Archive of Our Own

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What should have happened after the Nuvarin Incident and what actually happened, Dan discovers, turns out to be two completely and dreadfully different things. Two feverish days spent writing almost non-stop to produce a sprawling piece with visual components, a country in awe and ready to bubble over with acclaim like a shaken can of soda. Promotions, interviews, opportunities, awards. Those were all the things that he expected.Half a week of fatigue and night terrors followed by a few days of molasses-like progress where their writing was constantly interrupted by phone calls and visits by the police. A story that went up the same day that the obelisk was uncovered from under a pile of rubble and those that paid attention read their article with a critical eye that was only slightly lessened by the monstrosity they had seen before them on the news. Unemployed, accusations, misfortune, doubt. That is what happened.The problem, Dan realizes too late, is that when you open a can of worms with an explosive in the bottom of the can, people are going to notice when it detonates, especially when they find a Lovecraftian horror after the smoke clears. & & & Three Months Later Dan has barely left his apartment. He isn't necessarily proud of this fact, but with the feedback and the general state of things in the world around him, he would hardly figure that anybody out there would particularly blame him for his decision to hole himself up somewhere familiar for awhile. The entire world is still attempting to sort itself out and Dan has made it clear that—for the time being—he no longer wants to be a part of it. Phone calls from other journalists itching for exclusives, from detectives practically begging one of them to just confess to setting the fire because their arson investigator confirmed that it was no lab accident after all, the clamor of social media collectively demanding answers, conspiracy theorists wanting them to join their clubs, and government employees from various and secretive offices just generally making their lives miserable tends to wear thin on the nerves after a few weeks.He's watched television, kept his eye on the news as scientists from every field from biology to geology descend on the obelisk and not a single one can make heads nor tails of it. Citizens with sad lives and nothing better to do from around the country have turned the burnt remnants of the building into a campsite and, even more disgustingly, Dan saw it become a site of worship.“If aliens are truly out there,” Dan said one evening during a conversation with Amy and Jonah, “I sincerely hope they come to abduct me soon because I don't think I can stand living on this planet anymore.”The three of them clung to one another like they were each their own personal buoy in a ravaging storm in the middle of a treacherous ocean for lack of any other significant option and because you don't go through anything quite like that on your own, no matter how badly you truly wish you were capable. They were treated almost as a singular phenomenon, three minds in one body (or perhaps, one mind shared by three different forms) and that was what they became. It fell short of them living together because Dan hadn't had a roommate since college and he wasn't about to change that just because he had nightmares occasionally and found himself dialing one of their numbers in the middle of the night.Eric Nagel had, for the second time, disappeared. The last time Dan saw him, he was being led into the back of a police car, let go from the hospital with an eyepatch and a prognosis of five months to live due to a sudden reemergence of a particularly aggressive form of cancer. For all Dan knew, he absolutely was dead or soon would be but there was a lingering dark cloud that followed him around and said that he knew, he had to know it wouldn't be that simple.Nothing ever would be again. — — — The coffee he drinks is bitter and he grimaces with every sip but he doesn't stop until his mug is nothing but a cold swallow and coffee grounds. It's one of the rare occasions where he has ventured out into the world and he was going to enjoy as much of it as he possibly could before putting himself back into his self-imposed isolation. Amy and Jonah had both expressed concern about how he was currently living in the only ways they knew how (belligerently and also somehow subtly) but each time Dan had pushed them away, telling them that they had their ways of dealing with things and he had his own. They still spoke, they came by once or twice a week to have dinner. Wasn't that enough? It wasn't, apparently, but he refused to budge and there wasn't much they could do, so things pretty much stayed as they were, whether they liked it or not.The diner he's at is noisy and he's got an entire booth to himself despite the fact that he doesn't quite need the amount of room it afforded him. He puts his now-empty mug down heavily on the table and scratches at the beard he had started to grow, mostly because of his own laziness than any attempt at disguising himself as Jonah had joked about when he first saw him with the hair on his face. He watches two men in business suits pointedly ignoring each other as they finish their meals as if they had just come from a meeting that was wholly embarrassing for all of those involved and he jumps when he hears his phone beep at him.He'd paired down to a single phone, throwing away both of the ones that had accompanied him on the four day mindfuck that was their pursuit of a story (after backing up every shred of information he had stored on there). He still had the phone that belonged to the men who had attempted to kidnap them. Dan had tried to throw it away numerous times but, each moment his hand hovered over a garbage can, he found the damn thing being put back in his pocket or stored away in the bottom of a desk drawer. There was nothing on it worth holding on to, nothing incriminating, and yet there it was, still in his possession. It was like a minor addiction he just couldn't shake.What are you up 2? It's from Jonah, Dan could have figured that out just by the way the message was typed.None of your business, Dan responds, puts his phone down and less than five seconds later he has a response.Some guy wants to talk 2 us. Interesting, it says and Dan hesitates, reads it again and then sighs into his palm. At least this wasn't another proposition from TTK magazine. Simon Holst, editor and writer for Those That Know Magazine had been on their asses since they published their article, quietly suggesting bringing them over to their side, choosing to take Dan's question of possible employment as serious despite the fact that Dan still wasn't sure if he had sincerely meant it. They had made quite a few promises, none of which Dan nor the other two seemed particularly interested in and, for a couple of weeks, it seemed as if they had decided to let it go and allow them to live in peace. It was possible that this 'some guy' was actually Simon and that Jonah was hiding that just to see if Dan would be interested enough to hear him out but, somehow, Dan doubted Jonah would bother putting any serious effort into going through with that particular tactic.That's nice, Dan writes, but I'm busy. Another few seconds pass.No ur not, it says and Dan frowns.
How do you know?

---> ;)
It takes Dan a moment to figure out what the text means but he slowly turns to the right and very nearly has a heart attack when he sees Jonah standing on the sidewalk just a few feet away from the window. He waves and Dan gives him the finger before gesturing for him to get his ass inside which he finally does, explaining briefly to the woman attempting to lead him to a table that he was here meeting someone else and he slides into the seat across from Dan, folding his hands together and then unfolding them to lay them flat against the top of the table.“I hate you so much,” Dan says and Jonah smirks.“Sure you do,” Jonah says sympathetically and all but reaches out to pat him on the arm. He was going to ask Jonah how in the world he had managed to find him there but he knew the answer to that already: Jonah had some potentially supernatural ability to find both things and people that didn't want to (or seemingly couldn't) be found. Jonah stops a waitress that had been wandering past and orders a coffee for himself as well, turning back around to face Dan and lean back in his seat. He may have appeared to be handling things well but, as everyone knew, appearances had a tendency to be wholly deceiving. For some reason, the police had decided to target Jonah specifically as a suspect for the fire at Nuvarin and, in the end, they couldn't prove it was him but it didn't stop them from doing everything in their power to make Jonah's life as miserable as they could get away with for at least a month. The suspicion has died down and Jonah displayed a remarkable talent of being able to bounce back from the ire of both the media and the authorities but Dan had also seen him cry about it at least once and it had been so pathetic that Dan had been physically incapable of making fun of him for it.“'Some guy'?” Dan asks instead, holds up his phone towards Jonah and he shrugs a shoulder as a mug is placed down in front of him. He busies himself with adding sugar, Dan barely acknowledging as the waitress refills his own mug from a carafe she clutches unsteadily in her small hand.“Well, yeah,” Jonah says, still stirring as if he forgot he was doing it, “I wasn't going to type out a novel for you. He said his name was Harold Ledford.”“Harold Ledford?” Dan repeats with a snort, puts a hand over his face, shaking his head. “Jesus Christ. That sounds like the most made up name I've ever heard. Did he pull it out of some cheap paperback romance novel written by a horny housewife and hope you wouldn't notice?”“He told me to call him 'Hal',” Jonah says, finally putting his spoon down on the table and shrugging one shoulder again. “And I looked him up. Totally a real guy. Not that he's done much. Apparently his parents owned some company that made Q-Tips—”“Hold on. Ledford Brand Q-Tips? He's one of those Ledfords?” Pascal and Bridget Ledford had made a surprising fortune by simply churning out those little cotton balls stuffed on either end of a plastic stick and everything was moving along steadily, their business set to go quietly into the hands of the next generation, until just a week before Christmas three years ago when the single factory sent the town it was settled in shaking to the sewers after the entire building exploded, thanks to what turned out to be a patch of faulty wiring and a machine that leaked the exact type of liquid that nobody ever wanted to even be in the same room as a lightbulb if they could help it. Fifteen workers and both Pascal and Bridget (who had made an appearance at the early holiday party to make it seem like they actually cared about their employees) had died. Dan had kept up with the story the same way that any other regular person addicted to impersonal tragedy did: eyes on the news until it was just the same pieces of information rehashed by different people, until they realized that it was an accident and not some sort of malicious sabotage, that there wasn't going to be the terrifying face of a criminal and that the preceding court case was merely a lot of discussion with a few lawyers, a judge and an insurance company. He vaguely remembered hearing something about their son and how he had decided to sell what was left of the business, take that money and whatever his parents had left him and move on with his life but he hadn't retained his name.Dan wasn't going to pretend that the fact that Harold Ledford suddenly resurfaced and was contacting them (or contacting Jonah anyway) wasn't intriguing, but—considering their current reputation—he had a nagging suspicion that it was just some other conspiracy nut crawling from the woodwork, except this time he had a somewhat recognizable name and some money attached to his whacked-out theory.“What did he want?”“He was kind of vague but, uh, he said he's been researching something—”“'Something'?”“You do know what 'vague' means, don't you?” Jonah asks and Dan makes a face at him, moves his hand in a gesture for him to keep talking.“Like I said: he's been doing some sort of research and after... the current situation he went back through his notes and found something he thought we'd be interested in.” Jonah stops but Dan can tell that there's more and he's holding it back, pushing it down like the lid of a suitcase that's been stuffed with too many clothes and Dan frowns. There were a lot of things Jonah was terrible at but keeping a neat poker face and knowing how to easily lie had always, in Dan's experience, been at the top of the list.“Jonah, I'm not in the mood to play twenty questions with you. I'm never in the mood, to be completely honest, but I'm really not right now. Just tell me what he said. Spit it the fuck out.”“As I've made it clear numerous times,” Jonah says, sounding slightly aggravated, as if this also isn't the first time he's had a similar conversation today and Dan figures he must have told this all to Amy earlier which was bizarre because they got along civilly enough as long as the three of them were sharing the same space but they didn't make much of a habit of spending too much time one-on-one, just Amy and Jonah, unless they had been behind his back. Not that that thought bothered him, of course. “He was vague. But he may have mentioned it having something to do with the obelisk. I thought he was just saying that, just to reel us in or whatever—which is your fault, by the way, I never used to be so fucking skeptical—but then he emailed me this.” He brings up his phone and starts searching through it, tapping buttons with his long fingers and, swallowing, he finally turns the large screen towards Dan where a photo of a drawing obviously done by a child is there on the screen, a date five months before the obelisk was uncovered written in a more adult handwriting in the corner. Purples and blues swirled around the red construction paper but it was the crudely drawn obelisk in the center of the page, colored with a black crayon, that stood out the most and Dan stares at it wide-eyed for a moment before pushing Jonah's hand away and shaking his head again.“I don't want to look at that fucking thing.” He didn't want to deal with that anymore. It had caused him enough grief so far. Just seeing photographs of it or glimpses out of the corner of his eye when he sat with his back to the television screen in the evenings as he clicked around on his new laptop, searching for something he could never quite figure out what it was but knew when he'd find it, would bring about a sick feeling low in his stomach. He had dreams of feeling the warmth and the thud, thud, thud of it's heartbeat against his fingers, had visions of screeching monsters. That thing may be stuck firmly in the ground but it was a particularly invasive sort of object and Dan had managed to trim the worst of it back. All that being said, while he liked to claim he no longer cared—that the last thing he wanted was to be involved in anything like this again—he also knew he had an alert set up that would tell him whenever the obelisk was mentioned—even briefly at the end of an irrelevant article—and he kept the news on for as long as he could stand it, just in case.They teach you a lot of things when you're studying to be a journalist, but what they don't tell you is that sometimes, when you think you're finished with a story, it isn't completely finished with you. The opposite is true more often than not: a story is done but the journalist finds that they aren't, discovers that not talking to the victim anymore is impossible, that they show up to the execution of the death row inmate even though nobody asked them to be there, that they keep tabs on a company that had long since paid its dues. A story somehow developing a mind of it's own and deciding that no, it isn't finished wriggling into the lives of the person that wrote it, is a slightly more rare occurrence and nobody had bothered to sit Dan down and explain how he was supposed to make it stop.There had been one man, a few years ago, that Dan heard about who had tried to write a piece on the Capello Massacre, a bloodshed moment in a diner lost somewhere in the Nevada Desert. Six people had died and two had lived but the story had been about the killer, about the man who had run into a building with a machete and hadn't run back out. Who was he? What made him do this? The journalist spent a year talking to family, digging through his past and had produced a twelve-page article with huge gaps from his childhood that nobody was willing to publish. In an interview, he explained how he had let it go, how he had washed his hands of it. Despite the murderer-hungry culture he lived in, no one cared so why should he? A month later, he had gotten a phone call from someone, said it related to the man, to how and where he grew up, if he was willing to meet him. The journalist had gone and nobody had heard from him since.That wasn't the future Dan wanted for himself, to wind up becoming the missing person that Eric Nagel had tried to make them just because he didn't truly know when enough was enough. For all he knew, there could be answers or just another maniac with a gun, waiting to put them in the ground because you can escape death only so many times before it catches up to you and maybe once was their limit. He wants to tell Jonah to get lost, that he can do whatever the hell he wants, they aren't a team anymore but instead he says:“He could have drawn that yesterday. That doesn't prove anything.” And then: “What does Amy think about this, exactly?” — — — I think it's probably bullshit, Amy texts Dan back exactly twenty minutes after he had sent a message to her and he frowns first at his phone and then at Jonah who was currently shoveling french fries in his mouth because he had figured that if he was going to stick around (which Dan hadn't asked him to), he might as well get something to eat. Did he show you the picture?Yes, Dan responds tersely and she takes a moment to reply.Probably bullshit but... The rest of the sentence is gone, left hanging and Dan doesn't need her to finish to understand where this is going.Please don't tell me you want to meet this guy, Dan sends, tapping quickly on the keyboard and he absent-mindedly reaches over to Jonah's plate, snatching a fry before Jonah could pull the plate away from him. There's another pause and he can practically see her sitting behind the desk in her apartment that he’s never been to before, one leg crossed over the other as she stares down at the screen, trying to figure out how to confirm it without having to actually put those words out into the world. Goddammit, he types and then puts his face in his hands.“Goddammit.” Jonah grins at him and it takes all Dan's willpower not to take a handful of his food and mash it into his stupid fucking face. — — — Jonah calls the guy back right there in the diner, says they'll be over that afternoon because of course Jonah will never understand the art of actually waiting for anything (he was probably one of those kids who tried to open all his Christmas presents the night before) and Dan pinches the bridge of his nose and let's Amy know, looks as she tells him that she'll meet them there because she's not driving all over the city to find somewhere to park at Dan's building just so they could all show up in the same damn car. Once they're out on the sidewalk, he can practically sense Jonah about to ask him if they could drive there together, that they could go to Dan's apartment and then pile into his stupid new car but Dan says absolutely not. He can either give him the address or just follow him but they definitely aren't going there together.It isn't because he doesn't want Jonah to be in his place (it's far too late for that; after the whole situation with Nuvarin, the three of them made sure to be in each other's lives but—while Amy gave Dan his space and did most of her communicating by phone and email unless he specifically invited her over—Jonah had a tendency to show up in the hallway of Dan's apartment building, just standing in front of his door, his presence completely unsolicited. Dan could never figure out if Jonah had just assumed that, since they were somewhat akin to friends now, he had permission to weasel into every moment of Dan's life (more so than he did before) or that he just simply didn't understand what the words “please leave me alone” meant. Dan had tried, at first, to make him understand, even going so far as to pointedly slam the door in his face but he kept coming back, kept making Dan go out places to eat, kept bringing over cheap alcohol and insisting they watch some shitty comedy or an outlandish science-fiction show that had been cancelled years ago. Eventually, he had given up and just allowed it to happen, which seemed to be Jonah's goal the entire time anyway) but because he wants to give himself an easy opportunity to turn right back around and leave if this whole thing turned out to be, as he currently suspected, complete and utter garbage.Jonah looks momentarily disappointed but he fishes around in his bag, digs out a pen emblazoned with the Nuvarin logo, a souvenir from their first trip there (Dan would have still have had his own if he hadn't jammed the thing into Eric Nagel's eye) and scribbles the address in his loopy, barely legible handwriting on the back of the receipt he had only just gotten a few minutes ago. He slaps it down into Dan's palm and salutes him sloppily, wandering away towards where he had parked and Dan takes in a slow breath and idly glances up at the sky, staring at the dark grey clouds weighing heavy above him, looking as if they were going to open up at any moment. Rain, rain, and more rain. He's surprised the entire city hasn't drowned yet. — — — Just from pulling into the driveway, Dan can tell that this was the kind of house that wealthy people bought when they didn't want it to seem like they had money but everybody knew it anyway. It's small, painted plainly white with a dark, sloping roof and large windows, the lawn surprisingly unkempt. The other two are already there—Jonah's cube-shaped car parked behind Amy's sensible one—and Dan slams his door shut more loudly than he needed to, pulling the attention from an older woman who was jogging past and he grimaces at her until she rolls her eyes and looks away, saying something under her breath.He leans on the doorbell for just a second longer than necessary, listens to the shrill chime of it and to the footsteps, and then the door swings slowly open. Standing in front of Dan is a man who appeared to be closer to fifty than forty and was only a foot shorter than Jonah. He was dressed surprisingly casual, his feet bare, and he smiles genuinely at Dan, holding out a hand which Dan eventually accepts, shaking it twice before pulling away.“You must be Dan Egan,” he says. “Harold Ledford. But don't call me that, please. Hal is fine. Your friends are already here.” He steps aside, gestures into the rest of the house and Dan wants to protest, reflexively tell this man that those people weren't his friends, that they were associates at most but, instead, he rolls his shoulders and says nothing as he walks forward. It's cold inside despite the fact that outside wasn't particularly hot and Hal leads him past a steep flight of stairs, down a hallway past minimally decorated rooms, one with a dark wood dining room table with sturdy chairs, another with plush chairs and a large leather couch, the walls surrounded by immense and packed bookshelves. Hal doesn't speak either but the silence isn't particularly awkward and they turn a corner into a large open area at the back of the house where Jonah and Amy are currently standing and he watches as they both turn when the other two enter.The ceiling in the room is dramatically high and it's far more cluttered than the rest of the house appeared to be: cardboard boxes were stacked wherever there was room, a sleek laptop sat on a worn out desk that was pushed against a wall, the rest of the surface littered with papers marked with different colored notes. A bookshelf was against the wall directly across from Dan but—other than a few books that looked to be stolen from a library—it was packed with more boxes and papers and a few knick knacks, one of which seemed to be a badly charred piece of metal housed in a glass display case that Dan assumed must have been from the exploded factory. To his right were glass doors which led out to the backyard and Dan sighs, wanders over to stand beside Jonah, the three of them lined in front of a beat-up couch, Amy with her arms crossed over her chest, Jonah's limp at his sides and Dan's hands stuffed in his pockets, all of them waiting. Hal places himself in front of them, a coffee table low to the ground in between them and he puts his hands behind his back but then pulls them away, flexes his hands and clears his throat as if he was suddenly incredibly nervous.“Alright,” he says, “Now that you're all here, I suppose you want to know what I uncovered. But before I do that, I should probably tell you what I've been doing since... well, since my parents died.” He points at the mess around him but then hesitates. “Can I get you anything? Something to drink? Coffee or—”“Look,” Dan says and he can see Amy shooting him a look out of the corner of his eye, her way of telling him that she's not entirely pleased with this either but at least she's not going to be an asshole about it but he ignores her and keeps talking. “The only reason I'm here is because they are.” He points to Jonah and Amy and as far as everyone else in that room knew, that was the entire truth of it and he was happy to let it stay that way. “I just want to hear what you have to say and then I'm going home.” There's a part of him that wants to see Hal look distressed or offended but he just exhales and shrugs as if he completely understood and couldn't fault him for his apprehension.“After my parents passed away, I became a bit... well, ‘intrigued’ is how I would put it, ‘obsessed’ is how you might define it, with what happens to a person after they die.”“Oh for crying out loud...” Dan mutters, drops his shoulders and allows his eyes to shift briefly towards the ceiling before he takes a step back and then to the side, preparing himself to leave because he already doesn't like where this is going. If Hal heard him or noticed his movements, he certainly didn't react as if he had and continues.“For quite a few months now I've been talking to people about their incidents. People who have had near death experiences. Some of them I found through searching online, others were brought up to me from a friend of a friend or a family member. I'd listen to what they went through and keep track of their stories. At first it was just something to keep me busy, a way to cope, but it's grown into something much larger than that, as you can see,” he says, gestures once again to the boxes and papers that surround them. “After the obelisk was uncovered and after reading your article, I was struck with a sense of something familiar and decided to go back through everything, piece by piece, and I discovered more than thirty different stories where the person described seeing... seeing your obelisk or, at least, a similar one.” He finishes, waits for a reaction but none of them speak. Dan is hung up on it being called Their Obelisk. He doesn't want it to be 'theirs', doesn't want to be responsible for it, doesn't want any kind of ownership of that thing still out there, pointed and haunting as it sticks from the hard ground.“I don't understand,” Amy finally says, “Exactly what you want us to say? Or do here?”“To put it frankly,” Hal says, hands behind his back again, “I don't exactly trust the authorities. They'll either laugh me out of whatever building I bring this to or, worst case, they'll take everything away and all my hard work will be either classified or shredded. I just thought...” He exhales, looks to his feet. “You really aren't interested?”“I am,” Jonah says before the other two could say anything otherwise.“That picture you sent Jonah,” Dan says suddenly, isn't sure where it's coming from, “Do you have it?”“Of course,” Hal says, walks over to a box closer to the desk, flipping the lid off, tucking it under his arm, and he lifts the paper carefully off the top of the pile of folders inside, holding it gently between two fingers. He hands it over to Dan who finds himself reluctant to touch it as if he was afraid he might feel that heartbeat again so Jonah takes it instead, pinches the material at either end, both Dan and Amy leaning sideways to stare down at it. Dan swallows, his mouth dry, and he glances up at Hal, who seems to be able to tell what he's thinking. “Six-year-old girl. Went in for a basic surgery and was dead for two minutes on the table. While she was recovering she drew that. There are numerous illustrations of the same thing but I only managed to convince her parents to let me have that one.” Dan pushes Jonah's arms away, turns his hands down so the image was facing the floor and then straightens his back, kicks at his heel sharply with the toe of his other foot.“This is weird and all,” Amy says, “But I still don't understand what you think we'll get out of this.”“I thought you'd might like to know about this.”“Why?” Dan asks.“Because...” But Hal trails off, either because he honestly wasn't sure how to answer the question or because he found the answer to be so wholly obvious that he didn't think he needed to actually say it out loud. “After everything you've been through and this doesn't make you even the least bit curious? Everyone I talked to, all of these stories, were before that obelisk was uncovered. I checked them all. None of them worked for Nuvarin, none of them had family or friends who worked there. There was no way they could possibly know—”“Or maybe you're just seeing what you want to see,” Dan snaps. “It's all just one big coincidence. How many ideas can you come up with when you try to tell stories about seeing things when you die? If you really talked to so many people, it's not out of the question that a few of them are going to say the same thing.”“So you don't believe me.” He says it with the tone of a father who's only a few seconds away from saying 'I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed' and Dan feels himself clench his jaw.“You could say that.”“I believe it,” Jonah says, gives the drawing back to Hal, who smiles weakly at him.“Of course you do,” Dan says to Jonah and then turns back to Hal. “Don't be too happy about that. Jonah will literally believe anything you tell him. It's fucking remarkable.”“I'm just more open-minded than you are,” Jonah corrects him.“Here's the thing,” Amy says, interrupting the oncoming argument like a police officer standing in traffic and blowing an ear-piercing whistle, hand flat in front of her. “For a third and hopefully last time: I'm still not entirely clear on what you expect us to do with this information.”“I want you to talk to them. Talk to the people who saw the obelisk. See if you can get more information out of them, especially now that that thing truly exists.”“Why don't you do it?” Dan asks. “You've obviously talked to them before. Just call them back.”“I just...” Hal starts, holds his hands out and shakes his head slowly from side to side. “I don't understand how you aren't jumping at this. Don't you want to keep digging? To see where else this leads?”“Not really,” Dan says at the same time Amy says “I don't know” and Jonah says “Absolutely”.“How about this,” Hal says after a minute of tense silence. “Do me a favor. Sit here and look through the files. Read what they say and if you still aren't convinced, if you still don't want to keep going, then you can walk out and I'll never contact you again. Sound fair?” The three of them share a series of looks but it becomes quickly clear to Dan that he's outnumbered and he grinds his teeth. — — — Hal places a box down in front of them on the coffee table and says that he'll leave them be, that he'll be in the kitchen when they're finished and had come to a decision and Dan waits for him to completely disappear before talking.“Jonah I understand,” he says, watches as he already grabs a handful of folders and flops down onto the couch, “But Amy. Come on. You really believe this shit?”“Did I say that? No. It's like you said: just seeing what he wants to see. Everybody wants to think they have the answers to this obelisk thing but, I have to admit, this is definitely the most original story someone's bothered to come up with. So I'm going to humor him. This'll kill, what, an hour or so? Were you doing anything worthwhile before Jonah convinced you to drag yourself here? Because I sure as hell wasn't. So grab a few folders and at least pretend to read them, alright?” She sits down next to Jonah and snatches a few files from his hands instead of pulling them from the box and he looks like he wants to argue but lets it go, starts reading something new and Dan rubs a hand over his face and through his hair, grumbling as he takes the rest that Jonah had been holding, leaving him with nothing. Jonah throws his arms up in defeat and leans over, taking a new pile for himself, pushing the bottom of his shoes against the edge of the coffee table as he sits back again.There's a woman in Illinois who's heart stopped for three minutes and when she came back she confessed to her church group that she had seen not angels and the warm welcoming light of God, but a tall, crystal-like statue that she thought meant she was going to Hell. A man in Oregon got electrocuted in a construction accident and it stopped his heart. When they revived him, he babbled about a black pillar but when the doctors tried to pressure him for more, he clammed up and wouldn't talk about it anymore and apparently barely said as much else to Hal. A teenager just outside their city had overdosed on pills and when he woke up three hours later in the hospital, he told his brother about an onyx monolith that wouldn't let him come back, that was dragging him into death but lost out to defibrillators and a stomach pump. The brother had figured that he had just had a complete breakdown and Hal had had his conversation with the kid in the psychiatric ward. And then there was the little girl with her standard surgery gone horribly wrong, who spent a week or two drawing a dark monument on colorful construction paper, over and over, but when asked what it was, she shrugged and said that it was what she saw.Amy tells them about an old woman from just a few towns over that had died for five minutes after a bad interaction with medication and, after she had passed away two weeks later, her granddaughter discovered a diary where all the last few entries talked about was a crystal obelisk. A boy in West Virginia hit his head after a risky swing maneuver on the playground and—after they drained the blood from his brain—he kept asking where they could find the “tower” and it took his parents weeks to realize he wasn't talking about Devils Tower in Wyoming, which he had learned about at school just before his accident. Jonah reads slowly about a woman in Kansas who had woken up after a car accident and cried for days, not from the loss of her mobility, but because she was so terrified of what she had seen before she opened her eyes. A man in Washington had been brought back after a nasty spider bite and then had a panic attack a month later while visiting the rocks and minerals exhibit with his family at a local museum.The logical part of Dan's brain—the one that sounds the same as when he first saw what Theodore Nagel had turned into and Jonah tried to convince him that it was an alien and not the man in a rubber suit that Dan had attempted to cling to for far too long—thought it was easier to convince himself that this was just Hal wanting to be a part of something much bigger when Dan hadn't read any of it, that Hal was searching for meaning between the lines like people finding Jesus burned into their toast or when all there really was was smudged ink that may have looked like words, but now that each story was staring him directly in the face, it was difficult to pretend this was absolutely nothing and it made him nauseated.“We're never going to be able to walk away from this, are we?” Dan asks nobody in particular, throwing his pile sloppily back into the box, leaning his elbows on his thighs, face in his hands. “It's like when my uncle got pneumonia. He got better but he couldn't quite shake his damn cough for the rest of his life.”“Very poetic,” Amy says, adding her own folders to the stack. “You ever think about becoming a writer?”“I think this is fucking great,” Jonah says.“Nobody asked you,” Dan replies, his way of smacking him without actually using physical force. “So say we talk to these people. They tell us some more about seeing that... about seeing it. So what?”“So maybe you start building a broader picture of what we're all dealing with. Maybe you find other ones,” says a voice behind them and they all simultaneously turn to see Hal standing there looking apologetic. “I got bored. I just wanted to check in... I know I said— The truth is,” he continues as he walks back into the room, going to stand in the exact same place he had been earlier, “I want to write a book. Most of the people I talked to have agreed to be in it but I'm afraid that not only am I not much of a writer but, despite the content, it's set to be pretty dull, all things considered. If I'm not careful, it could just turn into another one of those awful Chicken Soup for The Soul-type books and I don't want that.”“You want us to write your book for you?” Amy asks, eyes narrowing.“Yes,” Hal admits, no hesitation, hands spread out in front of him as he spoke. “Think about it: we preface it with your article. A prologue of sorts. And then we tell these people's stories, all the while exploring this obelisk and it's meaning, if there is one. I've obviously spent some time thinking over this before I called you. I'm sure it sounds—”“It sounds,” Dan interrupts, “Like a lot of work on our end with no guarantee that we'll find anything useful. What happens if we don't come up with anything good? Or at least anything good for you.”“I highly doubt that,” Hal chuckles and the noise makes Dan's frown deepen. “I've seen what you three can do. A month of your time, that's all I want. A month. I'm willing to pay you ten-thousand dollars each for your trouble, as well as cover any extraneous expenses you may incur.” That's a lot of money, Dan thinks, to be given to make himself turn around and walk back into the pitch black unknown again. He won't lie and try to be noble about it, say that no amount of money in the world is going to convince him to go back there and dance just a bit closer around that obelisk for another month, like some sick game of 'Ring-Around-The-Rosie' because having that nest to fall back on so he could spend just a bit more time as a hermit, especially after whatever is going to happen next (it won't be good, he knows it won't because that just seems to be the direction his life is constantly headed in these days), would be something to look forward to if they make it out of this unscathed. He knows he should tell Hal that they want to think about it, should go home and call him in the morning after a good few hours of rational discussion with Amy and, to a lesser extent, Jonah who he was sure would spend his time trying to pressure them into saying yes and inform him that he if he really wanted this to be written or done at all, he knew someone named Simon who might be interested. It'd certainly be simpler but, deep down, Dan knows that it wouldn't leave him truly satisfied. He didn't have those news alerts because he found it easy to let it all go.Maybe if they're lucky and do enough legwork, they'll be able to finally close the damn chapter on this story.“Fine,” Dan says, “We'll do it.” The shock from both Jonah and Amy is palpable. — — — Hal gives them two boxes—the one they had read through as well as a lighter one with the bits and piece that wouldn't fit in the first—and three checks for five thousand dollars apiece, just to get them started, wishes them luck as Dan shoves them into Amy's trunk, and finishes by saying that Jonah has his number and vice versa, to call whenever they need or want to and that was pretty much all Dan could listen to from him for the rest of the day.Somehow they wind up converging at Jonah's old apartment, squeezing themselves in amongst the labelled boxes and plastic-wrapped furniture that was waiting for a few movers and a van to cart it all to a smaller place only three blocks away from the one they were currently standing in. Even though Jonah's landlord had been surprisingly sympathetic about the entire situation with the ruined wall and shattered window, Jonah had decided to find somewhere else he could call home and Dan doesn't entirely blame him. If he had to go back to the same place that he had been shot at only a short time ago, he'd probably be a little jumpy, too.The coffee table was still there as well as the couch and Dan leans over it, rapping his knuckles on the new window, turning to look at the holes in the wall that were patched up with a thick, white plaster.“Bulletproof this time?” Dan asks and Jonah looks nervous but it's fleeting and he snorts instead, nudging Dan to the side so he could sit down directly in the middle of the couch, his back to the window as if trying to prove that he was definitely not the least bit afraid which, of course, is cancelled out when he says:“I fucking wish.”“Alright,” Amy says, standing on the other side of the table, each hand pushed down on the lid of one of the boxes that Hal had given them, bending forward slightly, speaking as if she were a teacher trying to get the attention of two unruly students. “I say we go through all of these folders, separate them into people who are actually local and, you know, everyone else.” She yanks the lid off, flipping it upside-down and tosses it somewhere off to the side.“What's 'local' being defined as here?” Dan asks.“Dunno,” Amy says, pulling out the stacks of files, some folders five inches thick, others barely a centimeter, and she drops them down heavily, clears out the one box and throws it over in the same direction she had hurled the lid, beginning to dig through the second one. “Four hours away?”“Two,” Dan counters, holds up his fingers just to make it clear. “Maybe even one. I'm not sitting in a car for four hours or more with you guys just to drive to some stranger's house to drill them on this nonsense. Especially if they decide not to talk to us in the first place.”“Fine with me,” Amy says, making a face at him, ignoring when Jonah says something about being great to have on road trips. “So. There we go.” She directs her hands towards the piles in front of them, the boxes strewn across the wooden floor. “You have anything left to drink in this place?” She queries and Jonah scratches his jaw. “Besides tap water.” Jonah stands and shuffles towards his kitchen area, yanking open his fridge and leaning an arm against the closed door of the freezer to peer inside.“There's a couple cans of soda and... uh, a bottle of wine.”“Wine is good,” Amy says but Jonah hesitates.“I was saving it.”“For what?”“For when I got my new place.”“Please,” Dan says. “Your new place isn't going to be worth celebrating with a bottle of wine. I haven't seen it and I already know that.”“But—” “I'll buy you another one. Just open the damn bottle,” Amy says, turns back to the folders and they listen as Jonah talks to himself, rummaging through a box on the counter to find his corkscrew, going through another after he finds it before giving up and taking three red plastic cups from a pack that sat next to his sink. — — — It takes a little less than half an hour to sort through the files and put them in some semblance of an order and, soon, they have only five people who were within two hours of where they lived and a pile of thirty others from people who were either just past the two hour time limit or somewhere stretching towards the other side of the country.“So,” Amy says, taking a sip from her cup, drinking much slower than Dan has normally witnessed, most likely because Jonah didn't seem to understand that the larger cups didn't mean that he had to fill them almost to the top and neither she nor Dan were willing to spend the night finding somewhere to sleep in Jonah's apartment, (they weren't fucking teenagers anymore). “Who've we got?” None of them have their computers with them so Amy finds a piece of paper amongst the assemblage that didn't appear to be very important and flips it over, searching for something to write with only to have Jonah place the Nuvarin pen in her palm. She eyes it warily as if she's expecting it to somehow gain life and attempt to attack her but then she sighs, clicking it open and adjusting her knees as she kneels on the floor.“Kendra Hyland,” Dan reads after he takes the meager stack onto his lap, shifting the first folder to the bottom of the pile after he reads off her name, the phone number that Hal originally used to keep in contact with her, and her last known address, doing the same for the other four: Sadie de la Cruz, Rodney Meadows, Sarah Benton, and Christopher Gilliam.“Great,” Amy says as she finishes. “Anybody remember what their stories were? The only name that sounds familiar is Sadie. Pretty sure she's the granddaughter of that old woman who wrote about the obelisk in her diary.”“Let's see...” Dan starts, jumping when Jonah suddenly snatches the folders from him and begins flipping through them instead.“Yeah,” Jonah says. “That's Sadie. Rodney was some kid who overdosed. Says he's in the hospital but this is over a month old. Maybe he's been kicked out of the looney-bin by now.”