Haunted Worlds Read online

  Since then he knew that while it was comforting to have a lot of other people around, it was not a good idea to get too boxed in. It was like those situations where a woman gets groped in the press of bodies on a tightly packed train or bus. Best to keep his distance, so he could see the Green Hands coming for him.

  On this day he was at a large, sprawling mall with multiple levels. He didn’t know the name of the mall and wasn’t even sure which city he was in. He was already rationing his funds at this point, having emptied out his bank account shortly after he’d begun running, so for dinner he only allowed himself a small cup of coffee and one plain doughnut in the food court. Then, because he was so weary it was as though a filter of TV snow hung before his vision, he crossed his arms on the sticky table and rested his head on them. Yes, it was a risk—it was always a risk to sleep, anywhere—but he was not a machine. Never stop had to allow for at least teases of rest. He could only run for so long before he needed to recharge, so he could run again.

  Because his senses were so attuned now to the presence of others, he jolted awake a split-second before the person looming over his table could reach out to put a hand on his shoulder. Maybe he felt their presence displace the air, or caught a nearly subliminal whiff of perfume. In any case, he sat up, startled and wide-eyed, and scraped backwards in his chair.

  “Whoa, easy,” the female security guard said, holding up the hand she was going to touch him with. “Just wanted to ask if you’re okay—you’ve been asleep at this table for a couple hours now. Are you waiting for somebody?”

  “Two hours?” he replied, his head packed full of cotton.

  “Yeah, that I’ve noticed. The mall’s closing for the night, so I’m afraid you’ll have to move on. Do you need to call someone?”

  “Closing down?” Zetter looked to either side of him. All the tables that had been occupied when he’d first sat down with his frugal meal (by families with small children, teenage boys acting obnoxious to impress the girls in their pack, people who were not alone, were not running ) were empty now. A Latino man and a Latina woman in rumpled blue uniforms, on opposite ends of the food court, were spraying down and wiping the table tops.

  “Yes, it’s just past nine-thirty. The mall’s closed. You’ll have to leave now.”

  He stood up and slipped his arms through the straps of his backpack. He kept the backpack with him whenever he left his car, in case he was ever in a situation where he had to abandon the vehicle. This had happened a few times, but he’d been able to steal back to the car later.

  “Okay . . . sorry,” he muttered to the security guard, shuffling past her blearily, trying to remember in which direction an exit might lie. The floor plans of several malls he was better acquainted with overlapped in his mind, coming unbidden, confusing him even more instead of helping.

  But despite the disorientation brought on by having awoken abruptly after too little rest, Zetter found his way downstairs to one of the mall’s exits without any difficulty. Along the way, barred shutters were being drawn down over all the shop openings. Manikins, many of them faceless or even headless, stood frozen behind store windows like museum displays re-creating the life of an extinct alien race. Their poised, motionless, unnatural hands made him feel anxious.

  The spring night air was cool, with the faint smell of new life struggling to gain its foothold. The moon was full, the craters that caused people to liken it to cheese—in the way that humans often trivialized things greater than themselves—seeming especially vivid. His car looked remote and small, served up on a dinner plate of lamplight surrounded by empty darkness. He started across the lot toward his vehicle, glancing all around warily as he moved, like a soldier crossing a clearing. When he’d come here this afternoon he’d had to park far away because these empty slots had all been filled.

  Pine trees bordered the far side of the lot. It was the trees he watched most suspiciously. Any second now he expected to see a figure come running out from those dark trees: a clean-shaven white man in a neat business suit, eyes gleaming too feverishly, his grin too wide, and his arms held out in front of him, fingers hooked like talons, hands glowing a brighter green because the surrounding air was so dark.

  He was now equidistant between the mall’s entrance and his car cringing in its yellow pool. A crisp breeze came up, ran over him like water, and gooseflesh rose in its wake. He kept watching the trees as they grew closer, like a line of approaching figures garbed in black robes with peaked hoods. But he also kept shooting looks to either side. The wind caused an empty soda bottle to clatter across the pavement behind him, and he whirled around . . . relieved to find no smiling man in a black suit stretching his arms out to him, only paces away.

  At last he reached his car, tossed his backpack onto the passenger’s seat, locked himself inside, and exhaled a heavy shuddery breath.

  He still felt vulnerable, poised out here on an exposed plateau of darkness. Even with the lights off inside his inactive car, and him slumped down in gloom, the Green Hands would still be able to recognize the vehicle itself. If enough of them came . . . if they grew bold enough . . . if they were to smash his windshield with stones and grope in through the holes . . .

  Sleeping some more in his car was not an option, anyway: he could see the revolving red lights of a security vehicle as it started making its closing-time sweep of the lot that encircled the mall like a moat around an abandoned castle. He would be rousted a second time if he didn’t remove himself first. Better to get the shark swimming again. He had no destination, but he had half a tank of gas at present, so he could afford to drift aimlessly for a bit until he might spot another place where he could rest a little—preferably, once the new day broke, when he believed it would be safer.

