only her rain-soaked underpants separating her from his scratchy woolen trousers.
She snuggled her arms tighter around him and rested her cheek on his strong back. Despite the rain, she hoped the ride would never end.
Chapter Six
Jenny stood in her studio, staring at the mannequin. It was an androgynous, hairless, waist-up model clamped in place by a sawhorse. She’d carved and painted all kinds of symptoms into it, dark sores and dripping wounds. She’d glued ugly plastic black flies here and there all over the body, and cut out magazine pictures of people with horrified expressions and pasted a dense collage of them over the mannequin’s heart.
She could never show it to anyone, for a number of reasons, but she had no desire to share it. It was a confession of her evil, a splattering of all the haunting memories of death and suffering that crawled inside of her. The point was in the making of it, in doing something with the guilt fed by the horror movies that never stopped playing inside her mind. If she didn’t find a way to let them out, they would eat her up. She’d seen her dark side, with Alexander, and she wasn’t going to be that person again.
Jenny touched a hand to her stomach. No heavy bleeding yet. The little starter baby was still swimming around in there like a tiny fish. She felt bad for the doomed creature, but she avoided thinking of it as a person. It wouldn’t live long enough for that.
Seth knocked on her door, and Jenny turned down her stereo. She had to listen to Patsy Cline on a digital music app now. She missed her mother’s record collection, still back home with her dad. She missed her dad every day, too. She’d lived with him for eighteen years, then vanished, and it was almost certain that she would never see him again. She couldn’t risk returning to the United States.
“You busy?” Seth asked, leaning in the door.
“Busy-ish.” Jenny gestured toward the mannequin. “Just working on this stupid thing. Want to go out for oysters?”
“I’ve got some bad news. There’s something you should probably see.”
“Okay...” Jenny reluctantly followed him out of the room. She didn’t need more bad news. She could already feel their Parisian magic carpet beginning to unravel beneath their feet.
The living room was filled with autumn sunlight from the giant picture window. Seth dropped onto the antique settee, where his laptop was set up on the round oak table in front of him. Jenny sat beside him and snuggled up against him, enjoying the feeling of his hand resting on her hip. Being close to him made her feel safer, even though she would be the one dealing death if anyone attacked them.
“Here we go.” Seth maximized a video to fill the screen, then pressed play.
Melodramatic, echoing music played, clearly trying to be spooky, almost a rip-off of the Twilight Zone theme song. An animated logo popped up: the planet Earth, slowly rotating. The view zoomed out to show that the Earth was actually inside of a snowglobe clutched in a gray three-fingered hand. Lightning struck the Earth, and then the text appeared in glowing letters: Conspiracies of the Unknown.
Jenny laughed and elbowed him. “Seth, you really had me scared, you fuckface.”
“Just keep watching.”
The video showed a man, hugely overweight, with a goatee and thick glasses. He was sitting in what looked like a basement or garage, with a handmade Conspiracies of the Unknown sign tacked to the wall behind him. From the video quality and angle, it was clearly a webcam.
“Hi, everyone. Rudley McGhee here again, with the latest in what they don’t want you to know.”
“Oh, come on,” Jenny said. “Isn’t this the guy who says aliens shot JFK?”
“Blue lizard aliens. Sh, keep watching.”
“I have a Conspiracies of the Unknown special edition for you tonight, now that Beauford finally finished editing the footage.” Another chubby guy, balding on top but with long hair at the back, leaned into the frame and waved. “Move over, Beauford, you’re in the shot! Okay, folks, listen up. What if I told you that there was a little town, right here in the U.S.A., just a regular place like my town or your town, with a Wal-Mart and everything...But in this town, over two hundred people mysteriously disappeared!”
“It’s gnarly crazy,” Beauford said.
“Beauford, you’re still in the frame, home skillet! Ugh. Like I was saying, people, that’s a huge disappearance, all on the same day. That’s right, the same