by Wither
He threw the walkie-talkie back to the guard, thrust a finger at two of the men. “You and you—with me. We’ll sweep one floor at a time. The rest of you get downstairs and lock this place down.”
He broke the huddle and led the search for the fugitive.
The little girl had been left on her side following the biopsy and lay now facing the windows. Art thought she might be sleeping, but when he came around the foot of her bed he saw her eyes open and staring out at the cloud-streaked sky. He said her name quietly and the eyes shifted, fixing him with an indifferent gaze.
She looked smaller than he remembered, there in the great mechanical hospital bed. One IV dripped a steady flow of antibiotics into her arm, while a second fed her a liquid breakfast directly through a G-tube in her stomach. From beneath her blankets, more tubes carried away her urine to a discrete receptacle. Worst of all was the steel halo that stabilized her head while her vertebrae healed. Art saw the fine surgical screws that fixed the hardware directly to her skull and felt his heart seize within his chest with sorrow.
He wondered how much she remembered of the accident, wondered if the gaps in her memory had been filled with the fiction of his supposed kidnapping. And yet she regarded him now with neither recognition nor fear, only that cool, horrible indifference of a sick child heavily medicated.
“Abby,” he said, and crouched suddenly below the level of the bed as he saw two RNs stride by briskly outside the room. He was very close to the child now, his face close enough to hers that he i could feel her breath against his cheeks, and smell the ghost of a child beneath the disinfectant.
“Sweetheart, you have to try to talk again,” he whispered, as if sharing a secret. “You have to try to remember what happened, tell the police who has been hurting you.”
She stared at him without blinking. He could see tiny versions of himself reflected in her eyes.
“Abby, do you understand?”
Nothing. He took her hand in his own, then wished that he hadn’t: it was cool and clammy, a lifeless thing. He felt tears come then to his eyes, stinging, and he tipped his head against the chilly bars of the bed railing.
“I’m so sorry, Abby…,” he said miserably.
The little girl’s mouth twitched-involuntarily, he thought. And then she spoke.
“… name isn’t…Abby… anymore.”
Art froze, ice water beneath his skin. He felt her dead hand-impossibly—tighten around his own, seize him in an iron grip. He asked with great care, “What’s your name?”
To which the little girl answered: “Sarah…Hutchins.”
The elevator doors opened on Four and the sheriff emerged with the two security guards. The three men moved efficiently, fanning out as they swept through the PICU, checking each room.
The RN at the nurses’ station looked up from her paper jam as they stormed past. Sheriff Nottingham trotted ahead of the other two as Abby’s room came into sight-Nothing. She was alone.
Art descended the fire,stairs quickly, his paper slippers shushing across the concrete. Above, he heard loud male voices echoing in the stairwell.
Where now? Any advantage he’d had he’d lost by his detour through the PICU, and was certain now security would be covering all the main exits…
Except for one.
With the sounds of voices growing closer overhead, Art hurried down the stairs past the first-floor landing, heading for the basement…
Within moments, he was gone.
Later, Sheriff Bill Nottingham would replay the events of the morning and try to understand how exactly Art Leeson had managed to slip out of the hospital undetected. True, this wasn’t a high-security facility, and the sheriff hadn’t had either the time or the manpower to turn it into one. Yet they’d swept each floor methodically and posted men at every service entrance, fire exit, and back door.
In other words, at every exit a pedestrian might use to leave the hospital.
But Art hadn’t left by a pedestrian exit. He’d left via the physicians’ underground parking garage, where the only guard was a mechanical gate. Thus had he so effortlessly evaded the Windale police department and a team of trained security guards.
The sheriff vowed not to give Art a second chance at such evasion.
Wendy arrived at Pearson Hall several minutes early for comp lit and immediately regretted it. Frankie spotted her before she could get through the doors to the classroom and hurried over. “I’m not speaking to you,” Wendy said in a preemptive verbal strike.
“What are you talking about?” Frankie asked, genuinely baffled. Obviously Alex hadn’t clued her in.
