Out of the Smoke

I didn't hear him come.

That is what I tell myself when I cannot sleep. I tell myself that there was no sound, that a man had walked up behind me over four hundred feet of open ground in a field of gravel and dead leaves, and I had heard nothing. It is not quite true. I heard, in the last minute, a number of small things I did not think about. A drip of water in the stone. A rustle in the hedge. The faint click of a latch somewhere below the hill, rusty and slow, like a gate in a dream. I heard them the way you hear the refrigerator in the night. I put them away.

I was standing on the path between the pines with the flowers in my arm, as June had told me, and I was not turning round.

In my ear, the net had gone mad.

Camera three is down. Say again, camera three is out. Four's out. Confirm, four—four's out. What's the feed on seven? Seven's out. The bored voices were gone. They tumbled over one another, quick and ragged, a dozen men talking at once. Is it the relay? Is it the cable? Check the junction. Someone check the box. A dog barked, far off. A man swore. And through all of it, steady and flat, rose the voice of Frank Dunleavy, like a rock in a river.

"Quiet on the net. Quiet. Everyone hold your positions. It's a fault in the line. Pruitt."

"Here, sir."

It was a warm voice, a slow dry baritone, unhurried. I felt a fine cold wire tighten at the base of my skull.

"You're closest to the service lane. Take a flashlight and go check the junction box on the north wall. It'll be a gray cabinet at the base of the third lamp post. See if the line's been cut. Three minutes. Go."

"Copy."

That was all. Just copy. A click, and he was gone.

"Maren," said Dunleavy. "Stay where you are. Don't move. It's a camera fault. We've got you on the others."

"Frank—"

"Don't talk. Don't move. I've got eyes on you."

"June said—"

"I know what June said." His voice cracked on the edge of a shout, and he reined it in. "I heard. I'll deal with it. I need you to stand still and keep your mouth shut. We're a hundred men. Nothing can happen."

I stood.

I stood in the dark with the white chrysanthemums crushed against my coat and my heart going like a drum. Around me the pines moved and whispered. I could see my breath. I could see, a few yards down the slope, the pale fall of a headstone, and beyond it a drift of mist, curling slowly upward from the hollow like something being poured out of a jug.

Nothing can happen.

"Ms. Ostrander."

…

It was the same voice.

I had not heard it for twelve hours. I had heard it through a telephone speaker in a motel room with a cup of coffee spilled on the carpet, and it had spoken of my daughter's name, and of a tape, and of a cop in a gray coat. It was soft. It was low and level and unemphatic, and perfectly civil. It had the dry, patient, well-worn smoothness of a knife that has been honed ten thousand times on the same stone. It spoke from behind me, a little to the left, and so close that I felt the warmth of the breath on my neck.

"Don't move."

My body obeyed before my mind could. Every muscle in my back went rigid. The flowers slid from my arm and fell to the gravel at my feet, and I heard them, a dull soft patter, and I could not look down.

"That's very good. That's wonderful. Stay just like that."

"Who—"

"We've spoken, you and I." A pause. "Not for long. Fast runner."

I shut my eyes.

I could hear him breathing. I could hear his coat. He wore a heavy cloth, wool or canvas, that rubbed against itself as he shifted his weight. I could smell something, not oranges this time but a clean sharp scent of soap, a drugstore soap, and under it, faintly, wet earth.

"Frank," I said.

I didn't say it to him. I said it to the little bead behind my ear, softly, and my voice cracked in the middle. "Frank. He's here. He's behind me. Close the net."

…

There was a silence on the channel.

It was a brief one. It lasted about as long as it takes to draw a breath. And then I heard Dunleavy, hoarse and sharp and ringing, shout the order I'd have given anything to hear.

"Close the net! All units, close the net! Two and five, you have the path! Everybody in! Everybody in, now!"

I waited.

I waited for the thunder of boots. I waited for a dog's baying, a floodlight, a shout from the trees. I waited with every nerve in my body strung like a wire, for the hundred men who had been stationed in the dark to rise from their hiding places and come running up the hill. I thought: they're here. They're a few yards away. They've been watching me all night.

The pines whispered. The mist crept up the slope.

Nobody came.

It is a hard thing to describe, that emptiness. It was not a sudden silence. It was the long slow dawning absence of an event that should have happened. I stood in the middle of a field of the dead and listened to the net, and heard Dunleavy shouting, Two! Five! Do you copy? Seven! Respond! and heard no answer. Not one. Not a click. The voices that had chattered in my ear for an hour were gone, as though a hand had reached into the world and turned a dial.

"Frank, you still trust your people that much?"

It came from behind me, quietly. It was almost kind.

…

I would like to say that I fought.

I would like to tell you that I turned, and drove my knee up, as I had in the vault, and that the blow found its mark. I had the strength. I had the anger, God knows. But when I tried to move, a hand closed over my shoulder, and I felt something press against the bone, just below the collar, a flat cold square of metal no bigger than a matchbook, hard and thin. There was a tiny dry click.

My whole left side went dead.

It did not hurt. That was what terrified me. There was no pain, no burn, no shock. There was only a vast cold emptiness, as if I had been unplugged. My arm fell. My leg folded. The ground came up at me, and I heard a thin ugly sound that I realized was my own voice, a choked, wheezing, wordless gasp, and I went down on my knees on the gravel with my face in the flowers.

