Shimmer: A Novel (11 page)

“Hey, Mr. Walker, good to see you! How’s it going?” Bucky Weaver exclaimed as he stepped in front of Gideon, pulled off a work glove and offered his hand. Bucky’s high school sweetheart was carrying his child, and with the unexpected expenses of a wedding and a child in the offing, the young man was grateful for the job—grateful to a fault. As a result, perhaps, Bucky was the only person in Laramie who seemed completely oblivious to Gideon’s eye patch and facial scars.

“Can’t complain, Bucky,” Gideon said as he briskly shook the blond man’s hand. “Griggs tells me you’re doing a great job here. I appreciate it.”

“Thank you, sir!”

“And be sure to give Alice my regards.”

“You bet!” With a vigorous nod, Bucky nervously slapped his glove against his palm, slipped it on, then rushed back across the packed dirt to an aluminum ladder propped up against one pink-wrapped wall.

When Gideon returned his attention to the far side of the lot, the stranger in black was gone. Just to be certain, Gideon continued walking the perimeter, scanning left to right in the exaggerated gestures required by a man with only one eye.

Alan jogged over to his side. “Gone?”

Gideon nodded “Without a trace.” He looked at Alan and frowned. “Took my eyes off him for a moment. Don’t suppose you saw where he went?”

Alan shook his head. “When you were talking to Bucky, he stepped to the right. Walls obstructed my view. But I thought he’d be over there… somewhere.”

“Something’s not right about him,” Gideon said carefully.

“Like how?”

Gideon shrugged. “Call it a hunch. Firebug, maybe.”

“Well dressed for an arsonist,” Alan said.

“Maybe that’s what he wants us to think,” Gideon said, although his thought processes were racing down other, unnatural avenues. “Vandal. Graffiti artist. Whatever he is, he’s up to no good.”

“He comes back, I’m not likely to overlook him,” Alan said. “With that black suit and his face, it was so…”

“Pale.”

“White, actually,” Alan amended and Gideon thought he saw his angular foreman shudder. “Like there wasn’t an ounce of blood left in him.”

Chapter 18

Hadenford, New Jersey

Chelsea Conrad’s mother and her brother, Chad, came home within five minutes of each other. Chad came up the stairs two at a time in a thunderous rush and, a moment later, slammed his bedroom door. Startled, Chelsea slipped her headphones down around her neck, reducing the pop music hit to tinny susurration. Moments later, her mother approached Chelsea’s bedroom with the measured tapping of sensible heels followed by a soft knock.

From the cramped confines of her student desk, Chelsea said, “Come in.”

Nora Conrad opened her daughter’s bedroom door and stood in the doorway with her hand on the doorknob. She had short blond hair and green eyes in an oval face, and wore a white silk blouse under a hunter green skirt suit. As usual, in comparison to her mother’s business attire, Chelsea felt like a slob. Nora was the office manager for a software company in Cherry Hill, where half the programmers on staff wouldn’t remember the last time they wore a necktie. Chelsea’s mother, however, was determined to look as professional as possible, even on casual Fridays. “The hours those guys work,” Nora often commented, “they deserve all the casual Fridays they can handle.”

“Homework overload?” Nora asked her daughter.

Chelsea shrugged. “Par for my courses.”

“Right,” her mother said with a grin. “Everything else okay?”

She was about to mention Fallon’s strange new friend, but thought she might have overreacted to the whole incident. “Pretty much. What’s for dinner?”

“Spaghetti and meatballs okay with you?”

“Sure.”

“Good,” she said. “Already put the water on. Don’t forget to take a break. Give your eyes a rest.” At that moment, guitar-driven rock music assaulted them. Chelsea winced. Her mother shook her head in frustration. “I’d make him wear headphones but he’d be deaf in a week!”

Chelsea cupped her ear for dramatic effect. “What?”

“Exactly!”

Nora Conrad walked down the hallway to the next bedroom and pounded on the door several times before Chad finally heard her and turned the volume down.

Chelsea heard Chad’s door open. “Too loud?”

“For the last time, Chad,” Nora said, “demo your stereo system at work, not at home!” Chad worked at a home entertainment superstore and spent most of his paycheck upgrading his own entertainment system. Since he never seemed to have any one stereo or video component long enough to own it, their mother often kidded him about ‘demoing’ the store’s merchandise. “Your sister can’t hear herself think.”

