“The mayor? That was real?” I didn’t bother trying to mask my surprise. “That video made the rounds, but everyone dismissed it as a fake. I’ve seen page after page of analysis. There are splices! And they found the actress, the woman who goes on stage after the mayor disappears. She says she did it for her friend’s video project.”
“Nah,” Danny said, his face lighting up with a bright smile. “All of that stuff came from us. Misinformation. Brilliant, really! We couldn’t stop the video from getting out there—it was broadcast live, after all, on national television—so we flooded the Internet with fake copies. We added splices and artifacts. We even dubbed over some of the crowd noise, to make it sound like bad acting.”
Danny opened a new window on his computer screen and launched a video clip. It was the same press conference I’d seen a dozen times before, but in amazingly clean, high-definition video—better than broadcast quality, better than anything I’d ever seen. And there was no distortion, no artifacts, no obvious splicing. It showed the mayor answering questions, getting angry, then disappearing.
In front of cameras. In front of a whole crowd of reporters.
“We put an emergency injunction on everyone in the room, requiring them to stay quiet. The woman who comes on stage—” Danny pointed to the sharply dressed woman as she stepped up to the lectern; he stayed silent as she looked around and shook her head. “She was his press secretary. She’s in New York now. We hired an actress to come forward and claim credit for her role.”
Danny shut down the video and swiveled back around. “Truth is, the mayor’s gone. He disappeared—right that day, right that millisecond—and he hasn’t been seen since. And the video gives us nothing. Just—one frame he’s there, with that pissed-off look on his face, and the next frame… poof!” He popped open his hand, showing me an empty palm.
I stood dumbstruck for a moment, trying to process this information.
“Yeah,” Danny said. “Just blows your fucking mind.”
I glanced over at Taylor, thinking she’d break down laughing at any moment, revealing this whole thing as a big fat joke, but her face remained perfectly still.
“Anyway, after visitors and disappearances, we’ve got sounds without sources.” Danny pointed back to the whiteboard. “Voices emanating from empty rooms. Displaced screams and crying. Hell, for two days an invisible gun battle raged outside the convention center; a lot of people heard that one.” Danny shivered, and his voice dropped. “You could call them auditory ghosts, I guess. They usually come at night. We’ve got people who can’t sleep for all of the things they hear.”
I remembered the soldier at the barricade. I remembered the wistful, nervous look on his face. He’d seemed like a haunted man, talking about his transfer out of the city, about how he no longer heard things.
“Next, we’ve got creatures. Either animals completely out of place—flamingos in the park, clouds of butterflies in the middle of the night—or things that don’t exist, things that shouldn’t exist.” I nodded, remembering the dogs—the wolves—from the night before. Amanda’s animals, with those strange, extrajointed limbs. “There’s some scary shit out there,” he said. “We’ve found bodies. Bodies with tooth marks or clawed nearly in half.” Danny shivered again; I wasn’t sure if this was a genuine reaction, or just something he did to provide emphasis.
“Our fifth category is a little more difficult.” I glanced up at the board and saw the phrase “mental problems.” “We’re not quite sure if it’s a phenomenon in its own right or a result of everything else. It’s just… people going crazy. Acting odd, unusual. Losing memories. Going schizophrenic or catatonic. It might be a result of all this stress, or it might be something else. Another symptom of this… disease.” Danny shook his head and managed a sad little smile. “In my time here I’ve had two commanding officers fall apart. One was struck dumb by complete amnesia. The other attacked three of his men with a knife… before turning it on his own genitalia.”
I made an involuntary wince.
“And the final category?” I asked.
Danny gestured back toward the whiteboard. “Miscellaneous,” he said, offering up a pathetic shrug. “The last of our all-encompassing groups. Just… everything else.”
I stared at the board for a long time, waiting for a pattern to emerge, waiting for some type of connective thread to surface and tie it all together. But there was no thread. There was no pattern. The categories remained disparate, unconnected things—except for visitors and disappearances, which could have been flip sides of the same coin.
And miscellaneous? It seemed like these people, these experts, were stumbling around in the dark here. They had no idea what was going on, and their categories did nothing to illuminate the situation.
The hotel room—that frightening tableau, now burned into my memory—remained just as strange, just as alien.
I walked over and tapped the board. “In this… in this miscellaneous category, have you heard anything… like…” I groped for words, trying to figure out how to explain the body in the ceiling. “Has anybody seen somebody melted—a human body, just kind of merged with a ceiling or a wall? Limbs and body parts disappearing into solid objects?”
Danny shook his head. “No. Nothing like that. Not that I know of.”
“Is that what you saw yesterday?” Taylor asked. I turned and found a concerned look on her face. Not just concerned, but startled, going pale. “You saw a body? In a floor?”
“Well, I…” I shook my head. Pinned beneath that intense stare, I felt flustered. I felt a blush rising up beneath my collar. “No, not really. I’m just…” I composed myself a bit. “I’m not sure what I saw.” I shook my head, trying to dismiss her concern, trying to escape the sharp look in her eyes. “Just forget it.”
They both continued to stare at me, Danny curious and Taylor… well, there was something strange—something hungry—about Taylor’s expression.
“So what have you figured out?” I asked, trying to redirect the conversation. “After one, no, two months on the job, what have your experts deduced?”
Danny shrugged. “Nothing much. The doctors and scientists say there’s some type of chemical imbalance in the population here. Neurotransmitters. In the brain. They don’t know what’s causing it. They’ve been giving antidepressants to anybody who wants them, to boost serotonin and dopamine levels. It seems to help. Some.”
“Help with what?”
“With everything.” He nodded toward the list on the board: visitors, disappearances, sounds, creatures, mental, and miscellaneous.
“But it isn’t all mental, is it? There’s genuine physical phenomenon here.” I gestured toward his computer screen, where the mayor’s video file—09–07-pressconf.mpeg—remained highlighted. “Are you saying that a liberal dose of Prozac would have stopped the mayor from disappearing? That something physical—and impossible—was caused by errant brain chemicals?”