The Narrows (41 page)

And
in
the first cell was what remained of Maggie Quedentock. She lay slumped in one corner, her legs splayed out before her, one shoe off. Her head lay at an unnatural angle against the wall, the top portion of which had been sheared away to reveal a hollow cavern in the center of her nest of wet, stringy hair. The skull was an empty bowl that dribbled a pinkish fluid down her forehead. Her eye sockets dripped blood.

Ben leaned over one of the desks and vomited on the floor. Heat whooshed out of his shirt collar, causing sweat to spring out across his face. It took him several seconds to regain some semblance of composure. Through bleary eyes, he could see small bloody footprints on the floor tiles. They led in various erratic directions, like some animal trying to evade capture…or like some predator darting after prey.

The boy, Matthew Crawly…his body was gone. The fire retardant blanket and the sheet of blue tarp lay on the floor, kicked away and discarded like bedsheets in the middle of the night.

Trembling, Ben struggled to his feet. He planted one hand against the nearest wall for support while his pistol shook in his other hand. He scanned the rest of the room but saw nothing but hidden shadows and empty spaces. Rain slammed against the roof. His eyes kept returning to the three bodies scattered throughout the room. He was in no frame of mind to even begin to question what had happened here, to even try to formulate some kind of hypothesis.

Moving strictly off instinct, Ben made his way back across the room and out into the hall. His gun jumped and shook as he clenched it in both hands.

“Anybody here?”

No one answered him. From Shirley’s office, he could hear the ticking of the wall-mounted clock above her desk—a ghostly electronic toll. In the ceiling, the lights continued to blink. The air was charged with a faint medicinal odor, one that Ben readily recognized…

A soft, muffled whimper came from nearby. Ben looked around, his eyes finally landing on the closed door of the supply closet directly in front of him. Listening, he could hear something shuffling around on the other side of that door. He extended a shaky hand and gripped the doorknob with one sweaty palm…

The door swung outward before he could even grasp the knob. Ben uttered a small cry and, staggering backward, repositioned his handgun at the figure that burst out into the hallway.

It was Shirley. Her eyes, large as saucers, found him instantly. Her skin was bloodless and she held her hands out timidly before her in some mockery of Frankenstein’s monster. As she stared at Ben, a gasp of pent-up breath escaped her lungs. She looked about ready to collapse. Then she shrieked.

Ben holstered his gun and slung an arm around the woman, just as she went limp against him.

“Are you okay? What happened?”

She sobbed against him for a time and he didn’t bother asking her any further questions until she was able to get herself under control.

“The b-boy,” she stammered after a while. She was a tough old bird and Ben could tell she was struggling to keep it together. “He wasn’t dead. He w-wasn’t d-d-dead, Ben.”

“Where’s the boy now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you see what happened?
How
did it happen? What did you see?” He knew he was talking too fast for poor Shirley’s addled mind to keep up. He squeezed her shoulder. “Are you hurt?”

“No.” Shirley righted herself against him, swiping tracks of runny mascara off her cheeks. “I don’t think—”

Something banged at the far end of the hall, the reverberation of its echo like a gunshot. Both Ben and Shirley froze and whipped their heads in unison in the direction of the sound—the sally port. Shirley began making a shuddery, whimpering noise.

“Stay here,” Ben said as he began to creep down the hall toward the sally port, his gun leading the way.

“Don’t,” Shirley intoned. “Don’t leave me alone.” She clutched at the back of Ben’s shirt and followed him as he proceeded down the hallway. Just before they reached the door to the sally port, the lights blinked out and the phones ringing at the opposite end of the hallway went dead. Again, Shirley moaned.

“Shit,” Ben whispered. The station fell as silent as a crypt.

Then the lights winked back on, the electricity humming through the circuits in the walls, and Ben’s heart began beating again. On the other side of the sally port door, something metallic clanged around, grinding against the cement floor.

