He did, because he's waiting for me there, sitting right in the corner with his back to the wall. He was the younger of the two cops who came to see me yesterday, but he's aged a century or more since then. His face is a leather mask and there's less of his hair attached to his puckered scalp. He's jacked up, on edge, his head jerking left and right studying anyone who comes close, so it doesn't take him long to see me. He does a double take and I realize that he probably thinks I've aged too, that I'm a half-dead girl.
"Did you bring them?" I ask as soon as I'm close enough. There's a table of four next to us, parents and two young kids, and they're all quiet, looking up at me like I'm an addict collecting her next fix. The fact that Cyrus grabs my hand, yanks me down into the seat opposite him, even though I was about to sit there anyway, doesn't exactly help.
"Hey," says the dad on the table next door. "You okay?"
Cyrus does his best to smile, flashes his badge and the butt of his pistol. The man lifts his hand in apology.
"Sure, no problem," he says, but he's still looking at me like I'm in a bad place. Cyrus rubs his face with both hands, scratching his stubble. Then he flinches, snapping his hands away as if remembering what happens when he closes his eyes.
"You all alone, Tammy?"
"Tommi," I say, but I'm not sure if he hears me. I'm not sure if he sees me either because his head is still swinging left and right, left and right. "Yes," I say. "I'm alone. I need your help, did you—"
"What's going on?" he says, suddenly looking right at me. His hand is on my arm again and he won't let me pull loose. "You better tell me, because I swear to god I'm this close to losing my freaking mind."
"You're seeing them too," I say, watching the family walk away, taking their food with them. When I look back at Cyrus his swollen eyes are ready to pop clean out of their sockets.
"My wife gave birth last night," he says, and I can hear the lunacy riding his voice. "She wasn't pregnant, but she gave birth, right there in our house, and it's sitting there, a fucking... a fucking..."
He's struggling to form the word, his mouth isn't obeying him.
"I took her to the hospital but there's nothing wrong with her and now there's a baby in our house and it won't stop screaming and they said there's nothing wrong with it either even though... Christ, the feathers, she..." He's hurting my arm.
"Cyrus," I say. I can't remember his first name but I bunch a fist and slam it down on the table, hard enough to jolt the condiments. "Please, you need to..." I don't even know what to say to him. "I see them too, everything is wrong, everything is rotten. It's her, she's doing this."
He remembers himself, letting go of me. I rub at the welts he's left, I rub them away. He's staring at the table.
"It's a baby, or a bird, I can't look at it long enough to see." He lets his mouth hang open and I see that he's broken, that he's already outside himself. Nothing I can say will bring him back. He sits there like a child, picking dried blood out of his long nails.
"I don't know what it is, exactly," I say as calmly as I'm able.
A couple has sat down on the table next to us, younger than me, laughing their heads off. It's this that doesn't feel real, I think. The girls with no faces, the birds climbing out of throats, the babies with feathers, that's my new reality, maybe it was always my reality. The world I used to be a part of, it doesn't feel like it ever really existed.
"All I think I know is that as soon as you read one of the stories, it triggers something, a game, maybe, or a race. I don't know. It happened to Cara, she was using the stories to try to work out how to win the game, how to beat the..." I can't say it, I can't say the word. "But she gave up, or she died, I don't know. But I think I understand what we have to do, if we're going to survive this."
Cyrus is still staring at the table. The guy on the table next to us is flicking drink at his girlfriend with his straw. The food court is busy, people lining up at the KFC beside us. Their chatter is like waves, is like an ocean. I close my eyes and lose myself to it for a moment, sleep suddenly there, a leviathan trying to swallow me.
"What?" Cyrus says, bringing me back.
"It sounds crazy," I say. "But the stories Cara had, the ones she printed out and wrote on. They were clues, at least she thought they were."
"Clues?" he asks, wiping the spit from his lips. He looks like he's going to say something else but it dies in his throat.
"Clues to find her, clues to beat her maybe, I don't know."
I think he's going to ask who I'm talking about but he must already know because he nods his weary head and inhales a shuddering, lung-busting breath.
"I got our tech guys to run checks on those stories," he said. "The ones that Cara had. IP addresses, shit like that."
"And?" I say when he doesn't continue. He frowns at the table, brushing his fingers over it. It's covered in crumbs, I see, and I run my hand over them, feeling them lodge in my palm the way spilled teeth lodge in feet.
