The two ascended from the basement after he came to get her and they emerged into the back yard at the kitchen door.
The air was amicable, holding only a small, open palm of frigid air from the west. The sky was a dim blue near the horizon, intensifying to full-out electricity at the peak of its dome. Sebastion’s gaze came from that spot downwards to settle on his childhood playground—the massive yard where his life was lived for years and years. Under the trampled snow was the lawn, brown and dead now, but lush and satin green in his memory. All around were the shrubs and trees, his castles, the homes of his invented stories and adventures. On quiet afternoons, when there were no adventures to be played out, he would sit in the middle of the yard and listen to birds chirp from the furthest corners in all directions. If he closed his eyes the sounds would filter through him at intervals. One set of chirps to his right, behind him followed by another to his left in front. They would seem to be traveling inside him and the sounds always made his ears warm.
To his right was the trunk of the oak tree which extended into the sky and became a bulb of contored arms that towered over the white-stucco bungalow. It could be seen from blocks away. He discovered again the low, thick bough where a tire used to hang from a length of stiff, weathered rope and he re-witnessed the limb where Oliverthecrow would always perch before jumping into the sky again. The dark feathers on the back of the bird’s neck used to shine in moonlight—
“Trying to memorize it?” Malin was leaning close to him with the interior of her shoulder resting against his and her voice was soft. Her nose and cheeks stood out in pink from the cold. He felt warm breath on his ear lobe. And there was lavender and rain from her hair. But he didn’t answer.
She said that everyone makes the mistake, when they want to memorize something—commit it to eternal memory—of staring at it for hours and endless hours. “Try blinking backwards,” she said, “Take a short, less-than-a-second glimpse of what you want to hold onto. Then shut your eyes tight. In the blackness you’ll see it clearer than if you stared at it for a year.
“Practicing psychologists use that. Helps the patient to see.”
“Oh, so now I am a patient of yours?”
“I would never call you patient.”
Zeb threw back his head and laughed. Sometimes, speaking to Malin made him feel like he was lying in the shallow side of an especially deep pool.
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Dad traded in his sedan for a coupe last year. Zeb wondered if maybe, after a while, staring at those numbers for years and years, they finally made it clear when the end would come. Not so much that they spelled out the date and time when you were going to breathe your last, but perhaps there came a sighing whisper on the computer monitor or on a ream of printed reports that said, Hey, time is growing short. Time for the Last Hoorah. Time for the last Goodbye March—pay up and get out.
A ridiculously powerful creature, the coupe was a silver and black BMW 330Ci, one Zeb had only driven a few times. He had gotten his driver’s permit on a somewhat older one, a used Beemer sedan, an eighty-one or eighty-two—he couldn’t remember which.
The only design flaw in the long, somewhat sprawling Vaughan bungalow was the inclusion of a small, attached garage. It appeared to have been added later, not part of the original construction, something that always irked Oliver. It was limited in size by the property boundary to the west and as such, it was just barely wide enough for a vehicle at all.
In that tiny garage was squeezed only the new coupe and Oliver’s pet project, his 1983 BMW R65 motorcycle. He had bought the bulk of it from a salvage yard, then added to it over the years, scrap by scrap, mostly taking it out and annoying the neighbors with it in the driveway on hot weekend afternoons in the summertime. The throttle was the only issue left to fix. Oliver had said he would get the touchiness of it solved, then shine up the bike good as new before finally driving it in the September Charity Classic parade. In the narrow space between the front of the car and the door which led to the back yard, the bike sat under a grease-stained drop cloth, faded brown, dappled with flecks of paint from when Oliver re-did the bathroom a few years before.
Oliver kept his tools, two big red and silver kits full of them, in the basement, on the unfinished half where the washer and dryer were. It was also the only space he allowed Zeb to paint and all his canvases, stacks and stacks of them, helped to fill up the room. He kept all the shovels, rakes, and every other gardening tool out in the shed, simply because there was no room in the small garage. The doors of the coupe didn’t even have an arm’s length to open wide. The passenger door would gently rest against the foot of the three wooden stairs that ran up to the house door inside, and Oliver always made Zeb get out before he pulled the car inside the garage and closed the two shutter-style wooden doors manually. His fear of having a small flake of paint coming off the edge of the door onto the wooden step was nearly obsessive.
As a result, the car always sat a little closer to the east wall, the one it shared with the house where the little steps were. The coupe’s driver door could nearly swing out all the way.
The chill of the air in the garage caught them both when Sebastion opened its door and snapped on the light—a bare bulb which sat in the center of the empty rafters above. Malin’s eyes widened again. She commented on the beauty of the car, and Zeb agreed that Dad was a fanatic, a nut he said, about his Beemer. Before she went to move her rental car out of the driveway so the Ci could be backed out, he offered for her to hop into the passenger side of the coupe and get a feel for it—this would almost be her last chance to do so, he said. He was selling it. And the bike.
She did. The doors were never locked—the back door to the garage and the side house door where always kept locked instead. Vaughan was not the most dangerous of the neighborhoods stretched out from centerpoint of the big city syndrome. Burglaries, stolen property, strangers roaming the streets, break-and-enters, these kinds of things didn’t happen in that neighborhood.
