A Stab in the Dark
or alternatively: Quality Time with the Recently Deceased
Tucker wanted to like the new kid. Truly. He did.
Danny was funny and reasonably friendly, he played the same kinds of video games as Tucker and was more of a nerd than Sam, and the degree to which the universe seemed to despise him really made Tucker feel better about his own life. Danny was like a walking, wisecracking schadenfreude machine, and watching him try to open a locker or wrestle with the zipper on his backpack for ten minutes or whatever was incredibly cathartic. Did that make Tucker a bad person? Most likely yes.
The point is, it should have been easy for Tucker to like Danny. And it would've been, if Danny weren't so incredibly suspicious and weird.
The half-hour-or-more disappearances became a recurring and noticeable phenomenon over the course of the week. Every few days Danny would give some terrible excuse to duck out of class and then be gone for an extremely unreasonable amount of time. Was he on his man period or something? (Sam's first suggestion.) Tucker would assume he had some sort of, like, digestive problem and leave him alone, but one time he happened to go to the bathroom right after Danny left, and Danny was most definitely not there. And there was only one bathroom on that floor of the building, and it was in perfect working order! The next most obvious conclusion was that he was ditching class to inject horse tranquilizers (or, ya know, smoke weed), but Danny just didn't seem like a stoner. He was too sharp and with it right after returning from his mysterious sojourns to the most forgotten cobwebby corners of Casper High. On top of that, there were the mostly-dissipated weird feelings and his stratospheric B.O., which was weird even for high school. And Sam said his hands were always, like, really cold.
Sam, incidentally, had been hanging out with him a lot. She said it was like being the unwitting protagonist of a Lovecraft novel. Tucker had two problems with this: first of all, people shouldn't read early twentieth century literature for fun, and second of all, who would want to live in a Lovecraft novel?! (When you hung out with Sam enough, you absorbed some things.)
However, when Tucker dragged himself through his front door after school on Tuesday, September 17th, he wasn't thinking about any of that. After all, he had other things in his life to deal with, like that essay he was planning to procrastinate on for weeks and then scramble to half-ass at 2 a.m., or how his policeman uncle-once-removed (or something like that) kept leaving his gigantic shoes right in the blind spot at the bottom of the stairs and eating all the cereal.
He took off his hat to run one absentminded hand through his fledgling dreads, ambled into the living room, and froze.
His aunt and uncle, Tristan's parents, were sitting on the blue sofa in front of the coffee table. He couldn't see their faces, but his mom in the nearest chair had his aunt's hand in a death grip, and they were all staring fixedly at the TV.
Tucker opened his mouth to ask something and then shut it. The volume was turned down so low that the news anchor's voice sounded rustling and strange, and that quiet along with the tightness in their shoulders strangled the words in his throat. Carefully, slowing his steps with some instinctual solemnity, he moved around behind his mom's chair so he could hear the news and see the shifting colors of the screen batter his aunt's face.
The ticker-tape at the bottom of the screen read, "Chicago serial killer claims another victim."
The anchors were Tiffany Snow and Lance Thunder. The channel was the local news.
Tucker literally jumped into the air when the doorbell rang. He nearly swallowed his kidneys and just managed to catch a stack of Better Homes and Beyond magazines before they fell off his mom's wicker nightstand-style table. His aunt and uncle glanced over, looking startled and red-eyed besides, and Tucker's mom gave him a meaningful glare.
"H...hi, Aunt Grace. Uncle Jay," he mumbled. They looked kind of out of it, slow to respond. Tucker crumpled his beret in one hand and gave a little half-wave as he turned away awkwardly. "Uhh...sorry."
As soon as he made it through the threshold and out of sight, he jogged to the front door.
Sam was standing on the faded welcome mat, finger raised to push the doorbell button again. Her hair was up in a full ponytail with purple clips holding back her half-bangs, and her eyes were a little wild. As soon as she registered who it was, she started back down the driveway toward her currently double-parked blue Maserati. "If there's any possibility we can stop this, we have to investigate," she tossed back over her shoulder. "Get in the car."
