by David Wong
The rest of the shelves were crammed with stuffed animals and junk. I saw a row of plates on little wire stands painted with the faces of Star Trek characters.
The creature on the ceiling didn’t react.
“Well,” I said, letting out a tired breath, “I was hoping it would attack your hand. I guess it’s the electricity it likes and not the light.”
John slapped the lighter off and said, “I thought about opening a window and just shooing it outside.”
“Uh, that doesn’t seem like such a good idea.” I thought for a moment, wondering vaguely if I had remembered to turn on the porch light back home. “Can it, like, pass through walls?”
“It hasn’t yet.”
“Follow me.”
We stepped out into the hall and I closed the door behind us.
“Okay,” I said. “As long as nobody ever opens that door . . .”
“Right. We’ll put a sign on it or something,” John said, the first problem solved. “The weird thing is down here. Check this shit.”
We went across the hall and he gestured into an ancient bathroom, complete with enormous cast-iron tub and a yellowing vanity with a cracked mirror. A steady stream of drips plunked from the faucet. A pair of scissors were wedged under one of the knobs, presumably to keep the valve from running freely. He punched the switch and the light flickered on, this one apparently unmolested.
On the floor was what looked like a clear plastic bag, filled with a marbled pink-and-yellow substance, about the size of one of those giant bags of dog food. There was writing on the side in an odd, angular font.
John said, “That lock was bolted from inside. We had to jimmy it to get in here. Water was running in the sink, toothbrush laying on the counter with dried toothpaste on it. That window is painted shut, so there was no way out of the room. So she was in here and then she wasn’t. And she never left the room. Right?”
The lock was one of those little slide bolts like you’d see on old public toilet stalls. The “jimmy” of the lock had been accomplished by smacking the door, probably with their shoulders, until the little metal loop on the door frame popped out of its screw holes. I leaned over and inspected the window. It looked to have been sealed long before I was born. Not that it made a difference; even if Amy had locked the door and crawled out of the window for some reason, dropping fifteen feet or so to the ice below, how would she have gotten the window shut behind her?
“Can you think of a way that somebody could get that door locked from the other side? Like if they snatched her and then slid the bolt closed behind them?”
What you’re asking, said the irritating voice in my head, is whether or not you could have done it, Dave.
Bullshit. Forget that. I was sure my bout of missing time, during which a bullet had left my gun, had nothing to do with this person who suddenly went missing on the same day. Two completely separate events. In fact, the event I was repressing was probably Amy coming to my house to borrow a bullet, and me calmly handing it to her.
“Sure,” said John, “you could probably get the bolt slid in there with the door closed. Give a guy twenty minutes, a bent wire coat hanger. Let him try it about forty times. What would be the point, though? Just to mess with us?”
I nudged the bag on the floor with my foot. Dense liquid, a bag of sludge. He said, “The writing on the bag, that’s a weight, right?”
“I guess.” I leaned down. “Forty-four-point-four-two kilograms.” I scratched my head. “I give up.”
“You, uh, think that’s her? In the bag?”
“Ew. No, let’s assume not for now. That’s just gross.”
“You think the jellyfish ate her?”
“Bones and all?”
“We’re talking about a tentacled flying lamp fucker, Dave. What are you prepared to call unlikely?”
I stepped out of the bathroom and wandered down the hall, passing a room stacked with cardboard boxes and some broken chairs. There was another door that had been nailed shut, that seemed to lead out into midair.
John said, “You know what that is? They used to build these old houses with doors that just led to a big drop, to fool burglars. They’d label that door TREASURY or something like that. The guy busts through the door and finds himself falling straight down. They’d put spikes or something down there. They used to call it an ‘Irish Elevator.’ ”
“Or, John, they tore a balcony off here years ago and just never bothered to take out the door.”
We passed a bare guest room that smelled of dust and old varnish, then at the end of the hall came to a door standing open with a band poster stuck to the inside, a group called VNV Nation.
