by Dan Jolley
Janey shouted, “Stop, would you?” and, lunging across the carpet, reached out and grabbed Simon’s right ankle. Simon fell forward, his hands flailing out into the empty space at the top of the stairs, and he slammed into the topmost step. His breath whooshed out of him and he curled on his side, jerked his foot out of Janey’s grip and started wheezing. Janey sat up just as Simon swiveled his head around and glared at her, his eyes solid black and filled with hate even as he struggled to breathe.
Janey said, “For crying out loud, man, I don’t want to hurt you, would you just stop for a second and listen to me?”
“You’re her. That Gray Widow bitch. You’re her.”
Janey didn’t realize what was happening until the last instant. From somewhere Simon produced a knife, or something like a knife, and lurched at her with it clutched in both hands. Janey yelped and rolled out of the way as the blade punched through the carpet and wooden flooring where she’d been half-lying.
Simon screeched again, ripped the knife out of the floor, and threw himself at her. Knife? The thing looked more like some kind of sword. Janey made it to her feet and sidestepped Simon’s rush, planted a foot on Simon’s butt, and shoved. That sent him through the second glass door. Simon’s head connected with a huge oak desk right outside the stock broker’s office with a sickening crack that coincided with a deafening alarm. The broker’s office did have a security system.
That would mean police response in a matter of minutes. Simon jumped up out of the shower of broken glass and raised the knife over his head. For a second, less than a second, Janey got an eyeful of Simon’s weapon: it looked for all the world like a unicorn horn, and spiraled down from a broad base to a needle-sharp tip.
In the next instant Janey realized she couldn’t tell where the horn-thing ended and Simon’s hands began.
Still making an ear-splitting racket, Simon turned and charged the length of the broker’s-office hallway, headed straight for a huge picture window at the far end. He dove head-first through it and plunged out of sight in a shower of glass shards.
Just before he jumped, Janey saw him pull his arms apart, and the horn weapon unraveled, separated into long, tendril-like fingers.
Janey ran to the window. Several pedestrians stopped on the sidewalk below to peer up at the noise, but Simon was nowhere to be seen. Glittering electric blue lights and sirens swerved around a corner, approaching swiftly, and Janey retreated into the shadows.
* * *
Red and white emergency lights strobed through the trees and sirens split the night air as Janey walked back out of the woods and into the clearing, once again wearing her street clothes, the Vylar suit stashed safely in the basement. An ambulance approached, driving carefully on the brick walkways. Tim sat next to the jogger. He’d draped the girl’s torn sweatshirt over her, and kept a knot of curious passers-by from crowding in too close. He looked up as Janey shouldered her way through.
“Janey? Are you okay? Why the hell did you run after him like that?”
Janey squatted on her haunches. “I’m fine. I was just trying to get a good look at the guy, but he was too fast. Is she hurt?”
Tim’s eyes looked hollow. “I don’t know. She’s breathing all right, and her pulse is steady, but I think she’s in shock. And she’s lost some blood.” He gestured with one finger, traced a curving path up the girl’s arm. “From here. These marks.” Janey looked where he was pointing, and her stomach clenched tight.
Simon had covered the girl’s right forearm with deep purple bruises that shone slickly with blood in the diffuse light from the walkway lamps. The bruises encircled her arm, wrapping around it again and again, starting at her wrist and winding up past the elbow. Janey hissed involuntarily as she saw the same marks around the girl’s neck, like a high collar.
“She was strangled?”
The ambulance was almost there, its sirens deafening, so Janey had to shout. Tim shook his head.
“I don’t think so! I can’t tell what the hell happened here! There’s bleeding, but I don’t think she has any cuts or wounds!”
The sirens shut off, and Janey got out of the way as two paramedics rushed toward the girl. The onlookers scattered. Tim answered several terse questions, and moved aside as the paramedics loaded the girl into the ambulance. Janey stayed apart from them since she knew she’d only get in the way. Se felt too distracted to be of much use in any case.
Weird fingers aside...the thought of someone losing blood without being cut made her flesh crawl.
Tim’s touch on her arm startled her.
“Listen, Janey, I’m going to ride along with them in the ambulance. Come with me?”
“Ah, no, no, uh, listen, I’m—uh, I’m going to go back and get the car. To, uh, so, y’know...” She was babbling, and knew it, and wondered how much of it was an act. As Tim watched her, his eyebrows bunched together.
“Are you okay? Did that guy hurt you?”
“No, no, I’m fine, really! I’ll just, um, call you later, or you can call me. Can you get home from the hospital okay?”
“Yeah, no problem, I can get home.” She could see the thought in his eyes: she’s lost her mind.
“Okay, well, I’ll talk to you tomorrow, then?” She backed away, headed toward the trees.
* * *
Tim watched her go for a moment before he yelled after her. “Hey, wait a minute! You’re going to have to talk to the police!” But Janey was already gone.
He climbed aboard the ambulance after the EMTs loaded the college girl, and before the doors swung shut, the paramedic riding in back asked, “Where’s your girlfriend headed?”
