by James Renner
“Mr. Neff, my name is Aaron Zumock,” he said, shaking David’s hand. “Please follow me. I’m told we’re running late.” He waved David through the front doors and into the stark bright sunshine of late October. When his eyes adjusted, David saw that a stretch limo was parked at the end of the walkway.
“Do you work for Bashien?” he asked. He had never known his manager to be so flashy. Certainly this show of wealth would not help his case.
“I don’t work for Bashien, sir.”
“Who do you work for? Who bailed me out?”
Aaron smiled warmly. “I’ve been instructed not to say anything more. I’m supposed to bring you to the car. My employer is waiting inside. I’m sure he will explain everything.”
“Kid, I’m not getting into that car unless you tell me who’s in there waiting for me.”
“Well, that’s the thing, Mr. Neff. I don’t really know, myself.”
“You don’t know the name of your employer?”
Aaron shook his head. “No.”
“What sort of work do you do for him?”
“This and that,” he said. “My biggest asset is my discretion. So I couldn’t really get more specific. Today I’m his driver. Tomorrow?” He shrugged.
David nodded. “Everyone needs a Sherlock ruffian, I guess.”
Aaron laughed. “Funny. That’s what he calls me, too.”
David crouched down and stepped inside. The door closed behind him.
It was too dark to see.
“Have a seat, David,” said the voice of an older man.
David stretched out a hand and felt around. He found a leather couch at the back and collapsed into it. He squinted his eyes. There was a shape sitting in a leather seat facing him. Aaron climbed behind the wheel.
“Home. And some privacy, please.”
Aaron raised the window separating the driver from the passengers.
“Who are you?” asked David.
He heard a sigh. “I think you know.”
“I don’t.”
“You should. After everything you’ve found, everything you’ve gone through in the last few weeks, you have enough clues to put it together. It’s the only explanation that makes sense, even if it’s crazy.”
David could see a bit more detail now. The man in front of him was dressed in a sharp suit, a sleek navy-blue number. His hair was white and thin. His cheeks hollowed. His skin worn. He knew this man.
“You’re the Man from Primrose Lane,” he said.
“No. Well … not really.”
“Who are you?” David asked again.
“David, there’s a lot we have to discuss and there really isn’t that much time. I need to know you’re with me for what happens next. I need your mind to be sharp. I’ve given you enough time to work it out, I think. I left those paintings for you to find. To think about. You really have to come to this yourself. You need to trust your instincts. You have to have a little faith again. You know who I am.”
David didn’t say anything.
“Who am I?”
And then David put it into words. “You’re me,” he said.
“Good,” I replied. “Now let’s get you up to speed.”
INTERLUDE
THE BALLAD OF THE LOVELAND FROG
1996 He was in the park, under a magnolia tree, making out with Hannah Belcher beneath the empty summer sky, when it happened again.
Everett Bleakney was twenty, a lanky, dark-haired version of his father, the former police chief of Loveland, a beloved lawman who had died of a massive coronary out on Twightwee Road in 1986. Hannah, a blond-haired beaut with somewhat of a snaggletooth, was the middle daughter of Stacey Belcher, the old skank who ran the drive-thru. They had met in high school biology (during—of all things—a frog dissection) and had been going steady for two years. Everett was taking criminal justice classes at the community college; Hannah was a waitress at Paxton’s Grill. He had his hand up Hannah’s T-shirt when he heard it.
The sound was not merely percussive but invasive, a dull rhythmic drumming he felt in his fillings.
“Do you hear that?”
Hannah looked at him. “Somebody watching us?” she asked. She pulled him back down. “Let them.”
The fact that Everett had heard the sound and Hannah had not did not necessarily mean anything important. Over the years, Everett had trained himself to automatically distinguish between normal ambient sounds of everyday life and those sounds that were, for want of a better word, alien. The reason for this was simple: though he had never dared to put this thought into words, Everett believed his father had been killed by something from another world. He still had nightmares about that night in 1986 when his father got the call to drive out to Twightwee to investigate what he thought at the time was some abnormally large frog in the middle of the road. He remembered in vivid detail how the thing stood up, almost six feet tall, covered in a black goo that smelled of alfalfa, a creature that looked reptilian and carried a stick that emitted blue sparks like some fake wizard’s electrical wand. The sight of the monster, or perhaps the wand itself (Everett suspected the latter), had caused his father’s arrhythmia and he had died in Everett’s arms as the beast raced back into the forest. The frogman was never seen again. But Everett knew that a series of loud noises had preceded the creature’s appearance, explosions like thunderclaps when there had been no clouds. He reckoned if the thing should ever return, the sounds would return with it.
Everett didn’t allow Hannah to redirect his attention. He focused on that steady beat, waves in the air, like shock waves from some distant explosion. Over a period of ten seconds it dissipated, disappeared.
“We have to go, sweetie,” he said, kissing her quickly and pulling her up.
“Why?”
Because, he thought, I have to go shoot the monster that killed my pa.
* * *
Everett dropped Hannah off at the drive-thru, where her mother expected her to stock forties of Schlitz and bags of pork rinds before going home. He told her that he had forgotten tonight was the night his mother needed him to drive her to St. James for bingo.
