Little Girls(82)

It was silly, of course. She was standing in the woods at the cusp of a rundown industrial park with a key in the hip pocket of her jeans and an old photograph in her hand. The only thing momentous about all of this was the fact that she would have to explain her whereabouts to Ted when she eventually came home. She folded the photo and stuffed it in her back pocket. Crouching down, she crept beneath low branches while snagging her feet on brambles. Things very close to her that had been hiding in the woods took to their feet—or hooves—and trampled through the underbrush. One of them sounded disconcertingly large.

The opening in the fence was indeed large enough for her to pass through, though she did so heedful of the broken, rusty corkscrews of metal that practically hummed with tetanus. She didn’t see the small ravine on the other side of the fence until she planted one foot down into it. She managed to grab a handful of the fence before she fell. Cold water instantly soaked through her sneaker, her sock, and the cuff of her pant leg.

By the time she climbed up out of the ravine, grasping at tangles of weeds for handholds, and onto the solid ground of the parking lot, she already felt bested. Invisible flies droned around her head and she was sweating profusely. Although she was thin for her size, she rarely did any cardio and was already wheezing for breath. Yet here she was: She had been allowed admittance.

The walk across the parking lot felt like it took forever. Her footfalls were hollow thuds that seemed to echo out over the bay while her labored respiration found a rhythm similar to the underground droning of machinery. I’m being assimilated. Once, she thought someone was following her. When she stopped and looked around, she could see no one—she was the solitary island in the sea of black asphalt—but she was still not one hundred percent convinced. If Sadie Russ could come back as Abigail Evans and murder her father, was anything truly off limits?

The factories loomed over her as she approached. They were tremendous beasts, spewing fetid breath from smokestacks into the black night while glaring at her from blinking red and green eyes. At the end of the parking lot, a second fence circumnavigated the factory grounds. This fence was lower and she could have climbed over it easily enough if she had to, but she decided to walk its length and see if there was an easier way in.

There was—an open gate through which passed a stamped concrete walkway. She went through the gate and followed the walkway between two skyscraper-tall buildings. The buildings may have looked abandoned and out of use, but she thought she could hear electrical currents pulsing behind their steel and brick walls. Old buildings have ghosts, too. Machines are living things with souls. They’re in there right now, crying out to me. They’re no different than people. For whatever reason, this made her think of Sadie Russ’s headstone in the cemetery behind the park.

The walkway emptied into another parking area. There were storage sheds along the far side of the lot, and beyond the sheds she could see the silhouette of the Key Bridge backlit by a lavender sunset. She took the photo from her pocket and examined it again. Frowning, she realized the walkway had led her around to the wrong side of the building. Well, she was here now, so she continued in the direction she had been headed. She passed large sunken bays at the bottom of a concrete slope. There were old tractor trailers here, tagged with graffiti and leprous with rust. The windows along this side of the building were pebbled and situated behind wire meshwork. Over one iron door, a faded sign read LOADING. Over a similar door . . . well, the sign was missing, but she assumed it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that it had at one time read UNLOADING.

Out of nowhere, she felt giddy. Christ, she almost felt good.

The row of garage doors began halfway down this side of the building. There were sodium lights above some of them, casting sickly yellow puddles onto the ground. The first garage had a 12 on the door—faded but still legible. It was followed sequentially by 13, 14, 15, and the like. She had no idea what had happened to 1 through 11, but didn’t waste time worrying about it. Some had padlocks on the handles and some didn’t. Seeing the garage doors in real life, something occurred to her that she hadn’t realized when she’d first seen them in the photograph. The doors were about the same size as a standard garage door on a house, but these sons of bitches looked like they were made of corrugated steel. They looked heavy. Even if the key in her pocket fit the padlock on door 58, she doubted her ability to open it on her own.

At door 22, the walkway gave way to a swampy pool of dark, stagnant mud. She climbed overtop a series of propane tanks and dropped down onto gritty cement on the other side. Along the coastline, great steel crates were stacked like monstrous Legos. Directly above her, long metal chutes that reminded her of log flumes deviated from a single iron turret. There was writing on the side of the turret but she couldn’t make it out in the dark. The chutes crossed the gap from this building to the surrounding ones, to include a structure that looked like a water tower emblazoned with graffiti.

A shadow retreated from the walkway and disappeared into the darkness. Laurie caught it in her peripheral vision and whipped her head around to follow its retreat. But the darkness was too great to see beyond the pooling sodium lights.

“Abigail?” she said, her voice shaking. She would have thought speaking the child’s name aloud in this place would have made her feel foolish, but it didn’t. She was frightened. “Is it . . . Sadie?”

No figure emerged. No sounds came through the dark.