The Orphan (6 page)

The phone vibrated in her hand again. Raya’s entire body tensed, as if the air were alive and something around her was pulling on her skin. Her mouth was open and she felt short of breath.

‘Okay, stop,’ she said, needing to hear a voice of sanity, even if it was her own and she did not feel sane. ‘Who’s doing that?’

No one answered her. The house was silent.

As if to scold her for shifting her attention, the screen flashed bright white, glowing like a bulb in a lamp for several seconds, then instantly turned black.

Raya dropped the phone on the floor and covered her mouth to keep from screaming. She felt watched, stalked, and she had the craziest idea that if she made a sound, whoever was doing this would find her, show himself, pop out of thin air. If her phone started ringing right now she would have a heart attack.

Kill you?
He will
kill you? Kill you kill you kill you
… there was something desperate, threatening, even enraged about the last one.

The hall was dark, the phone on the floor no longer glowing. Raya didn’t know whether to call for her parents or run to her room. She was paralyzed by the cold around her and a growing, throbbing sting in her eyes, behind her nose, a sensation she could only describe as a hot headache.

The white glow emanated up at her once more.

The screen went black, faster than before, and a new message surfaced.

The white glow seemed blinding, then there was blackness.

Blackness.

Blackness.

Blackness.

‘Stop it!’ Raya startled herself by yelling. ‘Mom! Wake up!’

The screen turned black and she heard someone crying. Not her own tears, which had come in a series of whimpers, but the crying of a lost little boy. The sound made her want to scream and she turned to the front door, certain she had felt a draft of cold air beside her, but he wasn’t there either and —

Footsteps thumped to the end of the bridge, into the living room.

A shadow person stood there watching her.

‘Raya? What’s going on?’ The shadow slowly resolved into the shape of her mother. ‘Did something happen? What in God’s name are you doing up at this hour?’

Raya was too shocked and relieved to speak. She was trembling, toilet-paper rolls spilled around her feet.

‘Raya? What is it, honey?’ her mom said, hurrying over, hugging her.

‘Someone was here!’ Raya blurted, though she knew this was not strictly true. But it
felt
true. ‘The boy! I heard him crying!’

‘What boy? Here, in the house?’

‘Someone was talking to me, sending me messages – there, on my phone!’ She pointed at her phone where it had fallen in the hall.

Her mom picked up the phone. She looked at the screen, at Raya, then back to the screen.

‘Do you see it? He was talking about killing, saying he will kill you, he’s coming home, horrible things…’

Her mom clicked through, checking her messages. ‘There’s nothing here,’ she said. ‘Just texts from Chad. He’s out playing poker?’

Raya continued to cry, shaking her head.

‘Where’s your father? Is he out in the shop again?’

‘I don’t know.’

A pattering sound began to drum the roof and they both looked up, holding their breath, tensed with the expectation of some terrible arrival.

‘It’s raining,’ her mom said. ‘It’s just the rain.’

Shelter, at last. Warm, dry shelter.

But the comfort would be short-lived, because he couldn’t risk staying and it was not a shelter of his own. He had not been invited in and would not be welcomed upon discovery. The longer he stayed, the greater his chances of causing trouble, for himself or for the ones who lived here. In his heart Adam did not believe he was a criminal or a bad boy. But he felt guilty for trespassing, or breaking and entering, though he hadn’t done much breaking to enter.

The first few seconds after waking to cold drops of water landing on his ankles and cheeks, he hadn’t remembered where he was, or why, but then it all came back and he realized he was wedged under the ventilation duct. By the time he crawled out, the rain was really coming down, reversing what little dryness he had achieved since falling in the stream.

He’d crept along the back of the house intending to move on once he was sure the coast was clear, but when he saw that the house’s rear sliding glass door was open, and only a screen door separated him from the inside, he couldn’t resist going up for a closer look. He expected a living room or kitchen, but what he saw looked an awful lot like a basement. Carpeted, mostly empty, with only a pool table and stacks of boxes in the long room he could see.

Garages were good. Basements were better, warmer. He’d let himself into strangers’ homes before, he knew. The familiar feelings of guilt and fear and a touch of excitement that hit him as he stepped inside told him that he was not new to such survival tactics. Emboldened, seeing no beds or other furniture, he ventured deeper into the space.

There were three doors off the main room. The first led to a half-finished bathroom with a sink and a plastic shower stall and then a hole and some pipes in the concrete floor where, he assumed, the toilet would be installed. The next opened into a larger room, also unfinished, with wooden studs and a few slabs of drywall framed around a large tub sink and a deep freezer. The last room was not much larger than a closet and contained only a tall white cylinder with copper pipes running from its base – water heater or furnace.

