NINETEEN
***
The sheriff's station was awash in bright light, lit like a torch from within and without. Every light in the station was on, and the place was also illuminated with numerous portable floodlights.
Jason grinned for the first time since this ordeal had begun what seemed like a thousand years ago. "Hatty must have set this up to lead everyone here; to get the townspeople somewhere safe."
"Good thinking," said Lenore.
"That's Hatty for you."
He felt his spirits lift exponentially with each foot they came closer to the station, so by the time they entered the station he was practically beaming. His smile quickly dissipated, however, as he saw that, far from a milling crowd of Rising inhabitants, there was only one person inside: Hatty herself.
The old woman was slumped in her usual chair, chin resting on her chest. Jason tensed when he saw her, thinking that she must be dead. But no, he could see that she was breathing - easy enough to spot in the brightness of the office. Hatty had set several of the portable spots up inside the place, as though to warm the office with light.
Jason smiled again. "Hatty, we're home," he said in his best Ricky Ricardo voice - not a very good imitation, he knew, but he was proud of the fact that his spirits had risen enough to even attempt levity.
The old woman jerked as though surprised, but did not raise her eyes to face them. She remained in her stooped position, though one hand feebly gestured for them to come closer. Jason immediately grew wary. Something was wrong.
"Hatty?" he said quietly. He approached the old woman, and realized that she was whispering something, over and over:
"So dark. So dark. So dark...."
And now, at last, she sat upright, groaning as she did, as though it cost her every last bit of strength she had. She looked at Jason. And he inhaled in shock. Gone were the kind, twinkling old eyes. Now she looked at them with only blank, pupil-less orbs of solid white.
Lenore gave a small yip of surprise and anguish, and as she did, Hatty started crying. Even her tears were wrong, milky stains of pus-like moisture dripping down her cheeks.
"I tried," the old woman sobbed. "I tried to make it light, lit up everything I could, but it didn't work. Didn't work. The dark came. I put on the lights but it...all...went...dark!" And with that the old woman suddenly shrieked, writhing, clawing at her eyes in pain. "It hurts!" she screamed. "Too dark, too dark! Not the dark!"
She began bleeding as she tore at her own eyes, the eyelids scraping off with two vicious tears of her fingernails, the eyes themselves puncturing and seeming to sag in their sockets. "It hurts!" she screamed again, but did not stop her self-mutilation.
Jason was too shocked to move at first, but then he ran to her, crossing the space between them in two large steps and trying to grab her arms; to stop her from further injuring herself.
"The dark!" she screamed again, tearing away from his hands and continuing to rasp at her own face and eyes. Then she stopped suddenly. Her face went pale and her lips went blue, even the blood from her wounds seeming to lose color and vitality in an instant. She convulsed in her seat and grabbed her right arm in the classic tell-tales of a heart attack. She thrashed back and forth for a single moment, moaned loudly, and then went limp. Her ruined eyes stared into nothing, her breath ebbed from her in a loud gasp. A single black tear traced its way from one eye down her cheek.
"So...dark," she whispered. And she slumped again, her head coming to rest on her chest once more, then continuing down, down, down as she fell off the chair. She hit the floor face first, the movement so sudden that Jason didn't have the time to process what was happening, let alone prevent it in any way. She hit her nose on the floor, and he could hear it break and saw blood spatter across the tile. But Hatty didn't react, didn't move an iota.
"Hatty!" he shouted. He rolled her over. Her eyes still stared at nothing, and a blue tongue lolled from her mouth. He felt for a pulse. None. "Hatty!" he screamed again, and began chest compressions.
Without being asked, Lenore instantly moved to Hatty's mouth, pressing the woman's nose and breathing into her mouth after Jason had compressed her chest five times. "Breathe!" he shouted unnecessarily. Lenore breathed again, and then nodded at him. Five more compressions, two more breaths. He checked her pulse. Nothing. They kept up the CPR for several long minutes, but within the first twenty seconds Jason knew that the old woman was gone.
He rocked back on his heels. "Dammit," he groaned. Then he shouted it: "Dammit, dammit, dammit!" He felt tears, hot and salty, dripping down his cheeks, felt snot run from his nose. Lenore's hand touched his shoulder, then traveled down his arm and to his hand.
He clutched at her, holding her hand like it was a life preserver. And in a way, he supposed it was. Hatty had been his main reason for living for so long, his main connection to humanity, and now she was gone, her ruined face staring up at him in a macabre facsimile of the person she had once been. So he held to Lenore, drawing her close to him, holding her for warmth, for life. She stiffened at first, then relaxed and returned his embrace and the two of them held one another, survivors in the shipwreck that Rising had become, bounced and tossed with the waves of horror that had enveloped the place.
"What now?" Lenore asked, pressing herself into his chest.
Jason was silent for a time, still grappling with the loss of the old woman, of his oldest friend. Finally, though, he found his voice and said, "We go. Out of Rising. As fast as we can."
