Eleven

Dust and dark had worked themselves into the interior of the Feinstein place, casting a filmy tint over everything that made Dave think of hazy nightmare places, half remembered. The living room, as he recollected, lay off to the left. The dining room and hall closet lay to the right. Ahead, at the end of the hall, another door faced them. Dave assumed it was the study where Feinstein had filmed his videotape.

Immediately before them, the staircase stretched upward into gloom.

“Davey. . . .” He remembered a throaty laugh and a metallic chatter echoing down from the top of those stairs. He cleared the discomfort that caught in his throat and turned to the others.

“How should we do this?” he asked. In spite of his best effort otherwise, his voice still carried in the utter stillness.

“I think we should stick together.” Cheryl rested a protective hand on Sean’s shoulder.

“Hell yeah,” Erik replied. “Screw that splitting-up sh—” He caught himself, in front of the boy. “Stuff. Safety in numbers, man.”

“Works for me.” Dave moved forward. “Should we try upstairs first? Sean, you said you saw it upstairs, right?”

Sean nodded. “In Mr. Feinstein’s room.”

They moved as one group toward the stairs, then followed Dave single file, with Erik bringing up the rear. Dave clicked on the flashlight with reluctance, sure the beam of light would shatter any hope for an element of surprise.

That ship sailed long before you walked into this place, the voice inside told him. It knows you’re here. He gave a little wave of the flashlight beam. Nothing much but a pale wall and a turn at the top, as well as a closed door to the left.

At the landing, Dave moved forward and said, “Okay, folks, stick together. We ought to be ready for anything.”

When no one answered, he turned around.

He was alone in the hallway.

At the top of the stairs, Cheryl, holding on to Sean’s shoulder, saw Dave move forward. She heard him say, “Okay, folks, stick together,” before there came a faint chattering in her ear like teeth on a cold day, and the flashlight snapped off.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she realized Dave wasn’t in front of her anymore. She turned on her own flashlight, splashing the upstairs hallway in radical, panicked arcs. There was no sign of him.

“Cheryl, what happened to Dave?” Sean pulled back against her, his baseball bat tight to his chest.

“I don’t know, sweetie. Dave? Where did you go? Dave?” She fought to keep her voice from cracking. Holding on to Sean, she took a few steps toward the nearest door, to their left. It was open slightly. Had it been before?

Cheryl hesitated at the door, her hand hovering above the knob. “Dave, are you in there? Erik, I think we lost—”

She turned and stopped midsentence. Erik was gone, too.

“Maybe they went into one of the rooms,” Sean offered. He didn’t sound like he believed it, though. He sounded like he was quite sure a gaping maw in the wall disguised as a door had opened up and swallowed them whole. Cheryl considered it a possibility.

She turned back to the door. She thought she heard someone call her name from inside, soft and urgent. “Come on. Let’s check this one out. I think I heard one of them.”

Erik heard Cheryl call Dave’s name. He saw a brief arc of light followed by darkness, and thought he saw movement down the hall. He turned at the top of the stairs to follow them, and flipped on his flashlight. A small hall table stood outside one of the doors, an unplugged phone curled up like a sleeping cat on top of it. A linen closet door stood partially open beyond that. But he saw no sign of Cheryl, Dave, or the boy.

“Uh, guys? Cheryl? Dave, where the hell are you?”

Erik snorted. So much for sticking together. He moved past the linen closet. The door creaked open and he jumped as towels fell with a muted thump to the floor at his feet. He chuckled, turning down the flashlight on them.

They were crusty, stained with something that might have been blood. The chuckle died in his throat.

Erik moved forward again, the hand clutching the crowbar tightening into a fist. The door at the far end of the hall stood wide open, but movement from within drew his attention. Someone’s shadow. Someone just out of his line of view.

“Dave?” He knew in his gut that it wasn’t. The voice that answered him confirmed it.

“Erik? Is that you? C’mere, you little shit. Where the fuck you been all this time?” A belch followed that made his heart skitter. Hot liquid panic seared through his chest.

