When she was at Violet’s house, she imagined herself to be missing all sorts of amazingly important stuff. So far, all she’d gotten out of the day, though, was a few interesting chats with people who all wanted her to know they’re praying for Carol, one very entertaining conversation with Pammy, the racist hairdresser who wanted Ed to know that reggae music was an alien invasion, and—apparently—an extended hallucination from Desmond’s drum.
Desmond wasn’t at the desk any more and the door to the office was open.
How long has he been missing?
Ed saw her confusion.
“He said he had to fetch it from the printer. You didn’t hear that either, huh? Maybe paper mill employees aren’t the only ones losing sleep around here.”
“I said I’m fine.”
Desmond walked back in the room with a Manila folder. “Here we are,” he said, handing it over. “If you know how to read a spreadsheet, it should be pretty obvious what this is saying. I put my business card in there too if you have any questions. Private line, skips right past Missie. You call me any time.”
“Well thank you, Mr. Hollis, that’s incredibly helpful.”
“I have selfish motivations. I want to know what’s going on, and I’d rather I heard about it beforehand instead of during. Hard to game-plan in the middle of it all.”
“You make it sound like something big’s about to take place,” Ed said.
“Isn’t it? Sure feels that way to me. But maybe you know more than I do.”
Ed looked distinctly uncomfortable.
“We don’t know a lot more than this, Desmond,” Annie said. “Just rumors right now. But you knew that too, didn’t you?”
“Seemed like a good bet. You know my number too, Annie. If the apocalypse arrives and I haven’t received a call, I’m going to be very disappointed in both of you.”
WITH THE CAR still parked behind the diner, Annie and Ed had a hike ahead of them, because everything from the mill to Main was uphill. The best way to approach it was to reach the approximate same altitude as the parking lot and then taking the nearest side street running parallel to Main. It was far less scenic, but a good deal more efficient, and the humidity was just not getting any better. The weather reached that point where everyone caught outside was hoping it would just rain and get it over with.
The clouds indicated it was about to do just that.
The streets between the river’s edge and Main were almost entirely residential or were a building belonging to Hollis. There wasn’t much else. The residences were row houses—tall, three family buildings with a small footprint and almost no yard—that from Hollis’s window looked like a series of stairs for a giant. On the street level, the buildings blocked out the sun and made the roads seem narrower.
Annie’s preference was to drive through this area if possible. She hardly ever walked it. She did bike it a couple of times, but the climb back was brutal enough to discourage her from making it a habit.
They mostly climbed in silence. Ed was preoccupied with whatever he had going on in his head, stuff he annoyingly hadn’t bothered to share with her yet. She was still trying to break down whatever it was that happened when she was looking at the drum.
Overactive imagination, she thought. That was what the teachers used to accuse her of, as if a vivid imagination was a bad thing. She would have been okay with the idea that that was all it was, but it felt different.
It felt like a memory. The problem was, it wasn’t her memory.
Who else is in my head?
In any other town, the idea that something appeared in her mind that didn’t also begin there would have been entirely non-literal, but Sorrow Falls had an alien ship that put terrible thoughts in the heads of anyone who came too close to it. Also, if Ed was in any way correct, the entire town was behaving civilly to a statistically impossible degree. If the ship could reach out and make people unusually law-abiding, it could reach Annie’s head and put someone else’s memory in it. That wouldn’t necessarily even make the list of top five screwed up things going on.
Ed stopped.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
“Hear what?”
“I thought I heard a scream.”
“Maybe one of your zombies…” she stopped talking, because then she heard it too.
It was a woman’s scream, it came from directly ahead of them, and Annie thought she recognized the voice.
“That’s from the lot behind the diner,” she said. “And it sounds like Beth.”
They were already running by the time they heard a third scream—the quite clear “HELP ME!” in a voice that was unquestionably Beth’s.
The street they were running down took them to the lower back side of the lot, which was blocked off by a chain link fence that was too tall to get over.
Beth drove a Jeep with gold trim—Annie used to joke that Beth should paint it in pink so it would look just like the one in the Barbie playhouse set. It was memorable enough to identify quickly.
Through the fence, they could see Beth lying on her side next to the Jeep. She wasn’t moving.
A man was briskly walking away from Beth. Annie could only see his back, but he looked familiar.
“Hey, HEY! You leave her alone!” Annie yelled. He was, to that point, already doing so.
“How do we get in?” Ed asked.
Annie grabbed him by the elbow and pulled them back the way they’d come, up a side street, to a spot where there was no fence in their way.
Just then, the skies opened up.
It was not the polite kind of storm, which started with a light drizzle and worked its way up to something serious before pulling back and settling in on a decent rain-to-not-rain ratio. It was the angry kind; dumping all the water it had as fast as it could as if the clouds had someplace to be.
It completely destroyed their visibility. The fleeing man, the Jeep, Beth and all but the nearest parked cars vanished in the downpour.
The Jeep was at the far end of the lot, a courtesy parking job so the customers had the spots closest to the restaurant. Annie raced straight to it, her biggest fear, strangely, being that her friend was about to drown in the middle of the lot. She lost track of Ed.
“Beth, Beth! Hey!” Annie knelt down and lifted Beth from the pavement. She was breathing, and once Annie pulled her off the ground, her eyes fluttered and opened.
“Annie, run! We have to…” then she started crying. “Oh, it’s awful, it’s so awful.”
“What is it? What happened to you?”
There was blood on the pavement. Beth had an open wound on her head, but most of the blood was coming from the keys in her hands.
“It’s his blood,” Beth said. “I stabbed him. Maced him too, but he… Annie, I sprayed mace right in the eyes and he didn’t care.”
“Who was it?”
Ed ran up.
“I can’t find him. I can’t see anything out here. I called Pete, she’s on her way.”
“She needs an ambulance,” Annie said.
“They’re on their way too. Did she say who it was?”
“No, but…”
Beth squeezed Annie’s arm tightly.
“It was Mr. Blake, Annie,” she said. “I think he wanted to kill me.”
“Blake? Okay, I’ll tell Pete,” Ed said.
“Put away the phone,” Annie said.
“But Pete can send someone to pick this guy up.”
“Ed, he lives in Peacock Cemetery. George Blake has been dead for five months.”