In the far corner of the room a few feet away from the door to Interrogation Room 4, a hairy lump lay still, mostly obscured by the desk closest to it. White vertebrae trailed from one end of it, held together by rubbery red and white sinew. Around it was a puddle of the purple goo.
“Maybe some of us should try to look through these files,” Nadia said, wrinkling her nose, “while the others check out those doors.”
“Good idea,” Murdock said. “I can take a look around the interrogation rooms here. Tom, want to join me? I, uh, rather think we shouldn’t go this alone.”
Tom nodded, and they cut a cautious path around the cubicle walls, using them for support against the gravity that seemed only to affect the living things in the room. The door swung open on them and Murdock stumbled backwards. Regaining footing, they passed into Interrogation Room 3 and closed the door behind them. Jesse watched them give wide berth to a bloody mound on the table whose limp, serrated limbs brushed the tiled floor with their teeth. A body in a blue uniform slumped in the corner. Jesse couldn’t see its face, but from the look on Tom’s, he was glad for that.
Jesse wandered over to the fliers, searching for Mia or Caitlyn beneath the splatters. Some of the names and pictures he knew, and others struck him as vaguely familiar. Up close, he could see there were layers of fliers. Grimacing, he pulled up some of the corners to get at the ones beneath.
No Mia, no Caitlyn—at least, not as far down as he could get to, and he found that he didn’t really want to dig deeper. Finding their pictures on goo-splattered fliers wouldn’t tell him anything about where they were. It wouldn’t even confirm that they were dead. People went missing in Thrall all the time. Hell, the people in that very building were technically “missing” right now.
He turned to find Nadia rifling distastefully through file folders with a pen pinched between two fingers. She closed an ooze-soaked file and looked up. “Nothing here, Jesse. What do you think are behind those doors?”
“Danny Gurban’s brother gave us a tour once. If I remember, one leads down a hallway to the evidence room and I’m pretty sure the other one goes to more interrogation rooms. But I’m not totally sure, okay? Just stay here. I don’t want you to get lost. Not here.”
“Believe me,” Nadia said, eyeing the filing cabinet. “I’ll have plenty to do right in this room. I’m going to take a crack at those filing cabinets. Best place to start, right? You going to check the office?”
Jesse nodded. “Yeah. And you’ll stay here until I come back, then, all right? Don’t go anywhere without me or Tom.” He ignored her exasperated nod. He wasn’t sure why he felt so strongly the need to warn her not to go anywhere, but the idea of leaving her alone bothered him. The office wasn’t far away from her or anything, but still, he’d seen how fast some of those things could move, and....
He glanced at the hairy lump on the floor before continuing toward the office and realized that a part of him very much cared what happened to her. Was it guilt? A sense of responsibility? An affection for someone he’d messed around with, or an affection for a friend? Or maybe it was just something about the police station that irked him more than the other places they’d been to in town, a sense of safety lost in the last fortress of security.
He shook his head. It didn’t matter right then. He had an office to check.
The cabinet groaned behind him as Nadia slid it open. He left her to her search.
***
Jesse made his way around an overturned desk, skirting its dripping gore, and over a slimy, oil-soaked paper mound on the floor. From the corner of his eye, he could see a head and spine to his left and he shuddered. He drew his gun from his backpack. At the door to the captain’s office, he hesitated. His hand hovered above the knob. Muffled voices on the other side of the office door caught his attention. He glanced back once to see if Nadia heard them, but she was buried up to her elbows in files. Jesse frowned. The noise beyond the door sounded to him like a one-sided conversation of syllables too low to be discernible as anything but gibberish. But interspersed among the syllables were words—real words. “Mafhauba haggaji... Fine, fine... hishish gimmm...Free and clear...zummilim myoh....”
He doubted any of the voices inside belonged to William Strabner, Captain.
His other hand gripped the gun tighter and with a deep breath, he turned the knob and swung open the door.
