The backwash of his vision flooded his stomach and after a few more tottering steps he doubled over and threw up, acrid bile splattering at his feet. He lurched past the puddle, still retching, and puked again before he reached the back of Cabin Five and sagged against the wall.
I’m never going to look right, he despaired. I’m never going to be a real girl. Never. I should fucking kill myself. I should slit my wrists. Drink bleach. Lie down on the train tracks.
Something whined. Gabe straightened, wiping his sour-tasting mouth on his sleeve. Whose flannel was he wearing? He hadn’t had one on him when he’d woken. He limped to the corner of the cabin. A whimper, fainter this time. A dark shape lay sprawled in the dirt.
It was Malcolm’s dog, only something was wrong. It lay on its side in the shadow of Cabin Five, and as Gabe drew closer, he saw that its legs were splayed limp in the dirt and a dark puddle soaked the soil around its belly. He thought at once of his collie, Eli, who had slept on his bed every night since he could remember, and for the first time in his life he felt real love for Idaho’s dark woods and windswept fields, and with that love a deep and aching homesickness. He knelt beside the mangled thing and saw the trail of blood droplets leading to the dark under Cabin Seven. The flat, silvery glow of coin-like eyes stared back at him from the blackness.
A hand emerged from the shadow. An arm. An elbow. The bottom half of Corey’s grinning face, mouth and chin still slicked with blood and something moving under sunburned, freckled skin, bone and muscle shifting and converging. Gabe fell back, paralyzed by terror, a scream caught in his throat.
“Corey?” he whispered, his voice strangled. “Corey, what are you doing? What did you do to that dog?”
The counselor dragged himself out into the moonlight, crawling on his belly like a lizard, and rose up into a crouch, his smile stretching wider. Gabe inched back from him, glancing quickly down the alley between the two cabins. Then Corey was on him, pinning him to the dirt and kissing him, forcing his tongue into Gabe’s screaming mouth, and beneath the horrible taste of the dead dog’s blood was a sickly, cloying sweetness. Something sharp pricked the back of his throat.
The world turned into smoke and blew away.
Jo pushed the Glovers’ screen door open, eased it in to rest against her back, and turned the knob of the front door. The living room was empty, the television turned to CBS at a low murmur. Rush Limbaugh’s face danced distorted in the mirror under the stairs, his cheeks reddening as he shook his finger at the camera. Jo guided Brady past her and slipped in herself. Carefully, quietly, she closed first the screen door and then the inner, muting the sound of the sprinklers outside.
It was only a few steps to the study’s door. Jo’s heartbeat thundered in her ears as she crossed the Persian carpet and tried the handle. It opened. Relief washed over her in a pulverizing wave and then she and Brady were inside the little room, Brady shutting the door behind them. The sole window’s curtains were drawn. They were heavy and red and looked almost like they were made of wool. In the sliver of moonlight that fell between them Jo could just make out a desk, a chair, the spines of books stacked neatly in their recessed shelves. And there, resting on a lace doily set on a side table, a powder-blue phone sitting in its cradle. The hair on the back of Jo’s neck stood on end.
“Find a bill,” she hissed in Brady’s ear. “A letter. Something with an address.”
In silence, as quickly as they dared, they began to search the office, rifling through drawers and sorting stacks of papers. Jo had to hold each one up to the moonlight to make out the words. This is like something a detective would do in a movie, she thought. Except it wouldn’t be grocery lists and coupons. She held another sheet of paper up to the light. Something about toxicology. 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine. Ketamine. A bunch of other shit she couldn’t pronounce. She threw it aside. That was when she saw the little wicker wastepaper basket set between the desk and side table. She knelt and dug into it, wrinkling her nose as her hand touched a slimy black banana peel and the slick wrapper to some kind of yogurt cup. Under the thin layer of detritus, she found the letter.
A bank statement, thrust back into its torn and crumpled envelope. Her heart leapt into her throat when she saw the stamp, and beside it the chicken-scratch return address, ripped clean in half. Carefully, she folded the torn portion of the lip back over to match the partial return. In both it and the destination address, Resolution, UT stood out bold and dark. She put a hand over her mouth to stifle the delighted laugh that wanted to spring free of her.
“Brady,” she whispered, reaching for the back of his shirt. He turned, eyes widening when he saw the envelope. He was about to take it when a voice came through the window, muffled by curtains.
“Come along now, darling.”
