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  “So I asked him what he meant by that, and, Steve, he laid this crazy trip down on us again, about how the woods and the lake were packed with monsters that ate people. He talked about a whole town being cursed and people being poisoned. He said even the fog—he called it something else, and explained to us that it reminded him of a shredded stomach lining—that even the fog had secrets, and that those secrets had gotten into his little girl and eaten her from the inside out and made her a monster, too. He said that was what the raw meat was for, because ‘they, the secrets inside her’ liked it.”

  Mendez leaned back in his chair, the conspiratorial air between them not quite broken. From the look on his face, he seemed to need space between him and the memory to detach, to distance himself. “Jenks told me later that afternoon, when we’d gone back out on patrol, that once, in a grief-driven raving moment, he’d heard a scientist from around the same parts rant about alien creatures as big as whole places, and a language between them and other beings between worlds that was written only in three-dimensional symbols, that the ‘letters’ themselves actually had three dimensions, and their sound was something like the wind and everything it blows through. And I asked him then, like you asked me now, what went into the report if it ever turned out that these crazies knew what they were talking about. And he said that almost anything crazy could be made to sound sane, depending on how you spin it. It was all about spin. Nothing wrong with quoting lunatic rants verbatim, if it was all just a rant. But if there was ever any truth to it, you went with the spin, John-Hancocked the bottom, and closed the case.”

  Mendez searched Steve’s face, shook his head, muttered something in Spanish, and then said, “Let it go. You don’t have to spin or sign nothing if you don’t take those old cases on.”

  “Did that old man ever find his little granddaughter?”

  “No. Avery told me the search ran dead cold when they found out where the little girl disappeared. There are towns up past Wexton, almost off the Jersey map, where these things happen. Places where they say streets bleed and people disappear going down the block and the woods swallow up children and sometimes, just every once in a blue moon, you see something that maybe backs that shit up and you swear…”

  Mendez shook his head, lost for a moment in another time and place. Then he said, “Places where even the cavalry won’t come charging to the police’s rescue. Places where you spin it, sign it, and close it, because if you don’t, things have a funny way of getting worse, of devouring more people, their bodies and their obsessions, and the only thing that gives a guy peace at night is to accept the collateral damage, cut your losses, and go to bed knowing you won’t lose any more. Avery tried, but that little girl was gone, and after the third bunch of search party cops disappeared, along with three of their best dogs, there wasn’t nobody gonna find her up there, or hell, even help him look.”

  Steve took the information in. He’d grown up southeast of the area and although he’d heard a few stories, he had no idea as to the magnitude of them. He didn’t press Mendez further about those. It was one case, one file he wanted. The one weird that he did need answers to.

  He nodded at Mendez’s desk drawer, the bottom one where he’d put Feinstein’s file. “That what DeMarco did, spin it, sign it, and close it?”

  Mendez followed his gaze to the drawer and returned a stiff smile and a tight nod to Steve. “That’s what I told her to do when she asked me, too. I’m not saying DeMarco made all that up, or that she’s crazy. She’s pregnant, emotional, and hormonal, and she’s damned good with a gun, so I’ll tell you the truth. I wasn’t about to argue. Still, she had that same look on her face that you have now. It’s always been a sticking point, not that those people claimed what they did, but that she believes it entirely. But Lakehaven’s had a couple of cases like that. Call it the fresh New Jersey air, call it something in the water. She told me about those cases you’ve been poking into on your off time, about what people thought they saw. And even if there’s truth to what she believes, at best you’re messing with people’s fragile states here, and you’ll do more harm than good by connecting the dots. Take my advice—don’t expect to be a hero, upholding justice by bringing in a long-lost perp. Those cases, and whatever connects them, don’t work that way.”

  “I know,” Steve admitted truthfully. “I know that. I have more…personal reasons.” Truth for truth, Steve supposed. Mendez had gone out on a limb telling him as much as he had. “I’m not in a position to let this go.”

  Mendez looked at him, seeming to accept this explanation. “Yeah, well, that maybe makes it worse.”

  “Mendez—”

  The other officer held up a hand. “You can have the file, but I’m not going to tell DeMarco. She’s got enough going on with the baby. I won’t put her through more stress for nothing. And if you find whatever it is you’re looking for,” Mendez said, “and it hasn’t found her yet, I won’t give it any fucking reason to do so.” He reached into the desk drawer and handed Steve the Feinstein file. Then he turned back to his work.

  Steve got from his tone that the conversation was over, case, as they said, closed.

  “And Steve,” the other officer added over his shoulder as Steve made his way back to his own desk, “if you take it upon yourself to bring that mess down on her head, I’ll make it miserable for you here. Threat, promise, I’ll hold to it.”

  It found one at the airport.

  That was the word the Intended meat used. It meant a place where great conveyances carried the meats from one place to another over a great distance. An airport was a hunting ground teeming with meats, their insecurities and fears and skewed perceptions screaming in glorious cacophony all around it. The airport was, perhaps, simultaneously the richest and most revolting spectacle it had ever seen.

