The Gray Man’s stomach wrung itself out.
The phone rang only twice. Missed call. His brother had never intended for him to pick up; he merely wanted this: the Gray Man stopping the car, wondering if he was supposed to return the call. Wondering if his brother was going to call back. Untangling the wired threads in his gut.
Finally, a Labrador retriever barking at the door grounded him again. He shut the phone into the glove box, out of sight.
Back to Greenmantle’s devices.
They led him to a yellow house with an empty carport. With the EMF reader in one hand and a cesium magnetometer in the other, he climbed into the heat and followed the energy field.
He ducked under a desolate clothesline. There was a doghouse, but no dog. The air had the dry, complicated scent of a cornfield, but there was no cornfield. He was eerily reminded of the foreboding drugstore with the lights off.
In the backyard was an ambitious vegetable garden where seven impeccable rows flourished — textbook tomatoes, peas, beans, and carrots. The next four rows were not quite as productive. As he followed the increasingly frantic light on the EMF reader, the rows thinned further. The final three were merely strips of bare dirt pointed toward the distant fields. A few desiccated vines curled up the bamboo stakes, nothing but skeletons.
The instruments guided the Gray Man to a rosebush planted on the other side of the dead rows, directly in front of a concrete well cover. Unlike the dry vines, the rose was hyper-alive. Above an ordinary green trunk, dozens of twisted shoots clawed from the old canes, contorting tightly around one another. Each mutated cane was tinged the florid red of new growth; it looked eerily as if blood ran through them. The new shoots bristled with malevolent red spines.
The ultimate result of this furious growth was apparent in the blackened knots of branches above. Dead. The rose was growing itself to death.
The Gray Man was impressed by the deep wrongness of it.
A few waves of the meters confirmed that the energy was centered directly on the bush or the ground beneath it. An energy anomaly could possibly explain its hideous overgrowth. He didn’t see, however, how it could be connected to the Greywaren. Unless — Glancing toward the house, he set down his machines and hefted up the well’s lid.
The EMF reader screamed, every light furiously red. The magnetometer’s reading spiked jaggedly.
Cool air spiraled out of the impenetrably dark opening. He had a flashlight in the car, but he didn’t think it would begin to pierce the depths. He contemplated what it would take to retrieve an object hidden in a well, if it came to that.
Just as suddenly as they’d started, both of the machines went quiet.
Startled, he gave them an experimental swing of his arm — nothing. Carried them around the rosebush. Nothing. Hung them over the well. Nothing. Whatever spurt of wild energy had brought him here was gone.
It was possible, he thought, that the Greywaren was something that worked in pulses, and it had just shut off from its hiding place in the well.
But it was more possible, he thought, that this had to do with HEPCO’s little problem. The same energy surges that affected the stadium power might be at work here. Escaping from this water source. Somehow poisoning that blackened rose.
The Gray Man replaced the well cover, wiped a sheen of sweat from the back of his neck, and straightened.
He took a photo of the rose with his phone. And then he headed back to the car.