Haunted Worlds Read online

  He ran in the direction of the highway, and in his frantic state of mind even considered forsaking his car and flagging down someone else’s vehicle. But what would he tell the driver if he proved successful? (Though he knew it was more likely he’d only inspire anyone who saw him into increasing their speed.) Would he tell them he was being chased by three homicidal tykes, the touch of whose stubby little fingers would unmake him?

  Still bolting toward the highway, before he could start arcing to the right to circle back toward his vehicle, Zetter saw a tractor-trailer truck coming up fast on his left, having peeled off the highway onto the ramp to the rest stop. He managed to dig down in himself for a further surge of speed, to get past the truck before it could cut him off. If he had to stop abruptly to let it rumble past him, that might be all the time the children needed to catch up to him.

  Yet he made it across the width of the exit ramp to the guard rail, where he did have to skitter to a stop lest he topple himself right over it onto the highway. He heard the truck driver lay on his horn and thought the man must be angry at him for having dashed right in front of him. But as the truck’s air brakes hissed, Zetter heard a series of thuds and thumps, and even through the driver’s closed window he could hear the man yelling incoherently.

  Zetter turned toward the vehicle, which had come to a stop and loomed idling, to see the driver half jumping, half falling from his cab. He could also see several small dark heaps underneath the length of the trailer. Hoping that he wasn’t misinterpreting what he saw, Zetter started jogging back toward the truck.

  The driver had dropped to hands and knees to look under his vehicle and cried out, “Oh my God, no . . . oh God, no! No, no, no!”

  But Zetter wanted to cackle. He wanted to whoop, “Yes, yes, yes!”

  The truck had struck all three of the children who had been pursuing him. He couldn’t have planned it better if he had tried. One of them was still pinned under a rear wheel of the tractor, little more showing that an outflung arm. The other two, further back, were flattened like the dead animal they’d been playing with only a minute before, the whole of the intestines pressed out of one, the head of the other so squashed and emptied out it was just a sleeve of skin, and all this spread along smears of blood with the fanged pattern of tire tracks. Zetter could only tell the two bodies under the trailer had been the girls by their long hair.

  Maybe he giggled, because the driver suddenly jerked his head around to look up at him. The stocky, middle-aged man—with his white-stubbled jowls and a baseball cap like a souvenir from a mundane life that was now irretrievably behind him—had tears in his eyes. Zetter wondered if the man was crying for the children or for himself. Zetter hoped he wasn’t smiling; he couldn’t tell. The man wailed at him, “They just ran right out in front of me! You saw it, man, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Zetter comforted him, coming a few steps closer. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Will you tell the police that?”

  “Of course,” Zetter lied. He had no intention of staying here long enough to be questioned by police.

  “Were they . . . they weren’t with you, were they? I thought they were running after you.”

  “No.”

  “They weren’t playing with you?”

  “I didn’t even see them. I saw a moose on the other side of the highway.” Zetter pointed. He was in Maine, right? If not, he hoped the story didn’t sound too absurd. “At least, I thought I did, so I was running to have a better look. I bet those kids saw it, too. They were probably doing the same thing.”

  “Oh God,” the driver bawled, looking around again at the three children he’d killed. “I can’t believe this . . .”

  Zetter dared step closer to the driver, and therefore to the nearest of the bodies: the boy crushed under the rear tractor wheel. He helped the driver stand up, taking his elbow to support him. It was a strange sensation, touching another human being after having been so careful, in recent times, not to allow anyone to touch him under any circumstances. The man fished out his cell phone. “I’d better call the police,” he blubbered, like a big child himself, though other bystanders were now gathering all around the truck and numerous cell phones had already come out. Zetter saw a teenage boy squatting down to shoot video of the smeared bodies with his phone.

