by Chuck Wendig
In this abandoned gas station.
He’s not here. She can see that much.
Miriam goes over to the counter and sits down on a squeaky, ancient stool. The upholstery on it is so brittle, it’s gone full saltine cracker. It crunches as she sits on it, like she’s sitting on a carton of eggs.
The counter contains an endless line of names and initials, so she takes out her knife and adds:
MIRIAM <3 GABBY
It feels twee and stupid, but fuck it, she loves it.
(She’ll take any measure of momentary solace she can manage.)
Gabby calls her over, so she hops off the stool. Gabby is toward the back, near busted-out freezer cases and behind a couple of toppled aisle racks. There they find a discarded, dirty mattress, plus a ton of blankets and rags. Not to mention: a few saint candles, a small ceramic Virgin Mary statue, and a plate full of bird bones. (A mix, Miriam sees: blackbird, crow, and even the bones of a single mountain bluebird.)
“He was here,” Gabby says.
“And he’s not now,” Miriam answers, defeated, deflated, destroyed. “I feel like we’ve been chasing shadows.”
“Here, hold on.”
Gabby stoops, picks up something that’s half-stuck under the mattress. A ratty, fraying envelope. Not letter-size but larger: big enough for a portrait-style page. Gabby pops the flap, pulls out a couple twenty-dollar bills, some takeout menus, and—
A map.
On it, he’s got several places in the state marked with scribbled handwriting: The Methuselah Tree, The Integratron, Los Feliz Murder Mansion, Zzyzx Mineral Springs, but they’re all crossed out.
All but one:
Black Star Canyon, just southeast of Los Angeles.
That one remains uncrossed.
“Why’s he crossing them off?” Gabby asks.
“I don’t know. He’s taking a tour. Either visiting them for a reason or ruling them out. Maybe both.” She squints. “He must have a car. Or someone’s driving his raggedy ass around.”
“We could go here. It’s a couple-hour drive.”
Miriam winces.
“Why are you making that face?” Gabby asks.
“It’s today.”
“Today is always today; that’s why they call it today.”
“No, I mean—today is the eleventh.”
“I don’t know wh . . . Ohh. Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
Gabby gets it. Today’s the day Taylor Bowman dies.
“You said you’re just letting it happen,” Gabby says.
“I know.”
“But you’re not going to, are you?”
“I should. I really should. I don’t . . . I don’t fucking like this douchebag actor, he was drinking some shitty milkshake smoothie thing that smelled like rotten onion and overripe banana and I puked on him, and I don’t really care if he lives or he dies, but . . . I can stop it. I can stop him from dying. Today. In three hours, I can maybe go and stand in the Starfucker’s way. And I don’t even have anything against the Starfucker. I don’t care. That’s what I tell myself. Go kill people; what shit do I give? And yet . . .”
“You need to go.”
“It’s like a—” Miriam grits her teeth as she forms her right hand into a fist and holds it against her middle. “It’s this feeling deep down inside that I gotta handle this. I can’t just have this kid be born and tell her, Yeah, I let some actor prick get his face sliced off because I couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it. Life’s hard, kid; nobody’s gonna be there to save you. I don’t want her to feel that way.”
Miriam thinks but does not say:
I don’t want her to feel the way I feel.
“You’re going to stand in the way of a serial killer.”
“I think I am.”
“That’s dangerous. Maybe just call Guerrero, let him handle it.”
“It’s not his job. It’s mine. He’s fucked it all up already. And the last time I saw him, he pointed a gun at me. I don’t trust him.”
“Jesus, Miriam. Don’t do this. Not today, we’re close—I bet Abraham is going to whatever this . . . Black Star Canyon is. Let’s go. Together. We’ll find him.”
“You go. I’ll . . . catch up.”
“You’re not just stopping for milk. You’re stopping a serial killer.”
“Hopefully stopping a serial killer.”
Gabby paces. Because she knows. Miriam knows that she knows.
“I should go with you,” Gabby says, walking back and forth.
“No. You go . . . find the medium. I’ll do this. It’ll be fine.”
“Famous last words.”
“Yeah. Well. Let’s hope not.”
“You be careful,” Gabby says.
“You be careful, too. Last time we met ol’ Abe the Spirit Guide, he blasted a goddamn beanbag into my chest with a shotgun.”
“I love you. Don’t die.”
“Back atcha, babe. Back fuckin’ atcha.”
PART EIGHT
* * *
THE SPIDER AND THE FLY
SIXTY-TWO
THE WHITE ROOM
NOW.
Miriam is bound to an exam table. She is clothed. Her feet are in stirrups, bound there with a cruel swaddling of duct tape, the ankles elevated above her head. Her hands are fixed to a set of bedrails, also with tape—so much tape, it bulges, like a nodule, a tumor. Her arm, where the bullet cut through her, is already starting to heal up.
(And it itches something fierce. As if the injury is stuffed with crawling ants struggling to dig a colony in the meat of her body.)
The walls of this room are white and padded.
The floor is black, smooth, rubbery.
The ceiling is industrial, its beams, ducts, and conduits artfully and purposefully exposed.