“I hope so,” Dan says. He'd been to one once during a very dark time when he was fifteen to visit his mother who had trouble dealing with a sudden bought of depression that was seemingly nearly insurmountable to fight against. He had hated being there, had tried to come up with excuses as to why he couldn't go during the week she spent there and the one time his father had coerced him to come along he kept himself so stiff and tense, so careful not to touch or interact with another soul that, by the time they left an hour later after sitting with his mother at a wobbly card table, a television propped up in the corner while a nature show aired on a fuzzy screen, his whole body ached.“Sarah Benton is that kid. The one who drew that picture? Probably give her to Amy,” Jonah says and Amy scoff, crosses her arms over her chest.“I'm sorry, but when did I ever give out the impression that I was good with or even liked children? Yeah, no, if we have to deal with talking to a little kid, I'm taking you both with me. We're all going to suffer together. What about Kendra?”“Car accident,” Dan says, taking a folder from Jonah and skimming over the first page. “Head injury. Died during surgery, saw... saw it. Whatever. Sounds pretty boring, all things considered. Pretty small file. I'm already getting the feeling we won't get much from her.”“And then there's Christopher Gilliam,” Jonah says, looking through the last folder. “Says he's a teacher. Got stabbed during a break in and died for a couple minutes. Asked the doctor if it was normal to see a 'black crystal-like object' at some point during the whole dying and coming back but then didn't mention it again until he talked to Hal.”“How the hell does this guy find all these people?” Amy asks, taking another small drink. “I was looking through those earlier and some of them only told one other person for five minutes after they woke up and then there's other people who wrote entire public blogs about their experiences. He's like a goddamn bloodhound. He's worse than Jonah.”“Hey,” Jonah says, pointing a finger at her, “We never would have gotten as far as we did in any of that Nuvarin business if I didn't find all that shit for you guys. You're welcome for that, by the way,” he mutters.“If you're waiting for us to start bowing and 'we're not worthy-ing' you, you're going to be waiting there a long fucking time,” Amy says. Dan sits back against the cushions, brushes his fingers against a tear in the fabric that may have been from the broken window or just from general wear and he pulls at the strings and stuffing, listening to the other two—but mostly Jonah—talking about nothing in particular. It's almost entirely nonsense and, eventually, it starts to sound like white noise after awhile but it's the comforting sort of white noise, like a fan blowing in your room to help you fall asleep. His head is beginning to ache, a party favor left over from the hit he took in the cemetery coupled with two car accidents and a boot to the side of the face and he rubs the palm of a hand over his right eye, glancing at the time on his phone that he had pulled from his pocket. It's only five in the afternoon but he's already ready to go back to bed.“I'm going home,” Dan says suddenly and the other two stop talking to turn and stare at him. “What? You wanted to start calling these people now? It can wait. I'm done with all of... this.” He waves his hands at the mess in front of him on the table.“You said 'yes',” Amy says, mocking his hand movements, “To all of this, need I remind you.”“And I'm already starting to realize that I shouldn't have,” Dan says, rising to his feet and adjusting his clothes simply out of force of habit.“Oh no,” Amy says, getting to her feet as well if only to make it so Dan wasn't so looming over her quite so much, “You don't get to sign us up for this and then back the fuck out.”“I'm the one who signed us up? This isn't entirely my fault. You two were right there with me and I don't recall hearing either of you exactly protest. You were probably going to do it whether I walked away or not. Besides, I'm not backing out,” Dan assures her tiredly. “I just... That thing. I hate it.”“I've noticed,” Amy says. “You won't even use the damn word when you're talking about it.”“I'm going home,” Dan repeats. “Call me tomorrow. We'll go talk to one of those people or whatever. Oh and Jonah?” Dan says before he leaves and Jonah picks his head up, eyebrows slightly raised. “That wine is disgusting.”“Fuck you, Dan! I didn't ask you to drink it in the first place,” Dan hears Jonah shout after him as the door closes and he starts to walk down the hallway. — — — Dan keeps the names of the five people in the back of his head and makes sure to write them all down for himself once he's back in his apartment, a bottle of beer sitting next to his laptop on his desk, the window for his browser open to a new tab, fingers tapping against the keyboard but not hitting hard enough to make letters actually appear in the search bar. He takes a drink instead and closes the window, picking up his phone when it beeps at him, scrolling through the most recent alerts, expecting just another post from a nobody writer that may have briefly mentioned the obelisk or an update about the comic book author who was already trying to pen a graphic novel series loosely based on what happened at Nuvarin. Instead, he's pretty sure he feels his heart actually stop for a brief second, blood rushing in his ears.NUVARIN OBELISK VANISHED, the headline reads. No less than two minutes ago, social media had started to blow up, all from those who were still camped out amongst the wreckage of the Nuvarin property, people talking about the world turning into a void, like they had all gone blind, and—when the light came back—the obelisk had vanished. Photos were streaming in of the empty lot, of the flat and undisturbed ground as if there had been nothing there at all, not even a gaping wound of a hole left behind in the dirt as a reminder.Dan wants to keep reading, to take up every piece of information, but his phone is ringing, the browser interrupted by a screen letting him know that Jonah was trying to call him instead of simply texting, as if what was happening was too fucking important for him to make an attempt at typing out a few words. He answers because he knows Jonah won't stop until he picks up and he puts the phone to one ear, uses his other hand to start bringing up every news site he has bookmarked on his computer and they all say the same thing: the obelisk is gone, short bursts of paragraphs as updates come rolling in, photos stolen from the people blasting them out to the world on Twitter, different angles of the same blank surface.“Holy shit, dude. Holy fucking shit,” Jonah says as soon as he knows Dan is on the other end of the line. “Did you—”“Yeah,” Dan says, “Yeah, I know.” There's a pinging noise in his ear and it's a different sound than the one he set up for news alerts, knows it's most likely Amy trying to text him and he's suddenly really regretting not still having a second phone. “Hold on.” He switches the call to speaker and brings up his texts and, indeed, there she is, a message in all caps: WHAT THE FUCK. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS? There's a link next but he doesn't click on it because he already knows what it was and figures she probably knows that, too, that in her impatience and confusion she sent it anyway. Yes, Dan responds. I've seen it. I know.“Dan.” Jonah's trying to talk to him and Dan had already forgotten he was there.“Yeah, Jonah. What.”“What do you mean 'what'?! It's fucking gone, that's what!”“I know it's gone. I'm looking at the pictures right now.” He still is, practically unable to tear his eyes away from them, not sure what he's looking for but definitely not seeing it. His phone signals again and he glances down at it, sees Amy delivering a string of curses at him and then a sudden message that read: Where the fuck did it go? “I don't know,” Dan says, responding to her out loud, forgetting that she couldn't hear him.“What?” Jonah asks.“Sorry. I was talking to— Nevermind. Forget it.” He types back to her what he just said, getting slight mental whiplash when Jonah says:“Where the fuck did it go?”“Stop— Stop asking me. Why do you think I know where it went? I'm not the fucking obelisk-whisperer.”“Jesus,” Jonah says, “Relax. It was just a general fucking question. Rhetorical. Holy shit, though, right?”This is going to turn into a goddamn shit-show, Amy sends him. She wasn't wrong. It was one thing to have it constantly there, to have the government picking it apart but now that it's practically evaporated into thin air, there's going to be a split; people on one end are going to call for search parties, funding funneled into a department to look for it either here on Earth or somewhere in space, while others will want to let bygones be bygones and write it off as a mysterious part of human history. What Dan finds even more troubling is the fact that he's finding it difficult to determine which side of the metaphorical fence he wants to fall towards. He's spent the past three months wishing that the damn thing would be out of his life but now that it very suddenly was, he feels anxiety and disappointment crashing down onto him like a particularly violent wave.It was like the sun had been blotted out, they're saying. Like somebody flicked a light switch in everybody's heads and killed their eyes, just for a few seconds.“It probably just went back to wherever it came from,” Dan says, taking a long drink from his beer but his mouth was still horribly dry. He clutches the bottle tightly just to have something to hold onto and he startles, looks around when his apartment begins to shake and vibrate as if he's right in the middle of an earthquake. “What the—” A horrible whining like nasty feedback starts. It's as if it's coming from inside his head at first and he just manages to make out Jonah asking him what the hell that noise was before his phone stops working. He curls down into himself the best that he can, bending over in his chair, and he watches as his the screen on his computer glitches and then shuts down. Lights flicker and there are cracks forming in his windows and on his television and anything not too heavy or bolted to the walls is falling to the floor, plates and glasses shattering. He lets go of his beer bottle just in time, dark brown shards exploding out towards him and he feels a few pieces embed in his arm as he shields his face but knows it could have been a lot worse if he had still been holding it.Everything goes black but he's still awake, still aware. He blinks his eyes, holds them closed and then opens them wide but his vision is completely gone and he feels his chest tighten, his throat closing in barely contained panic. The tremors become more forceful, the whining rising in volume, all of it accumulating in a stomach churning crescendo but then, just as it all suddenly started, it stops and the dead quiet makes his ears ring. He blinks and he can see again, he rubs his eyes furiously with his knuckles, takes a moment to catch his breath. There are no car alarms going off outside, no sounds of sirens from police cars and ambulances as they roar down the streets, assessing damage and taking care of anybody who might need their help, no obvious indications that this had been felt by anybody but himself. Dan exhales slowly through his nose, stands and carefully lifts his head to begin dealing with everything that had broken, to take care of the glass in his arm, but what's behind him sends him reeling:His apartment is perfectly clean as if nothing at all had happened and there, directly in the center of the room, protruding from the polished wooden floor, was an obelisk, just over eight feet tall and shining black like an obsidian with all the ridges and points of a crystal. — — — Dan isn't entirely sure how long he had been standing there, frozen and staring, but he snaps out of it when he hears someone knocking on his door with the heavy pounding of a giant and he shuffles over, keeps his steps small and cautious as if he might get snapped in half if he makes an unexpected movement. He opens the door just a crack with unsettled hands to see both Jonah and Amy standing in the hall and they take a moment to simultaneously lean sideways to try and peer inside his apartment but, when they realize that Dan won't let them look, they focus back on him.“What the fuck happened?” Jonah asks. “I was talking to you and... and there was this noise and then you hung up and—”“I didn't hang up,” Dan says weakly, “My phone broke.” Or did it? He hadn't bothered to check. The way the place looks, it was entirely possible the line was simply disconnected.“You look like somebody tried to murder you,” Amy says.“I'm fine,” Dan says but he doesn't put as much effort as he should have into making it a believable lie. “Just a minor earthquake.” He should have shifted the blame, told her that Jonah was lying, that he hadn't heard anything but it was too late for that now. He tries to close the door but a hand slaps against it, pushing it back into him and, at first, he thinks it was Jonah but when he looks, he finds Amy with her arm outstretched. “Jesus,” he says, attempts to push once more but Amy easily resists it.“This is just sad,” she remarks. “And no, it wasn't. So how about you tell us what the hell happened because I didn't let Jonah drag me down here just to get a door slammed in my face.” She says it like Jonah had showed up on her doorstep and physically carried her to Dan's apartment but he knows that isn't true and the thought that either of them were willing to drop everything and come running just because Jonah heard something weird that might have just been a phone malfunction on either of their ends was making him uneasy. Judging by the expressions on their faces, they were starting to feel similarly and Amy clears her throat. Jonah sniffs the air and scowls so Amy does the same and Dan can't help but follow and he's smacked with the stench of rotting meat, just faint enough that it was easy to ignore if you didn't focus too hard on it. “Open the goddamn door, Dan Egan,” Amy says and he does, steps aside as the pair of them march in and abruptly stop after only a few steps. Dan closes the door and goes to stand between them, places himself just behind their shoulders.“Holy titty-fucking shit Christ,” Jonah says. He puts a hand over his eyes, pauses, and then pulls his fingers away but it's still there, and then he's on his knees, inspecting the splintered floor as if he's trying to see into the apartment below. “Is it—”“Nobody's said anything, so, you know... I guess not. Unless they're all— Well. I haven't heard anything.” Unless they're all dead, is what Dan was going to say but he's sure that if the obelisk had indeed penetrated the other residences below, the building would have been evacuated or he would have heard sirens or, at least, gotten more visitors than just his colleagues.“Is it...” Amy swallows, shifts slightly and takes a step backwards. “Is it the same one?”“How the hell should I know,” Dan says just as Jonah, rising to his full height, replies with: “Probably. It has to be. I mean, the one at Nuvarin disappears and then... this? No, no. There are no such fucking things as coincidences.” He reaches out as if he's going touch it but then pulls away, changing his mind.“So assuming Jonah's right,” Amy says, “The next question would have to be...” She spins around, stares directly at Dan, her brow furrowed, mouth turned completely down. “Why the hell is that thing in your apartment?”“Jesus, Amy!” Dan exclaims, moves away from her, putting a hand between them as if he's anticipating her to start trying to beat him up. “It's not like I conjured the damn thing here!”“Maybe you did,” Jonah says and Amy swings back towards him, finger pointing menacingly.“You shut up. And you...” she says, twisting back to face Dan but whatever threat she was going to lob at him dissolves in her mouth and she sighs heavily instead. “This is fucked up,” she says. “This is beyond fucked up, actually.”“No kidding,” Dan says and the three of them lapse into silence, all eyes glancing and then quickly averting from the obelisk, as if they were all afraid to stare at it for too long.“You're bleeding,” Jonah says finally and Dan lifts his arm, searches until he finds on the outside of his forearm, just under his wrist, where two jagged pieces of brown glass were still poking out from his skin, sticky blood sliding and dripping gently onto the floor.“Ah, shit,” he says, walks over to the sink and flicks on the light that was screwed into the cabinet above it. Amy follows him, takes off her jacket, draping it onto the center island and grabs a hand around his elbow, twisting his arm so she could look at it. He glances over to the desk, sees that his beer bottle was still broken and wonders if, unlike the rest of his apartment, the arrival of the obelisk destroyed it anyway or if he himself had somehow shattered it with his bare hands.“It doesn't look too bad,” she says. “Go get me a towel or something,” Amy tells Jonah and he wanders off in search of the bathroom without hesitation. Dan wants to complain, to say he could get it himself because the thought of Jonah rummaging through his things tastes sour—especially since he knows the guy wouldn't miss an opportunity to go through his medicine cabinet—but before he could even open his mouth, Jonah had come back with a towel and a handful of bandaids he must have dumped from the box Dan kept in the drawer underneath his bathroom sink. “Here,” Amy says, wrapping the towel around Dan's arm and he looks away from Jonah, startled to see the pieces of glass already in the bottom of the metal sink. “I took them out while you were busy whining to yourself in your head,” she tells him. “So now what?” She asks, letting Dan go and he replaces her hand with his free one to hold the towel to himself for another moment before unfurling it to inspect the injuries. “I mean, you're obviously not staying here.”“No,” Dan says, smacking at Jonah's hands as he tries to put the bandaids on him and he takes the one clutched in his fingers away, struggles before finally realizing he wasn't going to be able to get it right on his own and then grudgingly gives it back to Jonah. “I'm not just going to… to leave this thing alone in my apartment.”“I'm sorry,” Amy laughs, “You're telling me Mister 'I Couldn't Even Say the Word Obelisk' wants to stay here with it?”“I'm saying—” Dan starts, looking down when Jonah finishes to see that he had put far more bandages on him than was entirely necessary and he glares at him but the look just bounces off of Jonah, who merely shrugs with one shoulder. “I'm saying that… Look, I don't know what I'm saying. I don't want to leave it here but I also don't exactly want to stick around either.”“Well, seeing as how it's impossible as of right now to exist in two places at once,” Amy says, “You kind of have to make a decision here, although I'll just say I'm making my vote loudly known that you should vacate the premises.”“And go where, exactly?” Dan asks, looks pointedly at Amy, making it very clear to Jonah that staying over at his place wouldn't be an option and he frowns when Amy shakes her head. “You're un-fucking-believable. I'm not asking to move in with you.”“You might as well be,” Amy says. “How long was it hidden under Nuvarin? Years. It was there for years. If I wanted to live with something for an unbearable number of years, I would have bought a parrot.”“I'll stay,” Jonah says.“Absolutely not,” Dan responds. “You're not going to be alone in my goddamn apartment.”“I'm not a fucking wild dog, Dan. I'm not going to piss all over your furniture or eat your shoes as soon as you leave. I didn't say I'd be here by myself,” Jonah says and it takes Dan a moment to realize that he's not referring to the obelisk and that he means that both he and Dan would be here together. He's not entirely sure he likes that idea much better, but it's certainly a nicer option than having to start cold-calling hotels in the area until he could find a place that would take him without reservations and wouldn't cost him an arm and leg to use a bed just for a couple of nights. Also, like he said: he's not exactly sure how comfortable he feels in letting the thing have the place all to itself. Judging by how it quietly sat in the basement of Nuvarin, he doubted it would cause much of a problem (other than the problem it's mere presence incurred), but he still can't push away the uncomfortable feeling of being somewhere else and knowing that it's sitting there, invading his personal space. Amy was right: as much as Dan wished it were possible for him to be here and also be running far, far away, there was no way for him to do both together. Stay or go. Eventually he'd have to make a goddamn choice.“Let me pack a bag,” he says, making sure to direct the comment to Jonah. “You're sleeping on the couch. I'm taking your bed.” — — — He makes sure to close the curtains tightly, shut off every single light, and he locks the door behind them, triple-checking it and then pressing his head against it, listening, but he doesn't hear anything. Dan considers opening the door once again, peeking inside just in case, but he knows he wouldn't be that lucky. He hates this more than he thought it was possible to hate something, hates that he had been trying so hard to not care, to show to the world that Dan Egan didn't give one fuck about that obelisk anymore and then the damn thing had to go and show up in his apartment like it was taunting him.You want to forget about me? Ignore me? It had said. Fine. Try to ignore me now, asshole. Why him? Why not Jonah or Amy? They had been with him the entire time, they had been doing their best to push it away from their minds. He refused to believe it was random, that the obelisk just bounced around every few years and just happened to wind up in his apartment this time but the thought that it had specifically targeted him meant that either it or whatever force was moving it had free-will and enough of a conscious mind to be able to find him and know who he was. That wasn't particularly comforting either.Once he gets to Jonah's he figures he'll claim his bedroom just like he had said he would and call it a night but he's wide awake, mind racing, and he flops down onto the couch instead and Jonah stands just off to the side, not talking. Dan could feel, though, that he wanted to say something.“What do you want?” Dan asks but Jonah continues to not say anything, shifts from one foot to the other and then sits down next to Dan, pressing his palms into the edge of the cushion. “I'm fine,” he says, guesses that that's what Jonah was there for but he still won’t actually speak, which is more than slightly abnormal, since often times the guy did nothing but ramble on about absolutely nothing worthwhile. “Is this your weird way of trying to get me to talk? Because it's not working.” It was, sort of, which was making Dan intensely frustrated.“So... What happened—”“I don't want to talk about what happened, Jonah,” Dan says, rubbing a hand over his face. “Not right now. Can you just drop it?”“I was just—”“Jonah.”“Fine.” Jonah concedes, reaches into a box near his foot and takes out the television remote, clicking the power button. He flips around until he winds up on a food channel where four chefs were just beginning to battle it out for an obscene amount of money. “Who do you think we should talk to first tomorrow?” He asks after about twenty minutes and Dan slowly turns to stare at Jonah, blinking a few times.“Seriously?”“You don't want to talk about, you know, the giant obelisk currently jammed in the floor of your apartment. So... other stuff. There's not much we can do about it anyway. We might as well just do what we said were we going to do. Keep goddamn calm and carry the fuck on. Failure is not an option. Resistance is futile.”“Did you just quote Star Trek at me?”“It's true.”“You're such a nerd,” Dan says.“Yeah, well, you knew where it was from so welcome to the club,” Jonah replies. “You, uh, want one of those sodas?”“No,” Dan says. “I want you to shut up for awhile and just watch TV.” Jonah does, surprisingly, do as Dan tells him, although his apparent version of ‘shutting up’ meant not talking to Dan directly but allowing himself to shout at the chefs that definitely couldn't hear him, complaining about mistakes he called “obvious and just really fucking stupid” and commanding them to do this or that with an ingredient like he even knew what half of them were. — — — Dan doesn't get much sleep and he tries to blame it on the unfamiliar surroundings or the uncomfortable mattress or the chainsaw-like snoring from Jonah in the other room but he knows it's because his mind won't stop racing, that he can't stop seeing that obelisk in his living room every time he closes his eyes. He stares up at the ceiling and wishes that he had remembered to pack at least one of the four bottles of different sleep aids that he had in his medicine cabinet. He's pretty sure he forgot his toothbrush, too.He had wanted to argue with Jonah, to say that there was no way they could possibly even consider going through with talking to these people about their near death experiences and their visions of an obelisk, especially since there was one right in his fucking apartment that seemed like it required slightly more attention but he knew that, as painful as it was to acknowledge, Jonah had a point. There really wasn't much that could be done outside of calling some sort of authority and letting them know but the last thing he wanted was his place to become a mecca for the government, scientists, and devotees alike. He'd have to find somewhere new to live and, it was one thing to have the spotlight shining directly on him but it was entirely something else to be scrutinized by it. People would want to talk to him, to interview him and it wouldn't be because of the article he helped to write, because of the drama he went through the unearth it but because a pillar of stone had somehow found him and decided that, sure, right where he lived seemed like a nice enough place to hang out for awhile.Worst case, he'd be hauled away by men in dark suits to be questioned and probed and interrogated as if he was somehow involved far deeper in this than he actually was. He'd never see the light again and spend the rest of his days locked away somewhere because nobody believed that he didn't know what was going on. He takes in a few breaths, pushes away the panic that's starting to ravel around his bones like fishing wire. It's a stupid thought brought on by exhaustion and too many of Jonah's stupid movies.It's three in the morning and he closes his eyes, finally forcing himself to fall asleep. — — — “I'm just saying,” Amy says, taking a sip from her mug and picking up a greasy piece of bacon from her plate, biting down on one end of it and then using it to point at Jonah, “They're practically the same age.”“I'm twenty-nine!”“Twenty-nine, nineteen. Same difference,” Amy says with a shrug, finishing her bacon and wiping her fingers off on her napkin. The three of them had agreed to meet at the same diner that Jonah had found Dan at yesterday and were currently in the middle of eating breakfast and sorting out who each of them were going to talk to depending on, of course, if they agreed to it at all. They had decided to deploy Jonah's tactic after all of simply showing up at their front doors and hoping that they were home instead of being polite about it and calling ahead of time, mostly because Dan didn't want to give himself a single second to think about what had happened the night before and badgering people to recount traumatic experiences was enough to keep him occupied for a few hours. Amy had agreed to go along with it because, as she said: “I've never particularly made a habit out of it before. Why start now.”“You can butter him up,” Dan says. “Talk about video games or whatever.”“Amy's a solid eight, at least. Make her go,” Jonah says.“First of all, gross. Second of all: gross. And absolutely not. If there's anything I hate more than kids it's fucking teenagers. He's all yours, Ryan. I'll go talk to Kendra. She seems relatively normal enough,” Amy says, glancing at the paper with her photo and basic information. They had brought the folders with them and they were all mostly open, spread along the table, shoved in wherever they would fit between their plates and mugs.“I guess I'll go find Christopher then,” Dan says, finding his files and spinning it around on the sticky table surface, skimming over what was typed up on the first couple pages.“Sadie's kind of low level priority,” Amy says, gesturing to where she thought her folder was with a new piece of bacon, “Since it's all second-hand information. We've just got to convince her to let us read her grandmother's diary. And then Sarah... like I said, we're all going. I hate kids. Dan hates kids,” she says, speaking for him but Dan doesn't contend with her because she knows it's true, “Jonah practically is one but I don't trust you and your rapist-looking face to get anything beneficial from a six-year-old girl.”“Hey, this 'rapist face' lands eights. Consensually, thank you very fucking much.”“And suddenly, you saying I was a 'solid eight' has gotten just hell of a lot more gross which I didn’t think was possible,” Amy says, picking up her mug and taking another drink as if she was trying to wash a bad taste out of her mouth. “Thank you for completely destroying my appetite.” There's a lull in their conversation, the sounds of other people talking, utensils hitting heavy plates, sizzling and slamming of food and equipment from the kitchen filling the small space as they ate and Dan's cutting a triangle from his last pancake when Amy asks Jonah: “You really think that obelisk in Dan's apartment is the same one from Nuvarin?”“We could always pull up some photos and compare them but I sure don't see how it couldn't be,” Jonah says. “Like I said: coincidences are garbage. No such goddamn animal.”“Can you— Stop. Just stop. I'm trying not to think about it and this,” Dan says, gesturing back and forth between them, Amy across from him and Jonah to his left, “Isn't helping.”“It's not going anywhere any time soon. You can't bury your head in the sand on this forever,” Amy says.“I can try,” Dan replies, spearing a piece of his pancake with his fork and shoving it into his mouth. — — — Christopher Gilliam's house is a small box in a neat little suburb down a dead end street, the kind of place where most of the houses look similar and are painted varying dull shades of grey or pale yellow and he parks right in front of the path leading from the sidewalk up to the short flight of steps where the front door was and he sighs, turning off the engine. A vehicle is sitting in the driveway, the nose pushed right up against the wide door to the garage that was attached to the side of the house as if it were trying to hold something inside and keep it from escaping. There's a sign right in front of his own car that warns him, says that parking where he was was prohibited but he's not entirely sure how long he'll be there and, besides, nobody ever actually calls the police because some asshole decided to stop on the wrong side of the road for a half hour or so unless, of course, there's an old woman in one of those houses. Old women, in Dan's experience, are the nosiest pieces of work he's ever been around in his life. More than half of his sources—especially on the crime-related stories when he was just starting out—were old women who spent their afternoons sitting at their front windows, peeping through their lace curtains. He's yet to meet a single white-haired and wrinkled woman who knew how to mind her own damn business and who had an almost personal rapport with the 911 operators because they called them at least twice a day for even the most minor infraction they witnessed.Checking to see that he had everything, he brings up a photo of Christopher that he had nabbed from his Facebook profile even though he's got the folder with his information in his bag, just to make sure that he's got the right guy and then he goes over quickly and quietly in his head how he's going to start, makes sure to mention Hal's name immediately so he doesn't appear like some creep who managed to sniff him out and demand he tell him his story. He rings the bell twice, a hand in his pocket as a foot taps on the doorstep.“You’re not Christopher Gilliam,” Dan says when a short, stocky man with pitch black hair cut incredibly short finally answers and Dan glances down at the photo of Christopher he still has on his phone, checks back and forth and, yeah, most certainly not the guy he was looking for, even though it was definitely the right address.“No,” the man says, “I’m not. Can I help you?”“Unless you know where he is, then probably not,” Dan says.“Are you family? A friend?” The man asks and Dan hesitates, thinks about lying and confirming that he was, see where that took him but there’s an oddly authoritative feel to this man standing in front of him and he’s not sure if being untruthful will be a good plan, let alone a plan that would work.“Uh… no. Name’s Dan Egan. I’m a journalist. I—”“Son of a bitch,” the man says, “How the hell did you find out about this? I swear to God if Furlong is tapping my phone again—”“Find out about what?” Dan couldn’t help it even if he tried.“You’re not here about what happened to Mister Gilliam?” The man stares at him, eyes narrowing as if he’s just daring him to slip up.“I have a feeling,” Dan says eventually, “That you wouldn’t actually believe me if I told you why I was really here.”“Does it have something to do with this?” The man asks, opens the door wider and steps aside just enough that Dan could peer inside the house and, directly across from where he stood, was a wall lined entirely with disjointedly sketched out pictures of an obelisk. Some of them were drawn on paper the size of a small table with what appeared to be charcoal while others that he could just barely see from where he was seemed to have been absent-mindedly doodled on napkins and envelopes.“Yeah,” Dan says, “It might possibly have something to do with that.” He tries to lean in further, to get a better look, but the man stretches out an arm across the doorway and walks in front of his line of sight, blocking his view. “What happened to Christopher exactly? I'm starting to get the feeling that you're not related to him either.”“You got me there,” the man says, holds out a hand which Dan ignores. “Detective Cooke.”“Ah,” Dan says, stands on his toes but the detective follows his movements. “Do you have a first name, Detective Cooke?”“Reggie. But you're not going to call me that.”“Sure, Detective. Look, uh, in any other circumstance I'd be clamoring for every detail about what happened so I could make a story out of it but that's not really what I do. I haven't actually cared about stuff like that for years. I guess my name didn't sound familiar...?”“Oh,” Reggie says, “It did. It's why I showed you the wall. But I'm relatively sure what happened doesn't have anything to do with your... your thing.”“Why not?” Dan asks and Reggie hesitates, looks like he's considering something and he glances down the street, just over Dan's shoulder and Dan looks, too, but he doesn't see anything particularly interesting.“Does your thing shoot people?”“Not that I know of,” Dan says, trying his best to hide the twisting feeling that suddenly lurched in his stomach. It could have been another break-in but nobody is that unlucky. He either screwed over the wrong person or, god forbid, it has something to do with the obelisk.“Then it's probably not involved. What were you going to talk to him about exactly?”“It's kind of a long story.”“Okay,” Reggie says, closing the door and stepping down to stand face-to-face with Dan. “Go on then.”“Right.” Dan contemplates finding a way out of it, telling him that if he won't explain what happened to Christopher other than mentioning that he was shot, then he shouldn't have to open up wide for him, that it's none of his business, but there's no point, really, so he clears his throat and keeps it as vague as possible instead, tells him about how he was working on some sort of project and someone had asked for his and his colleagues' help. They were talking to people and Christopher Gilliam was on his list. It doesn't take as long to go through as he thought and Reggie remains still the entire time, arms at his sides as he watches Dan talk.“Well, it's a good thing you've got other people to speak to because Mister Gilliam isn't going to be doing much of that anymore.”“Who shot him?”“Somebody,” Reggie says and leaves it at that, which either meant that he knew and wasn't prepared to share that with Dan or, more likely, he had no idea and didn't want Dan to figure that out. Dan could ask if he'd be allowed just to step inside for a few minutes, to look around and maybe at least inspect that wall and take a photo or two because he had a feeling that both Amy and Jonah were going to come back with pages of useful information and all he'll have is a two second glimpse at some amateur artwork and a dead body. He could do that or, at least, try to do that but, from their brief conversation, Dan has the feeling that no matter how convincing he sounded, it wasn't going to go his way. So, Plan B: he'll do something else for an hour or two and then come back once the detective had left, snoop around, do the kind of thing he hadn't done since he was twenty and willing to openly break some rules to get what he needed. He'd started down that path again during their time looking into Nuvarin and he'd realized how much he secretly missed it. You aren't provided many opportunities to peek through windows or slide in through conveniently unlocked doors to pick through papers and drawers when dealing with politicians.“Alright. Well, I guess I'll be going then,” he says, rummages around in his bag and finds a few business cards from when he was still at the Leviathan stuffed tightly into an inside pocket and he takes one out but hesitates in handing it over. “Do you have a pen?” He asks, makes the gesture of writing in the air and Reggie sighs impatiently but hands one over, pulled from a pocket in his jacket. “Great.” He furiously scratches out the name of the magazine and the number for it, circles his own phone number twice in a wide loop, gives both it and the pen back to Reggie, who inspects the card for a moment, frowning, and then looks back to Dan. “I don't work there anymore. Probably should get some new ones made.” It was something he had thought about—spent a day or two poking around on websites picking out designs—but he could never decide on what to call himself, hated the title 'freelance journalist' but refused to say that he was a writer for Ryantology.com (which he wasn't, not really, but it was the last place he had truly published anything). “I'll be honest: if it turns out he fucked up somehow and got what was coming to him or whatever, then I don't really need to know about it. But if anything else comes up about... that thing or this is related somehow...” he says, points towards the closed door, “I'd appreciate it.”“Sure,” Reggie says, stuffing the card into the same pocket the pen had come from without a second look, says the word in a way that makes it seem like he's actually considering it but they both know that he'd never call him again.Dan leaves shortly after—mostly because he doesn't have much else to say—and he drives around the corner, parks about a block away in a convenience store lot. He takes out his phone and texts Amy, tells her that Christopher wasn't home, (which was more or less the truth) and that he was going to try again later and, hey, since he has the time, maybe he could just swing by Sadie de la Cruz' house and see if he could finagle the diary from her on his own. She replies with a yeah, sure, a distracted response that meant she was busy, that she had managed to get a hold of Kendra and was somewhere in the process of getting her to start verbalizing her experience once more to a complete stranger. He thinks about telling Jonah as well but he decides it isn't worth the effort and instead searches through his things, realizing that he doesn't have her address anywhere. He asks Amy and it takes a minute or two for her to write back and he can practically feel her exasperation through the text but she gives him what he wants, and he smiles when she finishes it with three simple words: stop texting me. — — — It doesn't take quite as long as he was expecting to find Sadie’s house and he rolls slowly down the narrow street, turns to park in her driveway behind an old sedan, feet scuffing as he walks up to her front door. As he waits for someone to answer after he knocks, he looks around the rest of the neighborhood and sees an Oldsmobile stretched along the driveway of another house across the street. He feels his skin crawl and has to make himself look away. He adjusts the collar of his shirt, plastering on a false smile when the door opens, Sadie standing barefoot on a pale green carpet with her dark hair pulled back, looking him up and down as if she was attempting to figure out who he was without having to ask, which she eventually does anyway.When he tells her who he is and why he's there, she pauses before laughing, shaking her head, saying that she knew Hal wasn't a stupid guy and she was just biding her time before somebody came around to talk to her about it again. She invites him inside, has him wait awkwardly in the small space between the door and the living room, listens to her as she searches through her things, talking under her breath, encouraging herself to remember where she put the diary. The ceilings are low and painted a dark red and there are drop cloths covering the furniture in the living room, buckets and tools for stripping wallpaper scattered on the floor, the beginnings of her work already showing directly across from him, floral ribbons hanging loosely from the pale walls.“Doing some redecorating?” Dan asks when she comes back to him, an old notebook grasped tightly in one hand, and she brushes a piece of stray hair over her ear and glances towards the mess in the other room.“This was my grandma's. She wanted me to keep it but I— I can't live here. I'm trying to sell but the realtor wants me to practically remodel the place before she'd even consider putting it on the market. It's a damn pain and I only have time for it on the weekends,” she explains to him easily, sighs and lifts her shoulders and then holds the diary out towards him with both hands. “Here you go.” Dan takes it, assumes that she won't let him leave with it and asks where he could sit for a few minutes to read through and take notes. He's taken slightly aback when she laughs once more. “Can you read Spanish?”“Uh... No,” Dan admits self-consciously. He'd taken the required courses for it during high school and had attempted to go through with it during college, figuring that he'd need to know at least one other language if he wanted to be truly successful as a journalist but it never stuck and he gave up after a couple of years worth of struggling to put together complete sentences. He knew a few words, could figure out context clues from others, but he was barely capable of holding his own in a conversation, let alone be able to read through huge blocks of text in what might be barely legible handwriting. Amy would probably know more than he did but, unfortunately for him, Amy wasn't there and he highly doubted she would drop everything just to come over. “You could translate for me,” he says, offers the diary back to her but she smiles and pushes his hands back towards him.“Sorry but no thanks. I'm tired of reading that thing. Besides, like I said, I don't have the time. Unless you're willing to help me get that wall finished?” She asks, eyebrow raised as she gestures over her shoulder with her thumb in the direction of the living room and Dan glances at it and then back to her. “I didn't think so.” It doesn't sound accusatory and she drops one arm to her side, grips at it with her hand, her other arm resting over her stomach. “Just take it.”“Are you sure?”“I'm not telling you to keep it,” she clarifies. “You can borrow it. Give it back to me some time next week. I marked the place where she starts to write about that tower,” she says, points to the bright pink sticky note that was poking out over a small chunk of the last few pages.“What do you think about it?” Dan hears himself ask and he's not sure where it came from, doesn't know why he would care about what some stranger thought about any of this and she looks just as surprised at receiving the question as he feels giving it.“I think it's entirely possible that she had a weird experience when she died the first time. This... thing, though? At first I thought it was just her calling shadows a monster but after what they found under that company? Maybe she wasn't just looking for meaning in a mound of dirt. If you get what I mean.”“Like finding Mary in on your wall when it’s just a weirdly shaped water stain,” Dan says without thinking and he waits for the dissatisfaction to come rolling his way but she just merely laughs again.“Right,” she says, “Like finding Mary in a water stain. Look, I really have to—”“Wallpaper. Got it,” Dan says, holds up the diary and then slips it into his bag. “I'll get this back to you next week.” She shakes his hand after he says it and then he leaves, taking a moment to check inside the diary once he's seated in his car. He goes to where the first page was marked and starts flipping through, stopping when he finds a section where the entire page is taken up by a single, shakily line-drawn obelisk with a written word underneath that was underlined several times with a heavy hand:
El demonio.
