John said, “Hi, I’m a friend of your dad’s. Are you at a park? Like an amusement park? Tell us where you are and we’ll come join you.”
“We’re at Joy Park! It was a surprise for my fly box!”
It was word salad. Ted closed his eyes, I imagined the rage and frustration turning his brain into a sputtering pot of chili. “Honey, can you hear me? Do you know what town you’re in? Or, do you remember how long you drove to get there?”
“Do you want to talk to Daddy? Hold on.”
“No, honey, I … are you still there?”
There was a pause, some faint voices on the other end. Finally, a male voice came on the line. It said, “This is Ted. Who’s this?”
Ted, the one sitting in the room with us, looked at his phone, then looked up at us. We had no suggestions.
“Who are you, you son of a bitch? Bring back my daughter!”
From the phone, a man with a very similar voice said, “What? I ain’t got your daughter, dude.” A faint female voice could be heard asking a question, and the man on the phone replied to her, “No idea, somebody she dialed on accident.”
The call disconnected.
Ted stood bolt upright off the sofa, looked at me, and said, “What the fuck was that?”
Another good question.
John said, “Try to call her back.”
He did, and shook his head. “They turned it off.”
John was quickly scrolling through something on his phone. He said, “I tried doing a search for Joy Park. I don’t find a place by that name. Not within driving distance. Lots of, uh, people.”
I said, “Maybe we heard her wrong?”
“Even so, what place like that would be open before dawn?”
Ted said, “That sounded like me. On the phone. And in the background, that was Loretta. What is this?”
John said to Ted, “Keep in mind, again, that call was placed for a reason. What you heard, what you were allowed to hear, somebody did that to get you to react in a certain way. Regardless of who or what is behind this, never lose sight of what we said a minute ago—what’s happening here is a game.”
Ted’s phone dinged—an incoming text. He showed it to us—a photo. A large, run-down building with a rounded, redbrick rooftop.
John said, “That’s the ice factory.”
I said, “The fact that he—or it—wants us to go there tells me that going there is a terrible idea.”
“What’s our alternative?”
I thought, move to a different town? but said nothing.
Ted said, “Let me get a weapon.”
“A thing like this,” I said, “probably cannot be killed with a gun.”
“He’s right,” said John. “It will take several guns, at least. Can you dual wield?”
Ted nodded and jogged down the hall, a little too enthusiastically. I glared at John. “Any bystanders get shot, it’s on you.”
* * *
We were all in John’s black Jeep Grand Cherokee, the hood of which was entirely covered by an airbrushed mural of Satan holding an ax, chopping the head off of a naked woman above the words EZEKIEL 23:20. The paint job wasn’t John’s work—the Jeep had come from the cops’ impound lot and they wouldn’t tell us anything about the previous owner, only that he was “Never, ever coming back.” They had given it to John as under-the-table payment for some work we did for them, which I think was a good deal for the cops as I estimated the blue book value at about negative two hundred dollars. John and I were in front, Ted was in back. We rolled through the downpour, a sunrise having drowned somewhere behind it.
Ted had brought three guns with him and at the moment was loading bullets into a pistol magazine. He said, “All right, tell me exactly what I’m walkin’ into here. In terms of their capabilities, strengths, vulnerabilities, anything you know.”
I said, “You know how the earth is mostly run by assholes, who got their jobs either by accident, or by being the kids of other assholes, or via some other backroom assholery? Well, it turns out if you keep going up the ladder, past humans and into spirits and demigods and such, it’s just more assholes for several more levels.”
John said, “Most of the time you can’t perceive them, the same as you can’t detect bacteria in your taco meat until you’re puking your guts out three hours later. But Dave and I are special. We were able to look behind the veil, thanks to some drugs we took, to see the debauchery these unholy bastards get up to behind the scenes, see how their fluids splatter into our reality. We’ve been face-to-face with beings that would give your nightmares nightmares. The first time, Dave didn’t even flinch, he’s like, ‘You wanna see the real monster, it’s standing right in front of you, bitch.’”
I said, “Also, don’t believe anything John tells you. He tends to … embellish.”
Ted, realizing that spiel had contained no useful tactical information said, “But these things, they can be killed, right?”
I said, “Sort of?”
John said, “You got a Facebook profile, right? You ever get like an annoying ex-girlfriend or something on there, and eventually you just block her? Well, killing the body of one of these things is usually like that. It gets them out of your hair but they’re not really gone. Whether you see them again really depends on how persistent they are. Usually still worth it to try.”
Ted nodded. No fear, no confusion—he was a soldier evaluating the situation and storing the data as it came, without judgment. He said, “Or, like when insurgents would shoot down one of our drones.”
I said, “Yeah, that’s actually a way better analogy.”
We turned into the mostly abandoned industrial park and soon came upon an arched brick rooftop that appeared to be sitting in the middle of a lake—in reality, an old parking lot that was currently under about three inches of water, boiling with raindrops. Of all the creepy and abandoned places in Undisclosed, this one is probably the creepiest and most abandonedest. This is the infamous ice factory, a spot that many around here believe is a portal to Hell.
I guess that requires some explanation.
See, as recently as the 1940s, refrigerators were something only rich jerks owned. Everybody else had iceboxes—literal wooden boxes you had to cool with a big block of ice you bought. Those blocks were made in factories like the dilapidated one we were rolling up to right now. The place had been closed since the early 1960s, a brick building in the shape of a Quonset hut, with faint shadows above each window where flames had scorched the exterior.
Oh, yeah, that’s the “portal to Hell” part. The factory was closed after a horrific fire in 1961, which no one ever isolated a cause for. The blaze supposedly burned so hot that it melted the bricks inside. I know that sounds like bullshit, but according to Munch (who worked as a volunteer firefighter and knows stuff like this), if you can get the temperature up to about four thousand degrees Fahrenheit, the clay in the bricks just liquefies like wax. They say the fire department didn’t even throw water at it, they just kept their distance and watched it roar like a blast furnace, the sheer heat wilting trees for a hundred yards in every direction. And then, just minutes after the firefighters arrived, it went dark, like somebody just flipped a switch. Once it cooled down, city officials glanced inside, nodded, then boarded up the doors and agreed to never speak of it again. Nobody had ever bought the factory or the land, presumably because they were afraid the supposed portal would open again and that their insurance wouldn’t cover the loss (and who wants to go to court over the issue of whether or not Hell itself counts as an “act of God”?).
The whole story was ridiculous, of course—even if a portal to Hell opened up, it isn’t a physical, fiery place. The ancient Hebrew word for Hell is “Gehenna,” which was an actual location outside Jerusalem back in Bible days, a valley where people tossed their garbage to burn it. They used to roll the corpses of sinners down into that putrid burning trash pit as a final posthumous insult, and New Testament writers just took that idea and ran with it. The real “Hell,” as far as John and I can surmise, is simply having to spend eternity with millions and millions of other terrible people with no laws, walls, or even physical bodies to separate them from you. An eternity spent swirling in a stew of ravenous, perverse appetites free of all restraints. Their torture is that they forever consume but are never satisfied, your torture is that you are forever consumed. Also, by the 1960s, consumer-grade refrigerators were common so the whole thing would have been a bad investment anyway.