“I know,” Wendy said. “Alex told me.”
“Again, what are you talking about?”
“You told him,” Wendy said, then whispered. “About the ceremony in the woods.”
“Did he show up?”
“He followed me!”
“I thought he would,” Frankie said. “Unless I underestimated him, he should have brought some wine and cheese and a selection of soft music.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s so obvious you guys are hot for each other,” Frankie said. “Some people are so dense. I should have known better than to initiate a rapprochement between the sexes. So what happened? He scare you?”
“He spied on me!”
“Yuck! A peeper?” Frankie said.
“I’m pissed at you, Frankie,” Wendy said. “I told you about the …about my ritual in private. And you told Alex to follow me. I thought you were my friend.”
Frankie’s eyes seemed to refocus. “You’re serious, aren’t you? You’re really mad at me?”
“Furious. I really liked Alex.”
“Past tense?”
“It’s over now,” Wendy said. “We can’t go back the way we were.”
“Look, Wendy, obviously I misjudged the situation… I screwed up. Please don’t be too quick to throw something away.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have been so quick to violate a confidence,” Wendy said, brushing by her and entering the lecture hall.
“Open mouth, insert Birkenstock,” Frankie said sullenly.
Wendy rolled her eyes when she saw that Alex had saved a seat for her. As if nothing had happened. She climbed the stairs and walked by him without even acknowledging his offer. Alex caught her arm, and she noticed abrasions on his hands, like rope burns or … road rash. “Wendy, I need to talk to you,” he said.
“I’m not feeling very talkative,” she said.
He forced a grin. “Then I’ll do all the talking.”
“Save your breath,” she said and walked back several rows to the next empty seat. She could feel his gaze on her back, but she ignored his attempts at eye contact then and all during the class.
Frankie took the seat Alex had saved for Wendy, and the two of them had a heated exchange before the start of class. Wendy couldn’t help watching them, wondering at the dynamic that had managed to split both of them away from her. Frankie’s meddling? Alex’s unspoken curiosity? Whenever they happened to glance her way, she quickly averted her eyes. She was trying her best to pretend they no longer existed. It would be easier that way.
After class, Frankie and Alex made an attempt to approach her. Wendy turned her back on them and cut through one of the back rows, intending to go out the far door to avoid even having to tell them she really didn’t want to talk about it, to leave her alone. That’s what brought her to Jensen Hoyt’s desk near the back of the class. The dark-haired girl had her head bowed over a sketchbook instead of her class notebook, her fingers methodically smudging the pencil illustration, getting the texture and the shadows just right. She seemed lost in the image she was rendering. Her long black hair, which hadn’t been washed in a week, formed a curtain in front of her face.
Jen seemed to sense somebody standing over her. She looked up, revealing dark circles under her haunted eyes, and the curtain of hair parted from the drawing. Wendy gasped.
Jen had drawn the face…the black, leathery face with the wisps of hair and the feral eyes that had stared back at Wendy from her bathroom mirror for the blink of an eye. The memory was an indelible image in Wendy’s mind, and obviously, Jen shared the nightmare visage.
“What…?” Wendy’s throat was suddenly dry. “What is that?”
“It’s hideous, isn’t it?” Jen said, as if that explained everything. Wendy nodded. Jen looked down at what she had drawn, then back at Wendy. “It’s all I can see.”
“What’s it from?”
“It’s the creature,” Jen said. “The creature that took Jack.”
Wendy’s knees buckled, and she fell into the desk in front of |Jen, sitting awkwardly and banging her elbow in the process. Alex and Frankie were watching her from the end of the row of seats, watching but maintaining their distance. They looked at each other, confused.
The rush of thoughts numbed Wendy’s mind to everything else. Somehow, she really must be responsible for Jack’s disappearance. Somehow she must have summoned this thing, this creature. It had come to do her bidding, to rid her of Jack, and now it was appearing to her, had come to collect its fee. Her free hand went to her mouth, her teeth biting down on her trembling lower lip. What have I done…? My God, what have I done?
