The Narrows

by Ronald Malfi

“Nice lookout,” Ben said, stepping through the trees while brandishing the bolt cutter. He held branches out of the way so that Brandy could follow him, unimpeded.

  “What’s that smell?” she said, wrinkling her nose.

  Ben whiffed the air but didn’t smell anything. “What does it smell like?” he asked.

  “Like the cleaner my mom uses to scrub the bathroom.”

  Ben gathered a link of chain between the teeth of the bolt cutter and squeezed. A second later, there came an audible pop and the link widened into a C. Ben cut the same link again and the chain came apart and dangled from the doorhandles like a mechanical snake. With one hand, Ben unwound the chain from the handles until it coiled to the ground. His fingers came away orange with rust.

  “Matthew would have found another way in,” Brandy said at his back.

  “Yeah,” he responded, though he was already quite certain her brother had not found a way into the old building. He was more curious about who else might have found a way in—whoever it had been that Matthew Crawly had thought he had seen in here…

  Ben took a step back, already breathing heavily though he hadn’t done anything except walk here. “You know what,” he said. “Take a few steps back. I don’t know what might come jumping out when I open these doors.”

  “Jumping out?”

  “A raccoon or possum, I mean,” he said, though he was thinking mountain lion.

  “Oh. I thought you meant…” But her voice trailed off, her thought unfinished. Brandy took a few steps back, the boughs of the trees sweeping down over her like curtains after a stage exit. Ben dropped the bolt cutter onto the ground and grabbed the doorhandles in both hands. The doors were enormous, pitted monstrosities, like the doors on an old battleship.

  “Here goes,” he said, and heaved them open.

  The stubborn hinges squealed and flakes of rust snowed down on him. They came only partway open, either impeded by the encroaching trees or simply refusing to budge any farther on their uncooperative hinges. A panel of darkness—of varying shades of darkness—appeared before Ben. Stale air breathed onto his face. There was another smell, too. Suddenly, he could smell what Brandy had smelled just a moment ago—the acrid, chemical stink of industrial cleaner. Though more potent, it was similar to the smell at Porter Conroy’s and Ted Minsky’s farms.

  “Yuck,” Brandy commented from behind the tree branches.

  Ben stepped inside, cautioning Brandy to be careful as she followed him. He entered into a room as spacious as an airplane hangar. The upper portions of the walls were lined with tiny square windows that reminded Ben of tic-tac-toe grids, the windowpanes so thick and grimy that only the barest hint of sunlight permeated. The floor was a level plain of concrete covered in an ancient blanket of dust. Large machines stood at intervals about the room, looking like a cross between an oil rig and dinosaur bones. The ceiling, with its exposed iron girders and sheets of hammered tin, reminded Ben of the high school gymnasium. Some sections of the ceiling were missing, allowing shafts of sunlight to slide like rapiers into the factory.

  “This place,” Brandy said. Her voice was almost reverent and hushed as she walked slowly across the floor. “This place doesn’t seem like it belongs here in Stillwater.”

  Ben thought it was a pretty astute comment, particularly coming from a sixteen-year-old. “Don’t wander off too far,” he warned her.

  “Matthew!” she shouted, startling Ben. Her voice echoed off the walls and the corrugated-tin ceiling. Flocks of birds lifted off rafters and funneled through the rents in the roof.

  “Quiet,” he told her.

  “He could be anywhere.”

  “Yeah, well, we don’t need to start an avalanche.”

  He unhooked his flashlight from his belt and went over to one of the large industrial machines. It was enormous, and looked like something that had been conceived and engineered on some distant planet.

  “What do these do?” Brandy asked. She was examining one of the machines, too.

  “I have no clue. It looks like an old printing press, only bigger. Much bigger.”

  Brandy opened a small hatch on the side of the machine and peered in. “Dusty,” she commented.

  “Stay here,” he told her. “I’m going to take a look around.”

  “I want to come with you.”

  “Just stay here. It’s too dangerous.”

  “He’s my brother,” she challenged.