No. No, no, nononono. One, two, three, four, can’t be. No way in hell. Can’t be. Five, six, seven, the dead don’t come back. . . .

Erik tucked first the flashlight, then the crowbar under one arm while he wiped the sweat off his palms. It wasn’t him, couldn’t frigging possibly be him, but Erik moved forward anyway, toward that awful stale-beer-and-smokes smell, that sweaty heat from the underarms of the black T-shirt, the rough elbows and the three-day stubble and the massive arms that had always seemed so, so intimidating and so inescapably strong.

His father sat in a beat-up pea-green easy chair, the only piece of furniture in the room besides a tiny television, which cast a spectral blue-gray glow across his wind-burned features. Gray hair bristled off his head. The dead Confederate soldier tattoo sized him up, its dead horse rearing over the movement of his father’s biceps.

At his bare feet sat a case of Michelob, overturned bottles the fallen soldiers of his evening’s marauding. He’d won so many battles before finally losing that particular war.

The laugh track from the sitcom on the television made Erik flinch. He felt six years old again, busted for something that might or might not have been his fault. He eyed his father’s belt, half smothered by the large stomach, with unease.

“You and those lowlifes out joyriding again?” his father asked without looking up from the TV. Sixteen, then, and not six. Little between him and his father had changed in those years between, except the belt had been replaced by the convenience of fists, or whatever else lay within handy arm’s reach.

“No, sir,” he mumbled, and wished he could sink into the floor.

Or . . . better yet, that he could be high. The old man was so much easier to tune out then.

“So, where you been? Out with that Kohlar boy? Or that little slut, what’s her name—Duffy? You been hanging out with them, have ya?” Without taking his eyes off the screen, his father reached down between his legs and pulled out another beer. “Or maybe you’ve been out getting high, is that it?”

Erik swallowed several times and shook his head no, more to keep the world in focus than in answer to the question.

His father finally looked up. “Look, I know you stole money from me. Don’t bother denying it, you little shit. The money’s gone, and you took it. Either spent it on that bitch, or on drugs. Either way, I’m gonna take it out of that scrawny little frame you call a body if you don’t cough it up right now.”

“I don’t have it,” Erik whispered. He closed his eyes. He’d paid his dues to the man. He was done answering to him. Had given that up when the old man died.

“You’re lying. I don’t like liars, Erik.” His father had a way of saying things sometimes where the tone suggested more threat than any words he actually used. What his father liked and didn’t like had always simply been a precursor to something more destructive. Sometimes he beat him up. Other times—and Erik often felt that these “life lessons,” as his father called them, were worse—he scared the hell out of him. Simply drove any sense of security Erik had away not by the act, but the threat of it—the implication of a violence that wouldn’t stop with a couple of punches to the stomach or a well-timed kidney shot. A camping trip turned hunting trip. Countless fixer-upper experiences with power tools. Driving lessons.

It occurred to Erik that, much like the Hollower, his father hadn’t ever touched him during those life lessons. He hadn’t needed to.

“You can’t hurt me.” Weak-sounding words leaked out of Erik, but in that moment, he felt that they could be true. He meant them in every sense. It couldn’t touch him, this thing pretending to be his father. Not physically, and not inside his head. Not anymore. He wouldn’t let it happen.

“Like hell I can’t!” His old man set the bottle down on the floor next to the chair. “I’ll bust your teeth down your throat. I’m not too old for that, and neither are you, asshole.”

“You’re not real.”

He heard the sounds of his father fumbling with his belt. “I’ll show you how real I am.” The leather cracked and he flinched, squeezing his eyes shut.

“You’re not real,” he whispered again, and when he opened his eyes, his father was staring at him nose to nose, the belt stretched between both meaty hands, his breath layers of stale beer and the ferment of pizza garlic.

Erik swore in the intake of breath but couldn’t move. His father raised the belt over his head.

“You can’t touch me.” He clutched the crowbar. “But I’d sure as hell like to see you try.”