I leaned into a chaotic bedroom, crammed with furniture and carpeted with wrinkled clothes. Posters on every wall, bands I’d never heard of and one of a shiny Angelina Jolie as the Tomb Raider. There was a very nice laptop computer, a Mac, propped up on a pillow on an unmade bed.
“The computer,” I asked, “it was like that when you got here?”
“Yeah. We didn’t touch a thing.”
On a nightstand off the bed there were four empty plastic bottles with orange juice labels and half a dozen brown prescription bottles. There was a box of Froot Loops on the floor, open.
I saw all this from the doorway but didn’t step inside. I felt dirty just for peeking my head in, invading this person’s space. John pushed past me, though, and I realized we probably didn’t have a choice if we were serious about this. Cops do this every day, rifling closets and digging through your dildo drawer. I noticed the bed laptop was on, ironically in sleep mode, a single power light glowing along one side. I tapped the space bar, the screen fading up from black to reveal a white screen with blue text scrolling down.
“Check it out.” John nodded his head toward a dresser, one drawer half open, a couple of bras trying to escape. Atop the dresser sat a little black object, round and not much bigger than a roll of film. A lens in the center.
“A camera,” I noted.
“It’s one of those wireless camera deals,” he said. “For the computer.”
“What, like a webcam?”
“Yeah, or something.”
“Was this Jim’s old room?” I asked, for some reason having trouble picturing Amy “Cucumber” Sullivan knowing how to shop for and use computer gadgetry. Before I encountered her while trying to return Molly a few years before, my only memory of Amy was from the Life Skills class at the Pine View Alternative School for Mentally Fucked Students where I had spent my senior year. She always had her head down on her desk, asleep, to me just a mop of red hair spilling over bony forearms.
I think I only heard her say a dozen words my whole time there and most of them were “please move or I’m going to puke on you.”
John muttered, “dunno,” in the way that people do when you ask a useless question that deserves nothing more. I glanced around and saw a second camera, a square one, sitting atop a shelf on a department store sortawood computer desk across the room. It wasn’t aimed at the chair in front of it like you’d think a webcam would be, but sideways, toward the hall.
“This camera is aimed over at the door,” I deduced. I looked up and saw a ceiling fan with a set of four little canister lights aimed around the room. Taped to one canister was another of the wireless cameras. “And another one,” I said. “Aimed right at the window. All the entryways covered, like a security system.”
A little tingle of ner vous ness rose in my gut for reasons I couldn’t wrap my sluggish brain around.
“Okay . . .” John said, moving toward the laptop. “You know, I just thought about something. Why would she lock her bathroom at all if she lived here alone? You’d just poop with the door open, right?”
I nodded and said, “So maybe she was already scared. If this were an episode of Law and Order we’d have a nice shot of her getting abducted right on camera. And yes, before you give me that look of yours, I do realize whatever happened, happened in the bathroom and not in her
e. She didn’t have a webcam in her bathroom, did she?”
“I want you to think about what you just asked.”
John picked up the laptop and sat down with it in the computer chair.
“Well,” I said, “she could have caught somebody in the hall.”
That feeling again. It was like a faint alarm in the back of my skull, like the creeping sense that you’ve left something important at the house just as you’re leaving for vacation.
He’s going to look for the webcam stills on there.
So? I shoved my hands in my pockets and wandered around the room, wondering how our getting first-look at the evidence would fuck up a prosecution should this turn out to be a run-of-the-mill kidnapping and murder, flying jellyfish notwithstanding. Welcome to Undisclosed.
I fingered a loose key in my pocket that had apparently fallen off the key ring. I ran my other hand through my hair, which was drying in a mushrooming Carrot Top spray. I said, “Is there any place open in town that sells that red Mountain Dew? I had some today, it’s like somebody melted a box of cherry Jolly Ranchers and stirred in some crack cocaine. Is that one convenience store on Lexington a twenty-four-hour deal?”
