PANIC (18 page)

“Could explain the ridging of the earth. That could be burrows.”

“Burrows?”

“Or warrens, whatever. Rabbits build them, so do rats and gophers. Huge networks of dug tunnels. We could check with animal control.”

Mia returned with the mug of tea.

“Enjoy,” she said with a smile. She couldn’t help but sound sarcastic, even though she meant it. Both men were too absorbed in trying to make the previous night’s event seem plausible.

“An ant hill. Termites, maybe. I've read in some places in Africa, ants build huge public works like moats and trade networks and farms, all underground. Few hundred million of them underneath your house could weaken the foundation and blam, there you go. Collapsed house.”

“Implosion rather than explosion.”

“Right. Especially if it’s termites.”

“We could consult with a geologist.”

They sat there for a while in silence, the huge fingerprint swirl imprinting on their inflamed brains.

More customers milled in, a woman with two young girls, a couple of high school kids, a guy in his suit working through his lunch break.

Wilson and the young man sank deeper into it, crafting theories about what might be.

Each idea fed off the last, symbiotically; an endless spiral into esoterica about unusual weather patterns, unorthodox mining techniques, elaborate pranks, alien interference, nuclear testing, subsonic earthquakes, concentrated radio waves and on and on to the absolute limit. They went back and forth like that for eight hours, producing little more than sheaf of insane scribbles and far-fetched theories, all destined to be crumpled up and tossed in a wastepaper basket.

Wilson rode home on the bus with less than no answers and a head full of questions.

T
HURSDAY

WILSON STEPS OUT of the Dodge with an accordion folder clutched under his arm, walking briskly toward a figure standing on the sidewalk across the four lanes of the street. In the field ahead of him there’s a metal canopy with picnic style tables off the side and what looks like an open green space covered by a staked tarp, freshly planted. He can tell because the translucent tarp pulls taut in the strong breeze, standing up like a parachute. It forms a rectangular dome, buffeted by the wind.

He can barely see the figure, though he knows who it is; tall, glasses, light, shaggy hair. P.J. stands perfectly still on the sidewalk, like a ghost in a photograph. He’s been standing there a while.

The wind is driving and tugging at Wilson’s raincoat, asking him to be lifted away like a stray plastic bag. He leans into it and hurries, even though there’s no traffic on the thoroughfare. There’s no rain, either, just the spray from the inlet turning to an ice-cold mist rolling across the ground. Gray wisps of cloud drag across the sky while the harbor wind kicks up. The mist carries the smell of the bay, marine oil, salt water and wet rocks.

This is a hat day.

He can see P.J.’s mouth moving but can’t hear a damn thing over the wind.

“What’s that?” says Wilson, jogging up onto the curb. He gives his erstwhile partner a firm clap on his upper arm, greeting him excitedly. There’s a worried look in P.J’s eyes that he doesn’t like. P.J. hardly reacts to the jovial salutation.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Peter,” Wilson begins, as he shifts the accordion folder from one arm to the other to tuck it. “You look like shit.”

“I haven’t been sleeping, Wilson.”

His eyes are wild, unblinking. Wilson clasps his hand on P.J.’s shoulder, feeling the young man’s knees buckle slightly.

“Let’s just go over here and sit do-”

He let Wilson take his hand away from his shoulder.

“Nevermind. I need to show you this.”

P.J. leans down to unlatch a J-hook attaching the tarp to one of the plastic stakes. It comes up easily but there are dozens lining each of the four sides of the sheet. Wilson starts in the opposite direction, going a little slower because of his bad knees. P.J. crawls along the ground in the grass, snapping up the hooks frantically to let more and more of the tarp flap in the breeze.

“Shit. Slow down,” Wilson mutters, trying to keep pace.

As each comes up, the wind draws the tarp tighter, causing the remaining hooks to pull taut and resist. The cold on the damp metal hooks bites his hands when he grips down, trying to keep pace with his erstwhile partner, madly snapping up the restraints.

The tarp flagged stiffly and tore at its harness, catching the wind like a sail. Even with only a quarter of the cover removed, Wilson can see it clearly. He stood from a kneel and the back of his hand covered his mouth. The characteristic parallel ridges lined the edge of the stakes, gently curving away from him. Breakfast came alive in his stomach.

