Something Stirs, page 20
Scott looked quickly at Fern, looked away. Her lower lip was pulled between her teeth; the cheek he could see was sucked inward, pulsing.
“So what the hell did he say?” Barnaby demanded.
“Voices.”
“What?”
“Hey!” Dale said, slipping out of his chair before Laine could stop him.
“Voices,” Pancho insisted. “In the river.” He looked around to see who already knew: Most of them did, about the fear Joey had, but Scott could see that only Laine knew what Pancho was really talking about.
“Hey, wow,” Dale said, pressing his nose against the window.
“He was little or something, nearly drowned, and he told Eddie …” He looked uncomfortable. Scott smiled, nodded at him to go on. “He kind of believed something lived down there. Scared him half to death.”
Pancho laughed quickly, forced, grabbed a spoon and began polishing its bowl mindlessly with his thumb.
“So big deal,” Barnaby said, rolling his eyes. “What the hell does that have to do with the price of apples?”
“Snow, Laine,” Dale said gleefully, tapping the window with one finger. “Look. Snow.”
“A little while ago,” Pancho said, ignoring Barnaby, looking straight at Scott, “Eddie called him and told him he was right.”
“Oh crap,” Barnaby declared in disgust.
“Snow, Laine,” Dale repeated.
And thunder. Faint, but enough to distract Scott’s attention to the wall of windows. His eyes widened when he saw the flakes flat and wet falling heavily, in no single direction as a wind began to rise. Despite the damp ground, he knew it wouldn’t be long before things started to cover over.
Thunder again, still distant.
Dale backed away.
“Hey, it’s okay,” Laine reassured him, taking his arm gently and guiding him back to his chair. “It’s all right, Dale, it happens sometimes.”
Thunder a third time, and the lights went out.
“Swell,” Fern said, almost angrily. “Swell.”
Nervous laughter from the front, and calls for Karacos to bring out the lanterns. Scott leaned forward to look around Laine, and saw that the streetlights were gone as well. There was nothing beyond the windows but black and slashing white, nothing in the room but a few flickering candles.
“Laine?”
“It’s all right, Dale.”
“Sure,” Scott agreed. “No sweat. Somebody probably skidded and hit a pole, that’s all.”
Dale gripped the edge of the table and said nothing.
Scott didn’t touch him, but he knew the boy was trembling.
“Maybe we’d better go,” Laine suggested, hugging her brother lightly.
“Eddie,” Pancho continued, as if nothing had happened, “told Joey, and Joey told me, that Eddie was trying to find … I don’t know … something in his closet.”
“Oh really?” Barnaby said. “Like what? A lost jock? A chick? A new tube of grease for his hair?”
Pancho shook his head. “I don’t … a monster.”
Garing gaped, then laughed hysterically, slapped Pancho across the back. “Oh Jesus, get a life, man.” He thumped the chair down, stood up, leaned across the table. “Look, gimp, this is all shit, okay? Eddie was bouncing off the walls before he killed his old man. We all know that, right? Fucking bouncing off the walls.” He slapped a palm on the table, and Tang jumped, uttered a cry. “I don’t know what the hell he was on, but c’mon … something in his goddamn closet? Christ, he was doped to the gills, you could see it.”
“Scared,” Pancho contradicted. “He was scared to death. And so was Joey.”
Barnaby snorted, looked around the table, threw up his hands and walked away. “You guys are nuts,” he called, turning to walk backward. “You’re out of your mushhead minds! Jesus, next thing you know, you’ll be saying Eddie believed in the goddamn boogeyman.”
Hanging a caustic laugh behind him, he left, bumped into the counter, and snarled at a man who told him to watch it.
Fern picked up a bread stick from a straw basket by the candle, held it up, snapped it in half. Everyone jumped, and she grinned. “See?” She pointed with one half while she nibbled on the other. “Look what’s going on here. You got a dark room, a candle, snow, and you’re scaring each other half to death.” A poke at Scott’s arm. “He’s right, you know.” She looked to Pancho. “He is, really. Eddie couldn’t have meant that.
