Sleeping Policemen

by Dale Bailey

  —like a talisman as he wheeled Evans’s car back through Ransom, ascending toward the mountains. Once, he glanced down at the speedometer—and discovered his hands swollen to twice their normal size. He looked quickly away, ignoring the hammer of his heart.

  Sue, he thought. I’m coming.

  Wind whistled through the hole in the windshield and roared in from the shot-out window behind him, filling the car with ghostly shouts, the cries of his dead friends, the plaintive pleading of Sue. He cranked the heat and drove faster, his breath pluming before him in wordless prayers, the lizard-tongue of the speedometer needle licking the 80, then the 90 on the straight stretches. His hands, grossly ballooned, swallowed the steering wheel.

  He slowed as he climbed deeper into the mountains, the tires squealing, the chassis complaining on the serpentine ribbon of road. At one point, Nick caught a glimpse of half-familiar slope and foliage. The car seemed to lurch across the form of a monstrous sleeping policeman. He cried aloud, gripping the wheel hard with both hands, knowing the place at some inarticulate, cellular level. He could feel it in the chill that prickled across his skin, could see it flashing by: the spot where the Aryan—

  —Aubrey, his name was Aubrey—

  —had lain, the bend where Pomeroy had flashed his brake lights, the scenic overlook where Evans had hurled Finney into the abyss.

  Ghostly voices crowded the car.

  Fucking speed bump.

  We have to think this thing through.

  The money, Nick. Nice little nest egg.

  Nick glanced into the rearview mirror. Finney and Tucker sat framed there, their faces deathly pale.

  This is your fault, Tucker said. You made us go back.

  What now, Nicky? Finney said. Think you can still ride this out?

  “Don’t call me Nicky,” he muttered.

  Then Sue’s voice drifted lazily over theirs: Time is everything, sweetheart. Stifling the scream that welled in his throat, Nick fumbled at the dash, shutting off the heat. Cold wind swept the ghosts from the car, their voices lost and fading.

  He drove, filling his head with the white noise of the wind—

  —the waves—

  —ignoring the glimmering beacon of the digital clock. He came out of the mountains hearing Sue’s whimpers, hit the highway leading into the city as her face twisted in a rictus of terrible pain, her eyes glazing with that dreadful emptiness.

  Just outside of Knoxville—the city spreading before him like an oilspill—Nick looked over to see his father sitting beside him. Staring straight ahead, Frank Laymon said, “Time waits for no man.”

  “Don’t I know it, Dad,” he mumbled, pressing the accelerator to the floor. The jittery needle edged up to 80. As he looped to the left of the downtown district, a Tennessee Highway Patrol car passed in the opposite lane. The officer watched Nick fly by, his mouth and eyes widening into small circles of surprise.

  Nick looked over to the other seat. His father still sat there, his legs twisted like licorice under the dash.

  “You’ve done all you can,” his father said. “Come home, come back to Glory.”

  Nick thought about how easy it would be simply to turn around and disappear over the horizon. Ditch the cruiser, hitch the rest of the way home, lose himself in the bayou. Sam and Jake would find him work; day after tomorrow he could be lost in the endless swell of the Gulf, working one of the cyclopean rigs. It was almost too simple.

  Then time crashed down upon him and his mind filled with Sue Thompson, the way her lithe form had unfolded over him two nights ago, the way he had so naturally slipped into her warmth. As in a nightmare, he watched her scramble across Gutman’s desk, the humidor flipping silently through the air, her face a mask of horrid helplessness. The cigar trimmer snarled hungrily in Gutman’s Jekyll hand.

  Please, Nicky. Promise me.

  Without his realizing it, the car slowed to sixty, fifty, traffic blurring around him. Nick gripped the wheel—his hands, he noticed, deflated to a normal size—and punched the accelerator. Frank Laymon had disappeared, blown away like so much vapor.

  4:24 Finney’s watch said; 4:29 according to the dash clock.

  For one bad moment, he had no idea where to go, what road to take to find Pachyderm Video Security; the landscape—every exit, every barren tree and sagging outbuilding—looked maddeningly the same. Nick screamed in frustration and slammed his fist into the dashboard. He swerved into the right lane—nearly clipping the rear bumper of a little, blue-haired lady’s BMW—and saw the sign: KNOXVILLE INDUSTRIAL PARK 1/4 MILE. Everything fell into place: plastic crèche scenes and rusted swing sets, clapboard houses and yellowed lawns, all discolored by the heatless rays of a December sun.

