Otherworld (24 page)

The CrimeStoppers telephone hotline received thirty-two calls after Channel 2's airing of the Dart 'n Shop holdup video. More than half of the people calling were teenagers identifying the suspect as Mr. Black.

 

Abby Diaz rose from the warm bubble bath, dried off, put on her underwear and pink Powerpuff Girls pajamas, and brushed her teeth at the bathroom sink.

From downstairs, her father called, “Are you brushing your teeth?”

“Yes, Daddy,” she yelled, spraying toothpaste foam onto the mirror. She giggled.

She spit, rinsed, spit again, and strolled to her bedroom. She climbed into bed, pulled the covers up to her chin, and waited for her mother to come read to her, which had been their nightly custom since Abby was three.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
, a book they were halfway through in their third consecutive reading of The Chronicles of Narnia, rested on her nightstand to the right, between the bed and the wall.

Abby glanced around the room, admiring the posters of puppies and kittens and one she had bought at the elementary school's book fair of an orangutan wearing swim trunks and “floaties.” They all hung at girl height, all personally tacked to the pastel pink walls by Abby herself.

In the corner, a dozen dolls sat on top of each other in a child's rocking chair. In the middle of the night, with the lights off and the moon glowing eerily through the window, the shadow of those dolls looked like a monster hovering in the corner, watching.

Abby remembered that her nightlight bulb had burned out. Her mother had showed her how to replace it, and she'd put a package of new ones in Abby's top dresser drawer, the junk drawer that held rubber bands for her hair and batteries for her toys and marbles and extra dice for her board games. The little girl climbed out of bed and shuffled over to her bureau. She opened the top drawer. It squeaked, but within that squeak, she heard something else …

A thump? A rustle? Hard to tell with the drawer's squeal drowning it out. She looked over her shoulder at her closet door to the left of the bed—right next to it, as a matter of fact. The door was shut. Abby turned around and faced it.

It seemed like she always heard sounds in the house. Especially at night. Creaks and squeaks. Thumps and bumps. The occasional scraping sound. Her mother always told her those were the sounds a house makes when it's settling. This explanation never satisfied Abby very much. She remembered a
Brady Bunch
rerun where the kids kept hearing noises and their parents told them the house was settling, and in the end, the house turned out to be haunted by ghosts. (Okay.
Really
at the end, the haunting was all a hoax carried out by the boys, but Abby had been so scared, she had stopped watching before that could be revealed.)

She didn't want to get back in bed. She heard footsteps approaching from the hallway.

“Abby, why aren't you in bed?” her mother asked.

Abby shrugged.

“Go ahead,” her mother said. “I'll be back in just a second to read with you. Where are we tonight?”

“Chapter Nine: In the Witch's House,” Abby said matter-of-factly.

“Oh. Okay, I'll be right back.”

With that, her mother turned around and walked away.

Abby looked again at the closet door and her bed that lay right next to it. She
could
get in that bed. She
could
. But then she'd be in arm's length of anything that happened to lurk in her closet and wanted to reach out with a gnarled, spider-hairy hand and grab her with sharp, dirty fingernails. The hand of
the bad man
felt like that, and at that very moment, Abby knew that he had taken up residence in her closet, had made her room his lair. Behind the curtain of clothes, in a pile of shoe boxes and toys and puzzles and Baby Sitter's Club books,
the bad man
crouched, knife in hand, waiting for her to climb into bed and fall asleep so he could slither out and pounce on her.

“I'm coming up, so you'd better be in bed,” her mother yelled.

Abby Diaz tiptoed to her bed, never averting her eyes from the closet door.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

He had crouched behind the row of hanging clothes to the right just inside the closet, waiting in their shadow for hours. His knees began to cramp, and he thought she would never come upstairs. He heard the front door downstairs close and assumed her father had come home. They stayed down there for a long while, probably eating dinner or watching a little television. But Jimmy knew that the girl would be up sooner or later. Little girls have bedtimes, and those bedtimes come fairly early.

He had his butterfly knife out and had been swinging it open and closed, open and closed, until he heard footfalls on the stairs. He placed his ear against the door. He heard the sound of running water. The girl's bath. He wanted to kill her now. Mommy and Daddy would be downstairs watching
CSI
or some stupid cop show, and she'd be left all alone. The sound of the faucet would cover the noise. And then he could clean his hands in the sink …

Just like at home.