“What’s to hear?”

Rising to the bait, Chelsea tossed her headphones on the desk, jumped out of her chair, and stepped into the hallway.

Twelve feet away, her older brother was looking back at her. He had the broad, rugged build, sandy hair and brown eyes of their absentee father.

“I heard that, asshole!” she yelled.

“Chelsea, watch your language,” her mother said.

Chad smirked. “Yeah, lighten up, Chelz.”

“Least I don’t have mold growing between my ears, you Neanderthal,” Chelsea muttered before returning to her bedroom and slamming the door.

She sat at her desk for a moment, headphones poised in her hands as she listened to her mother and Chad discuss reasonable volume levels for a few moments before Chad promised to keep it down. Then his door closed again. Though she could still hear the pounding bass through the wall separating their bedrooms, her headphones would mask the worst of it.
After dinner, he’d be on his way to community college,
she consoled herself,
and I’ll have absolute peace and quiet.

She raised the headphones toward her ears, but they fell from her numb fingers when she heard her mother scream.

Lurching backward, Chelsea knocked over her chair and nearly fell on top of it before regaining her balance. Her heart was pounding in her chest, the rush of blood throbbing against her temples. She staggered toward her closed bedroom door. Her arm seemed detached from her body as she grabbed the doorknob and fumbled with it three times before turning it far enough to yank the door open.

With her first step into the hallway, she heard an explosion. Shiny bits of metal or plastic whizzed by her face. Irregular chunks or rubber or black foam bounced along the blue carpeting in front of her. Chelsea’s startled gaze fell upon several jagged shards of tiger-striped plastic quivering in the wooden doorjamb. A moment passed before she realized what had exploded: her bicycle helmet.

Concerned for her mother, and frantic to know what had happened to her, Chelsea overcame her own fear and continued into the hallway. Nothing could have prepared her for the horror outside her room. She struggled to comprehend what she saw, but none of it made sense. No intruder was there, but someone—or something—had attacked her mother.

Nora Conrad was down on one knee, facing Chelsea, hand pressed to the right side of her face, which was bleeding profusely from a long gash. Blood spilled across the back of her hand and fell in fat drops to the blue carpeting. “Chelsea!” her mother gasped. She turned toward the section of wall between the bedroom doors.

Chelsea followed her mother’s gaze and saw it. An oblong shadow, dark and fluid, as if spilled from a jar of India ink, oozing along the surface of the wall. The shadow was so dark it blotted out the repeating gold fleur-de-lis wallpaper pattern beneath it. And Chelsea could locate no object to account for the approximate shape and location of the shadow. As her gaze became fixated on its dark movement, she saw it change, stretching, extending, and contracting, almost like a living organism existing in two dimensions.
An oily skin on the wall,
she thought,
with a mind of its own.

A moment or two after Chelsea, Chad opened his bedroom door and stepped into the hallway. “Mom, what the hell—?”

The shadow darted toward him, then
separated
from the wall to become airborne, tilting from vertical to horizontal as it struck Chad at shoulder height. The darkness seemed to pass through him—or he through it. Chelsea couldn’t be sure. But it appeared as if the area of Chad’s body in contact with the darkness winked out of existence for a moment. As the impact hurled him backward, Chad roared with pain. He landed hard, his blue flannel shirt in tatters around his collar, blood seeping through.

Shimmering, the darkness hovered five feet in the air—glistening and rippling with an unearthly pulse of inhuman life.

“Chelsea, run!”

Nora’s urgent voice shattered her daughter’s temporary paralysis. She might have run, but she never had the chance. The darkness shot toward Chelsea, but dipped in its flight and slammed down toward her kneeling mother’s position. In an instant, Chelsea’s mother was gone, as if a magician’s black cape had settled over her as part of an impressive vanishing act. The black shape pulsed in its eerie two-dimensional way, marking the spot where Chelsea’s mother had been. As it expanded and contracted, it blotted out the carpet without disturbing or staining it.

Terrified, Chelsea whispered, “Mom…”

Reacting to her voice, the darkness slid across the carpet, then flowed up the baseboard to resume its former position on the wall. Chelsea was afraid to move or speak again, fearing the darkness would locate her position and strike. She felt paralyzed, rooted to the spot, confused and helpless.
Oh, God! Oh, God! Where’s mom?
She thought frantically.
How could she just disappear?

