The Narrows(89)

“Maggie Quedentock is in lockup,” Ben said.

“Maggie?”

“I think she did something to her husband. And maybe Tom Schuler, too.”

“What do you mean ‘did something’?”

“She may have killed them.”

Outside the windows, lightning lashed across the sky. A peal of thunder followed.

Ben’s cell phone rang at his hip. He snatched it up and saw Joseph Platt’s name and number scrolling by on the digital screen. Ben answered. “This is Ben.”

“Can you…Ben? Hello?”

“Your phone’s breaking up, Joseph.”

“…problem here…”

“Come again?” Ben said. The worry on Shirley’s face increased.

“…need to get out here…”

“Where? Where are you? What’s going on?”

Through quips of static, Ben heard Platt say, “Gracie Street…old farmhouses…we found…think we…the Crawly boy…”

Ben’s left eyelid twitched.

On the other end of the line, he thought he heard Platt say, “…dead.”





Chapter Fifteen


1


Joseph Platt was in the middle of Gracie Street waving his arms when Ben approached in his squad car. Ben pulled onto the shoulder of the road and got out. He tugged a rain slicker over his uniform as he hustled across the swampy field, his boots driving craters into the soft mud. Platt met him halfway, talking fast.

“He’s up here in one of the houses,” Platt said, rainwater streaming down his face. His hair was plastered to his head.

“He’s dead?” Ben asked, following Platt between the skeletons of two run-down barns. Platt’s cruiser was parked in the mud before a square little house the same color as the storm-filled clouds above. Mel Haggis was wending around in the mud with an extendable baton in his hand.

“God, yes.” It came out in a sickening wheeze. “Me and Mel were up here checking out a car that had hit a tree and this girl, she comes running up the goddamn street—”

“What girl?”

“The sister,” Platt said. “She found the body.”

No no no no no, Ben thought. None of this is happening.

“Brandy Crawly?”

“Yes.”

“Where is she now?”

“In my car,” said Platt.

Indeed, as Ben hurried past Platt’s cruiser, he could see Brandy Crawly’s face staring out at him from the backseat. She was a ghost.

“Hey, Sarge,” Haggis grumbled when Ben arrived at the foot of the little house. Rickety steps led up to a door that was partway open.

“What’s with the baton?”

“Bats,” Haggis said. “Had to shoo ’em away from the house.”

“Terrific. Where is he?”

“Inside,” Platt said, moving up the porch steps and unclipping a penlight from his gear belt. “I’ll show you.”

Ben followed. Passing through the doorway was like being inhaled by the house. Inside, the air was stifling and musty, redolent with the stink of mildew, bat shit, and decay. Curtains of gauze crisscrossed the entranceway, strung up to the rotting beams in the ceiling and billowing gentle in the breeze. It took Ben a second or two to realize these were cobwebs.

“Be careful,” Platt warned. “Floor’s spongy. Don’t break an ankle.”

It was like walking on a mattress.

“There,” Platt said, shining his light at one corner of the room.

Ben thought, Holy Christ.

Momentarily, Ben was back on the banks of Wills Creek, staring down at the unidentified corpse of a hairless child. This creature looked no different—a pale white form frozen in a fetal position on the floor of the abandoned house, the gleaming dome of its skull like a giant hard-boiled egg, patchy with strands of blondish hair. The corpse’s face was Matthew Crawly’s face, though just barely. His eyelids were swollen shut and his skin looked taut and nearly transparent.

“What the hell happened to him?” Platt asked him. “I mean, Jesus f*ck, Ben, look at him. That’s not…I mean, that’s…what happened to him?”

“I don’t know.” Ben’s voice shook. Slowly, he advanced toward the boy. When Platt told him again to be careful, he wasn’t so sure he was talking about the floor anymore.

Ben knelt down beside the body. The boy’s skin was colorless and practically translucent. Ben could make out the assemblage of veins and arteries, like fine blue cables, networked just beneath the paper-thin flesh. The joints—the kneecaps and elbows—were bony protrusions that reminded Ben of knots in a tree’s trunk. The fingernails and toenails were ragged and blackened; there was mud and some other grit beneath the nails. And, of course, the face…the face was a taut membrane of skin stretched across the protuberances of the skull. Those horrific eyes bulged beneath purpled lids that had been seemingly fused shut. Within the slash of the boy’s mouth, Ben could see the protrusion of a tongue, swollen and black. When he reached out and touched the corpse—the skin was as cold and unyielding as the skin of a dead toad—Platt sucked in an intake of breath and moaned, “Ben…”

Ben ignored him. The boy’s body rocked forward and Ben peered down at the boy’s back. Shoulder blades like dorsal fins. Four circular wounds ran vertically down the boy’s back. A suppurated, yellowish discharge had dried in crusty ribbons along the interlocking knots of the boy’s spinal column.