He hung his bare feet over the edge of the bed and dropped them to the floor. The wood felt so cool. He wasn’t completely awake, but he was drawn to the windows by an unheard beckoning and stumbled as he walked. He pushed the billowing curtains aside and went down on his knees so he could prop his elbows on the window sill. The night air was so sweet on his face. He gulped it as if he were starving for it and he waited. He had no idea for what. Something.
He smelled roses, and a voice whispered as soft as starlight.
Something had called him to the window. Someone. His eyes grew accustomed to the dark and searched the spaces outside. There was a muted light moving from one tree shape to another. Weaving. It vanished and a tiny dot reappeared and rapidly grew into a child-size glow.
Jeremy caught his breath and drew back from the window. He knew who it was. And he knew he didn’t want to see him now, or ever again. He still remembered the first time he’d met him and what had happened. How had he found him?
“Charlie?” He fought to keep his voice from quivering. He was terrified the ghost would come in after him. Then what would he do? “You’re taking a big chance coming here, aren’t you?” Jeremy’s head was crammed up against the screen as he shifted his eyes to the left and the right following the glow. Suddenly it was gone.
“Charlie, I know it’s you. Where are you?” He hoped nothing would answer, that Charlie would go away and leave him alone. Yet, something had happened and Jeremy had the feeling Charlie was part of it—whatever it was. Though his mom had it fixed, he remembered their front door being battered weeks ago, and the eerie feeling he’d had as he woke up.
Charlie might know something about it. “Charlie?”
“Here.” It was a faint whisper on the breeze, hardly there at all.
Jeremy trembled as he met Charlie’s sorrowful eyes…eyes from the grave. “How do you do that?” He gulped. Charlie was hovering in mid-air right in front of him. It was awesome.
Charlie didn’t smile. Maybe he couldn’t. “It’s easy if you’re dead, like me.”
He looked the same as he had the last time. Same dirty raggedy clothes. Except he had no cat.
It was so cold. Jeremy’s teeth began to chatter. There were icicles hanging from the window. Jeremy stepped backwards. Charlie’s laugh was scary.
“Where’s kitty?” Jeremy stuttered. Oh, why was he so afraid? He mustn’t let Charlie know he was scared of him.
“Ooh, the cat, you mean?” Charlie looked confused as if he’d forgotten. Then he said: “I don’t like birds or cats.” He scowled. “I don’t like anything.”
That Jeremy believed.
Jeremy thought ghosts must get bored with only floating around to do. It was why they were probably so out of touch with things.
“What are you here for? What do you want?”
“To warn you.” The ghost’s face was a pale orb and Jeremy could see through him.
“To warn me about what?” Jeremy wanted to listen to Charlie and hear what he had to say and yet, he also wished he could run away and hide under the bed.
“Tell Sarah that Jim is hurt. Jim needs her.”
For a moment Jeremy was stumped. “You mean my Uncle Jim?” He put his hand to his mouth so he wouldn’t cry out.
“My brother.” The ghost nodded.
“Your brother?” Jeremy repeated. Now he was confused.
“My brother. I’m your uncle, too.” He said it sadly, as if it was a joke on him. On all of them. It did seem strange.
It was hard to link this thing with real people.
Jeremy frowned, Charlie was his uncle? Whew, weird. Did Charlie have any loyalty left to any of them, he wondered? Then he asked, “Is Uncle Jim all right?”
There was no answer as the glow that was Charlie drifted away. “Charlie, is he all right!” Still no answer. Jeremy was shaking. Should he go downstairs, wake his mother up and tell her?
“Charlie, don’t play games, please! Tell me!” Jeremy felt like crying, but Charlie was gone. Why did he always have to do that stupid disappearing act of his? So lame.
As if it’d been an afterthought, the wind moaned and the invisible thing at the window said, “Do you know what it’s like being dead, having the earth thrown over you? Do you know how lonely it is? She was my sister and she loved me and I owe her. I owe Jim. I hurt him once and have always been sorry. I was so bad. So bad. I’m so sorry. I have debts to pay.”
