by T Paulin
Valentine rang the doorbell and smiled warmly in anticipation of the door opening. Nobody came.
She rang the doorbell again. And again.
Eventually, a woman opened the door. Presumably Joey’s mother, she had the same big, sad eyes as the kid. Her hair looked oily and was matted in clumps. Valentine introduced the three of them and shook the woman’s hand.
Joey’s mother had the same dead-eyed, vacant stare as a Crasher. When she dim-wittedly turned and offered her hand to Eli, he fought his revulsion and shook it politely.
“My name is Eli,” he said.
“Elliot,” the woman said. “Elephant. You’re the elephant. Elouise. Elizabeth. L-M-N-O-P.”
Joey appeared and pushed her back behind him. “Mom!”
She stumbled backward, into the house. From what Eli could see from the doorway, the home’s interior was very different from the other houses on the street, but not in layout. The front hall and living room were full of cardboard boxes, discarded clothes, and dirty dishes. He’d seen hoarding before, but the shocking thing about this home, besides it being real and not on his TV or computer screen, was the massive network of cables and wires criss-crossing the upper third of the room. Joey’s mother must have had to duck to get to the front door.
The house made Eli feel alert. It smelled bad, but that was expected. There was something else, something he couldn’t see or smell or hear, but could feel in his bone marrow. The feeling was not painful, nor was it unpleasant.
If he had to describe this feeling in comparison to something common and everyday, he’d say it was the feeling he got in the instant after logging into his computer accounts, before his new messages came up on the screen, appearing in bold text to show they were still unread, still full of possibility. It was enthrallment.
Eli’s feet stayed in their laced-up black and white weekend shoes, planted on the front step, but his body leaned forward. He leaned toward the home’s open doorway like a seedling snaking toward a sunny window.
The acrid smell of an unwashed person in movement pushed him back again.
Joey’s mother crouched down in front of her son and patted his hair. “You have fun, James.”
“I’m Joey, Mom.”
“Joey Mom,” she repeated, her voice robotic.
Eli glanced to check the reactions of the Hart siblings. They both seemed as horrified as he felt. There was something very wrong in this house, and it was wrong inside Joey’s mother’s head.
Khan leaned into the house, and this small motion seemed to trip an invisible security alarm. A dog began barking inside the house, the yips muffled by a closed door. All around the neighborhood, other dogs joined in the chorus of angry barking.
“Let’s go,” Joey said. He pushed his mother back two steps so he could close the door, then ran down the front steps toward the van. He had a child-sized backpack slung over one shoulder—a backpack Eli hoped was full of snacks and toys for the day, and not his favorite things to run away from home with. Eli had meant what he said to Brenda about not adopting this kid, but his resolve was weakening by the minute.
The three of them followed Joey and got into the van, where Valentine helped him with his seatbelt on the bench seat next to her.
He grabbed her tablet and started asking questions about it, beginning with what games she played.
Eli started the van’s engine, but didn’t drive away immediately. He took another good look up and down the street. It was noon on a Sunday, and people were mowing lawns, weeding front gardens, and walking their tiny dogs. Eli had never lived in the suburbs, but he knew this was typical weekend behavior. The local residents all stared at the van in suspicion, but that wasn’t surprising, considering their recent involvement with the local poltergeists.
Movement in an upstairs window of Joey’s house caught Eli’s attention. The chihuahua, Nigel, was visible in the window, perched precariously on the back of a chair so he could see out. By the look of his bugged-out eyes and the spit flying from his snarling mouth, he was not happy about Joey leaving with them.
Eli felt sorry for the dog, but not sorry enough to suggest bringing the little yapper with them.
Chapter Eleven
The Renn Faire was being held in a city park where it wasn’t unusual to see people doing fire-breathing tricks on non-Renn Faire weekends. The usual assortment of dreadlocked musicians were around, looking accusingly at the short-haired suburban families who’d invaded for the day.
Few people looked twice at the four of them, except for some mothers who noticed Joey’s grime level.
