"If It had to Perish Twice" (Part II)
Here is the second part of the enormous story I wrote Amatara. I'm anticipating three parts. Let's see if livejournal cooperates.
Title: If It had to Perish Twice
Author: Nemo the Everbeing
Rating: PG-13 for general horror, language and some UST
Summary: Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those that favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that ice is also great, and would suffice.
Disclaimer: It all belongs to CBS, David Lynch and Mark Frost. This is my own poor imitation, and I make no money at it. Robert Frost owns my summary.
Part I
Cooper fell away from the desk as if burned, clutching at his head and twisting his face away. Albert jumped forward and switched off the radio, but the sound continued to come through the speakers. Cooper thrashed in a manner so similar to how he reacted to his nightmares that it brought Albert up short. For a crazy moment he wondered if he himself was trapped in Cooper’s fevered dreamscape.
But that was idiotic. Albert caught hold of the power cord and yanked it out of the wall. The noise continued. His heart beat faster at the impossibility, but he responded with a flush of anger and determination. No cheap piece of Wal-Mart crap electronics was going to stymie Albert Rosenfield. He pulled the radio from the shelf, dropped it on the ground and put his heel through it.
Albert felt a jolt of something run through him, but it didn’t feel like an electric shock. His breath was knocked from his body and his posture went rigid. Then it was gone as soon as it had come, and Albert fell back against the drywall, his chest heaving in an attempt to make up for the air he’d lost and his ears ringing in a pale imitation of the strange sound.
Cooper uncurled bit by bit, and he looked dazed. “I don’t want to remember that room, Albert,” he said. “I don’t want to remember that place.” Albert wasn’t certain what Cooper was talking about, but he could guess. Cooper never talked about what possession had been like, aside from the most general of dire warnings against trying it himself. But Albert remembered what Leland Palmer had said right before he smashed his brains across his cell door: when BOB was there, Leland went away, and when he left he couldn’t remember. Albert always assumed that Cooper couldn’t remember what had happened during those times either.
In truth, he’d hoped Cooper didn’t remember. He’d willed it to be so and refused to accept any alternative.
But stubborn denial only worked without facts to contradict his beliefs. Albert would admit to a considerable ego, but it was not one that would reject reality in order to be right. He was a scientist. The ego had to come second to fact, always. And Cooper remembered a place after acting like he’d been stuck in another nightmare.
Albert pushed himself away from the wall and staggered over to Cooper. His legs felt weak and his body shook in the aftermath of the jolt he’d gotten. Falling to his knees was not only to help Cooper; it was a necessity. Cooper dragged himself to his elbows and they met halfway.
Albert ran through his post-nightmare checkup with an ease born of years. Check the pupils: wide but not lopsided. Check the sclera: no burst blood vessels. Check the pulse: fast but strong. Check the nose: bleeding.
Albert applied pressure, and Cooper peered at him over his hand. Those serious eyes were wide and haunted. Albert wanted to look away. He had been fighting to keep Cooper from breaking down completely for two years, but on Cooper’s worst days Albert knew that his was a losing battle. He refused to accept it because he was arrogant enough to think that he could outmaneuver the encroaching crisis through sheer will.
“What do you remember?” Albert asked. He kept his tone professional. Cooper did not need to know how badly Albert fretted over him. He needed a medical professional, and Albert was the best for a reason.
“Some part of me never forgot,” Cooper said. His eyes were focused on the middle distance. “I dreamed about it before I went there. A room of red curtains and a jagged pattern on the floor. I was there for so long, Albert. Time does not function in the same way in that place. I was there for years. And the nightmares . . . the nightmares make me wonder if I have ever truly left.”
Albert was rattled. He hated being rattled. “You did leave. I was there. I’ve been watching you. If you were still . . . lost, I would know.”
“And if, in the wake of my experience, a splinter of that place remained within my mind? As you say, you’ve been with me these past years. Before Twin Peaks I could go weeks without a strange dream. Now, scarcely a day goes by that I don’t have some dream or vision or nightmare. I believe that possession was a disease that left my resistance compromised, and my mind open to further infiltration.”
Albert pressed against Cooper’s nose a little harder than necessary to staunch the bleeding. “Cooper, I have worked my ass off for the past two years to ensure that you remained on the straight and narrow. I will not lose you now, not to some ridiculous psychic immunocompromised status, and especially not to some noise on the radio. Come on. While we’re sitting around there’s a stiff in the funeral home rotting away.”
He started to stand, but Cooper caught his hand. His smile was warm, and it made Albert’s heart clench. “Oh, Albert,” Cooper said. “What would I do without you?”
Albert stepped away, uncomfortable with the sudden closeness. “Spend the whole investigation being beaten up by the radio,” he muttered.
They returned the way they’d come, out past the receptionist’s desk and to the heavy front door. Albert thought he heard scraping behind them, but there was no sign of movement, and their own footsteps echoed enough that such a sound was easily explained. He pushed the front door open without comment.
The sun was nearly set. The sky was a sickly, cold yellow, and the frost on the ground had spread to tip the grass of the lawn in white. Albert glanced up and down the road. They had a map of the town in the back seat of the car. Albert wasn’t a testosterone-fueled side of beef, and he was more than willing to consult the map again to confirm a destination. In any case, it made more sense to take the car to the funeral home. The temperature was dropping and Albert didn’t want to spend the whole night on long, pointless strolls when a short drive accomplished the same thing.
They climbed into the car, and Albert reached into the back seat for his briefcase. He popped the catch and dug through it until he found the map. The funeral home was one street north and three blocks east of the sheriff’s office.
“Albert,” Cooper said. Albert looked up from his map to find Cooper staring at the mat on the passenger floor, his feet lifted a bit for a better view.
It was a testament to the amount of time Albert had spent with Cooper’s bizarre requests that he didn’t bat an eye before looking. The burn mark of his cigarette was gone, as was the butt itself.
“What the hell is going on here, Cooper?” he asked. “Someone replaced our damaged floor mat? I would say that this defies any logic, but I don’t like to state the obvious.”
Cooper shook his head and Albert produced the key. It slid into the ignition, and he turned it. Nothing happened. There wasn’t even a whine to indicate the car was trying to turn over. Albert tried again, and again there was nothing. They might as well have been inside a statue.
Cooper’s eyes were tracking across the dashboard, then skipping to the floor, then back to the dashboard again and again. Albert did the same. The burn was gone, and the car not only refused to start, but also seemed to have no function at all. He thought back. The lights in the police station hadn’t worked. The radio worked, but it worked with or without being plugged in.
