"So how did you come to be here?” The New Guys presses, still trying to make friends. “That is no great mystery, I am here for the same reason as you.” Casper says. “I am here because I broke the law.” “I'm here for observation,” the New Guy tells him, remembering to act crazy. “I ate a dog.” Bryce confesses. Dale releases a tirade of vulgarities that spool out of his mouth and collect on the floor like a string of blinking holiday lights. “You assaulted a woman.” Casper tells the new guy. “But you did it in such a manner that you were found to be Questionably Insane rather than Certifiably Guilty. “ The New Guy simply grins at Casper, and says nothing “The insanity ruling was for you a lucky accident.” Casper continues. “You didn’t plan that, you didn't, in fact, plan any of it. It all simply happened, like a stream rolling downhill”. Bryce laughs. “Welcome to the bottom, welcome to the bottom.” His laughter sets Dean off again, and we all wait patiently for him to finish. Casper sniffles. “You did the right thing,” he tells the New Guy. “Prison is worse.” “I didn’t do anything.” The New Guy tells him. “I'm not responsible.” I go back to the lobby.

When I fell into liquor and drugs, Shelly somehow got away from me, and only the memory of her was waiting on the other side. She doesn't want to talk to me, and that’s understandable, I guess. I don't call her at home, because it’s a little weird, and if Donny answers the phone, he is just going to hang up on me. “Physician's Referral service, how can I direct your call?” “You go to his parent's house,” I ask in a flat tone of voice. “Yes, sometimes.” Shelly replies. I can hear her getting defensive. I suppose that I have lost some of my charm from earlier. “I thought that they were old and boring.” I say. Not that my parents are that exciting, but we never visited them. “Well, they're old, yes, but we still go. We still have a good time.” I am seeing so many wonderful family dinners rushing past in my imagination, like the pages a photo album of holiday meals being flipped to create a sense of motion in the photographs. “We go for walks.” She adds. “Oh, that sounds just great,” I tell her. We never walked, she never wanted to walk in New York, why is she walking now? It seems wrong, all wrong, and I tell her so. “You used to have your own life, Shelly, now it’s always Donny and what Donny wants to do -” “Hold, please.” I could get a gun, and enough ammunition, and kill everyone in the world, leaving the people who make bullets for the last. I wonder how long they would keep sending me ammunition, as I placed larger and larger orders, from more and more exotic locations, as I traveled the world, killing everybody. “Hello?” “So yeah, you’re going to his folk's again.” I begin. I am trying to play it cool now, trying to keep a lid on my fury. Perhaps it’s beginning to work, because when she replies, there’s a small hint of pleasure in her voice. “Yeah, its nice there, a little snobby, but nice.” If I play it right, I can get Shelly to relax, and we can have a real conversation. I can stay on the phone with her for a long time, listening to her voice. “That's all right, you should fit right in.” I tell her. I sound like someone trying hard not to shout. “What's wrong with you today?” Shelly asks, nearly shouting herself, now. “Because if you just called up to give me a hard time, I'll hang up right now, because I don’t need it.” “Yeah, you don’t need anything from me anymore, do you?” I hear myself tell her. “You know, I just love it when you have this superior attitude, like your happy or you're right--” She hangs up on me. A recorded voice jumps on the line and asks if I want to place another call. When I get back to the ward, Casper has all of his sails to the wind. “There we were,” Casper continues. “All of us standing around armed for battle, waiting for orders. It was night, now, in Heaven, and the fires burned and the uglier instruments --the drums, the horns and the strings with weight -- were all in full voice…” “What is all of this?” the New Guy interrupts, smiling. “It sounds like some sort of Nazi rally or something.” He still has his big grin on his face. Casper grins right back, and his eyes laugh crazy little quiet laugh. “Oh, yes, I know. Why night, when, if this was before the greater part of Creation, there is as of yet no sun? Why horns, when there is no air, why rank and file and command, when all is peaceful, and there can be no reason for war, because there is no enemy?” “Oh, I know what you are going to say,” the New Guy says, laughing like a drunk. “The Lord works in mysterious ways?” Casper replies, laughing himself, now, a high-pitched, girlish giggle that would have terrified anyone in their right minds, but seemed to be fairly well at home bouncing against the tile walls of this place. Casper keeps laughing until the New Guy begins to look uncomfortable, and then appends his closing chuckles with “It’s true, He does work in mysterious ways.” Casper tells us. “You couldn’t imagine.” Everyone falls quiet. Dean smacks an invisible bug off of his slack face. The New Guy just keeps smiling. “Well. Back to our divine Nazi Party Rally.” Casper continues. “The Big Man got up before us, and he went into his rant against Christ, which is indivisible from a harangue against God, but a direct appeal against the Lord wouldn’t have flown at all. Knowing this, the Big Man used Christ as a lever, to get some part of the Host into a war against God, to get us to follow him into his assured destruction.” “So why'd you do it?” the New Guy asks. “I didn't have anything else to do.” Casper replies with a shrug. “Besides, if it is to happen, it must be God’s will.”

