Cracked Lenses

by L J McIntyre

  “I suppose so. But I’m coming to the end of my tether. I feel like I could snap.”

  “Violence can’t solve this,” she says while watching me.

  “What if it can, though? Or if we’re pushed too far?”

  “You don’t seem like a violent person.”

  “Maybe not, but…” I rub my arm and look at her, “I almost killed someone once.”

  She sits up, “What do you mean you almost killed someone?”

  There’s a knock on the door and we both stare at it. I get up and open it slowly. No one’s there.

  I peak out the door and at first everything seems a little odd, but once I process the scene in front of me, piece together what I’m seeing, my mind tells me something terrifying is happening.

  Down on the street and on the paths, people are standing perfectly still. A dozen of them maybe, their backs to us, completely motionless, staring at something invisible beyond the town, at the orange band of colour on the horizon from the sun that must have set a few minutes ago. The streetlights seem to stretch the people’s shadows as if the shadows themselves are trying to escape the horror of whatever is happening down there. They remind me of empty vessels.

  The man in the black pinstripe suit is there right in the centre of them. He’s the only one facing us. He raises his hand and waves at me.

  “What’s happening?” Annie whispers. She puts her head out the door. “Let’s get back inside.” She pulls me into the room and closes the door.

  I lean against the door and take a breath. “This can’t be happening.”

  “They knocked on the door. They wanted us to see it.” She paces back and forth.

  “The man in the black suit, I’ve seen him before,” I say.

  Annie looks at me. “I didn’t see a man in a suit.”

  “He was standing right in the middle of everyone.”

  “I didn’t see him.” She shakes her head, but then she stops and holds her attention on something. “What’s that?” She points to the mirror on the wall opposite the bed.

  There’s a piece of paper wedged into the corner of the mirror. I walk over and pull it out, unfold it and start reading from it:

  Your car is hidden in the factory behind the town. They’re trying to keep you here. Don’t leave the room until after 5.30pm, when the Watchers have finished. You’ll know what they are if you look out your window before 5.30.

  “It’s 5.25pm now,” Annie says. “The Watchers must be the people in the street.”

  “And this person wants us to go out there? Tonight?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Okay,” I shake my head. “Fine, but let’s give it half an hour or so. Let things die down a bit.”

  “Fair enough, but we’ve barely eaten all day. We should try to get something down us.”

  “I don’t have much of an appetite, but you’re right. There are noodles over there in that bag.”

  Annie goes to the desk and opens the bag. “And chocolate, sandwiches, and bottled water.”

  “What? I didn’t buy those.”

  “Well, they’re here.” She lifts them out the bag and shows me.

  I take a sandwich from her. “Whoever left the message must have left us some food for some reason.”

  “Maybe the situation isn’t as straightforward as we thought,” Annie says. “I mean, this isn’t a movie where people are good guys and bad guys. We’re talking about a whole town here. There must be some decent people around, some people who want to help.”

  I take a bite out of the sandwich, BLT fillings, and before I’ve even swallowed it, my stomach growls, and mouth flows with saliva. There must have been so much going I’d lost track of how little I’d eaten all day.

  “Hey, Annie, remember when Tamati said Gerald, the university lecturer guy, had killed his wife?”

  “Yeah.” She takes her eyes off the sandwich and looks at me.

  “Well, I wonder what role he has in all of this. He’s probably well-respected in a town like this where not many get the chance to go to university, I’m guessing. And murdering his wife—”

  “We don’t know that he did. We’ve just got Tamati’s word for it.”

  I take my phone, google “Gerald university lecturer Auckland kills wife.”

  The search returns a single result titled, “University of Auckland Lecturer Cleared of Wife’s Murder.”

  Disappointingly, it’s nothing more than a tweet by an Auckland newspaper. No link or article. I follow the link to Twitter and read the rest of the tweet.

