by Ronald Malfi
Childress swung the rifle in front of him, jammed the stock against his right shoulder, and pointed the barrel into a cluster of treetops. Just before he pulled the trigger, I heard the sound again—tat-tat-tattat-tat. He fired, and the sound of the gunshot whip-cracked through my skull. Overhead, a bird spirited off into the darkness.
“Goddamn woodpecker,” Childress groused, lowering the rifle. A halo of gun smoke drifted about his head. “Keeps drilling holes in the cabins. I’ll get him yet.”
4
We parted ways at the road: Childress raised a hand in a farewell salute as he headed in the direction of the double-wide trailer while I continued down the hillside toward the motel. Thunder growled in the distance.
Despite the cold, my clothes had grown damp with perspiration. I entered my room and turned the feeble bolt in the door. It didn’t seem sufficient; someone could kick that door down on the first try. I looked around the room, saw the chairs by the table. I dragged one over to the door and tried to prop the back of the chair up under the doorknob, like they do in the movies, but the height was off. I looked around the room for something else. But there was nothing. I wondered if I should even stay here tonight. I wondered if I should find someplace else, someplace safer.
—He saw you peering in the window of that garage, other-Aaron spoke up. You told him Allison’s friend lived over in Bishop, where Shelby Davenport was killed. You made him suspicious.
I went back outside and walked to the end of the parking lot, where two large dumpsters sat among dense foliage. I kept glancing behind me, expecting to find a smoke-black figure advancing toward me in the darkness—Glenn Childress, with his skull smoldering and his eyes blazing red. Gas Head will make you dead.
There was a picnic table here, an old charcoal grill on wheels, a few metal trash barrels. Lifejackets hung from pegs on the outside of a large wooden shed, the double doors partway open. I peered into the shed and saw shelves burdened with painting supplies, tools, industrial cleaners, and bleach. There was a flashlight in a toolbox on the floor, a sturdy Maglite like the one Childress had been carrying. I picked it up, pressed the button, and a beam of white light cut through the darkness. I shut the flashlight off and tucked it under one arm.
Leaning against the rear wall of the shed were some heavy wooden oars. I took one and carried it back to my room, where I propped the paddle-end beneath the doorknob like a barricade.
5
I spent that evening in Room Four with the lights off and the drapes pulled, except for a vertical ribbon of window through which I could observe the motel’s parking lot. I dragged one of the chairs from the table and propped it in front of the window. I sat there peering out as a light rain began to fall, your loaded handgun on one thigh. I didn’t feel safe taking my eyes from the outside world for too long. It was as if Childress, not fooled by the lies I’d told him back at the campsite, might come for me in the night.
My exhaustion and fear was counterbalanced by a heart-thumping urgency to do something. When I shut my eyes, it was the faces of dead girls that ghosted toward me through the fog. Each time I edged toward sleep, I’d jerk awake, certain that someone—some formidable presence—was here in the room with me, standing right over my bed. I had conversations with people who were not there. You were one of them, Allison. Peter Sloane was another. Glenn Childress was yet another, and in my partial dream state, he sat in the other chair at the table staring at me while I talked to him from my perch before the window, my arms and legs powerless to move, as if I’d been administered some potent sedative. Childress was entirely cloaked in shadow except for his eyes, which shone like two silver coins set above a fire. The longer I stared at this visage, the closer those coins drew toward one another, until they joined to form a single iridescent sphere of light. Yet when Childress leaned forward to address me, his body creaking like something made of wooden planks and rusted bolts, I saw that it was actually other-Aaron.
—There’s a man made up of poison gas who lives in an abandoned castle. He’ll get inside your skull and drive you mad.
A pale wraith resolved itself within the black rectangle of the bathroom doorway, its body comprised of white smoke, its eyes two black pits swirling like tornados in the center of its skull-like face. It moved with the fluidity of something weightless, and when it finally dissolved, it left a smell like burning rubber in its wake.