Part Four will post on Sunday July 19th

Thank you for Reading

I don’t have any say in what goes on here. I don’t know much about the residents. I don’t even know what’s supposed to be wrong with most of them. What I do know is that they’re kind of frightening—most of them, anyway. They flit through the corridors in their whites, or sometimes in their street clothes, looking almost normal as they wander around talking to themselves, gesturing, waving their arms, and making horrible faces at the white tiles. Some of the others are too quiet, moving slowly and cautiously from point to point, as if the floor might come loose beneath their feet. These quiet ones sometimes remind me of the doctors who work here, because both are so passive. I rarely see the doctors. Like policemen in the outside world, they only show up when there’s a problem. And like the criminal I am, I give all problems a wide berth. In that regard, I’m like the patients here—I got this job through my parole board, and many of the residents weren’t sent here by doctors either, but by judges. They were sentenced for observation to determine whether they’re fit to stand trial. As I said, I don’t know what’s wrong with most of the residents, but they don’t seem fit to stand for much of anything. Bryce had eaten a dog. But it’s not just that he ate the dog—it’s that he won’t shut up about it: how he killed, dressed, and ate his neighbor’s dog. I doubt the woman who owned the dog talks about it as much. “It was a little dog,” Bryce will say if you stand next to him for too long. “Cockapoo, I think it was.” The breed is a flexible detail and changes often. “Little, floppy-eared thing. So I cooked it and ate it.” Not much of a story, I would think, but Bryce never seems to get tired of it. Some of the others, by contrast, are better conversationalists—the ones who believe their bellies are filled with swimming fish, or that their dead mothers are calling them from electrical sockets. Tonight, I knew, would be interesting because there was a new guy checking in. As I think I mentioned, new residents are rare, and so they’re always a big deal. The New Guy was young—just a little older than me—with neat hair and neat fingers. His eyes were a little fucked up, probably because before he got sent here, he spent most of his time with his nose pressed against a pocket mirror. I knew his game because I’d played it myself. Back when I got arrested, I pleaded junkie, even though I wasn’t really hooked that hard. I was sent to rehab instead of prison because it was my first offense. The New Guy went for crazy instead of criminal and ended up here. He wanted to be liked—you could tell right away. Life was a popularity contest to him, and he was ready to charm the whole ward. I might have told him it was a waste of time, if I thought it would do any good. Of the guests on the floor tonight, Bryce is a hardcore nutcase, Dean is mute, and Dale can’t say anything other than a stream of curses and swears. And then there’s Casper, who insists he isn’t even a human being. “Tell me more about the dog,” the New Guy asks Bryce—a mistake. Bryce fidgets and hides a secret, confused smile while chewing the inside of his mouth. When pressed, he panics. His pupils dart from one side to the other, searching for answers, clues, a way out—anything. At moments like this, you can almost see Bryce retreat into his own head. You can almost hear his inner voice cry, “More? What does he mean, more? What else is there? I killed and ate the dog.” Two-thirds of the world wouldn’t bat an eye at what he did, but here in America, dog-eating Bryce is considered worthy of injections, prescriptions, beatings, and restraints. Casper is the only one who says anything to the New Guy at first, and it’s just his standard greeting. “Welcome aboard.” He says the same thing to me every night when I start my shift. The New Guy actually puts his hand out, like he’s making new friends on the first day of school instead of being sized up by a room full of certified lunatics. Casper never touches anyone and ignores the gesture. “I already know your name,” Casper tells him. “Is that right?” the New Guy replies, smiling like a game show host as he pulls his hand back. “Casper knows everything,” Bryce explains. “Casper’s an angel.” “Sweet guy, huh?” the New Guy says, smiling away. “No,” I interrupt from my place in the corner, where I lean on my floor mop in anticipation of Bryce expectorating blood. “Casper’s an angel out of Heaven, cast down by the Great Lord Almighty for his part in the revolt against Christ.” Casper—a brief, heavy man with a round head and long, thin fingers—smiles modestly.

There are only a few things I know for sure about Casper: he’s queer, he’s crazy, and he’s dangerous. Soft-spoken and a little pudgy, he was sent away years ago for murder. Someone, somewhere, thinks he’s done enough time and wants to let him out—but this is as far as he’s gotten. “So you’re an angel?” the New Guy asks, breaking the silence. “Well, I wouldn’t want that getting around,” Casper replies. “I’m sort of hiding out.” “From who?” “Everyone,” Casper tells him. The New Guy smiles some more and waits. Casper looks up toward me. “How goes the phone war?” he asks. “No change,” I reply. Sometimes, Casper really does seem to know everything. “Women can be difficult,” Casper tells me in a sympathetic tone. “I’ve always wondered,” the New Guy asks, “are there women in Heaven?” “No,” Casper replies, shaking his great head slowly. “I guess that’s why you all left,” the New Guy jokes, flashing a wide grin. “Oh no,” Casper replies. “We were most certainly chased out. No one leaves Heaven of their own accord.”

Part Three will post on Sunday July 12

Thank you for Reading

Some Mistakes We Can't Stop Making

The asylum where I work is small, old, and contorted. The long corridors dip and bend in an unsettling, almost organic way. I don't like it and do not want to be here, most of the time.

But I have little choice in the matter; the judge sent me to the parole board, and the parole board sent me here, where I am a night janitor. I work from eleven at night until seven in the morning. Like the patients, I can’t just leave whenever I want to—although I think about leaving all the time.

The patients might not. That is, many of them seem all right with it here. The asylum is supposed to be a halfway house—the residents are either being rotated back into the real world or are under observation to determine if they can be released, or if they need to be locked up deeper still, in some other, more serious hospital somewhere else. But turnover is very, very slow, and everyone—patients, doctors, hospital staff, and myself included—feels trapped, waiting for something to happen. During my graveyard shift, there’s not even sunlight drifting across the floor to mark time, and the view from the small barred windows is always the same.