It was that or stay a moment longer in the unnerving, silent apartment. Tucker called in, "I'm going out with Sam! Back before sunset, I promise!" He waited a beat for his mom's faint affirmative, then didn't even look back as he closed the door behind him and hurried after her. The gravel crunched like popcorn under his sneakers, too loud in the afternoon sun.
~(*0*)~
Sam pulled up and parked about two feet from the curb in front of the weirdest house Tucker had ever seen. It was a regular two-story brownstone for the most part, but the address number was on a neon sign on the side of the house rather than painted tastefully next to the door, and there was what looked like a modified observatory just visible over the edge of the roof. Were Danny's parents astronomers or something?
She marched up the paved path to the door with the same air of purpose she'd maintained since showing up at Tucker's house unannounced. He didn't know how she kept it up; just watching her was exhausting. The button for the doorbell was hanging out of the wall by a few loose wires, so Sam knocked three times, briskly. While they waited, Tucker eyed the bronze doorknob set into the light blue door. There was some weird detailing around the keyhole, an engraved horizontal leaf shape. The inset circle for the keyhole turned it into a small eye.
Someone yelled something muffled inside the house, and then the door swung open to reveal a pretty red-haired woman in her late 50s, wearing a teal tee shirt and leggings. She gave them a puzzled smile. "Hi! Can I help you?" She had a husky, low voice that reminded Tucker of his old gym teacher.
Sam smiled warmly, which gave Tucker the creeps. "Hey! We're friends of Danny's. From school!"
She cocked her head inquisitively in a way that reminded Tucker of Danny, and a few strands of hair escaped her neat bun. "Oh! Sorry, he didn't say anything about having friends over. Come on in!" She pushed the door shut, then turned and craned her head toward the staircase Tucker could see to the right, just beyond the green-walled entryway. "DANNY?!" Tucker winced. Damn, this lady was loud.
"YEAH?" Danny's voice echoed from somewhere above them. Rapid footsteps sounded from that direction, quieter than Tucker would have expected based on the volume of everything else in this house. He'd become aware as soon as Mrs. Fenton shut the door of about six things whirring, what sounded like a leaky air conditioner blasting, and irregular mechanical beeps that seemed to emanate from every corner of the room. Danny trotted around the corner into the entryway and stopped short. "Oh, uh, hey."
Tucker mustered a smile but let Sam do the talking. She did not disappoint. "Hey! Sorry to drop in unannounced, but you said we should come over sometime soon to play Doomed 4: The Kiss of Doom, right? And my parents' housekeepers are doing the bathrooms right now so I thought I'd get out of the way for a few hours." She sounded downright apologetic. Maybe miracles were real. "Anyway, you free?"
Danny took a visible moment to process this spiel. "Uhh, yeah! Yeah." His mom smiled and headed away without further ado, and Danny started back toward the stairs. "Come on up."
The stairs were dark wood with a blue carpet, and they creaked when Sam and Tucker put their weight in the bowed middle of a step. Tucker held the railing and kept to the edges. "Dude, how did you get the new Doomed this early?! I thought it didn't come out 'til mid-October!" Okay, so maybe Tucker was getting a bit distracted from the mission, but he'd been excited for this game for months.
Danny smirked as they made it to the landing and padded down a hallway toward a white door with one of those dry-erase calendars on it (still displaying events from December 2018. Nice). "One of my mom's friends from college works in production. He lets us bug-test sometimes."
"Sweet." Sam caught Tucker grinning and sent him a warning glance behind Danny's back. Right. Possible serial killer. What exactly were they doing here, again?
They followed Danny through the white door into a room painted a surprising shade of lime-green. The twin bed in the corner was covered in a blue-black comforter printed with tiny stars and corkscrewing galaxies lined with visible nebulae in purple and green. The walls were adorned mostly with pictures of Danny and some combination of family members. The family seemed to consist of his mom, a younger woman who looked a lot like her (sister?), and an absolutely enormous man whom Tucker assumed was Danny's dad, and who seemed to be wearing some variation of an obnoxiously orange Hawaiian shirt in every picture. Only a few photos showed Danny with kids their age–friends from Chicago, most likely.
