A monster? Rain had no idea what Bethy had become. If she was a monster, Rain did not yet know what kind. She was sure, though, even deep inside her dream, that the dream was a true story. And that it had happened years ago. And that now the little girl was all grown up.
Rain groaned in her sleep. She reached under the covers and pulled Bug up to her chest, clinging to the small dog for dear life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The skateboarder scraped to a stop outside of the apartment building. This was one of the newer ones, with a well-lighted entrance, good locks on the heavy glass front door, and a video camera.
The boy smiled. He didn’t care about any of that.
He walked up the steps and paused for less than two minutes to pick the lock, then he slipped inside. It was a good lock, but he’d learned all about locks. About any kind of mechanism, really. Locks and clocks, those were his favorites.
The lock on the mailbox was a piece of cake, as it had been with the others. He opened it in twenty seconds. There were still letters there, which meant the man who lived here hadn’t picked up his Saturday mail. Good.
The boy shrugged out of the backpack, opened the flap, and sorted through the dozens of windup pocket watches to find the right one. The watches were of different sizes and made from different materials. Each had a small vial nestled in between pins, gears, cogs, and springs. The face of the clock was parchment yellow, with Roman numerals inlaid with onyx. The boy took a tiny key from a ring in his pocket, inserted it into the slot, and turned it very slowly and carefully until the hands were set at three minutes to midnight. Then he removed the key, held the clock to his lips, closed his eyes, and breathed on the crystal face.
Then he put the clock into the mailbox, closed the door, reengaged the lock, and went out into the night. He paused for a moment to glance up at the video camera. He smiled at it even though it did not, and could not, see him.
It wasn’t time for that kind of thing yet.
He kicked the skateboard down the steps, jumped down to land on it while it was rolling, and vanished into the night.
There was so much more work to do.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Around one o’clock, when she woke up to go to the bathroom—knife in hand and a ten-pound fierce hound at her heels—Rain saw something on the floor and bent to pick it up. It was the card the car driver had given her. Sticks. It must have fallen out of her pocket. Rain took it with her into the bathroom and dropped it in the trash can. While she sat on the toilet, her eyes kept cutting toward the trash. After she was done, she walked out of the bathroom, stopped, and turned around. Then she went back and fished the card out of the can and leaned against the doorframe, looking down at it.
The word safe kept echoing faintly in the back of her mind.
“Stupid,” she said aloud and threw the card back into the trash.
At 3:18 in the morning, she got out of bed, walked over to the bathroom, took the card out of the can, and carried it with her back to bed. She was asleep when she did this and in the morning was mildly—but not entirely—surprised to find the card on the nightstand.
Once she was in bed, though, Rain sank deep and fell into a dream. It was not more of the Bethy dream. No, this was different. This dream was about her.
She was on the dark side of Boundary Street, looking up the hill to where the bright lights glowed with promise. There was so much color up there, and it wasn’t cheesy ad-driven color like Times Square or gaudy trash color like Las Vegas. This was different. These lights always looked magical. Healthy, if that was a word that could be applied to artificial light.
Cars moved along Boundary Street, some cruising slowly and others going fast. There were motorcycles, too. A whole bunch of bikers rolled past, their engines growling like bears. She counted fifty bikes, all gleaming chrome and metallic reds and blues and greens. Most of the riders were guys with cutoff sleeves, extravagant beards, muscular arms inked with dragons and impossibly busty women and flaming skulls. Cliché stuff and some cruder art that Rain knew were prison tattoos. A few very tough-looking women rode with them, not as backseat luggage but on their own bikes, with their own colors and ink. They all wore the same emblem on the back, the silhouette of the Grim Reaper riding a chopped-down Harley, the scythe strapped across his back. The reaper’s bike rode atop a swirling tornado. In an arc above the image was the gang’s name—The Cyke-Lones. One of the riders, a really hunky guy with a shorter, neater beard and sunglasses despite the darkness, turned and looked at her. Even though Rain had never met him, or even heard of this club before, she knew his name. He called himself Boulevard Shark. It was a stupid name, she told herself, but she didn’t believe it. He was so insanely hot that Rain’s thighs rubbed and twisted together while she slept, because he reminded her of someone she knew back when she was using. She’d made it with that other guy a few times, and though he wasn’t really kind to her, he was less unkind than a lot of the other guys she knew.
The bikers thundered past and then, two by two, turned the corner. Not heading up toward the light but seeking the shadows on the wrong side of Boundary Street. Rain stood on the curb and watched them go, feeling the bass rumble of their engines behind her sternum.
Rain touched her chest and was surprised to realize that she still had the old reading glasses. She put them on and gasped. In the sliver of glass on the left lens formed by the crack, the colors around her were different. They were brighter, richer, and there were so many tones and shades that she couldn’t identify. In the dream, the number of primary colors expanded to include some that she knew she would never be able to remember or explain once she woke up. Also, she could hear the music better with the glasses on, as if seeing the light connected her to something bigger and more profound. The colors that filled the air and pushed back the shadows were part of the same thing as the music. And she realized that it was Music, not music. Capital M because it was a proper noun. A name of a living thing. This sound was completely and genuinely alive, and it owned its own name.