  He pointed his flashlight at her face. “I thought we went over this outside? You do as I say.”

  She continued to stare at him until he softened.

  “Okay,” he relented. “But stick close to me.”

  She followed him into an adjoining room where the ceiling wasn’t as high. Enormous lights were recessed into the hammered tin and caged with a metal meshwork, similar to the light in the sally port back at the station. The floor was empty, though there were piles of sawdust everywhere. What looked like jewels glittered on the floor as Ben panned his flashlight across the room. He bent down to examine some only to find that they were little metal shavings in the shape of fingernail clippings.

  “Tetanus city,” he muttered to himself.

  Brandy said, “Huh?”

  “Never mind.”

  At the end of the corridor they arrived at a wall of iron grates, blackened and fire-scarred. Ben assumed medieval prisons probably looked no worse. He went to one of the grates, shone the flashlight into it. The throat of a narrow pipe carried the light to an elbow that bent up into the stonework.

  “What is this?” Brandy asked.

  “Some sort of kiln.”

  “What’s a kiln?”

  “Like an oven. Don’t you take pottery classes or something in school?”

  Brandy shrugged and peered through the slatted iron bars.

  “I think these pipes all go up into one of those smokestacks,” he said.

  She pulled away from the bars. “I don’t like this place.”

  “I don’t think your brother came in here, Brandy.”

  By the expression on her face, he could tell she didn’t think so, either.

  She’s trying to hold out hope, he thought. In all likeliness, the kid probably did come out here and fell into the Narrows. I should alert the state police and they should keep an eye on the mouth of the Potomac. Jesus fucking Christ.

  Ben felt sick.

  “What’s that stuff?” Brandy asked. She pointed to a series of wooden rafters along one wall. The rafters themselves looked like some sort of scaffolding, yet there was something dripping from them that reminded Ben of spelunking as a child in Shenandoah. Specifically, he was reminded of the stalactites, those calcified horns of stone that hung from the ceilings of caves. Similarly, this stuff had hardened into corkscrews and hung from the scaffolding, a mottled white and black and gray in hue. On the floor beneath the scaffolding, mounds of the stuff rose up. As Ben shone the flashlight on the mass, large blackflies spiraled dizzyingly into the air.

  “That’s guano,” Ben said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Bat shit.” He shot her an apologetic glance. “It’s, uh, bat feces. Like, uh…bowel movements or…”

  “You can say shit. I know what shit is.” She stared up at the hanging columns of dried dung, nearly mesmerized. “There’s so much of it.”

  “We’ve been having a bat problem lately. I guess this is where they’ve been roosting.”

  “But where are they now?” Brandy took a few steps back, her eyes still trained on the rafters. “It’s daylight out there. They should be in here sleeping, right?”

  “I don’t really know too much about bats,” Ben said, though he thought, She’s right. Bats are nocturnal. Where are they?

  “He’s not in here, is he?”

  Ben clicked off his flashlight. “No, hon. I really don’t think so.” He caught another whiff of that antiseptic stink—that burning, medicinal smell that reminded him of doctors’ offices. It made his eyes water. “Let’
s get you home, okay?”

  Back in the car, with the ribbon of asphalt that was Route 40 curving around the mountain ahead of them, Brandy said, “Thanks for taking me out here and for taking a look around.”

  “It’s okay, Brandy. I wish I could be more help.” He glanced at her profile against the passenger window. “We’re doing all we can.”

  “I know.” She played with the door lock while she watched the countryside shuttle by. “I still have the shirt, in case you want to take it for evidence or whatever. I didn’t wash it and kept it just like we found it.”

  “The shirt?”

  “Matthew’s T-shirt,” she said. She looked at him. “You said my mom told you about it, right?”

  “Your mom said she found one of his shirts out in the yard. She said it probably blew off the clothesline.”

  “Maybe,” Brandy said. “It’s the holes that bother me.”

  “What holes?”

  “The holes in the back of the shirt.” With an index finger, she dotted the air in a vertical line. “There were these little holes going down the back of his shirt. I do his laundry all the time and never noticed them before.”

