The Intruders

Chapter 5

‘Who is this, please?’

The voice was male, rough, loud. Coming from Amy’s number it was about as wrong as could be.

‘It’s Jack,’ I said. It sounded dumb. ‘Who …’

‘Is this home?’

‘What? Who are you?’

The voice said something that might have been a name but sounded more like a random collection of syllables.

‘What?’ I repeated. He said it again. Could have been Polish, Russian, Martian. Could have been a coughing fit. There was a lot of noise in the background. Traffic, presumably.

‘Is this home?’ he barked again.

‘What do you mean? What are you doing with …’

The guy had one question and he was going to keep asking it. ‘This is number says “Home”?’

A light went on in my head. ‘Yes,’ I said, finally getting what he was driving at. ‘This is the number listed as “Home”. It’s my wife’s phone. But where’s …’

‘Find in cab,’ the man said.

‘Okay. I understand. When did you find it?’

‘Fifteen minutes. I call when I get good signal. Phones here not always so good.’

‘It belongs to a woman,’ I said, loudly and clearly. ‘Short blonde hair, in a bob, probably wearing a business suit. Have you just carried someone like that?’

‘All day,’ he said. ‘All day women like this.’

‘This evening?’

‘Maybe. Is she there, please? I speak her?’

‘No, I’m not in Seattle,’ I said. ‘She is, and you are, but I am not.’

‘Oh, okay. So … I don’t know. What you want me?’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Stay on the line.’

I quickly walked downstairs and into Amy’s study. Stuck dead centre to the flat screen of her computer was a Post-it note with a hotel name written on it. The Malo, that was it.

All I could hear down the phone was a distant siren. I waited for it to fade.

‘The Hotel Malo,’ I said. ‘Do you know it?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Downtown.’

‘Can you take it there? Can you take the phone to the hotel and hand it in at reception?’

‘Is long way,’ the man said.

‘I’m sure. But take it to reception and get them to call the lady down. Her name is Amy Whalen. You got that?’

He said something that sounded very slightly like Amy’s name. I repeated it another few times and spelt it twice. ‘Take it there, okay? She’ll pay you. I’ll call her, tell her you’re coming. Yes? Take it to the hotel.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Twenty dollar.’

My heart was still thudding after he’d hung up. At least I knew the score. No reply to my last message because Amy hadn’t heard it, which gave me a time before which she had to have lost the phone. When had that been? Around nine, I thought. Or could be she’d lost it earlier in the day and elected to wait until she got back to the hotel to fill me in. Either way, she needed a heads-up to deal with this guy, assuming he was on the level. When phones are stolen the thieves will sometimes call a home number, pretending to be a helpful citizen, in the hope of reassuring the owner that the phone isn’t lost. That way the victim will hold off getting the phone killed at the network, leaving the perpetrator free to use the hell out of it until the agreed handover time, when they just drop it in the trash. If this guy was using that scam there wasn’t a lot I could do about it – I wasn’t going to cancel Amy’s phone without talking to her first. The hotel’s number wasn’t on the note, unsurprisingly – we always communicated via cell when she was out of the house, which is how come mine was down as ‘Home’ in her contacts list.

Ten seconds on the internet tracked down the Hotel Malo. I called the number and withstood the receptionist’s mandatory welcoming message, which included highlights of the day’s restaurant specials. When he was done I asked to be put through to Amy Whalen. A faint background rattle of someone typing. Then: ‘I can’t do that right now, sir.’

‘She’s not back yet?’ I checked the clock. Nearly midnight. Kind of late, however important the client. ‘Okay. Put me through to voice mail.’

‘No, sir, I meant I have no one here under that name.’

I opened my mouth. Shut it again. Had I got the dates wrong? ‘What time did she check out?’

More tapping. When the man spoke again he sounded circumspect. ‘I have no record of a reservation being made under that name, sir.’

‘For today?’

‘For the past week.’

‘She’s been in town two days,’ I said patiently. ‘She arrived Tuesday. She’s in town until Friday morning. Tomorrow.’

The guy said nothing.

‘Could you try “Amy Dyer”?’

I spelt ‘Dyer’ for him. This had been her name before we married, and it was credible that someone in her office might have made a booking for her in that name seven years later. Just about credible.

Tapping. ‘No, sir. No Dyer.’

‘Try Kerry, Crane & Hardy. That’s a company name.’

Tapping. ‘Nothing for that either, sir.’

‘She never checked in?’

‘Can I help you with anything else this evening?’

