He took a breath, counted off a few moments, then grabbed another box and began to drag it out.

  The Main Post Office was where he’d thought he was starting his family life, but in truth it had been where he’d ended it.

  Don’t think about it, he warned himself. It’s over. It’s done. You got a new life over here so get on with it. The past is the past, good and bad.

  He rarely did think of it lately, even over the past handful of years. He’d gotten over it, with the help of time, reason, and a good shrink.

  Get off that shit! Grab another box and do your job!

  Subconsciously, he supposed, he’d never be rid of it. How could he be? How could anyone? And what he couldn’t figure, as he dragged yet another box of old post office records out of the crawlway, was why now? And why here, of all places? He’d never been in this building before his promotion. The Danelleton West Branch had been closed and abandoned for the past twenty years. For that time period all mail was processed through the main office at the city dock. This just-reopened facility meant nothing to Carlton.

  He shook his head in musty darkness edged by the flashlight beam.

  What was it about this building that triggered the worst memories of his life?

  He forcibly tried to shut his mind off, and dragged another box from the cubby, grunting. Sweat darkened his collar. His heart was beating faster.

  First, Mariel, he thought. Then Belinda.

  It had all happened so fast, sometimes it still seemed like a dream. After eight fine years of marriage—and with no warning signs—Mariel had lost it. Totally. In layman’s terms, she’d gone off the deep end. In psychiatric terms, she’d suffered a systemitized psychotic break with paranoid ideations, amine-related mania, and traits of something called Capgras syndrome. In other words, Carlton’s wife had begun to believe that nobody and no thing around her was genuine. She believed that Carlton, for instance, wasn’t really Carlton but an identical imposter. She believed the same of the neighbors, her friends, and her parents, anyone close in her life. They were all fakes. She even believed this about the house, the car, and eventually, the entire neighborhood. Everything had been manufactured as part of a plot to fool her. After the fact, Carlton had read about the syndrome on the internet. It was very rare but very real, spurred by either an organic brain defect or microtumors. Untreatable, in other words. Carlton had lost his wife in the wink of an eye.

  And his daughter, Belinda, too.

  Seven years ago, he realized. Belinda would be going on nineteen now—and then he reminded himself: Not “would be.” She IS. She IS going on nineteen now.

  One thing Carlton would not give up hope on was the prospect of Belinda still being alive. Mariel’s body had been recovered from the wreck but Belinda’s body had never been found. There was no blood of her type in the wreckage, no forensic signs that she’d been injured. She’d been eating Cracker Jacks in the car and the fingerprint people found Belinda’s prints and traces of corn syrup and sugar on the seat belt buckle and passenger door handle, so she’d clearly been buckled up.

  For whatever reason, pertaining to her illness, the one person Muriel didn’t believe was counterfeit was Belinda. So one night, she’d put her daughter in the family station wagon and left town—in her mind believing she was saving herself and her daughter from the “plot.” She’d made it as far as Baltimore before a drunk driver had crashed into them on Interstate 95. Muriel had been vaulted through the windshield—she always forgot to wear her seatbelt—and broken her neck on impact. Instant death.

  But Belinda’s body was not to be seen.

  Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it, the words kept pounding in Carlton’s mind.

  But something—for some reason—forced him to think about it.

  The drunk driver had been killed too, so there was no living witness directly on the scene. Maryland State Police, however, told Carlton a motorist who’d pulled over to help had seen another vehicle leaving the shoulder just as he’d stopped. In the back window he thought he’d seen two adult men and another shorter figure. “Shorter, sitting lower, like a kid maybe,” he’d reported.

  “I know this is very difficult for you to accept, sir,” an F.B.I. agent had later told Carlton, “but it’s our speculation that your daughter was abducted from the scene by an illicit party.”

  Abducted? Illicit party?

  No. This would never be something he could ever “accept.”

  Surely, Belinda, traumatized by the crash and witnessing her mother’s death, had gotten out of the car in a state of shock and was seen by another passing motorist. Not an illicit party. Just some normal decent person who’d seen the wreck and spotted a little twelve-year-old girl in the road. He’d picked Belinda up and taken her to a hospital.

