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I very slowly turned the knob and pushed the door in, just enough to lean my head and my right arm through. The hoverdog was about ten feet away, behind the couch and her incredibly hot new owner. I held out the candy, which immediately caught Molly’s attention.

I tossed the candy on the floor and quickly ducked back out. Molly floated over to it, tilted in midair until her snout was just over the white morsel. She lapped it up.

For a moment, nothing. John was about to supply the “it’s not working” when, with a wet, tearing KERRRAAAAACTCH sound, Molly exploded like a meat piñata at a birthday party for very strong, invisible children.

A couple of cops behind us cheered. Drake walked up. “What the hell was that?”

John answered for me. “It was a TestaMint. Little candies with Bible verses printed on them. You can get them at your local Christian bookstore. We were sort of hoping it would just drive the evil out of her, but...”

“Fantastic,” said Drake. “And, uh, while we appreciate it and all, you understand that as far as any of the cops here are concerned, you were never here. If you say otherwise, we’ll say you’re lyin’. Seriously, though, we do thank you. Now, you boys gotta step aside. This is a crime scene.”

I thought this was a fabulous idea, stepping aside. I thought the best thing to do would be to step aside all the way to Antarctica. Molly said she served something named Korrok. And while I didn’t know who or what a Korrok was or what it did, it seemed to involve tearing out people’s necks.

It was John who said to Drake, “One request. We helped you, so you do this for us. Let us take a shot at the girl.”

This horrified me, but Drake just shrugged and answered, “Eh, I dunno.”

“Come on,” John said. “We’ll walk her around, let her get some air, see if we can get her to talk. If we can’t do it, you can have her. Right, Dave?” I looked at John, suddenly understanding.

“Uh, yes, John,” I said, self-consciously. “Get her to talk. I knew exactly what you meant this entire time.”

The cop shrugged. “You got two minutes.”

We went to the couch. I couldn’t resist looking over at the red, six-foot circle of dog mush and I noticed something among the entrails, something that didn’t belong. An object was poking out at a right angle, a corner of something square.

I moved closer and, sure enough, there was a slimy rectangular box among the spilled innards, about the size of a red brick. Too big for Molly to have eaten it. Too big, in fact, for the dog to have lived with it inside her. But the laws of physics appear to be just annoying details these days and John and I began an extensive and complex debate over who should go fish the object out.

Eventually John did. The object was wrapped in plastic, solid and heavy. Maybe it was a brick. He handed it to me and I crammed it in my jacket before any of the cops outside noticed what we had done. They would have said we were taking evidence from a crime scene, but to be honest I didn’t think this was the type of thing you can bring before a jury anyway.

I looked around and found Molly’s collar near her head, saw the blood-stained tag there.

I’m Molly.

Please return me to...

“Goodbye, Molly,” I muttered. “Of all the dogs I’ve known in my life, I’ve never seen a better driver.”

Just before I turned away, I noticed something else. Out of the pile of dog salsa stuck one of the paws, straight up into the air. On the foot, on the pad where the palm would be on a human hand, was a marking, like a tattoo. A little black symbol, something like the mathematical symbol for Pi. I pointed this out to John, who suggested I take the severed paw home for further study. I decided it wasn’t that important. Maybe something the breeder put on there, I didn’t know. I hadn’t noticed it before but how often do you look at a dog’s feet?

Krissy Lovelace wouldn’t make eye contact with us and she wouldn’t respond to our voices, like the cops said. But when we pulled her up by her wrists she stood on her own. We led her to the door. Drake gave me and my bulging jacket a look but John distracted him, patted him on the shoulder and shook his hand, asked how Aunt Connie was doing.

Once outside we led Krissy around to the back yard, saying generic, soothing words to her the whole way. Once we were out of view of the cops I pulled out the dog package and tore away a layer of plastic wrapping. Three thin metal boxes inside it, strapped together with red tape. Each about six inches long and an inch wide, bullets poking out one end.

Pistol magazines.

This utterly baffled me, considering we got them from inside a dog, but I supposed there was nothing that could have been in the box that would have made perfect sense in that circumstance. I stuffed them back into my jacket. John put his hands on Krissy’s shoulders and turned her to face him. He got right in her face and held up his smoldering cigarette.

“Miss? You see this? You start talkin’ or I’m gonna burn you with it.”

No response.

“Ma’am,” I offered. “I’d do what he says. I’m a good guy, a reasonable guy, but my friend here? He’s a wild man. And once he gets goin’ I can’t stop him. Now wouldn’t you rather talk to me?”

Nothing.

John grabbed her wrist and jammed the lit cigarette into the back of her hand with a pssssst sound.