  However, it wasn’t there for culling from an abundance of meats. An Intended, one called Cheryl, had flown in to see the others. It had been following that one for a while, although it had not given her any great thought, separated as she was in many ways from the one called Dave, separated from the herd that might have provided distraction, if not safety. Alone, it could get her at its leisure.

  But she was startled—something inside that it could vaguely recognize as a sense or instinct, something which prompted her to find the one called Dave.

  It would not have that.

  She had thoughtprints—the meats called them “memories,” another word—and in them it found the images it wanted. She entered the chamber where the meats coordinated the flying of the conveyances and moved on and off them. With each step further into the chamber, the overhead buzz of sound and words slowed and deepened, grinding to a bass halt.

  It perceived her rapid gait slow down, her small oblong (“suitcase,” her mind read) containing outer skins rolling to a stop behind her. She looked up, frowning, and it registered a sick and sinking feeling from her as she realized all the other meats in the airport were gone. Cups of coffee remained on tables. Suitcases lay strewn about the waiting area. The big boxes that showed them electronic pictures of “tragedy” all over their dimensionworld flickered with static and then went out. The digital red numbers and letters (components, it had discovered, of the things called words) that listed the arrivals and departures of the airplanes—those it made into one repetitive scrolling command, for her to DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE.

  It laid an outer skin (in her thoughtprint it was called a “bathing suit”), still dripping with water, over the counter of one of the desks, which it now made to look like a bar counter at the place where she worked. It also dug up another image, a concept it found delightfully grotesque—tiny hard-bodied, dead-shell versions of child-meats, with unstaring eyes and unmoving chests. It understood that these dead-shells, completely devoid of any sense of self whatsoever, were given to other more vibrant child-meats to play with. The word they used for the dead-shells was “doll.”

  The doll meant to Cheryl what it perceived as Guilt and Terror an
d Shame, and so it had propped the doll up on the bar, next to the bathing suit. Then it pulled back out of her view and waited.

  When she saw the doll, the awful jelly orbs of her face grew large and wet, and the wetness moistened her cheeks in little streams. She left the suitcase and ran.

  It bent up the foundations of the building, smearing the outside beyond the doors so that there was only blackness with stars behind the one she opened and a horrible screaming and wailing behind another, which deterred her from even trying it. She skidded to a stop before falling into a huge chasm where the baggage claim area had once been, and then flung herself headlong through a door over which a sign read “EXIT.”

  It made the outside into a dark alley, with garbage cans that trembled in the wind, barbed wire fences, and homeless, rotting, unsheltered things growling and hissing and limping in the shadows.

  By now, the Intended meat was crying, a sound (one of the only) that gave it comfort, which took the edge off the terrible pulling and churning of the voids inside it. She stumbled through the alley, groping blindly, and her fingers closed over the metal chain links of a gate. With some excitement, with some misplaced hope, she pushed it open and stepped through…

  …right into a lake, off the warm sand of the shore.

  It felt her panic, intense and delicious, as she turned around, splashing, making little kicking gestures with her feet.

  It stood there in front of her with the doll on the sand at its feet.

  Its aspect frightened her very much; the outer skins it pretended with, the cast of obscurity beneath the hat, the deep chuckling of its voices as it tilted its head to regard her made her whimper. The water it made had already solidified into ice around her feet, an arctic bitterness that bit into her skin, causing thin, watery trickles of blood to spill out onto the thick top layer.

  Even the wetness on her face looked frosty, although the rest of the simulated surroundings appeared warm, even balmy, at least as far as it understood such tactile things.

  She didn’t say anything at all. It could perceive a hundred different thoughts, most of them about the one called Dave and some of them about a man whose name she didn’t know but who had done things to her once that made her feel more like one of the dead-shell child-meats than a living one.

  It looked down at the doll. With stiff and jerking movements, the little dead-shell rose to its feet and looked up at the Primary, who gave it a little nod.

  The doll looked at Cheryl. She began screaming and crying, bending down to tug at her feet frozen fast in the ice, clawing at her own skin with fingers raw from the frosty surface.

  “No no no no no no,” she kept whining over and over. The doll tottered closer. Each awkward step brought a fresh wave of screaming in higher pitch and more frantic pounding and scratching at the ice. The skin around her ankles bruised. Her nose bled. Her hair tangled itself over one eye as she shook her head against the approach of the doll.

  When it reached her, it picked up its head. It had no face, no eyes, no ceramic smile. Cheryl wilted where she stood, the tears slowing to crystal on her face. The fight in her eyes went out. She looked up at the Primary, and it sensed Despair, the most sustaining quality any meat could produce.

  The Primary drank it up.