He doesn't have to know the language to understand what it means. — — — Dan decides to leave his car in the same convenience store lot that he had been in before and walk back to Christopher's house, although he's almost there when he realizes that it might have just been less unusual for anybody who might have been watching if he just pulled up into the driveway like a normal human being but it's too late to double back, which in of itself would have appeared equally dubious in the long run. The detective's car is, thankfully, gone and Dan checks around as he lingers on the sidewalk but he's the only one outside for the time being and he goes to the front door first, just in case, but it's locked up tight. There's a window right next to the door that Dan probably could have fit through, but it's too high up from the ground and he doesn't trust himself to be able to balance on the railing and figure out how to get himself through without fracturing a bone.The garage may be unlocked but opening the large door would be far too noisy, so he walks around the other side of the house instead, keeping his gait as quiet as possible as he moves over the trimmed grass and he eyes a window he'd be able to hoist himself up through but checks the backyard first, rattles the handle on the back door but that won't work either and the single window that looked into an open pantry was far too small to be able to squeeze through.“Side window it is then,” he says to himself. Verifying once more that he wasn't being watched, he glimpses at the house next door but there are no faces gazing back out at him so he stretches his arms, presses his palms flat against the glass and pushes up, using the friction and his shoulders to get the window to open. It doesn't move and at first he thinks that it, too, was sealed shut but it turns out to only have been stuck and, after much more grunting and sweating than he had been prepared for, it slides open just wide enough that he has enough room to squeeze through. Gripping the window sill, he removes his bag and tosses it in first, lifts himself up next, legs scrambling on the siding, paint chips falling with each kick of his heels but he eventually manages to go tumbling headfirst into the house, landing in a heap on the floor and standing quickly, brushing off his clothes as if that was exactly what he meant to do.Closing the window behind him, he uses a moment to catch his breath and take in his surroundings. It's a mis-matched sort of mess, none of the furniture fitting together as if the owner had just wandered aimlessly through a store and pointed blindly at whatever was the cheapest, even if that happened to be an oversized easy chair or a couch with a stiff back and scratchy-looking fabric. There are a few photos hanging on the walls of Christopher with various other people, an old wedding picture in the middle of it all with a couple that were probably his parents but, other than the mass accumulation of drawings papering one of the walls, nothing appeared startlingly out the ordinary.He takes out his phone and turns on the camera, starts to snap photos of every drawing he could fit neatly in the frame and he idly considers taking a few down to bring with him but decides against it because the whole point of him sneaking around is to make it so nobody even knew he was there in the first place. When he finishes, he drifts towards what turns out to be a stack of collected mail and he looks through the envelopes but doesn't find anything particularly compelling so he turns, shuffles towards the back of the house and through the short hallway.A tiny bathroom with plastic shower curtains that needed to be cleaned, a dimly lit bedroom with an old mattress on a surprisingly lavish frame, an office packed with bookcases and a large desk, a laptop still propped open on the surface. There's no visible blood on any of the floors, no signs of violence, so either he hadn't been killed recently and someone had already gone through and cleaned up the mess or he hadn't died in the house.He settles into the last room, checks the titles of what turn out to be mostly nonfiction with a few mystery novels stuffed in wherever they would fit, as if he had been trying to hide them from somebody. Going through the drawers, he doesn't find anything there either and finally puts his full attention onto the computer. It's still on and he wakes it up with a tap to the spacebar, crosses his fingers that he'd have free reign but is instead greeted by a login screen and he deflates. There's no way he'd be able to decipher a password and he's not going to steal it if he couldn't even bring himself to take one or two of the pinned up drawings in the other room. He tries the basics anyway, just for shits and giggles, types in the word 'password' and then the numbers '1234', goes through his bag to search for the folder with the information that he had brought and attempts different variations of Christopher’s birthday until the computer runs out of patience and locks him out of venturing any further.“Goddammit,” he says, sitting back in the chair. “This was a colossal waste of time.” Standing up, he walks back out towards where the kitchen and living room were, mind occupied with going over what he would do next, thinks about getting a hold of the other two because they must be done by now and maybe they could have lunch and go over what they had all found out before deciding if they were going to tackle trying to talk to the little girl and her parents or if they wanted to wait until tomorrow and he nearly jumps clean out of his skin, skidding to a halt when he hears somebody cough.Reggie is standing just a few feet away from the front door, arms crossed over his chest, his expression dancing between angry and entertained and Dan supposed which way it ultimately landed all depended on how Dan chose to handle the current situation.“What're you doing?” Reggie asks with an almost sing-song sort of tone and Dan wants to say 'what the hell does it look like?' but instead he says:“Leaving.”“You want to use the front door this time?”“Sure,” Dan says, walks towards it but Reggie doesn't move out of his way.“Find what you were looking for?”“I'm not sure what I was looking for,” Dan confesses, “So no, not really.” There was still that computer but Dan wouldn't even know how to begin to try and break into it and wasn't sure he knew somebody who could. “Where the hell did you come from?” Dan asks and Reggie gives him a look.“I figured you'd probably come back later,” he says. “You gave up way too easily so I stuck around for awhile. Watched you climb through the window and everything.”“Why'd you wait for me to go through the whole house?”“Because I thought scaring you would be funny,” Reggie says and Dan frowns, changes the subject.“When did the guy die?”“Five days ago.”“His stuff is still here. All of it.”“I know,” Reggie says, once again refusing to elaborate.“Do you know the password for his computer?” Dan blurts out and who the hell was he turning into? Jonah? It's a terrible thought but he can't take the question back and Reggie starts to laugh, a real, hearty sort of one and he finally drops his arms from his chest, which Dan takes as his answer. “It was worth a shot.” He pulls out a small smile as if it had all been some sort of joke and shifts nervously from one foot to the other.“You take anything?” Reggie asks suddenly.“Nothing,” Dan says, holds out his bag and Reggie glances down, hesitates, but seems to figure that since he offered, it wouldn't be a problem to go through it. He flicks through the papers and folders but doesn't inspect them particularly closely and he takes out the diary, examines the cover but leaves it closed, holds it up so Dan could see it, an inquiring quirk in his eyebrows. “That's mine,” he says abruptly. “I mean, not mine exactly. I'm borrowing it.”“You're borrowing someone's diary?”“She's dead,” he says, “I don't think she'll mind.” It seems that confession was enough for Reggie who decides to open the notebook, pulling the pages apart to the section that had been marked off and he stares at the words as if he knew what they said but turns the other pages without reading them over, stopping when he finds the one with the picture. He looks from it to the mess of drawings on the wall and then back at the single image once more, finally lifting his head to look at Dan. He flips the diary shut and slips it back into Dan's bag without a single word, reaching into his own back pocket to take out his wallet, sliding a small white card from behind a few faded bills.“Here,” he says, offering it out to Dan, who cautiously accepts it between two fingers. It has the name and symbol of the police department stamped on the top, Reggie’s own full name and title printed underneath in clear block letters, his number just below that.“Why are you giving me this?” Dan asks because if Christopher's death has nothing to do with the obelisk, there really isn't any reason for them to ever even cross paths for a third time.“Just hold on to it,” Reggie says, turning to twist the doorknob and yank the front door wide open. “Now get the hell out of this house.” Dan tucks the card securely under the cover of the woman's diary and then easily complies. As he walks down the sidewalk, very aware that Reggie is standing on the doorstep watching him, his phone pings at him and he pulls it out to see a message from Jonah that says: Are u done yet? I'm fucking starving. — — — Dan is the last one to arrive and he walks into the diner, nudging the door open with an open palm and sees Jonah sitting at the same booth they had been in that morning, the hair flowing down the back of Amy's head shining in the florescent light. Jonah immediately sidles over closer to the window, shoulder brushing the metal blinds as if he already expects Dan to sit beside him and Dan thinks about settling down next to Amy just fuck with him but she's made it pretty clear the only way she would move over is if Dan was willing to push her (which he was not) so he takes his place at Jonah's side, putting his bag between them like a wall.A waitress stops by and he has her bring him a soda which she does, the glass already sweating, filled with more ice than actual liquid.“Please tell me,” Dan says while poking at his drink with his straw, “You two had better luck than I did.”“She had six cats,” Amy announces instead, either choosing to ignore what Dan said or not even hearing him, speaking as if she had been holding it in until all three of them were together instead of having to repeat herself. “Six goddamn cats. She introduced me to every single one before she'd even talk to me.” She brushes hands at her dress and only then does Dan notice that she has patches that are absolutely coated with loose fur. “Didn't say much of anything that we hadn't read in her damn file but, um,” she hesitates, pulls out Kendra's folder where Amy had written something down on the back of one of the pages and Dan wonders if Hal is going to be annoyed at her because of that in the future. “I tried to get her to be more specific about the obelisk and she said she remembered seeing construction equipment.” She halts again, looks from Dan to Jonah, waiting for a reaction.“She saw the Nuvarin basement?” Jonah finally asks and Amy lifts her arms, palms facing up and flat in the air in the mimic of a shrug and Jonah glances at Dan as if he expects him to say something but Dan just bites down on his straw and sucks at his soda, filling his mouth so he doesn't have to speak. So not only were people seeing the obelisk when they died but now they were seeing it's exact location? (Or, well, Dan thinks as his stomach drops, it's once upon a time location.)“Hold up,” Amy says, stuffing the papers back into her bag, eyes squinting at Dan, “What did you mean you hoped we had better luck than you? What happened?”“Christopher's not home because he's dead,” Dan says abruptly. Jonah stares at him, mouth agape and Amy rubs a hand over her left eye, pulling her hand back across the side of her head, stretching the skin slightly.“What do you mean ‘he's dead’?” She asks it almost with a nervous edge, voice lowering as if she's waiting for Dan to admit that he walked into the guy's house and found the body right there on the living room floor.“Recently,” Dan says. “Somebody shot him. Apparently.”“And how the fuck do you know that?”“There was a detective there when I showed up. He wouldn't tell me much more than that but at least I'm pretty sure it doesn't have anything to do with, you know, the thing,” Dan says, watches as Amy mocks his use of the word ‘thing', grumbling it under her breath. “There wasn't much else in his house except for these,” he says, taking out his phone and loading up the gallery of twenty-some-odd photos he had taken of the wall of obelisk drawings, tapping the first one full screen and placing it down on the table so both Amy and Jonah could see them. Amy uses her finger to swipe to the next one and does the same until she reaches the end and then sits back down, Jonah turning the phone so he wasn't seeing the photos upside-down and looks through them from the beginning again.“Jesus,” Jonah says, “Does this thing turn people into fucking artists or something?” Before either Amy or Dan could ask what he's talking about he starts blindly digging around in his own bag, keeping his eyes on the photos on Dan's phone as if he thought he'd miss something important by looking away and pulls out the teenager's folder, flipping it open on the middle of the table to reveal a crumpled piece of paper with an abstract drawing done with what looked like pastels, block colors surrounding a pillar of black with jagged edges.“Did he tell you anything?” Amy queries and Jonah gives a noncommittal noise as a reply so Dan snatches his phone aggressively away from his hands to get him to pay attention.“Alright, alright,” Jonah says, aggravated. “Just that it was very bright and empty. His words, not mine. Heard what sounded like a heart-beat. Gave me that fucking picture,” he says, gestures towards it, “Then his mom kicked me out.”“Here,” Dan says, remembering the diary, taking it out and tossing to Amy, who fumbles slightly when catching it. “You can read that, right?” She flicks through it, finds the marked pages and scans them, sighing irritatedly.“Yeah,” she says. “It'll take forever but I can. She really just gave this to you?”“I'm borrowing it,” Dan says, correcting her. “She wants it back next week.”“A few days to translate thirty pages,” Amy says, “Yeah, sure. Why not.” She goes through the rest of it with minor interest, starting from the back and going forward, plucking the detective's card from the front, flipping it over to read it and Dan is hit with the overwhelming urge to seize it from her and hide it but he holds back, takes another long drink from his glass which was now mostly soda-flavored water. “The detective who was at Christopher's house?” She waits for Dan to nod. “He gave you his card?”“No,” Dan says sarcastically, “I stole it. Right out of his wallet. I've become a master thief in my spare time.” She sets her bottom jaw forward slightly and shakes her head at him. “Yes, he gave me his card. No, I don't know why.”“Maybe he wants to—” Jonah starts to say, a smug and almost lurid expression on his face but Dan interrupts him.“I swear to God, Jonah, if you finish that sentence I will make you eat your fucking fork.”“Holy Shit, Dan.” Jonah says, putting his hands up in a form of surrendering, “Chill out.” Whatever Dan was going to say next is interrupted by their waitress returning, asking if they're ready to order and they realize that none of them had even so much as bothered to glance at the menus that had been placed in front of them since they arrived, much more interested in catching each other up. They each rattle off what they want anyway because Dan at least figures that most places like this are relatively the same and he highly doubts that the generic staples won't be somewhere on the lunch specials.“So to recap,” Amy says once they're left on their own again and she points to herself, “Nothing much,” she moves her finger to point Jonah next, “Barely anything,” finally, it settles on Dan, “Jack shit.”“Hey,” Dan protests, “I got the diary, didn't I?”“Oh, good,” Amy says, “The ramblings of an old woman that I have to spend time translating because you two are goddamn idiots. I'm sure that'll be super helpful. Geez, when did I become so impatient. Listen to me.” She runs a hand through her hair and exhales slowly. “Okay. All we have left in the two hour radius that Dan decided on is that little girl. And then we've got an entire box full of people all over the fucking country, which will just be a lot of sitting around and making phone calls.”“This is what Harold Ledford paid thirty thousand for,” Dan says. “Absolutely nothing.”“We have diary, though, right?” Amy says, holding it up, imitating Dan's earlier objection.“Maybe we'll get this done by tomorrow, call it a dead fucking end and then walk off with a crap load of cash,” Jonah says. “He's not taking it back. Besides, these people are boring as shit. We'd probably get more information from Googling them and then sitting around staring at the obelisk in Dan's apartment.”“About that...” Amy starts and Dan puts his hand up between them, stopping her.“Remember when I said I didn't want to talk about? This morning. I said that this morning.”“And like I said this morning, it's not going anywhere. You'll have to deal with it eventually.”“That's easy for you to say,” Dan says, voice rising, “It's not growing out of the floor of your goddamn apartment!”“You having a problem with mold?” Their waitress asks, catching the end of what Dan had said, lowering their plates down in front of them and Dan purses his lips together slightly before responding.“Sure. Mold.”“My sister had that in her bathroom. She just made a tub of baking soda and bleach. Got it right out with a little scrubbing,” she says, wiping her hands off on her apron and then digging a pile of clean napkins from a pocket, tossing them to the center of the table just in case they were needed. Amy thanks her quickly, not putting any true gratitude behind it but instead saying it in hopes that she'll understand that the conversation was over and the waitress nods once, looking perplexed at Jonah's silent laughter, before going to attend to an elderly man who had just shuffled up to haul himself onto a stool at the counter.“There you go,” Amy says, snickering, “Baking soda and bleach. Just scrub the damn thing right out.”“Yeah,” Dan grumbles, taking an angry bite from his sandwich, the toasted bread crunching between his teeth, “I'll get right on that.” — — — It doesn't make sense for them all to drive in their separate vehicles so Amy follows Dan and Jonah as they leave their own cars at Jonah's apartment (Dan making sure to tell Jonah that it didn't mean he was going to be staying over again, just that it was convenient and Jonah gives him a look like, sure, he knew that, of course) and then they pile into Amy's car, Jonah stuffed into the back seat, Dan next to her in the front. He fiddles with the radio, stops on a news station and they listen as the reporter speaks calmly about the disappearance of the obelisk last night and Dan leans his elbow against the small ledge of his closed window, resting his head in his hand, fingernails tapping against the glass.“It's weird, right?” Jonah asks, sitting forward and talking over the woman on the radio as she drones on, repeating the same useless information over and over just with slightly different words, as if she's sitting there with a short paragraph on one side and a thesaurus on the other. “Nobody's talking about it.” Dan lifts his head, turns to give him a look and then points at the radio. “No, I mean other people. The kid...” Jonah says, as if he and the teenager weren't merely ten or so years apart, “He mentioned it but it was like he didn't really give a shit.” He stops speaking when he realizes that the others weren't going to engage him and they go back to listening, the woman explaining how those who had been on location and suffered temporary blindness had been moved to a local hospital and were being examined but, so far, there appeared to be no serious damage and Dan puts his fingers to his own eyes but moves them away before the other two notice.He takes out his phone and starts looking through it, checking Twitter and other social media and he turns the screen towards Jonah.“People are talking about it,” he says, moves his phone back so only he could read it. “It's all useless bullshit, though.” Pointless jokes, most of which were copied from one person to the other, idle chatter and writers clamoring to get a hold of someone who had been there when it vanished, aching for an exclusive. There are photos but none from the exact moment the obelisk had blinked away, still-frames of the dark pillar slapped next to shaky, blurry shots of an empty lot used as placements until the images from professional photographers started to roll in.Somebody call Mulder and Scully!, a person says and the reply, which had been favorited over a hundred times, says: forget Mulder and Scully. someone call Dan, Amy, and Jonah. This situation would have been infinitely more gratifying, Dan thinks, if they had gotten the acclaim and recognition they had deserved instead of being treated like possible criminals (they kind of were criminals in the broadest sense of the word, Amy had reminded him one evening after the three of them had eaten takeout in Dan's apartment) and just the minuscule piece to a much larger, more interesting puzzle. All anybody wanted to discuss was the obelisk, Nuvarin, and Eric Nagel and, while the story itself was often quoted, cited, and sourced in other articles preceding their own, there was surprising lack of credit when it came to the actual authors. Dan wonders if maybe they should have just signed it as 'Anonymous' or agreed upon a pseudonym that made three names into one. At least there was the possibility that there would be in uptick in commentary, the headlines reading 'Who is Anonymous' or 'Where Did This Writer Come From?’.The people who did know them, who associated them so closely with the piece, didn't care about the how, didn't want to know what they went through to uncover this tangled mess and since Eric Nagel was remaining silent, hidden away behind a wall of lawyers and medical privacy, they wanted answers from the journalists: what was it, where did it come from, what did it do? Dan was an excellent liar when he needed to be, but he wasn't prepared to blatantly make up false facts or offer his opinion, which boiled simply down to: build a concrete and metal box around it and never talk about it again. Amy felt similarly and Jonah had tried to spit out technical terms but eventually the people interviewing him saw through the thinly veiled attempts at appeasing them and got bored of listening to him, as most people tended to do. A few had asked why they hadn't gone back, had said that images of them standing with the obelisk would have been great publicity and Dan had asked in return if any of them had been within a couple inches of it, instead of double-digit feet away behind yellow caution tape and they had said no, of course not. “You wouldn't be asking us that,” Dan had said, “If you had.”“You think Eric told them what he'd been doing with it?” Jonah asks.“If he did,” Amy says, turning down an unassuming suburban street, stopping in front of pale blue painted house, a minivan parked in the flat driveway, “I have a feeling they would have knocked it down the minute they found it. Either way, it would have disappeared eventually.” — — — The look on the middle-aged woman's face when she opens the door to see the three of them standing on her doorstep is anything but pleasant, as if she already knows who they are and what they might want from her. She grimaces, toes absent-mindedly straightening out the welcome mat that was inside the house to match the one on the outside, lining it up with the doorway.“Can I help you?” She asks, fingers darting up to play with a thin gold chain that was looped around her neck. They introduce themselves, hold out their hands but she refuses to touch them, barely even acknowledges the gestures. They tell her that they're journalists and her eyes flicker with anger and concern which only dulls slightly when Amy mentions that they're working with Harold Ledford. “Whatever he wants, I don't care. He's bothered us enough for one lifetime.” She goes to slam the door in their faces but Jonah tells her to wait and, surprisingly, she does, but she keeps her body behind the door as if she's afraid they're going to pull a knife out on her and it was her only form of protection. He hesitates, not sure what he should say next because—just like the similar situation with Caitlin those couple months ago—her cooperation wasn't exactly expected so Dan grabs the strap of Jonah's bag and pulls it over to himself, rifling through it, finally finding the drawing that the teenager had given Jonah, holding it out towards her and she stares at him nervously before gazing at the paper. “It's about that?” She asks. “Where'd you get this?”“From a kid,” Dan says, “Lives about twenty minutes away from here.” That probably wasn't true, Dan had no real idea where Rodney lived and how far away he was from where they were currently standing but she didn't need to know that. He gives the picture back to Jonah and takes out his own phone, opening the photo gallery once more and showing her the images. “From a man about an hour away. Drew every single one. Stuck them on his wall.” She only looks at the first picture, doesn't scroll through the rest and he puts his phone back where he had taken it from, watching as she took in a few shuddery breaths.“Look,” she says, “Sarah's not here. And even if she was, I wouldn't let you talk to her. She doesn't talk about it anymore, anyway.”“Why not?” Amy asks and the woman glares at her but answers her question regardless.“I don't know. She used to... She used to draw it, all the time. Constantly. I have a box full of nothing but— Then she stopped. Stopped drawing it as much. Stopped talking about it. The doctors had said that...” She wavers, realizes that she's telling them things she didn't have to, speaking as if she's been pushing everything down and this is first time in weeks she's spoken to anybody about it. “I figured it was just a passing thing. But then I saw what they found at Nuvarin and found those drawings again...” What they found, she says, as if the people responsible for unveiling it first weren't standing right in front of her and if this were any other situation, Dan would have said something about it but this is neither the time nor the place to let his ego take over the conversation.“Is there anything you can tell us,” Amy pressures lightly, “Anything that she told you that Hal didn't hear about maybe?” The woman sighs, closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose.“Alright,” she says eventually, sounding completely resigned. “Fine. I don't know why I'm even— There isn't anything I can tell you but you can look through her drawings if you want, in case there's something in there worthwhile. But my husband will be home with Sarah in an hour and I want you three out of here before they come back, do you understand? And then I never want to hear from either you or Harold again. We're all just trying to move on.” — — — She leads them through the open foyer, past a wide staircase on their right that took a sharp right turn before disappearing upstairs and through a short hallway with family photos lined on their side of the wall, into a cluttered living room. Their feet are muffled on the dark green carpet, there’s a couch and a few chair surrounding a coffee table covered with books and toys, a large television tucked into a rectangular space between looming bookshelves that were filled with books, potted plants in various stages of dying, framed photographs and books. A cabinet sat underneath the television and, through the glass doors, they could see the faint outlines of a cable box, a DVD player and a few movies with colorful boxes shoved into whatever spaces they would fit. She tells them to have a seat, that she'll be right back and she walks off towards the dining room which is directly across from the living room, wanders around a corner into what they assume is the kitchen and hear her opening a squeaky door, feet clomping down a flight of wooden stairs.Dan and Amy sit next to each other on the couch, perched on the edge so as not to appear as if they were making themselves comfortable and Jonah sits opposite them on the floor, leaning arms on the top of the table and reaching out to grab one of the action figures that was strewn on the surface, moving it's arms and legs and attempting to make it stand up.“Here we go,” she says, returning with a large cardboard box, lowering it down on the table wherever there was room and she brushes her hands together, wiping them on her pants. Amy thanks her, prompts her for a name. “Mrs. Benton is fine. I'd offer you tea but the water will finish boiling by the time you leave,” she says, not so subtly reminding them that she doesn't want them to be here for any longer than necessary. She looks lost, as if she isn't sure whether she should stay or give them some semblance of privacy and decides to sit in a chair, picking up a magazine that had been left hanging open on the arm, like she had been just sitting there in silence, reading, when the three of them had rang the doorbell.“Well, alright,” Jonah says after tense moment of quiet, rolling his legs underneath himself to prop up on his knees, “Let's crack this sucker open.” He rips the lid off, flipping it onto the floor and Dan glances at Sarah's mother but she barely reacts, keeps her eyes pointed at the magazine like they were keeping her hostage and she was doing everything possible to comply so she'd make it out alive. Jonah pulls out handfuls of drawings as if the little girl had done two a day for weeks and he splits them into three piles, hands them out to Dan and Amy and keeps a few for himself, studying each one like they were treasure maps that he had to decipher. Amy sits back slightly, crosses one leg over the other, goes through them as if she's being forced to look through a stack of somebody's vacation photos and Dan leans forward, presses his elbows on either of his thighs, staring at the paper on top of his own small pile.It looks similar to the one that Hal had kept in the girl's folder: bright swirled colors on red construction paper, the obelisk in the center, and he thinks back to the drawing the teenager had given Jonah, sees the rainbow of red, blues, purples, and yellows that he had surrounded the obelisk with as well. He closes his eyes, goes back to the basement under Nuvarin, puts himself in his apartment but when he thinks about the obelisk, all he sees is black and white, like the pictures Christopher had taped to his wall. He moves on to the next one but it's more of the same, except this one is on blue paper and the one underneath that yellow. There's a tension pulling in his arms, a feeling in his chest that he got when he was doing something particularly tedious that made him want to stop and make a noise or shake out his limbs and he's about to excuse himself, to go outside for some air when Amy says: look at this and holds one of the drawings towards Dan, who tosses his own stack onto the table and peers down at what she wants to show him. Jonah shuffles over on his knees until he reaches the couch and then climbs up beside Amy and she moves over so he isn't practically breathing on her neck.The obelisk is drawn much smaller than in the other ones and, instead of being surrounded by colors, there's childish interpretations of what Dan realizes is construction equipment.“Kendra said she saw construction equipment, right?” Jonah says and Amy nods. “This is fucked up.”“Hey,” Amy says, leaning around Dan to get the attention of Mrs. Benton and she looks up slowly, puts a hand to her face. “This one's different. Did she ever mention these?” She points to the machinery and Mrs. Benton studies it with narrowed eyes, mouth downturned.“Ah. My, uh, my husband tried to ask her, I think. She just said it was what she saw. Just what she saw,” she repeats with a shrug and then checks the time on a nearby clock. “I think that's enough.”“Can we take this?” Amy asks and Sarah’s mother looks at the box, eyes widening.“What? All of them?”“No, no,” Amy says, holds up the one she had shown her again, “Just this one.”“I suppose,” she says haltingly. “Sarah thinks we've thrown them all away, anyway. She won't miss it.” Amy gives the picture to Dan who then reaches across her lap to hand it to Jonah and he pushes it into his bag. Dan doesn't miss the look that Amy gives him but he doesn't give her the satisfaction of reacting to it and instead stands up, straightening his jacket and the other two follow, Mrs. Benton the last one to rise to her feet. “You got what you came for,” she says, even though they all know that isn't exactly true. “I'll show you out.” She leads them to the front of the house, wraps her arms around herself and closes the door behind them as soon they're outside.“That was weird,” Jonah says as they walk towards the driveway. “That was weird, right? I felt like any minute we were going to find out that her kid and her husband were dead. Like she fucking straight up murdered them.”