Something Stirs, page 12
“Take it easy,” he said.
“Right,” Pancho said, and stared at the cop’s face, taking in the mustache, the eyes squinting against a sudden brief breeze, nodded sharply and walked away, nearly marching. He could feel the asshole staring after him, and it was all he could do not to grin. That wouldn’t be cool. But he’d had enough of Jorgen’s sneaking around all the time, showing up where he wasn’t wanted, asking questions that made it seem as if he still thought one of the Pack had done Eddie. His own father was beginning to wonder, for Christ’s sake, and when Pancho had seen the cop in the diner, he’d almost gone in and punched out his lights.
Joey had stopped him.
But the way the freak had stood there, like they were just shooting the shit, old friends and crap, it made him mad.
He did grin then.
He had told off a cop and had gotten away with it, and only wished he could look back to see the look on the asshole’s face.
Barnaby tapped his arm when he caught up. “Nice.”
“Damn right.”
“You’re gonna tick him off,” Joey complained softly, his arm around Laine’s shoulders. “He’ll bug us forever.”
“Never happen,” Pancho said. “I put the fear into him. Lawyer fear. He bugs us again, we’ll sue his ass off.”
Tang giggled, Fern laughed, and at the next corner they argued without rancor over where to park it and rest. It was cold, much colder than early December had a right to be, and Joey was all for packing it in and going home. Pancho said nothing beyond a grunt or two. Joey bothered him. The guy wasn’t right, jumping around like he was walking on wires, snapping at Laine, snarling at everyone else. Maybe it was a good idea to leave. What the hell, all they’d do is talk about …
He huddled against himself, shoulders hunched and arms tight to his sides.
“Well, I don’t give a damn where we go as long as we for god’s sake get there,” Barnaby said.
Tang rose on her toes and looked back the way they’d come. “He’s still gone. Why didn’t we just go back to the Starlite?”
Pancho wiggled his eyebrows. “Why not my place?”
“Walk?” she said, slapping her arms across her chest.
“I’ll carry you.”
“In another life,” she said, not quite grinning.
Oh sure, he thought glumly; everybody gets a crack at you but me. He turned away, just as Katie pushed through to his side.
“You heard it, didn’t you,” she said.
She looked like a mouse. Pale skin, pink nose, tiny eyes, the shortest of them all, the highest voice. He called her Eddie’s pet, though never to her face, and though she was pretty enough in a sisterly kind of way, he’d never been able to connect with her. He couldn’t figure her out, all her bug movies and bug posters and talk about mutations and permutations and computer computations; it as like she actually believed all that crap she watched in those old films.
“Heard what?”
Her head tilted to one side as if she were trying to look through a hole under his jaw. “You know.”
He did.
Jesus, he did.
“Aw, Christ,” Joey said in disgust. “Can’t you just leave it alone, bozo?”
“Hey,” Pancho warned. “C’mon, Joey.”
“Well, she’s freaked, for god’s sake.”
Katie didn’t look away.
Pancho checked Barnaby for moral support, but Garing was jogging in place, puffing louder than he had to, inching closer to Tang and blowing at her cheek. She batted the air between them. He moved in. She yanked his wool cap down over his eyes.
“Hey,” Scott said, and Pancho immediately grabbed Katie’s shoulder and turned her to him. Anything to get those eyes off his face. It was spooky. Worse, because she knew, and he didn’t think Barnaby did.
“Hey what?” he said.
“I’m freezing my leg off here, do you mind? Are we going back or what?”
“You heard it too,” Katie told him.
“Oh, that’s it, that’s it,” Joey declared in disgust. He grabbed Laine’s hand. “I ain’t freezing my ass off just to listen to this bullshit.” He leaned close to Katie. “We’re going to the diner. You want to come, come, but you don’t say shit about this, okay? Not one goddamn word.”
He practically pulled Laine off her feet as he stomped away, and Pancho didn’t know what to do. Tang had nudged Barnaby into moving after them, Scott clearly wasn’t going, he was already off the curb with Fern just behind and heading for the other side, and he was left with the mouse.
