Niceville (28 page)

Both men were watching a wall of moving light on the far side of the basement, a field of flickering, dancing images in bright greens and deep yellows, pure blues and vivid browns, almost like a movie of an Impressionist painting being shown on a screen, a shimmering field of motion and light that covered the entire wall, a stretch of thirty, maybe forty feet, and about seven feet high.

Both men stared at it in stunned silence, each man feeling a cold crawling ripple on the back of his neck, and a kind of pagan dread.

“I … don’t know,” said Nick, stepping off the last stair and walking out into the dark room. “It sure as hell isn’t like any home theater I’ve ever seen.”

The glow from the field of light was strong enough, once his eyes adjusted, for Nick to make out a gigantic old furnace, like a huge squid squatting at the far end of the basement, and a row of storage boxes piled along the wall opposite the field of dancing light. Heavy rough-cut beams ran overhead and the floor was concrete, very clean, no dust, a dry well-kept space, as carefully tended as the rest of the house.

Behind him he heard Beau fumbling around, muttering to himself.

“What are you doing?” said Nick, speaking in a whisper, as if
he were afraid to attract the attention of whatever this light-thing really was.

“I’m looking for a light switch,” said Beau, also in a whisper.

“No. Don’t touch anything. Stay where you are.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” said Nick, moving farther out into the room, staring at the flickering on the basement wall. Bright green bands across the top, swatches and blobs of vivid color here and there, a band of cool sky blue along the bottom … cool sky blue?

“Beau, have you got a camera on your cell phone?”

“Yeah,” said Beau. “You want me to take a picture of … it?”

“Yes. No flash. Can you do that?”

“Just a minute … yeah … okay.”

Nick heard the phony metallic snap sound that cell phone cameras had to make now because of all the locker room perverts who bought cell phones with cameras, and then a rapid series of them
—snickety-snickety-snickety-snick
.

“I can take a video too, you want?”

“Yes. Start now.”

“Okay … but, boss, please, don’t go near it.”

“I’m not. I’m just—there’s something weird.”

“No shit,” said Beau, watching through his LCD screen as Nick stepped into the middle of the room, facing the wall of light, his body lit up by the glow, Nick staring at it, fixed and frozen.

He was trying make sense of it when something tripped in his brain, a visual gestalt, and the puzzle got solved. The color field was
upside down
.

He bent sideways, trying to see it that way, and suddenly he was looking at a tree line, blurry but clear enough, a broad canopy of oaks and chestnuts and a few dark spear points that could be pines or cedars, and, below the tree line, a large tilled field, with people working in it, a brown tractor pulling a flat sled loaded high with what looked like white stones, round as balls.

More dark figures of men, some digging in the black earth, others lifting what looked like long black boxes out of the ground, still others in a ragged line, watching the work.

He tried to get the image to focus, straining his eyes, stepped forward—

“Nick, honest, don’t touch it.”

“I’m just going to—”

He heard a sound, a low hissing growl that sent a chilly ripple up the back of his neck. At that moment, the field of light flickered, jumped, and changed. Instead of a tree line and a farm field, and workers digging at trenches of some kind, the scene had changed completely, and now he was looking at an upside-down image of a row of slate roofs, big old houses, spreading live oaks with drooping strands of Spanish moss, rolling lawns, and closer in, a wrought-iron fence, a gate, a red and black Jeep with a dark figure beside it—

Nick turned his back on the light wall, and walked across the basement towards a blacker patch high up on the far wall. As he walked, his shadow grew larger on the image, until it blotted it out completely. Nick held his hand up and saw, on his flat palm, a small disk of shimmering light.

He moved his palm forward toward the dark patch until the disk shrank to the size of a quarter.

Now the basement behind him was in total darkness. He looked at the dark patch and saw a tiny circle of light in the middle of it.

He reached out, felt some kind of heavy cloth, and in the middle of the cloth, a small hole, perhaps a rip, about an inch in diameter.

He stepped back, shaking his head, and started to laugh.

“What is it?” asked Beau, as Nick’s black shadow receded and some of the color field came back on the wall. Nick reached up and tugged the shade open, and the image on the wall disappeared in a wash of bright sunlight streaming in through a basement window.