“Yeah,” Dan agrees. “That was pretty weird.” They climb into Amy's car and, as they pull out into the street, Dan swears that he sees the face of a young girl from a top floor window watching them leave but the curtain closes before he can mention it. — — — Later that evening, Dan finds himself still inexplicably back at Jonah's place, sitting on the couch, his laptop balanced on his legs as he keeps his feet propped up against the coffee table, listening to Jonah fumble around in the kitchen, using the spare time between ordering their food and when it got there to do some more packing. There wasn't much else that could be done that afternoon and they had decided to temporarily part ways. Dan had considered going home but spending the rest of the day sitting around with the obelisk as his only company wasn't something he particularly wanted to deal with yet and he had found himself wishing he still had a job at the Leviathan because, at least, he would have somewhere else to be instead of following Jonah back to his apartment, grumbling about it the entire time.After calling Hal to fill him in on everything that had happened (they agreed that Jonah should be responsible for keeping in touch with the guy since Hal had gone out of his way to specifically contact Jonah in the first place), Jonah had attempted to get Dan to watch a movie with him and then, alternatively, play some sort of fighting video game with him, both of which Dan said no to repeatedly enough that Jonah had eventually given up and put in the newest Grand Theft Auto instead. Dan had kept himself occupied on his computer the entire time, every now and then glancing up to see what Jonah was yelling about or whom he was currently shooting at and they were stuck there like that for hours until just a little bit ago when Jonah announced he was hungry and Dan had made it clear that he was picking where the food came from, no arguments allowed.He figured that, once they had eaten, he would pack up his things and go home, see if he could tolerate sharing the same space with that obelisk because, if not, he would have to make a pretty difficult decision. He couldn't move out and try to sell the place because that was a surefire way for everyone to discover the damn thing, but he couldn't afford to live somewhere else while maintaining whatever bills he had to continue paying for the old place as well, especially since he was currently not holding on to a steady job. Hal's two separate five-thousand dollar checks would sustain him for awhile, but not for as long as he would like, especially if he had to use it all on paying rent. He almost considered telling Jonah to just take it, to move in and he'd go live wherever Jonah had been planning to move to. It would be smaller than he was used to but at least the obelisk wouldn't be there and Jonah could be left to deal with it, which was fine since the guy didn't seem nearly as bothered by that thing as Dan did just by idly thinking about it.It would never happen though and he knew that. This was his goddamn problem and he would just have to find a way to either fix it or make due with truly terrible circumstances.He puts his computer to the side, suddenly bored with what he had been doing, and instead starts going through a pile of papers he hadn't noticed earlier kept underneath the coffee table. Ronald Sharman it read on the top of the first page and, from there on, it looked to be bits and pieces of information about him, a list titled “Friends and Family”, pages that must have been from the package that Ronald's wife had sent, the one that showed up about a week after Nuvarin had burnt down and the three of them already had their story.“What the hell is this?” Dan asks and Jonah spins around from trying to shove a frying pan into an already overflowing box and he walks over, looks like he wants to snatch the papers away but instead pauses, shifts from one foot to the other.“I, uh... I've kind of been looking into Ronald. Trying to find him,” Jonah says as if Dan had just found his porn collection and wanted an explanation as to why in the world he would be into this sort of weird shit. “I called his wife and she gave me access to his Facebook account. But it's been slow as goddamn peanut butter since someone,” he says, putting a particular emphasis on the word, staring hard down at Dan, “Broke my laptop. It was either fix the car and get a new computer or fix the car and move out.”“So where the hell have you—” Dan starts to ask and Jonah shrugs a shoulder.“Simon's letting me use a desk at TTK,” he admits. “But I hate it there, man. Issy gives me the evil eye every time he's there and he's always fucking there.”“What've you been doing exactly?”“Looking up people he knew, checking them out.”“So you're stalking them pretty much,” Dan says and Jonah frowns, reaches over to finally take the pages away from him as if he was willing to let him touch them only if he was taking it seriously but, now that he was not, he wasn't going to share any of it anymore. Dan wants to say something else, something uncharacteristic about how he sincerely was just the slightest bit impressed that Jonah had even made it this far into it, even though it was, ultimately, a waste of time highly unlikely that even he would manage to get anywhere significant but then there's a knock on his door and the food had arrived and that was pretty much the end of that particular moment. — — — There's a wonderfully brief amount of seconds when Dan has his hand on the doorknob to his apartment, when he realizes that he's dealing with Schrodinger's Obelisk: it was, for the moment, both there and not there and he doesn't want to ruin it by actually breaking the spell but he inhales and exhales and opens the door. He doesn't realize he has his eyes closed until he's forcing them open but he doesn't need to see to know that it's still there; he can smell it, can practically feel it in the air and it's like the temperature in the entire place had risen almost ten degrees warmer than the rest of the building. He finds the thermostat that he hadn't touched since summer and turns it down but he's not sure it would even make much of a difference. He thinks about kicking it and then maybe talking to it instead but he does neither of those things, takes all his belongings that he had brought with him to Jonah's and escapes to his bedroom, slamming the door and wishing it had a lock.“I could live in here,” Dan says to himself, sitting on the edge of the bed. He could spend his time in here, darting back and forth to the bathroom as necessary and then, when he has to leave, he could run past the obelisk like it was a particularly nasty dog chained to a post in a yard and if he stayed just far enough away from it and moved quickly, it wouldn't bite him. He could go out to eat or order takeout for the rest of his life, enjoy it in his room, sitting on his bed. He'd move his desk and the television in there, never touch the kitchen or the living room again. He could make this work. It would be abnormally pathetic, but he could make this work.He's thinking about where he could put his desk, where the television would fit and if he would have to buy an extension cord or two when he's interrupted by the shrill tone of his phone ringing. He pulls it out from his pocket where it still sat, thinks it might be Amy already having something from the diary she said she was finally going to start reading through or Jonah letting him know that he forgot something at his apartment when he made his escape that day but he doesn't know the number. He frowns, figures he'll just let it go and if it was really that important they would leave a message and, maybe then, Dan would consider calling them back but he looks at it again and decides to answer it anyway, picking up just before the final ring.“Hello?” He asks cautiously. The person on the other end coughs, hesitates, and Dan is about to hang up, figuring that some conspiracy groupie had found his number somehow again and wanted to breathe creepily at him for awhile when a voice says:“Dan Egan?”“Yeah...? Who—”“Stop looking into the obelisk,” the voice interrupts him and Dan frowns.“What?”“Stop looking into the obelisk,” the voice repeats with the same calm inflection, as if they could say the same thing over and over for hours if Dan was willing to sit there and come up with different ways to ask the same question. Dan wants to tell this person that he would love nothing more but to do exactly that, but the other two would never let him live it down if he backed out and, besides, it's sort of difficult to do that when the damn thing is only a few feet outside of his bedroom. Instead he says:“What? No. How do you know I’m— Fuck you.” Maybe not the best response he could have come up with considering the last time he did that to somebody vaguely threatening him, things got a lot worse but it's what came tumbling out when his mouth opened and he figured he might as well just go with it. There's a brief silence on the other end of the line.“I see,” the voice says and then pauses again. “I was told that words probably wouldn't work with you. Thought I'd give you the benefit of the doubt. That you wouldn't be so fucking stupid.” The last two words come out of nowhere and the insult was directed at him with such vitriol that Dan pulls the phone away from his ear out of fear of being splattered with acid. He should end the call, should pretend that this never happened, have a drink and then go to bed but Jonah must have been rubbing off on him (as horrible a thought as that might be) and he still won’t hang up. Either the person on the other end has no idea that the obelisk is in his living room or they don't care.Dan resists the urge to curse at him again, holds it back and instead asks who told the guy about him, listens to the person breathe, waits for an answer.“Fine,” the voice says as if Dan hadn't said anything at all, “We'll do this the messy way.” The silence that Dan experiences is different this time: not the noise of a conversation stalled but a signal that the other person had ended the call and he takes his phone away from his face, stares at the screen and feels the color drain from his face. Messy? What did he mean exactly by messy? He goes through his call log, finds the most recent number and hits redial, tries to call them back but each time the other end rang once before cutting him off of the call completely and he runs a hand through his hair, looks around the room as if he expects to find an answer but there's nothing helpful. The last time a mysterious voice ambiguously threatened him, he was in a locked room and was told that “what happens next is on you”, which he had taken to mean that Amy or Jonah would be harmed if he did not cooperate. He had given in before having to find out if that truly had been the meaning behind the threat but he's not sure if the same tactic would work this time, especially since the person had made it impossible for Dan to contact them to have a discussion or at least make it clear that he doesn't want to be responsible for whatever they had planned, that he was willing to drop it completely because that particular brand of guilt wasn't an emotion he wanted to pile onto his shoulders.He considers simply texting them both—which would be quicker—but he knows that if either of them are engrossed in anything they'd be more likely to respond to an actual phone call so he stands, begins pacing, fingers unsteady as he stares at his embarrassingly minimal list of contacts (once upon a time there had been pages and pages of people on both of his phones but most of them had no reason to talk to him—especially since he no longer worked for the Leviathan—and now had been whittled down to Amy, Jonah, a few of the family members he still spoke to, and the writers from TTK, just in case), unsure of whom he should get in touch with first.“Shit,” he says to himself. “Shit.” He hits Amy's name, hits the call button next and waits, stops moving to tap his foot nervously and rhythmically on the floor. “Goddammit. Come on. Pick up, pick up. Answer the fucking pho— Amy,” he says, probably louder than necessary when he hears her say what do you want, Dan, speaking as if she had been in the middle of something particularly important and he was wasting her precious time. “You have to get out of your apartment,” he tells her abruptly.“I'm sorry. What was that?”“You have to leave. Right now.”“Why?” Amy asks slowly through teeth that were most likely pressed tightly together.“Just fucking do it,” Dan snaps at her, stops, takes in a breath when he hears her make a noise like she couldn't believe he actually gave her a command.“And where would you like me to go exactly?”“Here,” Dan says for lack of a better option. “Come here. I have to call Jonah,” he says as a way of telling her he can't answer any more questions and he doesn't confirm that she's actually going to do it, trusts that she'll at least be tepidly concerned enough about his current mental state to stop by and check on him under the guise of curiosity and he hangs up on her when she's mid-sentence, knows he’ll catch hell for doing that later but he doesn't particularly care. He dials Jonah's number next, kicks his heel on his bed frame, takes a few steps forward to lean a hand flat on the wall and angle his body slightly, eyes diverted to the floor.“Yeah? What is it?” Jonah picks up at the last possible second, talks quickly, and Dan can hear Jonah typing slowly on a keyboard with his giant fingers, putting too much pressure on the keys as if he thought they wouldn't do what he wanted unless he really roughed them up a bit.“Where are you?” Dan counters and Jonah grunts before letting out a put-upon sigh.“At the TTK offices. I had an idea about— Well, whatever. Doesn't matter. And since this is the only place where I don't have to pay to—”“Shut up,” Dan says and Jonah, remarkably, does. “Are you by yourself?”“No,” Jonah says. “Audra's here. Simon was but he went out to—”“I don't care. Just stay there, alright? Stay all night if you can.”“All night?” Jonah whines. “I'm not staying here all night. The only bed they have is some cot that I wouldn't fit on and a pillow with an old t-shirt wrapped around it. I think it might be one I left here actually...” He sounds like he's going to complain further but then wavers, takes in exactly what Dan is telling him or maybe he just listened to how Dan was saying it. The next thing he asks is with a lowered voice and Dan can almost see him bending over in his seat, moving closer to the desk, keeping his head down. “What's going on?”“I may have fucked up,” Dan says and he doesn't know why he's more willing to confess that to Jonah than he had been to Amy, but maybe it's because he knows that he's somewhere with other people and that if anybody was crazy enough to actually do something to one of them, they might not want to risk having to create more casualties than they were aiming for that night.“What did you do?” Jonah inquires, mimicking the same question that Dan had asked him after their first trip to Nuvarin. He tells Jonah about the phone call, about what the voice had said and Jonah listens without intruding with his own comments, waits until Dan finishes to say: “You fucked up.”“Thanks, Jonah.”“Where's Amy?”“I told her to come here. Which, now that I think about it might not have been my grandest fucking idea but I feel like if I call her back and make her turn around she might bite my head off praying-mantis-style.”“I'd pay to see that,” Jonah says, promises Dan that he won't leave and goes to end the call when Dan stops him. “What?”“Don't hang up.”“Okay,” Jonah says, sounding slightly bewildered by Dan's request. “Are you... I mean do you want—”“Don't make this weird,” Dan says, even though he's most definitely the one who made it exactly that, doesn't let Jonah complete his question because he doesn't want to know what Jonah thought Dan was asking of him. “It saves me from having to call you back when Amy shows up.” It's mostly true, which is good enough. The last thing he wants Jonah to think is that he's actually genuinely worried about his well-being.“Do you want to talk about something or...?” Jonah starts after a minute of awkward silence between them and Dan laughs.“No, I don't want to talk. Just put the phone down, alright? Keep doing whatever it was that you were doing.”“I was—”“I still don't care,” Dan says, finally leaves his bedroom to wait for Amy and he gives the obelisk as wide a berth as he could manage, pulls a chair over to the center counter in his kitchen area and sits facing the door, resting the phone down on the flat surface. He listens with his head in his hand as Jonah does the same, hears the noise of him going back to what he was typing, fingers picking each letter deliberately, like a chicken eating single pieces of dried corn from the ground. — — — There's a heavy pounding on his door, like Amy had specifically brought a sledgehammer with her just for this purpose and he answers it, but she hesitates in the hallway, glancing briefly over his shoulder at the obelisk behind him. When she finally walks inside, she stops at the small kitchen island where Dan's phone still rested, as if she was concerned about crossing a barrier and that the obelisk couldn't somehow find her past it. She crosses her arms, keeps her coat on and her bag slung over her shoulder as if she wasn't planning on staying unless Dan could give her a damn convincing reason.“You want to tell me why you made me come all the way down here? You hung up on me. You know I fucking hate that. What the hell is your problem?” She asks, waits, raises an eyebrow because Dan apparently didn't start talking fast enough.“Dan fucked up,” Jonah says, his voice flowing clearly from Dan's phone and Amy turns to look at it, her eyebrow still arched, before glancing back at Dan. “I'll tell her if you won't,” Jonah says and Dan walks over, hurriedly jamming his finger against the red button, disconnecting the call. It wasn't that he didn't want her to know, he just didn't want it to come from Jonah. He runs his fingers through his hair and sighs. He explains it to her, uses short sentences and pretends like he didn't remember the exact words the voice had used despite the fact that he had recited them easily only a few minutes earlier to Jonah. When he finishes, Amy doesn't speak for a moment, nods and then shakes her head, dropping her arms from across her chest. She slowly removes her jacket, dumping both it and her bag onto the counter, lowering herself heavily onto the stool that Dan had been sitting in before she showed up at his door.“You definitely fucked up,” she says.“You guys need to stop with that, alright?” Dan says, picks up his phone just to have something to do with his hands, flips it over and over, tossing it slightly. “I know. What was I supposed to say? 'Yeah, sure, we'll stop'?”“Uh,” Amy starts, makes a face at him like he's a goddamn child. “Yeah. Pretty much. You… We never really wanted to be involved in this again anyway. Would have been a good a reason as any to back off. But no, you had to go all Jonah on him instead. So now here I am, sitting in your apartment with that thing and—” Her rant is interrupted when Dan's phone rings and he visibly startles, tries to laugh it off when he sees Amy looking at him strangely and he glances nervously down at the screen but relaxes when he sees that it's Jonah.“Fuck you, Dan,” Jonah says as soon as Dan answers and then takes in a breath, clears his throat. Dan can hear him typing still, although he couldn't imagine what was so important. Maybe he wasn't doing anything. Maybe he was just hitting the same key over and over, an agitated string of the same letter on a page. “Did you tell her?”“Yeah. Hold on,” he puts it on speaker again, lowers it down flat on the counter.“Amy—” Jonah says and then stops himself.“Yes, Jonah?” Amy asks but Jonah doesn't respond as if he was pretending he hadn't said anything at all and Amy does him a favor by ignoring it. “So what, I just hang out here indefinitely? Because I'm telling you right now, that isn't going to happen. Not as long as...” She trails off, gaze flickering behind Dan and he doesn't have to encourage her to finish to know what she meant.“Until the morning,” Dan says. “At least until the morning. We'll go talk to Hal, tell him we're done. We couldn't help him.”“It'll buy us some time,” Jonah muses and both Dan and Amy turn towards the phone and it was as if Jonah could feel their glares on the other end because he asks: “What? We're not going to figure out who that asshole was? Who doesn't want us looking into the obelisk again? It's not like we can just walk away from the fucking thing,” Jonah says, “On account of it being in your living room.”“Oh,” Dan says, aggravated, “Is it? I hadn't noticed.”“Hang on. I'm not staying here overnight. I know you're concerned about me or whatever,” Amy says the word 'concerned' like it tastes bitter and she grimaces, “But this isn't happening.”“Amy, come on...” Dan starts but she puts up a finger.“Where will I sleep? The couch?” Dan opens his mouth again but she inches her finger forward, to let him know that she wasn't finished. “I'm not taking your charity bed. Besides, I'm not in the mood to deal with your whining like an old man about your back when you make a martyr of yourself and stretch out on the floor because we both know you won't sleep on the damn couch either.”“I would sleep on the couch,” Jonah says.“Well,” Dan says, “You're not here so that doesn't really matter, does it?”“I could be there,” Jonah says. “I should be there. I don't want to be here,” he groans, like some moronic Doctor Seuss rhyme. “I can't sleep here. The cot is broken, I checked. I'd have to curl up on a fucking desk with my coat as a blanket.”“So go home,” Amy suggests.“Dan said not to,” Jonah says. “Not that he's the boss of me or anything,” he follows up with quickly, “But I've already been shot at in my apartment once. That's one of those experiences you only want to live through once in a lifetime.”“Please don't come here,” Dan says.“Sorry,” Jonah says, his voice far away, “Can't hear you. Think I'm losing the connection.” He makes childish noises of static and breaks between his syllables, says something about coming over, about being right there and then hangs up and Dan does the same, pushes the phone away with his finger, stretching his arm out and then resting his head down on it.“I hate him,” Dan says. “I hate that guy.”“Yeah, yeah,” Amy replies, waving her hand at him. “You really think that telling Harold that we're done is going to get them off our backs? Or off your back, anyway.”“I don't know. Maybe? Probably. Absolutely yes. Ask again later. What do you want me to say here exactly?”“Forget it,” Amy says, “We'll do it your way. None of us really wanted to do this bullshit for him in the first place.”“Jonah did.”“Jonah is an anomaly. He'll get over it.” She exhales slowly, kicks the back of her shoe against one of the legs of the stool and she props her elbow on the counter, resting her head in her hand and Dan lifts his eyes to stare at her without picking his own head up from his arm. “How the hell did they know what we’re doing?” She asks and Dan doesn’t respond because he doesn’t know, not really. His best guess is that, since Nuvarin, people have been watching them, making sure they didn’t stick their noses back where they didn’t belong but the thought of that is deeply unsettling. “You think they know about that?” She points with one of the fingers holding her head up and Dan awkwardly shrugs.“Didn't sound like it. Not sure how they couldn't, though. Can probably see it for miles from the street. Guess people figure I'm just some weirdo with an obelisk fetish or something.”“Nah,” Amy says, pauses when she realizes that Dan might not understand what she was disagreeing with. “I mean that you can't see it from the street. It's weird. You'd think you could. I even stood on the sidewalk and stared up at your window like some creep before I came up here but nope. Nothing.”“God,” Dan moans, turns his face until his nose is pressed against the counter, folds his arm under his forehead to press his mouth against the back of his hand. “Please don't tell me we're all hallucinating this.” He hears the click of a photo being taken and peers up to see Amy inspecting his phone and then turning the screen towards him, a slightly tilted shot of the obelisk staring him in the face. “That doesn't prove anything.”“You can't take a picture of a hallucination,” Amy says, turns it back towards herself, swipes her finger across the screen and then tosses the phone back down.“You know that for a fact, do you?”“If you could, there'd be a million photography exhibitions dedicated to schizophrenics and childhood imaginary friends by now. It's just at a difficult angle. Besides, people don't look through other people's windows unless they're perverts. Nobody cares about what's going on in here.”“Let's hope,” Dan says, “It stays that way.” — — — They've been sitting there for almost half an hour before they both simultaneously realize that Jonah hadn't actually shown up like he had threatened to and Amy pulls her phone from her bag, fingers flying as she texts him and Dan does the same, but neither gets a response. He tries calling him instead, waits as the phone rings, is met with his voicemail and he considers leaving one before changing his mind.“I told him to stay there,” Dan says, listens to the tick, tick, tick as Amy continues typing a flurry of what were most likely increasingly violent insults. “Goddammit, Jonah,” he says, feels a lump the size of a pea and steadily growing form in his throat and he coughs but it won't go away. He calls the TTK office, hears Simon greet him tiredly. “Is Jonah still there?”“Uh,” Simon says, “No? He said he was going to your apartment. Is he not…?”“No, he isn't,” Dan says, ends the conversation, cutting Simon off mid-sentence, looking to Amy. “Anything?”“Not a damn thing. Where would he go? What else does he do? Does he have any other friends?”“I don't know! He said he was coming here,” Dan says uselessly. As far as Dan knew, Jonah did not, in fact, have any other friends. There was that Richard person he had mentioned once briefly but Dan didn't even know if the guy lived in the city or not and, anyway, why would he suddenly decide to go visit him instead of showing up at Dan's apartment? Moments ago he had been nearly ecstatic at the chance to have a fucking sleepover with the two of them. He wouldn't just wander off like a toddler who'd let go of his mother's hand and was currently chewing on his finger as he waddled down the street. “Come on,” he says, standing up, shoving his phone into his pocket and searching for his keys and Amy stands before she realizes she doesn't know what they're doing.“Where are we going?”“His place. Maybe he… I don't know, decided to take a shower and jerk off or something.” It seemed incredibly unlikely, but it was a better thought than him lying on the side of the road somewhere because he couldn't sit still for a few hours. — — — They take Dan's car only because he's already sitting in the driver's seat by the time Amy is saying that they could go with hers and they sit silently as Dan grips the steering wheel tightly with both hands, leaning forward in his seat as if he thought that he could push the other vehicles ahead of him out of the way like a battering ram. Amy has her hands folded in her lap but keeps untangling her fingers to check her phone despite the fact that neither of them had heard a single noise from it since Amy had sent out the original texts.It takes longer than it should to get there but maybe that was just how it felt and Dan checks over the area, searches for Jonah's car but he doesn't see it, knows that it doesn't mean that it isn't there, that Jonah maybe had to park around the corner like he did sometimes because his neighbors weren't particularly considerate folk and it tended to be first come, first serve when it came down to parking spaces. He takes in a slow breath and the two of them enter the building, feet clacking noisily on the tile floor and Dan balls his hands into fists at his sides as he marches down the green carpeted hallway to Jonah's door and he's about to start wailing on it with both fists or maybe trying to kick it down even though he didn't necessarily think it was as easy as it appeared on television when Amy says his name and then points. The door is already open and Dan clears his throat, puts his fingers against it and pushes it open slowly and they look inside before carefully inviting themselves in.The place is a mess: boxes that had been full and neatly stacked are dumped and torn apart, scattered on the floor. Dishes that Dan had watched Jonah pack were now broken in piles of white shards and tiny pieces of glass, the coffee table was on it's side, the documents that Dan had left there now strewn around, dirty footprints imprinted on the papers, his television smashed. Dan opens the door to his bedroom and finds a similar disarray in there as well: bedsheets and clothes littered everywhere, the dresser pulled over, a lamp unplugged, the shade torn and the bulb remarkably intact. He can hear Amy moving around in the other room and he tries the door to the bathroom next but it won't budge and he yanks on the doorknob, listens to it rattle and then stops, hesitates before knocking gently.“Jonah?” He asks, presses his head against the door and he thinks he hears something so he knocks again, sees Amy out of the corner of his eye as she comes into the room and she gives him a curious look to which he only shrugs back in response. “Jonah?” He tries once more, waits and he's about to try for a third time when he hears, faintly:“Dan?”“Yeah,” Dan says. “Open the door.” There's a brief pause and then the sound of feet on the floor, the click of a lock being switched and then suddenly the door is being flung open and Dan only has a few seconds to actually look at Jonah before the guy is flinging his arms around him in what Dan slowly realizes is a fucking hug and he stands there stiffly for longer than he should have before wrenching his arms between their bodies and pushing him away, making sure to take a few steps back to keep it from happening again.”Jesus Christ, Jonah,” he says. “What the hell?”“I came here to, you know, pick up some stuff and I was looking for my toothbrush when I heard them kicking down my fucking door. I locked myself in the bathroom. They tried to… They tried to get in but I guess it wasn't worth the effort,” Jonah says, grips his hands in his hair. “There were a lot of them,” he says, as if he's assuring them that he wasn't being a coward.“You're bleeding,” Amy says and Jonah's hands dart up to his head as if he had forgotten about it, pulls them away to stare at them, now slick and red.“Right,” he says. “Fuck.”“How'd that happen?” Dan asks and Jonah glances down at his feet before responding, keeping his voice low out of embarrassment.“Doesn't matter,” he says.“Whatever,” Dan says. “Go sit down. I'll find a towel or something.” He goes into the bathroom that Jonah had holed himself up in and flicks on the light, grabs a few thick loops of toilet paper instead of the towel he said he was going to find and, before he leaves, he notices a stretch of blood on the edge of the sink where Jonah's head must have hit. Probably tripped over his own feet in a panic to lock the door, Dan figures, walks back into the bedroom to see Jonah sitting on the edge of his bare mattress, feet moving underneath the comforter that was in a bundle on the floor, while Amy was just finishing picking the lamp up and settling it back down on the nightstand. “Here,” Dan says, holds the paper out towards him and he knows he should at least look at it, make sure they weren't going to have to drag themselves to the hospital but Dan's had enough physical contact with Jonah tonight to last him a lifetime. Jonah accepts it and presses it gingerly to his head, frowning as he looks around the room.“I heard them breaking my shit,” Jonah says sadly.“Did they say what they wanted? What they were looking for?” Amy inquires, goes to stand next to Dan and Jonah looks up at her and then shrugs.“Me?” Jonah proposes and then lifts his shoulders again. “I don't fucking know. I didn't think to ask.” Was this the 'mess' that the voice had been talking about? Just throwing around Jonah's things to scare him a little? He should probably be grateful that they chose him instead of Dan because he's not entirely sure how the night might have ended if a bunch of mysterious people had shown up to throw his furniture around only to come to face-to-face with the obelisk instead.“You should have just stayed where you were,” Dan says sharply, knows that it doesn't matter, that they would probably have done this anyway whether Jonah was here or not, but it was easier to reprimand him than be nice or say that there was an annoying part of him that was actually vaguely relieved that Jonah was still alive, only injured because of his own clumsiness.“This is your fault, Dan,” Jonah says, grimacing as he pulls the toilet paper gingerly away to glance at the blood before pushing it back against his head. Dan looks to Amy for any kind of back up but she merely shrugs at him instead and absent-mindedly pulls an arm out from where they were crossed and straightens the lampshade.“You know what...” Dan starts, has a perfectly formed barb on the tip of his tongue to jab him with like a toothpick under his fingernail but all he says is: “Fuck you.”“Well, fuck you,” Jonah says back.“Jesus. I'm going to stop you two before this turns into the Ryan-Egan Fuck You Wimbledon Championship,” Amy says, walking around the bed to stand beside Dan, holding her hands out in front of her. “For all we know, this had nothing to do with Dan.”“So what then?” Jonah asks. “Just a random home invasion?”“You said you were trying to find Ronald Sharman,” Dan says, doesn't miss the wide eyes and the quick shaking of Jonah's head when he brings it up but, unfortunately for him, Amy doesn't miss it either. “Maybe someone else is, too. Caught you sniffing around.”“You're looking for Ronald?” Amy asks, raises an eyebrow and Jonah hunches his back, deflates a bit.“Like Dan said,” Jonah says, moves the paper from his head again and bunches it together in his lap. The bleeding on his head already seemed to have slowed and it was now splotchy and swollen, on its way to a heavy bruise. “I'm trying. Kind of difficult when I don't have a computer. Have to hole up at… well, you know. I hate that goddamn place.”“Have you found anything?” Amy asks him and Jonah snorts. Dan's phone starts ringing in his pocket and he tenses, his fingers curling into a loose fist as he does his best to ignore it. The other two notice it as well but only somewhat distractedly before returning to their conversation.“Trust me,” Jonah says, “If I did, I would have told you already.”“Would you? You didn't say anything about looking for him in the first place,” she says.“Because I didn't— It's weird, right? It's weird. Even I know it's fucking weird. It'd seem less weird once I had something substantial,” Jonah tells her, hesitates, looks at Dan again because his phone is still going and Dan has his chin pointed upwards, eyes staring the ceiling like he's pretending not to hear it. “Dude,” Jonah says, “Are you gonna answer that or what?”“Why?” Dan asks.“Could be them,” Amy says.