Rising Fears (16 page)

The man went down, swallowed instantly in the mist.

But Jason had no time to revel in the win, had no time to even think because in the same instant Lenore screamed again. Jason swung around and saw that the man had reappeared behind him. The man's knife glinted in the mist as he ran toward them, coming at them like an unstoppable leviathan; a juggernaut born of the mist and not capable of being defeated.

"Come on!" shouted Jason. He ran full bore, hearing the man's cry behind them: an animal sound that writhed within him like a serpent, driving him onward faster and faster. "Hurry!"

A shape loomed in the mist before them: a house. Jason acted without thinking, barreling at the door without slowing. He hit it at top speed, felt the hinges crash inward before him and was grabbing at Lenore's hand almost in the same instant, pulling her deeper into the house, pushing her behind him.

He stood in the doorway, his gun drawn and ready, waiting for the man with the knife.

The man did not come. No intruder came out of the mist. Indeed, the opposite happened: the mist suddenly
withdrew
from the house, pulling backward as though sucked up by a vacuum cleaner, forming a perfect wall of fog about twenty feet away.

They waited. And waited. And waited. Then Lenore shouted from behind him and Jason spun around, almost squeezing off a round before he realized that the madman had not materialized behind them again. Instead, it was a smaller, rounder figure. A teenager that Jason had seen around town, though the boy's name escaped him for the moment.

"Albert," said Lenore in a relieved tone.

The teenager stepped closer to them, and his lip quivered. Jason could see he was trying not to cry, and couldn't blame him. "Are you real?" the boy asked. He was holding a video camera, clutching it to him like a high-tech security blanket.

"Yes, sweetie," said Lenore. "We're real." Jason saw tears well in the boy's eyes as well as in Lenore's, both of them obviously glad to have found even one other person alive.

Jason closed the front door. A large bay window nearby allowed a view outside. The mist was still in its holding pattern. Still waiting. But not coming any closer.

"What happened to my parents?" asked Albert. Jason experienced a flash of anger, of irritation that this boy should come out of nowhere and ask for an explanation, as though any of them knew what could be happening.

Lenore was apparently made of better stuff, however, for she tried to comfort the teen. "They're probably just waiting for you at home," she said.

The boy's expression fell. "This
is
home," he said. A moment later he looked at Jason. "They're dead, aren't they?"

Jason had no answer to that. He looked out at the mist again, then at Albert. "Is there somewhere safer than this? Somewhere we can defend? Basement?"

Albert nodded, and motioned them to follow him. The teen led them down a stairwell in the kitchen. "After I ran..." he said haltingly.

"Yes, Albert?" said Lenore. Again Jason marveled how soft her voice was, how caring her tone. She seemed to have put the night away from her in the last minute, focusing all her energy not on panic or worry for herself, but on concern for the chubby kid who now led them into his family's basement.

"Did you see anything?" asked Lenore. Jason was silent. Lenore was asking all the right questions and was doing it with far more composure than he himself would have, so he was content to let her conduct this investigation for now.

"You will," he said again. He laughed hollowly. "Shit,
I
think I'm crazy."

Jason somehow intuited what Albert was going to say. "Ghosts," he said to the boy. "You saw ghosts." It was not a question.

Albert stopped walking, staring at Jason. "Yeah," he finally said. "Shapes. And then I heard screams everywhere. So I ran home." He sniffled and wiped a hand across his eyes. "The kids at school are right: I'm just a big fat baby."

"No," said Lenore. "We all ran tonight. We all panicked. With all the weirdness that's going on, no one blames you for what you might have done. No babies here."

They walked the rest of the way to the basement in silence, and Albert shut and locked the door that was at the bottom of the stairs behind them, securing the area for now. If anything
was
secure. Jason remembered that Amy-Lynn had disappeared from a closed room, and doubted very much that the small lock in the door would deter whatever was out there from getting in if it wanted to.

Jason looked around. He saw a heavy supply cabinet and moved it in front of the door. It probably wouldn't make any more difference than the pitiful door lock, but it made him feel a little better.

As he moved the cabinet, he glanced around the basement and saw that he was in geek-Heaven. Comic books were piled in huge stacks everywhere. One corner held a television with various video game systems hooked up to it, and another corner was full of video equipment and editing paraphernalia. The last wall had a refrigerator and a shelf full of snack foods on it. Albert apparently saw him looking around because he grinned in a self-deprecating manner and said, "Welcome to the clubhouse." He grabbed a handful of chips from an open bag and began crunching them loudly. "I've been mostly down here," he said. "It feels safer."

"Have you seen anything else? Heard anything other than what you've told us?"

Albert hesitated. "I was...drawing," he said at last. "Sometimes it takes my mind off things. When everyone's being mean or when I'm worried." He chomped some more chips nervously, then continued, "So I was drawing. Or at least, I thought I was."

He opened a tablet of paper. Inside was page after page, each covered with black crayon writing. "cRaK IN the DAm," "it'S StarTInG," "FeAR."

Jason said nothing. He didn't know what
to
say.

