Monsters Among Us

by Monica Rodden

  Just then Catherine’s phone on the table buzzed. A text from Henry. Hania’s brows shot up.

  “Henry Brisbois?”

  Behind them, an oven was beeping and something clattered to the floor but didn’t break. The sounds were distracting and she felt uneasy, which she knew was stupid and pathetic.

  Catherine picked up the phone and pressed the side. The screen went black.

  “It’s nothing,” she told Hania.

  “Uh-huh. Well, he’s gorgeous. So that’s not nothing.” Hania gave Catherine a brief, searching look. “You do look sick.”

  “Love you too, Hania.”

  Hania flashed a grin at that. “All right then, I’ll leave you to it. But respond to me, okay? And feel better.” At the counter, someone called out Catherine’s name and drink order. Hania raised her coffee in farewell. “See you later.”

  “Catherine,” a barista called again as Hania left the coffee shop. Catherine got up from the table.

  “Thanks,” she said automatically, taking the coffee from the low counter.

  “No problem,” the barista said. “Be careful.”

  “You too—” Catherine began, already turning away.

  She stopped. Looked back.

  The barista was eyeing her under a green headband, her blond hair pulled back from her face.

  “Sorry,” Catherine said. “What did you say?”

  “I said be careful out there.”

  Catherine stared at her.

  The girl gestured out the window. The rain was picking up. “Don’t want to get hurt.”

  “N-no,” Catherine managed. She looked at the girl a little more carefully. She had a face that was like a word on the tip of the tongue. Catherine knew she’d seen her before. “Right. Thanks.”

  The girl gave her a thin smile, then turned, pressing something on a machine and making it roar to life.

  Catherine walked away, coffee in hand, though she didn’t much want it anymore. When she got back to her table, she glanced down at her laptop for a long moment before putting it back in her bag. She unplugged the charger she’d brought too, and stuffed it inside with the computer, almost wanting to cry at her previous optimism. The store was closing in an hour anyway, for the new year.

  She shrugged her heavy tote over her shoulder and strode toward the door—but no sooner had she wrenched it open than she collided with someone outside. Whoever it was stumbled backward, giving a muffled grunt of pain and surprise.

  “Sorry—” Catherine said. “God. Sorry. Are you okay?”

  The person looked up.

  Matt Walsh.

  Catherine gaped at him. His hair and face were wet, his eyes swollen and red as though from allergies. He was wearing only a T-shirt and jeans even though it was freezing out, and she could see fresh scratches up and down both his arms to his elbows. He looked…terrible. Wrecked. All dull brown hair and eyes. His skin gray except along his jaw, which was flushed red with acne.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him. Even though he was sixteen and at least six inches taller than her, he seemed almost vulnerable somehow, his thin shoulders hunched like a child. “Are you—?”

  “What?” His voice was hoarse. Hannah must have been wrong; he even sounded sick. She remembered one summer he’d had mono and she, Hannah, and Amy had made him chicken noodle soup from scratch, boiling the bones for over an hour just to make the broth. This had been before Amy’s interest in food had narrowed to baking, to bread. But Matt had said the soup tasted the same as the stuff from the can. Hannah had threatened to pour it over his head and Amy had to pull her back. But he’d eaten all of it, grudgingly admitting to Catherine in private a full month later that it was the best soup he’d ever tasted but to never let Hannah know he’d said that.

  “She’d never let me live it down,” he’d said. A pause. “You can tell Amy, though.”

  “Matt,” Catherine said now. “I’m Catherine. Catherine Ellers. Do you—do you remember me? I used to watch Amy in the summers.”

  “What?” he said again. He looked her up and down. “Oh. Yeah. Right.”

  She had a sudden urge to walk away, but just then the door opened behind her and she and Matt stepped to the side. As a group passed, forcing them both under the awning, Catherine grappled with something to say.

  “I saw Hannah at church the other day.”