I don’t understand the patients’ acceptance of the asylum. It’s a terrifically depressing place—it’s all white, for one thing. Maybe no one else notices the whiteness as much as I do, because they don’t have to clean it. The white tile floor joins the white tile walls with a seam of white rubber. From there, ceramic tile climbs about four feet to a wooden molding. The rest of the wall is white plaster, and the ceiling is white as well—a new suspended ceiling that was hung too low, making the place seem even more crowded and compressed. There’s hardly a bit of color to break it up. In one of my more prosaic moments, I described being here as living on a blank page.

On slow nights, I call Shelly.

I use the Patient’s Telephone Room, which is really just a closet with a phone in it. I have a key because I’m supposed to clean the place.

Shelly’s out in California now, having moved from New York while I was in jail. To call her from work, I have to use phone cards because of the long-distance block on the phone. Unwrapping the cards reminds me, oddly, of unwrapping condoms back when Shelly and I lived together.

I drop the plastic wrapper into the barrel of my cleaning cart and begin dialing. It takes a long time—about thirty numbers or so—but then, everything seems to take a long time here. I sit listening to a distant telephone ring and watch the floor I’ve just mopped dry.

“Physician’s Referral Service, can I help you?”

“Hi, Shelly.”

“Hi! How are you?” There’s always a burst of enthusiasm in her voice when I call, and I can hear her smile—I can see it in my mind. My muscles go slack and I shrink to a small percentage of my usual size. I’m not so big to begin with.

“Great,” I tell her, reflecting some of her good feeling back at her. “I’m great. Hey, listen—let’s you and I go out after work.” It’s a little game I play, pretending there isn’t a continent and three time zones between us.

Shelly always giggles at this. “I’d love to, but I have plans,” she says.

“Too bad,” I reply. I know better than to ask what she’s doing, but I ask anyway. “Where are you going?”

“Out with Donny. We’re going to see his folks for the weekend—”

“That’s cool,” I interrupt.

I can’t stand hearing about Donny.

I honestly hate Donny, even though I’ve never met him. Sometimes he appears in my dreams, not as a person but as a bloodshot streak of emotion. “My mother says hi, by the way.”

“That’s nice,” Shelly replies, her voice softening a little. “I didn’t think your mother liked me.”

She didn’t, really, but I’d lie all night to keep Shelly on the phone. “What gave you that idea? She likes you just fine. She was asking how school was going for you.”

“Good,” Shelly says. “I was actually doing some studying just now.”

Maybe she was, but I doubt it. I suspect I’ve just given her an excuse to get off the phone. “What are you studying?” I ask, trying to keep the conversation going.

“Oh, basic stuff,” she says. “Anatomy, mostly.”

“There must be a lot of that. In medical school,” I quip.

“Oh yeah.” Her response is flat; I’m losing her attention. I can feel it slipping away. A long silence stretches between us. I can feel the weight of it: thousands of miles of telephone line, several transformers, a satellite, a million switches—all lying open and pressing down on me as I sit in the Patient’s Telephone Room trying to think of something to say. There’s a soft, muted ring of a phone on her end.

“Hold, please.” The great distance is replaced by the stifling silence of a call on hold.

I sit there and try to think of what we’ll talk about when she comes back. I stare into the blank antique-white wall of the Patient’s Telephone Room. There are faint fingernail scratches in the paint. I spread my hand and try to fit my fingers into the handprint, but my hand is too small. I think that it was probably Dale. He's the biggest one in the ward.

“Are you still there?” Shelly asks.

“Oh yeah.” I hadn’t come up with anything better.

“Listen, I have to go page a doctor, but I’ll talk to you later, all right?”

I hate it when she uses that doctor-patient tone, but I’m suddenly too exhausted to protest.

“Sure,” is all I can manage as she hangs up. I feel as if I’ve just lost a fight.

I make a small deal with myself: I’ll sit here in the chair and recover until the floor is completely dry. Then I’ll go to the ward and check on Bryce, see if he’s spitting blood on the tiles.

Part Two will Post on 7/5. We Meet Casper

Thank You for Reading

Keri saw the shopfront diner that faced the bus station parking lot, the long windows fogged and streaked with rain, but if she went in there, she knew, someone would talk to her.

She didn't want that.

She went to the bus station: a white-painted space beneath an overhang lit by overhead fluorescents, with a long bench, two vending machines, a ticket counter hidden behind a locked wooden shutter. There was a schedule thumbtacked behind a scarred plastic shield. She looked at it. The text was too small, the shield too streaked with rain to make out any words. She realized she was crying.

She sat down, wiped her eyes, looked at her soaked and splotchy Docs for two long, shuddering minutes where she was able to slow her breathing and get the tears to stop flowing. If a bus to New York pulled up at that moment she'd climb aboard, ticket or no, and it would take more cops than this shit town could field to get her off of it.

Then Paul was standing too close, asking if anything was the matter.

"I was at the diner," he said, pointing at the storefront where it glowed in the night and rain. "I thought it was you." He didn't smile or add anything to this engaging insight.

Keri looked up at him, feeling wretched, absolutely spent, and thought he's going to kill me, and then, the change coming so swiftly she couldn't defend against it, began laughing at the idea.