Who took his arm.
“Pancho, I’m scared.”
Mouse-voice; little-girl voice.
“I’m so scared.”
“Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He started to back off; she wouldn’t let go.
screaming
“Pancho, please!”
in the middle of the night
Her arm was outstretched. If he took another step, she’d fall. Little eyes big now, lips almost black against a skin snow-pale.
“It—it was a nightmare,” he said at last, brushing at her hand. “I had a goddamn nightmare, okay?”
She shook her head.
“It was a nightmare,” he insisted.
The hand lost its grip.
in the middle of the night
“Pancho!” Scott called from the opposite curb.
He waved, shook his head, called to Barnaby to wait up, his ass was freezing, then grinned and bowed to a woman who glared at his language. But he didn’t stop moving. No way he was going to get into this bul. He had a nightmare.
Katie had a nightmare. Lots of people have nightmares on the same night. It’s not like everyone has their own time for bad dreams. That was nuts.
“Pancho, please, come with us.”
She was nuts.
“Where? I’m cold:”
Katie’s mittened hands gestured weakly. “I don’t know. Someplace. C’mon, don’t go. Please?”
Ten feet away, people between them, ignoring them. Santa ringing his bell. She moved toward the curb and bumped into a wire trash bin.
“Pancho, just a couple of minutes,” Scott called.
Right. A couple of minutes with a bunch of loons, I’ll be a squirrel by morning.
He shook his head, whirled and leapt as though slamming a basket home.
“Panch!”
“Later,” he called to Scott.
Scott rolled his eyes and watched Duncan sprint after Barnaby and Tang, dancing among the pedestrians, making two more phantom baskets on phantom hoops fixed to the lampposts. When he dropped the second time, the crowds swallowed him. He was gone.
What a jerk, he thought.
So you’re a jerk, he answered, because he hadn’t believed it when Katie claimed they had all heard the screaming the night Eddie had died, and the night Slap had been killed. Even if they didn’t remember it, they had heard it. Joey was right, that was crazy talk, but he didn’t have the nerve to tell her that to her face. And when she said they had to do something about it, talk about it, figure out what it meant, he just couldn’t ignore her the way Pancho had.
But Pancho had heard.
He knew it.
He had seen it in Duncan’s face.
And that made him nervous, because he hadn’t heard a thing.
“You all right?”
Fern rapped his shoulder until he looked at her, hair squashed by a ski cap, face darkened by the cold.
“No,” he said. “My leg is frozen to my leg. I’m going to have to take a scalding shower just to get it off.”
She hit him again, a little harder, and he couldn’t stop a laugh. She was embarrassed a little. They usually were whenever he made a joke about his leg. It was like he was supposed to pretend it was real until he got home, away from everyone else. As soon as he had figured that out, he seldom passed up a chance to make at least one of them squirm.
“All right,” Katie said angrily, wedging herself between them, grabbing an arm, marching them forward.
“Screw him. He wants to be a jerk, let him. We’ll do this ourselves.”
Scott let himself be pulled along.
“The way I see it,” Katie told them, looking up at first one, then the other, “is that it’s some kind of mind thing, you know? Like a link with Eddie and that dead bum.”
“Slap,” Scott said. “His name is Slap.”
“Okay, but it doesn’t make any difference what his name is. I mean, it’s the mind thing we’re looking at. It’s like … maybe somehow we’re turned into people who are going to die. We can hear them doing it—dying, I mean—no matter where we are, see, but that doesn’t do us any good because by then it’s too late, right? Sure it is. So what we have to do is figure out how we can do this mind thing to people before they get killed. That way we can warn them and they won’t die.”
Scott opened his mouth, closed it when she said, “Of course, they won’t believe us. They never do.
