Nightstruck (10 page)

She clawed at the edge of the doors, losing a couple of fingernails in a vain effort to pull herself away from the widening gap.

The doors continued to open, the motion smooth and effortless, as if the doors were
designed
to open that way. One end of the caution tape unwound itself from her ankle and plunged into the gap between the doors.

She tried to use her newly freed leg to propel herself off of the doors, but she couldn't even feel her foot.

The doors continued their inexorable opening. Gravity and rain-slick metal were working together to pull Jill toward that opening, through which she could see nothing but impenetrable darkness. But the tape decided to help the process along anyway.

Jill felt as if a two-ton anchor had just latched on to the bottom of the tape around her ankle. Even using both hands and her one free leg to resist, there was nothing she could do.

Screaming, she slid into the opening, wedging there for a moment because it wasn't large enough to admit her. Then the doors opened just a fraction more, and she was dragged down into the darkness below.

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

The good news was that Dad decided to give my cell phone back before my official grounding was over—not because I'd been such a perfect angel (the detention was proof that wasn't the case), but because he didn't like the idea of me being out in the city without a way to call for help if I needed it. Apparently the crime spree and wacko 9-1-1 calls were still in full force.

The bad news was that the crime spree made it so Dad was literally never home even close to on time. And even when he
was
home he was on the phone practically all the time. Which meant that not only was it up to me to stock our groceries and make our meals, I was also stuck walking Bob every night, once after dinner and once right before going to bed, if Dad wasn't home yet.

I know walking the dog a couple of times a day doesn't sound like much of a hardship, especially with one as well-behaved as Bob, but reports said we were having the coldest November in more than a century, and I had no trouble believing it. It didn't matter how cold it got, or if it was pouring down rain, or even if there was a freaking blizzard. Bob still had to go out, and I still had to clean up after him. All of which made me jealous of people who lived out in the 'burbs and had fenced-in yards.

Although Bob's intimidating presence made me feel pretty safe, I still kept a careful eye on my surroundings when I walked him, feeling a heightened sense of awareness both because of the crime spree and because of my own recent … misadventures. I was using a different dog-walking route these days, avoiding the alley by the church, but there was nothing on my new route I hadn't passed a thousand times before over the years of living here. Apparently I'd never really bothered to
look
at my surroundings before. Not closely anyway.

It was when I was walking Bob right before bed on Thursday night that I realized how truly oblivious I usually was to what was around me. For instance, I'd never noticed before that the metal grille the proprietor of a nearby antiques store lowered over his windows at night had wickedly sharp little burrs at regular intervals. You could see what was in the window through the grille, but heaven help you if you tried to, say, stick your face in the window to get a better look at something.

I stopped and frowned when I noticed the burrs, and Bob took that opportunity to mark the shop as belonging to him. There used to be a homeless guy who frequently hung out on the stoop next to the shop, and I could have sworn I used to see him sitting with his back against that grille sometimes. Though now that I thought of it, I hadn't seen him in a while. Maybe the owner had added the burrs to discourage just that kind of thing, and that was why the homeless guy had moved on.

I continued on around the block, and I noticed several more little oddities. Like the knocker on one of the doors on a row of houses being in the shape of a tongue. It was a small thing, but I wondered how I'd never noticed and had a little laugh at it before. It was possible whoever lived there had just installed it, though, so maybe there was nothing strange about my not noticing.

Then there was the iron railing on the sides of the stoop of another house. I'd noticed its highly ornamental ironwork before and had somehow thought the design in the center was a fleur-de-lis. Maybe that's what it was
supposed
to be. But the bulb in the middle didn't come to a point like it usually would in a fleur-de-lis, and the two petals on each side of it curled so much they were almost circular. How could I not have noticed before how phallic that design was? Again, it seemed like something I would have had a laugh at in the past. I must have been blind not to have seen it.

On Friday morning I decided to take advantage of having my cell phone back and take snapshots of a couple of the oddities I'd noticed the night before. I wanted to ask my dad if
he'd
ever noticed them. I figured he must have, because his cop instincts made him super observant.

And that was when I took yet another step into the Twilight Zone. I left my house a little early so I'd have time to walk around the block before heading to the train station for school, but when I came to the antiques shop, its grille was up and there was shadowy movement inside, so no chance there. I hurried forward until I reached the row of houses with the tongue door knocker. There were five houses, and I could have sworn it was the one in the middle with the red door that had had it, but this morning there was no sign of the tongue. All the door knockers looked perfectly normal.

Perhaps the owner had decided the tongue was too weird, I told myself, but I couldn't hold back a shiver of apprehension. It reminded me a little too much of the eagle incident.

I kept rationalizing and headed on to the house with the phallic design in its railing. There was no way the owner could have switched
that
out overnight.

But when I got there I saw that the design in the center was clearly a fleur-de-lis. I supposed if I squinted at it and looked at it sideways it might look a little phallic. But I was dead certain it didn't look the way it had when I'd walked Bob last night.

That damn brain tumor is acting up again,
I told myself, trying to laugh it off.

Maybe, thanks to my dad's stories about all the whacked-out stuff that was happening at night, I'd somehow made myself sort of paranoid. Maybe last night I'd been actively looking for something to be strange and had convinced myself I'd seen it. Damn it, I was going to stick to logical explanations as long as I possibly could.

I snapped a quick picture of the railing on my phone before I left to catch my train. Surely I'd shattered the illusion now that I'd seen the railing in the bright light of day, but I wanted that photographic evidence in case my eyes or memory started playing tricks on me when I walked Bob later that night.

