You’re being kind of an idiot, Tom told himself.
He started back up the path with the paper in his hand.
So where was his mother, then? The question niggled at him. He could never let a question go until he had the answer. Still, he tried to shake it off.
She was probably abducted by aliens, he told himself. That has to be the most reasonable explanation, right? Either that or she took a walk. But nah, I’m going with aliens. That’s gotta be it.
Tom was smiling to himself—smiling at himself—as he stepped back into the house. Smiling, he shut the door behind him. Smiling, he tossed the newspaper onto the front hall table: whap.
Then he stopped smiling.
He heard something. He heard a voice. It wasn’t his mother. It was a man talking. It was coming from inside the house.
Tom was still a little spooked by the idea that had come to him outside—the idea that there had been something moving around in the fog. His heart beat a little quicker as he walked down the hall toward the sound of the voice. With every step he took, the voice grew louder, more distinct. He started to be able to make out some of the words the man was saying.
“. . . your mission . . . what you have to do . . . remember . . .”
Tom came to the end of the hall and stepped into the kitchen. That sharp eye of his—and that sharp, questioning mind—saw immediately that his mom hadn’t been in here this morning. She hadn’t been in here at all. The lights were out. There were no dishes in the sink. There was nothing cooking on the stove. No trace of food on the counter. The place looked as it always did after Mom cleaned it for the last time at night and before she used it first thing in the morning.
Where is she?
Then he noticed something else. The voice—the man’s voice—was coming from the basement.
“. . . the game is the point . . . play the bigger game . . . ,” the man was saying in a firm, even tone. Then there was something Tom couldn’t make out because the basement door in the kitchen was closed and the voice was muffled. Then he heard, “. . . that’s the mission . . .”
Tom hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath, but it came out of him now. Everything suddenly fell into place with satisfying certainty. Tom and his brother, Burt, had fixed half the basement up into a family room two summers ago. Most Southern California houses didn’t have a basement at all, so they’d wanted to take full advantage of theirs. They’d paneled the walls and laid carpet down over the stone floors. They’d set up an entertainment center complete with a flatscreen, a couple of humongous speakers, two game consoles, and a laptop control center—some of which Tom had paid for himself with money he made that summer busing tables at California Pizza Kitchen. They’d even put in a small refrigerator so they wouldn’t have to run up and down the stairs for sodas and snacks in the middle of a football game or a Call of Duty shoot-out.
Mom didn’t go down into the basement much except to do the laundry in the other half of the space. She said she couldn’t even figure out how to turn the TV on. But that was a typically Mom-like exaggeration. She could turn it on when she wanted to. So, obviously, that was the answer. Obviously she’d gone down to the basement this morning and was watching TV for some reason. Maybe there was a big news story breaking and she wanted to find out about it before she made breakfast.
Tom stepped into the kitchen, pulled open the basement door—and froze stock-still, his heart pounding hard in his chest.
“This is what you have to do,” said the voice from the basement, quiet but firm. “Do you hear me? This is the point of everything. There’s no getting around this.”
Tom’s mouth went dry, his satisfying certainty gone as quickly as it had come. That was not the television. He could hear the man clearly now and he recognized the voice right away. He’d have known that voice anywhere. It was Burt’s voice. It was his brother.
Now Tom was scared again, and not just a little scared this time. This time he was really scared.
Because his brother, Burt, went on talking quietly in the basement. And his brother, Burt, had been dead these six months past.
3.
As Tom started down the stairs, his mind was searching for answers again. His brother’s voice must be coming from a video—sure, that’s what it was—some old vid of Burt that Mom was watching. That made sense. Mom was sad about Burt getting shot in Afghanistan. They were both sad—incredibly sad—how could they not be? Burt had been the coolest guy in the universe. Brave, honest, humble, funny. He’d been there for Mom whenever she needed him. He’d been Tom’s best friend and his guide through life. So yeah, they were sad. And so Mom, feeling sad, had gone downstairs and pulled up one of their old video files of Burt so she could see his face again, hear his voice.