  Auckland Police Update: This morning Gerald Lithglow, a 59 year old employee at the University of Auckland, had charges dropped against him for the murder of his wife, Libby Lithglow, 61. Her death has been ruled a suicide.

  That’s it?

  I show Annie the tweet.

  “So, it’s true,” she says.

  “Yep, and I think we may have found the puppet master. Or at least one of the people pulling the strings around here.”

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Thirty minutes later, two sandwiches down, we creak open the front door and peek out. It’s early evening, dark, some of the streetlights blinking erratically. The road is empty, the Watchers back in their hovels, and beyond the town but before the forest border, we can make out the factory. It’s probably only a ten minute walk.

  “Got your torch?” I ask Annie.

  “Yup.”

  “We won’t need them until we get to the factory, I think.”

  We leave the room but we don’t run. We don’t saunter, either. Instead we pace along the balcony, through the car park, past the main road and into the street behind. We stride with our hands in our jacket pockets. Our eyes swivel left and right. Our necks twitch in the direction of any strange sound. We avoid eye contact with anyone in their homes who might be watching us. We don’t try to hide or be discreet. If they want to see us, they will.

  I’m pointing out the obvious here, but this is an eerie sensation. We’re walking toward an old factory because a stranger told us to. We’re walking through a town that has ensnared us and is probably watching us right now. We’re walking with absolutely no idea of what is waiting for us in the dark.

  The alternative is a motel room from which there is no escape. The bathroom window has bars on it. The only way out is through the front door and down a flight of stairs. I’m beginning to think I was put in that particular motel room for a reason.

  Across the street, the silver Mustang is parked, lights off. It’s dark inside but I think I can make out the silhouette of someone in the driver’s seat.

  “Annie, watch out for this car across the road. This guy seems to be the town bully or something. He’s already threatened me once.”

  “He has?” She eyes the car. “I hate pricks like that.”

  I can hear real venom in her voice as if the guy reminds her of someone, an old boyfriend maybe.

  He’s definitely sitting in there. The closer we get, the more details I can make out; those wide eyes, shovel face, tense shoulders. He dangles his arm out of the car window, lets it lie nonchalantly against the car door. Then his hand starts to tap against the metal door, tap, tap, tap.

  Something is in hand. A knife, a long, sharp knife, which he’s gripping tightly. Its blade is reflecting light from somewhere as it flicks back and forth while his hand drums lightly against the car door.

  When we’re level with the driver window, he raises his arm and points the knife right at me. Annie and I keep quiet.

  The car motor roars into life, its headlights blaze awake, and then the engine softens, the car slowly rolls away from us with a gentle hum down the street and out of view.

  “What was that all about?” I ask Annie.

  “I’ve got no clue, but he’s bad news. We need to keep away from him, okay?”

  “You don’t need to ask me twice,” I respond.

  “Jack,” Annie whispers. “Why are we doing this?

  “To get my ca
r.”

  “Right, but we just need a car. Not your car. Literally any working car will do.”

  She’s right. It’s such a simple solution. Steal a car and flee and hope the corrupt police of Nesgrove don’t catch us.

  “You’re a genius, Annie.”

  “I know,” she says just as we pass the hanging tree. “Do you know how to steal a car?”

  “Not a clue. I thought you knew.”

  She shakes her head. “We could steal someone’s keys.”

  “Whose? And how?”

  “I don’t know…Wait a minute. What about this one?” She points to an old red car, the brand of which I don’t recognise. It’s one of only two cars parked on the street.

  We walk casually up to the driver’s door, try the handle: it’s locked.

  I weigh up the house we’re standing in front of. “Keys could be in the house. The lights are off. You think they’re out?”

  “Could be in the pub,” Annie suggests.

  She grabs me by the arm and pulls me into the garden. There’s a waist-high fence surrounding the property. We duck down.

  “We should go around the back,” I whisper.

  We crawl around the house, our hands and knees growing wet from the dewy grass until we get to the back door. One more check of the house reveals no lights are on.

