulp. Once in the car, she opened the paper, turning pages until she found the rhino boy article. Flanked by two more photos nearly identical to the one on the cover and obviously taken in sequence, the story was short and sketchy with very little hard information. The ‘‘prostitute,’’ if that’s really what she was, was identified only by her first name—Holly—and the city in which she lived— which just happened to be San Francisco.
Coincidence?
Carrie was beginning to think not.
The Weekly Globe was a national publication based in Minneapolis, but there was an address and phone number for a West Coast bureau listed in the staff box, and as soon as Carrie got back to the office, she called the number, got a receptionist on the line and asked to speak with Kent Daniels, the reporter who’d written the article.
‘‘I’m sorry,’’ the receptionist said in a pinched Ernestine voice, ‘‘but it is the policy of this publication not to give out the numbers of its contributors.’’
‘‘I’m not asking for his home phone. Just transfer me to his desk or his voice mail.’’
‘‘The Weekly Globe is one hundred percent freelance written,’’ the woman said. ‘‘Mr. Daniels does not have a desk or a phone here.’’
‘‘I just need to contact him,’’ Carrie said, beginning to get frustrated. She paused, thinking of something. ‘‘I read his article on the rhino boy.’’ Here she paused again, this time for dramatic effect. ‘‘I know someone else like that.’’ She didn’t elaborate, leading the woman to read between the lines that she might be calling in order to provide the reporter with a tip for a new story.
‘‘I’m sorry,’’ the receptionist repeated, ‘‘but it is the policy of this publication—’’
‘‘Forget it,’’ Carrie said tiredly. She hung up the phone. She was not entirely convinced that the rhino boy was real, but the connection with Juan, as tentative as it might be, was enough to keep her going a little further.
She thought for a moment. A lot of prostitutes received some sort of assistance, particularly if they had children. She could pass around the photo and see if anyone recognized the woman, or even access records within the department and see if any Hollys were assigned to one of their caseworkers. Even if that angle didn’t pan out, Social Services had numerous contacts within the police department. The two worked together frequently. She herself had good rapport with a sergeant who had recently referred to her a victim of domestic abuse. Someone somewhere was bound to be able to identify this woman and her child if they really existed.
She hit pay dirt almost immediately.
Jan Nguyen had counseled Holly a few years back. She, too, had seen the tabloid and had brought in the paper to show Sanchez. Carrie saw Jan and caught her before she could go into the supervisor’s office. ‘‘I need to talk to you,’’ she said.
Holly’s real name was Elaine Peters, and she was indeed a prostitute who at that time had been working the park. When Jan had been counseling her, Holly had been pregnant, but then she’d called one day and said she’d had an abortion and found a new job and didn’t need or want the state’s help anymore. Jan suspected Holly’s pimp was behind this, and she made several attempts to meet again with Holly, but all of her efforts were rebuffed, and she finally gave up, sucked back into the endless stream of cases
that flowed through Social Services.
Carrie explained her interest in the case, told Jan about Rosalia and Juan, and said that she’d like to meet with Holly if she could.
Jan was by the book. She went to Sanchez first, showed the supervisor her copy of the tabloid and explained the situation. He gave her permission to contact Holly once again and allowed Carrie to tag along. ‘‘This is not Juan,’’ he told Carrie, ‘‘but I understand your interest. I have to admit, I’m curious myself. Keep me up on what’s going on.’’
‘‘We will,’’ she promised.
The phone number they had on file was no longer in service. Although Jan searched through the records using Holly’s real name as well as various permutations of both her legal and street monikers, she came up with nothing. She was willing to wait, talk with some other caseworkers and come at this from another direction tomorrow,but Carrie wanted to act now, and Jan agreed to accompany her to the listed address.
Sanchez not only allowed them to take two hours but let them check a car out of the pool—an offer that shocked them both. Carrie quickly went to the bathroom while Jan printed out a map to the location, and after arranging for each of their calls to be covered, they were off.
Jan drove. It was a twenty-minute drive through some of the worst areas of the city, and Carrie was grateful that the other social worker was with her. Even after five years, she still didn’t feel comfortable going into really rough neighborhoods alone.
And this neighborhood was rough.
She’d known it even before leaving the office, but it was confirmed when two police cars roared past them a few blocks from Holly’s last-known address, sirens on, lights flashing, both coming to a screeching halt in the middle of the street, four officers jumping out, weapons drawn.
Jan quickly turned onto another street. ‘‘Maybe we should head back,’’ she suggested. ‘‘We can come here tomorrow.’’
It was the logical thing to do. And, in the grand scheme of things, what difference did a day make? Still, Carrie felt a strong, almost compulsive need to continue on. ‘‘How close is Holly’s place?’’
‘‘Two or three blocks.’’
‘‘That’s far enough away, isn’t it? If we come from the side or the back and stay off that street?’’
‘‘There’s no guarantee she still lives there. Or that she’s even home.’’
Carrie held up the tabloid photo.
Jan sighed. ‘‘All right, you’re right. I need to know, too.’’
They parked on the side of the three-story tenement building, alongside graffiti that seemed to be a list of gang members’ nicknames: Shorty. Big Boy. Daddy. Cupid. On the sidewalk, against the wall, a skinny black man lay in a fetal position, only the twitching of his feet indicating that he was still alive. From the distance came the sound of sirens and, closer in, gunfire.
Jan reached into her handbag before opening the car door. ‘‘Do you have pepper spray?’’
Carrie nodded.
‘‘Get it out.’’ She locked the car and, armed, the two of them hurried past the twitching man, around the corner and into the building. The interior of the tenement house was, if possible, even worse than the exterior. Away from the public, taggers had felt free to cover every available inch of space with spray painted words and pictures. The unlit corridor smelled of stale urine and vomit. Huff bags, syringes and broken liquor bottles littered the floor.