Adam placed his hands around it, gently at first, willing the heat into his palms and the rest of his body, and before long he was hugging the unit, pressing his entire body to its smooth surface. A source of heat. Perfect.

The rest of the basement wasn’t much warmer than the air outside, but at least it was dry. The boiler room was also the least likely of the rooms anyone would find a reason to enter tonight or come morning, which couldn’t be more than an hour or two from now. He took off his shoes and socks, then his pants and shirt, draping them over the top of the heater in hopes they would dry. Strangely, he felt warmer after that, even though he was almost naked. There was nothing to lie down on in here, so he slipped back to the room with the sink in search of some clothing or a scrap of carpet.

Beside the big sink, folded on a gray metal shelving rack, were some thin bed sheets with what he hoped were only paint stains on them, and half a dozen raggedy towels. He took three towels and one sheet back to the boiler room, wrapped himself in the sheet and then layered the towels across the floor in the form of a crude and very thin mattress. Not great, but better than resting his bare back and legs on the concrete, and much better than sleeping outside.

With any luck, the people who lived here would prepare for their day without any need to come down into the basement, then head off to work or school or wherever they had to go, and he could rest unnoticed all morning. Maybe even into the afternoon, waking with a few hours to spare before they came home. He might even be able to scrounge some food from the fridge and pantry.

Adam leaned back against the tank for a while, wanting to soak up the heat before stretching out to sleep. His tired gaze fell on his backpack. Time to see what was inside. He dragged it closer with his foot and unfastened the small plastic buckle on the nylon strap, flipping open its cover.

The first few items were more or less what he had expected. Clothes. A plain red T-shirt, a pair of plain white briefs, two pairs of white tube socks with colored bands at the top. Something he thought was a pair of jeans, but when he unrolled the denim he discovered it was a jean jacket, faded and so beat up it was as soft as a sweatshirt. He regretted not checking the pack earlier; the jacket would have been nice to have outside.

My jean jacket
, he remembered.
My only jacket. Even in winter. I was always cold because this was all I was allowed to have. But I loved it. It was mine
.

Under the clothes, packed into the bottom, were a few basic food stores. Sticks of beef jerky, half a Snickers bar, and a depleted wax sleeve of Ritz crackers. He chewed a few of the crackers and ate two sticks of beef jerky, swallowing dryly. The basement had water at the sink, but he didn’t want to risk turning it on, waking the people upstairs to the rattle of pipes. What else was in the bag?

A magazine rolled up tightly. Looked very futuristic, somewhat spooky, with an illustration of a man covered in armor astride a war horse and blowing a trumpet, with a pearl-colored planet in the sky behind him.
Questar
, it was called, and its otherworldly cover took him to another time and place. This issue was well worn, creased and wrinkled, as if someone had turned its pages a hundred times. He did so again now, idly, and almost at once the magazine flopped open to a bent sheaf of pages bookmarking an advertisement for amazingly realistic masks.

Monsters, aliens, ghosts, characters he recognized from movies he could not recall. There were dozens of masks, their photos not much bigger than postage stamps, enough to fill two pages. Pretty neat stuff. But then why did he feel something sour sinking in the pit of his belly? He sensed that at one time he had loved looking at these masks, dreaming of Halloween and ways to scare his friends.

But now they served a different purpose, and he understood why he had been carrying this magazine around for so long. Among the rows and rows of different creatures depicted here, he’d been trying to find the one that most resembled the monsters that had been chasing him. Another squall of terror swirled inside him and he closed the magazine, lowering it to his side, not wanting to see the thing’s face.

He leaned out of the boiler room’s doorway to make sure no one was coming for him. Everything was quiet, safe as it had been before. Stop being a baby, he scolded himself. It’s only a mask. Not even that, only a
picture
of a mask. Just because you look at it, doesn’t mean it’s going to come roaring out of the darkness, here and now.

This is important
, that other, knowing voice spoke up inside him.
It might even save your life.

Adam opened the magazine again. Flipped to the marked page. After scanning the rows of fantastic but lifelike creations for only a few seconds, his eyes darted to the bottom right corner. There it was, circled in marker ink that had faded, and he knew he’d done this to remind himself. And maybe so he could describe the thing to someone else, if he ever found someone he could trust.

It was horrible to look at, even in a silly ad for Halloween masks.

