What the Hell Did I Just Read

  The tires left twin overlapping wakes behind us as we rolled across the shallow pool of the parking lot. There were no visible vehicles or other signs of activity.

  Ted said, “Do a slow lap around the exterior. See what we can see.”

  “Now,” I said to Ted, “when we go in, I want you to keep one thing fixed in your mind. Whatever Nymph is, I can tell you what he almost certainly isn’t, and that’s a greasy pedophile in a suit with a smoking habit. What you saw in your driveway that day, that was just how this particular thing chose to present itself to you. It may look completely different now. Do you understand?”

  “What, like a disguise?”

  “Once,” I said, “we had a dainty young woman come in asking us to investigate a haunting in her parents’ house. We walk in, the door slams behind us, and the woman falls apart. All that’s left is a pile of snakes where the girl had been standing, patches of their scales colored like the dress she’d been wearing.”

  Ted tried to picture it. “The whole time you talked to her, you didn’t notice she was snakes?”

  John said, “They have, uh, techniques, for that.”

  I said, “And then John started dating a girl named Nicky who I assumed was made out of snakes but it turned out that’s just the way she is.”

  “She has been nothing but nice to you, Dave.”

  Ted said, “My voice, on the phone … you think these things took Maggie by pretending to be me? Is that what I’m gonna find in there, somethin’ that looks and sounds just like I do?”

  I shrugged. “Past experience has only taught us not to rely on past experience.”

  We completed our circuit and rolled to a stop, about thirty feet from the front door. John parked with the Jeep facing away from the building and left the engine running—in this line of work, you always assume that you’re thirty seconds from needing to fly off into the horizon in a mad panic.

  “Well,” Ted said as he pulled the slide on his pistol and stuffed it down the back of his pants, “let’s just assume ambush here.” He nodded toward the building. “Only two doors. Those are choke points. I’ve got line and hooks. I say we get up on the roof, rappel down to the windows, come crashing in on the fuckers.”

  I said, “I’d break both of my ankles the moment I landed, before breaking my neck a half-second later. This is going to have to be a traditional ‘walk in the front door’ entry. At least for me and John.”

  Ted seemed pretty disappointed by that, but didn’t argue. We circled around to the rear of the Jeep to retrieve our weapons. Ted brought out an M4 assault rifle (which I recognized from having used one in a video game recently) and a pump shotgun that he slung over his shoulder as a backup. John pulled out a gun with a six-inch-wide barrel, connected to a compressed-air tank he strapped to his back—one of those cannons they use to fire T-shirts at the crowd at basketball games. I would be carrying a small, faded wooden cross—supposedly carved from the very beams upon which the actual crucifixion was performed on Jim Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ. Taped to it was a pair of small Bose speakers, a battery pack, and an iPod shuffle loaded with 80s power ballads.

  I explained our gear to Ted, who gave the weapons a skeptical look.

  I said, “Trust me.”

  “What’s the range?”

  “For the music? Uh, I guess wherever it’s audible.”

  “But it’s not fatal to them? It’s more of an area effect deterrent?”

  “Yeah, they hate it a lot.”

  “How long do targets stay incapacitated?”

  “I don’t—”

  “And the cross, do they have to see it to be affected, or is it enough to just be in proximity?”

  “Uh, the second one I think—”

  “All right, so what’s the range?”

  John said, “This is not an exact science, Ted.”

  Ted didn’t reply, but his body language said it all. I’m on my own here. Again.

  We sloshed through the standing water—I had never bought rain boots because I knew that it would immediately stop raining the moment I did—and arrived at the main entrance, an arched brick doorway partially boarded up by what looked like the original planks the crew had hastily nailed into place in 1961. Standing guard beside the door was a concrete snowman—about six feet tall, arms made of rusted rebar, the top half absolutely covered in bird shit. The eyes and mouth were three misshapen, eroded holes in the concrete, as if the thing was wailing in terror and dread. Rainwater puddled and splattered out of its ragged eye holes like flowing tears. The words MR FROSTEE were etched into his chest, like the epitaph on a particularly eccentric tombstone. The old ice factory mascot had seen better days.