Paul took a step back.

Even now, half in shock I could beat the living shit out of this sorry man child. She laughed harder, edging into hysteria.

"You're shaking pretty badly," Paul said.

Keri could hear the concern in his voice, perhaps even a ripple of suspicion.

She began to resent his unwelcome interruption of her crisis. "I'm shaking, yes, what about it?"

Paul didn't answer that. "Trey still at the mill?"

"I don't know where the fuck he is," she said. "Halfway back to New York for all I know." The lie came with careless speed.

"Not on the bus," Paul answered. He walked past her, lifted the plastic cover of the bus schedule. She hadn't realized it was hinged at the top.

"No buses after 4 on a Sunday. He was still here at 4. I saw you guys at the mill."

Keri folded her arms, shifted her weight, turned her head away from him.

"Is Trey… Is Trey gone?" Paul asked.

"What?" Keri asked, at once absolutely present.

"You guys were going in and out of the mill." He stared at her, hard, his brown eyes fixed behind the smudged and slightly fogged lenses of his glasses. "Did something happen to him?"

"He just…" was all Keri said.

"Is he in the mill?" Paul asked, standing even nearer to her now, both beneath the overhang, the rain something that was happening apart from them. "Did he go in and not come out?"

When Keri didn't answer he took his phone from his pocket. He opened it; finger paused over the number pad, and said "Should I call the police?"

Keri turned to him. "What? The police?" What would she even say? Would they even come if he called them? Would they hold her, maybe keep Trey's car? They certainly wouldn't fucking find him. "No, don't."

Paul held the phone like a threat. "He's missing, isn't he?" he pressed. "Trey's missing."

"No it's not like that…" Keri collected herself. Stopped thinking about Trey, about the thing that had dragged him off. She started trying to frame the moment as a practical problem, a technique that had gotten her through other situations where inaction meant disaster.

"He fucking left," she said, putting as much weight and finality in the sentence as she could. "Left me here," she added, adding a few drops of embarrassment to the words, a shade of shame. Admit to a different crime was a trick she learned back in her trouble-filled school days. "We had a fucking row and he fucking left town, alright?"

Paul looked at her for a moment. His shoulders were hunched with concentration, his nostrils flared as he considered her words, her expression.

He put the phone in his pocket and turned and left her, heading straight for the mill.

She let him get onto the street, prayed that someone would run him down. When Paul had crossed safely, she followed.

Keri got in Trey's car and waited. If Paul didn't come back, she'd hitchhike to New York. And if he did come back, she'd have a plan for him.

Photo by F. Andrew Taylor

Paul came back.

He rapped on the window, and when she didn't get out, crossed to the passenger side, and got in. She could see the hem of his jeans were black with mud. She realized he'd gone beneath the mill.

Whatever was down there hadn't wanted him.

Paul held Trey's multi tool, flashlight, and car keys in his hand. Without speaking, he opened the glovebox and took out the registration; saw Trey's name and address.

"I thought you said this was your car."

She was ready for this one. "It is my car," Keri said. "I bought it, but I'm not a resident of New York, I can't legally register it or get insurance."

"The tool and the keys were under the mill," Paul said. "The flashlight I found on the factory floor. It flooded, I guess? The chalk faces are gone. Whole place is soaked."

Keri hadn't expected Paul to find the keys. She'd been preparing lies about how Trey had taken them with him. She sat mute to buy time, thinking that Paul wasn't the type who could manage long silences.

"This is important," he said. "Trey would be a second disappearance in four days, that's… that's way sooner than my model predicted. And it's only hours old."

His excitement was grotesque.

"We need to get the police here now. The State Police. If it's a wrongful death, it's their jurisdiction anyway. We have to call them, tell them everything you know."

Keri sat in a stunned silence. Somewhere, a river spirit was digesting its meal and this man wanted her to tell the police about it.

"Where's your car?" she asked.

"What?" he asked. "At the diner. Why?" he said.

He set the keys on his leg while he examined the registration. She snatched them from him and started the car.

"I don't want to talk here," she said, throwing the car in reverse and spitting gravel as she went into a three-point turn.

"No!" Paul shouted. "We need to stay here! We need to call the cops!"

"I'll need a beer first," she said as she dropped the car into drive and fishtailed onto River Street. There was a pub up the road; she'd seen it when Trey had been circling for a parking spot that morning before the search. "I've had a hell of an afternoon."

"Slow down!" Paul shouted as he struggled with the seat belt. The guy who had made a late-night run beneath a haunted mill suddenly sounded anxious.

Keri found a spot in the municipal lot across from a pub called The Millhouse, shut the car off and stuffed the keys into her purse.

"What do you think is going on here?" Paul asked. "This could be a murder; Trey could be dead. This needs to be an open investigation and we need to alert people now."

She snatched the registration and put it in her purse. "You're buying me a drink," she said, and she got out of the car.

Paul's strident "Tell me where Trey is!" was truncated by her slamming the door behind her.

Keri stepped to the sidewalk, stopped beneath a streetlight, and looked back at him. She felt horrid and likely stank like the river, but she was twenty-two, fit, her wet clothes clung to her, and her bright red hair framed her face in careless curls.

He looked through the windscreen at her, his round face flushed with frustration and anxiety.

Keri tugged at her wet shirt, pulling it tight over her breasts as she adjusted the hem.

