by Dan Jolley
Thatcher recoiled. “What? What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about what you just said. You’re condemning anyone who hates blacks, or gays, or Jews, or single mothers, I believe those were your words, out on the streets, taking the law into their own hands. And yet, during the Zimmerman trial, you wrote no fewer than seven columns in defense of what George Zimmerman did.”
Thatcher said, “See here, now, I won’t have you put words in my mouth!”
McCallum grinned. “I didn’t, Greg. I’m just telling all these good people what you already said. But I will put some words in your mouth, if you don’t object.” Thatcher very clearly did object, but before he could speak, McCallum steamrolled right over him. “I think what you’re really objecting to is that it’s a woman taking the law into her own hands. You were fine with it when it was a man. You stood up for George Zimmerman, even though actual law enforcement told him in no uncertain terms that it was not his place to follow Trayvon Martin. You stood up for him even though he pursued Trayvon Martin and provoked the incident that led to Trayvon’s death. But now, now, when it’s a female out there, stopping actual crimes as they’re being committed, oh, no, that’s unacceptable. Fascinating double standard, Greg. Maybe you can explain to everyone why you feel that way?”
Sheree clearly had no idea what to say or do. She sat, silent.
Thatcher huffed and straightened his suit jacket. “That’s ridiculous.”
He seemed to be struggling with how to follow that statement up, so McCallum stepped back into the opening. “Now, just to be clear, I am not saying the Gray Widow is anything like George Zimmerman. He acted as an opportunistic, violent bigot, whereas the Widow is more like…a symptom. A symptom of a larger, systemic problem. Is what she’s doing illegal? Yes, of course. But so far, she hasn’t killed anyone. She hasn’t caused any life-threatening injuries. She’s waited until there actually was a problem, and she’s stepped in and solved that problem. If you ask me, the Gray Widow is a role model. Not just for females who could by God use some empowerment in this society, but also for law enforcement as a whole. You called her a vigilante, Greg, but that’s not how I see her. I see her as an enforcer. One this country badly needs.”
Greg Thatcher’s face had been getting redder and redder, and as soon as Chirina McCallum stopped talking, he stood up and stalked out of the studio.
Sheree smiled desperately into the camera. “We’ll be back after this short break!”
Ted Swit sat in the control booth with his mouth hanging open, trying to decide whether or not to laugh. The only way this could get any better was if they had the Gray Widow herself out there in a chair. He tried to say something, and finally managed to choke out, “Damn.”
The technician said, “Well, I like this show better than the one we did on quilting.”
In the booth, every light on the phone board that wasn’t already glowing lit up.
* * *
While Greg Thatcher and Chirina McCallum traded verbal punches, Tim stood outside Janey’s door in the hallway, his back pressed to the wall, a pass-key held tightly in one hand.
“This is insane,” he said quietly. “By standing here, I am proving myself to be an insane person. Plus I might get arrested. Or killed.” He shifted the key to the other hand and looked at the one he’d been holding it in. Its imprint was very clear in the pale skin of his palm, which trembled slightly. He dropped the hand to his side, went to the door and knocked loudly.
“Janey? Janey, are you in there?”
No answer. He wasn’t surprised, but he still got a peculiar sinking feeling.
He’d watched the video from the security camera in the building’s entry hall, fast-forwarding through the periods of inactivity. Both the elevator and the staircase let out onto the entry hall, and there’d been no sign of Janey.
And now she wasn’t answering her phone.
Tim pressed his ear to the door, listened intently, and heard nothing.
He sighed, annoyed at himself.
Logically, Janey Sinclair was one of two things. One, she was indisposed, asleep or in the shower or something, maybe with the ringer off, so that she couldn’t hear the phone. Two...she actually was hurt, and couldn’t come to the door or answer the phone.
“This is stupid, Tim,” he said in a quiet voice. “What are you doing? Why are you here?”
He knocked again, louder this time, and waited. Still no answer. “Janey? Hey Janey! Open the door!”
Nothing.
“Dammit, dammit, dammit.” He jammed the key into the lock and turned it, popped the door open.
The apartment was mostly dark, lit only by the shaft of light coming in from over his shoulder and a weak yellow glow from a lamp on one end of the kitchen counter. Tim closed the door, and immediately missed the light from the outside hallway; the small lamp lit the apartment’s interior well enough for him to get around, but seemed to create more shadows than it dispelled. It was the same apartment he’d seen the first time, but now it seemed unrelentingly weird.
He tried to think of the right word. The painting of the cabin by the woods came back to him, and he resisted the impulse to jump back out into the hallway and slam the door.
Sinister. That’s the word. Just like that freaky painting. Only now it’s the whole place. He flicked the nearest wall switch, and an overhead fixture came on. Three high-wattage bulbs scattered the darkness. “That’s better.”
Janey had become a puzzle he couldn’t resist trying to assemble. He thought he’d already figured out one of the big pieces…but he got the feeling the other ones were even bigger.
“Hello? Are you here? Asleep? In the tub? Hello?”
The walls soaked his voice in and gave nothing back. He took a few hesitant steps to the middle of the living room, near the couch. The apartment had the stillness of the abandoned, and Tim forced himself to look through it, room to room.
