Division 13 Case File 013-016: The Hollowed Grounds

What begins as an ordinary autumn afternoon soon becomes one of Division 13's most disturbing investigations yet.

After Captain David Shipman notices something deeply unsettling at a traveling Halloween fair, the team uncovers a nightmare hidden beneath the lights, laughter, and music. As mysterious disappearances begin to connect across multiple states, Division 13 finds itself hunting a predator unlike any they have encountered before.

Some monsters are created.

Some create monsters of their own.

And somewhere within the darkness of The Hollowed Grounds, something is still waiting for its next audience.

Transcript

Division 13 Opens A Case

SPEAKER_08 0:00

My name is Hannah Keegan. I'm a lead detective for a top-secret New York Police Department Task Force. We're assigned to the unexplained cases that border on the paranormal. This is Division 13, and here are our case files.

A Calm Day At The Fair

SPEAKER_03 0:15

There is a lot of pleasure in watching a 10-year-old discover that the world is bigger and stranger and more wonderful than she previously understood. And I had forgotten, somewhere in the years between Afghanistan and Division 13, that this kind of pleasure existed. Lizzie Sinclair had been running on pure joy for approximately three hours. She had eaten a caramel apple and won a stuffed black cat at a ring toss game by hitting the bottle on her ninth attempt. She had navigated a corn maze in 11 minutes, which the attendant told us was a record for her age group, a claim Lizzie accepted with quiet satisfaction as though she had grown used to such praise. She had been on a hayride, eaten kettle corn, and acquired a light-up jack-o'-lantern wand that she was using as we walked the midway to illuminate interesting things and occasionally the faces of adults who were not expecting it. She illuminated my face at one point. I looked down at her. She grinned.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

You look less scary with orange light, she said. A little.

SPEAKER_03 1:26

Angela, walking beside me, pressed her lips together very tightly. Thank you, Lizzie, I said. It was an unusual day for me. I had not spent a Saturday afternoon at a Halloween fair since I was young enough that the concept of a Halloween fair was purely delightful. The hollowed grounds was exactly what the flyer had promised: hayrides and corn mazes and artisan cider and rows of vendor stalls selling things made of gourds. And I had spent the first hour waiting for some kind of professional relevance to assert itself. Gradually, I'd stopped waiting and began to relax. As Angela would say, there was hope for me yet. Speaking of, Angela had noticed. You're relaxing, she said, sometime around hour two, wearing the expression of someone reporting a surprising but welcome development. I'm working on it, I said.

SPEAKER_07 2:27

Old habits.

SPEAKER_03 2:29

Old habits, I agreed. I scanned the crowd. I couldn't stop doing that. Some things were deep enough to be structural rather than behavioral. But what I was registering was the ordinary pattern of families and couples and teenagers in costume and vendors who had seen too many weekends of this to still find it charming. Nothing that shouldn't be there. Except as evening began to come on, as the light shifted from gold to gray, and the fair string lights came on, and the temperature dropped in the way it drops in October when the sun goes down and takes whatever warmth it had accumulated with

A Watcher In The Shadows

SPEAKER_03 3:10

it. I saw something. Or I thought I saw something. From the corner of my eye, a figure at the edge of where the midway lights reached, standing in the shadows between two vendor stalls, very still, not just waiting or looking around, the stillness of someone watching. I looked directly at the spot. The figure was gone. I filed it, dismissed it, told myself I was looking for things to be wrong because things were currently right, and that was unfamiliar enough to make me nervous. Lizzie tugged my sleeve. That way, she said, pointing toward a large structure at the far end of the midway.

Meeting Caddywampus

SPEAKER_00 3:56

The haunted mansion. Can we go?