Sam clicked her tongue impatiently while Danny sat down to boot up his computer (Tucker would judge him for not having a laptop, but he could understand the benefits of a more powerful wired-in setup. Also, it would maybe be a bit hypocritical and unfair to Sheryl, his current PDA). Tucker could see in her eyes the moment she decided on her angle of attack. "Crazy what they're saying on the news, right? About the Chicago killer dumping another body?"
Tucker just managed to suppress a snort. Did she really think that was going to–Danny had gone still. Noticeably. Blue eyes darted quickly, guiltily to Tucker and then back to his screen. Tucker's heart started hammering, and one foot slid back toward the door, stealthily.
Then Danny responded, keeping his focus on the screen, "Yeah, I heard about that." A pause. "Uh, sorry about...I mean, he hurt your...cousin, or, uh, something. Right, Tuck?"
Oh. After the whole Dash and Kwan confrontation, he must have asked around for an explanation. The reaction hadn't been guilty; he'd just felt awkward talking this way about a guy who'd damaged Tucker's family.
Then and there, Tucker pretty much exonerated Danny in his mind. He probably ditched classes because he had a serious vaping habit, or—and here was a novel idea—he just really hated his classes. Both miles more likely than, like, "astral projecting with knife" or something. "Yeah, my cousin Tristan. It's cool, though, he's totally okay."
Sam, however, apparently hadn't even considered tact as an explanation for Danny's behavior (of course) and wanted one last stab, so to speak, at getting him to expose his guilt. "You guys have to admit, though, with how popular true crime stuff is, having a serial killer in our city...I mean, it's pretty sick."
Danny goggled at her like he was the one getting ready to run for it. "Uhh, that's not really my thing." His right hand, resting on the computer desk, curled into a fist, and his eyes strayed into a corner, unfocused. "I think anyone who could end someone else's whole life on purpose is disgusting."
Woah. Tucker was kind of taken aback. He'd never seen someone look so angry talking about impersonal tragedy. Danny's lip actually curled up in revulsion before he seemed to sort of shake himself and retreat back onto stabler conversational ground. "I mean, you know. It's kind of a big deal." He laughed lightly. "The biggest deal, really."
"Yeah, I agree." Tucker glared pointedly at Sam, who seemed almost put out to discover that Danny was almost definitely not a psychotic killer. "So...Kiss of Doom?"
Danny grinned mischievously. "I got three consoles that can hook in. Time to be complete hypocrites and murder some some NPCs."
~(*0*)~
Okay, so it was official now: Tucker genuinely liked Danny. He was still a pretty unknown quantity, but Tucker already vibed with him more than he did with Mikey or any of the other guys he hung out with to talk about coding. He, Sam, and Danny played Doomed for a while, trading snarky commentary and trying their best to reenact the worst, most physically impossible glitches (Danny was terrifyingly flexible, but Sam and Danny agreed that Tucker did the best faces), and then when they got bored of repeatedly losing a boss fight and staying stuck on one level, they walked down to the nearby mall with Danny's wallet and the loose change from Sam's Maserati (the irony) and bought cheap slushees. They were basically just wandering around between surprisingly empty stores when Sam stopped, a subtle smirk on her face. "Hey, you guys ever worked in retail? Don't answer that, Tucker, I know everything about you and you've only worked at Walgreens."
Danny shrugged. "Nope. I haven't actually had a job yet."
Sam looked delighted in a very evil, very Sam kind of way. "Then I've got something you've gotta see."
She led them to a discreet employee access door at the back of her favorite punk clothing outlet, Stick a Fork in It, and quickly scanned for witnesses before barging in. Tucker and Danny followed, albeit a bit more reluctantly. They ended up in a series of rough hallways that were floored in cement and walled with unplastered plywood, well-lit overhead by dangling lamps with black wires strung like telegraph lines between them.
Sam swept her arms out palms-up movie-villain style, walking backward and smirking. "This, naïve children, is the dark underside of the Westside Mall." Her voice echoed with a strange flat quality down the corridor, which was utterly empty.
"Woah." Tucker jogged down to where the corridor ended, only to discover that it really just intersected another identical hallway. This one had two doors bearing emergency exit warnings on the push bars. "Do these things go through the whole mall?"
"Yep, most stores have an access door to them. It's apparently a pretty common feature, although not so much in smaller malls like Westside. They're for evacuations and also, like, deliveries when they don't want to deal with all the people wandering around aimlessly."