"Tech say they come from all over the world, most from regular homes, like yours. Most are written by kids, like you. But there were some that he couldn't trace. Or rather, some that had what he called an impossible address."
"Six of them," I say, thinking of the stories that Cara had commented on, but he shakes his head.
"More. They all had the same address, the same place of origin, but it was like nothing else he'd ever seen. He was in the middle of telling me about it when I got the call from Valentina. I... I didn't go back to work."
"So these stories had, what? A different kind of IP address," I ask. "They all came from the same location? Do you remember which stories? Pinch, right? And, uh, Three Dead Things, Tubby, those ones? Right? They were all written by an Unknown. Right?"
He studies me with his bloodshot eyes, then nods. Despite everything I smile, because some of the pieces are clicking into place.
"Pinch, Tubby, they were on creeepy.com," I say. "But the others were deleted. One of Cara's friends gave me Three Dead Things but there must be others. You have them, right? You must do, if you checked where they came from."
The couple next to us are nodding their heads together, like they're listening to music, still laughing. Cyrus is staring at them, his teeth clenched so tight I'm worried they might shatter, I'm worried I might have to collect them in a teacup too.
"Cyrus," I say, and his head grinds back to me. "You have them?"
"They were deleted," he says. "Cara had printouts. But the tech guy worked some magic and found a trace of them online. That's what he couldn't understand, because they all come from the same place, those stories. He counted dozens of them, maybe more. But the place they were created, posted, whatever, it doesn't exist."
There's more laughter in the food court now, it's rising up behind me like this is a comedy show and that's the laughter track. There's something hideously artificial about it but I refuse to turn around. I don't want to know what's happening back there. Cyrus looks over my shoulder and I see the flesh of his face sag, like it's about to slide off the bone.
"Cyrus," I say. "Please, the stories."
"She's found me," he whispers.
"Please," I say, resisting every urge to turn. I dig my nails into the table top. "Please, or it's never going to end."
"It will end," he says. "Everything ends."
He gets to his feet, sways there for a moment. Then he reaches down to the seat and lifts a black backpack, dumping it in front of me.
"These are all I have," he says, not looking at me. "The rest are at the station, and there's one that's still in Cara's apartment. According to the notes Cara left behind there's something special about it, it's the one that started this. It let me read it, damn it to hell, but it wouldn't let me take it away. I couldn't..."
He opens his hand, closes it, staring at it like it belongs to a stranger. I open my mouth to thank him but he's already walking past me, the smell of him old, wild, like a forest floor. I watch him go, but anything I might have said is swallowed up by what I see.
Everyone in the food court is looking at us—no, looking at Cyrus, I see, as he staggers between the tables. They're all laughing and pointing, the wave of sound is almost liquid, it's almost enough to drown me. They don't even seem to be stopping for breath and I can see the panic in their eyes, the roar of their airless blood.
As one they move their arms to point to another figure, one that's standing in the very center of the room. It's a woman, maybe in her mid-thirties, pretty and petite but masked by misery, her eyes huge and dark and wet. She's dressed in pajamas, and in her arms she's holding a bundle of something that squawks a feeble cry, something that lifts a brown speckled wing beneath its swaddle. The woman opens her mouth to her husband as he approaches but there's no words there, no sound at all, there's just that endless, soulless laughter getting louder, and louder, and louder.
Now everybody's moving, a troupe of insane dancers thumping off the tables and the chairs as they spin like dervishes—all still laughing, still laughing.
All except for Cyrus's wife, all except for Cyrus, who's reaching into his jacket and pulling out his gun, who's firing it into the crowd. I have to fight to pull myself away, grabbing the bag and running, my feet slipping on the smooth floor, gunshots exploding behind me into a wall of screaming mirth.
I run until I can't hear them any more, until the mall is far behind me and I'm back on the street, sirens wailing. I look back, expecting to see the people on the street beside me pointing, laughing, dancing. But they are as shocked as I am, scattering with their kids, their pets, their shopping bags. This was his madness, I understand, not mine. The witch has rotted his life, his wife, and I see it because it is real.
I open the bag to see a manila folder inside, and inside that I find three familiar stories and one new one.
_the tube game_
added by _unknown_ on 30.11.2011.
Then I start walking again, looking for somewhere quiet to sit and read.