That’s why she hadn’t picked up the paper. That’s why she wasn’t making breakfast or vacuuming or whatever. She was down in the basement, feeling sad and watching a vid of Burt. That made perfect sense.
It did make sense—but Tom knew it wasn’t true. In the months since Burt had been killed by a Taliban sniper, he himself had watched every video they had of him. Burt clowning around. Burt teasing Mom. Burt wrestling with him and so on. There was nothing on any of those videos like what he was hearing now: Burt’s voice barking out with so much intensity, so much urgency.
“This is your mission, do you understand me?!”
Like he was talking to his fellow soldiers. Like he was giving them a pep talk before they set out into the wilds of the Hindu Kush. They had no video of Burt like that.
Tom licked his dry lips. He flicked the light switch on the wall. The basement lights went on below him. He couldn’t see much down there—just a little section of stone floor at the foot of the stairs. You had to turn the corner before you came into the family room where all the equipment was.
Anything could be waiting around that corner, he thought. But then he forced himself to stop thinking that. Don’t wimp out on me, Harding. What could be down there? This wasn’t a horror movie. This was real life.
He continued down the stairs. He told himself again that he was being an idiot for feeling afraid. Whatever the reasonable explanation was, there had to be one. Just because he couldn’t think of it, didn’t mean it wasn’t there.
And yet, it was so strange, so strange. With every step he took, Burt’s voice grew louder, clearer, more unmistakably Burt’s . . .
“Look, what did you think this was? A joke? It’s not, man! It was never that. Remember the Warrior. Right?”
. . . and yet, it couldn’t be a video because they had no video like that. And it couldn’t be Burt.
Because Burt was dead.
Tom had to force himself to breathe as he continued down into the cellar, step by slow step.
“This is what you have to understand,” said Burt from the family room. “This is what I’ve got to get you to understand.”
Just as Tom reached the bottom of the stairs, just as his sneaker touched down on the basement floor, Burt’s voice suddenly stopped in mid-sentence.
“This is exactly what I was always trying to get you ready to . . .”
And silence.
Tom halted where he was. He swallowed hard. The silence went on for a single second. Then:
“Dr. Cooper to the ER—stat!”
A totally new voice! A woman’s voice. Speaking as if over a loudspeaker. And then a man was shouting, “Single GSW to the chest! Clear Trauma One!”
Tom narrowed his eyes in confusion. He recognized these voices, too. They belonged to the actors on his mom’s favorite doctor show, The Cooper Practice. It was a show about a bunch of doctors in a hospital who spent their days falling in and out of love with one another between treating emergencies. Real realistic—in the sense of being not realistic at all. But Mom liked it, so Tom had watched it with her a couple of times.
“How’s his pulse?” one TV actor shouted to another.
“Sixty and falling fast,” another actor shouted bac
k.
So that was it. Mom was down here watching her favorite show on TV. Big mystery solved, right? Tom was already beginning to think he had only imagined hearing Burt’s voice a second ago. He turned the corner and stepped into the family room.
“Mom?”
But the room was empty. Mom wasn’t there.
There was nothing there but the entertainment center. The armchairs arrayed on the carpet around the flatscreen were empty. The TV was turned away from him so he couldn’t see the screen, but the shouts were definitely coming from the set. And they were definitely from the doctor show.
“Where’s Dr. Cooper?”
“We don’t have time to wait for him. Let’s go! Let’s go!”
Tom glanced through the door into the laundry room, just in case Mom was listening to her show while she loaded the washing machine. But no Mom there either. And the washing machine and dryer were both off, both silent.