"That's too bad, 'cuz these tunnels seem like an awesome place to wander around aimlessly." Danny took a few running steps and jumped up, trying to touch one of the simple metal lamps, but despite his truly impressive hang time it remained just beyond reach. "How did you find out about these?!"
"They don't really tell employees, but my ex-boyfriend I met when I worked at Stick a Fork was the owner's son, and he let me in on it. We even had a picnic in here once on our lunch break."
Tucker cracked open one of the doors on the adjoining corridor and quickly pulled it shut when he was treated to a view of the line outside one of the mall's public bathrooms. "Yo, these doors aren't even all in businesses! They're just all over the mall in plain view!"
Sam had joined Danny in trying to touch the dangling lights, though he tended to get a lot closer even though he was only maybe an inch taller, and she let her boots clonk down loudly on the concrete before responding. "Yeah, it's the worst kept secret of the Amity Park retail industry. It's not even really a secret, they're just fire corridors, but I like the vibe. They've got mystery."
Danny snorted. "I'm with the delivery guys on this one. These tunnels are cool 'cuz they let you get all over the place without having to deal with people. I need a system like this for, like, everywhere I go."
Inevitably, someone gave in to childhood instincts and voiced what they were all thinking about the coolness of the air and how the long corridors stretching ahead of you looked so inviting and run-able. Really, their true purpose was rather self-evident. And then they were sprinting down the hallways and skidding around corners, laughing breathlessly, converse and combat boots slapping oh-so-satisfyingly on the concrete underneath them, getting just as hopelessly lost as they'd ever hoped they could be.
Tucker was the first to tire out. "Hey! Flyboy and Wandergirl!" Admittedly not his best work, but he was literally wheezing. He dropped to the ground and leaned heavily against the nearest plywood support beam. "Stop trying to ditch me!"
Sam's laughter echoed around the next bend in the corridor. To her credit, though, in a few seconds he could hear the sound of her and Danny's feet heading back toward him. A moment later they reappeared in the flesh, both breathing heavily and stumbling over their feet.
"Dude, I shouldn't have eaten that whole slushee," Sam groan-laughed, clutching her stomach and propping herself up on the wall opposite him. "And I definitely shouldn't have gotten blue raspberry."
"Yeah, the laws of nature say you shouldn't ever get blue raspberry." Tucker pulled a face. "Just get lemonade."
"I think she's too goth for that," Danny piped in just as Sam retorted with "I don't like yellow, okay?!" and they all fell over themselves laughing again, though maybe Sam's red face wasn't entirely from the running.
"Is there anything else to do at the Westside mall?" Danny asked, idly gesturing with one limp hand. "Right now I'm getting the impression it's just Starbucks, Lululemon, Macy's, and an unnecessary number of frozen yogurt places slowly moldering into bankruptcy."
"Yep, that's pretty much it." Sam shrugged. "Oh, and the rooftop is supposedly the best sunset view in Amity. Is it sunset yet?"
"Nope." Danny shrugged as Tucker pulled out his PDA to confirm.
"Yeah, he's right. Sunset's about an hour and a half away."
"Shit. Oh, well." Sam pushed herself to her feet by bracing her back against the wall. "We'd better head back now, then."
Tucker stared blankly at her. "To do...what?"
She crossed her arms and started clomping away, leaving Tucker and Danny no choice but to scramble to their feet. "Finish that level. Seriously, am I the only one around here with any tenacity?"
It was almost seven when Sam and Tucker left Danny's house. They could still the sun over the ridges of the cookie-cutter suburban houses to the west, but the sunset was splattering orange and pink over the grey clouds rolling lazily across the dome of the sky. Tucker tripped over a garden hose left lying across the Fentons' path, bent down to twitch it back onto the grass, and from his crouch caught a flash of grey in the corner of his field of vision.
The small grey fox was sitting by the corner of the Fenton home, next to where the coils of the garden hose hung against the brick wall. It stared at him with those button-black eyes, then with deliberate slowness turned and slipped around the side of the brownstone. Before Tucker could even try to get Sam's attention, it had disappeared into the dark space between the house and the fence.
