Cursed Be the Child (24 page)

It wasn’t right. Missy was her friend, her very best friend. You don’t hurt friends!

“I’m sorry,” Dorothy said. “Don’t cry, huh?” She awkwardly touched Missy’s shoulder. Then, feeling really dumb and weird doing it, she hugged Missy. It was what she figured a grownup would do, but, maybe it was wrong to hug if you were all alone with your best friend.

“There, there, Missy,” Dorothy said, patting her back. “I am sorry, and I won’t say mean things to you again.”

“Okay.” Missy pulled away. She sniffled a final tear and formally held out a hand. “I forgive you.”

Dorothy solemnly shook with her.

“You are my best friend for always, Dorothy. I don’t need any other friends. I don’t want anyone else.”

Dorothy frowned, not quite sure what Missy meant.

Missy said, “If someone was picking on you, I’d be on your side. And if someone was against me, then you’d help me. I know you would.”

“Yeah,” Dorothy said. Missy was saying things that made sense, but that at the same time somehow didn’t make sense.

“I’ll be right back,” Missy said, walking toward the door.

“Where are you going?” Dorothy asked. She had a moment’s panic, fearing that Missy was on the way to tattle.

“I just have to go to the bathroom.”

Dorothy didn’t have to worry. Missy was her real and true friend, and a friend wouldn’t do anything rotten like tattle to your mother.

Your friend was on your side, you were on your friend’s side, and even if sometimes you got in fights with your friend, it didn’t really mean anything.

Friends were friends forever.

And a friend would never do anything to really hurt you.

After she’d gone to the toilet and washed her hands, Missy decided to rinse her face when a glance in the mirror showed her she had that look that always prompted Mom to ask, “Have you been crying?” Then she brushed her teeth, trying to wash the gunky crying taste from her mouth.

She slipped her toothbrush back in the holder.

She stood, cold sluicing down her spine, staring into the mirror over the vanity, staring at herself, staring at a face that no longer seemed to be her face.

Don’t you understand? I am you! Now I am the only you that there is!

No! I am Missy! You are Lisette! I am real! You are not real! I am alive!

Don’t…

I am alive and you are not alive! And if you are not alive, then you’ve got to be dead. That’s what you are, Lisette!

Don’t say it!

There was a burst of empty silence in her mind that went on and on.

Lisette?

Missy smiled. She had done something. She wasn’t quite sure what. There was no more Lisette. Imaginary Lisette, Pretend Lisette, Lisette Who Made Trouble, Lisette Who Cannot Be was gone.

And she, Melissa Barringer, called Missy, was herself just herself and nobody else!

Missy took a deep breath. That was that.

She’d just stepped back into her room when she heard the voice like scratchy smoke.

No more Missy.

She hated Dorothy Morgan. Dorothy Morgan was Missy’s best friend. Dorothy Morgan would want to help Missy. She would be on Missy’s side, wouldn’t she? Maybe Dorothy Morgan could be fooled. Maybe it was better to fool her, yes, and to fool her in a way that would get rid of her.

“Dorothy!”

That was Missy’s scream—a scream that could be heard only by Lisette who was now Missy. Melissa Barringer? She was here—and not here. She could watch and wish, but do nothing.

It was Lisette who was alive and smiling a fake smile at Dorothy Morgan. I will trick her.

Lisette was alive and…

Oh, it feels so lovely to smile. Your upper lip curls wet on the smooth hardness of your teeth…

And it’s lovely the way everything you see is swollen with color when you see with real eyes, my eyes…

And it’s lovely the way the air feels buzzing and tickly when you breathe in…

And it’s lovely the way my feet feel in these socks inside the warm pinch of these shoes, and I love to hear that scritchy-scratchy sound when I walk in my corduroy pants...

It is beautiful to be alive.

“Hey, Missy?” Dorothy said. “Is something wrong with you?”

“Hmm?”

“You’re doing something, you know, freaky-like with your face. Like in that movie,
Carrie,
when she burned up the prom and everything.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Dorothy.”

“It was on cable.”

“Oh.” She had no idea what Dorothy Morgan was talking about.

But she did know she wanted to get Dorothy Morgan out of here, Missy’s room—no, my room.

“Dorothy! Help me!”

The cry made Lisette grind her teeth.
No, you fool! You gave me your hair, your blood. You gave me your life! No one can help you. No one will!

And Dorothy wouldn’t help. No, Dorothy wouldn’t be around long because…

“Want to see something?”

“What?” Dorothy asked.

“Something secret.” She smiled. “I’ve got lots of secrets.”

