“No, sir. I spent the day in my apartment. You can talk to Melvin Clayton. He lives in 23. We had dinner about five p.m. or so.”
The phone on the desk rang. Detective Klecko shut off the recorder and listened, then told whoever was on the other end the interview was almost concluded. “Your wife, Wanda. She’s waiting outside. We’ll be done in a minute.”
“Oh, she’s not my wife—”
Detective Klecko started the recorder again. “Continuing interview with Mr. Pershing Dennard…. So, Mr. Dennard, you claim not to have seen Eric Ordbecker on Monday, September 24? When was the last time you did see Eric?”
“I’m not claiming anything. I didn’t see the kid that day. Last time I saw him? I don’t know—two weeks ago, maybe. I was talking to his dad. Let me tell you, you’re questioning the wrong person. Don’t you have the reports we’ve made about weirdoes sneaking around the building? You should be chatting them up. The weirdoes, I mean.”
“Well, let’s not worry about them. Let’s talk about you a bit more, shall we?”
And so it went for another two hours. Finally, the detective killed the recorder and thanked him for his cooperation. He didn’t think there would be any more questions. Wanda met Pershing in the reception area. She wore one of her serious work dresses and no glasses; her eyes were puffy from crying. Wrestling with his irritation at seeing her before he’d prepared his explanations, he hugged her and inhaled the perfume in her hair. He noted how dark the station had become. Illumination came from the vending machines and a reading lamp at the desk sergeant’s post. The sergeant himself was absent.
“Mr. Dennard?” Detective Klecko stood silhouetted in the office doorway, backlit by his flickering computer monitor.
“Yes, Detective?”
What now? Here come the cuffs, I bet.
“Thank you again. Don’t worry yourself over…what we discussed. We’ll take care of everything.” His face was hidden, but his eyes gleamed.
The detective’s words didn’t fully hit Pershing until he’d climbed into Wanda’s car and they were driving to Anthony’s, an expensive restaurant near the marina. She declared a couple of glasses of wine and a fancy lobster dinner were called for. Not to celebrate, but to restore some semblance of order, some measure of normalcy. She seemed equally, if not more, shaken than he was. That she hadn’t summoned the courage to demand where he’d been for three days told him everything about her state of mind.
We’ll take care of everything.
15.
Wanda parked in the side lot of a darkened bank and went to withdraw cash from the ATM. Pershing watched her from the car, keeping an eye out for lurking muggers. The thought of dinner made his stomach tighten. He didn’t feel well. His head ached and chills knotted the muscles along his spine. Exhaustion caused his eyelids to droop.
“Know what I ask myself?” Terry whispered from the vent under the dash. “I ask myself why you never told the cops about the two ‘men’ who took me away. In all these years, you’ve not told the whole truth to anyone.”
Pershing put his hand over his mouth. “Jesus!”
“Don’t weasel.
Answer the question.”
In a gesture he dimly acknowledged as absurd, he almost broke the lever in his haste to close the vent. “Because they didn’t exist,” he said, more to convince himself. “When the search parties got to me, I was half-dead from exposure, ranting and raving. You got lost. You just got lost and we couldn’t find you.” He wiped his eyes and breathed heavily.
“You think your visit with us was unpleasant? It was a gift. Pull yourself together. We kept the bad parts from you, Percy my boy. For now, at least. No sniveling; it’s unbecoming in a man your age.”
Pershing composed himself sufficiently to say, “That kid! What did you bastards do? Are you trying to hang me? Haven’t I suffered enough to please you sickos?”
“Like I said; you don’t know the first thing about suffering. Your little friend Eric does, though.”
Wanda faced the car, folding money into her wallet. A shadow detached from the bushes at the edge of the building. Terry rose behind her, his bone-white hand spread like a catcher’s mitt above her head. His fingers tapered to needles. He grinned evilly at Pershing, and made a shushing gesture. From the vent by some diabolical ventriloquism: “We’ll be around. If you need us. Be good.”
Wanda slung open the door and climbed in. She started the engine and kissed Pershing’s cheek. He scarcely noticed; his attention was riveted upon Terry waving as he melted into the shrubbery.
