Darkness Creeping (2 page)

He would sneer at his mother when she said things like that. His mother was as slender as could be—but Marty took after his father, who was not.

“I’ll bet his ice cream stinks!” Marty would grumble, but deep down, he didn’t believe it. In his heart of hearts, he believed that Creamy-Cold ice cream was the tastiest, most heavenly frozen treat ever devised by man—and the only way to get it was to buy it from the truck. Marty Zybeck did not have many goals in life—but at the top of that short list was catching the Creamy-Cold man.

Legend tells of a boy named Jim-Jim Jeffries.

Jim-Jim, as the neighborhood legend goes, was the fastest kid in little league. He could run faster than any player could throw a ball to a base, and so when he got a hit, he rarely got tagged out. He was a winner, and did not accept defeat easily. One day, long before anyone can remember, Jim-Jim went chasing after the Creamy-Cold ice-cream truck, refusing to accept that it was already leaving the neighborhood. He turned the corner, waving his dollar bill, and was never seen again.

Marty Zybeck knew the story of Jim-Jim. Children whispered it in hushed tones, but Marty had a logical, practical view of it.
Fact
: there was no one in the neighborhood with the last name of Jeffries.
Fact
: no one seemed to remember where he lived, or what he looked like.
Fact
: if anyone could confirm the story, it would be Marty’s father, who was a well-respected detective with the local police force, and he flatly denied the existence of Jim-Jim Jeffries. Marty was convinced it was just a made-up story, designed to keep small children from crossing dangerous streets to get ice cream. Well, he wasn’t a small child anymore. He didn’t believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or Jim-Jim Jeffries.

Still, the rumors went round and round every summer, when the music came in on the wind, and children scraped together their change.

This was the summer, however, that Marty discovered a great universal truth that every kid in the neighborhood already knew. Marty would have known it, too, had he been just a little more observant.

It was as he sat playing video games with his friend Tyler CoyoteMoon-O’Callahan that the truth began to emerge. The school year had just ended a few days earlier, and the two boys were filling their time playing interdimensional kickboxer. Five minutes into their third game, Marty heard the faint sounds of “Pop Goes the Weasel” through the open living-room window. Although leaving the game would allow Tyler to completely kick him into a parallel dimension, and thus win the match, he put down the video controller and stood up. He was mature enough to know that some things, like ice cream, were just more important than video games.

“Don’t bother,” said Tyler calmly. “He won’t stop for you.”

“He stops for other kids—he’ll stop for me.”

“Who says he stops for other kids?”

That gave Marty pause for thought. “Other kids always get ice cream from him.”

“How do you know?”

“Because,” said Marty, “I always see them running for the ice-cream man.”

“Yeah—but did you ever actually see someone
eating
a Creamy-Cold bar?”

Marty racked his brain, trying to flip through images to find an actual memory of someone walking down the street, eating something they bought from the ice-cream man, but his memory held no such image.

“Well . . . you’ve eaten Creamy-Cold bars, haven’t you?”

“Never,” said Tyler. “Not once. Sure, I used to run after him like you do, but I never caught him, so I gave up.”

They looked at each other, the only sound the music coming from somewhere outside, and Tyler said, “Everyone hears the music, but have you ever actually seen the truck?”

“Of course I have!” Marty said. But as he thought about it, he realized that the image of the ice-cream truck was only in his head. He had imagined what it would look like if he ever actually got out onto the street in time to catch it—but he never actually saw it.

“You know what I think?” said Tyler. “I think it’s a ghost truck from the spirit world of our ancestors.” Tyler, being half Navajo and half Irish, had a powerful belief in the ancestral spirit world and leprechauns.

“I think you’re nuts,” said Marty.

Tyler responded by turning to their game and kicking Marty into another dimension.

Fairy tales speak of a Pied Piper.

As the story goes, the piper’s tune was so entrancing it lured all the rats from the town of Hamlin. Then, when the towns-folk refused to pay his price, the piper used his tune to lure away all the children into a mountain, where, presumably, they either lived happily ever after or died horrible painful deaths. Fairy tales can go either way.

Such a thing could never happen to large groups of children in modern times, however, because as everyone knows, large groups of modern children are much too smart for that. Between movies, sitcoms, and the colorful language of older siblings, kids know everything, or at least they think they do. Thinking they do, however, is enough to prevent an entire mob of them from being lured by the music of a Pied Piper. More than likely they would just laugh at his funny green suit and pointed shoes, then walk the other way. No, when it comes to kids these days, there is safety in numbers, and the only ones who find themselves following the piper are the stragglers.

Stragglers like Marty.

Marty was not like Tyler. He was not satisfied to treat the Creamy-Cold man as a mystery best left alone. After all, being a detective was in his genes, and so at dinner that night, Marty tried to learn some technique from the greatest detective he knew.

