69: A Short Novel of Cosmic Horror Read online

  “What is it?” Barnes asked. “What does it say?”

  She made a fist around the paper, sealing its message from the others, and then dropped it on the floor.

  Amanda stormed out of the room, ignoring the barrage of inquiries. Not because she didn't want to answer their questions—she didn't, true, but that wasn't why. It was because her mind repeated the fortune's message, over and over again, on a never-ending loop. It was in Renteria's voice. It was coming from him.

  (touch it)

  (touch it)

  (touch it)

  Before she had crossed the threshold, she heard Kim say she didn't understand—the small ribbon was blank, nothing of significance there at all, nothing to worry about. Which was impossible because Amanda had seen what was written there, and the message was very clear.

  TOUCH IT, the small ribbon had read, and she had never felt colder, more haunted, in all her life.

  7

  Ten minutes later, the power came back on, shutting off the emergency lights and shrinking the darkness throughout the entire facility. The patients were stuck in the same positions they'd been when the lights had cut off. Not a single nurse reported movement among them. Manuel Renteria was the only one who held that honor, and why that was, Amanda couldn't fathom. Couldn't possibly guess. There were a great many things happening at Spring Lakes that she couldn't explain through science or logic, and why the man had suddenly stood up was currently chief among them.

  He's here to haunt me.

  That was the best she could do given the circumstances, and, to her, it made the most sense. The old man looked so much like her grandfather she'd thought it was him. He had that same wooly mustache, the little dark gray curls that rested atop his narrow head. A skinny, lanky man, not an ounce of fat on him. The sweet aroma of cigarillos he wore in lieu of cologne. His awful breath, that combination of smoke and advanced halitosis. The resemblance freaked her out, so much so she found it hard to concentrate on anything, including the task at hand—to find out what the hell was going down in the Garden State.

  She was in the security office going over the footage from the blackout. There weren't any cameras in the rooms (privacy laws Kim had explained) so she couldn't replay what had happened inside Renteria's dorm. She scanned the main common room to see if any of the nurses had been wrong, if one of the other patients had moved before or after the blackout. Not that any of this would help her prove her wild theories, but still—she needed to know if Renteria's case was an isolated one.

  She needed to know if this thing—whatever it was—was after her.

  A silly notion, she knew, but her mind started piecing together the evidence, and the strangeness of it all lent itself to such thoughts. She couldn't help it.

  She looked at the room from various angles. There was no movement among the sixty-niners, and they were stationed where they had been since the sickness had taken over. If she synched up the footage from earlier, it would reveal no differences. She fast-forwarded the tape until she passed the blackout, when the emergency lights had kicked on. She watched the nurses scramble around the room, panicking as they attended to the non-sixty-niners, those who hadn't been evacuated yet.

  Soon, Kim had promised her, the buses are on the way.

  As the nurses took care of those who were more alive than dead, Amanda zoomed in on the frozen faces. She studied each of them, playing the same three minutes of footage over and over again. They remained still. Not one of them so much as twitched. There were no involuntary muscle spasms. The patients were obedient and consistent with their previous symptoms, unlike Manuel Renteria.

  That was until she came across a woman sitting in the corner of the common room all by her lonesome, the sixty-niner who'd had her nose in a book, and had (probably) been rocking before the thing that happened had rendered her body stiff and impossibly heavy. Her eyes were no longer focused on the words in front of her since the paperback had hit the ground and now lay at her feet. They were turned toward the ceiling as if the story were scrawled above her. Her mouth was slightly open, just more than a crack, enough so Amanda could spot the darkness within. She recalled the awful footage from earlier, the thirty-second clip that showed the transformation, captured the woman writhing and violently convulsing, her limbs twisting without her approval. And that was when the movement happened; the pixelated area near the woman's mouth jumped.

  It was slight, just a blip. But enough to drag Amanda away from her meandering thoughts. No one who'd been in the room, not one of the three nurses, would have noticed it unless their eyes were trained on the woman's lips. With all the bustle and panic that had transpired, no one had the time to pay any attention to those rendered completely motionless. Amanda had the luxury of instant replay. She rewound the footage and watched again. Studied the pixels as they blipped and blinked. She zoomed out and watched again but wasn't able to learn anything new. Then she switched camera angles, zoomed back in on the woman's mouth.

  She saw something sweep the opening, something white. Something that contrasted the darkness. It was long and thin, a straw-like whisker. But it curled, traveled sideways along the woman's lips in a sweeping motion, probing the open area past her flesh. Almost like a... like a...

  She didn't want to speak it aloud, nor did she want to give the thoughts any plausibility because of how ridiculous it sounded. But the object did look like a flexible antenna, reminding her of some crustacean. Or what it really looked like was an insect leg, which seemed pretty gross and pretty impossible that an insect that large would have inhabited the woman's mouth without someone noticing, and she was certain her mind was just making shit up now because she couldn't rationalize a single iota of everything that had happened.

  But, as she played the clip over and over again, her mind couldn't come up with better conjectures. A grasshopper leg (possibly the world's longest, if indeed it was one), or some insect equivalent, a thin hairless appendage designed to jump, propel the bulk of its owner into the air and take flight. It was living inside the old woman, staked a claim to her oral domain.

