Gremlins (21 page)

Alone now with her nine cats, she began her typical evening by pouring food in their bowls but not placing the bowls on the floor until the cats had purred and meowed and curled themselves around her ankles for at least five minutes. That was their payment for the free food—obeisance, adoration, and humbling acknowledgment of her ultimate power.

Laughing, she placed the bowls on the floor and watched them fall over each other in their eagerness to eat.

“Cats,” she said to herself. “They’re so much nicer than people. And they don’t have money problems to whine about.”

When they had finished eating, Mrs. Deagle would relax before the television, watching her favorite game shows. She especially loved the ones that forced the contestants to utterly degrade themselves in exchange for prizes or money. “I wonder what fools are going to expose themselves tonight,” she said aloud, clutching her satin housedress closer around her neck.

The big old house was chilly, but Mrs. Deagle refused to turn the heat up higher than fifty-five degrees even when ice formed at the edges of the windows. “Why should I make the oil companies any richer?” she demanded, whenever her nephew Weldon dropped by with some legal papers and complained about the cold.

She also did not enrich the furniture companies, having kept the original pieces bought just after her and Donald’s wedding; those musty chairs and tables had been augmented over the years by furniture taken hostage from families unable to make mortgage or rent payments on time. As a result, the huge rooms—kept dark for economy reasons and piled high with assorted junk—resembled a warehouse containing the contents of unclaimed-freight auctions. If others didn’t like it, Mrs. Deagle rationalized, it was just too bad. She was comfortable in these somewhat Gothic surroundings, and that was all that mattered.

Her one concession to modern technology—for even the television was an old black-and-white model—was a device appended to her stairway. Basically a wheelchair attached to a motor and pulley, it had been recommended by Mrs. Deagle’s physician so that she would not strain her weak heart by climbing stairs. Although the reason she had the chair was serious, Mrs. Deagle still got something of a thrill when she sat in it, pushed the appropriate button, and automatically ascended to the second floor. Although she would never have admitted it, she often manufactured reasons for going up and down the stairs so that she could enjoy the ride.

She had already seated herself in the device and was about to flip the switch to
UP
when the doorbell rang.

“Blast!” she rasped. “Who can that be at this hour? Don’t people have any regard for others’ feelings?”

She walked slowly to the front door, opened it, and peered outside.

It was Mrs. Harris, bundled in an old coat, shivering as she held an envelope in her gloved hands.

Mrs. Deagle did not invite her inside.

“Yes?” she asked coldly.

“I got last month’s mortgage payment for you,” she said, a bit proudly. “We sold a few personal items and—”

“I’m not interested in that,” Mrs. Deagle shot back. “I have a bank that handles my business, you know.”

“Yes, ma’am, but it’s just that I didn’t get the money until after closing and since you said—”

“If I recall, I said I’d like to have everything that’s due me, not everything that was due a month ago.”

“Sorry, ma’am.”

“Is that it?”

“Yes’m.”

Mrs. Deagle reached out, snatched up the envelope, and smiled archly. “You probably won’t have to worry about dealing with me much longer,” she said, “since it’s my intention to sell a good deal of my properties to Hitox Chemical. Your place is one. Good evening.”

Leaving Mrs. Harris standing with a decidedly confused and unhappy expression on her face, Mrs. Deagle slammed the door.

Returning to the kitchen, where a fight had broken out among the cats, Mrs. Deagle cleaned up around the cats’ dishes, made herself a cup of instant soup to enjoy with her television, and ambled into the dank cavern of worn velvet she called her living room.

She was barely settled in her overstuffed rocker when the doorbell rang.

“Again!” she shouted. “This is disgusting. The loser probably stood there for ten minutes, screwing up her courage, and now she wants to plead with me to change my mind. Donald was right. All those little people out there are lazy, mindless slugs who are good for only two things—cheap labor and food consumption . . .”

As she started toward the door, she made an addendum of her own. “And the creation of garbage,” she added fiercely. “He forgot about that.”

Opening the door, she was greeted by the sound of carolers, a trifle off-key but enthusiastic.

“Joy to the world . . .”