  A gap had been pried loose in the boarded-up doorway large enough for a person to slide through, but it looked like it had been that way since before I was born—there were still no obvious signs anyone had been here recently. John nodded to me and I hit the iPod, which started playing Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Ted clicked on a flashlight attached to the barrel of his rifle and aimed the light through the gap, sweeping it slowly across the interior. He slid inside, quickly whipping his head back and forth to check for anyone waiting to waylay us inside the door. John went next. I brought up the rear and clicked on my own flashlight.

  The interior smelled like wet rust and a recently snuffed candle. A row of huge, charred machines loomed above us like the aftermath of a robot battle. There were tanks and pipes and gears and fifteen-foot-tall iron objects shaped like wagon wheels connected to chutes designed to deliver coffin-sized blocks of ice to ground level. All of it was warped and misshapen, metal parts caught in the process of drooping, dripping, or dissolving entirely according to their various melting points. I shined the light overhead. The brick had in fact liquefied and then cooled into thousands of tiny spikes that made the whole vast space look like a torture chamber. I imagined the curved ceiling snapping shut the moment some hooded inquisitor threw a switch.

  We crept steadily forward, the music echoing around the dead space. A light flared up to my left—John lighting a cigarette. He said into the darkness, “All right, we’re here, fartsong. What’s your deal?”

  No answer from inside the building, or at least none that could be heard over Mr. Bon Jovi insisting we have to hold on to what we’ve got and that it doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not. We advanced, Ted swinging his gun lamp around in both directions to light up nooks in between scorched machinery in which enemies could be lying in wait. We passed through an open doorway into an emptier room that had probably been a loading area, a truck-sized door at the opposite end the only other exit. How numb would your fingers get, loading ice all day?

  John said, “Come out where we can see you, you son of a bitch! I have to be in court at eight. So whatever you’ve got in mind, we need to wrap it up.”

  I said, “Yeah, and I have to pick Amy up from work soon, otherwise she has to get a ride home with this dudebro she works with and I think he’s trying to get in her pants. It’s a long story but the point is we don’t have time to dick around.”

  Ted’s phone rang.

  Hey, that worked.

  He motioned for me to cut the music, then put the call on speaker.

  The little girl’s voice said, “Hello?”

  “Baby, we’re here! Do you see us? I’m shining a flashlight.”

  “The Night Wheel was scary! I screamed when it started spinning and everybody’s faces went away. We’re going to watch the flying goats. They let me lick the luck lizard and we’ve been eating hot dogs that squirm in the bun.”

  “Maggie! Listen! I want you to yell for me. Yell anything, cry out real loud, so I can hear you.”

  She’d hung up. Ted cursed, tried to dial back again, and once again it rang, and rang …

  John held up a hand and said, “Shh.”

  We all heard it.

  A faint musical ringtone that I recognized as the theme song from a recent Disney movie. It wa
s about a princess who has to learn to be independent or something.

  The sound was coming from right below our feet.

  Three flashlight beams swung down to illuminate the floor in front of us. There was a gap where the floorboards had been ripped aside. Below it was a patch of loose dirt, like a freshly dug shallow grave.

  Ted dropped to his knees. He started digging away with his hands, flinging dirt behind him like a dog, crying out for his daughter.

  But how would she have made the call from—

  About a foot down, he found a phone.

  Still on, smeared with mud. Ted tossed it aside and kept digging.

  Something was moving in the dirt, in the shadows. Ripples in the clumps of muck, things squirming around his hands …

  And then they were gone, as if having burrowed into the earth, hiding from the light. Or maybe it had been nothing.

