I knew that Jordin and Carrie had both disappeared at night. Even though Jordin's journal indicated that she signed up for DHI's crazy scheme, that didn't mean she knew the full extent of it at the time, and the fact that she had come to both Derek and me asking for help meant that something had gone very wrong. As for the others, there may not have been anything particularly otherworldly about their disappearances; now that we knew real men made of flesh and blood were involved, it was more likely that these people from Durham Holdings just outright kidnapped the people bearing the mark. Maybe it acted like some kind of weird homing beacon for them.
If so, then it would be leading those same men to me right now.
But the question remained of how it got on my neck in the first place. On that, I hadn't a clue.
Then again, Jordin and Carrie both hadn't been on the move when they found their marks. They hadn't done anything to prevent what was going to happen, because Carrie had no idea what it meant, and Jordin pretty much just submitted to it.
I, on the other hand, was a moving target. If they wanted me, they would have to catch me.
Or, I thought sourly, they could just wait until I knock on their front door.
Why should they bother chasing me if I was headed straight for them?
Derek drove in the early morning to reach the address Pierre Ravenwood had provided, a heavily wooded area at the foot of the Catskills where we found nothing.
The exact address didn't exist. It was an empty lot in the middle of nowhere, with a large wooden sign proclaiming that a new strip mall was coming to the sleepy, barely inhabited area about a year from now.
The one thing we did find was Pierre, waiting for us on the side of the road in front of the parcel of empty land. He stood outside in the unseasonably frosty ground, leaning up against the side of his sedan with his arms crossed.
I instructed Derek to pull up behind him and stop.
Pierre inspected us with a sour expression as we approached. "What are we doing out here, Ms. Peters?" he said, a little louder than was necessary.
"You tell me," I replied. "This is the address of Durham Holdings' New York office, right?"
"According to the sign," Pierre replied, nodding at the billboard announcing the construction of the soon-to-be strip mall. "That doesn't tell me why I'm here."
"Look," I said. I had run out of patience. "Whatever has happened to my friend, it's preceded by the appearance of that symbol I showed you, and now it's happening to me!"
I spun in place, pulled my hair to the front, and lowered my collar so he could see the mark on my neck.
Pierre was silent, but I saw his eyebrows scrunched together when I turned back around.
"Something is at work here. You must know it, you can feel it in your gut. It's what led you to write that article about the college dropouts. You can either help us figure out what it is or you can go back to writing obits or whatever you've been demoted to."
A moment of silence passed as Pierre Ravenwood stared me down.
Derek chimed in. "Why would DHI fake an address? You think it's all a hoax and the office just doesn't exist?"
My instincts were saying no to that. "What would that serve? An address to an office that isn't really there?"
"So what are you thinking, then?" Pierre asked. "This address is a decoy?"
"Has to be," I replied, nodding. "The office is real, it's just not here. But I'd be willing to bet it's around here someplace."
"We passed a gas station a few miles back," Derek pointed out. "Maybe we could ask around."
Pierre let out a long sigh, but said, "I'll follow you."
"No," I said, stopping him before he could get into his car. "You're driving."
"What?" Derek and Pierre both said at the same time.
I looked at Derek. "The two of us are being hunted. If whatever attacked us at the cemetery reported back to DHI, they almost certainly included a description of the truck that smashed through the cemetery gates."
Derek reluctantly agreed.
Pierre closed his eyes and shook his head. "Just get in the car. I'll busy myself pretending I didn't hear any of what you just said."
The lady at the twenty-four-hour gas station hurriedly put out a cigarette butt as we walked into the store.
I looked at my watch. It was after three in the morning already.
"Help you find something?" the woman asked.
I forced a smile as I approached the counter. Her name tag identified her as Vera.
"We're looking for directions, actually," I said in the friendliest tone I could muster. "We're trying to find an office building, but the address we have took us to the wrong place."
"Lived here my whole life, sweetie," said Vera, and she helpfully pulled out a map from a rack just in front of the counter and unfolded it on the countertop. "What are you looking for?"
"Durham Holdings," I replied.
Vera was looking down at the counter but I saw her flinch. She tried to remain casual as she asked, "You always go looking for offices in the middle of the night?" The "helpful local" had dropped out of her tone.
"Just the mysterious ones," said Derek, stepping forward and flashing that charming smile of his. "Surely you've heard of it, haven't you?"
To my tremendous surprise, and a growing irritation at my entire gender, Vera actually blushed a bit at his attention. I was watching when it happened, and I was so offended that I must've opened my mouth, because Pierre elbowed me to get me to close it. The guy might have been somewhat handsome, but come on. He was going to be a minister, for crying out loud. There had to be some commandment that forbade him from using this uncanny ability to make random women swoon.
"Well, sure, I've heard of it," Vera said. She leaned in conspiratorially and lowered her voice, even though we were the only people in the building-or anywhere for miles around. "We're not supposed to talk about it."
"Why not?" asked Derek.
Even though she was still mooning over him and those Colgate teeth of his, she hesitated.
