One-Eyed Jack (38 page)

“
There is, though! I can
almost see it. It would be real if you could just find some way to
pull it free.”

“
Well, I
can’t,” he said angrily. He held out his arms. “Maybe
you
can.”

I reached out, thinking
that maybe I could pretend to help him, and that would make
whatever mental connection he needed to believe in it and make it
happen, and my hands touched his forearms, and I
felt
it.

It was like an electric shock. I
almost snatched my hands back, but at the last instant I stopped
myself, and closed my fingers around his arms.

That energy surged and buzzed in my
grip; it was the weirdest thing I had ever felt, but at the same
time I recognized it. It was the same thing I had felt when the
Jenny monster attacked me and clawed my face, but woven through a
boy’s arms instead of having its own existence, an existence shaped
into fingernails.

“
Do you feel that?” I
asked.

“
Feel what?” He looked
down. “I feel your hands, if that’s what you mean.”

“
No, I meant that...
that...” I didn’t have a word for it. It wasn’t really energy; it
was something else. Ectoplasm, maybe. I could feel it, but I
couldn’t describe it. I curled my fingers, expecting it to slip
through them. I wanted to know what that would feel
like.

It didn’t slip. It tugged and
struggled; I had hooked it.

I could see it now; that unnatural
brightness that had made Jack so strange-looking was pulling up
from his flesh, caught on my own fingers. His arms looked like a
sort of double exposure, the normal, dull skin of his wrists
beneath the bright, distorted substance I was tearing
loose.

I pulled harder, releasing
his wrists – his
physical
wrists. I still held his psychic, magical,
ectoplasmic, whatever-they-were wrists

The stuff more or less held its shape,
which meant it was coming free of his arms for their entire length.
The hands were exposed now, hands that were much bigger than Jack’s
own, a grown man’s hands with long, thick fingers that ended in
curving black claws. The arms were thickening as I watched. I could
feel their desire to grab, to tear, to destroy.

And Jack could see them now, as well.
His eyes widened. “Holy crap,” he said.

“
What
are you
doing
?” Ballard demanded.

I rose awkwardly from my chair,
getting myself in a position to pull farther. Jack’s shoulders
separated into a grown man’s broad, heavily-muscled pair and a
boy’s narrow ones, and a second face lifted itself out of his, a
face with a heavy tan and prominent cheekbones and a dark stubble,
wearing an eye-patch that was more like a movie pirate’s than like
the modern one Jack wore; the elastic band was replaced with a
black leather bootlace. Anger poured from the man like smoke from
smudge-pot.

Then the ghost pulled free of Jack
completely, and stood there in the Wilsons’ family room, grinning
at me. He had fangs, or perhaps tusks, in his lower jaw, and his
uncovered eye seemed to glow, but otherwise he looked human enough.
He wasn’t very tall for a grown man, scarcely taller than Jack
himself, but he was broad, and built like a
weightlifter.

“
What happened?” Jack
asked.

“
That’s what I want to
know,” Ballard said. She had risen and was standing next to Jack,
who had fallen back, sprawled on the couch, looking a little dazed.
Ben Skees had left his place by the door and was standing behind
the social worker.

I was standing now myself, standing
face to face with the creature I had pulled out of Jack’s body. I
stared at its face for a moment, then realized I was still holding
its wrists. I released them.

It vanished instantly.

I suddenly found myself staring at
Angie Ballard’s worried face. I could see Ben Skees over her left
shoulder, and Jack on the couch to her right.

Jack’s aura was gone. That detachment
from his surroundings was completely gone. I could no longer sense
his emotions. Except for the eye-patch and missing finger, he was
just an ordinary twelve-year-old boy

There was no trace of the ghost I had
pulled out of him.

And I knew that
this
was why I had
dreamed about him.
This
was how he was going to change my life. He was
the one who showed me I could do this strange new thing, freeing
ghosts from their creators.

This was the fourth addition to my
education that Mrs. Reinholt had given me. The dreams, the
apparitions, the psychics – and this.

I just didn’t know what it
meant.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The three of them, Jack Wilson and
Angie Ballard and Ben Skees, were staring back at me, awaiting
answers, and I had no idea what to say. I didn’t understand what
had just happened.

“
What the heck did you
do?” Jack asked.

“
I don’t know,” I said. I
looked at him. “What did you see?”

“
I
didn’t
see
anything at all,” he said. “You did some weird stuff with
your fingers, then you stood up and waved your arms around. That’s
all.”

He hadn’t seen the ghost? That was
interesting. But then, I had apparently pulled his psychic
abilities right out of him. “Then why are you asking what I
did?”

“
Because... because I feel
different.”

“
Different how?” Ballard
asked.

“
Different... kind of
good, actually.” He looked down at his hands. “I’m not as angry
anymore.” He looked back up at me, his one eye wide. “You did it,
didn’t you? You pulled it out of me.”

“
Pulled what out?” Ballard
asked.

Jack looked puzzled. “Whatever it was
that was bothering me. The anger. About the ghost. About
Jenny.”

Just then Emily Wilson reappeared in
the kitchen door. “Coffee’s ready,” she said.

That reminded me of my own beverage. I
picked it up and took a gulp, then said, “I should probably be
going.”

“
Already?” Emily glanced
at her son. “But I thought you wanted to talk to Jack.”

“
I think I’ve found out
everything I needed to know,” I said. “I don’t want to be any
bother.” I set my glass back down. “I need to go.”