The voices snapped off at once.
Nothing marred the interior whiteness of the office—no scattered paper debris, no splintered wood, no traces of blood or ooze. It stood empty except for a single desk, an empty bookshelf, and a police scanner radio, all in fairly good-looking condition. Each item clung to the insane tilt of the room. He skittered inside and the door hung open a moment against gravity, and then slammed shut behind him. He slid the gun back into his backpack. No one was in the room but him.
The radio crackled suddenly and Jesse jumped. It emitted a low whine, crackled again, and then permitted a choppy voice from beyond to speak.
“Okay then, so everything’s ship-shape over there in Thrall?”
Another voice responded, different than the first and much clearer, an invisible speaker at the desk with radio in hand. “Right as rain. We’re all good here at the funny farm.” This last was followed by a chuckle that sent icy ripples through Jesse’s blood. His eyes grew wide as he realized what Thrall was doing.
“Okay, then, have a good one. Wexton’s over and out.”
“You bastard,” he said, then louder, “You fucking bastard.” He lunged at the radio and scooped it up, frantically pushing buttons and shouting into the receiver. “Hello? Hello, Wexton? Can anyone hear me? Hello?”
No answer. The deadness of silent, vague space between Thrall and Wexton, with its dull, almost non-audible hiss, leaked into the room. Jesse peered down at the machine. The radio was switched to off. He switched it on, and nothing happened.
“If anyone can hear me, we’re not okay. Things are not okay here, do you hear me? We need help! Things are most definitely, abso-friggin-lutely not okay!” His voice cracked and for a moment, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to laugh or cry. Things were far from okay in Thrall, and they always had been. The town was out to surround and kill them all, and clearly, it would—and could—do anything to make that happen.
The static crackled to life, and a voice that sounded closer to Jesse’s ear than his hand said, “Oh, everything is just perfect. You’re here, and you’re all going to die.”
Overtaken by anger, Jesse shoved the radio off the desk. It crashed to the floor with a heavy thud and broke open, chips of plastic and transistors tumbling out of the casing like a kind of blood of its own.
“Jesse?” Nadia poked her head into the room. Tom and Murdock crowded behind her. “We heard a crash, and some yelling....” Seeing his face, she asked more softly, “Are you okay?”
“No,” Jesse replied in a voice that barely broke a whisper. “No, I’m not okay.”
Nadia exchanged glances with Tom, who nodded, then motioned for Murdock to follow him. The two took off down the hall. Nadia came into the captain’s room and closed the door.
“Jesse, we need to talk.”
“Nadia, I never should have brought you here. I’m sorry. I guess I can’t apologize enough for this whole mess. I knew it would be bad, but not like this. Christ, who the fuck would have expected this?” He gestured wildly around the room. “Maybe...maybe you should have just gone back with Carpenter and gotten the hell out of here.”
Nadia’s eyes darkened. “I’m not going anywhere without you. I thought you brought me here because you trusted me. Because you needed my support.”
“I didn’t want to be alone.” The tone of his words came from the part of him inside that ached like that unhealed injury, and the cruel, unpleasant part of him that liked the ache. “I just didn’t want to be alone.”
“And I didn’t want you to be alone. Look, I know this wasn’t easy for you. I can see—I mean, it’s painfully
obvious—why you left. But I also...I think I understand why you came back. And I don’t blame you. And truthfully, I’m glad to be here with you through all this.”
Jesse frowned. He wanted to let her words make the guilt go away, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t bring himself to let it go.
“However,” she continued before he could speak, “I think we need to take a look at what’s going on here. I’m just saying that you need to prepare yourself for the possibility that we’re chasing ghosts.”
Jesse felt a dull anger well up inside—could feel it burning across his neck and cheeks. “Dammit, Nadia. This is why you should have gone with Carpenter. What do you think I should do now, just pack up and leave? Maybe go off and live happily ever after with you? Do you even think I could leave now? I may have made a gooz-fuck of this entire situation, but I have to see it through.”
