Shadow Stations: Unseen (12 page)

“
About us?” Cars rushed by in the background. He had to be out on the road again with those stupid shoes.

“
No, Mike, I need a favor. You’re still collecting shoes?”

“
You want to donate something?” The hope trailed out of his voice.

“
No. I donated Ben’s boots at the college, and I’ve changed my mind, and I want to keep them.” I took the gun out while I held the cell phone.

“
I’ve picked all those up. I’ve done Gettysburg.”

“
You could look for them.”

Silence, then he said, “I just don’t think they’re around now. I mean, what kind of boots are we talking about?”

“
Boots, brown boots. You’re taking them to the Grasslands, right? I want to meet you out there to look for them.”

“
No, John said nobody can go in there except me because of the construction.”

“
Okay, then I’ll stay in the Jeep and tell you what they look like.”

“
I guess that’d be all right,” he said, sounding like he didn’t want to do it. I knew he was agreeing just to see me. “I should be out there at ten. That’s my last run.”

“
I’ll be in the parking lot.” I put the cell phone on the seat by the gun and headed down the Fairfield Road to pick up Nikki. I wasn’t leaving her out of this fight.

Once I was in the professor’s house, I took the device from the closet and raced through it one more time. It wasn’t working, not in the same way. The probe didn’t shoot out and only half the symbols appeared.

But I found something interesting, a map with a point of light that had to be the Grasslands, and another marker in the deep state park woods behind Catoctin Furnace in Maryland, and more markers through the mountains that ran up the coast of the United States into the Canadian wilderness. The map disappeared, though, and I couldn’t remember how I’d found and wasn’t able to bring it up again.

So be it. I hid the device in the closet. I wasn’t going to give John Savenue a chance to muscle it away from me. One last look at the quiet house and I jumped in the Jeep with Nikki in the back and the gun on the seat beside me and drove down the long driveway into the night. I was taking my own car this time. I was never hiding from him again.

We sped past miles of isolated farmland toward the mountains. After the split to Cashtown and the sign to the Grasslands, I took the road into the woods, dimmed my headlights, and opened the windows.

Long, wolfish shadows spread across the road as the whispers rushed past us. We drove until the woods thinned out and the land opened up under the eerie light from the dome that radiated over every hollow and hill. My gut instincts told me John Savenue was holed up in there like a snake.

Another curve in the road, and I turned off the headlights, passed the little white cross at the scene of the accident, swung into the gravel parking lot, and idled the Jeep by the doors with my hand on the gun. Mike’s empty Toyota sat beside the construction equipment on the far edge of the lot. He was still out in the company van.

I turned off the ignition to listen. The whispering grew louder, the voices saying something over and over in an indecipherable stream of words that blended with the sounds of the night, an undercurrent beneath the groans of trees scraping against each other, the distant rush of faraway cars, the stirring of animals in the fields.
Urgent, urgent, help me, help me, no, no, no
.

Nikki growled and kept her dark eyes on the window. The fur bristled on her back.

Ten minutes later, headlights washed over the ground. The van pulled in, circled the lot, and backed up to the doors. Mike’s pale face peered out the window. He jumped down, rolled out a hand truck, and loaded it with big cardboard boxes, his breath puffing out in icy clouds.

“
Come on, Nikki,” I told her and got out with the gun hidden in my coat.

“
Five minutes,” Mike called. The light from the dome cast a green pallor over his face.

“
We’re coming in with you. It’s too cold out here.”

“
I told you, John doesn’t want anybody in there.”

I pulled the gun on him. “I said we’re coming in. Open the doors.”

His mouth fell open. “Oh, no, Amy. Come on, don’t do this.”

“
I said open those doors.”

“
You need help. I mean, seriously, let me help you—”

“
I don’t want to hear it.”

He pressed his mouth in a tight line, went through the keys, and unlocked the doors.

I waved the gun at him. “You first.” We entered a wide corridor with a concrete floor, whitewashed walls, and an industrial ceiling with exposed white metal beams. It looked more like the basement of a mental hospital than a resort under construction. The corridor ended at heavy double doors without windows.

Mike wheeled the boxes over to the wall beside a stack of identical boxes he must have brought in earlier. He spread his hands, the way people do when they’re trying to reason with somebody who’s lost it.

“
I don’t know where Ben’s boots are. Honest, I don’t. If you want, we’ll tear all these boxes open right now, and I swear to God I’ll do that for you, but his boots aren’t here. I picked all these up tonight.”

“
I know they’re not here. Open those doors.”

“
I can’t do that. John told me not to go in there.”

I cocked the gun. “Do it, or I blow them off the hinges.”

He shook his head and pressed his mouth shut again, walked to the end of the corridor, looking over his shoulder at me, and unlocked the double doors. I motioned him in with the gun and followed him into an enormous space the size of an arena.

Nikki flattened her ears and bared her teeth. We were under the dome. The shadows and the whispering hit me first and then I saw the thousands of shoes.

Chapter 19

Shadows and whispers swirled around us, a ceaseless murmur of voices tumbling over each other, rushing out of the dim corners like water searching for a way to escape through a crevice, a crack, a hole, anywhere at all,
no no no, urgent urgent, help me help me
.

Nikki snarled at the air. Gripping the gun, I pulled her against my side and stared at the sea of shoes laid out across the vast floor.

Countless loafers stood two by two as if their owners had just stepped out of them. Empty evening shoes glittered beside satin wedding shoes with delicate beading. Running shoes that must have been laced up in the cool hours of the morning stood by construction boots with the mud still on the heels. Milk-stained baby booties lay beside men’s slip-ons, women’s high heels and casual mules, moccasins, and orthopedic shoes. Shoes from the living, shoes from the dead, discarded by the thousands.