  “Hannah’s a fucking wreck,” Matt said. He wiped his nose again. “What’d she say?”

  “Say?”

  “Yeah. She say anything to you?”

  Catherine shook her head.

  “Yeah, well,” Matt muttered, turning back to the door. “Good. She never knows what she’s talking about anyway.”

  Catherine swallowed, not knowing how to respond, but thankfully Matt turned from her without another word and went into the coffee shop. She watched the door close slowly behind him—it was on one of those timers—and by the time it shut all the way she realized she was standing half in and half out of the rain. She gave herself a shake, blinking back the rain, and nearly ran to her car.

  It wasn’t until she’d gotten into the driver’s seat and put her coffee into the cupholder that she remembered what the barista had said to her.

  Be careful out there.

  Don’t want to get hurt.

  She pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street. The car’s wipers jerked left to right as she drove through the growing storm. It was too much. She shouldn’t have gone out. Hania knew she was hiding something, Matt was a wreck, she herself couldn’t compose a stupid email, and some random stranger had just told her to be careful driving in the rain. She thought no advice had ever been so pointless in all her life.

  Then something clicked inside her mind, just as she was watching the rain gather on the windshield before being wiped clear again. And again. And again.

  The raindrops, scattering across her field of vision, reminded her of tiny rocks, like pebbles, or something even smaller—

  Sprinkles.

  The barista’s face. Where she’d seen her before: at the grocery store, the baking aisle shelves completely empty of pumpkin puree. Molly barking at the broken glass.

  Henry’s ex-girlfriend.

  Catherine awoke early on Wednesday morning and immediately curled her body inward, knees to her chest. She tried to control her breathing, making herself count the inhales and the exhales, forcing herself to focus on today, on the one thing she had to do: go into the cabinet.

  God, it sounded strange. Ridiculous, even. But it was true. It was six in the morning now and in an hour, they’d be at the church. They’d gone over the plan endlessly the past few days, talking back and forth, repeating it, almost quizzing each other, looking for weak spots, but now it was final:

  The three of them would park at the Westfield shopping center and walk up North Marsh Road to First Faith. They’d get in through the back, a door that didn’t need a key, but a code. It was mostly used for volunteers and deliveries and opened to a small room with nothing in it but hooks on the walls for coats and a battered welcome mat. The purpose of this room, Henry explained, was to get people out of the cold right away so they didn’t have to wait outside; if the church knew they were coming, they gave them the code ahead of time. And even if this code got passed around, it wasn’t that big a deal, because all it accessed was a ten-foot-long mudroom, and on the other side was a locked door. One that needed a key, or at least someone on the other side to answer the buzzer.

  Henry had “borrowed” the master key on Tuesday when he was there helping to set up for the New Year’s service and unlocked that door before putting the key back. They were counting on the fact that no one would notice the unlocked door in the hours between Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning.

  The last locked door they had to deal with was Pechman’s office, whi
ch the master key could unlock, but they would have to be sure that (a) Pechman was not in his office, hence their very early start, and (b) the cabinet had been emptied of old seminary books.

  “We can bring them down the hall,” Henry suggested. “Put them in the maintenance closet. It has recycling and trash and random stuff that doesn’t fit in the janitor’s closet. No one goes in there unless they’re…what do you call them? Maintenance workers. Pechman won’t go in there.”

  They’d unlock Pechman’s office, move the books, and (her heart thudded as she thought about it) lock Catherine inside the office. Henry and Andrew would even stay inside the church, just to be safe, hiding out in that same maintenance closet, just down the hall.

  “So you won’t be alone,” Henry said. “It’ll feel like it, but you won’t be.”

  They’d already told their parents they were going to Castle Rock for the day. Mount St. Helens and pub pizza. Maybe hiking, if it warmed up enough, but they were leaving early to get breakfast on the way. A famous donut shop with a famously long line.

  “They’ll be open on New Year’s?” her mom asked, looking surprised.

  “Yes,” Catherine said at once. “There’s a special.”