  Ted kept digging but there was no little girl down there, alive or dead. He sat back, chest heaving with the effort. He grabbed the muddy phone. He looked it over—it displayed only its lock screen.

  He screamed, “Hey! Where is she? Nymph! You here, you son of a bitch?”

  I shook my head. “She’s not here, and neither is Nymph. It’s a wild-goose ch—”

  I had turned to walk away and immediately bumped into an inhuman figure that had been standing right behind me. I screamed and tumbled backward.

  Ted jumped to his feet, whipped the shotgun off his back, and yelled for me to stay down. He fired and pumped and fired again, but John was yelling for him to stop.

  “Hey! Hey! Cool it! It’s just the snowman.”

  I looked up and the figure was of course just that stupid snowman mascot, now scarred across its chest from where the shotgun pellets had gouged the concrete and ricocheted away. Ted had succeeded in blowing one of its rebar arms off. In the panic and tension, we had forgotten that of course the MR FROSTEE mascot was there inside the factory, in the center of the storage room, where it had probably stood for eighty years. Where else would it be? I could now remember approaching it as we entered the room thirty seconds ago, plain as day.

  Feeling ridiculous, I stood up and brushed myself off. I cursed when I saw that I had landed right on top of my iPod, smashing it. John was blinking at the snowman as if confused by it, then went to help Ted. He was sweeping his flashlight around each corner, determined to search every inch of the place before admitting defeat.

  An hour of the three of us looking in and around the factory turned up no sign of either Nymph or Maggie. We rode back through town in silence, listening to the wipers squeak their complaints from the other side of the windshield.

  Ted said, “What now?”

  I said, “There are two threads to follow up on here. Who is Nymph, and where is Maggie? I’m guessing one will answer the other…”

  John said to me, “You go to the library and see if you can find any reference to Joy Park, I’ll take Nymph, see if I can find anybody else around town who’s encountered him. If I track him down, I’ll give you a call after I’ve killed him.”

  Ted said, “No. You get a bead on him, you call me. Not the cops, neither. I want to be the one to do it. I’m putting the word out for manhunt volunteers, get as many people lookin’ as we can. Got a friend I served with, he can be in town by this afternoon.”

  “And I’m clearly not going to the library, John. I can search the Internet from my phone, from some place with free wifi, and pancakes. Speaking of which…” I was holding the muddy phone we’d found buried at the ice factory, turning it over in my hands. I turned it on, again just got the lock screen. “Anybody know how to hack a phone?”

  “Amy probably does.”

  “Yeah, I’ll ask. Wait, does that mean she can get into my phone any time she wants?”

  “Only way to find out, put a bunch of pics of naked dudes on there and see if you can detect a change in mood afterward.”

  As we pulled up to the Knoll home, Ted said, “If what you’re sayin’ about imposters and such is true, we should have a system. In case that thing tries to imitate one of us.”

  I was taken aback. “Man, that’s a good idea. You should do this for a living.”

  “You make a lot of money doin’ this? The password is ‘bushmaster.’ Don’t forget it, we encounter each other, we ask the password. Got it?”

  John said, “Got it. Now, I figure we got forty hours before this goes from rescue to revenge, so there’s no time to lose. I’ll get on it right after I go to court on this public nudity thing.”

  4. A MONSTER’S PICTURES, A GRIEVING WIDOW, SEX

  I felt water squish out of my pants when I settled into my Saturn. Through my weeping windshield I watched Ted trudge up to his front door, knowing that inside he was about to be ambushed by the accusatory silence of that empty house. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I just had a feeling this one wasn’t going to end well. Maybe it’s because they pretty much never do.

  I pulled away and considered heading straight for Waffle House, since I’m usually much more effective with a big wad of cheap comfort food in me, but instead headed toward the used bookstore downtown. In the basement they had a collection of odd, out-of-print, and “banned” books. I would probably find nothing pertaining to this case, but Amy’s birthday was next weekend and they had a signed copy of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that I’d noticed her gaze longingly at when we were there about six months ago. Look, I have a life outside of work, okay?