A black padded bench sits along the far wall. A closet is open nearby, next to a bathroom, and in the closet hang what look to be a variety of outfits: a lab coat, a geisha dress, something gold and glitzy, something black and rubbery. On the opposing wall, a flat, red table with a red rubber sheet upon it; above it is constructed a skeletal architecture of metal rods—a framework on which hang various metal rings and poseable shackles.
All it is smeared with garish, bold, neon-blue light.
They have not gagged her, so she screams.
(And even if they did gag her, she tells herself she’d chew through it and scream anyway.)
A little part of her wonders if this is what it felt like to be David Guerrero—trapped by someone with murderous intent, unsure how you’ll escape. It is a feeling she is sadly all too familiar with, isn’t it? Harriet Adams and Hairless Fucker. The Mockingbird. Ashley Gaynes. Ethan Key and his Arizona militia. Go after the killers, and the killers come for you.
She fell into this trap, and she’s kicking herself for it.
Upstairs, gun to her belly, she contemplated how to escape—kick, punch, grab something, throw something, run. But that gun, pointed right at her middle, and the Man with the Shining Mask stepping in through the door, the sequins of his black balaclava gleaming and glittery? Where to go? She could risk herself easily—especially now that she knew she could potentially heal her injuries. (Certainly, Harriet could—that cuckoo bitch dropped off a roof, broke her limbs, and kept coming like a shattered automaton whose motherboard brain failed to acknowledge the damage. And next time Miriam saw her, she was back to normal, limbs stiff, bones back in her skin.) But the child inside her gave her some pause: if she ran, and they shot her, what if the bullet struck the kid? Her daughter is scheduled to be born to die, yes, but maybe, just maybe, Miriam can avert that fate.
She can’t avert a bullet.
They brought her down here, each wearing gloves so that she was never afforded the chance to see how they die. They brought her here, to this basement, to what the older man called his playspace. They put her here, in this humiliating position.
And now she waits.
She hears them upstairs. Mu
rmurs. The gentle thumping and creaking of footsteps back and forth. Is it just the two of them? Or are there others?
Miriam can’t tell.
But now, she hears something down here, too. A rustling of fabric. A clatter of hangers. From the corner of her eye, she sees it:
Something moves in the closet.
She’s sure of it.
But when she stares, she sees nothing. No movement. Nothing. Nobody. Until—
A dark shape steps out from the curtain of hanging clothes.
A big, dark shape.
Louis.
Not-Louis.
“Miriaaaaaam,” he says, his voice deep and rich but distorted too, as he sings her name as a warped and warbling song. “Wicked Miriam.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
But as he emerges from that room, stepping closer and closer with slow, ginger steps—like a comical thief sneaking into a room with overdramatic tiptoes, dink dink dink—he sings another song:
Your counsels I have slighted all
My carnal appetite shall fall
When I am dead, remember well
Your wicked Polly groans in Hell.
The Mockingbird’s song.
“Fuck you,” she spits.
“Such venom,” Not-Louis says. As he gets closer, she sees that his one eye socket is plugged shut with a golf ball painted crudely with an eye: iris, cornea, and all. Like a child painted it. “It’s sad how you find yourself in this situation again and again. Oh, how history repeats itself. Like you’re a broken record, sk-sk-skipping. A broken brain, replaying the greatest hits.”
“Isn’t this where you want me?” she snarls. “Here, in the nest of the killers? Isn’t this the path you want me on?”
He chuckles. Wet and diseased. A throat full of stagnant water.
“It is. You’re still doing my work. You still choose this path.”
“So, fine. Let me out. Do some magic, motherfucker.”
“I am not God.”
“No, but you’re learning to possess people, right? You’re evolving. So, evolve your boogeyman ass upstairs, possess one of those awful bastards, and do what needs doing. You don’t even need me anymore.”
Not-Louis shakes his head. He grins, and as he opens his mouth to speak, a fat-bellied camel cricket leaps out of his mouth and drops against the floor, hopping away.
“It doesn’t work that way. I can only possess those without purpose—with holes chewed in their souls. Those men upstairs have great, grave purpose. They are assured of their place in this universe, and so they are closed to me.” His grin grows wider, nearly splitting his face in two. “Besides, what fun would that be? I always love to see how you get out of these things. You have such an imagination.”
“Go away. Haunt someone else, Ghost of All-Dead.”
At that, the Trespasser straightens up. His teeth clamp together.
“Who told you that?”
“I’ve hit a nerve.”
“You have work to do, Miriam. I suggest you get to doing it, because they’re going to want to cut that baby out of you and take your heart as a prize. Get it done. Save yourself. Kill the killers. Break the cycle.”
She screams at the demon, but it’s already gone.
