Authors: Richard E. Gropp
My viewfinder showed Amanda, Mac, and Taylor clustered around the sign, surveying the surrounding buildings. I don’t
know if it was a conscious decision on their part, but they’d left a wide gap where Charlie’s mother had been.
Lined up, left to right: Amanda and Mac, the sign, a large space, and then Taylor.
I could combine the photos
, I thought, snapping the shot. At first it was just an idle bit of fancy, but the image that rose to mind was strangely affecting. I glanced down at the LCD screen and studied the photograph I’d just taken. I could see it now. The combined picture would have Amanda, Mac, Charlie’s mother, and Taylor, all lined up in a row. Amanda, Mac, and Taylor would look confused and just a little bit bored—on the camera’s screen, Taylor had her arms crossed in front of her chest and an impatient look on her face—but Charlie’s mother … she would be wreathed in a halo of mist, glancing back over her shoulder with that scared look on her face.
It would be an interesting shot. A hole punched through the world. A hole punched through time.
“Charlie!” Taylor called. I looked up from the camera and found her turning a full circle in the middle of the street, her hands cupped around her mouth. “Charlie!”
I joined the others at the sign, and we all started craning our heads, studying the surrounding buildings. After about a minute, I noticed Charlie half a block away, standing motionless in a doorway on Second Avenue. He wasn’t moving to join us. He wasn’t even looking our way. His head was down, tilted against the door frame, and the way he looked—the slump to his shoulders—made me think that the frame was the only thing keeping him on his feet.
I started toward him, and the others followed as soon as they saw where I was going. When I got within a dozen feet, I slowed down and stopped, not sure how to proceed. Charlie’s face was ashen-gray, and his cheeks glistened with tears. That emotion stopped me cold. I didn’t know what I could do for him.
He’s a kid
, I thought,
just a kid of seventeen
. I knew he was curious,
painfully smart, and full of answers, but really, I didn’t know him at all.
As I watched, his shoulders started to shake, trembling like branches caught in a swirling wind.
Taylor took over. She sprinted past me to Charlie’s side and wrapped her arms around him, scaring up a hitching, breathless sob.
“I can’t find her,” Charlie groaned, expelling breathless words against Taylor’s shoulder. “She was here, in the picture. She was here, but now she’s gone … and I can’t find her!”
“We’ll help,” Taylor said, her voice soothing and calm. “If you want, we’ll help you look.”
Taylor lifted her hand from Charlie’s back and gestured Amanda, Mac, and me toward the surrounding buildings, using a little twirl of her finger. Trying to get rid of us, I realized. And I felt relief—then guilt at that relief—as I retreated back down the street, away from Charlie and all that raw emotion. Both Amanda and Mac kept their faces down as they moved away, disappearing into the nearest doorway on the south side of the street.
I glanced from the bent sign toward the surrounding buildings. There was nothing there, no signs of life. There were street-level stores with shuttered windows; a couple of stairways leading down to substreet levels—cafés, a shoe store, some second-rate restaurants; and, looming overhead, a cluster of old run-down office buildings.
In the picture, Charlie’s mother had been facing down the length of Second Avenue, looking back over her shoulder. Her body had been turned toward the line of buildings on the north side of the street. Not much of a lead, but it was something. A place to start, at least. I headed toward that side of the road and opened the first door I came to.
On the other side of the door, I found a small alcove lined with metal mailboxes. An apartment building, then. Judging from the number of blank name tags on the mail slots, I guessed that most
of these apartments had been vacant before the evacuation. There was a narrow stairway at the end of the alcove, leading up to the housing overhead.
“Hello?” I called. My voice was tentative, weak. “Anyone home?”
I waited for a response, but none came.
I started up the stairs, and a gamy, spoiled-meat smell greeted me on the second-floor landing. Not decomposing flesh or dead animal, more like deli-style roast beef left out in the sun. A thick, damp smell. Almost musty.
There were six apartments on this level, and four of the doors stood wide open. Each of these tiny two-room dwellings was completely bare—nothing but frayed carpeting stained a uniform dingy brown. The bathroom doors stood open, revealing tiny sinks and coffin-size showers.
