Prowlers: Wild Things

by Christopher Golden

  That was a problem, however, because that was not what they should have been thinking at all. What they really ought to have been thinking was, how many more of these freak accidents have to happen before someone around here's bright enough to start thinking maybe it's not a coincidence? Aren't two in a week enough to give even the rustiest minds a little intuitive oil?

  Molly gazed at the screen, almost numb as the reporter at the scene detailed how fortunate it was that the accident had happened in the wee hours of the morning when there were so few motorists on the road. That another trucker had radioed in the crash but wished to remain anonymous. I'll bet, Molly thought. That Marie Suzanne Robinson came from Wheeling, West Virginia, and was a divorced mother of two.

  That snapped Molly out of the daze she had been in. Suzanne had been a mother. Two children, both high school age, according to the news. And hadn't they worked fast to dig up this information on a woman who had been dead only hours?

  "Damn it," Molly whispered.

  She set the remote control down and moved over to sit just beside Jack. For a few seconds she stared at him, the innocence of his sleeping face in spite of the dark stubble on his chin. She ran her fingers across that rough growth and then her eyes flicked back to the television. The picture of Suzanne was back, and then it was gone, and a story about pumpkin carving contests had taken its place.

  Something curdled in her stomach.

  Molly reached out and shook Jack, whispering his name.

  "Hey, Jack, come on. Wake up."

  In her dreams, Eden Hirsch had hundreds of names, one for each of the lives she had lived over the course of forgotten millennia. Lorenza, Gwendolyn, Astrid, Johannes, Viktor, Collette . . . so many that she could never remember them all. In the landscape of her own sleeping mind, her steps took her through time, across the icy fields of thousand year old Russian winters and the sparkling spring nights of nineteenth century Paris, hot summers on the streets of ancient Rome and gentle autumn breezes across the Chesapeake Bay in the Roaring Twenties.

  Hundreds of names.

  Yet only one face. With each of her lives, the face that looked back at her from the mirror had changed, but in the dream world, that face was always the same. No matter the name, or the memories that spun and traced and molded her dreams like clay on a potter's wheel, she was Eden Hirsch now in body and soul, and that was the form she wore in her subconscious journeys.

  This dream took her to an island in Polynesia long centuries past. Her name was Muani and each day when her chores were done and the men of the village were fishing she would take long walks around the island to find a shaded, silent spot where she could sit and listen to the wind and the waves, enjoying the peace of this life and remembering the many others that had come before it.

  Muani sat now in her dream — in Eden's dream — beneath the trees atop a small hill that overlooked the cove where the villagers did most of their fishing. She could feel the breeze rustling through her long, dark hair and she closed her eyes for just a moment, tasting the heat and the salt on the air.

  "Beautiful."

  Her eyes opened and she glanced beside her. Artie Carroll sat with his back against a tree and his knees drawn up in front of him. He wore blue jeans and a hooded sweatshirt torn at the neck, and his sneakers were untied. The way his unruly blond hair fell nearly to his shoulders reminded her of another time, a Viking warrior she had known in another life, when she had worn another face and name. The warrior was called Ottar, and Artie had the same smile, the same glint of mischief in his eyes. It had occurred to Eden that the two might indeed be one and the same and Artie never know. Not all souls returned, and of those that did, few remembered.

  When her name had been Roskva, she had loved Ottar.

  "It is beautiful, isn't it? I never know where my dreams will take me, and yet somehow I often find myself drifting back here."

  Artie grinned. "I'm not surprised. Even when we can't consciously control it, I think our minds are always dragging us back to the things we long for." An expression of surprise appeared upon his face and then he shrugged. "Not that I want to get all philosophical."

  "There's nothing wrong with philosophy, Artie. Each of us spends our lives developing our own. It's how we learn to understand things."

  He reached out to her and her dream shifted just enough so that they might be close enough to touch. Hands brushed close by and there seemed a moment when she grabbed at nothing. Then their fingers intertwined and Eden uttered a tiny gasp. She could feel his skin upon hers. It was only illusion, she knew. In her mind — perhaps in both of their minds — but it felt real.

