314 Book 2 (33 page)

“Look at that,” said Oliver with pride. He tapped the top of
a glowing letter ‘P’ before carefully walking to the side of building. “It’s getting better every day.”

“I’m telling you, the story
about Amanda was all over the news,” said Lee. The thin man was standing at the base of a ladder that was leaned against the diner. He was shouting up at Oliver about something, but the scientist didn’t seem to be paying attention. Lee cupped his hand to the side of his mouth and shouted louder. “It was a real tragedy!”

Oliver rolled his eyes and ignored Lee. He shouted down to Nia,
“We’ve got a big day ahead of us.”

“Oh yeah?” asked Nia. “What’s the plan?”

Oliver concentrated as he descended the ladder, and then brushed himself off before smiling at the two girls. He reached into his shirt pocket and produced a black, Bic pen. He raised his eyebrows as he looked at Nia.

Mindy shrugged. “What? Am I missing something?”

“It’s the pen,” said Oliver as if that should be enough to explain it to Mindy.

“I know it’s a pen,” said Mindy.

“Not just any pen,” said Oliver. “It’s the pen that Nia was able to get an imprint from back in Chicago.”

“
Oh,” said Mindy with sudden realization. “The one that was shoved down that chick’s throat? Yuck.”

Oliver had looked excited a moment earlier, and then regarded the pen with new consideration after Mindy’s comment. He frowned as he slipped it back into his pocket. “We’re going to the city council building today, where Amelia Reven’s body was found.”

“With that pen lodged in her throat,” said Nia.

“Right,” said Oliver, perturbed by the girls’ preoccupation with the pen. “It’s one of the last buildings that I really want to get a good
sketch of before we move on to the house on Sycamore.”

“I’m not ready for that yet,” said Nia in reference to the house that Oliver had brought her to when they first got to Widowsfield.

“I know, I know,” said Oliver. “But I’m hoping this will help you out. Amelia was one of two people that were found dead here in Widowsfield after the event. Everyone else, well, disappeared.” Oliver looked down and to the right as he spoke.

Nia’s psychometric ability had also trained her to be wary of deception. It wasn’t possible to tell if someone was lying by the direction their eyes looked, as
some television shows attested. However, it was possible to tell when they were having an internal dialogue before speaking. When a person lies, they tend to consider what they’re about to say, to make sure it’s appropriate, and that causes them to look down and to the right. It was a frequent sign of a lie, or at least of a carefully worded statement.

“Where’s the building at?” asked Nia.

“Just up the street, on the corner of Main and Beech,” said Oliver as he pointed. “Let us finish up here and we’ll head over.”

“Can I have the pen?” asked Nia.

Oliver looked surprised, but then shrugged. “I guess so, sure. Here.” He handed it to her.

“We’ll meet you there,” said Nia
as she took the pen. “I need to talk to Mindy about her boyfriend.”

“What boyfriend?” asked Mindy, but then Nia jerked her back toward the street.

“See you guys in a minute,” said Nia as she led Mindy away.

Oliver and Lee smiled and waved just before a cold drizzle began to fall.

As they left, Nia could hear Lee begin speaking with Oliver again. “Both of them were eaten by catfish. It was awful. I heard about it on the news.”

“Okay, what’s up?” asked Mindy when they were out of earshot
from Oliver. “Why are you dragging me off like this?”

“Because we’re going to finally figure out what the hell happened here, and I want to do it before Oliver shows up to take notes.”

Nia walked at a brisk pace and Mindy struggled to keep up. “What are you talking about?”

“That pen is the key,” said Nia before she corrected herself. “Well, not the pen exactly, but the event, the death of Amelia Reven, that’s the clue. That’s the starting point for us.”

“I’m lost,” said Mindy.

“When I first held that pen, I remembered how Amelia used to chew on it. She would walk around with that pen in her mouth because she was trying to quit smoking, and chewing on the pen cap helped
her stop her cravings. She died with that pen lodged in her throat, and they found her like that. If Oliver is telling the truth, and she’s one of the only people that was found dead here, then I think I can figure out what happened.”

“I’m still not following you,” said Mindy.

“It’s a constant. You see, everything around this place is filled with a million different histories, but that pen wasn’t. Amelia died the first day, right on March 14
th
. If she died before time was fractured, then I can use her as a constant to figure out what really happened. Does that make sense?”

Mindy thought about it for a second and then shook her head. “No.”

Nia groaned. “Okay, okay, let me try to think of how to explain it. You know how I get a ton of different alternate histories around this place, right?”

“Sure,” said Mindy.

“Well, if I could find just one history that’s real, that we know actually happened, then it could help me weed out all the wrong ones.” Nia saw her friend’s confused look and then came up with an analogy. “Think of it as a box filled with pieces from a thousand puzzles, all just mixed up. Okay? And you’re trying to put together one of those puzzles, but it’s impossible because there’re so many different pieces.”

“I’m with you,” said Mindy.

“And then you discover that the puzzle you want to put together can be distinguished by the color on the back of it. Suddenly you can go into the box and start to weed out all the pieces that don’t fit.”

“Well, here we are,” said Mindy as they stopped at the corner of Main and Beech. “If you’re right, then we can finally start to figure out what really happened here.”

Widowsfield

March 14
th
, 1996

2:59
pm

Amelia Reven picked up her black Bic pen from the silver cup on her desk. It had been a stressful day, and she wanted nothing more than to sneak out to the alley behind the building to smoke. She’d only recently quit, and was determined to stick with it this time. The third time was supposed to be the charm, but perhaps the fifth would be the charm for her. She stuck the pen cap in her mouth and gnawed on it.