  Ben’s skin went clammy. “Yeah?” he said, realizing his mouth was suddenly dry. “Holes?”

  “Yeah.” Brandy turned back to the window.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you give me that shirt, huh?”

  “For evidence?” she said.

  “Yeah.” His mind was reeling now. “For evidence.”

  2

  Ben pulled up outside the Crawly house and Brandy got out of the car. The door still open, she peeked in and said, “I’ll be right back.” Then she took off toward the house, leaving the door ajar.

  Unsettled, Ben turned on the goodtime radio, located a classic rock station, and tried to grow comfortable with one of his favorite Bruce Springsteen songs. Yet his mind was on other things.

  The unidentified boy’s body had been found by some watermen late in the day. Both Ben and Mike Keller had responded to the scene. What they found was the doughy outline of a young boy, naked and bloated, strewn in the reeds at the mouth of Wills Creek where the creek joined the Potomac River. They had rolled the boy over and found his face a sodden, swollen mess. The boy’s eyes were like jelly in their sockets. There had been a stiffening rigor to half the face, giving the corpse the frozen grimace of a stroke victim. Lord knew how long the boy’s body had been in the water, but it had been long enough to pull body hair out by the roots and turn the skin into glue. Ben had called Deets in from Cumberland, and the fastidious little medical examiner addressed the scene perfunctorily, taking pictures of his own and scribbling in a notebook. Deets called the death and he assisted a pair of medics in loading the corpse into the back of an ambulance.

  That evening, Mike Keller had gone with Ben down to Crossroads where they tilted back a number of beers. “Don’t think less of me for saying this, Ben,” Mike had told him while perched on a bar stool beside him, “but that was just about the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I feel like crying about it a little, too, but it feels like my insides are all dried up.”

  That’s how Ben felt now—as if his insides had all dried up.

  Brandy returned with her brother’s T-shirt wadded into a ball. She tossed it onto the passenger seat. “Maybe there’s fingerprints on it or something,” she said, and he felt miserable hearing the hope in her voice. “Like they find in those cop shows.”

  She’s just a goddamn kid. Life is so unfair.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Thanks again.”

  “You got it.”

  Brandy shut the door and Ben turned back out onto the road. When he got out of eyeshot of the Crawly residence, he pulled onto the shoulder and put the cruiser in Park. Reaching over, he grabbed the T-shirt off the seat and flapped it open so that it draped itself down the front of the steering wheel.

  The front of the shirt looked fine. There was nothing wrong with it.

  Chewing again on his lower lip, he turned the shirt over. The small holes in the fabric running down the back of the shirt caused a slight tremor to course through him. Distantly, he felt his left eyelid spasm.

  “Goddamn it,” he muttered. His words seemed to shatter like glass as they came out of his mouth and his whole face felt like it was on fire. On the radio, Springsteen sang about going down to the river, as if it were some sort of baptism, a holy rite. “What’s going on around here?” Ben muttered, his breath fogging up the windshield.

  Chapter Eleven

  1

  Ben’s discomfort only intensified by the time he returned to the station. He carried with him the balled-up T-shirt Brandy Crawly had given him—the T-shirt with the peculiar but all-too-familiar series of puncture marks down its back—and a sense of nonspecific apprehension.

  Blessedly, the Batter’s Box was empty. He went straight to his desk, flipped open the case file on the unidentified boy, and set the T-shirt down on his desk. As he looked over the photographs in the file, he flattened out the shirt and spread it out along his desktop. The line of tiny, frayed holes along the back of the shirt stared up at him. A tasteless lump formed at the back of Ben’s throat.