SPEAKER_03 3:59

I looked where she was pointing, and that was when we first saw Caddy Wampus. He was performing outside the attraction. That was the only word for it, and even that word was insufficient. He stood on a low platform in front of the haunted mansion's entrance, a Victorian gothic structure that was either exceptionally well constructed for a traveling fair, or had been standing in this field for considerably longer than the fair had, and he was talking to the crowd that had gathered around him, and the word performing implied a relationship between performer and audience that required a certain amount of separation between the two. Caddywampus did not maintain that separation. He was tall, very tall, six and a half feet, maybe more, though the height was difficult to gauge precisely because he was not standing the way a person of that height stands. He was folded slightly, crooked, like something that had been manufactured to approximate the posture of a standing human and had gotten most of it right without quite landing on all the details. He wore a costume, or what appeared to be a costume, that suggested a Victorian ringmaster crossed with something that had gone wrong in the wash. Pinstriped trousers, a tailcoat that hung from his shoulders at an angle that suggested either intentional eccentricity or a skeleton with some bizarre modifications. A top hat that sat on his head at a tilt that shouldn't have been stable. His face was painted, or appeared to be painted, in the black and white manner of a silent film villain, all exaggerated planes and shadows. And he was smiling. The smile was too wide, not grotesquely so, not in the way of a special effects makeup application in a horror film, but measurably too wide for the face it occupied, in the same way that a door hung slightly out of alignment is not obviously wrong until you look at it long enough. Step right up, he was saying, and his voice was a carnival barker's voice, projected, rhythmic, with the cadence of someone who had been saying these words for a very long time and had developed a relationship with them.

SPEAKER_04 6:29

Step right up, step right up, ladies and gentlemen and little ones. Welcome to the Hollowed Grounds Haunted Mansion, the most elaborately horrifying attraction in the northeastern United States, possibly the world. Definitely this particular field.

SPEAKER_03 6:48

He paused, his head swiveled on his neck. The motion was fluid and rapid and seemed to cover more range than a human neck is designed to cover.

SPEAKER_04 6:59

Step right up, he continued. Caddywampus built it himself. Every room, every figure, every little detail. Caddywampus is very proud.

SPEAKER_03 7:12

He said his own name the way a child says a word they have decided is the most important word they know. I was standing approximately 20 feet from the platform. I had stopped walking. Lizzie had moved closer to my side without being asked, not hiding exactly, but finding a position she had assessed as safer. Angela's hand had found my arm. The crowd around the platform was laughing, taking photographs, applauding the performance. They saw a gifted street performer, someone pushing the boundaries of character work in the way that good carnival performers do. I noticed a wrongness in his elbow joint as he gestured. It bent in the wrong direction. Not far, not dramatically, just slightly past the range that elbows are supposed to have. And when he moved his hand after that gesture, the motion had the quality of something being manually operated rather than something moving from internal intent. A pause at the apex, a resumption that was a fraction of a second delayed. The stuttering nature of his movements, the impression of watching a film reel with several frames removed. It was all too familiar. Angela, I said quietly.

SPEAKER_07 8:35

I see it, she said.

SPEAKER_03 8:38

Her voice was very controlled. Caddy Wampus's head swiveled again. His eyes, beneath the grease paint behind the performance, found us. Found me. The smile widened by precisely one more degree, the effect adding to the bizarre nature of the face. Step right up, he said, directly to us.

SPEAKER_04 9:04

The hollowed ground's haunted mansion awaits. Caddywampus built it himself.

SPEAKER_03 9:12

We're leaving, I said. To Angela, to Lizzie. Quietly. Neither of them argued. We turned and walked back up the midway. I resisted the urge to look back for thirty seconds. Then I looked. Caddy Wampus was on his platform, facing our direction, no longer performing. He was standing completely still. The crowd swirled around him, oblivious. There were animatronic figures arranged around the mansion's entrance, six of them in period costume, positioned to greet arriving visitors, also facing our direction. Every one of them, eyes forward, not moving, just watching us walk away. We kept walking.