She stood on the dark side of Boundary Street and heard the Music roll down the hill and speak to her in its voice. It was so … aware of itself, as if ordinary music had been played so long, so well, with such insight and profound artistry that it had developed consciousness and identity. It made her smile and it made her tremble all the way down to the soles of her feet, as if her aching feet were begging to move.
To dance, as she used to dance.
And then Rain saw a figure standing in the shadows a dozen feet away.
Not the enemy. The boy.
He stood at the very edge of the spill of light. She could see his face and shirt and the scuffed toes of his sneakers. He was a beautiful little boy. Six, maybe. The same age he’d been on the train but younger than when she’d seen him on the street. With brown hair that was a mix of waves and curls, and brown eyes filled with sparks of gold. He was skinny, though. Way too thin. Starved. And in his dark eyes there was a haunted, desperate look. Rain’s heart ached for him. She wanted to take him out of those shadows, hold him, help him find …
Find what?
Home? His parents? What?
The boy smiled at her. Or tried to. He winced at the effort, and tears jeweled his eyes. His face was completely smooth, like porcelain, and in that moment, in a flash of insight, Rain knew that this boy did not know how to smile. He never had. Not once.
Not since that one horrible smile when the nurse licked it onto his face.
Rain knew the boy could not smile. She knew why. Because Doctor Nine stole all his smiles. That thought, unowned by any of her inner voices, came and went. It was an absurd notion, and yet Rain knew that it was absolutely true.
Suddenly, a long-fingered hand, white as bone, with nails like talons, reached out of the inky shadows and clamped hard on the boy’s shoulder. The grip was crushing, and those spiked nails curled downward into the tender flesh. The boy cried out in sudden pain, his knees buckling with ter
ror and a grimace cracking that porcelain face.
“Help me!” he shrieked—and then he was gone, jerked backward into the shadows, which twisted and boiled with unnatural shapes. Impossible shapes that were not at all human. The boy’s despairing wail tore through the air and then faded, faded, as if he were being dragged a long way back. Rain tried to run after him, but she was frozen to the spot, though whether by magic or terror or shock she couldn’t tell.
That cry drove a knife through her, and even as she stood there, gasping as if she had run, her heart pounding dangerously close to rupturing in her chest, she heard the echo fade.
Help me? Was that really what he said?
The echo faded from the night, but it was there inside her head. What he had screamed as he was taken was not two words but three, and it had been that last word, that single word that finally dropped her to her knees.
What he’d actually screamed was this …
Help me, Mommy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Rain woke with a screech that made Bug yelp in fear.
She sprang out of bed, fists balled in horror but ready to fight, eyes bugged wide, skin burning, heart jackhammering. Bug stood on the bed barking ferociously, turning to look for something to bite. Rain backed quickly away from the bed, retreating from it, fleeing from it, hating it for what it had just done to her. Those three terrible words haunted the air, burning in her ears and in her mind.
Help me, Mommy.
The boy’s eyes had been like those of beautiful lost Noah, whom they had to bury as charred bones in a box. Noah the soldier who hadn’t even known he was going to be a father. Noah, whose ghost probably haunted a desert on the other side of the world. This boy looked so much like him. The same eyes. Exactly the same.
Rain felt herself collapsing, first bending at the waist as if punched and then sinking to her knees on the cold floorboards.
“No,” she whispered. Begging the world and the lord of dreams to take away that sadistic set of images. She toppled forward, catching herself on her balled fists.
Her bed stood empty, the sheets and blankets rumpled and hanging down. Pale morning sunlight slanted through the window and trapped her in a yellow square on the floor. The sunlight was the warmest thing in the world, and Rain raised her head, lifting her face into it. She wanted to call someone, needed to tell someone, to anchor what had happened to the real world by sharing it. But who? Yo-Yo would freak out and would probably think herself justified to stage some kind of intervention for Rain. Who did that leave? Her parents made it pretty clear they were done with her, distrusting her latest attempt at recovery even though it had lasted this long. They never answered their phones, and Rain was certain they were screening their calls. It’s possible her number was even blocked. That was something Mom would do. Dad … who knows? He might call her back, but he’d want something for it. Besides, if she told them this, it would only convince them both that their judgments had been right all along.
No help there. No hope there.
Who else? Who did that leave? Her shrink would want to be paid for the patience he’d have to exert. Rain had no other friends beyond the Cracked World Society, and they had their own damage. And there was nobody in this building who gave a lukewarm shit about anyone else. The nice ones were all crazier than she was, and the rest orbited the real world at enough of a distance to avoid even casual collisions.
The sunlight was beautiful, and she closed her eyes. The face of the little boy was still there, but it was fading, like a picture on a subway wall as the train pulls away. Such a beautiful little face.
And Noah’s eyes looking out of Dylan’s face.
It took a lot for Rain to stand up. It cost her dearly to leave that square of sunlight and the warmth it afforded her. She did it, though; pushing with her fists against the floor like some ancient and ponderous statue flexing its heavy limbs as it came to life. It took that much effort. She stood for a moment, swaying on the edge of passing out. The room around her rocked like a tilt-a-whirl, but she kept her fists balled and set her jaw and demanded that it stop spinning.