“I have more of them,” Jen said.
“More?” Wendy said, thinking, How many of them are there? “In my dorm room,” Jen said. “Show me,” Wendy said.
As Wendy followed Jen through the cinder block corridors of Bosch Residential Hall, she thought, Maybe I’m not really missing anything by living at home. The all-female dorm was a concrete bunker built twenty-five years ago in that great 19705 architectural tradition of post offices and public middle schools—all improbable angles and windows that wouldn’t open. The carpet underfoot was an institutional shade of tangerine, the fluorescent lighting overhead flickered to some subliminal rhythm, and the air had a weird stale smell of dirty laundry. The closed doors they passed were hung with dry-erase message boards (j, you go girl! t. and beware the bawl sac!) and plastered with male models ripped from the pages of GQ. Through the occasional open door, Wendy glimpsed a dorm decor that was timeless: the Escher prints of stairs going nowhere, the liquor-store promotional banners for Bud Lite, the stuffed-animal menageries.
When they arrived at Jen’s room at the end of the labyrinth, however, Wendy saw a bare door scarred with bits of Scotch tape. Jen fumbled with the keys, and gave Wendy a last dark look that seemed to say, Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. But behind that warning look there was another, wounded expression of frightened vulnerability. Wendy could see just how fragile the poor girl had become in these last few weeks, how she’d eroded under the pressure of a community’s skepticism. As Jen hesitated with the key in the lock, Wendy understood the psychological risk she was taking bringing Wendy here—exposing herself to yet another devastating session of disbelief.
Wendy put a hand on Jen’s arm and felt the girl flinch. “It’s okay,” Wendy said quietly. Jen took a breath, and her eyes brightened with tears. Then she pushed the door open…
“See…,” she said, raising a listless arm to welcome Wendy into her nightmare.
Wendy sucked in a sharp breath at what she saw, and stepped inside.
It seemed that she’d entered a hall of mirrors, where image upon image repeated itself endlessly on all sides… but instead of her reflection, the image she saw reflected back at her in a thousand charcoal variations was of the creature’s feral face…
Taped to every open scrap of cinder block wall. Taped to bureau and closet doors. Taped to chairs and lamps. Papering out the daylit window; scattered across the floors…
The room was suffocating in paper, the studio of a schizophrenic. Wendy turned slowly in a circle, taking it all in. It would be easy to go crazy in this room, to join its frightened artist in her compulsion. She turned to find Jen, and saw the girl standing quietly in the corner, her expression changed now to one of passive acceptance of whatever judgment Wendy might bring. A strange little smile quirked the girl’s lips, and she stole a furtive glance at Wendy.
“Do you like them?” she asked simply, and for a moment Wendy couldn’t decide which was the more horrible sight—the gallery of leering monsters, or the lost expression of the artist who’d rendered them.
Karen was cramping so badly by noon that she canceled her lunch with Eva Hartman and asked her teaching assistant, Kristin, to lead her afternoon graduate seminar.
When she arrived home, she rushed inside and huddled on the toilet in the guest powder room and waited for the pain to subside. There were a few drifting blossoms of fresh blood in the bowl. To quell the nausea, she poured herself a tall ginger ale and applied an ice cube to the webbing between her thumb and forefinger—one of Art’s little homeopathic tricks he’d picked up from his Chinese acupuncturist. She couldn’t tell if the ice actually had some soothing effect on her stomach, or if the feel of it melting up her sleeve was simply enough of a distraction to take her mind off of the nausea.
In the living room, she found the answering machine filled with messages. All Paul.
Beep. “Hi. Just wanted to know if you’re okay, if you need anything or—Okay.”
Beep. “Hi, it’s me. Are you screening your calls?” Long pause. “Guess not. I’d like to talk, but I’m willing to wait until you’re ready.”
Beep. “Please just give me a call and let me know you’re okay. You don’t have to stay on if you aren’t ready to talk yet.”