“All the more reason for me not to answer it, then,” Dan says, gestures to his pocket when the ringing stops only for it to start up again after a few seconds of silence. He lets it go for a second time, none of them speaking, and it isn't until the third round of the noise that he finally pulls the device out to stare at the screen, which he frowns at, thumb hovering over the green button. “Hello?” He says slowly, brow furrowing when nobody says anything in return. He's about to hang up, chalk it up to a particularly insistent spam caller when the same voice from earlier says:“I told you we were going to do this the messy way.”“I didn't think you'd take the word 'messy' so literally,” Dan says, is surprised he manages any sort of words at all, particularly ones that were dipped in a thick coat of sarcasm but he knows he's just using it to mask the small tremble that was working its way up his throat. The other two watch Dan's every move, Jonah motioning for him to put it on speaker (at least, that what he figures those hand gestures meant; the guy must be terrible at charades), but he puts his hand up, stops them, turns his back because whatever is said can just as easily be related to them second-hand once this is all over, especially if this conversation is as short as the first time. There's another brief silence on the other end of the line, followed by a small grunt that Dan could almost interpret as confusion. “Breaking into Jonah’s place,” Dan clarifies, “Messing with—” He hesitates, realizes what he's doing, clamps his lips together as if attempting to trap the words inside his mouth.“I'm sorry?” the voice asks, sounds sincere. “Did we—?” A muffled noise of a person turning to talk to someone else in the room, repeating the beginnings of the same question. “Did we—?” When the voice returns, a throat is cleared and they attempt to sound impassive and assertive once more. “I can assure you that what you’re talking about is not what we’re talking about.”“Right,” Dan says, practically feels the color draining from his own face and his ears start to ring. If they weren't responsible for screwing with Jonah's apartment, then what the hell did they do? He asks them, his voice quiet and he thinks he can hear them laugh.“Nothing we hadn't already planned to do, to be perfectly honest,” the voice tells him. “You just made me shift around the schedule is all. Using the whole 'messy way' sounded more ominous.” And then, without anything further, they hang up. Dan slowly pulls the phone away from his ear, lets his arms hang limp at his sides and he takes a moment before turning back to Jonah and Amy who were staring at him, expressions balanced between curious and concerned.“What?” Amy asks, takes a step forward when Dan doesn't respond. “Dan. What was it?”“I don't know,” Dan says eventually, “But I have a feeling it's pretty not fucking good.” — — — They go back to Dan’s apartment even though none of them really want to be there but there aren’t too many other places for them to go—especially since Amy was still forbidding them from even driving down the street where she lived—and they all shuffle in through the door, their gazes lingering on the obelisk. Amy is the one who shifts awkwardly from one foot to the other, arms wrapped around her stomach and asks if they could move to a room without a direct line of sight to that monstrosity.The only room that Dan can take them to that’s big enough for the three of them is his bedroom and he isn’t going to pretend that it isn’t weird having two other people that he tells himself he has no interest in sleeping with standing in there with him but he has to agree with Amy that it’s better than staring at the obelisk for the rest of the evening. He flicks on the lamp by his bedside and it fills the room with a pleasant yellow glow, illuminating the pale green walls and white ceiling and the floor creaks as Amy tries to find somewhere to stand while Jonah leans over the nearby dresser towards the mirror propped up above it to stare at the injury on his head which had stopped bleeding but was now an ugly shade of red and was progressing quickly to deep blues and purples. He pokes at it and hisses.“My head is killing me,” Jonah complains, stops inspecting himself and turns to face his friends, waiting, possibly, for sympathy but they’re both busy thinking about a lot of other shit. “I think I have a concussion.”“Probably,” Dan says, because there’s no use in trying to assure him that it was just a nasty bump. He’s been there, done that. At least he knows how to handle them. “But you’re walking and talking so, you know, I think you’ll live.”“I need a fucking handful of aspirin, dude,” Jonah says and Dan points out the bedroom door to the bathroom just across the hall. He doesn’t yell at Jonah not to snoop in the medicine cabinet while he’s in there because he knows it wouldn’t matter and, heck, he might have already done it one of the other few times he’s been here.“What did they say, exactly?” Amy asks and Dan looks up at her, waits, knows what she’s asking but doesn’t want to answer and she interprets his silence as him not knowing what she’s referring to. “On the phone earlier. What did they say?” He can’t shrug and pretend he forgot because it had only just happened twenty-five minutes ago.“That the ‘messy’ thing they had done wasn’t the break-in at Jonah’s,” he says. “I think.”(That part of it had been confusing, the way it had been worded difficult to interpret, leaving Dan to wonder if they truly didn’t have anything to do with the break-in or if that had been merely an appetizer, barely worth acknowledging, and whatever else they had done was the main course).That clearly isn’t what Amy had wanted. She wanted exact words but he wasn’t in the mood to cobble them together properly. He had a laptop and (sometimes) two phones because his memory had always been sort of shitty and if he didn’t write things down either with pens or in a note app somewhere, he’d probably forget. It was a really inconvenient problem to have as a journalist, especially if he found himself in a situation where he wasn’t allowed recording devices, but he’d always somehow managed to make it work. Important speeches and phrases stuck. It was the casual conversations, little quips and moments over the phone—especially when he was tired—that rolled off his brain like water off a duck’s back. “I asked them what they did.” Amy nods. She had heard that. “They said something like ‘nothing we hadn’t already planned’. And then they hung up.”He watches Amy dig out her own phone from her bag, start scrolling through it but apparently there was nothing noteworthy there because she frowned, peering up when Jonah lumbered back into the room, wiping tap water from his mouth and Dan finds himself idly hoping that Jonah seriously didn’t take a whole damn handful of those little white pills because he really wasn’t in the mood to take him to the hospital to get his stomach pumped.“Hey,” Amy says to him, “Check your phone.” He does without question but it’s obvious he doesn’t know why he’s doing it and he raises questioning eyebrows at her. “The guy talking to Dan said they did something.”“Well,” Jonah says, “If they did, nobody told me about it.”“Maybe no one’s found out yet,” Dan suggests, feels left out and pulls out his own device to flip through his messages and various news sites but there’s nothing breaking, no glaring updates on social media, nobody important trying to call him in a panic while something goes horribly wrong. He can’t imagine what they could have possibly done; none of them are particularly close with anyone anymore other than each other (it’s sad, he knows, he hates it but he also knows he sort of brought that on himself) and—besides family—he can’t think of a single person that could have been harmed or killed that would be bad enough to scare them off of dealing with the obelisk again (not that he had much choice, he thinks, laughing mirthlessly under his breath).The worst they could do was target Amy or Jonah or try to burn down his apartment but, even then, they’d be doing him a favor (although he highly doubted that the giant black monster in his living room would be susceptible to flame).“I need a drink,” Dan says, stands and is just about to head towards where Jonah is standing by the doorway when he realizes he ran out of booze last night and hadn’t gotten a chance to buy more. He sighs a lot heavier than he needed to and he drops his shoulders a bit. “I’ll make coffee.” — — — Neither of them follow him right away and Dan busies himself in his kitchen, banging around mugs and plugging in his clunky machine, dumping coffee grounds into a filter without measuring. He flicks a switch, stares at the dim light as he waits for it to turn red, listens for the gurgle of hot, brown liquid pouring into the carafe he rarely used.He turns from the counter when he hears footsteps and sees Jonah walking over, hesitating, putting the island between them, hands in his pockets but he tugs one of them out, rubs at his right eye, the one on the side of his face where he had hit his head and Dan hates how he’s actually wondering if that’s something he should be worried about.“What?” He asks instead, hoping to encourage him to spit whatever he wanted to say out quickly enough that he’d go back to leaving him alone for awhile.“I just wanted to, uh…” He looks away, searches for something else to stare at that wasn’t Dan, settles on the obelisk for only a couple seconds before focusing on the cabinets just behind and above Dan’s shoulders. “Thank you, I guess.”“Thank me?”“You and Amy but I already said—” He throws a thumb over his shoulder and then shoves the hand back in his pocket. “For coming to check on me. I mean, I was fine. I had it handled but, you know. Whatever.”“Alright,” Dan says, which is his way of saying yeah, you dumb shit, of course we were concerned about you, please stop trying to thank me for it, you’re making me uncomfortable and he hopes that Jonah actually knows him well enough that he can figure that out on his own. They stand there in silence, the obelisk lurking at their backs, the coffee machine whirring and spitting on the counter in front of them but then Jonah is clearing his throat, does it two more times with more insistence each time, as if he’s not going to say what he wants to say until Dan verbally acknowledges him. “Jesus, Jonah. What.” He turns, is startled to find that Jonah had moved closer to him at some point and Dan’s disappointed in himself that he hadn’t heard it. He takes a step backwards, hits the counter but Jonah doesn’t follow him, just shifts awkwardly from one foot to the other. “I swear to god if you try to kiss me I will kick you so hard in the dick it’ll invert into a vagina.”“Fuck you, Dan, don’t flatter yourself.” Jonah says. “You’re the last person on this planet I’d want to kiss. I’d rather hump that obelisk.”“I bet you would,” Dan grumbles, figures that he’d successfully intercepted whatever Jonah had wanted to say because there was a look on his face when Dan had turned that made it seem like he was going to be serious, was going to be real, and he didn’t want that, but Jonah seemed determined to make things as uncomfortable as Dan had silently begged him not to, to remind Dan that he (and Amy) are the only real friends he has (or, maybe, has ever had, which actually makes him feel kind of ill) and so he returns to studying the cabinets, starts going through them as if he couldn’t remember where he kept his mugs, even opens one of the doors, stares right at the damn things and pretends he hadn’t seen them.“There’s a lot of fucked up garbage happening with this bullshit—” Dan couldn’t see Jonah, but he was probably gesturing, once again, to the obelisk, “—and the phone calls and whatever.” (Dan could make a joke here about Jonah having a truly shitty way with words for someone who considers himself a writer but that would mean implying that there was an inkling of a thought lurking in his head that it was possible Jonah might not be altogether awful at what he does). “I’m only going to say this once, alright? And if you tell anyone that I said it I’ll… I’ll lynch you—”“Jesus, Jonah.”“—But whatever happens, whatever is happening isn’t your fault. So don’t go blaming yourself for any of this garbage.” Dan thinks there’s going to be more but Jonah seems finished and Dan takes that opportunity to ‘discover’ the mugs he’d been searching for, chooses three and slams them down with more force than they deserved. He’s angry that Jonah is going soft on him and he’s angry, too, that there’s a tiny part of him that knows Jonah is right, even if the rest of him doesn’t want to believe him. All of this was, in a certain way, his fault. This story was a like a hundred-dollar bill on a string laid out on the sidewalk and, yeah, he chased it, finally managed to grab it, only to find a monster waiting for him at the other end of a grimy alleyway with no exit except back the way he came (but, wouldn’t you know it, the monster has a friend and he’s blocking the way and goddammit, this metaphor was getting away from him, wasn’t making sense anymore or, maybe, didn’t make much sense in the first place but he’s frustrated and tired and on edge).“I think you hit your head harder than you thought,” Dan says, knocks his knuckles on the side of Jonah’s head where there wasn’t a bruise already starting to bloom against his pale skin and Jonah grimaces.“I’m trying to be fucking genuine with you, asshole,” Jonah says and Dan snorts, starts pouring out the coffee and Jonah seems like he wants to argue but then they hear footsteps and Amy’s finally left Dan’s room and she walks quickly past the obelisk as if she thought it would suddenly grow arms and try to grab her.“I thought you didn’t want to be near that thing,” Dan says and Amy grunts.“I don’t. But you two were taking too long and I felt creepy standing around alone in Dan’s bedroom.”“Translation:” Dan says, handing her a mug after dumping two healthy spoonfuls of white sugar into it without stirring, “She looked through my dresser but got bored once she realized there wasn’t anything worth finding.”“Please,” Amy scoffs, reaches past Dan to grab the spoon he had used to scoop out the sugar and starts mixing it in, watches Jonah approach Dan’s fridge like it was nothing and look for something vaguely milk-related to add to his coffee, “Like I wanted to see your drawer full of dildos.”“Seen one, seen ‘em all,” Jonah says off-handedly, the words just spilling from his mouth like the half-and-half he was pouring into his mug but, before Dan could make any sort of comeback to what he just heard, he’s interrupted by his phone buzzing with a news alert, Amy and Jonah’s joining in soon after, the three devices vibrating like angry wasps.BREAKING NEWS, Dan reads on his screen, feels what color was left pull immediately from his face, Harold Ledford, 45, heir to the Ledford Q-Tips company, found dead in his home.He reads it once, twice, finds himself wondering why his phone was still vibrating even though he’s already acknowledged the alert before he realizes that it wasn’t the device that was shaking: it was his hands. He slowly lifts his head, glances at the other two to see their own shock, Amy’s thumb scrolling, scrolling on her own screen, up and down, pulling the page as if she was hoping it would refresh with new information and Jonah is simply standing there, uncharacteristically quiet, staring at his phone but a look in his eyes as if he wasn’t actually seeing any of it.“This is a joke, right?” Jonah finally asks. “I hit my head too hard like Dan said, I’ve been in a coma and it’s April fucking first.”“They killed him,” Dan says, ignoring him. He’s stuck in his own head, everything else around him is white noise and static and a roiling boil of anxiety is burbling in his stomach, rising up into his chest. Whoever he spoke to on the phone, whoever was threatening him… Not only did they do it, but they did it, quite possibly, hours ago if their response of ‘nothing they hadn’t already planned’ when Dan had asked them what they had done, when they’d told Dan they’d said they would do it the messy way. They had warned him but he’d poked the bear instead. Too big for your goddamn britches, Dan thinks. His head’s swirling. What if they’re blamed for this? What if, any second now, police were going to kick down Dan’s door because the people who killed Hal Ledford made it look as if the three of them were somehow responsible? Nevermind the fact that neither of them had been back to his house since they took the job that, as far as Dan knew, none of them had even cashed the checks Hal had handed them yet. There was no way they could be connected back to him, didn’t even think anybody knew they had gone there in the first place and that should reassure him but it left him feeling cold instead. Shit like that wouldn’t stop someone who was determined enough.If you wanted to frame someone, even the smallest clue could do the job as long as it was good enough.There are hands on his arms, shaking him out of his own head and he comes back into the room, blinks at Amy who was still clutching him, gaze darting to Jonah who was staring with legitimate concern and Dan tries to frown at him.“Dan, what the fuck,” Jonah says.“What?” Dan asks, looks back and forth between the two of them, asks it again when nobody answers.“You were breathing like a fat kid who had to walk three feet from the couch to the kitchen because his pizza rolls were done,” Amy says, finally lets go of Dan, holds her arms close to herself as if she were embarrassed that she had touched him. “I thought you were going to pass out.” She sighs heavily, turns her phone over and over in her hand, checks the screen again and then goes back to flipping it. “It doesn’t say how he died,” she says. “Not yet. Either they don’t know or it’s being suppressed. If it’s the latter, they could just be protecting his privacy.”“Or it’s really, really bad,” Jonah says but, the way he says it is clear that he’s not enjoying this, that their adventure was exactly that—an adventure—but now someone they talked to, they were friendly with, was dead and, what he says next confirms it: “This is too fucking real.”“The people we talked to,” Dan says suddenly after a shared silence, the epiphany hitting him like a sledgehammer to the face, “You don’t think—?” They could be targets, too. What they had seen, what they knew hadn’t mattered because the obelisk hadn’t mattered but now, apparently, with the three of them digging around, whoever was behind the curtain was scared and trying to cover their tracks. They didn’t want them pursuing this story and they had already proven they were willing to do anything to stop either them or anybody they knew from reaching the finish line. “Christopher...” He starts to say, trails off, clears his throat. “I mean, it has to be a coincidence, right? None of the others are— It was five days ago. It couldn’t have anything to do with—” He rubs his hands over his face.“If we were looking into this five days ago,” Amy says, “Then, yeah, I’d think it was connected but, well, we weren’t. His death, I’m pretty sure, can be marked down as bad luck. The others though...”“We have to call them,” Jonah says and Dan surprises himself by laughing, even though he was the one who brought them up in the first place.“And say what, exactly? ‘The guy who originally found you, who hired us, is dead and we think you might be next’? Where’s our proof? If I were one of them and you came up to me with that kind of story, I’d slam the door so hard in your face you’d have a broken nose. No,” he shakes his head, “No. We can’t— We keep our distance. We— We let them know that this stunt—” This murder, a voice says in the back of his head, “—That this stunt worked, that we’re backing off. Maybe it’ll keep them safe. Maybe—” He hates it but he almost goes right through the ceiling like a rocket when his phone starts to ring and he stares wide-eyed at it but can’t make himself move, flinches when Amy snatches it from his hand and answers for him.“What the hell have you done?” She asks, outraged, but her face falls as she listens to the voice on the other end. “Uh-huh. I see. Well… No, of course. That won’t be necessary. We’ll be right there.” Amy hangs up slowly, keeps her grip on Dan’s phone and coughs, only once. “That was a Detective Cooke,” she says. “Apparently they found Jonah’s business card at Harold’s house. Seemed to figure where there’s Jonah, there’s me and Dan. He asked if we wouldn’t mind coming down to the station to answer a couple questions. I swear to Christ, Jonah,” she says, turns to look up at him, barely concealed fury radiating off of her body, “If you didn’t already have a concussion you certainly would have one right now.”“I didn’t make these cards to have them collecting dust in my wallet, Amy,” Jonah replies. “Besides, we all know we didn’t do it. As long as we keep repeating that, we’ll be golden.”“I would really,” Dan finally says, “Like to live in whatever fantasy world you’ve built your hovel in. Where the sun is shining and the trees sing and simply telling people you’re innocent actually works.”“We don’t know anything yet,” Amy says, “So take a Xanax or two if you have one and lets get this over with.” — — — They’re almost there, the GPS in Amy’s car talking quietly to them as they drive through the surprisingly quiet streets, out of the city and through the suburbs, when Dan finally has a clear enough head that he recognizes the name of the detective that had asked them to stop by. It’s the same guy who had been at Christopher Gilliam’s house, the one who had given Dan a hard time but had also given him his card before he sent him on his way. He doesn’t mention it, keeps his mouth shut as he sits in the passenger seat, gazes out the window at the overcast night sky.The station is small, the lot nearly empty and Amy parks in a reserved spot as if daring someone to make a stink about it. The three of them march through the front doors into the harsh glare of florescent lights and shiny, beige tiles, the murmurs of uniformed officers, civilians and god knows who else going about their business. There’s a collection of people surrounding a pair of desks, two of them talking energetically into different phones, gesticulating wildly and Amy goes up to the front desk, introduces herself, the other two, and the plump officer with the receding hairline behind the counter starts to say something but then Detective Cooke is walking up to the gate that separated the waiting area from where everybody worked and he doesn’t look particularly happy to see them, even though he’s the one who wanted them to be here in the first place.He gestures for them to follow him, which they do, and he leads them through the crowds—and, more than once, Dan hears Hal’s name being thrown around and he wonders how many of the people currently working were attached to this case, if it was because a murder like this didn’t happen every day and everyone wanted a piece of the action or if it was because of who had been killed—and into an office, his name stenciled on the door. The blinds are already drawn, the lights inside a dull orange, low as if Reggie had a migraine and he couldn’t get away with sitting in absolute darkness without being asked too many questions by his co-workers. There are only two chairs on the opposite side of his desk and he indicates towards them, Jonah sitting down heavily in one and Dan and Amy sharing a few looks before she takes the other. Reggie remains standing and, by lack of options, so does Dan but he doesn’t mind; his anxiety has shifted from immobility to restlessness and fidgeting is, somehow, less noticeable when you aren’t sitting down.“Well,” Reggie says finally, uncrosses his arms from his chest and leans forward, puts both palms flat on his desk and stares directly at Dan, “I can definitely say I’m surprised to see you again so soon, Egan.” Dan feels the other two turn in their chairs to stare at him as well, but he refuses to look back, laughs in a way that he hoped sounded flippant but, with his luck, was loaded with nerves instead. He figures that he doesn’t have to tell them who this man is, how he knows him, that they’re smart enough to work that out on their own. “Like I told Miss Brookheimer on the phone: I found Mister Ryan’s business card at the scene and I knew, for the most part, you three seem to come as a package deal which is why I asked you all to come down here together.”“If you found Jonah’s card,” Amy says, “Then why the hell did you call Dan?”“We’ve talked before,” Reggie says. “I thought it might be easier to get through to him. I admit, I didn’t think you’d be so cooperative. Most journalists I know wouldn’t have.”“Well,” Jonah says, “We’re not most journalists.”“So it seems,” Reggie says and then exhales slowly. “I assume you know what happened?”“We know Hal Ledford is dead,” Dan says and the words still taste like bitter greens in his mouth.“That’s a nice way of putting it,” Reggie grumbles.“What’s the not nice way of putting it?” Amy asks.“He’s dead, let’s just leave it at that. I shouldn’t have said anything,” Reggie says, lets the words sink in, hang like sticky humidity in the air.“From what we’ve read already,” Amy says, filling in the silence, “He hasn’t been dead for very long. It’s kind of weird to already be bringing people in to talk to.” Dan knows she’s right to be apprehensive. Normally it could take days for the police to start dragging in friends, family and suspects to interrogate; the fact that the three of them had been brought in so quickly wasn’t looking very good for them to say the least. As far as Dan assumed, it meant that someone already thought they were responsible.“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Reggie says and leaves it at that, as if that was all the explanation that they needed. It wasn’t but, for once, Dan was in no mood to argue. “What were you three were doing at his house?”“Who said we were at his house?” Jonah asks. “Maybe I gave him my card at the grocery store. I hand them out like candy. I don’t remember everyone I’ve given my business card to. Have you seen it? I spent a lot of money on those.”“Look,” Reggie says, gliding easily past Jonah’s bullshit, “I’ll be upfront with you: I don’t think you did it. I’m not accusing you of anything. But I need to know exactly what you were involved in because it might help us figure out what happened. Dan gave me the basics,” (when he says that, both Amy and Jonah glare at Dan, who all but starts to whistle and rock as innocently as possible on his heels), “Harold Ledford was into some pretty strange shit, a lot of people knew that, but if you guys were spending time with him? You don’t just call up the people who dealt with that obelisk first-hand to discuss Bigfoot.” He pauses again, waits out their uneasy quiet.“How much do you need to know exactly?” Dan asks finally, can’t believe the words are leaving his own mouth.“Ideally,” Reggie says, “Everything. But I doubt I’ll be that lucky. So we’ll start with this: how likely is it that what you’re involved in has something to do with why he died?” There’s a Magic 8 Ball on Reggie’s desk and Dan reaches through the space between Amy and Jonah, picks it up, gives it a hearty shake and turns it over to stare at the small window, the piece floating in blue liquid, and then points it towards Reggie.Signs point to yes.“And what you were looking at in Christopher Gilliam’s house, the pictures of that… that thing. That’s the ‘project’ you mentioned? You were working with Ledford?” Reggie asks and Dan brings the Magic 8 Ball back towards himself, shakes it again, reads the window and turns it back to Reggie.Very doubtful.“You wanna try that one again? Because I have a difficult time believing that considering what you just told me,” Reggie says. Dan is completely aware how truly bonkers this whole thing is, speaking to this detective through a toy and the fact that the same detective is responding to it without blinking. He probably thinks there’s something wrong with him, Dan figures. He’s not entirely sure that he’d be completely off the mark in that assumption. Dan shakes the ball again, wishes the phrase ‘not my problem’ was an option, settles on what it gives him instead.Yes.“’I figured.” Reggie says. Another shake. Amy and Jonah are watching this, most likely confused and, by a quick glance at their expressions, slightly troubled. “And do you think Christopher Gilliam’s death has something to do with this, too?” Reggie asks and Dan starts to shake the ball once more but Amy twists in her chair and snatches it abruptly from his hands, holds it tight in her lap as if she thought Dan might make a grab at it.“No,” Amy answers honestly. “But that’s it. That’s all you’re getting from us. We don’t know who may or may not have been involved in the death of Harold Ledford.” That, too, was the truth. “And we don’t know why what we’re looking into could cause this. If it did.” Again: mostly the truth. The truth without actually saying much of anything at all. Amy was good at that, the same way Jonah was good at finding things. Reggie listens to her, considers her words and then surprises them by nodding.“Fine. I know when I’m being stonewalled and when it’s easier not to fight it.” He exhales slowly. “Thank you for being honest with me. You can go. But don’t disappear,” he says as Jonah and Amy stand and face the closed door, Amy turning back to place the Magic 8 Ball where it belonged on Reggie’s desk. “I’m sure I’ll want to talk to you again.”Dan is the last one to leave, letting Amy and Jonah exit ahead of him and he has his hand on the doorknob but stops when he hears Reggie ask him something.“Hm?”“Are you okay?” He reiterates. Dan glances at him and then walks over to his desk, picks up the Magic 8 Ball and shakes it, thinks about doing it again until he can feed him a lie but changes his mind.My reply is no. — — — “What the fuck was that about?” Amy asks once they’re in the car and headed back to the city.“I don’t know,” Dan says and then, a bit quieter: “I think I’m losing it.”“No kidding,” Jonah says from the back seat but he doesn’t sound as glib as he usually does and it’s unnerving. “What the hell do we do now?” He asks.“I don’t know,” Dan repeats. Nobody says anything for a few minutes until they hit a stoplight and Amy glances down at Dan’s lap.“You stole his stupid toy, by the way,” she says and Dan looks down, sees the round, dark, plastic ball clutched in his hands, resting in the crevasse of his thighs.“Shit,” he whispers. — — — They all wind up back at Dan’s apartment and he says nothing, walks directly into his bedroom, do not pass Go, do not collect two-hundred dollars, leaves the other two to their own devices, drops the Magic 8 Ball on his bedside table, loosens his tie enough that it didn’t accidentally strangle him, kicks off his shoes and then collapses on his bed.After a few minutes, there’s a knock on his door, the person inviting themselves inside, and Dan watches Amy’s figure illuminated by the hall light as she rounds the bed, sits down on the other side of the mattress.“Jonah’s already passed out on the couch. We’ll have to check on him every now and then, make sure he doesn’t die in his sleep.” A pause. “And don’t get any ideas, alright? I’m exhausted. I’d kick you to the floor if you weren’t—” She doesn’t finish her sentence. “Whatever. I’m going to bed.” — — — Four days go by.Dan spends most of his time alone, holed up in his bedroom, and he wants to check into a hotel somewhere but he’s still wary about leaving the obelisk alone in his apartment, doesn’t know what would happen if he did (it could follow him, take up residence right beside the mini-bar and the thought that this thing was like an animal that somehow imprinted on him, a stray that he fed one too many times, makes his skin crawl). He hasn’t heard anything from his landlord or his downstairs neighbors so, by this point, he figures it’s safe to assume that it hadn’t grown roots in their ceiling, hadn’t flattened them in their sleep. For a brief moment he once again starts to wonder if he’s just imagining it, if it’s not really there at all but then he remembers Amy taking a picture of it (you can't take a picture of a hallucination). He’s not entirely convinced still but if he spends too much time thinking about it, he starts to have trouble breathing.He can barely remember what he’s been doing to pass the time. It’s a lot of mostly nothing, staring dazed at his computer, flipping through the diary of Sadie’s grandmother, knowing that he would have to give it back eventually and wondering how he can do it without actually making the trip over there himself (he could ship it to her but the thought of it not being in his hands, of being lost or intercepted by a third party makes him uncomfortable). He finds Reggie’s card still tucked inside and rubs his thumb along the edges. Despite the fact that Reggie had said he would want to talk to them again, none of them had heard from him since that night and, by that point, Hal’s death had been officially ruled a suicide. Unless some cowboy cop could figure out that it most definitely wasn’t, Dan didn’t expect to know anything more than what the other news sites were reporting.Speaking of nobody calling: the people who killed Hal, the people who had been harassing them to drop what is was they were doing, had seemed to have disappeared as well. Every time Dan’s phone rang he jumped, expected it to be them but, every time, it was either spam or Jonah—Jonah, who was still trying to track down Ronald Sharman, wouldn’t stop no matter how many times Dan told him he was digging his own grave by not letting this go. (I’ve been thinking of hiring a private investigator, Jonah had said during his most recent call. Do you know anybody? Just in case? The fact that Jonah, master of finding things, was seeking outside help meant that he was getting desperate. Dan did, in fact, know someone but he feigned ignorance, said that yeah, maybe once upon a time he had a guy, but he couldn’t remember his name. Jonah had snorted, made it clear he didn’t believe a single word spilling out of Dan’s mouth but, surprisingly, he didn’t push it either. They were all getting too soft.)They had discussed getting in touch with the people involved in Hal’s research just as Jonah had suggested but, in the end, they decided against it, figured sealing themselves off from this mess entirely was for the benefit of everyone involved.This is it then, Dan finds himself thinking one morning, cross-legged on his bed, scrolling through that month’s issue of The Leviathan (looking at it made him feel something he couldn’t define and he knows it wasn’t good for him but he can’t help himself), this is my life now. Living in my bedroom, hiding from an obelisk and jumping at fucking shadows.
What the hell have I become?