  He took the exit at fifty, tires squealing, inertia bearing into him like a fist; a horn blared behind him. He crested a hill and caught a glimpse of a Tennessee Highway Patrol car as it blew past in the rearview mirror, sunlight sparkling off the windshield, doing at least a hundred, blue lights pulsing. For one horrifying second, Nick knew it was Evans come back. Then he remembered his last sight of the patrolman, laid out in Finney’s tub, two slits—like lipless mouths—opening in his abdomen.

  He sped through the bleak neighborhood, the potholed road like a serpent twisting upon itself. He slowed only when he caught sight of the chain-link fence surrounding Gutman’s compound. He stopped a hundred yards from the gate, the dull gray aluminum building like a mirage through the dead foliage. He had no plan, none at all.

  4:28.

  The engine idled like a hungry beast. He inched the car forward. He could see security cameras mounted atop each side of the gate, their heads slowly rotating like mechanical birds. He braked again, pulling Pomeroy’s gun out of the back of his pants and checking the rounds. Five bullets. He thought of the loose bullet in the trunk, Finney’s hand closing around it in that last fatal reflex. In almost the same moment, he dismissed it, knowing he’d never be able to open the trunk again.

  Time, he thought. Time.

  He leaned over and retrieved the guns from the floorboard. He ejected the .45’s clip and shook loose eight rounds. Pomeroy’s second gun held five rounds, the hammer down on an empty chamber. Eighteen chances to free Sue. The number seemed impossibly small.

  He put the car in reverse and backed carefully up the road. When the gate was barely in sight, he stopped and shifted into drive. He leaned his head on the steering wheel and breathed a silent prayer. What gods would listen to him at this point he had no idea.

  4:31.

  He sat up, gripping the wheel, his knuckles white. He situated himself in the seat and snapped the seatbelt around him. With no plan at all, his mind a void except for the pulsating image of Sue Thompson writhing, screaming, he stood on the accelerator.

  Hurry, Nicky.

  Like a wild beast suddenly free of its chain, the cruiser lunged forward, tires shrieking at the pavement, the engine roaring.

  He saw only the gate, a rusted chain-link fence that divided the world into diamonds, slightly larger versions of the caging behind him. It grew rapidly—so fast that Nick felt a disorienting vertigo sweep through him. The gate filled the windshield; he could see the tiny flecks of rust, newly oiled hinges, a spider scurrying across one of the horizontal supports.

  The car hit the gate with a shattering metallic whumph, tearing it from its hinges and flipping it high into the air. Its shadow streaked across the hood, the image of some bird knocked from flight. In the mirror Nick saw it bounce off the trunk and disappear. One of the security cameras, twisting like a clockwork vulture, plunged through the back windshield.

  Vergil Gutman’s domain loomed ahead, as big and lifeless as an oil tanker. His hands welded to the wheel, his teeth gritted so tightly that his jaw popped, Nick pressed the accelerator to the floorboard, aiming the cruiser square at the dented metal door. The tires spit gravel as the cruiser roared through the parking lot.

  Nick chanced a quick look at his watch.

  4:32.


  Hurry, Nicky.

  When he looked back up—the car less than fifty yards from the entrance, the building growing before him like some creature in a bad science fiction movie—the door swung open and Oscar stepped outside. Oscar gazed at the car in shock, his mouth agape. Sunlight winked off his Coke-bottle glasses, gleamed across the oily pate of his balding head.

  At thirty yards, maybe twenty-five, Nick hesitated. He lifted his foot from the gas and let it hover over the brake for maybe half a second. Oscar snapped his mouth shut, raised his hand. Nick saw that he held a gun, and in the same moment that nightmare image returned to claim him: Sue, her mouth frozen in a timeless scream as her finger tumbled toward Gutman’s blotter. Nick let his foot fall square on the accelerator. The cruiser lunged forward once again, gaining speed. Something punched through the windshield and whistled past Nick’s ear, tiny slivers of glass gnawing at his cheek.

  Oscar never got off another shot. The car caught him halfway through his turn to escape. His glasses flew off, winking briefly in the sun.

  Nick hit the brakes.

