by Ben Farthing
“They tried to convince me that Kate had ran off with you, like long lost lovers.”
Jackson snorted. “Who said that?”
“My parents. Sheriff Miller.”
Jackson frantically looked at the stairs, the ceiling. “Did he follow you here?”
“No.”
“He can be sneaky. Show up when you least expect it.” Jackson continued tapping the carpet.
“I can guarantee he didn’t follow me.”
“You really can’t.” He tapped, looked down at his finger like it surprised him. “Lockler and the Maple Table are just the tip of the iceberg. Kate wanted to triangleify the signal.”
“Triangulate? Did you have the equipment for that?” What equipment had been in Valerie’s shack? Computers connected to a radio. Cessy didn’t know what equipment you needed to track down the source of a radio signal, or what that equipment would look like.
“No, so she started asking people if they knew Lockler, or the people from the Maple Table. Asking when they started broadcasting. If anyone had ever seen them.”
“Had they?” She couldn’t imagine that Charles Manson could have brainwashed people over the radio waves. Someone had to know where these radio hosts were.
Jackson jerked around to look over his shoulder. Cessy shined the flashlight beam on the blank wall. He relaxed. “Had they what?”
“Had anyone seen Lockler and the Maple Table?”
“Sure. People claim to. Can’t trust them.” He tapped the carpet. “Ten days ago. Kate met me here. She only believed what I’d been telling her because she’d called your parents. I don’t know what she asked, or what they said, but it made her believe me.”
“How long was she here before you lost her?”
He shook his head. “Hard to say. Ever since my house collapsed, things happen out of order.”
Cessy wanted to strangle him. “Where did Kate go?”
“I told you. She talked to our parents. Their friends. The ones who listen to Lockler. And the ones who think they’re not so bad, just listening to the Maple Table.”
“What did she find out? Who are they? Did Kate go after them?”
Jackson tapped his finger. “Olivia said there were cracks in the basement. I didn’t listen. I should have put two and two together.” His gaze drooped to the floor.
Cessy snapped her fingers in front of his eyes. “Did Kate hunt down the broadcasters? Where are they?”
“We heard it, first. Cinderblock crumbling all at once. Sounded like Paul Bunyan swung a sledge hammer into the statue of liberty. Then everything outside the window started racing up, and we realized we were falling.”
“Answer my question,” she ordered.
Jackson looked over his shoulder again. He seemed satisfied with the blank drywall. “I’ll circle back. Trust me.”
Cessy took a deep breath. If he was content to answer, even in his own roundabout way, she should let him. “Fine. Your house collapsed. Is Olivia secretly alive, too?”
The frail man opened his mouth, choked back a phlegmy sob. “No. My dad built us this big oak wardrobe. It fell on her. I don’t want to describe it.” He rubbed at his hands like he was trying to get something off his palms.
Cessy was taken aback. Before tonight, she’d never seen anything but overcompensating vanity in Jackson’s expressions. She didn’t know why she’d assumed his marriage to Olivia was somehow tainted, too. “No, I wouldn’t ask you to.”
It’d been over five years since she’d last seen Jackson. A person could change a lot. Hell, five years ago, Cessy hadn’t even met Pat yet, and now they were divorced. Five years ago, she was a new detective, still not assigned to bank robberies. Now she lived and breathed banks and dye packs and GPS trackers and marked bills.
She should try to trust that Jackson could have changed, too.
But. Five years ago, Cessy hadn’t destroyed Kate’s self-esteem to keep her in sick relationship. Jackson had.
It didn’t matter. She’d get what she needed out of him, and be done with it.
“Does the town really think you’re dead? Does your Dad?”
He nodded. Shadows shifted behind him. “When the house fell, the wardrobe fell at a weird angle. It made me a little nook that took the weight of the house. Daddy makes solid furniture. I was stuck there a while.”
The falling wardrobe that had killed Olivia. Cessy didn’t ask how close he was to her corpse.