I spilled out of the chair, mostly in some aquatic state unfit for traversing on land, and staggered for a moment in the unconscious dark. My head ached and I didn’t remember why until I reached up and felt the swollen knot protruding from my forehead. A part of me wondered if everything that had happened since that loose brick had clobbered me on the skull back in Woodvine had been a hallucination brought on by trauma. I was fumbling around aimlessly in the dark of my motel room when the bathroom light came on.
There you were, perched on the toilet lid, pale legs drawn up to your chest, your body nude and nearly translucent in the meager glow of the light. You looked up at me, and I was terrified to find your eyes were dark pits, and there was a moldy rot working around your hairline. You looked like something someone had dug up from deep in the earth.
Your mouth unhinged and inky black drool pattered onto the ceramic tiles. Steam began to seep from your mouth, your ears, your nostrils. Your eyes, those black gems, began to boil and liquefy in their sockets. It lives alongside me, you said as steam billowed out of your mouth. It moves when I move. It’s in the bedroom right now, waiting for me to come back…
I cried out, and fell from the chair onto the floor. That was when I realized I had been dreaming. I lay there breathing in great whooping gasps, staring at the darkened ceiling, while my heart tried to punch a hole in my chest.
I fumbled my cell phone off the nightstand and saw that it was a quarter to five. Sitting up, I saw that the rain had stopped; the world beyond the window drapes was as black and lifeless as some remote planet. I slipped the phone in my pocket, then set the gun on the nightstand. I tugged on my coat, pulled a knit cap down over my head, grabbed the Maglite, and then crept back out into the night.
6
What had felt like no more than a ten-minute walk earlier that evening now seemed twice as long beneath the freezing cover of darkness. I slipped past the double-wide trailer with its pitch-black windows and its curl of smoke unspooling from the stovepipe, and headed straight down the path that wound out toward the campground. The rain had ushered back the mist; it clung to the trees and simmered before me like something I could reach out and manipulate with my hands. I didn’t dare turn on the flashlight until I was halfway down the path and well out of sight of the double-wide. And even then, I winced as that stark bolt of light burst from the head of the torch. The fog was so great, the light reflected off it, creating a glowing white wall of smoke directly in front of me. I switched the light back off and continued on.
The fog seemed to dissipate once I reached the clearing. I could make out the angular shapes of the cabins around the perimeter of it, as well as the rack of kayaks closer toward the river. I moved quickly across the clearing and found the path that led to the garage that was buried deeper in the woods.
The garage rose up out of the dark, its corrugated metal roof radiating with the crisp, azure light of the moon. I jogged to the single window on the west-facing side of the building, the bulky flashlight in the pocket of my coat whapping against my ribs. I took out the flashlight, pressed it against the dirty windowpane, and clicked on the light. I had hoped at least a meager trickle of light might penetrate both the gunk on the window and the cavernous darkness inside the garage, but it didn’t; I could see less than I could earlier that evening.
I wedged the flashlight back in my coat and tried to raise the window. The sill was wet from the rain, the wood spongy, and I couldn’t get it to budge.
—That’s either the car in there or it’s not, said other-Aaron.
“Screw it,” I said, taking out the flashlight a
gain. I yanked the knit cap from my head, wrapped it around the head of the flashlight, then used it to break the window. The strike was muted, the broken shards tinkling to the floor inside.
I reached in, thumbed the latch, and jockeyed the window up. As I withdrew my hand, a jagged tooth of glass bit into the flesh along my arm, drawing blood. Wincing, I glanced at the wound, saw it wasn’t terribly bad, then climbed in through the window.
At some point it had started to drizzle again, though in my haste I hadn’t noticed until I was standing in the garage; the rain hammering on the metal roof sounded like mallet strikes on a steel drum.
I cast the flashlight’s beam along the section of blue tarpaulin. It was held in place by elastic cords affixed to the chassis of whatever vehicle was beneath it. I began undoing the cords, the tarp crinkling like something alive, the cone of light issuing from the flashlight jouncing along the walls as I worked.