  Annie nods at me, and I reach up for the door handle. Before I pull it down, I hear a noise to our right. I let go of the handle and we both drop to the ground and lie as still as possible.

  From the house next door, a man comes out with a plastic bag. He walks next to the fence, barely two metres from us. If he glances to his right for even a brief moment, he’ll see two prostrate people stretched across his neighbour’s lawn. I can see him out of the corner of my eye, but I don’t look directly at him for fear it might trigger that sixth-hey-someone’s-watching-me-sense.

  We lie perfectly still.

  He walks to the bin, lifts the metal lid, drops the bag inside, and clangs the metal lid down again.

  He whistles the whole time, and that whistling is like a thin current of normality cutting through a sea of abnormality, and every second he is whistling is a second passed without him seeing us. I wait for a blip in the tune, a missed note, a fraction of silence, but it never arrives. And as quickly as he came, he goes back into his house and closes the door.

  We remain on the ground a few more seconds before getting to our knees. I reach up for the handle once again, and when I pull it down, I hear a click and the door opens slowly.

  We both crawl inside and are greeted by a fierce stench of what I imagine rotten eggs smell like. It feels as though the odour’s invading me, my clothes, my nostrils, my bloodstream. I wretch quietly. Annie and I zip down our jackets and pull our T-shirts over our noses for some slight relief.

  In the house, we stand up and creep on the tips of our toes along the wooden floorboards.

  Annie lowers her T-shirt from her mouth and whispers in my ear, “The keys might be by the front door.” Her breath is sweet and warm and sends shivers down my neck and is almost a nice distraction from the reek of the house.

  I nod and try to figure out which way to go. Everything’s dark. The only light is coming from the streetlights outside. A penknife is lying on one of the benches, half-hidden underneath a rusted microwave. I stash the blade in my pocket.

  “Maybe this will take us to the front door.” Annie is pointing to a door on the other side of the room.

  I place my ear to the door and listen. Silence. The door opens up to a hallway. The space is flashing frantically bright and dark like the strobe-lit dance floor of a nightclub. The streetlight outside must be one of the broken ones.

  It’s hard to focus. My eyes can’t adapt fully to the changing brightness. Ahead of me is what looks like the front door. On the wall to the right is a table with a bowl on top. I sneak over to it and place my hand in the bowl. It’s empty. I scan around but don’t see anywhere else a key might be hiding.

  “The living room?” I whisper and nod to a room on my right, the door not quite fully closed.

  We creak the door open and go into the room. The broken streetlight is right outside the living room window. The strobe effect is more powerful here.

  Bright. Dark. Bright. Dark.

  I look at the sofa to my right. There’s a table at the other end of it.

  Bright. Dark. Bright. Dark.

  I approach it.

  Bright. Dark. Bright. Dark.

  Annie is watching me from the door.

  I reach down and brush my hand across the lower shelves. They’re empty.

  Bright. Dark. Bright. Dark.

  I turn around to see what is at the other end of the room. Two faces stare back at me, swallowed up and spat out again by the changing brightness.

  The faces belong to two people sitting in chairs beyond the door, beyond Annie. Their bodies are rigid, fingers tightly grasping the arms of the chairs, their eyes open and wild.

  They bare their teeth at me.

  “Annie run,” I shout for the second time today.

  Chapter Twenty Five

  We sprint out of the living room and try to force the front door open. It’s locked. I struggle to turn the internal lock because my hands are shaking and wet. We turn around. The two faces are now standing at the threshold of the living room door, their teeth still bare.

  The streetlight outside pulsates. Bright. Dark. Bright. Dark.

  I grab Annie by the arm and hurl past the people, through the kitchen door, and barge the back door open. We race into the back garden, and just as we go to run around the house, I catch sight of the neighbour who was taking out the rubbish earlier. He’s standing at his fence, eyes pointed at us, teeth bare.

  We run.

  Adrenaline rips through me.