  Surely, Carlton would hear from the authorities that Belinda was safe, recovering, and soon to be returned home.

  After a few weeks, part of Carlton knew that that was not the case. And after a couple of months, another part of him suspected that he’d never see his daughter again. She’d been abducted by an “illicit party.”

  For God knew what.

  Eventually the authorities apprised him of the worst possibilities, but Carlton didn’t listen. He could not think about his precious daughter in such terms. Instead, he clung to the best possibility. That some otherwise decent people had taken Belinda because they couldn’t have a child of their own. “I mean, it’s possible, right?” he’d practically begged the F.B.I. man. “Something like that could’ve happened. Right?”

  “Of course, sir. Things like that happen every day…”

  That’s all Carlton needed to hear, and that’s where he’d left it. He’d left it all with that stray hope and no reason to believe otherwise. And then he’d put it all aside, to the best that any man in the same horrible situation could.

  Until now.

  Until he’d come down into this dark old basement to clear out a bunch of twenty-year-old boxes that posed a fire risk.

  Oh, Belinda. Please be alive. Please be okay. Please be with people who are taking care of you…

  He’d read about things like that all the time, and seen it on TV. Otherwise well-meaning couples who were miserable because they couldn’t have kids. So they’d take someone else’s. And in that situation? Seeing her mother killed? Crawling out of the car in a state of shock? It was feasible that Belinda would’ve blacked the memory out. The new parents would tell her that not only her mother had been killed in the wreck but Carlton, too. Or maybe she wouldn’t remember anything of her past, including Carlton. Delayed stress reaction. Amnesia. Things like that. Carlton could only pray that that’s what had happened.

  Belinda, came the final thought.

  One last box, full of clanky sorter parts. Carlton dragged it out, huffing, filthy now in dust. That’s it. The last one. He sleeved some sweat off his brow, then shined his light down the crawlspace to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.

  Something glimmered.

  I wonder what that is…

  No more boxes remained in the cubby. But something—he was certain— glimmered on the floor when he angled his flashlight in.

  Oh, what the hell? One more trip won’t kill me. And it ain’t like I can get any dirtier…

  Carlton crawled back in, the end of the cubby blooming with light as he neared. But his eyes bloomed, too. The object that glimmered was a bracelet…

  A bracelet that looked very familiar.

  Carlton picked it up.

  And stared.

  This is impossible.

  It was a silver-chain bracelet ringed with shiny dolphins. It looked exactly like the bracelet he’d given Belinda seven years ago, on her twelfth birthday.

  Im…possible…

  Maybe it was just his imagination. Yes, that had to be it. It was just some old bracelet lying there, and because he’d been thinking about Belinda, he was subconsciously convincing himself it was the same as his daughter’s.

  That had to be it.

  His hands began to tremble when he flipped over one of the silver dolphins and saw the inscription:

  TO BELINDA, FROM DAD.

  Then he heard—

  Carlton’s stare shot up.

  He was looking right at the butt-end of the crawlway, which appeared to be nothing more than a square of sheetrock.

  But there was a sound—

  What the…

  —a sound coming from behind the sheetrock.

  Scratching.

  It sounded like someone on the other side, scratching on the sheetrock with their fingernails. Carlton put the flashlight right up to the corner and saw that the square had been chalked into the frame. He pressed his opened hand against it, pressed a little harder, and the panel gave a little.

  Hair on the back of his neck stood up.

  The scratching on the other side grew frantic.

  It’s…probably…a rat or something…

  Carlton gave the panel a hard thud with his palm.

  thump!

  The corner nudged out another inch, and then the scratching stopped and gave over to rapid taps.

  Not a rat. A rat couldn’t do that.

  But a person could. A person rapping their knuckles against the other side of the panel. Carlton couldn’t deny what he was observing.

  There’s somebody behind this panel!

  “Who’s there?” he shouted. “Is someone there?”

