One-Eyed Jack (25 page)

“
Helping? Who are you?”
The guy eyed me warily.

“
I’m a friend of the
family. Look, you need to call Detective Ben Skees at the
Lexington-Fayette police – he’s the man in charge of finding this
kid.”

The man looked at me, then down at
Jack, then said, “Come on, both of you.”

I followed as he hauled Jack along the
corridor and into a small lounge of some kind. There he set Jack on
one chair, and indicated another one to me. I sat, while he got out
a cellphone and called someone.

I didn’t listen in; I just sat and
looked at Jack. I looked at all that blood, and suppressed a
shudder.

One thing about being the
Dark Lady’s best friend was that I’d gotten pretty good at
suppressing shudders, and other signs of fear. Jack probably had no
idea I was almost as upset as he was. So very much blood, and the
depth and strength of that loathsome enjoyment – what had
Jenny
done
?

“
Are you okay?” I
asked.

He looked at me with his one good eye
wide and bleak. “She ate him,” he said.

I swallowed. He didn’t say
she’d eaten
part
of him.

This was bad. This was
very, very bad. Phantoms shouldn’t be able to hurt living people.
And this Jenny monster, in particular – this was
really
bad. The thing
that got Mrs. Reinholt had apparently never gone after anyone else
after it was done with her, but it had never
wanted
to hurt anyone else – just
her.

Jenny wasn’t so specific.
She wanted to eat children –
any
children.

I tried not to think about it. I had
to stay calm so I could talk to Jack, so I could learn more without
sending anyone into screaming fits, or catatonia. I hadn’t been
able to stop Jenny this time, but maybe I could find some way to
keep her from doing it again.

“
Well,
yeah,” I said. “But you sound surprised. She
said
she was going to,
didn’t she?”

“
Yeah,
but... She said it, yeah, and I... but not like
that
.”

I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know,
but I asked anyway. “Like what?”

Jack closed his one eye.
“She... she bit his entire hand off,” he whispered. “Not just a
finger. She didn’t... she was
fast
. She ate the whole thing, she
bit it off at the wrist and swallowed it whole. I don’t even know
how she
fit
it in
her mouth. And then when Andrew started screaming, she just leaned
over and tore his throat out with her teeth. And she was
enjoying
it. I
could
feel
how
much she enjoyed it.”

His voice had gotten gradually louder
as he spoke. The man in scrubs had stopped in mid-sentence to
listen. “Who did?” he demanded.

Jack looked up at him. “Jenny,” he
said.

The young man looked at me, saw no
help there, then looked back at Jack. “Who’s Jenny? Is she still in
the building?”

“
She’s... she was my
friend,” Jack said. “She was still in the room with Andrew last I
saw.”

I noticed the use of the past tense.
It didn’t sound as if Jack was still enamored of his flesh-eating
friend.

I thought I understood that. As I said
before, people aren’t logical. Jack had known all along that Jenny
wanted to kill someone, and he had helped her find a victim. He had
watched her bite off his own finger and pluck out his own eye, too.
He had known what she was planning to do.

But knowing it, and
actually
seeing
her attack someone else, was different.

It was a cliché that dying wasn’t as
hard as watching a loved one die, that it was worse to see a friend
or family member suffer than to be ill oneself, and it looked as if
that had caught Jack unawares. Feeding bits of himself to a ghoul
was painful and scary, but it was his own choice, almost under his
control; watching the ghoul try to kill someone else was completely
different.

And he must have felt what she was
radiating, that dark joy and cruel guilt. There had been something
horribly sexual about it; what would a twelve-year-old boy make of
that?

“
Still
in the
room
?” the man in scrubs asked. “I didn’t see anyone.”

Jack gave him a look and then shut his
mouth tight. He had clearly decided that he had said too
much.

The young man stared at him for a
moment, then turned his attention back to his phone.

I waited a few seconds, and then I
asked Jack quietly, “Who was he?”

Jack looked up at me with a troubled
eye. “His name was Andrew,” he said. “He had cancer – leukemia. I
met him in the cafeteria after I lost my finger. I thought since he
was going to die anyway...”

“
...you thought he might
as well help your ghost friend,” I said, completing his
sentence.

“
I
didn’t know it would be like
that
,” Jack said. He glanced back
toward Andrew’s room. “Do you think he’s dead?”

I looked at the blood on Jack’s face
and shirt, and the blood on the young man’s scrubs, and I
remembered what Jack had said about the monster tearing Andrew’s
throat out. I felt sick. “Yes,” I said.

“
I’m sorry,” Jack said
softly.

“
I did tell you she was a
monster.”

Another voice interrupted us before
Jack could reply. “Yeah, there’s a man with him,” the guy in scrubs
said into the phone, a little louder than he’d been talking up to
that point. “On the tall side, brown hair, jeans and a polo shirt.
If he gave a name, I didn’t hear it.”

“
Gregory Kraft,” I called.
“Kraft with a K, like the cheese.”

“
Gregory Kraft,” he
repeated.

“
Is that Detective Skees?”
I asked.

He ignored my question.

I sort of tried to hear what he was
saying, but I was distracted. There hadn’t been any more screams
coming from the room up the hall since we followed this guy to the
lounge, but there had still been a lot of talking and shouting
going on back there.

Now it had stopped. I didn’t hear
anything from the corridor but silence, and somehow that was even
more distracting than the shouting had been.