It wasn’t that I wanted to be rude, or
that I didn’t like the cola; it’s that reaction was starting to set
in, and I was trembling. If I hadn’t put that glass down I would
have spilled it, or dropped it.

I had just done
something
weird
,
pulling that creature out of Jack, and it had taken something out
of me, as well. It felt as if I had just touched...
something
. Another
world, maybe. An aspect of reality that I hadn’t known existed. My
brain didn’t want to accept what I had just seen, and my body was
not handling it all that well, either.

I think Skees saw that. Ballard’s
attention was on Jack, as it should be, and Emily was too far away
to really see what was happening. Besides, as Jack would have
pointed out, she was very good at not seeing things she didn’t want
to see.

“
I’ll walk you to your
car,” Skees said.

I nodded; I wasn’t sure I could keep
my voice steady if I said anything more. I headed for the
door.

Neither of the women tried to stop me,
or to accompany us; they stood and watched as we walked out of the
house.

Jack lay sprawled on the couch, not
speaking, looking slightly dazed – and far calmer than I had ever
seen him before. He didn’t move, either, as Skees and I
departed.

Once we were out the door we went down
the front steps together, and down the walk, but halfway across the
lawn Skees grabbed my arm and stopped me.

“
Are you all right?” he
asked.

“
No,” I said.

“
What happened in there?”
he demanded.

“
I’m not entirely sure,” I
replied. I looked back at the house. “I did something I’ve never
done before, something really strange.”

“
Like what?”

I took a few seconds to gather my
thoughts, then said, “You know how we think the monster that calls
itself Jenny somehow came from Jenny Derdiarian? That one day her
obsessive little fantasy just came loose and took on a life of its
own?”

“
Yeah, I heard you explain
that. So?”

“
Well, Jack’s been
dreaming of killing Jenny for what she did to him. He said he
couldn’t stop thinking about it. So just now I pulled Jack’s
obsessive little fantasy out of him, and gave it a life of its
own.”

Skees cocked his head. “You did
what?”

“
I pulled it out of
him.”

“
How did
you do
that
?”

“
I
don’t
know
,” I said. “I had no idea I could do that. Mrs. Reinholt said
once, when I was complaining about what she’d done to me, that
she’d given me more than I knew – maybe that’s what she
meant.”

Skees frowned. “You gave
it a life of its own – what does that
mean
?”

“
That means it’s a new
ghost. I saw it. It’s like a grown-up version of Jack, the way he’d
like to be – big and strong and bad-ass.”

Skees’ expression
hardened. “And he was obsessed with revenge killing? So you’ve just
set
another
one
of those monsters loose? You think that was a good
idea?”

“
Well, yeah,” I said. “Not
that I did it entirely on purpose, or knew it was going to happen,
but yeah, it’s more or less what I was hoping for.”

“
Turning another monster
loose?” He looked angrier than I’d ever seen him.

I tried to explain. “Detective, there
are ghosts all over the place. There’s one that crouches on the
sidewalk right over there every night.” I pointed. “There are half
a dozen prowling the hospital. One more won’t do any
harm.”

He looked where I pointed, saw
nothing, and turned back to me. “I’m still not getting it, Mr.
Kraft. You said this new one was a bad-ass killer.”

“
This
one isn’t obsessed with killing
kids
,” I said. “It’s
Jack’s
obsession, not
Jenny’s. And he was obsessed with killing
Jenny
. For what she did to him and
Andrew.”

The anger turned
thoughtful. “The
ghost
Jenny, not Jenny Derdiarian?”

“
Jack never met the real
Jenny.”

“
Does this ghost know
that?”

“
I don’t think the ghost
knows anything Jack didn’t. How could it?”

“
Mr.
Kraft, I don’t know how
any
of this works. Do you?”

“
Not really,” I
admitted.

“
So you think this new
Jack ghost will kill the Jenny ghost? That it can do
that?”

“
I’m hoping so,
yeah.”

He looked me in the eye for a moment,
then asked, “It doesn’t bother you, setting up someone to be
killed?”

“
It’s
not
someone
,” I protested. “It’s an inhuman, child-killing monster. It’s
a bundle of appetites and obsessions, not a living
being.”

“
So
you’re sending a kid’s dream to kill it. A
kid’s
dream.”

“
Yeah,” I said defiantly.
I lifted my chin. “Yeah, I am.”

“
It doesn’t bother you,
using a kid?”

I shook my head.
“Detective, it isn’t
Jack
that’s going to kill anyone. In fact, if this
works the way I think it does, Jack doesn’t even
want
to kill anyone
anymore.
That’s
what I pulled out of him. I yanked out all his anger, his
obsession with Jenny, his psychic abilities. Now he can go back to
being a kid.”

“
Psychic
abilities?
What
psychic abilities?”

“
He
could see Jenny, couldn’t he?
That
psychic ability. I pulled that
out to make the ghost.”

Skees clearly didn’t understand that,
but I didn’t know how to explain it.

“
And this new thing, it’ll
kill the ghost Jenny?”

“
I hope so.”

“
So how will you know if
it worked?”

I shrugged. “Maybe I won’t,” I said.
“We’ll just have to wait and see.”

“
You said you pulled this
ghost out of him. Where did it go? Can you see it now?”

I shook my head. “It vanished,” I
said. “It’s still daylight; I can’t see ghosts in daylight. Once it
was completely separate from Jack, and I let go of it, it
disappeared.”