Shadow Stations: Unseen (9 page)

Chapter 14

I rubbed more medicine on my hands and found the flashlight and the keys for the Jeep. I had to take the Jeep. I couldn’t drive out there at night in a light colored car. I didn’t expect to run into John Savenue anyway. Nobody would be at a construction site on a dead winter night.

The wind buffeted the Jeep. Nikki and I drove into Gettysburg, stopped for coffee at the 7-Eleven, and headed up deserted Chambersburg Pike. Everybody had either left town for Thanksgiving or else they were holed up inside.

“
Baby, it’s cold out there tonight,” the radio announcer said. “Buh-buh-brrrr, twenty-three degrees. Time to snuggle up with your sweetheart. You’re listening to WNBX FM in Adams County, Pennsylvania, home of the Warriors.”

I didn’t have a sweetheart, but I was going to do everything I could to find out what happened to him. I turned the radio up to chase away my jitters. The hotels and restaurants gave way to black stretches of road and Christmas billboards that were already up: “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” and “Happy Holidays, Buckle Up.” A few cars and tractor trailer trucks raced past us in the darkness.

It seemed strange to be driving at night without Ben. I bit back my grief and gunned the Jeep toward Cashtown. When the land began to rise toward the mountains, a “Coming Soon” sign for the Grasslands Resort appeared. I took a narrow road after the sign into the deep woods and flashed my brights over the trees. The road must have been the original farm lane.

Ben had driven this way six weeks ago. He’d left the house in a rush, revved up about the interview, talking about how important it was because the old farmer had resisted selling off his land and abruptly changed his mind after a devastating accident.

Two minutes after Ben went out the door, he hurried back in to kiss me and raced out again. I remembered the quiet after his car vanished down the street.

“
Here we go with another classic,” the announcer said. “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer. This one is for Tom from Tiffany in honor of that deer that wrapped itself around your windshield last night.”

I turned off the radio to watch for eyes in the woods. The deer were no joke. They could take out your car in nothing flat. Orange construction cones appeared in the weeds, followed by plastic fencing and barrels that blocked the road. My heart pounded when I saw the barricade. We were getting closer. I navigated past the barrels, bounced over the rough ground, and picked up the road again.

The woods thinned out and disappeared. Nikki sat up and made a low growl in the back of her throat. And then I saw the Grasslands. A chill ran through my body. I turned the headlights off and idled by the side of the road to get a good look.

A pale green glass dome rose in the center of a low building that sprawled with crablike arms across the stubbled fields. Light radiated out from inside the dome, but I could barely make out anything else because the shadows were so deep. The dome gave off the kind of dim light you see in places that have closed for the night, or the season, or were never open to begin with except in somebody’s nightmares.

The wind blew against the Jeep. I was crazy to be out here with just my dog.

The building with the dome looked like the center of the place, but the hulking concrete skeleton of another building stood nearby. Plastic sheets flapped in the wind. Probably hotel rooms or offices. Beyond this second building, a few outdoor security lights lit up a crane and some earth moving machinery with dirt-encrusted tires at the edge of an unfinished parking lot. There couldn’t be any construction going on now, not with the temperature below freezing. I didn’t see a car that a security guard would have driven in either.

But the dome overshadowed everything. Its eerie light drew my eyes and held them until I had to wrestle my gaze away. Ben had died somewhere out here on his way to interview the farmer, but it was so dark now I couldn’t see a farmhouse. Maybe they’d razed it. I started to feel foolish. I had no hope of finding the spot where the accident happened. It was too dark to see anything except that spectral dome.

When I turned my parking lights on, though, their glow caught a little white cross by the bend in the road. The people from Ben’s newspaper must have put it there.

I killed the engine and climbed out with Nikki, steeling myself, and took my time walking to the homemade memorial, boots clicking on the frozen pavement. Angry tears welled up in my eyes. The flashlight beam picked up skid marks and a gouge in the embankment where the car had veered off the road and flipped over.

“
I wish I’d been here,” I whispered. “I wish I could have saved you.”

I shone the flashlight down into that hellhole, even though I could hardly stand to do it. So this was the place where my sweetheart had burned to death. The beam lit up the ditch. The uneven earth and clumps of grass threw distorted shadows up the embankment, but it was impossible to tell if the ground was still charred. It was just too dark.

Nikki nuzzled my leg. The wind swept away the leaves on the ground and almost sounded like whispering voices.

Why would Ben have gone off the road? Black ice? Trying to avoid a deer? He grew up in Adams County and knew how to drive in the country at night.

The police didn’t tell me much after the accident because I wasn’t a relative. He died from burns and smoke inhalation and they identified him by his dental records, but nobody could explain why he went off the road. His parents put their house up for sale after the funeral and moved to their condo in Florida. I almost thought they blamed me for his death because he’d called me just before the accident.

But he hadn’t called because anything was wrong. He’d called just to talk.

“
I’m at the Grasslands. You should see this place. It’s huge. Hey, wait a minute, there’s something in the field. What the hell is that? Wait a minute. Look, I have to call you back. Love you.”

Something had startled him. What? The light the farmer saw?

Growing angry again, I swept the flashlight away from the place where he died and across the field until the darkness swallowed up the beam. The rough earth didn’t give up any clues. Maybe there’d been a gas line explosion. An explosion didn’t seem likely because the gas company would have put the lines in the ground, something they did every day, but maybe there’d been a flaw in the construction or something else in the picture I couldn’t see.

I was sure of one thing, though. If a gas explosion caused the accident, it would have come from the Grasslands. There was nothing else around.