The Decision To Go Back

SPEAKER_03 10:08

Lizzie fell asleep in the car before we reached the city. She was out with the totality of a child who had run at full speed for an entire day and had exhausted every available resource. When we arrived, I carried her inside without waking her. Angela tucked the little girl into bed, and when she came back downstairs, I had made coffee in the kitchen because it seemed like the right thing to do. And also because I needed something to do with my hands while I decided how to say what I had to say. The Barker, Angela said, settling across the table from me. She wrapped her hands around the mug.

SPEAKER_07 10:51

He was one of them, wasn't he?

SPEAKER_03 10:54

It wasn't quite a question. Angela Sinclair had been married to something that had been a no-born and had spent 18 months in close proximity to whatever Douglas had been becoming. She had a calibrated sense for wrongness that most people in her position hadn't had the occasion to develop. I think so, I said. The movement patterns, the joints, the way he tracked us.

SPEAKER_07 11:22

And the animatronics.

SPEAKER_03 11:24

And the animatronics. She was quiet for a moment. Outside, the street was empty and lit by sodium vapor, orange light on the pavement.

SPEAKER_07 11:36

I know what you have to do, she said.

SPEAKER_03 11:39

Angela.

SPEAKER_07 11:40

You're going to go back there.

SPEAKER_03 11:42

She said it without accusation. Just matter-of-factly, the way she said most things that were true, and that she had decided not to waste energy fighting.

SPEAKER_07 11:53

I know. Because that's what you do. That's who you are.

SPEAKER_03 11:58

She looked at me across the table with the green eyes that I had, over the course of several months, come to find unreasonably difficult to look away from.

SPEAKER_07 12:08

I'd like you to stay. In case you were wondering about that part.

SPEAKER_03 12:13

I know, I said.

SPEAKER_07 12:15

But you're going anyway.

SPEAKER_03 12:17

I have to know what that is, I said. Whatever he is. Whatever he's running. If people are going to that fair.

SPEAKER_07 12:27

I know, she said. I know.

SPEAKER_03 12:30

She reached across the table, and her hand covered mine briefly.

SPEAKER_07 12:35

The world is lucky to have you, David. I mean that.

SPEAKER_03 12:39

She withdrew her hand.

SPEAKER_07 12:41

Go. Call me when you're done. And for God's sake, be careful.

SPEAKER_03 12:47

I left the mug on the table, half finished. Outside, in the vehicle, I radioed Kenny. Start pulling everything you can find on a traveling fair called the Hollowed Grounds. Missing persons reports, corporate registration, route history. Any complaints filed with local law enforcement along their circuit. Suspected no-born activity. I paused. And get the team up. I'm heading back to the fairgrounds.

SPEAKER_04 13:18

Already on it, Captain, Kenny said.

unknown 13:21

You're going alone?

SPEAKER_03 13:23

For now. I just need eyes on the place before the team arrives. A pause.

SPEAKER_05 13:29

Captain. Alone. At night. At a carnival, possibly run by Nolborn.

SPEAKER_03 13:37

Your concern is noted, Kagimoto.

SPEAKER_05 13:40

Just keep your radio open.

SPEAKER_03 13:43

Copy that. I drove back toward Long Island.