It was Mrs. Glover. She was at the front of the house. Jo could hear her footsteps and the creaking of the porch. Hardly daring to breathe, she let go of Brady and moved with painstaking slowness back to the door and looked through the half-inch gap between it and its frame. The sticklike woman stood in the open front doorway, hand in hand with a shorter figure in a nightshirt, or maybe a too-big tee, who, as Jo squinted to bring the pair into focus, took a tottering step into the living room.
At first she thought it was Smith. It had the same flyaway hair, blond as a baby’s first feathery tresses, the same frail frame and willowy limbs, but then it limped under one of the overhead lights, and where Smith’s face should have been was a distended, eyeless snout, raw and pink and wrinkled as a foreskin, its mouth full of peglike yellow teeth, its nostrils oozing thick, yellowish mucus that gathered under its jaw to drip to the floor.
It’s not real, thought Jo. This is a nightmare. I’m having a nightmare. She bit her tongue until she tasted blood, but reality refused to cooperate. The terrible thing remained. At her side Brady had his hands over his mouth. He was crying silently.
“We’ll get you dressed and you can finish in the guest room,” cooed Mrs. Glover, pulling the front door shut behind them. The starved and skull-faced woman’s sunken cheeks were flushed. She looked emotional. “You’re doing so well, honey. I know this time it’s going to work.”
This isn’t real.
The pair passed by them, heading for the stairs. Jo listened as their halting steps began to fade. She tried to keep her breathing even as her headache pounded. It was getting worse. When she closed her right eye the point of white still burned in her left’s vision. She took the phone from its cradle and hit the zero key, praying to no one in particular that she still remembered Oji’s room extension. The crackling blare of the tone made her want to crawl out of her skin. They’ll hear. They’ll hear and they’ll bring that thing back down here, that thing with Smith’s hair that can’t be Smith, it can’t be.
Connection. A man’s scratchy voice. “Operator. How may I direct your call?”
“I need a number; Akira Takahashi, North Caldwell, New Jersey. He’s a resident at Green Grove retirement community.”
“One moment.”
Ringing.
The line connected. A scratchy recorded message played. “You’ve reached Green Grove retirement community. If you know your party’s extension—”
A click. Ringing and ringing and more ringing as Jo’s palms began to sweat. The phone was nearly stuck to her cheek by cold, stinking perspiration and her headache was jabbing at her over and over again as though a needle were being pushed through her pupil and into the front of her brain. She wanted to claw at her eye socket, to scratch until she couldn’t feel anymore. A recorded voice answered. She dialed the extension.
Ringing.
Ringing.
“Hello?”
“Oji-chan, don’t hang up,” she started, her voice already quavering at just the sound of his. “It’s Jo. I’m in Resolution, Utah. Mom and Dad sent me here, to a camp.”
“Joanna?” He sounded far away, his voice scratchy and thin. “It’s so late. Are you all right?”
She almost cried. “I … I need help. They’re hurting us. Giving us drugs. They want to do something bad to us. There’s a place in the city”—she read from the torn envelope—“Carter and Sons Feed, Fertilizer, and Farm Supply. We need you to meet us there as soon as you can. Do you still have your car?”
“Your mother sold it. Joanna—”
Running footsteps. The study door crashed open, knocking Brady back into the shadows as Enoch barged into the room. Jo’s breath came in quick gasps. Enoch’s eyes were on her. He took a step into the room. She thought how stupid he looked in his pinstripe pajamas, like an overgrown eight-year-old. “Resolution, Utah,” she repeated as clearly as she could through the sobs trying to force their way up out of her throat. “Please, Oji. It’s—”
Enoch grabbed the side table and flung it across the room. The cord tore from the wall and the line disconnected as Oji shouted something Jo couldn’t make out. She staggered back, ear ringing where the receiver had clipped her jaw. Enoch seized her by the arm. “You’re in big trouble, egg roll.”
A ding and then Enoch dropped to his knees. Brady stood behind him; he’d smashed the phone’s carriage into the back of the bigger man’s head. Enoch looked confused. Brady lifted it again and brought it down, harder this time. Ding. Service to the front desk, thought Jo as Enoch’s hand slipped from her arm. She turned away before the third blow landed, but she heard the wet, brittle crack as something broke in the man’s skull. Running footsteps overhead.
“She’s fuckin’ Japanese, you moron,” Brady hissed.
Jo grabbed his arm, and he dropped the phone as though it had burned him and wrapped her in a tight and desperate hug. Enoch lay very still, a dark stain spreading through the carpet from his dented temple. Everything felt like it was moving too fast. Footsteps coming closer. Brady crying. She was crying, too.
Oji has to come for us. He will. He’ll find a way.
