One-Eyed Jack (7 page)

He knew, and he wasn’t
telling.

And the woman under the tree didn’t
want to talk to me because I was an adult – but she had wanted to
talk about Jack.

I wished the homeowner hadn’t
interrupted; I might have gotten something out of the
creature.

I still might, if I went back about
2:00 a.m.

I drove out of the
neighborhood onto a major street called Winchester Road. As long as
I was in Lexington, I figured I might as well look around; I didn’t
have anything
better
to do until midnight or so.

It wasn’t a bad-looking city, from
what I saw of it. Lots of tree-lined streets in the older
residential areas. Some nice buildings downtown. Some not so nice
industrial areas along Winchester Road, too, but that’s
normal.

There were things lurking in the dark,
though. There was something shapeless and dark gray that was
perpetually falling from one of the towers on High Street. Thin
blue blurs slithered along Water Street. One block on West Main had
a line of phantom storefronts laid across the modern facade of an
office building, a phenomenon I’d never seen before.

I didn’t see these things in daylight,
but at night they were almost everywhere. When I got away from
downtown again I saw black things with scalloped wings flittering
through the trees, and pale shapes moving in the gutters, and a
hundred other varieties.

I was fairly sure they
were there in the daytime, too, at least most of them, but I
couldn’t
see
them
in sunlight. And they were weaker by daylight, I think. Most of
them were weak to begin with, and harmless, and the sun seemed to
weigh them down into complete invisible impotence.

That thing under the tree,
the woman Jack had talked to – well, first off, it wasn’t a woman,
because the lady with the shotgun hadn’t been able to see it.
Beyond that, though, it was unusually powerful; I had been able to
see it when the sky was still light, and Jack had apparently been
able to treat it as a material being.
How
powerful, or what form that
power might take, I didn’t know.

On TV, the psychics and witches and
detectives can look this stuff up; they’ll haul out musty old books
and flip through them until they find the particular monster
they’re fighting, or they’ll google stuff up on the web. There
might be a mentor figure who’s an expert on the six hundred and
forty-seven kinds of demons, or a friendly magician who can cast a
spell that explains everything.

I wish I had something like that. I
don’t. I have my dreams, I can spot people with some sort of second
sight or psychic power, and at night I can see the ghosts and
monsters, and that’s it – Mrs. Reinholt said she’d given me four
gifts, but I only count those three. Practically the only two
people I’ve ever talked to about the stuff that I can see are Mel
and Mrs. Reinholt; Mel doesn’t know any more than I do, and Mrs.
Reinholt has been dead for years.

I used to visit psychic advisors and
wiccan priestesses and that sort of thing, but none of them knew
anything useful. Most of them were outright frauds. A few had
fooled themselves, as well as their customers. A couple might have
really been seeing something, as they maybe had a faint trace of
that psychic otherness, but they were pretty vague about it, and
from what they told me they didn’t see the night creatures the same
way I did. They couldn’t help me much.

I’d met a few kids who could see some
of the night creatures, but they generally knew even less than I
did, and the ones I’d known longest all grew out of it. Most of
them didn’t even remember that they used to see things in the
dark.

The few real psychic
adults I’d spotted and managed to talk to over the past eight years
– well, most of them denied knowing what I was talking about, at
least at first, and if I did convince them that I wasn’t crazy and
I didn’t think
they
were crazy, it always turned out that just like the kids,
they didn’t know any more than I did. None of them had the dreams,
or the ability to spot other psychics, the way I did; they only saw
the things that came out at night. And they’d all had the talent
for as long as they could remember, they didn’t get it thrust on
them by a history teacher turned witch.

They’d all learned to ignore it as
children. I’d had some interesting conversations about that, but
none of them had led anywhere useful.

At least I knew those people were
seeing more or less the same things I saw. On the other hand, the
books on the occult that I’d read were just plain wrong. Everything
in them was nonsense. It didn’t matter if it was the old ones about
vampires and witches, or the New Age stuff about crystals and
vibrations – their explanations of the supernatural didn’t match
what I saw, or what the other psychics saw. They didn’t even come
close.

So for eight years, whenever I left
the safety of my apartment at night, I’d been winging it, making it
up as I went along.

I’d have given anything
for a watcher, a teacher, or a
sensei
.

After awhile the stores closed, and
then the restaurants, and when the bars started shutting their
doors and turning off their neon signs I headed back out Winchester
Road toward that quiet little 1950s development, trying not to look
at the night-things scampering and scurrying in the corners of my
vision.

At that, though, Lexington didn’t seem
quite as densely populated with shadows and monsters as back home
in the Washington area. I don’t know whether that was because there
were fewer people in the area, or because it hadn’t been settled as
long, or what.

Once I turned off the main
drag into the residential areas I drove slowly and carefully; I
didn’t want the sound of the car’s engine to disturb anyone or
attract attention. If someone
did
see me, I hoped they’d just think I was one of
their neighbors coming home late.

The streets were deserted.
The houses were dark. Not a single window was lit. This was clearly
not a place with any night-life. Yes, it was well after midnight,
but still, I wasn’t used to seeing anywhere
this
quiet.

I coasted to a stop at the end of the
street, killed the headlights, rolled down the window, and sat for
a moment, looking and listening and smelling the air.

