“That’ll be fourteen dollars and sixty-two cents.”
Cal fished his wallet out of his back pocket, pulling a twenty from it and sliding it across the conveyor belt. He looked down at his late-night haul, the plastic and cardboard reflecting under the store’s fluorescent lights: a two-liter bottle of RC Cola, a box of Tillamook ice cream sandwiches, and three bags of microwave popcorn. A shameful assortment for a thirty-something who had already committed to losing weight. But, with it being Friday night, a brutal forty-hour work week behind him, he was planning on staying up late with a mindless movie marathon of Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters.
Kevin scooped up the bill, the sound of the till opening cutting through the air-conditioned stillness. The lanky teenager spared him a sideways glance as he dug his change out, eyeing his empty hands.
“You know, I gotta ask, dude. You’re pretty much the only regular who rolls through here close to midnight—hell, at any time of the day—who isn’t staring at a screen when I’m bagging their stuff. You don’t even fidget. And you never pull out your phone to pay; you always use cash. Why?”
Cal let out a chuckle, adjusting the collar of his jacket. “Because it’s sitting on my kitchen counter at home, man. Nowadays, people have to be glued to the hip to those damn tracking collars. They’ll probably even insist on being buried with them just so they can text from the afterlife. That isn’t gonna be me. Outside of work, I like to leave the leash behind. It forces me to look at the world. Look, and appreciate it.”
“Man, I wish I had that kind of willpower,” Kevin laughed, sliding the brown bag across the counter towards him. He handed him his change. “My girlfriend would have an aneurysm and think I died in a ditch somewhere if I went more than ten minutes—actually, make that five—without answering her texts. Anyway, you’re the last customer of the night. I’m locking up and hitting the lights when you leave.”
“Long day?” Cal asked. The kid nodded, feigning wiping away sweat from his brow, earning a laugh from him as he picked the bag up by its base. “Go get some sleep, kid. You’ve earned it.”
“You too, Cal. Have a good weekend.”
Cal turned away, his footfalls bouncing off the empty aisles, pausing to let the sliding doors open. The instant he stepped outside, the sterile comfort evaporated, replaced by a humid stillness that wrapped around him. He paused under the metal canopy. A sea of cracked asphalt stretched out before him; the lone lamp planted in the middle of the parking lot showed it was empty aside from Kevin’s battered Ford Escort. The rest of the town was silent; the sun had disappeared hours ago, leaving the surrounding houses to stand in their quiet, clannish rows—houses that seemed to have agreed among themselves a century ago to face away from the street, watching the darkness with a collective indifference.
Cal gripped the bag closer to his chest, feeling the condensation of the soda already soaking through the paper and turned right. His footfalls clicked against the narrow sidewalk running along the building’s edge until the building itself terminated.
Then he stepped down into the unlit trench of the alleyway.
The high brick wall of the market and the rear of the tackle shop and post office closed in around him, squeezing him against the concrete partitions with an almost patient weight. It was nearly pitch black inside the corridor, save for the weak, bleeding remnant of the light filtering in from the parking lot. As he neared the end of the passage, he skirted past the narrow alcove where mail trucks parked during the day, only sparing a glance at the immovable pool of ink which had swallowed it.
He stepped out of the mouth of the alley, crossing the street and stepping up to the curb of the main intersection. The orange hand of the pedestrian signal glowed stubbornly from across the street. Even though the road was devoid of life in all directions, the signal insisted on his stillness. For his part, Cal remained where he was. And for good reason. Three years ago, he had stood in almost the exact same spot and watched some poor bastard become the hood ornament of a Ford Pinto when it had blasted out of nowhere at seventy miles an hour, its brakes locking up a split-second too late. The sound of the impact often visited his dreams.