Chad rolled onto his hands and knees. He staggered to his feet and gripped the banister railing for support. His other hand pressed to his chest, now soaked with his own blood. He looked at Chelsea, wide-eyed. “Chelz…?” he said, almost a grunt. “Sis? What—what’s happening?”

Chelsea shook her head rapidly.
I don’t know. Now be quiet!
She hoped she had conveyed both messages in that one frightened motion.

“Where’s Mom?”

Pointing at the liquid black spot on the wall, Chelsea spoke in small, terrified whisper. “In… there.”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” Chelsea almost wailed hysterically.
“It… swallowed her whole!”

Chad lunged forward in three long strides, his hands thrust before him. Sensing his intention, Chelsea was breathless with fear. Without pause, Chad reached toward the darkness—
into
its unaccountable depth—perhaps hoping to physically yank their mother out. His arms sank into the darkness up to his elbows.

Chelsea gasped.

The look of eerie curiosity on Chad’s face changed instantly to shock. Something inside the darkness seemed to latch onto his hands and pull him off-balance. He stumbled forward, and Chelsea imagined the darkness on the wall opening up and sucking him in.

She screamed, a purely involuntary response to the horror she was witnessing. As much as she tried, she couldn’t will herself down the hall, to grab her brother’s arm and pull him back from whatever gripped him. “God, Chad!” she screamed.

Something black, long and whip-like, and wide as a garden hose, flicked out of the darkness and struck Chad across the face, laying open his jaw to the bone. He roared with sudden pain, and then his face lost all color. He staggered backward, away from the wall. At first Chelsea thought the darkness had released its grip on him. Then she saw there was nothing left to grip. Chad’s forearms ended in ragged, bloody stumps. Carried by his stumbling momentum, he slammed against the banister railing and flipped over it. Cartwheeling out of sight, he fell headfirst down the stairs with a series of horrifying crashes.

To Chelsea’s left, a faint, tortured voice whispered, “Run.”

She thought she’d imagined it. She was alone… wasn’t she?

“Run… away.”

She looked toward the source of the agonized sound—to the wall—expecting the darkness, but seeing her mother instead. Chelsea began to weep pitifully, helplessly.

Some invisible force pinned Nora Conrad’s back to the wall, her bare feet dangling several inches above the carpeted floor. What remained of her stylish skirt suit was in blood-soaked tatters, hanging from her shoulders and arms. Her white silk blouse, camisole, bra and panties—all ripped away, exposing her torso and legs. The remnants of pantyhose fluttered around her calves. And her breasts… her breasts had been savaged, the gouged flesh welling steady pools of blood that painted her abdomen crimson. Blood streamed down her inner thighs as well. Every square inch of her flesh seemed riddled with bleeding cuts, slashes, and puncture marks. But her face was the worst.

Nora Conrad’s head lolled on her neck, her one remaining eye focused on her daughter. That damaged gaze had no fright left in it, only hopelessness… and resignation. The bottom half of her nose was gone, and the blood flowed over her lip into her mouth, making it difficult for her to speak. “Run… before… it’s too—”

Nora Conrad’s body separated from the wall.

The darkness blossomed around her like a malignant aura and slammed her into the wall so hard that Chelsea heard her mother’s bones crack. The thick, whip-like appendage curled up from between her mother’s legs and hovered in front of her body for a moment with the coiled tension of a viper poised to strike. The tip of the appendage was a hooked, gleaming barb. Without warning, the tip plunged into her mother’s abdomen and shook her as if with a deadly jolt of electricity. Droplets of blood splattered the walls, banister and floor—and Chelsea’s face.

Never before had she thought of her sanity as something fragile, something that could be broken and irreparably damaged. She began to moan, a low keening sound of helpless dismay, caught in the relentless and tightening grip of madness.

Chapter 19

Every few minutes Barrett glanced at the rearview and side mirrors, expecting the Police Chief’s black-and-white to roll up behind him at the most inopportune time. As a stalling—rather non-starting—tactic, Barrett had loosened the cable to his hot battery terminal. He doubted Chief Grainger would believe Barrett was so hopelessly lost that he continued to scratch his head over an unfolded roadmap. Now, if asked, Barrett was waiting for a tow truck. Of course, after Liana and Logan arrived in the conversion van, he’d fix the loose cable, switch cars and send one of them home with the Jeep. For now—