That carnival scent I’d noticed
earlier was gone; I could smell trees, and mown lawns, and engine
fumes. The air was cool, but so humid it felt clammy. I could hear
wind rustling in the leaves, and a faint hum of insects.

There were things moving out there,
lots of them. Some of them were making noises, or at least doing
something I seemed to hear, though I knew pretty much no one else
over the age of puberty would hear a thing; I was aware of giggling
and whispering and stifled little shrieks. I couldn’t see much in
the dark; the nearest streetlight was out, and the glow from the
rest didn’t penetrate this far very well.

And under the big tulip poplar
crouched something white.

I got out of the car, and slowly,
carefully closed the door, making sure that it latched and making
sure that the key was safely in my pocket. I glanced at the last
house on the street, the home of the shotgun-wielding woman, but it
was as dark and quiet as any other.

I walked forward cautiously. I
remembered that the tulip poplar had been dropping leaves, so I
watched where I put my feet; I didn’t want to rustle like a damned
newspaper.

“
I’m back,” I
whispered.

Where’s Jack?

“
In the hospital. For
another few hours, anyway.”

He’s coming back to
me?

“
I don’t know about that,
but he’s coming home.

He’ll come to me. He loves
me.

I stopped walking to consider that.
“Does he?” I asked at last.

He does love me. He cares
for me, and I care for him. I take care of him when his own mother
won’t.

I didn’t have an immediate answer for
that. I took another cautious step forward. “He cares for
you?”

He feeds me. I’m so
hungry, so very hungry, and Jack is good to me.

I shuddered. “He feeds you? Feeds you
what?” I had a horrible suspicion I already knew the
answer.

He feeds me flesh. I can’t
eat anything else.

“
What flesh?”

It didn’t answer at first,
but just as I was about to suggest that it had eaten Jack’s own
finger, it said,
He brought me a cat once,
but I couldn’t eat it. My teeth wouldn’t touch it.

I felt slightly ill. “Whose
cat?”

Jack brought it to
me.

“
You don’t know where he
got it?”

He brought it to
me.

Whatever this thing was, it clearly
didn’t worry about details. “Was it alive?”

Of course. Jack knew I
can’t eat dead things. He had brought me meat, meat from his
father’s table, but I couldn’t touch it.

That was something, anyway. I had been
afraid the kid was killing neighborhood pets even before he brought
the cat. I hoped it was just a stray he’d caught, and not one he’d
kidnaped.

If the thing
could
eat cats, of
course, then bringing that live one might have been even
worse.

Have you brought me
food?

I stepped back involuntarily. “No,” I
said, a little more vehemently than I intended. I paused and
glanced back at the house, but there was no sign my little outburst
had roused anyone.

Go away, then. Let me wait
for Jack.

“
I want to know more about
you,” I said. “Do you have a name?”

It turned its head toward
me; I could just barely make that out in the dark.
A name?

“
Yes, a name.”

I did once. I was called
Jenny. Jack calls me Jenny now.

“
Jenny?”

Yes.

“
Any last
name?”

It shook his head.
Not any more.

That implied it had a last
name once, and
that
meant it might have been human once, or at least passed for
human. This might be a ghost; I’d met ghosts before, or at least
I’d met things that claimed to be ghosts. “What happened?” I
asked.

Go away. I don’t want to
talk to you.

“
I’m not going anywhere
until I know more about you.”

I’m hungry.

“
I don’t have any food for
you.”

Then go away. I’m so
hungry!
I could feel its hunger now, a
gnawing emptiness. This wasn’t anything as natural as an empty
belly.

“
Jenny, tell me what
happened,” I coaxed. “Why are you hungry? Why are you here, under
this tree? Where were you before, when you had a last
name?”

Go away.

I wasn’t about to leave, but I thought
a change of subject might help. “Why is Jack good to
you?”

He loves me. Jack is a
good boy. He loves me.

“
Why?”

His mother doesn’t comfort
him. His mother doesn’t speak up for him. I do.

“
You aren’t his
mother.”

I could be his
mother.

“
He
has
a mother.”

I could do better. Not
like with my other children.

That was interesting. “What other
children?”

Its first response wasn’t words, but a
wave of anguish. I stumbled back involuntarily.

Then the words came.

My lost ones my loves my
babies, dead dead dead, I lost them, I starved them, I killed them,
how could I? How could I? What did I do? What have I done? No no no
no no...
The thing was curled up into a
ball, its hands wrapped around its head, and I thought I heard an
actual sound, a low moaning, as it bewailed its loss.

Something looked odd about its hands
as it pressed them against its skull. The nails were very, very
long, the hands were very bony – except for the little finger of
the left hand, which didn’t seem to match.

That finger was shorter, thicker, the
skin a little darker than the horrible pale complexion of the
others, the nail trimmed back.

I didn’t think I would need to concoct
any elaborate explanations or look for any other creatures, after
all. I was pretty sure I knew where that finger came
from.

“
You love Jack?” I called
quietly. “Then why did you chew off his finger?”

The hands sprang open and the head
jerked up to glare at me with dark, dark eyes, eyes that looked, in
the midnight gloom, more like holes than like eyes.

Go away! You hateful evil
man,
go away!
I
love Jack.

“
You
call
me
evil?
You’re
the one who ate your friend’s flesh!”