Whatever had been going on, whatever
the doctors had been trying to do, it seemed to be done.

I assumed that meant Andrew was dead,
and they’d given up any hope of reviving him. I felt sick to my
stomach. Once again, despite my dreams, I’d failed to save someone.
This time it was a kid I’d never met, not my mother or my teacher,
but still, it hurt.

The guy on the phone was quiet, too –
he was listening, but whether he was listening to someone on the
phone, or to the silence outside, I didn’t know. Whichever it was,
he wasn’t looking at me or Jack; he was staring at the lounge’s
open door.

Jenny had gotten a big
taste of human flesh there. I didn’t think it would turn her human,
the way Jack hoped, but I didn’t know what it
would
do – if anything. I didn’t
know whether it would satisfy her hunger, or whether she would want
more. I didn’t know whether it would make her stronger.

I didn’t know what Skees was going to
think about this, either officially or actually. I didn’t know how
Jack’s parents would deal with it, or Andrew’s parents.

I didn’t know how Jack was going to
react – but then he spoke.

“
But she said what she was
going to do,” Jack said into the silence, more to himself than to
me. “I mean, it was horrible, but did it work? Is she human
again?”

I turned to stare at him.

He stared back. His expression had
changed completely. He had regained his composure, and shaken off
what he had seen. I couldn’t believe he had really gotten over his
shock and horror so quickly, but he looked calm.

“
You
can’t be serious,” I said. I was beginning to wonder whether Jenny
was the only monster involved here. Had
Jack
enjoyed it, on some level? Had
the rush of Jenny’s emotions overwhelmed his natural
revulsion?

I had seen someone change that quickly
before, I realized. A guy I knew a few years ago had come into a
party badly shaken; he had been driving drunk and had barely missed
running down a little girl. He had walked in swearing that he’d
never drink again, that he’d had it, he was giving up booze – and
five minutes later he took a shot of tequila to steady his
nerves.

He’d wound up in rehab. He was an
alcoholic, an addict.

Was
Jack
an addict? Was he hooked on
Jenny’s imitation of love?

“
I still love her,” he
replied. He stood up. “I need to see her. I need to know if it
worked.”

Chapter Seventeen

A twelve-year-old kid can move pretty
fast when he wants to; Jack was out the door before I could grab
him. I followed him while the guy in scrubs was still fumbling with
his phone, trying to decide whether to drop it, put it away, or
keep holding it.

Jack was headed back up the corridor,
to Andrew’s room. There were people in the corridor, people in
white coats and in scrubs, but Jack was ignoring them, and none of
them seemed to be reacting quickly enough to stop him.

I couldn’t believe what was happening.
Jack had deliberately helped the phantom kill a kid. He had watched
her take bites out of a boy he had known, a boy he had befriended.
He had been soaked in gore, and practically in shock.

But the instant he was over that
initial shock, he was back to thinking he loved her. I wondered how
a kid his age could be that messed up.

Then Jenny stepped out of the room,
into the corridor.

She was smiling, her human eye bright,
her white teeth gleaming, and she was drenched in blood. Her white
dress was wet red, and her black hair was streaked with dark
dampness where it reached past her shoulders. At the sight of Jack
she raised a childlike hand, a warm brown hand, the fingers
streaked with blood, in greeting. She was radiating satisfaction
and contentment.

Jack and I saw her clearly. No one
else saw her at all.

Jack stopped dead in his tracks, and
half a dozen hands reached to grab for his shoulders.

Delicious!
Jenny said.
So
sweet!

My mouth fell open in shock; then I
forced it closed to keep from vomiting.

“
Hold it, kid,” someone
said, as a couple of people got hold of Jack.

The guy in scrubs had emerged from the
lounge right behind me; he called, “The police are on the
way.”

Jenny stepped forward, moving through
the crowded corridor as if it were empty, and came right toward
us.

Jack was frozen, staring
at her, completely ignoring everyone else – and
that
didn’t surprise me at all. She
was an absolutely horrific apparition, that big splash of bright
red in the cool earth-toned corridor, amid white coats and blue
scrubs, and the waves of happy calm coming from her made it all the
worse.

Jenny stopped and stooped down, and
gave Jack a big hug. The various hands holding him didn’t seem to
interfere with her at all. I couldn’t see whether anything actually
passed through her, or whether she went through anyone else, but
certainly nothing stopped her.

Thank you so
much!

I couldn’t see his face from where I
stood, but from what I could see, he seemed stunned.

It was so kind of you to
introduce us, and to convince Andrew to love me!

“
He... I didn’t,” Jack
said.

“
Didn’t what?” someone
asked.

Then the guy in scrubs put a hand on
my arm, and pulled me back into the lounge.

I didn’t resist, and neither did Jack,
when his captors brought him back, as well. I did call softly,
“Jenny, come talk to us.”

I hoped no one else heard
that.

Then we were back in our seats, with
the guy in scrubs and a security guard watching over us while we
waited for the cops to arrive. They kept their attention focused on
me and Jack, and this time they shut the door.

Jack and I kept our attention on
Jenny. She had followed us into the lounge – I’m not sure whether
she slipped in before the door closed, or simply walked through it.
She settled cross-legged on the tile floor in front of us, smiling
up at Jack.

“
It didn’t work,” Jack
said, staring at her.

The guard and the man in scrubs
exchanged quick glances.

She smiled
beatifically.
It worked beautifully! Bless
you, Jack, I feel so much better now!