  Artie felt it too, for his eyes widened and then he laughed. "That's new."

  "Yes," she agreed, gazing at him. "It must be you. Your focus."

  "I'm not doing anything."

  "No, but Seth was never able to touch me."

  They fell silent then, there on her dream island. Seth had been her spirit guide over the course of many of her lives, a friend from the distant past with whom she had lingered in the Ghostlands, the afterlife, before she had been reborn. Seth had not come back, but he had stayed with her as a spirit, visiting her in her dreams until she had died again. And again. And again.

  Seth was gone now, but almost as though fate had played a role in it, the very night she had lost her old friend, she had met Artie. Somehow her frequent reincarnation had blurred the border between her dreams and the Ghostlands, and spirits could pass back and forth. Artie had begun to visit her in her dreams and Eden welcomed him. He was sweet and funny and lonely, and he was dead. Without a spirit guide to connect her to the Ghostlands, Eden would have felt lost in the flesh world. Artie kept an eye out on those he had loved when he was alive, but now Eden provided him with a vital tether.

  The hot breeze blew and they smiled at one another.

  "Eden," he said.

  "Muani," she corrected. "It's Muani here."

  "Muani. This is pretty cool."

  "Yes. It really is."

  They found themselves then sitting side by side, backs to the same thick tree. Birdsong filled the air and the surf crashed on the shore below the hill. Eden felt the warm pressure of his hand in hers and she squeezed. Artie squeezed back.

  The phone rang.

  Eden woke with a frown knitting her brows. Dawn splashed across the foot of her bed. Outside the window was a golden morning, the sky brightening with each passing moment. The phone rang again and Eden sat up, the tangled mess of her dark curls falling down around her face, across her eyes. With the third ring, she stretched and yawned and blinked her eyes, coming fully awake at last. A sadness swept through her and she glanced around her elegant bedroom.

  "Sorry," she whispered to the empty room.

  Halfway into the fourth ring, she picked up the phone and lay back onto her pillow.

  "It is awfully early," she said.

  "I know, Eden, and I'm sorry if I woke you up."

  She knew the voice right away. "Jack."

  "Yeah. Listen, Molly and I are in New York in this little town called Fairbrook. It's off Route 87, a little north of —"

  "I know where it is," she said, stifling another yawn. "I used to live not far from there."

  There was a pause on the other end of the line before Jack went on. "You did? When was that?"

  "Turn of the century. It was nice back then. I remember the Wild West Show came through in aught-one. That was something else. Truly a marvel, even by today's standards."

  "Wow," Jack said, and she could tell by the tone of his voice that he meant it.

  Eden smiled. Though she knew Jack's heart belonged to Molly, there were very few people in her life with whom she could speak so freely about her past. It was nice.

  "Stories for another time, Jack. I suppose you're calling for Artie."

  "Yes. If he's around. We're trying to track down a pack in this area and we could really use his help."

  Eden flexed the fingers of her left hand. It sti
ll felt warm where Artie's ghost had touched her. The sensation was nice, but also bittersweet, for it was only in her dreams that she could see him, feel his touch, and she had a life to live. Her response to Jack then was tinged with sadness, for if Artie were to go she did not know how long he would be gone, how many dreams she would have without him. She would miss him. Still, in life, Jack and Molly had been the people Artie cared about more than anyone else in the world.

  "I'll pass it on," she said. "Good luck."

  Jack thanked her and they said their goodbyes. As Eden hung up the phone, she gazed again around the empty room, at the hand-painted Carnival masks and framed pages of hundred and fifty year old fashion magazines that hung on the walls. Antique perfume bottles lined her bureau, and a silk gown hung on the back of her door. Her things. Her place.

  With a short, resigned sigh, she spoke to that room, to the ghost of a young man she had become quite fond of. His friends needed him, she said, and she explained where he could find them. For a moment, her hand tingled with warmth again and she felt a breeze caress her cheek though no window was open.

