The Night Shifters (24 page)

Sometimes I would
wake up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep.
I used to go for midnight walks down these streets. Everyone else
was still asleep, it was like I had the whole world to myself. My
fancy could make these houses seem far grander and more mysterious
than they really were.

Why couldn’t I find
a little of that fancy, now? All I could see were dead lawns,
peeling paint, and dirty windows. At least the windows weren’t
broken, that was some improvement. And I didn’t smell sewage. In
fact, a touch of jasmine hung on the air; someone’s vine must be in
bloom.

Desperate for a
good omen, I followed my nose down the street. Here and there, I
spotted pale blooms in the starlight.

Some of my
neighbors were talented gardeners; they could transform the
plainest surroundings with flowers. They thought of their homes as
a refuge, a little corner of the universe they could call their
own. They prettified, painted and planted; landscaped with dry bed
streams, pretty rocks, fountains, trees, and garden statues.

It doesn’t matter
how humble your house is. In fact, the humbler it is, the more
likely you are to fix it up. I had done that with my own house, I
planted flowers in the bed under the front windows, because Mom and
I...

Mom and I did that.
We did it several times a year, from the time I was barely able to
walk. In fact, I could see her digging, mixing a little bone meal
into the soil of the bed, and me toddling up to her with a pot of
marigolds. When she looked up at me, she smiled for real, no
half-smile this time. Maybe we even had a jasmine vine out back, I
could almost...

My eyes were fixed
on my neighbors’ yards; I wasn’t watching where I was going. But
suddenly I heard Sir John’s voice hissing in my ear, “Hazel!”

I looked around,
expecting to see him. But he wasn’t there.

Instead, a young
guy waited in the middle of the sidewalk. I would have bumped right
into him if I had kept walking. He stood medium height, had a
medium build and short, medium-brown hair. If I were ever required
to describe him in a police report, I wouldn’t be able to recall
anything more than that, and I doubt I would have been able to pick
him out of a line-up. His face revealed no expression
whatsoever.

Okay –
almost
no expression. I thought the
corners of his mouth quirked in an almost-smirk, like the face of a
kid who’s been caught doing something wrong.

And then a
piece of memory clicked into place. “You’re the clerk who works in
that Super Gulp on 75
^th
Avenue and
Indian School.” It seemed ages since the Drivers had chased me into
that store, though probably it had been just a matter of hours. He
was the guy whose bland, expressionless face had driven me back
into the City of Night. But now that he wasn’t standing behind that
counter anymore, his mask of normalcy seemed to be
slipping.

“What are you doing
here?” I asked.

He didn’t
respond, merely continued to stare as if there was something I had
missed, until another little chunk of memory went
click
. “You worked there for a few years, I used to
see you all the time.”

Now the smirk
seemed much more inclined to come out of hiding, though he still
didn’t say anything.

What’s with this creep?
I wondered. Because even though there was absolutely nothing
remarkable about him, he set off warning bells in my head. With
each passing moment that he stood there almost-smirking, those
bells got louder. Until finally, one last chunk of memory fell into
place with a resounding
THUNK
.

This memory was
actually a newspaper headline: KILLER GETS DEATH SENTENCE FOR
STRANGLING 13 GIRLS. His photo was displayed next to the headline,
and I recognized the clerk I had seen every time I walked into that
store to buy a comic book. But if I hadn’t seen him so many times,
I wouldn’t have recognized him at all.

Everyone always
thinks it’s some stranger who kills people for sport. But most of
the time, it’s some guy you see so often, you barely even notice
him.

“
In the
Waking World, I was sitting on Death Row.” The Girl-killer spoke
with the same flat, emotionless voice I had heard whispering from
behind the door,
I like to kill girls.
“But now I’ve got access to
this
world. And you’re the one who brought me here. The City of
Night is manifesting your memories – and I’m one of them.” His
smirk turned into a full grin.

And he lunged at
me, faster than a snake.

* * * * *

So maybe
there was
one
good thing about
being eleven: I could run really fast. But he stayed right on my
heels, up one block and down another, around corners, through
alleys, and even over a couple of fences. I couldn’t shake him, and
pretty soon I started to get winded.

He wasn’t even
breathing hard. “Why don’t you admit it?” He spoke as if we were
standing together having a calm conversation. “You can’t get away
from me. I don’t get tired. That’s how I caught all the other
girls, I just ran them down. And when I caught them, I wrapped my
hands around their throats and squeezed, but not too hard, not at
first. It’s really fun to watch a girl trying to catch her breath.
Once I made it last for three hours. Maybe with you, I can make it
last forever.”

My memory threw
another image at me, pictures of his victims lined up in the
newspaper, a gallery of girls like me. They lived in the same
general part of town; some of them had even gone to my school.
Probably they had walked into that Super Gulp and bought stuff from
this creep, looked into his expressionless eyes and saw nothing
there. He didn’t show them his true face until they met him on a
dark street just like this one, and by then they would have felt
creeped out, they would have stared at him, wondered what his
problem was – and finally they would have turned and run, just like
I was running. And they would have been so scared.

But I wasn’t
scared. In fact, the longer this went on, the madder I felt. This
smug, over-confident son of a bitch preyed on children. And fifteen
years later he was still sitting on Death Row, still filing appeals
while the families of his victims had to just get on with their
lives. What gave him the right to be in the City of Night? Even
this run-down, hopeless corner of it?

He chased me down
cracked sidewalks, over chalk-marks where girls’ hopscotch had been
played, past darkened windows and locked doors, across a street and
onto the ragged lawn of a public park. Something about the patchy
grass made me uneasy, but that was a distant concern as I aimed
myself at a sidewalk that bisected the park. I ran up the short
incline to the pavement, which slowed me down just enough for the
girl killer to brush his fingers down the back of my neck.