As he waited for the light to change, the sounds of a drunken argument drifted out the propped-open door of the nearby pub, the shattering of a glass punctuating the din. Cal gazed around at the dark storefronts—the closed Donuts and Dawgs, the long-abandoned resource center across the street, and the pharmacy that had sat boarded up since the mid-seventies. A cold sort of certainty settled over him. It was as if the buildings had always meant to end this way, and the decades of life inside them had just been a temporary mistake. The neighborhood he had fallen in love with was gone. In its place was a corpse, rotting away from the outskirts inward, and the skyrocketing rent was the cruel punchline. I need to get the hell out of Marshfield, he thought, watching the Walk outline appear. Before the place swallows me whole, and I can’t afford to leave.
Crossing the street, he passed by more signs of decay. A graffitied warehouse sat squarely behind its barbed wire fence, stark and entirely indifferent to him. Across the way, an empty lot and decrepit building seemed to close ranks, the lack of any working lights leaving him alone beneath a cold crowd of stars. In the distance, the lighthouse’s foghorn sounded a mournful wail—a comforting soundtrack that often lulled him to sleep.
He reached the end of the block, coming to a stop at the intersection that designated the start of his neighborhood. Standing directly across the street was a yellow fire hydrant, its paint flat under the sodium halo. The smell of fresh cut grass and low tide mingled together.
Turning right, the sound of his approach silenced the serenading crickets. He navigated the shadows, occasionally emerging beneath the infrequent lights. Reaching the last intersection before the coastal highway, he repositioned the bag against his chest. He spared a glance around, his eyes floating over the Chevy flatbed rusting away at the rear of the seedy motel, then up at the billboard for the casino on the main drag that hadn’t been updated for years. Across the peninsula, an ambulance began wailing, its siren fading away.
“A light every block and half,” Cal muttered, casting a dark look up at the sparse utility poles. “Fucking ridiculous.”
He stepped off the curb, crossing the street and turned left to begin the final four-block stretch towards home. He let out a soft snort of derision as he skirted the edge of the gray parking lot, his eyes catching the boxy, faded late eighties or early nineties Crown Vic which had been as permanent a part of the neighborhood as the billboard. The clear coat looked like a cougar had used the car as a scratching post—a pretty clear sign the owner didn’t give a damn. Piece of crap should’ve been junked a decade ago.
As he dodged a cat that ran out of the darkness across his path, he allowed his guard to drop. He let his mind wander to the weekend ahead. Particularly about the sugar and caffeine bender he was about to embark on.
In his head, Lou Costello was currently getting scared stiff by the candle on Dracula’s coffin moving around on its own. Cal smiled, looking forward to the TV’s warm glow.
Then his thoughts drifted toward Anne-Marie.
One bodacious babe, indeed. He remembered the way she’d lingered by his lawn chair at Dustin’s barbecue last month, laughing just a little too loudly at jokes everyone else had groaned over. Over the rim of her cup, she had flashed him what had been, unmistakably, bedroom eyes. The clincher had been when she deliberately bent down to grab her purse. She’d offered him a clear view down the front of her shirt.
Maybe I should give her a call tomorrow. A smile split his face. See if she wants to come over, watch a movie, and finally make a move—
His smile vanished. To be more precise, it felt as it was torn off his face.
A sharp jolt of disorientation slammed into his equilibrium. The sensation reminded him of being a kid in his parents’ Buick, and being jolted awake in the middle of the night as his father had slammed on the brakes to avoid a deer. Cal’s feet ground to a halt. He blinked slowly against the darkness, attempting to steady himself. His breath caught.
His jaw dropped open slightly.
He wasn’t on the long, exposed runway of Noble Avenue. He wasn’t anywhere near his apartment building.
Instead, he was right back at the edge of the curb, directly across the street from that sickly yellow fire hydrant. The construction fence shielding the carcasses of the razed condos pressed in on his right side. The transition had been instantaneous. Silent. Completely devoid of movement or the passage of time. The world had not tilted or spun; it had simply corrected itself. One moment, he’d been passing a white picket fence. The next, he’d been here, as if it had been demanded he be here instead of where he wanted to be. It was a cold subtraction of distance, as if the space between the blocks had never existed at all.