“Yes, I can,” the Hollower’s multivoice answered from the father-thing. “In the places that really hurt.”

Erik heard chuckling and a chattery sound from behind him. He turned, and the whole room changed. He was in his bedroom now, the one he shared with Casey. He blinked, disoriented. Was he home?

He saw the blood on the bed.

Creeping closer, he also saw a picture of Casey propped in the center of the bloody sheets. He remembered taking it at a picnic three or four years before. She wore a white tank top and the way the sun lit her skin and hair, she glowed. He loved that picture of her.

The glass holding it in was cracked, and the eyes and mouth had been scratched away by something sharp. A thin smear of blood streaked across her neck.

That same multivoice said over his shoulder, “While you’re here, I’ll be there, hurting her.”

Erik turned again and bolted for the door. He emerged into another familiar room. Another bedroom, he remembered. His picture of Casey was tacked to one of the sparse white walls above a bed made up with pale green sheets. The room held the faint odor of stale sweat, different than his father’s—cleaner, but tangy with frustration and strung-out nerves. He remembered the window behind his bed, reinforced with metal—no jumpers here, no, sir—and the scuffed tiled floor beneath his feet. He remembered it all, every detail he’d focused on as he counted his way through withdrawal. He’d both loathed and loved that tiny rehab room.

He moved toward the door. There had been one particularly bad night when he’d pounded on it, half on the verge of tears, begging them to just let him go already, while his roommate lay curled up against the wall on his own bed.

Erik pounded the door with his fist, tried the knob, and found it locked. “Shit. I swear, you son of a bitch, if you hurt her—”

He stopped when he heard the other bed behind him creak. He wasn’t alone in the room.

Dave headed down the hallway, figuring maybe Sean had led them to Max Feinstein’s bedroom. How they had gotten ahead of him, he could only hazard a guess. Beneath the gear-turning in his mind, though, he suspected he was alone precisely because the Hollower wanted him to be an easier target.

But to think that way would start a train of defeatist thought in his mind about the Hollower’s abilities against his own, and he wasn’t quite ready to give up yet. Wherever the others were, he hoped they were together, and safe. If he could draw the bastard’s attention away from them by crashing the Hollower’s new stomping ground alone, so be it.

A small table lay on its side on the floor. Next to it, the receiver of an unplugged phone rocked gently, its cord wiggling slightly with the movement. He had a strange compulsion to plug it back into the wall, jack and all, and when he did, he thought he heard muffled sound from the earpiece. He crouched and when he touched the phone, it stopped rocking. He brought the receiver to his ear and heard the shuddery breath of someone crying.

“Sally?”

“I—I used the towels. They’re ruined. I used them to s-soak up the blood. There w-was s-s-so much. It sh-showed me blood.”

“Sally, where are you?”

There was a click, and the receiver went dead in his hand. He dropped the phone and stood up. The door behind the fallen table was open now—wide open—and he could see a king-sized bed. An amorphous stain darkened the wall above the headboard.

Max Feinstein’s room.

He stepped inside.

The room at the top of the stairs drew drafty breath in and out through unseen cracks in the walls. The dry flowered paper of its lungs, peeling away from the Sheetrock in some places, wavered in the slight breeze. Scuffs on the hardwood floor suggested that heavy pieces once furnished the room—a bed and dresser, maybe—but they had evidently since been moved. The vacancy of the room appeared out of place to Cheryl, as if, without life to sustain it, the house were falling to uneven decay.

She rubbed her arms. “Cold in here.”

“What do you think happened to the others?” Sean gazed around the empty room, bat clutched to his chest.

“Don’t know, sweetie.” Seeing his expression, she added, “I’m sure they’re fine, though. Those two can handle themselves. They’re fine.”

Sean didn’t answer. His gaze was fixed on the closet door, which stood open a crack.

“Sean?”

“I don’t think that door was open when we came in,” he murmured.