“
Come on, Nikki,” I told her. “Let’s get a closer look.”

We slid down the embankment and crunched across the frozen ground while I looked for the tiny colored flags that would mark a gas line. I didn’t see any, but I wasn’t sure I knew where to look. It was so dark it might be impossible to see anything.

The wind picked up with that same odd, rushing whisper. It sounded like the whispers I’d heard in the ruins, but clearer and closer, without the distortion they’d had on the island. The unease almost seemed to come out of the earth itself. The old farmer had said he’d heard whispers in his pasture. He must have stood outside at night and listened to the whispers come across his land like the voices of the damned searching for something.

Nikki and I drew closer to the Grasslands and came to a chain link construction fence that had to be seven feet high. I wasn’t about to climb over it and leave her behind, but I squeezed through a gap and forced the fence open for her. The hair on her back bristled.

“
What do you see, Nikki? You see something?”

She pricked her ears toward the Grasslands and growled.

My flashlight still couldn’t pick up any little flags. In a few minutes the huge dome loomed above us. Darkness pooled over the walls. The terrible whispering grew louder. I stopped to listen and saw a river of black smoke streaming out of the vents near the roofline.

“
What is that?” I asked Nikki and put a hand on her collar. The same black smoke I’d seen in the ruins? Smoke or shadows or something else, I wasn’t sure. But I had all my senses now, and wasn’t in a dream state, and didn’t smell smoke or anything else that would signal a fire.

I was wrong about the black shadows.

They weren’t flowing out of the vents. They were flowing
in
.

Nikki bared her teeth at the walls.

I stood there for a full minute, staring at the black stuff rushing over the ground and shooting up through the vents. I was afraid to put my hand in it.

Nikki growled at the air. Her lips curled in a snarl.

“
No, don’t,” I hissed, dragging her away as I looked around for a way to see inside. We turned a corner and found a wall of pale green frosted glass that faced the parking lot. The wind blew with full force across the silent construction equipment. My heart raced. I touched Nikki to keep her quiet, cupped my hands around my eyes, and pressed my face against the glass, trying to see what was in there.

Something was moving around. My heart leaped.

The shapes flowed and twisted, almost human, but not quite. Shapes that resembled heads and arms and legs, merging and flickering until they became so distorted that they lost their forms. Desperate hands reached out and drifted apart. Hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, flowing and twisting.

“
What the hell?” I stared at the outside walls again. The black river of shadow was still flowing up into the vents. Still being sucked inside.

It was coming over the field toward the building.

I could hear the whispers, almost like urgent voices, the same voices I’d heard on the island.

Nikki snarled at the window. My pulse pounded. I began to feel sick. I had to get out of there. I grabbed Nikki’s collar but got no more than ten feet away from the building when I saw a dark panel van with the lights off.

It hadn’t been in the parking lot before.

Somebody was inside, watching us.

Chapter 15

I ran faster than I’d ever run in my life, through the river of shadows streaming toward the building, over the dark ground and the frozen grass to the fence, and through the gap. The chain links caught my sleeve.

“
No,” I screamed and ripped free.

Nikki snarled at the shadows. I grabbed her fur, dragged her through the gap, and ran again, panting. We scrambled up the embankment where Ben had died. I choked back my grief, hurried past the little cross, leaped into the Jeep with Nikki, and slammed the locks.

The headlights on the van flashed on as it moved toward us.

“
Hold on, Nikki,” I said, wheeled around, and floored the Jeep down the narrow road, which was as black as the bottom of hell.

Forty miles an hour, fifty, through a curve with my boot on the gas, trees flying by us. I prayed that I wouldn’t hit a deer. One mile, two miles, with the van still after us. We finally reached the main road, ran the light to Cashtown, and then I floored the Jeep again. We were flying, bombing down the Chambersburg Pike.

The van came after me. I took a side road into a dead end, saw the van, tore across the grass, and raced down the Chambersburg Pike again.

The van was gaining on us. The headlights filled my rear view mirror and flashed three times. If it was John Savenue, he was crazy if he thought I was going to pull over.

I pushed the Jeep to eighty miles an hour. We passed a dirt road to a dilapidated barn, a pullover with a rusted trailer, more roads over railroad tracks and past black cornfields to nowhere. I had to find civilization, a gas station or a store with lights and people, but there seemed to be nothing around except endless road.

And then I saw it. An auto parts store with floodlights. I jerked the Jeep over the gravel side road, screeched into the lot, and was about to run to the doors when my headlights caught the CLOSED sign on the glass doors.

The van pulled over. I grabbed my cell phone to call 911 when the driver got out.

Mike. Of all people. Mike, the saintly do-gooder. My blood began to boil. It would have boiled out of my nose, eyes, and ears if it could have. Mike. Of all the creepy things in the world for him to be doing, he must have stalked me out there and watched me the whole time while I cried over Ben, struggled down the embankment, and tried to find a gas line.

Mike. I hated the very sight of his stubby nose, his dumb mouth, his stupid, hopeful eyebrows, and dumb, hovering concern.

I got out of the Jeep and glared at him. He got out, too, and to top it all off, he ran his hand over his buzz cut, as if I cared what he looked like. The store lights cast sharp shadows that gave him a deranged look.

“
How dare you.” I clenched my hands into fists.

He circled me. “Listen, I tried to call you, but your cell’s off—”

I circled back. “No, you listen, you sick freak. You were stalking me.”

“
No, I wasn’t, I was just worried about you—”

“
Worried for what, creep?”

“
Because you were out there in the middle of the night. I didn’t know what you were doing—”