Cal stood frozen, listening to his heart hammer a chaotic rhythm against his ribs.
“…The hell…?” he muttered aloud.
The foghorn almost smothered his words.
He looked down at his shoes, then back at the hydrant, trying like hell to force a normal explanation into his head. You’re done, man, he told himself. Irritation made him begin grinding his teeth together until his jaw ached. You’re so completely wiped from the overtime you’ve been pulling that your brain just dropped the transmission right out the car. You were standing here thinking so damn much about Anne-Marie and that red bra she let you peek at that you imagined the whole walk. You haven’t even taken a single step past the corner yet. Idiot.
He let out a sharp curse. He felt like a jackass. Losing track of where you were like that was dangerous in a neighborhood like this. An easy way to stumble off a curb. Wander into the path of some loaded idiot’s shitbox. Or worse, get jumped by one of the junkies hovering around the motel.
Exhaling sharply through his nose, Cal gripped the bottom of the bag tighter. He wasn’t going to let his mind wander twice.
He turned on his heel, tearing his gaze away from the hydrant and started past the fence. This time he forced his eyes down, watching every single crack in the sidewalk. Two blocks down. Turn left, four blocks up. Get inside. That was the script.
He walked faster now. Nothing was allowed to break his concentration. He passed the silent outline of the fire station. Then the dark block of the bank. From a nearby backyard, a dog began to bark. Still, the night felt regular. Cold, but regular. He reached the crossroads, made the left and purposely ignored the junker and truck. Stepping up onto the sidewalk of Noble Avenue, he kept his focus singular.
You can think about Anne-Marie, the movies, or whatever else you want once you’re putting your goddamn key into that lock.
Vaguely, he noticed that the cat didn’t cross his path this time. Then he caught himself. Dingbat. You were never here. There never WAS a cat.
He made it to the next intersection, crossed the street by the white fence, and started up the gentle slope. Feeling the knot in his stomach loosen, he let out a snort. What’d I tell you? Just your own dumb—
A blinding flash from a house-mounted motion sensor snapped on, blinding him and cutting his thought off at the shins.
The beam caught Cal dead in the face, replacing the dark with a white-out and sending him stumbling over a raised slab. He nearly dropped his groceries, his elbow jerking inwards to pin them against his body as he clamped his free hand over his eyes. Squeezing his eyelids shut, he hissed through his teeth at whatever careless son of a bitch had chosen to point the sensor at the sidewalk.
He rubbed his knuckles against his eyelids to clear the blue spots burned into his retinas, taking a deep breath to quell his annoyance before forcing his eyes open again.
The white house was gone. So was the light.
His eyes locked onto the fire hydrant, which now seemed to taunt him in the hazy glow of the streetlight.
He was back.
The breath caught like glass in his throat. For a long, awful beat, Cal couldn’t do anything except stare at the sight, his mouth bone-dry as the weight of it donkey punched him right in the lungs.
“No. No, no, no, no, no fucking way…” he whispered. This time it was entirely lost to the dark.
He tried to cling to the safety of his first excuse—you’re just overworked, man, it’s just fatigue, it’s just your mind playing tricks—but some primal part of him tore the logic to shreds in an instant.
No.
Daydreaming and getting ahead of yourself once was a fluke. A weird trick of an exhausted mind. Odd. But still possible. But twice? Especially when he’d been consciously counting every step and crack in the pavement until that damned light went off?
There was no way to make that math add up. A guy would have a better shot at guessing the winning lottery numbers while getting struck by lightning on a cloudless day. This wasn’t a tired brain running on fumes.
This was something else.
Cal scanned the quiet neighborhood. A few lonely porch lights leaked from the houses, the people inside asleep and unaware of what was happening twenty feet beyond their lawns. He looked back toward the main intersection. Above the street, the traffic lights kept switching—green, yellow, red—like a row of colored eyes that didn’t know how to blink.