I grabbed a section of the tarp and pulled it back…
…to reveal a John Deere tractor with a plow attachment on the front.
Something very much like a laugh threatened to claw its way up my throat. I took a couple steps back, just letting the flashlight beam linger on the vehicle. Rain hammered the roof with increased urgency.
“Son of a bitch,” I muttered.
I redirected the flashlight to take in the rest of the garage—the tools hanging from pegboards on the wall, the clutter on a series of standing aluminum shelves, the mound of used tires, farming equipment, and all-weather gear. One shelf in particular was stocked with automotive gear—a few car batteries, jumper cables, a dented chrome fender, countless headlights gaping like blind eyes. A detachable spotlight—the exact type a police sedan would have mounted on the driver’s door—sat right there on the shelf. The flashlight’s beam reflected from its concave glass dome, so that it looked as if the spotlight had come on.
I took a few cautious steps toward it, as if the thing were emitting waves of radiation and I didn’t want to get too close. My breath shuddered from my lungs, clouding the air in front of my face with vapor.
Something tickled the right side of my face. I shone the light on its black, slender, partially curled body, and my initial impression was that it was some variety of impossibly thin snake. But as my gaze rose higher, I recognized it for what it was…
Spools of electrical wire hung from a bracket in the ceiling.
7
A steady sheet of rain was falling as I crossed out of the woods and headed back down toward the motel, the neon pink glow of the marquee and the lighted lobby windows guiding me like a beacon. In the rain, the trek back from the garage and across the campground had been more treacherous than earlier, and I had slipped and fallen several times on the slick mud. By the time I reached the parking lot of The Valentine Motel, I was soaked straight through to my underwear and striated with mud.
I had tried to reach Peter Sloane on my cell phone, but there was no cell service on the mountain; the call would not go through. I tried one last time, standing beneath the motel’s marquee, the warm phone to my ear. Nothing—no service.
I peered through the fishbowl windows of the motel’s dimly lit lobby. It was empty, with a sign on the counter that said PLEASE RING BELL FOR SERVICE. The sign sat next to the old rotary phone.
I crept inside, warm air blasting me in the face, and went to the counter. I half expected the phone not to work, but when I pressed the receiver to my ear, I heard the dial tone. I called Peter Sloane’s cell number. It rang twice before Sloane answered.
“Who’s this?”
“Peter, it’s Aaron.”
“What number is this?”
“I’m on the motel landline. There’s no cell service out here.” I noticed two globules of blood on the countertop; it took me a few seconds to realize it was blood from my arm wound, dripping from my sleeve. “Peter, I didn’t find the car, but I found the spotlight and I found several spools of electrical wire. He’s keeping them in a garage in the woods.”
“Have you had any interaction with him?”
“Earlier today, yeah. He was out—”
“Get out of there.”
I thought I’d misunderstood him. “What?”
“Get out of there, Aaron. You’ve convinced me. Let’s go to the police.”
“But we still can’t connect him to any of the murders.” I reached across the countertop for the first aid kit bolted to the wall, but then froze. One of the framed photographs on the wall had snared my attention.
“Aaron,” Sloane said. “Do you hear me?”
“Holy shit, Peter,” I breathed into the phone. “Holy shit…”
“Aar—”
The lights blew out and the phone went dead. Outside, lightning streaked across the sky, followed by a roar of thunder.
The dead receiver still to my ear, I dug the Maglite from my coat pocket, clicked it on, and projected its beam onto the collage of photos hanging on the wall behind the counter. Photos of men and women holding large, sleek, metallic-looking fish. Photos of people in orange life vests cruising down a river. Among them all, one photograph in particular stood out. Maybe I had even seen it on my first trip to this place, when I’d first come down here looking for answers to what I thought was a different sort of question. A framed photograph that, under any other circumstances, would have been wholly and completely innocuous…
It was a photograph of young girls, perhaps twenty in all, standing before one of the cabins at the very campsite beyond this motel, each one wearing a shirt that said SAINT FRANCIS YOUTH LEAGUE in bold red letters. Holly Renfrow was the third girl on the left.
