by Ilsa J. Bick
“Come on, Christian.” Sarah was laughing. She held the baseball bat in one hand, and now she trotted over and gave my arm a tug. “Your turn. Give it a whack.”
I tried begging off. “I’m really not very good at that kind of thing.”
“Come on,” she said, but her eyes were pleading and angry at the same time: Don’t be such a jerk, you were doing so well.
I shot a quick glance at the other kids waiting for me to get on with it already. Something Dr. Rainier said—or had it been Sarah—came back to me: Have you ever considered that you exclude yourself?
“Sure. Hand it over.” I let myself be blindfolded and then started taking shots at that piñata with the bat. At first people were egging me on, but then all the talk suddenly dried up, and I felt the air change. In the silence, I could hear the distant singsong of Mrs. Schoenberg talking to someone in the kitchen, a girl doing a breathy, very bad Mariah Carey imitation on the karaoke—and the sudden surge of the muttering in my head.
Oh no . . . I tugged off the blindfold and saw that everyone was staring at something behind me. I turned—and all the feeling in my body puddled at my ankles.
Karl Dekker was there. Curly and Larry or whoever flanked him. All three wore that weird mask and cape like that guy in Scream, only the glow-in-the-dark masks were pushed up on top of their heads. Trust me, the view wasn’t any better or less scary. Silhouetted against the orange flames from the fire, Dekker was a demon straight out of hell.
Dekker’s lips split in a wolfish grin. “Hey, Killer. Trick or treat.”
And, right then, I knew something else.
Daecher.
Dekker.
XXXIV
No one said anything. I just stood there, baseball bat in hand, my brain totally frozen. I felt like every bad thing I imagined might ever happen was standing right there, like a chemistry experiment where you distilled away all the crap and ended up with only one element. In this case, the element was Evil, and Evil was Dekker.
How hadn’t we heard them coming? This far out of town, they’d have to had ridden their motorcycles. Of course, none of that mattered now.
I became aware of a general shuffling. A quick glance over either shoulder and I saw that everyone else was edging away, trying to move to the relative safety of the house. Leaving me alone....
Except for Sarah. She moved up, a little behind and to my left. Shadows danced across her face. She said, “What do you want, Karl?”
“Not anything you haven’t given up before, but . . .” Dekker’s grin widened. “I just want to talk to Killer here.”
“Stop calling him that.”
“Oooh.” Dekker mimed fear, and I flashed to that moment at the school when I’d seen how his eyes slid over Sarah’s body, to the day he’d come to the barn and cut me with his knife. Really, it was all the same, a ghastly replay. I’d been here before, and I’d lost every time, and this was the third time. The last time.
Dekker said, “We got business, Killer and me. He ruined my bike, not once but twice. This is the first time I got a chance to talk to him.”
No, this was the first time in a long while I’d been away from town. Away from Uncle Hank. Away from the law. Every time he’d really come after me—not the garbage in the school yard, there would be too many witnesses—he’d done so where it would take time for anyone to show up and help. So he must already know that all these other people were no threat.
You want to be a man? This is the time.
I’d faced him down once before, at the school. I could do it again. I had to. There was no one who could do this for me.
I found my voice. “So . . . talk. I told you I’d fix it.”
“I know that. So how about right now? We go to my place, you get started; that way I can supervise.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you right now.”
“Whatsa matter? You afraid?”
I said nothing.
Dekker took a step closer. “Come on. I know you got a mouth on you. Come on, Killer, show off for Sarah the way you did before.”
“Leave her out of this,” I said.
“I don’t need protecting,” said Sarah, heatedly.
Dekker laughed. “Yeah, you’re a regular spitfire, aren’t you? Let me tell you, Killer, I know what Sarah’s like when she gets her blood up and she’s like a cat in he—”
Darting forward, Sarah slapped Dekker across the face with a sound like a pistol shot. “Shut up!” She was screaming and crying at the same time. “Just shut up, shut up, shut up!”
We were too stunned to say or do anything. A couple of Sarah’s friends took a few tentative steps toward her and then stopped.
Dekker said, “Sarah, you do that again, I’ll set your fucking house on fire.”