Now Nadia’s cheeks turned red. “Oh, come on! Maybe you’ve got to start looking at the facts, Jesse. How do you think Mia called you on the phone? The telephone lines don’t work. You guys told me that yourselves. How do you think she called you, huh? How do you even know it was her?” Nadia’s pupils flashed like angry bolts of lightning, striking randomly in an attempt to sear his insides. “What are you going to do if Mia simply isn’t here?”
The lightning found its mark and it broke him. Tears welled in his eyes and he whispered, “I don’t know. I don’t have any fucking answers to your questions.”
Nadia paused. Her face mingled confusion with a burgeoning guilt. Whatever anger had been in her voice laid down its arms. “Jesse....”
Jesse mashed a fist into his eyes to clear the tears, but had more trouble managing the lump in his throat. “When I left here, my only thought was to get away. I wanted to survive. I had no one to tie me here but her and Tom, and they wouldn’t come with me. In the end, they weren’t enough to make me stay.” It hurt him to say it, and he had to take a deep breath before he continued. “She wouldn’t leave her family and friends. And I just left her here. For all I know, I left her and everyone else to die. And you know what? I feel guilty as hell about it. Guilty because I never could go back, not all the way. And now that I finally have come back, I just can’t accept that it won’t make a damn bit of difference anyway.”
Nadia’s gaze dropped to the floor. She soft-chewed her nail in silence. But Jesse couldn’t stop. Every emotion, every doubt and anger and frustration clamored for the air outside of him. Every weight looked to be lifted.
“When she called me, Nadia, I figured it was a second chance to get her out. Maybe...I needed to prove that I’m not so cold that I could let the people I love wither away and die here. Or to let any part of me wither away and die here. This town has taken enough from me already.” He glared around him. “But it won’t take Mia and Caitlyn if I can find them. I’m not leaving here until I know for sure, one way or another.”
Nadia reached out tentatively and touched his shoulder. Her fingers felt warm. He turned to her and slipped his arms around her waist. She kissed him softly on the forehead, and he buried his face in the crook between her shoulder and neck. Her fingers lazed trails up and down his back.
“We’ll find them, Jesse. We will. We’ll find them if we have to tear every building in this town apart, okay? We’ll find them.”
His grip around her tightened until she winced, but he was afraid to let her go. “Okay,” he muttered into her neck. “Okay.” He believed she meant what she said, but he was still afraid.
“You guys okay in here?” Tom, leaning in from the doorway, arched an eyebrow in Jesse’s direction. Murdock stood behind him.
Jesse pulled away from her. “Yeah, yeah. Everything’s cool.” He sniffled. His eyes burned a little; he knew they must be red. But Tom said nothing about it. He nodded once and walked out. From beyond the doorway, he said, “We found something you might want to see.”
ELEVEN
The sullen houses of Wainwright Terrace drew the oncoming dusk a little too quickly to themselves, as if looking to hide from prying eyes. The broken glass of their windows played with the dying light, giving the appearance of life and sentience.
Carpenter knew that those houses couldn’t think, or at least believed it to be true. Like the properties on Main Street, nearly all of the homes in Thrall had been built by the people who lived there—a good portion, in fact, only within the last seventy years or so. They weren’t original buildings. But Carpenter believed that in a sense, that didn’t matter. Thrall assimilated. It could use what it wanted, how it wanted.
He caught a whiff of something unpleasant, something reptilian. It reminded him of the weekend that he and Annie and Ryan had returned from Seaside to find Ryan’s pet snake had tried to slither out over the top of the tank. It had gotten stuck at the rim and essentially hanged itself. The stink of unclean cage and decaying snake flesh pervaded the whole bedroom—hell, half of the upstairs floor. Not only that, but snake shit, too, which to Carpenter was the smell of animal death itself.
