Cedrick stared at the invoice Mr. Pence wordlessly delivered the next afternoon before loading the bodies of his dogs upon the van and screeching out of the yard.
“Sentimental fool!” Cedrick moaned. “If I’ve told him once, I’ve told him a thousand times. There’s no excuse for him to get so attached to those dogs. Such animals either achieve their potential, or they do not. This invoice is terribly inflated with emotion.”
Ethan grimaced. “I doubt many would share that sentiment.”
“Do you see many building towers such as mine?” Cedrick hissed “Hell, boy, go ahead and cut Mr. Pence a check. But it wasn’t the cold that killed his dogs.”
“Then what did?”
“Fear,” Cedrick sighed. “Simple fear.”
Ethan stared at his grandfather’s bald crown as the old man lowered his chin to squint at some other sliver of paper piled upon his desk. The memory of that face which had leered at him from a warehouse window flashed in Ethan’s mind. Though never a devout man, Ethan prayed his grandfather had truly slipped into madness. He prayed the time had arrived for him to take his grandfather’s place at the top of the enterprise old Mr. Pyle had built. A chill jolted down Ethan’s spine to think there might exist a shred of truth to Cedrick’s phobias.
“You think Clavius Turner killed the dogs.”
Cedrick nodded. “There’s no other way to explain it.”
Cedrick’s smartphone vibrated upon the desk. Ethan peeked at the glowing number on the smartphone’s screen and recognized it as belonging to the current crew supervisor struggling to stretch the tower still higher. The chamber suddenly felt a lot colder, a lot draftier, and Ethan pitied the man who waited on the other end of that incoming call.
Cedrick stabbed at his smartphone. “Ah, Mr. Lopez. Have we made any progress?”
“It’s been difficult,” replied a disembodied voice. “Two of my men are home with frostbitten fingers. The equipment is giving us all kinds of problems. We’re doing all we can to account for the lean in the tower’s level.”
Cedrick’s eyes blazed. “Mr. Lopez, I will ask for details when I’m ready to hear them. My question is simple. Has your crew made any progress?”
“We’ve managed to raise the frames for the east and south wall. If they manage to hold up in the wind.”
Cedrick winked at Ethan. “Very good, Mr. Lopez. Two walls sound like progress to me, and we’ll only put them back up if the wind howls them down. Ever onwards. Ever upwards. Progress is the key, Mr Lopez.”
Cedrick straightened from his desk after the smartphone’s screen turned dark, his back cracking and popping along with his tower. Cedrick shuffled to a large black safe always hauled into the newest and highest of the old man’s chambers. Cedrick’s fingers quickly twisted its dial, and the safe opened after several short echoes within its mechanism.
“You better come over here and choose your weapon, Ethan.”
Ethan’s heart skipped. “What am I going to do with one of the guns you keep in there?”
“Shoot it if you must,” Cedrick answered. “We’re going back into the cold. We’re going to search for Clavius Turner ourselves.”
Cedrick wrapped himself into a single coat and stepped into a pair of boots before Ethan caught his breath.
“Tell me you haven’t forgotten to fire those guns, boy. Tell me all that money spent on your ammunition and the shooting range hasn’t fallen by the wayside.”
An old, buried intensity in Ethan’s gut fired at the accusation, and Ethan replied with a sneer.
“I hardly believe any gun I might choose from that safe is going to do much harm to a monster like Clavius Turner.”
Cedrick’s lips contorted into a wicked smile. “You may be right in the end, boy. You may be right.”
Ethan again chased his grandfather down the tower’s stairs. Outside, the sky felt heavier, assuming the color of soot newly belched into the atmosphere. Ethan recalled the hunting trips Cedrick had dragged him upon during his youth, the mornings spent shooting pheasant or waiting for deer in the cold. But the chill of none of those mornings compared to the painful cold the winds whipped around his grandfather’s tower.
