ELEVEN
***
Jason slammed into his office, moving quickly to his Rolodex, flipping through the cards until he found the one marked "FBI." He picked up the phone, and grimaced as he heard the dial tone. Staticky, whispery, it sounded like the pale echo of a real dial tone, as though he had stepped out of reality and into a nearby dimension that only lightly touched upon the normality he had come to expect in his everyday life.
Jason dialed the number on his Rolodex card. The line rang a few times, then picked up. His stomach sank as he heard the voice. It was barely discernable through the static that all but obscured the words being spoken at the other end of the line. "FBI...office...may...-elp...you...."
"Hello?" said Jason.
"...an't...you..."
The static on the line spiked, completely overpowering the thin voice of the FBI field office person, and then thinned out. When the static lessened, however, there was no longer any hint of a human voice on the other end of the line. Silence reigned for a moment. And then something else came on the line: a high-pitched whine, so low in volume as to be barely discernible, but undeniably there for all that. The sound was familiar to him somehow, as though Jason had heard it in another life, or the dream of another life. It chilled him like a shadow across the winter sun, drawing a cold cloth over his soul and making him shiver.
Then the hissing stopped. The line cut out. Dead. Jason toggled the disconnect switch on the receiver a few times, but knew before he did it that he would have no success in coaxing the phone into working. Then he noticed something.
The computer. It was back on. And just as he noticed it, he caught something moving across the screen. Just the barest glimpse before it was gone, but it was enough. Enough to be sure that he had seen it. Enough to wish that he hadn't.
It was Aaron. His boy's mouth was open in that same silent scream that his wife had worn when he had seen her image in the screen. But his son was gone in just an instant, and once again the computer flared and went dark.
At the same instant, the lights in his office went out, leaving him in a black room, his only illumination the dim moonlight that had managed to penetrate the fog that had invaded Rising in the last few hours. The light was cold and lifeless, the pale shading of a corpse.
The phone rang a moment later. It was Hatty. And her voice was, thank goodness, strong and clear, the line easily audible. "You better get here," she said without preamble. As she said it, a crash sounded on the line, as though someone had dropped an armful of glassware onto a tile floor.
"Hatty? Where are you?" said Jason. "What-" And that was when the screaming began.
"I'm at Doc Peabody's!" shouted Hatty. Behind her voice, the screams could still be heard clearly, a thunderous shouting that rivaled anything Jason had ever heard before in terms of sheer power and volume. "You better come quick!"
"What is it?" shouted Jason. "What's going on?"
At that moment, his computer screen flared. A single word appeared: "Hoer-Verde."
"It's the boy's mother," responded Hatty, sounding as though she were struggling with something - or someone. "It's Sean's mother."
In the background of the phone call, Jason could hear a sudden, awful, almost inhuman scream of pain and terror. Then he heard Amy-Lynn's voice, grown awful and deep: the voice from beyond Hell. "It's here!" she shrieked, her voice gravelly and shredded. "The monster is here!"
The computer continued to flare as the woman spoke, the single word appearing over and over again.
Hoer-Verde.
Hoer-Verde.
Hoer-Verde. Hoer-Verde. Hoer-Verde. Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde....
***
Jason pulled into the quaint two-story house that was both Doc Peabody's residence and his medical offices and was out of the truck and through the front door almost in a single movement. The sound of Amy-Lynn's scream resounded in his mind, and he couldn't shake the idea that every second lost meant a second closer to...
(death)
...something truly awful. Something for which he had no words.
He rushed into the front office area. It was deserted. Completely, spookily silent. "Doc?" he shouted. "Hatty?"
"In here," came Doc's voice from nearby. Jason went through a sliding door and into a small, convivially-furnished waiting room. Modern art graced the walls right next to pictures of Donald and Goofy, Mickey and Bugs; and newspapers like Modern Housekeeping took their places beside Teen Beat and a host of other periodicals where just about any patient of any age could find something of interest.
Hatty and Doc were sitting beside one another on a couch in the waiting room, looking at the closed door to Doc's examination room. Jason glanced at the door. All was still. Tomb silent.
"She calm down?" he asked with a hopeful smile. When neither Hatty nor Doc moved to answer, he said, "Guys?"
"She stopped screaming," whispered the doctor at last, after far too long a pause had elapsed for Jason's comfort.