  Her skin crawled.

  What the hell am I seeing?

  She wished she knew.

  What the hell is happening here?

  She had no idea, but she was determined to find out.

  8

  Phelps lit a smoke for them. She'd been good that day, had only smoked one since landing in New Jersey. Quitting was tough business though, and, after what had happened in Renteria's room, the craving had intensified, set her nerves on fire.

  The first drag was always the best, the way the smoke hit her lungs, filling her with that necessary poison, sending the sensation on a magic carpet ride through her bloodstream, scratching at that temporary euphoric state. She enjoyed the first drag, the second too, holding them in her lungs far longer than she would the rest. After, she passed the cigarette to Barnes, who took it slowly, put the tan end between his lips, and inhaled. He was a casual smoker, had quit a long time ago when he had kicked the bottle, but borrowed a smoke every once in a while. He'd never been coy about his past and his struggles with alcoholism, though Phelps had never pried information from him. She wasn't much for gossip and didn't know Barnes that well, had never felt comfortable asking, but over the past few month things had changed and the two had become pretty close co-workers.

  “Okay,” she said, taking the smoke back from him. “I have to ask. And you don't have to answer if you don't want to.”

  Barnes looked at her dubiously, exhaling a cloud between them. “Oh God. This oughta be a good one.”

  “You quit smoking when you quit drinking, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “Doesn't smoking... I dunno... make you want it again?”

  He squinted as if thinking about the answer gave him a headache. “No, not really. Although they fall under the same category, I suppose, nicotine and alcohol, my brain is able to separate the two. I don't have any desire to drink again. Smoke every once in a while
. And, honestly, I don't even enjoy it as much as I used to. Sometimes a cigarette tastes like shit.”

  “That's weird.” She took in another lungful, then released a thick fog. It most certainly did not taste like shit. “I enjoy it too much. I've tried to quit. Like a hundred times. Patches, pills—none of them work. It's the want I think. I want to smoke. I've convinced myself I'll be a smoker forever.”

  Barnes shrugged. “I wanted to drink. A lot. All the time, actually. Never wanted to spend a minute of my day sober. It was wired into my brain, that line of thinking. That constant want. It was habitual. After a while, your body convinces you that you need it, and that's where the real internal war is waged.”

  She shook her head, unable to relate. Sure, she thought about smoking when she wasn't. But not every single waking moment. It was there when she wanted it. On her breaks. After lunch, after dinner. With that cup of coffee on the drive to work. The smokes were a companion and she never felt like she needed it—it was just something that was certain. Always there. Ever present. A part of her.

  “Any tips?” she asked, as she burned through more paper and tobacco.

  “On quitting?” Barnes shrugged again, offered her a contagious smile. “First you have to want to.”

  “Ah, therein lies my problem.”

  “Indeed. Convincing yourself that don't need it, or don't want it, is the hardest part of the process. The physical symptoms are nothing compared to the mental ones. Anyone can beat a sickness, the flu or a cold—but not everyone can defeat their own mind.”

  “Hm. Some sage-like advice right there.”

  He plucked the cigarette out of her hand. There wasn't much left, but he took the rest of it down to the filter, then tossed the butt into the parking lot.

  “I think you could do it, Phelps. Quit, I mean. You might just learn something about yourself.”

  “You think so?” She fingered the top of her pack, wanting to snatch another one, stick it between her lips and light up. The shared cigarette didn't ease her nerves as much as she'd thought and she had convinced herself a second one would do the trick. She squeezed the filter of another cig, but something stopped her from pulling it free.

  “I do,” he said, walking toward the parking lot, as if something had caught his attention. “The mind—it's a powerful tool. The most powerful tool on the planet if you ask me. It has the ability to make us great...” She eyed him as he walked farther, weaving between the sea of parked cars. “Or destroy us.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked, closing the pack and pocketing them.

  He drifted across the parking lot, toward the back where a patch of woods bordered the entire facility. How long the woods went on for, Phelps didn't know. It looked endless from their vantage point, but so do a lot of forests at the beginning. Could have gone on for miles or just a few hundred feet. There was no way to tell.

  She followed him, slowly, wondering where he was going and why he wasn't answering her.

  “Barnes?” she asked, scoffing. “What the hell, man?”

  Barnes stopped short of the forest. He bent down on one knee. There was something on the small strip of grass between the woods and the lot. Something turquoise. Long. It was sparkly, even beneath the cloudy sky that had fallen over them.

  “What is it?” Phelps asked, hurrying over.

  “Phelps?”

  “What?” She hated the sound of his voice. The alarm in his tone spiked her heart rate. “What is it?”

  “There are seven of them, aren't there? The sixty-niners?”

  “Yeah, that's what we counted. Why?”

  Holding the object up, he turned to her. It was a scarf, a thin fashion accessory that hardly provided any warmth. “Because I think we might be missing one.”

  9

  “How could this happen?” Kim Charon questioned no one in particular. Her hands were at her temples and she twisted her lips, a rage burning strong within her.

