Shimmer: A Novel (14 page)

That he questioned his own sanity was the one reason Grainger knew he wasn’t insane. From what he’d read, the truly insane never consider the possibility of their own madness. But maybe that was simply a bit of homespun hokum. Maybe he was stark raving mad after all.

Before succumbing to doubts about his mental stability, Grainger had turned the crime scene over to his shift sergeant, Tony Delarosa, and to senior patrolwoman Lacy Novak with instructions to keep the press and any curious neighbors as far from the grisly slaughter as possible. He’d waited for the county ME to rule out a sword as a murder weapon, then followed the Walkers back to their house in his police cruiser. Actually, Calvin Scarborough had allowed for the possibility of a sword having been involved in the mutilation of Chad Conrad, but one small detail seemed to exonerate Barrett Walker: Chad’s severed arms were missing.
Swallowed by that weird fucking black hole,
Grainger thought with a shudder.

Now Grainger sat in the cluttered downstairs office of the Walker family patriarch and, while introductions were past, Grainger had yet to enumerate his growing list of questions for these strange people. Ambrose Walker had insisted they wait until everyone had a cup of coffee and a chance to gather their thoughts. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before Liana Walker returned from the kitchen with a serving tray, bearing regular coffee for Ambrose and Grainger, decaf for Barrett and herbal tea for herself.

Grainger took a perfunctory sip, then placed the mug on the desk, slapped his thighs in a let’s-get-down-to-business gesture and said, “Okay, now—”

Ambrose held up a hand to interrupt the question.

“What?”

Ambrose looked away from him to address Liana. “The youngsters?”

“Still in the kitchen,” she said. “Logan and Fallon are comforting Chelsea, as much as possible given the circumstances. She’s better but clearly in a state of shock.”

“Other family?”

“Father, remarried, out on the west coast.”

“Will he come for her?”

Liana nodded. “I made the call. He’s dropping everything to catch the first flight. Should be here tomorrow. I told him she could stay with us overnight. She says there’s no way she can ever go back to ‘that house.’ That’s what she called it, ‘that house.’ She can’t leave Hadenford soon enough.”

Grainger leaned forward. “I need to question her about… everything.”

Ambrose placed his elbows on the desk and steepled his fingers. “Chief Grainger, she is not a witness in the traditional sense.”

“What are you talking about?” Grainger said. “She was right there when it happened!”

“When her mother and brother were brutally murdered?”

“Yes!”

“You know this?”

“Of course,” Grainger said. “What’s your point?”

Ambrose spread his arms as if the answer were self-evident. “What more could she possibly tell you?”

“What more…?” Grainger shook his head in disbelief. It was obvious, it was… what? “But she saw…”

“Yes?”

Grainger took a deep breath and blew it out forcefully. “She’s…”

“A survivor,” Barrett said. “One out of three.”

Liana cradled her tea mug between both hands, as if for warmth. After taking a sip, she said, “We’re not keeping score.”

Barrett cast an irritated look her way, but said nothing.

Very hard on himself,
Grainger realized.
He saved Chelsea Conrad, but that’s not good enough for him. He sees only the negatives.

“Unless the young woman crossed,” Ambrose said, “she will have little useful information for us.”

“Us?”

“Our investigation is a bit beyond the scope of traditional law enforcement.”

“Your investigation? So that’s what you people are, investigators?” Grainger directed his gaze at Barrett. “You told me you were in security.”

“I am.” Barrett shrugged. “In a manner of speaking.”

“We’re a… full-service shop,” Ambrose said with a twinkle in his watery-blue eyes. “Detection, prevention, investigation, infiltration and, when necessary, extermination.”

“Uh-huh,” Grainger said, nodding skeptically. “Don’t suppose you’re licensed.”

“We’re a self-regulating body,” Barrett said. “We prefer no outside interference.”

“Sounds like a cult.”

“We keep to ourselves,” Ambrose said. He glanced back and forth between Barrett and Liana with an arched eyebrow. “Usually.”

“I tried to slow him down,” Liana said.

“After he tried to stop me,” Barrett said, anger flaring. “If he hadn’t whipped out his gun, I might have been able to—!”

Grainger sprang out of his chair. “You were kicking down a door, carrying a sword. What was I supposed to do?”

“Get the hell out of my way!”