  Then the room seemed even emptier than before.

  The Blueberry Diner was a sight to behold. Though only the jutting flagpole of a sign was visible from the highway, the place was a stone's throw from the Hollingsworth exit ramp. With its vast, cracked parking lot lined with trucks and the row of windows along its face, the diner would have been interchangeable with hundreds of others if not for the paint job that gave the Blueberry its name. The entire building had been adorned with several coats of blueish-purple paint that gleamed wetly in the sun.

  "Wow," Jack said in honest admiration as he pulled the Jeep into the lot. "That's blue all right."

  "Oh, yes," Molly agreed. "Sort of purple too, but all in all, I'm not sure I've ever seen anything so blue."

  They both stared at the place in amazement as Jack parked amongst the handful of cars in front of the Blueberry, a half dozen or so vehicles that were dwarfed by the tractor-trailers, and which Jack suspected were owned by the employees of the diner. Nobody hauled electronics components in Ford station wagons as far as he knew.

  "What was it that guy said yesterday?" Molly asked him as she got out of the Jeep. "The guy with the crewcut?"

  "That we should talk to Max, because he knows everyone."

  "No, no," Molly said, waving the words away as if they were annoying gnats. "I mean about breakfast. What did he say was good here?"

  Surprised, Jack glanced at her. "Where did that girl go? The one who woke me up because she was so freaked about that lady trucker getting killed?"

  A hurt look flickered across Molly's features. "Don't do that, even kidding. I know why we're here, Jack, but we also have to eat breakfast."

  "Hey," he said softly, slipping an arm around her. "None of this is fun. I was teasing, yeah, but I'm also glad you can think about something else. And it was French toast, I think. The guy with the crew said the French toast was good."

  Jack pulled the door open for her. Molly surprised him with a kiss on the cheek and then grabbed his hand and they went into the Blueberry Diner together.

  Jack was more than a little relieved to find that whatever mad diner genius had lathered the exterior of the building in gaudy berry color had been stopped before reaching the interior. Inside, the Blueberry was mundane, a simple arrangement of counter, stools and booths that had been an unchanged formula for fifty years or more. Four of the dozen or so booths were occupied, as were about half the stools. Normally Jack would have opted for a booth but aside from breakfast, their purpose in coming here was to meet Max, the counterman mentioned by the jarhead the night before.

  As they crossed to the counter and slid onto a pair of stools, heads turned. Jack knew that he wasn't the only person who found Molly attractive. Her hair alone, that wild red mane that she could barely control, was enough to draw stares. But the attention they were getting just then was for both of them, not just her, and he supposed it was natural enough for the people in the diner to be curious. He felt as though he was wearing a sign around his neck that said NOT A TRUCK DRIVER.

  Once they had settled in at the counter and picked up menus, the truckers all went back to their breakfast and conversation. Jack glanced at Molly and gave her a smile with just the corner of his mouth.

  A waitress in blue jeans and a white blouse hustled a tray to one of the booths. She was a thin woman who looked almost too frail to balance such a heavy tray. Over her clothes was draped an apron the same screaming purple-blue as the diner's outer walls, but someone had taken it one step further. On the front of the apron, inside a white border, was a big blueberry with a face and arms and legs and a lunatic's grin. Jack thought it looked like an octopus — like an old cartoon character called Squiddly Diddly, in fact — but he supposed it must be a blueberry.

  The waitress slid dishes of Eggs Benedict and sausages and pancakes onto the table, along with another plate piled high with an unrecognizable heap of food he suspected must be what the menu identified as the "trashcan special." She called everyone "hon'" as though she had been brought in from Hollywood's central casting to play the gum-snapping, tough gal local waitress. What ruined that impression was the fact that she was not visibly chewing gum, as well as the light in her eyes and the laugh that seemed about to burst out at any moment, as though she knew all her "hons" and "sweeties" were expected of her, and she was in on the joke.