  We tear across the lawn, through the gate open, and sprint along the pavement.

  My legs don’t feel like they’re moving quickly enough.

  We run and know that they’re watching us from everywhere.

  We sprint toward the factory and hope they’re not waiting for us.

  We sprint because we’re out of ideas.

  The streets fall away to patchy, high grass which is housing old bike frames, mattresses and other larger items that are easier to dump in a field than dispose of legally. We stop, gasp for air and check over our shoulders to make sure no one is following. Annie bends forward and rests her hands on her knees.

  “What the fuck just happened?” she asks.

  “You see?”

  She stands up and looks at me. “Yeah, I saw it, but I’ve got no clue what it was. Why were they snarling at us?”

  I shrug and then point up ahead. “That’s the factory.”

  Beyond the grass is a rusted red factory with tubes and machinery sticking out in different places. A couple of working lights are attached to an outside wall. Below the lights is a sign that says ‘Entrance’. Below that is a large metal door.

  “We can’t go in there,” I say to Annie. “Too obvious.”

  “What about around the back? Could be a different way in.”

  We walk along one side of the building, away from the only lights around, to where the darkness is. We power on our torches and shine them on the grass to make sure the path is free of junk. We turn our torches toward the factory. A few minutes later we find what looks like a hatch or small door.

  The metal handle is rusted shut, it seems. I put my whole weight on it and feel a tiny downward movement. I do it again and this time it budges a little more. It takes about five minutes of heaving my weight up and down to dislodge the handle.

  Before I pull the door open, I whisper, “I’m not sure about this.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Do we have any other options?”

  “What about trying to leave town again?” she asks. “We could just walk in any direction.”

  “Through the forest in the dead of night without provisions? We’d have to
be crazy. And let’s be realistic, they’ve put all this effort into keeping us here. Doesn’t it seem too easy to just stroll out of here through the forest? Wouldn’t they have already thought of that?”

  “I suppose you’re right. But this could be a trap.”

  “We’re already in the trap, aren’t we? That’s what Nesgrove is. A big trap.”

  “So what’s this then?” She points to the factory.

  “Maybe someone really is trying to help us. Honestly, what other choice do we have?”

  We both eye the unlocked hatch. My left hand reaches into my pocket and holds onto the folded up penknife. I don’t tell Annie about the knife. Her expression back in the motel when I told her I’d almost killed someone: she looked scared, disappointed maybe. I don’t know. Whatever it was, it made me feel ashamed.

  “Maybe we should turn the torches off and see if our eyes adjust to the darkness,” Annie says.

  We stand in the shadows for a few minutes as our eyes become slightly better at picking out finer details. It’ll be darker in the factory without residual light from the town. I pull the handle down and push the heavy door forward.

  We gape into the abyss without any idea of what is gaping back. My heart had recovered somewhat after the sprint, but now it’s beginning to spike again, and my breathing quickens. I strain my ears to pick up any movement inside, but a vacuum of sound welcomes us.

  My chest is almost heaving in anticipation of crossing the threshold into the darkness, into the metal cage. Annie must have sensed my hesitation. She steps in first. I follow after her, but reach out and grab her hand. We can’t be separated in this place.

  At first I see nothing. We take tiny steps forward, our free hands feeling for obstacles, but the further in we go and the longer in the abyss we stay, the more my eyes adjust. Yet black remains black, and the little that becomes visible does nothing more than guide our feet and let us know if something is directly in front of us.

  Anything beyond a few metres is nothingness. Our feet scuff just lightly on the floor but the sound travels unimpeded through the open space. I squeeze Annie’s hand because this is pointless, or worse; dangerous. We’re walking without aim.

  I take my torch again and consider flashing it on quickly to illuminate the space we’re in, but my mind is still reeling from the two people in the house, the weirdo in the forest this morning, the skinny woman in the rotten cabin. And the Watchers, all those people staring at something, or nothing.