Finding Vanessa (Part 8)

In the center of town, there’s an old cemetary connected to the Baptist church. Behind it, there’s a service trail leading off into the woods, which connects to a dilapidated caretaker’s cottage that’s been out of commission since the fifties. When I was in school, it was a popular spot for kids to sneak away and make out or get high. I had a hard time imagining teens slipping back there these days, now that the forest had swallowed up any semblance of civilization. The path was overgrown and narrow, with low tree branches reaching out like the claws of forest giants, scratching the car on both sides as I drove slowly past.

I pulled O’Brien’s cruiser back there deep enough that nobody would spot it from the main road, killed the lights and engine, then got to work.

I used the pass code I’d gleaned from Vanessa’s file to get inside her phone and started with emails and texts. Not too much to see, but there was a long conversation chain with somebody named “Toulouse.” They had first started chatting a couple months ago.

Vanessa - “I had a good time yesterday. Looking forward to our next hang sesh.”

Toulouse - “Wow. Desperate much?”

Vanessa - “Lol, kiss my ass. I’m trying to pay you a compliment.”

Toulouse - “What the hell is a compliment?” Is that some kind of sandwich?”

Vanessa - “God, ur so weird.”

Vanessa - “Wanna come over and play smash bros tonight?”

Toulouse - “Can’t. Got a thing.”

Toulouse - “It’s super mysterious, yet important as fuck.”

Vanessa - “Sounds intriguing. Can I have a hint?”

Toulouse - “Gotta help a guy get rid of some bodies.”

Vanessa - “Well, when you’re done, come play smash bros.”

Vanessa - “And bring beer.”

I’ll spare you the gritty details, but there were a few times when I had to put the phone down and roll my eyes.

Is this how kids flirt these days?

Toulouse seemed mostly harmless, but immature even by teenager standards. I honestly couldn’t tell what Vanessa saw in him (or her?), but there’s no accounting for taste, and Toulouse made her type “LOL” enough times that she must have enjoyed his company. There was nothing overtly sexual in their messages, just a strong overtone of two horny kids trying to figure themselves out.

I felt like such a creep, but then reminded myself that this was what I did for a living. Stalking couples, waiting for cheaters to get busy, then stealing some photos while they were going at it. The only difference here was that I knew the person whose life I was digging into. But even still, I couldn’t shake that nagging thought: this feels wrong.

Vanessa and Toulouse’s texts weren’t as expositional as I’d hoped. A whole lot of “see you tomorrow’s” gave me the impression that Toulouse was from work. A couple “I had fun last night’s” told me that they had gone out for some not-dates. A ton of emojis back and forth reminded me just how out-of-touch I was with this generation. And then the whole thing ended abruptly, with a few messages from Vanessa.

Vanessa - “Hey. Whatcha doin?”

Vanessa - “You there? I’m bored. Wanna hang?”

Vanessa - “Hello?”

Vanessa - “I guess you’re not talking to me anymore, huh?”

Toulouse - “Lose my number.”

Vanessa - “Wtf? What the hell did I do?”

Toulouse - “Vanessa was a friend of mine, douchebag.”

Vanessa - “I should have listened to everybody when they said that there’s something wrong with ur brain. U r an asshole.”

Toulouse - “Sorry, my bad, autocorrect.”

Toulouse - “What I meant to say was”

Toulouse - “Vanessa was a friend of mine, you twat-waffle Mcfuckface.”

That’s how it ended. The date of the last message put the conversation at about a week before her disappearance. I saved Toulouse’s number on the burner I got from Roger and made a plan to track the line down once I had a moment’s reprieve.

The next step was checking her phone for pictures. I opened the gallery, scrolled down a ways, and started flicking through the slideshow in chronological order. Vanessa was a normal teenage girl, and she took what I would consider an average amount of selfies. One for every day or so. I studied them, looking for any sort of clue or indicator that something was wrong, or about to go wrong. But she was always happy. Always wearing that same old brown jacket and that same typical teenage-girl smile.

I had to smile when I first saw it. The jacket. I recognized it as the one Donny used to wear all the time. It was a little too big on her, but she made it work.

Starting around a month back, there were more frequent pictures of her. Four, five, or more each day. Not selfies, though. Somebody else was taking pictures of her, with her phone, while she looked back and laughed.

The last picture on her phone was taken an entire week and a half before she went missing. Two days before her breakup text with Toulouse. And that last picture was the only one I needed to see.

Mother fucker.

The last photo showed her and Toulouse, cheek to cheek, smiling in a shared selfie, and I recognized the guy she was with instantly. When I had met him the day before, he said he didn’t really know her all that well. Only back then I knew him as Jerry, and I was quickly running out of reasons not to beat the shit out of this guy.

