Bad Glass

would have to wait until we got back to the house.

As soon as the camera had been put away, I collapsed back to the floor, slumping into a boneless sitting position. I could feel the blood rushing out of my head, a cold sweat popping out on my cheeks and forehead. I was exhausted.

That face. Was it alive? Had it seen me? At the end, right before the spiders had come, that eye had swiveled up toward me, and there had been something there, some type of intelligence, maybe. But without a corresponding facial expression, it was hard to interpret. Was it conscious of its situation, pleading for help?

Impossible.

“Dean?” Taylor crouched down at my side. “Whatever it was, it’s over now. It’s just the city. It’s what the city does.” She draped her jacket over my shoulders, trying to comfort me. I almost laughed. Almost.

I took a deep breath and forced myself to sit up straight. “What are you doing here?” I asked. “Did you follow me?”

“I didn’t even know you were up here. Charlie wanted me to help look for his mom, and this is the first building I came to. I heard you cry out from the ground floor.”

I didn’t remember crying out, but I wasn’t surprised. Maybe when that first spider had touched my cheek—my head in that hole, bristles brushing against my face as I stared up into the moving darkness. After a few more deep breaths, I shrugged out of Taylor’s jacket and got back to my feet.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I grunted, shaking my arms, trying to work blood back through my body. “It’s just the city,” I said, repeating her words. “Just the city.”

I noticed the throbbing in my palm as we walked back to the house.

We moved slowly. Amanda and Taylor were trying to comfort Charlie as we walked, flanking him on both sides, bracing him with gentle hands and quiet, indistinct words. His shoulders were slumped, practically radiating a sense of defeat. Mac and I stayed off to one side, trying to give them enough space and silence.

We’d spent nearly two hours going room to room through those abandoned buildings, but there had been no sign of his mother. No hint that she’d ever been near the corner of Second Avenue and Sherman Street.

Just that photo.

I flexed my left hand and felt a burst of fire beneath my fingers. I looked and found a line of raw flesh bisecting my palm. The outer layers of skin were gone—a bloodred line stretching from beneath my pinkie all the way to the web of flesh bridging fingers and thumb.

I stared at it for several seconds before finally placing the wound. Back in the apartment. I’d had my head in the hole, and when I’d pulled back, I’d felt my hand ripping free from the wall. But how? This was no cut, no abrasion.

I flexed again, feeling the throb.

The skin is gone, I realized. Left behind, inside the wall.

Had it begun to take me? The wall? The city? If I’d stayed in that position, focused on my camera, would I have pulled back to find my hand sunk all the way through, my fingers poking out from drywall, joining the face— that horrible, conscious face—inside that claustrophobic prison?

Again I flexed, and again I felt that throb.

Is that what this is? I wondered, my stomach churning, upset with dread and revelation. Some type of dissolution of form? Boundaries fading and merging, absorbing and consuming?

But how? And why?

I continued to flex my hand, flexing and releasing all the way home.

Photograph. October 19, 08:35 A.M. The warren:

A cave dug into the side of a grassy hill. A slice of darkness, partially hidden beneath a pricker bush.

At the top of the frame, autumn-red trees reach up from the far side of the hill, touching a clear blue sky. The top of a clock tower is visible above the highest branches; the clock is out of focus, the time illegible. There are two human-shaped shadows cast against the side of the hill, one on each side of the dark opening. The photographer’s shadow is on the left—arms steepled up into a pyramid—and a thin, armless apparition lurks to the right.

The grass at the mouth of the opening is trampled into mud. Countless paw prints have warped the turf into textured stucco.

There is nothing visible inside the cave. It is an entrance into pure, depthless black.

I dreamed about the face and the spiders. Not the reality of the situation—I didn’t find myself back inside that apartment, seeing these things for the first time—instead, I dreamed about the photographs I’d taken. My precisely cropped, color-corrected images. The same ones I’d spent hours and hours tweaking and adjusting the night before.

The pictures weren’t great—the light was too dim, the focus too soft—but I managed to salvage a trio of interesting shots: one taken between the walls, capturing the line of electric blue and that eerie face (the face just barely visible after extensive masking and gamma correction); a wide-angle shot showing the horde of spiders swarming out of the hole, cluttering the surrounding wall; and finally, a close-up of the spider with the human finger. In that last shot, the bizarre subject matter had to make up for a bad angle and weak, muted colors.

After I retired for the night, these static images followed me down into sleep, changing and multiplying in my dreams.

I spent the entire night tweaking dream photos, watching as spiders took life, stepped out of my pictures, and crawled across the computer screen while I tried desperately to capture and freeze them in place with my trackpad. I was trying to create the perfect photograph, I knew, the one that would make me famous, the one that would save me from a life of accounting. But the spiders refused to hold still. And as the night wore on, I grew increasingly frustrated.

When Amanda touched my shoulder, I jolted upright, coming fully awake.

“Shhhhh!” Her pale skin and blond hair glowed in a trickle of predawn violet. “It’s early,” she said. “Everyone’s asleep.”

I nodded and stifled a cough, then scooted up into a sitting position.

I was still camped out on the living-room sofa. The photo of Charlie’s mother had brought the entire house to a screeching halt, filling the rooms with a funereal stillness and putting my move on hold.

It had been a difficult evening. As soon as we got back home from Sherman and Second Avenue, Charlie had retreated to his room upstairs. The rest of us—including Devon, Floyd, and Sabine—had gathered in the living room, unsure how to respond to Charlie’s pain. Should we offer him comfort? Give him time to think and heal? Ultimately, we decided to just let him be.

There was no pot that night and no laughter, and dinner proved a rather subdued affair. After we finished eating, Taylor disappeared upstairs with a plate of food. She stayed up there for the rest of the night.

I, for my part, made my own retreat, cracking open my notebook computer and immersing myself in Photoshop.

“What time is it?” I asked Amanda. My sleep had been fitful, and I was still confused, disoriented. It took me