Crossroads (12 page)

"They’re hurting her," she gasped, glancing toward the Dairy Queen.

A boy stuck his head out of the walk-up window, then slammed it shut and disappeared.

Loud grunts sounded from the car along with the laughter of some of the boys. The girl’s screams now sounded more like pain-filled sobs.

"Stop them," pleaded Kira, glaring at Jen.

"I cannot," said Jen.

Kira started to say
you did in the bank
, but she knew that was futile. Jen hadn’t stopped anything. She had only postponed it long enough for them to escape, and Kira wasn’t in danger here. Jen would not act.

When the girl shrieked again Kira saw one of the boys haul off and punch down toward the seat. There were no more shrieks after that. Kira climbed limply from the table and stumbled across the asphalt toward the car. When she glanced toward the DQ again the boy inside looked her in the eye, then quickly turned away. He might have called the cops. He might not have, but with the killings the cops were pretty busy, anyway, and who knew how soon they’d show up for something like this?

Kira had heard the word rape in whispered conversation, and she understood what it meant. She didn’t need to know all the mechanics to understand that she would never have wanted to be in the position the girl was in, certainly not with three boys, and most certainly not being beaten into submission and attacked in broad daylight in the parking lot of a fast food joint. When she reached the car she saw one of the boys on top of the girl. The girl’s legs were splayed, and the boy’s jeans were down around his knees as he humped wildly, the other two boys whooping as though they were riding the Tilt-a-Whirl. The closest of the pair kneeling on the rear floorboard, looked in their direction and glared.

"Get the fuck out of here!"

"Maybe she wants some of this," laughed his partner.

"Yeah, maybe," said boy one, reaching for the door handle.

At the sight of the girl’s plight Kira’s fear stirred with her anger, boiling into a dangerous stew inside her chest. She felt a strange and sad kinship with the victim whose face she had never seen. The girl hadn’t asked to be treated like this any more than she and Jen had asked to be hunted.

"You’d better let her up before someone gets hurt," she said, stopping the boy by simply resting her hand on the door.

His confusion and traces of his fear tingled like an electrical current through the cool metal. His eyes narrowed, becoming cunning, like a snake that didn’t know whether to coil and strike or slither away. The boy with his pants down on top of the girl stopped with his butt in the air and looked back over his shoulder.

"Who the fuck are you?"  

"You’d better get off of her," repeated Kira.

"Fuck off," he said, thrusting again with his hips.

"You should have listened," said Kira, quiet as the lid of a coffin closing.

The girl’s fingernails clawed into his back, and Kira watched them as they grew into long talons, ripping through his shirt and into the skin of his shoulder blades.

"Shit!" he screamed, trying to shove himself up off the seat.

But the girl’s hands were too powerful, her knuckles now boney and gnarly, leathery tendons popping through the thin, graying flesh.

"What the fuck?" said the boy nearest Kira as he struggled to climb out of the car. The other boy on his knees reached for his door handle, but one of the girl’s clawlike hands latched onto his throat like a crab’s pincers.

"Let me go!" screamed the rapist, kicking and slapping at the girl, struggling to break away from the razor talons and roll off of her.

Kira stepped back, allowing the closest boy to escape. He stood shivering a few feet away, gazing with wide eyes at the scene of carnage erupting inside the car.

"It’s not real," Kira assured him, wrinkling her nose when she noticed that he had peed his pants.

But the rapist’s scream told her that his pain was very real, and blood poured down his back where the girl still had the talons of her other
hand
now buried in his flesh, dragging them through the skin, muscle, and cartilage along his arched spine like the sharpened tines of a pitchfork. As more blood spurted from the kneeling boy’s throat, and the rapist continued to writhe, the girl’s face was finally revealed, and Kira gasped.

She looked more like a corpse than a young woman. Her skin was thin and pale as sour milk, and her eyes were rimmed with black. Her lips were equally dark, drawn back from long fangs that dripped with blood.

