One-Eyed Jack (31 page)

They didn’t believe in curses. Even
when they saw what had become of her, they were convinced that Mel
had changed on her own, that it was her behavior that made her so
frightening.

At least, that was what they
said.

Mel’s other old friends hadn’t needed
to make up excuses; they just said she’d changed, and they’d moved
on.

I couldn’t do that. I knew the curse
was real. I knew what Mrs. Reinholt had done to Mel, and to me. And
I had always liked her.

But that didn’t make it easy to be
embraced by fear in human form, by a walking incarnation of death
and despair.

She released me and stepped back, then
looked at my face. She had been smiling again, but the smile
vanished.

I don’t know exactly what she saw, but
it wasn’t just the bandages. Something must have shown in my eyes,
or perhaps I had gone pale. The skin of my face felt as if it were
stretched impossibly tight over my jaw and cheekbones.

“
I’m sorry,” she
said.

“
Don’t be,” I said,
forcing the words out. “Not your fault.”

“
Of course it is. I didn’t
need to hug you.” Her voice turned bitter, and I didn’t think it
was the curse. “I didn’t need to come at all.”

“
I’m glad you did,” I
lied.

“
It’s sweet of you to say
so,” she said. She reached into her purse and pulled out a brown
prescription bottle. “Here,” she said. “Xanax. I’m told it
helps.”

I didn’t bother asking how she’d
gotten it. I accepted the bottle, but I put it in my pocket without
opening it.

“
I can manage,” I
said.

“
Well, we’ll see,” she
replied. “Come on, let’s give these people their hotel back. I want
you to show me where this killer ghost hangs out.”

I nodded, and followed her out to her
car.

It was unbelievably tempting to turn
and run, flee back to my room, do whatever it took to get away from
her; the thought of being closed up in a car with her was so
terrifying I was afraid I’d be sick. I couldn’t do that, though,
not to Mel.

I was all she had left.

Chapter Twenty-One

Mel drove while I played navigator,
and I gave her the grand tour of the Wilsons’ neighborhood,
including the big tulip poplar, and of the area around the U.K.
Health Center.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t all that bad
riding with her. Being that close for that long, it wasn’t possible
to stay panicky; instead it settled into dread and despair, and
with a little practice I was able to turn that into something like
resignation and keep my fear under control – it never went away,
didn’t really decrease, but I could accept it. I just sat there in
a state of abject quivering terror, waiting for it to be
over.

I’ve heard that people who know
they’re going to die soon sometimes accept it, and become weirdly
calm. I think that’s what it felt like.

She didn’t talk, which
helped.

Driving through the city in broad
daylight was... interesting. Or it would have been if I’d been
capable of coherent thought, anyway; it was interesting in
retrospect. Other drivers got out of our way; the cars behind us
hung well back. Sudden swerves were common, but always directed
away from us, so we were never endangered. The slightest slowing on
Mel’s part would set brakes squealing behind us. I don’t think we
caused any actual collisions, but it was close.

We stopped in the hospital garage and
got my phone out of the rental car. Mel waited while I checked in
with Skees and brought him up to date.

“
Good,” he said. “We’ve
set up your meeting with Jack.”

“
Thank you.”

“
You... Ms. de Cheverley
won’t be accompanying you, will she?”

I glanced over at Mel, which was like
looking into the abyss. “Did you want to meet Jack this afternoon?”
I asked her.

She shook her head. “I need some
sleep,” she said.

I tried not to look relieved. “I don’t
think so,” I said into the phone.

“
You’ll be talking to him
at Youth Services, on Cisco Road.”

“
Okay, I can find it,” I
said. I had my GPS. “When do I need to be there?”

“
Any time; Jack’s schedule
is pretty flexible today. He’s being evaluated. Again.”

“
Thanks.” I closed the
phone and put it away, then turned to Mel. “I’ll see you
tonight?”

“
Oh, indeed you will, dear
boy. I’m looking forward to doing some ghost-hunting.”

“
We may not find it,” I
warned her.

“
It’ll be fun to try. I’ll
give you a call.” She waved, and slid back into the BMW.

I watched her go, waited until the
lingering sense of dread faded and the wave of trembling had
passed, then climbed into the rental and booted up the
GPS.

Cisco Road turned out to be fairly
close by; I headed down Limestone a couple of blocks, then cut west
for a mile or two past the harness track, and it was two left turns
away. It was a quiet residential street with a school and a couple
of other things mixed in among a bunch of tidy little houses, and
one of the things mixed in was the Division of Youth
Services.

I’d seen the inside in my dreams, so I
was able to find my way around, but it still took awhile to find
the right people and get it confirmed that I was allowed to be
there. Then I got to wait in a nice non-threatening room, lots of
calming colors and soft textures, until Jack finished talking to
whoever he was talking to.

Finally, though, I found myself
sitting across a small table from him. He looked very small there,
and his eye-patch didn’t make him look dashing or piratical, just
smaller and damaged. His psychic aura, if you want to call it that,
was stronger than ever – he looked as if he was about to drop out
of our reality entirely.

And I thought I could feel something,
as if Jack had begun to radiate his emotions the same way Jenny
did. I knew that under his calm, withdrawn appearance he was
furiously angry.

“
Hello, Jack,” I
said.

“
Hello, Mr. Kraft,” he
replied warily. “What happened to your face?”

“
Got a few scratches.
How’re you doing?”

He shrugged.

“
I don’t suppose you’ve
been entirely open with these people.”