Valentine leaned over and said quietly to Eli, “We need to hose down this kid. You get him into that water park over there and I’ll go buy him some clean, dry clothes.”
Eli agreed to the plan, and loudly suggested the guys head over to the park’s interactive water feature.
Khan rubbed his stomach. “I’ll go do some recon on those food smells. You boys have fun splashing around.”
Khan headed off toward the food trucks while Eli led Joey over to the water park, where toddlers ran squealing through the sprinklers and teenagers huddled nearby, pretending they didn’t want to do the same.
Joey was reluctant to take off his shoes and shirt to play with the other kids, until Eli took off everything but his jeans and jumped into the fray.
Within minutes, he had not just Joey soaked, but half the kids in attendance. A dozen of the less angsty teenagers even jumped into the fun. Parents stood just outside the splash zone and watched as Eli play-fought over the free-spray hose, then gave the smaller kids shoulder rides.
He had just swung a dripping wet and squealing Joey around in a circle and set him down when he noticed a number of mothers were watching him, Eli, and not their kids.
He looked down to see what had the women’s attention, and noticed his well-defined abdominal muscles. They were extra defined today, thanks to the subtle brown shading of Brenda’s makeup. A giggling girl asked him for a shoulder ride. He suddenly realized the teens that had joined him in the water were all females, with soaking wet tops.
With an embarrassed gasp, he ran for his folded clothes at the perimeter and quickly donned his red T-shirt. He’d meant to scrub off the brown makeup before leaving the apartment, but Brenda had demanded access to the washroom and rushed him out. On a typical day, Eli didn’t remove his shirt in public, so he hadn’t anticipated any problems.
Valentine stood at the splash perimeter with dry clothes for Joey in her hands. “Nice abs,” she said to Eli.
He thanked her and tugged on his shoes and socks without meeting her eyes. Did she really mean he had nice abs? Or was she letting him know that she knew they were mostly drawn on? She couldn’t know, he told himself. Who would even notice that the shadows on someone’s abs didn’t obey the laws of physics and shift with the ab-owner’s relative angle to the sun?
A genius.
A genius would notice such a thing.
Eli laced up his shoes and tried to remain calm. His wet jeans clung to him accusingly. He could feel heat in his cheeks from blushing. Stay calm, he told himself. According to Khan, people could spontaneously combust from embarrassment. Just because it hadn’t happened to Eli before didn’t mean spontaneous combustion wasn’t a danger, every moment of every day.
“What about me?” Joey asked brightly. Shirtless and soaking wet, he flexed his small biceps and posed like a miniature body builder.
“You have great abs, too, Joey.”
“One day I’ll be big like Eli, and I’ll come work with you guys.”
“We’ll see about that. Look what I bought you. It’s a red T-shirt so you can match with Eli.” She held out the clothes. “Well, it’s actually tie-dyed, so it’s red and blue and yellow, but that’s even better, right?”
Joey was so excited, his words came out in an excited jumble of sounds, making him sound like a little dog barking.
Valentine laughed, and it was a new type of laugh Eli hadn’t he
ard before. It wasn’t the mean laugh she shared with Khan over one of their pranks, but a genuinely joyful laugh, innocent and free.
It was the kind of laugh that echoes around in your head for a while, making you smile and smile.
A knight in armor walked by just then, and Eli’s smile grew bigger. As he stared at the metal components, his mind flitted to a fantasy of owning a workshop and making his own armor. His embarrassment over the fake six-pack muscles disappeared, the memory not to resurface again for several hours.
As they walked around in the warm sunshine, Eli’s wet jeans dried unevenly, with the section over his thighs turning soft and pliant almost immediately while the waistband and crotch squeaked for hours.
They watched the jousting performances, cheering on the participants as they raced at each other with pointed weaponry. The people jousting were not on horseback, so the damage inflicted was minimal, but Eli still winced whenever someone went down hard.
