“Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi,” he said. “Either one’s fine.”
Paige and Bethany both asked for the same. Jeannie stepped into the back room, and the three of them sat at the bar. Travis saw a stack of menus to his left. The cover showed a Paul Bunyan type character wearing a huge belt with three notches carved into it. Travis couldn’t imagine being any less interested in hearing a backstory.
Jeannie returned with the drinks and the check, set them down and got to work squaring things away around the register. Her movements were hurried, anxious.
“I heard of this place a while back,” Travis said.
Jeannie didn’t look up from her work. “Yeah?”
“Guy I used to know told me I should stop by, if I was ever in the area.”
Jeannie said nothing.
Outside, the sedan with the stuffed trunk went past.
“He said he left something of mine in the basement,” Travis continued. “Said someone here would know what I was talking about.”
At last Jeannie glanced up at him.
Travis studied her face for any sign of suspicion. Any hint that she understood the significance of this place’s basement, and that a stranger requesting access to it was probably tied to that significance in some way.
But all she did was knit her eyebrows together. “I think it’s pretty empty down there,” she said. “How long ago was this?”
“Few years,” Travis said.
Jeannie shrugged, thought about it another second and then went back to her straightening, as if that concluded the discussion.
“Can I take a look anyway?” Travis said.
She seemed amused at the request, for some reason. She shrugged again and said, “Knock yourself out,” then reached under the bar out of sight. Travis heard a coffee can slide on wood, and objects clinking against one another. After a moment Jeannie brought out two keys, each on its own ring. The rings had plastic tabs attached to them, labeled simply #1 and #2. She pushed them across to Travis. “Entrance is outside, around the back.”
With that she returned to the register and ignored them.
Travis traded looks with Paige and Bethany, and then the three of them stood, leaving their drinks. They were almost to the door when Travis stopped and turned back toward Jeannie.
“You ever heard of a man named Ruben Ward?” he said.
She met his gaze.
Travis had seen lots of people play dumb before. They almost always overdid it. Their faces scrunched up. They registered too much confusion. Really, any confusion was too much; it wasn’t confusing to simply hear an unfamiliar name.
Jeannie didn’t look confused. She looked puzzled, which was stranger yet. Travis got the impression that she knew nothing about Ward, but that she’d heard the name. Maybe recently.
After a moment she shook her head. “Can’t help you.”
Travis considered pressing her on the subject, but held back. He turned and led the others out.
They were halfway along the building’s left side, moving down an alley floored with cracked pavement and a few lonely tufts of grass, when it happened.
It started as a sound—or what seemed like a sound. Maybe the frenetic hum of an electrical transformer about to fail, or the snapping, static-like buzz you sometimes heard over a field of grasshoppers on a dry summer day. It rose over the span of a second, seemingly from a source very close to Travis—behind him, he thought at first. He spun to look for it but saw nothing there, and noticed as he moved that the sound’s direction didn’t change at all. It had no direction. It was just everywhere, as if he were hearing it through a set of headphones. He saw Paige and Bethany reacting the same way. They were hearing it too. They looked at him and each other, their eyes narrowing in concern—and then widening.
Because they’d just realized the same thing Travis had.
That it wasn’t a sound, exactly. It wasn’t anything they were picking up with their ears. It was closer than that, somehow—already inside their heads.
It was a thought.
They were hearing it the way they heard their own internal monologue.
All three of them came to a stop, facing one another. None of them spoke. Second by second the sensation intensified, its apparent volume and clarity mounting. Travis felt it becoming almost a physical presence, its insectile quality growing sharper. It felt like bugs swarming inside his skull. The effect began to push him toward nausea. He saw it doing the same to Paige and Bethany. Saw them taking careful breaths to keep their stomachs under control.
And then it was over. The sound was gone as if someone had thrown a switch, and there was only the hush of the town again.
The three of them stood there for a long moment, still not speaking. Just breathing, getting their bearings.
“What the hell’s happening in this place?” Bethany said. It came out as hardly more than a whisper.