I pulled up in front of my house, killed the engine, and ran inside, slamming the door closed behind me and locking it.
The sound of massive, pumping wings flew over the house. The force of the downdraft from them shattered a couple of windows.
I leaned against the door, shaking.
Jesus Christ, what now?
It wasn’t long before I had the answer.
A pair of bright headlight beams cut a path through the darkness. I pulled back the curtain to see a large tan vehicle shaped like an old bread-delivery truck crawl past my house, its driver sweeping the street with a handheld searchlight. The truck came to a stop and the driver killed all lights. It took my vision a moment to adjust afterward-the light had shone directly in my face at one point-and by the time I could focus clearly the driver was out of the truck and looking in my yard. It was already dark so I wondered how he could see.
He adjusted a strap on something he’d just put on his face, then reached up and hit a switch between his eyes. It wasn’t actually between his eyes, of course, but that’s how it looked. I caught a flash of a small green light glowing where the bridge of his nose should be and realized that he’d just donned and activated a pair of night-vision goggles. I wondered if they were Starlight technology like the scopes soldiers used in Vietnam. I wondered how expensive they were and how Cedar Hill Animal Control could afford such high-tech gear.
An SUV came around the corner, its headlights shining on high, enabling me to both see the driver and read the name on the side of the truck.
Neither came as a surprise.
He was impeccably dressed, expensive suit, tie, bowler hat on his head.
The side of the truck read: KEEPERS.
Still, my legs began to buckle, my chest felt tight, and my heart once again tried to squirt through my ribs; my breath came up short as I pressed my back against the wall and slid to the floor, a hand over my mouth.
I held my breath, listening to his footsteps as Magritte-Man made his way up the walk, then to one side of the front porch before turning around and going back to his truck; I continued holding it until the sound of his engine faded into cricket-song and streetlight buzz. When I finally allowed myself to exhale, everything inside me became miasma and dissipated into the twilight.
– grabbing my shirt through the bars of the cage and pulling me toward him, blood seeping into the cotton of my shirt as I lifted the bowler and showed him that it was undamaged, looking into my eyes, lips squirming in a mockery of communication because his vocal cords had been cut out long ago, sounds that were a burlesque of language, but there was something there, something that drew him to me or me to him, and he turned his head ever so slightly to the right and pulled me closer to the bars – I shook my head and pulled away from the wall. A thin layer of perspiration covered my face, neck, chest, and hands; my arms were shaking, and for a moment I feared I was going to vomit. This last, at least, proved to be a false alarm.
Pressing a hand against the front door, I eased myself onto my sponge-like feet and dragged in a few deep breaths to steady my nerves and my balance. Grabbing my shirt through the bars of the cage? Where the hell had that come from? I never get my memories mixed up in that way, one bleeding over into the other until the seams couldn’t be spotted.
(Are you sure about that one, pal?)
Christ.
Rubbing my eyes, I made my way into the downstairs guest bedroom before I even knew where I was going or why. Ever notice how there are times when your body’s memory and will operate independently from your own? Synapses take a detour and you’re left wondering, Why am I here? / Doing this? / Looking for… what?
I reached for the light switch but at the last moment my body’s will took over again and wouldn’t let me turn it on. This room had to remain dark; I’d have to rely on the light spilling in from the other room to see things.
I moved the bed several feet to the right, then yanked away the cheap throw-rug that lay underneath to reveal the area of flooring that had been torn up and then replaced with a 3? 3 trapdoor-an addition the plumbers suggested in the event that the new pipes running underneath needed to be accessed during an emergency. A padlock held the door firmly closed. I retrieved my keys from their hook by the front door and flipped through until I found the one for the padlock, opened it, but did not pull up the door. Not yet.
Trying to look as casual as possible, I made my way through the downstairs, turning off a few more lights but not enough to slide everything into darkness; the light over the sink in the kitchen, the table lamp in the living room, and my desk lamp remained on. They would give me plenty of light for what I needed to do.