He didn’t touch a thing at dinner. His nerves were shot—a child cried, a couple bickered with a waiter, and boisterous laughter from a neighboring table set his teeth on edge. The dim lighting was provided by candles in bowls and lamps in sconces. He couldn’t even see his own feet through the shadows when he glanced under the table while Wanda had her head turned. The bottle of wine came in handy. She watched in wordless amazement as he downed several consecutive glasses.
That night his dreams were smooth and black as the void.
16.
The calendar ticked over into October. Elgin proposed a long weekend at his grandfather’s cabin. He’d bring his latest girlfriend, an Evergreen graduate student named Sarah. Mel and Gina, and Pershing and Wanda would round out the expedition. “We all could use a day or two away from the bright lights,” Elgin said. “Drink some booze, play some cards, tell a few tales around the bonfire. It’ll be a hoot.”
Pershing would have happily begged off. He was irritable as a badger. More than ever he wanted to curl into a ball and make his apartment a den, no trespassers allowed. On the other hand, he’d grown twitchier by the day. Shadows spooked him. Being alone spooked him. There’d been no news about the missing child and he constantly waited for the other shoe to drop. The idea of running into Mark Ordbecker gave him acid. He prayed the Ordbeckers had focused their suspicion on the real culprits and would continue to leave him in peace.
Ultimately he consented to the getaway for Wanda’s sake. She’d lit up at the mention of being included on this most sacred of annual events. It made her feel that she’d been accepted as a member of the inner circle.
Late Friday afternoon, the six of them loaded food, extra clothes, and sleeping bags into two cars and headed for the hills. It was an hour’s drive that wound from Olympia through the nearby pastureland of the Waddell Valley toward the Black Hills. Elgin paced them as they climbed a series of gravel and dirt access roads into the high country. Even after all these years, Pershing was impressed by how quickly the trappings of civilization were erased as the forest closed in. Few people came this far—mainly hunters and hikers passing through. Several logging camps were located in the region, but none within earshot.
Elgin’s cabin lay at the end of an overgrown track atop a ridge. Below, the valley spread in a misty gulf. At night, Olympia’s skyline burned orange in the middle distance. No phone, no television, no electricity. Water came from a hand pump. There was an outhouse in the woods behind the cabin. While everyone else unpacked the cars, Pershing and Mel fetched wood from the shed and made a big fire in the pit near the porch, and a second fire in the massive stone hearth inside the cabin. By then it was dark.
Wanda and Gina turned the tables on the men and demonstrated their superior barbequing skills. Everyone ate hot dogs and drank Löwenbräu and avoided gloomy conversation until Sarah commented that Elgin’s cabin would be “a great place to wait out the apocalypse” and received nervous chuckles in response.
Pershing smiled to cover the prickle along the back of his neck. He stared into the night and wondered what kind of apocalypse a kid like Sarah imagined when she used that word. Probably she visualized the polar icecaps melting, or the world as a desert. Pershing’s generation had lived in fear of the Reds, nuclear holocaust, and being invaded by little green men from Mars.
Wind sighed in the trees and sent a swirl of sparks tumbling skyward. He trembled.
I hate the woods. Who thought the day would come?
Star fields twinkled across the millions of light years. He didn’t like the looks of them either. Wanda patted his arm and laid her head against his shoulder while Elgin told an old story about the time he and his college dorm mates replaced the school flag with a pair of giant pink bloomers.
Pershing didn’t find the story amusing this time. The laughter sounded canned and made him consider the artificiality of the entire situation, man’s supposed mastery of nature and darkness. Beyond this feeble bubble of light yawned a chasm. He’d drunk more than his share these past few days; had helped himself to Wanda’s Valium. None of these measures did the trick of allowing him to forget where he’d gone or what he’d seen; it hadn’t convinced him that his worst memories were the products of nightmare. Wanda’s touch repulsed him, confined him. He wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and hide beneath the covers until everything bad went away.
It grew chilly and the bonfire died to coals. The others drifted off to sleep. The cabin had two bedrooms—Elgin claimed one, and as the married couple, Mel and Gina were awarded the second. Pershing and Wanda settled for an air mattress near the fireplace. When the last of the beer was gone, he extricated himself from her and rose to stretch. “I’m going inside,” he said. She smiled and said she’d be along soon. She wanted to watch the stars a bit longer.
