"What can I say? Andy Goodis was a deranged, disgruntled employee. He was also a drunk. I'd been warning people about him since I got this job, but nobody would listen. This is the tragic result."
Matt became aware of someone approaching him. He turned to look and was surprised to see Rachel coming his way.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
"The police ran the plates on my car, wanted to know if it had been stolen," she said. "I told them my husband had it and I demanded to see him. Hope you don't mind the lie about us, but it was the only way they'd let me in to see you."
"It's okay," he said. "I'm glad you're here."
She stood in front of the cop car and gave him a hug. "Are you all right?"
Matt shook his head. "Something is wrong, Rachel. I can feel it. Even worse, I saw Andy become evil."
He'd also smelled it, but he didn't want to mention that.
"Of course you did," she said. "We all did. You just didn't want to see it."
"There's a lot I didn't want to see. But I can't pretend anymore. Something happened to me. And nothing is the same."
"Not all of it is bad," she said.
"There's a reason I'm not dead."
"And she's standing right in front of you," she said. "At least, that's what you told me."
"I'm afraid there's more to it. I think it has something to do with Andy, and the way I saw him rot. And I'm afraid that somehow, I'm the reason it happened."
As if on cue, the coroners emerged from the sawmill, wheeling Andy out in a body bag on a gurney.
Matt looked past her and she followed his gaze.
The coroners pushed the gurney up to the van body and were about to slide it inside when they stopped in midmotion.
And so did everybody else.
Matt looked at Rachel and saw her standing stock-still, her head turned, looking at the gurney without blinking, without breathing.
"Rachel?" He waved his hand in front of her face. "Can you hear me?"
But there was no reaction. She was a statue. Everything was still. Everything was silent. It was as if time had simply…
Stopped.
Even the helicopter was suspended in the air, its blades no longer moving.
Impossible.
But there was a lot of that going around lately.
Even the air itself seemed to solidify.
Matt tried to slide off the hood of the car, but it was like trying to swim through Jell-O.
He caught some motion out of the corner of his eye.
Someone else was moving.
Matt turned and saw a uniformed police officer strolling jauntily towards him across the yard, spinning his nightstick like a bandleader's baton and whistling the Happy Burger song.
It was him.
The doctor from hell.
Only he wasn't a doctor now.
"I can't tell you how entertaining this has been," the cop said with a wicked smile, flashing those oh-so-sharp incisors. "I have learned so much."
"Who are you?" Matt asked. "What are you?"
The cop strolled over to the paramedic unit and regarded Silbert and the officer with amusement.
"You already know me, Matthew. Everybody does, if only a little bit. But you and me, we're going to have a very special relationship. Let me introduce myself. My friends call me Mr. Dark."
He reached out and touched the festering sore on Silbert's cheek. The sore erupted, spraying yellow puss all over his face, rotting away the skin.
It was like watching time-lapse photography of a decomposing corpse. Within seconds, the flesh was gone, dripping off his bloody skull in thick globs, leaving only his bulging eyes and perfect teeth.
Silbert reached out to the officer in front of him, the one frozen in midnotation, and snatched the gun from his holster.
In that instant, time started again, the suspended sound returning with a deafening roar, followed by the blast as Silbert shot the officer point-blank in the stomach.
Silbert grinned and turned towards Rachel.
Matt launched himself off the car and into Rachel, tackling her to the ground as Silbert opened fire, the bullets shattering the windshield.
As Matt and Rachel hit the ground, a dozen officers drew their weapons and fired, bombarding Silbert with a hail of bullets.
Silbert jerked into a grotesque dance of death, like a puppet yanked by every string at once, before collapsing, thoroughly perforated, into the back of the ambulance.
Matt rose up on his knees and hurriedly, but intently, checked out Rachel, looking for any signs of blood. "Were you hit? Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," she said. "What happened?"
But he didn't answer. Now that he knew that she wasn't hurt, his priorities abruptly shifted to something more urgent than her questions.
He had to find Mr. Dark.
He had to stop him.
Matt got to his feet and saw pure chaos, police officers and paramedics and coroners running around everywhere in a mad panic. He pushed through the throng, looking for the man responsible for the mayhem, for the death.
He couldn't see him.
But he could hear him.
Mr. Dark's maniacal laughter rode over the cacophony of panicked cries and frantic shouting like a musical loop on a merry-go-round.
"Why am I alive?" Matt yelled.
Mr. Dark's singsong reply came from somewhere nearby and yet far away.
"That's for me to know and you to find out."
Matt continued to push through the crowd until he reached the fence, but Mr. Dark was nowhere to be seen.
But he was out there.
Matt had no doubt about that.
He could hear the laughter.
Rachel watched helplessly in her living room as Matt finished stuffing the few clothes he had into a hiker's backpack. He was leaving her again, and it was death that was taking him away, only this time it wasn't his own.
It was all those others. The employees at Happy Burger. The sawmill security guard. Andy Goodis, Roger Silbert, that poor cop.
"You said you loved me," she said.
"I do," he said.
"Then stay."
"It's why I have to go," he said. "I don't want anything to happen to you. I'll be back someday, I promise."
"All you have to do first is find somebody nobody saw, a guy who probably only exists in your mind."
"Do you think I'd go, that I would leave you behind, if I wasn't certain that what I saw was real? If I didn't believe that your life could be in danger if I stay?"
"You need help, Matt," she said. "You can see a shrink. Maybe he can give you something that will make the illusions go away."
"What happened to Andy and Silbert weren't illusions," Matt said. "Neither was my resurrection."
She started to cry, even though she thought the hours that she'd already spent doing it had sapped every tear she had left.
"Please don't go," she said. "I'm begging you."
Matt gave her long, warm kiss. As she wrapped her arms around him, her kiss taking on an urgent longing, he gently broke away from her grasp.
"It isn't just Mr. Dark that I'm looking for," he said. "I should be dead. Maybe I am dead. Whatever the explanation is, I won't find it here."
She sniffled and swallowed hard. "Where will you go?"
He shrugged. "All I know is that I have to get there before he does, before the evil spreads and more people die."
Matt hefted the backpack onto his shoulders and picked up his grandfather's ax.
"I'll be back," he said.
And with that, Matthew Cahill walked out the door and down the road, chasing the receding echo of Mr. Dark's twisted laughter wherever it might lead him.