One-Eyed Jack (29 page)

I glanced back over my
shoulder.

Skees was watching me. I suppose to
him I appeared to be talking to nothing, to the empty
air.

He didn’t say a word, though; he just
watched.

“
Thank you,” I said to the
knife-wielder. “I owe you a favor.”

It nodded, and a shiver ran across my
shoulder blades. I hoped I hadn’t just committed myself to doing
something horrible.

Right now, though, I had a direction.
“This way,” I told Skees.

The corridor was empty, the doors
along either side mostly closed; the few that were open gave into
empty rooms. I walked slowly along the passage, looking and
listening for some sign of Jenny’s presence.

I didn’t see or
hear
her
, but I
heard a child’s voice say something – I couldn’t be sure of the
words through the closed door, but it might have been, “You poor
thing!”

“
There,” I said,
pointing.

Skees nodded, and opened the
door.

It was a room almost exactly like
Andrew McPhee’s, but this one had a girl, perhaps eight years old,
in it, sitting up in bed and staring at us. She was thin and pale,
with an IV line in her arm. The light at the head of her bed was
on, but the ceiling lights were off.

She had a very faint oddness about
her, as if the light on her wasn’t quite the same as the light in
the rest of the room. It wasn’t anywhere near as intense as Jack’s,
not even the same order of magnitude, but she had it, ever so
slightly.

And standing beside the bed, standing
over her, was a black-haired, pale-skinned woman with mismatched
eyes and hands. Her dress was still streaked with dark red, but
most of it was white again. She was glaring furiously at me; I
could feel her anger – and just a twinge of hunger.

“
Hey, honey,” Skees said.
“Sorry to bother you, but we needed to check on
something.”

“
Are you a doctor?” the
girl asked.

“
No, sweetie, I’m a
policeman,” Skees said, looking around.

“
She’s here,” I
said.

Skees threw me a quick glance, then
scanned the room. “Where?”

“
Right by the bed,” I
said.

The little girl looked at me, then at
Jenny. Any doubts I might have had vanished; the kid could
definitely see the monster.

The younger man can see
me. The older one can’t.
The anger had
faded a little, and when she spoke to the girl the hunger seemed
stronger.

Or maybe it wasn’t exactly hunger; it
was almost lust.

The girl didn’t say anything, but
turned her eyes back toward me.

“
I don’t see it,” Skees
said. “I somehow thought I would, despite what you said. You sure
it’s there?”

“
Oh, she’s there, all
right,” I said, as Jenny glowered at me.

Go away.
The anger was back, and now had a trace of
desperation.

“
Do
you
see it, honey?” Skees asked. “The ghost-woman?”

“
My name isn’t Honey,” the
little girl said. “It’s Lisette Babcock.”

Startled, Skees said, “I’m sorry, Miss
Babcock. No offense meant. But can you see anyone else here,
besides you, me, and Mr. Kraft?”

She stared straight at him, but didn’t
answer.

“
She can see it,” I said.
“I think she sees Jenny just fine.”

“
I don’t think you should
be in my room,” Lisette said.

“
The call button for the
nurse is right there,” I replied.

“
I know that! I’m not
stupid.”

“
No, I’m sure you aren’t,”
I said. “And I’m guessing you’ve been in and out of hospitals a
lot, and know perfectly well how to call the nurse. Go ahead and
call, if you don’t think we should be in here. I’m sorry we had to
bother you, but that ghost you’re talking to – did you know she
killed a kid earlier tonight?”

Lisette gave Jenny an uncertain
glance.

The anger became
incandescent fury.
Go away! Leave us
alone!

I ignored Jenny’s desperate shout. “A
boy named Andrew McPhee,” I said. “That’s his blood on her dress.
She tore him to pieces.”

“
How can a ghost hurt
anyone?” Lisette demanded. “It’s not solid.”

I shrugged. “Who knows
anything about ghosts, really?
I
don’t know why some of them can hurt people and
some can’t, but that’s the way it is.
This
one, that calls herself Jenny
Derdiarian, can only hurt kids who trust her. She can’t touch
grown-ups at all, or kids who can’t see her, but what she does is
she tricks kids into thinking she loves them, and that they love
her, and then she talks them into feeding her. Except what she eats
is human flesh.”

Shut up shut up shut
up!

Lisette gave Jenny a
startled glance, then made a face. “She eats
people
?”

“
That’s
right. She does. She ate a big piece of Andrew McPhee tonight, but
I think she’s already getting hungry again, so she came here to
start convincing
you
to feed her. She’s figured out that kids who are
really sick, who think they might die soon anyway, are more likely
to agree to feed her.”

“
That’s
gross!
”

I nodded. “It really is.”

The ghost glared at
me.
I’ll kill you, I’ll destroy you, I’ll
ruin you!

Lisette looked at me, then back at
Jenny.

The ghost saw that look,
and turned back to the child, anger giving way to eagerness.
He lies! I love you, I love children!

“
Ask her where that dried
blood on her dress came from.”

“
It
is
blood? I wasn’t sure I was seeing it right.”

It’s my blood!
Mine!

“
It’s
Andrew’s.”

“
Is that true?” Lisette
asked Detective Skees.

“
I can’t see her,” Skees
admitted. “I don’t know what’s on her dress. But Andrew McPhee was
killed here in this hospital earlier tonight, and pieces of him are
missing. So far, every time I’ve been able to check something Mr.
Kraft told me, it was true. He says he can see ghosts, and it
sounds like you can, too.”