Cheryl crossed the empty room and took his hand. She knew the Hollower better than to offer the empty reassurance that it was just a closet, or that one of the drafts had urged the door open. Instead, she led Sean to the door and with the nose of the nail gun, nudged it open farther.

Before them, a long, smooth concrete tunnel lay twenty feet or so ahead, then branched sharply to the left and dissolved into darkness over what should have been the exterior of the side of the house. The tunnel went behind and through walls, taking up space that should have been wood and packed fiberglass and metal and electrical wires. It was round—a throat, an intestine, a soft vaginal place deep in the house that accepted bad things and expelled monstrosities in return. She tried to shake off those thoughts, heavy as they were with a cloying sense of sex and death, and found it hard to disconnect those associations.

“It might be a way back to the others,” Sean said.

“Maybe,” Cheryl said, giving his hand a light squeeze. “Or farther away from them. This is all wrong. It shouldn’t be here—can’t exist here, not the way this house is built. I don’t think we should go down this way. I think we should go back out into the hallway and try to find them in another room.”

Sean considered this for a moment, then nodded in agreement.

Cheryl closed the door to what should have been a closet and crossed back to the door through which they’d first entered. It was closed now. She wasn’t all that surprised, she supposed. But it did startle her when she found the door locked—not the fact of it being locked, so much as the realization that they’d have to find another way.

Through the tunnel.

She looked back at Sean. His face was pale. A lock of hair stuck to the dewy sweat on his little forehead.

Cheryl crossed back and opened the closet door. “Hold my hand,” she said. “And whatever you do, don’t let go.”

“Believe me,” he answered, “I won’t.”

Cheryl stepped through and immediately felt movement beneath her feet. Inside the concrete, it reeked less of claustrophobic sexuality, but that idea was replaced by a recollection of one of those funhouse tubes that rotated while people tried to walk through to the other side. It made her feel a little sick.

The tunnel seemed to bend to her perception then; the concrete turned slowly by the frayed edge of the shadows, and Cheryl’s stomach turned with it in a seasick lurch. “Sean?”

“I’m right behind you,” Sean said. If he had noticed the motion of the tunnel, he didn’t mention it, but his shuddery breath made his voice tremble. A pause, then, “Are you scared?”

“Yes. You?”

“Yes.”

“We can do this,” she told him.

They plunged forward into the darkness.

When DeMarco pulled up in front of the Feinstein place on River Falls Road, the first thing she noticed was a car. Not Bennie’s car, she realized with a twinge of panic. The plate number sounded familiar—Kohlar’s? She tried to run it but she couldn’t get anything to come up on the computer.

DeMarco frowned. There wasn’t any good reason she could think of why the computer wouldn’t work, but it kept blinking a prompt at her, patiently waiting for her to understand that she was alone out there.

She glanced at the car again. It was possible that Mrs. Feinstein, the widow, had returned to clean up or maybe go through some of her husband’s old things. At this hour, though, DeMarco didn’t think so. Cop hunch, May would have called it.

As she got out of the car, DeMarco felt for her gun in its holster. Cool metal beneath her fingertips steadied her a little. She surveyed the neighborhood. It was awfully quiet for evening. No one outside dragging the garbage cans to the curbs, no one tidying up the front yard or coming home from work. Come to think of it, it was awfully dark, too. How long had it taken her to get there?

A terrible idea struck her—what if she had been in that shadowed spot on the road for longer than she thought? What if it hadn’t swallowed up just space and the cops who occupied it, but time, too? Or what if it hadn’t really been the guys who’d been swallowed up and excreted into some overdark, overquiet alternate version of River Falls Road—

She closed her eyes and opened them. DeMarco had never been given over to wild flights of fancy, and couldn’t fathom why such an idea might possess her now, except that (“for Chrissakes, Detective, he didn’t have a face”) nothing about the case was normal or right. The whole situation had a fantastic quality to it. At the precinct, under the fluorescent lighting, the facts of her case files made her think of jigsaw pieces laid out on a table—pieces meant to fit eventually, tight and snug and proper. But out here, the house and the faceless maniac that maybe waited inside were ominiscent and menacing in the suburban night. It was almost as if she could hear its secrets through the walls.