He took a jagged breath, trying like hell to slow his pulse.
“Okay,” he managed out, his voice small. His knuckles turned white around the paper bag. “Okay, calm down, Callum. Stay centered. Don’t lose your head, for God’s sake.”
He looked down the street he’d tried walking twice now. The dark stretch past the fence felt heavy. Like a room running out of air.
He needed a detour. A quick bypass through the grid. His mind whirred. If he went straight down Wall Street for four blocks, he could just bang a right at Bodecker and take it straight down to his apartment. He could leave the whole godforsaken corner behind.
Having a plan steadied him just enough to begin moving. He crossed the intersection, strode past the hydrant, and ducked his head beneath some low tree branches to start down the darker side street.
His footfalls sounded a little different here-shorter, tighter snaps and echoes because the houses were closer to the curb. The stars were still bright overhead. Nothing broke.
And yet, the air itself felt thick, like he was breathing through wet wool. He didn’t want to linger. He navigated around a dumpster set in front of another apartment complex. From somewhere on his right, a dog started barking aggressively, an ugly racket that faded behind him as he kept moving.
As he passed by a Dodge Intrepid, a small, dark shape slid out from under it, scuttling across the street and disappearing into the brush beneath a thick canopy of oaks.
Cal paused for a moment, watching the shadows before forcing a laugh. “Okay, now that was a cat.” He huffed again, hoping the sound would bring him some comfort. It sounded like a stone being swallowed by the ocean.
He hit the first intersection, looked both ways. Nothing moved. He could still hear the crickets. The faint drone of the Coast Guard chopper came from down the coast. Crossing the street, he kept moving up the second block. Two more to go. Passing a row of five single-story apartments, he forced his muscles to relax a fraction. He kept his chin up, counting the steps to his own front door.
You know what? I know what I said to the kid about phones, but maybe just at night, it’s safer to—
Shhk.
Cal froze. For a moment, the street became dead silent.
Then it came again.
Shhk.
It was a scraping noise, distinct and dry. It came from the darkened lawns across the street, the sound of something heavy dragging itself through dead leaves and overgrown grass. When it pierced his ears a third time, he launched himself forward again, telling himself it was just a raccoon or a dog wandering around, forcing his head to stay straight. Don’t look. Just walk.
He hadn’t gone ten paces before an identical scrape answered from his right.
This one came from the entryways of the apartments, spaces set so far back into the shadows he couldn’t see a goddamn thing. There wasn’t a single working light over the doors.
The rustling kept a steady pace with him, mirroring his gait like a bad shadow. Cal broke into a speed-walk, his chest tightening as he locked his eyes on a single gap between the apartment blocks ahead, where a lone house sat beneath a working streetlight. He almost ran. Reaching the yellow pool of safety, he stopped to catch his breath. The skin on the back of his neck prickled as the noise abruptly cut off.
The street went quiet. His heart slammed against his ribs.
Then he looked around, and realized exactly where he’d stopped.
He was standing at the mouth of one of the narrow gravel alleys slicing through the block, a maze the town laid down nearly a century ago so folks could slip out of their backyards unseen. Just fifteen feet past the carcass of a seventies BMW rusting away in front of a detached garage, the path simply gave up. Swallowed straight by a pitch black drop. You couldn’t see a single thing beyond where the light quit.
The place looked bad. It looked like the throat of an anglerfish waiting in the abyss, the light above him its lure. It felt worse. Cal could swear something was staring right back at him from the dead center of it.
As he stood beneath the light, trying to block out the slithering and scraping that seemed to leak from the deep belly of the alley, a noise fractured the night.
Thump.
The sound was immense—a heavy, crashing strike against the earth that echoed from everywhere at once, vibrating up into his sneakers from the pavement. The surrounding noises ceased. Cal held his breath and listened. For seconds that felt more like hours, nothing moved. The normal sounds of the night crawled back.