He grimaced. “Not entirely,” he
admitted.

“
I was wondering whether
there was anything you wanted to say that you hadn’t been able to
tell anyone.”

“
Like what?”

“
Like, about
Jenny.”

He looked at me silently for a moment,
then said, “What about her?”

That rage I sensed in him was closer
to the surface now.

“
You tell me,” I
said.

“
You saw her.”

“
Yeah, I did.”

“
She killed Andrew, she
ate his heart, and it didn’t bring her back to life.” The anger was
beginning to leak into his voice now.

“
She was never alive to
begin with, Jack,” I said, as calmly as I could. I probably sounded
like every annoying, superior adult he’d ever dealt with, but I
couldn’t think of a better way to get through to him. “She’s not
really a ghost at all, she’s... I don’t know, something else. But
the real Jenny Derdiarian is still alive; so are her kids. They
live in Clark County. The Jenny you know isn’t a ghost; she was
never human in the first place.”

“
Seriously?” He looked me
in the eye.

I met his look straight on. “Yeah,
seriously.”

“
So she
lied about
everything
.” His gaze dropped, and
he stared with his one good eye at his hands, folded on the table,
and at the scar tissue where his missing finger used to
be.

“
Pretty much,
yeah.”

“
Bitch,” he said
quietly.

I wasn’t going to argue with that
assessment.

“
What
a
bitch
,”
he said, more emphatically, looking up from his hands, and the rage
burst out of him. There was no longer any question that he was
radiating his emotions on some psychic wavelength that I could
feel. “I loved her, I fed her my
own
finger
, and it was all
lies
?
All
lies?”

“
Yeah.” I tried to ignore
the waves of fury. Jack was trying to hold in his anger, I could
sense that, and I didn’t want him to know how much I felt it. I
didn’t want him to think I was invading his privacy.

“
She’s not a
ghost?”

“
If you mean a dead
person, then she’s not a ghost.”

“
Can she
die, then? If she’s not
already
dead, can she
die?”

“
I don’t know,” I
said.

“
I hope
she can,” he said, and the anger was suddenly controlled again. “I
want her dead. I want her
dead
. I keep remembering what she
did to Andrew, and wishing I could do that to her.”

I had been so attentive to that
emotional undercurrent that his words caught me off-guard. I said,
“Do what?”

“
Rip her to pieces.” He
spoke through clenched teeth. “Tear her heart out and eat it. Chop
off her hand and rip out her throat, the way she did to
Andrew.”

“
You can’t,” I said. “I do
know that much. There may be a way to kill things like her, but you
can’t do it like that. I’ve tried stabbing them; I even hit one
with a car once. It doesn’t hurt them.”

“
Are you sure? Because I
really want to tear her apart. I keep thinking about it, imagining
how it would feel.” He bared his teeth and flexed his remaining
nine fingers. “I know I’m not strong enough to rip apart a real
person, but she isn’t a real person. Are you sure I
can’t?”

“
Pretty sure,” I said. I
was also pretty sure that it wasn’t healthy for a twelve-year-old
kid to be thinking like that, or feeling such anger, but I didn’t
say so. I was watching him closely, trying to figure out what to
say – and why he was so important. Why had I dreamed about him? If
it was just because he was going to lead me to Jenny, why hadn’t I
dreamed about Jenny herself, or about Ben Skees, or Andrew McPhee?
Was it just because Jack could see the night-things?

Or did it have something
to do with his burgeoning psychic ability? He hadn’t been this...
this
powerful
before. He hadn’t been projecting emotions before.

“
You should stay away from
her,” I added. “She’s dangerous.”

“
She’s a good liar,” he
acknowledged.

“
No, I
mean she’s
dangerous
,” I said. I pointed to the
bandages. “She was the one who scratched me.”

That caught his interest, distracted
him from his anger, and he stared at my bloodied, patched face. “I
thought she couldn’t hurt anyone without permission.”

“
Maybe she couldn’t
before, but she can now. At least me. She didn’t scratch Detective
Skees, but she did a job on my face.”

“
She did that?” His eyes
were fixed on the bandages.

I nodded.

“
She said she couldn’t eat
me or Andrew without our permission.”

I shrugged. “Maybe she couldn’t. I
don’t know. But she was the one who clawed me up. I think she used
Andrew’s hand to do it.”

He frowned. “She killed Andrew. He was
a good kid, and she killed him.”

“
Yeah, I know.” I
hesitated, then said, “But he was really sick, wasn’t he? Going to
die soon?” I hoped to ease his rage a little by reminding him of
extenuating circumstances.

“
He said
he was,” Jack acknowledged. “He was the sickest kid I could find.
But he wanted to help her, and she killed him for
nothing
.” He looked me
in the eye, and it was as if a little bit of Hell was staring at me
from behind that black eye-patch. “I want to rip her apart and take
my eye back.”

“
That won’t do Andrew any
good,” I said.

“
It’ll
make
me
feel better.”

“
Maybe,” I said. “Maybe
not. These things don’t always work out the way we
expect.”

“
Yeah,” he said bitterly,
looking down at his hands again. “I saw that.”

That oddness, that out-of-place look,
was definitely much stronger; Jack hardly seemed to be in the same
room I was. He was almost glowing now. I didn’t know whether that
reflected his mental state, whether his anger was fueling it, or
whether his psychic abilities, whatever they were, were suddenly
blossoming, or whether it was just something about the indirect
lighting in that room.