Mrs. Deagle threw her hands in the air, a gesture accompanied not with a loud hosanna but a wail of misery.

“Stop!” she shrieked. “Stop emptying your cesspool into my ears!”

The young carolers, shaken but determined to win over Mrs. Deagle, continued:

“The Lord is come.

Let earth receive her King . . .”

“Go away! I hate carolers!” Mrs. Deagle shouted. “Get off my front lawn! Take your whiny voices somewhere else! To the sanitary landfill! Go-o-o!”

Her shrillness caused the carolers to lose their concentration and place in the music. The melody began to disintegrate in an untidy fugato of overlapping sounds.

“That’s better,” Mrs. Deagle declared, smiling at the silent group. “If you just stand in the snow and keep your mouths shut, it’s much more enjoyable.”

She wheeled around and the door slammed behind her. Confused and hurt, the youngsters looked at one another for comfort. No one said anything for a long moment.

“Let’s try the houses in that new development,” one of them finally offered. “They’re young people, real nice, not like this old . . .”

“Woman,” another added charitably.

As the group trudged across the field, they one by one became aware of a member who had not started out with them. Much shorter than the others, he or she was hidden by stature and what seemed to be a heavy scarf at first, and then each assumed the new member was one or another caroler’s younger sister or brother who had dressed up in a Halloween outfit and become part of the group. Eventually, when it joined in the caroling, the newcomer’s voice generated more attention than its size, shape, or color. Rather like someone singing with the teeth firmly clenched, the words came out blurred and high-pitched, somewhere between the twang of a Jew’s harp and the indistinct falsetto of a chipmunk who didn’t know the words.

“Maybe,” one of the carolers now suggested, “it’s that kid who’s causing the problem.”

“Nah,” another replied. “It’s just Mrs. Deagle. She hates everything.”

“But have you heard how he sings?”

“Sure, but so what? We’re not supposed to be the church choir. This is just to make people feel good.”

“Yeah. I guess you’re right.”

Despite agreement that the new kid was not to be criticized because of his—or its—singing, one young man decided he wanted to at least find out who their free-lance caroler was. Walking closer to the newcomer, he was surprised when it moved quickly away from him.

“Hey,” the boy said. “Don’t you want to talk? I just wanted to find out who you are.”

The small person didn’t answer.

“That’s a neat costume you got, but it’s the wrong holiday. This is Christmas, not Halloween.”

Still no reply.

“I’ll bet I know who you are—Eric Wallman. Right?”

The little person didn’t answer.

A list of approximately a dozen names of area girls and boys produced a similar lack of reaction.

“Hey, come here. I want to talk to you.”

The interloper did not advance, so the young man took off after it. Although the costumed kid moved with surprising speed and agility through the snow, the longer strides of the older pursuer eventually brought them within inches of each other. As the young man reached out to grab the mysterious visitor, he was suddenly met with an unseasonably hostile snarl, and a sharp pain slashed into his arm.

“Ow!” he cried out.

Looking down, he saw blood seeping through the slashed sleeve of his jacket. More angry than hurt, he cupped his hands to yell after the departing delinquent.

“You’re a lousy singer anyway! We don’t need you! Your voice stinks!”

They had walked for nearly an hour, going from one clear trail of tri-pronged Gremlin footprints to a jumbled patch and then—usually via luck rather than skill—onto a clear trail again. To keep both their spirits up and his mind active, Billy continued to talk aloud to Gizmo and himself, planning their next move as they trudged along together.

“Giz, I just thought of something,” Billy said. “Water makes you guys reproduce, right? And snow is just frozen water. But snow must not have had any effect on Stripe. Otherwise, this whole area would be crawling with those things. What are they called, anyway? They’re sure not Mogwai. They’re more like those things Mr. Futterman told me about. What did he call them? Grebblies? Gremlins? Yeah, that’s it. And to think, I thought he was crazy. Anyway, for water to make you reproduce it must have to be a warmer temperature. Stripe won’t find any water outside like that, so luck is with us.”

Billy knew he was rambling on as a means of bolstering his confidence, but presenting his thoughts out loud, even to Gizmo, helped him get them in better order.