I went into the linen closet for the second time that day, pulling out all of the hand towels and wash rags on the top shelf, then reaching back and flopping my hand around until I felt the curved brass handle on a wooden box; pulling it out and setting it on the floor of the closet, I turned the dials on the combination lock until the lid popped up with a soft click. I hadn’t opened this thing in years, hadn’t really wanted to, but now I had to. My body’s will commanded me.
The 7.65mm Deutsche Werk semiautomatic pistol looked just as it had when Mom gave it to me after Dad’s funeral, along with his medals. He’d taken this gun from a dead SS officer in Austria near the end of World War Two. He’d kept it cleaned and oiled and had insisted on firing it at least once a year to make sure it was still in good working order. When I was much younger and still thought of guns as something powerful and romantically alien, Dad would sometimes let me fire it in the air at midnight on New Year’s Eve. The gun was small but its recoil packed a wallop. Dad used to laugh every year when the thing’d knock me on my ass after I fired.
I jacked back the slide to make sure it was empty, then loaded the clip, chambered a round, set the safety, and shoved it into the back of my pants. (I’ve always hated movies where some guy shoves a gun into the front of his pants to hold it in place; sneeze, trip, or bump into something and it’s hi-diddle-deedee, the eunuch’s life for me. I hadn’t been with a woman for a very long time, but it seemed a good idea to keep the package attached, just in case. It’s the little fantasies that keep us going.)
From inside the lid of the box I removed the serrated SS dagger in its ankle-sheath and strapped it on. After double-checking to make sure it was securely in place, I reached under the closet’s lower shelf, shoved aside a few mid-sized storage boxes, and pulled out the one weapon that hadn’t come from my father: a Mossberg 500 pistol-grip, pumpaction twelve-gauge shotgun. I took down the box of shells and fed it until it was full, then pumped a load into the chamber, stood up, and kicked the closet door closed behind me. I still wasn’t sure why I felt compelled to arm myself like a road-company Robert DeNiro in the penultimate reel of Taxi Driver, but my body told me I’d know soon enough.
A few moments later I was back at the front door, peering through the window.
Magritte-Man was back with at least two others of his ilk. The three of them stood, all bowlers and dapperness, on the sidewalk, night goggles at the ready. I stood up straight and looked right at them. I wasn’t sure they’d seen me, so I waved at them.
Magritte-Man returned the gesture, but neither he nor the others made a move toward the house. At least there wouldn’t have to be any sneaking around now, dim light or no.
They might -mark that- might know about the crawl-space, but not the trapdoor.
I started back toward the guest bedroom, moving the shotgun from one hand to the other and shaking each empty hand in turn because my fingers had gone numb.
Not you, I thought, hoping some small part of the universe would scatter the thought Magritte-Man’s way. She will not go with you.
I will not allow that.
I will bury her here.
You won’t get your hands on her, not you, not you, not you…
I’d kill all of us before I let that happen.
TWO
I put the Mossberg on a small tab
le just inside the guest bedroom and knelt to open the trapdoor. This was the first time I’d used it since having it installed, and I was surprised by the thin cloud of sawdust that blew into my face. Coughing, I waved the cloud away, blinked until my eyes were clear, and started to drop my legs into the opening.
Something outside slammed against the side of the house with enough force to shake the floor and cause the Mossberg to nearly fall off the edge of the table.
I scrambled to my feet, grabbing the shotgun as I ran toward the living room. Whatever slammed against the house had raised some dust of its own, because a dissipating smog of sandy debris was swirling against the window. It wasn’t until I was just a foot or so away from the window that I realized it wasn’t dust at all.
Crouching, I pulled back one side of the curtain to take a look.
It was a cavernous silver mist-so thick in places it was nearly impossible to make out the shape of Magritte-Man’s truck in the street-that churned as if caught in a strong wind. But there was no wind. There hadn’t even been any humidity. The old joke might say that if you don’t like the weather in Ohio just wait a minute, and sometimes it sure seems that way, but barring any sort of significant meteorological aberration, no way in hell could a mist this heavy and wide-spread form in a matter of… I quickly played in reverse everything that had happened since I’d loaded the shotgun… ninety seconds?