Well, that was horrible, and Tucker very much disliked it. Despite a pretty fun day with a new casual friend, Tucker hopped into Sam's passenger seat just a beat too fast and didn't relax until they were speeding at 35 through the residential streets.
~(*0*)~
Tucker's aunt and uncle were gone when he got home. His mom scolded him for cutting it so close to sunset, but her mind was clearly elsewhere. When his dad got home thirty minutes later, his mom exchanged a few hushed words with him and then left him to set down his briefcase, loosen his tie, and turn on the news. She and Tucker's aunt and uncle had apparently recorded it with Maurice in mind. Tucker made a quick sandwich from the ingredients in the fridge and then wandered through, eyes averted, toward the stairs.
The staircase was the darkest part of the apartment even in daytime because there weren't any windows that looked in on the space. It was narrow, hemmed in by high walls on both sides, with no railing and no lightbulb overhead (an oversight when the builders were doing the wiring). The stairs themselves were an uncarpeted dark mahogany that blended together so that you had to place each foot very carefully, and even then people coming down would often imagine a phantom step at the end only to thump too hard and too soon onto the floor. Tucker hated that little heart-stopping jolt of wrongness; when he was a kid he would always make sure one of the upstairs rooms had a door open and the light on so that at least the top third or so of the staircase was visible. He'd abandoned that practice after his dad had accused him of conspiring against the polar bears and being personally responsible for sustaining global warming. At sixteen years old, he was pretty comfortable now with getting up and down when he needed to.
Halfway up the stairs, he started to get that feeling.
It wasn't like nails on a chalkboard, it was more like...drinking hand sanitizer. Swallowing it in big oily slippery gulps and feeling the sharp, sour chemicals slide into his stomach and swish sickly around his tongue. He swallowed reflexively and debated retreating to the living room. He wasn't afraid, per se, but even the buffest, badass-est bodybuilder would have to admit that he had good reason to trust his instincts.
His upraised right foot was hovering above the next step up. Slowly, he braced his left forearm on the wall and lowered the foot onto the step behind him. He turned over his shoulder to look back at the warm lights spilling out onto the first step. "Dad?"
His dad's shadow shifted across the floor, just barely visible from beyond the doorframe. "Yeah?" The warm light flickered once.
The feeling faded down a bit, mixing with regular nerves until Tucker wasn't quite sure if it was real. Maybe he'd just had a bad burrito. And either way, what was he going to do, never go upstairs again? "...Nothing."
"Mhmm." His dad had already refocused on the screen.
Tucker breathed out once, long and shaky. He turned and jogged up the stairs.
As soon as he hit the landing, he banged open the bathroom door and scrabbled for the light switch. The whole landing became visible, if dim: about fifteen feet of white walls and light brown carpeting, with a dark splooch creeping from the bottom of the bathroom door from the bathtub overflowing and flooding the room when he was six. The space was really more of a hallway, just a bit wider than the stairs, so that if Tucker stretched out his arms he could just leave fingerprints on both walls' tidy wainscotting. He opened the other three nearest doors, flipping switches with blind, brusque efficiency. Finally, when the landing was fully (if not brightly) illuminated, he breathed a sigh of relief and leaned back on the closet door.
There was a girl at the other end of the hall.
Tucker would be pretty sure later that he yelped, but he didn't actually hear it. She had blue hair in a dirty, tangled ponytail with pieces escaping. She was wearing all black clothes. At first she wasn't quite looking at him, more down and to the right, but at his silent yell her head snapped up and she started toward him, movements too fluid, like a sped-up, grainy tape of someone walking underwater.
Tucker bolted for the stairs, but her course took her deceptively fast to cut him off. He scurried back to grab the doorknob of his room—hadn't he just opened that door?—but it wouldn't turn. Then he was backed into the wall with her feather-light hands on his shoulders and his inner monologue wasn't doing anything but screaming.
"You have to remember," she whispered. Her eyes were red-rimmed and impossibly angry. "You need to remember me."