The whispers and the shadows rushed by us.
No no no, urgent urgent, help me.

Slow shock spread over Mike’s face. “They said they gave all these out. They said there was nothing in here.”

Nikki snarled at the air. I kept my eyes glued to the horrifying shadows until I realized they were flowing around and around in a bigger current toward a luminous grid where the far walls met the floor. The source of all the ominous green light under the dome seemed to be hidden under that grid.

I hadn’t come this far to turn away. With my heart pounding, I gripped Nikki’s collar and moved with her across the floor until I stood beside the grid and dared to look down into the brilliant light.

A shocking crevice dropped hundreds of feet below the Grasslands. Silvery green shapes that resembled liquid slugs writhed along its sheer walls. I saw the gears of some kind of nightmarish machinery that reached to the bottom of the abyss where hypnotic light radiated from a sickening green pool. Something was sucking the shadows down into the pool, but I wasn’t close enough to see, so I took a step forward. The light pierced my skull and my hands seemed to rise by themselves to shield my face.

The pool bubbled. Green lightning flashed across my vision. I felt if I stood there any longer I might lose my eyesight and even the ability to breathe and would topple headfirst into that hypnotic green light. Shadows spiraled down around my feet, twisting into doomed mouths and eyes and hands, reaching up, desperate, before they vanished into the hellish pool.

Nikki gave a long, vicious growl.

“
Your dog seems upset,” John Savenue said behind us.

I whirled around and leveled the gun at him and his dead eyes.

“
She doesn’t like assholes,” I told him.

Mike gripped my shoulders. “Leave her alone. You deal with me.”

John Savenue laughed in his face.

I pushed Mike away. “You tell me what you did to Ben or I’m emptying this gun.”

“
A little macho mama. End this game, Amy.” John Savenue placed his six fingered hands together. “You know you’re turning into one of us. Look at your hands. Now, you took something that belongs to me, so you’re going to be a nice girl and hand it over.”

“
And you have some serious fucking delusions.” I kept the gun steady. “I’ll tell you what, Mr. Johns Avenue, you took something that belongs to me—my fiancé and my life. You stole his image and you stuck it in some sick program and caused his car accident. I know you did. He saw something he wasn’t supposed to see so you killed him.”

“
You stupid little bitch. So you’re the one he called.”

I felt a jolt. “One last time, what did you do to Ben?”

“
You’re about to find out when you end up in the same place.”

Nikki snarled, lunged at John Savenue, and sank her jaws into his stomach, growling and biting with all the savagery of her ancient wolf ancestors, but he grabbed her head in one swift movement and twisted. She held on, still biting, and made a terrible shriek.

Not my dog. I pulled the trigger and blew a hole in John Savenue’s neck. The impact knocked him off his feet and threw him across the field of shoes. Nikki fell off him, choking. When she lunged again with the true heart of a noble German shepherd, ready to defend me, I pulled her away, thinking he was dead.

But John Savenue was alive, lying on his back with a horrible smile even though I’d blown a hole the size of the Lincoln Tunnel in his neck. The bastard wasn’t even bleeding. Black shadows streamed out of the hole.

He raised his hand.

The dome pulsed with green light.

Mike grabbed my shoulders. “We have to get out of here, Amy. Now.”

I shook him off again, rooted to the spot. “What did you do to Ben?” I screamed.

John Savenue moved his hand a second time. The light under the dome throbbed over and over. He was still laughing even with that giant hole in his neck.

Eerie wisps of green light rose like restless souls from the empty shoes on the edge of the room. The light spiraled up in bright twisting columns shot with gold. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing and wondered if he’d set the shoes on fire.

The light in the shoes grew flesh-colored with scars and blotches and dark tufts of hair. Bones and glistening muscles formed into feet. Ankles and calves appeared.

Nikki snarled and barked.

The light rising from a pair of men’s fine leather Oxfords solidified first. Bare knees sprouted two flabby thighs, a shrunken penis atop dangling balls, bony hips, and a flap of flesh over a pasty stomach. Saggy old man breasts grew from the torso, divided by a dull red keloid scar that ran up the hairless white chest. Skin grew over the breastplate. Wrinkled arms and hands formed, then a neck with turkey wattle skin, and a head with shaggy white hair and cloudy eyes.

My heart raced. I recognized him. The demonic light had formed a copy of a man at the college, somebody in administration. I’d seen him in the corridors near the dean’s office, dressed in a turtleneck sweater and tan trousers with life in his face, expressive eyebrows, an intense frown, an engaging smile. It was shocking to see him in his old man nakedness, but the copy didn’t seem aware of us. He just stood there as if he were drying off.

Thin columns of green light rose from the high heel shoes next to him. The light formed itself into bone and flesh, flabby legs and arms, big breasts that hung down like flat pancakes, wrinkled lips, and colored red hair. A copy of a woman, saggy and baggy, standing there in all her helpless, naked humanity as if she were drying off, too. Like the man, her face was familiar. Somebody who worked at the college, but I couldn’t place her.

Those must have been their shoes. They must have donated them.

Copies of feet and legs were forming all across the floor, the far rows first, then the next, creeping toward us in a slow wave of supernatural devilment.

I held Nikki close to my side. “They’re copying everybody in Adams County who gave shoes to this fucking place.”

“
Karin donated some shoes,” Mike said.

“
What did she give you?” I screamed.

“
I can’t remember.” He stared in horror at the field of shoes.

I grabbed his coat. “You have to! Damn it, what did she give you? What?”

He ran his hand over his hair. “Gold ballet shoes.”