Then he drew the shade closed again, and the glowing image on the far wall reappeared, although, Nick realized, not at all like the image he had first seen, that strange unreal scene of a green tree line, and workers in a farm field, a tractor towing a sled of small pale round objects that could have been white stones.

Or skulls
, the thought came, but he said nothing. Instead he looked at Beau.

“Ever hear of a camera obscura, Beau?”

“Yeah, I think so. Isn’t it like a pinhole camera? We studied them in school, made ’em out of shoe boxes.”

“Yeah. That’s what this room is right now.”

He turned, pointing to the field of light.

“I guess the light’s about right for this effect. There’s a small hole in this black shade here. When it’s closed, the sun comes in through the hole in a narrow beam, just like in a pinhole camera. What you’re looking at there is an upside-down picture of the street out front. There’s the Armed Response Jeep, that figure is Dale Jonquil standing next to it, those are the gates, the fence, and the houses and the lawns across the street.”

Beau stared at it, frowning, and then got it, in that abrupt and startling way that an optical illusion will suddenly reveal itself. He stepped up to the wall, reached out, and felt cold stone under his fingertips.

“Damn, Nick. Scared the living—”

“Me too. First time I ever saw something like this, I was a kid, helping some friends move. We rented a stake truck, with a tarp over it. There was no room in the cab so I rode in the back, under the tarp. I had my back up against the side boards—it was pitch dark—and I realized that there was something flickering on the far side of the truck. There was a small hole in one of the boards, and the daylight was coming through it. Took me a minute or two to figure out I was looking at an image of the streets and cars going by, only upside down. A camera obscura. That’s what this room is.”

“You figure Miss Cotton set it up like this?”

“Don’t know. Looks like it was just some sort of freaky accident …” he said, his voice trailing off as he tried to deal with the effect that first image had had on him, the image of the farmer’s field and the people working in the earth, the image that had abruptly changed into a reflection of the street outside Delia Cotton’s mansion.

A ghostly farm, strange twisted trees in a weird golden light, human skulls heaped on a cart, workers—or slaves—digging up … digging up what?

Coffins?

“Beau, did you get this on the camera?”

“I think so,” said Beau, reaching out, finding a switch, and turning the light on, a large electric bulb hanging from a wire in the middle of the basement. The dark shadows leaped away into the corners and the image on the wall faded into a faint suggestion of colored motion.

The light also showed something underneath the octopus furnace, in the shadows of it, a dark rounded mass.

Beau went over to it, kneeling down to peer under the old tin ductworks.
The dark mass receded, almost as if it were liquid, pulling itself back deeper into the shadows, but in complete silence. Beau recoiled, sat back on his heels.

“I do not like this house, Nick. I truly do not. Now I know what the jimjams are. What the hell is that thing?”

“I don’t know,” said Nick, leaning down to look under the pipe, his heart blipping. Beau wasn’t the only cop here with the jimjams.

“It’s alive, whatever it is,” said Beau. “Now I can hear something hissing. How about I just shoot it?”

“You can’t just shoot things, Beau. Tig wouldn’t like it. He’d make you pay for the bullet. How about you just get down there and go on in and see what it is?”

Beau gave him a look, pushed himself to his feet, stepped back, smiled broadly, and waved Nick on through with a graceful veronica.

“Sir, according to the manual, this is where a highly skilled senior officer is supposed to show the dumb-ass rookie how these things are done.”

“According to the manual?”

“Oh yes sir. It surely is. Just like on
NCIS
.”

Nick looked sideways at him, sighed, and stepped forward, going down on one knee, leaning over to peer into the darkness.

Whatever was in there, it didn’t like that and the low hissing turned into a long, throaty snarl that made all his favorite body parts go tingly and cold. He looked up at Beau.

“We got any gloves in the car?”

“Just those latex jobs,” said Beau.

“See if there’s any gardening gloves around.”

“What is it?” asked Beau, backing away, afraid he was going to miss something interesting.

“Just find some,” said Nick, settling back into a crouch, breathing through his mouth and trying to calm down, listening to Beau ramble up the wooden staircase and make the floorboards creak as he walked down the front hall.

