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Morgan sat the gas cans at his feet, then lit a cigarette. He smoked in silence for a moment, looking off into space as if he had suddenly forgotten I was there.

“So,” I began, figuring I would remind him, “I suppose you’re wondering why I’m here.”

He shook his head slightly. “Same as everybody. You’re trying to figure out what in the name of Elvis going on. Everybody ‘cept me. Me, I don’t even wanna know no more. I bet you’re wondering what I’m doing with these here gas cans.”

“I think I know. And I don’t think Robert’s landlord would approve at all.”

He studied my bleeding face, then reached into his pocket and handed me a handkerchief. I pressed it to my cheek.

“Thank you. I, uh, fell. On a... drill.”

“You believe in Hell, Mr. Wong?”

Five seconds of confused silence, then,

“Uh, yeah. I guess.”

“Why?” he asked. “Why do you believe in Hell?”

“Because it’s the opposite of what I want to believe.”

He nodded slowly, as if this answer seemed to satisfy him. He picked up one gas can, unscrewed the cap, and started splashing the orange liquid around the living room.

I watched him for a moment, then took a tentative step toward the door. In a blur of movement Morgan turned, whipped his hand out of his jacket and suddenly there was a revolver, aimed right at my face.

“You leavin’ already?”

My mind was still buzzing and suddenly I saw a flash from Morgan’s memory, something too bizarre to grasp. It was a scene from this morning, here at this very trailer. Blood.

And screaming. All that screaming. What the hell did you see here, Morgan?

Then I had another vision, of walls erupting in flame around me. I put my hands up in surrender and he nodded down toward the other gas can.

“Help me.”

“I’ll be glad to. But first I want you to tell me what happened to John. You know, the other guy you were interrogating?”

“Well, you know he’s gone, right?”

“Yeah. He died right at the-“

“-No, man. They took him to the hospital. Paramedics got his heart goin’ but the man wasn’t home, neither. If you know what I mean. In a coma, I guess. You know how it happened? He was in the interview room and Mike Dunlow is askin’ him the same questions I was askin’ you and your guy is muttering responses like he’s half asleep. He keeps sayin’ we gotta let you and him go, else it's the end of the world. Finally Dunlow says ‘look, we got dead or missing kids here and we’re gonna find out what we need to know, so you’re stayin’ in this room until I’m satisfied or you die of old age.’ That’s a line Mike has, he says it to everybody. Your boy, when he hears that, he falls over dead. Just like that.”

“Yeah, that sounds like John.”

“He’s gone now, though.”

“Meaning?”

“Just gone.”

Okay.

I very slowly picked up the gas can and removed the cap. Morgan put his gun away, I soaked the couch.

“You know a kid named Justin White, Mr. Wong? High school kid?”

“No. You asked me that back at the police station. He’s one of the missing, right?”

No, you know him. Think.

Morgan said, “Drives a cherry-red ‘65 Mustang?”

Ah. I didn’t know the man but I knew the car. This was the baby-faced blonde kid I saw Jennifer making out with at the party.

“I know what he looks like, that’s it.”

“He’s the guy who called in the—the whatever happened here. Now, this is how my day started. Just so you understand me, so you understand my state of mind. Okay? Kid calls 911 in a panic, hysterical, talkin’ about a dead body. This was about four in the morning. I was at the Hungry Waffle Pancake House over on Jefferson, waitin’ for some pancakes, so I was just three blocks away and they sent me. So I go, I race over and I’m the first one there and from outside I hear screamin’. And there’s people runnin’, kids, you know, runnin’ away, peelin’ out in their cars, party that went bad and all that. I figure there was a fight or somebody smoked some Meth and went into a seizure or what have you. Anyway, I go in and this kid...”

He stopped splashing the gasoline for a second, staring off into space. He sucked some inspiration from his cigarette butt and spoke again.

“He’s there in the room, in this room we’re standin’ in right now. With, with the mess, you know, with the pink pile of what’s left of the Rastafarian Drug Dealer. But this kid, Justin, he’s on his hands and knees and just wailing. And I think he’s been stabbed in the gut or somethin’ but I look closer and he’s got something on him. All over him, his arms and his face.”

He left the cigarette in his mouth as he spoke, the paper burning away, leaving a quarter inch of ash dangling off the end. I stopped now, gasoline dripping off the wallpaper around me. As the cop spoke, I realized I could see his memory. I tried not to. Trust me, I tried. But it played out in my own head, through Morgan’s eyes.