Not monsters, stuff like that. Nobody believes in that anymore. My god, we’re practically in college, for god’s sake. We know better.” No one answered. “We do!”
Of course they did, Scott thought. Like you outgrow your toys, you outgrow whatever monster plagued you when you were young. Some kids sooner, some kids later, but it always happened. One night, for no reason at all, you got the nerve to look in the closet, or under the bed, or behind the hedge, or in the cellar, or wherever, and you learned that there wasn’t anything there at all. Just imagination, and shadow, and sometimes a quiet noise that didn’t belong to the house. Which meant Eddie had to have been talking about something else, something he was trying to tell Joey and failed, something Joey had misunderstood. So Mr. Roman died, and Eddie dead, and …
He frowned.
Slap died.
Joey died.
The wind changed again, and snow scratched at the window.
Mr. Tobin and his lover died.
He pinched the back of his hand, squeezing until the pain made him stop, woke him up.
“Laine?” Dale said.
Tang had pulled her ponytail over her shoulder, twisted it aimlessly with her fingers. “Then what about the screaming?”
“I don’t know,” Fern said. “Some kind of psychic thing, maybe, like Katie claims.” She scowled. “How the hell should I know? And why isn’t she here yet, anyway?”
“Laine?”
“Hush, honey, we’re going soon, don’t worry, we’re going.” She gathered her brother’s hands into hers, pulled them into her lap. “Joey,” she said, “was scared too, like Panch said. He wouldn’t tell me why. He was just … scared.” A quick glare toward the front. “And it wasn’t dope. Not with Eddie, either. I don’t know what’s with Barnaby, but it wasn’t dope, no way.”
Silence then.
A moist scratching at the window.
Low voices in the booths.
A siren that passed the diner.
The lights flickered, died, flickered and died.
“So what are you saying, Laine?” Tang smiled, but only briefly. “That Eddie made his monster come back or something? He did a Tinker Bell thing? You know, clap your hands if you believe in fairies?” Her laugh was almost genuine.
Scott’s left heel tapping.
Fern biting into the bread stick.
Tang spread her hands. “So …?”
Scott saw them all, faces danced with shadow, expressions changing each time the candle’s flame moved, waiting for someone to tell them it was all stupid, ridiculous, they were only a bunch of kids sitting around a campfire scaring the hell out of each other with ghost stories they claimed really, honestly, happened to someone they knew. Ail except Tang Porter. He knew the look on her face; he had seen it a million times in math class when she’d lock onto a complex problem that had stumped everyone else, knowing she had the solution and was just waiting for the words to come.
The wind punched at the window, shimmering the glass.
And then he saw it himself, and grinned almost smugly, and Tang blew him a kiss.
“Okay,” he said, “listen up. This is the way it is.”
Which was simple when he finally got around the candlelight and the storm and Pancho’s story about Joey and Eddie. There was, he said, no denying that something weird was going on. The screaming, for instance. They all heard it but Barnaby, and he thought that might be because Barnaby didn’t have much of an imagination. Which is what it all boiled down to—having an imagination. Eddie maybe really had been trying to resurrect a childhood monster, and, knowing Eddie, it wasn’t such a farfetched thing for him to try. He hung on to an idea like a dog on a fresh bone. It excited him. It made him jumpy. Energized, something like that. The Pack, since it was tied so closely to him, fed on that energy, felt it, followed it, grew its own. Like when they joined the Pack in the first place. Eddie might even have done it, found the monster in the closet, but the most likely explanation, the probable explanation, was that he thought he had done it.
And in thinking it, believing it, had gone over the edge.
And in going over the edge, nearly dragged the rest of them with him without them realizing what was wrong.
Fern’s weird beetles.
Katie’s giants.
Laine’s cellar.