He could tell from Lenore's relieved sigh that she was happy to hear this, but his respect for her grew in the next moment when she showed she was not just concerned with saving her own skin. "What about the rest of the town?" she asked. "Shouldn't we help them?"
"I think," he replied, looking out the window. The mist was still there, the dark shadows still writhed like nightmares and he was sure that it was only a matter of time before they came for Hatty as they had come for Sarah West. "I think they're all dead," he finally finished, giving voice at last to the fear that had plagued him since arriving at the abandoned station.
"I think they're all dead."
***
TWENTY
***
They drove slowly, crawling along through the darkness that surrounded the town. The mist still seemed to glow with an otherworldly light, but the illumination neither warmed Lenore nor made her feel any safer. On the contrary, it reminded her that whatever was happening, it was happening in a place grown suddenly alien and strange, a place where light shed no light and where shadows took corpses in the mist.
"Can't we go any faster?" she asked Sheriff Meeks. He frowned, and she noted that even when he frowned, his eyes were kind and alert. He was something she had heard of but never expected to find: a good man.
"Not unless you want to find out what paint feels like, splashed all over the side of some building."
He maintained their slow pace, but suddenly something loomed before them. A sign. "See ya! Town of Rising says Goodbye and invites you to return to the Friendliest Little Place on Earth."
The mist seemed to die down a bit as they passed the sign, and Lenore felt hope bloom inside her breast. "We're through," she breathed. "We made it."
"Here's hoping," the sheriff responded, but she could tell from his clenched jaw and white knuckles that he didn't believe it. Either that or he did believe it, and was worried that their escape would be snatched away from them instantly.
He hit the gas, accelerating a bit as the mist thinned. But Lenore soon saw that whatever was happening, it wasn't over. The mist kicked up again, thickening around them. She saw the sheriff grind his teeth in anger and perhaps despair.
But he didn't decelerate. Indeed, she saw his foot plunge down on the accelerator and felt the truck lurch forward even as visibility disappeared.
"Shouldn't you slow down?" asked Lenore. Sheriff Meeks didn't answer, his gaze riveted on the road ahead. "Sheriff?" she tried again. "You're scaring me."
Still no answer. The truck moved faster and faster, the tachometer redlining as the sheriff pushed the truck to its limits in a clear attempt to rip them free of the town and its evil influences.
Then she screamed as a woman suddenly stepped out into the road in front of them; screamed again in the next instant as she saw the woman's face. It was only half there, destroyed by what looked like a bullet wound.
"Elizabeth!" screamed the sheriff in a voice steeped in despair and fear. He cranked the wheel to one side in order to avoid hitting this stranger, this walking corpse, and Lenore felt the world crumble in on her as the truck hit a rut, bounced, and then slammed into something with bone-crushing force. She heard a loud "pop" and knew it must be the vertebrae shattering inside her neck and back, and then she slammed forward into something unyielding, and the darkness claimed her as its own.
***
She awoke, though she could not say whether seconds or hours had passed. She looked in front of her and saw a pillow from her bed.
No, that wasn't right. She wasn't in bed.
She shook her head to clear it of the fog that gripped her, and realized in a moment that what she had taken to be a pillow was in fact an air bag. The popping she had heard must have been the sound of the explosives that ringed the safety device going off, allowing it to escape its hiding spot in the dashboard of the truck and inflate at the speed of sound, saving her from crashing into the windshield of the truck; probably saving her life.
She looked over.
The sheriff was gone.
His air bag had gone off as well, but it hung loosely from the steering wheel, completely deflated.
Where was Sheriff Meeks? she wondered, and felt her stomach drop at the prospect of being alone. Especially since being alone meant that she would be lost in this thick fog, with the possibility of running into him again, of running into the man who had caused her so much pain and grief.
The thought of him made her break out in a cold sweat, and she could feel her respiration increase as she started to panic. She almost had a heart attack then, as the door tore open with a shriek of twisted metal!
But it was only Sheriff Meeks. "So sorry," he said. "So sorry. I just...I just...." He didn't finish the thought, but took a knife from his belt and stabbed her air bag. It ripped open and a blast of warm air hit her in the face, but in a second the air bag hung like afterbirth from the dashboard and she had enough room to remove her safety belt and get out of the truck.
Moving was painful; she was sure she had bruised some ribs in the crash. But she made no murmur of complaint. She could see that the sheriff was grappling with something terrible right now, something that must have to do with that dead woman they had seen - Elizabeth, he had called her.
But there was no time to ask him what had just happened, what it was he knew that she didn't. Because in that instant she saw where they were.
"Jesus," whispered the sheriff. And she didn't get the feeling that he was swearing, more that he was uttering a short prayer. Nor could she blame him when she saw what they had crashed into.
It was the general store. They had smashed halfway through the plate glass window at the front of the store and then must have careened into a load-bearing wall with a thick steel core, because the front of the truck had crumpled and they had stopped moving fast enough for the air bags to go off.
"This is impossible," said the sheriff as he looked at the front of the store. "We were outside of town. We were outside of town, so how could we crash into the general store on Main Street?"