  With the driver distracted by his call, Zetter approached the child pinned under the wheel, until he all but stood over that outflung hand. It was of extreme interest to him. The miniature hand with its slightly curled fingers was intact except for a deep gash in the center of the palm, almost like stigmata. But the detail that so intrigued Zetter was the fact that, in death, the boy’s hand no longer glowed green. It was the same brownish skin tone that his face had been.

  “It’s awful, ” a woman was sobbing hysterically. “Where are their parents? Does anyone know their parents?”

  “Why would they run in front of him like that?” some man behind Zetter asked.

  The driver looked up from his cell phone. “They saw a moose,” he sobbed.

  Zetter was about to turn away, figuring now was a good time to make his escape before the police arrived—and with the crowd growing thicker, the driver wouldn’t as readily notice the departure of his witness—but something else about the dead boy’s hand reclaimed his attention. Was the skin of his palm actually moving slightly, the lips of the laceration pulsing irregularly?

  Then a tiny head pushed out of the wound: the head of an insect, with feelers probing the air. The head was luminous green, even the two great eyes. Horrified but mesmerized, Zetter continued watching as the rest of the insect struggled out of the wound in the boy’s palm, like a moth emerging from its cocoon. It wasn’t a moth, however, but a large wasp, entirely colored that pale phosphorescent green, though slicked red with blood. It flicked its wet wings as it poised there on the boy’s cupped hand.

  Zetter wondered if the boy had only been a host, and if he was now gazing at the entity that had possessed the child. Was that why the boy’s dead hand was no longer luminescent: this fleshly vehicle could no longer serve its purpose?

  The wasp scuttled in a half-circle, as if to face Zetter directly. He backed off several paces. Thank God its wings were too wet for the thing to take flight just yet.

  In the meantime, Zetter took flight instead, running off toward his car. He thought he heard the truck driver call after him, but in the mounting clamor of voices he couldn’t be sure, and he didn’t look back to check.

  He stopped for gas and coffee in a small town, after taking an exit further down the highway.

  5. The Endless Crime

  He was in a motel again. He hadn’t bothered to take in its name. They were all interchangeable by now. Once again, he wasn’t sure what state he was in. He figured lower New Jersey; perhaps Delaware.

  It was good to be showered again. He called for a pizza delivery but wished he owned a handgun as he answered the door to accept it. How could he apply for a gun permit, though, the way he jumped between states? And he had no idea how one went about obtaining a gun illegally, except to steal one. But the exchange of pizza and money went without incident, and he sat down on the bed to eat while he watched TV.

  No news stories about mysterious assailants with green hands, whose touch caused people to vanish from this world. Did the authorities know about the Green Hands but conspire to keep the general public unaware?

  In all this time he hadn’t caught any news stories about a missing wife and husband from Massachusetts, their home abandoned without anything having been packed. Either he had missed any such story or the authorities had squashed that information, too.

  He sat in just a T-shirt and boxers he had bought in a mall after the escape from his home. On the bedside table lay his wallet and the stainless steel Swiss Army watch that Deirdre had bought him for his birthday eleven years ago. It was a little scuffed but still handsome. Its hands were frozen at 11:59 p.m. He could have had the battery replaced at one of the malls
he’d been to, but since he avoided unnecessary human interaction he had been putting it off. Anyway, it seemed appropriate to him that he should appear to be moving outside the flow of natural time.

  After he finished the pizza and a bottle of soda, he lay back in bed and continued watching TV, having settled on a true-crime series, the theme of which involved the critical first forty-eight hours of a homicide investigation. A suspect was brought into an interrogation room, a camera near the ceiling recording the session. Zetter became engrossed in the proceedings but dozed off during a commercial. When he opened his bleary eyes again, another person was being interrogated. At first he thought this was an accomplice, until he realized that the earlier episode had ended and this was a new one. There was no doubt a marathon session of episodes of this program underway. Though he regretted not seeing the outcome of the last episode, Zetter got caught up in this one. A man shifted restlessly in his chair as a detective pressed him about the shooting death of his wife. The suspect swore that in the darkened living room of their home he had thought his wife—returning home late from visiting a friend—was a burglar.