“It looks like, like thick hairs. All over him,” he said. “White, almost clear, maybe like little twisted bits of fishing line. And they’re all over, on his eyelids and ears and neck and arms and this guy is screamin’, on his hands and knees, just shrieking like a little kid. And this stuff, whatever it is, it’s movin’, it’s alive and I look and I can see it on the carpet around him and then I can sorta see it in the air, too, buzzing around him like, little streaks of white, like those little white dandelion seeds blowin’ around in a strong wind.”

A half inch of ash hanging off his cigarette now. My eyes moved from it to the gasoline-soaked floor at his feet.

“And man, I am frozen there, in the doorway. I mean, I look over and on one side of the room I got a guy sprayed all over the walls like he stepped on a land mine and then there’s this, and I should go try to, try to render some assistance but I don’t wanna touch him. I don’t want whatever’s on him on me.”

In my mind, I saw it. The kid’s got his hands on the floor and this stuff, whatever it is, is crawling up his fingers and wrists and up his sleeves. It’s puddled all around him on the carpet, moving in waves, with little whisps of the things standing up like a breeze on a fur coat. They zip into the air and swirl around and around in clouds and land on the guy-

Morgan had trailed off again. He looked down at his own hands, as if to make absolutely sure they were clean. The long hunk of ash fell off of Morgan’s cigarette, into the wet carpet below.

It went out with a soft hiss.

Morgan said, “I’m a detective and I notice things, that’s my job, so I notice real fast that this swarm of, whatever, is oozing out from the pile of dead guy next to us. Then I did what I shouldn’t have done, I ran back out to my car and called for the ambulance. I mean, it’s already on the way and I shoulda stayed in and, I don’t know, found a can of bug spray or somethin’ or dragged the guy off into the shower and washed these things off him but I couldn’t. I couldn’t make myself because of the way the guy was screamin’. But not just that. Bugs, even biting bugs, I’ll handle that if I got to. But I could...”

He paused, testing what he was about to say in his own head.

“I could hear them. Do you understand?”

I didn’t, but found myself unable to speak. He opened a closet, doused the contents with gas.

“So I go to the car and I call it in and I’m real vague about what’s goin’ on, okay? I got a can of mace in the car and I grab it and I head back inside and I’m thinkin’ I should call a hazmat team, guys who could come in and, I don’t know, seal this place off, disinfect it. But I gotta try to help this guy first and I rush back inside, and, well, he’s fine. Just like that. He’s standing there fixin’ his hair and there’s no sign of these things nowhere, the bugs or whatever. And this kid, Justin, he starts talkin’ like normal, like I just got there.”

I went down to the bedroom, threw open the door and, without looking in, tossed in the half-full gas can. I shut the door behind me. Morgan saw me, smiled.

“Yeah, you saw that. That painting. That’s messed up, ain’t it? Ain’t no man who could do that. And I tell ya what, you stay in there long enough, that mural gets inside your head. The dude that was takin’ pictures of the crime scene, he went in there for half an hour. He had to be dragged out and he was cryin’. Like a little baby.”

Again, I didn’t say anything.

He went on. “So the ambulance gets here, and the kid says he’s fine but I put him in it anyway, told the guys the kid maybe had somethin’ in his blood that could kill him any second. I mean, I know this kid is, infested I guess. And I wanna know what this stuff is, but I never found out because the kid never arrived at the hospital. That ambulance took off from here with sirens and lights and it’s goin’ to St. Johns, which is just ten minutes away. Ambulance crew shows up there 45 minutes later, laughin’ and jokin’ and carryin’ fast food cups, and the kid is nowhere in sight. They ask the two guys what happened and they got no idea what anybody’s talkin’ about. No memory of any of it. Nobody’s heard from the kid since and when they go back out to the garage they find the effing ambulan ce is gone. They still ain’t found it. So, do you understand the kind of day I’m havin’?”

I wiped my cheek with the handkerchief, now deep red and sticky. My hands stank of fuel. I tried to process all this, still studying the carpet, wondering if maybe there wasn’t a swarm of alien bugs zipping around under the subfloor.

“So,” I said, “can you, uh, hear anything? Right now? Like they’re still hanging around in here?”

“Not since I got back.”

“But you’re gonna burn the place down just to make sure?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re not gonna let me go.”