  Finally he drew back and rammed his fist against the sheetrock, banged the panel completely out of its frame. Darkness swallowed it, and foul air gusted out of the opening.

  “Is somebody there? I KNOW there’s someone there! I can hear you!”

  He picked up the flashlight, meaning to thrust its beam in the hole, when—

  Darkness fell on him like an avalanche.

  Carlton froze. The flashlight had died in his hand. He smacked it in the most clichéd desperation, hoping it would snap back on, but it didn’t.

  Blind now, he thought of crawling backward out of the cubby. It would be easy. He could do it quickly. He could be back in the light. But he didn’t.

  He didn’t move.

  “Is somebody there?” he whispered into the dark.

  He already knew the answer, before the light and very familiar voice replied:

  “Hi, Daddy. It’s me. It’s Belinda.”

  Carlton’s heart didn’t seem to beat as much as squirm in his chest. The foul air continued to eddy into his face, evil fetors like rotten meat and bodies unwashed for weeks. Again, part of his senses thought to back up, get out of the cubby and be away from this hallucination or nightmare or whatever it was, but his muscles wouldn’t respond to the commands of his brain. He simply remained there on hands and knees, staring into the rank darkness.

  “You should see where I’ve been, Daddy,” his daughter’s voice flowed. “It’s not like in the Bible.”

  “What?”

  “But I can only be here for a few minutes. He let me come up, to talk to you.”

  He?

  “He’s the Messenger. He wants me to tell you some things.” The pretty voice seemed to dip up and down. Carlton wasn’t sure, but as his eyes were acclimating to the darkness, he thought he could make out the dimmest shape just beyond the opening, the most indistinct silhouette.

  “Who is…he?” Carlton croaked.

  “I can’t say. His name’s a secret, and someone like me isn’t allowed to speak it.”

  “Someone like you? But you’re just a teenaged girl. What do you mean—someone like you?”

  “I’m just a low-level myrmidon, daddy.”

  Myrmidon? Carlton had never heard the word.

  “I’m, like, a sexual acolyte. There’s lots and lots of sex down here, Daddy.”

  “But you’re not even twenty! You’re just a teenaged girl!” Carlton bellowed back into the insanity.

  “Not anymore. I might as well be ten thousand years old, Daddy. I’ll live forever down here. You know where here is, don’t you?”

  “You’re my daughter! You’re an innocent little girl! This is a trick! It’s stress! I’m hearing things and seeing things because of the stress of your mother being killed and you being taken! I know you’re alive somewhere, being cared for by good people, people who couldn’t have a child of their own but wanted one so much they took you!”

  “Oh, I was taken, all right, Daddy. But not by people who wanted a little girl to raise. When Mommy crashed, some men pulled me out and put me in their car. They drove me to Baltimore. They got me on crack right away, so I’d do anything they wanted. They tricked me out mostly, and made me be in movies. The scat movies were the worst but after a while it wasn’t so bad. I got used to it, just as long as I got my rock. And they used me for a lot of kink johns, special jobs, stuff like that.”

  Carlton’s mouth hung open. What could he say?

  The tiny voice in the dark continued. “Then I began to wear out from all the dope, started to look beat. Shit, in that business once a girl’s past sixteen, she no good for kiddie flicks and pedophiles. So about a month ago, the guys were shooting another movie, a four-way, and one of the stuntcocks got a little carried away. Fuckin’ asshole was big as a rolling pin to begin with, and he was all methed out. Anyway, I had a massive hemorrhage and died.”

  Carlton’s eyes felt lidless.

  “And then I came down here.”

  Did she giggle?

  “Now I’m an odalisque, Daddy. That’s what they call a prostitute down here. I’m kept by the wardens of Grand Duke Belarius of the Drakonia Prefecture. He commands four legions—that’s about twelve thousand conscripts. There’s a big war going on now in the Lowlands, so I’m in the field a lot. We have these big tents that they cycle the troops in and out of—you know, for sexual relief. Sometimes I’m on my back for weeks at a time, one conscript after another, until the campaign’s over. There’s no sleep here, either. It’s an endless night, and that’s all I do. Like I said, Daddy, there’s a lot of sex down here. That’s pretty much what it’s all about in Hell.”