She yelped and yanked her hand back, shaking it madly. “What the heck are you doing?” she screeched.

“Ma’am, we got a serious situation here,” John said, in a voice devoid of sympathy. “We got a dead guy and maybe a lot worse on the horizon if you can’t help us. Now I’m real sorry you saw what you saw but we ain’t got time for you to curl up into some psychological shell. Help us and you can just repress the memory later.”

She stood and looked around for a moment, bewildered. I fully expected her to ask where she was, but it came to her after a moment.

“Molly!” she gasped. “Molly attacked Ken!”

“Yes, we know,” I said. “But we don’t get why-“

“-and you say he died?”

“It’s—yes, he died. It’s a strange thing and we need you to tell us-“

“-I’m gonna puke,” she said, leaning over. “Can I go to jail for this? Because it was my dog? Can they charge me with murder?”

“No. I—look, I don’t know. But we need to-“

“-Miss,” John interrupted. “We have reason to believe your dog was possessed by some kind of Helldemon. Has Molly ever spoken to you before?”

Pause.

“Who are you guys?”

“Just answer the question. Please,” John said. “Has there ever been any levitation?”

“What? No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Ma’am,” I said, “if your dog ever dabbled in the occult it’s best you tell us now. We’re experts.”

“What? No, no. I’ve only had her for a few weeks, she showed up at my house and I went to return her to the address on her tag but the owner was this weird girl and she told me to keep her. I was just walking her and we ran into Danny Wexler.”

She said that name like we should know it, like it was a mutual friend or something. She saw the look of non-recognition on our faces and said, “The Channel Five sports guy. I know him, he goes to my church. He pulled up alongside the road, like he was gonna stop at Ken Phillipe’s house because, you know, they work together. He gets out and he pets Molly and then he drives off. Just like that.”

I glanced at John, then turned to her.

“Ma’am-”

“Please stop calling me that. You sound like a cop when you do it. Call me Krissy.”

“Krissy,” I said, “tell me exactly what Wexler said to you. Word for word.”

“I don’t think he said much of anything. Just, ‘nice dog you got there.’ Then he drove away. A second later Molly went nuts.”

“After he touched her?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Just to pet her, though.”

“And he didn’t say anything else?” I asked. “Didn’t mention serving the Dark Lord Korrok or anything like that?”

“Um, no, I’m pretty sure he didn’t.”

“Okay.” I turned to walk away.

“Wait!” said Krissy. “There’s something else. When Danny drove up, he was wearing a mask. Or it looked like it, all black. But he must have taken it off because when he pulled up it was off. But I know I saw it. That’s weird, isn’t it?”

I asked, “Could you see any of his face? When he had the mask on?”

“No, it was dark.“

“-No, I’m asking if it looked like he had a face at all. Or was it just all black?”

“It was all in shadow. It could have been a ski mask or something, with something over the eyes. But why would he do that?”

“So basically for a moment you just saw a dark shape where Wexler should have been. And then a moment later Wexler was there.”

“Well, sort of. But I’m pretty sure I saw it, though. Is Molly okay? Do you think they’ll take her to the pound?”

“Uh, if you go around and talk to the police, they’ll explain everything.”

I turned to John.

“Let’s go.”

I walked away. John followed, taking a moment to thank Krissy for her cooperation and let her know that we would contact her if any more leads developed. When our butts landed in my car a minute later, John lit up another cigarette and asked, “Okay, what now?”

* * * * *

The thing about video game basketball is that the computer decides whether or not the ball goes in when you shoot. So say you’re playing against the computer team, you’re down by one and let's say you take a last-second shot to win the game. It’s the same program you’re playing against that decides whether or not the digital ball goes through the digital hoop on that final shot. So it can arbitrarily make you lose or arbitrarily let you win. Even when John and I played each other, as we were now, the game can decide at any moment to just make one of us win, make the characters we’re controlling throw up bad shots. The whole thing is bullshit.

But we were playing anyway, on my sofa. John was Kobe Bryant’s Lakers and I was the Chicago Bulls, led by Pierre Manslapper (you can name your own players if you want). It was an hour after the thing with Molly and the dead weather guy. We were alone, Jen was at her friend Amber’s house, ostensibly to help out with Amber’s new baby. She had been gone for two days, though, and seemed to have taken a lot of clothes with her.

“So,” John said, glancing at his watch. “You think the cops talked to Wexler?”

“Who?”

“Danny Wexler, the sports guy? Because of the thing with the weather guy getting killed?”

“The weather guy was killed by the dog. That’s how it’ll go down, dog attack. Case closed. Even the dog is dead.”

“But they gotta recognize it’s more than that, right? And you know Wexler had to be part of it, she said he looked like one of those shadow things.”

I shrugged. “Eh, what can you do. Hey, did you know that the number one all-time rated show in Korea was the premiere of that 80’sshow Joanie Loves Chachi? It turns out that in Korean, ‘chachi” means ‘penis.’”

John paused the game.

“It’s after ten. I wanna flip over, see if the news has got anything about it.”

He did, before I could object, and I was immediately reminded of why I hated local newscasts. We sat through a lengthy tribute to the departed Ken Phillipe, showing old video clips of the idiot standing knee-deep in rushing flood water while wind pummeled his microphone, another shot of a shaky camera trying to track a tornado on the horizon while Ken shouted his report. They transitioned from that to a scandal at a local nursing home where dishwashers rinsed bedpans and dinner plates in the same load, then to a house fire that wouldn’t have made the newscast at all had their crew not arrived in time to get video of the pretty flames. Then they got to sports and I admit, that part was pretty entertaining.

The first thing that was strange was when they cut to the two-shot of Danny Wexler and the anchor, Danny’s face was black. I saw immediately why Krissy thought he was wearing a mask when she first saw him. At first glance it did look like he had on a black ski mask, one without the eye holes, look a second longer and you might think he had painted his entire head black. And when they cut to the closer one-shot of his head, you could see that Danny Wexler appeared to be a statue carved from solid shadow. Only John and I saw this, of course, because the other anchors didn’t react in horror. Or at least, not until Danny Wexler opened his mouth:

“I’m Danny Wexler and this is Channel 5 sports! The (undisclosed) football team has been raped in the ass by fate once again, booted from the first round of the playoffs as they failed to carry their inflatable turd past a chalk line in the grass as often as their opponents did. Here’s Hornets quarterback Mikey Wolford, flopping that right arm around like a retard while he tries to pass to a teammate that apparently only he can see. Aaaaand, it’s intercepted. Nice pass, ‘tard! Now here’s Spartans fullback Derrick Simpson, pumping those nigger thighs down the field like pistons on a machine designed for cotton picking. Ooh, nice tackle attempt there, Freddy Mason! You run like you’re taking it up the ass. I bet you could tackle that fullback if he was made of dick, couldn’t you, Freddy? But, he’s not, so final score, 41-17. May every Spartan die with a turd on his lips. All hail Korrok.”

Danny didn’t get to read any more highlights, as the newscast abruptly switched back to a visibly shaken anchor woman, who announced they would be right back. Commercial.

John clicked off the TV and I let out a long, resigned sigh. Without a word, we put on our jackets and walked out the door. We stopped by my tool shed first.

* * * * *

The flat little Channel 5 building was about fifteen minutes outside of town, the red light on its transmitter tower growing out of the horizon as we approached. It was a wasted trip. The morbidly obese security guard inside the door kept asking us our business there and, since we forgot to make up a lie, he sent us on our way. In the course of the conversation we did get him to mention that he thought Wexler had left early.

We climbed back into my Hyundai and put on our detective hats. Our proverbial hats led us to a convenience store where we asked if they had a phone book behind the counter. We looked up Wexler’s address, then we drove around for half an hour, driving past his building four times before we figured out we were looking on the wrong side of the street. We pulled into the lot and found a Buick with the license plate 5 SPRTS which, after some debate, we decided must stand for Channel 5 sports and that it must be his. We pulled around and found a visitor’s lot at the back of the building.

“You still got the mints?” John asked as we strode into the shadow of the four-story apartment building. “You knock on the door and when Wexler answers, you cram some mints down his throat.”

I was carrying a new CD player, a rugged model they sell at the hardware store, designed to keep playing even if knocked off a workbench or batted across the room by, say, a sasquatch. John was carrying a satchel containing several items he collected from my tool shed. I wasn’t sure what all he had in there. We didn’t have any holy water. Where do you even get it? Off the internet?

In the front door, through the lobby, to the stairs, then back to the lobby as we both realized we didn’t have an apartment number for Wexler because the phone book only had the street address. We stood around for about fifteen minutes, when an older lady walked passed and we told her we had a pizza to deliver to Wexler and needed to know which door was his. Three-thirteen, she said. She asked if we had seen the newscast and said she was worried about that poor young man. John told her it was nothing a nice pizza wouldn’t cure. She didn’t ask where the pizza was.

To the stairs. Wexler had a lot fewer years in the broadcasting business than had Weatherman Phillipe and it showed in his living accommodations. This wasn’t that nice of a building. We found 313 and I planted the CD player on the floor, speakers facing the closed door. John unzipped the satchel and pulled out a weapon he had made, a baseball bat with a Bible wrapped around the end of it with electrician’s tape. He brought it up to the ready. I pushed “play.”

The smooth-yet-screechy sound of Cinderella’s “Don’t Know What You’ve Got ‘Til it’s Gone” filled the hall.

“Don’t know what you got, till it’s gone

Don’t know what it is I did so wrong

Now I know what I got

It’s just this song

And it ain’t easy to get back

Takes so long...”

We let it play for the duration of the song, one guy down the hall poking his head out of a door in confusion and then closing it quickly at the sight of John and his bat. Wexler’s door remained closed.

We shut off the CD player, listened. Nothing from the other side of the door. I tried the knob. Unlocked. I gestured to John and he ducked inside, Bible bat at the ready.

Lights on, nobody home. The television was on and I was momentarily surprised to see me and John on the screen. Then I noticed a tripod and camcorder facing us from across the room. Between the camera and us was a sofa, so it had apparently been positioned to tape whoever was sitting on it, the TV set to show the live feed. The sofa was empty now.

We split up and quickly searched all five rooms of the small apartment, neat but cramped. Furniture too close to the TV, a kitchen table that’d have to be pulled away from the wall if you wanted to seat more than two people around it. Movie posters in the bedroom. Bachelor pad.

But no Wexler. Then, I heard a shout from John, who I found laying prone on the floor of the bedroom. At the sight of me he sat up and thrust his hands out. In one hand he held a large, folded envelope, ragged where it had been torn open. In the other hand he held a small, silver canister. Just like mine.

I took the envelope and flattened it out. The address was written in an aggressive jagged scrawl that had to be a man’s.

ATTN: KATHY BORTZ, REPORTER

CHANNEL 5 NEWSROOM

...and then the P.O. Box number of the TV station. I didn’t know who Kathy Bortz was but deductive reasoning led me to assume she was a reporter at Channel 5 and worked in the newsroom. John said he remembered her from the newscast earlier, said she was the lead reporter who did the nursing home story. So if you were a citizen and had something big you wanted to share with the world, such as a vial of a black, oily goo from Planet X, you’d mail it to a Kathy Bortz because you’d likely not know the name of the assignment editor or news director. You’d mail it to the face you knew. Or, at least, that’s what James “Big Jim” Sullivan would do.

I can say that because his name was scrawled in the return address corner, followed by an address I had seen many times and had long memorized, always following the words “I’m Molly, please return me to...”

I rubbed my hand over my mouth, tried to think through it. I sat on the edge of the bed and glanced at John.

I said, “Jim had the Soy Sauce.”

John shrugged. “I guess so.”

“Why didn’t he tell us?”

“He acted pretty weird when he first saw it. That night I mean, when the Jamaican pulled it out. I thought he was just scared of the needle. Big Jim, he didn’t even drink. I was surprised he hung around as long as he did but, hey, maybe he was there because he did know what it was. And he did try to tell somebody, you know. He mailed it to the damned TV station.”

“Before he died.”

A shrug. “Probably.”

I stood and walked into the living room. John laid the baseball bat down on an end table, hands on his hips, not sure what to do. I sat down on the couch, seeing myself do it on the TV screen at the same time. I waved to myself. John went and did something in the kitchen, banging around plates and whatnot. A minute later he came and sat down beside me, carrying a sandwich and a can of Coke. I noticed a VCR atop the TV was recording the camera’s feed. John leaned over onto the end table and looked at Wexler’s answering machine. The New Message light was off.

John said, “Those little camcorder tapes can only go for, what, half an hour? If that one’s still going it means we couldn’t have missed him by much.”

I hit stop on the VCR and hit Rewind. John meanwhile was messing with the menu options on the phone, trying to go through and play all the old messages still in its memory. He did, skipping through eleven worthless messages before we heard the unmistakable voice of Action Weather Watcher Ken Phillipe:

Beep.

“Danny? It’s Ken. Call me, buddy. What you saw, I don’t want you to misunderstand. Krissy and I, we been neighbors a long time, I knew her mom from way back—look, I want you to know that she and I were talking but we were talkin’ about you, Danny. You got her scared, the way you’ve been acting. Anyway. Give me a call, Danny and I’ll be over with a six pack and we’ll shoot the shit. I hope you’re well, buddy.”

Beep.

I started the VCR from the beginning of the tape. Empty sofa. Then Danny Wexler leaned into frame, glancing over at the feed on the TV. He sat down, looking worn and beaten and drained, in a sweat-stained T-shirt and jeans. The door we had just entered through was visible over his shoulder.

“Hi, honey,” he said. “Are you there? Answer me if you’re there.”

