Unless it was a Satanic church. Maybe then it would work.
Nicole informs us that she’s officially having second thoughts about hearing this story.
“Well,” Mia asks, “do you want me to read any of it or not?”
Kyle and I out-vote Nicole, and Mia pulls out her laptop and clears her throat. “The sound of shattering glass awakens me in the night.”
“That’s a good opening line,” Kyle notes. “I like it. Sets the tense and the point of view, has action, mystery, danger, intrigue and—”
But Nicole hushes him. “You’ve got me curious now, Mia. Go on.”
She reads:
I rise from my mat.
The darkness in my chamber is oppressive, but accompanies the cool, damp smell I have come to know so well since entering this monastery as a novice seven years ago.
I hear no feet shuffling through the corridor, no call to prayer, only the sound, once again, of glass tinkling to the ground.
Somewhat hesitantly, I step into the hallway where two torches flicker and lick at the darkness, throwing unkempt shadows across the walls, revealing the skulls. Some are faded yellow with the years, others are clean and white and only recently added to the rows with their brothers.
A stained-glass window containing the Blessed Virgin lies at the end of the hall, but in the torchlight, even from here I can see that some of its glass sits glistening at its base.
I wonder at this, but my curiosity compels me forward.
I pass the torches illuminating the faceless grins of the dead around me, and come to the broken window.
A specter hovers outside in the night—a face drained of color, drained of life, staring at me from just beyond my arm’s reach.
Its mouth opens wide, swallowing the shadows that curl around it, the tendrils of the unseen realm. Then it utters a piercing howl as from the very pits of hell and fades away from me, disappearing into the black depths of the night.
“Well, okay, then,” Nicole says. “I’m good here.”
“You don’t want me to go on?”
“You know, maybe some music would be cool. That, and let me make one tiny suggestion: Can we not talk about razor blades in waterslides or needles in ball pits or churches made of bones for a while? Actually, like, maybe forever.”
“Okay, change of subject,” Kyle suggests. “How about a riddle I’ve been working on.”
“Does anyone die in it?”
“Nope.”
“Skulls? Ghosts? The pits of hell?”
“Not this time.”
“Alright. Go ahead.”
“What’s the largest thing you’ll ever see, yet smaller than a pin? You’re looking into history, so let the guessing begin.”
“How could the largest thing be smaller than a pin?” Mia asks.
“That’s what you need to figure out.”
She sips at a Capri Sun. “Is it like dark matter or quantum particles or something like that?”
“Is that your guess?”
“No.” She takes another drink. “Unless it’s right.”
“It’s not. And don’t forget, sometimes the answers to riddles are concepts rather than material things,” Kyle reminds us, probably just as a way of trying to throw us off track. He turns to me. “So Daniel, what do you think?”
“Not bad. I’ll get back to you.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Later in the afternoon, I use the preloaded debit card the anonymous donor sent us to fill up with gas one last time and finally convince my friends to let me drive for the final hour of the trip.
As we’re passing by Champaign, Nicole is seated next to me, with Kyle and Mia in the back. They’ve been texting each other for the last half hour even though they’re seated less than a foot apart.
Nicole stares out the window at the flat landscape that seems to go on forever. “It would be cool if we could’ve done a song montage of our drive instead of having to live through it.”
“What do you mean?” Mia asks.
“Let’s say they were making a movie of us heading down here. They’d play a song while they show clips of us snacking, rocking out, chilling, stopping for gas, napping, playing games on our phones, whatever—shrink the whole trip down to, like, three minutes. And it’d be sung by some group no one except Kyle’s ever heard of, and suddenly they’d become famous and popular when the movie comes out.”
“I could deal with that—not the listening to Kyle’s music part, but the part about condensing our trip down to a couple minutes. That would work.”
Kyle glances up into the rearview mirror. “That’s what that scientist was trying to do, right Dan? Condensing time? The guy who was at the fish management center that didn’t actually study fish?”
“Dr. Waxford?”
“Yeah.”
Last winter, when my dad got stabbed by an escaped convict, we found out that a place near Beldon was doing secret research on prisoners from Derthick State Penitentiary. It was all led by a scientist named Dr. Adrian Waxford.
It turns out Waxford was a chronobiologist obsessed with trying to make it seem to people like time is passing more slowly than it really is. So, if you applied his research, you could make it seem to someone like hundreds of years of solitary confinement had passed when maybe only a couple actually had.
Psychological torture of the worst kind.
After we located that escaped prisoner and saved my dad, the fish management place blew up from a supposed gas leak.
The cops looked into it, but didn’t find anything suspicious.
Nicole and I did some follow-up, but we couldn’t find anything more on what might’ve happened to Dr. Waxford. It was like he just dropped off the map.
And so did a psychopathic killer who knew that convict and had murdered at least seven people before trying to burn me to death in an old lighthouse. He disappeared from the same hospital Dad was recovering in. And as far as I know, no one has heard from him since then either.
As time went by, all of that sort of faded from the main news reports, but I heard from my dad that the authorities were still searching for that serial killer.