Paul got out of the car. Keri could see his priorities change as he closed the door and followed her into the Millhouse.

They had three drinks; she stoked his ego, played on his sympathies, took the role of abandoned lover, and apologized mightily for Trey's plan to steal all of Paul's insight and research.

He said you were a fool, Keri spun. I thought you might have had something. Trey is an asshole but he's not dead. He's not in the mill or in the river or in a cannibal's freezer somewhere. He just left town with people you don't know and who you didn't see. If you call the police, you'll look a fool, and then American Mysteries may judge you harshly.

"Is that why you fought?" Paul asked. "About whether I'm crazy?"

"We always fight," Keri explained. "About everything."

She started to tell Paul about her father, whom she had also fought with. Well, a father. Not hers. From a book she'd read. Cleaned it up. Made the dynamic less pulpy but kept it sad. Explained she was attracted to older men. Why she let them treat her the way they did.

After a while Paul didn't even care that they weren't talking about Trey anymore.

She carried on until he thought she was too drunk to drive. His place was nearby.

They walked there arm in arm, Paul vibrating with excitement. She'd been a little afraid of him at times, thought his madness might be deep enough to make him dangerous. But now she'd decided he was genuinely a child. If she faked passing out, he'd likely leave her be, but then she knew he'd be awake all night, watching her pretend to sleep. She thought if she could get him off and onto sleep with some heavy petting and maybe some hand stuff, she might not even have to kiss him.

His apartment was small and cluttered.

There was a long mirror hung over a weary sofa and Keri almost gasped when she saw her reflection. She looked half dead and half drowned.

The weight of events came back to her. She was at once struggling against tears. "I'm a fright," she said. She touched her hair; it was a tangled ruin.

Paul stood close behind her; timidly put his hands on her shoulders. "You're lovely," he said. He kissed the side of her head just above her left ear.

"Do you have a hairbrush?" she asked, trying to slow things down.

He took his hands away, stepped into the bathroom and returned with a black rubber hairbrush. She reached to take it, but he stopped her and kept her facing the mirror. They watched their reflections as he slowly brushed her hair.

Keri looked into her own eyes, thinking about monsters no one ever saw.

Then Paul's hands grew bolder, and she turned away from the mirror.

“This is fucking daft,” Keri said to Trey. They were standing in the dirt parking lot beside Trey’s Camry, getting rained on. The shoot was completed, and Trey’s lights and equipment were stowed neatly inside the car. They had no reason to remain in Shayham, and Keri was so eager to be gone she could almost feel the momentum of the car and hear the tires as they sluiced through the flooded highways.

“You’re right,” Trey said looking back at the bulky square shape of the mill, the red of the bricks and the black of the iron of the place washed out by the weak light of the distant streetlamps. “That room can’t flood. It’s not flooded now, and if the water isn’t getting in there now, in all this rain. How would that much water ever get in there?”

“A mystery for another day.” Keri said. She wanted to punctuate the comment by getting into the car, but she didn’t. She stood there, waiting.

He ran the flashlight beam over the brick wall of the mill. “Something is off about the underside of this thing.” Trey said. ““Take your light. Go into the head of the stairs in the big room. I’ll go under and we can meet up.”

“This is idiotic,” she said. “You’ll fall in the bloody river and drown and then Paul will say a fairy carried you off.”

“Paul wasn’t saying that.” Trey said. “You were saying that. He said a guy with an axe.”

On that bright note, Trey walked to the edge of the mill and disappeared around the corner. Keri saw his light fade into shadow of the of the cavity beneath the mill even as she followed Trey out of the rain and back into the rotting mill.

Keri was attuned to the mill now, and it didn’t frighten her as it had before. The two hours or so of boredom they’d spent filming the place had mortared familiarity over fear. Her first thought was at least she’d be out of the rain for a moment.

Her cranberry doc martens were so soaked she didn’t notice for a moment or two that she was treading in water.

She shone the light down and saw water cresting over her boots and running into the eyelets. The water carried a scrim of colorful chalk dust on its surface—melted faces, she thought wildly. A large piece of chalk lifted by the deluge roll up over her foot.

Keri didn’t think, ‘I was wrong’, and rationalize some natural phenomenon to account for a localized river surge or other bizarre flash flood event.

Her thought was This is how they all went.

“Fuck me,” she said quietly, and turned her light towards the stairs that led beneath the mill, sunken into the floor, sealed by a chain link fence and impassible. Trey was down there, and if this room was flooding, he was already underwater.

She heard a rattle and a bang; identified the clamor as the chain link fence heaving against the flood, or, more terrible, being pushed against by Trey, trapped below.

Keri ran to the grate because to not do so would be cruel, but of course there was nothing to be done.

The water was surging up so powerfully from below that it was forced into the shape of the fence, scores of small diamond-shaped fountains arcing upwards and spilling out to flood the room.

She saw Trey’s flashlight, spinning in the tumult. The steel light couldn’t float, but the water was being pushed up so fiercely that the small flashlight was trapped against the links of the fence.

She saw, for instant, fingers on the links.

They were too small, too pale, and too feminine to be Trey’s. The fingers were green.

Then they were gone.

Trey’s flashlight spun, came up through the fence, and rolled along the floor, pushed along the concrete by the last of the water as the pressure ebbed.

Keri was on her knees; light shining through the fence, pulling at the links with her left hand, watching as the water receded with terrible swiftness.