“We can’t smell for the trail like those dogs,” Cedrick’s words bounced off his brick warehouses, “but I’m ready to wager will find something soon enough in one of my buildings. There has to be an entrance to those tunnels those monsters are digging to reach at my foundations. We just have to keep patient enough in this cold to come across it.”
Ethan followed his grandfather into one warehouse after another with reservations about jumping into any hole they might discover in the shadow of such buildings. A narrow and faint beam from Cedrick’s flashlight offered what little illumination penetrated into the darkness that gathered around corners and between tall stacks of crates. Ethan again marveled at Cedrick’s energy, at how the old man’s eyes burned in the dark. Cedrick moved slowly, but despite the cold, or the sheer number of steps the old man shuffled as they moved through one warehouse after another, Cederick’s energy never looked to waver. Not even Cedrick’s breath quickened as it frosted in the chill.
Ethan could not say the same for himself. He felt his own breath taxed. His heart rate increased, and Ethan often paused to take long breaths to steady it and to calm his nerves that grew more tense with every step. The cold clutched him and refused to retreat from his extremities though he wore several additional layers of clothing in comparison with his grandfather. Ethan was holding his breath for something. He was sure that at any moment something sinister, and terrible, was going to jump at his throat.
They saw no one in the warehouses no matter Ethan’s suspicion. Yet he could not deny that trespassers did indeed lurk somewhere in the shadows. They stumbled upon sleeping bags and blankets. Empty tin cans of food and liquor bottles gathered in the corners. The search uncovered strange evidence of the presence of interlopers: old polaroid pictures of smiling strangers, stuffed animals with torn ears and missing eyes, cracked and unspooled cassette tapes abandoned in the digital age, silverware sets with bent spoons and tines, corroded typewriters loaded with yellowing and blank pages, small televisions with dark screens. Ethan thought all of the items were unnerving. They increased the dark’s tension. Ethan shuddered to imagine the hands that had collected such detritus strewn about his grandfather’s warehouses. He had lived in his grandfather’s tower for thirty years. It felt as if invisible intruder had entered his home’s most intimate rooms through secret doorways and tossed the ruin of their lives into Ethan’s spaces.
Ethan glanced behind before following his grandfather into another brick warehouse standing deeper in the yard. His grandfather’s tower of mismatched architectural styles loomed high above the warehouses, giving Ethan a reference point, an anchor, by which to gauge how many more buildings waited for inspection, how long he might have to remain in the cold. Ethan stepped into one more dark building and turned his head at a shuffling noise in a corner.
Ethan gasped. He trembled as fear chilled his blood.
The pale and ghastly visage Ethan had looked upon from the top of the tower grinned maliciously upon Ethan from the corner of a stacked pile of crates. Ethan’s mind stammered, reeling before the foul face that winked and vanished.
Cedrick’s gun blazed over Ethan’s shoulder. The blast deafened Ethan before tearing into the crate around which that horrible face had leered an instant before. Wooden splinters rebounded from the impact, and the tall stack toppled and crashed upon the warehouse floor in a cacophony of shattering contents that echoed along the building’s walls.
Ethan clasped his hand to his ear and swooned for the ringing in his head. He feared the crates had fallen on his grandfather.
Yet Cedrick’s luck held for a little longer still, and the old man shuffled through the fallen boxes, the pistol still smoking in his hand.
“You saw him,” Cedrick shouted through Ethan’s ringing ear
s. “You got a glimpse of him. I’m afraid you’re not going to sleep much at all now that you’ve seen him a second time. But you can’t chalk it all up to your grandfather’s senility any more. I’m glad you saw him. Now you will help me fight him. Now you will understand.”
Ethan would not be able to explain the sense of danger that flooded over him. He was unsure a vocabulary existed for him to do so. But his instincts screamed warning as he peeked into so many dark and empty windows on their way back to the tower. He did not see Clavius Turner’s face again upon his return to the tower’s warm shelter, but Ethan knew the face looked upon him.
Cedrick betrayed no sign of fear as he shuffled through the cold, and he made no effort to hurry his pace back to the tower that awaited him.