  The doll shattered beneath Cheryl’s chin, just at her throat, and a thousand tiny shards of ice embedded themselves into her neck and chest. By the time her body hit the floor, the ice was gone and the beats of her cold-shocked heart were already quieted, while around her the airport bustled with meats and noise again. It watched a number of them rush over to her and signal at each other before it pulled back into the Convergence, the black holes inside it temporarily eased.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It had been her, in that alley. Chloe.No, it hadn’t. But it had looked so much like her, sounded like her, even smelled like her, for chrissakes. It had stood half-naked before him, wearing a ratty black broom skirt and no top at all. Then it stumbled toward him. Cuts haphazardly made up and down its arms and stomach bled a little when it moved. It stood barefoot, and its feet made little crunching sounds, like tiny bones breaking, as it walked over garbage in the alley, totally oblivious. It left white powder footprints in its wake that caught fire in blazes and then disappeared.

  And yet, he wanted to hold it (her), to touch it (her), even ghost-pale and angry-eyed and very clearly not the real girl he’d fallen in love with. He wanted to pull it…her…close and tell her—tell it, he corrected with a grimace—everything was okay.

  He wanted to say he was sorry, that he wished for all the world he’d never left the house that night, that if he could, he’d have taken death off her hands and the drugs from her system and made her free.

  First, he’d seen something in the hallway of the rec center, a wave of hair, a flash of a long white arm, and they had seemed familiar to him. He even thought he could smell her perfume. He’d gotten up and followed the glimpses, always just enough steps ahead of him to make him unsure, outside and around the side of the building.

  And when he’d turned the corner, he found Chloe standing there, bone-thin, oatmeal-pale, looking sad and needy at the same time.

  His brain tried to lodge a complaint that, logically, what his eyes were seeing couldn’t be possible. Chloe was dead. She had been for a while. He knew that. He knew it.

  Then the thing that looked so much like her started collapsing from the inside out. Inky veins spidered outward from gaping, bruise-colored holes in the arms, giving the skin a kind of marblelike look. When the spidering reached the breasts, the nipples turned black and crumbled then blew away like ash. When the poison veins got to the face, the cheeks and forehead took on a drawn look, sadder and more sickly than when she’d been twitching and sweating and throwing up from withdrawal. It reached the eyes, and they turned a watery black, melting out of the head in sooty streams down the cheeks.

  It hadn’t spoken to him at all, only held out those broken arms with their collapsing veins working death through its system. But once, it parted the lips, just a little, and he’d seen what looked like heavy threads weaving in and out of the soft, wet inner flesh of the mouth, sewing it closed.

  That, maybe, more than anything, scared the hell out of him. That…thing wasn’t a drugged out Chloe or even simply an overdosing Chloe. It was an already dead version of his ex-girlfriend, hopped up marionette- like on enough drugs to jolt a body into a grotesque parody of the movement of living things.

  It made him sick. Scared. Disgusted that even then, even then, he still wanted to hold her (it) and tell it that he’d fix it, that he’d make up for everything, he promised, if she’d just promise to never go away again.

  It was worse than seeing his dead aunt. Worse than seeing his brother, who he’d been trying unsuccessfully to get a hold of for days. Worse because of the things it said to him, the accusations and blame, worse because maybe, just maybe, it was right.

  More than maybe.

  “You let me die. You made me die, you bastard. You never were good for anything but ruining lives. It should have been you, you fucking junkie. It should have been you…”

  It hadn’t been hard to get the handgun. He knew a guy named Rick in Rockaway, way up Green Pond Road deep in the woods in a place they called Split Rock, who owed him money and was willing to loan out a gun to repay a debt and not ask any questions about it. They weren’t Rick’s guns; he thought of himself as a collector, in fact, for the very purposes of trade, and he collected from the teenaged hoods of Morris, Sussex, and Bloomwood counties—kids whose wildest crimes, at least the wildest they were ever caught doing, amounted to little more than bungling breaking and entering and boosting car stereos. If these hoods managed to come across any firearms, Rick was the guy to dump them off with.

  Rick had been surprised but delighted to see Jake, and hugged him like a long-lost brother. He even seemed disappointed when Jake said he’d come to do business and couldn’t stay long. But it was all business,
in the end. Rick didn’t care any more about Jake than whatever Jake could do for him. And at one time, Jake had done his fair share. He’d been a frequent visitor at Rick’s place back when his habit had been manageable enough to work off in trade. And maybe as a nod of remembrance or fondness for those old times, Rick had handed him the gun upon request without so much as a raised eyebrow. More likely, his discretion was a result of not wanting to be involved—the less he knew, the less he’d be able to testify to in court, should the occasion ever arise.

  In spite of his visits to Rick’s and his full awareness of what was bought and sold there, Jake had never fired or even held a gun. The thought of actually pointing it and pulling the trigger absolutely terrified him. But he didn’t see any other way.

  He’d considered the possibility of keeping the gun on him as protection, until he’d managed to straighten the whole mess out, but the thought was short-lived. He knew better; guns didn’t work on the dead. And in his gut, he knew that guns wouldn’t work, either, on any kind of monsters that masqueraded around as the dead.

  But they worked on people. They offered one bright flash and deafening noise and then instant peace. He was afraid that he was left with little else as an alternative. He’d be damned if he’d fall apart and go crazy, and going back to getting high just flew in the face of everything he hated and resented about whatever these ghostly creatures were and what they were doing to him.