Albert dug in his briefcase again and pulled the phone out. The Bureau had issued them one of those new mobile phones for emergencies. The battery didn’t last that long, so Albert tended to leave it off. He flipped the cover down, pulled the antenna up, and pressed the power button. He’d charged the phone before they left Philadelphia, so there was no reason it wouldn’t turn on.
It didn’t. Albert looked to Cooper. Cooper pulled his Dictaphone out of his inner jacket pocket and clicked it on. The tape didn’t advance. The red light didn’t come on. Albert felt a rising clamor of fear in his throat that he choked down and pulled his flashlight out of the briefcase and twisted the end. It remained dark. Nothing in their car worked. Albert breathed deeply, focused himself on the problem at hand and glanced in Cooper’s direction.
“Strong electromagnetism could have wiped out our electronics,” Albert said. “Though where a backwater burg like this would have come by an electromagnet powerful enough to take out a car is anyone’s guess.” A thought struck Albert, incongruous amidst the rising fear. It was so wonderfully demented that he smirked. “Hey, maybe it’s a mad scientist. He has an electromagnet and a freeze-ray.”
“You believe in mad scientists but not in ghosts,” Cooper said, and his smile was faint but honest. It felt like a relief to mock in the face of such strangeness.
“I’ve met mad scientists,” Albert said.
“Some might even argue that you are a mad scientist.”
“I’m certainly an irritated scientist. We’re going to have to walk to the funeral home, and I didn’t come prepared for an Arctic expedition.”
Cooper opened the car door. “We’ll just have to make do, Albert.”
Albert climbed out of his own side. Cooper had joined him by the time he’d shut the door, and by the time he’d half-turned, Cooper had slid his hand around Albert’s elbow.
Albert crooked his arm out of reflex. He looked down at their linked arms, and then up at that idiotically sincere look on Cooper’s face. “Am I escorting you to the Prom?”
“I think it best not to lose sight of one another, don’t you?” Cooper said.
Albert thought about protesting. They looked like morons. They didn’t have to do this. But there was no real harm done, and there was a chill in the air that Cooper drove away. Albert, God help him, enjoyed the feel of someone at his side.
He did not have some sort of sappy infatuation with his mentally questionable, altogether straight partner. Because Albert was many things, but he had never been and would never be horrifically pathetic.
They made their way down the main drag, two men in drab suits with their arms linked, and Albert tried to convince himself that the subtle scraping sound he heard behind them occasionally was nothing of note. He never saw anything when he turned around, or when he glanced back without being obvious. The more it continued, though, the more certain Albert became that someone was following along behind them.
Cooper gave him a curious look.
“You don’t hear that?” Albert whispered, not wanting to alert whoever was following them. “Someone has been following us since the station.”
“You hear footsteps?”
Albert was disconcerted. The scraping was quiet, but in such silence it should stand out. “You’re getting your hearing checked when we get back to Philly,” he said. “Is this some sort of joke at my expense? You have to hear the scraping.”
“I believe you may be hearing something not meant for me,” Cooper said after a second’s consideration.
Albert snorted. “So you’re going to start being the brilliant, sarcastic one while I chuck rocks at milk bottles? Don’t quit your day job, Cooper.”
Cooper turned back to the road, but his hand was perhaps a bit tighter on Albert’s arm. “I trust your observational skills, Albert, more than those of anyone else I have met. Tell me if the sound changes at all, becomes louder, or draws closer.”
They kept walking again. Albert focused on the warmth of the compliment. It was better than the chill of fear he felt every time he heard the scraping behind them. It didn’t change, or get louder, or get closer. It stayed the same, trailing behind them with the sound of metal on stone and a dull sense of a threat. Albert stared straight ahead. The sun dipped beyond the horizon, but its glow remained. Their shadows stretched out in front of them, long and thin and joined at the chest.
“It’s going to get cold,” Cooper said. Then he dug in his coat pocket and pulled out a pair of bright yellow knit mittens. “Did you know that I was once a Boy Scout, Albert?”
“If you were always prepared, you would have brought me a pair too.”
Cooper pulled one of the mittens onto the hand currently wrapped around Albert’s arm, and then, to Albert’s surprise, slid the other over his own exposed hand. His knuckles were festooned with white knit snowflakes and the bottom of the mitten didn’t quite reach his wrist. “A Boy Scout is adaptable, as well as prepared,” Cooper said.
Albert shoved his ungloved hand into his pocket and refused to look awkward or touched. This was not sweet. The situation was potentially dangerous, and someone was trailing them. No amount of yellow mittens and out-of-left-field thoughtfulness was going to change that. If it had been anyone he respected less than Cooper, Albert would call the entire state of affairs insipid. No matter how warm his hand was now.
The sky was still cold and yellow. The light was wan. The scraping behind them remained.
Albert gritted his teeth. No way in hell he was going to roll over just because of some out of place noises and an abandoned town. He had been in the Bureau over a decade, and he knew how to handle high-pressure situations. Someone had to remain in control at all times, and that person was going to be Albert Rosenfield.
“Your ghost has self-esteem issues, Coop,” he said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Long shadows? Ugly yellow sky? This atmosphere is a cliché. Does this ghost not trust in its ability to scare us in broad daylight? What’s next, thunder and lightning to highlight dramatic dialogue?”
“Do you approach all such situations with flippancy?” Cooper asked. It wasn’t an accusation. He seemed genuinely interested.
“Flippancy implies a disregard for potential danger. I am more than willing to acknowledge the fact that this town is potentially dangerous, and that there is very likely something wrong here. But acknowledging the inherently ridiculous nature of this situation allows me to keep it and all pertinent data in perspective.”
“Then I approve of your approach,” Cooper said. “If any of our electronics were working, I would turn my flashlight on and off in rapid succession.”
Albert didn’t even try to follow Cooper’s thought processes. “Okay,” he said.
Cooper looked at him, guileless and sincere. “Lightning,” he said, “to highlight dramatic dialogue.”
Albert couldn’t help but grin for a few seconds. In all his years, he had never had a co-conspirator in his one-man crusade against stupidity, uselessness, and aggression. Even when he worked with someone else, he felt that they were moving in the same direction and going through the same actions, but their goals were completely different. No one else in the Bureau, or in medical school, or in college, and certainly not in the godforsaken suburbs had ever considered themselves a crusader for peace and intelligence, and so no one had ever been on Albert’s side.
Cooper’s smile said that they were on the same side. Albert reminded himself once more that he was not attracted to Cooper. He didn’t go in for straight men for the same reason he didn’t swallow razor blades. There was enough pain in the world without indulging in gratuitous masochism.