I couldn’t think of anything else to ask. The guy waited a beat, told me the hotel group’s URL, and cut the connection.

I took the Post-it from the screen. Amy’s handwriting is extremely legible. You can make out what it says from low-lying space orbits. It said Hotel Malo.

I dialled the hotel again and got put through to reservations. I re-checked all three names. At the last minute I remembered to get myself transferred back to the front desk, this time reaching a woman. I told her that someone would be bringing in a cell phone, asked if she’d hold it under my name. I gave her my credit card number against twenty bucks to pay the driver.

Then I went back on the web. Did searches for hotels in downtown for anything similar to ‘Malo’. I found a Hotel Monaco, only a few streets away. Their website suggested it was exactly the kind of place Amy hung her coat on trips: funky decor, restaurant specializing in Pan-Cajun this, that and the other, complementary goldfish in the rooms. Whatever the fuck that meant.

I looked at her note again. It could just about be ‘Monaco’, if written in a hurry or while having an embolism. It might even be she’d misheard the name when being told where she’d been booked, and written it down wrong for me. Mal-o/Monac-o. Maybe.

I called the Monaco front desk and got someone human and responsive. She was able to quickly and regretfully establish that my wife was not, and had never been, resident in the hotel. I thanked her and put the phone down. I did this calmly, as if what I’d done made the slightest sense. As if I could really have misread the note, or Amy misheard something from an assistant, and as a result happened to name a hotel that actually existed, only a couple of streets away in the same town.

I stood up. I rubbed my hands together, cracked my knuckles. The house felt large around me. There was a sudden clatter from the floor above, as the fridge dropped a new load of ice into the tray.

I am not an especially imaginative man. The flashes of intuition I’ve experienced in my life usually have a basis in something obvious, even if only in retrospect. But right then I felt untethered, unguarded, as when I’d stood out on the deck a week before. It was after midnight now. I’d last spoken to my wife around eleven the previous evening. A shorthand debrief between two people who’ve loved each other for a while. Your day, my day; errand reminders; kiss kiss, goodnight. I’d idly pictured her sitting Indian-style on a turned-down bed, a pot of coffee by her side or on its way, her expensive and doubtless too-tight business shoes kicked halfway across the floor of her room, in this Hotel Malo.

Except she hadn’t been there.

I put my hand on the mouse to her computer. Hesitated, then found her personal organizer software and double-clicked it. It felt like an intrusion, but I needed to check. The diary window popped up on screen. A bar across four days said ‘Seattle’. The space in between was peppered with meetings, plus a clutch of client breakfasts, lunches and dinners. Except for this evening. Tonight had been clear from 6:30.

So why no earlier call?

There had been a couple of attempts at contact via the house phone. But she always called the cell. She knew I was supposed to be at home working but also that my desk and I acted like magnets with the same charge, and it was highly possible I would be elsewhere. And she always left a message. Amy had strong views on hotels. Maybe she got to the Malo and didn’t like it, checked herself in somewhere else. Didn’t mention it because it was trivia and didn’t affect our communication. Back-to-back meetings, then had herself booked into this week’s most fashionable Seattle eatery, table for one, briefings and demographics to read while she ate – leave calling Jack until she gets back to the room. Her phone slips out in the cab on the way there. She runs into someone from work, stays for an extra glass of wine. Would be getting back to the hotel round about now, reaching into her bag … and thinking shit, where’s the phone.

Yeah, maybe.

I looked around her desk again. Other people’s working spaces are like the ruins of lost civilizations. It’s impossible to understand why they’d have that thing there, put the other here. Even with Amy’s, which is blisteringly neat and looks like an office supplies serving suggestion. The desk looked as it always did, in I’ll-be-back-later mode. Except that her PDA was sitting in its dock. Amy was the only person I knew who actually used an organizer instead of merely owning one. She kept lists and her diary on it, maintained addresses, took notes, referred to it twenty times a day. She always toted it with her on business.

But there it was. I lifted it out, turned it on. A mirror of the diary I’d seen on the main computer. To Do lists. Slogans-in-progress. I put it back. So she elected to take one less piece of equipment on the road this time. Rock and roll. Amy had her systems. In her world there was a place for everything and everything stayed in its place, if it knew what was good for it.

And yet tonight, she was not in her allotted space.