SIXTY-THREE
UNMASKED
Minutes give birth to hours, and time multiplies endlessly, infinitely. It loses meaning. Miriam struggles. She screams. At some point, she even sleeps—a restive, electric sleep, earned in unwanted fits and starts. Her legs are numb. Her hands are numb. Her cheeks feel flushed. The baby kicks her bladder, and at some point, she pisses herself. It is a thing she does willfully, with wanton disregard, because she knows they’re going to have to deal with it. She can hear it drip against the table, and off it, onto the floor. Too bad this room is designed for easy cleanup, she thinks. She wishes like hell she was pissing on a carpet right now or in between some fancy floorboards. If they’re going to kill her, at least let the rank stink of her urine haunt this place—a nose-curdling pisstergeist.
And then, at one moment, she opens her eyes and discovers again she is not alone. Two men stand there. Each wearing black gloves.
One, the owner of this house. Cardigan, smartwatch, and pistol.
The other, a man in a silver suit. In one hand, he holds a familiar knife with a hooked blade. In the other, he holds a black balaclava.
The Starfucker, unmasked.
And Miriam recognizes him.
The vision of Ethan Key’s death plays out once more inside her mind, with the leader of the Arizona militia dangling naked from a pipe.
His killer, that day, is the same man who stands here now.
He showed Ethan Key a playing card, but all that was on it was a spider, inked there in the center of what might be its web, a circle on its back. He asked Ethan Key: “Is this your card?”
In that vision, the killer explained that he was from the cartel before he said something that Miriam considered then—and considers now—strange to come from of the mouth of a common assassin:
Life. Existence. Presence. It is decided at the moment of inception. A length of string carefully meted and measured out, then cut. All things, predetermined. Destiny: from the Latin, destinare. Meaning to make something firm. To establish its permanence. As if carving it in stone. Fate: a thing ordained. Fate. Fatal. Death. Nona, Decima, Morta. You established your fate when you built your little town.
Creation is thought to be a gift, but it is not. It is not a thing given but rather a thing bought. Purchased. A debt incurred at the moment of becoming. All things must end. It is not just a person’s life that incurs this debt. All things that exist must make the purchase and owe the payment. Everything that exists will one day not exist. That can be troubling for some, but I find it freeing. Our presence here is given margins. A start and an end. Everything in this way has a story; some stories are long and boring. Others? Short and exciting. Yours was exciting, I think. And good for you. But it will be shorter than you like.
Then he killed Ethan Key. Drove a blade up under his chin. Pushed it deeper and deeper until it found the brain.
That would have happened by now, except Miriam knows that it didn’t. Ethan Key was dead by the hand of a young boy—a psychic—named Isaiah. A boy with a psychic touch, now living with Gabby’s sister.
This man never killed Ethan Key.
But he would have, had they not intervened.
When Miriam sees him, she can’t help it. She says:
“Nona, Decima, Morta.”
It works. The two men seem taken aback. They look to one another, and for a moment a spark of actual panic passes between them, like a bit of lightning juggled from one dark cloud to the next.
It gives her some small, cold pleasure.
“You are quite surprising,” the man in the cardigan says. “You are trickier than we imagined you to be. Our mistake, I see.”
“I don’t know you,” Miriam says. But she looks to the unmasked Starfucker. “You, though. I know you.”
His eyes pinch to uncertain slits. “Do you?”
“You were going to kill Ethan Key.”
“Ethan Key. And his wife, Karen. Yes.” His voice now, as it was then in the vision, conjures burned, smoky caramel. He raises a dark eyebrow and says, with some curiosity, “You stole that kill from me.”
She declines to correct him, that it was Isaiah who did that.
“You bet,” she says.
The man in the cardigan says, “You see, Alejandro? This one has been violating the tapestry for a long time. I told you that if we put out the right bait, eventually one of them would come along and get caught in our web.”
“Yes, Emerson. You were right.”
“But this one,” the man called Emerson says as he takes a step forward, “is a prize, indeed. I don’t know that we’ve ever caught one that’s with child.”
“Don’t think about it.”
“What? We could keep her. Bring the child to term. See what happ
ens. Think of it as an experiment.”
Alejandro sneers. “You cannot domesticate this little untethered beast. The moment you reach for her, she’ll bite your hand clean off at the wrist. Her destiny will be to destroy us, if we aren’t careful. I say we just open her up, cut the baby out, and choke them both with the umbilicus.”
Miriam growls back at him: “Destiny: from the Latin, destinare. Meaning to make something firm. To establish its permanence. As if carving it in stone.” Again she sees the man flinch.
“Who told you this?” Alejandro asks.
“You did. In the future where you kill Ethan Key.”
He smiles. “That is something I say when I . . . do my job. You are good. You do see things.” His gaze drifts to the space around her. “You aren’t tethered to the rest of us. Only one comes off you. One that connects to something. Someone. But who, or what?” Then, to his cardiganed cohort: “We should kill her now. Sever that tether. Stop her from disrupting the rest of the pattern.”
Emerson takes another step forward. “I am undecided. My scientific mind, my doctor’s curiosity, begs me to choose differently.”
Now Alejandro looks angry. His brow creases so deeply, the lines form little, bitter canyons. “You foolish old man—”
“Hey!” Miriam barks.
They both turn toward her, equal parts stunned and irritated.
“Who the fuck are you people?” she asks.
So, the man, Emerson, explains.
