Chapter 7: Ghost-Face

The barricade was city property: black panel on a steel frame, red letters, a crossbar welded between the feet so it wouldn’t walk off in the wind. ROAD CLOSED. It stood in the middle of the crosswalk with no crew anywhere near it — no truck, no cones, no hole in the road, no man in an orange vest. Just the sign, and a man in a dark jacket sitting on the curb with his back against one leg of it, playing a game on his phone where you swapped two colored squares and the board came apart in a chain.

He was big through the shoulders and going thick through the middle, and he sat like a man who had learned to sit anywhere.

Behind him the street ran down between two rows of brick into the old part of the city. A lamp at the bottom that worked. A lamp past it that hadn’t worked since spring. Between them the street looked like a photograph of itself — the same shutter down, the same plywood over the same window, the same nothing.

Nothing had come out of that street since the sign went up. That was what the sign was for, and the sign was doing it.

The phone said 9:41. Level two hundred and something, three moves left, no good ones, and he was working out which of the bad ones was least bad when a man came off the far corner.

“Hey.” The man stopped at the edge of the crosswalk. Late forties. A lunch bag with a foil lining folded under one arm, a work jacket, a hooded sweatshirt under it in that heat. “You know you’re sitting in the street.”

“I know.”

“All right.” The man laughed, one syllable. “You waiting on somebody?”

“Something like that.”

“Yeah?” He dug in his jacket and came out with a pack and held it up. “Smoke?”

“No.” A beat. “On the clock.”

The man looked at him for a second. “You’re on the clock.”

“Yeah.”

“Sitting on the ground.”

“Yeah.”

“All right.” He put the pack away. “That’s a new one.”

He stood there. He had the look of a man who’d been on his feet for ten hours and hadn’t talked to anybody for most of them, and he wasn’t in a hurry now that he’d stopped. The phone made its little sounds. The man watched it upside down from where he stood.

Then: “Well.” He shifted the bag. “I’m going that way.”

“No,” the man on the curb said. “You’re not.”

The man’s eyebrows came up. “Excuse me?”

“Not tonight.” He looked up for the first time. “You can’t go through here tonight.”

The man looked down the empty street, and back, and he was smiling the way people smile when they’re deciding whether to take something personally. “Why’s that.”

“Road’s closed.”

“Closed.” He looked again. “There’s no crew out here.”

“No.”

“So they’re coming back.”

“They leave it.”

“They leave it.” The man’s voice came up a notch. “What’s your problem, chief? Huh? You got a problem with me?”

No answer.

“No, I’m asking.” The man stepped back off the white line, and his bag knocked against his leg. “Because I’ve lived on Ninth my whole life. That’s my house down there. You want to tell me I can’t walk to my own house?”

“Not through here.”

“Let me see the sign, then.” He said it like a dare, and he walked past with his boots loud on the crosswalk paint. “That thing’s in the middle of the road. It’s not even — there’s supposed to be a permit on these. There’s supposed to be a number—“

The red in the letters came up once, all the way through, like a coal when the air gets to it, and then it was paint again.

The man straightened up. What had been in his face was gone out of it — not fear, nothing, the way a window goes when the light behind it goes off. He stood there with his hands at his sides. Then he turned around and walked back the way he had come, across the crosswalk and up onto the far sidewalk, and he did not look at the sign or at the curb or at the street, and at the corner he turned and went out of sight.

He could hear the boots for a while after the man was gone, and then he couldn’t.

He had said something to the first of them — keep walking, you’re all right, ten minutes home — and it had made no difference, and it had made him feel like a man talking to somebody asleep. So now he watched.

The earpiece clicked twice.

“Krantz.”

He was off the curb before the second syllable. “Here. North mouth. Sign’s holding, nothing’s come out.”

“Listen to me.” Rourke. Rourke did not open with listen to me. “We had them backed into the basement and one of them went up on us. It’s a King now, and it’s out of the rift.”

“Out.” Something went cold along the backs of his arms. “How far out.”

“Red’s down.”

“How bad.”

“Bad. It put Red through a basement wall on the way out. Came up the storm drain and got past the signs. It’s moving.”

“Which way.”

“South. Under the cut, toward the river.”

“Send me. I can be at the river end in four minutes—“

“No.”

“I can be there before it—“

“You can’t fight it, Eli.” Flat. Not unkind. “I’m not saying you won’t. I’m saying you can’t. I’ll take the King.”

He stood there with the phone in his hand and said nothing at all.

“Krantz.”

“Here.”

“When it went out, two more went with it. Same drain. They’re in the pipes now and they’re moving southeast, and the rest of the batch is still in the basement and I can’t pull anybody off it.”

“Which street.”

“The cut to the river. If they get to the water—“

“Which street, Captain.”

“The cut to the river. Go.”

“Copy.”

He put the phone in his pocket and ran.

The cut was a block of street the city had dropped a step and a half when it put the sewer in. Brick on both sides, the storm drain under it the whole way down, and at the bottom the outfall set into the riverbank at chest height with a rust stain under it the size of a door. In a hard rain it emptied the whole lower block into the river on its own. That was where he was going.

The truck was on the corner in the loading zone where he’d left it — black, no markings, sitting a little low at the back left where the leaf spring had been going for a year and a half. The keys were already in it.

On the passenger seat, folded and laid out square: a cloak, black at the shoulder and dark red where the fold came over, and under it a straight sword in a scabbard with the hilt turned toward the door.

He put the truck in gear and left them where they were.