  Amanda approached her like a stick of dynamite. “It must have happened when the lights went out.” Providing a reasonable answer wasn't going to make things better, but at least it was an excuse. The woman had slipped out, undetected, during the outage. “It's all on tape if you want to see.”

  “And no one saw her leave?” Kim's hands fell on her hips. “Not a single one of the CNAs or the assistants?”

  Amanda looked to Phelps and Barnes, both of whom had directed their eyes elsewhere—the floor, the ceiling, anywhere but the unpleasant woman's hard gaze.

  “Mrs. Charon, I believe if you review the tape—”

  “What? What is it?”

  “Well, it's really odd. Might be better just to show you.”

  Kim threw her hands up in surrender. “Fine. Show me. Better explain why a sixty-nine-year-old woman with chronic back pain was able to get up and find her way out the door in the dark without a single person in this goddamn facility noticing her.”

  Oh, it will, Amanda thought. Ohhhhh it will.

  They crammed into the security office. Amanda had left the clip on the screen, paused on the exact moment before the lights went out. Julie Finch was stationed in a rocking chair, near the front door. They could see the window behind her with clarity.

  Without saying a word, without prefacing the footage, Amanda pressed play.

  The screen went dark. On the tape, the lights flickered for a second, and, in that blip, they saw Julie Finch was standing, her entire body turned toward the camera. Her lips spread apart, displaying the black hole that was her mouth. Her eyes were wide open, nearly popping out of her skull, as if someone were squeezing her, choking her, killing her. The image was gone in a blink and the screen went dark again. Then the emergency lights kicked on, throwing sepia shadows over the room.

  The woman was gone.

  The window was open.

  No matter how many times Amanda watched the footage, a strong case of the chills washed over her, hardening her flesh. Her blood ran cold. Her neck tingled with a haunted touch. She wanted to shed her skin just to rid herself of the feeling.

  For a solid ten seconds, no one in the office spoke a word.

  Then, Kim stood up straight, lifting her chin with authority. “Well. Does anyone want to provide a rational explanation on how a sixty-nine-year-old woman with a terrible back, advanced arthritis, and degenerative muscle tone can lift open a window and climb through it, all in the matter of a few seconds?”

  It was a question no one had an answer for, not a logical one. Amanda kept coming back to The Exorcist movie, but an answer of that nature was sure to get her thrown out of here, and, if her superiors caught wind of it, they'd probably—at the very least—document her.

  “No,” was the answer Amanda settled on, and it was the truest answer she could currently provide. It was simple, and it was accurate. “There is no logical explanation for this. Nor the note that was tucked in the back of Manuel Renteria's throat.”

  “You mean the blank piece of paper?”

  Blank to you, Amanda thought, but dared not speak.

  “Yes, the blank piece of paper.” She watched Barnes's eyes lock onto hers when she spoke those words. She didn't know what he was trying to tell her, but just shut it was probably close enough.

  “I think the important thing is,” Barnes said, putting his hands on his hips and pacing the small office, “that we find her. Quickly. Without making a big fuss of it.”

  “You mean,” Kim said, directing her awful stare at him, “without notifying certain authorities.”

  Barnes seemed hesitant to respond. “I think that would be a bigger mess than what we need right now. Luckily, no one has tipped off the local news outlets. Or dealing with this issue with discretion would be an impossibility. I think we should take the opportunity to find Mrs. Finch before this whole thing blows up. And the sooner we get out there looking, the sooner we can bring her back without causing a media circus for the duration of our investigation.”

  “For once, I actually agree with you
.” Kim nodded. Her lawyers kept unusually quiet, uncharacteristically still. They kept their distance from her, as if the woman were a wild, unpredictable animal that could strike at any moment. Occasionally they glanced down at their phones, probably wishing to receive some important call, something to drag them away from this escalating situation. Something that would free them from this nonsense.

  This frightening nonsense, Amanda thought.

  “Good. It's settled then.” Barnes spun and faced Amanda. “I'll head into the woods and track her down.”

  “Well, I'm coming with you.”

  “Me too,” Phelps added, stepping forward.

  Amanda nodded. There was no way they were staying behind and dealing with the woman and her attitude alone.

  Barnes turned toward Kim. “We'll need a representative from the facility to accompany us. A guard preferably. In case Mrs. Finch isn't... cooperative.”

  The woman nodded. “I'll stick Cunningham on it.”

  “Sounds good. Tell Mr. Cunningham to be ready in five.”

  Kim craned her head toward Amanda. “What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

  Amanda gave her that what-you-should-have-done-already glance and folded her arms. “Get the rest of these people out of here. Send your staff home except for one CNA and one guard.” She paused, pinching her lower lip between her teeth. “This facility isn't safe anymore.”

  10

  Cunningham was tall, but he didn't have a lot of muscle on him, and that wasn't comforting to the others. Not that the man needed to look like Rambo to take down an old lady if she got agitated and violent, but still—he wasn't built like your typical security guard, capable of handling messy situations or physical altercations. Amanda had seen mall cops strike a more authoritative pose. Alas, he was the one Kim had stuck them with, and it wasn't like they had much of a choice; Cunningham was one of two on duty.