Following Christopher Creed (11 page)

"Leave me alone. Stop touching me."

She hadn't actually touched me yet, but I could feel it coming, and suddenly her hand cupped my neck, my cheek, where she always put her hand, where I swore if another person ever touched me I would punch them out.
Nobody
touched my cheek, my neck, my ear like she always insisted on doing—not ever. Her hand felt cold and scabby. When I turned, her eyes were her own, but the rest was the rotted flesh of a semirecent corpse. The skin on her arm dangled in tatters and only bones and corroded flesh touched the side of my face that had been her favorite stomping ground.

I ducked and threw my arm up to block her, but her bones flew into fifteen pieces in the air, then joined back together and touched my face again.

"Don't, don't," she crooned. "Come over to that flat stump. Let me do it in one clean blow. Don't fight me..."

I spun and looked for Chris, but he was gone, evaporated.
Little wimp. You never thought of anybody but yourself. It's good I never got a chance to write about you.

"I'm tired, Mom. I'm so tired."

"I know, darling. Come over to the stump. Just lay your little head down, and I will sing you to sleep."

I did it. I was there suddenly, kneeling, laying my head on the stump, just to get her slithering fingers off the crook of my neck. I could see the hatchet, which she laid just in my view, and she started to sing.

Don't cry, my baby, don't cry this eve
,
The fairies are coming from make-believe.

Her favorite song from when I was little. I'd loved that song when I was three, but she was still trying to sing it when I was ten. My head suddenly weighed a thousand pounds. I couldn't lift it, couldn't get away. But a shadow moved into view, huge like some superhero's, only more foreboding, more ominous, stronger. She stopped singing, obviously aware of it, and started weeping. Disappointed sobs fell out of her rhythmically, like kitten mews, and she beat the forest floor with her bony fist until the earth banged and bumped and started to crumble under its power.

It's me. It's
my
shadow, I told myself.
Mike Mavic will come to save himself.

But Mike Mavic was not powerful enough. This shadow of redemption was somebody else—

***

I shot straight up in the bed, huffing, trying to drown out the earthquakes and cat screeches. The cat turned into RayAnn hollering, "...on earth is going on?"

My vision blacked out totally from sitting up so fast, and I had to wait a few seconds to see her back and shoulders beside me. Last I remembered, she was talking to her dad on the phone, and I was lying here, trying not to spiral. She now sat up with the blanket around her waist, her sweatshirt sleeves fluttering as she stood and moved to the thundering noises.

"Don't answer the door!" I said quickly, realizing that the earthquakes were someone pounding, slowly and methodically.

Lanz kept growling and moved to sniff the door, and catching his long nose in my vision calmed me. He stuck his nostrils right up to the crack in the door, inhaling with great pulls, which he would not have done if it were someone truly dangerous. Dogs know these things.

I rubbed my hair to get the sleep out of my head and moved past RayAnn, who had dropped the blanket, causing me to stumble over it.

"Who's there?" I asked into the door.

"Let me in," a man said. "You want to talk to me or what?"

"Talk to
whom?
At..."

RayAnn finished. "...at four-fifteen in the morning."

"Who are you?" I demanded again.

"The bogeyman."

Ten seconds earlier I might have believed it, but I opened the door a crack and found the face on the other side. It was a kid, his eyes darting madly to one side. I would have pegged him at about thirteen until his eyes found mine, peering around the door. They betrayed years, sharp intelligence, a crusty need for sleep.

"You're Mike?" he asked, his voice less deep this time.

"Yeah."

"Kobe the Creep sent me."

I was already opening the door. Justin Creed lumbered past me as if it were perfectly normal to come into a motel room in the middle of the night without being asked. I remembered tales Adams wrote of Chris's not understanding "boundaries," of Adams punching Chris in the face back in sixth grade for taking his expensive guitar without asking, standing on a desk, and doing an Elvis routine. And then there were all the stories of the Mother Creed barging into the kids' bedrooms without knocking. This "boundary challenge" still seemed to run in the family, but it didn't do Justin much damage. He looked kind of impish and made you want to laugh.