Maybe Cooper picked up on the shifting mood, because his smile faded away. They continued walking in silence, but they didn’t let go of one another.
In the end, the funeral home was easy to find. There just wasn’t enough town in Prophetstown to get lost, and they found themselves standing in front of a one-story building with shell pink siding and a tall row of skeletal lilac bushes. The doors were closed.
They walked up to the doors. There was a button for an electric doorbell set into the frame. Albert rang the bell more in whimsical hope than any form of genuine expectation of answer or function. Nothing happened.
“I don’t suppose you got a merit badge in lock picking too,” he said.
“I appreciate your confidence in my abilities, Albert, but I’m afraid that housebreaking has never been a skill I could claim. We could look for an open window.”
Albert thought leaving windows open during this sort of weather was about as likely as winning the lottery. Or perhaps just as likely as the situation in which they currently found themselves. He wasn’t certain if their present levels of improbability improved their chances or not.
They circled the building, and Albert wondered why so many funeral homes insisted on being sided in such aggressively cheerful colors. Did they somehow think that the people arriving were going to forget their grief and loss by the sheer power of pink vinyl?
In the back of the funeral home they found the garage door up, and a hearse inside. Albert peered through the car windows. The ambient light had faded somewhat, but it was still enough to confirm that there was no one inside the hearse, alive or dead.
The door to the funeral home was unlocked, and Albert was not surprised that it opened into the sterile white walls and tile floors of the prep room. A guttered operating table stood in one corner with a hose running from it to a sink in the far wall. On shelves nearby were bottles of pink tissue filler and clear organic solvents, jugs of sealants and Paulex powder. On the shelves below that were boxes of mouth formers and eyecaps, tins of hair wash, spools of suture thread, needle injectors, and tiny bottles of bonding agents, lip glue, molding wax and makeup. Everything you might need to make the dead look like wax statues of themselves.
He inspected the operating table, but if it had been used recently it had been scrubbed down. There was a heavy metal door on the far side of the room to what had to be the cooler, and with Thomas Moorley nowhere in sight, that was his most likely location. Albert paused before opening the door. “Fair warning, Cooper: if the electricity has been cut off for some time to the entire town, then the cooler is off. Anything in there will have resumed decomposing.”
“I believe my stomach is prepared,” Cooper said, and Albert believed him. Cooper, for all his seeming innocence, had never been squeamish.
Albert twisted the heavy metal handle and pulled. After a second the pressure seal broke, and air rushed into the fridge with a hiss. Bitter cold poured out, penetrating Albert’s clothing and prickling at his skin. The improbability of that chill was not lost. There was no sound of a motor. Even the pressure seal on the door would only do so much to maintain a cold temperature without power, and yet the refrigerator was well past the standard temperature and dipping into a range that would freeze tissue and denature evidence.
Lacking any explanation for the cold, Albert took a tentative step inside. The ambient light didn’t permeate the cooler the way it did the prep room, but the spillover illuminated enough for Albert to see that there were no bodies in the cooler; no bags on the operating tables. There wasn’t even a catastrophe bag hanging from one of the hooks off to one side. The cooler was spotlessly clean, and had no lingering smell of decomposition or urine. It didn’t smell as if the dead had ever been in residence.
What there was, dangling from the ceiling and strung along the hooks for the catastrophe bags, was ice. There had to have been some sort of leak to cause that much condensation to form, drape, and drip its way into something so sculptural. It was beautiful, which was not a look Albert was used to seeing in a morgue cooler.
“The body is gone,” Cooper said. “Either we were directed to the wrong institution, or it has been removed.”
“Either way, we have no idea where that corpse is now,” Albert said. “That’s wonderful. I’m always so pleased by useless visits to an institution whose sole purpose lies in the vain attempt to make the deceased beautiful.”
“You don’t like mortuary services,” Cooper said. His gaze was keen, and his tone not quite questioning. “And yet you yourself have performed countless autopsies.”
“What a pathologist does is a public service,” Albert said. “We explain death. We disseminate information that could be vital to surviving relatives and the public alike. We take away doubts and we bring closure. I’m disquieted by the attempts of American mortuary practices to sanitize and glamorize death. Is pumping a loved one full of chemicals, gluing their mouths and eyes shut, replacing their fluids with formalin and then painting them some semblance of a living color really going to aid the process of grief? We’re so desperate to believe that nothing ends that we make caricatures of people we loved instead of focusing on their memories and honoring their lives. It’s superficial, shallow, and distasteful. Mortuary services are a travesty. Burn me when I die, Cooper, because I’m not being put through this chemical mess.”
“Duly noted, Albert.”
Albert left the prep room through the door that led into the rest of the funeral home’s back area. There was a short, white hallway with two cheap plywood doors in the sidewalls, and an expensive wooden door at the end. Albert assumed that door led into the public half of the funeral home.
Albert opened the cheap door to their left first, which opened into a supply closet filled with heavy organic cleaners. The door on the right was the door to the office.
Within they found an empty room. It was lined with bookshelves, filing cabinets, and a small end table. The bookshelves held various books on mortuary services, catalogues for mortuary supplies, and what looked like business textbooks from a community college. The end table was packed with boxes of pamphlets on grief and choosing the correct coffin.
A large oak desk dominated the center of the room. It was in good order but for the pen standing up in its center. The pen had been jammed through a piece of paper and into the desk with such force that it remained vertical. Someone had exerted a great deal of effort leaving some form of message, and Albert went to see what it was.
The note said, ‘Don’t answer the phone. The call is not for you.’
Albert glanced at the phone sitting on the corner of the desk. Someone had ripped both the power cord and the phone line out of its body. They lay a short distance away, wires exposed by the violence with which they’d been removed.
“That’s one way to deal with the issue,” Cooper said.
And then the phone started to ring. Underneath that sound Albert could hear the scraping. It was far away, but it was moving through the building and getting closer.
Albert took an involuntary step back. Cooper was at his side, pressed arm to arm, and Albert took a stupid amount of comfort in that. The phone continued to ring, setting aside any need for power or input. The scraping got closer, and Albert half wanted to slam the door to the office shut. But they had to know what was following them, and if the phone worked as a lure then he would leave the door open.
He was so focused on keeping his eyes and his attention trained on the doorway that he almost didn’t notice his partner start to do something brainless. Cooper stepped forward, his hand extended. The scraping stopped abruptly, and Albert was momentarily shocked into stillness by the double-fronted insanity. Then he jerked out of his paralysis and grabbed Cooper’s arm.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Cooper?” he asked.