Fog And Moving Animatronics

SPEAKER_03 13:52

The fair was closed. The parking field was empty, the ticket booth shutter, the food stalls dark and locked. The string lights that had given the midway its warmth in the early evening were off, and without them, the fairground was a different place entirely. Not abandoned, exactly, but evacuated, as if something had instructed everything with a heartbeat to leave, and they'd all complied. The fog had come in from the water while I was in Brooklyn. It lay low across the midway, knee high in the open stretches, thicker near the edges where it pooled against the vendor stalls and the game booths and the shuttered ride machinery. It moved in the way coastal fog moves, slowly, with the patience of something that has decided to settle in and stay for a while. I walked the midway with my hand on my service weapon, not drawing it, just maintaining the option. The animatronics were still out. I registered this as a fact before I registered it as a problem. During operating hours, the figures had been positioned around the haunted mansion's entrance, six of them, period costumed, arranged in welcoming poses. I didn't like the things. Heads too large for their bodies, inhuman expressions, a disturbing mockery of emotion, which one could all too easily imagine concealing an inner murderous range. Every movement, an unsettling approximation of human motion that couldn't quite be duplicated. In the fog and the dark, I could see that they were not all in the same positions as before. I could see three of them in the vicinity of the mansion. I could see one near the ring toss booth, 60 feet to my left. I could see one at the far end of the midway. One I could not see at all. I stopped walking. I took stock of the figures I could see. They were all facing me. This was notable because when I'd first noticed them, they'd all been facing in different directions, as though guarding the mansion entrance by monitoring all possible approach points. Now, they were all facing me. Which means they had moved. I had not seen them move. I turned slowly, doing a full 360. The sixth figure, the one I hadn't been able to locate, was actually behind me, approximately forty feet back in the direction I had come from. It had not been there when I entered the midway. I had not passed it on the way in. But there it stood. It was facing me. I turned back to the front. Three figures near the mansion, one by the ring toss, one at the far end, one behind me. I took two steps to the left. Something scraped behind me, soft, deliberate. The sound of something repositioning on gravel and then going still. I turned. The figure behind me was closer. It was still. I could not identify the precise moment it had moved, which was the point. The frozen facial features bearing a grotesque expression of range. I drew my weapon. All right, I said, to the fog, to the fairground, to whatever was behind the stillness of six figures that should not have been able to move at all. I know you're here. Caddy Wampus's voice came from everywhere and nowhere, carried by the fog, sourceless and layered. Caddy Wampus sees you, he said. Caddy Wampus has been seeing you all day. Catty Wampus knows you. The animatronics began to move. Not smoothly, fitfully. They moved with the same jerky fractional motion Caddy Wampus had used during his performance. That missing frames quality, that stop and start advancement that the eye could not resolve into a continuous sequence. One moment a figure was fifteen feet away. Then it was twelve. Then it was ten. Swiveling, I could see that they were obviously moving to surround me. The hell with that. I fired. The round hit the nearest figure's center mass, and it staggered but kept coming. I fired again. It slowed. It did not stop. The material of its construction, whatever it was, not fabric over a wire armature, something denser, absorbed the impacts and redistributed them in a way that conventional ballistic damage was not designed to address. I kept firing. I kept moving. The figures kept coming. There were more than six now. I had lost count in the fog. They emerged from between the stalls, from behind the shuttered booths, from the corn maze entrance at the far end, stuttering, jerking, disturbingly quick movements. I backed toward the center of the midway, trying to keep as many of them in my line of sight as possible, which was becoming functionally impossible in the fog. My back hit something. I spun. A figure directly behind me, close enough that I could see the detail work on its face, the carved features on the oversized head, the painted expression of rage, the glass eyes that caught the ambient light and held it in a way that made them look in the dark and the fog, disturbingly alive. Its mouth was open, fixed open, the jaw locked in a position that suggested a scream of rage, and behind the glass eyes, something faint and orange glowed. I fired into its grotesque face three times at point blank range, and it went down and stayed down, the orange light guttering out like a candle in wind. But there were more, and my magazine was running low, and the fog was thicker now, and the figures were closing from every direction, and I was genuinely cornered.