In just under two minutes he determined that Janey Sinclair was indeed not in the apartment.
“Okay,” he said, in a normal voice. “So you’re not here, but you’re still in the building. Fine. That’s normal. You could be visiting friends on the next floor up. Kicking back, watching the game, drinking beer. That’d be perfectly normal. At eight-thirty in the morning.”
He didn’t believe that for a second, and wondered again exactly what he hoped to prove by doing this. He went to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of water, sat down on Janey’s couch and turned on the TV. A rerun of Grimm had just come on, and he settled back into the cushions, content to wait.
Minutes stretched into hours.
Embarrassment and self-doubt had somehow transformed into a belligerent need to figure this out. I’ll sit here. I’ll sit here until she shows up, and if she doesn’t kick my ass, maybe I can get her to come clean.
The next time he glanced at a clock, it read 2:52. Tim still sat alone in Janey’s apartment, reading Robert McCammon’s Gone South, a novel he’d found in a small bookcase in the corner of the living room.
He knew he should be down in the office. It wasn’t as though he didn’t have enough paperwork to do. But his cell number was on the door, and any maintenance emergencies would get to him that way. So he sat and read.
He’d turned off the TV shortly after turning it on, since he didn’t want Janey to hear it before she came in. Every so often, when he could force himself to pull his eyes away from the book, he glanced up at the apartment door. He tried not to think about what he’d say when Janey came home from wherever she was. Maybe, “Hi, I couldn’t figure out where you went, so I thought I’d break in and wait here to ask you, because I’ve got a suspicion about you that might land one or both of us in the looney bin.”
Something like that.
Sure.
He closed his eyes and went over the building’s floor plans in his head, tryin
g to remember...what? A blank space? Somewhere for a secret passageway to go? When the door opened and she stepped inside, probably holding a bag of groceries, he knew he’d look like an idiot. Almost certainly an unwelcome idiot. But he had to know. Had to stay and find out.
But—what if she’d left right after she got back yesterday? ...What if she was staying with someone else?
What if she was sleeping in someone else’s bed?
That was a thought he refused to entertain. He went back to reading, and almost jumped out of the chair entirely when two loud thumps sounded from his left.
He tried to think of some reason why he shouldn’t bolt out of the apartment, and couldn’t come up with anything good, but he stood up anyway and moved hesitantly toward the source of the noise. There’d been two, each very distinct. Thump, and less than a second later, thump, just like the first one. He thought they’d come from the coat closet.
Tim had looked in that closet when he first got there, just as he’d looked around the rest of the place. It was empty, with the light bulb missing. Just a perfectly ordinary closet, vaguely coffin-like, with a single shelf at about head height, nothing on it. He took a couple of deep breaths and glanced around the apartment. With the overhead fixture still burning, it looked cheery enough, though it was painfully clear that the place belonged to a single person. He turned back to the closet door, put out a hand and touched the knob.
“What’s behind door number one?” he said aloud. The sound of his own voice made it a little easier. “I’ll turn the knob, open the door, and a corpse will fall out, right into my arms. Just like on TV.”
No, no. That’d be too easy. Although...a few images came to him, probably spawned by reading too many Stephen King novels, of dead bodies and expanding intestinal gas and rupturing flesh, and what if those thumps were the corpse’s arms falling off? Or a couple of internal organs squeezing out through a big hole in the stomach? He’d turn the knob, open the door, and something would be in there waiting for him, and reach out and pull him in. He thought of the painting again, of whatever it was he thought he’d seen in there.
“Jesus, I’m making it worse,” he said quickly, and with a swift turn and yank he pulled the door wide open and stepped back so the light from the overhead lamp could reach inside.
Tim thought about laughing. On the floor of the closet lay a pair of gray combat boots.
Thump-thump. One-two. Hitting the floor. He tilted his head and looked up at the shelf, a couple of inches above eye level. There hadn’t been any boots there before when he looked, he was sure of that. Even if he’d missed them, why would they have fallen now? He knelt and picked one up, turned around and sat down with his back to the wall beside the open closet.
He’d thought they were combat boots—they were the right height, they laced up—but that was only at first glance. He turned the boot over in his hands, examining it. It wasn’t all leather, that was certain. He recognized the other material as some kind of synthetic, but not like anything he’d seen before. He brought it close to his nose, stared hard at the material, and thought it looked like...scales? Tiny scales? No...too regular. The sole was thick black rubber, like the sole of a hiking boot. He couldn’t find a brand name anywhere on it, or even a size, for that matter.
He heard the sound in his mind again. Thump-thump. As though they had just been dropped. Just like someone sitting on the edge of a bed, ready to sack out: pull off the boots, maybe look at one of them to see if anything was stuck to the bottom, then toss them into the corner. Thump-thump.
Slowly Tim pulled the boot’s tongue out, loosened the laces further, and touched the inside of the boot. It was warm against his fingers, and very slightly damp. He made a face and, hesitantly, brought the boot up to his nose and sniffed. There was the scent of sweat there, yes, but not offensively strong. He picked up the other boot and held them side by side. They were very high quality, clearly enough. Well-maintained. And recently worn.
