Rising Fears (7 page)

Something rolls out of the alley: a single crayon. Black.

Complete silence, save only the sound of blood pumping in his ears.

He runs as though through syrup, cloying and nasty, pulling him one step back for every two steps that he takes.

He can hear his watch ticking. Slow. Everything is slow. Tick...tick...tick....

Then, at last, a pair of hard, fast sounds pierce the night: two gunshots.

Jason felt every fluid ounce of blood drain from his face in an instant; felt himself grow cold and weak and faint as his heart started pounding again at his ears. He shone his light all around, but he was alone.

Only him and the ghosts of the dead in this room, in this place, in this entry to Hell.

He left then, almost running out of the basement, sure when he reached the top that the door

(
and the door was closed had he closed it he didn't remember closing it so what could have closed the damn thing
)

would be locked to his touch; that he would have to stay and learn in the most horrifying fashion exactly what had taken Sean away.

But no. The door opened easily on well-maintained hinges, and Jason was through the door in an instant, fairly slamming it shut behind him in his hurry to get away.

It was only after he had been standing in the kitchen for several seconds that he realized he was still holding something tightly in his hand.

The crayon.

"Aaron?" he whispered.

The name of his dead son seeped into the still depths of the house, like the susurrations of dying leaves as they cast themselves from a tree that would sleep through the winter, leaving behind so much of itself in the process.

Nothing moved. All was silent, dark, deep.

Haunted.

A chill prickled at the back of Jason's neck as the word leapt into his mind unbidden. Haunted. Ghostly. The ghosts of the past were here.

He left the kitchen quickly, and for some reason he felt himself consciously avoiding looking at the microwave. Even though he had unplugged it, even though there was no way that it could hurt him, even so he did not want to look at it, convinced for a moment that if he did he would once again see those horrible, blurred green numbers.

Haunting him.

He went back into the entry, then went up the steps to the second floor. He was spooked, but he still had a job to do. Still had a boy

(
no boy there was too much blood, far too much blood
)

to find.

He went into the first room and could see at a glance that it was little Sean Rand's room. Bed shaped like a racecar, a pinboard with family pictures above a used desk that had clearly been inherited from his daddy, a chest of drawers. It all fairly screamed out to him of Sean's presence.

Jason poked through a few things, but found - as he had expected - very little. Only evidence that a truly nice kid had spent hours of happy time here. He moved to the desk and opened a drawer, then cried out in disgust as hundreds - no,
thousands
- of black, writhing cockroaches squirmed over and upon each other within the drawer. Jason felt himself propel backward, knocking into the bed and falling onto it with a small cry before managing to stand up again.

He could hear the cockroaches hissing. Did cockroaches hiss?

He reached out to slam the drawer shut, to trap the vile insects inside until he could come back with some gloves and find out what had attracted them to this place...then he stopped in mid-motion.

The roaches were gone.

But what
was
there - what had not been there before, he was sure of it - was equally disturbing.

He opened another drawer, and it had more of the same. Another drawer, and still more. Soon all the drawers in the room were open, and Jason felt something inside himself slide, as though he were a mountain and a part of him were sloughing away to plummet thousands of feet, never to be found again.

It can't be, he thought. Not here, not like this.

Every single drawer held the same thing. Thousands of them, all exactly the same, all bringing forth memories of a night - of
the
night - with their dark, burgeoning power.

Crayons. Thousands and thousands of black crayons. Just like the one that Aaron had dropped before....

Jason stared at the crayons all around him, unsure what they meant, unsure what to do. He actually pinched himself, hard enough to draw blood, to make sure he wasn't stuck in some insane dream; to make sure that he wasn't going to wake up and find himself still hunting in the woods.

He looked over then, and saw one more thing that chilled him to the bone.

A clock on the windowsill. Digital. A happy clock, Donald Duck with a clock inset in his belly. Normally this would be nothing but a fun though kitschy child's plaything. Three-fifteen in the afternoon and all's well.

But as Jason watched, the numbers shifted. Blurred, just like the microwave clock had done, the numbers suddenly disappearing in a faded swatch of gray on the LED screen. And again he heard Sean's mother, Amy-Lynn, saying "The clocks" in that gravelly voice from beyond.

A cloud moved over the sun outside.

Shadow draped the room in darkness.

Jason's breath caught in his throat. He stared at the clock for along moment. Then the cloud moved past the sun. Light returned to the room, and with it the clock returned to normal once again. Jason felt himself breathe once more.

At least, he breathed until he looked again at the desk. And this time the breath didn't catch in his throat, no this time it exploded out of him in an insane rush of air that left him instantly gasping. Gasping in the center of a room filled impossibly with darkness and black crayons and blurred clocks and there...on the desk...in a place where just a moment ago there had been nothing, there was now a piece of paper. Large and white.

The kind that children drew on in school.

Jason couldn't move for a moment. Then he did move. He grabbed the paper and crammed it in his pocket, then left. Fast.

The paper felt like it was burning him all the way down the stairs, charring a hole in his pants and then in his leg itself, searing its way through to his femur.

The paper was large and white. The kind that children drew on in school. And on it, in large, panicky letters written in black crayon, there were four words. Four words on a paper that Jason was
damn
sure had not been there only moments before. Four words that chilled him even as they burned:

I wiL be FiRSt.