*   *   *

I spent the day trying not to obsess. Not only did I do a piss-poor job of it, but I was so lost in my own head that I couldn't seem to concentrate on the inconvenient pop quiz my teacher sprang on us during calculus class. I'm really good at math—obviously, or I wouldn't have been taking calculus—but my skills failed me that afternoon, and I knew I'd be lucky if I got a C.

I consoled myself with the thought that, unlike my mom, my dad didn't pore over my every grade and share his opinion of my performance. But that thought evoked a strange twist of yearning in my chest. I'd gotten over the worst of missing my mom within a month or so of her moving to Boston, but every once in a while her absence would rise up out of nowhere and smack me in the face. I talked to her on the phone every week, and I'd be going up to Boston soon to spend Thanksgiving with her and my sister, but that wasn't the same.

If my mom were still living with me, would I have confided in her about all the strange things that had been happening? I wasn't sure I would have had the nerve, because talking about it would somehow make it all more real, but I
might
have. She was warmer and more approachable than my dad. At least more so than my post-divorce dad. But then she wasn't warm and nurturing enough to hang around in Philadelphia for my last year of living at home, and her taking that job in Boston had forced me to decide between her and my dad. Maybe she used to be someone I could have confided in, but she wasn't anymore.

I was not a bit surprised when, shortly after I got home from school, my dad called to let me know he'd be home late. Again.

“Maybe you should call when you're
not
going to be late,” I quipped. I meant it as a joke, but I could tell from the tone of his voice that Dad didn't take it that way.

“I'm really sorry, honey,” he said. “If there was any way I could—”

“Relax, Dad. I was just kidding.”

But was I? I honestly didn't know if there was something passive-aggressive about that little joke. I had to admit, I was pretty sick of being home alone all the time.

“I'm sorry anyway,” Dad said, and I wanted to kick myself for putting the guilt trip on him, whether it had been semi-intentional or not. He was doing the best he could, and I knew that.

I fixed myself some tomato soup and a grilled cheese for dinner, too lazy to put together something that required any actual effort, then fed Bob and prepared for what I feared would be the ordeal of walking him. I didn't know what I was going to see on our little stroll around the block, but at this point I knew I would be unnerved by the time I got home, either way.

I bundled up against the cold and clipped on Bob's leash. “Let's do this,” I muttered under my breath.

But when I reached the front door I found myself hesitating, not sure I had the courage to face what was out there. Or what
wasn't
out there.

Bob whined and scratched at the door, giving me an impatient look.

I took a deep breath and finally found my courage. My cell phone was tucked away in my pocket, and within a few minutes I would know whether I should be fearing for my sanity or fearing that something genuinely goose bump–inducing was happening.

Out into the cold I went, Bob leading the way. I had the brief, cowardly thought that I should choose a different route, but Bob knew the way, and I didn't argue.

We passed the antiques store with its barbed grille, but since I hadn't seen it during the day, I didn't know whether those barbs were unusual or not. When we got to the house that may or may not have had a tongue-shaped door knocker the night before, I saw that the door was open and some guy was going at the knocker with a screwdriver. So apparently the homeowner
was
messing around with the knocker.

Hope surged through me, and my knees felt weak with relief. I wasn't crazy, and nothing spooky was going on. There had been a logical explanation all along.

The relief and hope both retreated when I remembered the phallic railing and my inability to come up with any logical explanation for it. Certainly that homeowner wasn't changing the railing back and forth within the span of a single day.

Bracing myself, I continued on my route. As soon as I turned the corner up ahead, the railing would come into sight, though it would be too far away to make out details yet. Bob slowed us down by taking care of business, but then we were rounding the corner, heading toward the railing in question. My eyes homed in on it immediately, and I stared at it with single-minded purpose as we approached.

My stomach did a nausea-inducing backflip when I got close enough for a good look and saw the unmistakable phallic symbol in a circle of iron at the center of the railing.

I swallowed hard and came to a complete stop, shaking my head. Bob gave me a curious look, no doubt wondering why we'd stopped, but he was perfectly content to spend a little time sniffing around.

Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out my cell phone and brought up the photo I had taken just this morning. In that photo, the emblem in the center of the railing was clearly a fleur-de-lis. I closed my eyes, squeezing them tight, then ventured another peek at the railing in front of me. Everything about the house looked exactly the same now as it did in the photo—up to and including the house number on the weathered gray door—except for that railing.

This was no trick of the light or of my imagination. The railing did not look the same now as it had this morning. Period.

The realization made my head spin and my pulse race.

With shaking hands I raised my phone and took another picture of the railing. I was thinking that maybe I could show the two pictures to Dad tonight when he came home, though I wasn't sure I could wait that long to get confirmation of what my eyes were telling me. Maybe I'd just send the two pictures to Piper and ask her what she saw.

But apparently seeing a phallic symbol with my own two eyes after confirming earlier that it was a fleur-de-lis wasn't enough weirdness for one night, because when I pulled up the photo I had just taken …

There was the fleur-de-lis, right smack in the middle of the railing where it was supposed to be.

It has to be the wrong photo,
I told myself, but I knew it wasn't, even as I flipped to the previous photo on my phone and saw the daytime shot. One was clearly taken during the day, and one was clearly taken at night. I rubbed my eyes and looked at the railing again, but that phallic symbol remained firmly in place. Mocking me.

I tried taking a photo again. When I looked at the camera view, I saw the phallic symbol, but when I actually snapped the picture, the fleur-de-lis was back.

I felt near hyperventilating and was probably white as a ghost. A kind-faced lady walking by looked like she was thinking of asking me if I was all right, but then she saw Bob and kept moving. Bob doesn't even have to bare his teeth to make people think twice about getting close to him. I considered asking the lady to look at the railing and tell me what she saw, but if I was going crazy, the last person I'd want to confirm it for me was some stranger who just happened to be passing by.