The door to the fifth apartment was closed but unlocked. I eased it open, and the creaking hinge started my heart thudding a quick bass rhythm inside my chest. The room was dark, but I could see immediately that there was no one hiding inside. The only piece of furniture was a stripped mattress laid out in the far corner. The window here had been covered up with cardboard and uneven strips of duct tape, and someone’s works lay spread out near the head of the mattress: a black-charred spoon, a lighter, a length of bungee cord, shredded cigarettes. There were empty Baggies and vials sitting on the windowsill.
The room smelled of stale sweat and fever dreams. But no trace of spoiled meat.
The final door was flanked on both sides by stacks of newspaper. One of the stacks had tipped over, clogging the width of the corridor with a jumble of yellowing newsprint, a mad collage of text and black-and-white photographs. Smiling politicians. Crowded cityscapes. I bent down and read the date off the nearest sheet: June 15, 2002.
The smell was stronger here. It was coming from inside the apartment.
I reached for the doorknob, hesitated, and decided to knock. There was a sound of movement on the other side of the door—the groaning of mattress springs, followed by the sound of a foot hitting the floor—then abrupt silence.
I knocked again and cleared my throat. “Hello? I don’t mean you any harm. Really. I’m just looking for somebody—my friend’s mother. Have you seen anyone? Do you think you could help?”
There was no response. I tried to turn the doorknob, but the door was locked.
I waited for nearly a minute, keeping my head cocked next to the door, but there was no sound of movement inside the room. There was nothing.
The sound of held breath, maybe
, I thought.
Held breath and paralysis
. I retreated back to the stairwell and continued up to the third floor.
There was nothing on the third floor, and again, nothing on the fourth. Just empty, abandoned rooms, the refuse of long-gone squatters.
A sound greeted me on the fifth-floor landing, a scramble of movement coming from the far end of the corridor. It was a faint, small sound, like a horsehair brush sliding back and forth over wood. But different—something foreign, alien—nothing I could place. Charlie’s mother? Doing what? I quickly made my way past the other apartments on the floor, noting the empty, unremarkable rooms as they swam past the corners of my eyes. As I drew near, the sound didn’t seem to get any louder. It stayed a quiet, unearthly whisper—the
shhhhhh
of a record player hitting blank grooves, maybe—and I was afraid it would peter out entirely, disappearing before I could reach that last apartment.
I rounded the open doorway and found an empty room.
My lungs were working hard now, and I stopped with my hand on the doorjamb, trying to hear over my panting breath. The sound was still there, coming from somewhere inside the room.
I stepped forward and noticed a hole in the left-hand wall. It was a ragged oval, about three feet wide and two feet tall, punched
through the drywall and plaster. No, not punched, I realized. The edges of the hole jutted outward, into the room, as if scrabbling, frantic hands had pulled at the opening, trying to make it wider. Or, I thought, as if something had pushed its way through from the other side.
The hole didn’t go all the way through to the neighboring room; there was no hint of light on the other side, just darkness. Darkness and sound. It was a little bit louder now. Definitely coming from the hole.
I approached the hole and paused for a handful of seconds, trying to gather the courage to peer inside. Finally, I took a deep breath and moved forward, easing my head through the opening.
The gap between the walls was about a foot wide, and I could see plumbing snaking down toward the lower floors. A tiny breeze, cool and damp, trickled up from the basement. I glanced down and saw blue light five or six floors down. At first, I wasn’t sure if it was actually there; my eyes were treacherous, swimming with afterimages as they adjusted to the dark. But the light solidified, becoming a line in the distance.
Something underground, I realized. Beneath the building.
I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye and glanced to my left. There was a mass sprouting from the neighboring wall, about five feet down. At first, it wouldn’t register, this thing that I was seeing. I just couldn’t comprehend it. A flesh-colored mound fringed with dark fluff. Then I noticed movement on its surface, a quivering blotch of white.
An eye. A face.
I sucked breath in through my teeth—it got trapped there, in my throat and lungs. I couldn’t move, not for at least half a minute.
What is it?
It wasn’t a body, wasn’t a person. It wasn’t even a head. It was
half
a head, trapped between the walls. A face, bisected. And the eye was trembling, moving in tiny, uncoordinated bursts.