“I used the towels. They’re ruined. I used them to s-soak up the blood.”

DeMarco drew her gun and moved forward toward the steps. From inside, she thought she heard crying.

Erik turned and winced. Immediately, he felt sick. The figure on the bed lay curled in the fetal position, its face to the wall. The bony back, each vertebra outlined by the thin graying T-shirt, shook as the figure cried. It wore a grungy New York Yankees cap turned backward. Erik could smell the sour tang of hair oils and dry-mouth and nights sweating out the tension from muscle pain.

The figure’s scrawny arms covered its face so Erik couldn’t see. That didn’t matter. Erik had seen pictures of himself from back when he was getting high. He remembered well enough that he’d looked like hell.

And it was that version of him that lay on the bed.

He fought the gorge rising in his throat.

“Uh . . . ah, hello?”

The Erik-thing didn’t answer. Erik reached for its shoulder, hesitated, moved in again. He jumped when the figure bolted upright and turned around.

It had his face—most of it. The eyes and mouth looked swollen and sealed with crusted blood. Where the nose should have been, there was blackness, and issuing from the hole with each convulsion of the body, white powder tufted into the air.

He could smell the cocaine, and he wanted it. He knew that the only thing keeping him from shaking the thing-version of himself for its snowfall of head-coke was the simple revulsion at the thought of actually touching it. He wasn’t sure, though, how long revulsion would serve as a deterrent.

I could do it.

An ugly thought, but he felt no real guilt. No one around to care, no one able to get to him in this weird alternate version of the Feinstein house, even if someone did want to help. He could get high in peace, in private, and no one would have to know. A little coke to clear his head. He’d be stronger, faster, sharper. He wanted that.

He closed his eyes and saw Casey’s face behind his eyelids. When he opened them, his alternate self was gone. The night table between the beds had been cleared for neat, long lines of white laid out in soft rows.

Everything would be better. Even dying high would be better than dying in a place he wasn’t even sure was really there, with no one but that bitch sobriety to see him through at the end.

He thought of Casey again, and the way she felt in his arms, and of Dave and Cheryl. Of the kid, Sean, who looked terrified and small with his baseball bat. But mostly, he thought of Casey, and the Hollower’s threat to go after her.

Erik sat down on the edge of the bed where he could remember lying night after night, staring up at the ceiling and counting. He leaned in close to the night table, so close that he could stick out the tip of his tongue and taste the coke if he chose. So close. So close.

He inhaled a slow, deep breath, careful not to disturb the lines, then blew all the cocaine off the surface.

Somewhere above and beyond the ceiling, he heard a frustrated wail, and he smiled in spite of the lump in his throat.

Behind him, he heard a click and the familiar rusty squeak of his door opening. He got up and crossed to the doorway. Beyond it, a dimly lit stairwell, whose walls looked damp and almost shiny, led down to a door. Erik took a deep breath and headed down.

Cheryl held Sean’s hand tightly as they moved through the tunnel. She had no idea how far ahead the tunnel went, or if it had an end at all. To her left, close to her ear, she heard steady dripping like water (blood) in a cave. She couldn’t see much beyond irregular outlines that seemed to melt when she got close to them.

The tunnel had a dank, chemical smell, metallic in her throat. She became aware of the sudden absence of the dripping, and stopped to glance back. Cheryl hadn’t heard the door behind them close and wasn’t completely sure it had, but the dark stretched its legs out behind them, the empty room from which they’d come now lost.

Cheryl reached out in front of her with the nail gun. A flash of purple from below drew her attention. The floor had fallen away from a platform on which they now stood. Far beneath it, blackness swirled in blackness, drawing thin streams of red downward like a drain. Cheryl cried out, momentarily unsteady on the platform, and Sean squeezed her hand. She could feel its heat, the sweat of his palm, even the light, quick beat of his pulse in his wrist.