The engine caught on the second turn. He went up out of the old part with the lights off and the window down, turned south at the top, and the red of the taillights went out of the intersection and did not come back.

Nine-fifty.

The school doors had been shut for twelve minutes and the last of the cars had gone up toward Vine. The street that ran down into the old part was doing what it did at that hour, which was not much. A screen door somewhere. A dog with a cough, two blocks over. The river was a block and a half down and the air off it smelled of wet iron.

The corner had two streetlights and only one of them hummed.

Sean Dooley stopped at the mouth of the cut with his hands in his jacket pockets. “All right. This is me.”

Bryce stopped walking, which was how he got everyone else to stop walking. “It’s not, though.”

“It’s a block.”

“It’s a block down there.” Bryce had the jersey over his shoulder; he brought it down and held it in both hands. “That’s what I’m saying.”

“Say it, then,” Sean said, “or don’t,” and Kayla said, “Bryce.”

“What?” Bryce looked around at all of them. “What, I can’t say anything?”

“You can say it walking.”

So he lowered his voice instead, and made them lean in to hear it, which was worse.

“There’s been people dying down there.”

“Where,” Sean said.

“The old part. Since last week. A dozen of them.”

“A dozen.”

“Yeah.”

“A dozen people died in the old part this week and it wasn’t on the news.”

“It’s not on the news.” Bryce said it slowly, the way you say a thing to somebody being stupid on purpose. “That’s the whole entire point.”

“Then how do you know.”

“My dad.”

Nothing for a second. Owen had come back and stopped at the corner with his hands in his pockets.

“He’s on nights,” Bryce said. “He was out on Wednesday. He came home and he sat in the truck in the driveway for an hour before he came in the house. You want to tell me what that’s about?”

“He could’ve been tired,” Kayla said, and her voice went up at the end of it, so it came out a question.

“It’s not a guy with a knife, is what I’m saying.” Bryce swallowed. “The ones they found — there’s no face on them. There’s the eyes. There’s all the rest of it. There’s no face.”

The wind came up the hill and moved the plastic stapled over the fence. Nobody said anything.

“Bryce.” Adrian had not spoken since the crosswalk. “The ones with no faces. You’re sure a person did that.”

The street was quiet enough that he could hear Owen breathing through his mouth.

“What’s that supposed to mean,” Bryce said.

“Nothing.”

“No — what’s it supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, Bryce.”

“You don’t say stuff.” Bryce said it to the others. “Right? He doesn’t say stuff. That’s like his whole—“ He gestured with the jersey, one-handed, at Adrian. “And now he’s saying it.”

“Oh my God,” Kayla said, and reached over and got the skin of Bryce’s arm above the elbow and twisted it.

“Ow — ow, Kayla, that’s the same arm—“

“Shut up. Shut up.”

“I’m not even doing anything—“

“Shut up.” She let go and stepped back and pushed her hair off her forehead with the flat of her wrist. “I have to be home. Do you understand that? I have to be home and you’re doing this.”

Bryce held his arm against his body and glared at the sidewalk. Then, to nobody, quietly: “It’s not a ghost story.”

Sean took his hands out of his pockets and put them back in. “Okay,” he said. “So it’s a person.”

“Sean—“

“Whatever’s doing it. It’s a person doing it. People do things.” He shrugged, and the shrug was for the others as much as for himself. “There’s no such thing as the other thing.”

“That’s not what I—“

“I walk down that cut every day of my life. There’s a cat in it. There’s a Dumpster in it. One time there was a guy asleep in it, and that’s the whole list.” He looked at the three of them, then down into the cut, then at Adrian a second longer than at the others. “Ten o’clock at night, it’s the cat.”

“Sean.”

“Night,” he said, and went.

The cut ran between the back of the old furniture store and the wall of what had been the same store’s warehouse. At the mouth it was wide enough for a car and a half. It got narrower. Past the second building there was one lamp on the warehouse wall, and past that the dark.

Kayla got four steps past the corner before she stopped.

She turned her head and sniffed, twice.

“Do you smell that?”

“Smell what,” Owen said.

“Something dead.” She turned in a slow half circle, her head up. “Like something died down there.”

“There’s rats down there,” Bryce said. “There’s always—“ and then he stopped, and then he said, “Oh.”

“Oh,” Owen said, a beat behind him. “Oh, that’s—“ He pulled the collar of his shirt up over his nose. “That’s not rats.”

It got to Adrian last, and it got to him all at once. Up through the back of his throat, and his mouth flooded, and his stomach turned over and kept turning.

It was meat left in a car. It was the drain behind the plant in July, when the wind came off it wrong.

He braced his hand on the brick of the corner and held on to it.

Kayla said, “I’m—“ and went down on one knee in the gutter and was sick between her hands.

“Kayla. Kayla, hey—“ Owen started toward her and stopped halfway, and Bryce said, “Oh my God,” and then said it again, and nobody moved.

Adrian turned his head. The smell came out of the cut and bent at the corner and came up the street to him, and it was not a smell that had been there a minute ago, and it was not getting weaker.

“It’s in there,” he said.

“Where?” Bryce, too loud. “Where?”

“The cut.” Adrian lifted his arm and pointed with two fingers down the mouth of it. “It’s coming down the cut.”

Then the scream came out of the cut.

It went up high and it stopped all at once, in the middle of itself.

Adrian’s cane came up off the sidewalk. He was in the street, one step past the curb, before anybody had said anything to him at all, and behind him Kayla was still down on one knee with her hand flat on the pavement.