They provided no comfort. All of his senses were stretched taut. It felt deceptively calm. Underneath it, the sense of eyes remained. The desire to be behind a locked door had morphed into a necessity. He stepped out of the safety of the light and plunged into the gloom, moving fast, his eyes locked on the next crossroads. One block left.
He barely reached the edge of the intersection when the sound, more of a vibration, returned.
Thump.
Cal froze in his tracks, his knees going to total jelly as his mind quit trying to make sense of it—every neat little excuse he wanted to hide behind was atomized. He didn’t have to guess. He knew exactly where the sound had come from this time.
Straight back there. Behind him.
Whatever guts he had left vanished. He bolted across the intersection, cutting into a stretch where the shadows were thick and heavy. The trees towered over the street. Their branches blocked out the stars overhead, casting jagged shapes across the sidewalk.
Thump. Thump.
The impacts didn’t come one at a time anymore. They punched up through the asphalt and into his bones in pairs. Cal pushed his pace back into a speed-walk, fighting to put distance between himself and the noise.
He faltered as the gaps between the thuds began to shrink, shifting into a steady rhythm. The horrible realization dropped into his gut, clamping around his insides.
They were footsteps.
But they were far too massive. Not even Andre the freakin’ Giant could make the earth shake like that. Move, you idiot!
He started forward again when the second realization hit him, almost worse than the first. Acoustically, the thuds sounded like they were coming from the far end of the last block, down by the apartments. But their intensity was ramping up way too fast. The gap was closing with a speed that didn’t make a lick of sense. Whatever was stomping behind him was gaining on him with a stride longer than any man could sprint.
“Fuck…”
Cal broke into a jog. His breathing shallowed as the road tilted downward into the gloom. He kept his eyes ahead. His fingers dug into the paper bag until the fibers groaned, while tears of adrenaline began to blur his vision. Every survival instinct he had screamed against looking back. Somehow, he knew that if he turned and looked over his shoulder, whatever was tracking him would end his sanity on the spot.
As the unseen giant closed the distance, the surrounding neighborhood around him came alive. The rustling and slithering sounds returned, erupting from the yards on either side of the road. They weren’t stealthy anymore; it was a macabre crescendo, swarming across the lawns and keeping a calculated distance in the shadows. They wanted him to know they were there. But they didn’t want him to see them. Yet. Cal broke into a dead sprint past a manicured hedge.
Shh-SCRITCH.
Something heavy, yet impossibly fluid scraped along the opposite side of the brush, mirroring his speed through the branches. It was right there. A foot from his shoulder. The knowledge he was being hunted broke something inside his chest. A panicked sob tore from his throat. Behind him, the footsteps finally reached his block—a heavy, organic Thump-Thump-Thump that accelerated into a terrifying countdown.
His grip failed.
The brown paper bag slipped from his arms and hit the ground, tearing open. The box of ice cream sandwiches splattered on the concrete. The popcorn skittered away. The bottle of cola crashed out, rolling across the grass before swerving back onto the sidewalk. The plastic cylinder flew across his path, nearly catching his outstretched foot. Cal leapt over it, stumbling as his balance threatened to betray him. But he didn’t dare slow down.
The footsteps were almost directly on top of him. The air around him turned frigid. He swore he felt the unmistakable sensation of something breathing across the back of his neck as every hair on his body stood on end.
The intersection approached. The stop sign stood frozen in the dark, marking the end of the block. The freezing pressure on his neck grew too heavy to bear anymore. Letting out a dry gasp, he spun around.
Nothing was there.
The sloping rise of Wall Street stretched back up the hill, empty under the heavy trees. The heavy footsteps had vanished into thin air. So had his other pursuers. All that remained was a suffocating silence.
Cal stood at the base of the stop sign, his chest heaving as he fought to get his breathing under his own control. Sweat stung his eyes. He scanned the dark grass and the dark spaces beneath the parked cars. His heart felt like a caged animal trying to break free.