“Information is critical at this stage,” Cooper said, “and we are running on a tank that is very nearly empty. We need a lead.”
“No, we need common sense. The last piece of electronics that operated without power sent you into convulsions. This one might do worse. Call me old-fashioned, but when someone manages to stab a ballpoint into a desk and make it stick during an effort to scrawl the words ‘the call is not for you’, I take that message very seriously. The call is not for us, Cooper. Look at the files, see if Moorley got his cooling ass shipped elsewhere, and then we’re leaving.” Before the scraping finally found them.
Cooper’s hand lowered with reluctance, and Albert released him with even greater reluctance. The last thing he needed was for Cooper to be rendered unconscious by some strange noise or to be given some cryptic message that sent him scuttling off into the woods to track down an unrelated lead.
The phone continued to ring as Albert sorted through the funeral director’s inbox and Cooper sifted the rest of the papers on the desk. Moorley was a recent enough acquisition that his papers shouldn’t have been filed yet, particularly if the locals were expecting FBI agents to come in and handle the processing. At least, that was what logic dictated. When Albert could find no mention of Moorley in the inbox he moved over to the filing cabinet and flipped to the M section.
The phone continued to ring. The scraping did not resume. Albert watched Cooper out of the corner of his eye. There was nothing on Moorley in the files, so he joined Cooper at the desk and placed himself between Cooper and the phone.
“It’s not a compulsion,” Cooper said.
“Your curiosity? You could have fooled me.”
“You know what I mean.”
Albert thought back to the radio. He thought back to sleepless nights in nameless hotel rooms praying that Cooper found his way out of his nightmares. And when Cooper woke up with Albert half-asleep on a chair near the bed he always, always wanted to talk about it, pick at it, and try to figure it out.
“I know what you mean,” Albert said.
They sorted through the desktop in the relative silence afforded them by the ringing phone. The papers were in no sort of order, but after a few minutes they’d been through over half of the accumulation with no sign of Moorley’s write-up, and Albert was beginning to wonder if Thomas Moorley had ever existed at all, evidence found on Wagonseller Road notwithstanding.
Then Cooper said, “Albert, I think this is it.”
Albert moved around the desk to where Cooper stood. Cooper held a slim file folder with a few papers inside. Albert saw a newly filled out death certificate, internal papers from the funeral home, and-
“Hold on,” he said, stilling Cooper’s hand. Cooper brought the page down again.
“It appears to be an autopsy report,” Cooper said.
“Preliminaries,” Albert said. The fields for name, age, and weight had been filled out, which wasn’t of great concern. Different pathologists did their paperwork in different orders.
But no one started an autopsy and shipped the body elsewhere in the middle. Albert scanned the notes. They mentioned a tattoo on Thomas Moorley’s hip, and a scar in his inguinal region. That implied that he had been stripped for the external exam. There were notes mentioning fluids being collected.
He shook his head. “Either this coroner was the most incompetent boob ever to disgrace the medical profession, or they didn’t crack Moorley.”
“Perhaps they were interrupted,” Cooper said.
“With what? What exactly has happened in this town, Cooper? I keep expecting to turn a corner and see the word ‘CROATOAN’ carved into some tree.”
Cooper frowned. The telephone rang. Cooper glanced at it again.
“Don’t,” Albert said.
“Thomas Moorley is gone without a trace,” Cooper said. “There are no transfer papers. The coroner is gone without a trace. Everyone who should be present in this town is gone without a trace.”
“That doesn’t mean we do something stupid.”
“Albert,” Cooper said. He laid a hand on Albert’s arm. “Do you trust my instincts?”
That was unfair. Albert shot back, “Do you trust my intelligence?”
Cooper’s eyes were dark and intent, that thousand-mile stare a physical thing holding Albert in tableau. Was this how Cooper wrangled such rabid devotion? People looked into those large, dark eyes, and they were never able to look away.
Albert broke the stare. They weren’t going to solve anything making googly eyes at one another. There were always explanations and logic to be found, clues to be analyzed, and facts to be weighed, even in situations that defied belief. If Albert couldn’t trust in that constant he could not believe in anything.
He forced his words out, not backing away from Cooper’s gaze or from the ringing phone or from the tense anticipation inherent in the silence outside the door. “I’d appreciate an answer, Cooper. I trust you to go on your vision quests and talk to inanimate objects. I trust you to have dreams that give you clues, and I trust you to have impeccable investigative technique and instincts. If you haven’t noticed, that is a hell of a lot of trust for me to give. But what I do here, what my job entails, is to make certain that you don’t step off a cliff while your head is in the clouds. I’m your partner, Coop. We’ve got what we came for, so let’s go.”
And, miracle of miracles, Cooper stepped away from the desk and phone. He didn’t look away from Albert. “There is an adage about temptation detailing the choice between foolish action and driving oneself insane wondering what might have happened if one took the risk. I find it difficult to turn my back on potential answers.” He turned and opened the office door. “Let’s leave.”
The phone stopped ringing. Cooper turned to look at it, but Albert didn’t have time. The scraping was feet away and making for them fast. His heart thudded in his chest and he whirled around. Something was coming at him in the hall, and Albert caught a glimpse of brown as the ambient light began to fail. The scraping took on a ringing tone and Cooper stiffened too.
“Albert!” he said, and then pushed past Albert to slam the door shut. The scraping became something like that tinnitus noise in the radio, and then it stopped. There was something on the other side of the door, and Albert couldn’t bring himself to call it a person. Cooper stepped away, his gun drawn and his eyes focused on the handle.
It turned slowly, just a little at a time. Albert’s hand went to the holster at his belt, and he drew the canister of OC spray he kept on himself. Albert was a pacifist, but he was also a pragmatist in a very dangerous occupation.
And then the door handle snapped back closed and the scraping retreated. Albert and Cooper ran after it, flinging open the door and giving chase. Albert’s longer legs did him credit, and he took the lead down the hallway toward the back room.
Albert kept the canister held level. There was a trick to running in leather shoes without making sound while on linoleum and it had to do with center of gravity. Before Cooper, such knowledge was academic. Things changed. Albert changed.
He shouldered his way through the door and his feet went out from under him. For a crystallized second he saw the whole room as though in snapshot: walls and floor and ceiling slicked with ice, the operating table dripping with icicles. In the corner next to the freezer there was a figure draped in brown rags. The ambient light vanished for a split second, and Albert heard the shriek of scraping louder and harsher than the ringing tone on the radio. Cooper shouted, and the light came back on. The brown-clad figure was halfway across the room in that second, feet from Albert.