“Don’t look down,” he whispered. Cheryl nodded, even though she doubted he could see, and fixed her attention ahead of her. Reaching out the hand with the nail gun again, she inched forward.

The muzzle of the nail gun eventually brushed with something hard and she exhaled a surprised “Oh!” and accidentally discharged a nail with a small, sharp bang. She felt ahead and determined it to be a length of rough wood. Further search yielded a cold metal knob. She turned it and stepped into a closet. Sean packed in after her. A lightbulb like a bulging eye gazed down at them from the low ceiling, its rusty chain grazing her shoulder. A brass bar ran across the length of the closet about level with her neck, and musty, ragged clothes hung on old wooden hangers. The clothes retained the bulk of breathing chests and strong muscles. They hung tense with that careful, calculated stillness that masks and dolls seem to possess. She could imagine one of those moth-eaten sleeves reaching up and knotting tightly around her neck.

She felt between them, shivering as their fabrics brushed her arms, for a door on the other side. There was nothing there, nor to either side. She looked up. No trapdoor to the attic, either. She gave the back wall a solid kick and swore under her breath.

A sleeve reached up to touch her back, and she jumped.

“Just me,” Sean said with an apologetic grin. “Are you okay?”

No. No, no, no, she thought. It couldn’t be a dead end, not after all that. If they were in some goddamned maze between worlds, she was pretty sure that they would never manage to find their way back to the empty room. But she’d be damned if she would let them suffocate in some tiny closet quite literally in the middle of nowhere.

“Hm-mm.” She couldn’t bring herself to say yes.

“Now what?” Sean asked, breathless.

She choked on the disappointment. “I guess that wasn’t the way out. We’ll have to go back.”

“I can’t.” His voice was hoarse. “I can’t do it again, Cheryl.”

She grasped the knob. “We have to, sweetie. We can’t stay in this—”

She opened the door and stepped out into a hallway she didn’t recognize. Not the upstairs hallway, but someplace else.

Cheryl turned to Sean, who stood inside the closet doorway. “Well, at least we don’t have to—”

The bulb winked out inside the closet. The door creaked once and swept inward to close Sean off from her. She thought fast and reacted faster, thrusting an arm in the doorway. She cried out from the impact of wood on her forearm, and squeezed her eyes shut as sharp pain ran up to her armpit. But she felt his shirt, his shoulder. She had him.

“Sean?” she said through gritted teeth. She felt his hand on her own.

“I’m here, but something’s in here with me. Please get me out of here. Oh . . . oh God.” He sounded very close to tears. She tried using her foot and shoulder to widen the opening, but the door wouldn’t move.

“Please, Cheryl!” Sean’s voice cracked on the other side of the door.

“I gotcha, don’t worry.” She clenched his shirt tighter and the pain in her forearm grew hot and bright behind her eyes. She tucked the nail gun between her knees and worked her good arm into the opening, then threw her weight against the door. It resisted her attempt, but budged enough to let Cheryl pull the boy through. The door slammed shut behind him.

He hugged her, and for several moments, she just held him. She didn’t ask what he saw and he didn’t tell her. She just hugged him and after a moment, she thought she heard little sobs, muffled by her clothes.

It felt nice, to be needed. To be the comforting one. The brave one.

When he pulled away, she saw his eyes were red, but he rubbed them with the heel of his hand before she could see tears.

“Where are we now?” He cast a suspicious glance around the hallway.

“I don’t know. Looks like some kind of hospital.”

“That can’t be good.”

“Probably not.” Behind them, to the right, were a couple of closed doors, painted a pale eggshell color. Off to the left was an empty nurses’ station, and beyond that, the door to the fire stairs. The entire hallway was dusted in white powder. It reminded Cheryl of snow.

She noticed a small plaque outside the door through which they’d just come. It read kohlar, sally in neat black lettering. Her grip around the nail gun tightened. Not good at all.

“Do you hear that?” Sean frowned, hugging the bat close to him.