Jackson rubbed at his hands again, then continued tapping.
“How long until someone called 911?”
“No one did.”
“Your house is on a busy road. No one noticed that a sinkhole had swallowed your house?”
“Who would they call? Sheriff Miller? They knew I was vermin; they knew what had happened.”
“What do you mean?”
Tap tap tap. “Too long. Lockler’s the angry one. He points the fingers. Declares who’s causing the problems. Says your most hateful thoughts out loud. The Maple Table makes it sound happy. Like it’s what good folks know is right.” He looked over his shoulder, spoke more quickly. “Lockler showed up first. He hated me and my competitors.”
“Meth dealers,” said Cessy.
“Bingo. Lockler talked to Sheriff Miller. Broadcasted to everyone, but you could tell he was mainly talking to the man in charge. ‘You don’t ignore a rat in your pantry,’ things like that.” He tapped faster. “Something’s not right.”
“What do you mean? Lockler told the Sheriff to target you? Did he come after you before the sinkhole?”
Jackson turned around. “Does that wall look different to you?”
Cessy inspected the blank drywall. “No.”
“We’ll change topics to be safe. I was stuck in my bedroom which had fallen into my basement, which had sunk halfway into an underground stream. Then worm, and next thing I knew I was splashing around in the Mud River, downstream from the high school.” He tapped faster, lost his rhythm.
“‘Then worm?’ Is that what you meant to say?”
“Different topic. No one would be honest with Kate. And they got suspicious when she kept asking. Even everyone loving her couldn’t keep them friendly for long. She should have brought you to start with. She started seeing the weird things Lockler and the Maple Table could do. It spooked her bad, since it was all at once, instead of a little at a time like if she’d been living here.” Jackson pointed. “There, did you see that?”
Cessy aimed the flashlight. “It’s just a wall.” She was done dealing with this abusive meth head. “When did you last see Kate?” she demanded.
“Different topic.”
“No.”
“Sheriff Miller listened close. But they didn’t want him to act, they just wanted his permission. Like a pact.”
“Tell me about Kate.”
He moaned, “I’ll circle back.”
“When did you last see my sister?”
“Three days! She left to go ask my dad some more questions. Something that spooked her made her think of him. There! Look!”
“What scared her?”
Jackson grabbed her wrist to point her flashlight. His grip was surprisingly strong. The flashlight pointed to the same spot on the wall as before.
The white drywall was gone.
Blackness replaced it, a long mass larger than the wall, pressed against the room and rushing past. Cessy thought of standing in an underground Metro station when the lights went out, walking toward a passing train.
The darkness moved perpendicular to them.
Even as it did so, it advanced.
30
Cessy backed up towards the stairs. “Like in the basement,” she whispered.
The black mass squeezed into the room even as it moved past it. The yellow bloom of her flashlight wouldn’t touch the invader.
It swallowed beige carpet and white walls. Fabric and paint was jerked across the room and disappeared.
“Get up,” said Cessy.
Jack
son scrambled to his feet.
The sound of glass being crushed. Beer bottles fell from the impossible space. Splintered wood popped out, stuck in the walls.
“What is it?” Cessy asked.
Jackson limped past her, up the stairs. “I told you not to stay on one topic. We caught their attention.”
Cessy followed him, quickly catching up. She resisted the urge to pick up the malnourished man and throw him up the stairs.
One glance back into the basement. The flowing black curtain lurched towards her.
She jumped up the last steps and slammed the basement door shut.
On the other side of the flimsy hollow door, steps strained and creaked. First one, then another, then a wailing chorus of wood and nails.
Jackson staggered through the living room, down the hallway. Cessy considered the back door, but she needed more answers. She hurried after him. “What’s in the basement?”
He waved her into the bedroom, shut the door.
The house settled and popped, like the air conditioner had turned on and the outtake vent was blocked. Jackson crouched in the corner to rifle through a backpack.
Cessy grabbed his chin to make him look at her. “Should we run?”