This stink was a lot like that. He turned toward where it seemed strongest and saw long stalks connected to a single head. A tricoil. The blood of the thing had dried on the street, and tiny white corpses littered the asphalt like flakes of dandruff. The bulk of the thing shuddered in some kind of wind that he couldn’t feel himself but was clearly strong enough to peel off dead scales and carry them a few feet down the street.
Carpenter frowned. The suburban panorama around him was quiet, the sky swept with purpling clouds. He was sure that dead tricoil had come out hunting the night before. And flesh, even dead flesh of their own kind, would bring tricoils out again. He hurried past the beast. Suddenly, Carpenter wished he had a flashlight of his own. When it got full-on dark in Thrall, he wouldn’t be able to see the car unless he tripped over it.
A few more houses down, though, he saw it, a silver Nissan Sentra with Ohio plates, pulled up practically on top of the curb. Carpenter paused, jingling the keys softly. The sound seemed to echo for miles, a tiny voice caught on the wind, passing around the delicious secret of his whereabouts.
“I hope to God the bitch starts,” he muttered under his breath, then moved forward again. Every step reverberated in the emptiness between the houses. With every movement, he felt like he was on display.
Something had made Jesse stop the car. Something had made him cut the ignition. It suddenly seemed important to Carpenter to know what that something was.
‘I cut the ignition to—’
“To what, Jesse?” he said into the empty air. The space between the houses swallowed the sound and this time there was no echo.
‘—to check on something,’ the boy had said. But to check on what? He moved closer to the car and noticed it was angled slightly, as if Jesse had been aiming for a certain spot on the curb.
The sidewalk in front of the car was empty. Just a rectangle of concrete, no different than any other along the street except—
Except that it was different. Different enough that he was surprised he hadn’t noticed right away.
A single blue eye—a baby doll eye, big and round and innocent—was embedded in the concrete. It stared up at him unblinkingly. The concrete around it was a bruised purple, like a baggy socket.
The stiffness in his knees turned into a dull throb.
At the same time, an utterly irrational thought occurred to him: it was Celeste’s eye, and she was buried alive beneath the sidewalk and she couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t save her. Fresh spirals of pain swirled across the small of his back.
It wasn’t true. He knew that, in his head. The eye was made of shiny plastic, the iris painted on. The eyelashes were fake. It couldn’t be Celeste’s eye.
But the look in it—that animal mistrust eclipsing the unconditional trust and innocence—left him with an eerie sense of déjà vu he couldn’t shake.
To be sure, he bent down and touched the eye gingerly with his finger. Yup, it was plastic, all right. Up close, he could see tiny cracks in
the iris paint. Nothing but a plastic eye.
Then it blinked at him.
He flinched, then stood up quickly, his knees screaming in protest as he snapped them straight again. He crossed around the front of the car to the driver’s side and got in.
It couldn’t be Celeste’s eye. Celeste was....
He wouldn’t let the word form in his head. The suggestion was there all the same, and that was enough. He supposed he knew what she was, always had known though he’d never let the thought take even silent definitive shape in his head. She wasn’t just missing.
Carpenter adjusted the seat, then the rearview and side mirrors, his attention returning again and again to the sidewalk. He couldn’t see the eye from where he sat, but he felt sure it was still there, watching. Maybe there were two now, as well as a cheek splattered with raw hamburger blood. Maybe a mouth was seeping up through the concrete, and soon fingers would follow, and tiny hands, and....
Dolls, that man who’d killed Ryan had said. That man swore up and down that he’d seen broken dolls running across the street. “They weren’t children. They didn’t move like children....”
Carpenter put the key in the ignition, but hesitated in turning it. He thought of Celeste that night in the kitchen, who’d looked so much to him like a fragile little breakable thing. That glassy look in her eyes had seared the impression into his memory—a doll, a mock-person, a plaything that was hollow on the inside and pretty on the outside. An empty little moppet eating raw hamburger.
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