So now what? Her phone was taken care of. I’d run down every available route for trying to talk to her, and hit dead ends. It all probably meant nothing. My rational mind was braced for an incoming phone call, a tired/apologetic Amy with a complex tale of screwed hotel bookings and phone-loss woe. I could almost hear how shrill the ring would sound, and was halfway to deciding to go have a cigarette on the deck while I waited. Either that, or just go to bed.

Instead I found myself in the living room, standing in front of the big windows, hands down by my sides. Minutes passed, and I did not move. The house was quiet around me, so silent in the continued absence of a phone call, that after a time the background rustle of moving blood in my ears began to seem very loud, appeared to swell until it sounded like the tyres of a car on a wet road, some distance away yet, but coming closer.

I could not shake off the ridiculous idea that something had happened to my wife. That she might be in danger. As I stared past my reflection in the plate glass, out towards the dark shapes against the blue-black sky, I began to feel dimly certain that this unknown car was heading inexorably toward me.

That I had always been its target, and now the time had come. That this was the night when the car hit.

Chapter 6

Oz Turner sat in the seat he’d pre-selected, wall-side of the booth nearest the door. This position was obscured from most of Blizzard Mary’s other patrons by the coat rack. It gave him a good view onto the parking lot, cars and pickups whose sole shared characteristic was that of not looking too new. He’d been to the bar twice the day before, in preparation. Office workers at lunch, young moms sharing salads. Late at night the clientele switched to lone men interspersed with middle-aged couples drinking steadily in silences companionable or otherwise. Meanwhile their vehicles waited outside, like old dogs, pale and ghostly in the dark. Beyond the lot was the little town of Hanley. A few streets away, through the small and prettified knot of the old quarter, was a wide, flat watercourse. Either the Mississippi itself or the Black River. Oz wasn’t sure. He didn’t really care.

He was nursing a beer to earn his place. He’d ordered one of the specials too, but barely touched the gluey Buffalo wings. This was only partly due to nervousness. Over the last year his habits had changed. He’d once been something of a gourmand, in his own way: a connoisseur of quantity. He made his coffee with three big spoonfuls of Maxwell House. He took his meals super-sized. He’d enjoyed the tastes of these things, of course, but also responded to the comfort of sheer bulk. He no longer found solace there. After a time the waitress came and took his plate, and he felt no sense of loss.

He checked his watch again. Well after midnight. The bar was dim but for lamps and neon beer advertisements. The television was on low. There were only ten, fifteen people left. Oz was going to give the guy another quarter hour, then go.

As he was telling himself this, a car pulled into the lot outside.

The man who entered the bar wore old denim and a battered Raiders jacket. He had the air of a person who spent his days on the wide flat plains, near farm machinery. The Raiders didn’t hail from anywhere near here, of course, but geography has become malleable now. It could also, Oz realized, be intended as a signal. To him. He turned to the window and watched the man’s reflection in the glass.

He went up to the counter, got a beer, exchanged the pleasantries required to pass as no one in particular. Then he came straight over towards the booth. He had evidently used the mirrors behind the bar to scope the room, so he could look like he was coming to meet a friend, not searching for a stranger.

Oz turned from the window as the man slid into the opposite side of the booth. ‘Mr Jones?’

The man nodded, looking Oz over. Oz knew what he was seeing. A man who looked ten years older than he should. Grey stubble over the dry jowls of someone who used to carry an extra sixty pounds. A thick coat that looked like it doubled as the bed blanket of a large dog.

‘Glad you agreed to meet in person,’ the man said. ‘A little surprised, too.’

‘Two guys in a bar,’ Oz said, ‘they’re the only people ever have to know. Emails, anyone can find out what was said. Even after both of you are dead.’

The man nodded appreciatively. ‘They want to find you, they gonna.’

Oz knew this only too well, having been attacked by Them a year before. He still wasn’t sure who They were. He’d managed to fix the damage they’d tried to cause before it became insuperable, but still felt he had to leave town. He’d kept moving ever since, leaving behind a job on a small local newspaper and the few people he had called friends. Joining the undertow. It was better that way.

Jones didn’t know about this, of course. He was referring instead to the fact that every email you send, every message you post, every file you download, is logged on a server somewhere. Machines see nothing, understand less; but their memories are perfect. There is no anonymity on the internet, and sooner or later a lot of solid citizens were going to discover emails to lovers were not private, nor hours spent bathed in the light of other people’s nakedness. That people were watching you, all the time. That the web was not some huge sandpit. It was quicksand. It could swallow you up.

‘So how come Hanley?’ the man asked, looking around. A couple in the next booth were conducting a vague, whispered fight, bitter sentences that bore no relevance to what the other had just said. ‘I know Wisconsin, some. Never even heard of this town.’