If he hadn’t
done that, I might have kept running. But the unintended gentleness
of that touch, the unwanted intimacy, was the straw that broke the
camel’s back. I leaped onto the sidewalk and turned to face him
head-on. I had one second to register that he was still wearing the
smirk on his rotten face, and then I slammed my fist into his nose
just like the hero in my favorite comic book:
Superman
.

His momentum added
to the force of the impact, which slid me backward a couple of feet
and made my fist go numb. He recoiled, lost his balance, and fell
on his ass. He sat there for a moment, dazed, and a trickle of
blood started from his nose. But then his eyes focused on me again,
and I could see what would have been apparent if I hadn’t been
fixated on that smirk of his.

Murder.

He sat up, but he
didn’t jump to his feet. He wasn’t going to rush into my second
punch, he was going to slide there like a snake, get in under my
defenses and grab my throat while I flailed helplessly at him,
getting weaker and weaker as he cut off my air. But I cocked my
fist and waited, because this confrontation was going to happen
later if it didn’t happen now. I had to make my stand.

He rose to a
half-crouch, with one hand still on the ground. But he couldn’t
seem to rise farther. Startled, he looked down. Something had
grabbed him by his wrist, something that emerged from the grass. It
had claws at the end of its fingers. They bloomed red with his
blood.

And suddenly
the ground beneath him was boiling with more claw-finger thingees,
way more than the sparse group that attacked me next to the field
at 75
^th
Avenue. He struggled like an animal
– but he couldn’t budge an inch, and they pulled him flat on his
back. That’s when things
really
got
hairy.

In a matter of
seconds, all I could see were flashing, red-stained claws moving
over a body-shaped spot on the ground. That shape quickly dissolved
into isolated patches. And then only the claw-finger thingees
remained. They stopped thrashing, spread their wet fingers toward
the stars as if in gratitude, then slid beneath the ground again,
pulling the patchy grass back into place.

He never even
screamed.

I stood on my
sidewalk, breathing heavily, my ears ringing. My hand began to
throb in time with my heartbeat. Each throb hurt a little more,
until it felt like my hand was swelling to ten times its normal
size. Superman’s hand never throbbed like that when he deflected a
runaway missile with his bare fist.

My sore paw was a
dose of reality in an otherwise dream-infested world. I had given
it the old college try, but I still wasn’t a superhero.

But as my breathing
grew less labored, my hand began to feel a little better, and I
could finally tear my eyes away from the wretched patch of earth
where the bad guy had met his doom. The stars blazed down on me
with renewed enthusiasm – and the neighborhoods around me, though
still familiar, looked less seedy, not so hopeless. I recalled that
when I had walked these streets as a kid, even in the brightest
light of day, I had always managed to find beauty there, even
mystery. Those qualities hadn’t been really obvious, but they
hadn’t been totally hidden either.

So – had my
disappointment drawn the Girl-killer, like a moth to the flame? Or
maybe the city of Night thought I needed a kick in the butt. But if
I had gotten my butt kicked, he had gotten chewed up and spit out –
literally.

Now there
must be an empty cell on Death Row, where the Girl-killer used to
be. Or had his Death-By-Claw-Finger-Thingees merely been the Night
World’s way of spitting out someone it didn’t like? Did it spit him
right back into that cell? And how did he get here in the first
place?
The City
of Night is manifesting your memories...

And he was one of
those memories, because I saw him every week when I went to buy
comics at the Super Gulp.

“Did you manage to
kill anyone while you were here?” I asked the patch where he used
to be.

“No,” said Voice,
once again making me jump.

But I was glad to
hear her again. “What did he do, then?”

“He just wandered
around. The only person he ever attacked was you. And you managed
to foil him with just a few words, which really pissed him off. So
that’s why he went looking for you again. Until you gave him
exactly what he deserved.”

I gazed at the
ground on which he had died, my hands on my hips. “I think the
local fauna get the credit for that. Or flora, whatever they
are.”

“Both, I think,”
said Voice. “By the way – did you notice your boobs are back?”

I looked down and –
glory of glories – my size Bs were back where they belonged.
“Hooray! I’m a grownup again! But why now?”

“I’m not actually
sure,” admitted Voice. “Maybe because you got fed up and took
charge of the situation. That’s a very grownup thing to do, even
when a kid does it.”

So here was my kick
in the butt. If I hadn’t mustered the anger to turn around and
punch the Girl-killer in the nose, I might be lying in some dark
corner with his hands wrapped around my throat, fighting for
breath. And maybe he really could have made it last forever. And
maybe no one else could have helped me out of that pickle, even if
they wanted to. The City of Night 2.0 had harsher rules.

“But what about the
pay-off?” I wondered. “I’m glad I earned my boobs back and
everything – but have I earned anything else?”

“I think there’s
still some stuff you have to do if you want to earn your place
here,” said Voice. “But even I’m not sure what that is, and I’ve
seen a lot in my time. By the way – have you guessed who I am
yet?”

“Um – “ I thought,
hard. Voice really seemed to expect me to know. I still sort of
suspected she might be a manifestation of my own subconscious, but
I wasn’t about to say that again. So who else could she be? Who
else would know me as well as she did? Suddenly a possibility
occurred to me that made my voice tremble as I asked, “you’re not –
my mom, are you?”

“
Your
mom
!?” she sounded incredulous.

“
Well,” I
backpedaled sheepishly, “I mean, like, the
ghost
of my mom – ?”

“
The
ghost
of your mom!? Do I even
sound
like your mom?”

“Well, no, but –
“

“
I’m going to
have to give you
way
broader hints,”
said Voice. “I promise, I’m not a ghost, I’m not your mom, I’m not
you or anyone in your family. Isn’t there
anyone
else I remind you of, at all?”