Arc Rounds Stop The Screaming

SPEAKER_03 20:34

Headlights swept across the midway from the entrance. A familiar SUV. The doors opened, and the team came out at a run, and I had never been so grateful for the sound of Rygen rifles cycling. Kenny tossed something to me, which I caught without thinking about it. My Rygen, field ready. I looked up. Kenny, 15 feet away, already engaging the nearest figure with arc rounds, was not looking at me. You might want to keep one of those in the vehicle from now on, Captain. I picked up the rifle. Arc rounds, it turned out, were very effective against animatronic figures, seemingly powered by null-born nanotech. The electrical discharge disrupted whatever was animating them at the source. The orange light in their eyes flared and died. The jerky motion ceased, the figures dropped like marionettes with cut strings. They died screaming. That was the thing none of us had expected, the sound they made when the arc rounds hit. Not mechanical, not the crash of machinery. A sound that was distorted but disturbingly, horribly human. Castillo, after the third one, stopped shooting for a half second.

SPEAKER_06 21:50

What the hell are these things?

SPEAKER_03 21:52

she said.

SPEAKER_06 21:53

Why do they sound?

SPEAKER_03 21:55

Keep moving, I said. She kept moving. It was over. Over in four minutes. The midway was littered with the collapsed forms of what had looked, in daylight, like whimsical Victorian carnival figures, and looked now, in the aftermath, like something considerably more troubling. Seventeen of them, Kendrick had counted. Kenny was moving through the wreckage, crouching beside each one, examining the construction with the focused attention of a man who recognized craftsmanship even when it disturbed him. Missing persons reports, he said. He was looking at the internal structure of a collapsed figure, and his voice was careful and flat in the way voices get when the speaker has decided to process the implications later.

SPEAKER_05 22:51

Connections weren't made, which doesn't surprise me much. Small towns. But the missing people, dozens of them. He paused.

SPEAKER_03 23:08

Let's move. I'll fill you in as we go.

Inside The Impossible Haunted House

SPEAKER_03 23:15

Caddy Wampus was in the attraction. We could hear him, the voice drifting out through the propped open entrance, singing to himself, humming an eerily familiar carnival theme. He was humming in the way a person hums when they are engaged in something that requires their hands, but not their full attention. We went in. The interior of the hollowed grounds haunted mansion was, I had to admit, extraordinary work. Not extraordinary in the way of a legitimately talented set designer operating with a budget and Hollywood production team. Extraordinary in the way of something built by a single obsessive intelligence that had spent years refining a vision and had access to materials and methods that didn't map neatly onto anything I had seen in the context of normal carnival construction. The rooms were elaborate, the figures were precise. The lighting, battery-powered, self-sustaining, designed to create maximum disorientation, was technically sophisticated in a way that made the question of who had built it and how considerably more troubling than the content of what it depicted. Caddywampus's voice came through the speakers built into the walls. He had built an intercom system into a traveling haunted house, which told me something about the planning that had gone into this, and it bounced and layered until the direction it was coming from was impossible to determine. They came in, he said.

SPEAKER_01 24:54

Caddywampus is pleased. Caddywampus worked very hard on this one. Did they see the second room? The second room is very good. Cadywampus spent 14 months on the second room.

SPEAKER_03 25:10

A door opened in the wall to our left. Not a door we had seen. A door that had not existed a moment before, concealed in the paneling, swinging outward to reveal a corridor that went further into the structure than the structure's visible exterior dimensions should have allowed. This way, Caddy Wampus said.

SPEAKER_01 25:33

Caddywampus will show you the good parts, yes, he will. Caddywampus is gonna get you.

SPEAKER_03 25:41

Kendrick looked at me. Stay tight, I said. Watch everything. Every surface. We went through the door. What followed was the most disorienting 12 minutes of my professional career, and I've survived a no-born infested government black site in Alaska in the middle of a collapse. The hidden doors opened and closed without apparent mechanism, Caddy Wampus operating them remotely, I assumed, through the same system that ran the intercom, guiding us through the attraction the way a cat plays with something it has already caught. The funhouse mirrors that lined one corridor stretched and compressed our reflections into shapes that took a moment too long to resolve back into the correct proportions. The rooms were themed: a Victorian dining room, a surgical theater, a nursery with the wrongness of a child space that has been designed by something that understood the elements of a child space without understanding the warmth that should animate it. The first trap came in the third corridor. A section of floor, three feet wide, eight feet long, designed to look identical to the surrounding boards, gave way under Kendrick's weight. He went down fast, one hand catching the edge, the other finding nothing. I caught his wrist with both hands and pulled, my boots finding perches on the solid floor behind me, and for a moment we were both at the edge of a pit that went down further than the attraction's basement level should have allowed, and at the bottom of which I could see, in the dim orange emergency lighting that lined the pit walls, a bed of metal spikes. Kendrick got his elbow onto the floor. I pulled. He came up. We lay on the solid floor for a moment, both of us breathing harder than we'd been a minute ago. Caddy Wampus's voice through the speakers.