  The car spun, the half-open warehouse door folding over the left fender—the one that caught Oscar—like a man taking a solid punch in the gut. The right fender snapped a support beam, the force turning the car even farther sideways. The sign with the juggling elephant flew across Nick’s field of vision. The wall gave with a shriek of metal on metal, shearing away the passenger side mirror and shattering the window.

  Bright crystals of safety glass showered over Nick as the car skidded through the office and broadsided Oscar’s banged-up desk, throwing it halfway through the wall. The front end rammed a girder hidden behind the paneling, bending it almost double as the car ground to a reluctant stop. In the same moment, Nick released the wheel and hurled himself across the front seat, the seatbelt tearing at him. The car jolted as the back end came off the ground and slammed back down. Nick caught a glimpse of the trunk flying open in the rearview mirror, and then he was down, huddled across the seat, his arms flung over his head, his foot still pressed to the brake pedal. Something—

  —a gun—

  —exploded like a cannon round. The rear end of the car sagged, and Nick sighed in relief. Not a gun. A tire. Just then, something else gave way—the crack of a stout board, glass shattering. Then nothing. Silence curled around him like a pall.

  Nick pulled one of Pomeroy’s pistols from his belt, unbuckled his seatbelt, and peered over the dash. Spiderwebs spread across the windshield, the shattered office a kaleidoscopic jumble. Smoke lifted lazily from beneath the hood. Something hissed spastically.

  He sat up.

  4:33.

  In his mind he saw the Pachyderm—his Jekyll—self being swallowed by the grotesque ballooning of his Hyde-self—approaching Sue with the cigar trimmer. Reaching for her.

  There was a small explosion—a quiet, muffled boom—and, simultaneously, something threw Nick against the seat, something huge, leviathan, bearing into him, its hide rough and pebbled.

  Nick screamed and fired two rounds—two thunderous claps, one on top of the other—into the creature. He heard the faraway whine of ricochets. Shrinking away from him, the creature shrieked in pain and despair. Nick flailed at it, scrambling to the other side of the seat. He leveled the revolver again—

  —and discovered the driver’s side airbag slowly deflating. He stared at it in amazement, his breath hitching in his chest, smoke curling from the barrel of the gun. With the revolver still pointed at the air bag, he kicked out the windshield. It gave way in a single crumpled sheet of glass and collapsed like something dead over the hood.

  The tape.

  He looked on the seat beside him, and then under him, patting the leather down and wedging his hands between the seat and door. He thought it was gone—that he had somehow left it behind on the hillside with Pomeroy; then he saw it on the floorboard, a darker rectangle against the iron-gray carpet. He picked it up and slipped it inside his jacket pocket. Heedless of the noise, he crawled from the car and clambered across the hood to the floor.

  A groan came from the next room. Nick whirled, his body falling instinctively into a crouch, both hands bringing the gun up. The noise came again, a timorous moan, the sound of death approaching.

  Oscar, he thought. Somewhere in the next room, broken into a thousand pieces.

  “H-h-hel—” The plea died away. A gasping rattle of air. Nothing.

  The gun leading the way, Nick stepped to the wall and peered around the corner. The long hallway that led to Gutman’s office was empty. He stepped into it and pulled the door closed behind him. From above Gutman’s door, a security camera stared down at him, its red eye unblinking. He took several steps into the hallway. The lights flickered above him, once, twice, then went out.

  Tuesday, 4:41 PM

  The darkness was alive; it wormed its tentacles into him, sucking away his breath, his courage. Nick sagged against the wall as a wave of panic broke over him, releasing a tide of haunted images. Finney and Tucker loured out of the darkness, their eyes accusing. Your fault, your fault. Vergil Gutman appeared, sloughing off the sane Jekyll-portion of his body to reveal his true self, the misshapen Hyde-thing, rife with cauliflower-shaped tumors. Sue—her face contorted, her pinky clutched in the steel maw of the cigar trimmer—wailed at him, Nick, you promised! You promised!

  The image of Sue did it, her face twisted with agony. She brought him back to his world, the hallway, the click of another second fleeing past—

  Sue, oh Sue.

  Nick glanced down at Finney’s watch. He could see nothing. Prodding the blackness with the .45, he took a tentative step forward and then stepped sidewise, coming up against a cold metal door. He fumbled for the knob, turned it. Locked. He huddled there, cowering in the shallow recess, seconds zipping past like bullets.