John wasn’t listening. He was studying the flat monitor on the laptop.
FOR THE WEBCAM STILLS. TO SEE WHO TOOK AMY.
My mouth was going dry, my heart thumping just a little too fast. The caffeine, probably. I leaned over John’s shoulder and saw the phrase MY CAT PEED ON MY BED at the top of the screen. It was a series of broken lines, each beginning with a name in brackets. I knew the format.
That’s a chat log. She was on there when she got up to brush her teeth. Then somebody took her, maybe somebody or maybe some thing. But the key is she knew they were coming, somehow. She knew because she set up cameras so she would have evid—
OH, SHIT.
I stood bolt upright.
WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO SAY IF THAT’S YOU ON THE CAMERA, ASSHOLE?
That thought—like a hammer to the balls. John actually glanced over at me and I suddenly felt naked. I tried to remember what my body language looked like when I was at my most casual and innocent, then the whole effect was ruined when I pulled my other hand from my pocket and saw what I was holding.
It was the key to the toolshed in my backyard.
I normally keep it on a nail near my back door. I do not normally keep it in my pocket.
Oh, what did you put in your toolshed, Dave?
I held up a declaratory, “I’ve got an idea” finger and said, “Wait.”
John turned to me, his sudden attention like a heat lamp on my face. I realized I had absolutely no idea what I was going to say next.
“We shouldn’t, uh, we shouldn’t do that yet.”
“Okay. Why?”
“Because, uh, I think it would be better if—look, we have one witness to this thing, right?”
“We do?”
“Yeah, the thing. The jellyfish thing. I mean, we’re up here dicking around with computers and that thing could take off in the meantime, go back to wherever it goes. The computer isn’t going anywhere.”
John glanced into the hallway and said, “You think it talks?”
I looked him straight in the eye and said, “I think you can make it talk. Whether it wants to or not.”
He scratched his chin thoughtfully, then said, “I’ll need a toaster.”
“I saw one in the kitchen. Here, hand me the laptop, you go beat some information out of that slimy bastard.”
John strode out of the room with newfound purpose. I took his seat. The desktop wallpaper on the laptop was a photo of Orlando Bloom, in full Lord of the Rings costume. I waited until I heard John’s footsteps clomping down the stairs before I started clicking through folders, as fast as my fingers would go. Sweating a little now, my heart thumping against bone, my knee bouncing.
I eventually stumbled across a folder full of little icons that came up as grainy camera stills. I clicked on one, saw a dim image of a lump sleeping soundly under the covers of the bed. Another, same thing. A third, a shot of an empty bed. A fourth, the lump again. There were hundreds.
I heard John stomp back up the stairs and I glanced toward the hall, not returning to my task until I heard him open the library door.
I was stuck. Deleting the pictures was out of the question. I was not covering up a crime here and at that point I fully intended to tell John if it somehow turned out I was the culprit we were after. But I wanted him to find out my way. I needed time to figure it out, to pro cess it, to have some control over the revelation. I needed options.
I cut the whole folder of pics and moved them to the most obscure location on the hard drive I could find, inside a subfolder of a subfolder of a subfolder of a subfolder of printer drivers. I closed up the computer and leapt out of the chair, suddenly a bundle of nervous energy.
You’ve got to get home. You’ve got to see what’s in that toolshed.
Yes. That was right. I plunged a hand into my pocket and clutched my car keys so tightly they etched marks in my palm. I strode out and down the hall, feeling a cloud of guilt around me like a stench. I passed the library just as John came flying out, slamming the door behind him.
He said, “That dangly bastard knows something. I can read it in his body language.”
I said, “I have to go.”
“Why?”
“I just have to run home. I’ll be back.”
“Yeah, you probably gotta check on the brownies. Can you get me some rubber gloves while you’re at it?”
“Okay.”
He opened the library door again and said, “Where’d you go, asshole?” then once more closed himself inside the room.
I fled.