There was only one horse at the event, a mellow piebald Appaloosa with one blue eye. The horse was being ridden around by a woman in a loose-fitting tunic, who stopped to admire Joey in his tie-dye shirt and colorful cotton pants. She slid off the horse’s bare back and offered the boy a ride.
Joey looked to Eli for permission and encouragement.
“Go for it,” Eli said, and helped the young woman boost Joey onto the horse’s back.
The woman led the horse away, and Eli panicked for an instant, thinking this was an elaborate kidnapping plot, but then they didn’t go far. He felt silly for being such a worry-wart, but proud that he was learning new things about life. Raising a kid was stressful, but you got to see your favorite things through new eyes, so it balanced out.
Eli grinned, waved, and snapped photos of Joey on the horse. He always did love horses, and seeing Joey take his first-ever horse ride filled Eli’s heart with an enormous squishy feeling.
Next to the horse ride, Joey’s favorite part of the Renn Faire was the armor and weaponry.
“I want to buy something,” Joey said.
“Sure,” Eli said. “I’ll buy you something small. Do you want one of these pouches?” He leaned over a table of leather wallets and bags, all embossed with intricate Celtic designs. The scent of the tanned leather was masculine, like aftershave, and intoxicating.
“I have my own money,” Joey said. “See?”
He held a fist full of bills over the leather goods. It was more than the typical kid’s allowance of a few bucks. In fact, Eli quickly assessed that Joey could buy the next round of deep-fried Renn Faire food, given that he had several thousand dollars in bills.
Eli covered Joey’s small hand with his own and looked around nervously. “Don’t let people see you with that,” he said in a hushed voice. “And what’s an eight-year old doing with that much money? Did you rob a bank or something?”
“My mom’s job pays really good, so she raised my allowance. She keeps giving me money and telling me to go do stuff by myself so she can work her overtime. But there aren’t very many stores by our house, and I’m too small to drive the car. I tried, but my feet can’t reach the pedals.”
Eli knelt in front of Joey so he could look him in the eyes.
“Promise you won’t try to drive the car again,” Eli said. “That’s dangerous. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“But I get bored.”
“I used to get bored too, when I was your age.”
“What did you do?”
“I stayed bored, and then I grew up and got a boring job. That’s life.”
Joey frowned. “I don’t want to get bigger.”
“It’s not all bad. I just got my bedtime extended by half an hour. And I had that boring job for a while, but now I have a good job, working with Khan and Valentine.”
“I want to work with you. I could be your helper.”
Eli smiled. In all the fun of the day, he’d nearly forgotten his plan to do detective work, but he remembered now. This could be a chance to find out what information Joey had.
“How could you help us?” Eli asked. “What do you know about the poltergeists? What special skills do you have?”
Joey shrugged and stuck his baby finger in his nostril.
“Do you see ghosts?” Eli asked. “Or talk to them?”
The kid gave him a blank look and lodged his baby finger deeper into a crusty nostril.
“Great,” Eli said glumly. “Your only special skill is digging for gold in the nostril mines.”
Joey laughed, just like a normal kid who’d been taken out for a day of fun.
So much for figuring out the neighborhood’s mystery easily, Eli thought.
Joey patted the pants pocket where he’d stuffed the money. “I’ll buy something for us to play with,” he said. “Something good.”
“Okay, but let me do the purchasing for you. Don’t show anyone that money.” He glanced around to see who might overhear them. The coast was clear. “Especially don’t show Khan that money.”
Joey’s eyes widened. “He likes money even more than my mom does.”
“He sure does.” Eli got to his feet and turned back to the table of leather goods. “Do you think my girlfriend would like one of these purses?”
Joey laughed even harder than he had at the nostril-mining joke. “You don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Do too.”
“Do not.”
Eli spent the next half hour browsing the leather goods and trying to convince Joey he did have a girlfriend. He bought Brenda a coin purse with a celtic cat design stamped into the black leather.