I lit a smoke to calm my nerves, then remembered I wasn’t in my own car, and O’Brien might not be too merciful if she got her car back smelling like tobacco. I rolled down my window, and that’s when I smelled it. That sour, putrid stench. The one from the bowling alley.

I flicked on the headlights, illuminating the forest path in front of me, but as far as I could see it was empty.

Then I heard it. Stomping through the overgrown trail far behind me, walking towards the cruiser from the cemetery, and I instantly realized why O’Brien always parked her car facing the road.

I couldn’t see what it was, but I could smell it from a mile away. The thing, whatever it was, kept walking. Closer and closer. The outline of its shape slowly taking form in the darkness: an unnatural juggernaut, enormous, wide, dark, and dragging something behind it that scraped at the road with each step. From this distance, there was no way for me to make out exactly what I was dealing with. It was protected by the shadows, and whatever manner of monster, one thing was glaringly obvious: I didn’t want to be out here alone with it.

I turned on the engine, then reached for the gear shift and heard the sound of that thing’s feet slamming into the ground as it sprinted down the path towards me with impossible speed. By the time I had the car in gear, it was there.

The car rocked as the back window shattered into pieces, the roof buckled, and suddenly the front window erupted into a spiderweb of broken safety glass. I dropped my lit cigarette onto my lap and tried to figure out what the hell was going on.

In the center of the smashed glass, a giant piece of metal wiggled and pulled itself free, then disappeared into the sky and came right back down into the windshield again with a loud impact that completely covered my entire field of vision in broken glass.

The reality of the situation clicked into place and I screamed, “Oh shit!”

That thing was standing on the roof of the cruiser, swinging a giant mallet into the windshield, and by the looks of it I didn’t have long until there was nothing left between me and the hammerhead.

DRIVE!

I couldn’t see anything in front of me and even if I could I didn’t have anywhere to go. The trail would dead end in the forest and I would be fucked.

Reverse didn’t feel like a much better option. The back window was busted out but there was no light to guide me and I’d be pretty much flying blind.

There wasn’t enough room to turn around and I sure as shit wasn’t going to leave the rapidly deteriorating “safety” of the vehicle.

The piece of metal that had penetrated the laminated glass in front of my face started to budge, like the thing was getting ready to pull it back out for another swing, and I made a split-second decision to kick the car into reverse and put the pedal to the floor.

We lurched backwards and started flying down the trail, but somehow the thing on the roof didn’t fall off. An enormous hand, the size of a baseball glove, reached down and wrapped its fingers through my open window. Giant grey, inhuman digits gripped the roof just inches from my face and I could see another hand on the opposite side as it smashed through the tempered glass of the passenger window. This titanic fuck was laying flat on top of the car, with an arm span wide enough to reach into both side windows at the same time.

I kept my foot pressed hard on the gas while I yanked out my Beretta, pressed it against the roof, and fired off three shots.

I would have fired a fourth but the car bounced over a tombstone and we went into a quick spin. I yanked the wheel back, gaining control without ever dropping speed. I’d cleared the forest road and hit the cemetery and we were going over graves, colliding with markers, mowing over the smaller ones and ricocheting with the biggers. At one point I ran over the back bumper, and before I knew it we were through the ditch and back on the main road.

There were street lights here, and I could actually see the path in front of me. I swung the wheel again, fishtailing into a near perfect ninety degree turn that pointed me in a straight line down the road. We climbed in speed, and in no time I was redlining the RPMs, but the thing held firm onto the top of the car.

The road was about to run out, a sharp deadman’s curve to the left, and despite my performance up to this point, I wasn’t so sure I’d be able to hook another turn at these speeds in reverse gear. If I stayed the course, I was going to crash into another dense portion of forest. So I made one more split-second decision.

I picked up my gun, put it against the roof again, then started shooting at the same moment I slammed the breaks sending us into a long skid, tires screeching against the road loud enough to wake the dead.

The thing finally flew off the top of the car and landed somewhere between the trees across the ditch with a loud crash. I immediately pointed the gun back there and waited to see if it was going to get up.

The only sounds were those of the unhealthy rattle of the cruiser engine and my own heartbeat pounding in my ears. I still hadn’t gotten a good look at it, and now I couldn’t even tell where the thing was.

What are you doing? Get out of here!

I turned in my seat to face forward then realized that I still couldn’t see out the front window, the shattered laminated glass held in place was impossible to look through. I pointed my gun at it, then caught myself.

That won’t work. This isn’t a fucking movie.