It did. Reluctantly. Slowly.
The bedside clock told her that it was 6:57.
She called Joplin and got his voice mail. She left a quick message. “Call me!”
It sounded weak and needy, and she hated herself for leaving it. Then something occurred to her. A weird thought. When she trusted her feet enough to walk the few steps to the nightstand, she found that the card was there. She picked it up and looked at the name. Alexander Stickley. Sticks. Bug sniffed the card and wagged her tail. Rain tried to understand why, of all people in the world, she would call a guy who worked for a car service.
She called anyway.
Sticks answered on the third ring.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Yo-Yo is awake again, hours earlier than she planned. The dream won’t let her sleep in this morning.
There is a suffocating thickness to the darkness around her bed, and she wants, needs, must run from it. But she can’t. She knows that. You can’t run from some things. Not in the real world. Even Yo-Yo, the dreamer, knows that, has always known that, just as she knows that dreams are part of the real world. Well … these kinds of dreams are. There is sunlight on the other side of the blinds and curtains, but Yo-Yo is afraid of it. Sunlight shows the truth, and what if she could see her dream in that unflinching light? Would it force everything from her dream to be real? Would it open a door and let them walk right in, see her, own her?
She wants a weapon, a defense against the darkness and what it contains. A torch, pitchforks, a crowd of angry villagers to chase the monsters. In the pernicious darkness, she craves a weapon against her fear and what it wants to do to her.
There is only one.
A needle, a knife, a pen with which to cut her skin and let the corrupted wine of terror spill out onto paper.
In her alien darkness, Yo-Yo lets her fingers crawl along the floor beside her bed until they find the pen and the notebook. Hastily she snatches them off the floor and pulls them into the bed with her, against her chest, against the hammering of her heart.
The darkness is bigger now, thicker. It smells of old sweat and oily rags. She doesn’t turn on the bedside light, because she knows it offers no protection, even against the darkness. When you turn on the lights, the dark things just hide behind chairs and under the bed frame. They don’t really go away.
She holds the pen and pad to her like a sword and shield, and with them in her hands, her terrors take a small half step back.
Yo-Yo doesn’t need lights to write. Her hand knows the way; the pen point knows her notebook too well to need the path illuminated. The writing is the act of counterattack. Yo-Yo knows this. She has beaten back a thousand monsters with it and trapped them on the page. A stack of tattered and rubber-banded notebooks surround her bed like barbed wire.
In the dangerous dark, Yo-Yo writes. A poem. She may or may not ever read it. Knowing that she has written it is enough. Knowing that she has fought back is enough.
In the past, it has been enough.
Until now, it has been enough.
She writes.
Doctor Nine
Is as thin as a bone.
He is a scarecrow
From a blighted field.
He is handsome
In the same way
That a scythe
Is beautiful.
And he smiles
But he never
Ever
Laughs.
And he never
Ever
Laughs,
But he always
Smiles.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Sticks was already in the diner when Rain walked in, seated at a booth in the back.
It wasn’t the Diner, which always closed from midnight Saturday to seven on Sunday morning for cleaning. Rain had arranged to meet Sticks at American Dollar, which never closed, and certainly not for
a thorough cleaning. It was the quintessential greasy spoon, and it attracted a mixed crowd of graveyard shift cops, delivery truck drivers, and fringe dwellers who never seemed to be anywhere else except diners like these. Once in a while the priest from the women’s shelter was there in the morning, slipping Jack Daniels into his coffee and staring at nothing at all. Nobody else ever came here unless they had bad directions.
A pair of metal cuff crutches stood against the wall between Sticks’s booth and one of those claw machines that had an Out of Order sign on it and was filled with dusty stuffed toys.
“Pardon me if I don’t get up,” he said with a grin.
“Um, sure, no problem,” Rain said as she slid onto the cracked green vinyl seat across from him. “Thanks for meeting me. Sorry to call so early.”
“I was up,” he said, shrugging it off.
In the slightly yellow diner light, Sticks looked sickly and frail, and his burn scars were a darker red against the brown of his skin. He sat with his hands cupped around a mug of coffee that was softened by a tiny drop of milk.
A waitress appeared as if by magic. The name stitched over her left breast was Bernadette, and she wore pins shaped like wiener dogs.
“Getcha, hon?” she asked. Rain wondered if all diner waitresses were related. Or maybe they were fembots programmed with the same software and scripts.
“Um,” said Rain and cut a look at Sticks.
“I already ordered,” he said. “Short stack and crisp bacon.”
“Sounds good,” said Rain after a quick mental inventory of the cash in her purse. If she skipped lunch and had cereal for dinner, there was enough to cover his breakfast, too. Rain figured she owed it to him for meeting her.
The waitress went away, taking with her the scent of the kind of perfume they sold in gift packs at the drugstore. The kind that came with lotions and powders, all for under ten bucks. The kind kids gave their moms for Christmas and thought it was something special. Bernadette wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but that didn’t mean much. She could still have kids. It wasn’t likely she’d have bought that scent with her own money.
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