Someone caught me under the arm. A hand like a vise. It lowered me, quite gently, to the ground.

"Easy now," said the voice. "Easy. It wears off. It's only a nerve." And then, with the faintest dry note of amusement: "Don't you struggle, Ms. Ostrander. You'll only tire yourself."

I lay on my side.

The dead stones loomed over me against the sky. I could see the underbellies of the pines, black and ragged, and a single star. I could see, a foot from my face, a crushed white chrysanthemum with a drop of dew on one petal. My mouth was full of the taste of iron. I lay there and heard Dunleavy in my ear, a long way off, a tiny frantic whisper, shouting my name.

"Maren! Maren! Talk to me!"

I tried. I tried to say he's here, and what came out was a bubble of spit.

Then the smoke came.

…

It came from nowhere. One moment there was a star, and the next the star was gone, and the whole world had turned white. It poured over us in a silent flood, thick and cold and smelling of burnt sugar, rolling downhill from the pines, rising from the ground, bursting out of the grass in great soft billows. I could not see the man who knelt beside me. I could not see my own hand. The beam of a flashlight, somewhere to the left, wavered and flared and was swallowed in a dull glow.

"Where is she?" I heard someone shout. "I can't see her! Where is she?"

Not Dunleavy. Another voice. A long way off. And then the hands were under my arms.

He dragged me.

I could feel it, though I could not feel my left leg. I was a sack, a bundle of limp rags, bumping and scraping over the ground. The gravel gave way to turf and the turf to mud. The white roared around me. I smelled mold and iron and the sweet wet reek of a drain. I heard the soft rhythmic grunt of a man doing heavy work, and under it, the faint patter of water on stone.

"Don't," I said. "June."

"Hush."

"My daughter—"

"Is perfectly safe," said the voice. "For the moment."

Something clanged. A heavy iron lid, lifted and let fall. A black mouth opened at my feet, and I smelled the cold breath of the earth, and felt myself tipped forward and carried down.

…

I won't tell you all of it.

There was a tunnel. It was narrow and wet and tall enough for a stooped man, a brick pipe with a curved ceiling, slimed with green, with a trickle of water running down the middle that soaked my shoes. It sloped down for a long way. Somebody had been here before us. There were work lights clipped to the wall every fifty feet, a string of small yellow bulbs glowing dully in the dark. There were boot-prints in the mud. There was a rope, strung along the wall, for a handhold. All of it was neat. All of it was prepared. It had been laid out and checked and set in order, like a stage, by someone who had had days.

Nobody has been in here, I thought, stupidly. Nobody looked.

They had a hundred men and nobody looked down.

After a while the feeling came back into my leg. It came in a rush of pins and needles so fierce that I gasped aloud, and the man who held me by the collar paused, and without turning his head said, "Better?" in a tone of polite inquiry.

"Where are you taking me?"

"Somewhere with a little less audience."

We came out into the air.

It was a sudden opening, a ragged hole in a brick wall, overgrown with bramble. A smell of earth and rot and the green breath of dead things. The night came in around us, big and cold, with a wind in it, and I lay on my back and looked up through a roof of broken glass. It was a greenhouse. A huge one, a Victorian structure of iron ribs and rusted panes, gutted and long abandoned. The panels were smashed. Weeds grew through the floor. Rows of clay pots stood on the stone benches, full of black stalks, the brittle skeletons of flowers that had died years ago. Overhead hung the tatters of a canvas blind. The moon shone through, gray and fractured, and laid a pattern of broken light across the floor.

"The flower house," said the voice. "For the old section. A florist's, once, for the funerals. It closed in '88." A faint sound, like a man easing his shoulders. "Quiet here. The wall's thick. No one goes in."

I turned my head.

He was standing a few feet away, with his back to the moon, a dark shape in a heavy coat. He was tall. He was broad. He had one hand pressed flat against his ear, as a man does who is listening to something very faint. The other hung at his side. A black cloth covered the lower half of his face, from the bridge of the nose to the chin. Above it his eyes were pale and still and perfectly calm.

"Mr. Voss," I said.

"If you like."

He raised his free hand to the mask. He took hold of the edge of the cloth between thumb and finger, delicately, and drew it down over his chin.

I saw him then.

I saw a heavy pale face, a gray crew cut, a pair of rimless glasses shining blue in the moonlight like two small ponds. I saw the long kindly lines at the corners of the eyes. I saw the slow, grave, courteous curve of a smile. I had never seen this man in my life. But I had heard his name, over a radio, a dozen times that evening, in a warm slow voice that said only copy.

Officer Pruitt.

"Good evening, Ms. Ostrander," said the man who had been Officer Ray Pruitt, in a warm and cello-deep and utterly unhurried voice. "I'm sorry for the inconvenience. I think you'll find your daughter very much better off for being kept out of it."

I heard a sound.

It came faintly, tinny, from the bead behind my ear, which had somehow not been torn away. It was thin and frantic and small. It was the voice of a girl, hoarse with terror, shouting from a very long way off.

"Mom! Mom, he's gone! He's not in the seat, Devon, the seat's empty—the doors—the doors won't open! Somebody locked the doors! Mom! Mom, something's ticking!"

And then there was only static.