“Dad, where do you begin an investigation?”

“Usually at the scene of the crime.”

“What if there is no scene?”

“Then why investigate?”

“Because it’s important?”

“Is there a paycheck involved?”

“No.”

“Then it’s not important.”

His father was very good at deflecting any and all questions Marty ever asked him with logic that was so circular, it often left Marty forgetting what the question was.

“Uh . . . I want to investigate the ice-cream man,” Marty said.

“Why? Did he run someone over?”

“No, he’s just never there.”

“You can’t investigate something that isn’t there—just something that is.”

“What about something that
was
there, but isn’t anymore?”

“That’s called a cold case. Not my field of expertise.”

Marty thanked his father and decided he was on his own. He spent the evening pondering the problem, starting with the things he knew for sure.
Fact
: the music comes from somewhere.
Fact
: the sound rises and it falls, which suggests that it’s moving.
Fact
: if it’s moving through their neighborhood, it has to pass by Fillmore Savings Bank around the corner, right?

That’s when he came up with the big idea. He approached his father again the following morning.

“Dad, do you think you could get me some surveillance videos from Fillmore Savings for a school project?”

“No,” his father said. “What’s the project?”

“We’re doing a mathematical study of how many people use the ATM machine. Can you get those tapes for me?”

“No. Why don’t I just get you the bank’s statistics?”

“We’re supposed to write up the statistics ourselves. Can’t you get me some videos?”

“No,” said Mr. Zybeck. “I’ll ask around.”

Mr. Zybeck had so many strings he could pull around town, he was often getting tangled up in them. Getting the tapes was fairly easy—certainly easier than having to listen to Marty nag about them—which is exactly what Marty was counting on.

With a determination he rarely showed, Marty settled in to watch the surveillance tapes. The thing about the Creamy-Cold man is that he didn’t come every day, and he always came at a different time. You could never predict when you’d hear that maddening “Pop Goes the Weasel” tune. Marty had no way of knowing when he might pass by in the background. He watched hour after hour of tape, amazed at how many people at the ATM made faces at the camera, figuring no one would actually watch it. He saw one mugging, which his father claimed to already know about, but no ice-cream truck. He was about to give up when a white blur zoomed past in the background—a blur that was somehow different from all the other cars, trucks, and buses that zipped by. Marty hit the pause button so hard, the remote flew out of his hand. He picked it up and played the last few seconds frame by frame.

It was there in the tenth frame.

It was blurry, it was faint, but it was there: a speeding white truck with pictures of ice-cream selections on the side, and there was a big sign over the service window that said CREAMY-COLD.

Success! Proof positive! There actually
was
a Creamy-Cold truck. Tyler had been wrong—it was real. Maybe he was right in saying that it never stopped—but that could just be because it was driven by a psychotic ice-cream man. Sure—that was it—some lunatic who got his kicks taunting people with the promise of ice cream never delivered—but this was no ghost truck!

Then Marty let the video go one more frame—and what he saw in the next frame
really
got his attention.

The truck had progressed farther into the image. Its front end was already out of the picture, but now the entire sign above the service window could be read. It said CREAMY-COLD. CATCH MEIF YOU DARE.

Marty smiled. This was a challenge if ever there was one. He would catch the Creamy-Cold man—not just for himself but for all the kids who had ever run out into the street only to be denied the ice cream they so rightfully deserved. The Creamy-Cold man was going down!

Literature tells of a captain, name of Ahab.

Ahab had an unhealthy obsession with a great white whale that led to the destruction of his ship, and to his own untimely end. He had a first mate named Starbuck. I know what you’re thinking, but Starbuck had absolutely nothing to do with making coffee. If he had, perhaps Captain Ahab might have kicked the whale habit and pursued the white-chocolate latte instead of the white whale. Unfortunately, as Ahab discovered, obsessions are rarely reasonable, and quite often will lead to one’s personal doom. Although few involve the death of a sea mammal.

Marty’s great white whale had four wheels and played a painfully annoying tune. He had no Starbuck to help him, since his first mate, Tyler, was off at the tribal casino, which, thanks to the luck of the Irish, was raking in big bucks. Therefore, in this obsession, Marty was alone.

Catching the ice-cream truck on film was different from catching it in person. It required a plan. He drew a map of the neighborhood, marking the entry and exit points. He labeled the sight lines from various key vantage spots. Then Marty took stock of the tools at his disposal. There were lots of them, because Mr. Zybeck often brought home things from the office that wouldn’t be missed. Things like paper clips, or police tape, which was good for wrapping presents if you ran out of ribbon. Mr. Zybeck brought home a few body bags once. Mrs. Zybeck found them wonderful for storing linens, although they did give Grandma quite a scare.