‘It’s where I am right now,’ Oz said. ‘That’s all. How did you get my email address?’

‘Heard your podcast. Made us want to talk to you. Did a little digging, took a chance. No big deal.’

Oz nodded. Once upon a time he had a little late night radio show, back east. That stopped when he left town, of course. But in the last couple of months he’d started recording snippets onto his laptop, uploading them onto the web, started spreading the word again. There were others like him, doing the same thing. ‘It concerns me that you were able to find my email address.’

‘Should worry you even more if I couldn’t. Otherwise I’d just be an amateur, right?’

‘And what did you want to say to me?’

‘You first,’ Jones said. ‘What you said in the ’cast was pretty oblique. I threw you a couple bones in my email, hinted what we know. Let’s hear you talk now.’

Oz had thought about ways of communicating the bottom line while remaining circumspect. He took a sip of his beer, then set it back on the table and looked the man in the eye.

‘The Neanderthals had flutes,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘To play tunes,’ the man shrugged.

‘That just rephrases the question. Why did they believe it important to be able to replicate certain sounds, when just getting enough to eat was hard labour?’

‘Why indeed.’

‘Because sound is important in ways we’ve forgotten. For millions of years it couldn’t be recorded. Now it can, so we concentrate on the types with obvious meaning. But music is a side alley. Even speech isn’t important. Every other species on the planet gets by with chirps and barks – how come we need thousands of words?’

‘Because our universe is more complex than a dog’s.’

‘But that’s because of speech, not the other way around. Our world is full of talking, radio, television, everybody chattering, so loud all the time that we forget why control of sound was originally important to us.’

‘Which was?’

‘Speech developed from prehistoric religious ritual, grew out of chanted sounds. The question is why we were doing this back then. Who we were trying to talk to.’

The man had begun to smile faintly.

‘Also why, when you look at European stone age monuments, it’s clear that sound was a major design factor. Newgrange. Carnac. Stonehenge itself – the outside faces of the uprights are rough, but the interiors are smooth. To channel sound. Certain frequencies of sound.’

‘Long time ago, Oz. Who knows what those guys were up to? Why should we care?’

‘Read the Syntagma Musicum, Praetorius’s ancient catalogue of musical instruments. Back in the sixteenth century all the major cathedral organs in Europe had thirty-two foot organ pipes, monsters that produce infrasound, sounds too low for the human ear to even hear. Why – if not for some other effect these frequencies have? Why did people feel so different in church, so connected with something beyond? And why do so many alternative therapies now centre on vibration, which is just another way of quantifying sound?’

‘Tell me,’ Jones said, quietly.

‘Because the walls of Jericho story is not about sound breaking down literal walls, but figurative ones,’ Oz said. ‘The walls between this place and another. Sound isn’t just about hearing. It’s about seeing things too.’

The man nodded slowly, and in acquiescence. ‘I hear you, my friend, if you’ll excuse the pun. I hear you loud and clear.’

Oz sat back. ‘That enough?’

‘For now. We’re on the same page, that’s for sure. I’m curious. Where did you first hear about this?’

‘Met a guy at a conference a couple years ago. A small convention of the anomalous, down in Texas.’

‘WeirdCon?’

‘Right. We kept in touch. He had some ideas, started working on them in his spare time. He was building something. We emailed once in a while, I shared my research on pre-historical parallels with him. Then nearly a month ago, he dropped off the face. Haven’t heard from him since.’

‘Probably he’s fine,’ the man said. ‘People get spooked, lay low for a while. You two ever discuss this in a public forum?’

‘Hell no. Always private.’

‘You never email anyone else about it yourself?’

‘Nope.’

‘Never know when They might be listening, right?’

This was both a joke and not a joke, and Oz grunted. Amongst people trying to find the truth, the concept of ‘Them’ was complicated. You knew they were out there, of course – it was the only way to make sense of all the unexplained things in the world – but you understood that talking about Them made you sound like a kook. So you put inverted commas around it. Someone said Them with double underlining and a big, bold typeface, and you knew he was either faking it or a nut. You heard those little ironical quote marks, however … chances were the guy was okay.

‘Isn’t that the truth,’ Oz said, playing along. ‘You just never know. Even if They don’t actually exist.’

The man smiled. ‘I’m going to talk to my friends, see about getting us all together. Glad we met, Oz. Been waiting a long time to connect with someone like you.’