Bad Glass

I started to say something—I don’t remember what: a question for Taylor, maybe, about Danny and the military—but a loud bang shocked me out of my thoughts. I turned and found Charlie standing bolt upright in front of his computer, his chair overturned on the floor. He stood like that for a long moment, a stricken look on his face. Then he slammed his laptop shut and darted out of the room.

He fled the house, leaving the front door standing open behind him.

I glanced over at Taylor, but she just shook her head, her eyes wide.

After a moment of paralyzed silence, Mac started to move. He took several steps toward the front door, going after Charlie, then pulled to an abrupt stop. He took a step forward, then a step back. It was like some halting, tentative dance, a ballet of confusion and adrenaline. Amanda, meanwhile, stayed on her side of the room, fiddling with the dials on the Coleman stove.

“What …?” Mac finally implored, turning toward Taylor. “What just happened?”

Taylor stood up and moved over to Charlie’s computer. She opened the lid and pressed the space bar a couple of times, waking it from slumber. After a few seconds, the hard drive spun into motion and the screen flickered back on.

I recognized Charlie’s email program. There was an incoming message open in the main window. Charlie’s address—[email protected]—was listed in the “to” field, and the subject line had been left blank. The sender was listed as [email protected].

There was no text in the body of the message, just a single picture. File name: sherman_today.jpg.

The picture showed a woman standing on the corner of an abandoned city block. She was a black woman, at least forty years old, maybe forty-five. She had straight shoulder-length hair. Her body was turned away from the camera, but she was glancing back over her shoulder. It was a candid shot, and she looked distracted, worried. The street was shrouded in mist, disappearing into white oblivion a half block up. It looked like early morning, just before sunrise.

There was a street sign on the corner. The pole was bent at a severe angle—at least thirty degrees off vertical—but it was still readable, its green reflective surface practically glowing in the early-morning haze. It was the brightest color in the whole frame: SHERMAN ST.

Taylor reached out and touched the computer screen, gently tracing the length of the woman’s body. She glanced up. Her eyes were wide, darting from my face over to Amanda and Mac.

“It’s Charlie’s mother,” she said. “She’s here. Downtown.”

Photograph. October 18, 01:50 P.M. Between the walls:

It is a claustrophobic space. Very little light.

The photograph is framed in the vertical—walls to the left and right, the camera pointed straight down. The space between the walls is no more than a foot wide. There is a source of light down below—a dim line of electric blue, extending from the top of the frame all the way to the bottom. A ruler-straight line of color, down where the walls end.

A trickle of daylight illuminates the foreground; we can see bare wood studs and line after line of joists proceeding into the darkness. There are holes punched through these two imposing stretches of wall—splintered dents, like violent, gaping wounds. But they are distant, and they let in only tiny fingers of gray.

The wood in the foreground is damp, glistening as if coated with a sheen of ice.

There is a bulge in the left-hand wall, about five feet away—a dark half-moon with a blurry fuzz around its edge. It is off center, perched in the lower part of the frame. Slightly out of focus. After a moment of study, you can just make out pale flesh in the dim light, then a wide-open, terrified eye.

Down there, lodged in the wall, is half a face. Half a human face—sexless—ringed in a nimbus of short, dark hair. It is angled inward, toward the wall, and its open mouth is bisected just to the left of the canine tooth, sheared away where flesh meets wood.

The wide-open eye is not blurred. Not clouded. Not insensate.

The eye is clear. And damp. And terrified.

We found the street sign on the corner of Second Avenue and Sherman Street. It was twisted like a bendy straw, just as we’d seen in Charlie’s photo.

The corner was deserted. No Charlie. No mother.

“It wasn’t like that before,” Taylor said, nodding toward the sign. “I walk this street three times a week, and I don’t remember seeing it bent like that. It must have happened in the last couple of days.”

Amanda and Mac both nodded. Mac gave a single strong nod, while Amanda’s head just kept bouncing up and down, like a weight on a spring.

I had my backpack slung over my shoulder—I’d grabbed it as we stormed out of the house—and on a whim, I took out my camera and tried to re-create the photo of Charlie’s mother. I found the correct angle about twenty feet up Second Avenue, then turned back toward the sign and raised the viewfinder to my eye. This is where the photographer had stood. I tried to remember the particulars of the shot. The light was completely different now, with sunshine and shadows instead of early-morning mist.

My viewfinder showed Amanda, Mac, and Taylor clustered around the sign, surveying the surrounding buildings. I don’t know if it was a conscious decision on their part, but they’d left a wide gap where Charlie’s mother had been.

Lined up, left to right: Amanda and Mac, the sign, a large space, and then Taylor.

I could combine the photos, I thought, snapping the shot. At first it was just an idle bit of fancy, but the image that rose to mind was strangely affecting. I glanced down at the LCD screen and studied the photograph I’d just taken. I could see it now. The combined picture would have Amanda, Mac, Charlie’s mother, and Taylor, all lined up in a row. Amanda, Mac, and Taylor would look confused and just a little bit bored—on the camera’s screen, Taylor had her arms crossed in front of her chest and an impatient look on her face—but Charlie’s mother … she would be wreathed in a halo of mist, glancing back over her shoulder with that scared look on her face.

It would be an interesting shot. A hole punched through the world. A hole punched through time.

“Charlie!” Taylor called. I looked up from the camera and found her turning a full circle in the middle of the street, her hands cupped around her mouth. “Charlie!”

I joined the others at the sign, and we all started craning our heads, studying the surrounding buildings. After about a minute, I noticed Charlie half a block away, standing motionless in a doorway on Second Avenue. He wasn’t moving to join us. He wasn’t even looking our way. His head was down, tilted against the door frame, and the way he looked—the slump to his shoulders—made me think that the frame was the only thing keeping him on his feet.

I started toward him, and the others followed as soon as they saw where I was going. When I got within a dozen feet, I slowed down and stopped, not sure how to proceed. Charlie’s face was ashen-gray, and his cheeks glistened with tears. That emotion stopped me cold. I didn’t know what I could do for him. He’s a kid, I thought, just a kid of seventeen. I knew he was curious, painfully