“Monster bees,” Pancho admitted with a lopsided smile, when Scott stalled, trying to remember what the halfback shied away from. “They could even talk, shit like that. I used to think they lived in the walls and were trying to get into my bedroom. My dad says it’s because I was stung when I was little. I mean, real little. I’d have fits every time a bee came near me.” He thumped himself on the forehead in mock admission of something silly. “Even now Barn can get me, put a dead bee on my tray, something like that. The bastard.”
Dale pointed at the window, nearly fully coated with snow. “Laine?”
Embarrassment lifted one of Tang’s shoulders. “They live behind trees and bushes. I don’t know what they are, but they were after me all the time. Couldn’t stand to go into the yard at night.” A plea, then, not to laugh. “They wanted me. I don’t why, but they wanted me.”
“Exactly,” Scott said with an I-told-you grin. “We got all this stuff coming down, that cop bugs us, we get nervous, we see things, we get more nervous…” He leaned back. “Simple.”
“So,” said Fern, “the guy who followed you home twice isn’t real?”
Under the streetlamp.
Faceless.
Without a shadow.
“No.”
Pancho dropped the spoon on his plate. The clatter made them start. “So what killed Eddie, then? Him? You really believe he killed himself, you really believe Joey cut himself up?” He looked at Scott. “You really think that guy, Slap, he froze to death and some cats ate him?”
“Laine!”
“Damnit, Dale, what do you want?”
Dale slipped out of his chair, stood behind Scott, shifting from foot to foot. “Bad, Laine.”
Scott watched as Laine’s face paled. “It’s all right,” he said to the boy. “Hey, it’s okay, pal.”
Dale shook his head quickly and pointed at the window. At the snow. Lower lip quivering. “Bad out there.” A tear slipped from one eye. “Real bad, Laine. I’m scared.”
He’s retarded, Scott thought as something cold touched the back of his neck; he doesn’t know what he’s saying. The lights, all this talk about monsters… we’ve scared him. That’s all it is. He’s a kid. A little kid.
The wind punched the diner again, and all he could think of was Katie’s giants.
Stupid; this was stupid.
He stood up slowly, easing his chair back to move Dale aside, moving to the window to watch the snow pull its blanket over the cars down in the lot, top the fence that hid the houses across the way. The blacktop was still mostly uncovered, though it wouldn’t be long before the cold changed all that. Dale stood beside him, and he put a hand on the boy’s shoulder.
The lights danced on, dim but steady. “Pretty, isn’t it,” he said.
“Bad,” Dale answered. Then he touched a finger to the pane and said, “Hey.”
“Jesus,” Scott said, “it’s Katie!”
She ran.
don’t be late, dear.
i won’t, gram, its just to the diner for a couple of minutes.
She ran.
be careful, it’s starting to snow.
i will, gram, i will.
She had been a block from Midhill Avenue when she felt the dark begin to grow behind her. Refusing to look lasted only a few paces. Just long enough for the flakes to take the cold and sting her cheeks, make her squint, make her wish sourly that she’d thought to bring her mittens.
Then she looked.
Then she ran.
Skidding around the corner onto Midhill just as the lights went out.
Confusion turned her in the wrong direction, heading downhill instead of up, realizing her mistake when the footing became precarious and she felt herself slipping, sliding, landing on one knee, crying out at the hammer-blow when she struck the concrete, still sliding as she kicked and thrashed her way back to her feet and turned the next corner.
It was back there.
Growing.
Formless despite the snow, filling the gaps between the flakes with a dark that had never belonged to the night.
Her first thought had been to get back to the house, hide in her room where she knew the giant couldn’t get her, it never had; but Gram was there, and this was different, and the wind had grown strong enough to slow her to a fast trot. Quickly, then, she cut through two yards, back to her own street, crouching beside a fence until she was sure the way was clear.
Running.
To the Pack.
She had to get to the Pack, because they would know what to do.
Up the avenue this time, knee throbbing, her jeans soaked, snow clinging to her hair and eyelashes like spiders that tried to claw their way into her eyes.
It was back there.
It had turned.
The wind began to howl.
A window shattered somewhere.