I looked out the window again. At the rate this was going, the mist would turn into heavy fog in no time.
Ninety seconds.
Dropping the curtain back into place, I moved through the living room toward the back door. The mist couldn’t be a natural phenomenon; yes, the weather here can make some extreme swings from time to time, but not like this, not a mist-bordering-on-fog that looks like it followed the tail of a major storm in summer, not in less than two minutes. So it stood to reason (didn’t it?) that Magritte-Man and his droogies had to have created it. It had only been two minutes, so whatever they were using to generate the mist couldn’t have worked up enough vapor to encircle the entire house-hell, even if they had more than one means of creating the mist (dry ice, a fog machine maybe?), there still hadn’t been enough time.
(There you again, pal-trying to create logical reasons for stuff that you know damned well-)
Up yours.
I threw open the back door and stepped onto the porch, the Mossberg pointing out from my hip.
The mist formed a semi-solid wall that spread out to create a barrier around the yard and rose so far into the evening sky it was impossible to see where it ended and the October clouds began. I leaned over the porch railing to see just how far the barrier extended; at both the far left and right edges of the house it curved so sharply and so abruptly it actually formed corners before continuing.
It was surrounding the house.
I felt a damp chill and exhaled; my breath became silver vapor as soon as it hit the air and billowed in front of my face, faintly glowing. From deep inside, the mist shimmered with silver light-nothing bright or blinding, but enough to illuminate the yard and the outside of the house.
Moving down the steps I looked from side to side for some sign of the others. I caught a glimpse of one of them when a pair of thin red beams cast by their night goggles glided across the mist from about ten yards to my left. Mossberg at the ready, I ran toward the spot from which the beams had come; just as I hit the mist the handle-grip of the shotgun punched into my ribs, causing me to cry out as I tumbled backward from the force of the impact.
It took a few seconds for my torso to stop throbbing and the breath to find its way back into my lungs. What the fuck had I slammed into? Rolling onto my side, I picked up the Mossberg and checked to make sure the gun and knife were still in place, then got to my feet and looked around for who- or whatever had hit me. As far as I could tell, I was alone in the yard-whose boundaries were rapidly shrinking against the encroaching mist. In a few minutes it would be all the way up to the back porch.
I turned back toward the spot where I’d remembered seeing the beams and moved closer to it, slowly this time. I knew this was probably the wrong thing to do-after all, the back door was unlocked and stood wide open (Why not just send out written invitations? I thought)-but I had to let them know I wasn’t going down without a fight.
I heard a dog bark from outside the barrier, another one howled in response, then the song of an unseen nightbird was answered by the yowls of a stray neighborhood cat.
The mist was playing with me; whenever I moved forward, it retreated, expanding the boundaries; if I moved back, it would advance, swallowing more of the yard. I did this three times, moving backward and forward to make sure I wasn’t imagining it, and I wasn’t; the mist moved in the opposite of my direction each time. Finally, I remained still, as did it.
Flexing the fingers of my left hand, I reached up; a small area of the barrier pulled away from the tips of my fingers. I folded my fingers into my palm and watched the area begin to fill in, and that’s when I came up with my right hand still fisted around the shotgun’s handle-grip and punched at it.
I heard the bones break well before the pain had a chance to register, but by then I was down on one knee and whimpering, my right hand cradled against my chest. As far as I could tell, I had broken my fourth and fifth metacarpals. A jagged, bloody scrape lay across the width of my hand, made thin and black in places by my swollen knuckles. Jesus! It had been like pummeling my fist against a slab of granite. I could still feel the vibration of the impact all the way up into my shoulder and neck.
Struggling to my feet, I grabbed the Mossberg with my left hand because my right was useless for the moment. The mist remained stationary, churning, forming surreal shapes.
I wondered if my neighbors had noticed what was surrounding my house. Were any of them watching right now, their curiosity piqued, or was this mist engulfing the entire block? It had to have occurred to at least one person that this wasn’t normal, right? (Assuming that black mastiffs hadn’t been disassembling people around here, as well.)