  I dug out my phone and dialed as I turned down Brown Street. The driver’s side windshield wiper had a crack in the rubber blade that left behind an arc of rainwater right in the center of my field of vision—it had failed exactly in the way that would annoy me most.

  Amy answered, “Hey! You’re up early.”

  “Got a call from John, situation with a missing kid, thinks it might be a thing. Can you get a ride home?”

  “A missing kid? Tell me everything.”

  “I just did, there’s not much more to it. She just vanished, like she fell through a hole in reality. We followed up on one lead, turned out to be nothing. Not sure there’s much to be done, and I’m really not sure how we’re going to get paid.”

  “There’s a missing child and you’re talking to me about payment? I’m going to reach through this phone and slap you. And you know that’s not easy for me. Did you find the muffin?”

  “Already eaten. Did you say you could or couldn’t get a ride home?”

  “Shawn will do it. Hey, I was thinking about the argument we had yesterday, and having slept on it I’ve decided that you are even more wrong than I thought you were then.”

  “Looks like you need to sleep on it some more.”

  The argument had been over whether or not Neo should have just left everyone in the Matrix, since their quality of life was clearly better inside it than out. I say no, she says yes. I should note here that Amy has seen The Matrix at least thirty times. When I got her the Blu-ray for Christmas, she became visibly upset when she saw they had done this odd color correction thing that gave the whole movie a weird green tint. She downloaded editing software on her laptop and has been manually correcting it, shot by shot.

  “Oh,” I said, “and I just want to let you know that I’ve completely forgotten your birthday next week, because I’m a man and thus care nothing about your feelings.”

  “Oh, okay, thanks for letting me know ahead of time.”

  I pulled up to the bookstore, the interior still dark. I realized just now that it wouldn’t open for another twenty minutes—I wasn’t used to being up this early. I grabbed the muddy phone we’d picked up at the ice factory and turned it on, the lock screen asking for the four-digit passcode.

  “Hey, do you know how to hack into a phone? Like to get past the lock screen? Did you ever have a class on that?”

  “Whose phone is it? Do you know their social security number? Lots of times it’s the last four digits.”

 
“We found it looking for that little girl. I, uh, would be surprised if this guy has a social security card.”

  “Wait, does the phone belong to a guy or is this some kind of weird monster situation?”

  “Don’t know. It’s an iPhone, if that helps. What code would an unholy predator of the night have on his phone?”

  “I was sick the day they taught that.”

  I mindlessly punched in the code for my own phone—6669.

  It unlocked.

  Why did I know that would work?

  I said, “Hey, I think I hacked it.”

  The home screen looked normal. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting. I tapped on the icon for any stored photos and video and braced myself for the worst.

  The first photo was of a plate of breakfast food. Looked like eggs benedict.

  I swiped it aside.

  I sucked in a breath, and Amy heard it.

  “What? What are you seeing?”

  The second photo was of a little blond girl, bound and bleeding, her mouth gagged with duct tape. I was going to take a wild guess and say this was Margaret “Maggie” Knoll.

  I said, “Not sure.”

  I swiped to the next photo. A picture of an orange tabby cat, licking the lens. I swiped again.

  The little girl again.

  Her limbs were a tangled, red mess.

  She had been bound and gagged and then … crushed somehow. Like a giant had forgotten she was in his back pocket before sitting down.

  I closed my eyes.

  I wondered … at age eight, did she know? Was she aware of what kind of universe she had been born into? Did she have even the faintest hint that this was one of the possible outcomes of her life—that she wouldn’t grow up to be a Disney princess, or marry a handsome man at a fancy wedding, or have kids of her own? That she would wind up terrified and alone, in the dark, as some monster’s plaything? At the end, had she still held out hope that her daddy would come rescue her? Or that the crazy man would soften at the sound of her cries?