  There it was—one of the photos of the unidentified boy. Mike Keller had taken these pictures, crouching down over the bloated and pallid corpse and snapping shots like a consummate professional. (It wasn’t until later, knocking back those beers at Crossroads, that Mike told him just how much he had been affected by the boy’s body, and how he was sure to lose much sleep over what he’d seen.) He’d taken photos of the body just as they’d found it—facedown, one bony arm crooked in a nest of reeds, one leg partially submerged in the brown, brackish water. Looking at the photo now, Ben could see the twin shoulder blades at the child’s back…the S-shaped curve of the boy’s spine…the bloated hubs of the boy’s buttocks…

  There were four small puncture marks trailing down the boy’s back, the first one starting from just between the shoulder blades while the final one ended just above the boy’s buttocks. Peculiar little holes drilled right into the fishy flesh…

  Ben examined Matthew Crawly’s T-shirt again. Smoothing it out along his desk, he counted one, two, three, four holes running vertically down the back.

  There was a connection here…

  He just didn’t know what it was.

  Fifteen minutes later, he was listening to the telephone ring a number of times before John Deets of the county coroner’s office picked up.

  “John, it’s Ben Journell over in Stillwater.”

  “You sound panicked.”

  “Christ. Is it that obvious?”

  “What is it?”

  Ben closed his eyes, attempted to catch his breath. When he spoke again, his voice was calmer and more decisive. “First off, is there any news on the whereabouts of the boy’s body?”

  “No. No one saw a thing. No one had even come in here in the two days before the body went missing. It’s an anomaly, Ben. I’m really embarrassed about all this, you have no idea.” John Deets laughed nervously on the other end of the line. “It’s like the fucking thing got up and walked out on its own.”

  Again, Ben closed his eyes, then said, “Those marks on the boy’s back. Do you remember?”

  “Yes. Circular puncture marks.”

  “Did you get a chance to identify them before the body went missing?”

  “Officially?” Deets sighed like a locomotive. “No.”

  “Unofficially?” Ben prompted.

  “Unofficially, they looked like the kind of wound a scorpion makes with the stinger on the end of its tail.”

  “A scorpion?”

  “Yeah,” Deets said, “if the fucking scorpion was the size of a grizzly bear.”

  Ben made a clicking sound way back in his throat.

  “I never got a chance to do an autopsy, Ben. Nothing I can tell you has any scientific backing. You understand that, right?”

  “How deep did
those puncture wounds look? Like, could those have been the cause of death?”

  “I can’t really say for sure. I examined one of the wounds and it looked like it went straight through the tissue down to the vertebrae. Maybe the kid fell on a two-by-four that had some nails poking up from it.”

  “Why’d you say it looked like a scorpion’s wounds?”

  “Hell, Ben,” Deets said, and Ben could tell the coroner was already regretting having made the comment to him. “It’s just the first thing that came to my mind.”

  “Why?” he pressed.

  “Because when I used to live in Albuquerque, a neighbor’s kid got stung by a scorpion on the back of his hand. The wound looked identical to the wounds on the back of the kid you shipped over to me—the entry small and hooked, not straight in, and the surrounding area of flesh irritated, red, puffy…Christ, Ben, I don’t know…”

  He was staring at Mike Keller’s photos of the dead boy in the case file. “Okay. You’ll call me if you hear anything else?”

  “You know I will.”

  “Thanks, John.”

  “What’s going on out there, Ben?”

  He drummed his fingers on the photographs of the dead boy. “I don’t know,” he told the coroner. “I don’t know.”

  2

  What had been seated at the back of John Deets’s mind during his discussion with Sergeant Ben Journell was the comment Dougie Overland, one of the morgue attendees, had made after being questioned on the whereabouts of the unidentified boy’s body. Dougie, who was in his twenties and had blue-dyed hair and gold hoop earrings, had assured Deets that no one had come into the facility the night he was on duty, which happened to be the night the boy’s body disappeared. What bothered Deets—and what he found himself unable to relay to Ben, lest he feel like a complete fool—was what Dougie Overland had admitted to later that evening: that he swore, on a few occasions, he could hear muted thumping sounds coming from the room where they kept the bodies in their steel drawers. “It was like someone was trying to get out,” Dougie had said.

  3

  After he hung up with Deets, Ben went into the dispatcher’s office where Shirley monitored the phones. On the console, a small television set showed one of Shirley’s soap operas.