  The detective insisted the husband had shot his wife intentionally, aware that it wasn’t a friend she had been visiting, but her lover.

  At some point Zetter fell asleep again. Later he woke up again and resumed watching. Once more it took him a few minutes to realize it was yet another episode, yet another crime.

  This recurred several more times through the deep of night, into the small hours of the morning. One crime blended, unresolved, into the next until they all seemed to be a single crime—complex, convoluted, ultimately insoluble—involving countless perpetrators, countless victims, a crime that was ongoing and never ending.

  6. Blackout

  Zetter had parked his car in the lot of a large bookstore that was perched on a hill like a fortress in a very hilly area of this city, which to his mind demonstrated humankind’s insect-like determination to flourish in any terrain or environment. He didn’t know this ashy gray city’s name and was still not certain what state he was in—both literally and figuratively—but the bookstore at least offered him a welcome sense of familiarity. He and Deirdre had often visited several Massachusetts branches of this same bookstore chain, and though each store varied slightly in its individual character, overall they were pretty much uniform. A common Sunday routine for them had been to go to the bookstore to browse around and have a cappuccino in its little café before going across the street to the supermarket for some grocery shopping.

  He sipped a cappuccino now, standing by his car, looking out over the unknown city as its lights multiplied, the mellow purple evening shading toward full night. The summer air was thick, enveloped him as if to drown him slowly in its humidity, but it further reminded him of weekend excursions and vacations with his wife. Car headlights advancing in strung beads of gold and receding in beads of ruby streamed along the distant, steep streets. Golden light glowed through the bookstore windows that faced onto the parking lot, and inside Zetter could see people flipping through magazines in that section of the store. Inside the building, a little Asian boy maybe five years old pressed his palms and nose against the glass, staring out at the pretty evening like Zetter.

  But as if to masochistically spoil this tranquil moment for himself, Zetter was reminded of one of their Sunday bookstore visits, when a masculine voice had said with pleased surprise, “Deirdre,” and they had both looked up from the magazines they’d been perusing to see a man who was younger, taller, more trim, more nicely dressed than unshaven Zetter in his casual Sunday T-shirt and shorts. This man was grinning at Deirdre and entering into enthusiastic chitchat with her. Deirdre was suddenly bubbly and animated, too; and though she introduced the man as a former coworker from her previous job, after that the two of them had gone on as if Zetter wasn’t there, as if he had altogether ceased to exist, until finally he had simply returned to paging through his magazine, without really seeing what those pages held, his face gone hot inside, his jaw clamped too tightly.

  Later, they’d argued in the supermarket across the street while buying the food they meant to eat together, in one of countless rituals in the life they shared—arguing itself a recurrent ritual—their voices growing so loud that people turned their heads to look at them, and by the time they arrived home that evening they’d gone from raised voices to not speaking.

  Zetter glanced over at the little boy still squashed against the glass as if suction-cupped there, gecko-like, suspiciously expecting to catch the boy staring at him, but the child was still dreamily gazing off toward the urban vista, those scintillating rivers of gold and red. Zetter turned back to look upon the sprawling, sparkling city, too.

  And then it stopped sparkling. All the city lights that had proliferated as the sky darkened were extinguished simultaneously, extending to the limits of the horizon. The only lights that remained were the headlights and taillights of the traffic streams that crawled like immense, bejeweled millipedes.

  Had the city’s electrical grid become overtaxed this sultry summer night? Too many air conditioners running?

  He heard voices behind him, looked around warily at a couple with paper coffee cups in their hands, who had just emerged from the bookstore and unlocked their own car so as to depart. They too were gazing off toward the lightless city. “Huh,” Zetter heard the man say to the woman. “Maybe a solar flare, huh?”

  “Maybe a drunk hit a pole and brought down a power line.”