  Down along the counter, a grizzled looking fiftyish guy was pouring coffee for a sad-eyed, dough-faced trucker who didn't look much older than Jack himself. The counterman had a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair and a mustache to match, and he had not bothered to shave for the previous day or so. His apron was white, and Jack had the idea that he would not have worn the maniac octopus-blueberry apron even if someone held a gun to his head.

  Jack caught his eye and the counterman brightened and strolled over, passing an obscene pleasantry with a coffee-skinned man who clutched a cigarette in his teeth and looked more than a little like the actor Laurence Fishburne. With his laughter still echoing, he zeroed in on them.

  "So what can I get you folks?"

  "I'll have French toast," Molly said immediately. "Orange juice, hash browns, and bacon."

  "Hungry," the counterman said appreciatively. "That's the way we like 'em." He focused on Jack. "What about you?"

  "I'll have the French toast too. We heard it was something special."

  The counterman scraped a hand across his bristly chin and studied them a bit more closely. "You did, didja? We don't get a lot of tourists in the Blueberry, mostly long-haul folks. I'm glad someone around here appreciates us."

  "Actually, it wasn't anybody local," Jack explained. "It was a truck driver. Guy with a crewcut. We met him last night. He was with a few other people, these two brothers, Dave and Hank . . . what was it? Cross, maybe."

  "Krause," Molly corrected.

  The counterman beamed at her and Jack knew it was time for him to keep quiet. He figured they had a much better chance of this guy opening up if Molly did the talking.

  "Dave!" the man said happily. "Hell of a guy. Then the crewcut had to be John Ford. Ford always gets the French toast. He has it with berries, though, if he didn't mention it. Sort of our specialty."

  "Why didn't I guess that?" Molly teased. Then the smile disappeared from her face. "There was a woman with them. Suzanne. We saw on the news this morning . . ."

  Her words trailed off as the counterman began to nod sadly. "Saw that myself. A terrible shame. We were all just stunned in here." Then his eyes widened and he pointed at them. "Wait, you know what? The Krause boys were in here last night and I think they mentioned you two. You're the ones related to the Wilkes boy."

  Jack stiffened, a bit taken aback by the man's knowledge of them. But Molly only smiled again.

  "You must be Max," she said.

  Max's eyebrows went up. "I'm famous now?"

  "Your friend John told us you know e
veryone. I guess he thought maybe you'd heard something that might help us figure out what happened to my cousin." Jack lowered his voice and leaned in a bit. "I've heard about some other things that have happened, about this couple, the Rausches, who were killed, and a trucker just last week, Chester Douglas."

  "Yeah, poor Chet. First him and now Suzanne. Been a hell of a month so far," Max said grimly, real anguish in his eyes. "I wish I could help you folks, I really do. I know the stories, of course. Heard about your young cousin and that married couple, and plenty of others in the years I've been working this counter. Bad things happen on the highway, just a fact of life. World wasn't like this when I was a boy.

  "Truth be told, every trucker comes through here has a story or a theory. Serial killers, alien abductions, monsters, hoaxes, Bigfoot . . . you name it. Hell, half of the drivers blame the media for blowing things out of proportion, making things seem worse than they are. Planes and trains and boats and cars, there are always accidents, right? But long-haul truckers, that's a story. Still, you get two in a week like we've got here, makes you think."

  Jack nodded, but he was barely paying attention now. Given how secretive, even worried, the jarhead had seemed the night before, he had held out a hope that Max would be able to give them a lead, no matter how slim. But the man had nothing. Just rumor, the same way Jack figured the bartender at the roadhouse in Fairbrook would have. This place was a dead end. If he wasn't so hungry, he might have simply got up and left.

  Max scribbled their order on a pad and ripped the sheet off, then turned and slid it through a window to the kitchen where the cook would grab it. He snatched a plate of sausage and eggs off the shelf and placed it in front of the guy with the Laurence Fishburne intensity. Then, as though it were an afterthought, Max glanced back at them.

  "Kind of surprised you ran into those folks last night though," he said.