The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

transformer about to fail, or the snapping, static-like buzz you sometimes heard over a field of grasshoppers on a dry summer day. It rose over the span of a second, seemingly from a source very close to Travis—behind him, he thought at first. He spun to look for it but saw nothing there, and noticed as he moved that the sound’s direction didn’t change at all. It had no direction. It was just everywhere, as if he were hearing it through a set of headphones. He saw Paige and Bethany reacting the same way. They were hearing it too. They looked at him and each other, their eyes narrowing in concern—and then widening.
    Because they’d just realized the same thing Travis had.
    That it wasn’t a sound, exactly. It wasn’t anything they were picking up with their ears. It was closer than that, somehow—already inside their heads.
    It was a thought.
    They were hearing it the way they heard their own internal monologue.
    All three of them came to a stop, facing one another. None of them spoke. Second by second the sensation intensified, its apparent volume and clarity mounting. Travis felt it becoming almost a physical presence, its insectile quality growing sharper. It felt like bugs swarming inside his skull. The effect began to push him toward nausea. He saw it doing the same to Paige and Bethany. Saw them taking careful breaths to keep their stomachs under control.
    And then it was over. The sound was gone as if someone had thrown a switch, and there was only the hush of the town again.
    The three of them stood there for a long moment, still not speaking. Just breathing, getting their bearings.
    “What the hell’s happening in this place?” Bethany said. It came out as hardly more than a whisper.
    Travis thought of the sea withdrawing before the arrival of a tsunami. Of people’s hair standing on end before a lightning strike. Of the supposed panicked behavior of animals in the hours before a major earthquake.
    “No idea,” he said, his own voice quieter than he’d intended. He nodded to the back of the building. “Come on.”

Chapter Twenty-Five
    A passageway beneath the Third Notch.
    They didn’t even have to enter the basement to see it. It was there in plain view to any stray dog that wandered through the rear lot. Centered on the back wall, one story below the main level, was the arched entry to a corridor beneath the building. A set of concrete stairs descended to it, hugging the cinderblock foundation. A stamped metal sign was bolted to the bricks just shy of the opening:
    720 Main St.
     
    Apt. 1
     
    Apt. 2
     
    An orange security light glowed softly, somewhere in the gloom beyond the arch. The floor down there was more concrete, probably from the same pour that’d laid the stairs.
    Travis understood Jeannie’s amusement now. He also knew what they would find beneath the restaurant.
    Nothing.
    Both apartments were long deserted. They’d probably been declared illegal for residential use: each had only a tiny window, tucked up near the ceiling, all but impossible to crawl out through during an emergency.
    Each unit’s layout was a mirror image of the other: kitchen and bathroom on one end, balanced by undefined space that served as living, dining, and sleeping quarters. Like a slightly oversized hotel room minus carpeting and a view. Both apartments were empty. Not even boxes of random junk had accumulated—just a few cracked laundry baskets in unit two, nested together and forgotten in a corner.
    There was nothing else that could’ve been called a passageway. No hidden tunnel behind either derelict refrigerator—they checked. No mirror on any wall that could swing out on concealed hinges. The corridor itself was the only thing the notebook could’ve been referring to.
    “A passageway beneath the third notch,” Bethany said. “And the next sentence started with Look for.” She thought about it. “Look for one of these apartments? It wouldn’t make sense to word it like that. You don’t have to look very hard to find these doors, once you’re in the hallway.”
    “Look for John Doe in Apartment One,” Travis said. That sounded better. He couldn’t think of anything else that sounded right at all. “Maybe Ward met someone here. Was instructed to meet someone here—someone who lived in one of these units back then.”
    Before he could say more they heard Jeannie’s voice through the ceiling straight above them, yelling at someone. They were standing in the second apartment,