Part III
Title: If It had to Perish Twice
Author: Nemo the Everbeing
Rating: PG-13 for general horror, language and some UST
Summary: Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those that favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that ice is also great, and would suffice.
Disclaimer: It all belongs to CBS, David Lynch and Mark Frost. This is my own poor imitation, and I make no money at it. Robert Frost owns my summary.
Part I
Cooper fell away from the desk as if burned, clutching at his head and twisting his face away. Albert jumped forward and switched off the radio, but the sound continued to come through the speakers. Cooper thrashed in a manner so similar to how he reacted to his nightmares that it brought Albert up short. For a crazy moment he wondered if he himself was trapped in Cooper’s fevered dreamscape.
But that was idiotic. Albert caught hold of the power cord and yanked it out of the wall. The noise continued. His heart beat faster at the impossibility, but he responded with a flush of anger and determination. No cheap piece of Wal-Mart crap electronics was going to stymie Albert Rosenfield. He pulled the radio from the shelf, dropped it on the ground and put his heel through it.
Albert felt a jolt of something run through him, but it didn’t feel like an electric shock. His breath was knocked from his body and his posture went rigid. Then it was gone as soon as it had come, and Albert fell back against the drywall, his chest heaving in an attempt to make up for the air he’d lost and his ears ringing in a pale imitation of the strange sound.
Cooper uncurled bit by bit, and he looked dazed. “I don’t want to remember that room, Albert,” he said. “I don’t want to remember that place.” Albert wasn’t certain what Cooper was talking about, but he could guess. Cooper never talked about what possession had been like, aside from the most general of dire warnings against trying it himself. But Albert remembered what Leland Palmer had said right before he smashed his brains across his cell door: when BOB was there, Leland went away, and when he left he couldn’t remember. Albert always assumed that Cooper couldn’t remember what had happened during those times either.
In truth, he’d hoped Cooper didn’t remember. He’d willed it to be so and refused to accept any alternative.
But stubborn denial only worked without facts to contradict his beliefs. Albert would admit to a considerable ego, but it was not one that would reject reality in order to be right. He was a scientist. The ego had to come second to fact, always. And Cooper remembered a place after acting like he’d been stuck in another nightmare.
Albert pushed himself away from the wall and staggered over to Cooper. His legs felt weak and his body shook in the aftermath of the jolt he’d gotten. Falling to his knees was not only to help Cooper; it was a necessity. Cooper dragged himself to his elbows and they met halfway.
Albert ran through his post-nightmare checkup with an ease born of years. Check the pupils: wide but not lopsided. Check the sclera: no burst blood vessels. Check the pulse: fast but strong. Check the nose: bleeding.
Albert applied pressure, and Cooper peered at him over his hand. Those serious eyes were wide and haunted. Albert wanted to look away. He had been fighting to keep Cooper from breaking down completely for two years, but on Cooper’s worst days Albert knew that his was a losing battle. He refused to accept it because he was arrogant enough to think that he could outmaneuver the encroaching crisis through sheer will.
“What do you remember?” Albert asked. He kept his tone professional. Cooper did not need to know how badly Albert fretted over him. He needed a medical professional, and Albert was the best for a reason.
“Some part of me never forgot,” Cooper said. His eyes were focused on the middle distance. “I dreamed about it before I went there. A room of red curtains and a jagged pattern on the floor. I was there for so long, Albert. Time does not function in the same way in that place. I was there for years. And the nightmares . . . the nightmares make me wonder if I have ever truly left.”
Albert was rattled. He hated being rattled. “You did leave. I was there. I’ve been watching you. If you were still . . . lost, I would know.”
“And if, in the wake of my experience, a splinter of that place remained within my mind? As you say, you’ve been with me these past years. Before Twin Peaks I could go weeks without a strange dream. Now, scarcely a day goes by that I don’t have some dream or vision or nightmare. I believe that possession was a disease that left my resistance compromised, and my mind open to further infiltration.”
Albert pressed against Cooper’s nose a little harder than necessary to staunch the bleeding. “Cooper, I have worked my ass off for the past two years to ensure that you remained on the straight and narrow. I will not lose you now, not to some ridiculous psychic immunocompromised status, and especially not to some noise on the radio. Come on. While we’re sitting around there’s a stiff in the funeral home rotting away.”
He started to stand, but Cooper caught his hand. His smile was warm, and it made Albert’s heart clench. “Oh, Albert,” Cooper said. “What would I do without you?”
Albert stepped away, uncomfortable with the sudden closeness. “Spend the whole investigation being beaten up by the radio,” he muttered.
They returned the way they’d come, out past the receptionist’s desk and to the heavy front door. Albert thought he heard scraping behind them, but there was no sign of movement, and their own footsteps echoed enough that such a sound was easily explained. He pushed the front door open without comment.
The sun was nearly set. The sky was a sickly, cold yellow, and the frost on the ground had spread to tip the grass of the lawn in white. Albert glanced up and down the road. They had a map of the town in the back seat of the car. Albert wasn’t a testosterone-fueled side of beef, and he was more than willing to consult the map again to confirm a destination. In any case, it made more sense to take the car to the funeral home. The temperature was dropping and Albert didn’t want to spend the whole night on long, pointless strolls when a short drive accomplished the same thing.
They climbed into the car, and Albert reached into the back seat for his briefcase. He popped the catch and dug through it until he found the map. The funeral home was one street north and three blocks east of the sheriff’s office.
“Albert,” Cooper said. Albert looked up from his map to find Cooper staring at the mat on the passenger floor, his feet lifted a bit for a better view.
It was a testament to the amount of time Albert had spent with Cooper’s bizarre requests that he didn’t bat an eye before looking. The burn mark of his cigarette was gone, as was the butt itself.
“What the hell is going on here, Cooper?” he asked. “Someone replaced our damaged floor mat? I would say that this defies any logic, but I don’t like to state the obvious.”
Cooper shook his head and Albert produced the key. It slid into the ignition, and he turned it. Nothing happened. There wasn’t even a whine to indicate the car was trying to turn over. Albert tried again, and again there was nothing. They might as well have been inside a statue.
Cooper’s eyes were tracking across the dashboard, then skipping to the floor, then back to the dashboard again and again. Albert did the same. The burn was gone, and the car not only refused to start, but also seemed to have no function at all. He thought back. The lights in the police station hadn’t worked. The radio worked, but it worked with or without being plugged in.
