Kat Richardson - Vanished

Cary shook his burning head. The long-gone flesh was blackened and crisp, but the face was still his, though his eyes were only coals and his smile showed tombstone teeth against the inferno that engulfed him.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I had the chance and I took it, but that window’s starting to close. I’ll have to leave soon.”

“Then you’ll have to talk fast.” My voice caught in the back of my throat like smoke and stones.

“I don’t have a complete picture,” Cary said. “Just the outline. What I can see or hear from my tiny window. I heard about you when you first came here. I couldn’t believe you were dead. I tried to get to you then, but by the time I got close, you weren’t with us anymore. And then it got so much harder to get near you. There are things after you. Things near you all the time. I don’t know what to call them. They aren’t the dead and they aren’t the living. They watch you and they have been for a long time. They were watching you even when I died and since before then—a long time. Now something’s happening. Something’s. breaking. Suddenly it’s like everything is unlocked around you and the things from your past are flooding out. I snuck out with them, but I can’t stay. I don’t think they mean you any good. They’re. evil things. That sounds so crazy. ”

He was fading. I tried to reach for him, but my arms felt scorched and I jerked them back. “It’s not crazy. Cary! Don’t go!”

He put out his incorporeal hand, wreathed in fading fire, and stroked my cheek, sending a whisper of burning and chill over my face. “I’m sorry, Slim. If I told you I loved you, I lied. I miss you, but I don’t want you here. I’m. so sorry. Be careful. They come out of the past. They come. from. evil.”

“No!” I shouted as he snuffed out and disappeared into the smoggy canyon air in a dwindling stream of smoke. I snatched at the dark plume as it dissipated and got nothing but a handful of eucalyptus leaves and the odor of doused campfires.

“Cary!” I screamed, willing him to come back, knowing he was gone and I couldn’t bring him back. I was outraged and hurt and torn into pieces. I thought of Quinton’s uncomplicated affection and I hated Cary, but I kept yelling his name until I had to lay my head on my drawn-up knees and gulp my breath.

I sat huddled in the umber-tinged sunlight until the dreadful sensation of loss was bearable. Not just Cary Malloy and whatever I’d thought we’d had, but my father and my belief in my past had all been swept away at a stroke, and I howled at the gashed hurt of fresh loss. Not even thoughts of Quinton and my home and my life could stop the ache of betrayal. The sound that tore itself out of me was not just of grief, but of fury. I wanted to find the truth—whatever it was—and devour it so I could never be lied to again. No matter how it hurt I was going to hunt it down.

I returned to my hotel with that resolve to hunt the truth still as hard and shining as steel, and the box of my father’s things was the first hunting ground on my list. Resolve took a bit of a hammering as I dug into that messy cardboard repository of the past.

I started out trying to sort the items as I pulled them from the box, but in the end it was easier to just dump it all on my bed and sort by eye. A lot of the things in my father’s box were obvious on sight: his appointments book, his desk diary, some kind of medical notebooks, catalogs for dental equipment that was twenty years out-of-date, checkbooks, ledgers, patient files, X-ray envelopes. They all went into piles along with useless objects like a dozen yellowed, packaged toothbrushes and samples of dental floss. It took a couple of hours to get the piles sorted enough that the eerie glow of the Grey became easier to isolate.

I removed all the Grey items from the piles until I had one gleaming pile and a lot of dull ones. I shoveled the dreck back into the box for another time and only considered the things that throbbed with the traces of ghosts and magic. What I had—aside from a headache—was a small pile of notebooks, my father’s appointment calendar, the suicide note, and a small metal puzzle that looked like a flat bunch of fancy, interlocked paper clips.

I recalled him carrying the puzzle in his pocket, and seeing it again brought on a rush of tearstained nostalgia. He’d always had a box full of small, cheap toys for his younger patients to take a “prize” from after they’d endured their cleanings and fillings, but this toy had always been much more interesting to me. He’d let me play with it once in a while, though I didn’t remember ever solving it. Dad had always solved it with ease. Maybe that had been the beginning of my obsession with puzzles and mysteries. I dimly remembered his dismantling and solving it over and over on some occasions, the way some people use a stress ball or prayer beads.

I picked up the toy and slid a few of the metal parts back and forth, melancholy in my contemplation of it. It tingled slightly from the Grey energy that clung to it, but I got no particular feeling off it aside from that. I still wasn’t sure I could put it back together once I’d taken it apart, and the preternatural gleam of it gave me pause, too. It might have been Grey just because it was associated with my father—some of the things I handled every day had similar Grey traces—but the thought that there could be a more sinister reason turned my reverie cold and I laid it aside.

Next, I picked up the appointment calendar and leafed through it, seeing mundane bookings for the usual dental business up to and past the day he’d died. He hadn’t made many notes other than the usual run of business, such as “needs flossing instructions,” and so on. I put that aside as well and turned to the notebooks.

These were less business and more personal, and the books were chronological. I put them in order and saw that they started four years before his death, about the time my mother had pushed me into dance classes. That was an interesting coincidence. I started the first entry and was soon sucked into my father’s strange narrative.

One entry began:

Veronica has given up on me and turned her attention to Harper. I feel sorry for the kid, but I don’t suppose it’ll do her any harm. I’m sure no good for them, but the watchers won’t bother them if they aren’t near me. They’re watching all the time, but I don’t know what I’ve done to get their attention. They even come to the office now. They just won’t leave me alone.

It sounded like my dad was paranoid and I supposed that was what my mother had been hinting at when she said he was odd. I was startled at the mention of “watchers,” echoing what Cary had told me about things that kept an eye on me, but I wasn’t sure how they connected to my father. Still, the parallel sent a chill over my skin.

The entries went on for a while about his frustrations with my mother and increasing references to “they” and “the watchers.” A little over a year later, the tone changed and the entries rarely spoke of business or even my mother and me.

It’s the nightmares. They’ve crept out into the daylight. How could I have missed that for so long? Maybe because they changed shape? They invade everything, infest everything. They’re like weevils, burrowing into the heart of everything and chewing it up from the inside out. They don’t even leave my wife and kid alone now. I see them trailing after Veronica and Harper when they leave for class. I have to make them stop.

He rambled on for a couple more years, trying to put his mysterious watchers off the scent, having nightmares both sleeping and awake. Then someone had come to see him—or that’s what he said, but I wasn’t sure if it had been a real person, a ghost, or some figment of his increasingly fractured imagination.