by David Wong
I saw something out of the corner of my eye that stopped me in midthought. I leaned back to see through the open door of my bedroom.
The drawer on my nightstand was open.
The drawer where I keep my gun.
My butt cheeks clenched so tightly that not even light could have escaped. I listened for burglar sounds. Dead quiet. I took a soft step forward, wondering if I could fake kung fu if I had to. I once saw Arnold Schwarzenegger kill a man in a movie by grabbing his head and twisting it until the neck broke. Was that difficult? Could a man do it without a lot of practice?
I keep the gun in a hollowed-out copy of the Koran that John got me for Christmas. And there the big book was, tossed on the bed, open and gunless. Nothing else disturbed. They actually checked my Koran to see if there was a gun inside. I knew I was dealing with a sick son of a bitch.
I stepped carefully and quietly through the bedroom doorway, glancing this way and that. Nobody here. I checked under the bed, the sheets still smelling faintly of girl even now, months after I’d spent my last naked night on them with Jen. Or maybe it was my imagination.
Either way, you should probably change those sheets . . .
Nothing under the bed. I checked the other rooms in the dark little house, stepping slowly across the carpet. Somebody had called, I noticed, the little red “new message” light on my answering machine blinking in the darkness like a time bomb.
Nobody here. I wandered toward the answering machine, my gut full of snakes. Snow melted in my hair, a droplet of ice water running into my ear. I reached up to brush it back—
And sucked in a shocked breath.
I had found the pistol.
It was in my motherfucking hand.
I dropped the gun like it was made of bees. It bounced onto the sofa and I stared stupidly at it, then stared even more stupidly at my empty palm, fingers pink from the cold. What the—
Now that you ask, it’s a whole ten-foot walk from your heated truck to your front door. Why does every inch of exposed skin feel windburned? Why do you seem to have a pint of snow in your hair?
There’s that feeling again, that fluttery feeling of mental weightlessness, like the times when you wake up in the dark, on the hood of a car, a bottle in your hand, no idea what day it is, some girl shouting at you in Arabic.
I tried to collect myself. Tired. Tired like a zombie. An overworked zombie, one who got hired as a salaried assistant manager at a zombie video store, only to find out “salaried” just means he doesn’t get paid for overtime. My skull pounded, my knees were ground glass. I sat heavily on the sofa and stared vacantly at the little beads of water standing on the sleek, chrome surface of the Smith. I glanced at my watch. Right after midnight.
Okay. You got off at eleven. You came straight home. It’s a twelve-minute drive, figure maybe twenty for the weather. You came right in. So where did the other half hour go, Dave? Did you maybe take a detour and shoot your boss?
No, if I’d shot Wally’s manager Jeff Wolflake, I wouldn’t have deprived myself by repressing the memory, would I?
I picked up the gun and ejected the magazine. Still heavy with bullets. I sighed with relief. If I had indeed stopped by Jeff’s house to murder him, I would have emptied the gun. I reinserted the magazine.
This was no way to start the weekend. I punched the “play” button on the machine, listened to the message. It was John. It finished, I hit “play” again, listened closer, then hit “play” again. By the fourth time I was pretty sure that John had said, “bag full of fat.”
I decided to try once more:
Beep.“ Dave? It’s me. Amy’s missing and we got what looks like a bag full of fat here. It’s weird. And I mean ‘bad’ weird, not ‘clown’ weird. It’s almost midnight and—I guess you’re not home yet. Or maybe you’re in bed. You’re not in bed, are you? I know you haven’t been sleepin’. Are you there? Wake up, David. Wake up. Okay, so you’re not there. Call me when you get this, I don’t care how late. Oh, and when you come over, watch out for a jellyfish. See you.”
Beep.
Bag full of fat. I picked up the phone and dialed John on his cell. One ring, and then—
“I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE, VINNY!”
“John?”
“Oh, Dave. Sorry. I had been having a heated argument here on my phone and then I hung up in disgust. Then when the phone rang I just assumed, without checking, that it was the person I was having an argument with, so I just blindly shouted insults into the phone. How embarrassing.”
