“No, stay! Stay!”
So much for spending the night. No way was he doing that now.
“I was just getting ready to pop a frozen pizza in the oven.”
Graham dropped his backpack on the floor and walked across the living room to the adjoining kitchen. Every single cupboard door was open. The floor and counters were strewn with dishes and crap that had been pulled out. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for something.” Alastair jumped to his feet. “You haven’t seen a small tin tea canister, have you? About this size?” He made a shape with his hands.
“Silver?”
“Yes!”
“I think I saw it with some of my dad’s stuff. At the other place.”
His grandfather crossed the room and grabbed him by both shoulders. “If you see it again, stay away from it.” He gave him a small shake. His eyes were bloodshot and glassy. “Understand? Stay away from it.”
“Okay, you know what?” Graham bent his knees and slipped from his grasp. “I can’t do this.” He walked to the door and picked up his backpack. “Go to bed. Go to bed and sleep it off.”
“If you see it, call me. If you see the tin.”
“I’ll do that.”
He left.
Out the door and back in the car.
He made a three-point turn and headed down the hill that took him past the morgue, where Rachel Burton had lived. Parked outside the Victorian mansion was what looked like the same moving truck he’d seen there before. Was Rachel still in town?
He pulled into the back driveway, then ran around the brick path that led to the massive wooden front doors. He rang Rachel’s apartment. The front door buzzed to let him in.
He strode down the dark, carpeted halls, briefly thought about taking the elevator, then decided to sprint up the stairs to her place on the third floor.
She opened the door, and it was immediately obvious she’d been crying. Her eyes were red; her nose was red.
And her stomach.
What the hell?
“You’re having a baby?” The words just came out.
“Didn’t you know?” She turned and shuffled away to grab a box of tissues. “I figured everybody in town knew.”
Holy shit.
He thought back to the last time he’d seen her. She’d been driving the coroner van. Her stomach had been hidden.
He didn’t even know she had a boyfriend. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe this was one of those artificial inseminations. Oh, that was just too bizarre. He felt heat creeping up his face, and he lingered by the door.
“Come on in.”
The apartment was empty except for a red retro table and chairs. In the middle of the table were two dead plants.
“You know what . . . ?” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “I think I should go. . . .”
“Stay a minute.” She blew her nose and tossed the tissue aside. Now he caught sight of a big pile of wadded-up tissues on the floor next to a chair.
“I saw the truck outside. What happened? Aren’t you moving?”
“I can’t get out of here. I have to face it. It’s not going to happen.” She made a useless gesture with her hand. “I can’t leave. Tuonela won’t let me leave.”
He wanted to ask her about the baby, but how did you do something like that? “I have to go.” He backed up. “I’m sorry for disturbing you. I’m glad you aren’t moving. Well, I’m sorry for you, but glad for me. I gotta go.”
He gave a little bounce, spun around, and got the hell out of there. Back in the car he pulled out his cell phone and punched in Kristin Blackmoore’s number.
They hadn’t left for the bar yet.
He caught up with them at the inn, where Kristin made a fake ID for him. It took only minutes to print it out on the inn’s printer and slip it into a used laminate sleeve. He was twenty-one and his name was Kevin Graham.
Pretty sneaky.
The bar was less than a mile away, so they walked. Claire—the person in charge of the shoot— didn’t go. She was working on getting a psychic to come to Tuonela to do a reading on the town. So it was just the four of them—three guys and a girl.
Until that moment, until they were all walking down the sidewalk together talking about nothing, Graham hadn’t realized how lonely he’d been. Especially since Isobel had left. He knew kids at school, but nobody really hung out with him. Kids his age were afraid of him. He was an outsider. One with an unpleasant past.
Maybe that was why he found the idea of spending time with the documentary crew appealing. They were outsiders too. And they didn’t know about him. Not everything.
The fake ID got him inside.
“Told you there was nothing to worry about,” Kristin said. “They don’t care if you’re old enough to drink, as long as you have something that keeps them from getting in trouble.”