I rolled my eyes. "You can trust us, Vera. I'm nobody, this guy in the back is just along for the ride, and Derek here is a preacher's kid and has never done a bad thing in his life. The last six hours notwithstanding."
Derek threw me a look but quickly returned to Vera. He flattened out the map that she'd unfolded and pointed to a familiar spot on it. "This is where the address led us to. Is there somewhere else we should be looking?"
Vera gave Derek a half frown/half smile and slid her finger down the map to a location high up in the Catskills. Then she winked at him.
Pierre stepped forward and got a good look at the spot on the map Vera was pointing to, memorizing it.
"Thank you, Vera," Derek said, and smiled at her one last time before we left.
As we were walking back to the car, Pierre asked, "Are you two dating?"
"No," Derek told him.
"No!" I stated emphatically.
"My heart belongs to another," Derek said, all the charm dissolving into hardened resolve. "She's one of the girls they abducted and I'm going to get her back."
"Well, you two act like an old married couple," Pierre observed.
I grimaced. "We just ... we've had to spend a little too much time together lately. Derek's engaged and I am exceedingly available."
"Good," Pierre said, getting into the front seat of the car. "Then if we get to the bottom of this DHI business and I get my old job back, I'm taking you to dinner, Ms. Peters."
I blinked. Then I grinned as I slid into the back seat.
We wound our way slowly through a small township and on up the mountain, passing a sign that labeled the area as "Catskill State Park."
"Why would the state of New York let a company build an office out in the middle of a park?" I mused.
"Kickback," Pierre said from the front seat. "Have you seen these roads we're riding on? They've been re-paved very recently and outfitted with reflectors and guardrails on both sides."
"Yep," said Derek. "And I noticed a brand-new-looking high school in that town we just passed through."
Pierre nodded. "DHI lined the pockets of all the right people in that tiny little town, made sizable contributions to the local economy and the natural environment, and were granted a concession in return. Your friend Vera said the locals weren't supposed to talk about the place. They've probably been asked by the bigger businesses in town to help them keep a low profile."
"But all that subterfuge just to build a little office out in the middle of a forest up on a mountain?" I asked. "Feels like an unbalanced trade."
But something had caught Pierre's eye. "Maybe the office is not so little. Look."
He pointed through the front windshield at a sight far in the distance, and it couldn't have been more out of place if it tried. Derek whistled.
The mountain forest concealed most of it, but the top few floors of what was easily a ten-story building or better stuck out above the tops of the trees. It was white, with a perfectly round footprint, and had floodlights lining the roof's perimeter, shining straight down to create A-shaped glows up against the building.
We were more than five miles away, maybe farther, but moving straight toward the big white structure. "Stop the car," I said.
Pierre pulled over on the side of the road, up against a thick cluster of spruce trees.
"You said they knew you were coming," Pierre said.
"Right," I agreed. "We can't drive in, we'll be spotted before we get close."
"Then we find another way to reach it," Derek said, "and go the last leg by foot."
We agreed to the plan, though the extra trouble we went to added two hours to finally reaching our destination.
Pierre found a side road that looked like it led around the far side of the building, and we parked about two miles out so we could walk the rest of the way.
It was biting cold up on the mountain and all three of us had come without winter apparel. I insisted we slog through the dangerous, hard-to-see forest off to the side of the main road, and no one argued.
Creeping through the forest, yet keeping the road in sight, we made painfully slow progress. Not once did we see a sign of any sort along the road, but we did see trucks. Unmarked white trucks thundered by us, coming and going again and again. The thought of what they were probably delivering made me feel a little sick to my stomach.
Despite the dark, it was impossible to get lost, because the big white building always loomed straight ahead. It was so huge, it barely grew in our vision even after walking for more than half an hour. Oddly, we couldn't see any windows. The thing was a big white cylinder, like a missile silo for an incredibly fat rocket.
As we came to about half a mile out from the building, I felt something cold touch my nose. I stopped and looked around.
It was snowing.
We couldn't believe it. We were walking through a snow shower in a dark mountain forest at the end of summer. There was no way things could get any more surreal.
We finally drew near to the building and found it to be devoid of electronic fences or guards. Pierre pointed out that there was probably no need for them, since the building was completely unmarked-no logo even designating it as Durham Holdings International-so for all intents and purposes, it just didn't exist. Who needed security when nobody in the world knew where you were?
The three of us squatted behind some trees just on the edge of the forest and got a look at the loading dock where several of the unmarked trucks were backing in and unloading their cargo.
I hugged myself in the cold as I got a better look at the building from up close. It was even bigger than I'd thought. The lack of windows made it hard to judge, but I guessed it must have been over fifteen stories into the night. And while it was perfectly round, its white cement sides were not smooth. Hundreds or maybe thousands of symbols were carved into the cement. Every inch of the building was covered with the colorless engravings, overlapping and intertwining with one another. In no way did it surprise me to see that they bore a resemblance to Dr. Eccleston's alchemical symbols.