“I’m the chief of police, damn it!”

“Gentlemen,” Ambrose said. “Please calm yourselves. Chief Grainger is guilty of ignorance, nothing more.”

“But he—!”

“Don’t fault the man for doing what he believed was right.”

“It was right,” Grainger snapped. “I still have half a mind to—!”

“Half sounds about right!” Barrett pushed himself out of his armchair to pace the office like a caged jungle cat.

“Enough!” Ambrose shouted. “This is getting us nowhere.” After a few moments passed in silence, Ambrose continued, “And, frankly, Chief Grainger, we need to decide what to do about you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Let me put it in terms the chief can understand,” Barrett said tightly. He glared at Grainger. “This problem is way out of your jurisdiction.”

“But not out of yours?”

“You got that right.”

Liana heaved a frustrated sigh. “Is this pissing contest soon over?” Grainger and Barrett stared at her. “There’s a young woman two rooms away who watched her mother and brother die horribly. And the two of you are arguing about jurisdiction?”

“Fine,” Grainger said, looking from her to Ambrose and pointedly ignoring Barrett. “You’re the experts. Tell me what you know about this… about what happened.”

“Too much and too little,” Ambrose said with a slight sigh of his own. “Our line has been… dealing with these rifts for thousands of years.”

“Rifts?” Grainger said, sitting up straighter. “You said something about Chelsea crossing? Crossing this rift?”

“It is possible to enter the rifts,” Ambrose allowed.

With a pointed glare at Liana, Barrett said, “That’s what I was trying to do when Logan tackled me.”

Liana rolled her eyes in exasperation but directed her response to Ambrose. “The rift was too small to cross. He’d have lost a foot or a hand, possibly his head, not that he’d miss that.”

Grainger snorted. “Lost how?”

“Like the Conrad boy’s arms,” Liana said. “Rifts are volatile.”

“What exactly is a rift? It looked dark, like some kind of intelligent shadow.”

“Dark, yes,” Ambrose said. “But not always. Some might appear as heat waves above the asphalt. A ripple in the air, a shimmer across our reality. This one, so far, manifests as darkness. Not intelligent, but directed, perhaps, by the force responsible for the breach.”

“Somebody created it?”

“Not someone,” Liana said. “Some
thing.”

“An Outsider,” Barrett said grimly.

“You keep saying that. What’s an Outsider?”

Ambrose frowned. “Something from outside our world, beyond our reality.”

“Imaginary?”

“No,” Ambrose said. “Quite real, but not reality as we know it. Another dimension or a layer, if you will, of the multiverse.”

“Multiverse?”

“There are a multitude of universes,” Ambrose said. “All of them, each and every possible universe is part of the multiverse. A collection—
the collection
—of universes.”

“Like… parallel dimensions? Alternate history. Universes where the Germans won the Second World War or where dinosaurs never became extinct and humans still live in trees.”

“Along those lines,” Ambrose said. “But rarely anything so… tidy or recognizable. Some of these universes are strange and wonderful while others are antithetical and violent.”

Grainger began to chuckle.

“Something amusing?” Barrett asked.

“Don’t suppose you have any proof?”

Ambrose frowned. “I was under the assumption you had, earlier this evening, already witnessed the proof of all this.”

“I saw something,” Grainger admitted. “No clue what it was, other than pitch black. But I didn’t see Oz or Neverland or Narnia in there. Just darkness and some sort of clawed tentacle.”

“Pick up any book on mythology or folklore,” Ambrose said, “and you’ll have your proof. Sketches and descriptions of creatures—Outsiders—who managed to cross over.”

Grainger laughed. “Are you talking about unicorns and fairies and dragons?”

Ambrose sighed again. “Failures, all of them.”

“Whose failures?”

“Ours,” Ambrose said. “Walker failures. We were late getting to the rift, late sealing it, late in rounding up the Outsiders. Rifts were much more common hundred of years ago and we couldn’t be everywhere at once.”

Grainger stopped laughing. “You’re telling me all those things are—were—real?”

The twinkle was back in Ambrose’s eyes. “Once upon a time,” he said. “Yes.”

“Then where are they now?”

“Dead or returned to their rightful place in the multiverse.”

“What about the bones, the… fossil record?”

“When the Outsiders die in our world,” Liana said, “barring special circumstances, their remains fade away.”