DRIVING AGAIN. DEFROST heat blowing on the windshield, ice crystals melting on contact with the glass, swept aside by the wiper blade a second later. Wheels floating under me, no traction in the ice. The roads all to myself.
If there’s a body in your toolshed, say, of a skinny, retarded redheaded girl, just come clean. To John first. Tell him exactly what happened. No need to plan beyond that. Gotta see what’s there first. Gotta see . . .
I turned on the radio, looking for something to blast the thoughts out of my head, hoping the moist nighttime air would blow in a rare non-country station. I ground through static and static and static, then recoiled at the shrill, choking sound of a man apparently squealing through a crushed larynx. After a moment I realized it was simply Fred Durst and the group Limp Bizkit—Shitload’s favorite band. They’re the ones who invented the musical technique of feeding a list of generic rap phrases to a goat, then reading its turds into a microphone over heavy metal guitar.
This was the song “Rollin’,” judging by the fact that the chorus was Fred saying that word several dozen times. Perfect. Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ . . .
Just tell the truth, that’s all I had to do. Just tell the truth. If I did it, I did it. I blanked and found a dead girl. No cover-up, no hiding the body or any of that. Just face the consequences.
Sure. Your “dad” will fly up and he’ll tell you not to talk to anybody and he’ll make noise about your record of mental illness and use lots of big words. You’ll get off, because he’s damned good at getting people off, and instead of jail you’ll get a stay in an institution smelling of ammonia and spoiled food, surrounded by people mumbling to themselves and smearing feces on the walls. It will work. It worked for the Hitchcock thing. No, don’t think about that. Keep rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ . . .
From the darkness behind me, a very cold and very bony hand reached up and closed around my mouth.
The hand squeezed, pulling my head back.
I expected a blade on my throat.
Instead, something long and cold and wet and twitching slid across my neck and down my shirt.
I cranked the wheel and clawed at the hand. The truck skidded in the snow, jumped a curb and smacked a newspaper machine with a crash of ruined metal and glass.
With a jolt, the front tires blasted through a snowdrift and landed back on the street, wheels spinning, grabbing, then spinning again.
The thing on my neck snaked across my collarbone and slid down my shirt, something with the texture of a slug or a leech but long, its tail snaking up from my chest around my collarbone. A cool, twitching, itching weight on my skin.
I screamed. I admit it. I blew through an intersection blinking yellow lights, I stomped around with my feet until I found the brake and went into a powerslide, the rear of the truck trading places with the front.
“No, no. Keep driving,” said a soft voice in my ear. “She will not bite if you keep driving.”
Fuck that. Fuck that idea like the fucking captain of the Thai Fuck Team fucking at the fucking Tour de Fuck. I stomped the brake and cranked the wheel. We skidded to a stop and—
I screamed again. A terrible, pinching pain pierced my breastbone. It was unreal, like my bones were sprouting razor blades. I screamed again and grabbed at the monster on my chest. A hand reached around and snatched my wrist with a quick, clean move.
“Be calm,” said the voice. “Drive. Just drive. She will leave you alone. If you drive.”
I didn’t even hear this, not really. I got my other hand into my pocket and clawed free the pistol. A pain ripped through my chest again, unimaginable, like being torn in half. It crippled me. All of my limbs stopped in protest.
The hand reached up from the backseat and very slowly took the Smith. Once more he said, “Drive. Just drive.”
The pain relented. Huge gasps of breath tore in and out of my lungs. I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them again, and eased my foot onto the accelerator. I tried to look down at the thing that had me, its tail sticking out of the neck of my shirt. It had inch-long stalks all along its back, each ending in what looked like a small black eye. Several of the stalks tickled my chin as it wormed its way around, the end of the creature resting over my shoulder, squirming gently back and forth on the leather of my jacket. I heard the figure behind me shift on the upholstery, as if it was sitting back in the seat. I drove into the night, desperately trying to remember where I was going. I felt a drop of some kind of liquid crawl down my belly.