Zeb pressed himself through the space where the bike’s drab cover was and moved around to the driver’s side of the car. He patted the breast pocket of his shirt. But the key was hanging on a hook in the kitchen, next to where the phone used to be.
He bent down a little and looked through the driver’s window to Malin as she was running a hand across the silver-white veneer of the dash. He made a small turning gesture with his forefinger and thumb pinched and raised his voice so she could hear him through the glass: I need the key. She nodded and said okay. And he heard. He looked up again and his gaze fell squarely on the back door of the garage just as a weak puff of air made it waver. It was open and a crack of light from the yard stood like a spear between it and the jamb. The jamb against which it should have been tightly closed.
He felt the blood run away from his face. It seemed not to stop there either. In less than a second that sight of the cracked doorway looked exactly in his mind like the doorway of his bedroom the night those crazed eyes were made real. All the feeling fell away from every part of him—as though it was a liquid that had suddenly turned hot and thin, and had drained down to his feet and out onto the cement floor of the garage.
In the space where his first missed heart beat should have been, there was the thought that this was impossible. In the space where a second should have followed the first there was the realization that Malin’s talk—skipping stones and druids—had not been mere myth. It had been dead correct. He knew it, had known it himself in a looser, less solidified way, since his head had been held over the five-hundred foot drop just the other side of Arkham. There were certain things of which you didn’t need to be convinced. Certain things you just knew. And after you stopped lying to yourself that they were wrong, their rightness became that much more apparent again.
He stepped back, his arms looking for things to brace against, as though he expected to pass dead away. Pawing, he lurched and found the wall and the roof of the coupe with his extenuated fingers.
&nb
sp; Something snapped out from under the coupe then, and took hold of his ankle with an iron grip. It nearly yanked him off his feet. He fell backwards, still bracing against the car’s top and the west wall behind him. The world seemed suddenly far away. He looked down and saw the arm, the sleeve, the hand, that was reaching out from the space beneath the car, the rounding-up quarter panel of the coupe’s trunk. And he saw a shoulder and a part of a chin just beyond the black of the tire. He struggled away with a grunt, instinctively, losing his balance from the yank and the simultaneous reaction to knowing what the yank had come from. He turned—a partial jerking motion—and his hand fell across the door handle of the car. He had a vision of that twisting arm like the tentacle of a beast, latching on and never letting go—it would eventually pull him under the vehicle and consume him as his arms banged dull and percussive against the shiny aluminum and plastic of the car’s skin. He floundered to feel his fingers tighten around the handle as those around his ankle twisted at him—threatening, it felt—to nearly snap off his foot. He managed to kick free with his other foot and he let out another haggard, breathless grunt. His hand finally found purchase on the shiny handle and he pulled open the door, letting it swing wide and bang against the wall of the garage.
Before realizing it, Zeb was inside on his back, pushing against Malin and the soft plush white leather of the interior. His hands were again thrashing at the heavy door, finally pulling it shut, and he yanked his legs in behind the rest of him. As the door drew closed—painfully slowly it seemed—he expected that hand to slink up like a glossy rubber stem and slither into the cab along with him. But it didn’t. The door slammed tight. And his own hand cracked outward like a whip to press the automatic door lock.
Click: the lock was engaged. He was shuddering. There was no feeling in any of his extremities. Like before, there was the throb of blood in his ears.
Bent, with his legs curled up like a fetus and pressing against the steering wheel, he was half across Malin’s lap. There was no color in his face. Sweat lay like an oil-slick on his arms and neck and face. She, in surprised half-gasp, opened her mouth to say something but a stifled scream escaped her instead. Zeb burst with a startled jolt too as they both saw the figure rise up from beside the car. It came to a full stand.
Through the driver’s window, they both saw the white cast arm of Jewels Fairweather.
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Silence. He regarded them both with only silence. They could not see his face.
His other hand, the one not held in the dried cast, reached out and tried the handle. He yanked on it several times. To no avail. Next he pounded on the window with a hand wound up into a tightly-fisted rock. But after three of those knocks the effort faded away as though he was capable of reason. And reason suggested that fists against the glass of a BMW was unreasonable. Then he moved back and shoulder checked the driver’s side door, a development that caught both Malin and Zeb off-guard. The car shuddered. And so did they. Both of them were shaking. Malin’s hands held the scrunched shirt shoulders of Zeb. Her eyes were wide portholes of terror. White to match the plush interior.
Fairweather—they both knew it was Fairweather, who else but Fairweather could it be—circled around the front corner of the car. His face came into view, not offering so much a surprise as a confirmation that this whole situation was rotated into uncanny revelation. His expression was twisted in a grimace of either hurt or anger. Both would have been acceptable descriptions. His head hung like the hinge of his neck was broken. He paced a little in the tiny space—between the front tires of the bike and the car’s driver side door. But he said nothing.