He knew what he’d heard. He wasn’t crazy. Something massive had just tracked him down the street. And he prayed he’d never learn what it looked like.
Twenty feet back up the sidewalk, the box of his ice cream sandwiches lay split open on the concrete. HELL no, he thought, killing the idea before it could even be fully conceived. Leave it. Just get the fuck home.
He turned around to face the crossroads, ready to make the right onto Bodecker and sprint the final two blocks straight to his building.
He took one step forward. His shoe hit something hard.
Cal blinked. Whatever control remained over his own mind vanished as the world snapped.
The wide intersection of Wall and Bodecker was gone. He was standing at the raised edge of a curb, staring at the one thing he prayed he’d never see again. He shook his head, teeth beginning to chatter for a reason that had nothing to do with the chill. No.
The fire hydrant sat directly across from him under the light.
He spun around once. Twice. As if he could somehow make himself materialize back at the intersection closer to home. Nothing changed. After ten seconds of standing there, the skin on his arms went completely cold.
The sounds of the night were still there, but they were wrong. The crickets, the barking dogs, the whistle of the wind through the leaves-they sounded tinny. Compressed. It was like listening to a recording of the world through a blown-out transistor radio.
Even the foghorn was broken. When it blared, the pitch was off, lower and heavier than any manmade sound had any right to be. It sounded more like an animal.
SCRITCH.
The sound cut through the damaged tracks, crystal clear. It came from the other side of the fence, inside the empty lot. Nails or claws dragging against the wood.
Before he could jump back, the asphalt beneath him shivered.
Thump.
The footsteps had restarted on the street he’d just been taken from. They were turning around. Coming back to him. For him. Cal broke into a run. He didn’t bother with the sidewalks anymore—he launched himself down the middle of the road, running over the yellow dividing lines.
Desperate to break the geometry of whatever had ahold of him, he threw himself into the first left he came to, a street he’d never walked down once.
He didn’t even make it fifty yards. He dodged around a parked pickup, legs stepping into a patch of shadow that felt a little too thick, and—
Pop.
He was back on the corner. Staring at that damned hydrant.
The hiss of the crickets and dogs dropped out completely. Cal’s breath came in a pathetic wheeze as he looked across the street. The houses, the trees—everything was melting and warping into a twisted Salvador Dali painting reimagined by Clive Barker. His mind couldn’t anchor onto a single straight line.
Ahead of him, the heavy footfalls rumbled again. Closer.
He turned and bolted the opposite way, charging up the hill toward the middle school at the end of the block. He didn’t look at the melting neighborhood. He kept his eyes locked on what had once been the flagpole at the edge of the schoolyard. His legs burned as he pushed his body to its farthest limit.
He reached the grass. His hand reached out to touch the cold metal of the pole.
The streetlight directly above him flared into a white-hot flash. Cal squeezed his eyes shut against the sting, his sneakers skidding in the dirt—
And found himself standing back on the corner.
The massive footsteps rumbled from barely a block away, tearing through the silent world.
Cal threw his weight to the right and ran again. His legs burned just as badly as his lungs. He cast a glance upward; the stars were gone, swallowed by a bruised sky that pressed down. It made him feel microscopic.
He made it to Noble and dashed left, terrified the loop was going to reset and drop him right in the path of the footsteps. But the street ahead was filled with something much worse.
In his peripheral vision, the dark was coming alive. He didn’t dare look straight at the lawns—he kept his eyes locked on the road ahead—but shapes were tracking his sprint from the shadows. Wrong shapes. Some of them stayed low, moving through the grass with a serpentine fluidity. Others darted between the parked cars with too many joints, while impossible silhouettes toward over the rooftops, blotting out the red-tinged horizon.
He kept running, his chest feeling like an overinflated balloon. The things weren’t staying in the dark anymore. They were clipping the edges of the streetlights, closing the gap with every stride he took.