From a few yards away one might almost mistake her for human, but this close Tucker could see how her ripped black jeans exposed too-pale flesh that bulged in a way he'd never seen on a human being. Her skin seemed to be almost writhing, a grotesque parody of life. "Uh, I…?" His voice cracked out a high-pitched whimper, and he swallowed laboriously. Apparently that wasn't good enough, because she twitched impatiently and dropped her hands from his shoulders, pacing a few steps down the landing. She kept making bizarre, choked-off little noises in her throat. One hand slid around, not through the air in a careless gesture that made Tucker's stomach rebel.
She dug her hands into her hair in frustration, fingers slipping throughthe strands, and Tucker couldn't help but feel a spike of queasy sympathy despite his terror. "Uh...miss?" He licked his lips and swallowed more air down his dry throat. "Is there anything I can…."
Reality bent. Tucker scrambled to push himself backward through the wall as she whirled on him, loose strands of hair drifting gravity-free as the landing tilted wildly sideways. Colors screamed in fractured voices. The girl's pale makeup cracked and flaked off piece by piece to reveal something terrible and...infested underneath. And her voice
seemed to come from everywhere as she screamed
You
will
re
r
me
~(*0*)~
"–ctim's name was Victor Schulker, a 46-year-old Canadian national stopping in Amity on his way to the Pere Marquette hunting grounds outside of St. Louis."
Tucker was on the couch. Tucker was on the couch, and his eyes were open.
"Mr. Schulker had no close relatives, but coworkers at CrossHares Fishing and Game Store in Alberta were surprised and unnerved when notified of the incident by police." Tucker was on the couch, and his ears hurt, and the TV display read three in the morning, and he didn't remember going to sleep. Over a thin sound-blanket of static, a clock ticked loudly. From behind her desk, Tiffany Snow stared at the camera for a moment of bad editing, and then the box in the upper left-hand corner that had been displaying pictures of the victim, usually wearing camo and grinning over some gigantic fish, expanded to fill the screen.
In the slightly shaky video, a weedy-looking white guy with a brown goatee jumped as a microphone was shoved under his nose. "It's just shocked all of us here," he said, glancing into the camera and then looking away guiltily. Text at the bottom of the screen identified him as the manager of the CrossHares store where the victim had worked. "Victor wasn't the friendliest guy, but we respected him, and he was a damn good hunter. Best I've ever seen. Never went anywhere without his rifle and a knife or two, either. Can't imagine how someone was able to get the jump on him." He shook his head, accent creeping more into his vowels as he got more affected. "What a waste."
The screen shrunk back into a smaller box, once more giving Tiffany Snow center stage. "A waste indeed." She gave Tucker soulful, sympathetic eyes for a second, then launched back into her lines, looking like a peppy shark with her slightly overlarge white teeth. "And thank you to the Alberta Inquirer for obtaining this interview for our viewers here in Amity. Now, according to the statement delivered by Police Commissioner Davis this morning, Mr. Schulker's body was found early in the morning last Friday, September 13, in a dumpster behind the Pins and Needles Bowling Alley at the entrance to the Westside Mall. Police have been sitting on this situation for the last four days, but this morning they made the decision to ask the public for any information they might have."
The corner box reabsorbed the whole screen, this time showing Amity's harried police commissioner, sunlight gleaming off his bald head and the buttons on his formal uniform. He and six other officers were arrayed at the top of the Amity courthouse stairs, flanked by the columns that just a week ago (had it really only been a week?) Tristan and his friends had mentioned filming for their play. They cast long shadows over the men and women onstage. "We ask that anyone with information pertaining to this heinous act to call in to our tip-line immediately," the commissioner rumbled. "We are doing the absolute utmost we can to protect the city we all love and ensure that you and your children are safe. No further questions." The crowd of journalists, more than Tucker had ever seen in Amity before, erupted, shoving microphones and cameras in the faces of the unfortunate officers now struggling to edge their way down the marble steps.
The video minimized one last time to reveal Tiffany Snow positively beaming for an instant before she schooled her face into a more appropriately grave expression. Tucker could just see the reflection of his own terrified eyes superimposed on her smooth, poreless face. "There you have it. Don't forget to call in any tips to the police–or, if you'd prefer, our own tip-line here at the Amity Local News" –she proceeded to rattle off a number, feral grin threatening the edges of her immaculately lipsticked mouth again– "and stay safe out there, Amity Park."