  They wanted to be at the church no later than seven that morning, and in the office with the books cleared out before eight. That would leave four hours until the noon meeting, probably one or two at the most before Pechman arrived at the church. Assuming the meeting was in Pechman’s office, or at the church at all. Catherine pictured herself waiting in that cabinet, growing increasingly panicky and desperate, while all the time the two pastors were talking in Ken Itoh’s living room miles away.

  But they had to try. She had to try. She kept thinking of the face at her window. A pale oval between the pines, the eyes dark and fixed.

  You have to look.

  The clock read 6:17. Inside the frame of her window, the world looked like a painting done in black and gray, the jutting elbows of mountaintops bleeding into the wide bruise of the sky.

  * * *

  —

  They left Andrew’s car in the shopping center by the Starbucks. Catherine eyed the shop, thinking of Hania, of Henry’s ex, of Matt, and then of the water bottles dripping with condensation under the bakery items on display in neat rows.

  She hadn’t had any food or drink since the night before—almost ten hours now—because it wasn’t like she’d have access to a bathroom while trapped in a cabinet. Her stomach was empty, her lips dry.

  They walked through cold the sunlight couldn’t touch, not talking. All three of them kept looking around, eyes darting nervously. Well, Andrew looked nervous. Henry seemed more determined, his moving eyes more curious than wary, and when they met hers, he gave her a reassuring smile.

  “It’ll be fine,” he said.

  “Yeah.” She looked down at herself. She was wearing all black: slim leggings and a fitted turtleneck, her hair pulled back from her face. “I feel like we’re about to rob a bank,” she told him.

  Henry gave a short laugh but Andrew just glanced over at her. He looked very pale in the sunlight, his skin almost translucent. She wondered, not for the first time, what he was thinking. With Henry, she almost always knew, but Andrew seemed to be made of empty spaces that could be filled with anything at all.

  They were approaching the church and veered off the sidewalk, into the trees, so they could circle around to the back. Catherine looked over her shoulder, her heart speeding up. There was a panic that she was trying to ignore, and she was slightly ashamed she was already feeling so uneasy. Get it together. Nothing’s even happened yet.

  They walked quickly across the asphalt in the smaller back parking lot until they reached the door. A keypad was installed just above the handle, a familiar-looking setup with numbers 1 to 9, as well as a pound sign. Henry pressed the pound sign first, and then 53161 and then pound again.

  “The five is for J, for John,” Henry said as the keypad beeped loudly and he pulled the heavy door open. “Three-sixteen, obviously, and then one because it needed another number.”

  “John like the apostle,” Andrew said, stepping into the small, narrow room.

  “Or the pastor,” Catherine said, following him.

  “Fair,” Henry said, closing the door behind the three of them. The room was in darkness for a moment; then he hit something on the wall and a dim light came on overhead. He walked past them to the door at the other end and Catherine held her breath, part of her wishing it wouldn’t open—but then Henry turned to her and, with a grin, pulled it wide.

  “Open,” he said unnecessarily. “Thank God.”

  Catherine could see a long, darkened hallway with closed doors on either side and more hallways leading off in the distance. There was something unnerving about a building—any building, really—when it was unlit and empty, and the dark church seemed like a labyrinth made of shadows, a thing of nightmares, where monsters lived.

  Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

  Thank God, Henry had said. Trust in the Resurrection, Pechman had preached. But she wasn’t sure she believed in God. Not after what had happened to her, to Amy. Perhaps not even after learning about Dante’s Inferno. That seventh circle, with the self-murderers, a woman upside down. Hell like a forest, the trees stretching endlessly. Did God think they deserved it? Was hell something you chose?

  Maybe. A little.

  Catherine walked past Henry, into the darkness of the church.

  They used their cell phones for light. The hallways were silent and carpeted and their phones lit their path in unsteady white circles, occasionally sweeping up the walls and then back, like pendulums. Catherine felt nauseous, her empty stomach lurching.