"That's great," said the sheriff. "That's good, right?" Another long moment, then, "Right?"
Doc looked directly at Jason for the first time, and Jason was dismayed to see how the man looked: his eyes were bloodshot, his entire demeanor that of someone who has been broken in some small but critical fashion, whose world had suddenly and irrevocably taken a step to one side and would never return to its "normal" state ever again. "You don't understand," said Doc Peabody. "She shouldn't have ever started screaming. Not with the amount of tranquilizer in her."
Jason fought down the urge to shiver, knowing that the room was warm enough and also knowing that any outward display of fear was likely to slow down the process of getting to the bottom of what was going on here.
Jason looked pointedly at the closed door to the exam room. "She in there?"
Hatty and Doc nodded, their heads moving in unison to the point that Jason had an insane urge to check the couch to see if they'd been wired to respond to the same remote control. "How is she?" he asked instead.
"Don't know," said Hatty.
"She was asleep, tranquilized, when she woke up and started screaming. I tried to get to her, but before I could get into the examination room, she just barricaded herself in there," said Doc. "We couldn't get to her. And then she just went...." The old man looked at his hands.
"...Silent," finished Hatty for him.
Doc nodded. "As death," he added.
Jason went to the door. He rapped quietly on it with his knuckles. "Amy-Lynn?" he said through the door. "It's Sheriff Meeks. You okay?" No answer. Another quick rat-tat with the knuckles, an empty, dull sound that made Jason feel as though it were he being hit, a sturdy fist punching into him, knocking the air out of him, making it hard to breathe....
"Amy-Lynn?" he tried again.
Still no answer.
He grabbed the doorknob. It turned, but when he tried to push the door open, there was no give. He grunted as he threw his shoulder into the door. Was it his imagination, or had the door given just a centimeter or two? He drew back and hit the door again.
Slam. Slam. Slam.
Each time, the door opened a quarter-inch, then a half-inch, then an inch at a time. Soon he had the door open far enough that he could make out what was blocking his entrance: looked like Amy-Lynn had picked up every bit of furniture, medical equipment, and anything else not bolted to the floor, and used it to create a makeshift blockade, a fortification clearly built with one purpose in mind: to keep anything and everything out of that room.
"Amy-Lynn?" he called. No use getting a scalpel in the noggin for surprising her, he thought. "Amy-Lynn, it's Sheriff Meeks. I'm coming in. You're safe, I promise." He waited a moment, then grasped the doorjamb for leverage, fighting his way further into the room.
He pushed and strained, then with one final grunt and the crash and clatter of falling medical equipment, he was at last standing in a wide open door.
He took half a step, then stopped and stared, unmoving.
Hatty and Doc came up behind him a moment later, and he could tell from the collective gasps he heard that they were as dumbfounded at what he was seeing as he was.
"Impossible," whispered Doc.
The room - a windowless place with only one way in and one way out - was empty. Someone had barricaded themselves from the inside of a room with no other egress.
And subsequently disappeared.
Then Jason noticed something even more disquieting: a digital clock on the wall. It was blurred, just like the one on the Rands' microwave; just like the one in little Sean Rand's bedroom.
"The clocks," whispered Jason. "The dark. And you're all alone."
Hatty shivered and looked around, then Jason heard her shriek and spun to face her. "What, Hatty?" he snapped, concern for his old teacher almost overpowering him in an instant.
Hatty pointed to her left, down the dark hall that lay beyond the waiting and exam rooms. "What did you see?" Jason asked again.
Hatty could barely speak, her voice sounding cracked and unsure. But at last she managed to get out the words. "I think...I think it was the boy, Sheriff. I think it was little Sean."
A moment later Jason was walking through the house, room to room, his Beretta in one hand, his flashlight in the other. He flicked on lights as he went from place to place, Doc and Hatty staying a few steps behind him at all times, both looking ready to bolt as rabbits in the fox coop.
Top to bottom, bottom to top. No Sean, no Amy-Lynn.
The last place he looked was back in the exam room once again. He looked at the impossibly empty room with the blurred clock, and the words came unbidden to his mind:
"The dark. The clocks. Time slows down. And you're all alone."
Sean Rand was gone. And now Amy-Lynn had disappeared as literally and completely as a magician's assistant.
Who would be next?
***