"It’s not real," Kira whispered, glancing at Jen who was back to wearing her usual nonchalant expression.

"What did you do?" gasped the boy behind her, still shivering, but pointing into the car. "Stop her. She’s killing them."

Kira
tried
to stop the massacre. With all her might she willed the illusion away, but she had never had to do that before. She had always just assumed that because her mother had told her that was the way of it that the illusions she created weren’t real, that they just faded on their own. Until now.

We all learn what we need to learn.

Blood poured from the kneeling boy’s throat, and his head lolled above the girl’s giant fist. The rapist was still kicking feebly, but his back was no longer arched. He rested upon her chest like a limp blanket.

Kira willed harder, glaring into the fiery, defiant eyes of the
thing
she had created, telling herself that they were the eyes of a frightened young girl. Over and over. Until they were a young girl’s eyes. Until the fear was back in them and real. Until the girl lay quivering beneath the body of the young boy, and the other boy collapsed atop her as well.

"What are you?" gasped the lone youngster in the parking lot. "What the hell are you?"

"I don’t know," whispered Kira, hurrying past him to the highway.

Chapter 16

Sheila Bright sat at the dusty kitchen table in her mother’s house, staring at her hands wrapped around the cup of tea. She didn’t like camomile. In fact the thought of it made her nauseous, but she knew better than to go there. Better to accept the things you could not change and to save yourself for the battles you could win. Besides, it wasn’t real. The cup was empty. Only she could see the amber liquid, smell its warm fruity aroma.

Why she was even here was beyond her, but ever since the killings she had not been able to get her mother out of her mind. She’d driven by once on the fateful day, without stopping. Then she resisted the urge for one more sleepless night and a blurry day in which she couldn’t get one order right. She finally became convinced that unless she checked up on the old house something bad was going to happen. It was a stupid hunch, something her mother would have understood. Even after closing the diner early and driving the long winding road to the house Sheila had sat for half an hour at the bottom of the driveway before deciding that she wasn’t going to make the trip for nothing.

Now here she was.

Her mother sat across from her, regarding her stoically with that placid smile that had driven Sheila up the walls when Marguerite was alive. Under the most trying of circumstances her mother could look as calm and cool as a statue. It wasn’t that she hadn’t known people thought she was crazy. It was that she simply hadn’t cared, and Sheila could never quite make up her mind which was worse, but she knew her mother could sit that way without speaking for days if necessary. God only knew where her mind was. Probably
omming
itself into oblivion somewhere.

"How have you been, Mother?" asked Sheila at last.

Her mother’s face brightened as though Sheila had tripped a smile switch. "Why, I’ve been fine, Sheila. Thank you for asking. And yourself?"

Sheila nodded, staring around the confines of the tiny kitchen, taking in the flowers and herbs that had been drying on the walls the day her mother was killed, the candles everywhere, the crystals refracting fading sunlight through the open window, sending rainbows spiraling around the room with every touch of breeze, the New Age cookbooks on the counter, one volume of self published poetry with her mother’s name in the author’s spot, and everywhere the dust.

"You don’t clean much."

Her mother laughed. "Ghosts don’t clean, dear. It’s not in our contract."

Sheila sighed. "I guess I could take some time and-"

"Please don’t. You’ll come in and start moving stuff around and throwing stuff away. I like it the way it is. The dust doesn’t bother me. It lends a certain ambiance, and ghosts aren’t allergic, either, you know."

"I guess I should have realized that."

"How would you? We hardly talk. I thought you might come around though after... I mean the murders were so... terrible."

"You heard about Vern Billings?" asked Sheila, wondering just how the hell ghosts got their news. It wasn’t like her mother had watched television when she was alive.

"Yes. Wasn’t that terrible. I’ve said prayers for the whole family. I wish I’d had some warning. As soon as I did their charts of course it was all there."

Sheila said nothing. Telling her mother that prophecy after the fact was a pretty useless talent would only add fuel to the old fire.

"Have you seen..." said Sheila, not sure how to say it. "Have you run into-"

"Vern or the family?"