“Hey, come on.” Out of the group, one of the jocks said, “Come on, Dekker, leave them alone.”
“Okay, who’s the brave guy?” Dekker turned to glare at the group. His cape flowed around his body like black oil. “Come on, brave guy, you want to come out where I can see you? You want to say that to my face?”
No one volunteered. Gliding forward, Curly touched Dekker on the arm. “Easy, man.”
I said, “Listen, I’ll come tomorrow, first thing.”
“Tomorrow, I got to work. Someone’s got to work, right? Because of your old man, I ain’t got the luxury of worrying about homework or school or going to some fancy-ass college.”
In the house, the karaoke singing had stopped. The fire crackled. Sarah had stopped crying, though her face glistened.
Of course, the voices were still there.
Before I could respond, a pair of floodlights snapped on above the kitchen door, spilling a harsh yellow glare over the yard. The group of other kids suddenly reappeared, as if the house lights had come up in a dark theater, and then Mrs. Schoenberg was pushing out of the kitchen, onto the stoop, and then down the stairs.
“You boys get out of here now, you hear me?” She was still pretty far away, but I could see that she had a phone in hand. She strode across the yard, and then she was toe-to-toe, right in his face: “All I got to do is hit Talk and this’ll go to the sheriff, and you don’t want that, Karl. I’m not fooling. I am truly sorry if you think life has been unfair to you, but you reap as you sow. Now get off our property, and get out of my sight.”
Okay, I was impressed. This was one mom against three very bad guys.
There was a long moment where no one said anything— well, all except the muttering. Dekker stared down hard at Mrs. Schoenberg, who did not look away and most certainly didn’t back down.
He said, “Let me tell you something, Mama. You think your little girl is so wonderful? You think she’s so innocent?”
Sarah made a kind of broken sound, but Mrs. Schoenberg didn’t turn around. Instead, she said, very distinctly, “Karl, I am sorry you’ve been so hurt by life, but that’s no excuse to spread ruin wherever you go. Have mercy on others, and you might be surprised to find that they will have mercy on you.”
If she meant to shame him, I think she succeeded—maybe a little too well, in retrospect. People like Karl Dekker don’t bear shame well.
But at that moment, she seemed to have gotten through to him because Dekker suddenly turned to Curly and then Larry and then jerked his head. “Come on, let’s get the fuck out of here.”
They faded quickly into the darkness, moving fast for the front of the house, their black capes snapping behind. They rounded the far corner of the house, and a few moments later, I heard the roar of motorcycles growling to life. I remembered to take a breath.
“All right, everyone.” Mrs. Schoenberg turned to the rest of us. “I don’t see why this should break things up. You go—”
A sudden blast of engine roar split the air in a chain saw of sound, a racket that ruptured the night and rebounded off the trees as if the world were cracking apart at the seams. Someone just had time to scream, “HEY!”
I whirled.
De
kker and the others were on their bikes, racing over the yard, in a wedge like fighter pilots.
No one moved.
We were all stunned, immobilized for a split second too long as they bore down, and I realized they weren’t going to swerve. In the lead, the tip of the arrow, Dekker’s bike wasn’t just a machine. With those glowing lupine eyes and snarling teeth, Dekker’s bike was an engine of doom, a creature pulled from a nightmare . . . from the sideways place, and I had done that. I had given him the power. My fault, this was my fault....
That was also the moment I saw two things.
Dekker and the others had pulled those masks over their faces, maybe for effect, but mostly because they were from hell. Their faces glowed as if drawing fire from within. They were gleaming latex gargoyles as hideous as the ruin Hermann Woolfe had made of his own flesh.
And Dekker had something in his left hand.
A pipe, maybe, or a crowbar, I couldn’t tell. But I saw what he was going to do just as I had known what Woolfe would do an instant before he did. I knew, I saw . . . God help me, I saw, and I was as helpless in the flesh, in the here and now, as I’d been as a phantom in the past.
The voices were trying to claw their way out of my head. I didn’t know which was louder: the screams of the other kids or the gibberings of the things living in my head.
“No,” I whispered. “No, no. Stop. Please.”