Alone in the basement—well, not entirely alone—Nick could feel the big house settling down on him, a great dead weight trying to crush him into the concrete.

He had no idea what had happened to Delia Cotton, but something had definitely happened to her house. The whole place was just …

Outside?

Lemon Featherlight’s phrase came back, the way he had described whatever had happened to Rainey Teague, how the kid had somehow been … transported … to an ancient crypt.

Whatever it was, it came from … outside
.

Nick shook himself, ran his hands through his hair. That was just horseshit. Somebody—somebody real—was screwing around with Niceville, and that was what guys like him were supposed to stop.

He heard the floorboards creaking, Beau coming across the main floor and down the basement stairs. Whatever was under the furnace hissed again, and recoiled farther into the shadows.

“I got these,” said Beau, handing him a pair of long, heavy cotton gardening gloves. “And these,” he said, holding up a shovel and a rough gray blanket.

Nick slipped the gloves on, tugged his shirtsleeves down, got down on his knees, and crawled under the pipe, tensed, and made a sudden snapping lunge.

He got a fistful of thick fur—felt his glove and his forearm getting raked—the thing hissing and snarling deep down in its throat. Incredibly strong, it writhed under his hand and sank its teeth into the glove—Nick could feel the pinpricks of its fangs just touching his skin. He came back out, holding a large Maine Coon cat by the scruff of its neck.

He grabbed the hind legs with his other hand, struggling to keep a grip on the thing. The cat’s eyes were wild and dilated, ears flat back, ruff flared up, tail lashing, lips snarling back and fangs exposed to the gum line, a crazy green light in its irises. It was trying to use its hind-leg claws to rip the flesh off Nick’s forearm.

Beau threw the blanket around it and they finally managed to wrap the big cat up tightly inside it, with only its head sticking out, the cat fighting with everything it had, hissing and snarling at them, trying to bend its head around far enough to bite Nick’s hand.

“Jeez,” said Beau, looking at the cat. “What the hell’s got into her?”

“This is Delia’s cat,” said Nick. “On the report. Mildred … something. Mildred Pierce.”

Hearing the name, the cat seemed to settle down a bit, not enough for them to let it out of the blanket, but at least it had stopped trying to shred them into human confetti.

Nick could feel the animal trembling under his hands, and the heat coming off her radiated through the blanket.

He generally liked cats better than dogs, and now he held her in close to his chest. She was thrumming like a bowstring as they went back up the stairs and into the kitchen area, Beau keeping a wary eye on the cat, holding the shovel like a baseball bat.

“Put the shovel away,” said Nick. “We’re not going to brain a goddam house cat, are we?”

“She gets away from you, I am. She’s as big as a lynx. Look at her eyes. That cat’s insane.”

Nick looked at the cat, and the cat, going suddenly still, glared back at him, a fixed lidless stare, and Nick had the momentary illusion that a cold but intelligent entity was looking at him. The feeling passed, and it was just a cat.

“Jesus,” said Nick, lifting it up. “What have you seen, cat? What the hell have you seen?”

“We’re interviewing a cat?” said Beau.

“She’s the only witness we have,” Nick answered. “I think she’s got some blood on her fur. Let’s start by seeing whose blood it is.”

Bock had been one of the few people in Niceville, other than Byron Deitz, who had gone about his Saturday chores blissfully unaware of the hostage situation unfolding at Peachtree and Gwinnett.

Once committed to a course of action, no matter how swinish, Bock possessed a work ethic second to none. After firing off three copies of the Kevin David Dennison e-mail to the church, the local newspapers, and Live Eye Seven quite early in the day, he had spent the rest of his Saturday morning diligently at work on the Littlebasket file, hunting for, locating, and then downloading the most sexually graphic, or simply graphically humiliating, of the hidden-camera shots Morgan Littlebasket had taken of his daughters, Twyla and Bluebell, as they flowered into womanhood.

The selection had required some close concentration—how to choose for maximum pain and humiliation—but he finally got the job done around two, listening with half a mind to NPR on Sirius Satellite Radio, a rebroadcast of Garrison Keillor’s
Prairie Home Companion
—“The Joke Show,” as it happened, one of his all-time favorites.