“How convenient,” Grainger said skeptically.

“Yes,” Ambrose said. “Quite convenient, actually.”

“Remember the claw I hacked off?” Barrett said.

Grainger paused and nodded slowly. The severed claw had fallen to the blood-soaked carpet and, a moment later, faded away. “Some kind of illusion. Gotta be.”

“What about the dismembered corpses the Outsider left behind?” Ambrose said. “More illusion?”

Grainger blew out his breath, defeated, and slumped in his chair. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Then perhaps you should listen,” Ambrose advised gently. After a long sip of coffee, he clasped his hands together on his desk. “For thousands of years we—that is, various branches of the Walker family throughout the world—have been responsible for finding and sealing rifts in our, as some would call it, space-time continuum. Please don’t ask me why we do this because I don’t have a definitive answer for you. If there is a real answer to that question, it is as old as recorded time and maybe older. Perhaps a Walker was the first human to witness a rift, or at least the first human witness to do something about it. Over the course of millennia and thousands of rifts, we have become the de facto experts.

“Sometimes—quite often, actually—creatures from these other planes, beings we refer to collectively as Outsiders, have crossed over to our world. Some are harmless, or appear so, while some are violent or otherwise dangerous. And yet all of them represent instability in the multiverse, or rather an extension of the instability inherent in the nature of the rifts themselves. You might think of rifts as lesions on the plane of our existence and the Outsiders as invading, infectious bodies.”

“And the Walkers take it upon themselves to kill these infections and heal the wound?” Grainger asked.

“Kill if we must,” Ambrose said. “Return if we are able. As I said, not all Outsiders are violent. Some might even appear pleasant or wholesome. These we try to return peaceably to their continuum.”

“Like the leprechauns,” Barrett said with a wry grin. “Tried to bribe us with pots of gold before we drove them out of the Emerald Isle.”

“Leprechauns? You drove them out—?”

“Well, not personally,” Barrett amended. “That was before our time.” He glanced at Ambrose and muttered, “Mostly.”

Ambrose frowned and cleared his throat. “You must understand that gold is much more abundant in the leprechaun’s true realm. Planned to use it to wheedle their way into our society—and nearly succeeded.” Ambrose chuckled. “The bribe was kind of humorous, actually. Like a beachcomber offering to pay with barrels of sand.”

“You have barrels of sand—gold, I mean?”

“We’ve had generous patrons in times past,” Ambrose said. “Wealthy families, emperors, governments, religious institutions. All have recognized the importance of our mission. Recent times have been the most difficult… but I stray from my point. It was the leprechauns themselves with the ‘beaches’ of gold. Not that we would keep their gold in our dimension, despite it’s similarity to our gold. Ultimately, we believe any being or object from another dimension could prove dangerous to ours.”

“Better safe than sorry?”

“Exactly,” Ambrose said, wagging his finger in agreement. “I might add that sometimes the rifts themselves appear benign, with no apparent deleterious effects on our plane. Nevertheless, we treat them all as eventually harmful.”

“Like radioactive substances,” Grainger suggested. “The longer the half-life, the less dangerous.”

“Possibly,” Ambrose said. “While we can’t confirm that all rifts are eventually dangerous, we operate under that assumption.”

“Same principle,” Liana said. “Why risk inaction?”

“What if these rifts are part of the grand design?” Grainger said, playing devil’s—or nature’s—advocate.

“Like the proliferation of weeds?” Ambrose asked. “Rust? Rot and decay?”

“Rot and decay serve a purpose,” Grainger said. “Compost heaps. Renewal and rebirth.”

Ambrose acknowledged his point with an impatient nod and said, “Forgive us if we choose not to gamble the fate of human existence on the benevolence of transdimensional entropy.”

“Well, when you put it like that…”

From where she stood leaning against the doorjamb, Liana flashed a wry smile. “Unchecked, the grand design might exclude us,” she said. “We choose to ‘rage against the dying of the light.’”

“Dylan Thomas,” Grainger said. “Not a Walker, was he?”

“In spirit, I think,” she said.

“Liana’s right,” Ambrose said. “The multiverse might consider us selfish, but it’s as simple and as powerful as self-preservation. Species survival.”

“That may explain why you do what you do,” Grainger said, “but not how.”