He jerked away. “To where?”
“What do we do? What happens when it reaches us?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you knew it might come. What do you know about it?”
The door pressed in on its hinges.
“That’s what collapsed my house. And the others, is my guess.” He yanked tissues and granola bars from his backpack. “Where is it?”
Cessy yanked the sheet down from over the window. She pulled up the blinds. The side yard was narrow; the neighbor’s house less than twenty feet away. Their windows were dark. “Come on, let’s go out this way.”
Jackson pulled a film canister from the backpack. “Run if you want. Where would you go?” He popped the lid off, stuck the opening to his nose, and sniffed.
She’d known Jackson was weak, but this surprised her. Faced with danger, he drowned out his own survival instincts with a high. He was right to call himself “vermin.”
Cessy unlocked and opened the window.
Jackson continued searching through his backpack.
The door strained, groaned. The frame cracked.
Dad wasn’t quite the carpenter he fancied himself to be. The latch held the door shut, but it just barely caught the fastener. It left a sliver of space along one side and the top of the door.
A thin sheet of blackness pushed through the crack. It extended like a printer turned on its side, slowly, stiffly. It curled as it came into the bedroom, like wood shavings under a whittling knife. It reached the far wall, a spiral fence of thin dark. The sound of flesh tearing. The sheet of blackness fell towards them, its top landing at the foot of Jackson’s sleeping bag. It made a muddy splash on the carpet, lingered.
More darkness pushed past the unlevelled door.
Panic welled inside Cessy. She imagined falling into the black swampy carpet, feeling it absorb her, and then another stiff sheet crashing down on her from above.
She pushed at the window screen. It wouldn’t budge. She dug at the hooks with her fingernails.
Jackson ignored the intruder. He found what he was looking for. A printed photograph of a laughing blonde woman, holding a recurve bow and a target with a hole through the bullseye. Olivia Goodman, died Olivia Wilder.
Her grieving husband gripped the photograph with both thumbs and forefingers. He leaned against the wall and blocked out the world with the printed memory. “There you are.”
His weakness disgusted her, but his coping mechanism felt familiar. She’d loved Pat once, used the thought of him to get through tough moments. If she’d lost him in the throes of love, before she’d learned to hate him, she’d have been weaker for it.
The bedroom was filling with upright curls of blackness.
Cessy shoved at the screen.
If meth had infected Hamlin when Cessy was still young and stupid, would she have tried it, too, before she understood the consequences? Was the only difference between her and Jackson that the rebellious teens of her generation were smoking pot or getting drunk instead of experimenting with something far heavier and getting instantly hooked?
Of course not, she told herself. If it was comparable, she’d be a drunk and pothead today. But she saw Jackson as a sad sap who’d made stupid choices and kept making them. He belonged in prison for selling--and if it was true that people had died because of him, he belonged there for a long time. But she didn’t want to hate him. Not this grieving, malnourished young man who, when scared, turned to the woman he loved, and now made due with a photograph.
He didn’t look too heavy.
She tucked the pistol and flashlight into her belt, then crouched to pick him up.
Between the drugs and the photograph, Jackson was gone to the world. “I’m sorry,” he whispered over and over to Olivia, wringing his hands. “I tried to get it all back inside.”
Cessy shushed him comfortingly, hooked her arms under his knees and shoulders. She stood. Her thighs ached from the day’s hikes, but Jackson was as light as he looked.
The screwed-down latches on the screen might not budge, but the screen itself would tear free with enough force. Cessy faced the room, ready to throw herself backwards against it and out the window.
Before her, in the bedroom lit with the residual light from her tucked away flashlight, the solid blackness was gone.
The bedroom was back to its empty state. The door to the hallway no longer strained, although the frame retained the crack. The carpet was perfectly clean.
Cessy’s heartbeat thrummed in her ears. Jackson wriggled free. She set his legs down first. He kept his focus on the photograph.
Cessy crept to the door. She waited, listening. Nothing.
