Reed tried to keep it together.
He was out there probably in the middle of the street turning circles. Enough already. Balling his hands into fists, he strode purposely forward and within a minute, he spotted the buildings. That wasn’t so damn hard, now was it?
The buildings were all two and three story affairs made of the same soiled brick. The upper floors were apartments, he guessed, and below, street level, dentist’s offices and pharmacies and curio shops. All of them dark and empty, pooling with shadow. Through the plate glass windows, he could see boxes and things bobbing. So much for inventory. Above, all those tall rectangular windows were simply wet and gray, beaded with raindrops.
The thing to do, Reed decided, was to duck into one of the storefronts for a bit, see if the rain subsided, then he’d just have to back-track the best he could.
It was a plan and it made sense.
He started towards the front of a silk-screening shop and above he heard a creaking sound cut through the rain. He looked up. One of the windows on the second floor was open.
It had not been open before.
Tilting his head back, he called out: “Hey! Is someone up there?”
There was nothing but the sound of the rain, a few lonesome breaths of wind creating a spray that he had to blink from his eyes. He was certain that window had not been open before and the idea of that filled him with a brief rush of terror. His heart fluttered like a trapped moth, then settled down.
Don’t you dare start that shit again.
He stood in the flooded streets, water falling all around him. It had not gotten deeper since he had left the bus, but it sure as hell had not retreated any, either. As he waited and he did not really know for what, a dead cat floated by followed by an empty coffee can. A few sticks. And more leaves, of course. The water itself was dark and oily looking. God only knew what was in it.
Reed kept thinking of Lucy Costigan, the soccer coach. Her of the hard, sleek body and bouncing ponytail. If she hadn’t decided to stay in Park Falls with her fucking sister none of this would be happening. And, man, wasn’t it amazing that in the middle of this mess he was still thinking with his dick? Because he was and he knew it. If Lucy was there she’d be wet and cold, her nipples hard against her shirt like thimbles and Reed would put his hands on them and-
He let out a cry as something wet slapped into the back of his neck.
He almost went under again, whirling about crazily and that’s when he saw what it was. Sure, it was floating there in the rain-speckled water: a doll. A little ragdoll with a stitched mouth and shoebutton eyes. As he watched, it slipped beneath the surface and sank.
Reed knew it didn’t jump on him of its own accord.
He looked up and there was a woman standing before that opened window on the second floor. She was terribly pale and she wore no shirt. He could clearly see the naval of her flat belly and her round breasts quite clearly. She smiled and waved. Her mouth was moving and she was saying something, but he couldn’t hear what it was.
It was then that it struck him with a dreamy sort of realization that the woman in the window was Lucy Costigan. Well, it couldn’t be because Lucy was in Park Falls and that woman up there looked to be a brunette. But the resemblance was uncanny. Same big dark eyes and high cheekbones, long neck, and even the breasts…just as he’d imagined them.
She was trapped up there.
Sure, that was it. She needed someone to rescue her and when they did she would be impossibly grateful and…
And Reed, not paying one lick of attention to his instincts and that high alarmed voice in his head, strolled right up to the door of a curio shop called Leslie’s Notions. The door was open and he waded right in there, bumping past floating boxes and plastic bags. It was shadowy in there and the fear he had felt before had not entirely abandoned him. Some childlike sense of horror told him that any moment something huge and shaggy and oyster- eyed would rise from the standing water and sink its teeth into him.
But as quickly as that image had inserted itself, it fled.
Because Reed felt an exhilaration now, one born from a childhood spent reading fairy tales and heroic fantasy. There was a damsel in distress and he would now rescue her. It was the thing to do. It seemed right and more so, it simply felt right.
At the rear of the store, a door stood open and Reed found stairs there. He began to climb them. About half way up, he stopped again, just wondering frantically what he thought he was doing here. This was insane…yet, so necessary. He could not have stopped himself even if he had wanted to. His heart was telling him to rescue Lucy Costigan even if it was really not Lucy Costigan.
So up he went, glad to be out of the water now.
The steps creaked and his entire body was so waterlogged it felt clumsy and heavy. There was a bad stink up here, one that he associated with shit and raw sewage, but also crawling things, profuse and many-legged.
But that didn’t stop him.
He found a corridor and a waiting room. The door was closed, but he could see wet footprints leading up to it and then he knew it had been these same footprints that he had followed out of the water and up to this door.
The smell was worse up here, just flyblown and rancid, a poisoned smell of corpses afloat in stagnant ponds. And this made Reed again ask himself what in the fuck he thought he was doing.
But then he heard the approach of squishing feet.
“Lucy?” he said. “Is that you, Lucy?”
“Yes,” a voice said and he thought for one moment that it sounded like wind blown through a reedy pipe, hollow and haunted.
The door opened and Lucy was standing there.
Reed went to her as she came to him, melted into his arms and it was then he saw that braided dark ponytail plastered to one bony shoulder with wetness and knew it was the floating dead woman. But he didn’t honestly care. He held onto her and she was cold as the guts of a dead fish and only marginally less slimy.
“Down below, down below,” she said in that voice of windy churchyards. “Down in the dark spaces, that’s where I’ll take you.”
Reed kissed her lips and they were frigid and waxy. Her bland white face was perforated with tiny holes as if something had been tunneling into her. Her flesh was not only cold, but gelid and wormy. As she pulled him closer against her, one of her breasts mashed flat and then popped like bubble in a spew of black fluid.
But by then, Reed did not care.
He let his Lucy take him to the window and then out of it, falling together into the surging dead sea of Bethany. He might have screamed once as they splashed down, his lungs quickly filling with rainwater. But that was it. Looping him in those boneless arms, she dove beneath the streets of Bethany, pulling Reed through those nighted tunnels and into the forever darkness of the rushing, cloistered underworld below where there was only silt and black water and decomposition.
All in all, Reed’s death was almost peaceful.
8
It was coming.
Night was coming.
Like some dead clock chiming just over the gray, fuming horizon, echoing with the sound of midnight down mahogany corridors, night was surely coming. And it was coming with menace and murk and malevolence, and what could you really do but fold up like a flower engulfed by night-frost or lay still like a corpse tucked away in a moonlight latticed box and just hope it would pass you by without stopping or lingering and reaching out for you?
Twilight hung decaying over the winding streets and glistening rooftops of that far northern country of