  So he got the car rolling and pointed it toward one of the lot’s exits, before the roving red lights could swing in his direction.

  The side road he nosed along soon flowed into a highway. He went with its current, a dark ribbon of night, nearly empty but for distant red taillights floating like airborne embers. The full moon rode the sky alongside him, as if pursuing him.

  He put on his radio for a semblance of company, but the FM was just as noisy with grating static as the AM. When he thought he heard a man’s voice say Zetter behind the layer of static, he quickly shut the radio off.

  How did they know his name? How did they know him at all? Why did they want him? What had he done to them? What was he to them?

  Yet he knew he wasn’t the only one they’d targeted. Maybe all his life he’d brushed shoulders with people hunted, haunted, by the Green Hands. People whose harried, tense faces he’d dismissed as merely the manifestation of an anxious, anxiety-ridden society.

  He knew he wasn’t their only target because he had seen them touch someone else with their green hands.

  Until then he’d never known of the Green Hands—never suspected their existence, never heard so much as a rumor of them.

  It had happened like this.

  1. Deirdre

  It had been a Sunday evening. Who, he’d wondered when his wife Deirdre went to answer the front door, would be ringing the bell at this time? His sister, living in Rhode Island with her husband, would never come unannounced—though perhaps an old friend or two would, despite his dislike of unexpected guests. He heard Deirdre’s voice in their tiny front hallway, but didn’t catch the words. Curiosity roused him from lounging in their bed watching TV, and he went to go look for himself.

  Deirdre had left the living room door halfway open, so through it he saw her in the hallway, standing at the threshold to the front door, though at this angle he couldn’t see who was speaking to her. He hung back to listen.

  Deirdre’s coppery red hair was mussed, and she had pulled on a bathrobe because they hadn’t changed out of their sleep attire for the entire day, too comfortably lazy to even shower. Deirdre was forty, but to Zetter’s eyes just as attractive as when he had met her at twenty-five. Too attractive, he often fretted. The
y had argued over the years because of his jealousy, his insecurity. He was the first to admit that he was jealous and insecure. Who wouldn’t be, with a wife as good-looking as Deirdre? He always imagined how her coworkers must covet her. He sometimes checked her cell phone and laptop, and when she caught him at it their fighting would be long and awful. Conversely, she didn’t seem jealous at all, and even that would eat at him; didn’t she value him as he did her? Despite not sharing his affliction, did she comprehend that if she were ever to cheat on him, he would be utterly abandoned, lost in the world? That if the only person he really loved could betray him like that, then no other person could ever be trusted again? Maybe she would have sympathized more if her parents had been unfaithful to each other, as his had. They were both gone now, his parents, their own fighting only stilled in death, their twin stone plaques in the earth disingenuously serene.

  When he and Deirdre fought about his anxieties—especially when he gave voice to these fears and, in doing so, more than implied accusation—he would feel physically corrupted afterwards, as if guilt were an actual poison he’d masochistically injected into his own body.

  Yet even now he wondered: was this person at the door a persistent lover she was trying to shoo away? Some coworker so obsessed and bold he would even try to see her at the house, or who might not realize (through Deirdre’s intentional omission) that she had a husband at all?

  Watching his wife as she looked out into the evening’s deepening murk, Zetter could make out her words at least. She said, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

  Then Zetter saw an arm reach through the threshold toward his wife’s chest, as if to take hold of a breast. His heart rocketed in his own chest . . . but Deirdre seemed just as startled. She flinched back from the reaching hand. The stranger’s arm was covered in a black sleeve, such as that of a business suit, with a white shirt cuff peeking out its end. The suit made Zetter flash, irrationally, on the idea of Jehovah’s Witnesses come to sell them salvation. But there was another detail: the hand moving toward his wife appeared to glow faintly, a pallid bioluminescent green, in the gloom of their front hallway.

  It all happened in a moment. Deirdre didn’t recoil far enough, and the hand with its firefly glow pressed flat against her sternum, the V of bare skin between her breasts, and Deirdre disappeared.

  There was the barest sliver of a second in which Deirdre, poised at the doorway, seemed suspended between existence and nonexistence. In that eye-blink she appeared as a negative image of herself, the same phosphorescent green as the hand that had touched her, the hand that had then been promptly withdrawn. She was like an afterimage burned by the sun on Zetter’s eyes. Then Deirdre ceased to be, and the place where she’d been standing in her bathrobe and tousled red hair was empty.

  The person who had touched her then stepped through the open doorway, out of the night and into the hallway, as if to occupy the space where Deirdre had been.

  “Hey!” Zetter said in dazed protest, gaping.

  The man who had stepped into Zetter’s home turned his head to grin hugely at him, his gleaming eyes unblinking and fervid. He appeared to be younger than Zetter, perhaps in his thirties, with neatly cut sandy hair and a nicely fitted black business suit. His tie was green. His hands were green. He raised both of them and extended them toward Zetter, starting for the half-open door to the living room in which Zetter stood.