“I’m getting sick of that one, John.”
“Are you on your way over?”
“I, uh, got somethin’ going on here.”
“What’s your thing?”
“I’ve got a—”
I paused, made a decision.
“—batch of brownies in the oven. I don’t want them to burn, or else they get gummy.”
“Yeah, they’ll stick, too. Did you grease the pan?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Good. Anyway, Amy is missing and the scene is weird as shit. The situation has a real Lovecraft feel to it. Though, you know, if you come over it’ll be more of an Anne Rice situation. If you know what I mean.”
“Who’s—”
“Because you’re gay.”
“Who’s missing, John?”
“Amy, Dave. A-M-Y. I think my signal’s breaking up—”
“I don’t know any—”
“Amy Sullivan? Big Jim’s sister?”
That stopped me.
Memories of an entire day spent locked in the back of a truck, sick with fear and boredom. A promise made to a dead man. I hadn’t thought of that day in months.
“Oh. You mean Cucumber.”
“Do you not feel the need to learn people’s real names, Dave?”
“We called her that in school. She was in that Special Ed class, always throwing up for some reason.”
A silent pause on John’s end.
“You know, like a sea cucumber? They’re these eels that—”
“Anyway, Dave, we’re at her house now. The cops, too. How soon can you be here?”
How about June?
Even that wasn’t going to be enough time to piece this together. I pictured Big Jim on his back, a crimson stain across his neck and the floor like a scarf. The dead man had circled back into my life somehow. I glanced at the gun, trying to make it all fit and failing.
“What’d you say on my machine? Bag full of—”
“I can’t hear you, you’re breaking up. Just get here as soon as you can, we gotta go deal with this flying jellyfish thing.”
A pause on my end now.
“What?”
“See you in a few—UNDER THE CABINET! NO, THE CABINET! THE—HERE, LET ME—”
Click. Doooooooooooooooo . . .
I disconnected and did what I usually do after hanging up with John: sat in dumbfounded silence and contemplated all of the poor choices in my life.
I shrugged out of my coat, pulled off my Wally’s shirt, smelled it, then hung it back in the bedroom closet.
As I pulled on a new shirt I grabbed a bottle of caffeine pills from my desk drawer. I washed down four of them with a warm, half-empty bottle of red Mountain Dew I found on the kitchen counter.
I pulled on the coat and, after a moment’s hesitation, dropped the Smith & Wesson in the pocket, the weight pulling the whole left side of the coat down on my shoulder. I felt like Bruce Willis.
Is it just me, or is the barrel slightly warm?
I pushed through my front door and plunged into the cold, but made it no farther than the doormat.
Footprints.
The thin blanket of white across my front lawn should have been clean, save for a single trail of prints from the driver’s side of my Bronco to the spot I was standing. Instead, there was a haphazard circle of tracks in loops around my front yard, then trailing off around the back of the house. The trail of prints emerged from the other side and ev
entually led to the front porch, where I was now.
I stepped off the porch and into the crunchy snow/ice shell that coated the ground. I leaned down, squinting against the storm. Boot prints, zigzag treads. I had a very dark, very lonely realization.
The prints were mine. All of them.
I glanced around in the darkness, seeing nothing but sparkling flecks of ice passing through shafts of street light. I made the silent decision to never tell anyone about this, and got in my truck.
Missing time. That’s what they call it. John’s got a missing girl, you’ve got a missing half hour. Shit.
I twisted the ignition to life, thought for a moment, then pulled the Smith from my pocket. I pressed the button on the handle and again popped out the magazine. I made a little pouch in my lap with my shirt and, with my thumb, flicked out the bullets one by one. I counted as I went, hoping—no, praying—that none were missing.
One, two, three, four . . .