He was silent for a moment, then said, “Those things that were on the guy? I been describing them like they were bugs or worms or something, you know, something you’ve seen before. But when they flew, I had one fly right across my face, okay, and they didn’t have like wings or anything. They had this little row of bristles, spiraling down their length like a barbershop pole. They sort of twisted through the air like that, headlong. A corkscrew motion. And the ones that were on the guy, on his skin? That’s what they were doin’ I think, turnin’ and drillin’ themselves into him. You understand?”

“You don’t think they were from this world.”

“You said it, I didn’t. I said I heard them, it’s like a, like a chittering I guess. You hear it, you don’t hear it really but you just get the sound in the middle of your head, like an itch. It’s not so much like a swarm of bees but more like a crowd, a crowd at a concert because you can pick out words and, I say it out loud and it sounds insane but you can hear them talking to each other, coordinating. And more than that, you can hear their hate. Little high-pitched voices. Okay? I want you to understand this. I want you to understand what I’m about to do.”

“I think I do.”

“Your buddy, from the video store. John. I told ya he’s gone now. His body, it ain’t at the hospital no more. Did he walk out? Did somebody take him? We don’t know. They got cameras in the rooms there, security cameras. We watched ‘em, rewound back to when he was brought in. You know what it shows? Nothin’. Shows the orderlies wheeling in an empty gurney and making motions like they’re movin’ a body over but their hands are empty. Like a couple of mimes doin’ an E.R. routine. That make sense to you?”

“No.”

The survival part of my brain was scrambling for a plan to get the cop’s gun or at least get away from him, but in my current clarity of mind I realized the certainty of it all. The man was going to shoot me and leave me here, no matter what I did. I was just waiting for it now. An odd feeling.

“So,” he said, a kind of slow panic creeping into his eyes, “you understand my mood. You understand why I’m out committin’ felonies today. There are dark things happenin’ and I got the real lonely feeling like I’m the only one who knows, the only one who can do anything about it.”

Morgan moved toward the door, blocking my exit. He sat the gas can down, almost empty now, and gestured to it. “Pick it up, and toss it out the door, in the yard.”

I hesitated, the detective put his gun on me again. I did as he asked. He pulled out his lighter once more and, holding it in one hand and his revolver in the other, ignited it. The gasoline fumes burned my nose now and I was getting light-headed. Standing there, a little yellow flame flickering in his hand, he said,

“You know, everybody’s got a ghost story. Or a UFO story or a bigfoot story or an ESP story. Sit around a campfire late at night and you won’t find one janitor who ain’t seen a glowing old lady roamin’ the halls in the middle of the night or maybe a hunter whose seen a pair of leathery wings flappin’ out of a tree, somethin’ way too big to be a bat. Or lights in the sky or just somethin’ simple, like a little kid at the store who goes around the corner and disappears into thin air a second later. And nobody thinks its real because they figure nobody else saw it, but everybody’s got their story. Everybody.”

He gazed into the lighter flame as he spoke, as if mesmerized. His gun was pointed at the floor and with a soft double-click his thumb pulled back the hammer, as if on its own.

“Now what I think,” he said, to his lighter, “I think all that stuff is both real and not real at the same time. And I think the people who see it and the people that don’t are both right. They’re just like two different radios, switched to different stations. Now I ain’t no Star Trek fan and I don’t know about other dimensions and all that. Maybe there is, maybe there’s another world just like this one except over there I’m Japanese and part robot, I don’t know, but I am an old Catholic and I do believe in Hell. I believe it ain’t just rapists and murderers down there, I believe its demons and worms and vile things that wouldn’t make no sense to you if you saw them. It’s the grease trap of the universe. And the more I think of it, the more I think it’s not some place ‘down there’ at all, that it’s here, all around us. We just don’t perceive it. Just like how the country music radio station is out there, in the air, even if you ain’t tuned to it. But I think somehow, through some chemistry or magic or some voodoo, that faux Jamaican S.O.B. tuned into it, into Hell itself. With that, he opened the door. He became the door.”

I thought about this, realized I was sweating from head to toe. I nodded, opened my mouth to say something, then closed it again.

“And me,” he said, nodding to himself. “I intend to close it.”

He raised his gun and shot me in the heart.

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Copyright © 2008 David Wong and Jason Pargin - All rights reserved. No part of this book or website may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the express written consent of the author and publisher. This online book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidence.