Interrogation Room

The detective stood at the desk, motionless. Mick sat across from him in the only chair, equally still. It was like being in a play, waiting for the first line to be spoken. 

"I should leave," Mick thought. But it wasn't in him. He'd made his choice.

He'd seen two doors, the Waiting Room on the right and Interrogation, on the left. In a fit of bravado, he'd chosen the door on the left. Or maybe it was less bravado than the fear of what sleep might bring.

A desk and a chair were the only pieces of furniture. Photographs of cops in old uniforms passed as decoration, their faces faded and almost featureless.  The walls were painted an uncertain color. Mick could have walked out of the room and not remembered a single thing about it.

(A voice whispered, but Mick tried not to listen. Tried to keep it from hurting him.)

There was a window, too.  It framed the black of night, but beyond that, Mick had no idea what time it was. It was dark and time had passed. That and his secret were the whole of what he knew. 

"Where is your wife?" 

"I don't know," lied Mick.  

So he was being questioned. By the detective and by something else. Something in his head. Something cold and curious and unrelenting. Maybe he'd gone crazy.

(Tell them. Then you can sleep. You can forget. )

Mick violently shook his head. It hurt. Like rolling down a hill with his head in a barrel spiked with nails. The pain made him sweat.

The detective didn't react, just ploughed on. 

"Are you sure you don't know where your wife is? There is no record of any activity on any of your wife's accounts, with the exception of an automatic withdrawal by your gym. "

"Your gym." Mick heard the faint hint of accusation in those two words, the call for explanation. 

(Tell them. Tell them where Susie is hidden. Then you will be left alone.)

Mick controlled the impulse to shake his head this time. A brief migraine tore through him anyway.

"It's my new franchise. Susie has a free membership, but she signed up to help me track the payment process, to make sure it was working OK." Not answering the main question, the real question, seemed safer, somehow. 

"We can't find the woman. Not in your home, not among the trees. Is. . Susie. . .at your gym?"

(No lies. Make it easy. Tell.)

Mick stared back, ignoring the pain in his head. The detective  spoke with an odd precision,  each word ending before the next began, each syllable getting its due. Mick looked down to where the detective had entwined his long fingers at the front of his slim body. Those bare hands with their perfect nails proved nothing. But Mick knew. The other man had a quality of aloneness. Sterility. 

Mick could almost hear Susie saying it:

"That guy would drive me crazy."

Except she wasn't speaking. Susie was hidden.

Finally, Mick answered:

"The gym is closed. But she might have gone to check it out"  He worked to picture  the  sauna, small and dark, with its clean, woody odor.

(Is she there? Hiding in that dark little room?) There was no pain this time.

No response from the detective. 

"I dunno. You want the keys? Here.  It's on Forward Street."

Mick dug in his pocket and tossed the keys down on the table, then glanced away toward the window. When he looked down again the keys were gone. The detective standing behind the desk did not appear to have moved, except his head was bowed and he was blinking rapidly. 

(The detective is tired. You're tired. If we find Susie you can sleep.) The pain was back. Lighter. More a warning than a punishment. 

Headlights came on in what he assumed  was the parking lot. The light blazed through the window, right into Mick's eyes, startling him, reminding him of being shocked into wakefulness. 

Mick rubbed his face, feeling himself under the detective's gaze.

Quietly, he said what he had to say.  Mick wasn't a shouter.

"What can I say or do? I want my wife to be safe."

The detective spoke, never looking up from the tablet or whatever it was he was suddenly holding.

"There are others looking for her. They are combing the woods and the neighborhood. We will go to the gym as well. As to our talks, you have to understand.  It is. . .atypical for someone with your wife's background to be so very hard to find."

In other words, married women in their forties, women with stable jobs, who'd never been to jail or rehab, they didn't get nabbed by serial killers, not as a rule. They didn't run off to find themselves. They didn't disappear. Not unless their husbands had something to do with it. Not usually.  But the local talk said these weren't usual times.

"Yeah, well, things have been different around here lately." 

The detective's response was flat.

"Abduction stories are hoaxes. They've always been hoaxes."

But the detective should know about the B Negative Abductions. They were all over the local news.  Eight or nine people were gone, had stayed gone--no bodies--men, women, children, every age.  Always at night. The one characteristic they had in common was the same rare blood type. A nurse from the local blood bank had called Susie.  Two of the missing men and one of the women were in the blood bank database as B Negatives.  

The nurse warned Susie because Susie was a B Negative donor, too.

Days later, the nurse died of a stroke. She was 37. That's what the obituary said.

Shortly after, Mick and Susie began to hear noises at night; they saw lights in the woods.

Susie, who did not scare easily, read everything she could find on the abductions. Recent victims had installed lights and security, had bought guns and stayed up at night. It made no difference.  

"But I'm good with my hands," thought Mick, out of the blue, "and our house is old."

The detective abruptly cocked his head, as if listening. 

"I've got to get my head on right," thought Mick. Or did he say it?

"Mick," said the detective, "you've got to get your head on on right."

Mick tried to picture the sauna again, but he wasn't feeling 100%. A weird pressure was coming over him, in a wave. He hardly ever got drunk, but he remembered now. He'd passed out in his living room recliner, looking out into their backyard deck and the trees beyond it.  

The pressure in his head let up, as if someone were tired, and the memories lurched off track. 

Mick had awakened to light and a cold breeze flowing onto him from the wide open door. It had been a moonless night.  The new motion-activated lights had flashed on, then off, while the house itself was dark.  Mick was quite unable to reach for his new shotgun.  He had the feeling that someone had touched him as it passed by.

"Mick?"  He'd turned his head, slowly. His fearless wife had been standing in the hallway doorway, in light pink pajamas, staring at him in terror.

"Something is here," she'd whispered. Downstairs, there was skittering and chittering and other noises he couldn't make sense of.

"It's time," he'd told Susie, barely breathing the words. She'd kissed him and was gone. He'd forced himself out of the recliner and stumbled out of the house, across the deck and down the stairs, making as much noise as possible. Then he was in the forest, running. 

A buzzing noise roared overhead as he tried to run over the uneven ground. Something above the trees was following  him. Away from the old house and away from his wife's hiding place.  Then a molten light encompassed him, and when he could finally make it out, it was the spotlight on top of a cop car. What might have been a cop car.

He'd kept telling those cops "no." He'd shouted it at them. 

This door or that, they'd said. As he stared, the first door quickly opened and closed as someone passed through. Behind it, he'd caught a glimpse of people sleeping, peaceful faces in nests of wires and tubes.

"You bought liquor that night?" Mick came back to the moment,  in the strange interrogation room. The detective was speaking in his mechanical way. 

Mick knew how he was supposed to answer.

".. .Yes."

"How much did you drink? Too much?"

"I don't remember."

"How much?"

That's when it hit him. This was all a scam, sure. But the idea of being drunk was in his head--no reality to it, none of the pleasure or guilt. But the idea was right there in his brain, right where they'd put it.  Along with where they'd put the rest of it.

"Where is your wife?"

(In the little dark room?)

Mick wasn't listening anymore.  He was staring at the office walls knowing there was no name for this color, that it was no descendant of red and yellow  and blue.  At the same time, the old photos were melting into a kind of writing he did not recognize. 

The being he'd imagined into a carefully groomed cop melted, like the supposed photographs,  into another form. Or rather, his brain was no longer turning what was unthinkable into something  he could bear. The thing before him was alive, but no more description was possible. Mick couldn't take it in.  At the same time Mick became aware the same kind of being was right next to him, where it had been the whole time.  Part of it was threaded through his hair, touching his scalp, and it felt like no other touch he'd ever experienced,  so complete was its wrongness. 

His next action was motivated by two truths. One was the realization that what was real in the room were the door and the window. The window was showing him dawn, while the door was showing him the way home. The other was that he was done being tricked.

He punched the thing touching him, hit it with all his adrenaline and fear and outrage. He got a brief flash of astonishment before it fell away from him. He knew, also, that it was almost out of time, and so was he.

The other thing cowered back and a hatchway came open as soon as he clawed at what looked like a handle. 

Then Mick was outside, in the woods again, bursting through.  He was not alone. His enemy was in play. But daylight was coming on fast.

He ran toward home, hoping his wife was still hidden deep within the old house, behind bricks and wood and pipe, far behind the stairs.