“I guess I want to,” said Dorothy Morgan. “Yeah. Okay.”

“It’s in here,” she said, and she opened the dresser’s top drawer. “Look.”

“Huh?” Dorothy said, staring quizzically at neatly arranged underpants and undershirts. “What are you talking about, Missy?”

“It’s a surprise. Look under the underpants.”

Cautiously, as though expecting to find a live worm, or worse, a dead one, Dorothy reached inside the drawer. “I think you’re just kidding, Missy.”

“It’s big. You’ll need both hands.”

“Okay.” With both hands, Dorothy dug beneath the stack of underwear. “I don’t feel anything.”

“No! Dorothy! Oh, please don’t do that!”

Missy’s outcry came from somewhere else, from someplace ever so faraway, a warning that Dorothy could not hear.

And a plea that Lisette-who-was-Missy ignored.

As she put the palms of her hands against the drawer and slammed it shut.

— | — | —

Twenty-Seven

The Volvo’s rear speakers hissed static. A weak FM station broadcast a nostalgia show,
When Radio Was Radio,
“…those well remembered, best loved shows from the good old days when we were all so very young.” The wipers dragged sluggishly over the windshield, working hard. The heavy rain seemed timeless. He could not doubt that it would go on forever. It seemed he’d always been driving like this, in the constant rain.

There was the moody intro music, and then, “There he goes…”

There he goes, Warren thought, and he knew who he was. The radio character was a private detective named Brad Runyon. The Fat Man. Warren wondered how he knew that. After all, when radio was radio, Warren Barringer had been too young to know it. His was the first generation to grow up with television as an electronic babysitter. He was an alumnus of Howdy Doody’s Peanut Gallery, not Tom Mix’s Ralston Straight Shooters.

Still, the announcer and Warren said it together:

“…into that drugstore…”

It was time for him to go somewhere, too.

It was…time.

He clearly understood that now that he was in control.

“Sure, Vicki, I’ll leave you womenfolk to yourselves, and I’ll go rustle myself up a bit of grub. Be back later, not quite sure when I’ll mosey in…” That’s what he had told her.

He had stopped for lunch about an hour ago, but what he was really going to do was nothing he could have told Vicki, nothing he could have explained to her. He couldn’t have told her he was off to do battle with demons.

And he was ready.

This was the day that everything would be forever set right by Warren Barringer’s willpower.

In control, in control. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. He repeated it in his mind, a ritual chant perfectly synchronized to the cadence of the windshield wipers.

Far out to the west, three-pronged lightning lanced from the sky and stabbed the earth. He thought about symbols and coincidences. The rear speakers responded with a crackling rush of static, almost, but not quite, drowning out the announcer’s words.

Bursting thundershocks followed, echoing weighty crashes of sound.

Warren turned off the radio. Then he heard a voice, taunting and familiar—and expected. It was the voice of The Rat within him.
I’m here, Warren. I’m still with you, you know.

Warren smiled and felt the tightness at the edges of his mouth.

You will never be rid of me,
said The Rat.

Warren gripped the steering wheel harder. A mile or so ahead, through the momentarily clear screen of the windshield, he saw the shopping center.

I am you! I am!
said The Rat.

He pressed down on the accelerator, speeding to the battleground.

Tolando Park was a middle-class suburb some 50 miles northwest of Grove Corner. Although he’d never been here before, the Tolando Park Magna-Mall was exactly what he knew he would find—a standard issue 20th century shopping center, open seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. Tolando Park, Illinois, Lebanon, Missouri, Horseshoe Bend, Arkansas—it didn’t matter where you went, you had two or three levels and the same basic layout under one roof. The three major department stores had only different names, not the merchandise. The not so special specialty stores had discount records and discount shoes and discount eyeglasses and discount jeans.

He was alert, all senses fully engaged, watching. With his hands in the pockets of his car coat, he ambled along in what seemed an aimless manner. Anyone paying attention to him would have thought: Here’s a guy killing time while his wife takes the Visa card to the limit, or, maybe he’s here to pick up his kid and the kid’s friends…

Here to pick up a kid,
said The Rat.

A few steps ahead, an ancient woman with parakeet legs stopped abruptly. He stopped just in time to avoid impaling himself on her shoulder blades, as she turned a smart right angle into the Hi-Standard Uniform Center.

At the entrance to the video arcade, snippets of strobe light and sirens shooting out, a punky girl (teen? pre-teen?) broke away from her loitering friends.

“Spare change?” She held her hand out, palm up. She wore mirrored sunglasses and an ancient, baggy pin-striped, man’s suit jacket; he could smell the damp wool. “Got any spare change?”