A streetlamp screamed as it twisted to the ground.
She ran, veered off the sidewalk and ricocheted off a telephone pole. She sobbed as her left arm dangled uselessly, the tingling racing across her shoulders, replaced by pain, replaced by numbness. The collision had spun her around, and she faced the giant for a second, watching it fill the gap between the curbs, still without features but there nonetheless. In that second before she turned again, before she tried to scream and couldn’t, she told herself there was no such thing as the thing swatting aside a parked car, its windows exploding, its hubcaps spinning off, passenger door crushed when it came up against a tree; no such thing since she had been a little girl.
Another car was kicked aside.
She ran.
No such thing.
Please, God, no such thing.
Feeling returned to her arm, and the sudden needled agony nearly brought her to her knees.
A siren.
Here and there the lights returned, none of them fully bright, but the glow caught and spread by the snow allowed her to swerve into the parking lot behind the Starlite. There were places to hide here, alleys between stores, people who could help her, and she ran headlong past the diner while the wind tried to pull her apart and the shadowgiant behind her tore apart the fence and a hand grabbed her arm and yanked her off her feet.
As Scott ran for the exit, the others, standing or half out of their chairs, saw Katie race past, limping, clutching her left arm to her side, saw the fence down at the end lift and shatter into splinters, saw an automobile’s front end crumple as if it had crashed against a boulder. Then the last window in the dining room imploded, glass and snow and wind shrieking over the tables that lifted and toppled along with their chairs, while napkins and placemats flapped into the air.
Scott grabbed the back of a counter stool, spun around as the stool spun on its post. Someone yelled, “Katie,” and he ran for the door.
The next window blew in.
The others were right behind him, soon passed him, and they battled through the customers in the front who were trying to see what had happened back there. A woman cried out, the cry shredded by the wind; the third window shattered and snow tunneled furiously toward the booths and counter. Scott took an elbow in the ribs, a foot lashed against his good leg as the crowd turned from curious to frightened and reversed its rush. He lashed out when someone tried to grab his arm, saw an open-mouthed Barnaby step in just in time to have Pancho grab his jacket in a fist and yank him outside again.
Once on the street no one stopped.
The wind had already knocked over all the newspaper dispensers, had begun to rend the newsstand awning next door.
Another siren, and the hoot of a fire engine.
Scott did his best to follow the Pack south, cursing his leg, cursing the slick layer of wet snow that had settled on the sidewalk and made running, even for the others, precarious at best. He didn’t see Laine or Dale, but Fern dropped back to grab his hand, look at him long enough to tell him she didn’t think either that the wind had done all this.
Between a record shop and a card shop was a narrow alley, a pedestrian walkway to the parking lot in back. They spun into it one by one, Scott the last and breathing hard through his mouth, tasting snow, smelling wet stone and blacktop, suddenly yanking on Fern’s hand when a black cloud passed the alley’s mouth at the far end, killing the light for just a moment.
The others had stopped as well.
When the cloud had gone, the light returned, there was nothing left but the sighing wind, the drip of snow from a fire escape somewhere overhead.
And a sobbing in a shadow that pulled away from the wall.
Katie, huddled in the arms of Blade Murtaugh.
Dale, in the arms of his sister.
Crouched under the table where she had dragged them when the first window exploded, as if someone had taken a bat to it from the outside.
Sobbing now, her face streaked with running blood, glass around them, in her hair, stuck in her sweater, her jacket.
Sobbing as she pulled a blade of glass from her ankle.
“Dale.”
His face freckled with blood, his hair matted darkly, his eyes closed.
“Dale.”
Yelling for help when the wind died.
Karacos kneeling beside her, gasping and swearing when he saw them, trying to pull the boy from her arms, but she wouldn’t let him go, couldn’t let him go, he wasn’t even supposed to be here and it was her fault, all her fault, just like Joey’s dying had been her fault because they had had a fight and he had gotten drunk and if he hadn’t gotten drunk he never would have gone down to the river.
