One-Eyed Jack (36 page)

“
I think she believes it,”
I said. “But it’s not true.”

There’s no other
Jenny.

“
She’s right here,” I
said, pointing at her.

That’s just a fat old
woman, that’s not Jenny, that’s not me.

I turned. “Ms. Derdiarian, tell Trevor
who you are.”

“
I’m Jenny Derdiarian,”
she said. “I’m Ashley’s mother, and Sarah’s, and Jason’s. And
they’re all healthy and alive. I’d never hurt them.”

Lies lies lies.

Trevor stared up at Ms. Derdiarian,
then turned to look at the monster.

“
Wow,” he said. “That’s
really weird.”

“
Hey, ghost,” Skees said,
looking over the monster’s head. “You see? You aren’t
real!”

I’m Jenny, they lie, my
poor babies died and I love you, Trevor.

“
So if
she’s not a ghost, what
is
she?”

“
We don’t know exactly,” I
said. “A monster of some kind.”

“
Trevor, is it?” the
original Jenny asked.

“
Uh huh.”

“
You really see a... a
ghost of me? What does it look like?”

Trevor looked at her, then at the
false Jenny. “Well, I can’t see her clearly, it’s like she’s all
blurry, but her face looks a lot like yours, only skinnier. Her
hair’s the same color, but it’s long and straight. She’s real thin,
and she’s wearing a white dress that just kind of hangs on her –
it’s too big for someone so bony.”

“
She’s right there?” She
reached out, and the monster flinched back, away from the hand that
would have... touched her? Passed through her?

Go away!

“
Yeah. You can’t see her
at all?”

“
No.”

For a moment, we all paused. Jenny
Derdiarian, Ben Skees, and I were standing around the bed, the
ghoul was crouching beside it glaring up at us, and Trevor was
sitting up, enjoying the attention.

“
Well,” I said to Skees.
“Now what?”

“
She’s still here? She
hasn’t... I don’t know, faded away?”

“
Nope. She’s a bit pissed
that we’re here hassling her, but she’s still here, as much as
ever. She says we’re lying, and that she’s the real Jenny, and we
should all go away.”

Yes! Leave us
alone!

“
I
think you’re the real one,” Trevor
told the human Jenny.

“
Well, of course I am,”
Jenny said, startled.

“
So where did the other
one come from?”

Jenny looked from Trevor to me, then
to Ben Skees, then back to Trevor. “It’s like Mr. Kraft says,” she
said. “I used to... to worry about my kids all the time, so much I
thought there was something wrong with me. Then one day I sat down
under a big tree and took a nap, and when I woke up I wasn’t
worried any more. I thought God had blessed me, that He’d answered
my prayers and taken my worries away, but it seems that somehow all
those worries had gone into this... whatever it is that you and Mr.
Kraft can see, and we can’t.” She looked at... well, from my point
of view she was looking at the back of the monster’s neck, but to
her she must have been looking at empty air.

“
So your worries just came
loose and turned into her?” Trevor asked.

“
I
suppose maybe they did,” Jenny said. “I don’t really know.” She
studied the area where she thought the Jenny-thing was – which was
about half the monster, and half empty air. “You know, when I was
younger I used to think I saw ghosts sometimes, so I thought maybe
I’d be able to see this one, but for me there’s nothing there at
all. There are just the four of us here. I don’t see or hear
anything, I don’t feel any cold spot or any of the other stuff that
they say goes with a haunting. You
really
see her?”

“
Yeah,”
Trevor said, wonderingly. “She’s
right there
.” He pointed at the
false Jenny’s face.

The monster stared hungrily at the
boy’s finger; its mouth opened, and razor-sharp teeth gleamed in
the dull fluorescent light.

Trevor snatched his hand back and
tucked it under his other arm.

So
hungry
, the thing moaned.
So very, very hungry. Can’t I have a bite,
Trevor, honey?

“
No!” he shrieked. “Get
away from me!”

“
What’s it doing?” Skees
said, reaching under his jacket. He didn’t actually draw a gun, but
for a moment I thought he would.

Please please please, I
love you so, I love you...
It leaned down
closer to the boy.

“
Don’t touch
me!”

“
It wants to bite off that
finger,” I said.

“
Make it go away!” Trevor
said, shrinking down into the bed.

“
We
can’t,” I said. “We’ve been trying to find a way, but we can’t.
That was why we brought Madame de Cheverley here, and why Ms.
Derdirarian is here, but it isn’t working. But
you
can send her away, I
think.”

Don’t, please, Trevor, I
love you.

“
I don’t
love
you
,”
he said, on the verge of tears.

Please, I’m so hungry, so
hungry!

“
No!” He turned and buried
his face in his pillow. “Go away!”

Trevor,
honey...

“
You
aren’t real! You’re just a bunch of worries!
Hungry
worries!”

Please, I love you. I’m
the real Jenny.

“
If you’re real, then talk
about something else,” Trevor said, his voice muffled by the
pillow. “Something besides me or your kids. Tell me what TV shows
you like, or where you grew up. You can’t, can you?”

I wondered whether maybe he hadn’t
been as asleep as we thought when Jenny and I were
talking.

That doesn’t matter – I
love you.

“
You
aren’t real. You’re
stupid
. Mr. Kraft was right, you’re
a monster, a
stupid
monster. Go away!”

Trevor, please.

“
Go away!” He pulled the
pillow over his head.