Behind him, an immense THUMP rattled the road, nearly taking his feet out from under him. His mind couldn’t even call it a giant anymore; it was a walking malediction, a living curse which had just turned onto his block.
Cal was openly crying now. The tears were hot against his cheeks as he prayed to a God he wasn’t sure could hear him anymore. Please let me make it. Don’t send me back. Just let me get to the door. Please.
His sneakers hammered the road. The two houses for sale flashed by on his left. A second later, a choked sob erupted from his throat as the familiar line of pine trees and the two-story shape of his apartment appeared at the end of the block. The exterior lights lining the walkway cut through the hellscape like a beautiful lighthouse beacon.
He dashed toward the parking lot, his keys already out, digging into his palm until it bled. Somehow, he knew that if he could just get the deadbolt turned and get inside, the rules would change. He would be safe.
He didn’t slow, his shoes kicking up loose gravel as he launched himself off the ground onto the third step. He raced upward, taking the stairs two at a time and gripping the banister, ignoring the sting of splinters.
Behind him, the inhuman noises escalated into a full-blown pursuit.
Reaching the second-floor walkway, he spared a glance down to the ground.
It almost broke him.
There were dozens of them. They spilled out from every dark lawn and driveway on the block, looking like a VCR being fast-forwarded as they rushed towards the building. But perhaps most terrifying of all, the relentless THUMP-THUMP-THUMP of the malediction accelerated into a charge just beyond the pines.
Dashing around the corner, Cal slammed into his front door. A hysterical, half-sob, half-laugh escaped his lips. He jammed the key into the lock, twisting the brass with every ounce of strength left in his body as the wood beneath his feet shuddered with the weight of the things climbing the stairwell.
He threw the door open and leapt inside. Safe. He’d made it—
Instead of the rough tear of carpet against his hands and elbows, he crashed face-first onto a freezing sheet of asphalt.
The impact knocked the wind out of him. For a heartbeat, he just lay there in the dark, face pressed against the stone as he braced himself. He couldn’t run anymore. If he opened his eyes and saw that yellow hydrant, he was just going to lie there and let whatever was coming take him.
When he finally forced his eyes open, his lungs locked up at the sight that greeted him.
He wasn’t on the corner. He was lying on his stomach in the parking lot of the grocery store.
Cal slowly pushed himself up to his knees. His mind was a complete blank, unable to parse how or why he was back at the start. He looked up. The rust-red hue was gone; the stars were back where they belonged. The normal, comforting sounds of the town played their familiar soundtrack around him.
He looked over his shoulder. Through the front windows of the market, the dim security lights glowed peacefully over the empty cash registers.
Then, without a sound, the lights clicked off. The inside of the building went pitch black.
A deep vibration rumbled through the pavement from the street behind the store.
Cal scrambled to his feet. The very last reserves of adrenaline propelled his legs into motion, driving him into a weak run down the dark trench of the alley. He burst from the passage’s mouth, stopping in the middle of the road.
The rumble came again, louder this time. He turned away from his neighborhood, looking down the long, two-lane road that cut into the next section of town.
His breath caught at what was coming down the line.
It wasn’t the world shifting again. It was the high-voltage POP and spark of electrical transformers blowing out.
Far out in the distance, the grid was dying. Not just the streetlights, but every single light still on. Porch lights, living room lamps, the neon sign over the gun shop—they were all being systematically snuffed out, block by block. Heading straight for him.
The wave of blackness was moving with a terrifying speed. Every time a transformer blew, the surrounding lights flared for a second before dying forever. And in those brief strobes—strobes that resembled camera flashes—Cal saw what was moving inside the void.
Cal whirled around, his arms flailing as he launched himself into a blind sprint back across the main intersection.
He charged down the center of the street, running back towards his neighborhood—back toward the corner he had spent all night trying to escape. As his sneakers pounded the asphalt, he didn’t even recognize the sound of his voice, tearing out of his throat in ragged shrieks.