  “Nah. . . . Look, it’s too widespread for that.”

  “Mark,” the woman said, her tone edging toward nervousness as she shot a look toward the now darkened bookstore, “I don’t like this.”

  “Something’s wrong,” Zetter said, as if joining in their conversation, but he only said it under his breath.

  “Something’s not right,” Zetter heard the man named Mark say to the woman.

  The couple got into their car quickly and started it up.

  Zetter looked from their car to the bookstore windows. They were now like thin sheets of ice covering a starless black void that reached back unto infinity. There, still pressed to the glass, were two tiny hands. Hands that glowed green against the blackness of oblivion.

  Zetter fumbled with his keys, unlocked his car, and got himself inside. Through his windshield, he saw the couple in their car already heading for the parking lot’s exit. He started his own vehicle and began turning it in a wide arc to point it toward the exit. This action brought him nearer to a wooden fence that bordered the far side of the lot, where the hill fell away sharply. With this fence close on his left, he peeked out again at the darkened city. Something about the scene that stretched below him caused him to brake for a moment and to study it more carefully. He then realized what he was seeing.

  Those lines of headlights and taillights were no longer flowing. The lights still glowed just as brightly, but they had all come to a standstill, as if in a still photograph of a city.

  Could a solar flare, he wondered, shut down car engines, too? But even as he asked himself this, he knew this occurrence was not due to any conventional celestial event.

  He got his car moving toward the exit again, once more glancing at the black windows lining the bookstore’s flank. Those little green hands suction-cupped to the glass were gone.

  As he came up on the lot’s exit, he saw that the couple had pulled their car over to the side a little and put it into park, with the motor idling. Its interior was dark. Just as Zetter’s vehicle came parallel, both the driver’s and passenger’s doors opened and the couple stepped outside again. They no longer held coffee cups in their glowing green hands. With their faces contorted into grins that threatened to split their cheeks, the man and woman extended their arms and threw themselves upon Zetter’s car, pounding its hood and windows with their palms.

  He thrust his foot against the gas pedal, and the man slid away off to one side. The woman, more toward the front of his car, was pushed ove
r and went down below the line of the hood. The car jounced roughly as it went over her . . . first the front tires, then the rear. Zetter didn’t stop or look back, not even to see if the man with the crazed clown grin was chasing after him. He sped down the hill toward the main street.

  There, ahead of him, he saw the street was clogged with unmoving traffic. Idling cars with their headlights and taillights gleaming. As he approached the bottom of the hill, he suddenly slowed in speed, for he saw that the doors on all those unmoving cars were swinging open.

  Just before this steep access road to the bookstore joined the main street, there was a little residential road that branched off to the right. Zetter veered his car onto this tributary, grateful for it, his heartbeat a desperate, incoherent splutter.

  In his rearview mirror, as he turned onto the offshoot road, he saw overlapping figures in unknown numbers silhouetted against the headlights, leaving their cars . . . and breaking into a run en masse, like a group taking part in a marathon.

  The side road was narrow and bumpy, the pavement split and potholed as if great tree roots underneath had stressed the pavement, though it was only a matter of frost heaves and neglect. His car bounced as if he were running over more scattered bodies. He passed several dark houses that crouched among clumps of black trees. And then he came to the road’s end. It was a cul-de-sac.

  Zetter swore and pounded the steering wheel with the heel of his fist. He cranked himself around in his seat to look out the back window, but trees now blocked the lights of the street except for gold and red twinkles showing through here and there, like stars in alien constellations. Too dark. If any figures were already racing along the twisty little side road, he couldn’t see them. Probably none were close, just yet; otherwise their hands, glowing disembodied, would give them away. But this was only the scantiest respite; he knew they’d catch up with him at any moment.

  Even if he could back up or turn the car around, what was the point? The traffic that had come to a standstill in the major street would block his way. And all those many drivers . . . they’d block him, too.