Mrs. Schoenberg was closer to the house, standing where Dekker and his boys had been, and separated from the rest of us by a good thirty feet—and they went right for her.
“No, no, look out!” Now I started forward, but I was too far away and much too late. “Mrs. Schoenberg, look out, get out of the way, look out!”
“MOM!!” Sarah screamed at the same instant.
Mrs. Schoenberg reacted, but she was too late. Maybe she saw it coming, maybe not, or maybe she only sensed that something very, very bad was about to happen. She took a few stumbling steps to the left, toward the house, but Dekker anticipated her, and then he whizzed past. I never saw where the pipe hit her, but there was that awful unforgettable sound from the past—of metal smacking meat and bone—and then a hollow popping sound, like what you’d expect from a cantaloupe if you smash it against concrete. The impact lifted her a foot in the air as a fan of blood exploded in the harsh backlight from the house floods. Mrs. Schoenberg made a sound—UNGH!— and then she crashed to the ground. She lay on the grass, her arms and legs jittering, and I could see that her head . . . oh, her face ...
“NO!” Sarah was running for her mother. “Mom, MOM!!”
The other kids started screaming and shouting, and they broke apart, scattering like sheep as Dekker and the other two swooped and turned, pivoting sharply, tearing up clods of earth. I just stood there, and why they never mowed me down in that first pass, I’ll never know. Maybe they were just too focused on the chaos, or perhaps Dekker decided he needed to get rid of Mrs. Schoenberg first. I mean, you get right down to it, how better to shock the hell out of kids— even grown kids like us—than to show them that adults can’t protect them?
Dekker shot for the fire pit. Burning logs tumbled to the grass, some rolling to those dry hay bales, which caught fire almost at once. Sweeping up a flaming log, Dekker held it high as a torch and then sent it spinning and sailing toward the house—and the bales of hay and cornstalks heaped near the patio. The log buried itself in a square of hay, and an instant later, I smelled the sweet char of scorched alfalfa.
Sarah had reached her mother, who wasn’t moving anymore. “Help!” She was almost drowned out by the engine roar. “Help, someone, help!”
The fires were going in earnest now. Dekker’s two friends crisscrossed before the flames, their capes billowing, but I saw them pull up and turn at Sarah’s scream. Their headlights glared out of the darkness like eyes, and I knew they were looking at Mrs. Schoenberg because in the next second, they’d wheeled around and were streaking back for the road, fast.
Leaving only Dekker—who was more than bad enough.
I don’t know if anyone had the good sense to pull out a cell and call 911. I didn’t have a phone, but I did see what Sarah didn’t. Ten feet from her mother’s body, the phone Mrs. Schoenberg had been carrying gleamed orange in the grass.
To my left, I saw Dekker coming around for another pass and then the beam of Dekker’s headlight speared Sarah, and his motorcycle sprang forward. Pinned in a bubble of silver-white glare, Sarah’s skin was a ghastly, washed-out gray. Her shocked, uncomprehending eyes bulged, but she didn’t move.
But I finally, finally did.
“Sarah!” With a wild yell, I rushed forward, cocking the piñata bat I still held with my right hand. As Dekker screamed up, I chopped the bat with everything I had. I’d been aiming for that horrible mask, but either he’d seen me or some preternatural sixth sense warned him. He ducked, hunched up his shoulders, and suddenly decelerated, trying to plant a boot and spin away, but he was going too fast. In the next instant, the bat connected. The blow was solid, and Dekker screamed as he and the bike went crashing sideways, wiping out, skidding along the ground.
A white blaze of pain shuddered all the way to my shoulder. I screamed, lost my grip on the bat, and then it was a choice: the bat or. . .
No, not the bat. Instead, I scrambled for the phone, prayed that Mrs. Schoenberg hadn’t been bluffing like Sarah, and then heard the musical notes of the three numbers dialing and then a voice, the dispatcher: “Winter Sheriff’s Department 911, what—”
“Fire! The Schoenbergs! Send help, send an ambulance now!” Then I dropped the phone but left the connection open, hooked my hand under Sarah’s arm and hauled her to her feet. “Sarah, Sarah, come on, we got to go, we got to go now!”