I looked at John. “Was he talking to somebody behind the camera?”

John didn’t answer, just squinted quizzically.

“Come on. It’s okay,” Wexler said, staring into the camera in silence for a few seconds. “Just say hello.” More silence. He continued. “I know. It’s been a rough couple of weeks. Baby, I’ve done somethin’ really stupid. I’ve gotten wrapped up in something. Something you can’t imagine.”

“That’s bizarre,” said John. “It’s like listening to one half of a phone conversation.”

Wexler continued after a short pause. “If I told you the details, you would wish I hadn’t,” he said. “But, you know by now that I’m not myself. I come and go, and right now I’m fine, but I have to fight for every second of control. It’s draining. Baby, it takes so much energy to keep myself on top, on the surface, at the wheel. As soon as I relax, he’ll take over. It will take over. And I’ll just be a spectator. Helpless.”

He broke down into sobs.

Wexler babbled on, these long pauses in between here and there. I turned to John.

“So, he was on the sauce, right?”

“At some point, yeah. Maybe he thought it would improve his sportscast. And now that I think about it, it sort of did.”

“Or maybe he didn’t take it. Maybe it took him. The same way it happened to me.”

Wexler was still going on, weeping softly on the screen now. His face broke into a wide grin, as if something profoundly comforting had been whispered to him.

I said, “Fast forward toward the end. See if he mentions where he’s going before he leaves.”

John never got the chance. We saw Wexler flinch and look up, as if hearing a noise. It was Cinderella’s “Don’t Know What You’ve Got ‘Til its Gone.” Wexler looked nervously back at the camera and then stood up off the couch, nervous. He walked out of frame and, minutes later, we watched ourselves burst through the door.

John and I leapt up from the couch as if our asses were spring-loaded.

“We just missed him!” John screamed. “We just missed him! Shit!”

On the TV John and I walked passed the camera, then headed off to search the apartment. Then, a shape, moving at the top of the frame. On the ceiling.

Some kind of creature...

It was Wexler. Crawling on the ceiling like something that had never spent one day being human. On the TV we watched him scramble out the door, limbs clutching the top of the door frame and pushing himself out into the hall. Weightless. Moving fast as a salamander, an inhuman blur.

We picked up our stuff and flew out the door and into the hall. He had fifteen minutes on us now, at least. We pounded down the stairs, stupidly hoping we’d somehow see him slooooowly leaving the parking lot in time for us to climb into my Hyundai and follow.

Our shoes hit pavement. We ran to Wexler’s parking spot and found it empty. We stood there like idiots, chests heaving, chilled air frosting the sweat on my face.

John said, “Maybe he went back to the TV station?”

I shrugged. “Or to Ken’s house. Or Krissy’s house. Or to the hospital. Or that 24-hour tattoo place. Or the airport where he has a flight waiting to take him to Thailand. We could drive around all night, John.”

We trudged around the building and back through a row of hedges that separated the visitor’s lot. Black as pitch out here. I glanced up and noticed the lights were off in the lot-

-of course they are-

-and there was no moon. Dark as hell. It was chilly, a wet autumn night kind of cold, but I knew part of the cold I was feeling was coming from the inside. Fear was creeping up on me, working from the guts out.

Just go back, man. Go back home, to the warmth and the light. You did your best, now it’s over. You won’t find him and dark like this, true dark, belongs to bats and rapists. You did what you could.

I walked on, feeling already like this was wrong, totally wrong, my car keys clutched in my right hand like a rosary, our shoes crunching dead leaves with each step.

Crunch... crunch... crunch...

I blinked, trying to adjust to the dark, not doing it. I got that feeling again, like I did outside McDonald's earlier, that total awareness of every inch of my skin. Eyes watering from the chilled air, a little soreness in my knees from bouncing down the steps, a tickling around the hairs of my ankles. The adrenaline of a fear response, perking every nerve.

I blinked and could see a little now, my Hyundai just twenty feet away, one of only two cars in the lot. The low, cloud-filtered gloom made the blue compact appear a few shades too dark. I suddenly had this flash of visual memory, the glimpse of parking lot as my headlights swept across it when we pulled in, flat asphalt under circles of lamplight. That memory knotted in my gut for some reason, something I couldn’t put my finger on. We walked.

Crunch... cranch.... crinch...

Something’s wrong.

Seeing it again, the lights flashing across the lot as we turned in, a newly-paved lot with fresh, dark pavement against sharp, yellow lines...

Crunch... cree-unch...

...and completely devoid of fallen leaves.

Cruuuuunch...

That tickling at my ankles again. I stopped. I looked down.

From behind me, John screamed.

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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.