  “You’re not in Hell!” Carlton roared so loudly he nearly blew his vocal cords. “You’re an innocent teenaged girl! Even if you DID die, you wouldn’t have gone to Hell! You’d have gone to Heaven!”

  The responding giggle fluttered, then seemed to be absorbed by darkness. “Are you sure? Things aren’t always as they seem. Mommy’s down here too, but she’s not an odalisque. She works on a chain-gang in one of the waste furnaces in the Industrial Zone. Everything’s recycled here, Daddy, including shit. They bake it in furnaces and turn it into bricks. That’s where Mommy works, and she’ll continue to work there until the end of time.”

  “This is a nightmare! That’s all it is!” Carlton shrieked, spit flying off his lips.

  “Think what you want. I have to go back now anyway. This is only a partial discarnation. But there’s a reason why he let me come here today, even for just a few minutes. He sent me to tell you something.”

  He, Carlton thought again.

  “He sent me to give you a message. This is the message: Behold the Messenger. The arrival of the Messenger is at hand.”

  Now the darkness seemed to howl.

  “I have to go now, Daddy. It’s been nice talking to you. But before I go, I want you to look in here. I want you to see me as I am now. I’m not a teenaged girl anymore. I’m a seasoned odalisque.”

  Carlton’s mind was spiraling. All he could make out was the splotched silhouette. “I can’t! It’s too dark!”

  Suddenly the flashlight snapped back on. The light blared all around him.

  Then he screamed when he pointed it into the hole.

  In the vision, Belinda was no teenaged girl now, she was a mature woman—a woman, yes, and more. She lay naked within the recess, her sleek body and long legs stretched out lazily over what first appeared to be a couch but as Carlton let his vision focus, he saw that the couch was formed of severed human hands. Some of the hands appeared to be human, some clearly not. Some sporting more than five fingers, others with just two or three. Some taloned. Some flaked with snake-like scales, some covered with tumors, mold, or nameless filth, while still others were mummified or decomposed down to bone.

  Then Carlton noticed something else: the hands were moving. This demonic couch of hands was alive.

  Belinda’s heavy breasts sat flawlessly erect even though she was lying down. Sweat coated her body thick as glycerin; her poreless perfect skin shone white as summer clouds, a stunning contrast to large, blood-red nipples and flame-orange eyes. Her hair seemed luminous, hanging in yard-long sun-blond tresses off each shoulder. She moaned, closed-eyed, grinning like a cat. Her buttocks, legs, and back squirmed in the most erotic luxury—it was the hands, all those severed but living hands caressing her from underneath, kneading her flesh. Carlton’s eyes roamed up his daughter’s elegant body to her face.

  Blushing-pink horns sprouted from her forehead, and in the pre-orgasmic grin, Carlton saw fangs and a slender forked tongue. Eventually she pulled two hands from the moving mass—a demonic hand and one that seemed octopoid—then sighed when she placed them on her breasts. The hands kneaded her independently, coaxing more waves of writhing pleasure. Finally, she picked up a third hand—a large human one—and began to masturbate with it.

  The image blared bright as headlights in his face.

  “Goodbye, Daddy. I’ll see you again someday. And remember what I said. Remember his holy message.”

  Carlton’s heart felt like a dying lump.

  “The arrival of the Messenger is at hand—”

  —and then she was gone.

  The vision vanished, leaving Carlton alone in utter silence. The cubby seemed cold, like a walk-in refrigerator, and the flashlight’s beam reflected off the narrow walls so brightly it was hurting his eyes. I must’ve fallen asleep or something, he told himself, and had a nightmare. And what a nightmare it had been, the cruelest invention. How could his mind manufacture something so awful?

  The imaginary bracelet, too, was gone. None of it had been real. All that remained was the square hole in front of him, the panel of which he’d knocked out previously. He took a few moments to still his mind, to let the remnant images of horror evaporate, then looked at the hole again.