SPEAKER_01 27:50

Oh, that one almost worked. Caddy Wampus was excited. He's been waiting for someone interesting to try that one.

SPEAKER_03 28:01

A pause. A sound that was somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. Next time. Overton had found another door. She pulled it open. Behind it, a room full of animatronics. Standing in the cramped space, pressed together, faces swiveling toward the door that had just opened, the facial expressions quickly transforming to show inhuman rage at this disturbance. Overton looked at them for a moment. Then she stepped back, firmly, and pulled the door closed. She turned to face the team. No, thank you, she said flatly. More animatronics appeared behind us, emerging from a concealed panel in the wall, moving with that quick, fractional advance. We turned to face them. The team spread into their positions without being told. Castillo let loose a sigh. I love this for us, she said, and then she opened fire. We pressed forward through the attraction, clearing each room as we went, the arc rounds lighting the dark and blue-white flashes as each figure fell screaming, that horrible human screaming, and went still. Caddy Wampus kept talking through the speakers, his commentary shifting from pride to frustration to something that sounded, at the edges, like genuine rage and distress. Not the performed distress of a villain monologuing. Something raw.

SPEAKER_02 29:51

They're breaking them, he said. They're breaking Catty Wampus's work. He made them. He made all of them. He was very careful. He spent so much time.

SPEAKER_03 30:07

The voice fractured into something that sounded like crying, then laughter, then back. Catty wampus is gonna get ya, he said, cycling back to the refrain, the way a broken mind returns to a fixed point when the variable material becomes too much to process. Catty Wampus is gonna get ya. Catty Wampus is gonna get ya.

Traps Doors And A Final Room

SPEAKER_03 30:33

We found him in the final room of the attraction. A large space, clearly the centerpiece, built as an elaborate recreation of a Victorian ballroom. He was at the far end of it, backed against the wall, and for the first time I could see him clearly, without the platform and the crowd and the performance framing him. He was weeping. The grease paint had run in tracks down his face from whatever was happening behind his eyes, and his joints were moving in that involuntary, mechanical way. Not a controlled performance, but one that made it seem like whatever was keeping him together wasn't quite keeping him together anymore. He was simultaneously laughing and weeping, the sounds overlapping, neither one quite winning. They broke them, he said.

SPEAKER_02 31:27

Caddy Wampus built them and they broke them. He tried so hard.

SPEAKER_01 31:34

He always tries so hard. The laughter surged back. It doesn't matter. He'll build more. He always builds more. He has so much time. He has nothing but time.

SPEAKER_03 31:53

We moved to close in. He was faster than anything his size should have been able to be. He crossed the ballroom in a motion that my eye couldn't fully track. There, and then not there. A blur that resolved on the far side of the room where a door I had not seen was now open. He went through it. Kendrick put an arc round through the doorframe as he cleared it. The round clipped him. I heard the sound, heard the scream, but it didn't stop him. He's hit. He's a nullborn, I said. Assume he heals fast. Don't lose him. We went through the door. He was gone. The door led to stairs. The stairs went down.