“Hear what?” She strained but heard nothing.

“That,” he whispered, his eyes wide, and then she heard it, too. A scrabbling sound, like a thousand tiny legs skittering over the hard floor. And the groan of wood under pressure.

From beneath the door at the far end of the hallway, black blood oozed onto the tiles, sending up puffs of white dust. At least, at first, that’s what Cheryl saw. But then large individual drops of black began moving on their own. They caught the fluorescent lighting and shined.

Sean’s bat fell to his side. “Oh God.”

They poured into the hallway in an inky wave, kicking up a whitecap as they surged forward. Their contact with the powder increased the metallic smell, making it sharp in Cheryl’s throat. Some drops jumped up onto the front of the nurses’ station desk, leaving smoking furrows as they skittered along its length.

“Let’s go,” Cheryl said, but Sean stood transfixed to the floor, his horrified face taking it all in. “Now, Sean!” She tugged on his shirt and dragged him toward the fire stairs and pounced on the handle.

It wouldn’t move. Inside her head, Cheryl screamed.

How could it be locked? She threw her good shoulder into it, trying to force open the door. No luck. Her gaze darted to the nurses’ station. Was there a key, maybe? A security button?

Sean held the bat out in front of him, ready to swipe through the first wave of attack. She grabbed his arm and led him over to the nurses’ station. On the desk was a box with a series of buttons, but nothing marked security. There was one marked fire alarm. She jabbed it.

A splintering sound like an ambulance siren filled the hallway with noise. The sprinklers turned on and snowed more powder down on top of them. The wave of black hesitated. The white piled up fast, burying the drops beneath it. Cheryl grabbed Sean and lunged back toward the fire door.

A long wail rose above the siren. She had made it angry. She wasn’t sure where the thought had come from—it wasn’t hers, really—but she knew it to be true.

The piles of white rustled from beneath. The drops were burrowing their way out again. She turned the handle and slammed herself into the door. It swung open and she and Sean spilled out onto the stairs. They raced down, two at a time to the landing, then down farther to the bottom. Only then did they stop and listen.

The stairwell echoed with their ragged breathing, but they were alone.

Sean offered her a grateful smile. They both turned to the door at the bottom of the stairs.

DeMarco opened the front door and stepped into the police station.

“What the . . . ?” She blinked, but there it was. Most of the other desks, even the night-shifters’ desks, were unoccupied, their phones quiet, their desk lamps turned off for the night. The captain’s door stood closed, the light off. Hers was on, though. So was Bennie’s, and Joe Rubelli’s. But she appeared to be alone in the room. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

“Hello? Anybody here?” No one answered.

Gun drawn, she crossed the room to her own desk. Everything on it appeared to be in order. She opened the top drawer. Extra paper clips, a granola bar, and some rubber bands, all as they should be. But this wasn’t the police station. It couldn’t be. What had happened to Feinstein’s house?

She picked through the contents on top of her desk. Her case files lay stacked neatly in one corner, along with her morning coffee mug, her legal pad, telephone, computer . . .

The computer was on. She was sure she’d logged out and shut it off before she’d left.

An open writing document filled the screen. In a large black font that took up most of the page, someone had typed:

LOOK
BEHIND
YOU

She clicked the safety off her gun and turned slowly.

At Rubelli’s desk, a body lay slumped over. Another at Bennie’s, too. She recognized them from their builds, even hunched over, and swallowed the tightness in her throat.

Not Bennie. Please, not Bennie.

“Guys?” She moved toward Bennie’s desk. A quick sweep of the room again told her no one else was there.

“Bennie? She looked down on him. From this close, she could see a couple of drops of blood already dried brown on his desk blotter.

“No, but I could be.” The body sat up—jerked, DeMarco thought, like a puppet on a string—and tilted its head up at her.

She uttered a small cry and pointed her gun at it, backing away.