They’ll think we’re nuts. What we’ll have to do, I guess, is talk to that cop, Jorgen, tell him about this, and then, when it happens again, he’ll believe us and help us figure out a way to …” She frowned. “No, that won’t work. The cops never believe anything until the very end. It’ll have to be someone else. Like a scientist.”
“We don’t know any scientists, Katie,” Fern said.
“Sure we do. Dr. Freelin.”
“He’s a doctor.”
“Practically the same thing. The point is that the cops will listen to him. If we can get Laine to get him to believe us, then we’ll …”
Scott waited.
Katie lowered her head. “I sound like a jerk.” She stopped, turned them around, started walking north again. “I sound like I ought to be locked up.”
Scott agreed, but he didn’t say it aloud. Instead, as gently as he could: “You know, maybe Panch was right. It could have been a nightmare.”
“Twice? Both times when people died? All of us?”
They stopped under a theater marquee, the Apollo, the running lights from its border talking away shade and shadow from their faces. Scott nudged them toward the ticket window then, away from the crowds.
Katie stood on her own, back to the street, hands in and out of her pockets, squinting at the posters, at the woman in the glass cage taking someone’s money, at him. At him.
“I didn’t hear anything,” he said at last, softly.
“You did,” she argued just as softly.
He shook his head. “No.”
Fern tugged at her gloves. “Katie, for crying out loud, there’s no connection between Eddie and Slap.”
Katie’s expression said there was.
“And even if there is,” Fern continued, “it has nothing to do with anybody’s nightmares.”
“That’s right,” Scott agreed. “It just means there’s a nut out there, that’s all.” His voice deepened. “And it means that Eddie didn’t kill himself. He was murdered too.”
As soon as he said it, he blinked rapidly and looked up the street toward the diner. Is that, he wondered, what Jorgen thought too?
“I heard it,” Katie insisted quietly, a diamond tear in one eye. “I …” A long sigh that lifted her shoulders.
“… did.”
“Katie.”
And he looked at her with such sorrow, such pity, that suddenly she couldn’t take it anymore. She ran.
Ignored Fern’s cry. Ignored Scott’s calling. She ran up the street through the crowds, hearing the bells and the carols deafeningly loud and harsh, dodging a woman laden with wrapped presents, brushing the arm of a man trying to fish something from his topcoat pocket, finally passing the diner and swerving around the corner.
A mitten brushed over her eyes, but she wasn’t crying yet. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t let them make her. Maybe that would come later, but right now she was too angry. They were all lying; she knew it; she had seen it in all their eyes. And maybe they’d admit it to each other, but they wouldn’t admit it to her. Oh no, not her. She was only Katie. Eddie’s pet. She knew that’s how they thought of her. Don’t take her seriously because she’s not worth the trouble. Just a pet. Pat her on the head, tell her she’s a good girl, and push her gently on her way. Give her a bone. Give her a treat. Poor little orphan girl. Poor little nut.
She ran.
She slowed.
Ice formed in her lungs and made breathing sharp.
A foot slipped on a small patch of dark ice and she nearly tumbled into a snowdrift shoved up by the plows.
She walked.
Into the Manor, it wasn’t very far now, she didn’t live as far north as Laine or Pancho.
On the edge.
She lived on the edge, just like being on the edge of the Pack.
Eddie’s pet.
But not anymore.
The sidewalk narrowed between drifts high on her right and lawns on her left, in some places only as wide as the shovel that had cleared it. Her shadow crawled over the lumps and freezing hillocks of white and grainy slush, dipping and climbing like a shadow-cloud over a rolling meadow. Her ears began to sting. Her lips began to chap. Her shoulders began to stiffen from being hunched so long against the cold.
All right, she thought, kicking a chunk of ice out of the way; all right, they don’t believe me, or they won’t admit it. All right. That’s okay. I won’t say anything else, I’ll let them figure it out on their own. They’ll come to me. They will. Eddie’s pet’s got a brain. She knows things. It won’t be long. Somebody else’ll die and they’ll come to me, no sweat.
Snow dropped from a branch.
