One-Eyed Jack (6 page)

The houses here weren’t quite as well
maintained, and the trees somehow seemed a little wilder. At the
very end the street didn’t have a round court, or become someone’s
driveway; it just stopped, the sidewalks blending into the grass on
either side, as if the builder had intended to extend it someday,
but had never managed it. The little bit of undeveloped land where
the next block would have gone wasn’t tidy enough to call a park,
but it wasn’t wilderness, either; it was just an empty place, with
trees and tall grass.

I stopped the car by the curb and
killed the engine; with the air conditioning off it seemed to
instantly turn hot and stuffy.

The sun was below the horizon in the
west, and the light was beginning to fade; the sky overhead was not
as blue anymore, and the golden sunset was tarnishing. I opened the
car door, stuck my head out in the fresh air, and
listened.

I could hear traffic in
the distance – maybe on Winchester Road, if I remembered the map
correctly, or maybe on that beltway thing they called New Circle
Road. I could hear children shouting somewhere in the distance, but
not on
this
block. Leaves rustled, and I smelled something on the wind,
something sweet.

It smelled like a carnival, like
popcorn and cotton candy and funnel cake.

Well, maybe there
was
a carnival somewhere
nearby. I peered into the shadows beneath the trees at the end of
the street.

Under the biggest tree, a big tulip
poplar, something moved. Something white.

“
Hello?” I
called.

The white thing froze.

“
I can see you, you know,”
I said, in a conversational tone.

That was only partially true; I could
see something, but not what it was, there in the shadows of
twilight. Dead leaves were scattered around it, and a lot of the
leaves still on the tree were turning yellow; it seemed awfully
early in the year for that, but I didn’t know whether to blame that
on the weather, or the thing I was talking to.

No
, something said. It wasn’t exactly sound; it was more like a
memory of sound, as if I knew what had been said, but didn’t
actually hear it.
No
, it said.
You’re too old. You’re a
grown man.

I didn’t like that.

“
I’m only twenty-five,” I
said, stepping out of the car and carefully, quietly closing the
door. “I’m just a kid.” I tried to get a better look at the thing.
It was hunched over at the foot of the tree, pressing up against
the trunk. I thought it was probably the thin woman, but I couldn’t
be sure; even though it was still daylight, whatever I was talking
to was faded and dim.

Supernatural, almost certainly. Even
without the soundless voice, I would have guessed it wasn’t
anything normal.

In the dream where the mystery woman
comforted Jack I had noticed something strange about her voice, but
in dreams you aren’t hearing with your ears in the first place, so
I hadn’t been sure. Now I was – whatever I was talking to, it
wasn’t human.

I was assuming this really was the
same person, or the same thing, that I had seen in my dreams, but I
couldn’t be absolutely sure of that at first.

I could see it a little more clearly
now, though; it had long black hair and the white was almost
certainly a garment. It had to be the woman.

No
, it said again.
Go away. Leave me
alone
.

“
My name’s Greg,” I said.
“Gregory Kraft. Kraft with a K, like the cheese.”

Go away.

“
Why?”

It turned its face toward
me, but I couldn’t make out any features; the shadows and the long
hair concealed them.
How can you see
me?
it demanded.
How can you hear me? Only children can
.
Only some children. Only special
children.

That wasn’t really what I
wanted to discuss, but I didn’t want to antagonize it, not when I’d
been lucky enough to find it like this. “I... am special,” I said.
“Something happened to me when I was seventeen. I see everything
now.” I mentally added, but did not say aloud,
Whether I want to or not
.

I didn’t tell it that there were other
adults who could see night-creatures, either. There are, though.
Not very many; it’s not one person in a hundred, probably not one
in a thousand. It’s more common in kids, but still not exactly
common.

I can spot the people with
the ability – that’s another part of the nasty little gift Mrs.
Reinholt gave me, another part of the “everything” I see. It’s a
little hard to explain how I recognize them; it’s not an aura or
anything like that. Instead, they have a sort of
otherness
, as if they
aren’t quite part of the natural world; it looks almost as if they
were photoshopped into our reality, rather than belonging in it,
and whoever did it didn’t get it exactly right. They just don’t
quite fit with their surroundings.

Some of them have it more than others.
Mrs. Reinholt had looked like a bad cut-and-paste job where no one
had tried to match the light – she was always brighter than the
world around her, never fitting in.

Mel doesn’t have it, despite the
curse. Her wrongness is completely different, more like darkness
seeping out into her surroundings.

One funny thing is that it doesn’t
show in my dreams; if any of the Wilsons or the cops or doctors or
social workers were psychic, I didn’t know about it yet.

And another peculiar feature of my
talent was that the supernatural creatures themselves don’t have
that oddness, even though most of them can see one another. Most of
them are pretty clearly not human anyway, though. The thin woman
might have passed for human under the right circumstances, but most
of them, no.

Go away
.

“
Why?” I repeated. “Aren’t
you lonely out here? Wouldn’t you like someone to talk
to?”

Go away
.

It didn’t seem to be interested in
conversation, or at least, not in talking about itself, or about
me. Well, I thought I knew a subject that would get its
attention.

“
If you’re waiting for
Jack,” I said, “they’re releasing him in the morning.”

It seemed suddenly
attentive.
Jack?

“
Yes.”

Jack is coming back to
me?

“
Jack is
coming home tomorrow,” I said. “I don’t know if he’ll want anything
more to do with
you
, though. After
all...”