‘‘Holly lived upstairs,’’ Jan said, walking slowly and holding the spray can of Mace in front of her. ‘‘On the second floor. The stairway’s up ahead.’’
Carrie’s heart was pounding. She had no desire to walk up any dark stairwell, and the rational part of her brain was telling her to turn tail and run. But there was nothing rational about the impulse that had brought her here, and the crazy desire to find the rhino boy overrode all arguments.
She remembered her dream of the blackout, heard in her mind Juan’s raspy chuckle and the two English words whispered by Rosalia: ‘‘He’s coming.’’ The panic she felt now was eerily similar to the emotion she’d experienced in the nightmare, and she gripped her pepper spray more tightly as she and Jan approached the open stairwell. The two of them walked up the steps together. Shadows bathed the landing, and the strong, sickening stench of feces arose about them. Gagging, Carrie tried to breathe through her mouth, being careful where she stepped, although in the darkness she couldn’t really see the stairs beneath her feet.
They reached the second floor without incident.
The hallway was dark, the building quiet.
Too quiet.
Carrie hadn’t noticed it before, but the sounds of life usually heard in apartment buildings—crying babies, radios, televisions, arguments—were completely absent. Instead, an unnatural stillness seemed to have settled over the tenement house. They were in the center of the building, surrounded by dozens of rooms, yet it seemed as though they were all alone.
He’s coming.
There was indeed a looming sense that someone—or something—was approaching, that if any people other than themselves were in the building, they were sitting in frightened silence behind closed, locked doors, desperately trying not to make a sound. As much as the threatening physical surroundings, it was this completely unfounded feeling that something big was on its way that made her pulse pound and struck terror in her heart. Carrie looked down the hallway, suddenly seized by the irrational conviction that if they could only get inside one of the apartments and out of the corridor, they would be safe.
He’s coming.
She glanced over at Jan. The other social worker seemed, if not unconcerned for their safety, at least oblivious to this unseen threat, and Carrie forced herself to breathe deeply, calm down. She wasn’t ordinarily an imaginative person, but something about Juan and the rhino boy and the entire situation set her nerves on edge and made her far more susceptible to illusory dangers than she usually was.
‘‘Apartment 210,’’ Jan said, and though her voice wasn’t loud, it sounded amplified in the stillness. She must have noticed it, too, because when she said, ‘‘It’s right up here on the left,’’ she whispered the words.
If there was a focal point to the silence, a still center about which the noiselessness spiraled, it was apartment number 210. Carrie had no idea what made her think such a thing, but as she stopped in front of the battered door, she was convinced that it was so. The two of them stood there for a moment, looking at each other, both of them nervous.
It was Jan who stepped forward and knocked on the door.
They waited several seconds, but there was no answer.
‘‘Maybe she’s not here,’’ Carrie suggested. ‘‘Maybe she’s on the street.’’
‘‘Or strung out,’’ Jan said hopefully.
But neither of them believed that, and as Jan turned the knob of the unlocked door and pushed against the peeling facade, Carrie prepared herself for what they might find inside.
It was a good thing she did.
The front room had been trashed. A coffee table was split in half, a mirror smashed, several wooden chairs broken, a television screen shattered, a crib crushed under the weight of an overturned couch. The lone window in the kitchenette was closed, and a suffocating stench permeated the air, a horrible, foul smell that was worse than rotting meat and worse than human waste but somehow incorporated both.
Blood was everywhere.
Jan was gagging, holding her hand over her nose and mouth, but Carrie had already taken out her cell phone and was calling 911. Even as she spoke to the dispatcher, explaining who they were and what they’d found, giving the address of Holly’s apartment, Carrie was looking about the room, trying to find a body, searching for concreteinformation that she could provide the police. She was surprised by how calm she was acting, but she shouldn’t have been. Under pressure, she inevitably went into automatic mode. Her training took over, and she was always able to handle any crisis that was thrown at her. It was only la
ter, when all was done, that the full weight of what had occurred would sink in, and it was then that she would collapse into a trembling heap of gelatinous protoplasm.
The dispatcher informed her that officers were on their way and told her to stay on the line, but Carrie hung up on him. Hand still over her nose and mouth, Jan was moving cautiously toward the bedroom and Carrie joined her. They were probably destroying evidence with every footstep, but if Holly or her son were still alive, they owed it to the two of them to try to help.
They reached the open doorway.
If the front room was bad, the bedroom was even worse.
The bed was covered with blood and feathers. The sheets had been torn, the mattress and pillows ripped open, as though whoever had done this had been searching for something hidden and valuable. Carrie knew that was not the case, though. In the same way that she’d known she had to find Holly today, she was certain that whoever had torn up the apartment had done so in order to hide his real motive: killing the hooker and her son.
Holly herself, nude and spread-eagled, lay half on, half off the bed, her belly slit open, its gruesome contents piled next to her on the blood-soaked mattress. In her mouth, the young woman’s remaining teeth were red, and one eye was swollen shut while the other was wide open, giving the corpse an unnerving, deranged look.
Carrie’s gaze focused on Holly’s hanging hand, where a white feather lay glued to the back of the woman’s index finger with congealed blood. It was an eerie imitationof the artwork from a children’s book of horror stories titled More Tales to Tremble By. Her uncle had given her the book for a birthday present, and as a young girl she had been terrified by the pictures on the cover, even going so far as to hide the book in her closet so she wouldn’t see its spine on her bookshelf when she tried to fall asleep.
The feather fluttered in the breeze generated by Jan’s passing, then loosened and fell to the floor, landing in a puddle of blood that immediately soaked the feather and turned it completely red.
The Vanishing Page 5