***

***

Lenore drove slowly down the street. It was deserted, which was unusual for this time of day. Generally there would be kids playing, neighbors chatting.

Today, however, there was nothing. And she had the strange feeling that she was being watched; as though the silence that had enveloped the town hid within it some kind of watchful, angry presence. Something that resented the inhabitants of Rising; something that wanted the town for itself.

Still, Lenore continued looking.

Finally she saw what she had hoped she would: after hours of rolling up and down Rising's streets, over and over, she saw Albert, camcorder in hand, filming his feet as he walked dejectedly down the sidewalk.

She pulled up next to him and rolled down her window.

"Albert," she said.

His head jerked up to look at her. He looked afraid, as though he had not noticed the car pulling up beside him. Worse still, when he
did
see the car and who was driving it, the look of fear only intensified. He cringed as though about to be struck some serious blow, the look of someone who had been beaten down so many times that this was the only way he had left to react.

Lenore tried to keep up, but was no match for the heavy but deceptively fast kid. He leapt over an ivy-laden fence, halting only an instant at the top to scream at her, "You're all out to get me!"

Then he was gone.

Lenore's shoulders drooped. She had wanted to explain; to tell him...

What? Sorry I shouted but
I saw your eyes start to bleed?

She turned and walked slowly back to her car. What
could
she have told him? And for that matter, what had caused that strange vision in the middle of the school?

A cloud fell across the sky. A storm was coming.

She walked by a house on the way back to her car and heard a chilling sound: the sound of a door shutting and a lock being thrown. In all her time in Rising, she could not remember ever hearing those sounds together before. Locks were something that out-of-towners used, not the people of this hamlet in the mountains. It was a measure of the fear that had fallen over the town, though, that people were actually trying to keep the monsters at bay with such basic methods as turning locks.

The wind blew for a moment, and Lenore could see stray wisps of fog curling down from the mountains, beginning the long crawl toward Rising. Soon, if they continued unabated, the fog would roll over the town, and all would be lost in the white darkness. Fog in Rising could reach otherworldly levels, making it all but impossible to move about, so thick that you could literally lose sight of your house - lights ablaze and all - within ten feet of exiting. It was never a death-sentence, as the fog usually came when the temperatures were fairly warm, so it wasn't as though getting lost would mean anything other than getting wet and uncomfortable until you could find your way to a friendly haven, but the fog
was
tremendously isolating and even frightening.

Not today, she found herself saying to herself in a kind of mystical mantra just short of prayer. Not today, not after the funeral. We don't need the fog.

But the low-hanging clouds that clung like nightmares to the mountains paid her no heed. They reached out tendrils of moisture and gradually started to writhe and roll into the town.

The wind whipped up again.

A storm was coming.

***

***

Jason strode back into his office, feeling an unusual mix of emotions. Fear, certainly, but also confusion and even an unsettling sense of the unreal, as though he had stepped out of Rising and into some mirror image of the town; one where nothing made sense and where the laws of nature no longer applied.

Where did all those damn roaches come from?

Hatty was typing at her desk in the reception area, and the old woman looked over her reading glasses at him as he entered. "Find anything we didn't expect?" she said as she handed him a stack of handwritten phone messages.

Jason looked at her. How was he supposed to answer
that
question?

Unable to come to a satisfactory way of responding, he chose not to, instead sidestepping the query by saying, "Hatty, could you dial me up the local FBI branch and connect me in the office?"

He went into his office without waiting for a reply. One thing was certain: whatever was happening in Rising, it was beyond him. He needed help, and the fact that there was a missing - though presumed dead - child would be enough cause for him to get it fairly quickly.

He sat down, glancing at the picture of Elizabeth and Aaron that sat in its customary spot, the only thing to detract from the Spartan, almost sterile, neatness of his desk. He looked at his phone. The extension light was not lit up, so Hatty clearly hadn't gotten through to the FBI field office yet.

Jason pulled two papers from his pockets. The first was the sheet that he had taken from Sean's classroom that morning. That thought brought thoughts of Lenore to mind, and he immediately blushed and glanced at the photo of his wife, fully expecting to see her frowning at him in the celluloid. But she still smiled.

He looked back at the paper. The page with no picture, but only four simple words on it:

I wiL be FiRSt.

Then he pulled out the other paper, the one that he had taken from where it had appeared out of thin air on Sean's desk in the little boy's room. Other than the fact that one had been carefully folded and the other was wrinkled and creased from being hurriedly shoved in Jason's pocket, the two were identical.

He felt something skitter over his hand then.

A roach.

Jason threw it from him with a shout, pushing away from his desk reflexively as the grotesque insect drew from him a visceral reaction of disgust and loathing. The roach flew off his hand, Jason's flailing propelling it through the air until it hit a wall and fell into the dark space between two filing cabinets. Jason could hear it scuttling about between the metal cases, its carapace bouncing off the cabinets as it hurried to the darkness that it called home.

Then it was silent. As quiet as though it had disappeared.

Maybe it has
.

Then Jason jumped so hard it felt like his skeleton had fractured when the phone rang. He stabbed the speaker button and Hatty's voice came through. "FBI office on the line," she said.