“Trey…” She whispered. She didn’t have the courage to shout. She pulled on the fence, her strength barely registering against the firmly bolted frame. She collapsed, crying, but not for long.

Her ear to the wet bricks, Keri heard something moving under the mill: crunching as if of bones, and a rough, sliding sound.

Hooves on gravel and scree.

Her imagination conjured the image she’d always pictured of the kelpie: a drowned, long-dead horse, upright and moving.

Keri got to her feet in a single, panicked lunge and then froze in place, too terrified to move, to abandon Trey.

She saw Trey’s Maglite, still lit, lolling gently in the receding water.

If she took his flashlight and went to the place where Trey had gone beneath the mill, she could watch the water flow into the Manomet and see if there was anything else there.

Something squelched in the mud below her, followed by another rustle of sliding gravel and the clump of what could only be a hoof.

“Fuck that,” Keri whispered, and she headed for the parking lot.

Keri had never seen a ghost or spoken to an angel but there was no doubt in her mind that she’d just been in the presence of something supernatural, something both predatory and unreal, but with a mind and a will and a complete awareness of Keri Boyle and that thing was rejecting her. or releasing her, but whatever that thing was, and whatever its reasons, Keri understood that it was allowing her to live when it did not have to.

She was not escaping as much as being let go, so she was going. She was going, as far and fast as she could, on shaky legs and with crying eyes, she was going.

She ran to the Camry, pulled the door open and got behind the wheel. Her already soaked clothes now streaked with color from the chalked floor, squelched when she sat and doubtless stained the upholstery.

Trey had the keys.

She hid inside the car for just a minute or two, but that was too close to the mill for comfort. She set out and walked away from the river, away from the bridge.

The bus station lights were on.

She went there.

“Oh God, he’s such a twat!” Keri exclaimed as soon as she and Trey were settled in his Toyota. It was still raining, the drops falling fat and heavy on the windscreen. He’d stood for the price of a jumbo hot coffee; she hoped he understood that this morning was going to cost more than that.

“Sure, but does he know something?” Trey asked with impatience. He started the car and drove a block and a half to an unpaved lot overlooking the river. The lot was filled with searcher’s cars, but Trey wormed the Toyota in. They could just see the river through the trees and on their left was the bridge that Maggie Grose was supposed to have leaped from. A Shayham patrol car was parked on the bridge, lights spinning as they coordinated the searchers on both sides of the river.

“No,” Kerri said. She took a sip of her coffee. It was old and burnt, but it was piping, and that was what mattered. “I don’t know. He might. It’s true what he said that people have gone missing from this area. He has it all graphed out. Offered to show it to me. ‘Want to come see my serial killer profile?’ has got to be the weirdest come-on anyone’s ever tried on me.”

Trey took his camera out and began scrolling through the stills he’d taken. “I already searched for Shayham, and there are a few missing persons.” he said, “It’s spread out over the years though. I don’t know if it’s greater than the average.”

“It’s almost forty percent higher than average for a city this size!” Keri exclaimed. “He rattled off names, dates, odd facts. The bridge there,” Keri she said, pointing. “The Grose girl wouldn’t have died from jumping from it, he said. It’s too low. So, he thinks she was abducted. He thinks some kind of cult or murderer stalks people from that mill. Calls it ‘the nexus.’”

“Why does anyone even think she jumped off the bridge?”

“Some of her friends told her to — on Facebook. She was being bullied.” Keri sipped more coffee. What she really wanted was a shower, preferably back in New York. “Then she disappeared. They don’t have anything else.”

“What does your twat friend think?”

“He’s mad, I swear. Went on about The Green River Killer and how no one had caught him for years. BTK, too.” She looked at Trey. “What is wrong with this country? You’ve got more maniacs than…” She trailed off. “Than a place with a lot of maniacs, I don’t fucking know. Too many, that’s how many!” She laughed, but Trey didn’t. Without saying a word, he got out and walked towards the mill.

“Fucking leave then,” Kerri said, determined to stay in the car. She began scrolling through the pictures, stopped in disgust at the shot of the dead bird. Trey was gone for almost fifteen minutes. Keri sat; engine running, heater on high, wishing her jeans would dry out. Searchers were starting to come up from the river and collect their cars, and she felt sure that she’d see Paul among them before Trey returned. Instead, Trey rapped his knuckles on the passenger side window and gestured for her to follow. “Bring the camera.” he shouted through the glass.

The old mill was red brick over a skeleton of steel beams. They stepped into a smaller room, bare to the plaster walls, the single window an open rectangle that let river mist and spattering rain in.

There was graffiti everywhere.

That wasn’t surprising, but Keri did take note that most of the graffiti was done in chalk, not spray-paint. There were stubs of brightly colored chalk scattered about, the thick rounds kids used on sidewalks and driveways.

The rain had spoiled most of the artwork, the faces and words flowing together in shallow swirls of running color.

“We need to shoot this!” Keri said. She turned and looked out the door. “You can see the river, just a few steps out and you can see the bridge she jumped off of.”

Trey didn’t say anything about that, only invited Keri to go further into the mill. She followed his boot prints, splotches of purple, brown, and orange from where he’d trod through the chalk puddles.

Looking through the passage into the space beyond, she could see it was a much larger room, with windows set high on the walls. The weak sunlight that came through only just lit the huge space, and as she passed through a small moment of near blindness as her eyes adjusted.