This was Cedar Hill, and in Cedar Hill if anything not normal or even mildly interesting happens, well, then, you call the police or the trusty news team at Channel 7 and get a mobile unit right over. If they’d dispatch a crew to cover the opening of a new electronics store one county away, they’d sure as hell send someone to a local neighborhood to cover the appearance of an intensely localized weather anomaly.
Never count on the help of others when you most need it. Take my word on this. I wasn’t about to assume that any of my neighbors had called or were going to call anyone to report this. So I did the only thing I knew for a fact would get someone on the phone to the news or police; I rose to my feet, lifted the Mossberg over my head using only my left hand, pointed it into the air, and fired.
The force of the blast wrenched my left arm backward and tore the handle-grip from my grasp. The shotgun flew back and landed in the grass about five feet away; I half-spun around, my shoulder screaming, nearly losing my balance. Almost none of this had to do with the physical effects of firing the weapon-some of it, yes, you can’t fire a scattergun with only one hand and not get jolted down to your marrow-but more than anything, it was the sound of the shot.
Under the best and most controlled of circumstances a gunshot is deafening, but it seemed as if this one had gone off in the center of my skull; it hadn’t just been a noise or an explosion-it was a pulverizing force that ripped the air from inside me and jammed an invisible ice pick into each side of my head. I stumbled around in half-circles pressing my hands against my ears (I had done this before, I knew that I had held my ears like this before, that there had been pain and panic then, as well… but where and when and why?) while stomping my feet and working my jaw in order to create some kind of pressure and please God make one or both of my ears pop-but nothing helped. At one point the pain and weight became so great I thought I was going to pass out, then a soft hiss began to issue from the base of my brainpan
, someone letting the air out of a bicycle tire, and I pulled my hands away and felt the cool air enter my ears with a soft whoosh. I shook my head once, then twice to see if I could jar anything into functioning, but there was only a thick, gluey numbness; I didn’t hear so much as feel the hissing, which was rapidly giving way to a deep, disturbing thrum. I blinked, turned slowly around, saw the shotgun lying in the grass, and made a beeline for the thing. It was vital I have something to focus on besides the disorienting pressure in my head, and the Mossberg would do just fine. Looking up to where the mist met the clouds, I prayed that the blast hadn’t blown out my eardrums and rendered me permanently deaf. I shook my head once more as I swung down and grabbed the shotgun with my good hand, and as I returned to a fully upright position there was hiss and a buzz and a pop and something that sounded like a sheet being torn into shreds by a pair of teeth, then a moment of nauseating dizziness and then… sound. I could at least discern (if not actually hear) sound again. Not much, just the echo of a dog’s bark coming from somewhere deep under the Atlantic Ocean, but it was there, and I could recognize it, and that meant that the damage wasn’t (thank you thank you thank you ) permanent. Despite the circumstances, I smiled as I made my way up the back steps and into the kitchen. It was only as I was locking the door and shoving the kitchen table up against it that I allowed myself to acknowledge what I hadn’t wanted to admit while out there: the noise and force of the blast had been so fantastically intensified-so brutally magnified-because they had been contained.
The mist wasn’t just surrounding the house, it was encasing it.
I thought, This must be how a pheasant under glass feels.
Then a remembered voice: You might say they’re not from around here. But who’d said that, and when? Where? Like with holding my ears, I should have known, but…
(You’re getting awfully close to not leaving me with any choice here, pal.)
I looked out the window over the sink. The mist roiled forward, stopping only a few feet from the bottom step of the back porch. Two thin red beams danced across a part of the wall, then one of Magritte-Man’s cronies stepped through and simply stood there. The glow from his night goggles made him look almost comical. He gave a quick nod of his head to affirm that he could see me. I flipped him the bird with my right middle finger and immediately shrieked from the pain. I had to do something about my broken hand and I had to do it now or I didn’t stand a chance. Bowler (I now chose to think of him and the others by this name) waved a hand to get my attention, then made an odd gesture. I stared at him, shook my head, and he repeated the gesture, albeit a bit more exaggeratedly.
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