I had been to a lot of places all over the globe that most sane people considered to be frightening. Yet I hadn't been genuinely fearful in many of them. The behemoth of a building that stood before me like an enormous sentinel reaching high into the night sky was the most terrifying place I'd ever seen. I couldn't imagine why DHI had gone to all the trouble of building Ghost Town; if they wanted to scare people, they should've just invited them to see what I was looking at now.
"Look there!" Derek whispered, pointing to the loading dock.
A couple of workers in navy blue jumpsuits-deceptively similar to those of a paramedic, I noted-were hauling something out of the back of one of the trucks. When it emerged into the open, we could see that it was a gurney, carrying an unconscious man, who was covered with a white sheet all the way up to his neck. The two men wheeled the stretcher up a ramp inside the covered delivery bay, and we could just see the recipient. A man in a lab coat, holding a clipboard, stopped them and took custody of the gurney and its occupant. The two delivery guys waited off to one side while the man with the clipboard turned the unconscious man's head painfully to one side and took a close look at a black mark at the base of his neck. The symbol. He noted something on his clipboard and then nodded at the guys in the blue jumpsuits. They grabbed the gurney again and pushed it through a large doorway that led inside the building.
"Guess we know where they're doing the whole `soul extraction' thing," Derek whispered. "At the rate they're bringing them in, it makes me wonder how many of them are in there."
"But what do they do with the victims' bodies after the procedure?" I asked. "I see them taking plenty of people in, but noth- ing's coming back out."
"There's no conspicuous landfill in sight," said Pierre.
I was glad Pierre didn't finish that thought, for Derek's sake. He didn't need to hear someone suggest that his girlfriend's body could be piled beneath a bunch of others in a big hole.
"Anybody thinking about Star Wars?" Pierre asked.
"Wookie handcuffs?" I guessed.
"Wookie handcuffs," he said with a nod.
Derek glanced at both of us, a mixture of eageness and resolve. "Let's do it," he said.
APRIL 22ND
It took a full three weeks ofJordin's badgering, pleading, begging, and promising never to ignore my instructions again before I deigned to even speak to her. It was another week after that that I finally agreed to take her on another trip.
I knew I shouldn't. I knew my doctor would kill me, and that it could be dangerous for Jordin if she really was the epicenter of all the activity we'd been finding. But I also knew that she'd go investigating anyway, without me, and though I hated to admit it, I felt a certain level of responsibility for getting her so hooked on this stuff. Plus, the scientist in me had an almost clinical desire to see this through, just to find out if it really was Jordin that was somehow a magnet for so much of the paranormal activity we'd seen.
I could hold on to a grudge for a long time. I got it from my mother. So I enjoyed nursing those angry feelings for Jordin as long as I possibly could.
Making matters worse between us was the fact that Jordin had lost her digital recorder and video camera in her rush to flee the church in New Jersey. These were easily replaceable, but it irked me that if we had to have gone to a place like that, we had absolutely nothing to show for it. No evidence whatsoever, despite the extraordinary and awful things that happened there.
Plus, my physical well-being was foremost on my mind now, since the events in NewJersey had done nothing to help my heart condition. More than once, even the memory of the things we'd seen at the church in Mount Hope had nearly forced me to take a Valium to keep my heart from racing.
When I felt like I was up to it again and I'd decidedJordin had suffered enough for her sins, I said I would take her investigating again. But I told her I would only do it on the cond
ition that I had no more than two or three of these trips left in me. The end of the school year was approaching and we both would have exams to study for soon, so whenever I said we were done, we were done for good and I wouldn't be talked into any more of this.
She agreed with one condition of her own: that I make these last few trips the biggest and best we'd ever undertaken.
Choosing locations to fit that bill wasn't hard. The first one that came to mind was an obvious choice, but I decided to save that one for last in favor of a more immediate trip to California. My parents lived in San Jose, and I was eager to see them. I hadn't yet shared with them the news about my panic disorder-I didn't want to do it over the phone-and my inner child was longing for a little parental sympathy from Mom and Dad.
After we exchanged tea and sympathy, I asked Mom and Dad how the family business was doing. I was hoping to find out, without giving away my reasons for asking, if they had seen an increase in the levels ofparanormal activity in their investigations of late. But Dad reminded me-and I should have remembered anyway-that they were in the middle of their annual downtime, between seasons of the show. They were consumed with the business side of things-paying bills, planning where they would go to investigate next season, that sort of thing-and had conducted no investigations of their own for months.
After personal time was over, we pointed our rental car west and I informed Jordin of our next stop.
"Alcatraz?"
"Private access for one night. I promised you'd be very generous to the National Park Service."
Alcatraz was an easy choice for me. I had been fascinated by the place and its storied history since before I was able to join my parents on investigations. My career interest in criminal justice might even owe some small bit ofinfluence to my obsession with the island prison. Before this trip, I'd been at least a dozen times, mostly as a tourist, though there had been a few investigations over the years, as well. I was pretty much a walking encyclopedia when it came to Alcatraz.
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