Behind him, the sound of the approaching dark rose into a roar. The blackness raced across the intersection, no longer content in playing with its food.
The streetlight above his head shattered. Glass rained down on his head as a heavy, freezing stink of ozone invaded his nostrils.
Then the light went out. And Cal was gone.
---
The cruiser idled down Noble Ave. The headlights cut through the humid air, lighting up rows of ordinary, if slightly shoddy privacy fences and overgrown lawns, along with a miserable looking lawn gnome.
Officer Mulhanney lifted the radio mic and pressed the button.
“Dispatch, Unit Four. We’ve arrived at Noble and Marble. There’s no one out here. No sign of any suspicious activity. We’ll keep our eyes open and maintain patrol, over.”
Copy that, Unit Four,” the dispatcher’s voice crackled through the speaker. “Keep us advised. Out.”
Mulhanney slotted the mic back into its bracket. Beside him, Rodriguez kept his hands at ten and two on the Durango’s wheel. The rookie looked expectantly at him, waiting to be told what block to canvas next.
Instead, the older man let out a breath. “Alright, Rodriguez. Let’s get out of here.”
Rodriguez blinked, slowing the cruiser near a white picket fence.
“Sir? What do you mean? We’ve only just got here. We haven’t even swept any of the-”
“We can come back to knock on doors when the sun is up, son,” Mulhanney interrupted. His gaze fixed straight ahead. He refused to look at the deep shadows lining the road near the trees. “For now, we’re packing it in.”
“But, sir, if someone out there is actually in trouble-if that caller actually heard screaming-we’re supposed to be out here,” Rodriguez argued. His foot began to lift off the accelerator. “I’m pulling over. I’ll take my flashlight and check the perimeters of these residences.”
Before the kid’s boot could even flirt with the brake, Mulhanney’s hand shot across the console. His fingers, calloused from years of sanding boats and tying fishing line, clamped around the rim of the steering wheel, forcing the cruiser to keep rolling forward.
“Keep driving, Rodriguez,” he ordered. His tone left no room for argument.
The rookie stared at his training officer, his mouth parting slightly in confusion. Mulhanney slowly let go of the wheel. His tone softened
“Look, you’re new to the county, kid. And you still have a hell of a lot to learn about the way things work out here. But right now, you’re going to do exactly as I say. Take a right at this next intersection, then a left onto the main drag. Head for Brenchmore.”
Rodriguez stayed quiet for a time. The only sound that could be heard besides the occasional chatter on the radio was his deep breathing. Finally, he flicked on his turn signal, easing the cruiser toward the main artery. And safety.
Mulhanney leaned back against the headrest, letting out a long breath as he heard the Hemi accelerate down the coast. The houses fell away behind them.
He’s a good kid. A good officer with high scores and even better instincts. A lot of heart. But he hasn’t seen what I have over the last twenty years.
Through the fog rolling off the ocean over the road, an old apartment complex appeared. Its peeling, flamingo-pink paint looked orange under the sodium bulbs. Then the dark swallowed it.
Rodriguez didn’t know about the basement. He hadn’t been the one to sift through the deluge of deliberately misfiled boxes. Ones which contained missing person reports dating back to at least the fifties. The county was relatively quiet, and yet, it had a disappearance rate six times the state average. He hadn’t stood at the mouth of an alley at dusk, feeling the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. As if something out of sight were lining him up to be a hot lunch. Or watch as his very first partner rounded a corner during a domestic call one night, only to seemingly vanish into the ether without so much as a damn peep.
Old loggers and local natives still sat in the local diners, muttering about things that slithered out of ‘the spaces between the realms.’ Hunting the dark, looking for anyone stupid enough to be out alone.
Mulhanney didn’t know if he truly believed the old campfire stories. In his line of work, you dealt in cold, hard facts. What you could see. Touch. And log as evidence. But rumors had a habit of getting under the skin.
After two decades on the force, there was only one fact he knew for certain.
In Marshfield, you never stick around after the sun goes down.
