The Narrows(98)
“Shirley?” He poked his head into the dispatch room to find it empty. One of Shirley’s People magazines lay flat on the counter.
Back out in the hall, he shouted a “hello.” Aside from the echo, there came no response.
When he entered lockup, the world threatened to break apart all around him. He saw Melvin Haggis’s corpse first. Haggis’s large body was on the floor, straining the blood-drenched fabric of his khaki police uniform. Where his head should have been lay a pulpy, scarlet stew through which Haggis’s lower jawbone protruded like a tree root arching out of a swamp. His hands were melted down to the wrists, where knobby bones jutted from the shredded wounds.
Ben’s gun was out before he moved over to the second corpse, that of Joseph Platt, although he was only able to identify the man because he knew he’d been with Haggis earlier. Platt’s head was gone as well; where it should have been was a sizzling crater in the floor, clogged with blood and hair. Platt’s gun was gone. There were bloody slashes across his pant legs and sleeves. He had one white, rigid hand wrapped around one of the bars of the first cell.
And in the first cell was what remained of Maggie Quedentock. She lay slumped in one corner, her legs splayed out before her, one shoe off. Her head lay at an unnatural angle against the wall, the top portion of which had been sheared away to reveal a hollow cavern in the center of her nest of wet, stringy hair. The skull was an empty bowl that dribbled a pinkish fluid down her forehead. Her eye sockets dripped blood.
Ben leaned over one of the desks and vomited on the floor. Heat whooshed out of his shirt collar, causing sweat to spring out across his face. It took him several seconds to regain some semblance of composure. Through bleary eyes, he could see small bloody footprints on the floor tiles. They led in various erratic directions, like some animal trying to evade capture…or like some predator darting after prey.
The boy, Matthew Crawly…his body was gone. The fire retardant blanket and the sheet of blue tarp lay on the floor, kicked away and discarded like bedsheets in the middle of the night.
Trembling, Ben struggled to his feet. He planted one hand against the nearest wall for support while his pistol shook in his other hand. He scanned the rest of the room but saw nothing but hidden shadows and empty spaces. Rain slammed against the roof. His eyes kept returning to the three bodies scattered throughout the room. He was in no frame of mind to even begin to question what had happened here, to even try to formulate some kind of hypothesis.
Moving strictly off instinct, Ben made his way back across the room and out into the hall. His gun jumped and shook as he clenched it in both hands.
“Anybody here?”
No one answered him. From Shirley’s office, he could hear the ticking of the wall-mounted clock above her desk—a ghostly electronic toll. In the ceiling, the lights continued to blink. The air was charged with a faint medicinal odor, one that Ben readily recognized…
A soft, muffled whimper came from nearby. Ben looked around, his eyes finally landing on the closed door of the supply closet directly in front of him. Listening, he could hear something shuffling around on the other side of that door. He extended a shaky hand and gripped the doorknob with one sweaty palm…
The door swung outward before he could even grasp the knob. Ben uttered a small cry and, staggering backward, repositioned his handgun at the figure that burst out into the hallway.
It was Shirley. Her eyes, large as saucers, found him instantly. Her skin was bloodless and she held her hands out timidly before her in some mockery of Frankenstein’s monster. As she stared at Ben, a gasp of pent-up breath escaped her lungs. She looked about ready to collapse. Then she shrieked.
Ben holstered his gun and slung an arm around the woman, just as she went limp against him.
“Are you okay? What happened?”
She sobbed against him for a time and he didn’t bother asking her any further questions until she was able to get herself under control.
“The b-boy,” she stammered after a while. She was a tough old bird and Ben could tell she was struggling to keep it together. “He wasn’t dead. He w-wasn’t d-d-dead, Ben.”
“Where’s the boy now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you see what happened? How did it happen? What did you see?” He knew he was talking too fast for poor Shirley’s addled mind to keep up. He squeezed her shoulder. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” Shirley righted herself against him, swiping tracks of runny mascara off her cheeks. “I don’t think—”
Something banged at the far end of the hall, the reverberation of its echo like a gunshot. Both Ben and Shirley froze and whipped their heads in unison in the direction of the sound—the sally port. Shirley began making a shuddery, whimpering noise.
“Stay here,” Ben said as he began to creep down the hall toward the sally port, his gun leading the way.
“Don’t,” Shirley intoned. “Don’t leave me alone.” She clutched at the back of Ben’s shirt and followed him as he proceeded down the hallway. Just before they reached the door to the sally port, the lights blinked out and the phones ringing at the opposite end of the hallway went dead. Again, Shirley moaned.
“Shit,” Ben whispered. The station fell as silent as a crypt.
Then the lights winked back on, the electricity humming through the circuits in the walls, and Ben’s heart began beating again. On the other side of the sally port door, something metallic clanged around, grinding against the cement floor.