Beep. “Karen, please, we need to—”
She stabbed the erase button hard and stood listening to the whirring hiss of the tape. She held her finger down on the erase as if she were stubbing out an errant spark—an ember of longing for Paul she wasn’t yet ready to acknowledge.
It had been three days since she’d last seen Paul, and in that time she’d withdrawn as well from colleagues and students and retreated to this nest of misery she was building. This was not depression, she told herself, but rather a kind of horrible patience. She was waiting for her baby to die. Waiting for the child inside her to finally succumb to its birthright infirmities. Paul couldn’t understand what she was suffering; he was a man, with a man’s self-protective instinct for blamelessness. Already she could hear it in his voice, this note of sad acceptance, already he was distancing himself from the raw immediacy of their loss. In his mind they were simple victims. If he’d been here he would grieve with her, yes, and comfort her, and hold her hand, but he would also mistake what she was feeling for simple depression, some female analogue to his own emotion. But she didn’t feel depressed; she felt com-plicit. After all, who else was to blame if not her for bequeathing these crippled genes to her baby?
Her baby. Oh God, my baby…
In the basement below, something suddenly went thud. She felt the sound through the soles of her feet as much as heard it. She turned sharply Had it just been the sound of some precariously stacked junk—the milk crates of old clothing, the ice cream maker she’d bought at a garage sale but never got around to using—shifting in the cluttered basement? Or something else…
Silence. She felt her heart’s adagio flutter settle to a gentler rhythm: curiosity. She wasn’t afraid; the house was flooded with late-afternoon daylight, was too bright for fear. She walked to the top of the cellar stairs and flicked on the light switch. The bulb brightened momentarily and then went nova, its filament exploding with a muffled pop. Shit. With a sigh she started down the rickety stairs.
At the bottom of the stairs, she peered out into the dark. Paul had strung a second simple light fixture midway around the basement’s bend. She could just see it dangling from the open floor joists above. Around her, a lifetime’s clutter crouched in shadow, moldering, making its own dust. She strode across the darkness to the light fixture and pulled the dangling chain. Nothing. Then she noticed the bulb had been smashed…
Something shifted from among the shadows, and Karen spun, giving a small
cry of surprise. Movement. A face—
“Don’t be frightened,” Art said. “It’s just me.”
He peered out from the dark place between the furnace and wall where he’d been huddled.
“Christ, Art! What the hell are you doing here?”
He emerged clumsily from his hiding place, kicking over a tinkling box of Christmas ornaments in the process. He was wearing blue surgical scrubs grimy with soot and grease.
“I didn’t know where else to go. I had to break the padlock to get in. I’m sorry. But I couldn’t go home…and I couldn’t go to Paul’s. They’d find me there.”
“Who?”
“The police,” Art said. “Haven’t you heard the helicopters all afternoon? I’m a fugitive from the law.” He gave a rueful smile at the ridiculousness of the notion.
She was staring down at his feet, trying to decide what sort of footwear the sodden muddy masses had been once. “Hospital booties,” he explained. “Not exactly all-weather gear.”
“My god. Are you okay?” The maternal instincts were kicking in, and she led him closer to the dingy light cast by the basement’s one high window.
“I didn’t know where to go. I wasn’t strong enough to get on a bus out of town. And I didn’t know if I could trust Paul.”
Karen gave Art a critical look. “That’s not very fair to your brother. You know he’d never turn you in.”
“No, but he’d try to talk m£ into turning myself in.”
“And you think I won’t?”
Doubt flickered briefly across his face. “I hope not.”
“Art, this is crazy—” He hushed her with a raised hand, cocking his head at a sound only he heard. She listened, and then she heard it, too: the distant noise of a helicopter. “It’s them,” he said in a whisper. “The cops have infrared cameras and scopes, you know. Like night predators. They can see right through rooftops. I don’t think they can penetrate to the basement, though.” Karen felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. Art seemed unaware of how hard he was squeezing her arm, of the fact that he was hurting her.
