Thalo Blue (42 page)

She did. The doors were never locked—the back door to the garage and the side house door where always kept locked instead. Vaughan was not the most dangerous of the neighborhoods stretched out from centerpoint of the big city syndrome. Burglaries, stolen property, strangers roaming the streets, break-and-enters, these kinds of things didn’t happen in that neighborhood.

Zeb pressed himself through the space where the bike’s drab cover was and moved around to the driver’s side of the car. He patted the breast pocket of his shirt. But the key was hanging on a hook in the kitchen, next to where the phone used to be.

He bent down a little and looked through the driver’s window to Malin as she was running a hand across the silver-white veneer of the dash. He made a small turning gesture with his forefinger and thumb pinched and raised his voice so she could hear him through the glass:
I need the key.
She nodded and said
okay
. And he heard. He looked up again and his gaze fell squarely on the back door of the garage just as a weak puff of air made it waver. It was open and a crack of light from the yard stood like a spear between it and the jamb. The jamb against which it
should
have been tightly closed.

He felt the blood run away from his face. It seemed not to stop there either. In less than a second that sight of the cracked doorway looked exactly in his mind like the doorway of his bedroom the night those crazed eyes were made real. All the feeling fell away from every part of him—as though it was a liquid that had suddenly turned hot and thin, and had drained down to his feet and out onto the cement floor of the garage.

In the space where his first missed heart beat should have been, there was the thought that this was impossible. In the space where a second should have followed the first there was the realization that Malin’s talk—skipping stones and druids—had not been mere myth. It had been dead correct. He knew it,
had
known it himself in a looser, less solidified way, since his head had been held over the five-hundred foot drop just the other side of Arkham. There were certain things of which you didn’t need to be convinced. Certain things you just knew. And after you stopped lying to yourself that they were wrong, their rightness became that much more apparent again.

He stepped back, his arms looking for things to brace against, as though he expected to pass dead away. Pawing, he lurched and found the wall and the roof of the coupe with his extenuated fingers.

Something snapped out from under the coupe then, and took hold of his ankle with an iron grip. It nearly yanked him off his feet. He fell backwards, still bracing against the car’s top and the west wall behind him. The world seemed suddenly far away. He looked down and saw the arm, the sleeve, the hand, that was reaching out from the space beneath the car, the rounding-up quarter panel of the coupe’s trunk. And he saw a shoulder and a part of a chin just beyond the black of the tire. He struggled away with a grunt, instinctively, losing his balance from the yank and the simultaneous reaction to knowing what the yank had come from. He turned—a partial jerking motion—and his hand fell across the door handle of the car. He had a vision of that twisting arm like the tentacle of a beast, latching on and never letting go—it would eventually pull him under the vehicle and consume him as his arms banged dull and percussive against the shiny aluminum and plastic of the car’s skin. He floundered to feel his fingers tighten around the handle as those around his ankle twisted at him—threatening, it felt—to nearly snap off his foot. He managed to kick free with his other foot and he let out another haggard, breathless grunt. His hand finally found purchase on the shiny handle and he pulled open the door, letting it swing wide and bang against the wall of the garage.

Before realizing it, Zeb was inside on his back, pushing against Malin and the soft plush white leather of the interior. His hands were again thrashing at the heavy door, finally pulling it shut, and he yanked his legs in behind the rest of him. As the door drew closed—painfully slowly it seemed—he expected that hand to slink up like a glossy rubber stem and slither into the cab along with him. But it didn’t. The door slammed tight. And his own hand cracked outward like a whip to press the automatic door lock.

Click
: the lock was engaged. He was shuddering. There was no feeling in any of his extremities. Like before, there was the throb of blood in his ears.

Bent, with his legs curled up like a fetus and pressing against the steering wheel, he was half across Malin’s lap. There was no color in his face. Sweat lay like an oil-slick on his arms and neck and face. She, in surprised half-gasp, opened her mouth to say something but a stifled scream escaped her instead. Zeb burst with a startled jolt too as they both saw the figure rise up from beside the car. It came to a full stand.