I was interrupted by the sound of a
storm door latch; the front door of the nearest house, the last
house on the left, was open, and a fiftyish woman was staring out
at me.

“
After all,” I finished, a
little more quietly, “aren’t you the one who bit his finger off?” I
realized I had been almost shouting.

“
Who are you talking to,
Mister?” the woman called from the door.

“
No one, Ma’am,” I
answered. “Just practicing lines.”

She stared at me thoughtfully for a
moment, and moved her hands enough to let me see that she was
holding a long gun behind the skirt of her house-dress – a shotgun
by the look of it, but I’m not an expert. It might have been a
rifle of some kind.

“
Well, go do it somewhere
else,” she said.

“
I just wanted somewhere
quiet,” I said.

“
Well, we like it quiet
around here,” she said, pulling the gun out of concealment and
holding it across her chest, “and that means we don’t like
strangers shouting to themselves on the sidewalk.”

It only had one barrel, but it
definitely looked like a shotgun, the kind you pump.

I raised my hands – not high, not as
if I felt threatened, just enough to show her that they were empty.
“Sorry, Ma’am,” I said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“
Then don’t disturb me. Go
away.”

“
Ma’am, I don’t think
that’s called for. I just wanted a quiet place to practice, and
this street seemed perfect. I didn’t mean to bother anyone. I’ll
try not to be so loud.”

“
I think you should try it
somewhere else.”

“
Honestly, Ma’am, I think
you’re overreacting. Do you always answer the door with a
gun?”

She glowered at me. “A boy was
attacked a few days ago, a kid from just up the street. Whoever did
it hasn’t been caught.”

“
Well, it wasn’t me. A few
days ago I was in Maryland.”

“
I don’t know
that.”

I sighed. “I don’t want any trouble,
Ma’am.”

“
Then go away, before I
call the police.”

“
Ma’am, I’m on a public
sidewalk.”

“
In a neighborhood where
you’ve got no business.”

“
I was looking at the
trees,” I said, gesturing toward the end of the street. I turned my
head and pretended to start. “Did you see that?”

“
See what?” She followed
my gaze, keeping the gun pointed harmlessly down and to the side.
That made me think she knew how to use it. Someone who wasn’t
familiar with guns would have brought it up automatically, and
might be waving it around wildly, maybe pointing it at my face; she
wasn’t doing that. She was handling it properly.

I wondered what it was loaded with.
From what little I knew about shotguns, it could be anything from
rock salt to solid slugs.

“
There,” I said, pointing
at the white-clad thing. “Under that tree; I thought I saw
something move.”

She looked. “I don’t see anything,”
she said. “Light’s going, anyway. You go on about your business,
young man; if you want to look at trees there are some beauties on
East Main, and if you want to recite lines you can find a theater
somewhere. Around here you’re a public nuisance.”

The white figure was definitely
supernatural, beyond any possible question, because I could still
see it just fine; in fact, it had turned to glare at me with dark
eyes set in a deathly pale face.

It was the woman from my dream, no
doubt about it, and now that I got a good look at those eyes I knew
I hadn’t needed the woman with the shotgun to confirm
anything.

I couldn’t talk to it with the
homeowner standing there, and it didn’t want to talk to me anyway.
The time had come to retreat and regroup.

“
Sorry to have bothered
you, Ma’am, and I hope they catch whoever hurt that kid.” I nodded
to her, gave the thing under the tree a final glance, then climbed
back into my rental car.

Daylight was fading rapidly now, and I
could see other things besides the one I had been talking to; there
was something that looked like an old woman in a dark robe crouched
on the sidewalk, hunched over and motionless. There was a pale,
offensively male shape, stark naked and somewhat larger than a
human, stalking through a nearby back yard.

Three big obvious apparitions – that
was a fairly typical concentration for a quiet neighborhood like
this. Maybe a little less than average, really. There were some
smaller, less distinct ones around, too; I didn’t bother counting
them before closing the door and fumbling the key into the
ignition. Those fuzzy little ones turn up everywhere, and I’ve
never yet found one that could talk, or that was even remotely
dangerous.

I was leaving but I wasn’t giving up.
I had found the neighborhood in just a couple of hours, and I had
found the mystery woman, the creature in white, right away, which
was much better progress than I expected. A few setbacks were to be
expected.

I would come back later, when Mrs.
Armed Homeowner was asleep in her bed, and talk to the thing under
the tree again.

I started the engine and turned the
car around.

Chapter Four

I still didn’t know what was going on.
I knew there was a manifestation of the supernatural lurking under
a tree at the end of Jack’s street, I knew Jack had visited it, and
I knew something had gnawed off Jack’s finger, but that was about
it. The obvious theory was that the creature in white had bitten
the finger off, but I didn’t know that; in fact, the mystery woman
might be protecting Jack from some worse menace, and the lost
finger might have happened when she let her guard down for a
moment. There were lots of possibilities.

The only two who were
likely to know what was really going on were Jack and the woman
under the tree, and neither of them seemed eager to tell anyone
about it. In my dreams Jack had insisted that he didn’t know what
had happened to his finger, and I couldn’t rule out the possibility
that he was telling the truth, but I didn’t think so. A kid who
found himself missing a finger, with no idea what happened to it,
would have been screaming and crying and demanding an explanation,
wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t have been calmly telling everyone it was
an accident, and that he didn’t remember what kind of accident.
Maybe at first, while he was still in shock, but those dreams had
dragged on and on and on, and Jack had stuck to his story for
hours, maybe for
days
, without ever getting upset. That wasn’t shock, that was
lying.