"Well," said Lenore, trying to muster enough courage to speak without crying. "We're not outside town anymore."
"No," agreed the sheriff. "We're right back where we started from."
"Guess whatever is doing this doesn't want us to leave," she said. Then she shouted and pointed into the store.
The sheriff stepped gingerly through the broken window and into the store. She followed him a moment later, walking into the bright store and staring at what had made her shout.
It was Ox. He was laying facedown on the tile floor next to a small footstool. Blood pooled all around, and the floor had shattered around him in a crazed fashion, spider cracks running through the tile and allowing her to see that even the concrete below the tile had been smashed.
Sheriff Meeks leaned down next to Ox and touched the big man's neck. He yelped as he did so, and pulled his fingers back as though he had been burnt. "What is it?" asked Lenore.
"Soft," answered the sheriff.
"Soft?"
The lawman nodded. "He's soft."
Lenore noted then that the body looked strange: lacking shape, somehow, like it was a bag and not a human being made of muscle and bone.
She reached out a trembling finger to touch the big man's arm. Her fingers sunk in like she was touching putty, and she too yelped and pulled her fingers back - but not until they had slid into his body up to the knuckles.
"Where are his bones?" she asked, aware that she was sounding for all the world like one of her third-graders and not caring in the least.
The sheriff didn't seem to mind, either. He just stood up and looked over the store. The aisles were full of debris, she saw: items knocked off shelves, plaster dust everywhere, even some tiles from the ceiling were strewn about. It was as though an earthquake had struck the store, and somehow she knew that the destruction was not the result of their crashing into the place.
The sheriff looked back at the big man then. "Like he fell," he murmured.
The lights went out then, flickering once and then plunging them both into darkness. Mist curled in over the broken window, crawling into the general store like a living being.
It covered Ox. Lenore looked away. "What now?" she said.
Suddenly, she could hear something in the mist. Screams. Faint, but screams.
Sheriff Meeks stepped toward the window to leave. "Where are you going?" she asked.
"We have to find out what's happening to the town," he answered.
Dread filled her belly. She knew he was going to say that, but it tore her apart inside nonetheless. "Can't we stay here?" she pleaded.
The sheriff looked at her with a concerned expression, and she could tell he was weighing his words carefully, trying to spare her any unnecessary pain. "We can't," he finally said. "If we stay here, then we're just going to end up dead like everyone else. We have to find out what's happening and try to stop it." He held out a hand to Lenore.
She hesitated. Then took his hand.
He helped her over the dangerous shards of glass that still clung like witch's teeth to the windowpane of the general store, and then kept on holding her hand for a moment.
In spite of their predicament, in spite of all the danger, in spite of everything that had happened that night, she felt warmth bloom where he touched her. It spread up her arm and into her chest, touching her heart and making it beat faster for a wonderful moment.
Then he let go, and she thought she saw something - was it guilt? - flash across his face.
"Come on," he said gruffly. "We have a town to investigate."
***
Hours later she was on the verge of falling over from exhaustion, and they had found nothing useful. Just empty house after empty house. Half-eaten meals, clocks that were strangely out of focus and impossible to read, dim screams sounding all around them...and the shadows. The phantoms in the mist that seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Never touching them, always moving too fast to be followed. Not always, but often when a shadow passed, the sheriff's walkie-talkie would blast out a high-pitched whistle, and he joked in a low voice that at least they had an early warning system.
She did not laugh. The shadows were too frightening to laugh about, with their horned heads and glassy eyes.
They stepped out of one last house, and she bent over to rub her aching calves, wishing she had some other footwear than the heels. She had toyed with the idea of taking some other clothes from one of the houses, but immediately discarded it: she would not steal from the dead. Nor was she about to go back to her own house; not with what had just happened there. She only felt safe next to the sheriff, and so she would brave the blisters that the heels gave her, knowing that to have no footwear in this mist could prove dangerous since they could barely see the ground ahead of them. She thought about what her feet would look like if she had stepped out of the sheriff's truck without shoes when they were surrounded by broken glass at the general store, and shuddered.
The mist surrounded them as always, and Lenore whispered, "What now?" The sheriff held up his hand, motioning her to silence. "What is it?" she said after a long moment.
"Listen."
"I don't hear anything."
"Neither do I," said Sheriff Meeks. "The screaming's stopped."
The mist was thick, but she realized that the shadows were nowhere to be seen, either. As though they had done their work and gone. "We're all alone," she whispered in a frightened voice. Somehow, the silence was as terrifying - if not more so - as the screams had been.
"Should we try to leave?" asked the sheriff.
"No," she answered. "It's not over. Can't you feel it, Sheriff?"
"Call me Jason," he said, and tried to grin. "I hoped that feeling was just my underwear being too tight."
The mist billowed around her and the sheriff - around her and Jason, she corrected herself. "It's not over," she whispered again.
Then a deep, dark voice, a voice that had been to Hell and taught the devil about fear, sliced out of the mist. "No," said the voice. "For you, it's just beginning."
Lenore felt herself turn inside out.
It was him.
***