Ordinarily, at this time of day, Babbitt House was empty and quiet save for one or two residents who might be home studying and perhaps listening to music. Now, however, it seemed that everyone was home, and though she couldn't see them behind the closed doors or through the walls, she could sense them there, listening, watching, waiting.
And there was ...
Something else.
A noise.
It had started off as a low hum, barely audible as they walked through the front door. Within seconds, however, mumbling was coming not only from Winston and Brock's apartment but from all of the apartments, like surround sound. It was the same unintelligible chattering she'd heard before-the ghost-and it seemed to freak out even Derek.
"What the hell is that." he .asked, his voice shaky.
"It's a ghost," Angela admitted. "This place is haunted."
"Is that from the mold, too?"
"No. It's in addition to the mold."
"Jesus Christ," Derek breathed.
The babbling took on a more frantic tone.
"Let's hurry up," Angela said, "and get out of here."
The two of them dashed up the stairs. She half expected blood or dark water to start oozing from the walls, the whole building to begin tumbling down, but they made it to the top without incident.
At the far end of the hallway stood Drew and Lisa, both of them dressed only in underwear, standing stock-still, like statues. That alien voice was still babbling, the sound issuing from all around them as though speakers were hidden in every wall, and what might have been a comic tableau under other circumstances was transformed into a disturbing scene of unfathomable horror.
They had to do this quickly.
Angela strode to the closed door of her apartment, trying the knob. It was locked. She knocked loudly. "Chrissie?" She was hoping against hope that her roommate was not in, and the lack of an answer briefly let her think that she'd be able to remove her belongings unimpeded. But the moment she put her key in the lock, turned it and tried to open the door, she met resistance. Her fleeting sense of relief dissipated. She pushed harder, trying to force open the door, but Chrissie was leaning on it from the other side. "Bitch!" Chrissie screamed. "Brown fucking beaner bitch!"
Derek touched her arm. "Come on," he said. "Let's go. Let's get out of here. Let the police handle it."
"No!" Angela insisted, more angry now than scared. "Those are my things, and I'm taking them with me."
"Bitch!" Chrissie screamed.
"Fuck you!" Angela yelled back. She retreated a step, then shoved her shoulder against the door like she'd seen cops do in movies. Derek's hand closed over hers on the knob, and then the two of them were pressing their combined weight against the door. Gradually, it gave way before them, Chrissie's strength no match for theirs.
The door flew open.
Angela sucked in her breath. Next to her, Derek did the same. Mold had grown throughout the apartment, creeping over everything. The couch was completely black, as were the television and kitchen counter. Inky tendrils climbed up the walls like tree branches, exploding into a galaxy of jet stars on the ceiling. The floor was covered with a dark carpet of fungus.
And the smell ...
The two of them moved no farther than the doorway. Chrissie was naked and screaming at them, her skin milky and untouched by the terrible infestation, her eyes wild with rage, but it was not she that prevented them from going inside. It was the overwhelming transformation of the apartment itself. Angela barely recognized the place. It looked like a bat cave. And she knew with certainty that her bedroom had to be even worse. That was where the mold had started, and there was no way it had escaped unscathed. No doubt all of her belongings had succumbed to this creeping corpse-spawned blight.
She and Derek backed out and closed the door just as Chrissie rushed them, arms extended, hands clawed, shrieking. "You ugly brown-" There was a hard thump as she hit the door.
"Let's get out of here," Derek said.
Angela nodded. Down the hall, Drew and Lisa were still frozen like statues.
Although they were closer now.
She and Derek hurried down the stairs. Winston and Brock were in the entryway, standing before the now-open door of their apartment, from whence that crazy jabbering was issuing at earsplitting levels. The last time she'd been allowed a glimpse into their living quarters, she'd thought she'd seen a black spot on the couch. Now the black was everywhere, not as comprehensive or concentrated as it was upstairs ... but still bad.
She was afraid they might have problems with her two former friends, thought she and Derek might have to fight their way out of the house, but she'd obviously seen too many movies because no such confrontation occurred. Winston and Brock glared at them and called her names like "beaner" and "brown bitch" that echoed Chrissie's words exactly, but she and Derek made it outside without further incident and ran over the lawn toward the street and the safety of the car.
"Holy shit!" Derek exclaimed after they'd gotten in and locked the doors behind them. "That was intense!"
Angela was too tired to do anything but nod. She felt drained and at the same time keyed up. Her knotted stomach was cramping, and she hoped she wouldn't vomit. Hazarding a glance back at Babbitt House, she saw identical black shapes in every one of the windows facing the street. It had to be mold ... but the shapes looked like shadows or silhouettes of people, and out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw one of them move. She quickly turned away. "Come on," she said. "Drive. Fast."
Derek started the car, pulled away from the curb, heading up the street toward the hulking mountains that towered over the city. "Where?" he asked.
"It all started in that tunnel," she said, "with that ... zombie. Let's go to the police station, find the policeman, see what he knows. He was there. He saw what really happened."
"What's his name?"
"I don't know, but it should be easy to find out."
Her cell phone rang, and Angela took it out of her purse, surprised. She peered at the small screen, but the number was blocked so she couldn't see who it was. She pressed the button to answer. "Hello?"
It was Edna Wong.
She wanted to talk.
* * *
They met in a little downtown health food restaurant called Mountain Oasis. There was no privacy, but these were the off-hours and the only other patron was a gray-bearded Karl Marx look-alike who was eating soup while he read an impressively thick book through depressingly thick eyeglasses.
Angela and Derek were already in the neighborhood and arrived ten minutes before Edna, who had to fight the traffic from NAU. The old woman walked through the doorway just as their decaf iced teas were being refilled, and Angela waved her over. She and Derek had been sitting at the table in virtual silence, trying to decompress, to absorb what had happened, unable to talk yet about what they'd seen.
They were seated opposite each other, and Edna took a chair from an adjoining table and sat down facing both of them. "You want to know about the tunnel," she said without preamble.
"Yes," Angela told her. Derek nodded.
"Okay, then." The housing administrator took a deep breath. "I only know rumors. Maybe they're true, maybe not. Maybe they're just stories. But I'll tell you what I heard.
"When I was a little girl, Flagstaff was an almost completely white city. Oh, you'd see Indians in town from time to time, but it wasn't like today. The state's Hispanic population all seemed to live down by Tucson and never ventured above Phoenix, and I'd never even seen anyone who was African-American. As far as I knew, there were only three Asian families in town, including mine.
"The thing was, it had not always been this way. At one time, in the early 1900s, after the railroad came in, after they'd built the station, there were quite a few Chinese families living here, doing the work no one else wanted to do." She smiled ruefully. "Coolie labor. But there was as much anti-immigrant sentiment then as there is today, more probably, and a lot of locals were resentful, claiming that the Chinese were taking jobs away from white Arizonans."