“Hi, hello? Everything okay?”

He walked toward the door, squeezing the phone a little tighter without being aware of it. He found himself thinking of some movie that had scared heck out of him as a kid, some haunted house thing. A bunch of teenagers had approached the old deserted house, and when one of them saw the door standing ajar, he’d whispered “Look, it’s open!” to his buddies. You wanted to tell them not to go in there, but of course they had.

That’s stupid. If there’s someone in that car, he could be hurt.

Of course the guy might have gone up to the restaurant, maybe looking for a pay phone, but if he was really hurt —

“Hello?”

Doug reached for the door handle, then thought better of it and stooped to peer through the opening. What he saw was dismaying. The bench seat was covered with mud; so were the dashboard and the steering wheel. Dark goo dripped from the old-fashioned knobs of the radio, and on the wheel were prints that didn’t look exactly as if hands had made them. The palm prints were awfully big, for one thing, but the finger marks were as narrow as pencils.

“Is someone in there?” He shifted his cell phone to his right hand and took hold of the driver’s door with his left, meaning to swing it wide so he could look into the backseat. “Is someone hur—”

There was a moment to register an ungodly stink, and then his left hand exploded into pain so great it seemed to leap through his entire body, trailing fire and filling all his hollow spaces with agony. Doug didn’t, couldn’t, scream. His throat locked shut with the sudden shock of it. He looked down and saw that the door handle appeared to have impaled the pad of his palm.

His fingers were barely there. He could see only the stubs of them, just below the last knuckles where the back of his hand started. The rest had somehow been swallowed by the door. As Doug watched, the third finger broke. His wedding ring fell off and clinked to the pavement.