Circle of Enemies

I’d have as much cash as I could carry.

Sometimes an empty house feels empty. Everything seems inert, like a vacant tomb. But I couldn’t tell with Wally’s place. It didn’t feel empty or full; it was just a space.

A quick scan of the room didn’t show any sigils or other signs of a spell. I kicked over the corner of the fancy rug, but it was just unmarked floorboards underneath.

To the left I saw a doorway to a room with counters and a tiled floor. I went in. It was a small kitchen, but it wasn’t lacking for gear. It had a four-burner gas stove top and a full-sized fridge. I went through and opened another door to a little mudroom, complete with washer and dryer.

The only other door here obviously led outside. I wasn’t ready to leave yet, but I did peek out the window. Having light sources close by made the darkness outside look like black paint on the glass. If Annalise and Talbot were out there, I couldn’t see them.

On my way out of the kitchen, I opened the fridge. Part of me was convinced it would be full of human heads, but all I found were spoiled chicken parts and discolored steaks still in the packaging. The unit was just as cold as it should be; Wally hadn’t been here for a while. This was the second abandoned home in as many days, and it made me feel like I was in a race but so far behind the pack that I couldn’t see the other runners.

I went back into the living room, and more details jumped out at me. There was no TV, but there was a stack of newspapers in the corner and a pile of magazines beside that. A small stack of mail sat on the table, but when I flipped through it, I didn’t see anything interesting. No brochures for Vegas hotels or train schedules, at least. It was all addressed to Wally King.

I lifted a framed photo off the table. It showed Wally at about eighteen, wearing a life jacket and standing next to a wide stretch of white-water rapids somewhere. He was smiling and giving a thumbs-up, as though excited about his new adventure. There was no one else in the picture, and there were no other photos in the room—not family, not friends, nothing.

In the back corner there was another doorway. It led to a short hallway with a door at the end and another just on my left. I figured the one on my left was a bathroom, and opening it proved me right. I looked around quickly but didn’t find anything unusual, unless you counted a bottle of Vicodin with no doctor or patient’s name on it, which I didn’t.

When I put my hand on the knob of the other door, though, goose bumps ran up my arms and back. I’ve learned to trust those sudden intuitions, and I held both my weapons at the ready as I opened it.

This was the bedroom, naturally. It was empty. I stood in the doorway, my heart pounding. No one was there. I flicked the light switch.

The bulb in the center of the ceiling struggled to life. It barely lit the room. The dresser against the back wall was made of mahogany, and the sheets on the bed were satin. Between the dresser and the wall was a pair of sliding closet doors.

I crossed the room to the dresser, hearing the floor creak under my feet. I took each drawer out of the dresser and dumped the contents onto the bed. All of his clothes were triple-X sweat suits in various colors, plus gray boxers and white socks. There was nothing else in the drawers or taped to the bottom. There was nothing in or under the bed, either.

Then I opened the closet.

The only thing hanging inside was a heavy winter coat. I took it off the hanger and tossed it onto the bed. I’d search the pockets, but that could wait.

Because inside the empty closet, Wally had drawn something on the wall in black Sharpie. I couldn’t see the whole thing at once because the sliding doors blocked half the closet. Gripping the bottom of the door, I lifted it up and out like the door to a DeLorean until the wheels burst out of the tracks. Then I did it again, tossing both onto the bed.

I squatted low, because the light was weak and I was throwing a shadow. “Well, well,” I said aloud. The sound of my own voice surprised me.

In the upper left corner of the closet was a drawing of the earth. There was a crude energy to it—it wasn’t pretty, but I could see Florida and the eastern edge of South America along one side of the circle. On the other, I could see West Africa and southern Europe. Two heavy black lines ran along the continents and oceans like cracks in an eggshell.

To the right of that drawing and a little lower on the wall was a second drawing of the earth, but while the first was made by someone who couldn’t form a perfect freehand circle, this one was obviously meant to be bulging and malformed. Billows of steam shrouded most of the planet like a blanket of clouds, but something was just coming through them—something alive. Wally had drawn a single eye on a face that might have been liquid, or partially liquid, and in other places something else was rising out. Were they tentacles? The curves of a serpent?

To the right of that drawing and still lower on the wall was a crude image of a city. In the foreground, people fled toward me, their arms over their heads in a stick-figure depiction of blind panic. In the background was a towering something—a thing so huge that the city skyscrapers looked like pencil stubs next to a grown man’s leg. I had the impression that it was dragging across the ground like a tongue licking a lollipop, and inside it I could see objects rising up: buildings, trees, and tiny screaming people.

The last image was almost down at the carpet, and at first it was difficult to make out in the shadowy corner of the closet. I got onto my hands and knees to peer at it.

The sun—our sun, presumably—was way down in the bottom right corner. There were a few broken specks to the left of that, and it took me a moment to realize that they must have been asteroids or loose rock. Maybe the broken pieces of the earth?

On the left edge of this picture was a drawing of something obviously meant to be very much in the foreground. It was a ragged piece of something that was moving out of sight on the left, and all I could see was the rear part trailing behind like a corner of wet laundry. Inside it, as though trapped in an amoeba, were people, and they were screaming with all their might. I got the impression that they had been screaming for a long time, and would still be screaming an eternity from now.

I took out the cell Annalise had left for me. I had to noodle with it a little, but eventually I figured out how to take a picture of all four pictures together, then I took a close-up of each one. What the hell. Someone might care.

On the floor by this final sketch was an open book. It was a thin hardcover, one of those kids’ books that come