“Where’s the key?” Malin finally whispered, unsure as to whether Fairweather, beyond the glass, could hear her. A glimmer of sickness filled Zeb’s throat. A tiny voice in his head had told him to expect this—well not this—but something. Fairweather had called him Zeb at the hospital, and he knew that, but he pushed it aside. Stunned and silent, Zeb finally forced himself to respond. “In the kitchen.” His eyes were locked on those of Fairweather, the Druid. The keys were in the kitchen. He paused, thinking, wondering. Would the Druid—most assuredly who this man was—know that the coupe’s keys were hanging in the kitchen? They had shared a mind for a flash of a second somewhere beyond this place. Somewhere hanging over the edge of a rocky precipice. He knew the Druid had things in his head that he could see but his recollections of them were hazy, incomplete. Would the Druid have similar picture postcards of Zeb’s insides? And, among them, would there be a photograph of where those keys hung? All the car keys, from as far back as he could remember, through all the sedans and wagons, they had all hung on that hook by the tan phone. It was like fingerprints, that hook, like a piece of him, something that had come into the world with him on his birthday.
Sensing the urgency in his thoughts, he finally stiffened, sat upright, and pressed a pensive, panicked hand to his face, rubbing where the fine sandpaper of a shadow was just beginning to form. How much did this man know?
It was like the horror from his bedroom all over again. He wasn’t absorbed at the neck by the stranger, but he was trapped by him just the same. And the interiors of the Beemer felt like the finely procured and lush landscape of an eternal coffin. He started to feel claustrophobic and the dark walls of the garage pressed in imposingly. The Druid was still pacing, the anger seeming to grow. Yes, definitely. It was the Druid. It was the presence, the mind, whichever phrase you wanted to use, that had stood in his bedroom that night and threatened to squeeze the life out of him. He and Malin exchanged a look that said they both understood. This figure was the same. The Thief. The Druid. Whatever the name was, the terror fit. He was in Julius Fairweather. And he wanted Zeb and Malin.
His eyes were darting around the space, perhaps searching for something. His brooding and bitterness seemed to match Zeb’s, who’s next thoughts stumbled across the items which could be used to shatter the windshield. That, he decided in a split thought was what the Druid was doing. The Druid didn’t hold Zeb in his tree root grip yet, but he could, and he would, if the windows were suddenly smashed. He would reach in and that would be the end of it. And there were no police on the way this time.
“...Where’s your cell?” he whispered with urgency to Malin, not taking his eyes from the pacing menace beyond the glass.
“—Already thought of it. It’s in my purse.”
“Where’s your purse?”
“...In the living room...”
She sounded dejected, like a slap of shame had fallen across her face. He wanted, pithily, to tell her not to feel the weight of blame. That there was no way she should feel fault for not having a help-line manned and standing ready. But there just wasn’t time to caress her self-esteem, or his for that matter. He threw his cares for politeness out and instead, his mind clumsily fingered the consequences of having no communication. Added to that, the rental car was in the driveway. Even if they had the keys for the Ci he couldn’t burst backwards out onto the ice-covered patch of cement. He wouldn’t have hesitated flooring this machine, then firing backwards like a shot from a firearm to break down the wooden doors of the garage bay. The panels of plywood and small square plates of tinted glass would blow outward as the big silver dart screeched through it in reverse. But he tossed that idea out in an instant, even tossed the idea of firing forward and breaking both of Fairweather’s kneecaps with the Ci’s bumper, maybe even crushing him to death against the motorcycle. What were they going to do? Open the car doors, put their feet on the cement, and peddle the car?
His mind groped again at the possible objects available to smash the windshield. For the moment, they were safe. There was nothing in arm’s reach, nothing for the Druid to seize upon. No hammers, tools, garden shears. There was nothing in that garage heavy enough to lob against the windows and produce even a spidery crack line. The closest item was in the living room down the west hall, past the front guest bedroom and the rear guest bath. It lay in the sparkling glass of t
he picture tube and among blood-spotted carpet. Would the Druid make a run for that? Would he remember it being there?
Or would he not risk leaving the two of them alone? They could jump out of the car in the short seconds while he was gone and make their own dash for the garage’s back door all while the Druid made his way down that narrow hall, past the paints and canvas there on the floor to pick up the grapefruit sized plaster sculpture of an Egyptian Queen. He looked towards the door as the thought of bolting through it crossed his mind. The Druid saw him look. He fell across the hood at that moment with a crumpled thunderclap and his face was suddenly a mere hair width from the glass, only the length of a fist from Zeb who sat ductile with fingers gripped on the steering wheel. “Don’t.” His voice was a low growl, but strident. Easily audible. The word was like a wipe of flesh against frigid steel. “I promise you, Zeb. You won’t get three steps.” Zeb. He hit the pronunciation of that name with particular distaste, like having it in his mouth was akin to a mouthful of poison and he needed to wash it away with something vile itself. Only turpentine would work.
He banged his fist again, this time on the windshield. As if to punctuate those serious words. Zeb, still clutching the wheel, knuckles shed of their color, leaned a little forward. Their eyes wore a tight beam between them, invisible, but no less powerful.
“...What do you want from me?” he shrieked.
Thalo Blue Page 32