Albert dug in his briefcase again and pulled the phone out. The Bureau had issued them one of those new mobile phones for emergencies. The battery didn’t last that long, so Albert tended to leave it off. He flipped the cover down, pulled the antenna up, and pressed the power button. He’d charged the phone before they left Philadelphia, so there was no reason it wouldn’t turn on.
It didn’t. Albert looked to Cooper. Cooper pulled his Dictaphone out of his inner jacket pocket and clicked it on. The tape didn’t advance. The red light didn’t come on. Albert felt a rising clamor of fear in his throat that he choked down and pulled his flashlight out of the briefcase and twisted the end. It remained dark. Nothing in their car worked. Albert breathed deeply, focused himself on the problem at hand and glanced in Cooper’s direction.
“Strong electromagnetism could have wiped out our electronics,” Albert said. “Though where a backwater burg like this would have come by an electromagnet powerful enough to take out a car is anyone’s guess.” A thought struck Albert, incongruous amidst the rising fear. It was so wonderfully demented that he smirked. “Hey, maybe it’s a mad scientist. He has an electromagnet and a freeze-ray.”
“You believe in mad scientists but not in ghosts,” Cooper said, and his smile was faint but honest. It felt like a relief to mock in the face of such strangeness.
“I’ve met mad scientists,” Albert said.
“Some might even argue that you are a mad scientist.”
“I’m certainly an irritated scientist. We’re going to have to walk to the funeral home, and I didn’t come prepared for an Arctic expedition.”
Cooper opened the car door. “We’ll just have to make do, Albert.”
Albert climbed out of his own side. Cooper had joined him by the time he’d shut the door, and by the time he’d half-turned, Cooper had slid his hand around Albert’s elbow.
Albert crooked his arm out of reflex. He looked down at their linked arms, and then up at that idiotically sincere look on Cooper’s face. “Am I escorting you to the Prom?”
“I think it best not to lose sight of one another, don’t you?” Cooper said.
Albert thought about protesting. They looked like morons. They didn’t have to do this. But there was no real harm done, and there was a chill in the air that Cooper drove away. Albert, God help him, enjoyed the feel of someone at his side.
He did not have some sort of sappy infatuation with his mentally questionable, altogether straight partner. Because Albert was many things, but he had never been and would never be horrifically pathetic.
They made their way down the main drag, two men in drab suits with their arms linked, and Albert tried to convince himself that the subtle scraping sound he heard behind them occasionally was nothing of note. He never saw anything when he turned around, or when he glanced back without being obvious. The more it continued, though, the more certain Albert became that someone was following along behind them.
Cooper gave him a curious look.
“You don’t hear that?” Albert whispered, not wanting to alert whoever was following them. “Someone has been following us since the station.”
“You hear footsteps?”
Albert was disconcerted. The scraping was quiet, but in such silence it should stand out. “You’re getting your hearing checked when we get back to Philly,” he said. “Is this some sort of joke at my expense? You have to hear the scraping.”
“I believe you may be hearing something not meant for me,” Cooper said after a second’s consideration.
Albert snorted. “So you’re going to start being the brilliant, sarcastic one while I chuck rocks at milk bottles? Don’t quit your day job, Cooper.”
Cooper turned back to the road, but his hand was perhaps a bit tighter on Albert’s arm. “I trust your observational skills, Albert, more than those of anyone else I have met. Tell me if the sound changes at all, becomes louder, or draws closer.”
They kept walking again. Albert focused on the warmth of the compliment. It was better than the chill of fear he felt every time he heard the scraping behind them. It didn’t change, or get louder, or get closer. It stayed the same, trailing behind them with the sound of metal on stone and a dull sense of a threat. Albert stared straight ahead. The sun dipped beyond the horizon, but its glow remained. Their shadows stretched out in front of them, long and thin and joined at the chest.
“It’s going to get cold,” Cooper said. Then he dug in his coat pocket and pulled out a pair of bright yellow knit mittens. “Did you know that I was once a Boy Scout, Albert?”
“If you were always prepared, you would have brought me a pair too.”
Cooper pulled one of the mittens onto the hand currently wrapped around Albert’s arm, and then, to Albert’s surprise, slid the other over his own exposed hand. His knuckles were festooned with white knit snowflakes and the bottom of the mitten didn’t quite reach his wrist. “A Boy Scout is adaptable, as well as prepared,” Cooper said.
Albert shoved his ungloved hand into his pocket and refused to look awkward or touched. This was not sweet. The situation was potentially dangerous, and someone was trailing them. No amount of yellow mittens and out-of-left-field thoughtfulness was going to change that. If it had been anyone he respected less than Cooper, Albert would call the entire state of affairs insipid. No matter how warm his hand was now.
The sky was still cold and yellow. The light was wan. The scraping behind them remained.
Albert gritted his teeth. No way in hell he was going to roll over just because of some out of place noises and an abandoned town. He had been in the Bureau over a decade, and he knew how to handle high-pressure situations. Someone had to remain in control at all times, and that person was going to be Albert Rosenfield.
“Your ghost has self-esteem issues, Coop,” he said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Long shadows? Ugly yellow sky? This atmosphere is a cliché. Does this ghost not trust in its ability to scare us in broad daylight? What’s next, thunder and lightning to highlight dramatic dialogue?”
“Do you approach all such situations with flippancy?” Cooper asked. It wasn’t an accusation. He seemed genuinely interested.
“Flippancy implies a disregard for potential danger. I am more than willing to acknowledge the fact that this town is potentially dangerous, and that there is very likely something wrong here. But acknowledging the inherently ridiculous nature of this situation allows me to keep it and all pertinent data in perspective.”
“Then I approve of your approach,” Cooper said. “If any of our electronics were working, I would turn my flashlight on and off in rapid succession.”
Albert didn’t even try to follow Cooper’s thought processes. “Okay,” he said.
Cooper looked at him, guileless and sincere. “Lightning,” he said, “to highlight dramatic dialogue.”
Albert couldn’t help but grin for a few seconds. In all his years, he had never had a co-conspirator in his one-man crusade against stupidity, uselessness, and aggression. Even when he worked with someone else, he felt that they were moving in the same direction and going through the same actions, but their goals were completely different. No one else in the Bureau, or in medical school, or in college, and certainly not in the godforsaken suburbs had ever considered themselves a crusader for peace and intelligence, and so no one had ever been on Albert’s side.
Cooper’s smile said that they were on the same side. Albert reminded himself once more that he was not attracted to Cooper. He didn’t go in for straight men for the same reason he didn’t swallow razor blades. There was enough pain in the world without indulging in gratuitous masochism.