  Henry was slightly ahead of her, Andrew behind, the hallway lit with the dancing glow of their phones. They’d turned more corners than she could count. It made her think of children’s fairy tales, of bread-crumb trails. She kept listening for footsteps that weren’t theirs, for distant voices growing closer, but there were none.

  They turned another corner. Henry stopped at a gray box sticking out from a wall, about a foot high and a foot wide. It was shut, but there was a closet nearby and he opened it, seeming to feel along the wall, and a moment later he emerged with a thin metal instrument. Not a key so much as a screwdriver, but even that wasn’t entirely right. Whatever it was, Catherine held her phone light aloft and watched as Henry pushed the small object up, into a hole in the bottom of the box. There was a small click and the box opened. She saw several rows of keys. They glinted, turning slightly as Henry reached inside.

  Henry grabbed a key on the left and, without a word, led them farther down the hall. Andrew was looking at her. She could feel his eyes on her more than she could see them, so she turned her phone to get a better look at his face, but then he was moving, following Henry. She went after them, not wanting to be left alone in the dark.

  “Here,” Henry said quietly. He’d stopped by a door on the right side of the hall. She could just make out the edges of it in the darkness, and then there was a scratching sound, Henry’s ragged breath, and he pushed the door open.

  “Can we turn on the light?” she asked almost as soon as she stepped into the room.

  “I don’t know,” Andrew said. He sounded uneasy.

  “Oh, come on,” Catherine said. I can do this. But not in the dark. Not all of it in the dark. “This is his office, right? We’re already here. We have to move the books. How can we do that in the dark?”

  “How about this?” Henry offered. He flipped a switch on the wall. A light clicked on: a lamp on Pechman’s desk, toward the middle of the room, flooding the space with light. Almost immediately, Henry unzipped his thin jacket and threw it over the lampshade. The room dimmed, and Catherine took her hands from her eyes, blinking as her vision adjusted.

  “Mood lighting,” H
enry said, and, when neither she nor Andrew looked amused, shrugged. “Well, it’s something, and it’s not so bright you can see it from three hallways down. Okay, here.”

  Catherine took a moment to look around the space. John Pechman’s office was almost a perfect square, a little smaller than her family’s living room. There was a dark green couch near the door, and a coatrack right next to it. The majority of the office was taken up by a large desk, which was shaped like an L and jutted into the middle of the room. It held not one but two computers, with a fat, high-backed leather chair behind it that she recognized from the office set at Roche Bobois. Another chair—this one wooden and strangely circular—was pushed up against the remaining wall space, right next to the cabinet.

  Henry had gotten it right. Pechman’s cabinet was the twin of the one they had seen in Seattle, and that more than anything made this whole thing real to her.

  “Shit,” Henry said now. “Shit shit shit.”

  “What?” she asked him, her voice high with fear. “What?”

  Henry was kneeling in front of the cabinet, both doors pulled wide.

  “He put in a shelf.”

  Catherine knelt down too. Instead of the open space of the one in Seattle, this cabinet was filled with books, like Henry had told them, but it also had a shelf going across it, about three-quarters of the way up from the bottom. The shelf, though it wasn’t thick, made the space she’d have to fit into smaller by at least five inches.

  “I can’t,” she said at once. “There’s no way I can fit under it.”

  “You won’t have to.” Henry was craning his neck, squinting into the cabinet. “Here, shine your phone. Yeah, there. Okay.” He pushed his arms inside, grabbing some of the books at the front—there were dozens, maybe fifty or more—and setting them on the carpet so he could look at the shelf more closely. “He’s screwed it in. Here, at the sides. We’ll have to take it out with the books.”

  Catherine sat back on her heels. “Can you do that?”

  “Shouldn’t be too hard,” Henry said, and she tried not to look disappointed. “I bet there’re tools in the maintenance closet somewhere, and we have to go there anyway to store the books. Andrew, give me a hand?”