It had been Charlie. What did the words mean? Jeremy had no idea. The dawn was coming in a cloud of pink and the purple shadows were fleeing. So Charlie was sorry. What did it matter now? Jeremy couldn’t believe what was happening. Didn’t people who die go to heaven or the other place? What was Charlie still doing here? Charlie was his uncle, too? If the thing was telling the truth. Jeremy wasn’t sure.
Jeremy’s fingers caressed the screen. His knees hurt from kneeling and he was frightened. He didn’t know what to do. Should he tell his mother about Charlie?
Would she believe him?
“Do you know what it’s like being dead?” the ghost asked him.
How had he hurt Uncle Jim? Charlie had left so many puzzles. Jeremy turned from the window, sighing.
“You’re dead, Charlie. You’re dead,” he said it out loud. “Why don’t you stay dead and stop scaring me?”
Jeremy got dressed and went downstairs. It was so early he knew his mom wouldn’t be up. He sat down in the front room and waited. She’d be up soon. His mom never slept late.
What was he going to tell her? What could they do? What was going on anyway?
* * * *
When it was over and the smoking truck sat crammed up against the tree in the dawning daylight, Jim was still for a long time. He came to gradually, cradling his aching head in bloody hands. At first, he didn’t know where he was or how he’d gotten there but then, painfully, the memories came sifting back through the fog until he was sobbing softly. The worst tragedy was that he was still alive.
Alive for the torture to continue. Oh, why hadn’t he died! No, no. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. It was too soon, he knew it. Looking up at the ragged hole in the windshield, he felt a wave of sadness.
Amy.
With sore eyes he stared at the empty passenger’s seat and at the sharp fragments of glass scattered over everything. Had it really been Amy, or a lure to get him outside and in the truck? Had Amy been a trap?
Had there even been an Amy to begin with?
His legs were hurting and when he moved them he cried out. Something might be broken. In a haze of shock, he wanted to go outside and see if Amy was out there. She might need his help. The truck was a smoking hulk, barely recognizable as ever having been anything else but a lump of burnt metal. It could explode any second.
I have to get out of the truck and find Amy.
He forced his bleeding legs to move and dropped from the seat to the hard ground with a muffled groan. Pulling himself up by the door handle, he pushed off the wave of nausea that engulfed him. His glasses had been smashed and lay in pieces in his lap. He’d brushed them away. Slowly, he hobbled to the front of the truck and combed the area around it. Without his glasses his eyesight was blurry, but he made do, and found no sign of Amy or anyone else. The headlights were glaring away into the trees and the horizon was wanly silhouetted by a salmon colored sky. Soon, it’d be dawn.
His heart in his throat, his hands jerky, he stumbled around in the weeds searching for a body that wasn’t there.
As he peered into the gloom, he knew he wouldn’t find her. Finally pain and weariness overcame him and he sank to the ground in the truck’s dimming headlights.
The police found him a half hour later, unconscious. They took him to the hospital and he was examined and released, his injuries not bad enough to keep him there, his legs not br
oken, he was taken to the police station to fill out an accident report. He hadn’t been drunk and no other car had been involved in the crash. They determined, after questioning him, it’d be useless to press charges. No harm done except to the truck. When they gave him a ticket for reckless driving, he laughed softly.
He didn’t mention Amy. They wouldn’t find a body. There’d never been one. It’d been an hallucination. After he’d answered their questions, he went out to the lobby and with shaking fingers dialed Sarah’s number.
“They aren’t keeping me. No, no charges.” He let the wall hold him up, fending off the queasiness. His mouth tasted of blood and standing was hard. He shut his eyes, and when everything around him began to spin, he opened them.
“Yeah, I’m in one piece, I think.” He told her about Amy, the totaled truck, and the accident. Panic circled below the surface waiting to suck him under.