Maybe Cooper picked up on the shifting mood, because his smile faded away. They continued walking in silence, but they didn’t let go of one another.
In the end, the funeral home was easy to find. There just wasn’t enough town in Prophetstown to get lost, and they found themselves standing in front of a one-story building with shell pink siding and a tall row of skeletal lilac bushes. The doors were closed.
They walked up to the doors. There was a button for an electric doorbell set into the frame. Albert rang the bell more in whimsical hope than any form of genuine expectation of answer or function. Nothing happened.
“I don’t suppose you got a merit badge in lock picking too,” he said.
“I appreciate your confidence in my abilities, Albert, but I’m afraid that housebreaking has never been a skill I could claim. We could look for an open window.”
Albert thought leaving windows open during this sort of weather was about as likely as winning the lottery. Or perhaps just as likely as the situation in which they currently found themselves. He wasn’t certain if their present levels of improbability improved their chances or not.
They circled the building, and Albert wondered why so many funeral homes insisted on being sided in such aggressively cheerful colors. Did they somehow think that the people arriving were going to forget their grief and loss by the sheer power of pink vinyl?
In the back of the funeral home they found the garage door up, and a hearse inside. Albert peered through the car windows. The ambient light had faded somewhat, but it was still enough to confirm that there was no one inside the hearse, alive or dead.
The door to the funeral home was unlocked, and Albert was not surprised that it opened into the sterile white walls and tile floors of the prep room. A guttered operating table stood in one corner with a hose running from it to a sink in the far wall. On shelves nearby were bottles of pink tissue filler and clear organic solvents, jugs of sealants and Paulex powder. On the shelves below that were boxes of mouth formers and eyecaps, tins of hair wash, spools of suture thread, needle injectors, and tiny bottles of bonding agents, lip glue, molding wax and makeup. Everything you might need to make the dead look like wax statues of themselves.
He inspected the operating table, but if it had been used recently it had been scrubbed down. There was a heavy metal door on the far side of the room to what had to be the cooler, and with Thomas Moorley nowhere in sight, that was his most likely location. Albert paused before opening the door. “Fair warning, Cooper: if the electricity has been cut off for some time to the entire town, then the cooler is off. Anything in there will have resumed decomposing.”
“I believe my stomach is prepared,” Cooper said, and Albert believed him. Cooper, for all his seeming innocence, had never been squeamish.
Albert twisted the heavy metal handle and pulled. After a second the pressure seal broke, and air rushed into the fridge with a hiss. Bitter cold poured out, penetrating Albert’s clothing and prickling at his skin. The improbability of that chill was not lost. There was no sound of a motor. Even the pressure seal on the door would only do so much to maintain a cold temperature without power, and yet the refrigerator was well past the standard temperature and dipping into a range that would freeze tissue and denature evidence.
Lacking any explanation for the cold, Albert took a tentative step inside. The ambient light didn’t permeate the cooler the way it did the prep room, but the spillover illuminated enough for Albert to see that there were no bodies in the cooler; no bags on the operating tables. There wasn’t even a catastrophe bag hanging from one of the hooks off to one side. The cooler was spotlessly clean, and had no lingering smell of decomposition or urine. It didn’t smell as if the dead had ever been in residence.
What there was, dangling from the ceiling and strung along the hooks for the catastrophe bags, was ice. There had to have been some sort of leak to cause that much condensation to form, drape, and drip its way into something so sculptural. It was beautiful, which was not a look Albert was used to seeing in a morgue cooler.
“The body is gone,” Cooper said. “Either we were directed to the wrong institution, or it has been removed.”
“Either way, we have no idea where that corpse is now,” Albert said. “That’s wonderful. I’m always so pleased by useless visits to an institution whose sole purpose lies in the vain attempt to make the deceased beautiful.”
“You don’t like mortuary services,” Cooper said. His gaze was keen, and his tone not quite questioning. “And yet you yourself have performed countless autopsies.”
“What a pathologist does is a public service,” Albert said. “We explain death. We disseminate information that could be vital to surviving relatives and the public alike. We take away doubts and we bring closure. I’m disquieted by the attempts of American mortuary practices to sanitize and glamorize death. Is pumping a loved one full of chemicals, gluing their mouths and eyes shut, replacing their fluids with formalin and then painting them some semblance of a living color really going to aid the process of grief? We’re so desperate to believe that nothing ends that we make caricatures of people we loved instead of focusing on their memories and honoring their lives. It’s superficial, shallow, and distasteful. Mortuary services are a travesty. Burn me when I die, Cooper, because I’m not being put through this chemical mess.”
“Duly noted, Albert.”
Albert left the prep room through the door that led into the rest of the funeral home’s back area. There was a short, white hallway with two cheap plywood doors in the sidewalls, and an expensive wooden door at the end. Albert assumed that door led into the public half of the funeral home.
Albert opened the cheap door to their left first, which opened into a supply closet filled with heavy organic cleaners. The door on the right was the door to the office.
Within they found an empty room. It was lined with bookshelves, filing cabinets, and a small end table. The bookshelves held various books on mortuary services, catalogues for mortuary supplies, and what looked like business textbooks from a community college. The end table was packed with boxes of pamphlets on grief and choosing the correct coffin.
A large oak desk dominated the center of the room. It was in good order but for the pen standing up in its center. The pen had been jammed through a piece of paper and into the desk with such force that it remained vertical. Someone had exerted a great deal of effort leaving some form of message, and Albert went to see what it was.
The note said, ‘Don’t answer the phone. The call is not for you.’
Albert glanced at the phone sitting on the corner of the desk. Someone had ripped both the power cord and the phone line out of its body. They lay a short distance away, wires exposed by the violence with which they’d been removed.
“That’s one way to deal with the issue,” Cooper said.
And then the phone started to ring. Underneath that sound Albert could hear the scraping. It was far away, but it was moving through the building and getting closer.
Albert took an involuntary step back. Cooper was at his side, pressed arm to arm, and Albert took a stupid amount of comfort in that. The phone continued to ring, setting aside any need for power or input. The scraping got closer, and Albert half wanted to slam the door to the office shut. But they had to know what was following them, and if the phone worked as a lure then he would leave the door open.
He was so focused on keeping his eyes and his attention trained on the doorway that he almost didn’t notice his partner start to do something brainless. Cooper stepped forward, his hand extended. The scraping stopped abruptly, and Albert was momentarily shocked into stillness by the double-fronted insanity. Then he jerked out of his paralysis and grabbed Cooper’s arm.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Cooper?” he asked.