Unlike all the other monsters, with their excess facial hair, horns, fangs, gaping flesh wounds, spilling brains or forked tongues, their skin in shades of green and blue, scaled or gilled or dripping red blood, this one was disturbing for its simple, haunting intensity and terrible lack of distinguishing features.

Overall the face was pale white with small, glossy black eyes, the head shape somewhat long or oval, with a wide lipless mouth and a flat nose with two small holes in it. It had no hair, only the smallest ears, and a sharp chin. It wasn’t snarling or growling or sticking out its tongue, and in many ways had no personality at all. To Adam, it looked like a pitiful, lost, utterly dead thing. Almost alien, but not an actual alien like the other alien masks with tentacles and multiple sets of eyes. There was something human yet unidentifiably evil in it. It had no feelings, no goal or clear role in the world, and he doubted it had ever appeared in a movie or comic book. Staring at it, he was sure it had no purpose but to inflict pain and cause death.

How it might take life, he did not know. Probably through some deceptively powerful psychic act, like sucking the life force out of you by sheer willpower alone.

Like all the other creatures, this one had a name. It was printed right there above the product number, and its name was as unsettlingly plain as its looks. Adam didn’t even know what it meant, but it didn’t sound cool, like Wolfman, Creature From the Black Lagoon, Scarecrow or Frankenstein. Difficult to remember, a strange name whose meaning he could not quite grasp.

The Nocturnal.

Adam thought it had something do with sleeping, or the darkness. Late-night fear. The kind he had been living with for days, weeks, maybe years.

Whatever The Nocturnal meant, he didn’t like it.

Adam put the magazine away, the crackers he had eaten now a dry sour mash stuck somewhere between his stomach and his throat.

He remembered his pocket knife. There was nothing else at the bottom of the pack, but his fingers hit upon a zipper, opening to a small inside pocket. Inside the pocket was a knife, but it wasn’t his pocket knife. The knife Adam remembered owning was small, maybe three inches long, with a wood-grain handle and brass ends. Inside there were only two blades, and while they weren’t very sharp, he trusted it, the knife had felt at home in his pocket, as if it possessed some special powers or had come to him as a gift from a benevolent source.

This wasn’t a pocketknife at all. It had black steel handles with holes in them, and when he raised it, one handle fell open on a hinge, revealing a five-inch, smoke-steel blade with a tip so fine it might have been a needle. Etched into the base of the blade was a butterfly. Adam didn’t like holding it. It looked like a knife made for nothing besides stabbing people. Viciously. He liked it even less when he rubbed the base of the blade with his thumb and felt something grainy and dry stuck to it, like flakes of rust. Some of it came off like powder on his fingers and when he looked closer, he knew it was dried blood.

Whose knife was this? Adam didn’t think it belonged to him, but it must. Why else would he have it? But if so, whose blood was this? He didn’t remember stabbing anyone, and how could you forget something like that? Maybe he had cut himself playing with it. But that felt like a lie of the sort you tell yourself to keep from freaking out. Someone had used this knife to hurt someone else and, along with the picture of The Nocturnal mask, it made him feel sick and afraid.

He put the knife back, careful to fold the blade up and latch the handles together so that he wouldn’t stab himself running with it in the pack. He was done scavenging for the night, but his fingers brushed against something in the pocket, smaller, also metal. They felt like keys and made the same clinking sound.

He took them out. They were rings, three of them hooped together. Gold-colored, but probably not real gold, because they looked like ordinary hardware, something you would use to hang something on the wall, or lock something together. Each ring was about an inch in diameter, the metal surface flattened all around except for one groove at the top. The ends of each ring fastened together with a tiny screw, like the plastic rings that held the shower curtain up.

Something was engraved on the outside surface of each, in cursive script. A single word starting with a C, but he couldn’t read it in the dark and he thought it might be written in another language. C-a-m… something. He had no idea what their purpose might be or why he had kept them, but the fact that he had kept them, along with the other things in the pack, suggested they had a purpose. He would need them at some point, or they might help him remember something.

He hoped there was a purpose in all of this.

Tired and sad in ways he didn’t understand, Adam closed up his pack and used it for a pillow. Stretching out on the towels, listening for any signs of movement overhead, he closed his eyes and tried to think of all the good food he would eat tomorrow. He tried to think of anything but The Nocturnal in the magazine, and the pale dead faces that were out there in the real world, hunting for him.

He slept peacefully for a couple of hours. When he woke up, the sun was rising, his long lonely night was almost over, and the people who lived here were screaming bloody murder.