And then Jimmy remembered what happened to his mother, what
he
had done to her. She'd screamed when he approached her. And then he brought the blade down and in and across and up what seemed like thousands of times. He remembered walking to the bathroom, cleaning his knife in the sink, and taking a shower, mesmerized by the swirl of blood spinning down the drain. The memory of his deed, and even the understanding of it, had drained away as well, but now it came back. It backed up like sewage, and Jimmy remembered it—the foulness, the evil—vividly. Too late to go back. And yes …

He wanted to kill the girl now, while she shampooed and scrubbed and maybe had soap in her eyes. Jimmy grinned. She would be playing with rubber duckies, and he would walk in, and she would look up and, with bubbles on her face, would mistake him for Daddy. “Hi, Daddy,” she would say. And then Daddy would reach down and do a very bad thing. Yes …

The time had come.

No, Jimmy.

“Who's there?” he said aloud.

Shh, Jimmy! Are you crazy? They'll hear you, you idiot!

“I'm not crazy,” Jimmy whispered.

Then just shut up and listen.

“Okay.”

See, there you go! Talking after we told you not to!

A sharp pain pierced Jimmy's skull. He winced, tears squirting from his eyes, but he did not say a word.

Now, just listen. We don't want her now, Jimmy. We want her. Make no mistake about it, we want her, and we want her good. Better than your mother, Jimmy. And you know why? Because this little witch has already escaped you once. She's gotten away from you, and she laughed about it. So now she's got to pay.

Thoughts of that night drifted into Jimmy's mind. What about …

Don't worry about the other one, Jimmy. He sneaked through last time, but he won't do it again. That's all taken care of. But you have to be patient. You have to wait until bedtime. The others will be asleep, and she will be too. She'll be asleep in the bed right outside. And then, Jimmy—and then, you come out. Just like in her nightmares. The thing that goes “bump” in the night. The monster in the closet. That's you, Jimmy. So just do us this favor: just stay right where you are and wait for her to turn her light off and go to sleep.

Jimmy heard the water's rushing cease. Bath time was over. He leaned back against the closet wall. His crouch cut off some circulation in his legs, and they went numb. Clutching the knife to his breast, he waited, just in case someone happened to open the closet door. If that happened, all bets were off. Forget about the voices. He would jump out and kill anything that moved. He heard a man yell, “Are you brushing your teeth?” and a reply—“Yes, Daddy.”

Footsteps now, coming down the hall. Little footsteps. The girl. Then, the bed springs creaking. Only a wall separated them. Jimmy thought he could thrust his knife through the sheetrock and probably get her. But he would follow the instructions of the voices. Killing her in the middle of the night would allow a better getaway, anyway. No one would be downstairs to see him steal away.

The little girl sighed.

The bed creaked, and he heard two tiny, pajama-padded feet strike the floor. He heard her shuffle across the carpet. He leaned forward, peering through the wedge of light at the door's side. She walked over to a white dresser with pink trim. She opened a drawer. Jimmy lost his balance and fell forward, his right knee thumping on the floor. He froze.

The girl looked over her shoulder. Jimmy thought maybe she could see his eyeball in the sliver of space between the door and doorjamb. She turned around.

All right; this is it. If she knows I'm in here, I come blazing out. I'm Mr. Black, and I ain't afraid of no little brat in pink pajamas. I'll take this little chick out.

She remained staring at the door. Something in her face told Jimmy that she was toying with the idea that the sound in her closet was “just a noise.” He thought she was thinking,
Maybe I just imagined the whole thing. There wasn't any sound at all.
He heard footsteps.
If it's Daddy, and she tells him she heard a noise, it's all over.

“Abby, why aren't you in bed?” Mommy asked.

He watched the girl relax a bit, and she hunched her shoulders.

“Go ahead,” Mommy said. “I'll be back in just a second to read with you. Where are we tonight?”

“Chapter Nine,” the girl said. “In the Witch's House.”

Jimmy thought,
You got that right.

“Oh. Okay, I'll be right back,” Mommy said, and she left.

The girl looked at the closet door again. He saw a swallow trickle down her neck. She was afraid. She took a step forward.

That's right. Come to Mr. Black. Mr. Black will make everything “ay-okay.”

He decided to go ahead and burst out, maybe give the little chick a coronary before he sliced her up, when the voices said,
You do it, and we kill
you
, Jimmy!
, and her mother yelled, “I'm coming up, so you'd better be in bed.”

He shrunk back but kept his line of sight through the crack. He watched the little girl move slowly toward the bed, watching
him
through the closet door. She silently climbed in, and he thought it might be cool if he reached out and grabbed her by the neck as she cozied up. He could hear her breathing, every tiny inhale and exhale.

Mommy returned and sat on the edge of the bed. Her body blocked Jimmy's view through the crack. She said, “Do you want to read, or me?”

“You,” the girl said.

“Okay,” the mother said. “Chapter Nine: In the Witch's House. ‘And now of course you want to know what had happened to Edmund,'” she began.

