There’s a car stopped in the road beside Ryan’s lifeless body. It’s not quite as wide as the Cadillac, but it’s sleeker, built lower to the ground, and painted such a dazzling shade of cartoon green that it almost hurts to look at. It doesn’t look real, Gwendy thinks with morbid fascination. It looks like a child’s toy come to life.
She immediately recognizes the car as the same vehicle in which she’d seen Gareth Winston sitting beside the blond man when she touched Winston’s hand outside of the lavatory on Eagle Heavy. He was there, she thinks, squeezing her fists together so hard the color fades from her fingertips. Maybe not in Derry, and maybe not on the day they killed my husband, but the son-of-a-bitch was inside that car. And was he making some kind of a deal? Of course he was, because that’s what guys like Gareth do: they make deals.
“He’s one of them,” she says aloud to the empty sitting room.
As Gwendy watches, the doors of the car (an old green Chrysler, big as a boat, she suddenly remembers from her old friend Norris Ridgewick’s email) swing open and four men step out onto Carter Street.
“What the—” She never finishes the sentence.
The men are unnaturally tall and thin. And dressed identically—wearing long yellow dusters and bandanas over the lower halves of their faces—like a gang of Old West outlaws. They amble to the front of the car and stand shoulder to shoulder, surrounding the body. Looking down, one of the men places a dark-gloved hand on his chest and bends over, howling with a high, barking laughter that Gwendy is somehow able to hear over the whine of the wind. It’s an ugly animal sound, and she quickly lowers the volume on her laptop. The others soon join in, gesturing at the fallen body, hooting and guffawing. One of the men suddenly spins in a tight circle and begins hopping from one foot to the other, performing some kind of lunatic jig, slapping at his thighs with furious delight.
Gwendy abruptly stops the video—and hits REWIND. She doesn’t go back very far, maybe ten or twelve seconds. She isn’t sure if her eyes are playing tricks on her or if what she thinks she just saw is real.
She hits PLAY and watches as the man launches into his bizarre dance, and then it happens again. The man begins to fade in and out—not in and out of focus, but in and out of existence. One second, he’s whole and solid, the next he’s blurry and only partially there.
And then it’s all four of the men.
While everything else in the video remains crystal clear—if Gwendy leans close enough to the screen, she can almost make out the phone number printed at the bottom of the FOR SALE BY OWNER sign—the four men in the yellow dusters have suddenly begun to shimmer. Looking at them now is a little like staring at a heat mirage rising off the highway in the middle of a summer heat wave. This isn’t what they look like, Gwendy thinks with calm assurance. This isn’t what they look like at all. It’s as if they’re wearing costumes and masks to make them appear human, but the disguises are only temporary, and I’m sitting here watching as they fade in and out of reality. Even the goddamn car is wearing one. It’s lost its edges. Its shape no longer looks quite solid.
And apparently she’s not the only one who notices. For the first time since he started recording, Vernon Beeson, from Providence, Rhode Island zooms in for a closer look. The houses and gas station and Bassey Park all fall away. As the front end of the Chrysler, with its acre of shiny green hood, rushes forward and fills the screen, Gwendy suddenly wishes she were wearing her flight helmet so she could lower the visor. Looking at the four men and their funny green car doesn’t just make her eyes want to water, it makes her brain want to water. The camera slowly pans away from the Chrysler and once again finds the men at the side of the road. Even up close, they continue to blur in and out, as if they’re being seen from behind a dirty pane of rain-streaked glass. One of the men is standing directly in front of Ryan’s body sparing Gwendy an up-close and personal look at the gruesome details. She swears if he moves one step to the left or right, she’s going to scream, or throw her laptop across the room, or both. There’s a sudden burst of ear-piercing static and then the screen goes dark. And remains that way for what feels like a long time. Just when she’s convinced the video is over, it sparks back to life again.
In the interim, cameraman Vernon Beeson has given up on the close-up, and is pulling back to the original wide-angle view. As the row of houses reappears on the right side of the screen, the abandoned gas station and Bassey Park creep back into view on the left. The four masked men standing across the intersection gradually regain their focus, albeit from a distance. The static is gone.
Gwendy glances at the time code in the upper corner of the video screen and is astonished to discover that she’s only been watching for three minutes and forty-seven seconds. It feels so much longer than that.
The men in the yellow dusters and bandanas have grown quiet. They shuffle closer to each other, standing with their heads pressed together—palavering, Gwendy thinks—and then they break up their impromptu huddle. Three of the men return to the car. Even with the volume turned down, the slamming of the car doors is very loud inside the small sitting room. The fourth man waits on the side of the road until the Chrysler speeds away—with not so much as a whisper of its engine—and then he jaywalks across Carter Street and disappears into the cold afternoon shadows of Bassey Park.
Ryan’s body remains silent and still on the shoulder of the road.
Nobody else comes, because in Derry, nobody ever does when things like this happen.
A few seconds later, the video ends.
33
GWENDY’S ANGER IS BACK. Her face feels as hot as a furnace and her jaw aches from grinding her teeth. She wipes away tears with a Kleenex, uses it to noisily blow her nose, and then stuffs it in the zero-g wastecan. While her shell-shocked mind is unable to fully comprehend what she’s just witnessed, she knows enough to call it what it is: cold-blooded murder. Someone—the blond stranger from her vision, the strange men in their yellow coats, or maybe even Gareth Winston—lured her husband to Derry and ran him down in the middle of the street like a stray dog. Were they all working for Sombra? Gwendy guesses they were. Are.
Even from across the room and inside the closet, she can hear the steady hum of the button box calling to her. Just because you hear it, she reminds herself, doesn’t mean you have to listen to it. She already knows what it’s saying anyway. Ever since they landed on Many Flags the button box is like a broken fucking record. Just one more piece of chocolate, Gwendy girl, that’s all. Just one more delicious bite-sized animal and you’ll think clearer and you’ll sleep better and you’ll never forget another goddamn thing. Or, better yet, why not press the red button and make all your troubles disappear? Starting with your billionaire friend. You know you want to …
“You’re damn right I want to,” she snaps, yanking another Kleenex from the box. “And if he’d actually been there in the video, I don’t think I could hold back.”
Gwendy shoves the voice into the corner of her broken brain—it’s getting more and more difficult to do this as her journey nears its end—and clicks on the MITCHELL file. There are a series of loud beeps and then the video begins.