Sheila nodded.

Marguerite frowned. "No, but I wouldn’t expect to see any of them for a little while. It was a pretty traumatic way for all of them to go. I suspect they’re all in good hands."   

"I saw him," said Sheila.

Her mother frowned. "Really? I wonder what he wanted with you? I expected him to be somewhere else-"

"Like where?"

"In therapy, I suppose."

"What?" said Sheila, her eyebrows peaking. "You mean like afterlife counseling or something?"

Marguerite laughed again, and her voice echoed strangely as if she were not only inside the kitchen with Sheila but were standing in another invisible room as well. "I guess you could put it that way. I have a hunch we have some pretty famous shrinks here, but I don’t think that’s exactly how it works."

Sheila didn’t really care how it worked. She was just making conversation, and half the time she was pretty sure she was making it with herself. She had been seeing her mother since a few days after her fatal auto accident. Sheila had been talking to-or more aptly talked
to
by-dead people since she was little. The first time it happened her mother had explained to her that her companion that no one else seemed able to see was a real, honest-to-goodness ghost Sheila was only nine. At first she’d been scared. Then-because her friend, a little girl named Nancy with long curly brown hair-was so sweet, she had thought it was wonderful. But then as her
real
friends tormented her more and more for her weirdness she finally put away Nancy and the others the way a child puts away toys they have outgrown, closing her eyes to them to make them disappear.

That hadn’t completely stopped her
visitations,
though
.
For years she couldn’t pass a graveyard or hospital or an old folks home or half the houses in town without
someone
crawling out of the woodwork to chat. Her mother told her she was gifted. Sheila was certain she was cursed. Two visits to an expensive shrink taught her to keep her mouth shut again. She wasn’t really suppressing childhood horrors. Other than her guilt over deserting Nancy, her mother’s strangeness and their near abject poverty, her childhood hadn’t been all that bad. Her mother was a New Ager who didn’t believe in punishing kids. Her father
had
run out on them when Sheila was only three, but she didn’t buy the shrink’s diagnosis about how
he
fit into her supposed hallucinations.

"How’s the diner going?" asked her mother.

"Same as usual. Breaking even."

"It pays the bills."

Sheila nodded, not mentioning that it had paid most of her mother’s as well.

"I heard from your Uncle Willy," said her mother.

Sheila frowned. Uncle Willy was their only living relative, her mother’s brother, and he was at least as crazy as she was.

"How could you possibly have heard from him?"

It wasn’t like ghosts got e-mail. Or did they?

Marguerite shrugged. "Willy isn’t as attuned to the dead as you’ve always been, but he and I were close all our lives. Do you find it surprising that we would continue to be after my death? You and I talk."

"Yeah. But I mean what does he do, call long distance or something?"

That reminded her of the phone call, and she shivered.

"What’s wrong?" asked her mother.

Sheila shook her head. "Did you call me? I mean right after Vern... you know."

"Call you?"

"On the phone."

Marguerite frowned, placing a spectral hand over Sheila’s. Sheila stared through it, wishing she could feel it, feel anything, even if it was cold like a corpse, but it simply wasn’t there, just a misty hand shape over her own.

"I’ve never made one of those spirit calls you read about," said Marguerite. "I wouldn’t know how to place one, and to tell the truth I’m not at all sure they’re a good thing. Not all spirits are benign. Did it frighten you?"

Sheila shook her head, refusing to look her mother in the eye. "It was just odd."

"In what way?"

"I thought I could hear someone talking a long way off. Only I couldn’t make out what they were saying."

"Probably just a prank call."

"I guess."

The moment dragged on, and Sheila could sense her mother studying her.

"Willy’s opened up a shop in California, and he says it’s going great guns," said Marguerite at last.

"What kind of shop?" asked Sheila, fearing she knew.

"New Age stuff, books, crystals, pyramids, you know."

Sheila nodded again.

"He wants me to move out there and be with him," said her mother.