“Oh, Christ.”

P.J. diligently pulled them up one by one, not content with a partial view. He worked so quickly that he didn’t even need Wilson’s help and the older man stood back. On the last hook, P.J. knelt there and let his hands go up to the sky, offering the billowing sheet twist in the current and pull up the stake. His hands found his hair and dug in like he was going to pull it out by the roots, but bowed his head low.

Wilson couldn’t hear anything. The edges of the plastic flagged, making a flapping sound that drowned out everything nearby.

He could see it very clearly now. A bar lay flat with chains hanging from it, leather straps attached to the chains at the end. On top of it, a shattered fiberglass slide splayed out, on top of a heap of brightly colored metal bars. Pressed into the soft earth were rocking horses, their tightly coiled springs bent and flattened - everything squashed to two dimensions.

From the sandbox to the swing, there was that same depression, slightly elongated, tapering off to a narrow hill at the apex. There was another concentric sweep of lines furrowing the earth, which the tarp shamefully hid. A delta shaped swirl formed in the center of the pattern.

The cops didn’t lay this here and they certainly didn’t announce it on the radio.

Index finger, Wilson thought. They were about a mile and a half from the site of the destroyed home, a place he refused to return to. Left hand.

F
RIDAY

WILSON WOKE UP on the couch with the laptop screen flipped up. Sometime in the night after he’d passed out, Sanda threw a blanket on him and turned the TV off.

They met at the station this time, right in front. It was about a mile west of the playground.

“I found—,” Wilson stammered, rifling through a folder stuffed with loose papers.

“I found an incidence of this in Bogota last year.”

P.J. leaned against the building in dark shades, slurring his words.

“Colombia?”

He sounded hoarse.

“New Jersey. Only one news story and one blog post about it. The first - take a look at this,”

He peered into the sunglasses and couldn’t tell if P.J was even paying attention. He was too wired to really notice how awful P.J. looked, just standing there with his jaw idly slack.

“I did cartwheels when I found it. I had my wife print it out for me.”

He held up the printout: a home by the side of the road in greyscale, flattened like its supports have been removed. It looks like the aftermath of a landslide or a tsunami but the debris lies there in a finger shaped depression. If there are ridges, they’ve been faded by rain or some other disturbance.

“Look familiar?”

P.J. took it in his trembling hand and stared down at it through eyes heavy with exhaustion. He was so worn down he felt like crying.

“And this? This is a personal blog post from the daughter of the woman who owned the house. The gist of it is, her mother wakes her up in the middle of the night telling them they needed to get out of the house. Just up and move, right in the middle of the night. This was the night before that picture was taken, but there are no more updates after that.”

P.J. speaks, finally, in a voice so cracked and hoarse it sounds like it’s coming from a man who’s dying of thirst.

“Did...they get out?”

“I don’t want to assume but there are no death records for her or her mother. They seem to have just disappeared.”

“I’ve got something else, Wilson,” he says, trying to match some semblance of enthusiasm. “Just come to my office, I want to show you.”

Wilson opens the door and P.J. buzzes them both in, urging his partner down to a disused office in the basement near the holding cells. Spread out on the table are the pictures P.J. took two days before, nice big prints that could easily be blown up to the size of a poster. There are dozens, haphazardly arranged and taken from various heights and angles. It looks familiar enough, the paint in the driveway, the freestanding wall with the intact bathroom, the roof of the house spread flat like a disassembled paper airplane.

The grass and the ground divot, as they should, in the outline of a thumb but the ridges are gone. They were never there. Even the depression of the land seems natural, like its severity has been eroded away.

Maybe it’s a trick of the light or the camera but every possible angle showing the scene shows the same thing - a home that simply collapsed.

The cracked voice sounds frantic now.

“I wanted to bring them in, bring them in to run them in the database.”

“I—”

“These are someone’s fingerprints, I thought, someone living or dead.”

“I don’t think—”

“It spoke to me when I thought I was sleeping.”