I wonder if anyone is out there looking for Waxford.
“Actually,” I tell Kyle, “Waxford could probably do the opposite and make three minutes seem like eighteen hours. And he could probably make eighteen hours seem like a year or two. I mean, if the stuff I read about him is true.”
“That’s just crazy.”
“It’s sick, if you ask me,” Nicole says.
Mia finally stops texting and looks up just long enough to agree. “I’d say it’s both.”
Then she goes back to her phone again.
And Kyle goes back to his.
We pull into Mr. Schuster’s driveway right around suppertime.
Though my dad has stayed in touch with him since they roomed together in college, I’ve never met him. However, I recognize him immediately from the pictures I’ve seen.
He’s a little overweight and has wild, Einsteinish hair that makes him look like a mad scientist and not the classic car salesman that he is.
When we arrive, he’s in the garage with the door open, tinkering under the hood of a car that looks like it’s in astonishingly good shape even though, by its design, I’m guessing it’s decades old.
Mr. Schuster shakes our hands warmly and leads us inside where a huge, slobbery mastiff jumps on us as soon as we walk through the door.
It’s a dog only a PETA member could love, but Nicole gushes over how cute it is. She kneels, and as she’s lovingly scratching it behind the ears, the dog shakes its head, sending sticky globs of dog drool frothing off to each side.
Mr. Schuster watches and smiles. “Easy, Annabelle.”
“Aren’t you sweet, girl,” Nicole tells the dog.
“Don’t worry, she won’t bite. She just likes to lick.”
“Brilliant,” mutters Mia, who is much more of a cat person.
Or a reptile one, fr
om what I’ve heard.
Two air mattresses lie beside each other in the living room. “In the basement there’s also a pullout couch and a queen bed,” Mr. Schuster explains. “You’ll have to fight over those.”
Even though I’m not thrilled about Annabelle lapping at my face in the middle of the night, Kyle and I offer to take the air mattresses and the girls don’t argue.
After checking in with our parents, we fill up on some spaghetti and meatballs, or in Nicole’s case, spaghetti and tofu—Mr. Schuster has done his homework. Then he leaves us alone while he heads to the garage again to work on the 1966 convertible that he tells us he’s getting ready to take to a car show later this summer.
Annabelle decides we’re more interesting than her master and makes the rounds, climbing onto and slathering on each of us we talk in the living room.
Time passes, and as it’s closing in on bedtime, Kyle says, “Annabelle reminds me of a story I heard about this blind woman who lived near the town where I was born, back in Minnesota.”
“Is this another one of your urban legends?” Nicole asks him somewhat skeptically.
“It’s just a story my friend told me when I was in sixth grade. Anyway, the lady’s husband was a truck driver and was gone all the time so he got her this dog and it was trained so that when she would hold her hand down whenever she was scared, the dog would lick it, and then she would know that everything was okay.”
“Oh, I can tell already I’m not gonna like this one.”
“Do you not want to hear it?”
“Well . . .” But then, just like with Mia’s ghost story, Nicole’s curiosity wins out. “Go ahead.”
“So, one night the lady hears a dripping sound in her bathroom, but she’s nervous and doesn’t want to check it out. All night she keeps lowering her hand over the edge of her bed and when she feels the dog lick it, she knows things are okay. But in the morning she calls her friend over to figure out what’s going on. Her friend goes into the bathroom and comes running back out screaming, grabs the blind woman’s hand, and rushes her outside.”
“What did she see in the bathroom?” Nicole’s voice catches with apprehension.
“The dog was staked to the ceiling. Its blood had been dripping down into the toilet. And a note was left there, scrawled in the woman’s lipstick on the mirror: People can lick hands too.”
Nicole looks from Kyle to Annabelle, and then back to Kyle. “Seriously, did that really happen?”
He shrugs. “Dunno. My friend told me it did.” Then he fake yawns. “Okay, we should probably be getting to bed.”
“That’s messed up. I’m not gonna sleep at all tonight.”
I think of the blur I had on Wednesday of the blood dripping onto my bedroom floor.
Dripping blood, just like in this story.
It seems like there’s a grim connection between the things that are going on, almost as if they were planned out beforehand and are now weaving together in some mysterious, unexplainable way.
That’s not exactly reassuring.
“I swear to God,” Mia warns us. “If any of you guys licks my hand tonight when I’m asleep, you are dead.”
I’m pretty sure she’s joking, but she does carry a butterfly knife in her purse, and the way she says it, I’m not sure I would want to test things.
“And I’m not kidding,” she adds.
“No hand licking,” Kyle says. “Got it.”
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
“Tane Tagaloa?”
The stocky Samoan high school senior turned and slowly removed the cigarette from his mouth. “Who’s asking?”
“I’m the man who contacted you last November, Malcolm Zacharias. I’d like you to come with me. I have a plane waiting.”
They stood on a street corner next to an alley dominated by a looming, reeking dumpster. The yellowish glow of the sodium-vapor streetlight overhead gave the night a sickly, washed-out feel.
But they weren’t the only ones out on that corner.