He got drunk. Wasted, actually.
Briefly he thought of Alastair, about how truly unattractive a drunk person could be, but he quickly brushed that memory aside. They bought something called Immortal Punch. It came in a giant bowl and knocked them all on their asses.
He couldn’t sing worth shit, but he got up and sang the Pogues song “Dirty Old Town.”
The night grew late, and people began to drift away and return to their homes. Ian and Stewart headed back to the inn. Graham and Kristin stayed until the karaoke machine was unplugged, the beer coolers refilled, and the OPEN light turned off.
They clung to each other.
Under the glow of a full moon, they talked and laughed as they made their way back down the steep sidewalk to Main Street.
Leaves whispered even though there was no breeze, and shadows crept out of sidewalk cracks.
They were so loud and so caught up in their drunkenness that they would never have known if anybody had followed them. They would never have known if something less than human was drawn to the noise, watching and skittering along behind them with a sound that resembled rustling leaves.
They stopped under a street lamp.
“I killed somebody,” Graham announced.
Kristin stared at him. “I died.” She swayed, then held up two fingers. “Twice.”
They burst out laughing and continued down the hill, where the moon was obscured and the shadows were so dark they could no longer see their feet in front of them. Where their steps took them off the edge of the earth.
“Shhhh,” Kristin said when they reached the inn.
She fished a key from her pocket and unlocked the door as if she lived there. Graham was impressed. With great exaggeration, they tiptoed up the stairs to Kristin’s room on the third floor.
Once they were inside with the door closed, Kristin toed off her sneakers and slipped out of her jeans, leaving them in a pile on the floor next to the bed. “You should really come to school in Minneapolis.” She crawled under the covers. Graham peeled off his jeans and followed.
Chapter Nine
A scraping sound pulled Evan from a comatose sleep. He lay in bed, ears alert.
There it was again. Coming from downstairs. Like a bare branch scraping against a window.
He checked the clock by the bed. Two a.m. Normally he waited and waited for darkness. How had he slept so late?
He got up and got dressed.
In Graham’s room he found a neatly made bed and no sign of Graham. He would call Alastair. But at the last moment he thought to go downstairs to check his voice mail and found a message from Graham saying he was staying in Tuonela with his grandfather. Evan relaxed.
The scratching started again. Now that he was closer he could tell it was coming from outside. He followed the sound to the front door.
On his porch he found a stinking, fetid mass of boneless, formless skin with black, opaque pits where the eyes should have been. He put a hand to his nose and pulled back a few inches.
Is this a dream? Have I finally completely lost my mind?
As he watched, the skin turned and tumbled down the porch steps to collapse in a pile on the walk. A minute passed; then it began to move again. A hand reached out, nails digging into the ground. It pulled itself several feet, then repeated the movement.
Evan grabbed the shovel and lantern and followed from a safe distance.
He watched as the skin crawled under the gate, then made its way down the lane toward the heart of Old Tuonela.
Matthew Torrance had been the museum’s custodian for almost twenty years. He liked the job. He liked being by himself. He liked being able to listen to music with headphones on while he cleaned. He liked being able to smoke a joint if he felt like it, or take a nap. Nobody to bug him.
He was single, never married, and was into heavy metal. He read science fiction, and had been to two
Star Trek
conventions back in the early nineties. He’d met a girl there, but after three years he’d decided
Star Trek
wasn’t enough to have in common. He wasn’t even sure he liked girls. Or guys. Or people in general.
He went out on the roof of the museum and lit up.
The sky was clear and the moon was full. And the pot was new and potent as hell.
Damn.
After a few hits he started feeling almost too fucked-up. If there was such a thing. He put out the joint, tucked it into a little plastic film canister, and slipped the canister into his pocket.
Whoa.
Had to sit down. Had to
lie
down.
He sprawled out on his back on the tar-and-pea-gravel roof.
The stars above his head swirled.
He put on his headphones and turned on his iPod. Tunes. The tunes would stabilize him.