Ben kicked open the door, shoving his gun straight into the darkness with one hand while his other hand went quickly for the light switch beside the door. The lights jumped on, stinging Ben’s eyes. He swatted blindly at the air then gripped the gun again in both hands. Shirley’s fingernails dug deeper into his back.

The noise came from the bell-shaped birdcage. It had fallen to the floor and scraped along the concrete as the small bat inside beat frantically against the bars of the cage. It unleashed a series of aggravated screeches that cleaved through the center of Ben’s skull.

“Oh,” Shirley sighed at his back, her breath warm along the pockets of sweat that had broken out across the back of Ben’s shirt. The relief was evident in her voice. She managed it a second time. “Oh…”

Despite the insanity all around them, Ben felt a burst of laughter borne on the waters of his own stark relief, threaten his throat. “I forgot that thing was in here,” he said.

“It’s going berserk,” said Shirley.

The bat raged against the bars of the cage with enough force to drag it several inches across the floor. It screeched and tittered, its clawed wings and scrabbling feet clanging against the cage. At one point, it hooked a pair of fangs around one of the bars and hung suspended by its snout.

“Looks like it wants to get out,” Shirley said. She took a step closer to the cage, still clinging to the back of Ben’s shirt with one hand.

A nonspecific disquiet settled around Ben like a shroud. Piping up in his head was Brandy Crawly’s voice, whispering,
The bats go wherever he goes. I mean, I think so, anyway.
And on the heels of that,
He isn’t dead. He’s just…changed. He’s some kind of…vampire now.

Again, the lights blinked off then back on. Very soon, the storm would knock the power out for good.

“It wants to get out, all right,” Ben said, crouching down beside the bat’s cage. Its beady little eyes stared at him. Its fangs, still clinging to one of the bars, looked like the fangs of a rattlesnake. “It knows something. It wants to get somewhere.” Ben stood. “I want to know where it wants to go.”

“What are you talking about, Ben?”

“This thing’s a homing device.”
I mean, I think so, anyway,
Brandy added in his head. “If I let it out, I bet it takes me straight to…”

“To where?” Shirley asked.

You have to kill the head vampire, Ben.

Yet he couldn’t bring himself to speak the words aloud. Despite all that had transpired in Stillwater in the past two weeks, it was still too ridiculous to think about…still too insane…

“To whatever has been going on in this town,” he said at last. It was the best he could do to speak the truth of it. He holstered his handgun and found that his hands shook terribly. “How do you follow a goddamn bat, Shirley?” He wondered if Eddie would know—Eddie, with all his ridiculous horror magazines, Stephen King novels, and beloved gory vampire films. When was the last time he’d heard from Eddie? Ben’s mind raced. He couldn’t think straight.

“Ha!” Shirley cried, startling him. When he faced her, he found a surprising grin stretched across her otherwise bleary face. Her eyes were alight. “You don’t
follow
a bat, Ben. You
track
it.”

“Yeah? And how do you do that?”

Shirley released her grip on the back of Ben’s shirt then went immediately to one of the two-by-four shelves that were hammered straight into the drywall. She rummaged through stacks of boxes until she found what she was looking for—a plastic case roughly the size of a laptop. Shirley set the case on an overturned five-gallon bucket and opened it. Pressed into the foam padding was a GPS screen, a jumble of wires, and four nondescript black boxes, each one approximately the size of a silver dollar.

“What is that?” Ben asked.

Shirley picked up one of the black boxes and examined it more closely in the palm of her hand. “A tracking device. Don’t you remember? Cumberland sent them over to us, in case we ever needed to track a vehicle. Mike laughed.”

“You don’t mean…I mean, you think…”

“Why not?”

Ben peered down at the tiny black box in the center of Shirley’s hand. “Holy crap, Shirl. You’re a goddamn genius.”

“I want a raise when this is all over,” Shirley said.