The bullets were, uh, unusual. The heads were silver with a bright-green plastic tip. A guy had mailed me these, anonymously. They were lined up in rows in a heavy white cardboard box, a tag on the inside typed with bullet jargon I didn’t understand. Something about “proximity fuses” and long serial numbers. John and I test-fired them, shot a pumpkin and watched it explode into flaming bits of blackened shell.
. . . seven, eight, nine . . .
That’s what people do these days, they mail me things. Crystals. Shrunken heads. Doctored pictures of angels in clouds and of bleeding statues. Bundles of blue-lined notebook paper full of scrawled, rambly stories about Satan sending hidden messages through mass e-mail subject lines. I’ve gotten chunks of stone stolen from haunted castles in Scotland, hunks of supposedly cursed black volcanic rock from Hawaii, dried Bigfoot turds. John and I have this reputation now and everybody wants to help.
. . . thirteen, fourteen . . .
I let out a long breath.
One missing. One.
THE TWO-STORY PSYCHO -STYLE house “Big Jim” Sullivan had lived in with his mentally handicapped sister would have cost most of a million dollars had it not been run-down and located in a weedy, desolate section of town a block from a chemical-drain-cleaner factory. I guessed the sister, Amy, lived here by herself now that Big Jim was deceased under circumstances I am rarely able to adequately explain in mixed company.
I swung my headlights into the yard of the Sullivan Psycho house, between John’s 1978 Caddie (bearing the cryptic license plate, CRKHTLR) and an Undisclosed cop car that was parked along the road.
It really was a shitty, shitty neighborhood. The next house over looked empty. The neighbor down the hill on the other side was an expanse of white parking lot dense with a wormy pattern of tire treads. It led to the ass of a huge building lined with a row of roll-up garage doors. The rear trucking entrance of the Drain Rooter plant. There was a single semi backed into one of the stalls, bearing the logo of a cartoon plumber with a big red “X” through him. I wondered if the bathroom drains at the plant ever got clogged to the point that they had to call in a plumber and, if so, if anyone was able to make eye contact with the guy while he was there.
Through my windshield I saw two figures in the front yard. One was John, arms jammed in his pockets, the stiff breeze sucking away cigarette smoke in a horizontal stream. The other was a bear of a man who I recognized as John’s uncle Drake, still the only cop in town with whom we were on a first-name basis. Drake spoke, John nodded, the ember of his cigarette bobbing slightly in the darkness. John was growing a beard. He had been working construction off and on after having been fired from Wally’s a year before. He had gotten caught bootlegging DVDs and giving them away to customers, right there at the store. Not selling them, mind you. Giving them away. I climbed out and was immediately assaulted by the freezing wind.
The looming house didn’t just look empty, it looked abandoned. It had gone downhill since I had last seen it on the night I tried to return Molly. Peeling paint, filthy windows, no tire tracks in the driveway.
Big Jim had looked after Amy in the years since their parents died, but I don’t know who was looking after her now. Apparently nobody, since she was lost and all. Man, was it cold.
Drake looked shabbier than I did, the man inflated in full cop uniform and parka, complete with one of those navy blue fur earflap hats. The blue blimp of weariness.
“Wong,” he said, with a lack of enthusiasm usually reserved for door-to-door Mormons.
I don’t enjoy our little encounters either, Drake. But here we are, just the same.
“How long’s she been missing?”
“Don’t know. Neighbors saw her dog walking around the neighborhood this afternoon. They tried to return her and couldn’t get anybody at the door. I came by and saw the—”
A skipped beat, a quick glance at John.
“Uh, I thought you guys might know something.”
Tell him about your missing half hour!
I pushed that thought from my head and pretended it had never been there. Besides, I knew exactly where I had been during my missing time. Walking around and around my yard in circles. Right? Perfect sense.
John flicked away his cigarette and crunched toward the front door. “Drake is gonna see if Amy is at a friend’s house. She knows the Hoaglands, so he figures maybe she got scared off by the, uh—”
The two of them shared a second “let’s not discuss this now” glance. Opening the door to his cruiser, Drake said, “You find anything, you call my cell, right? Then I handle it.” Making it clear that we weren’t cops, that a missing person was still a cop thing no matter what weird-assedness lurked inside the house.
