“Did that page of words and scribbles guide you to a street that didn’t exist?” Chloe asked.
“Yeah, it actually did,” she said. “But right before that, something else happened. The girls got excited. They kept whispering to each other that they could feel him, that he was coming.”
“Who?”
“They said that the Gray God was calling them, and they started to run. My friend and I followed, but it was hard to keep up. We ended up running for three or four blocks until we came to the entrance of a narrow old cobblestone alleyway, but when I looked down at the GPS on my phone, there was no alley. As far as Google Maps was concerned, we were standing in front of a solid building. And something else was strange.”
“What?” Chloe asked.
“There was nobody around. Somehow we’d ended up alone on a Friday night in London.”
“So?” Chloe said. “Maybe it was just a lull or something.”
“No. That doesn’t happen. This is London, mate. There are always people everywhere.”
Carlotta was silent for a moment, possibly reliving the weirdness of those vacant streets.
“What happened next?” I prompted.
“My friend told the girls that we were supposed to wait for the others and enter the alley as a group, but they weren’t having it. They said that the Gray God was calling to them, and that he wanted them to hurry. Then the two girls held hands and stepped into the alley. I can still hear the sound of their heels clicking against the cobblestones as they moved forward, hand in hand, into the darkness. My friend texted the others our location, and then we followed the girls.”
Carlotta paused for a moment to take a sip of something, and then continued.
“Now, this is when things start to get extra weird,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Chloe asked.
“Well, it’s kind of hard to explain but…something started to change in the alley, near the back.”
“Change how?” I asked.
“Well, it started like some kind of smudge in the distance…a smudge that soon became something else. It was like a horror film. The darkness was…folding around the alley somehow, and we could no longer see the two girls ahead of us. Suddenly I felt an irresistible urge to run away. Something was coming. I could feel it.”
“You felt like this thing was coming for you?” Chloe asked.
“It was worse than that,” Carlotta said.
“What do you mean?” I asked. My mouth was suddenly dry, and I felt the deep heat slowly rising from my chest to fill my head.
“It was coming for everyone,” she said.
I took a deep breath and did my best to calm down. I looked over at Chloe. She was staring back, worried, hands clasped between her knees, her knuckles white.
Carlotta continued. “Anyway, at that point, I grabbed my friend’s hand and the two of us sprinted away from there as fast as we could manage.”
“And the girls who’d entered the alley?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.
“Gone,” she said.
“Was there a door or something somewhere that they might have used to leave the alley?” Chloe asked.
“There was nothing. It was a dead end. No doors or fences. We caught up with the rest of the group on the next street over and breathlessly explained what had happened. They were excited and demanded we take them back to the alley immediately. We ran back over to where we’d last seen the girls, but the alley wasn’t there. The street was the same, but where the alley had been mere minutes ago, there was now nothing but solid building.”
“And you’re sure you had the right street?” Chloe asked.
“Positive. Everything else was exactly the same—but no alley. I don’t know what it was, but something happened to those girls. I didn’t sleep at all that night. The next morning, I called my friend to ask her about the alley and to let her know that she was leaving that cult no matter what. But she was gone.”
“She disappeared?”
“No. She was dead.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“They told us she’d suffered a heart attack—but she was only twenty-eight.”
Chloe and I shared another look.
Baron was only thirty-nine.
28
ROCKET
“Now entering Westlake Station,” a lightly distorted robot voice declared as the mostly empty Link train car slowed and finally came to a stop inside the tunnel.
Chloe had to work for a few hours, so I decided to go downtown to Pike Place Market and grab some groceries for dinner.