The Basement Of Missing People

SPEAKER_03 32:42

The basement beneath the haunted mansion was not on any building plan, because it had not been built by anyone who filed building plans. It was large, much larger than the structure above it should have been able to contain, which suggested either significant excavation work or something about the geometry of this space that I was not going to think too carefully about tonight. The smell reached us before we reached the bottom. I have described, in earlier case files, the quality of the smell of death in enclosed spaces. I have described the slaughterhouse quality of the tomb's reception hall and what it did to the professional detachment I had spent years cultivating. Somehow, this was even worse. The victims. Some of them were still alive. Not many, but some. Chained to the walls of the basement, like animals awaiting slaughter, the floor sticky with dried blood. The victims stared into the distance blankly, seemingly unaware of our presence. Around them, barely visible in the gloom, were piles of human body parts, severed arms, legs, heads. At first, it was hard to visually separate living from dead. Body parts were so randomly strewn about the space that we couldn't initially tell where one body began and the other ended. Some of the pieces looked as though they'd been surgically severed, some looked savagely torn. On some of these, I could see visible teeth marks. Caddy Wampus had obviously been doing this for a long time. The evidence suggested years. The missing persons' reports Kenny had pulled, the ones that followed the fair's route across multiple states like a shadow, had found their destination. I gave the orders that needed to be given. The words came out of me the way they always did in situations like this. Automatic, correct, stripped of everything that wasn't immediately operational. And I was grateful for that automation, because the part of me that was not being operational was doing something else entirely. Kendrick worked through the space with the focused, gentle urgency of a man who had decided there was nothing else in the room except the people who were still alive. Castillo helped him. Overton documented. Kenny stayed at the entrance to the stairs, maintaining the perimeter, his face unreadable. We got everyone out who could be gotten out. It wasn't enough. It was never going to be enough. But it was what we had.

Cleanup And A Threat Unfinished

SPEAKER_03 35:45

Suffolk County Sheriffs initially, then state police, then eventually a pair of Sentinel Prime contacts who materialized from unmarked vehicles and began the quiet process of explaining to everyone else what they were and weren't going to be putting in their official reports. I stood at the edge of the midway while this happened. The fog was still there, lower now, hugging the ground between the collapsed forms of Caddy Wampus's figures. In the lights of the emergency vehicles, it looked almost beautiful. The way terrible things sometimes do when they're lit a certain way. The team assembled around me. We were all tired in the way that goes deeper than sleep. The kind of tire that takes days to process and never completely resolves.

SPEAKER_06 36:38

No sign of how he escaped, Castillo said. He's out there.

SPEAKER_03 36:44

Yes, I said.

SPEAKER_06 36:46

He got hit. Jackson's arc round clipped him. That'll slow his healing.

SPEAKER_05 36:51

For a while, Kenny said, I can't believe he was able to stay on his feet, much less get away.

SPEAKER_09 36:58

The fair's registration, Overton said.

SPEAKER_03 37:01

Her notebook was out, which was its own kind of steadiness. Her way of converting the unthinkable into something manageable.

SPEAKER_09 37:10

It'll take time to trace. Multiple shell companies, probably. He's been doing this long enough to have systems in place.

SPEAKER_03 37:17

He'll build another one, Kendrick said. Wherever he goes, he'll build another one. We were quiet for a moment. We'll find him, I said. He's not done. But neither are we. I got in the vehicle. The rest of the team filed in. Kendrick started the engine. As we pulled out of the parking field and onto the road, I rolled down the window. The October night came in. Cold, salt-edged, Long Island in the dark. And from somewhere in the tree line to the south, from somewhere in the woods beyond the fairground where the lights didn't reach and the fog was thickest, I heard it. Or maybe I just thought I did. Humming, an eerily familiar carnival theme. The way a person hums when they are engaged in something that requires their hands but not their full attention. I rolled up the window. I did not say anything to the team. I thought about a little girl in Brooklyn who looked up at a superhero with pure childlike faith that everything was going to be okay. That the superhero would save everyone. I wondered what cost would have to be paid.