Trey was heading straight across the open floor. She saw that three sets of loading doors were securely boarded up and three large windows that were similarly sealed up with thick plywood. The gray light of midday leaked in around the sills, with greater strength in the places where someone had tried to pry the boards off, breaking off the corners but with no further success.

“The light is shit in here.” Trey said. “We can set up the stand lights I have in the trunk, but we’ll need a few hours on an outlet to charge the batteries.”

“Why bother?” Keri asked. She wasn’t excited about spending time in the mill after dark. “What’s wrong with the other room? The melted faces and so on? Creepy stuff and you can see the river.”

He’d stopped and put his hand out for her to stop when she’d joined him. She could see that they were standing by a long channel set in the concrete floor, just eight feet wide but more than twenty feet long, the opening covered by a chain link fence tied to a frame of steel pipes and bolted down. She could see that someone had tried to pry this up as well but had no luck.

“Does that go down to the river?” she asked.

“Probably.” He turned on the light on his phone. She could see they were standing on a chalk drawing of girl’s face, almost eight feet by six feet, the long hair black and deep green, the eyes black with small squares of white cut into them, like the big-eyed paintings her mother had treasured, but lacking the pleading sorrow of those long-ago curiosities.

These eyes were vacant, animal-like. Sinister she realized was the word.

The mouth — Jesus the mouth — was the channel in the floor, so the face, a teenaged girl’s face, had no chin, only a hugely distended jaw, the ever-screaming mouth sealed over with chain link.

“Look,” Trey said as if Keri were missing something, and she was startled to see that she was missing something: footprints in the chalk dust, bare footprints, a girl’s, spattered and smudged around the edges as if she’d been walking in the puddles, and had stepped to the horizontal fence, where, Keri guessed, had then walked along the top of it? As if on a dare? Because there the footprints ended.

“I thought I heard someone moving in here.” Trey said. “When I was in the other room. I heard someone moving away from the door.”

He shone the light of his phone into the room, a small effort given the size of the space and the motes of dust swirling in the air.

“I hope that’s not asbestos.” Keri said. She wanted to get out of here.

“I think there’s someone here,” Trey said, ignoring her. “Something to do with the girl who disappeared. Maybe the local kids are up to something. Some kind of suicide thing, or a bullying thing where they got her to jump. I think some of those kids are here right now, in one of the other rooms, maybe upstairs somewhere. Watching the search.”

“God, you sound like Paul.” Keri said.

Trey turned off the light. “Maybe,” he allowed with a shrug. “But there is something going on here, something the locals are either covering up or refuse to see. That many disappearances, even over twenty years, could be national news stuff.”

He walked out into the parking lot, without looking to see if she was following.

Keri stood in the doorway for a moment, hearing the rain on the dead October leaves and the river they all but obscured.

She shaded her eyes from the rain and looked up at the open upper windows that ran along the length of the huge building. She wondered if she’d see faces peering down at her, but there was nothing, just black rectangles of shadow.

Continued Next Sunday June 7th

Thank You for Reading!

Keri slipped out of the bed as gently as she could. She wanted to be out of Paul’s apartment, preferably out of town before he realized she was gone.

Once she’d put some highway miles and a state line between them, she’d text Paul and ask him to stay away from her. She’d say things between her and Trey were more serious than she’d admitted, and she didn’t want to muddle it up. She’d say she let things go too far; apologize for giving him a one-off. Guys always appreciated the inference that their charm had clouded her judgment. When Keri was done, Paul would believe that her boyfriend Trey wasn’t, as Paul had assumed, missing.

She’d only slept with Paul to change the subject. The real issue, the true matter at hand, was that Trey *had *disappeared and no one would ever see him again. The real issue was that there was something in the Manomet River, some monstrous thing, and it had taken Trey, as it had taken many others before, and there was no getting rid of it, or fighting it, or explaining it.

Keri hadn’t told Paul any of this. She just met him that day, but already knew that Paul was too closed-minded to understand the danger he was in.

She wished she didn’t understand, and envied Paul’s ignorance. Knowing about the monstrous thing that lived in the Manomet River was no more useful than being told about comet headed for the Earth or a late-stage cancer diagnosis. You couldn’t fight it, not really, only try to fit your new understanding to what remained of your life.

At least Paul, and the trouble his curiosity would cause, was something she could run from.

“You’re not from around here,” the fellow said with a small grin. He looked about twenty-five, with a broad chin covered by a reddish goatee. His black-rimmed glasses were fogged and streaked from the rain, but if that bothered him, he didn’t show it.

“Well observed,” Keri replied with a guest’s politeness. She tried to imagine the figure she cut, red hair hanging in straggles from beneath Trey’s City by the Sea film crew baseball cap, her body obscured by an olive-green plastic poncho. Not at her best, but she was still attracting all the randy locals at the early morning river side body search.

His face lit up at her West London accent, and he said, “You’re really not from around here, are you?” and she smiled again.

About thirty volunteers had gathered at the riverbank, all wearing raincoats and boots. They milled around, trying to squeeze into drier spots beneath the pine boughs, waiting for the search for the 14-year-old presumed suicide Maggie Grose to get underway.

Trey had given up trying to stay dry and was on the bank of the river, his back against a car-sized granite block that jutted up out of the mud. It all felt like a terrible waste of time to Keri: they’d get maybe 15 minutes of footage, and the show might use as much as 30 seconds of it. Unless the searchers found the missing girl, of course.