Tim hopped up from the floor and went quickly through Janey’s bedroom to the adjoining bath, which he knew shared a wall with the closet. The bathroom was empty, and the molded acrylic wall of the shower-and-bath unit covered the place on the bathroom wall where any kind of concealed door would have opened.
He went back into the short hallway where the closet stood and opened the door next to it. The heating and cooling unit and water heater sat there, undisturbed, exactly as he’d left them when he’d finished with the air filter. He knocked on the wall shared by the two closets and found it satisfyingly solid.
Thump-thump. It wouldn’t get out of his head.
“Stuff doesn’t just appear out of nowhere,” he said. Hearing the words out loud didn’t do much to make him feel better. He kept talking anyway. “And if something did, it wouldn’t be a pair of boots, for God’s sake. It’d be something else—a little toothy creature, or an old book. Or a wheelchair. Or something. Not a pair of sweaty boots.”
Before he could say anything else he felt a change in the air. He couldn’t put any kind of name to it, but he felt it, just as surely as he would have felt the airflow from an electric fan suddenly turned on him. Sweat popped out on his skin and seemed to evaporate as soon as it appeared.
Something was coming.
Maybe he wouldn’t have felt it if he hadn’t already been so tense, waiting for something to happen. But something was coming, he knew it, the same kind of feeling he’d gotten from the painting but ten times stronger, twenty times. Every hair on his body tried to stand on end. Tim put the McCammon novel back on the shelf, straightened the couch cushions, and ran to the wall switch and flipped it down, plunging the apartment back into the shadows. The closet itself received no light at all, and seemed endlessly deep, a cavern to enter and never exit.
Tim fumbled with his keys, tried to sort out which one was the right key—and heard a soft sound. Something brushing against the carpet. Something like skin. His hands began shaking too badly to hold the keys, and he dropped them on the floor.
He turned around, his back to the door, and was facing the closet just as Janey Sinclair stepped out of it, and for an instant, just a heartbeat, the light from the lamp shone straight through her, so that Tim saw the wall of the hallway and the door to her bedroom through her chest. She wore only socks, a sports bra, and white panties. Sweat beaded on her head and ran down her face, and she carried the same gray bundle under one arm that Tim had seen the first time.
Janey saw him immediately. Tim didn’t think anyone could move as fast as she did then, and his shout cut off abruptly as her hand clamped over his mouth. Quickly and gracefully, she spun him around and held him tightly to her.
A hole in the world opened up and Tim fell through it.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
At first Tim couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or not. He blinked several times, touched his eyes with his fingers, and decided they were open. He stared wide-eyed into total darkness, and called out, “Where am I?”
The words echoed around him, in a manner that reminded him of the gymnasium at his grammar school. The gray concrete walls and the polished wooden floor had flung sound back to him much the same way his voice returned to him now.
He quickly patted himself. All his clothes were in place, and he couldn’t find any injuries. The air was cool and slightly musty.
“You’re safe,” Janey’s voice said from the dark.
A candle lit ten feet directly in front of him, and he jumped. Dressed in a strange, segmented gray suit, Janey Sinclair stood behind it, holding a match, which she slowly raised to her lips and blew out. She watched him intently, but he didn’t think there was any malice in her expression. “Janey—”
She calmly pulled a gray mask over her head. Tim stared into the black mesh eyes.
Without surprise, Tim said, “You’re the Gray Widow.”
She faltered, and pulled the mask back off. “...
You knew?”
Tim glanced around, trying to get a better feel for where they were. “Well, it’s not like you’re Barbara Gordon. Anybody could’ve figured it out.”
Janey shuffled one foot self-consciously. “I haven’t been at it that long.”
“Where exactly are we? And how’d we get here?”
She came forward, holding the mask in both hands. “That’ll take some explaining.”
“I bet it will. Where’d you come from, out of the closet like that? What, you’ve got mirrors set up or something?” He reached out and took the mask from her. “And Jesus, Janey, was that theatrical enough back there? You scared me to death!”
“Sorry. Look, I only brought you here because I wanted to tell you about, uh, this.” She gestured at the gray suit. “Would you mind going back to the apartment? To talk, I mean?”
“No, I’d—”
He stopped.
It clicked with him, then, that what had happened was no illusion with dry ice and mirrors. He remembered, the way he sometimes remembered fragments of a dream minutes after he’d awakened from it. The hole, the doorway opening up. The heat inside.
Janey took his arm, and he had time enough to say, “Oh shit” and grit his teeth before it happened again.
* * *
About an hour later Tim sat on Janey’s couch, sipping a cup of hot tea.
Janey sat at the opposite end with an identical mug. She had showered quickly, and was now dressed in blue sweats.
Tim shook his head, blinking.
“And...you said the heat, that was...”
“It happens every time I do it. Near as I can tell, the farther I go, the hotter it is where I’ve just left. I think—I think some of the…energy, I guess, the energy I use gets lost. Like a light bulb. You want the light, but you get the heat as a by-product.”
“All right...all right, so, what happens if you take a running start? You come out moving on the other side? So you could all of a sudden come shooting out of the shadows?”
