A few moments later I was back at the front door, peering through the window.
Magritte-Man was back with at least two others of his ilk. The three of them stood, all bowlers and dapperness, on the sidewalk, night goggles at the ready. I stood up straight and looked right at them. I wasn’t sure they’d seen me, so I waved at them.
Magritte-Man returned the gesture, but neither he nor the others made a move toward the house. At least there wouldn’t have to be any sneaking around now, dim light or no.
They might -mark that- might know about the crawl-space, but not the trapdoor.
I started back toward the guest bedroom, moving the shotgun from one hand to the other and shaking each empty hand in turn because my fingers had gone numb.
Not you, I thought, hoping some small part of the universe would scatter the thought Magritte-Man’s way. She will not go with you.
I will not allow that.
I will bury her here.
You won’t get your hands on her, not you, not you, not you…
I’d kill all of us before I let that happen.
TWO
I put the Mossberg on a small table just inside the guest bedroom and knelt to open the trapdoor. This was the first time I’d used it since having it installed, and I was surprised by the thin cloud of sawdust that blew into my face. Coughing, I waved the cloud away, blinked until my eyes were clear, and started to drop my legs into the opening.
Something outside slammed against the side of the house with enough force to shake the floor and cause the Mossberg to nearly fall off the edge of the table.
I scrambled to my feet, grabbing the shotgun as I ran toward the living room. Whatever slammed against the house had raised some dust of its own, because a dissipating smog of sandy debris was swirling against the window. It wasn’t until I was just a foot or so away from the window that I realized it wasn’t dust at all.
Crouching, I pulled back one side of the curtain to take a look.
It was a cavernous silver mist-so thick in places it was nearly impossible to make out the shape of Magritte-Man’s truck in the street-that churned as if caught in a strong wind. But there was no wind. There hadn’t even been any humidity. The old joke might say that if you don’t like the weather in Ohio just wait a minute, and sometimes it sure seems that way, but barring any sort of significant meteorological aberration, no way in hell could a mist this heavy and wide-spread form in a matter of… I quickly played in reverse everything that had happened since I’d loaded the shotgun… ninety seconds?
I looked out the window again. At the rate this was going, the mist would turn into heavy fog in no time.
Ninety seconds.
Dropping the curtain back into place, I moved through the living room toward the back door. The mist couldn’t be a natural phenomenon; yes, the weather here can make some extreme swings from time to time, but not like this, not a mist-bordering-on-fog that looks like it followed the tail of a major storm in summer, not in less than two minutes. So it stood to reason (didn’t it?) that Magritte-Man and his droogies had to have created it. It had only been two minutes, so whatever they were using to generate the mist couldn’t have worked up enough vapor to encircle the entire house-hell, even if they had more than one means of creating the mist (dry ice, a fog machine maybe?), there still hadn’t been enough time.
(There you again, pal-trying to create logical reasons for stuff that you know damned well-)
Up yours.
I threw open the back door and stepped onto the porch, the Mossberg pointing out from my hip.
The mist formed a semi-solid wall that spread out to create a barrier around the yard and rose so far into the evening sky it was impossible to see where it ended and the October clouds began. I leaned over the porch railing to see just how far the barrier extended; at both the far left and right edges of the house it curved so sharply and so abruptly it actually formed corners before continuing.
It was surrounding the house.
I felt a damp chill and exhaled; my breath became silver vapor as soon as it hit the air and billowed in front of my face, faintly glowing. From deep inside, the mist shimmered with silver light-nothing bright or blinding, but enough to illuminate the yard and the outside of the house.
Moving down the steps I looked from side to side for some sign of the others. I caught a glimpse of one of them when a pair of thin red beams cast by their night goggles glided across the mist from about ten yards to my left. Mossberg at the ready, I ran toward the spot from which the beams had come; just as I hit the mist the handle-grip of the shotgun punched into my ribs, causing me to cry out as I tumbled backward from the force of the impact.
It took a few seconds for my torso to stop throbbing and the breath to find its way back into my lungs. What the fuck had I slammed into? Rolling onto my side, I picked up the Mossberg and checked to make sure the gun and knife were still in place, then got to my feet and looked around for who- or whatever had hit me. As far as I could tell, I was alone in the yard-whose boundaries were rapidly shrinking against the encroaching mist. In a few minutes it would be all the way up to the back porch.
I turned back toward the spot where I’d remembered seeing the beams and moved closer to it, slowly this time. I knew this was probably the wrong thing to do-after all, the back door was unlocked and stood wide open (Why not just send out written invitations? I thought)-but I had to let them know I wasn’t going down without a fight.
I heard a dog bark from outside the barrier, another one howled in response, then the song of an unseen nightbird was answered by the yowls of a stray neighborhood cat.
The mist was playing with me; whenever I moved forward, it retreated, expanding the boundaries; if I moved back, it would advance, swallowing more of the yard. I did this three times, moving backward and forward to make sure I wasn’t imagining it, and I wasn’t; the mist moved in the opposite of my direction each time. Finally, I remained still, as did it.
Flexing the fingers of my left hand, I reached up; a small area of the barrier pulled away from the tips of my fingers. I folded my fingers into my palm and watched the area begin to fill in, and that’s when I came up with my right hand still fisted around the shotgun’s handle-grip and punched at it.
I heard the bones break well before the pain had a chance to register, but by then I was down on one knee and whimpering, my right hand cradled against my chest. As far as I could tell, I had broken my fourth and fifth metacarpals. A jagged, bloody scrape lay across the width of my hand, made thin and black in places by my swollen knuckles. Jesus! It had been like pummeling my fist against a slab of granite. I could still feel the vibration of the impact all the way up into my shoulder and neck.
Struggling to my feet, I grabbed the Mossberg with my left hand because my right was useless for the moment. The mist remained stationary, churning, forming surreal shapes.
I wondered if my neighbors had noticed what was surrounding my house. Were any of them watching right now, their curiosity piqued, or was this mist engulfing the entire block? It had to have occurred to at least one person that this wasn’t normal, right? (Assuming that black mastiffs hadn’t been disassembling people around here, as well.)