4

4

AFTER GRABBING A late bite to eat with Palm Clemency and his daughter, Cimmeria, Katelyn returned to the New Look. She walked to her door with the folder of news cuttings under her arm, pausing to buy a soda from the vending machines.

An old man was standing in the shadows of the motel office’s doorway, drinking coffee out of an almond-colored MOLINE, ILL. stoneware mug. He nodded at her.

“Looks like I’ll be needing the room awhile longer, Mr. Pye,” Katie informed him.

“No misters, young lady—just Pye,” said the old man, sipping his coffee. He winked. “Happy to have you. You’re the only paying guest in the whole place.” He lifted the cup toward her, his face all creased and wrinkly. “See you in the funnies.”

Inside her locked room for the evening, Katie put her cell phone on its charger and opened her can of orange soda. She began going through the photocopies from the manila folder, sitting among their array on the bed, perusing articles that told where the bodies had been found, and seemingly insignificant details of the crimes. She noted the last name of each child gone missing: Quigg. Billups. Granberg. Pomeroy. Ward. Now all dead, she knew. Dispatched by someone referred to as “Mr. Vespers”. And all born either right before or just after her father and she had visited the Val a decade and a half ago, in their bereft, grief-stricken state.

Katie tilted her head back and drank some soda, her pearly gaze catching on the window blinds of her room as she did, the watchful night trying to creep in between them from the other side.

He’s out there, she thought abruptly, and shivered.

Turning from the window she again studied the black-and-white clippings, and felt a twinge of unease. Wrong, everything about this. The malice, and brutality, the sheer lack of evidence. Simply wrong.

A sudden, heavy feeling of loneliness hit her, the grim realization of just how truly alone she was in this strange place. Being deprived of her freedom for so many months, and now here, in this near-empty motel. All by herself. But . . . there was always the Glass, wasn’t there? And its occupants. If she needed companionship. She fidgeted, trying to shake the melancholy off, her pale eyes darkening in hue. Narrowing.

Katie got up from the bed and retrieved her phone, dialed Palm Clemency’s home number. It rang three, four, five times. She was about to cut the connection when, finally, he answered.

“Hello?”

“Chief? It’s Kate Franklin. I’m not calling too late, am I?”

“No, not at all. What’s up?”

“Well, I was wondering . . . ” she faltered, hunching forward, not sure how to proceed. Her glance fell upon the window again, and the blackness beyond. “In your office today, you said ‘Something’s out there, stealing our young people.’ Do you believe that? You feel it’s a thing? Not a person?”

There was a long pause on the other end.

“I don’t know what I meant, Katelyn,” he said. “These crimes have me tied in knots, mentally and physically. I feel more tired now and older than I’ve ever felt in my life. But no, I can’t accept that it’s not a person. Can’t accept an answer like that—even if we are all cursed here.”

“You need it to be natural,” Katie guessed, “not supernatural.”

“I suppose so, yes. Although . . . I did read something once.”

Katie straightened. “What was that?”

“It was in a book of Native American folklore, I think. It said that when someone’s eyes were put out on purpose, it was sometimes done so they would wander blindly in death, their spirit lost forever, and the victim could never find their way back again from the afterlife.”

She smiled. “It doesn’t really work that way.”

“Ah. Right.” Katie heard Clemency stifle a yawn on his end.

“Sorry for the late-night call,” she said. “I better let you go.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll sleep in due course. Anyway, it’s good to have a fresh mind on this,” the chief reminded her. After another silence: “Any idea where you’ll start?”

“I was thinking of trying the high school maybe. See what I might find out from classmates, or teachers, something like that. Maybe not.”

“Um-hmm. Well, I believe tomorrow is the school outing over to the Grasslands, if I’m not mistaken. Field trip they take once a month.”

“Grasslands?”

“Yes. Blessing Acres, it used to be called. Now it’s Blessing Grasslands. Bison sanctuary.”

Katie smiled again. “I remember Blessing Acres.”

“Know where it is?”

“I’ll find it.”

“Wear boots. And remember . . . discreet. Stay safe.”

“Goodnight, Chief.”

“Goodnight, Katelyn.”

***

Eventually, Katie nodded off in an armchair by the window, photocopies of the victims’ images in her lap. As she dozed, her head leaning propped on one hand, something stirred and began waking up in the darkness outside the motel.

Except, of course, they were always awake.

Indistinct shapes drew near, gathering to watch her through the blinds of her lighted room. Solidifying just enough, these strange, silent figures touched fingertips to the glass window, pressed torn faces against it.

Recognized their own former likenesses in the pictures on her lap.

They observed at the glass as she dreamt in her armchair, their eye sockets sunken, a multitude of shiny black-bead spider eyes peering out from within the hollow craters.

Katie must’ve felt them watching her. She mumbled in her sleep, her breathing erratic, her other hand going to the small keepsake vial she wore on a cord around her neck. She felt the drop in temperature and a chill at her leg when one of them reached out, her flesh tingling from its close proximity. The coldness quickly faded as the touch withdrew, but she would be left with that same tingling sensation in her chest and arms the next morning. In unsettled dreams she saw smeary, wasted features as a procession of dead presences looked upon her and then moved on, dissipating in the moonlight.

Before long, another night-thing tentatively approached the motel window, almost like a young girl lost and confused might do, left alone, scared of the dark—

A girl with slick tangled hair, and no eyes or skin.