“Wh-what?” Sarah was in shock. Closer to the house, there were screams and shouts, and she turned, saw the fire, and would’ve started that way if I hadn’t yanked her back. “What, what are you . . . No! Mom, Mom, I can’t leave . . .”
“FUCK!” It was Dekker, and I jerked around, saw him crawling out from under his bike, his hideous mask swinging in our direction, and then he was pointing, screaming: “You’re dead, you’re fucking DEAD . . . !”
“Come on!” And then I was running as fast as I could, dragging Sarah behind, sprinting for the woods. “Sarah, hurry, hurry, go, go!”
We plunged into the forest.
XXXV
The fiames devoured the hay, releasing pulsing orange light that throbbed against the forest dark. In a way, that helped us because there was no moon, no other way for me to see where we were going. But the fact that I could see something meant that we could be seen too. We wore dark clothing and that that we could be seen too. We wore dark clothing and that would help, but we had to get out of the light.
“This way.” I pulled Sarah to the left, angling us away from the fire. Here, the darkness was denser, thicker, and soon the woods swallowed us up. Branches whipped the bare skin of my face; snarls of brush clawed at my waist and legs.
“Cover your face,” I said to Sarah. I put my arm up to shield my eyes. The trees pressed around us, but I had only the vaguest sense of where they were and when they were coming up, the sense of something really solid hurtling out of the dark for my face.
My idea had been that Dekker couldn’t follow us in the woods, not on his bike anyway. He’d have to come on foot. If we could just get in far enough, then duck down and wait until the dispatcher got the fire department and Uncle Hank and the others out here, then we’d get out of this. We got maybe a hundred, two hundred yards farther in, and then I veered around a wide chunk of roots and clotted dirt and pulled Sarah down into a soft earthen bowl created when the tree had toppled. I had a fleeting thought back to Mosby and what he’d said about the difference between a depression made by felled trees and a grave, and I shivered.
The things you think about when you’re a hair’s breath away from getting yourself killed.
“We’ll wait here.” I barely heard mys
elf over the cacophony in my head—those voices that still clawed—but I forced myself to pitch my voice to a whisper. “Uncle Hank’ll get here soon. It’ll be okay.”
“N-noooo,” Sarah moaned. She was shaking. “Nooo, Mom ... Mom’s dead; they killed Mom....”
“Hey.” I wrapped her up, though my arms had begun to itch and burn with a familiar fire. Right, a lot of good that would do me now. Yeah, I had Witek’s brushes but nothing to really draw with, nothing to paint on, no paints . . . and what would I draw anyway? Sarah felt small, fragile as a baby bird as she huddled in my arms. “We don’t know that.... It’ll be okay, Sarah, it’ll be okay.”
God, I hated how I felt: helpless and scared, waiting for a rescue. Why couldn’t I do something? Anything? What good was I to anyone when it really counted? It was Mrs. Schoenberg who’d been the brave one, and when it mattered—when I’d had the chance to warn her—my stupid, stupid brain hadn’t registered the danger until too late. And what if Uncle Hank got here too late? What if Mrs. Schoenberg was already dead?
My arms were killing me. I tried clamping down on the itch. Useless, useless, useless, what could I possibly draw . . . ?
“Oh!” Sarah gasped. “Oh my God.”
Startled, I looked up. “Wha . . .” And then I thought: Oh no.
A shaft of blue-white light lanced the woods directly in front of us. The light swept right and then left, then right again in a search pattern: skimming the floor, sweeping up to the trees on either side.
“Killer.” Dekker’s voice was almost a singsong. “Hey, Killer, I know you’re out here. Come on out. Don’t make it worse on yourself now. Come out and I won’t hurt you.”
Sarah was trembling now, a bone-deep visceral shudder. I said nothing. I barely breathed. The inside of my head was going ape shit. My arms were on fire.
“You killed my bike.” Dekker’s voice was closer, the bob of his light was brighter, and I knew he would find us soon. Even as quiet as we were, it would be a miracle if he didn’t find us. Somehow he would know exactly where to look.