“Information is critical at this stage,” Cooper said, “and we are running on a tank that is very nearly empty. We need a lead.”
“No, we need common sense. The last piece of electronics that operated without power sent you into convulsions. This one might do worse. Call me old-fashioned, but when someone manages to stab a ballpoint into a desk and make it stick during an effort to scrawl the words ‘the call is not for you’, I take that message very seriously. The call is not for us, Cooper. Look at the files, see if Moorley got his cooling ass shipped elsewhere, and then we’re leaving.” Before the scraping finally found them.
Cooper’s hand lowered with reluctance, and Albert released him with even greater reluctance. The last thing he needed was for Cooper to be rendered unconscious by some strange noise or to be given some cryptic message that sent him scuttling off into the woods to track down an unrelated lead.
The phone continued to ring as Albert sorted through the funeral director’s inbox and Cooper sifted the rest of the papers on the desk. Moorley was a recent enough acquisition that his papers shouldn’t have been filed yet, particularly if the locals were expecting FBI agents to come in and handle the processing. At least, that was what logic dictated. When Albert could find no mention of Moorley in the inbox he moved over to the filing cabinet and flipped to the M section.
The phone continued to ring. The scraping did not resume. Albert watched Cooper out of the corner of his eye. There was nothing on Moorley in the files, so he joined Cooper at the desk and placed himself between Cooper and the phone.
“It’s not a compulsion,” Cooper said.
“Your curiosity? You could have fooled me.”
“You know what I mean.”
Albert thought back to the radio. He thought back to sleepless nights in nameless hotel rooms praying that Cooper found his way out of his nightmares. And when Cooper woke up with Albert half-asleep on a chair near the bed he always, always wanted to talk about it, pick at it, and try to figure it out.
“I know what you mean,” Albert said.
They sorted through the desktop in the relative silence afforded them by the ringing phone. The papers were in no sort of order, but after a few minutes they’d been through over half of the accumulation with no sign of Moorley’s write-up, and Albert was beginning to wonder if Thomas Moorley had ever existed at all, evidence found on Wagonseller Road notwithstanding.
Then Cooper said, “Albert, I think this is it.”
Albert moved around the desk to where Cooper stood. Cooper held a slim file folder with a few papers inside. Albert saw a newly filled out death certificate, internal papers from the funeral home, and-
“Hold on,” he said, stilling Cooper’s hand. Cooper brought the page down again.
“It appears to be an autopsy report,” Cooper said.
“Preliminaries,” Albert said. The fields for name, age, and weight had been filled out, which wasn’t of great concern. Different pathologists did their paperwork in different orders.
But no one started an autopsy and shipped the body elsewhere in the middle. Albert scanned the notes. They mentioned a tattoo on Thomas Moorley’s hip, and a scar in his inguinal region. That implied that he had been stripped for the external exam. There were notes mentioning fluids being collected.
He shook his head. “Either this coroner was the most incompetent boob ever to disgrace the medical profession, or they didn’t crack Moorley.”
“Perhaps they were interrupted,” Cooper said.
“With what? What exactly has happened in this town, Cooper? I keep expecting to turn a corner and see the word ‘CROATOAN’ carved into some tree.”
Cooper frowned. The telephone rang. Cooper glanced at it again.
“Don’t,” Albert said.
“Thomas Moorley is gone without a trace,” Cooper said. “There are no transfer papers. The coroner is gone without a trace. Everyone who should be present in this town is gone without a trace.”
“That doesn’t mean we do something stupid.”
“Albert,” Cooper said. He laid a hand on Albert’s arm. “Do you trust my instincts?”
That was unfair. Albert shot back, “Do you trust my intelligence?”
Cooper’s eyes were dark and intent, that thousand-mile stare a physical thing holding Albert in tableau. Was this how Cooper wrangled such rabid devotion? People looked into those large, dark eyes, and they were never able to look away.
Albert broke the stare. They weren’t going to solve anything making googly eyes at one another. There were always explanations and logic to be found, clues to be analyzed, and facts to be weighed, even in situations that defied belief. If Albert couldn’t trust in that constant he could not believe in anything.
He forced his words out, not backing away from Cooper’s gaze or from the ringing phone or from the tense anticipation inherent in the silence outside the door. “I’d appreciate an answer, Cooper. I trust you to go on your vision quests and talk to inanimate objects. I trust you to have dreams that give you clues, and I trust you to have impeccable investigative technique and instincts. If you haven’t noticed, that is a hell of a lot of trust for me to give. But what I do here, what my job entails, is to make certain that you don’t step off a cliff while your head is in the clouds. I’m your partner, Coop. We’ve got what we came for, so let’s go.”
And, miracle of miracles, Cooper stepped away from the desk and phone. He didn’t look away from Albert. “There is an adage about temptation detailing the choice between foolish action and driving oneself insane wondering what might have happened if one took the risk. I find it difficult to turn my back on potential answers.” He turned and opened the office door. “Let’s leave.”
The phone stopped ringing. Cooper turned to look at it, but Albert didn’t have time. The scraping was feet away and making for them fast. His heart thudded in his chest and he whirled around. Something was coming at him in the hall, and Albert caught a glimpse of brown as the ambient light began to fail. The scraping took on a ringing tone and Cooper stiffened too.
“Albert!” he said, and then pushed past Albert to slam the door shut. The scraping became something like that tinnitus noise in the radio, and then it stopped. There was something on the other side of the door, and Albert couldn’t bring himself to call it a person. Cooper stepped away, his gun drawn and his eyes focused on the handle.
It turned slowly, just a little at a time. Albert’s hand went to the holster at his belt, and he drew the canister of OC spray he kept on himself. Albert was a pacifist, but he was also a pragmatist in a very dangerous occupation.
And then the door handle snapped back closed and the scraping retreated. Albert and Cooper ran after it, flinging open the door and giving chase. Albert’s longer legs did him credit, and he took the lead down the hallway toward the back room.
Albert kept the canister held level. There was a trick to running in leather shoes without making sound while on linoleum and it had to do with center of gravity. Before Cooper, such knowledge was academic. Things changed. Albert changed.
He shouldered his way through the door and his feet went out from under him. For a crystallized second he saw the whole room as though in snapshot: walls and floor and ceiling slicked with ice, the operating table dripping with icicles. In the corner next to the freezer there was a figure draped in brown rags. The ambient light vanished for a split second, and Albert heard the shriek of scraping louder and harsher than the ringing tone on the radio. Cooper shouted, and the light came back on. The brown-clad figure was halfway across the room in that second, feet from Albert.
Part III