“Jim, please, oh please come home now. It’s time. I don’t want to lose you.”
“I’m coming, Sarah. I’ve done more than my duty to the band and stayed longer than I’d promised. I don’t care what they need or what they say. You and Jeremy are worth more to me than any of them. You need me. I need you. I’m coming home.” His voice was adamant. “As soon as I can get my stuff into a suitcase, inform the other guys of my decision, I’ll catch a bus. I’ll be on my way today.”
He couldn’t tell his sister he was petrified.
“Please be careful.”
Jim hung up and called a taxi to take him to his motel. He didn’t look forward to telling the other guys he was running out on them, but, he knew, there wasn’t much time left now. His days of running and hiding were over.
As he packed his clothes, he knew he’d been given a brief reprieve. He refused to dwell on the accident or the woman that had never been there. All of it had reopened a painful wound so deep to linger on it was to invite insanity, and he didn’t have time for it.
He opened the door, went down the carpeted hallway and left the hotel, a strange gleam in his now seeing eyes. It was time. Time to face what he’d run from all his life…and longer.
Chapter Twenty-Six
I slumped in the chair by the telephone motionless after Jim’s call. I’d known it was bad news before I’d lifted the receiver. When it rings like that in the middle of the night, I never want to answer it. What else can it be but bad news?
I couldn’t believe what he’d told me. No, that was wrong, I could believe it. It made sense. Jim was coming home because it wanted him here. Come home or die. It was as simple as that.
Neither one of us could escape any longer. Time was up.
I held my hands tightly together in my lap, staring at nothing. I hadn’t had a vision in a while. I’d been fooled into believing we were normal people in a normal world again.
So much for fantasies.
Thank God Jim was unharmed, except for bruises and sore legs. Thank God he was coming home. “Our only hope is in our strength. Our strength,” I whispered to no one.
It was morning. I looked over at where Jeremy was curled up sleeping on the couch, and wondered as I had when I’d run down to answer the ringing phone, what he was doing sleeping down here. I perched on the edge of the sofa and looked down at him. It was too early to wake him and he must be in a deep sleep if the phone failed to bring him to.
I sunk into the couch, careful not to disturb my son. I’d ask him why he was on the couch when he woke.
It could wait.
I closed my eyes, my hand light on Jeremy’s shoulder as if I could protect him and fell asleep, too. It wasn’t only that I was tired, though the call had taken a lot out of me, it was my way of escaping.
“Mom?” Jeremy’s voice was waking me. A small hand was shaking my shoulder insistently. “Wake up, Mom, who was on the phone?”
With much effort, I forced my eyes open. The sunlight was blinding. “Jeremy?”
“Mom, who was on the phone?” His eyes were level with my own. There was a worried frown on his lips.
I wasn’t fully awake. “What phone? Who?” I mumbled. The clouds lifted. “Oh. The phone. It was Jim. He’s coming home.” I sat up, rubbing my eyes and yawning.
“Then he’s all right!” Was that a sigh of relief I heard?
I sat up. “How did you know I had a phone call? You were asleep.”
“I know.” He had a look on his face of someone who was wiser than you and mystified that you couldn’t see it. His face was not a child’s face. He seemed to be weighing something in his mind. “I know a lot more than you think I do. I know Uncle Jim’s been hurt.” Then in a low voice. “Charlie told me he was hurt, but he’d be okay. Or at least he told me he was.” His child’s face was clouded with thought.
I didn’t know what to say, my heart thumped in my chest. Bells were going off in my head. I felt sick to my stomach. Charlie! I found my tongue.
“Charlie?” I pronounced the word carefully, as if by uttering the name, I would call up the dead child himself. God help me.
Jeremy rotated his head away. His face was rosy from sleep and his hair was wispy in disarray. He was only a child.
“You know, your brother Charlie. The one that’s dead.” His eyes were huge. I took him wordlessly into my arms and stroked his hair. I loved my son so much but how could I protect, or save him from what was going to happen? It could happen anyway no matter what I did or didn’t do.