Tom moved around the brightly lit family room until he could see the front of the TV. There on the screen, sure enough, was the doctor show in progress. It was the usual sort of scene: a bunch of doctors and nurses and aides crowded frantically around a gurney as they rolled it into the emergency room. Everybody shouting about a GSW—which meant a gunshot wound, as Tom knew from a Sentinel story he’d written about the Springland police. Tom couldn’t see the patient on the gurney, but he was sure it was someone on the brink of death. Patients were always on the brink of death on The Cooper Practice. Nothing new about that. Nothing strange at all.
But where had Mom gone off to after she turned the TV on?
Tom found the remote lying on one of the chairs. He picked it up and clicked the TV off.
“Mom?” he shouted.
But no—no answer here either. There was just the same silence as there was upstairs: that silence that made him feel the place was empty.
All right, he thought. Enough of this stupidity. Let’s find out what’s going on. Right now.
Tom jogged upstairs, taking the steps two at a time, pausing only to hit the light switch at the top. (Electricity costs money, he could practically hear his mom say.)
He swung round the corner. Jogged down the hall. Up the stairs again. Back into his bedroom. He retrieved his cell phone from where it was still lying on the worktable. He hit the button to call up his speed-dial list.
“What?” Tom whispered aloud into the silent house.
The speed-dial list was empty.
All right. Must’ve accidentally erased the list. Or something. No big deal. He went into his contacts list.
Again Tom spoke out loud, more than a whisper this time: “What. Is. Going. On?”
His contacts list had been completely erased as well.
For a second, Tom actually considered the possibility he was still dreaming. Sure, why not? You see stuff like that in the movies, right? Guy has a scary dream, sees a monster. Then he thinks he wakes up; he thinks he’s safe. Then—Frang!—the monster leaps out at him, and it turns out he only dreamed he was waking up and he’s still in the nightmare. Maybe it was like that, Tom thought: he had dreamed he was in heaven and then . . .
But he looked up and his eyes traveled around the room, his room. His familiar room with everything where it ought to be. And he knew this was real, this was really happening. It was no dream.
Okay, he thought. Don’t panic. Think. You’re a reporter. Find the answer. Figure it out.
He knew his mom’s number by heart. She had told him once: The problem with speed dials and contacts lists is that you never need to memorize a phone number. And he had said: Why would you ever want to memorize a phone number? And she had said: Well, in case you’re lost somewhere without your phone. And he had replied sarcastically: Yeah, Mom. Like that’s gonna happen!
But all the same, Mom wasn’t a big worrier, so when she did worry, it stuck in his head. He’d memorized her number one day, just in case.
He dialed the number now.
As the phone started ringing against his ear, he moved back out of the room, back down the hall to the stairs. He was just starting down the stairs again as the ringing stopped.
And there—hallelujah!—there was Mom, her voice coming over the phone: “Tom?”
Tom rolled his eyes with relief. “Mom! There you are!”
“Tom, can you hear me?” Mom said.
“Yeah, I’m right here,” he said into the phone loudly. “Where are you?”
“Tom! Tom, are you hearing me?”
“Mom, I’m right here!” he shouted. “Can you hear me? I’m at home. Where are you?”
There was a pause. Then something awful happened, something that made Tom’s stomach go hollow with fear. He was just coming off the last stair into the front hall again when he heard Mom say, “Oh, Tom, please say you hear me! Please! Please . . .”
Tom opened his mouth to answer her, but only a whisper came out. “Mom?”
Mom was crying. He could hear it. She was crying hard. And that was bad. Mom almost never cried. Mom was a girl, and a very girly girl, but there was something really tough about her, too, something really strong. She cried when they buried Burt. She cried when the lieutenant colonel handed her the folded flag from Burt’s coffin, the overlong, coffin-sized flag that now hung on Tom’s bedroom wall. She cried then, sure. Tom cried, too. Everybody cried, even the lieutenant colonel. But that’s what it took—that’s how much it took to make Mom break down in tears. Other than that, it just didn’t happen.
Except that she was breaking down now on the phone.
“Tom, you have to hear me! You have to!” she said, her sobs almost overwhelming the words.