She reached her block and quickened her step, anxious now to get home and have some cocoa. Gram would have it ready. She always did. Somehow she always knew when her Katie would get home.
A gleam of silver ahead.
She tried to snap her fingers at her good luck, and laughed when her mittens wouldn’t cooperate.
Closer, and the cold lifted tears in her eyes; she couldn’t tell if it was a quarter or a crushed bottle cap.
If it’s a quarter, she told herself, I’ll live forever, or at least long enough to see Barnaby so damn old he won’t be able to grope Tang anymore. Giggling. Stopping a yard short and closing her eyes. Heads, I’ll pick it up; tails, I’ll still be broke. A shake of her head, and a memory of the time she had passed on a five-dollar bill because Lincoln’s face was to the ground. Bad luck to grab a president by the back of his head. It was dumb to be superstitious, Scott teased her about it all the time, but it hadn’t failed her yet.
Her eyes opened.
“Right!” she said.
It was a quarter; it was heads.
She pulled off a mitten, leaned over and watched her shadow slip ahead of her.
And keep growing.
Slowly. Taller, and wider; she spun around to see who had snuck up on her, who was trying to dump her into the snow, and stumbled back with a silent cry when she saw something down at the end of the block, something huge, immense, rising from what seemed to be a hole in the street. Too black to make distinctions, but too big to be natural.
She didn’t wait until she could see it clearly.
She ran.
The shadow grew; she could hear it—slow footfalls slowly crushing the snow as it followed, branches whipping and snapping, a hollow drumlike echo every time it took a step.
The shadow grew no matter how fast she moved.
A high-pitched whirring.
The lights before her darkening.
The tortured twist of a lamppost bent over at its base.
“Help!”
Shadow growing.
“Somebody, help!”
The rattle and crack of a tree toppling into the street.
She screamed, and slipped, and ordered herself not to fall the way they always did in the movies.
The shadow grew, sweeping across every yard, along the street, smothering the houses, taking away the stars, taking its time because it knew she couldn’t win.
Whirring climbing higher up the scale.
Hollow echoes.
Snow falling in clumps and showers in a new storm from eaves and branches.
Ice tripping her as she leapt onto her front walk and streaked toward the porch, glancing left now and nearly stopping when she saw something towering over the trees, over the roofs, no shape or design, no eyes, no mouth. In darkness it was darker, and reaching out to grab her head.
Up the steps two at a time, throwing herself at the door and falling inside, yelping at the pain in her knees, twisting onto her back and kicking the door closed.
“Katie?” A deep voice, weak and trembling with age.
Katie gaped at the door, waiting for it to shatter. She couldn’t move, could scarcely breathe.
Waiting.
“Katie, child, for heaven’s sake, are you all right?”
Waiting.
Dark blotting out the tiny window in the center of the door.
“Gram, run!” she cried, finally turning over to her hands and knees, kicking herself to her feet and dashing down the hall toward the kitchen. “Gram, run!”
Her grandmother, a white-haired gnome half buried in a robe that dragged on the floor, looked away from the milk simmering in a saucepan on the stove. “Katie, dear, you’re tracking snow.”
Katie slid on the linoleum, grabbed the door frame to stop her. Momentum spun her around, faced her to the front where she saw the streetlight through the door window, glittering harshly.
She couldn’t find a breath. “Gram.”
“Take off your boots and coat, dear. You’ll catch your death dressed like that in here.”
“Gram.”
“Don’t argue, just sit. Drink your cocoa and go to bed. It’s late. I don’t know why you stay out so late on a school night. You’ll never get to college this way. Never. Now sit down, child, my Lord, you’re trembling.”
Katie sat as she peeled off her mittens, her coat, yanked off her boots and felt the floor beneath her stockinged feet. The smell of warming milk. The smell of her grandmother as she fussed around the kitchen.
Watching the door.
Watching the light.
“Gram,” she said, finally looking at the old woman. “Gram, something chased me.”