The monster stared at him
for a moment, then glared at me with her mismatched eyes.
You did this
, she
said.
You drove him away from me.
Her left hand lashed out, fingers curled into
claws.

I tried to duck away, but I wasn’t
fast enough; I felt her nails scratching me, passing through the
bandages as if they weren’t there and continuing on across the
bridge of my nose. I stepped back, my own hands coming up to
protect my face. Skees saw what was happening, but this time he was
too far away to intervene. He took a step closer.

But he didn’t need to. She was
gone.

Chapter Twenty-Five

After a moment of awkward silence, I
said, “She’s gone. What do you say we get out of here and let
Trevor get some sleep?”

“
What happened?” Jenny
asked. “What happened to your face? You’re bleeding!”

“
I’ll tell you later,” I
said, dabbing at my nose. “Can we please go?”

“
Come on,” Skees
said.

We went. I paused in the doorway long
enough to call, “Good night, Trevor. I’m sorry about all
this.”

He made a muffled noise from beneath
the pillow.

“
Come on,” Skees said.
“Let’s get those scratches looked at.”

We headed down the hall to the nurses’
station, where they took one look at me and got out a bottle of
antiseptic and another batch of bandages.

Two minutes later I was sitting on a
metal chair while a nurse tended to my wounds and Jenny Derdiarian
asked an endless string of questions about what was going
on.

“
I couldn’t see a thing!”
she exclaimed.

“
I
wish
I
couldn’t,” I said. “Maybe if I couldn’t see her, she couldn’t
scratch me.”

“
I’m sorry to drag you out
here at this hour for nothing, Ms. Derdiarian,” Skees said. “I
really thought that if she saw you, it would break her pattern
somehow.”

“
I don’t
think anything’s going to break her pattern,” I said. “All
she
is
is
a walking, talking bunch of obsessions. Trevor was right about that
– she isn’t real, she’s just Jenny’s worries, gotten out and
roaming around loose.”

“
I would never have really
hurt anyone, though!” Jenny protested.

“
No, because you’re a
human being. She isn’t. You restrain yourself because you know
better; she doesn’t.” I looked at her. “Could you really see ghosts
before you... before she took away your obsessions?”

“
I thought so. My parents
always said I was imagining it, and my first husband said I was
lying, but I really did think I saw them. There was an old woman
that used to kneel on the sidewalk...”

“
I’ve seen her,” I
interrupted. “She’s still there.”

“
But I
can’t see her! I can’t see any of them anymore, not even
my
own
ghost.”

“
They aren’t really
ghosts,” I said. “And maybe you can’t see them anymore because she
took that, too, along with your obsessions.”

Jenny shook her head. “You’re probably
right,” she said. “Honestly, 90% of the time I can’t say I miss
them.”

I looked at her, at how perfectly she
fit into her surroundings, how there wasn’t the slightest trace of
that psychic strangeness, that photoshop effect. Her psychic
abilities, if that’s what they were, were definitely gone – but
they had definitely been real once, or she wouldn’t have known
about the old woman on the sidewalk.

They had gone when the false Jenny
came along and carried away the obsessions with food and children
and death.

Or maybe...

I didn’t have any
evidence, but I had a hypothesis. Maybe the false Jenny
was
her psychic power,
thrown out on its own. Maybe she had somehow unconsciously used it
to pull the obsessions out of her.

Detective Skees had wanted her pull
those obsessions back into herself, and it hadn’t worked – the
separation was complete, and without her lost talents she couldn’t
even see her other self.

But if it had been her own
psychic abilities that pulled the obsessions out of her in the
first place, maybe
other
people’s psychic abilities could affect them, as
well.

And Jack Wilson’s power had reached an
intensity where he almost seemed to glow.

“
I need to talk to Jack
again,” I said.

“
What? Why?” Skees
asked.

“
I still don’t know why I
dreamed about him,” I said. That wasn’t anything like the complete
truth, but it ought to be good enough.

It was.

“
I’ll see if I can set it
up for you,” Skees said. “You’ll see if you can come up with more
ideas for stopping that thing?”

“
I’ll try,” I said,
touching my new bandages. “I don’t want it running around loose any
more than you do.”

He nodded.

After that we split up; Skees escorted
Jenny Derdiarian back out to her car, and I gave Mel a call. She
met me in the garage, and we went out for a drink.

That was not a happy
occasion for the bar we chose. Within ten minutes of our arrival
every other customer was gone, and the bartender’s hands were
trembling so much that she spilled half my beer. She didn’t
dare
spill any of Mel’s
screwdriver, but she needed about five minutes to get it to us. If
I hadn’t been so miserable and frightened just because Mel was
there, it would have depressed me.

It
did
depress Mel. We finished our
drinks, and I gave her as detailed an account of what had happened
in Trevor’s room as I could, but after that she wasn’t smiling or
talking. We paid our tab and got ready to go.

“
Listen, Greg,” she said
as she slid off her barstool . “I’m not doing any good here. I’m
going to head home.”

“
When?” I asked, trying
not to sound eager.

“
Now,” she replied.
“Tonight.”

“
It’s a long
drive.”

“
I’ll manage.”

I tried to think of something
intelligent to say, something that wouldn’t offend the Dark Lady,
but all I could come up with was, “Okay.”

“
I could give you a
lift.”

I thought about that. I was tempted.
It would save me the airfare and get me home sooner – but it would
mean spending several hours in a car with the Queen of Despair. I
didn’t think I could face that. Staying near her as long as I
already had was wearing me out.