One-Eyed Jack (39 page)

“
And you don’t know where
it went.”

“
That’s right.”

He glared at me for a moment, while I
stared back, as calmly as I could manage. Finally he said, “Fine.
Then go. Go. Go back to Maryland if you want; seems like you’ve
done everything you can here.” His expression softened slightly as
he added, “No point in getting you clawed up anymore.”

“
Thanks,” I said. “I was
planning to try for a flight for tomorrow morning. We can settle up
my consultant’s bill later.”

He smiled at that. For a moment I
thought he was going to offer his hand to shake, and I think he
thought he was, too, but he didn’t. I nodded farewell, and went
back to my rental car.

I sat in the driver’s seat
for a few minutes, catching my breath and thinking about what had
just happened. I had
pulled an apparition
right out of a living person
.

That was
weird
.

It was apparently
something that sometimes happened spontaneously, the way it had to
Jenny Derdiarian, but I could
make
it happen.

A possibility occurred to
me. Did this mean that
all
the ghosts and night-creatures I saw came from
people? Were they
all
unwanted obsessions and fantasies that had gotten loose
somehow?

And if Jenny’s experience was typical,
the people they came from didn’t just lose their obsessions; they
also lost the ability to see the things lurking in the
night.

Maybe
everybody
was born with the ability
to see the creatures, but most people lost it early on, when they
had some sort of
idée fixe
get loose. Maybe that was why so few adults still
had the knack. Maybe that was where all those blurry little
night-creatures came from, the harmless ones that didn’t look human
– kids too young to have a clear image of themselves might have
generated those.

Or maybe I was making stuff up, and
reading too much into it. This theory of mine might explain ghosts,
and even vampires and werewolves – I could imagine people being
obsessed with sucking blood, or with turning into wolves – but it
didn’t explain Mrs. Reinholt, or what she did to me, or to
Mel.

Eventually I got my thoughts into some
sort of order, got my hands steady and my stomach calm, and started
the car. I turned the car around and headed carefully back to my
motel. I didn’t go straight to my room; instead I got the desk
staff to help me book a flight home; I couldn’t get a direct
flight, but there was one the next morning at 10:55 a.m., changing
planes in Charlotte. It cost more than I liked, but I didn’t have
very much choice.

Thinking about that money got me
wondering whether there might be some way to use my
newly-discovered talent to make money, the way Mel had used her
curse. Maybe set myself up as a sort of freelance
exorcist?

That had real
possibilities, I thought. Maybe I could finally
use
my abilities, instead of being
trapped by them.

And as for Mel, I wondered whether I
might be able to tear that curse right out of her.

I went back to my room and called her,
or tried to. She hung up on me; she was still in bed, recovering
from the long drive home.

I wondered whether the Jack ghost had
found the Jenny ghost and killed her yet. Did they even exist by
daylight? I knew I couldn’t see them, but were they still
there?

I went out for dinner eventually, a
burger place on New Circle Road – I’m used to eating alone, but
that doesn’t mean I enjoy it enough to go to anywhere fancier than
a burger joint, especially when I have bandages covering half my
face, inviting stares. I’d picked up a copy of USA Today at the
motel, and took my time reading it. By the time I walked back out
to my car the sun was out of sight in the west, and the sky’s
sunset colors were starting to fade.

I settled into the driver’s seat, and
reached to put the key in the ignition, when I suddenly realized I
wasn’t alone in the car. Someone was sitting in the passenger seat
next to me.

I started, and dropped the keys. I
straightened up, whacking my wrist on the steering wheel, and
turned to see a tusked, one-eyed face grinning at me.

I stared at it for a moment, taking it
in. I hadn’t had a chance to really look at the ghost Jack before
it vanished, but now I had all the time I needed.

It was definitely Jack Wilson’s face,
but in exaggerated, tough-guy caricature. The nose was longer, the
jaw stronger, the brows thicker, and of course there was that
coarse brown stubble, and the tusks, or fangs, or whatever you
would call them. The eye-patch was a rough wad of black cotton,
like a black bandage, held in place with a black leather string,
and the intact eye was inhumanly bright, the enlarged white almost
glowing.

The thing was wearing the same
dull-red plaid shirt that the real Jack had been wearing, the same
cheap blue jeans, but its shoulders were broad, its thighs bulging
with muscle, its hands as big as dinner plates.

That makes it sound like a cartoon,
but believe me, there wasn’t anything funny or cartoonish about it.
It looked genuinely dangerous.

It didn’t speak; it just sat there,
smiling at me.

“
What
do
you
want?” I finally asked.

Take me to her.

So it could talk the same way that the
Jenny monster could – I didn’t so much hear it as remember what it
had said.

I didn’t answer
immediately, and it added,
Gonna kill the
bitch
.

“
What do
you need
me
for?”

Can’t drive. Don’t know
where she is. You do. Take me to her.

I glanced around. “How’d you find me
here?” I said.

Been waiting in this car
all afternoon. Come on, take me to her.

I bent down, never taking my eyes off
it, and retrieved the keys.

I was having second
thoughts. Yes, this was what I’d intended all along, to set one
ghost against the other, but suddenly I wasn’t sure that was such a
good idea. That thing looked mean, and it
was
a killer, or wanted to be. I had
shrugged off Skees’ doubts, but now I wondered whether he might
have had a point.
Had
I created another monster?

What would it do to get at
Jenny?

What would it do
after
it found
her?

Come on. Gonna kill the
bitch.

I started the car.