“Tell me about it. All of it.”
As he told me about Charlie I was astounded. Alarmed, to hear the evil was so close to my son. Jeremy had seen a ghost, talked to a ghost, it meant only one thing. I hadn’t seen what was in Jeremy before. I hadn’t seen one of my own kind. If, truly, that’s what he was. I couldn’t be positive. I was afraid to be. And, God, how I pitied him if he were.
What did Charlie want? What was he up to? “Does this sort of thing happen often, Jeremy?” I asked him, needing to know.
“No. It never did until we moved here. You did say Uncle Jim was all right, he’s coming home?”
“Yes. Uncle Jim’s coming home.” I smiled, seeing how cleverly he’d avoided completely answering my question. He wasn’t ready yet. “Come on, I’ll take you back to bed. It’s Sunday and only six-thirty.” I ushered him up the stairs.
“When Uncle Jim gets home can we all go fishing?” he asked sleepily as I tucked him into bed.
Outside the windows the distant woods waited, as did Charlie, our old home and all those other dead children. I didn’t hear my son the first time he asked it, but I did the second. I pulled myself back to the present.
“Yes, we’ll go fishing when Uncle Jim gets here.” It was a strange request but I was too tired to wonder about it and Jeremy was already slipping into dreamland.
I could see Jim far away, climbing on a bus and waving at us. Charlie was there, too. I shook my head to dissolve the vision and looked down at Jeremy’s innocent face.
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it sooner.
Jeremy had the gift. Jeremy had the curse.
I stood up to leave and something caught my eye outside the window. I moved closer to investigate. A scrap of bright cloth was caught on a twig and was fluttering like a banner against the skies.
That was all it took to trigger the memories.
* * * *
I was plummeting in reverse through the years. How many I couldn’t be sure. I was a spectator, but I was also part of what was unfolding before my eyes, as I looked outside the window. It was like a mirror into another world, another time.
There was only wilderness out there, the kind of wilderness this country must have known over a hundred and fifty years ago. There were no houses or towns, only desolation. In my vision I was down there among the trees that lined the creek. It was night, or soon before dawn. I was walking towards the wagon
s, and the campfires that illuminated them.
There were seven of them, tattered covered wagons like the pioneers used to travel west in. They hunkered around in a circle. I’d seen plenty of movies and pictures of the rugged men and women who lived in these traveling homes out on the prairies, but this was different. I was touching these; they were as close to me as my own hand. I could see the grain of the wood and count the spokes of the mammoth wheels. I could hear the fear in the voices of the people who crowded around the blazing campfires.
I hid behind the nearest wagon, confused. I knew who I was and yet I was afraid they might see me and I could never in a lifetime explain myself. Since I’d returned to Suncrest it was alarming, how vivid my psychic experiences had become.
This sort of thing had happened before, so I knew eventually I’d be able to return to my own time. The campfires were crackling and far off in the woods, there were wolves baying at the moon. I was seeing something I couldn’t be seeing. What was I doing here?
Shivering, I stared down at my feet. There was snow on the ground and they were covered in some sort of fur boots. I was no longer dressed as myself. I wore a long baggy skirt covered with a thick, worn shawl. I was cold.
The dream was too real and I was afraid I’d actually been pulled into another time and wouldn’t be able to ever find my way back. Was I trapped there? I ached to turn and run home, but home didn’t exist anymore.
I pressed myself against the wagon as tightly as I could and when I’d found my courage, I became aware of the people on the other side. If I was here and I couldn’t get back for a time, then I’d better become familiar with the situation. There was a reason, I calmed myself, I was here so I should find out what it was. It might be the key that would release me.
Of the five people huddled around the campfire, three were children. One was a very young one of about six and the other two were older. Two boys and a girl, there was also an old woman and another man who appeared to be her son.
One of the children, the girl, was crying.
Evil Stalks the Night Page 25