He lost track of time.
Maybe he’d been there three minutes or three hours.
He checked the luminescent dial on his watch, but immediately forgot what it said.
Gotta go clean the museum. Gotta go get stuff done.
He shoved himself to his feet and went back inside. Instead of using the stairs, he took the service elevator down to the basement level, where he’d left his supplies.
He dug out his insulated lunch bag and began eating everything in it.
Maybe if he ate enough he’d come down.
Pretty soon his chicken sandwich was gone. The chips were gone. His diet soda was gone, along with a giant peanut-butter cookie he’d picked up at the gas station near his house. Now he was stuffed, stoned, but still thinking about food.
Something chocolate would be nice. . . .
He pulled out his duty list.
Buff the floors.
Shit.
He didn’t feel like doing that. It was hard enough when he was straight. The buffer had a mind of its own, and sometimes it got away from him. He’d do it tomorrow. Maybe he’d just drag the dry mop across the floors tonight.
That’s what he did.
And became absorbed in the rhythmic pattern of the red mop sliding across the maple floor, the contrast of deep red against the pale wood, the way the handle’s shadow shifted from right to left as he swept, stark and sharp.
The shadow vanished.
Had a bulb gone out? Then he realized something was blocking the light. His own body?
With mop handle in hand, he shifted slightly.
Nothing changed.
Something wrong.
Something very wrong.
And yet he didn’t want to turn and look behind him. If somebody was back there he didn’t want him to know he was onto him.
He casually shut off his iPod. Then
sweep, sweep, sweep.
Turn and look.
Nothing.
Nobody.
He swung back around. Something still blocked the light.
He wanted to run. He wanted to get the hell out of there. Instead, he forced himself to walk around.
He checked the restrooms. He checked the storage closet. The last place he looked was the new room.
He let out a gasp and dropped the mop. He took two steps back, his mouth hanging open.
Son of a bitch.
Gloria Raymond woke up, tossed back the covers, and got out of bed. Without putting on shoes or a coat, without pulling up her hair or even covering it with a hat, she walked out the front door, then down the sidewalk to the center of the street.
A mile took her through the park and through vacant lots and woodland, across railroads tracks and broken glass. Feeling no pain, her feet cut and bleeding enough to leave footprints, she walked to the levee and climbed the chain-link fence that had been put up last year when a three-year-old had drowned. Her pink cotton nightgown snagged and ripped as she dropped to the other side.
Even though she would be seventy-five next month, she jumped nimbly to the bobbing dock and walked to the end that jutted out into the Wisconsin River.
The moon reflected off the surface.
A full moon, round like a face. The water rippled, creating a pretty, repeating design that was mesmerizing.
Under the surface of the water Gloria saw her husband smiling up at her, his eyes wide open. He reached for her hand, and she reached back. . . .
Evan followed the skin to Old Tuonela, where crumbling buildings had been reclaimed by nature. The skin collapsed in a dark corner near a stone wall.
Evan finally understood.
He jabbed the shovel in the ground and began digging.
Rachel couldn’t sleep.
She kept dreaming that someone was in her apartment. She would awaken with a jolt, lie there and listen to the ticking clock, then go back to sleep, only to have it happen again. The dream itself was so real that even after waking up she felt a presence and imagined the sound of breathing coming from nearby.
Earlier in the day the mayor had sent a crew over to unload the moving truck. Within an hour of their arrival her apartment was almost back to the way it had been before she’d tried to get the hell out of Dodge. They’d even put the dishes in the cupboard and returned books to the bookshelves. Boxes that had taken her weeks to pack were unpacked, broken down, and waiting to be picked up by Recycling.
Erase and rewind.
Part of her was shocked that she’d given in so easily. That same part wanted to call a cab and head for the nearest airport, get on a plane, and that would be that. Job done. Because once she had some physical distance between herself and Tuonela, the pull wouldn’t be as strong. She knew that from experience. Close proximity brought about confusion and mental chaos.