It was a gang-infested neighborhood and three thugs, the oldest one looking about twenty-five or so, eyed them from across the street, nodded to each other, and started their way.
Tane watched them disinterestedly.
“You don’t blend in,” he said to Malcolm.
“No. Probably not.”
“Well, this is the wrong neighborhood for you to be visiting at this time of night.”
“Thanks for the heads-up. Now, follow me before—”
“How did you find me? I didn’t tell anyone I was coming out here.”
“I’m good at what I—”
“Hey.” The guy in the lead interrupted Malcolm mid-sentence. He held a bottle tipped upside down, leaving a trail of beer behind him on the road. “That’s a nice shirt.”
His buddies snickered.
“Thank you,” Malcolm said, then he addressed Tane again, gesturing toward a rental car waiting nearby. “Shall we?”
The man shook out the rest of the beer as he stepped between Malcolm and Tane. “I said, I like your shirt.”
“To which I would say I compliment your taste. But now if you’ll excuse me, I’m having a conversation with this young man and I would appreciate it if you not interrupt us again.”
“Give it to me.”
The other men closed in around them.
“Take off the shirt.”
Malcolm studied the three of them, then—almost, but not quite under his breath—said to the gang leader who was threatening him, “Are you sure you want to do this here in front of your friends? Once you lose face, it’s hard to get it back again. It might be smarter if you just walk away, before you embarrass yourself.”
The man cursed at him, then, holding his bottle by the neck, he smashed the other end against the dumpster, leaving him with a jagged-edged weapon.
“Okay. We’ll do it your way.” Malcolm eased his shirt off and held it out toward him.
However, rather than go for the shirt, the guy lunged forward with the broken bottle, swiping it at his abdomen.
Malcolm pivoted sideways while simultaneously whipping the shirt out and encircling the guy’s wrist with it. He grabbed the shirt’s other end, snugged it tight, then with one fluid move, he spun toward the street, twisting his attacker’s arm behind him and driving him to his knees.
The man cried out.
Malcolm put just enough pressure on his wrist to make him drop the bottle. “When I let go, you’re not going to hassle us anymore, are you?”
“This is my street. This is—”
He rotated the man’s wrist.
Just a few more degrees and it would snap.
“Ow! Yeah! I promise!” he exclaimed. “Okay!”
Malcolm released him, then offered his shirt to the other two men. “Anyone else looking for a wardrobe addition?”
Neither of them moved, but the guy on his knees slipped his hand into his waistband and went for a Glock.
As he was removing it, Tane punched him in the face, sending him colliding hard against the sidewalk.
While he was disoriented, Malcolm pinned his arm against the ground with his foot, and then grabbed the gun to relieve him of it, but the guy held on.
“Let go.”
“Screw you.”
Having no other choice, Malcolm firmed up his grip on the Glock and cranked the weapon to the side, breaking the man’s index finger in the process.
He howled in pain, staring at the way the finger jutted out sideways from his hand.
“I warned you about losing face.” Malcolm removed the gun’s clip, pocketed it, and tossed the Glock into the dumpster, then said to the other men, “You can stand up for him or step aside. The choice is yours.”
They stepped aside.
“Come on, Tane. We have a plane to catch.”
“Where are we going?”
“Atlanta.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I can tell by Kyle’s snoring that he didn’t manage to break h
is record and stay up for thirty-nine hours. Not even close.
I’m not sure what happens with his air mattress, but as the night wears on, mine keeps losing air, until I’m basically lying flat on the floor with just a few bulges of air left around the edges where none of my weight is.
But then, whenever I roll over, the air scooches to the other side of the mattress so it doesn’t end up making any difference how I position myself.
However, at last I do manage to drift off to sleep.
And this is my dream:
I’m standing ten feet from the edge of a cliff. The wind rushing up the mountain somehow feels both fierce and calming at the same time.
A voice calls me forward: Walk to the edge.
I do.
As I stand there, the air swirls around me, eager and expectant and full of promise, caressing my face, tossing my hair into a wispy frenzy.
I look down over the lip of the precipice.
A river wanders past, a thousand feet below me.
I feel a sense of vertigo, an enticing lure of dizziness that taps me on the shoulder and invites me to lean forward.
The wind will hold you.
It’s strong coming up over the edge.
I close my eyes and let the spinning, whirling air encircle me.
My heartbeat quickens with the thrill of the moment.
I hold out my arms as if I’m going to take a swan dive.
Then the voice returns: You can do this. You can find the beginning in the end.
Letting go of all restraint, I tip forward, into the arms of eternity.
I awaken with a start.
Here on the floor.
Here beside Kyle.
Here in Mr. Schuster’s living room.
Here.
And not on my way to the bottom of a gorge, plummeting to my death.
When I check the time on my phone, I see that it’s almost three thirty in the morning.
For a while I try going back to sleep, but that doesn’t work out too well, so I decide that, rather than just lying here staring at the ceiling, I’ll grab a little fresh air and clear my head.
Annabelle is dozing near the door, but I ease it open, step over her onto the porch, and gently close the door behind me.