He was short but stacked. He had a neck like a linebacker's, though the rest was covered in a Stockton sweatshirt. He looked all around with energy that spoke of assurance but not invasion. His eyes stopped on RayAnn as she stood by the desk illuminated by the lamp she'd clicked on. He raised and lowered his eyebrows quickly.

"Not much on romantic sleepwear, are you?"

"I call this dorm-wear," she said sleepily, glancing down at her Randolph sweatshirt and sweatpants. I thought it was a pretty good comeback...
considering it was four goddamn o'clock in the morning.

Justin had Chris's alleged undying grin, but with a sharpness to it, though the rest of his framework was his own. The "mean" side of him that Katy and Chan had spoken about earlier tonight either was buried in exhaustion or only came out for cheering onlookers. I figured it was a little of both. He stared, frozen, down at Lanz, whose nose was pressed against his jeans while he sniffed and sniffed.

"If this dog were going to rip off my package, I take it you'd be pulling him away."

"He's a service dog," I said, as RayAnn giggled.

"What kind of service? Not like ... the breakfast patrol for carnivores, right?"

"I'm visually impaired. Lanz..." I patted my thigh for him to come while fumbling for my glasses, and RayAnn moved for another light switch. Too much light at once could give me a knife-through-the-eyes effect.

I heard Justin plopping into the chair with a sigh. "Would you mind not putting on any more lights, please? No need to flood us out. He's some sort of blind, and I'm, well, in more need of darkness than light." He seemed a little wound up, drumming the arms of the chair and bouncing a bit. "Wish I had the Ring of Power. I could just ... put it on and walk around town invisible, ya know?"

Lord of the Rings
was my favorite trilogy, so that sucked me a step or two closer, studying him through my trusty lenses. His eyes told me he wasn't on anything in spite of his nervous drumming. He obviously had things to be nervous about. I suggested, "You're hiding from someone."

I expected him to dive into a load of grief about his mother, but he said, "Mostly from myself. Even though that's not possible. Ha. How did they put it in rehab ... all these wonderful speeches about 'assuming responsibility for yourself.' Endless, wonderful speeches. So. What is it you want to talk to me about?"

"I was actually thinking of a different
time
..." I tried.

"You want to know about my brother, right?"

"Correct. I want to write about him."

"It's about time somebody else wanted to write about my brother. A couple other college dudes came around over the past couple years, but nothing was ever printed. You gonna make it?"

"I'll make it."

"'Cuz he's different than me, but he's my brother, and I think he's awesome."

I moved my eyes to RayAnn, who raised her eye
brows at me, obviously noting how Justin just used the present tense.

"You think he's alive?" I asked.

"Of course he's alive."

"But ... he hasn't contacted you, right?"

"Wrong," he said. "Among other things, I've had two e-mails from him."

I was speechless. "You're ... sure they're from him?"

"It's a long story, but trust me on this one. I'll show them to you, if you want. But it'll have to be later. They're on my hard drive at home. Well hidden." He grinned broadly. "My mom still checks my e-mail every day, if I forget to cover my keypad when I change my password. She's got a video cam hidden somewhere near my terminal, so she can see me change passwords."

I shuddered, but he only cackled. He enjoyed my reaction.

"So, you ... know where he is?" I suggested, my heart revving up like I was on the treadmill at the gym.

He was still resting his head on the back of the chair, staring straight up at the ceiling. "I can't tell you exactly where he is, but I can tell you somewhere he's coming to."

"Which is?"

"Close to here. My mom doesn't know. He's totally, beyond reasonable sanity, scared of my mom. It's ridiculous. But you can't tell anyone what I tell you, because if he gets any idea that she may be onto him, I'll bet he won't show."

"Uh ... we can relate to that," RayAnn said on my behalf.

I stared, a thousand questions banging through my head, starting with
When can I see those e-mails?
and ending with
In what other ways has he contacted you?
" The whole thing rattled my brain like that earthquake was still going on.

I settled on "Uh, when is he coming?"

"He might already be here. I've been kind of out of the loop," he said.

"So, he wouldn't be at your house," RayAnn guessed.

