October 16, 3:27 p.m., Year of the Curtain+5
New York, New York
Alex Rooker thought his lungs were going to burst. He’d been running full-out since he left the school, and only his relatively small size was allowing him to twist past the crowded mobs of the New York City streets and stay one step ahead of his pursuers. Kevin Malcolm and his gang had never been his friends, but at some point in the past few weeks, they’d decided to make a special target out of him.
It started when he got to his locker on Monday to find someone had written “Denier” all over it with a Magic Marker. The school security cameras quickly revealed the culprit to be Brady Franks, one of Kevin’s flunkies, and although he would never admit it, Alex was certain Kevin put him up to it. Brady simply wasn’t clever enough to have come up with that sort of properly-spelled vandalism on his own. It got worse on Tuesday, when he opened his locker to find his mother’s picture clipped out of the newspaper and covered in obscenities and death threats. To a degree, Alex blamed her for his current troubles. Her Anti-Curtain crusade had become a model across New York, giving those who denied the existence of the Dark Things somebody to rally around, and giving those who did believe, like Kevin Malcolm, a human target to focus on. In fact, Alex had his doubts as to how deep a believer Kevin actually was and how much of what he said was simply an excuse to make his life hell.
Now it had escalated. Kevin, Brady, and Adam Rodrigue had been chasing him since they were out of sight of the school. They’d gone four blocks, and only the fact that Alex was smaller and alone – and thus more able to maneuver the pedestrian-jammed sidewalk – kept him from being caught. But he was getting tired, and he couldn’t keep this up.
He threw a glance over his shoulder, hoping Kevin and his goons couldn’t see him through the mob, and jumped out of the crowd into an alley next to an old antique store. He’d hoped to cut across and lose them, but the ten-foot fence at the end of the alley would make that impossible. He gasped, terrified, trying to catch his breath. There was no way he would be able to scale it without Kevin’s boys seeing him. And if gym class was any indication, at least two of them could outclimb him
That left only one potential path for escape: the coal chute. This was an old building, and although the coal chute was padlocked and looked as though it hadn’t been opened in decades, it was still there. The lock didn’t look like it was in great shape either – rusty and filthy. It probably hadn’t been opened since it was first attached, and probably wasn’t exactly top-of-the-line even then. Alex gave it a solid kick and felt the latch give a little. A second kick broke the lock off entirely, and he pulled the door open with a terrible screeching sound that even the jaded New York pedestrians turned to investigate. He couldn’t tell yet if Kevin and his crew were in the mob, but to be frank, he didn’t want to wait to find out. The chute was dark, full of spider webs and things with entirely too many legs, and he had no idea what was down there, but he was more concerned with what he knew was not down there: Kevin Malcolm. At that moment, that was enough. He grit his teeth and jumped in.
He slid down the chute into the basement, where he was fortunate enough to land on the slab concrete floor instead of one of the many piles of junk littering the place. He’d jumped headfirst and used his arms to shield his head, so they took the brunt of the impact – he was certain, in fact, that he sprained a wrist – but he managed to brush himself off and stand up just a few moments after landing.
Getting his bearings, he started to look around. In some ways, this place was like a dream. It was full of stuff, old stuff left behind when the antique store closed down, and somme of it looked pretty cool – an old juke box, a sword in a glass case, some old porcelain Coca-Cola signs… a lot of it, though, held no interest for him. Mountains of fine china, old dolls, rocking chairs, and books that looked as though they would swarm with silverfish if he dared try to extract one.
It would be a while yet, he knew, before Kevin and company would abandon their search for him and leave the neighborhood, so he would have some time in the basement. And time meant thinking. And thinking meant a realization that he didn’t quite know how he was going to get out of the chute was pretty high – about a foot out of his reach, even when fully extended. Perhaps, he thought, the time would be best served looking for something to move under the chute that he would be able to stand on without it falling apart.
He tested out a few of the chairs, but to his dismay he found that they were, for the most part, in terribly unstable condition or too heavy for him to move, particularly the ones laden with other junk. He knew he’d be in big trouble if anyone caught him down here. He didn’t want to make it worse by creating an avalanche out of someone’s wedding dishes.
He turned, inspecting the room through the thing rays of sun that came in through the low windows, until his eyes settled on a shape standing against the wall. The thing, whatever it was, was draped under an enormous drop cloth. It was very tall, almost tall enough to reach the ceiling. A dresser, probably, or some other huge piece of furniture, almost certainly too heavy to move. But maybe he wouldn’t have to, Alex reasoned. The thing was pretty close to the coal chute. Maybe if he climbed it, he would be able to reach the chute and pull himself out, if he could use his good hand to do it. He grabbed the drop cloth that covered the monolith and gave it a good, hard tug.
The thing beneath nearly stopped his heart.
It was a man, or at least, it was man-shaped. It was huge and bulky, and looked a bit like a statue. The blank, featureless face of the man didn’t look like it had been carved from stone, but rather like it had been molded from clay and then baked to harden. Its body, like its face, was unmarked and undefined, and after a moment Alex started to feel silly for having been frightened by it. It was just a statue, he told himself. Just a man of clay dumped here with all the other junk and left to rot. Nothing disturbing about it at all.
Except that wasn’t true. Its face was what freaked him out, and what was still freaking him out, if he was going to be honest. It was without features, but not without expression. Where its eyes should have been, the sculptor left two deep, empty, hollow sockets then plunged down into a blackness that made the coal chute look inviting by comparison. And its mouth… its mouth was wide open.
Its mouth looked like it was waiting.
Its mouth looked like it was hungry.