“You don’t know about the missing people?” the stranger asked

“Well the one, obviously.” Keri asked. “You mean there are others?”

“I noticed the camera,” the fellow said, gesturing towards Trey, who was hunched over trying to keep the rain off his camera while getting shots of a dead bird he’d discovered in the brambles. “That’s pretty serious hardware. You’re not local news. Or at least I didn’t see a van.”

“We work with America Mysteries,” Keri said. This was a tremendous exaggeration. Trey had sold crime-related footage to the basic cable program before and hoped to again.

The fellow perked up at this. “They’ve noticed Shayham?” he asked, his excitement ridiculous on someone standing hatless in the rain. “Who’s writing the segment, do you know?”

“I don’t,” Kari answered, still smiling. “What do you mean, they noticed Shayham?”

“You don’t know about the missing people?”

“Well, the one, obviously.” Keri asked. “You mean there are others?”

She sensed more than saw Trey’s head come up at the unexpected course the conversation had taken.

The stranger scoffed. “Dozens if not more,” he said. “I’m writing a book on it.” He paused, pretending an idea he’d had the moment he approached Keri had just form in his mind. “We should talk. I’m trying to interview the father of the missing girl this afternoon, but maybe we could get drinks or dinner later?”

Trey strode up then. Late thirties, of intimidating size and exuding a powerful air of ‘She’s with me,’ most men talking Keri up took one look at Trey and excused themselves, but not this one.

“Maybe I should be talking to you,” he said, extending a dripping hand toward Trey. “I’m Paul Coppard, author of the forthcoming The Shayham Phenomenon.”

“You’ll have to make it quick,” Trey said, taking the man’s hand but not giving his name in return. “Search is starting, and we’re here just to get some shots of that, then it’s back to New York.”

Paul frowned. “I can’t just lay it all out while we walk in the woods,” he said. “It’s dozens of cases, going back years. All connected — well, I’ve connected them.” He frowned more deeply. “And my research, my time has value. I’m not going to just tell American Mysteries everything I’ve discovered without some kind of contract. I need guarantees.”

“You’ve solved the disappearances?” Keri said, a little adrift in the moment. Around them, volunteers were leaving the riverbank. The search had begun.

“Not yet,” he said with an aggressive, and more than a little defensive pride. “But I’ve tied them together. Like I said, a lot of people. Well into double digits. Mostly young. People who are gonna be out in a place like this by themselves.” He gestured to the river and the oppressive bulk of the crumbling mill looming on the far bank. “And nothing is ever found. They don’t leave notes, assuming they are suicides, which I do not, and the searches never turn up any evidence or traces.”

“How do you know what happens to them here then?” Keri asked, beginning already to feel that Paul Coppard might not be entirely rational. “How do you know they even vanish near the river?”

“People‘s habits.” Paul replied, wiping rain from his eyes. “It’s always the loners. right? If the captain of the cheer squad or the guy who owns the big dealership on route nine or even if everybody’s favorite mailman went missing it’d be bigger deal. But it’s always the odds and ends. This girl’s no different.” This last added with a dismissive note of frustration. To Paul, Keri realized, the search was already over, and already a failure.

“Okay,” Trey began. “Keri is a production assistant, and I trust her judgment.” Keri was no such thing. She was a film student at NYU and was here for no reason she could explain other than Trey had invited her on a shoot and she had nothing better to do with her Saturday. “Keri, please accompany Mr. Coppard on the search while I get what we came for. See if he has anything worth following up on.”

Keri looked at Trey like he was a madman for pawning her off on some jackoff they’d just met.

“I’ll be right by with the cam,” Trey said, making strong eye contact with Keri. “Walk with him at least to the bridge.” He pointed to where River Street crossed the Manomet River less than a quarter mile upstream. “If our friend doesn’t have anything worthwhile, I’ll apologize for wasting your time.”

“I won’t waste your time,” Paul said, a hint of ‘how dare you’ in his rebuttal.

Keri wasn’t a shy girl; London wasn’t the kind of place that let shyness survive. Her first instinct was to lash out at Trey and find her own way back to New York, fuck him and his fucking Camry. Something stopped her. A sense that she was seeing Trey at work, now. Not documenting what was happening, which was only part of what he did. Monetizing what had happened was the larger part, the part Try had real talent for. The part she wanted to learn more about.

Keri realized that, if she and Trey worked together, they’d take everything of value this horny idiot might have learned and have it on Youtube and old news before he even knew he’d been taken.

“Yeah, all right,” Keri told Trey, and then turned to Paul.

“Hello, Mr. Coppard, I’m Keri Boyle,” she said with a broad smile but no handshake — she wasn’t about to let Paul Coppard touch her in any way. “Let’s hear about this Shayham Phenomenon of yours.”

“You won’t be disappointed,” Paul said. “It’s a bad town, lots of horrible things to uncover.” Without waiting for a response, he turned and began leading Keri away from the searchers and toward the bridge over the Manomet.

Keri didn’t hesitate. Following a strange man away from a group was a textbook mistake, she knew, but Paul didn’t seem like anyone she couldn’t handle.

She watched his wide and slightly slouching body climb the riverbank towards the sidewalk and smiled at his awkwardness, so natural on a man who had no idea how he appeared to others. It was all she could do not to giggle.

Continued Next Sunday May 30th

Thank You for Reading!