Through the driver’s window, they both saw the white cast arm of Jewels Fairweather.

<> <> <>

Silence. He regarded them both with only silence. They could not see his face.

His other hand, the one not held in the dried cast, reached out and tried the handle. He yanked on it several times. To no avail. Next he pounded on the window with a hand wound up into a tightly-fisted rock. But after three of those knocks the effort faded away as though he was capable of reason. And reason suggested that fists against the glass of a BMW was
un
reasonable. Then he moved back and shoulder checked the driver’s side door, a development that caught both Malin and Zeb off-guard. The car shuddered. And so did they. Both of them were shaking. Malin’s hands held the scrunched shirt shoulders of Zeb. Her eyes were wide portholes of terror. White to match the plush interior.

Fairweather—they both knew it was Fairweather, who else but Fairweather could it be—circled around the front corner of the car. His face came into view, not offering so much a surprise as a confirmation that this whole situation was rotated into uncanny revelation. His expression was twisted in a grimace of either hurt or anger. Both would have been acceptable descriptions. His head hung like the hinge of his neck was broken. He paced a little in the tiny space—between the front tires of the bike and the car’s driver side door. But he said nothing.

“
Where’s the key?
” Malin finally whispered, unsure as to whether Fairweather, beyond the glass, could hear her. A glimmer of sickness filled Zeb’s throat. A tiny voice in his head had told him to expect this—well not
this
—but something. Fairweather had called him Zeb at the hospital, and he knew that, but he pushed it aside. Stunned and silent, Zeb finally forced himself to respond. “
In the kitchen
.” His eyes were locked on those of Fairweather, the Druid.
The keys were in the kitchen.
He paused, thinking, wondering. Would the Druid—most assuredly who this man was—know that the coupe’s keys were hanging in the kitchen? They had shared a mind for a flash of a second somewhere beyond this place. Somewhere hanging over the edge of a rocky precipice. He knew the Druid had things in his head that
he
could see but his recollections of them were hazy, incomplete. Would the Druid have similar picture postcards of Zeb’s insides? And, among them, would there be a photograph of where those keys hung? All the car keys, from as far back as he could remember, through all the sedans and wagons, they had all hung on that hook by the tan phone. It was like fingerprints, that hook, like a piece of him, something that had come into the world with him on his birthday.

Sensing the urgency in his thoughts, he finally stiffened, sat upright, and pressed a pensive, panicked hand to his face, rubbing where the fine sandpaper of a shadow was just beginning to form.
How much did this man know?

It was like the horror from his bedroom all over again. He wasn’t absorbed at the neck by the stranger, but he was trapped by him just the same. And the interiors of the Beemer felt like the finely procured and lush landscape of an eternal coffin. He started to feel claustrophobic and the dark walls of the garage pressed in imposingly. The Druid was still pacing, the anger seeming to grow. Yes, definitely. It was the Druid. It was the presence, the mind, whichever phrase you wanted to use, that had stood in his bedroom that night and threatened to squeeze the life out of him. He and Malin exchanged a look that said they both understood. This figure was the same. The Thief. The Druid. Whatever the name was, the terror fit. He was
in
Julius Fairweather. And he wanted Zeb and Malin.

His eyes were darting around the space, perhaps searching for something. His brooding and bitterness seemed to match Zeb’s, who’s next thoughts stumbled across the items which could be used to shatter the windshield. That, he decided in a split thought was what the Druid was doing. The Druid didn’t hold Zeb in his tree root grip yet, but he could, and he would, if the windows were suddenly smashed. He would reach in and that would be the end of it. And there were no police on the way this time.

“...
Where’s your cell?
” he whispered with urgency to Malin, not taking his eyes from the pacing menace beyond the glass.