Jenny was a murderer; she had ripped
Andrew McPhee apart. She had torn out Jack’s eye and bitten off his
finger. Now I was going to bring a bigger, meaner monster to punish
her for that. This was ugly, and I was sure it was going to get
uglier, but in the end, wasn’t it the right thing? I shifted the
car into drive and headed it out of the parking lot.

I drove slowly and carefully, taking
Winchester Road into downtown.

When I passed Strader, where I would
have turned if I were going back to the Wilsons, I was tempted to
make a little detour – the ghost wouldn’t know the difference,
would it? And it would have been interesting, I thought, to see how
he and Jack reacted to each other.

But I didn’t. One glance at the thing,
and feel of the bandages on my face, convinced me I didn’t want to
do anything that might annoy my passenger. I drove straight to the
hospital, following Winchester to Midland to Main, then turning
south from Main Street onto Limestone.

It was full dark by the time I pulled
the car into a space in the garage and turned off the engine. The
creature beside me seemed completely real and solid – not that it
had ever been particularly ghostly; from the instant it first
reappeared, it had been entirely opaque and three-dimensional.
Still, it had acquired a certain definition that hadn’t been as
pronounced at first.

I didn’t rush to open the car door; I
hoped the thing might take it from here without my help. I looked
at it.

Take me to
her
, it said.

I swallowed, unbuckled, and got out of
the car. “This way,” I said.

I led it into the hospital; I didn’t
know what else to do. I didn’t know which room Jenny would be in,
if she was there at all, and I told it that.

Find
her
, it said.
Take me to her.

So I led it in.

I went to Trevor’s room first – or
rather, the room Trevor had been in the night before. He’d been
moved.

I tried Lisette’s room; she wasn’t
there, either. I asked at the nurses’ station, and was informed
that she’d gone home with her family, a few days earlier than
originally planned – the McPhee boy’s death had triggered some
changes in routine.

It was strange, talking to
them with that big one-eyed ghost at my elbow, hanging on every
word. I was constantly aware of his presence, I could almost
smell
him, but I could
tell that the nurses couldn’t see him at all.

I thanked them, and walked away. They
probably thought I was leaving, but I doubled back; I still had
other possibilities to check.

And one of them paid off. The boy I’d
seen sleeping with the IV in his arm, Jesus Martinez, was still
there. He looked asleep this time, as well, but he wasn’t
alone.

Jenny was there, leaning over him,
gently stroking his head with one hand; I had the impression that
if she had a human voice, she would have been crooning
wordlessly.

I was about to say something, I’m not
sure what, when the new creature, the one-eyed ghost, surged past
me.

Die, bitch! Die, die,
die!

Jenny looked up, astonished; the long
hair fell back from her face, exposing the one bright eye and the
one dark one. The sight seemed to further enrage the false Jack, if
that was possible; he grabbed her throat with both hands and
snatched her off the bed.

Jack?
I could hear her surprise – or remember hearing it, at any
rate.

I hadn’t expected her to recognize her
attacker.

Die die die
die!

Then it tore her head off.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

There wasn’t any blood.
Even though I knew it wasn’t human, I had expected blood. There
should have been a veritable
fountain
of blood.

There wasn’t. Instead there was a sort
of scattering of darkness, little bits of blackness drifting off in
various directions, unaffected by gravity, and then vanishing, like
negative-image flames blinking out. The Jenny thing’s head seemed
to dissolve into black smoke, then fade away to nothing –
mostly.

One bit didn’t fade, and the new
monster’s hand closed on it, and yanked it free. It shoved the
captured object up under its eye-patch.

Then it tore off the eye-patch and
flung it aside.

While it did that, Jenny’s headless
body had remained crouched on the edge of the bed. It hadn’t
collapsed when decapitated; it hadn’t moved at all.

Little Jesus screamed; his eyes,
closed a moment before, were wide open, staring at the ruins of
Jenny’s neck. He flung his arms wide, pressed back against the
bed.

“
It’s okay!” I called,
gesturing desperately. “It won’t hurt you! It can’t!”

I wished I was sure of
that.

Once it had recovered Jack’s stolen
eye, the vengeful ghost reached for what was left of Jenny and
tried to tear off an arm. Jenny was struggling now; a shadowy image
of her head was reappearing, and she was trying to push her
attacker away.

Jesus screamed again, and I ran in. I
scooped him out of the bed, slung him over one shoulder, then
grabbed the IV stand with my other hand and pulled it along as I
rushed him out of the room.

As I had expected, two nurses were
running toward us, drawn by the screams. “Here,” I said, handing
them the terrified boy.

“
Get a wheelchair,” one of
them ordered the other as she accepted the child.

Jesus wasn’t screaming anymore, just
whimpering. I watched just long enough to be sure the nurse could
carry him, then turned and stepped back into the room.

Jack and Jenny were clawing at each
other, tearing strips of ectoplasmic flesh from one another,
scattering that powdery blackness everywhere. Jenny was putting up
a fight, and the shadow of her head was still there, but Jack was
clearly getting the better of it.

He got his teeth around one of her
wrists, and bit down hard; a child’s hand, solid and real, fell to
the floor, and red blood spattered. I felt a pressure in my head,
as if Jenny was screaming.

Then Jack picked her up in those big
hands of his, shaking her as if she were a naughty child, and
thrust her other arm into his mouth, in horrific imitation of
Goya’s painting of Saturn devouring his children. The resemblance
was so close I suspected Jack had seen the painting somewhere. The
monster bit down again, and more of that darkness
spread.