"No way. If this makes sense ... he would be at the place you were at with Mary Ellen and Kobe tonight. The Lightning Field."

I exchanged glances with RayAnn and saw her bang her palm on her forehead, probably wondering if Chris Creed could have something to do with the light she saw out by the trees earlier, the one she said looked like lightning coming out of the ground. Could it have been a person striking a match? A flashlight beam?

Despite all this wonderful "great story" luck—or maybe because of it—my journalistic alarm was going off badly. Things were utterly wrong with this story. Justin just got out of rehab. He could be half off his gourd. It occurred to me that he might be one of those people who think UFOs are going to land next week. His friends thought he had been reading quantum thought, but maybe he was totally bats. And he had taken a seat in our sleeping quarters that he obviously was not getting up from quickly.

"Look, here's the rules," he said. "We all need rules, as they say in rehab. I have a few. I will talk about my brother all you want, as long as you want. But two things: First, I signed myself out of rehab because of Darla Richardson. I can't miss that funeral. God, Bo is gonna be a basket case. But I don't want to talk about Darla. It's too sad. I'm very at-risk right now. They couldn't stop me from signing myself out of rehab, but I was given the whole speech ... I'm vulnerable, susceptible to relapsing, I ought to let the dead bury their own dead, whatever. I can't get myself all bummed."

"Yeah, we understand," I said. As far as I could see, we had no reason to even bring up Darla. "What's the second thing?"

He slithered out of the chair and lay on the floor, grinning at the ceiling. "Ahhhh. Give me four hours of uninterrupted sleep. And don't tell anybody I'm here. Like, nobody."

I found RayAnn's eyes, which were popping out of her head as she stared from him to me. I was pretty much convinced at that point that he had come to us for a place to lie low, not realizing how the media not only asks all the ques
tions but watches your every move. I didn't feel victorious, like I had a real catch, though I would have if it were anybody else. But very few people in this world, I decided, would have the nerve to pull a stunt like this.

"Do you want a pillow?" I asked, and RayAnn moved with hesitation in her tread to get him the extra off the closet shelf.

His eyes rolled like he was already fighting sleep, and he said, "I've been on a bus since eleven-thirty last night. Then I had to walk seven miles from the bus stop. You guys are, um, swell. But I'm not done with the rules yet."

"I thought you said two," I said, and he ignored me, shoving the pillow RayAnn handed him under his head and closing his eyes.

"And when I wake up, you have to buy me breakfast. Wawa's good. Bagel sandwich and a Pepsi."

He must have opened one eye long enough to see RayAnn and me exchanging looks over what Claudia would say about this. He was grinning again, while reaching into his pockets. "Please don't tell me you're as broke as I am."

"No, it's an ethics question," I said, catching both his pockets turned inside out. He left them that way. "Our editor doesn't approve of us giving things to interviewees or buying them things in order to get them to talk to us."

"Hmm. Don't TV shows pay people to come on some
times? Don't they give those people, like, forty thousand bucks sometimes?"

"If they're trashy," I said. "We're for real. Sorry."

"Just don't make me leave," he said with some fake whining thrown in, followed by some chuckles. "If I have to sleep in a tree, a squirrel might climb up my ass and make me rabid. Some people around here think I
am
rabid. I got enough problems without an up-my-ass squirrel thrown in.
Challenges.
Not
problems.
None of these guys I been reading lets you use the word
problems.
"

His eyes looked so swollen with tiredness that the grin didn't fit. It was as if his body was exhausted but his brain wouldn't cool down.

"Some of your friends tonight mentioned your reading preferences," I said. "They mentioned positive thinking and quantum thought. They say it makes you happy."

"Don't get me started on quantum thought right now. If I start talking about where science meets the spiritual side, I'll be blathering and way manic in around ten minutes. And I'm actually feeling tired. You don't want to see me way manic."

"Manic," I repeated, remembering Elaine accusing Justin of actually being manic-depressive. "Are you bipolar?"

"Among other things." He grinned, rolling his tired eyes. "I've had it on and off, probably for a couple years, but I had to get away from home to get a diagnosis. Everyone's mom wants to believe her kid 'just doesn't know how to behave,' right?"