He drove to the trailer his family had moved into after his father died and the mortgage became an issue, a double-wide on the east side of town with a yard and a well-kept garden. It was a home. His mother didn’t look up when he came in—she was deeply entranced in Wheel of Fortune—and she did not notice Everett removing his father’s sidearm from its case in the cabinet over the fridge.
“Hot Rod Serling!” she shouted at the tube.
In some other world, in some other universe, he knew his father had not taken that call and was still alive. He wished he lived there.
I will kill this thing, he thought.
* * *
He heard it again, through the open window. It sounded like someone hitting an empty fifty-gallon water drum with a sledgehammer. The humidity of the air hanging stagnant over this desolate stretch of Twightwee seemed affected by the sound in some weird way. The sky rippled like a pond after someone had tossed in a pebble. Except that wasn’t exactly right. The sky didn’t ripple. Everything in his perspective rippled. It was as if the three dimensions Everett perceived rested upon an invisible medium that acted like water and wobbled the trees and the air like inflatable toys in a pool.
He parked his car just beyond the bridge, a quarter mile from the old entrance to Camp Ritchie, as close to the spot where his father had died as he could recall. The sound came from the woods to his left. He guessed it had originated a few hundred feet in, past a thick hedge of briars, somewhere among the evergreens.
Everett checked the safety on his father’s gun. There were ghost chasers, he knew, who sometimes came out here with their ectoplasmic catchers and Geiger counters to try to find the frogman. The story of what he had seen that night had trickled out of Loveland over the years, until some author had collected all of Ohio’s strange legends into a compendium two years ago. Since then, seekers of the Loveland
Frog remained fairly steady—they were instantly recognizable by their funny hats and X-Files T-shirts—and picked up considerably around Halloween. He didn’t want to accidentally shoot one of these delusional nerds. For all he knew, it could be one of them making the sound, in an attempt to summon the beast.
The briars grabbed at him and dozens of trefoil seeds stuck to his jeans, little green triangles that looked like scales. Beyond, the woods were dark, the tall pines creating a cool canopy that shielded the sun and kept undergrowth from running amok. The forest floor here was a bed of spent pine needles, soft and pungent. He could see for what seemed like miles down long corridors in the trees. It would be easy to get disoriented here, he knew; there was no discernible way to tell one tree from another.
The sound came again.
It was so loud that it forced Everett to clap his hands to his ears and moan weakly. He watched the air vibrate in nauseating waves from the direction of the base of a particular tree a few feet away. The waves doubled over themselves until it was impossible to see what was at the center anymore.
Suddenly it was over. And there, at the epicenter of the disruption, was a large black egg. It was about ten feet high and four feet at its widest. There were no markings or scratches on its surface; there was no writing of any kind. It was so shiny, Everett saw himself reflected in it.
His first thought was that the object was an extraterrestrial craft or probe sent, perhaps, to locate the creature that had arrived ten years ago. And he asked himself a crazy question: Could he really kill an alien? Was that what he came here to do?
For several minutes nothing happened. Everett didn’t move a muscle, so transfixed was he on the vessel. He stood fifty feet away, the handgun pointed at it.
He thought about touching it, to see what would happen. But he remembered The Blob. He had stayed up late with his father watching it on the Midnight Movie when he was six, and it had scared the living shit out of him. He knew better than to touch something that might be from space. Fuck that.
A high-pitched electrical sound emanated from the craft. It sounded like an electric can opener.
A thin line appeared around the top of the black egg. Something was hatching from it. Something was breaking out.
Everett clicked off the safety.
The sound stopped and the top popped off. A hiss of trapped air rushed out from within. A thin vapor wafted out of the hole. It smelled like rotted meat.
A hand appeared on the lip, a humanoid hand covered in thick black goop. It was impossible to tell how many fingers it had.
Everett hid behind the closest tree. He didn’t want to die out here, eaten by some monster. He no longer even wanted to kill it. He was too scared. His flight response had kicked in. He just wanted to get out of the woods alive. But if he moved now, maybe the thing would hear him. Hear him and start chasing. Because maybe it had been in there long enough to get hungry.
Another black hand appeared and pushed upon the lip of the egg. Its body rose up and out of the hole, an indistinguishable mass of blackness, like living oil. It collapsed upon the ground, struggling against the harsh and unexpected gravity of another planet. He did not have to worry about this monster chasing him; it could barely stand up.
In fact, it took almost five minutes for it to pull itself up onto its ganglion legs. It leaned against a tree and cried out in some fierce language, “Ahhhhhhnaaaa!”
It was a weak and confused sound and Everett realized he was no longer afraid of this feeble creature. Well, okay, he was. Afraid enough to keep his distance. But not so afraid that he wasn’t going to find out once and for all what it was. He stepped around the tree and moved forward.
Two black eyes looked up at him in surprise. The creature’s frog-fish lips drew back in a snarl. It tried to speak. “Nahop. Nahhh oppp!” it said. It lifted a hand and Everett saw that it, too, had one of those spark-wands.
