All of the color suddenly left Chloe’s face. “Shit,” she said.
“Baron would have said exactly the same thing if he’d been here.”
Chloe nodded. She knew I was right. But that didn’t make it any easier.
* * *
—
Chloe and I had finished our pizza and were waiting for the check when I thought of something.
“Shit,” I said.
“What?”
“I’ll be right back.” I rushed out of the pizza place and ran the half a block or so down to the pop-up record store. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it sooner. I grabbed the handle of the door and pulled.
Locked. Fuck.
I pressed my face against the window. I could see the young woman with the orange hair behind the register. I knocked on the door and waved. She set down a handful of cash she’d been counting, looked up, and saw me. I could tell she was thinking about opening the door.
I made a praying motion with my hands.
It worked. She let me in.
I told her I knew exactly what I wanted to buy, and it would take me less than a minute. I went straight to the vinyl records, flipped to the S section and pulled out Steely Dan’s Gaucho. I would have bought them all, but they had only one copy.
Chloe was standing in front of the store when I came out.
“What the hell?” she asked. Then she saw the Steely Dan record.
“Damn it. Why didn’t we think of that earlier?”
“We were hungry?” I suggested.
We started walking over to where Chloe had parked her car and as we walked, something strange started happening. The streetlights began switching off—going completely dark, one by one, immediately after we passed each of them in turn.
At first we thought it was just a funny coincidence. I mean, what kind of weird power outage could possibly be connected to the location and pace of two people walking? But eventually it started to feel like something else—like somebody or something in the darkness was following us.
As we moved up the sidewalk toward the car, I felt a chill. I grabbed Chloe’s hand and the two of us started walking faster.
When we were a few blocks away, I turned and looked behind us. It took a second to make them out but they were there, in the distance—dark shapeless things moving slowly, like large black fish at the bottom of a dark sea.
It was happening again.
The same thing that happened all those years ago in Portland. The same thing that had happened to the Magician in that Super 8 film.
The shadow things were coming.
We ran the remaining two blocks to the car and didn’t look back.
* * *
—
I listened to the sound of the rain against the windshield as we drove back to Chloe’s place.
Chloe told me that she hadn’t actually seen any weird shapes in the darkness, but the streetlights switching off behind us had been more than freaky enough for her.
I was thinking about those streetlights and the strange twisting shapes in the darkness when I received a text alert.
It was an image of a white towel hanging on a rack.
Chloe was beside me and Baron was dead. There was nobody else who knew our secret emergency code.
A few seconds after that message, I received a Google Maps link. There was a yellow pin marking a location.
It was the diner across from the arcade.
39
TOWEL
As we approached the diner, I thought I saw the sky dim for a moment, just a little, like somebody had been adjusting the brightness and then suddenly changed their mind.
“Did you see that?” I asked Chloe.
“What? The billboard?”
I shook my head. I was talking about the sky. But when I took another look up in that direction, I saw the billboard Chloe was referring to, and I noticed something odd.
It was an advertisement for an album by a famous recording artist. At first glance, it didn’t seem out of place, but when I looked again, I noticed that the billboard was promoting the artist’s brand-new album, not a collection of greatest hits or previously unreleased material.
The artist was David Bowie.
“Okay,” I said, grabbing Chloe’s hand just as she was about to open the door to the diner, “I’m going to ask you what might sound like a strange question, but…is David Bowie alive?”
“Umm…yes, I mean, as far as I know. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” I said, opening the door to the diner. “Let’s go.”
* * *
—
The diner wasn’t busy. There were five or six other people inside, but none of them looked up as we entered. Maybe whoever had sent the towel wasn’t here yet.