They’d all gone to the camp. That was how he’d found them.
—Get out of here. It was other-Aaron, echoing Peter Sloane’s sentiment.
8
It took me three tries to jab the key into my motel-room door, the rain pelting my back and plastering the hair to my head. Inside, I swiped the wall for the light switch, momentarily forgetting that the power had been knocked out. I went to the window and yanked open the drapes, flooding the room with moonlight.
The dead girls’ files were still scattered about the table. I gathered them up into a hasty pile, but midway through this process I happened to look up and see that your armless doll was no longer perched on the nightstand. It was now tucked up against the headboard, its remaining eye aglow with moonlight. The oar that I had used to barricade the door lay slantwise across the bed.
I looked at the nightstand and noticed that the revolver was no longer there, either.
Someone—or something—shifted in the darkness behind me. I turned and saw a figure standing in the bathroom doorway. The figure advanced into the harsh neon light of the room and took form.
It was Glenn Childress, and he had your revolver pointed at my chest.
9
Childress’s face was void of expression. Beads of perspiration glistened on his high forehead, each one reflecting the moonlight coming through the motel-room window. His colorless eyes hung on me from beneath the prominent ridge of his brow.
“I know who you are,” he said, his voice low. “I looked you up. It wasn’t hard.”
I said nothing.
“I looked your wife up, too. Plenty of news articles about her. Pictures and everything. I’ll admit, with her dyed black hair, it took me a moment to recognize her. But then it hit me. She looked so much like her sister.”
Your yearbook was among the files on the table, opened to your sister’s memorial page. Childress placed a hand on your sister’s photo. He kept the gun trained on me.
“You think you’ve got it all figured out,” he said, “but you don’t. You see me, you see some monster. You see something ugly and detestable that needs to be stopped. But you don’t see what I see.”
Somehow I found my voice. Said, “What do you see?”
Childress caressed your sister’s yearbook picture. “Corruption,” he said. “Pollution. A pollution of the soul. Girls wh
o start out innocent and with their whole lives ahead of them, yet somewhere along the way, they become poisoned. They rot.”
He glanced down at the yearbook. Half his body was silvered in moonlight, the other half awash in shadow.
“I watched it happen to her. She was the first. I could do nothing but mourn what was happening to her until someone spoke up and told me what needed to be done.”
“Who spoke up?”
Childress returned his heavy gaze to me. He tapped his temple with one blunt index finger. “Glenn the Friend,” he said. “It’s what the kids at the high school in Woodvine used to call me. But they didn’t know it was the man in my head they were actually talking about.”
He took a step in my direction, and I backed up until I was against the wall.
“We’ve all got two people inside us. A voice, a whisper. An alternate consciousness. Most people, they don’t listen to that voice. I was no different at first. When I first started hearing it, I didn’t know what it was trying to tell me. But then I listened… and it showed me the darkness that existed in others. In her.”
He slammed the yearbook closed.
“I saved her,” Childress said. “That’s the thing you don’t understand. I didn’t hurt these girls, I saved them. They were doing terrible things to their bodies, their minds. They were going rotten. What did I do? I squeezed every ounce of poison from their bodies and left behind something pure and wholesome and clean again, just like the day they were born. You can see it happen; it’s a real thing. When I heal them”—he brought one hand up in a fist—“you can see the innocence flood back into their eyes. And when I’m done, I let the water baptize what’s left.”
“You murdered them.”
“I stopped them from getting worse.”
“You tracked them down. You pretended to be a cop so they’d go with you.”
“They came to me!” he shouted, teeth clenched. “Carol Thompson came to me. She was presented as the first, and I cleared that poison right out of her. And so I had my calling. I followed the voice, and the voice led me here. And they are brought to me.”