  He strained his eyes toward the far end of the hallway. A block of darkness slowly separated from the surrounding blackness. The base of the shape—

  —Gutman’s door—

  —flickered with a smokey blue light, faraway heat lightning that pushed back the envelope of darkness, turning it into a smoked-mirror image of the hallway, a passage lined with doors and shadows. Watching the flickering light, he found himself back in Glory for an instant, standing on the beach, his six-year-old hand in the cancer-ridden grip of his mother. He could feel every bone, brittle as dry twigs, as they looked out over the horizon. A storm brewed there, massed thunderheads high above the Gulf, shimmering with ghostly pulses of light.

  “Never forget the beauty, Nicky,” she had told him. “Never overlook simple things.” Her last lesson, their last walk on the beach.

  Nick pulled out the second of Pomeroy’s six-shooters. With his mind’s eye he saw Gutman crouched behind the door, waiting, a gun held loosely in his Jekyll hand, the malformed Hyde hand wrapped around Sue’s porcelain throat, her hair spilling around the monstrosity in copper rivulets.

  Nick pressed the barrel of the larger gun to his lips and inhaled the acrid stench of cordite. Thumbing back both hammers, he murmured something—

  —a prayer—

  —under his breath. Then he charged down the hallway, his fingers squeezing the triggers again and again.

  Thunder roared in the narrow hallway. Tongues of orange flame licked at the gloom. At the far end of the hall—miles and miles away, an endlessly elongating funhouse corridor—quarter-sized holes bloomed in the door to Gutman’s office. Ghostly lasers of smokey blue light beamed out, slashing Nick’s face and chest. He ran on, forging through the dense air, each step jarring him as though it might shake him apart, each gunshot like a stick of dynamite detonating between his ears.

  The smaller gun, the one in his right hand, quit firing; Nick dropped it and fumbled for the .45. The sight caught on his belt. Never slowing, he tugged harder—and then Gutman’s door loomed up before him, each bullet hole a cataract-stricken eye, staring at him with its milky blue gaze. The hammer of the second gun fell on empty
chambers.

  Click!

  Click!

  Click!

  The thunder of time.

  Nick dropped the pistol—still tugging at the .45—and launched himself at the door. He hit it with the meat of his shoulder, following with his full weight. A satisfying crack sounded and the door flew back. Nick tumbled through—he felt the cold plate bearing the name VERGIL GUTMAN brand his cheek—and spilled across the thick carpet of the Pachyderm’s office. He rolled and came up in a crouch, pulling the .45 free at last. The flickering glow from the bank of television monitors illuminated the room with an eerie incandescence. Nick glanced at Finney’s Rolex and discovered that his fall had shattered the watch. Time stood still, frozen at 4:41, the second hand jutting up like an accusatory finger.

  Behind him, the door crashed against the wall. Nick whirled, firing two rounds into the gleaming oak as the door swung back into its frame. Wispy tendrils of smoke, like a bank of fog, rolled slowly into the room. The air smelled charred.

  Someone chuckled, an oily wheezing sound.

  “Oh, bravo, Mr. Laymon. I do love an entrance.”

  Shadow loomed mountainously behind the desk. Even as Nick pivoted, even as he raised again the .45, a desk lamp clicked on; a pool of light spread across the desk, revealing the Pachyderm. Again the burp of obscene laughter threatened to burst from Nick. For an instant he knew that it would, that shocked, vulgar hilarity would spill from his throat. Something—a belch, a swallowed chuckle—escaped his lips, burbled into the room.

  Nick met Gutman’s eyes—and all humor died.

  Vergil Gutman stared at him with eyes devoid of emotion. The Pachyderm had changed not at all since Nick had last seen him: the burn-puckered whorl above his eye; the alien nodule of diseased flesh running rampant along his left cheek; the thick, twisted lip. Everything looked exactly, horrifyingly the same. Again vertigo knocked Nick off balance, sent his mind reeling. Staring into those cold eyes, Nick sensed the titanic battle raging inside the man, the struggle between his Jekyll and Hyde selves, between the normal, sane man and his tortured, malformed twin. Looking at him—the deadness of his eyes, the rigidity of his posture—Nick knew that the Hyde-self, for the moment, held sway.