"You think I've gone crazy, don't you?" said Albert. Clearly the kid was more than a little paranoid.

Again, Lenore came to the rescue with her soothing, motherly tones. "No, Albert. We don't think you're crazy. I wrote something similar, myself."

"What does it mean?" asked Albert. He looked at Jason. "Did you draw these things, Sheriff?"

"Yeah," answered Jason. "And I also saw some weird things. Not just the mist and the shadows. On my computer."

"What?" asked Lenore.

"Pictures," he said, unwilling to linger on the hideous images of death and mayhem that he had seen on the screen in his office. "And I thought I saw...." He gulped, then continued. "I thought I saw my wife and son."

"Didn't know you were married, Sheriff," said Albert.

Jason felt his mouth firm into a straight line. "They're dead," he said simply. "But on my computer, I saw them. It looked like they were trying to say something."

"Not the same as on the papers," he said. "Not that crazy crayon stuff." He thought back, trying to recall. "I can only remember one: Roanoke." He frowned. "Wait. Harama? No. What was it?"

For a moment Jason thought that the boy had gone insane. He tore into a stack of comics with manic fury. "Because I know what Harappan is, and what it has to do with Roanoke," he said, holding out a comic book in a plastic bag.

Jason took it. "'The Disappeared'?" he asked.

Albert nodded. "Limited set. I have all thirty five issues." Then, as though Jason had challenged his choice of collection, he added, "It's an investment." He took back the plastic-wrapped book and looked at it for a long moment. Finally, he said, "Screw it," and yanked the wrapping off the book. Then he grabbed another comic and did the same. Then another, and another, soon accumulating a small pile on the floor.

The overweight kid grabbed one of the issues and handed it to Jason. "Issue eighteen,
Roanoke
," he said. Then he picked up another one. "Number twenty four:
The Harappans
."

Jason picked up several other comics. "These were the other names I saw. Chinese Army. Hoer-Verde."

"What are they all about, Albert?" asked Lenore

Albert thumbed through one of the comics, entering power-nerd mode. Jason smiled in spite of himself, remembering for a moment the days when
he
had collected comics; when
he
had been so innocent and full of life.

"They're all cities or cultures that disappeared," said Albert. "Roanoke," he continued, gesturing at the first comic he'd given Jason. "You were right, Miss Harris, it was an early American settlement. But colonists who followed them came to Roanoke and found it deserted. Food still on tables, beds unmade, clothing in the houses. Everyone just disappeared."

"And the Chinese army?" asked Jason. "
It
hasn't disappeared."

"No," said Albert. "But a unit of three thousand soldiers disappeared without a trace outside Nanking in nineteen fifty seven."

"Same with Hoer-Verde?" asked Lenore.

Albert nodded. "The six hundred inhabitants of Hoer-Verde, Brazil, disappeared on February fifth, nineteen twenty three. Police went through the town, and all they found was a discharged gun and a note on the blackboard."

"Even scarier," said Albert. "Not a town or a group of people, an entire
civilization
disappeared in Pakistan about two thousand B.C. No one knows why."

"They all just disappeared?" Lenore asked, gesturing at the dozens of comics on the basement floor.

"History is full of mass disappearances," said Albert. "Times when entire communities just faded away."

"Just like ours," Jason nodded. He locked eyes with Lenore. "Just like Rising." Then he looked at Albert, the apparent resident expert on their situation. "But why not us?" he said. "Why has everybody else disappeared, but not us?"

***

***

Fog flowed into the room like a living pool of whitewater as soon as the door flew off its hinges. Jason managed not to scream, but he heard Lenore and Albert yelling beside him. With the fog came the phantoms, and at the same moment his walkie-talkie went crazy, issuing high-pitched squeals that grated worse than nails on a chalkboard.

Notwithstanding the fact that the phantoms had yet to touch them or harm them, being so close to the things was not in Jason's itinerary. "Come on," he hollered, and grabbed Lenore's hand. She in turn grasped Albert's hand, and he led them in a small train up the stairs. The shadows poured past them into the basement below and lights flashed strobiscopically in the mist, disconcerting and frightening.

They ran as one into the foyer of Albert's house, toward the front door. Jason glanced to the side as they did, and saw a huge shape barreling at them through the mist. And this was no phantom, he could tell: it had a weight, a substantial
reality
that the wraiths did not have.

"Down!" shouted Jason, driving Lenore and Albert down below him as he hit the deck. They fell in a heap as the bay window shattered inward.

Jason gasped.

It was the deer. The deer that he had shot on his hunt, the same one that had disappeared. Its face and neck had been torn by his shot, blood and foam matted its fur around its mouth. It was bloody, broken, but still moving somehow.

And most horrific of all: at the front of the deer, impaled on its antlers, so beautiful and deadly at the same time, was Jonesy. The veteran hunter shouted quietly as the deer rammed into the wall, driving its antlers right through the hunter.

Jason had a moment to remember Jonesy's words when the hunter had shown up at the general store to buy shot:
"I figured I'd get out of town. Go up to the mountains where the only thing I have to worry about is a rogue dear impaling me or something."