 — — — He’s in the bathroom, just finishing shaving because the beard was starting to become a problem and he may feel like shit but that didn’t mean he had to look like it anymore when his phone—balanced on the edge of the sink—starts to vibrate. He rinses off his razor, rests it behind the faucet, wipes his hands off on a towel and picks it up, stares at the screen.Sarah’s mom called me.It’s from Amy and it takes Dan a second to remember who Sarah was and why her mother calling Amy was worth telling him about but then it comes crawling back: she was one of the people who saw the obelisk, who had started drawing it after a near-death experience. She was also the child of a mother who was the most resistant to them questioning her about it, who had told them that, after she let them in, she never wanted to hear from any of them again.Another text pops up: Jonah and I are at the diner. Get your ass over here.Another: NOW. — — — “If the kid is dead,” Dan says, sitting down beside Jonah, picking up the water that he hadn’t started drinking yet, the ice already half-melted, and takes a long drink, “I don’t want to know.”“The kid isn’t dead,” Amy assures him, twists her mug on the table, watches as Jonah tries to get his water back but Dan smacks his hand away. “Her mother called me, out of the blue, says that she heard about Hal. I told her, you know, they say it was suicide. He was troubled. It happens.” She shrugs with open hands. “I say that she shouldn’t worry, we definitely won’t bother her again but then she says ‘that’s fine, because we’re leaving anyway’.” She pauses and Dan blinks at her. At some point during that, Jonah had managed to grab at his glass and he drains the rest of it, is chewing on the straw.“Leaving,” Dan says and Amy nods.“I ask her why and she tells me that the same day we went to talk to her, that evening, she gets a call from what looks to be Sarah’s school but, when she answers, there’s a strange voice on the other end that warns her not to stay involved with us, to forget about the obelisk. ‘We know where you live’, that sort of bullshit.” If they had called the Bentons, that meant that they had most likely done the same to the others, only they actually listened. Mrs Benton was taking a big risk in calling Amy and it almost seemed like it was because there was something else she wanted to say but didn’t know exactly how to say it (and definitely didn’t want to do it over the phone). “Jonah thinks we should go down there, talk face-to-face, catch them before they blow out of town.”“Jonah’s right,” Dan says, almost laughs at the astonished look that flutters across Amy’s face, at the smugness that settles onto Jonah’s. He opens his mouth to explain himself but the waitress chooses that exact moment to show, to ask him if he wanted anything and he thinks about telling her to get lost but orders a coffee instead. “Besides, I need to give Sadie the diary back. We’ll be in the area. And...” He trails off, lifts a shoulder.“And what?” Amy asks.“And I should probably give this back, too,” he says, reaches into his bag, brings out the Magic 8 Ball.“Please don’t tell me you’ve been carrying that around everywhere,” Amy groans, covers her face with her hands but drops them when Dan says:“I haven’t left my apartment in almost five days so, no, I haven’t. I just figured while I’m actually outside, may as well run a few errands, right? Now, at least, I’ve got a better excuse for going— What?” He interrupts himself, stops his train of thought, looks back and forth between Amy and Jonah, tries to judge their expressions, can’t figure them out but then, finally, just before Jonah—of all people—speaks, he realizes: it’s apprehension. They’re bothered. He doesn’t like it. He never has, especially coming from them.“Dude,” Jonah says, “Seriously?”“Where could I have gone exactly? It’s not like I have a 9-to-5 anymore.”“Yeah, but—”“’But’ nothing,” Dan says, cutting him off. “Are we going, or what?”“Busy schedule of being depressed and doing nothing?” Amy asks and he appreciates it, appreciates her trying to not make a big deal out of how he’s been treating himself recently, trying to re-bury her emotions, like the bones of a deceased family pet that had been uncovered by a heavy rain. — — — The trunk of a forest green station wagon parked in the driveway is wide open when they pull up in front of the Bentons’ house, cardboard boxes stuffed and stacked, unlabeled, as if they couldn’t wait for a real moving van to deal with this, they were in a hurry and Dan wonders where they found to go so quickly—they didn’t seem like the type of family to have a second home somewhere, a lakehouse, and he figures it must be a relative, probably out-of-state but not far enough away that they couldn’t drive there.(They had stopped at Sadie’s house first and Dan hadn’t even tried to ring the doorbell, simply dropped the diary in the mailbox with a post-it attached that said thanks and nothing else, assumes that the mailman wasn’t stupid enough to think that it was put there for him.)Sarah’s mother walks out the front door, a plastic laundry basket filled with stuffed animals balanced in her arms but she stops on the top step, stares at them as they hover by Amy’s car. Nobody says anything for what feels like hours until, finally, from behind the woman, a child’s voice asks, loudly:“Who are those people?” Dan guesses that’s Sarah and her mother turns, looks down at the little girl, says something to her and Sarah disappears back into the house, her mother continuing her walk to the car and Dan and the other two meet her there.“Who’d you tell her we were?” Jonah asks. She shields her eyes, gazes up at him after shoving the laundry basket into the trunk.“What are you doing here?” She returns his question with one of her own but doesn’t let them answer. “We’re leaving.” She says it as if she thinks they’re here to stop her, as if they’re going to beg her not to go.“We know,” Amy says. “We just wanted to ask—”“The people who called you,” Dan says. “What did they say? What exactly.”“I told her,” she says, gestures to Amy. “That was it. That was enough.” A shaky exhale. “I have a kid. A creep telling me to back off, saying that he knows where I live? I can’t just brush that off. Whatever you’re involved in, whatever this is… I shouldn’t have called. I’m sorry.” She’s shutting down, end of conversation and, like Reggie had said: he’s being stonewalled, it’s easier not to fight it.They’re back in the car, the engine started, when a voice shouts wait, and they simultaneously turn to see Sarah’s mother coming their way, a box in her arms. Jonah rolls down the passenger side window and she drops the box, leans forward to be able to speak to them.“I want you to take this,” she says, kicks the box. “They’re Sarah’s drawings.”“Oh,” Amy says, “We don’t—”“I don’t want them,” Sarah’s mother says and Dan wants to ask: well, what the hell makes you think we do, but he keeps his mouth shut.“Sure,” Amy says. “Okay. Thanks.” Jonah opens his door. She lifts the box, plops it down on his knees and, without another word, walks away. — — — Amy asks Dan if he wants them to come in with him once they get to the police station and he hesitates, can’t tell if she’s teasing him or not and settles on giving her the finger as he goes towards the glass front doors, hears her chuckle at it, figures he made the right choice.The building looks different during the day, somehow more dreary, the outside brick walls faded, the lack of natural light inside making it feel like it’s lost, stuck in some indeterminate time, as if, maybe, time didn’t even exist. There’s a bearded man dressed in black—his clothes too big for his already enormous frame—sitting on the slim bench in the waiting area and Dan walks past him, tries to ignore the feeling of being watched, and approaches the front desk.“This is going to sound weird but I accidentally took this—” he says, reaches into his bag and, out of the corner of his eye, he can see the woman in uniform behind the counter tense, but it dissipates when all he pulls out is a toy, “—From a detective’s desk a few nights ago and, uh, well. I guess I’m finally returning it.” The police officer stares him down, one eyebrow lifts and she frowns.“Which detective?”“Reg— Detective Cooke,” he says, starts to address him by his first name but quickly corrects himself.“You accidentally took it?” She queries, asks it as if she thinks he had stolen it on purpose and was trying to give it back without getting into any sort of real trouble.“You,” a voice says emphatically, loud enough that Dan knows it wasn’t just a piece of a conversation that rose above the rest of the normal commotion of a busy station, and both he and the police officer he had been speaking to look over to see Reggie standing behind the waist-high swinging door into the rest of the building, pointing a finger directly at Dan. Dan directs a finger of his own at his chest. “Yes, you.” Reggie flips his hand, uses the finger he had been pointing with to gesture for Dan to come closer.“I brought your thing back,” Dan says once he’s on the other side of the door, offers it to him and Reggie regards it for a second and then reaches out to take it.“Thanks. It’s a family heirloom. I was devastated when I saw it was missing.” Dan knows sarcasm, knows someone being dismissive, when he hears it and he doesn’t directly respond to it, instead asks:“What’s up?”“’What’s up’ is this,” Reggie says, indicates to the right side of his face, the one that had been mostly turned away from Dan and he finally notices the bruising, the purples and greens that mottled his jaw, by his eye, and reached up into his hairline, as if someone had slammed the side of his head onto something very hard. “I was walking to my apartment from where I parked my car last night when two guys come up behind me. One of them grabs me by the neck, the other tells me very quietly that I should forget anything I may have heard about the obelisk and to leave you guys alone.”“Oh,” Dan says after a lengthy pause, his head feeling like it’s been packed with a bee hive. Reggie says something but Dan can’t hear him. “Hmm?” His mouth is dry and his heart seems to have grown legs and claws, pulled itself up into his throat. He coughs. “It wasn’t me.”“I know,” Reggie says, puts a hand on Dan’s elbow and starts to lead him back towards his office and Dan knows he should probably tell him that he didn’t come here alone, that the other two are out there waiting for him but maybe they’re all better off just leaving this discussion between the two of them for now. “I saw them as they was running away.”“What’d they look like?” Dan asks once the door is closed behind him.“Why?”“Just curious,” Dan says, tries to make it sound as nonchalant as possible, simply a guy trying to make conversation and not standing out in the middle of a lake with a giant fishing pole. Reggie stares at him for an almost excruciating amount of time before saying:“The one who manhandled me was massive, other had platinum blonde hair, ran stiffly, like there was something wrong with his leg. That’s pretty much all I got. Didn’t seem like they were too concerned with being seen. Sound familiar?” Reggie asks, goes to stand behind his desk, crosses his arms when Dan shakes his head. “You maybe want to give me some idea of what the hell is going on? Why I’ve got somebody warning me away from you guys?”“I don’t really know what to tell you,” Dan shrugs with his hands. Amy would kill him for spilling everything but Reggie hasn’t given them any reason not to trust him and besides: they really didn’t know much of anything themselves. “We started looking into the obelisk again. You know that. Somebody or multiple somebody’s found out and I guess they weren’t happy.” He shrugs again. That’s all folks. “I don’t know why they waited so long to— We stopped, just like they wanted. None of us have touched it in days.”(That might be true or it might not. There was Jonah and his incessant search for Ronald and who the hell knew what Amy had been up to recently. Dan certainly hadn’t been doing any research but, then again, he was living with the damn thing.)“’Just like they wanted’,” Reggie repeats. Dan curses under his breath. “So they contacted you, too? Did they hurt you? You or your friends?” Other than Harold he means.“I appreciate the concern but no,” Dan says, tries to keep his tone light but it’s not working. “It was strictly phone calls.”“What’d they say?”“I don’t remember,” Dan lies. Reggie glares at him. “I don’t— They said to drop it. To stop what we were doing or else.”“Or else what?”“I don’t know,” Dan says, hopes it sounds convincing. “We never found out because we did like they said: we dropped it.” He sighs, rubs fingers over his face and then leans his hands on the back of one of the chairs; it slides a few inches and he follows it.“And they haven’t gotten in touch with you since? Haven’t tried anything?” Dan can sense there’s something else, something he really wants to know and Dan isn’t sure why he isn’t just coming out with it. Just ask, he thinks, just ask if Hal Ledford’s death is our fault, is my fault. He knows. Of course he knows. How could he not?“No.”“Do you have your recent calls still saved?” Reggie asks and Dan can’t recall off the top of his head, knows that he used to be fairly obsessive about cleaning the list out every night because he talked to some pretty damn important people who didn’t need their personal numbers falling into the wrong hands. These days, it didn’t really seem to matter. He scrolls through the list, goes back to the times when they had gotten in touch with him. Reggie holds out his hand but Dan refuses to give the device to him.“I can write the number down,” he says, waits, and, eventually, Reggie grabs a pen from a cracked mug, flips over a coffee-stained piece of paper to the blank back, slides it across the desk and Dan comes around the other side of the chair, leans over and scribbles it in his tight handwriting, watches Reggie turn it towards himself.“It’s just the one?”“Looks like it,” Dan says. Reggie asks him if they called Amy and Jonah too but Dan shakes his head. If they had, he was sure they would have mentioned it. He suddenly remembers, apropos of nothing, Jonah’s place being broken into, Jonah hiding in his bathroom, concussing himself on the sink, thinks about telling Reggie about it but changes his mind, isn’t sure that it has anything to do with the people on the phone (it probably did, it’s stupid of him to consider otherwise even though the voice had sounded confused when Dan had brought it up).“You can’t be the only people doing research into this thing but they seem to be targeting you specifically,” Reggie says. “Any idea why?” Might have to do with the obelisk growing out of my kitchen floor, Dan thinks but, outwardly, he tries to make his expression as unreadable as he can possibly manage. “Have you tried calling them back?”“No,” Dan says. Had he, though? He wasn’t sure. Everything has been such a blur recently, days melting into one another. It was getting easier and easier to completely lose track of time. “I don’t think so,” he admits.“No time like the present,” Reggie says, glances at the number and then leans over to pick up the standard, black office phone on his desk instead of either of their cells but, when his finger is hovering over the final digit on the number pad, Dan shouts wait loud enough and suddenly enough that Reggie actually startles and he freezes, stares up at Dan, doing exactly as he said.“You’re not going to put on speaker?” Dan asks and it’s clear to the both of them that that wasn’t anywhere near what he actually had wanted to say but Reggie does him the favor of letting it go, dials the last number and holds down on the button so the voice of whomever they talk to will fill the room, rests the receiver back in it’s cradle. There’s two seconds of silence and then:We’re sorry, the number you are trying to reach is no longer in service. If you would like to— Reggie doesn’t let the soothing robotic voice finish, hangs up on her. He tries two more times, double-checking, making sure that he hadn’t dialed wrong somehow but, both times, they get the same message. Disconnected.“Well,” Dan says, “That was anticlimactic.” A pause. “Look, I just came here to give you that thing back so I think I’d really like to—” He gestures over his shoulder with this thumb to the door, starts backing away towards it, expects Reggie to call him out, to stop him, but he doesn’t, doesn’t say anything until Dan’s back is turned, his hand on the doorknob, just like last time.“You know I won’t be dropping this,” he says and Dan stares at his reflection in the glass. “Not really in the job description to let a couple of thugs tell me what to do.” That’s all, as if he’s waiting for Dan to acknowledge that he’d heard him.“Okay. Good to know.”“If they contact you again,” Reggie tells him, “If anything happens because I— You call me. Let Amy and Jonah know, too.”“You know we don’t live in town, right?” Dan asks. “You don’t really—”“I know. Do it anyway. No matter what I’m getting myself into, what you’ve gotten yourselves into, I think maybe it’d be good for you to have a friend with a badge, don’t you?” If you’re not dead by tomorrow, Dan thinks but, instead, simply says:“Sure.” And then he leaves. — — — “Jesus,” Amy says once Dan finally makes it back to the car. She’s got the window rolled down, arm stretched along the empty space and a pair of sunglasses she must have had in her purse perched on her nose to combat the quickly moving sun. “What the hell happened? Officer Friendly offer you a BJ in a supply closet after you gave him his toy back?”“Yeah,” Dan says, gets into the back seat, pushes Sarah’s box of drawings that Jonah had shoved back there while he was gone off to the side. “And then after that, he showed me the bruises on his face and told me about the guys who assaulted him and told him to leave us alone and stop looking into anything having to do with the obelisk.” This whole time, Amy had been gazing at him in the rearview mirror but, after he says that, both her and Jonah turn near simultaneously in their seats to stare him down.“You’re kidding,” Amy says, although it’s clear she knows that he’s not.“Jonah,” Dan says, ignores her for the moment, “Those guys who broke into your place, you didn’t get a good look at them did you? How many there were, anything helpful at all?”“No,” Jonah says emphatically but then frowns, scrunches up his face for a second as he think. “I mean, I’m not sure. I don’t know. It sounded like there were about ten of them but I only heard two voices.”“So it could have been, I don’t know, a really big fucking guy making a ton of noise?”“It could have been that, yeah,” Jonah says. “I still didn’t see either of them.”“Officer Friendly. Detective What’s-His-Face, whatever,” Amy says with a hand wave and Dan wonders in passing how she managed to be so damn good at her job if she can’t remember the name of the detective she had met only a few days ago. “He saw the guys who knocked him around?”“Parts of them. Platinum blonde, walked funny and a guy the size of a—” He cuts himself short, feels his eyes widen, the hair prickle on the back of his neck.
There’s a bearded man dressed in black, his clothes too big for his already enormous frame, sitting on the slim bench in the waiting area.
He all but kicks open the door, stumbles out of the car, disregards Amy’s voice as she calls after him, asking him what the fuck his problem is and bursts back into the police station, screeches to a halt in the wide waiting area when he sees that he and the same woman at the front desk are the only ones there. He jogs over to her, uses the desk to stop his momentum and she stares down at him strangely, bewildered.“Sir…?” She starts to say.“The man,” Dan says. “The big guy who was sitting right there when I came in.” He points to the benches. “Where’d he go?”“I don’t know,” she tells him. “Why?”“Did he say why he was here? What he wanted?” He asks and she looks around, unsure, but then seems to decide something, lifts a single shoulder. Maybe she knows who he is or maybe she just doesn’t perceive Dan as a threat, figures if he wants to go after a brick shithouse like that, it’d be his own funeral and she’d try to remember to send a bouquet of flowers to his wake.“Showed up about a thirty minutes before you did, said he wasn’t feeling well and needed to rest somewhere cool for a little while. I’m not supposed to just let someone— He didn’t seem like he’d cause any problems so I let him wait. He left while you were talking to Detective Cooke.”“You didn’t get a name, anything at all?”“No,” she says. “Did he do something to you?”“Not to me,” Dan says. “I don’t think so. Nevermind. Thanks.” He’s halfway to going back outside when he wonders, briefly, if he should tell Reggie that the guy who bruised his face may have been sitting just a few feet away but, when he had come over to get Dan to follow him into the rest of the station, he hadn’t said anything, hadn’t made any indication that he might recognize him (and he wasn’t exactly difficult to miss) so he lets it go, tells himself that it really was just some out-of-shape guy who needed a minute to rest. Then again… “Neither of you saw him leave?” He questions Amy and Jonah when he comes back to them. “Seriously?”“Jonah was going through the box, I was on my phone,” Amy says. “We didn’t really have a reason to be watching the door. You seriously think that was the same guy, though? I mean, he’s not exactly inconspicuous. His friend doesn’t sound like he is either, just based on what the detective got, but still. It’d be like needing one of us to stakeout a well-lit building and deciding to use Jonah instead of you.”“I’m not saying it makes sense,” Dan says. “I’m just saying that too much weird shit happens around us that I’m not discounting it is all.” There’s a shared silence and Dan silently speculates how much longer they could get away with sitting here before someone tells them to get lost, also thinks about telling Amy and Jonah about calling the number that had called him so many times, about how it’s no longer in service but realizes that it didn’t matter. He does tell them about what Reggie had said before he left, how he wouldn’t be letting it go and if something happened to them, if they were harassed again, they should call him.“Weird,” Amy comments when he finishes, “But he’s got a point. It’s always good to have a badge on your side and I guess there could be worse people trying to stick their nose in this.”“That’s bullshit,” Jonah says and the other two give him a look. “I mean about something happening to us because he can’t let it go. It’s not our fault. Why the hell would they keep coming after us?”“I’m not sure. The obelisk in my living room? The fact that you’re still looking for Ronald?” Dan asks and Jonah bristles.“I’m not—”“Don’t even try,” Dan says. “You’re a shitty liar. And for Christ’s sake you asked me for help two days ago.”“I didn’t ‘ask for your help’, Dan. I just asked—”“The point is,” Dan says, interrupts him, “Is that they have at least two solid reasons not to leave us alone and, besides, I wouldn’t put it past these people to fuck with us because someone else is messing in their business.”“Still bullshit,” Jonah says.“For once,” Amy says, finally starting the engine, “I one-hundred percent agree.” — — — Dan had, with some great effort, managed to move his television from where it had been since he moved permanently into his bedroom, rearranged his furniture to put his dresser across from his bed, kept it on nearly twenty-four/seven but with the volume low so he could hear anything that might be happening in the rest of his apartment, outside his single-room isolation.It was the day after he had his conversation with Reggie, inching close to nine in the evening and he had the news on, the grey-haired man rambling about current politics, something he used to obsess over, that used to be his entire life but now held no interest to him whatsoever, names popping up on screen that he didn’t know, analysts he’d never seen before stoically explaining a bill, a scandal that rolled on by recently without his notice. The vice president’s daughter had said the wrong thing, had leaked something she shouldn’t have and Dan’s ears perk up at the words ‘Area 51’ but anything else that’s said is pushed to the wayside when he hears someone knocking on his door.Jonah is the only one Dan knows now that would show up unannounced but he was sequestered away at the Those That Know offices all day (he knew that because Jonah kept texting him with updates, had specifically told him he wasn’t leaving until he found something new and Dan was sure that would never happen, had replied with well, I guess you live there now, huh?). Amy didn’t just appear like that, always texted first and she showed less than zero interest in being at his place with the obelisk still there and he didn’t blame her. If she really wanted to see him in person, they’d meet at the diner.The person knocks three more times and then stops. Dan waits, hopes that it’s just an in-person wrong number and that they’d realized their mistake and wandered off but it starts up again. It’s clear that whoever is there isn’t going away and Dan knows he should ignore it, should stay where he is, hidden away in his bedroom, but he’s got a lot of dead cats killed by curiosity stuffed in his closet. What’s one more?He keeps his footsteps as quiet as he can manage, slides them along the polished wood floors, stops in front of his door and takes in a breath, jumps when the man on the other side knocks again.“Daniel,” he says, sing-song, uses his full name even though nobody—not even his own mother—called him that anymore. Dan leans forward carefully to look through the peephole and he feels his body go ice cold. His obviously dyed, almost stark-white hair is slicked back, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his jaw working as he chews gum, which he slides between his front teeth as he looks, not at the door, but down the hall. He reaches up to pull at it, stretches it out until just before it breaks and then, stuck to the tip of his thumb, puts it back into his mouth. “I know you’re in there, Daniel.” He turns to the door, waves his hand in front of the peephole. “I saw the light change.” He has an accent but Dan hasn’t spent nearly enough (or, really, any) time in the South to pinpoint which specific state it comes from exactly. “I’ll get in there one way or another but I’d prefer if you’d just invite me in.” A pause. “I’m all by my lonesome, I swear.”Dan steps away from the door, looks behind him at the window, at the fire escape. It would take five minutes, maybe less, to pack up a few things and make a run for it but where would he go? If they know where he lives, they know where Amy does, too, and they, presumably, had already been to see Jonah. He could go to the magazine offices but he has to assume that, for right now, there’s nowhere he could hide that is familiar to him that they wouldn’t be able to find and the thought of that makes him more than a little uneasy. His other option is to do nothing but the man had already said that he was simply being polite by waiting and Dan had no reason to disbelieve him when he implied that he could come in whenever he wanted. So, really, in the end, neither of those options were really options at all.Besides, a voice in his head says, don’t you want to know why he’s here? Talk to him. What’s the worst that could happen?“They could kill me,” he responds to himself. They’ve already shown they’re willing to. Shit. Goddammit. “What do want,” he asks when he opens the door. The man doesn’t answer, a look of what appears to be genuine shock morphing onto his face but it seems more like he’s surprised to see that the thing he’s currently looking at is there at all and not at what that thing is, as if he’s already seen this (or something like it) before.“Holy shit,” he says, starts walking forward, his right side slightly more graceless than his left when he moves, pushes past Dan and stops just a couple feet in front of the obelisk, hands on his hips and then turns back to face him, “I don’t mean to alarm you, Daniel, but it looks as if you’ve got a rock growin’ out of your floor.” Dan can feel the fake astonished reply bubbling up underneath the constant loop of screaming going on inside him despite attempting to make himself seem as unaffected by this as possible but he can’t make it come out, finds himself asking again:“What do you want?” The man heaves out a sigh.“Calling wasn’t cutting it so I’ve come to reprimand you in person as per the request of those I work for but this,” he gestures at the obelisk, “Changes some things.” Dan had, for some time, operated under the belief that they had no idea the obelisk was here in his apartment but, at some point had realized how stupid it was to believe that, figured that—since these people seemed to know a hell of a lot more than he originally thought—they probably knew about this, too. He knows now that he’d been right the first time: they had no idea. They certainly did now though, and any ace up his sleeve this might have provided was completely gone. He decides to latch on to a different word in what had been just said.“Reprimand me? For what?”“’For what’,” the man repeats, laughs. “Okay.” He pulls at his orange gum again. The way he responds makes it seem like he thinks Dan knows exactly what he’s talking about and is simply playing dumb. He isn’t, but he plays along.“Why keep slapping us on the wrists like this if you want us to stop so badly? Harold Ledford talks to us once and you—”“Getting you three involved,” the man says, “Was kind of...” He holds an invisible hammer in one hand, brings it down on a closed fists, makes a tch sort of noise out the side of his mouth. “Nail in the coffin for him.” Dan must have made a face at that because the man grins briefly at him but the expression doesn’t reach his eyes. “Truth be told, the people I work for didn’t care one bit about ol’ Ledford until you guys started hanging around him. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, am I right, Daniel? You and the obelisk. Ham and cheese.” It’s unsettling how he keeps using his full name, keeps saying it as if he has to remind himself who he’s talking to or if he’s just letting Dan know that he hasn’t forgotten who he is. “Alright,” he says after a lengthy pause, claps his hand down on Dan’s back as if he had just been a neighbor who decided to stop by for a chat, to catch up. “I won’t say ‘I’ll see you around’ because if you ever see this mug again that would mean I’ve come to kill you so let’s hope this is the last time I get to see your handsome face.”He moves over to the obelisk, takes out his gum and sticks it to the dark surface.“I’m sure you’ve got a million questions but I’ve got a schedule to keep and some questions of my own for some other people now that I know about your little rock problem so...” He pulls out a phone, snaps a photo of the obelisk and then walks backwards, puts his hands together and bows slightly as he steps out of the still-open door, disappearing down the hallway. Dan stands in the doorway, watches him leave, turn a corner and, instead of taking the stairs, Dan can hear the ding as he stands and waits for the elevator.Dan closes the door, locks it even though he’s relatively sure that he won’t be coming back and then leans against it, tries to take a moment to catch his breath before he figures out what to do next. He should have stopped him, taken the phone, done something but he had no idea if he had been lying about being alone, if he had a weapon on him and, even without a picture, he had the image of it stored away in his brain, he knew and the only way to stop that from getting out would be to stop him. The worst part of that is knowing he could do it if he really had to, flashes back to the man he had sent flying through the windshield when he and Jonah had been kidnapped, to when he had stabbed Eric Nagel in the eye with a pen. He could, but he hadn’t and now it didn’t really matter, he was already gone. He figured, he guessed, that part of him knew that someone outside of his incredibly small inner circle would find out eventually. What would happen now? Was his life on a timer, could he pull out a stopwatch and count down to how much longer he had left to live? Would they put him and only him six feet under or would the other two join him?Rubbing hands over his face, he packs that thought away. He’d said he had a schedule. Was Dan just stop number one or three? He’d like to think that if this guy had shown up to hassle Jonah or Amy that they would have called to warn him Unless they’re already dead.He left his phone in his room and curses, can’t believe how much of an amateur he had been in handling this entire situation, should have had it on him, recording the entire conversation, but now the only proof that it had happened was in his head and still stuck to the obelisk back out in his living room. It’s sitting right where he left it on his beside table but there are only two messages waiting for him when he grabs the device: a news alert about a house he recognizes having gone up in flames (he stares and stares at the raging inferno, tries to pick out the shape of it until he realizes: that’s the Benton’s house) and a short single text from Jonah:
I think I found him.
 — — — Dan had texted Amy first under the guise of asking her if Jonah had sent her the same thing (for a guy who had his own website, who knew how to find almost anything or anyone, Jonah was amazingly inept when it came to using his phone for anything and still hadn’t figured out how to send a single message to more than one person at a time instead of firing off multiple, identical ones to different people—unless it was, for some reason, on purpose) when, really, he was making sure that she was still alive.He didn’t, comes the reply. By ‘him’ I’m assuming he means Ronald. Dan responds with the affirmative. Maybe he figured you’d do exactly what you’re doing now, Amy sends to him next, as if she could tell that he had been wondering why Jonah would tell him and not her. Or he knows I think this is even more of a waste of time than you do and knew I’d yell at him for it. Actually, hold that thought.Dan doesn’t hear from anybody for almost five minutes and, when his phone finally beeps at him again, it’s Jonah.
You told her????
Was I not supposed to? Dan asks back. Whoops.You don’t mean that. And then: Fire. Even though Dan had only just read about it, it takes him a moment to figure out what Jonah was trying to say. Since Dan had known him, Jonah communicated through the phone in quick, short bursts, the fewer words the better as long as he could still get his point across and Dan doesn’t blame him; he’s seen first-hand what long sentences from Jonah looked like, had to edit his part of their article, and just trying to decipher every spelling error (many so incomprehensible that even the word processor couldn’t take a wild guess at what he meant to say) gave him a headache.I know. I saw the news alert.
Dead?
I only know what I read. Dan sincerely hoped not. Amy had their number stored away somewhere and he considers asking her to call them but figures that maybe every party involved was better off if they didn’t. If they were dead, they’d find out soon enough and if they weren’t, if they had managed to get out before the fire, then it was safer if the people who started it didn’t have any excuse to go after them. There was nothing else to say about that so he brings the conversation back around to where it started. You really found Ronald. Seriously?
I did. Can’t tell you like this. Come here.
I’m not you’re pet, Jonah, Dan replies. But I’ll be right there.The last thing Jonah says is: Good boy. — — — Amy gets back to Dan shortly after he finishes with Jonah, tells him that yes, she did yell at him and then asks if he’s going down to the TTK offices and if he’d like a ride. He waits for her on the curb, the clouds dark and heavy, soaked with a rain that won’t start and, before she pulls back out into traffic, Amy does a double-take when she glances at Dan and he doesn’t miss it.“Have you seen a ghost recently?” She asks. “Because you look like you have.”“Where’ve you been tonight?”“Excuse me?” Amy snorts, doesn’t wave at the person who lets her back onto the street. “I was on None of Your Business Avenue doing Mind Your Own Beeswax. How about you?”“You know what… just… Nevermind.”“Alright.” She says, shouts at someone in the right-hand lane who realizes they’re in the wrong place, darts out in front of her, the exchange seemingly already forgotten. — — — The offices of their local conspiracy magazine that housed the three writers who had helped them unlock the last few pieces of what was hiding in Nuvarin Pharmaceuticals hadn’t changed much since the last time either Dan or Amy had been there; the computers were still mostly ancient save for a couple newer ones, the desks mostly bare, the coffee machine gurgling, the printer sagging the table it sat on, the fish still alive and swimming. The cork board was full of clippings, photos, new stories and old ones not yet solved. The only thing that surprised Dan was that Jonah appeared to be completely alone. He expected to see the rag-tag group’s possibly fearless leader, Simon, at the very least but the place was empty save for their BFG at a desk littered with empty cups and paper right in the middle of the room.“There you are,” Jonah says, stands up, addresses them as if it had been hours since he told them to get here.“Where is everyone?” Amy asks, gestures to the room and Jonah follows her hand, looks around.“Simon and Audra are away. Working on some story, lizard people maybe? Who knows. I didn’t ask. Issy is...” He points upwards.“Dead?” Dan asks.“Roof,” Jonah replies. “Talking to someone called ‘Nate’.”“On the roof,” Amy clarifies.“He wanted privacy and I wasn’t going to vacate the premises just so he could take a fucking phone call,” Jonah says, his voice edged with frustration as if this was a concluded argument he was still pissed off about having, rising as if he thought Issy (who, Dan realizes, he still had never met in person, only knew by name) could hear him. “Forget it.” He pushes around the paper on the desk, picks up a printed out copy of an old photo that Dan and Amy had seen far too many times before: Eric, Theodore, Ronald and Caitlin (as well as a few other scattered employees) standing in front of a still-as-of-yet burned down Nuvarin. Ronald’s face had been circled with red sharpie. “I found him.”“Congratulations,” Amy says, points at the photo he’s holding up, “There he is.” Jonah scowls at that and she and Dan approach him finally, stand on the other side of the desk, but before Jonah can explain himself she cuts him off, continues talking: “Ronald Sharman has been missing for a ridiculous number of years and not a single person has been able to locate him and yet you, amateur Casey Smith and even more amateur Encyclopedia Brown, have managed to succeed where so many professionals have failed.”There’s a very brief moment where Dan can see that Jonah is seriously considering looking the former name up just so he knows what the hell she’s talking about but he changes his mind. “How about fuck you and also yes.”“Fine,” Amy says, opens her arms at him, “Dazzle us.”“Bam,” Jonah says, turns what must be a borrowed laptop around to face the two of them and there, on the screen, is a wanted poster from a town an hour and a half out of the city with a sketch of a man who looked a hell of a lot like Ronald Sharman. Dan opens his mouth to say something but nothing comes out and Amy herself seems momentarily struck speechless. “I told you.”“This hardly counts as ‘finding him’,” Amy says after twenty seconds of silence had gone by and Jonah does not look pleased. “This poster is a year old. At most, it tells us that he’s still alive which, I guess, is something. But look,” she points at the page, “Assault and car theft. He could be anywhere by now.”“Untwist your panties, Amy,” Jonah says and there’s a flash in her eyes that let’s him know he was going to seriously regret saying that to her, “That’s not all I have. I figured after finding this that, if this is only a year old, he hasn’t strayed too far from home. This entire time he’s been right under our noses.”“And nobody could find him.” Amy says.“Look at who his friends were,” Dan says, can’t believe he’s standing up for Jonah, “Eric was probably happy to have him out of the picture, Theodore was a monster. His wife barely knew anything.”“I get it,” Amy concedes. “If someone really doesn’t want to be found...” If someone doesn’t want to be found, all you can rely on is either them (or the person who took them) making a stupid mistake: eating at a favorite restaurant, calling an old friend or, in Ronald’s case, stealing someone’s car and beating them up to do so.“So from there, assuming he’s been in the area all these years… He’s got no family around and he’d never be able to buy a house or rent an apartment with his real name if he wants to stay hidden. False identity? No thanks. So what’s left?”“Motels,” Dan and Amy say at the same time.“And not chains, either. Even the cheapest chain motels are still kind of nice, still require ID of some kind, credit cards. But not the real rundown, family-owned, shitty places. They don’t give a fuck as long as you can pay. So I—”“You know an awful lot about motels,” Dan says, interrupting him. “Spend a lot of time in them, do you?”“Yeah,” Jonah says, “Every month I meet your mom in one of them. We always sign in as Kim and Kanye and I take her to Bone Town for a weekend.”“Well, that’s a relief,” Dan says and Jonah looks puzzled. “See, for a second I believed you but then you used the words ‘Bone Town’ and realized you’ve never had sex before in your entire life.”“Dan, you have no idea how many people—”“'People’?”“For the love of Christ!” Amy interrupts. “Can we please focus on something other than the farm animals Jonah has copulated with? I don’t want to think about either of you having sex with anything. Ronald. Motels. Continue.”“Okay. So, here’s the state border,” Jonah says, pulls out a real paper map, not a digital one, and points to a thick black line. There are markings all over it in various colored pens, and he smooths it out over the desk.“Have you been sleeping?” Dan asks and Jonah glances up at him.“Eh,” Jonah says, which really isn’t much of an answer, pulls their attention back to what’s spread out in front of them. “I looked up all the— Nevermind. Not important. These are the really gross, beat-up motels around where that poster was issued.” There are six red ‘X’ markings scattered on the paper, the names written in thick marker, scribbled in Jonah’s illegible handwriting.“So he’s in one of those,” Amy says. “He’s been in one of those motels, living out of it for years. This is, uh, surprisingly decent work, Miss Smith,” she tells him, sounds like it’s a struggle just to spit those words out. “But it’s all speculation.”“It’ll take a day. One day to check them all out. Less if we split up. Which we won’t because I’m not letting one of you truffle pigs find him before I do. If we don’t find him then you can hang it over my head for the rest of our lives but if we do…”“We what,” Amy asks, “Drag him kicking and screaming back home?”