He reacted before he was aware he meant to. A single shot: boom! The bullet hit the monster’s left leg. It roared and fell to the ground. Then it lifted itself on its elbows and looked at him. Quite clearly, but quite slowly, it said, “You dumb motherfucker.”
Everett’s heart stopped—literally stopped—from the shock of hearing the alien speaking in English. It started up again with a rusty flutter that made him feel dislodged from his body. Obviously, it had tapped into his mind and had learned the basics of human speech. And if that was the case, what else could it do? Could it, Everett wondered, make me turn the gun on myself?
He turned and fled.
Back in town, he would arrive at Paxton’s, where he would try to convince the patrons that a frogman from another planet had crashed in the woods. Reinforcements had come to get the thing that killed his old man. They had to go back with guns. They had to kill it before it killed them.
He spent that night in the psychiatric ward. The first of many.
PART THREE
ME
EPISODE THIRTEEN
THE BLACK EGG
In the back of the limousine, David sat quietly as I finally shared the story of my life. Which, in a way, was the story of our life.
* * *
I fell in love with Katy Keenan not long before her body was discovered lying facedown in an Ashland County wheat field. I fell in love with the girl from the MISSING poster. The first one. The school photo with the cloud background. The one with her in that ponytail. She had some kind of light about her. An inexplicable and unfortunate sensuality. What I’m saying is it was very difficult for any man, age five to ninety-five, not to fall a little in love with her at first sight. I was twenty. I mention this only because I believe it became her undoing.
It was not a crime of opportunity, not some random kidnapping by a guy cruising the suburbs in a dirty van. She was targeted. Katy, I learned from the newspaper accounts, had encountered the man outside Big Fun (a toy shop in the village of Coventry, about a mile from Cleveland Heights) at about three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. A classmate saw a man walk up to her, whisper something into her ear, and then lead her into a car and drive off. In broad daylight, he had walked past half a dozen other kids before he reached her. Any other day, Katy would have been with a friend or her parents. But that day, her mother had been late to pick her up. It was as if this man had stalked her, waiting for just such a moment to whisk her away.
I became obsessed with the crime.
It was the knowledge that if I had met this girl when I was a kid in school, she would have been the one I passed notes to behind Miss Kline’s back. This was a girl I would have loved. A girl who could have loved me. I was sure of it.
To me, the case was a giant puzzle. The kind where, even if you get all the pieces in the right places, you still have to look through the picture to see the three-dimensional solution hidden within. I thought I was smarter than the detectives working the case. I thought I could figure it out before they did. I thought I could figure it out in enough time to save her.
On May 15, 1999, a man walking his dog along County Road 581 in Ashland County, about sixty miles from Cleveland Heights, discovered Katy’s body ten feet off the road, in a harvested wheat field. She had been strangled. And raped.
As tragic as the discovery was—I couldn’t sleep for two nights—it was a bit of luck for investigators. They had a crime scene. And, from the desolate location of the dump site, they could logically infer that whoever had murdered Katy had been familiar with both Cleveland Heights and Ashland County. That narrowed their search a little.
A year later, I used my notes on the case as research for my senior project at Kent State. I wrote a thirty-thousand-word paper. At the prodding of my professor, I submitted a proposal to a local publisher. The thesis became a book. Ten years later, I wrote a sequel.
The problem with Katy’s murder was not lack of evidence—on the contrary, we had several clues left behind by the killer—it was the vast number of men who had the means, motive, and opportunity to commit the crime.
&nb
sp; There was the principal at her elementary school, a man named Burt McQuinn, who had called in sick that day. His family owned a hunting cabin not two miles from where Katy’s body was found. And when authorities took a close look at his hard drives, they discovered that he’d been sending digital pictures of his penis to several girls at his school, some as young as twelve.
There was the paper man, an odd fellow named Kevin Sweeney, who delivered the Keenans’ daily copy of the Plain Dealer, and who, the FBI found after some digging, had once lived in Florida under the name “John” Sweeney, but fled when he was caught sodomizing a Girl Scout behind a playground slide.
There was the well-known lawyer, a partner at Cleveland’s most prestigious firm (you know the one I’m talking about). I won’t name him—after all, the man is a lawyer. This particular barrister had a side hobby of flashing joggers in the Metro Parks. He was also a closeted polygamist.
There were a dozen or so men like this close enough to Katy to have committed the crime, each with weak or nonexistent alibis.
Over the span of twenty-eight years, I interviewed all of them except Kevin Sweeney, who had committed suicide before anyone could ask him questions.
After I graduated, I became a journalist, and about once a year I’d update Katy’s case for whatever publication I worked for at the time. Whenever I caught a spare moment between stories, I dug some more. I could not allow this murderer to think he was smarter than me. There must be some puzzle piece yet unfound.
By 2014, I came to believe I had exhausted all conventional methods of solving this crime. I began to consider unconventional methods.
In 2018, I spent a week in Tibet—ostensibly to work on a freelance piece on the effect the Dalai Lama’s return had on the region, but in reality to study with a particular brother the art of transcendental meditation. But the answer was not in the spiritual realm.