She opened the door. The hallway was empty. Walls and trim in fine shape.
Cessy’s heart pounded in her ears. Cessy explored the house. Around every corner, she expected a Metro train of shadow to speed by, and drag her underneath. But it was gone.
It had left behind cracked drywall, and the yeasty smell of beer.
After she gathered her courage, she checked the basement. The far wall was drywall again. A dartboard hung in the center, with the words “Evening Whistle” stamped on the bullseye. Hamlin’s shuttered bar.
Cessy went back up to the kitchen. She dragged the fridge in front of the basement door.
Back in the bedroom, she swiped a couple of Jackson’s granola bars. The calories slowed her shaking. Reality was crumbling.
Or more likely, her perception of it. Some Jonestown psychopaths had moved in on Hamlin. Had they targeted the drug dealers first to eliminate their own competition? Was Cessy on some kind of hallucinogen right now?
Jackson was already asleep, curled up on his sleeping bag, photograph cradled against his chest.
Cessy tugged at his shoulder. “Let’s go somewhere else. We shouldn’t stay here.”
Jackson grunted. Drool dripped down his slack chin.
Cessy sat down next to him. She could at least make sure he wasn’t going to choke on his tongue before she left. She still needed to get back up to Valerie. The librarian knew something about the broadcasts. But Cessy had a better lead now: Jackson said Kate had gone to Gordon Wilder’s house.
Gordon was probably at Tapjacks still, which gave Cessy time to rest for a few minutes.
Moments after she leaned her head against the wall, sleep overtook her.
31
Cessy groggily opened her eyes to blinding sunlight and an ache in her neck.
It was 7:14 a.m.
She jolted fully awake. She’d slept the whole night sitting against the wall. Kate was still missing.
The bedroom in her parents’ rental house looked emptier in the daylight. Jackson curled up on his sleeping bag looked even sadder.
Cessy scolded hersel
f for sleeping so long. She knew that Kate had gone up to Gordon Wilder.
And from there, had she gone to the Black Gold Peak trails? It stood to reason; the rented minivan was in the parking lot. Kate had gone up Goat’s Jaunt to talk to Gordon, and then from there cut over to the trailhead parking lot.
But why? And who had picked her up when her tire went flat? Or was she still up that mountain somewhere? Or in the mine?
Cessy intended to find out.
Gordon had lied earlier about seeing Kate--no surprise there.
Cessy could imagine Detective Landis’ lecturing drone, telling her to work with people, not through them. But she’d failed to get answers from Mom and Dad because she’d gone in optimistic.
Cessy jostled Jackson. He mumbled in his sleep. A second film canister lay next to his limp hand. He’d woken up before Cessy and sniffed himself deeper into oblivion. No help from him, then.
She’d go by herself. She wouldn’t assume anything but resistance.
Landis had a disarming smile and a careful reasoning tone.
Cessy didn’t have his patience.
But she did have a shotgun and a box of shells in the truck.
32
Cessy drove out of town, turned north at Jackson and Olivia’s collapsed house.
Ahead, she craned her neck to see the top of Black Gold Peak. Again, she’d postponed checking on Valerie. The librarian probably had answers that Kate was searching for. But Cessy was searching for Kate. Explanations as to where Lockler and the Maple Table were broadcasting from, or to the impossible things she’d seen in the last day, were only relevant inasmuch as they helped Cessy find her baby sister.
She could ponder how the hell Sheriff Miller had tarzaned inside of a rock after she got Kate out of here. Or what the rushing shadow chasing her and Jackson had been, or how it had squeezed through a crack in the door like sheets of curly rock candy made from coal.
It was how she dealt with the occasional horrors of police work--learn to think about it later. When a perp was shooting at you from over the hood of his stolen Mercedes, you couldn’t take the time to remember your first partner’s chest spurting blood, or his look of terror as he begged you to tell his wife he was sorry from whatever shit argument they’d had that morning. You thought about those things after you’d survived the shootout.