He remembered once in high school when he had written a report on Sherlock Holmes and been quite impressed with the legendary detective’s ratiocinative powers. For the most part—at least in those adventures Billy recalled most vividly—Holmes was able to predict his villain’s next move by the simple process of putting himself in his opponent’s place. This Billy now proceeded to do with reference to Stripe.

“Let’s see now, Giz,” he said. “Where would we go if we were Stripe?”

Considering the rather narrow parameters within which Stripe could operate, the question was not really a very difficult one.

“Outside, it’s dark and he’s free to move about as he pleases, but apparently the snow is too cold to use for reproduction,” Billy reasoned. “Inside, there’s the thing he’s probably looking for—warmer water. But most of these houses are brightly lit now. Then there’s the problem of getting in. How can he do that? Well, he could curl into a ball and throw himself through a glass window, the way he did back home. But that would attract a lot of attention and he could get caught . . . Unless he picked a house with nobody home . . . Or . . . he could try to sneak in, say, when somebody else went inside a house . . . or if the door was left open a minute . . .”

He had been subliminally aware of the carolers’ singing in the distance for perhaps a quarter hour before it struck him that there might be a connection.

Breaking into a faster pace, he headed toward the sound of the voices. “This may be a long shot,” he said to Gizmo, “but if we were Stripe, I think we’d try hanging around those carolers. At the worst, they’d help hide our tracks. And if somebody left a door open while the group was singing, maybe there’d be a chance to slip inside . . . Anyway, it won’t hurt to ask. Maybe they’ve seen him during their travels.”

Having convinced himself that he had an excellent case, Billy pulled the knapsack cover down tighter to shield Gizmo from the cold and started to run at a brisk pace. A quarter mile down the road he caught up with the singers.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m looking for a little fella about this high.”

He held his palm about two and a half feet off the ground.

The response was immediate.

“Yeah,” one of the carolers said. “We saw him. Is he your kid brother or something?”

“Not exactly. Why?”

“Because he’s a creep. Neil tried to find out his name and he ran away. Then when Neil caught up to him, he pulled a knife on him.”

Billy looked around.

“Is Neil here?” he asked.

“No,” another fellow said. “He went home when he saw how bad his coat was ripped. His arm was bleedin’, too.”

“Why you looking for the creepy midget?” another caroler asked.

“Because he’s supposed to be home now,” Billy replied. He saw no reason to alarm them by telling the truth. “Which way did he go, anyway?”

Several pointed toward a darkened building, which loomed as a heavy shadow between two smaller, brightly illuminated homes. It was the YMCA.

“Don’t know why he went that way,” one of the carolers said. “It’s closed tighter’n a clam.”

“Maybe he was just afraid,” another offered.

“Thanks,” Billy said. “And tell Neil I’m sorry if the little guy hurt him.”

As he started to move off, three or four of the young people simultaneously spotted Gizmo peeking out from beneath the knapsack cover and trotted after him.

“Hey,” one of them asked. “What kind of animal is that? He’s cute.”

“It’s a Mogwai,” Billy replied.

“Where do they come from?”

“Nowhere around here. Look, I gotta go. Thanks a lot for your help.”

Waving a quick goodbye, he trotted toward the darkened building, picking up the familiar tri-pronged trail of Stripe less than a minute later. Running faster, he followed the fresh tracks nearly all the way around the building until they ended.

Directly below a broken window.

“This must be the place, Giz,” Billy said, his voice a blend of anticipation and anxiety.

As he picked the remaining shards of glass from the ledge so that he could boost himself through the broken window, Billy recalled the uproar of a few months ago, when a typewriter had been stolen from the YMCA office. Some aroused citizens, perhaps overreacting, had proposed that every public building in the entire town be wired with the best anti-burglary’ devices and patrolled around the clock by armed guards. Others, proud of Kingston Falls’s reputation as a safe place to live, took the view that until the theft proved to be more than a solitary aberration, a continuation of normal prudence should suffice. Several invitingly weak locks at the high school and YMCA were replaced, as were broken windows on the ground levels. Now, as Billy pushed himself through the opening, he remembered one highlight of last summer’s great security debate among Kingston Falls’s town leaders.