“Amazing,” Gwendy says. “How do you get him back in his cage?”
“I put him in myself,” Adesh says. “I don a glove to do it. I have no urge to be stung, even if it’s no worse than the sting of a bee. Boris is trainable, as you see, but he is far from tame. No no no.”
“And maar? What does that mean?”
Adesh goes to the door of the big containment facility, then turns back and gives her a gentle smile in which one gold tooth twinkles. “Kill,” he says.
32
WHEN GWENDY GETS BACK to her quarters, the light on her laptop is flashing. Five fresh emails have come in, but the only one she cares about is Charlotte Morgan’s. She pushes aside her paperwork and opens it.
Gwen: I didn’t think this story could get any stranger, but boy was I wrong. You were on the money about Detective Mitchell knowing more than he was telling. Take a look at the attached video and get back to me with further instructions. It’s pretty lengthy—once we got the guy talking, he wouldn’t shut up—but most of what you’re looking for can be found starting at around the seven-minute mark.
I’ve also attached a second, much shorter video that came from the iPhone of an eyewitness to Ryan’s accident (which as you surmised wasn’t an accident at all). The phone belongs (or belonged) to a man named Vernon Beeson, from Providence, Rhode Island. He was on his way to Presque Isle to see his sister. He never arrived. We can’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was now floating around in the Derry sewer system. Mitchell claims a patrolman found the phone in a trashcan outside Bassey Park. Mitchell also claims not to know what happened to Mr. Beeson. All we could get out of him on that subject was “Maybe the clown took him.” Weird, huh?
Very weird, Gwendy thinks, and resists the sudden urge to pull the little chocolate-dispensing lever on the side of the button box. She goes back to Charlotte’s communique instead.
It’s hard to watch, Gwen, even harder to believe, and I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you decided to hit the DELETE button without ever opening it. I might even suggest you do exactly that, but I know it’s not my place. We found Mr. Beeson’s phone locked away in the gun safe in Mitchell’s basement, right where he told us it would be.
Last thing I’m going to say and then I’ll let you get to it. I’ve said it before: please be careful, old friend. I know you must feel as though you’re all alone up there, but I promise you’re not. Sending love and luck your way. Godspeed.
C
The video attachments located at the bottom of the email are labeled MITCHELL and DERRY. Gwendy knows she should open the Ward Mitchell interrogation first—after all, the fate of the world may rest on its contents—but she can’t help herself. Taking slow and steady breaths, like she’s learned from years of yoga classes, she slides the cursor over to the DERRY file and clicks on it. A window opens in her laptop’s upper right-hand corner. She hits the ENLARGE icon and a surprisingly clear wide-angle view of the intersection of Witcham and Carter Streets fills the screen.
On the right side of the video she can see a couple of run-down houses, window shutters hanging crooked or absent altogether, paint peeling in long, curling strips, brown lawns overgrown even in the middle of December. An old bicycle with a missing rear tire leans against one of the porch railings.
Across the street, kitty-corner from the house with the bike, is an abandoned Phillips 66 gas station, the pumps out front long ago removed. Weeds grow in wild spurts between the cracks of broken pavement. Someone has spray-painted DERRY SUCKS across the faded brick façade. Just beyond the boarded-up office, Gwendy can make out the gated entrance to Bassey Park.
Whoever is filming—Beeson, presumably—has the sound turned on and she can hear the loud undulating whistle of a cold late-season wind blowing across the rooftops. A discarded piece of trash tumbles across the sidewalk—Gwendy’s almost certain it’s a McDonald’s hamburger wrapper—and disappears down the deserted street. It’s half past noon on the day after Thanksgiving, but there’s not a single living soul or automobile in sight.
And then there is.
An old Volkswagen Bug, traveling north on Witcham, putters through the intersection. The driver, an older man with a wild tuft of scraggly white hair and round John Lennon eyeglasses, is looking around like he’s lost. And maybe he is; he’s certainly driving slowly enough. Right behind him, riding the VW’s rear bumper, is a black truck with jacked-up snow tires and a full-sized American flag flapping from a metal pole jutting out of the rear of its double-wide bed. She can hear the throaty boom of the truck stereo’s bass even with the dark-tinted windows closed up tight.
Gwendy has just enough time to take it all in and wonder why in the world is the person filming this? when Ryan appears onscreen. It suddenly feels as if all of the air has been sucked from the room. She bites her lower lip and leans closer to the laptop.
He enters from the bottom right corner of the screen, sauntering along the sidewalk with that long confident stride she remembers so well. He’s wearing his favorite winter coat—a long-ago Christmas gift from Gwendy’s parents—and a red-and-white New England Patriots ski cap. Every once in awhile, he sneaks a glance at the row of nearby houses, but it’s clear that the main focus of his attention is the cell phone he’s carrying in his right hand. He’s studying the display like he’s following directions.
Reaching the corner of Witcham and Carter, he stops with the tips of his LL Beans dangling over the curb. He looks both ways, like an obedient little boy who’s promised his mother to always be careful crossing the street, and then down at his phone again.
And then he starts across.
The Cadillac—a garish shade of purple, obscenely wide and long with a pair of dime-store fuzzy dice dangling from the rearview mirror—slams into him before he reaches the street’s centerline. Gwendy hears the meaty thunk of impact, and then her husband is flying through the air. He hits the pavement and actually bounces, not once but twice, before rolling to an abrupt facedown stop at the opposite side of the intersection. A ragged trail of dark blotches tracks his progress across the roadway.
The Caddy keeps on going without even a flash of its brake lights. It’s not until the next day, while showering, that Gwendy realizes she never once heard the sound of the Cadillac’s engine. She could hear the sewing machine putt-putt-putt of the VW Bug, the angry growl of the black pick-up’s V-8, the bass thud of heavy metal from the truck’s sound system, but when it came to the purple Caddy … nothing. Almost as if it had no motor.
What remained of Ryan’s shattered body lay halfway on the shoulder of Carter Street, his broken legs splayed at grotesque angles atop a narrow strip of dirt and grass separating the curb from the sidewalk. His ski cap, along with one of the boots and wool socks he was wearing had been torn away by the force of the crash. The boot and sock are nowhere to be found, but Gwendy can see the pale pink skin of Ryan’s left foot resting mere inches away from a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign poking out of the frozen ground. The back of Ryan’s head—as caved-in and lopsided as a pumpkin left rotting in a field—no longer resembled that of a human being.
Gwendy jerks away from the screen, a loud sob lodging in her throat. For one panic-stricken moment, she fears she might actually choke to death on her grief. She sits back and once again focuses on her breathing. The suffocating sensation gradually loosens its grip. Eyes filled with tears, she turns back to her laptop. And gasps.