She wouldn’t use the coin purse, but he bought it mainly for the yellowed brochure it came with, which had a creepy illustration of a black cat with a patch of white on its chest, along with the Legend of the Cat Sith. The ornate typeface used for the text was almost illegible, but Eli thought Brenda would find it sweet he’d been thinking of her. He was being sweet. He imagined Brenda mentioning his blossoming sensitivity, and nearly cancelled the transaction in irritation, but his password had already gone through on the hand-held card swiper.
Joey wasn’t interested in buying anything leather, so they left and met up with Khan and Valentine at a booth for hand-made chainmail. Two people were twisting wire in a live demonstration, and their handiwork was displayed on mannequins as well as live models.
Khan couldn’t take his eyes off an attractive blonde model, wandering through the crowd displaying a chainmail bikini. Even Joey’s eyes bugged out at the sight of her, making him resemble Nigel, his chihuahua.
“Chainmail is awesome,” Khan said for the tenth time.
“She’s for display only,” Valentine said to her brother. “Wipe that drool off your chin.”
“You have to admire the craftsmanship,” Khan said.
“Very impressive,” Eli said in agreement.
“No, you have to admire it. Up close. Excuse me for a minute.” Khan cleared his throat, rolled back his shoulders, and walked toward the blonde in the chainmail bikini.
“Now that’s craftsmanship,” Valentine said breathily. “Not the girl. Look over there.”
Eli followed her unwavering gaze to a shirtless, muscular man posing for photos with a sword in one hand and a shield in the other. The shadows of his abdominal muscles seemed accurate enough.
“Nice shield,” Eli said.
Valentine sighed. “What shield?”
Joey tugged on Eli’s hand. “Can I go over there for a minute?”
“Sure, little man. Are you hungry again? You know, you don’t have to eat sugar and deep-fried things then throw up in a trash can, but I can’t say it’s not part of the magic of a Renn Faire to cram food down your hole until your tummy says reboot.”
Valentine let out her joyful laugh again. “Your tummy says reboot?”
“When it gets too boogity, yeah.”
“Boogity.” Valentine laughed again, and Eli
didn’t notice Joey slipping away from them.
Someone tapped on Eli’s shoulder.
He turned around, expecting to see Khan there with a big grin and a bikini model, but the man standing behind him wasn’t Khan.
The rest of the world blurred around Eli, allowing him to focus only on the person before him.
He hadn’t seen him since high school, and the last he’d heard, the bully was serving time in jail. But that must have been untrue.
Unless he had a twin, the man standing in front of Eli Carter was the criminally cruel Falcon Devereaux.
He was eating cotton candy.
Chapter Twelve
“Eli Carter. I thought it was you,” Falcon said.
In the shock of the moment, Eli could scarcely breathe, let alone speak. He fought an internal battle, feeling more awful by the second. After a week of paranormal battles, and feeling like a hero, he was back to his cowardly ways. Falcon, the guy who had made life hell in high school, stood before him now, and Eli could do nothing.
They hadn’t seen each other for over a decade, but all that time compressed as Eli stared into Falcon’s deep, dark eyes. He’d gained some weight and filled out, so his cheeks were no longer gaunt, but he still had that look. Hunger. Malice.
Eli winced, his eyes stinging as he remembered the shame. Falcon convinced him to go into the Zone that night, where they’d shattered the spirit of another boy, Mike. Eli let down his father that night, and even though he’d allowed some forgiveness to throw light into that dark memory, there was still shame. Still pain.
“How long’s it been, anyway?” Falcon grinned, like a regular person who wasn’t a sociopath might grin upon running into an old friend.
“About ten years,” Eli croaked.
“You haven’t changed a bit,” Falcon said jovially. Eli tore his gaze from the man’s darkly hypnotic eyes and looked him over. His black, glossy hair was long on top and slicked back, the way he’d always worn it. His hairline had receded about half an inch at the temples, but still arched down into a widow’s peak. Falcon could have played Dracula every year for Halloween, if he was the sort of kid who put on costumes, rather than the sort of kid who set things on fire.