“Or we just talk to him. I definitely have a thousand and one questions I’d like some answers to,” Dan says but then hesitates, closes his eyes and inhales, exhales a few times. He was getting caught up, caught up in the discovery, the rush of things being like they used to, in the spectacle of what Jonah was laying out in front of him that he momentarily forgot why, after he started getting those phone calls, he kept telling Jonah not to keep going with this in the first place. The man who showed up at his apartment less than an hour before was the final warning, the countdown from Mom but—instead of getting grounded if you didn’t do what she said when she got to ‘one’—you were killed. He came to Dan first, which meant that he either saw him as the head of this three person snake and figured he’d get the message across to the others or there was a more subtle meaning to it: whatever happens next is your fault. Hal’s death was for all of them but the consequences of them still not letting it go? They were all going to be on Dan. It’s like fucking Nuvarin all over again. “No. No, no, no. Stop. We’re not doing this.” Even Amy, who had been so wholeheartedly against this only moments before, is looking at him with something akin to surprise. “Look, you’re never going to hear me say this again, Jonah, so you better listen carefully: this is good work. But we can’t do anything with it. This,” he says, indicates to the scattered papers, to the map, the wanted poster on his laptop, “Is as far as we go.”“Dan—” Jonah starts but he doesn’t let him keep going.“Hal Ledford died,” Dan says. “Your place was broken into, Detective Cooke was assaulted, the Benton’s house was set on fire, I was—” He stops himself, clears his throat but they had both heard it.“You were what?” Amy asks. “Does it have to do with that look you had on your face when I came to pick you up earlier?”“It doesn’t matter,” Dan says dismissively, waves a hand in her direction and she leans away from it, arms crossed, “What matters is that right now, in this point in time, there is no good outcome for anybody by us pursuing this. He hasn’t gone anywhere for years. Until we know for sure that you doing this isn’t responsible for them still hounding us, the people we know, I think he can cool his heels for another month or two to give us a chance to slide off these people’s radars.”“A month or— No way. I’ve been working on this for almost two and a half months already,” Jonah says. “I am not waiting another two to go after this. I’ll just go on my own.” He picks up his map and a piece of paper, printed and typed up with what looks to be the addresses of all six motels, but Dan reaches out, grabs his wrist.“Absolutely not,” Dan says.“’You’re not my boss, Dan. You can’t order me around,” Jonah says, wrenches his hand from Dan’s grip.“No, I’m not your boss, you goddamn moron. I’m your friend. I’m your only friend,” he says, glances at Amy. “It physically pains me to say it but it’s true. If you go after this, something is going to go wrong. You have to stop just fucking rushing into shit. You did that with Nuvarin and it ended with two destroyed cars, a missing CEO, a dead monster, a building on fire and Amy and my reputations completely ruined.”“Give me a break, Dan,” Jonah says. “You miss it. You’ve been hiding in your apartment, no idea what to do with yourself. You were with us when we talked to Hal, you went to those people’s houses, you read that woman’s diary. You complain and complain and yet you keep hanging around. You could have stayed home tonight when I told you about Ronald but you didn’t. You came. You like the excitement of how I do things. You both do.” Dan wants to argue, he wants to tell Jonah just how wrong he is, how every single word of what he just said was false, that he was fine where he was, he was done and that was it but he couldn’t. He couldn’t because he knew he’d be lying. They let the words stew, hang heavy like rancid afternoon stink around a dumpster until, finally, Dan says:“What do I need to do to talk you out of this?” Whatever happens next would be just like Hal talking to them: the final nail in the coffin.“Normally I’d have you get on your knees and lick my shoes but this is too important. There is nothing short of snapping your fingers and magically teleporting Ronald here that will get me to give this up.”“Amy,” Dan says, turns to her, tries to appeal to her clear, reasonable head and she shrugs.“Trust me, I’m with you but I don’t know why you think he’s going to listen to anything I could possibly say.”“I won’t,” Jonah says, “Just for the record.” Dan looks back at him, stares at him, at everything else.“One day,” Dan says. “Just sit on this for one day.”“And then what?” Jonah asks.“I don’t know,” Dan says. “But just do it, alright? If you won’t do it for me, do it for Amy and if won’t do it for her, do it to keep your helium-filled head attached to your chicken neck for a few more hours.” He waits for Jonah to keep fighting him, to keep pushing, but tonight seems to be one surprise after the other because Jonah sighs, deflates and says okay. “Good. I’m taking this.” He picks up the map, tries to fold it but it won’t go back right so he does his best, creates new creases and edges, takes the list of addresses, too. He thinks about grabbing Jonah’s laptop because there’s no way he doesn’t have all of this backed up on there somewhere but he has to show that, on some level, he does trust him, even if most of him doesn’t. “Amy...” He thinks about telling her to take him home but he’d literally rather be anywhere but there at that moment so, instead, he says that he needs a drink. — — — Jonah elects to stay behind at the offices, says he’ll find another way home later because there’s still more he can do but Dan knows it’s because he’s royally pissed off at him and would rather not have to share the same space for awhile and Dan doesn’t begrudge him that. He figures Amy was going to find him a bar, sit him down and then leave him there and she does, in fact, pull up in front of one of the less sleazy-looking ones nearby but then Dan holds out his hands in his lap because he realizes just as they hit the curb that he didn’t have his wallet. His brain had been so scattered, so preoccupied by what had happened and what Jonah had said that he’d left his apartment with nothing but his phone.Amy rolls her eyes, shakes her head, but sighs as she pulls back into traffic.“We’re not going to my place,” she says, stopping at a red light. There’s a woman sobbing in the back seat of the cab next to them and Dan watches her, idly wonders what it’s like to be able to do that.“It’s just one night,” Dan says. “A couple hours.”“You’re closer.”“I don’t want to go back there.”“Ever?”“Tonight,” Dan says. They had hit the light just as it turned which left them time to sit and Amy drums her fingers on the steering wheel, looks at everything but at Dan and then, finally, curses.“Fine,” she says. “Goddammit. Fine.” — — — “I can’t believe you got Jonah to agree to wait,” Amy says, turns her glass of red wine in front of her on the kitchen island as she and Dan sat side-by-side on long-legged metal stools. This was as far as she would let him get, as comfortable as he was allowed and, from what he could see, the place was as minimal as it could get, looked almost as if no one actually lived here. It reminded him of Eric Nagel’s office, a furniture showroom more than anything else, but he doesn’t say that to her. There’s a cardboard box, out of place on her leather couch, and it takes him a minute to recognize it as the one Sarah’s mother had handed off to them before she left. Had Amy specifically asked to take it home or did Jonah foist it on her because he knew the chances of it being discovered here were slim?(Maybe less slim now, Dan thinks, now that I’m sitting here. For a split second, he feels bad about exposing her apartment like this to the people who have been intimidating them.)“You know,” Dan says, “Me neither. I was about two seconds from trying to tie him down to that damn chair.” He takes a sip from his own glass, watches Amy take a much heartier one and then, once she’s put it back down, lifts the chilled bottle and refills her glass. It takes six glasses for her to get dizzy, to get truly drunk, but that’s not what he’s aiming for; he just needs to get her buzzed enough that she won’t notice right away that Dan hasn’t had more than a few tastes of his own glass or that her car keys have disappeared.He had told Jonah to wait a day and wasn’t lying when he agreed that he didn’t think it would work but Dan knew the only way to truly stop him from going through with hunting Ronald down would be to do it first. Jonah would never forgive him for this, he knows (especially if he actually manages to find him) and he has no real proof that doing this would keep the other two’s necks off the chopping block but he had to believe that the threat of possible death that the nameless blonde had said to him was exactly, simply that and not some insidious omen of things to come for his friends if he wouldn’t take his claws out of this.An hour later and he has her exactly where he needs her to be.“I’m gonna head out,” he says, completely sober, and Amy furrows her brow at him, looks to his glass, to hers, and to the nearly empty bottle.“You son-of-a-bitch,” she says, her voice just on the edge of being thick and loopy. “You got me drunk on purpose.”“Buzzed, not drunk. But yes, I did,” Dan admits, knows there’s no point in trying to mislead her anymore.“What’re you doing?” She asks, stands up, her bare feet making no noise on the hard floor.“Something stupid,” Dan says, swiping her keys from where she had dropped them as they walked in. “I was kind of hoping it would take you longer to figure even this much out, though. Do you have a landline in here?”“Yeah,” Amy says, points to a sleek desk resting up against a wall in between two white wood bookcases and there it is, resting beside a desktop computer. “Why?”“So I can take this—” he says, reaches for her cell phone and she tries to beat him to it but she’s too slow, futilely watches him pocket it, “—And not feel bad about leaving you without a way to call anybody in case something happens. Even though I don’t think it will.”“In case something— Dan. Fuck off. No, wait. Don’t— You’re stealing my car.” She sees the keys held tight in his fist. “You’re going after fucking Ronald.”“You’re a very mouthy drunk, has anyone ever told you that?”“You’re an asshole,” Amy says.“Yeah, well...” Dan starts but doesn’t know how to finish it so he doesn’t, turns his back on her and wanders away. — — — Before Dan leaves, he takes a few minutes to input a motel address at random, figures it doesn’t matter which one is first and realizes that Jonah had been fudging the numbers when he said that it wouldn’t take very long to visit each place, had probably said so in an effort to convince them that this was a good idea. There was no possible way he’d be able to finish this before morning and, by then, the other two would have managed to catch up to him (‘how’ he didn’t know and ‘why’ he wasn’t entirely sure of right now either) or he’d be dead, the thought of which he knows should bother him a lot more than it did but, he figures, people like him have died for a lot less in pursuit of even smaller stories.Jonah truly hadn’t been wrong when he told Dan that he liked the excitement of how he did things. Dan grumbled and he protested, he yelled about lives lost and property ruined but, at the end of the day, this sort of bullshit was in his blood and denying that, making a pageant out of trying to pretend he was a good person somewhere in there was wearing thin even for himself. He had opportunity after opportunity to leave, to tell them both to fuck off, to stop contacting him, cut all ties and start over (it wouldn’t be the first time and, even though he was having problems with going through with it now, he knows it also won’t be the last) but, each time, he would reply to their texts, would meet them at that diner. He wants to blame the obelisk itself and his own damn fragility when faced with it; if it hadn’t shown up where it did, if it hadn’t done this to him, maybe he would have eventually ghosted himself. He could have gone home, he could have called Kent, called every editor he knew and begged for a respectable job back, blamed this nonsense on a lapse of judgement. But this bullshit wouldn’t leave him alone and ‘alone’ is exactly how unprepared he was to deal with it.He’s waiting behind a limo, stuck at a red that didn’t seem interested in changing any time soon when his phone rings. He glances down, sees a number that he doesn’t recognize and, at first, he thinks it’s Amy calling from her landline to shout at him for what he’s doing but then he just seems to instinctively know: it’s them. Not answering didn’t seem like a real choice for him so he picks up, fumbles with the screen to switch it to the speaker and drops the device into the cup holder.“You have an obelisk,” the voice says, as if the thing was some sort of little trinket that hadn’t been mass produced in years and the person was a collector, calling up Dan to see if he was willing to sell it. “There’s no point in denying it,” (as if he would, as if he had a reason to at this point), “Levi came back with a picture.” Levi. At least the man with the hair and the gum had a name now. It was either a slip of the tongue of they just didn’t care. Speaking of a slip of the tongue:“An obelisk?” There’s a short pause.“The obelisk,” the voice corrects itself. “The.”“Right,” Dan says. Just as Levi had said to Dan before: this changes things. Truthfully, Dan had no reason to believe that the obelisk at Nuvarin, nor the one that showed up at his place, were even the same one (yet, somehow, it just felt like it was, a revelation that sent a brief shudder up his spine) or that it would, in fact, be the only one here. The people that Dan and the others had talked to for Hal were drawing them, some of which had construction equipment in the background but there were others—like the wall plastered with them in Christopher Gilliam’s home—that did not. Dan had assumed that it was the same one, over and over, some more detailed than others, but now, with those two single syllable words floating around his head like frantic moths, he was starting to think he hadn’t been thinking big enough.“Now, whatever reason you think we might be calling you for, I can guarantee that you’re incorrect.” (That was the most infuriating thing, really, about these people: Dan had no idea how much or how little they truly knew. One minute they seemed to be aware of every minute detail of what they did, who they spoke to, where they went and then a second later, Dan got the distinct feeling that whomever he’s been talking to were flying by the seats of their pants, as if they were dealing with a situation far above their pay grade, a simple robbery turned into a hostage situation that the criminals hadn’t planned for and all they can ask for is a plane and a box of pizza because that’s what always happens in the movies.) “We want to talk to you.”“We’re—”“In person,” the voice clarifies and Dan blinks.“To all three of us?”“Just you,” they say. This is bad, Dan knows in his gut that this is bad. It’s dangerous and it’s reckless and it’s everything that he had, only a short time before, warned Jonah away from doing. There is no good outcome for anybody by us pursuing this. He’d be a hypocrite of the highest standing, felt like one for even thinking about this, for even keeping the line open instead of immediately hanging up as soon as he heard that.“When?” He asks. “Where?”“Right now,” the voice says and then gives him an address, one that he repeats to himself, over and over in his head because he’s not exactly in a position at the moment to work the GPS without risking getting into an accident. “We’re looking forward to seeing you,” they say and then end the call.His heart hammering noisily in his ears, Dan finds a place to pull over and sets a new destination but, before he starts to drive again, he picks up his phone, figures that, at the very least, he should let someone know where he’s going, just in case. His first choice would be Amy but he had her phone and, he realizes, he never actually got the number for her landline.“I’m sure by now that Amy probably told you what’s going on,” Dan says into Jonah’s voicemail (he hadn’t answered and Dan wasn’t surprised), tries to make himself heard over the rain, the sky having opened up in the minutes between him fixing the GPS and deciding to call, “But there’s been a slight change of plans. The people who keep warning us off this mess want to meet me, just me, in person. So that’s where I’m going.” He gives him the address, speaks it slowly, clearly, so there was no way it could possibly be misheard. “If it looks like a suicide it wasn’t and if it looks like an accident it probably wasn’t that either. Don’t look for Ronald, don’t ‘avenge’ me. Give up, go home, move on.” There’s more he could say but he’s only got so much space to fill so he leaves it there.It’s not until he’s a few minutes from leaving the city that he realizes he was, in his own convoluted way, saying goodbye. — — — The phone doesn’t ring again the entire ride to where he’s supposed to meet these people and Dan isn’t sure if he’s really all that disappointed. It’s easier not to have to debate whether or not to answer, to not have to listen to one or both of the only people he has in his life tell him just how much they hate him now or, worse, try to convince him to stop what he’s doing. It would be worse, not because of what they were saying but because of why: calling him, attempting to talk him down despite what he’s done would mean that they still cared. He would be faced with the fact that they were weak around each other, that their connection mattered. It was already hard enough for him to keep remembering that every stupid thing he’s done since this all started however many months ago wasn’t because he was selfishly trying to further his career, using them as a means to an end, stepping stones to get closer to the top; it was because he didn’t want them to get hurt. It was easier to deal with when he thought that it was only him with the problem of having the sort of emotions he had dug a grave for so long ago but the two of them calling him would mean it was all reciprocated and he still wasn’t ready for that.He’d caught glimpses of it as far back as Nuvarin, when he went missing and they called the police, how they look relived that he had come back, when Amy had come to get him and Jonah after they had run from their kidnappers and then taken them to the hospital, when they shared looks of honest concern when he admitted that he barely left his apartment, when he started talking to Reggie through a plastic toy, but those were all just minor cracks in an old ceiling that could easily be covered with plaster.Dan had shown too many of his cards back at the Those That Know offices and them ignoring him was the only way to stop that ceiling from collapsing down on top of them all. — — — 
You have reached your destination.
Which, really, was all well and good but his “destination” had turned out to be a wide, unlit and muddy path leading to a damaged chainlink fence that surrounded what appeared to have once been where a building had stood but now was merely a large, square patch of dirt. The only light here is from his headlights and he turns on his high beams, expects to have them illuminate a vehicle hidden in the dark or a group of men standing in the rain, waiting, but there’s nothing. He considers getting out of the car but the rain hasn’t let up since he left the city and he has a feeling that all he would get for his trouble is completely soaked to the bone.He thinks back on what they had said, repeats the address to himself, mutters it under his breath and then checks the GPS but he can’t see an error, a single wrong number. This is exactly where they had told him to show, but the only person who seems to be here is him.“I don’t like this,” he says, feels like throwing around the word ‘suspicious’ would be far too on the nose. He sits forward as far as he can in his seat, trying to see past the reach of the lights, through the downpour battering him on all sides and, as he leans, he accidentally presses his chest against the horn, sending out a loud wail into the pitch black. After that, three things happen in marginally rapid succession: Dan sits back and tells the car to be quiet as if it had made that noise of it’s own volition, he tries to leave but he forgets to put the vehicle is reverse and nearly winds up driving right into the fence, and a bullet goes flying through the windshield. It doesn’t keep going though, doesn’t shatter the back window and Dan ducks down in his seat searches frantically for where it could have buried itself and then notices dark red blossoming on his upper arm. “Shit, shit, shit…” he says, repeating it quickly, saying it so fast that the words turn into mush, melting together.This isn’t the first time he’s been shot at (he laughs a little at that—a nervous sort of sound—because he’s pretty sure journalists in a war zone haven’t been shot at nearly as many times as he has at this point) but it’s not even close to something he’s gotten used to yet. There’s another one, cracking the glass with another perfect hole but it misses, goes whining into the backseat, drilling into the fabric and the padding. Dan finally reverses without looking in the mirror, keeps his head down as low as he can but still be able to see where he’s going and pulls back out onto the road, tires screeching. There’s a third crack from another shot but it doesn’t enter the car and he’s moving, speeding away, not knowing where he’s going other than far, far away.He drives frantically for what feels like hours but only turns out to be five minutes and Dan takes the next exit he finds without seeing where it was taking him, winds up at a small patch of asphalt with a few scattered picnic tables and a portable toilet stall, just somewhere to park for a few minutes to stretch your legs. The rain had finally slowed down and Dan opens his car door without taking off his seatbelt and leans sideways, just breathing in the cool air and trying to calm his breath, to control the pain and tightness in his chest, the nausea roiling in his stomach, burning acid in his throat.He sits back, keeps the door open, wipes his mouth with his sleeve, face flushed with embarrassment at his reaction because even the first time with bullets flying at him and Jonah in that cramped apartment, he’d held it together much better than that, had just gone slightly wild-eyed and then numb and he blames it more on lack of sleep, too much happening in a short amount of time, than adrenaline and fear.“Goddammit. Shit,” Dan says, finally giving attention to his wounded arm, slides his arm away from the steering wheel to rest in his lap, his other hand gently exploring the damage first without removing his jacket. It stings and burns, the pain finally hitting him and he gently tugs his arm free, relieved to find that it had simply grazed him that, at most, it would need a few stitches, maybe not even that. He can’t stay here forever, he knows that, but when he goes to try and drive again, his hands won’t hold still thanks to adrenaline and, besides, the windshield is just enough of a mess that he has no idea how he even managed to get where he was without hitting someone.The clear choice would be to call a tow truck but, without his wallet, the only way of getting into contact with one without wasting the battery on either his or Amy’s phone researching the number for a nearby company would be to call the police and the last thing he needs is to have to explain to a stranger why there were very obvious bullet holes in a car that both didn’t belong to him and that he was driving without a license. Even if they didn’t ask, someone would have to report something to somebody else and he wasn’t in the mood to spend his night answering questions at best or, at worst, sitting in a jail cell while people in uniforms tried to sort him out.He could try Jonah but he didn’t even have any real hope that something would have changed in the last hour to make him suddenly want to talk to him. There was, really, he realizes with another small, maniacal laugh, only one person he could call. — — — “Oh, Lucy,” Reggie says after he pulls up behind Dan forty long minutes after Dan had called him, getting out of his car to walk over to where he’s standing, leaning up against his own vehicle, waiting for him, “You’ve got some explaining to do.” All Dan had told him over the phone was that he was in a little bit of trouble and could really use a ride, it’s not bad but it’s not that great either. The joking tone of what Reggie says disappears quickly though once he gets close enough to see the damage to the car through the back windshield and he stops, puts his hands on his hips for a moment, his face sliding into an almost comical seriousness. “Are you alright?”“Somebody shot me,” Dan says.“Somebody— Christ, Egan,” Reggie says, steps up in front of him, searches by the glow of his headlights and Dan turns his body, directs him to the wound on his arm.“I told you it wasn’t that bad,” he says but Reggie checks it out anyway until he’s satisfied and then goes around to the front of Amy’s car, takes in the spider-webbed glass, the two small holes. “You told me to call you if something happened.”“I did,” Reggie says in a way that sounded like he was already regretting extending that offer to him.“Look, I just need you to get take me home, alright? I really don’t want to leave her car here but I can’t drive it like this. I don’t think I can drive period right now, if I’m being honest.”“What’s the matter?” Reggie asks, as if he thinks Dan has been hurt somewhere else he isn’t telling him about but Dan just holds up his furiously shaking hands for a few seconds before he hides them away again. Reggie looks like he’s deep in thought for awhile, stares at the car as if daring it to interrupt him and then he exhales slowly. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. The guy who runs the tow truck service that our station uses owes me a favor. I’ll have him come out here, take the car to our impound lot for safe keeping until the morning. Anonymous tip, abandoned car. You said it was ‘her’ car so I’m assuming this belongs to Amy. She’ll have to be the one to claim it but, looking the way it does, she probably won’t get it back right away. I can’t help with that other than to purposely vandalize the car further to cover it up but I’m already bending the rules as far as they’ll go by doing this in the first place.” He pauses, lets Dan process everything he’s said and then points to his own vehicle. “Go wait in there.”“Yeah,” Dan says, “Hang on. Let me make sure I’ve got everything.” Reggie doesn’t stop him so he leans in through the front, takes his phone and Amy’s from where they were sitting in the cup holders and then moves on to the back where he had tossed Jonah’s map and list of motel addresses, starts to shove them into his jacket and leave but then hesitates, stares at the bullet holes in the fabric of the seats. Glancing as subtly as possible over his shoulder, he sees that Reggie has his back to him, is busy talking to someone on his phone and then repositions himself, tries to move as fast as he can with barely working fingers.He slams the door just as Reggie finishes his call, doesn’t wait to get told a second time to get in the car and drops himself heavily down into the passenger seat and Reggie joins him shortly after but doesn’t start the engine right away.“Are you sure you’re alright?” Reggie asks and Dan shrugs, nods and then swallows hard, stares forward. There was a lot of brutality in his life very suddenly. It used to be that everything he knew revolved solely around politics and now it seemed to have fallen into nothing but violence. “You know,” Reggie is saying and Dan unclenches his jaw, just a bit, “There are some guys on the force… bad stuff seems to just follow them around. Every case ends in… It’s rarely good. Bad luck, pretty much.” Dan can hear him start to drum his fingers on the steering wheel. “But I’ve seen the looks on their faces, having to deal with that day in and day out…” He trails off and he won’t seem to say it outright but Dan catches on. He’s seen those looks before and he’s seeing it again right now.“Can you please just get me out of here?” Dan asks and Reggie sighs. — — — “Which hospital do you want me to take you to?”“No hospital,” Dan says as they glide down the highway, the city creeping closer and closer.“I can’t just—”“It barely even hurts anymore. I will— I’ll figure it out but I don’t want to deal with—” He rubs his hands over his face. “Believe me, if I had the option of calling anyone but you, I would have but you’re really all I’ve got right now and I am begging you to pretend that you’re not a cop for five fucking minutes and just take me home.” He doesn’t look at Reggie after his brief outburst, keeps his gaze focused ahead of them, waits to be chewed out, for the disagreement, the lecture on who he is and what he has to do because of that but, instead, Reggie asks:“I’m really all you’ve got?”“Amy and Jonah are, uh, not too pleased with me right now,” Dan admits, tries to figure out how to explain it without giving away too much detail. “Jonah’s been trying to find someone and tonight he finally did it but actually going out and looking for him would probably get us killed so I told him to wait and then I took his information and went out here do to it by myself.”“So only you would get killed, then,” Reggie says. “Amy pissed about that, too?”“I got her buzzed and stole her car. And her phone.”“Wow. Uh, yeah. I think I can see why they might not be happy with you. Is that who shot at you?” Reggie asks and, for a second, Dan thinks he means Amy and Jonah, that they had been so angry with him that they opened fire and the thought of it is enough to illicit a genuine, but brief, laugh. “The guy you went after,” Reggie clarifies. What Dan should have said was ‘yes’. He should have agreed and then refused to reveal who he had been looking for no matter how nicely or rudely Reggie insisted on him giving up the name of some dangerous guy who would rather murder someone than be found. To this day, he still doesn’t know what in the world compelled him to tell the truth.“The people that have been— They called me while I was driving. Said they wanted to meet, in person. Alone.” There’s a lengthy silence after he says it and he takes a risk, glances at Reggie, is surprised to see him looking angry, his hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel. “What?”“I just really hate being in the dark here. These people… they’re impossible to track down and you certainly aren’t being as helpful as I know you could.”“I swear,” Dan says, “I have no idea who these people are.”“I know,” Reggie tells him. “I believe that. But I can tell you’re holding a hell of a lot close to your chest and I don’t know if it’s because you’re scared or you’re being threatened or it’s just a symptom of what you do for a living but it’s driving me up a wall. I can help and I’d be a lot more understanding than anyone else in a uniform. Do you get that?”“I get it,” Dan says and he does.“You sure as hell don’t seem like you do,” Reggie mumbles. They pass by a sign that tells them in a mile there was an exit to a town with an oddly familiar name that offered places to eat and sleep, the final respite before the last half hour towards the city. Dan rolls it over in his head before finally clicking on one of the overhead lights, scans the list of motels that Jonah had typed up and there, at the very bottom is the same name, the same tiny, out of the way rest-stop town.“Can you do me one more favor?” Dan asks, turns off the light and Reggie glances at him. “This guy I was supposed to be looking for… the next exit is one of the places he might be.” He holds up the paper even though he knows Reggie can’t take the time to look at it. He can feel him seething and his grip on the steering wheel hasn’t relaxed. “You just said you wanted to be more involved.” A pause. “It’ll take five minutes, tops.”Without saying a single thing, Reggie flicks on his turn signal and drifts over into the right-hand lane. — — — The motel isn’t difficult to find and it’s just as grubby and squalid as Jonah had said it would be: it’s only two stories tall, the red painted doors peeling, the lighted sign out front blinking and missing letters claiming no vacancy even though the parking lot was almost entirely empty, offering free cable and a pool but, even before they pull up into the parking lot, Dan can tell that the pool hadn’t been cleaned in most likely years. The whole thing gave off a clear vibe like it was the type of place that a lot of people had died in. There are only two other cars here and Dan wracks his brain to remember the description of the car that Ronald had stolen but neither of the ones he was currently staring at matched it. It was possible that he had switched vehicles again (especially since somebody was still looking for it) but Dan is leaning more towards assuming that he isn’t here.He supposes he could ask the person he can see standing at the front desk inside the office but he doesn’t have a photo of Ronald on-hand and, besides, he doesn’t think he’d be lucky enough to hit the jackpot on the first try.“See?” Dan says. “Just like I said: five minutes.”“You’re sure?” Reggie asks, watches Dan take pictures of the vehicles to check on later, to see if either of them had been reported stolen recently.“Yeah,” Dan says. Whether Ronald is actually here or not, he’s pretty sure he’s better off not alerting the guy at the desk that he’s looking for someone who might be a repeat customer. Motel owners had a tendency to be either the most or least helpful people to talk to when you’re trying to find a person. They might spill their entire can of beans or block your every question but you don’t get to figure that out until you actually talk to them and then after you leave, no matter how pleasant or unhelpful they had been, they still might tell the person you’re looking for that you’ve been sniffing at their heels.There’s only one way in and out of the parking lot and Reggie turns the car around, starts to drive back towards the street but comes to a screeching halt when a Hummer pulls up in front of them, blocking the exit, and Dan watches in horror as the passenger side door flings open and Levi hops down onto the pavement. He starts walking towards the car and goes, not to Reggie’s side, but to Dan’s and hits his knuckles against the glass.“Twice in one night,” Levi says when Dan rolls down the window just enough that his voice would be able to get through, isn’t sure why he does it. “That has to be some sort of record for me. And look who you’re with.” He says it as if he had no idea the two of them were together although it was clear that they had been following them at least for long enough to find them here and Dan wonders how neither of them had noticed such a hulking vehicle on their tail. Jonah probably would have noticed, Dan hears himself think. “Remember what I told you earlier, Daniel?” Levi asks.“I remember,” Dan says.“I want you to repeat it back to me,” Levi says, waits, but Dan doesn’t say anything so he turns his head slightly, puts a finger behind his ear. “I didn’t hear you.” Gives him the benefit of the doubt, pretends like he’d just been too quiet and not that he was being discourteous.“If I ever see your mug again,” Dan says, makes sure to use the right words, “Then that meant you were here to kill me.”“Right-o,” Levi says. “Sorry about before, with the—” He makes his fingers into the shape of guns, makes a noise like firing bullets. “There’s a reason I don’t let the big guy handle a gun. It wasn’t supposed to go down like that.”“I know you,” Reggie says finally. Levi grins.“I hope so.” He clears his throat. “So here’s the thing: I’m sort of improvising here. I have no idea why you’re here, what’s so special about a fleabag place like this but, either way, someone is dying tonight and if we have to do it here, well, I suppose I can make that work.” He pauses, lets the words settle. “Daniel, would you be a good boy and step out of the vehicle for me?”“No,” Dan says.“Okay,” Levi says and then starts walking away, opens the door he had only just closed and starts coming back with a metal baseball bat.“You have a gun with you, right?” Dan asks Reggie softly and Reggie nods once, indicates towards the glove box but, just as he starts to reach for it, Levi swings at the passenger window just behind where Dan is sitting. It cracks but doesn’t break and, just as he’s reeling his arms back for a second swing, the woman who had been minding her own business behind the counter inside finally decides on coming out to see what was going on.“What the fuck do you think you’re—” She starts but Levi cuts her off, says busy and, before Dan can even blink, pulls out a pistol from the back of his pants and shoots her right in the chest. He looks to the Hummer, whistles loud between his teeth and an enormous man dressed in black clothes somehow far too large for his frame comes lumbering out of the driver’s seat, meandering over to where the woman had fallen. Reggie is telling Dan to do something but he can’t make heads or tails of what it is, his ears ringing, his head a million miles away, tunnel vision stuck on watching the Big Guy lift that woman’s still-breathing body and carry her back inside like she weighed nothing at all, jumps when he feels the door to the glove box hit the tops of his legs, a hand reaching in, coming out with a gun of it’s own.A seatbelt clicks off and Dan comes back into the real world just in time to see Reggie exit the car, point the weapon at Levi, who chuckles.“You can shoot me,” Dan hears him say, “But he’ll kill you if you do and it’ll take more than the clip in that gun to put him down.” Reggie’s telling him that he doesn’t want to do it, that there was still a chance that he could just come in on his own, that they both could, if he’d just put down his gun and give up and Levi is just laughing his way through every word Reggie is saying to him.You can solve this, a voice is saying in Dan’s head. You can fix this right now. The driver’s seat is empty, the keys are still in the ignition, the car had never even been turned off. Climbing over isn’t exactly easy or comfortable but he manages, holds the wheel, digs his fingernails into the faux leather. Gripping the gear shift, he throws it out of park and into reverse.Levi’s body hits the back of the car with a grisly thunk, goes flying just a couple feet and Dan slams his foot on the brakes, didn’t want to have him go under the wheels, get stuck on the underbelly of the machine, just wanted to hit him hard enough to make him go down, for it to hurt. The Big Guy must have been elsewhere, busy tending to the dead woman, no idea what just happened, but he’d figure it out eventually and Dan nearly feels his heart stop when someone bangs on his window but he looks up to see that it’s only Reggie.“What the fuck, Egan,” Reggie says. “That’s not— Get out of the car,” he commands and Dan doesn’t know why he thought that he would accept what he did, would jump into the passenger seat and tell him to go, to drive and not look back. This wasn’t Amy or Jonah, they couldn’t just run away from what they— from what he just did, leave it for someone else to deal with. Reggie was that ‘someone else’ and he’d just witnessed Dan run someone down. He does as he says, opens his mouth in a desperate attempt to explain himself but no words would come out. “Stay there. I’ll deal with you in a minute.” Reggie goes to check on Levi but stops when the man starts moving on his own, stands up slowly, spits blood on the asphalt and Dan doesn’t know how he’s doing it, how it was even possible. His right leg looks twisted in a way that should be excruciating and he winks, uses a fist to knock on it and Dan hears the sound of knuckles hitting plastic and metal.“Oh,” Levi laughs, his teeth stained red, “You’re really going to wish you hadn’t done that.”Big Guy comes bursting through the office door and tackles the first person he sees, who turns out to be Reggie. They both hit the ground, a bone somewhere on Reggie making an audible crunch as Big Guy lands on top of him. Reggie’s gun had gone flying when he fell and Dan can see it, knows he’d likely get to it before Levi could but it wouldn’t matter, he’d already been told it would be like a moth hitting a lightbulb and there’s no way he could go in there swinging and think he’d make any sort of impact. He could get back in the car, try to run him down, but it was too risky. There was, quite literally, nothing he could do. From that point on, Dan was powerless to do anything but watch and listen to the sickening noises as the cement blocks that man called fists collide with Reggie’s body.He feels like his own body is shutting down and he fumbles with the driver’s side door, gets ready to leave because there’s no other reason for him to stay, but he hears two shots ring out and the tell-tale sound of tires letting out a heavy rush of air. He gets out and both he and Levi simultaneously look over to the Hummer.“Goddammit, BG,” Levi yells at his companion, tries to whistle but can’t with all the blood still in his mouth, “Stop tenderizing your meat and stop him.” The man rises and it takes every last dwindling bit of Dan’s willpower not to look at what he’s climbing off of, to see what’s been left behind on the ground but he still gets a glimpse of blood and god know’s what else on the man’s fists as he starts to come towards him but Dan is smaller, is faster and he makes it to the truck, hoists himself into the driver’s seat, easily starts the engine with the keys the idiot had left behind.Levi, hunched over slightly, listing to the left, arm hugging his stomach, stands directly in front of him and waves politely as Dan backs up and drives away. — — — Dan goes towards the exit back onto the highway but, instead of taking the way towards the city, he uses the U-Turn to drive away from it. It’s too familiar, they know where he lives, where Jonah and Amy live, where they frequent. There’s nowhere there that would be safe and, for the first time, his home—the monoliths that he called buildings, the criss-cross, winding streets—suddenly feels unbearably small.Much like before, Dan finds himself stopping at an abandoned rest-stop on the side of the road but, this time, instead of simply leaning out of his seat to catch his breath, he comes tumbling down from his seat, forgets how far away the ground was, nearly knocks himself out, and he hits the wet grass, struggles to regain his footing and then gives up. He vomits but hardly anything comes up because it’s been hours since he’s eaten and then he sits back, rests against one of the truck’s colossal tires.He loses track of time, the only thing going through his head the nauseating sound of breaking bones under a pair of angry fists. Reggie had tried to say something but it quickly turned into gurgles and then silence.His fault. This was his fault.He couldn’t stay where he was, couldn’t grow roots by one of the picnic tables but he wasn’t sure where else he could go. He shifts, hears the noise of crumpling paper and pulls out with shaky hands the wrinkled list of motels. Levi (bloody teeth, oh, you’re really going to wish you hadn’t done that) had told them that he hadn’t known why they were at the motel he followed them to. Was it possible that these people had no idea what Jonah had been up to these past two and half months? If that were true, then one of these five other remaining places were his best bet.Closing his eyes, he runs his index finger up and down the page and picks one at random. — — — He stops at the one that he had picked and then changes his mind when he sees how packed the parking lot was, chooses a new one and there are only three cars here, a single-story building with a flat roof, doors with crooked letters and no falsely advertised pool. If the man in the motel’s office saw Dan pacing back and forth behind a huge vehicle in a crumpled, slightly bloody suit, he did him the favor of not going to confront him, figuring he’d either leave eventually or come in to rent a room; either way: it wasn’t his problem for the time being.Dan had called Jonah six times and, each time, he hadn’t answered but on the seventh he finally, finally picked up. “What the fuck do you want?” Jonah asks angrily, his tone betraying the fact that he hadn’t listened to the voicemail Dan had left him almost two hours ago.