Tom practically shouted back at her, “I hear you, Mom! I’m right here! I’m right here! I can hear you! Where are you? What’s the matter?”
“Oh, Tom, please!” Mom cried, almost hysterical now—and Mom never got hysterical, never. “Please answer me!”
Tom clutched at his own hair in frustration. “Mom, where are you? What’s wrong? Tell me where you are! I hear you!”
And then there was a sound that made Tom’s heart squeeze tight in his chest. That double beep.
He looked at the readout on the phone: Connection lost.
“No!”
Tom shouted out loud in his frustration. Quickly, he pressed the Redial button. The phone sang out its series of tones and then began ringing again. It rang twice . . . three times . . .
“Come on!” Tom willed his mother to answer.
Where was she?
In the middle of the fourth ring, the ring broke off.
“Mom?” Tom said eagerly.
“You’ve reached Ann Harding’s cell phone. Please leave a message after the tone.”
Her voice mail!
The tone sounded. Tom started talking rapidly, urgently. “Mom, it’s me. Listen. Where are you? I heard you before but you couldn’t hear me. Everything’s so bizarre here. Call me back as soon as you get this! Okay?”
He hung up. His unsteady hand slowly fell to his side.
What. Is. Going. On?
Has to be an explanation, he thought. Has to be, has to be, has to be. There always is.
But that horrible, horrible sound of his mother’s frantic crying came back to him and he realized: even if there was an explanation, it wasn’t going to be good.
Tom stood there, thinking, trying to figure out what to do next. His eyes moved slowly around the front hall. His gaze traveled over the large photo portrait that hung on the wall—right next to the hall closet so it was the first thing you saw when you came in. It was a photo of the three of them: Mom, Burt, and Tom. A blowup of the portrait they’d had taken for the church directory. Mom was sitting in a chair. Burt was behind her to the right, wearing his uniform. Tom was in a jacket and tie behind her to the left. Each of the brothers had one hand on Mom’s shoulder. Tom’s glance moved past the framed photo to the small wooden cross that hung beside it—then onto the sidelight beside the door, to the pane that held the g
old star sticker that marked this as the home of a family that had lost someone in the war.
Tom gazed absently at the star for a minute—and then the focus of his gaze shifted and he looked through the glass to the outside.
The marine layer had thickened out there. The fog had crept in closer to the house. The whiteness hunkered and swirled over the edge of the grass. The end of the driveway was misted over, almost invisible.
Tom stared out, trying to think. He saw the fog shift a little.
Someone was standing there!
There was a woman standing in the street, standing in the mist, just at the very end of the driveway. The first human being he had seen all morning. She was a small woman, thirty or forty years old. Pale and thin. She was dressed in light colors—a white blouse, a tan skirt—so that she almost blended into the swirling white atmosphere. She didn’t move. She didn’t do anything. She just stood there, staring. Her face was expressionless—weirdly blank—almost completely empty of any feeling, as if she were sleepwalking or as if . . . as if she weren’t alive at all.
Moment after moment, she didn’t move. She just went on standing there, standing very still, her arms down by her sides. Standing and staring at the house. Staring straight at the sidelight. Staring straight at Tom.
Tom felt as if his heart had stopped beating. He gaped out at the woman, his phone forgotten in his hand. The woman didn’t move. The dead expression on her face didn’t change. But now the fog began to blow and roll across her. The swirling white mist began to thicken around her. It began to cover her over. She began to fade into it, her features becoming dim, her figure becoming more shadowy, harder to see. As Tom watched, dumbstruck, she began to disappear from view.
No! thought Tom.
He grabbed the door, pulled it open, and rushed outside.
4.
Tom felt the cold and damp of the day on his face as he broke from the house. He moved quickly to the driveway, quickly down the driveway toward the street where the woman in the white blouse was standing. Even as he hurried toward her, she seemed to fade away from him, to fade back into the swirling fog.