Monsters Got Blamed for Murder, So I Relived the Victim's Last Hour novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: Twenty-One

I threw myself down on the concrete and got my bare hand on the sliding fold's wrist an arm's length from the seam.

It stopped.

The long flat figure turned its faceless head toward me.

The hum in the hall climbed three steps and stopped, a question with no words in it.

I knew what it asked, because I had heard the same tone climb over every name in the dark.

It asked whose.

"Reiss," I said, without looking up. "Hands. It stops for hands, but a hand needs a name or it slips."

On the next shelf, a boy of the Garfield Park set had laid his palm on a stranger's flank to help.

I watched the gray hide under it go flat and slide from beneath his fingers.

He snatched the hand back and stared at it, burned white with cold.

So I knew the whole rule, and it fit in one sentence.

The Thing took what nobody could say the name of.

Deloris had climbed onto an overturned crate with a bullhorn from the Marine's truck, her glasses on their chain.

"I need twenty-one people who will carry a stranger," she said, and the hall heard her.

"Not forever."

"I need you to put a hand on one, and not let go, and answer for them when the Doctor gives you the name."

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