“Look at the pictures, there has to be some optical illusion.” He angrily jabbed at a picture right in the center. “We thought we had proof but now I just don’t know.”

“I do know. It has a head like a star.”

“You’re having bad dreams. We need to regroup and figure this thing out.”

“I wasn’t asleep.”

“I’m close, Peter. It’s not a fingerprint, it’s some kind of sinkhole.”

“It’s their mark.”

“It’s daytime. We can go over there and get a good look and see for ourselves. Look at my picture; then look at your pictures. They’re the same!”

“They’re trying to hide it, but we saw it. I know we saw it. Then it spoke to me.”

“Listen to yourself, man. All the roads we’ve been going down are apophenic horseshit. I’ve got pages and pages of this crap and it goes nowhere.”

“I’m not sure if it’s “it” or “they”...”

“No, no, listen...”

“...they wouldn’t let me ask any questions.”

“This is serious, Peter. Just sit and let me show you what I’ve found.”

“We’re interfering.”

Wilson stops himself to pull out P.J.’s chair and helps him to a seat. In the windowless, grey room, Wilson is reminded of the gloomy atmosphere of an interrogation. He takes the seat opposite, realizing that the young man isn’t just rambling.

“Wilson,” he says with his head in his hands. His voice croaks, hopelessly. “Nothing is adding up.”

Wilson nods in silent agreement.

“Just, please, follow along.”

P.J. clasps his hands tight, anticipating some satisfactory answer. Wilson slides more loose papers across the table containing official signatory, cellphone records and a few other personal documents.

“I went through the bank that holds their mortgage and a few choice family members on both sides. Couldn’t get in touch with either husband or wife.”

“They’ve disappeared,” says the shaking voice. “Just like the mother and daughter.”

“Yes. Strong reason to suspect. We need to get in touch, but we can’t seem to. They have friends, relatives and neighbors but nobody declared any of them missing. Let me ask you something.”

“I...don’t know how much help I can be.”

Wilson’s eyes narrowed.

“Who called you to the scene, initially?”

“I...I heard the call come in over the radio. I have a scanner. Nobody summoned me to the scene.”

“My cellphone has a scanner and I just got lucky the signal was unprotected. Don’t you see?”

He placed his hand on P.J’s forearm, trying to calm him.

“See, I believe you. I believe that we are interfering in something but we need to keep our heads on straight. Forget about the fingerprint and all the rest of it; this is becoming something else. How’d you find the other site?”

“I was riding my bike around town because I couldn’t sleep.”

“And you just rode past it?”

“It was just like my dream. In my dream I rode around town on my bike, here and there. Nobody was on the streets, not even cars. I rode up to the playground then stopped. That’s when I heard them, speaking to me. I wanted to ask it why.”

“Then you rode to the park for real and saw that the playground was missing.”

“They’re trying to hide it. Somebody knows about it and they’re hiding it.”

“We need to unhide it, then.”

“Unhide it? Unhide what? It revealed itself to me and I still couldn’t tell you what it is.”

Neither man could put a name to whatever it might be.

“If we take this to the papers, it can’t be ignored. We’re not getting straight answers. There isn’t even anyone assigned to the case because there is no case. Now’s the time to make some noise about this. It would take the pressure off, and-”

Wilson watched as P.J. removed his sunglasses. The lids are raw and red and trembling, with lubricating tears just hanging at the rim. His irises are albino pale and scratched from not blinking, but he wasn’t blind. His pupils darted around madly.

“-you could...get some sleep.”

Wilson tightened his fingers in his palm, utterly disquieted. For the first time in his fifty-seven years on Earth, he felt he made a serious mistake. The young man’s blank stare looked impossibly ancient.

“It’s here. I had to bring you here,” he whispers with a fatal edge. “Wilson, it’s too late.”

Wilson has a moment to look up to watch the ceiling buckle like a block of Jello. There’s no reference in his lifetime for what it is until his mind seizes on it: sudden free-fall. His last conscious thought is to grab his coat and head for the door. P.J. sits and waits, not smiling, just placid. Content.

The entire concrete edifice crushes inward, burying the two men and a sleeping desk sergeant; their distorted bodies covered in fine masonry dust.