“He’s dead,” Dan says, no reason to beat around the bush, to tread lightly because the more he dragged it out, the more likely it was that Jonah would think Dan was calling just to find a way to weasel out of having to make an apology and hang up on him.“Dead?” Jonah repeats, obviously bewildered. “Who’s dead?”“Reggie. Detective Cooke,” Dan says.“Why were you with—?” A hesitation. “Wait. Dead? He’s actually dead?” Another pause. “Are you—?”“Shut up,” Dan says, snaps at him, “Just… Stop talking. Look, I’m at...” He turns, glances at the sign, “Sun Suites Motel. You and Amy— You have to get out of the city. You have to get here. I need you to— I don’t care how much either of you hate me right now, I just need you to get here as fast as humanly possible, alright?” They might be followed, they might not, but it’s a risk that Dan is willing to take at the moment. There’s an overly long silence on the other end, long enough that Dan was beginning to wonder if Jonah really had hung up on him at some point and he only just noticed but then Jonah says:“On our way.” And then that’s when he finally ends the call.He walks into the office to give himself something to do while he waits, fixes his gaze on the television mounted on the wall, tuned to the news, waits for a report about gunshots at a nearby motel but there’s nothing and he can feel the owner regarding him carefully before he says something.“You look like you’ve been through hell.” Dan turns to stare at him, his shiny bald head, his white moustache. I saw someone die, he thinks. It wasn’t an attempt or an ambiguous question of maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. He saw it.“Yeah,” he grunts, feels a laugh lodged in the back of his throat like a peach pit.“Here,” the man says, pulls two grimy glasses out from behind the counter, follows it with an unlabeled bottle of amber-colored alcohol and, normally, Dan would refuse but nothing about tonight was normal. He drinks it in one gulp and it burns as it goes down but, right now, it was one of the nicest things Dan has felt and he doesn’t shake his head when the man offers to refill his glass. He’s probably doing the same thing to me that I did to Amy, Dan thinks. Get me drunk enough that I can’t drive. Then I’ll have no choice but to rent a room from him.Thirty minutes and one more drink later, a car pulls up, the doors slam, feet hit the ground and Dan’s whole body goes tense until he hears Amy calling his name. He walks out slowly, the bell on the door he hadn’t noticed earlier ringing and he sees Jonah running at him but he isn’t sure why until his body hits into him and, even then, for a brief moment his head is screaming, a flash of a black-clothed boulder attacking a much, much smaller one but then he realizes: it’s a hug. He allows it for five seconds longer than he normally would before, finally, pushing him away.“This has to stop,” Amy says, practically wagging her finger in Dan’s face, “You can’t just keep— You can't keep running off on your own like this! Look what happens!” She reaches over, pushes him hard on the chest. “Look what fucking happens!” She does it a second time, goes in for a third but then seems to think better of it and takes a step back instead.“Who killed him?” Jonah asks. “What the hell was he even doing out here?” Dan glances behind him at the office door, at the man watching them and then wanders over towards the truck, listens to the other two following and Amy waits until they’re standing beside it to ask:“Where’s my car?” Dan doesn’t answer. “Where’s my car, Dan?”“Hopefully at an impound by now.”“An impound? What the fuck did you—” She takes in a slow breath, lets it out equally as slow. “Is he really dead?”“Would you guys stop asking me that?” Dan yells and they both jump. “I heard— I saw it— I saw it happen and I couldn’t do anything. I just stood there and watched so yeah, I’m pretty damn fucking sure he’s dead unless by some miracle, a man can live with his brains stuck to another man’s fists.”“Jesus Christ,” Amy breathes out. She lifts a hand like she’s going to touch him but quickly takes it back. “Start from where you left me drunk in my apartment and tell us everything.”“I’m going to have to start a little earlier than that,” Dan says and runs numb fingers through his hair. — — — “I suppose,” Amy says when Dan finishes, “That I should be grateful that my car hasn’t been completely totaled. Although getting it back is going to be a headache.”“Poor Amy,” Jonah says, “Life just isn’t fair.”“Fuck off,” Amy says. “I’m just trying— I’m trying to find some positive in this clusterfuck because, otherwise, I think I might jump in front of a moving train before the sun comes up and I wasn’t even the one who was there.” A motel door opens somewhere behind them and a voice says:“Listen, guys, I’m trying to sleep in here, okay? These walls are paper thin. I’m grateful that at least you aren’t having a party but, for the love of all that is holy, please just shut up.” The three of them turn, round the back of the truck to confront whoever is talking to them because not a single one of them is in the mood to be polite right then but they all freeze when he realize who they’re looking at. I knew it, Jonah exclaims at the same time Amy mutters: You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me and Dan couldn’t agree with her more. “What?” Ronald asks. “Look, I’m not interested in starting a fight, I just want another hour or two of—”An incredibly ancient car that’s sagging on the left, the right driver’s window broken, the headlights off, comes driving up the street and turns into the large parking lot and Dan doesn’t have to say anything for Jonah and Amy to know who they are. Getting in the vehicle that Amy and Jonah had arrived in, making a run for it seemed like a decent option for two seconds but none of them (despite Jonah’s claims to the contrary) were good enough drivers to keep up with a high speed chase because all of them knew that Levi and BG wouldn’t let them get away that easily this time. Instead, they make a beeline for Ronald and, as they move, they hear the car doors open, the creak of the suspension as BG gets out of the vehicle.“What the—” Ronald starts as three bodies crowd into him, push him backwards into his room and Jonah slams the door, locks it behind them. “Hey! Whatever you three are involved in, I do not want to be a part of it so if you guys could just—”“Ronald,” Amy shouts at him, raises a finger and the fact that she knows his name is enough to shut him up but she shushes him anyway.“Daniel...” Comes a voice from outside, says it like he’s playing hide-and-seek with him, like he’s his pet who ran away from home. Dan puts himself as far away from the door as he possibly can without hiding in the bathroom. The room has two beds even though Ronald is seemingly the only one in it and Amy places herself between them but Jonah temporarily ignores what’s coming for them and turns to face Ronald, looming over him.“I’ve been looking for you,” Jonah says.“You’ve been— What? Who are you? How do you know who—” Ronald is starting to look panicked, concerned, and Dan doesn’t blame him. If he found himself locked away, hiding in his motel room with three strangers who knew what his name was, he’d probably be a few seconds away from having a stroke, too.“How much have you been paying attention to the news recently?” Jonah asks and apparently that’s enough for Ronald to figure out exactly what’s going on.“You’re those guys,” he says, “Those— Those journalists. Oh god.” He grabs at his hair with his hands, starts pacing like Dan had after he ran from the first motel. “This is about… This is about that thing that was— Those two work for them, don’t they? All this time, all these years, I’ve been trying to stay away—”“Stay away?” Jonah scoffs, is surprisingly calm considering everything that’s happening. “For someone who’s trying to ‘stay away’, you definitely didn’t go very far.”“Daniel...” The calls out to him again and a massive shadow blocks the outside light through the window. “Amy. Jonah. You might as well be sitting in a glass box. I’d prefer not to have to cause any more of a scene tonight by breaking something to get in there.”“I can’t,” Ronald says, responding to what Jonah had said. “I tried to run, I really did but once you’ve been near the obelisk it’s pretty damn hard to leave. I made it two hours away before I felt like I was suffocating and had to turn around.” Two hours, Dan thinks, goes back to when he and the other two had been discussing how far they should go to talk to the people from Hal’s research. And all those people who were camped out at Nuvarin. The figure at the window taps on the glass.“Pretty please with sugar on top?” They hear Levi ask sweetly.“Even before you three raised hell and uncovered that thing those people—” Ronald says, points to the figures outside, “—Were calling me, calling Eric. Threatening us. Like they knew it was down there but I don’t know how, we kept it so quiet, so—” There’s a duffel bag on a small table just to the left of the room by the ancient television and Ronald goes over to it, starts rummaging through.“I’m really hurt,” Levi says. “Let’s just get this over with so I can get some help.” A moment of stillness. “You messed up my leg, Daniel,” he growls, and he must have thrown something because there’s a substantial thud against the door when he says Dan’s name. “Do you have any idea how expensive these are?”“You know why the turnover rate at Nuvarin was so high?” Ronald asks, still going through his bag. “It wasn’t because we were trying to keep the secret, it was because those people were chasing away our employees. They kept leaving and leaving in a damn hurry, tails between their legs, terrified. Nearly half of our annual budget, most of my paycheck went to keeping everyone else quiet. The things they said… What they— I don’t know why I stayed for as long as I did. Stupid,” He mutters to himself and then stops, seems to find what he was searching for and three of them freeze when he pulls out a gun. “You shouldn’t have found me,” Ronald says sadly and before anyone can say anything, he’s lifting his arm, apologizing, and puts it up against the side of his head. They all know exactly what he’s trying to do, but Jonah is the first one to physically react, launches himself towards Ronald, grabs his arm and tries to direct it away at the same time that Ronald pulls the trigger.Drops of blood fleck the wall behind him and, for a moment, Dan thinks that Jonah had failed to stop him or, worse, had gotten hit himself but then Ronald yells, the gun changes hands from him to Jonah (who, inexplicably, puts it down instead of simply holding on to it), and he bends over slightly, holds his hands to his right ear, cursing, stomps a foot on the floor.“That was the only shot I had left,” Ronald says.“You’re welcome,” Jonah replies, says it like someone had been threatening Ronald and Jonah had just saved his life instead of stopping an obviously troubled man from leaving the world on his own terms.“I was saving that,” Ronald hisses through a clenched jaw, “And you blew my goddamn ear off with it! What the fuck am I supposed to do now?” He moves his fingers, looks at them briefly and, indeed, there’s a large chunk of his ear now completely gone.“What was that?” Levi asks cautiously from outside. “What did you do?” None of them respond. Dan hears Levi give a short whistle through his teeth and the brute that’s with him starts ramming his body into the door, trying to knock it down.“You have to hide,” Jonah tells him, grabs him by the shoulders and Ronald first gapes, and then glares, at him.“Hide?! Hide?!”“That guy out there,” Amy says, gestures to the slowly breaking door, the metal-plated hinges holding surprisingly strong for such a run-down place, “Doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t know who you are.” She, as she often did, made a strong point: Levi had called out to all of them by name—all of them except for Ronald. Even if these people were still looking for him, he was low enough in priority that the men they sent to do their dirty work apparently didn’t have a clue what the guy looked like. That, or maybe he was so much of a non-threat that they just didn’t care and Ronald—years of isolation coupled with exposure to the obelisk and an inflated ego—was blowing things way out of proportion. If Dan didn’t know how frighteningly real this whole thing was firsthand, he’d definitely think that Ronald was just another paranoid whack-job off his meds.Ronald looks back at Dan as if expecting him to chime in, but he has no idea what to say. He wanted to take the easy way out and Dan couldn’t begrudge him that. If I had another bullet, Dan thinks, I might just do him a favor and give it to him. He did actually have two, remembers the ones he had dug out of the back seat of Amy’s car but there’s no way that anybody would be able to fire them again. It’s just a passing, morbid consideration, though, Dan knows, brought on by simmering anxiety and the blur of savagery that he had only just witnessed eating at his brain. (At least, that’s what he’s telling himself.)Just as abruptly as the human battering ram had started, it stops, and they listen as at least two other cars come driving up into the parking lot. Doors open and close, feet hit the ground and the voice from the phone, the one who had been talking to Dan, to everyone else, who was apparently calling the shots, says:“Enough. For the love of— This behavior has to stop.”“Sir—” Levi starts to say but he’s cut off.“I know,” the voice says. “Are they in there?”“Yeah,” Levi says.“Mister Egan,” the voice calls out, “Miss Brookheimer, Mister Ryan. Would you join us out here please?” The only other window that wasn’t directly in front of them, that wasn’t facing the lot, is too small for any of them to fit through and, even if they could, where would they go, who would help them? This town was barely a town at all, and how long could they conceivably run down the side of the highway until they were caught? The only way out is straight into the lion’s den and none of them are sure how long they could stay cooped up in here before they would be forcibly removed. Ronald moves so slow that he may not have been even moving at all, drops to his belly on the floor and somehow manages to squeeze himself under one of the motel beds.Amy leaves first, Dan behind her, Jonah after that and they stand on the concrete walkway, an absurdly average-looking man in a generic suit standing in front of them, two other suited men flanking him, more shadows in the cars parked behind them, Levi and BG waiting just off to the side. Levi’s leaning against his companion, looks even worse than he did the last time Dan saw him just after he had hit him and he scowls at the trio.“There was someone else in there with you,” he says, says it quietly as if he didn’t want his approaching boss to know and Dan isn’t sure why he’d keep that from him, “Did you—?” He almost looks impressed for a moment but Dan shakes his head.“I’m so sorry about all of this,” the voice from the phone says, “All this bloodshed… We never wanted any of you to have to see anything like that.” He sounds sincere, which almost makes it worse. “We’re just trying to protect our— Well. But you three...” He shakes his finger at them. “You just won’t let it go.”“We did,” Amy says. “After what you did to Hal… We were done. You were the ones who couldn’t leave us alone.” It’s like they were goading them, they wanted them to keep looking into the obelisk, to keep digging so they had an excuse to come after them and take them out of the picture. We had no choice, Dan could practically hear the man say, They just wouldn’t let it go.“There may have been some prodding,” the man admits, “You three aren’t the only ones looking into these obelisks—” And there they went again, implying that somewhere out there, there were far more than the one that’s still in Dan’s apartment with a piece of Levi’s gum stuck to it. “—But you’re one of the few most likely to find something more, something else you really shouldn’t, and I wanted to absolutely ensure that you’d never look into it again. I hadn’t meant for things to get so ugly, you have to believe that.” In any other circumstance, Dan would be flattered that someone like this—someone with a clear amount of power—considered him (and Amy and Jonah of all people) a threat but, right now, he would give nearly anything to be nothing more than an easily ignored sketchy tabloid writer that thought they knew everything but knew absolutely nothing at all. “So I’ve been doing some thinking and I’m going to make you an offer. Instead of tiring myself out by asking, once again, for you to give it up, how about you simply come with me instead?”“Where?” Amy asks, speaks for all of them because Jonah seems to have suddenly decided he’s not going to talk anymore and Dan feels like he’s floating a thousand miles away from his body, aware of the situation but not exactly present for it.“A house not far from here,” he says and then assures them: “Don’t worry, I know about the pull the obelisks have on people, what happens if you go too far.” At least one of them must have had worry creasing their brow, if only for a second, because he blinks at them. “You do know what happens to people, don’t you?” He waits but receives no answers. “It’s bad. Really bad.” The way he says that, reminiscent of how he had sounded in certain moments when talking to Dan on the phone, the tone of someone in way over their heads and merely trying to convince everyone if they were in complete control of the situation, should have been comical but, considering their current circumstances, it came out as vaguely ominous instead. “The house is only twenty-five minutes away. It won’t be a problem.”“And then what?”“And then we talk, Give you our side and then go from there.” He has his hands up as if he’s trying to appease them, to show them he’s got nothing to hide, and Dan can feel Amy looking back and forth between him and Jonah but he’s in no place to be making any decisions. As far as he was concerned, he’d be happy just to lie down right there on the ground and hope for the best.“Fine,” Amy says eventually. “I don’t see how we have much choice.”“Great,” the voice from the phone says, gestures for them to come over, and Amy starts walking, realizes the Dan and Jonah aren’t following and backtracks, grabs an elbow on each of them and leads them towards the cars, stops them all right beside the man, staring him down as if she wasn’t prepared to turn any of their backs on him. “There’s just one more thing I need to take care of.” He signals wordlessly at the two people standing with him and, without flinching, the one to his right takes out a gun and shoots BG in the chest.“What the f—” Levi begins to say but doesn’t get to finish, a shot hitting him, his neck snapping back, and he falls like a felled tree backwards onto the asphalt.“So much unnecessary bloodshed,” the man murmurs to himself and then spins on his heels, addresses the three of them but speaks directly to Amy. “Shall we?” He indicates to where someone else is holding the door to the back seat open for them and, with a final disgusted look, Amy takes herself and the other two and shoves them into the vehicle. — — — One of the cars gets left behind, most likely to deal with the mess that they were moving away from. The ride is conducted in complete silence, just a nameless driver, the man beside him and Dan, Amy, and Jonah side-by-side on the bench seat in the back. Just as they had been assured, exactly twenty-five minutes later they take a turn down an exit and there, just past the curve, is a lone house with pale, paint-peeling paneling and a grey roof, sitting perched up on a small piece of land, the yard unkempt and wild, growing through the low and out-of-place chainlink fence that surrounded the property. It’s still fairly dark out but there was a lightness to the sky that warned an oncoming morning and, as the vehicle pulls up onto the dirt driveway, Amy finally speaks to him and Jonah, her voice low.“I’m going to need you two to get your shit together. Pretend if you have to but wake the fuck up.” The back door opens and she sits up straighter, offers them a placating, thin-lipped smile and then nudges Jonah, who actually moves on his own, exits the car, and Amy has to flick Dan’s ear fairly hard but he, too, leaves without needing assistance.“I’m sure you three will want to get right down to business,” the man says as he takes them up the stone walkway, dry grass and cattails brushing against their legs, “But I think you’ve had a pretty traumatic night so go inside, have a seat in the kitchen and I’ll make coffee.” They move up to the porch that creaks under their feet, the wood sagging, and he takes a ring of keys from his front pocket, jams one into the single lock but then hesitates, thinking. “Maybe not coffee. Tea. You can rest and we’ll deal with all of this once the sun’s come up.”“Full offense,” Amy says as he swings the door inwards, extends his arm and bows slightly and she lets Dan and Jonah go in ahead of her, “But the last thing any of us want to do is stay here with you for any longer than necessary.”“I suppose I can’t fault you for that,” the man says, closes the door and plunges them all into darkness for a few seconds before there’s a click and the small foyer floods with a weak orange glow. Ahead of them is a set of stairs that leads to the second floor, a short hallway that would take them towards a bathroom, to the left a living room, the right, a kitchen that appeared to have come straight out of the sixties: bright colors visible even in the low light, wooden cabinets, tile floor. They’re corralled into it, directed towards the round table just in front of the robin’s egg blue refrigerator and they sit on padded chairs, Amy keeping her purse on her lap, refusing to let it go even though nobody had tried to take it yet. He dismisses the person who had driven them there, who had been following like a baby duck and they disappear, feet clunking up stairs and the man busies him by picking up a cheap electric kettle that was sitting on the counter, holds it up to the three of them.“No thanks,” Amy says. The man sighs, flips the lid open and turns on the faucet, holds the kettle underneath the flow of water and fills it to the top anyway.“Just in case,” he says, and winks at them, plugs it in and then starts opening cabinets, pulling down four mugs, searching through miscellaneous boxes until he finds a rectangular red and white one, sets it down. He’s trying to be affable and he certainly seems to be wearing it well but Dan can feel a vibrating filament somewhere under the surface, a barely contained something that wouldn’t remain hidden for long. He’d already caught a flash of it once before, a mild threat punctuated by a vicious few words (thought I'd give you the benefit of the doubt. That you wouldn't be so fucking stupid.) “I really would rather that you’d take a few hours to settle down a bit.” He opens the box, tangles the threads for four teabags around his fingers and pulls them out, drops one into each mug. “I have a lot to tell you and at least two of you seem to be in no condition to hear any of it.”“They’ll be fine,” Amy says unconvincingly. The man doesn’t say anything after that for awhile, the only sound of the water in the kettle starting to boil, the steam leaking from the spout and, just as it clicks, turns itself off, he says:“You know, I don’t appreciate how uncooperative you’re being.” All the pleasantness he had been carrying in his voice while talking to them melts away, has turned to stone just as Dan had predicted, albeit a heck of a lot sooner than he expected. The man picks up the kettle, starts pouring out the hot water, doesn’t fill each mug all the way to the brim and, for a split second, Dan thinks he’s going to throw the rest of it in their faces.“Uncooperative?” Jonah says and hearing his voice after remaining so quiet for such a long stretch of time is almost disconcerting. “Dude, we’ve been nothing but cooperative since the motel. Since before the motel. Because we won’t drink your tea or take a nap we’re suddenly ‘uncooperative’?” Dan is finding that he wishes Jonah would really go back to being uncommonly mute and, by the look Amy was currently giving him, she was thinking the exact same thing. Then again, maybe he had the right idea. Treating this situation gently but coldly certainly didn’t seem to be doing any of them any favors.“We’ve been doing this, keeping these— these rocks hidden for almost thirty years and then the Nagels came along and ruined everything and you three had to go and make it worse,” the man says, ignoring Jonah.“Thirty years?” Amy asks, incredulous.“The first one, the biggest one, popped up in a field just outside of a farm in Missouri in 1988. Shortly after, I was put in the lead of a group meant to deal specifically with keeping them under wraps while we worked on figuring out what they wanted, what they were doing here.”“Where do they come from, then?” Amy inquires. “What do they want?”“We still don’t know,” the man admits. “You have no reason to think I’m being truthful, but I am. They seem to stick to rural areas, towns with small populations, the kinds of places people are born and die in, which certainly made our jobs easier. Who would believe some hick ranting about an unnatural stone growing out of their wheat field? They pick a place, they stay there. This one,” he says, points at Dan, “Your one… It’s the first discovered so close to a city and the first to move around.” He holds his hands out. “We don’t know what that means either.”“So to sum all of this up:” Amy says after letting his words sink in, “These things have been popping up all over the country since the late eighties and you still have no idea what they are.”“You don’t know anything except that they exist,” Jonah adds and, the more that Dan thinks about it, the funnier that idea actually gets. Here they were, being followed, being called off and harassed by people who most likely worked for the government in one way or another, had the technology, the minds, to study these obelisks and yet there were the Nagels, turning them into pills that stopped tumors from growing, there was Harold Ledford, talking to people who saw them as they died, connecting threads that wound up at a still unknown center point and then there they were—himself, Amy, and Jonah—who had dug up in less than a week something that had been expertly hidden for nearly thirty years, all because some disgruntled employee had finally had enough.“You people are useless,” Dan laughs. The man’s face is turning red, his hands closing into fists at his sides and Dan knows it won’t take much more to push him over the edge but he can’t stop himself, the words dribbling out of him like a leaking pipe. “You don’t want us to stop because we know too much. You want us to give up because you don’t know anything and we’re making you look bad. Eric and Theodore knew more than you, Hal was just starting to know more than you, and you’ve had to sit there while we exposed everything, while we told everybody. You’re not scared,” Dan says. “You’re embarrassed.”“What was it,” Amy asks, latching on to Dan’s train of thought, “After we revealed the obelisk, the people higher up than you finally started to realize you’ve been coasting all these years? You’ve been mistakenly riding the big boy bus, trying to hide in the back but someone finally noticed and honk, honk,” she beeps an imaginary horn, “The short bus is a’comin’ and you’re desperate not to be on it?”“What we are doing matters,” the man shouts, spitting as he yells, gesturing wildly at them, “Nobody knew a damn thing about any of this! Thirty years I have done nothing but this, I have spilled blood, spent millions of dollars to keep this covered up!” He pauses to take in a few breaths, chest heaving. “And you have screwed everything up. I was going to offer you a chance to work with us. I thought: maybe dismantling the competition isn’t the right way to go after all. Maybe this would be a last ditch effort to prove I’m not just a glorified janitor, to not be retired to a bunker upstate. But if dealing with your insolence is part of the deal, if being ridiculed is what I’ll have to suffer through...” He turns back to the cabinet that had held boxes of tea and, instead, pulls down a well-polished pistol, “Then I’d rather just kill you and live with the consequences.”Of all the reasons to be murdered, Dan thinks, hurting someone’s feelings by making fun of them for being bad at their job is not exactly at the top of my list. (It probably should have been. This was himself he was talking about here.)There’s the sound of footsteps coming back down the stairs and the person the man had dismissed must have heard the noise (it would have been difficult not to) and Dan sees her out of the corner of his eye, lurking just outside of the threshold into the kitchen. Dan wonders how many other people were in the house, if there was an entire army crammed on the second floor or if these two were the only ones here but the notion is fleeting because the man is pointing his gun at Amy and now that’s all he can think about.“If you’re going to do that,” Dan says and he surprises himself by how suddenly calm he sounds when he speaks, “You better kill me first.”“Why?”“Because if you kill them, then I’ll literally have nothing left and you don’t want to be standing in a room with me when that happens.” His career has been over for months, his apartment now belongs to an obelisk. Amy and Jonah were it. The two people sitting on either side of him were the last two tangible things that kept him from completely snapping and if they weren’t there, if he had to watch them die, too…“I’m terrified, I really am,” the man says, “But I honestly don’t think you’d be able to do anything before I finished you off.”“Try it and find out then,” Dan says and the man keeps the gun trained on Amy, but he won’t shoot. He isn’t going to do it. He hasn’t killed anyone before, Dan thinks and then stands, plants his hands flat on the table. It’s easy when he tells someone else to take care of it, but when he has to do it himself… What barrel did they scrape this guy off the bottom of?“What are you doing?”“Making it easier for you,” Dan says but still nothing happens. “You know, the only reason Eric Nagel didn’t shoot us is because his building was on fire. What the hell is your excuse?”“Shut up!” The man screams and he’s so infuriated that his face is practically purple.“Do it, you fucking coward!” Dan yells back and the man is walking forward now, closing the gap between them, flips the table so it was no longer in his way. Amy is scrambling backwards out of her seat, Jonah is clamoring, his words so fast they’re melding into a string of nonsense. He doesn’t really expect to die, he’s putting on a performance because pretending to be exceptionally brave has always come easy to him when it was absolutely necessary (you figure out how to do that pretty damn early on when you’re someone like him). He’s wasting time until they can figure out what to do next but the man’s hand is shaking as he aims the barrel right at Dan’s head and Dan starts to count down: five, four, three, two—Just as he hits one there’s a godawful sound from outside, the whine and collapse of metal meeting metal and they all turn to look out the kitchen window to see the Hummer ramming through the chainlink fence—bending and twisting it as it’s pulled free from the dirt—and stopping just a few feet from the porch. Nothing happens for a few seconds as if the vehicle had driven itself here all on it’s own but then the driver’s side door flings open and Levi hauls himself out, hits the ground hard, stumbles but manages to regain as much of his balance as he can.“Julian,” he calls out and it must be the name of the man they had been talking to because, upon hearing that, his mouth starts working as if he wanted to speak but no words come out, the color washing from his cheeks. “Julian, you really screwed me over.” Levi is limping over towards the front steps and he looks absolutely gruesome: the right side of his face is covered with blood, his almost-white hair now streaked with dark red, a long, painful-looking and deep gouge stretching from his temple to nearly the back of his head. He hesitates at the bottom stair, reaches up a palm to wipe blood from his eye before he keeps going.“Don’t just stand there,” Julian, a man now with a name says to the woman standing behind them and she goes to the door, unnecessarily kicks it wide open, weapon raised.“Mornin’, Janine,” Levi says to her, “Maybe you should let me get a bit closer, just to make sure you don’t miss this time.” One more step, then another, his prosthetic leg dragging along, and then stops directly in front of her, the gun practically pressed to his forehead. “There you go.” She says something to him but it’s too quiet for any of them inside to hear and Levi laughs, which is obviously not what she wanted to hear but it doesn’t matter because the next noise she makes is a surprised yelp, followed by a grunt and then nothing at all after the gun goes off. “Julian,” Levi says again, walks in through the door, drags himself over the threshold into the kitchen. “You tried to get rid of me.”“You were a mistake,” Julian says. “People— We needed— But you were—” He's having trouble finishing his thoughts. He exhales sharply. "The fire at Nuvarin, Harold Ledford, an innocent motel owner, a detective for Christ’s sake, Levi! Do you know how much effort goes into cleaning something like that up? What else were we supposed to do?” If Julian wanted to walk away from here alive, he certainly seemed pretty intent on standing there, digging his own grave.“It’s what you wanted,” Levi says to him and, while they talk, Dan moves away from where he had been in front of Julian, steps to the side, away from the fridge, Amy and Jonah following. They don’t know the house well enough to be able to make a run for it and, besides, Levi is standing between them and the front door and not a single one of them trusted him enough not to take them down and call it collateral damage.“It wasn’t! Vandalize some property! Spook people. Showboat. You and that thug you had with you went too far. I could go to prison for even knowing about what you’ve done, do you understand that? I can’t go— You had to be put down.”“’Put down’,” Levi repeats coldly. “Put down like a goddamn dog.” He lifts his gun, goes to fire but nothing happens other than a faint click. It was jammed or maybe it was empty and he regards it for a moment before tossing it uselessly to the floor. “Woof,” he says, and launches himself at Julian. As soon as they hit the ground, the other three use it as a chance to leave because it’s clear that there’s nobody else left in the house but there might be more coming for them and they nearly trip over Janine’s body laying in a pool of her own blood in the doorway. It was going to take decades, Dan realizes, for him to process and work through everything he’s seen tonight. They make it out to the front yard but then find themselves slowing down. There were only two vehicles for them to choose from—the truck that Levi had shown up in and the car that had driven them there—and neither of them were guaranteed to have the keys left behind and none of them particularly wanted to double back.“Come on,” Amy says, makes a beeline for the Hummer and the other two follow because, keys or not, it felt a heck of a lot safer in there than it did just standing outside and, at the very least, it would give them a chance to possibly wait it out and see who may (or may not) come walking back out the front door. “What the shit, Dan,” she says after they’ve taken a minute to catch their breath. “What the shit was that?” She and Jonah had both clambered into the back, Dan in the passenger seat because the driver’s side was covered in blood and he glances at her through the rearview mirror. “’Do it you fucking coward’? Really?”“I don’t know,” Dan admits. He hopes that she doesn’t ask him if he thought that Julian would actually go through with it or not because, truthfully, he didn’t know that either. He didn’t think so at first but after staring directly into his eyes as he held the gun to Dan’s head...“Well,” Jonah says, “I thought it was bad-fucking-ass.”“You’re approval of my reckless behavior means the world to me,” Dan says, “Thank you. But I am never doing that again.” They lapse into silence and Dan leans forward, rests his head on the dashboard. (When there’s no other sound, he can still hear the noise of that giant man’s fists colliding with what was left of Reggie’s head. How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop? How many hits can a man take until your fists are just punching the pavement? He shudders.) A hand nudges his shoulder and he sits up, turns to ask Amy what she wanted but she pushes fingers into his jaw to make him face forward again and there’s movement inside the house, a silhouette that eventually turns into Levi, looking not much worse than he did going in, heaving himself back across the porch and down the stairs, heading right for where they were currently sitting.He opens the driver’s side door, pulls himself inside, lifts his prosthetic leg and hoists it into the space under the dashboard to join his flesh and bone cousin and lets out a heavy, wheezing sigh.“You three ready to go?” He asks, finally acknowledging them.“Go?” Amy responds with a question of her own because that’s definitely not what they were expecting to hear. “Where are we going?”“Wherever,” Levi says, fishes the keys out of his pocket and starts the truck, starts to reverse, and the chainlink fence fights him, tries to come along for the ride but it eventually breaks free of the bumper and he keeps going, stops at the end of the driveway.“You’re not gonna kill us,” Jonah says, disbelief edged around his words.“I don’t work for them anymore,” Levi says. “I have no reason to. You, Daniel… I thought about it.” He looks at him, skin sticky and red, his head still bleeding. “You hit me with your car.”“I did,” Dan says, thinks about saying he’s sorry but he doesn’t because he isn’t.“You know,” Levi says after a moment, “I can help you guys.”“Help us,” Dan says, realizes they’ve spent most of this conversation just repeating what he’s said to them right back at him. “Help us how?”“I know where most of the obelisks are,” Levi says. “Or, at least, the ones on the East Coast, in the Midwest. I could tell you exactly where they are.”“But we can’t—” Amy starts to say but Levi shakes his head slowly at her and then blinks a few times after realizing that was a bad idea.“Leave? Nah, being too far from an obelisk isn’t that awful. It’s just kind of like having the beginnings of the flu. Tired, achy. Julian just made it seem like a death sentence to scare people. That was all he did. That was his job. Bare his teeth and when that didn’t work, he made me do it instead.” He wipes more blood from his eye, smears it back against his cheek. This close, Dan is pretty sure the white he can see on the side of Levi’s head isn’t pale skin but, in fact, bone. He really doesn’t think that he should be the one behind the wheel but he was surprisingly lucid all things considered and he’d somehow made it here in one piece (although he couldn’t speak for anybody else that had happened to be on the road). Either way, arguing with him didn’t seem like the smart choice no matter how large a part of him wanted to finish the job that Julian had attempted to start. People were dead because of him, although he had no real proof that Levi was the one to get his hands dirty with any of them (other than Reggie, which he knew for sure). He was still there, he still let it happen.He hates himself for it though because, after all is said and done, despite knowing that, the idea of having the locations of obelisks, of being able to keep digging was more than a little enticing. He had wallowed, he had fought his instincts because he thought that maybe it was, in the end, the right thing to do but now his own head was as clear as it had been in a long time. He was still alive, Amy and Jonah were still alive and they were all in this far too deep to ever hope to see the surface again. There’s nowhere else to go but down. If it meant making a deal with a devil, then so be it.“What do you get out of it?” Amy is asking Levi. “What do you want?” Because there was no possible way that someone like him would want to do this out of the kindness of his own heart.“A gold star from God," He answers her first question. "And I’ll think of something. Medical attention might be nice. And maybe you could not turn me in. Not that doing so would get you anywhere. Julian knew how to cover people’s tracks, you have to give him that.”“Please shut up,” Dan tells him, seething, every word Levi is saying making it more and more difficult for Dan to not talk himself out agreeing to letting him help.“Forget an article,” Jonah is saying, lost in his own head, “With a fuckin’ map of obelisks and the boxes of Hal’s research we still have, we could write a book. Two books,” he amends. “Black Trees, Parts One and Two by Jonah Ryan, Dan Egan, and Amy Brookheimer.”“We’re not calling it that,” Amy says. “And, you piece of shit, my name would absolutely go first.”“Age before beauty, right?” Jonah says and Amy snaps back:“Pearls before swine.”“Yeah,” Dan says and the two of them look away from each other to stare at him. “Let’s do it.”“Are you sure?” Amy asks.“Screw it,” Dan says. “We’re stuck, aren’t we? We’ve adopted this terror child of a story and we can’t give it back.” They tried repeatedly to abandon it at a gas station but it just kept making it’s way back home again. “Take us back to the city,” he says to Levi, knows it’s probably stupid, that if they were being hunted down it’d be the first place everyone would look but the past few hours have been them making one stupid decision after the other. What was one more?Besides, he finally remembered that he still didn’t have his goddamn wallet.