“
I never did before,”
Lisette said. “But I can see Jenny. She’s been here talking to me
for hours, telling me about her children and stuff.”

That was interesting –
could Jenny
make
kids see her now? Maybe eating poor Andrew had made her more
powerful, more dangerous. Lisette definitely had that strangeness
that meant she could see the spirit world, but had she always had
it, or was that something Jenny had done to her? There were
multiple mysteries here.

But that wasn’t what I
needed to tell Lisette. “She told you that she locked them in their
rooms until they starved to death?” I said. I shook my head. “That
didn’t happen.” I remembered what the real Jenny Derdiarian had
told me about the whole fantasy. “I mean, think about it,” I
continued. “If you were locked in your room for days and days,
wouldn’t you find a way to break a window and climb out, or a way
to call for help? Wouldn’t your friends or your teachers notice
something was wrong and send someone to check on you? It takes
weeks to starve to death! And if they
starved
, where were they getting
water? They’d die of thirst first! Did they have water in their
rooms?”

You lie you lie you lie!
Shut up shut up!
Her rage almost visible,
Jenny turned away from the bed and came charging at me, hands
raised, fingers curled into claws.

I stepped back. I knew she
couldn’t hurt me, or I
thought
I did, but still, it looked as if a grown woman
was about to attack me. My brain may have known she wasn’t real,
but my eyes and feet didn’t.

And sure enough, her right
hand just seemed to disappear before it touched me, I couldn’t feel
it any more than I could feel a shadow – but her
left
hand, the little
brown hand that looked like Andrew’s, actually hit me.

It wasn’t like a human hand; it was
cold, and felt more like a gust of wind than like living flesh, but
the nails clawed my cheek, and I felt scratches. It
stung.

I was too astonished to react at
first, but Lisette screamed, clapping her hands to her mouth, her
eyes fixed on my face.

Skees moved, his hand reaching under
his jacket and bringing out a gun I didn’t know he had, but he
didn’t know where to point it; he kept the muzzle toward the
ceiling as he looked around for a target.

He couldn’t see Jenny, couldn’t see
her flailing furiously at me, but he did see my face.

“
Oh, my God,” he
said.

By this time I’d brought up my own
hands to defend myself, but I couldn’t get a grip on Jenny’s wrist,
and she was still clawing at my face with her left hand. It hurt;
it felt as if someone had taken coarse sandpaper to my
cheek.

Die die die!
she shrieked.

Lisette burst into tears. “Stop it!”
she shouted.

Skees still couldn’t see Jenny, but he
could see me, and he could see that something was happening to me.
He pushed himself in front of me, shielding me; he raised the gun,
but still couldn’t see anything to point it at. He looked around,
trying to find some visible sign of my attacker.

Mostly, though, he simply blocked me,
the back of his head close against my injured cheek. For Jenny to
claw me again, she would have to go through Ben Skees.

She didn’t. She stopped attacking me;
she stepped back –

And she wasn’t there
anymore.

“
She’s gone,” I
said

“
She what?” Skees
said.

“
She’s gone,” I repeated.
“She disappeared.” I looked over his shoulder at the girl in the
bed. “Are you okay, Lisette?” I called.

“
No,” she said, between
sobs.

“
What do you mean, she
disappeared?” Skees demanded, as he stepped away from me and tucked
his gun away again.

“
She
disappeared. Vanished. Poof. She’s a
ghost
, remember? Or something like
one.”

“
They can do that?” He
produced a big white handkerchief from somewhere, like someone in
an old movie. Nobody I knew back home still carried one, but
apparently in Kentucky the plainclothes cops did.

“
Yeah, I guess they can,”
I said, accepting the handkerchief. I pressed it to my injured
face. “I didn’t know that before.”

I hadn’t known that Jenny could hurt
me like that, either.

“
So is she gone for good?”
Skees asked.

“
I very much doubt it.”
Then I pushed past him to the bedside. “I’m sorry, Lisette. Is
there anything we can do?”

She swallowed a sob and looked up at
me. “You’re bleeding,” she said.

“
I am?” I took the
handkerchief from my cheek and looked at it.

It was soaked in blood. Not just a few
streaks; soaked.

“
She’s definitely getting
stronger,” I said.

That was when the nurse showed
up.

Chapter Twenty

It took about half an hour
to straighten things out. Hospital security was pretty antsy after
the McPhee boy’s death, and finding me and Detective Skees in a
room with a crying kid did not exactly look like business as usual,
especially not with half my face scratched raw. A police badge
helped, but it still took a few calls before they decided not to
cuff us and call the cops –
other
cops.

They did patch up my face. I got a
quick look in a mirror before the bandages went on, and wished I
hadn’t; it looked like hamburger. Which is a cliché, but it was
also true.

Or maybe it was more like cube steak.
Nasty, either way.

Finally, though, we were back in
Skees’ car, and he was giving me a lift back to my motel room – my
rental car was still in the hotel garage, but I was too exhausted
to drive. I could pick it up in the morning; if that didn’t work,
worst case scenario was that I would turn in the keys and tell the
rental company where I left it.

Except my phone was still in it; I’d
called Mel on Skees’ cell, not my own. Well, I told myself I’d
retrieve it later.

“
You chased it away,”
Skees said suddenly, as we slowed to a stop at a light.

“
What?” I’d been thinking
about cars and phones, not child-eating monsters.

“
You chased the ghost
away,.” he said.

“
I think it was Lisette’s
crying more than anything I did,” I said. “Or you shielding
me.”