2

Her mother took a Valium, poured a glass of red wine, and fell asleep on the living room sofa. Once Brandy was confident her mother was out, she went up into her mother’s bedroom and opened the bottom drawer of the dresser. There was a pink shoebox in there and it was filled with her grandmother’s belongings—various trinkets and bits of costume jewelry that the woman had left to Wendy, her only daughter, just before she died many years earlier. Brandy had very few memories of her grandmother but she knew about the shoebox. On occasion, whenever her mother felt nostalgic, they went through the ancient and tarnished relics together. There were large, spangled rings and great looping necklaces, and earrings that looked as though they’d been made from the shells of tortoises. But those were not the items Brandy concerned herself with on this night.

Brandy’s grandmother had been a devout Catholic. Inside the box, Brandy located a silver crucifix, nearly seven inches long. It was heavy and cold and felt strangely powerful in Brandy’s hand. There was also a rosary in the box. Brandy didn’t know if rosary beads harbored the same power against vampires that crucifixes did but she didn’t think there was any harm in taking that, too.

She hung the rosary beads from the doorknocker on the front door. Beside the back door, she slipped the silver crucifix into the rusted eyelet beside the doorframe where Hugh Crawly used to plant an American flag when he was feeling patriotic. She knew vampires couldn’t enter someone’s home unless they were specifically invited, but she wasn’t so sure if that rule applied if the home had previously belonged to the vampire. Better safe than sorry.

There were garlic cloves in the refrigerator. She broke them apart, getting stink on her fingers, and scattered the remnants around all the windowsills throughout the two-story house. Once she’d finished, she deliberated on one final precaution. While arguably the most vital, she did not know if she could actually bring herself to do it.

Stakes. Wooden stakes. You were supposed to drive them through the vampire’s heart.

There were brooms and mops and all sorts of things with wooden handles in the laundry room. It wouldn’t take much effort to whittle the handles into points with a kitchen knife. The hard part, she knew, would be summoning enough courage to actually
use
the stakes if and when the time came. Could she do it?

She didn’t realize she had fallen asleep until a clash of thunder jarred her awake. She was sprawled out on the kitchen floor, a broom handle angled across her lap. The tip of the handle was sharpened to a point and there were curled bits of shaving scattered around the tiles. In her right hand, Brandy still clutched the kitchen knife.

Something was wrong. She felt it in the center of her animal brain.

She got up and checked on her mother, who was still asleep on the sofa in the living room. Rain slammed against the windows and lightning briefly lit up the sky. The lamp beside the sofa dimmed but stayed on.

She went through the house a second time, methodically checking the locks on the doors and windows. In the kitchen, she picked up the telephone to make sure there was still a dial tone in the event she needed to call the police. There was.

With the kitchen lights off so that nothing could see inside, she cleaned up the wood shavings off the floor then shook them into the kitchen trash. Then she systematically lined up the brooms and mop beside the laundry room door like rifles in an armory. Her hands reeked of garlic.

Hungry, she took out a dish of cold chicken from the refrigerator and poured herself a cold glass of milk. In the dark, she sat at the kitchen table and ate. Around her, the house creaked and moaned. The storm was unforgiving.

The epicenter of her animal brain remained on high alert. Her skin tingled. After only a few bites of chicken and a few sips of milk, she broke down, crying silently into her hands.
Wake up,
she told herself.
Wake up, wake up! You’re dreaming. This is all one bad dream.
But it wasn’t a dream. The tingling intensified as thunder shook her bones.

She waited, a blood-sense promising her that something would soon happen. The way parents know when something bad has happened to their children…the way twins sense each other’s pain and grief and happiness…the way dogs know when their master is about to arrive home…

All those things.

She waited for her brother.

3

Wearing a pair of rubber gloves, Ben carefully extracted the small bat from the birdcage. The thing struggled futilely in his grasp, its one free wing batting uselessly in the air. High-pitched squawks funneled up from its throat as its blind head bobbed like some windup toy. Even through the gloves, Ben felt the heat radiating off the tiny creature, and the power of its struggle to break free. He held it delicately but firmly.