“—
Already thought of it.
It’s in my purse.
”

“
Where’s your purse?
”

“...
In the living room...
”

She sounded dejected, like a slap of shame had fallen across her face. He wanted, pithily, to tell her not to feel the weight of blame. That there was no way she should feel fault for not having a help-line manned and standing ready. But there just wasn’t time to caress her self-esteem, or his for that matter. He threw his cares for politeness out and instead, his mind clumsily fingered the consequences of having no communication. Added to that, the rental car was in the driveway. Even if they had the keys for the Ci he couldn’t burst backwards out onto the ice-covered patch of cement. He wouldn’t have hesitated flooring this machine, then firing backwards like a shot from a firearm to break down the wooden doors of the garage bay. The panels of plywood and small square plates of tinted glass would blow outward as the big silver dart screeched through it in reverse. But he tossed that idea out in an instant, even tossed the idea of firing forward and breaking both of Fairweather’s kneecaps with the Ci’s bumper, maybe even crushing him to death against the motorcycle. What were they going to do? Open the car doors, put their feet on the cement, and peddle the car?

His mind groped again at the possible objects available to smash the windshield. For the moment, they were safe. There was nothing in arm’s reach, nothing for the Druid to seize upon. No hammers, tools, garden shears. There was nothing in that garage heavy enough to lob against the windows and produce even a spidery crack line. The closest item was in the living room down the west hall, past the front guest bedroom and the rear guest bath. It lay in the sparkling glass of the picture tube and among blood-spotted carpet. Would the Druid make a run for that? Would he remember it being there?

Or would he not risk leaving the two of them alone? They could jump out of the car in the short seconds while he was gone and make their own dash for the garage’s back door all while the Druid made his way down that narrow hall, past the paints and canvas there on the floor to pick up the grapefruit sized plaster sculpture of an Egyptian Queen. He looked towards the door as the thought of bolting through it crossed his mind. The Druid saw him look. He fell across the hood at that moment with a crumpled thunderclap and his face was suddenly a mere hair width from the glass, only the length of a fist from Zeb who sat ductile with fingers gripped on the steering wheel. “
Don’t.
” His voice was a low growl, but strident. Easily audible. The word was like a wipe of flesh against frigid steel. “
I promise you, Zeb.
You won’t get three steps.
”
Zeb
. He hit the pronunciation of that name with particular distaste, like having it in his mouth was akin to a mouthful of poison and he needed to wash it away with something vile itself. Only turpentine would work.

He banged his fist again, this time on the windshield. As if to punctuate those serious words. Zeb, still clutching the wheel, knuckles shed of their color, leaned a little forward. Their eyes wore a tight beam between them, invisible, but no less powerful.

“...
What do you want from me?
” he shrieked.

“
I want...you...”
It was an equally pitched response.

Malin had regained her senses. The shock had either dissipated or simply lessened enough for her to regain some clarity. Or perhaps it was now a
loss
of clarity from which she suffered. As those words,
I want YOU
, rolled out of the stained spot of the Druid’s mouth, she leaned forward in one gesture and pressed her fists down on the steering wheel’s horn, sounding it in one long screeching blast. The Druid was stunned. Zeb a little also. The Druid squinted his eyes and shook his head ever so slightly. She began screaming for help and Zeb found himself joining her, though somewhere deep below his throat he knew it to be nearly useless. Other houses on large lots thick with foliage were much too far away. And tucked neatly away inside this garage, within the cab of a rather well-built sport coupe—the notion that someone may hear them at all seemed entirely implausible.

The Druid slid backwards across the hood and then came at them pummeling fists once again on the coupe’s casing and across its front window. He was screaming for her to stop. She wouldn’t. She changed her cries for help to swears at him and she kept firing off small blasts of the horn, then long ones, then more and more. He hammered at the spot on the window above her face until she either realized the uselessness of the yelling and the horn-blowing or found herself intimidated. Zeb knew it was likely not the latter.

But panic
was
rising in her. He could feel it. Just as he could feel the closeness of the coupe’s cab again. There was a choking sensation rising in his throat too. And it only got worse.