John tipped a finger at him and said, “Yep. Thanks for calling us, Drake. You’re the kind of man a man wants when a man wants a man.”
Just inside the door was a little entrance hall with a black-and-white tiled floor, like a chessboard. There was a plate-sized chunk of tile missing near the wall and the bare wood had been painted in to match the pattern with what looked like Magic Marker and Wite-Out.
I glanced into the kitchen.
I froze.
Molly.
No question it was her. A red Labrador whatever, fast asleep on the linoleum. I had the same thought from when we glimpsed her outside the abandoned mall that night.
No way. Just another dog of the same breed. Surely.
“Oh, that’s her,” said John. “Go look at the collar. Got the address on there and everything.”
“But . . . how?”
“Don’t know. She answers to Molly, though. Or at least as well as she ever did.”
I wanted to go look closer but, I admit, I was afraid to. Something coming back from the dead was almost always bad news. Movies taught me that. For every one Jesus you get a million zombies.
“So the dog we saw explode, that wasn’t Molly?”
“Don’t know.”
“Or maybe that was Molly and this is, what, an imposter?”
He shrugged. “You should have seen me, when I saw her here. I freaked out.”
“You think she’s responsible for what happened to Amy? Maybe she, I don’t know. Ate her.”
“Withhold judgment until you see the jellyfish.”
I didn’t ask. I reluctantly turned my back on the resurrected dog and we pushed through a living room with a green couch that looked to be from 1905. Up a stairway, into a darkened hall. There was an unlit light fixture on the ceiling and one of those old brass switch plates on the wall, the kind with the black buttons. I punched the top button, nothing happened.
John stepped carefully down the hall, squinting into the darkness. He turned and said, “No, that doesn’t do anything. Hand me the flashlight.”
“You didn’t tell me to bring a—”
He held a hand out to shush me and ducked into a side door. We both stepped into a large room that, in the dim glow from the window, looked like a library of shelves mostly filled with odd shadowy shapes that were not books
. I saw what looked like a bundle of cobweb hanging from the ceiling and reached out to brush it aside—
POP!
A shower of blue sparks flashlit the room. A bone-rattling electric sting flared up my elbow.
The fixture on the ceiling blinked once, twice and then bathed the room in light. About a foot in front of me was what looked like a bundle of wet string, suspended in the air by nothing at all. It didn’t look so much like a jellyfish as a man-o’-war, the slimy things that float lazily on the ocean surface and let their stringy tentacles hang down in the water. The creature drifted slowly up to the ceiling, toward the light. It wrapped its tentacles around the fixture and, to our utter astonishment, began frantically humping it like a puppy on a bunny slipper.
The lights dimmed, finally flickering out to darkness again. The room was silent except for the soft rattling of glass vibrating against metal with each of the creature’s spastic thrusts.
“You ever seen one of those before?” John whispered, somewhere in the darkness. Above us, a little blue spark jumped from one noodly tentacle to another with a soft FZZZZT sound.
“I like to think I would have mentioned it if I had.”
“Uncle Drake shot it, didn’t seem to bother it much.”
“He could see it?”
“Yeah. It’s real.”
So that put it in the category of the mutants at the mall, and not the wig monsters and shadow people. I’d have to make a spreadsheet somewhere to keep track.
And don’t forget, just because Drake can see it, doesn’t mean another stranger from around town would. Lots of chances for a cop to get infected in this town. Ask Morgan Freeman.
Now there was another train of thought badly in need of derailing.
I said, “You got your lighter?”
John flicked his Zippo and cast a pool of weak yellowy light around us. I glanced around, saw that only a couple of the shelves contained books, worn paper backs with white fold lines. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, somebody named Terry Pratchett. Babylon 5 novelizations. The first, third and fourth Harry Potter novels. Jim must have figured three was the most he could allow without risking turning Amy to witchcraft.