A mirror! I grasped at the possibility. It explained what I was
seeing: my own face—half in the hole, half out—reflected in something down below.
I reached in and ran my hand across my cheek, moving it in front of my teeth, but there was no corresponding movement on the face. The teeth and lips, sheared in two, remained clear, unobstructed.
I felt dizzy, the blood in my head rushing and pounding behind my temples.
No
, I chided myself.
None of that fainting shit!
I scrabbled for my camera, slinging my backpack off my shoulder and digging through it one-handed. I did this blind, keeping my head in the hole. I just couldn’t look away
—I couldn’t
—afraid that if I took my eye off that face, it would disappear. Just some transitory phantom, caught, for a moment, in the fragile juncture between eye and world. I flicked the lens cap off my wide-angle zoom and brought the camera up to my face. The light was horrible here; almost nothing made its way in through the hole. I cranked open the aperture and tried to hold the camera steady. I took a couple of wide-angle shots in the dark, hoping to capture that line of light in the distance, then flicked on the flash. My hands were shaking as I focused on the face. It was male, I saw. Its hair was black …
his
hair was black.
I twisted the lens from wide-angle to telephoto, filling the viewfinder. The camera focused, and I found myself staring at a close-up of that quivering eye.
Then the eye stopped quivering—its brow steepled up.
Suddenly, there was
sense
there, in that eye. And surprise.
I heard a
click
behind my head and realized that the sound that had drawn me here—those sandpaper whispers and horsehair brushes, that crackling record player—had grown louder in the last couple of minutes, while I’d been focused on the face down below. It was behind my head now, between the walls. And there was movement in that sound. It wasn’t getting
louder
, it was getting
nearer
. I braced my hand on the hole’s ragged edge and turned to look.
There were dark shapes in the gap up above. A jumble of moving
limbs—large and tentacled things, just inches away. Something brushed against my cheek—just the barest, lightest touch—and I immediately recoiled, my skin prickling in a wave of gooseflesh.
My hand caught on something at the hole’s edge, and there was a brief burst of fire across my palm. Then I was free, stumbling back. I slipped my camera’s carry strap around my neck and took a half dozen steps back. My legs were weak, and for a moment I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep them beneath my body. The sweat on my cheeks was freezing cold.
And there was movement at the edge of the hole. At first, it was just a tiny blur of black—at one spot along the top of the hole, then, a moment later, at a dozen more, all around its perimeter. Then a black, finger-thick tentacle reached out, waving, snakelike, up toward the wall, touching and repositioning itself, as if trying to find purchase. It was a dark, jointed stub bristling with whisker-thick hair.
I was holding my breath. I thought about the camera hanging against my chest, but I couldn’t break my paralysis, I couldn’t lift my hands and start taking pictures. Not now. I was transfixed by that hole—
consumed
—just standing there on weak, shaking legs, watching as it gave birth to …
whatever
.
To something dark. And bristling. And
wrong
.
Then more of those dark limbs reached out, and a form heaved itself through the hole. Considering its initial, tentative movements, it moved fast, skittering on a bouquet of long limbs.
A spider
, I thought, suddenly flush with relief.
Just a spider!
But it wasn’t a normal spider. At least, it wasn’t like any spider I’d ever seen. It was huge, about the size of a small cat. And its limbs were surprisingly long, out of proportion with its body. It moved in a quick, rhythmic lurch, hauling itself down the wall in drunken uneven spurts. But fast.
And by the time it reached the floor, a half dozen of its ilk had made their way through the opening.
Now that I could see what they were—or at least I could comprehend
their form—I broke my paralysis and grabbed for my camera. I started taking shots, the motor in the lens whirring as I tried to keep focus on the skittering things. I got wide shots of the spiders swarming through the hole—there were dozens now, crowding the wall. I zoomed in on one, filling the frame with a single black spider against the dirty gray carpet. I even got a series of shots of one spider crawling over another; the latter was an undersized specimen, spinning in a circle. There was something strange about the smaller spider, but, caught in its tornado of motion, I couldn’t see what. I lowered the camera from my eye and activated the display, scrolling back to the start of that series.