Her phone
rang. It was a large, black monstrosity that had the capacity to reach multiple lines. The Widowsfield Council Building had been outfitted with a new system recently, and she still hadn’t learned to use it properly.

“Hello?” asked Amelia as she held the phone to her ear. She used the tip of her pen to poke at the buttons on the phone to attach to the ringing line. As if to mock her, the phone continued to ring even though it was off the hook.

“Oh for heaven’s sake,” she said as she stabbed at the various buttons. “Why the heck can’t we just have a phone instead of this blasted thing? All I want is to have a simple, regular old… Hello?” she asked again when she finally hit the right button.

“Oh, hi Mark. I’m sorry, it’s just this silly new phone system. I can’t seem to make heads or tails out of it. I’m like a badger with a beer bottle here. What can I do for you darling?”

The pen tapped on an oak table as Amelia listened to the man on the phone. The pen had no recollection of what the man was saying.

“Oh my gosh,” said Amelia. “You’re kidding me. Hold on, I’ll go look.”

Amelia started to walk to the window, but the phone cord dragged across her table, pulling off papers and pencils as it went. She groaned in frustration and then held the cord up and guided it over the edge of the desk as she walked across the room to the window.

She used the pen to push up one of the wooden slats in the blinds.

“No, I don’t see anything.”

Mark’s voice was a deep, bass rumble.

“Wait,” said Amelia. “I think I can see it. A big grey cloud, right? Holy mackerel, I see it. Where’s it coming from?”

Amelia put the pen in her mouth and then pulled the cord to raise the blinds. It was sunny out, but a cloud marred the horizon on the north side of town. “Lord, oh Lord. We need to evacuate the town, Mark. You go tell Sandra that we need to get word out to the schools. I don’t know. No, I don’t know and I don’t care. Holy mother of God, what is that?”

The cloud billowed faster than seemed plausible. It was far off, well north of the center of town, but it advanced at a shocking rate. Then a green bolt of lightning crossed an upper ridge of the fog, lighting it for a moment and revealing a twisting mass of black within.

Amelia gasped and muttered, “Lord have mercy.”

The phone line went dead.

“Mark? Mark?” Amelia went back to her desk and started to jam on the base of the phone, but it was
no use. Her heart was thundering, and her pulse quickened. She hung up the phone and went back to the window.

Widowsfield was disappearing within a cloud of smoke that had erupted from somewhere on the north side of town. The cloud swelled at an unnatural rate, but didn’t reach skyward. Instead, the cloud acted heavy, and rolled across town while leaving the blue sky above untouched. It molded itself over buildings, rising just high enough to cover the roofs, and then falling to the street below as if it were gelatinous.
Then the lightning coursed through again, revealing tentacles that lashed at the road, dragging the form within forward.

Amelia grasped her chest and groaned. She stopped chewing on the pen cap and instead bit down on it.

The fog swelled until it reached Main Street. It spread across the road and up the side of the Anderson Used Book store, and then over the emergency services building. Next it flowed past the entrance of the Salt and Pepper Diner and Amelia could see a young man in a flannel shirt caught up in the fog, and then disappear within the blackness.

Amelia staggered back, her hand still gripping her blouse. She gasped and then got down on one knee. She braced herself on the floor
with both hands before falling forward.

The fog claimed its first victim as Amelia Reven’s poor diet and years of smoking finally caught up with her. The fear of the encroaching terror had initiated a long overdue heart attack, and when she hit the floor face first, the black Bic pen lodged itself in her throat.

The room went dark as the fog swallowed them, but Amelia was dead before it got there.

Widowsfield

February 20th, 2007

“This is it,” said Nia.

Mindy and Nia were standing in the gutted remains of what had once been Amelia Reven’s office. Nia placed her hand on the floor where the woman had died. The floor was pine, laid in thin strips, and the soft wood bore a legacy of traffic. She let her index finger trace the edge of a dent and knew that the desk had fallen here once, when it was being moved by a janitor that was cleaning the vents. It had since been varnished, creating a waxy residue that protected the dent, sealing in the deep hue of soil and dust.

Then Nia moved her hand over to a new spot, where a smaller dent had pierced the pine. This was where the pen had struck when Amelia fell. Nia retracted her hand, wary of too much stimulation.

“She only appears in one memory. She died before the fracture.”

“So what does that mean?” asked Mindy.

“It means that the fog was real. I should’ve seen it sooner. The fog is always murky for me, but not with this. This time I saw it clear as day. All the other times I’ve been given memories, the fog was sort of an ill-defined thing; I knew it existed, but couldn’t have described it. I know what it looks like now, so I can find the truth wherever we go. I can finally see what really happened, as long as I look for the fog. It was moving too fast though, which makes me wonder if what I saw was a manipulation too. But I’ve never gotten a better sense of reality than this. It was as if I was staring at him.”

“At who?” asked Mindy.

“At The Watcher in the Walls,” said Nia. “I think almost everything I’ve seen has been an echo of what he did, but this is the first time I actually felt his presence. What Amelia saw out that window existed before The Skeleton Man or the red-haired woman broke free.”

“Okay, I still don’t get how that’s go
ing to help us. Are you going to tell Oliver?”

“No,” said Nia with insistence. “Don’t say a word. Keep this between you and me.”

“Okay, I will. Why though?”

“Because I don’t trust
him, and neither should you.”

“Don’t worry, I don’t. Never have,” said Mindy.

“The fog came from the north side of town. I want to go there to see if we can trace everything back to where it started.”

“Where the fog started?
Are you sure you want to go there?” asked Mindy.

“Yeah. I think if we can find that, then we’ve got a chance of solving this whole thing.”