The tires left twin overlapping wakes behind us as we rolled across the shallow pool of the parking lot. There were no visible vehicles or other signs of activity.
Ted said, “Do a slow lap around the exterior. See what we can see.”
“Now,” I said to Ted, “when we go in, I want you to keep one thing fixed in your mind. Whatever Nymph is, I can tell you what he almost certainly isn’t, and that’s a greasy pedophile in a suit with a smoking habit. What you saw in your driveway that day, that was just how this particular thing chose to present itself to you. It may look completely different now. Do you understand?”
“What, like a disguise?”
“Once,” I said, “we had a dainty young woman come in asking us to investigate a haunting in her parents’ house. We walk in, the door slams behind us, and the woman falls apart. All that’s left is a pile of snakes where the girl had been standing, patches of their scales colored like the dress she’d been wearing.”
Ted tried to picture it. “The whole time you talked to her, you didn’t notice she was snakes?”
John said, “They have, uh, techniques, for that.”
I said, “And then John started dating a girl named Nicky who I assumed was made out of snakes but it turned out that’s just the way she is.”
“She has been nothing but nice to you, Dave.”
Ted said, “My voice, on the phone … you think these things took Maggie by pretending to be me? Is that what I’m gonna find in there, somethin’ that looks and sounds just like I do?”
I shrugged. “Past experience has only taught us not to rely on past experience.”
We completed our circuit and rolled to a stop, about thirty feet from the front door. John parked with the Jeep facing away from the building and left the engine running—in this line of work, you always assume that you’re thirty seconds from needing to fly off into the horizon in a mad panic.
“Well,” Ted said as he pulled the slide on his pistol and stuffed it down the back of his pants, “let’s just assume ambush here.” He nodded toward the building. “Only two doors. Those are choke points. I’ve got line and hooks. I say we get up on the roof, rappel down to the windows, come crashing in on the fuckers.”
I said, “I’d break both of my ankles the moment I landed, before breaking my neck a half-second later. This is going to have to be a traditional ‘walk in the front door’ entry. At least for me and John.”
Ted seemed pretty disappointed by that, but didn’t argue. We circled around to the rear of the Jeep to retrieve our weapons. Ted brought out an M4 assault rifle (which I recognized from having used one in a video game recently) and a pump shotgun that he slung over his shoulder as a backup. John pulled out a gun with a six-inch-wide barrel, connected to a compressed-air tank he strapped to his back—one of those cannons they use to fire T-shirts at the crowd at basketball games. I would be carrying a small, faded wooden cross—supposedly carved from the very beams upon which the actual crucifixion was performed on Jim Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ. Taped to it was a pair of small Bose speakers, a battery pack, and an iPod shuffle loaded with 80s power ballads.
I explained our gear to Ted, who gave the weapons a skeptical look.
I said, “Trust me.”
“What’s the range?”
“For the music? Uh, I guess wherever it’s audible.”
“But it’s not fatal to them? It’s more of an area effect deterrent?”
“Yeah, they hate it a lot.”
“How long do targets stay incapacitated?”
“I don’t—”
“And the cross, do they have to see it to be affected, or is it enough to just be in proximity?”
“Uh, the second one I think—”
“All right, so what’s the range?”
John said, “This is not an exact science, Ted.”
Ted didn’t reply, but his body language said it all. I’m on my own here. Again.
We sloshed through the standing water—I had never bought rain boots because I knew that it would immediately stop raining the moment I did—and arrived at the main entrance, an arched brick doorway partially boarded up by what looked like the original planks the crew had hastily nailed into place in 1961. Standing guard beside the door was a concrete snowman—about six feet tall, arms made of rusted rebar, the top half absolutely covered in bird shit. The eyes and mouth were three misshapen, eroded holes in the concrete, as if the thing was wailing in terror and dread. Rainwater puddled and splattered out of its ragged eye holes like flowing tears. The words MR FROSTEE were etched into his chest, like the epitaph on a particularly eccentric tombstone. The old ice factory mascot had seen better days.
A gap had been pried loose in the boarded-up doorway large enough for a person to slide through, but it looked like it had been that way since before I was born—there were still no obvious signs anyone had been here recently. John nodded to me and I hit the iPod, which started playing Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Ted clicked on a flashlight attached to the barrel of his rifle and aimed the light through the gap, sweeping it slowly across the interior. He slid inside, quickly whipping his head back and forth to check for anyone waiting to waylay us inside the door. John went next. I brought up the rear and clicked on my own flashlight.
The interior smelled like wet rust and a recently snuffed candle. A row of huge, charred machines loomed above us like the aftermath of a robot battle. There were tanks and pipes and gears and fifteen-foot-tall iron objects shaped like wagon wheels connected to chutes designed to deliver coffin-sized blocks of ice to ground level. All of it was warped and misshapen, metal parts caught in the process of drooping, dripping, or dissolving entirely according to their various melting points. I shined the light overhead. The brick had in fact liquefied and then cooled into thousands of tiny spikes that made the whole vast space look like a torture chamber. I imagined the curved ceiling snapping shut the moment some hooded inquisitor threw a switch.
We crept steadily forward, the music echoing around the dead space. A light flared up to my left—John lighting a cigarette. He said into the darkness, “All right, we’re here, fartsong. What’s your deal?”
No answer from inside the building, or at least none that could be heard over Mr. Bon Jovi insisting we have to hold on to what we’ve got and that it doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not. We advanced, Ted swinging his gun lamp around in both directions to light up nooks in between scorched machinery in which enemies could be lying in wait. We passed through an open doorway into an emptier room that had probably been a loading area, a truck-sized door at the opposite end the only other exit. How numb would your fingers get, loading ice all day?
John said, “Come out where we can see you, you son of a bitch! I have to be in court at eight. So whatever you’ve got in mind, we need to wrap it up.”
I said, “Yeah, and I have to pick Amy up from work soon, otherwise she has to get a ride home with this dudebro she works with and I think he’s trying to get in her pants. It’s a long story but the point is we don’t have time to dick around.”