It had no mouth. No eyes or nose, either, but she suspected it could see and smell her as well as it had been able to talk, as if facial features were window dressings, and not actual conveyances for the senses. It did have a bullet hole, though—right where its forehead should have been. The skin around the small hole was stippled with gun powder. DeMarco felt a sharp pinprick in her chest.

No exit wound. There’s no exit wound. There should be—

She clung to this thought, because underlying it was a more important one: this thing hadn’t thought to form an exit hole in the back of its head because it hadn’t copied a bullet wound from a real-life model. Which meant maybe Bennie Mendez was alive and kicking somewhere.

It seemed to hear her thoughts, and as if in defiance, blood dribbled out of the bullet hole and down the length of its face.

Behind it, at the other desk not too far away, the Rubelli-thing’s body jerked upward. Scorch marks in the pasty flesh indicated where eyes would have been. It had a bullet hole in its chest. A crimson halo stained the front of its shirt and part of its tie.

“We found you,” the Rubelli thing said. The sound came from the burn holes.

“Who are you?” DeMarco saw the Bennie-thing push its chair out from the corner of her eye, and she leveled the gun at its head.

“Don’t you know?” It bled a little more from its bullet hole as it spoke. Its voice—Bennie’s voice—sounded close to her ear, over her shoulder.

“I know who you aren’t,” she said.

When the Bennie-thing rose, she fired at its head. The bullet never made contact, though, because the thing dissolved into a pile of white powder on the chair. The bullet lodged itself in the wall behind the desk.

She turned and found the other one had closed half the distance between them. Each step pumped fresh blood through the bullet wound in the chest, too. The front of it shone in the dim light.

She fired at it and before the bullet could reach it, it snowed into a pile on the floor.

DeMarco ran a hand over her eyes and found them wet. Pull it together, An. She crossed the room, sidestepping the pile of dust on the floor, and opened the door to the waiting area—

—and found herself in Feinstein’s basement, standing at the bottom of the stairs.

She assumed, at any rate, that it was the basement. Wiring hard-stapled to wooden beams ran across the ceiling. The washer and drier stood in one corner, and the casing of the water heater and the furnace stood in another. The floor beneath her feet crackled when she took a step, and she looked down. A sticky crimson stained the concrete.

The furnace belched and she jumped. The after-echo sounded like a word. . . .

And then she heard soft crying, like a child’s, from somewhere farther in the basement. Ahead of her, the room took a ninety-degree turn to the right. She moved forward, the gun guiding her way, listening for the source of the crying. At the bend, it occurred to her there was something broken-record-like about the sound, its dips and swells following a pattern. She thought she even heard the muffled clip of a record skipping in its groove.

She kept going anyway. In the basement acoustics, her ears could deceive her. And besides, a record player still needed someone to turn it on.

The remainder of the basement around the bend proved a shorter distance. It ended in a door. She approached it with caution, weary now of doors and what could lay beyond them in the confines of the Feinstein house.

A sob broke out from under the door, and dissolved into whimpering and sniffles.

She leaned an ear closer. “Hello? Anyone in there? Hello?”

“Help me,” a woman’s voice said.

DeMarco tried the door but it was locked. “I can’t get in. Are you hurt? Can you unlock the door?”

“It’s unlocked,” the voice replied.

“Well, then it might be stuck because I can’t—” She turned the knob and the door eased open.

She stepped into a small storage room. Stacked boxes marked HOLIDAY DECORATIONS and WINTER COATS and GLADYS walled the room in on three sides. DeMarco felt for a switch and flipped the light on. In the middle of the room, sitting on the floor with her legs tucked under her, was a frail blond woman. She hugged herself tightly with bony arms. Tears cupped in the skin beneath her eyes spilled over onto her cheeks.

She looked familiar—a photo from the missing persons case file.

“Ms. Kohlar? Everything’s okay, ma’am. I’m a police officer. I’m going to get you out of here.” She flipped the safety of the gun back on and put it in its holster. “Everything will be okay.”

Sally Kohlar shook her head. “No, it won’t. It’s sensed you. Now it can find you like it finds us.”