Jimmy reclined against the closet wall, rubbing his legs silently, and listened to the little girl's mother read her a story. The event lasted only about seven minutes, but might not have lasted that long, if the girl hadn't stopped her mother several times to ask questions.

Finally, the mother read, “‘Make ready our sledge,' ordered the Witch, ‘and use the harness without bells,'” and the story was over. “Good night, baby,” Mommy said, and Jimmy heard the sound of a kiss. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” the girl replied.

The bed creaked, he watched the woman walk out the doorway. The lights went out, and he heard her walking away down the hall.

Just two hours
, the voices said.
Just wait two more hours, and she's yours.

Those two hours crawled by. In the silent darkness, Jimmy could hear the faint sound of snoring coming from another bedroom. He didn't know how he would know when two hours had passed, but he assumed the voices would tell him. They had guided him this far; they would take him the rest of the way. He almost fell asleep in there, but the moment came.

Now, Jimmy. Now's the time. But be quiet about it.

Mr. Black stood up. His joints popped, and his legs groaned as blood coursed freely through them again and feeling rushed back. He felt light-headed. Sweat gathered on his brow, though his body shook with chills. He reached out and grasped the doorknob. Mr. Black was about to meet the girl for the second time. And this time, someone would die.

Holding his knife with his right hand, he twisted the knob with his left.

 

Pops Dickey sat on his rear in his backyard grass, something he normally wouldn't do. It was too difficult to stand his old bones back up again. He didn't think about it. He started a cozy little fire, and he sat up close to it, feeding on its heat. The flames lit up his face like a grotesque jack-o'-lantern.

Gertie had fainted dead away. The sight of him sitting on their couch, shotgun in hand, rambling on about UFOs and aliens and Graham Lattimer and people who wanted to stop the show, was probably just too much for her to handle.

He smiled into the fire. The shotgun lay across his lap. He looked into the distance, into the darkness of the woods, and then looked up into the sky. A full moon. He felt like howling. He wanted his visitor to return, maybe to take him away to its far-off planet. He thought about that, what it must be like. How long would it take to get there? Was it in the Milky Way? He saw a pair of blinking lights, knew they belonged to an airplane, and almost cried.

Hoping it could sense his psychic energy, he began to pray to whatever had visited him the night before.

A light drizzle began to fall.

 

Something woke Abby Diaz up. Not a noise. Not a nightmare. A realization. She had never replaced the bulb in her nightlight. The room slept in haunting darkness. The autumn moon, full and glowing, squeezed its aura through the open blinds, casting strips of ghastly light on the floor and illuminating the room with an eerie alien shimmer. She listened to the darkness …

… and heard
something
.

She knew immediately that
the bad man
had come for her, so it was not a great surprise to see, when she rolled her head to the right on her pillow, the doorknob on the closet twisting.

She sat up and looked again, wiping the dryness of slumber from her eyes. The knob turned.

“Mommy Daddy!”

Inside the closet, Jimmy, inspired by the girl's screams, finished turning the knob and pressed against the closet door.

“Daddy!” Abby jumped out of bed and ran down the hall to her parents' bedroom.

Jimmy pressed against the door, but it would not open.
Locked!
He cursed and fumbled on the knob …

… There
wasn't
a lock.

Stuck!
He banged against the door, fully expecting to explode out into the room and come face-to-face with the girl's father. The door wouldn't budge. He hurled himself against it.

Carlos and Lisa Diaz met their daughter in the hallway.

“What's wrong, sweetie?” Lisa asked, but she knew. She could hear the banging coming from Abby's room.

“Lisa, take Abby right now,” Carlos demanded. “Take her right now and go downstairs and call 911.”

“Carlos—”

“Now!” he yelled.

“
The bad man'
s in my closet,” Abby said through her tears.

“Come with me, honey,” Lisa said, and she grabbed her daughter by the arm and dragged her down the stairs.

The banging in Abby's room continued.

Carlos headed for his daughter's bedroom. “Run to Melody's, Lisa,” he shouted.

Inside the closet, Jimmy Horn was going berserk. He cursed the door, and he cursed the little girl. The voices began to jeer.

Come on, Jimmy! We thought you were Mr. Black! We thought you had it all under control! Why can't you even open a simple door? Do we have to do everything for you? Are you so crazy you can't even open a door?

“Leave me alone!” Jimmy wailed, and he threw all of his weight against the door. Nothing. He began to cry heavy tears of rage. He turned the knob again. Nothing. He pressed against the door. What could be holding it?
Who
could be holding it? The girl! The girl had undoubtedly pulled her bed against the door.