Pershing stripped to his boxers and lay on the air mattress. He pulled the blanket to his chin and stared at the rafters. His skin was clammy and it itched fiercely. Sharp, throbbing pains radiated from his knees and shoulders. Tears formed in the corners of his eyes. He remembered the day he’d talked to Mark Ordbecker, the incredible heat, young Eric’s terrified expression as he skulked behind his father. Little pitchers and big ears. The boy heard the voices crooning from below, hadn’t he?
A purple ring of light flickered on the rough-hewn beam directly overhead. It pulsed and blurred with each thud of his heart. The ring shivered like water and changed. His face was damp, but not from tears, not from sweat. He felt his knuckle joints split, the skin and meat popping and peeling like an overripe banana. What had Terry said about eating the young and immortality?
How does our species propagate, you may ask. Cultural assimilation, my friend. We chop out the things that make you lesser life forms weak and then pump you full of love. You’ll be part of the family soon; you’ll understand everything.
A mental switch clicked and he smiled at the memory of creeping into Eric’s room and plucking him from his bed; later, the child’s hands fluttering, nerveless, the approving croaks and cries of his new kin. He shuddered in ecstasy and burst crude seams in a dozen places. He threw off the blanket and stood, swaying, drunk with revelation. His flesh was a chrysalis, leaking gore.
Terry and Gloria watched him from the doorways of the bedrooms—naked and ghostly, and smiling like devils. Behind them, the rooms were silent. He looked at their bodies, contemptuous that anyone could be fooled for two seconds by these distorted forms, or by his own.
Then he was outside under the cold, cold stars.
Wanda huddled in her shawl, wan and small in the firelight. Finally she noticed him, tilting her head so she could meet his eyes. “Sweetie, are you waiting for me?” She gave him a concerned smile. The recent days of worry and doubt had deepened the lines of her brow. “Good Lord—are you naked?”
He regarded her from the shadows, speechless as his mouth filled with blood. He touched his face, probing a moist seam just beneath the hairline; a fissure, a fleshy zipper. Near his elbow, Terry said, “The first time, it’s easier if you just snatch it off.”
Pershing gripped the flap of skin. He swept his hand down and ripped away all the frailties of humanity.
--30--
You know how this is going to end.
—What? He woke, although it was only a slight shift between states of consciousness, an emergence from a lucid dream state. His eyes were already open and focused on a flickering panel. In his ears, rapidly ascending to inaudible decibels, Dracula’s organ music, the wheedling peep of a theremin, now the gentle hiss of air through the vents.
—Yes? she said. She didn’t look up from the exposed circuit board on her lap. She gripped a soldering gun like a real weapon. Her hatred wasn’t fixed upon him at the moment.
—What did you say?
—I didn’t say anything.
—I thought—
—Let’s see. An hour ago I asked for a caliper. Had to get it myself.
—An hour?
She set aside the soldering gun and waved her hand to disperse the coils of rising smoke. —Forty-eight minutes and change. Sorry.
—You are not. He said this under his breath.
—Excuse me?
All six security feeds went dark. He toggled switches, then tapped the nearest screen with his ring, as if
that
made any sense.
—Problem? she said.
—I’ve lost all video.
—Ooo-weee-ooo
, she said in a sinister voice. —Starring Keith David and Jessica Lange:
In a world gone mad, two scientists spend a month in the badlands, haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Past—
—Laugh now. He smacked the screen again. —You’re no Jessica Lange, honey-pie. Me, I’m Sidney Poitier. Except badass.
—Poitier was badass. You’re more like Poitier if he were scary-looking.
Feed One remained down, but the others revived in sequence. Feed Two displayed a keyhole perspective of the southeastern quadrant—a sloping field of short, dry grass and scrub brush wavering in the breeze. Feed Three, a vista of pebbly ground and small boulders, Four through Six, a line of trees. Feed One would’ve revealed the module, their little habitat itself. But the monitor was still dead. It bothered him that Feed One wouldn’t work and he kept flipping the switch. Slow-moving clouds passed over the translucent dome and reflected a diamond pattern of shadows on the control boards, the fabric of his coat sleeves.