  Zetter couldn’t reach the door in time to close and lock it. Instead, he whirled in the opposite direction, streaking through the dining room and into the kitchen, and the back door of the little house he had shared with Deirdre for over a decade. He heard the grinning man behind him in pursuit, but somehow Zetter had the presence of mind to scoop his car keys off the kitchen table before he threw open the door and burst out into the darkness of his back yard. His driveway was just around the corner of the house, though his feet almost went out from under him on the slippery grass.

  He got the car door shut just as the grinning man slammed his body against it, hands splayed open against the glass. They glowed more distinctly out here than they had inside the house.

  The man was still thumping his hands across the windows and the car’s body as Zetter got it started and screeched out of his driveway, onto the quiet side road where his humble little house squatted.

  In the rearview mirror, Zetter saw the black-suited man still chasing after him, sprinting down the center of that drowsy little residential street, hands groping at the air, white grin reflecting the streetlights.

  Zetter had never looked back since.

  And he carried that final flash of Deirdre with him, like a strip of negative from which one no longer has a print.

  3. The Rest Stop

  He drove on the highway for an hour and forty minutes. He was vaguely conscious that he had crossed a state line. He had rolled his window down to let in the brisk spring night air, to keep himself from nodding off, regretting that he hadn’t hidden in a toilet stall in one of the mall’s department stores, to nap there sitting down until the mall opened again in the morning. Finally he gave in to exhaustion and pulled the car into a rest stop. He considered going inside the service building to buy another coffee to keep himself awake until daylight, but he didn’t think any amount of coffee could accomplish that at this point. He parked his car at the far edge of the lot, sank down low in his seat, and pulled a soft orange blanket over himself. It was the blanket Deirdre would cover herself with in the car. Deirdre had always complained of being cold, even in the warm months. He would tease her about it.

  He pressed a corner of the blanket to his nose, to see if he could detect a ghost of her perfume, the scent of her hair, some lingering essence, but there was nothing. It just smelled vaguely of himself.

  Sunk in his seat, tightrope walking the fine line between the waking and dream worlds, he found himself staring at the car’s closed glove box. He seemed to recall there was a pair of Deirdre’s winter gloves inside, made from soft leather. He wondered if those would retain any of her scent, but he couldn’t bring himself to reach out and open that little hatch, to take the gloves out and confront them.

  He dreamed that he had forgotten to roll his window up again. He dreamed that a man stood just outside the car, a man with sandy hair, reaching in to touch him on the head like a faith healer. He snapped awake with a gasp in his heart, but saw that the window was closed and no man dressed like a Jehovah’s Witness stood beside the car. He also saw that the sun had come up, though it was still low enough in the sky to indicate the day was young.

  He was cramped, but he felt a little better for the rest. His stomach complained, however, and so did his bladder. A headache had developed while he slept, too. Caffeine deprivation was the primary cause, he figured; he was addicted to coffee. Now was the time to get some, and he’d need to gas up again before he got back to moving.

  So Zetter slipped out of his car and, hands on his hips, stretched far backwards and then from side to side to work out some of the kinks. While rotating his head on his neck, to the accompaniment of grinding creaks, he saw three children playing in the parking lot, not very far from him. His car was still solitary here at the edge of the rest stop lot, so he presumed these kids belonged to one of those vehicles parked nearer to the service building, occupying themselves while their parents fetched them some breakfast sandwiches or such inside.

  Seeing that he had emerged from his locked car, the children stopped whatever it was they were doing to raise their heads and look directly at him.

  Zetter returned their gaze and saw they were two girls and a boy, ranging from maybe six to nine, with dark complexions and jet-black hair—perhaps Indian? Huge dark eyes in solemnly beautiful faces. The morning was very cool, so they wore padded winter coats, with their hands in mittens. They had been kicking at something on the ground between them.

  Zetter saw that their object of interest was a dead animal that had been flattened by a car in the lot, so long ago t
hat its fur was faded, its species unidentifiable.

  “Hi,” Zetter said, as they stared at him without blinking their outsized black eyes. He was already taking one step backwards toward his car.

  As one, the three small children broke into big white smiles and pulled the mittens off their hands, off their small green-glowing hands, to let them drop to the pavement. Then, as if at the sound of a starter gun, they charged at him, their mouths silent but their eyes seeming to giggle exuberantly.

  He made an instantaneous decision, though it was more animal instinct than strategy. He knew he didn’t have time to slip his hand into his jeans pocket for his car keys, extract them, unlock his door (even though his key chain had a remote), open the door, duck inside, close and lock the door before the trio of children were upon him. So instead, he turned in the opposite direction from his vehicle and ran, sprinting, hoping his long legs would carry him well beyond their reach so that he could swing back around toward his car again, this time with more of a space between himself and his pursuers.

  Daylight? Children instead of adults? Nonwhite children? Two of them female children? Either there had been all sorts of Green Hands all along, or else the original beings had spread their condition, their corruption, like a disease.