Tim chewed his lower lip for a second. “I think she’s going to go change clothes.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Janey’s thoughts spun as she drove back to the LaCroix. She’d originally intended to go to the basement before she did anything else, but she realized that, if her story were to hold any water at all, she’d at least have to put the car back where Tim would expect to find it. She wasn’t sure how much sense her actions made to an observer—first rushing off to face the attacker, then freaking out and leaving—but she felt sure she could think up some explanation to cover the weirdness.
Hard empty eyes, fingers white and jointless and twisting.
Janey screeched to a halt in the LaCroix’s private parking lot. She jumped out, slammed the door, looked around briefly, and sprinted for the unbroken shadow behind the building’s dumpster. She fell into it and flickered away.
Janey rolled to her feet in the basement. The Vylar suit hung there on its rack, just as she’d left it. Another ten seconds and she was wearing the suit, more comfortably now since she didn’t have to drag it on over her street clothes.
Her heart hadn’t stopped pounding since she’d first heard the girl’s scream in the park. She took a deep breath and calmed herself. Focused and centered.
Janey vanished in a breath of blistering air.
* * *
Thousands, millions of lights everywhere sparkled and glittered, but reached only so far; darkness surrounded each one, and she flickered there, a hot, heavy presence wherever the light fell short.
Only a few people felt her passing, and then only as a sudden sweltering wind. A uniformed policeman, sitting in his patrol car in an alley between a convenience store and a CVS, froze with his lukewarm coffee halfway to his lips, abruptly certain that someone was watching him. He turned, scanned the alleyway and saw nothing, but gooseflesh crawled over him—and his windshield abruptly fogged. When he lifted a slightly shaky hand to take a sip of the coffee he discovered it was steaming.
A prostitute lounging against a burned-out street lamp gasped as a breath of tropical air brushed her. The metal of the lamp almost burned her partially bare back, and she jerked away from it with a startled yelp. She tried to rub the spot, but her tight dress rest
ricted her movement. As she cast about for someone she could ask to look at her back, she saw something move around the corner of a nearby building and vanish into an alley. She thought it might have been a woman...but for a second, just a second, she thought she saw through it.
The heat from her back twined itself with fear, flashed into her stomach and out along her bones, and she turned and ran.
* * *
Janey had never covered as much ground as she covered tonight. From shadow to shadow, darkness to darkness, she flickered in, took in her surroundings, flickered away again. Twice she broke up muggings and left the assailants stretched out on the concrete. The first of the would-be victims began to offer shaky thanks before Janey left. The other bolted away without a word.
“I’m sorry...” It was like a plea. The young man had sounded so pitiful.
And frightened.
“I’m sorry...”
Janey had just stepped out of the shadows beside a dilapidated frame house in one of the metropolitan area’s worse residential districts when she heard the distinct sound of flesh striking flesh, followed by a howl of pain. She reached into the dark, back to the basement, and brought a second police baton to her. Janey snapped both of them open and moved closer to the nearest window.
The house was a two-story, built onto the side of a hill and separated from the next one by a fifteen-foot-wide alley that sloped sharply down toward the backs of the structures. Lights visible through thin curtains burned in all the windows of both houses, but if she stayed quiet, there was no reason anyone should see her. Not until she wanted them to.
Janey crept forward and raised her head to the window. Dingy, faded beige curtains had spots of mildew on them. Hung incorrectly, they left a half-inch gap below the right panel, which let her see into the house’s front room.
Her hands tightened around the batons.
A huge white teenager with long, greasy blond hair stood unsteadily in the middle of the room. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen. He wore blue jeans and a white T-shirt emblazoned with the Confederate flag, and he clutched a young, shapely Hispanic girl by one wrist, and even as he weaved on his feet he drew back a block-like fist and smashed it across her face.
The teenager’s words through the glass were badly slurred, and the only one Janey could pick out was “whore.” The girl screamed. Her face ran purple and red in a mass of bruises and contusions, and one split lip bled openly. Janey thought he heard her call the young man “Jeff.”
Janey’s teeth ground together as she left the window.
Jeff dropped the girl and spun around as the front door exploded off its hinges. It slammed to the floor and kicked up a huge cloud of dust as the glass in its one small window shattered. Janey came through the doorway, batons held ready, and Jeff grunted and pulled a knife.
The girl backed into a corner, forgotten, her one good eye widening. She whispered “Gray Widow,” and jumped up and fled into a back room.
Janey watched Jeff carefully. The kid was flying high, that much was clear, but she couldn’t tell from what. She held the batons ready and waited for him to make the first move.
Obligingly, Jeff raised the weapon, a bone-handled sheath knife with a five-inch blade, and swung at Janey. Janey stepped aside, brought a baton down on Jeff’s elbow and kicked his feet out from under him. Jeff landed face-down, but held on to the knife, so Janey knelt beside him and cranked his elbow up, pinning the back of his hand flat to the floor. Jeff’s tendons obligingly spasmed open, and Janey took the knife out of his unresisting fingers.
Pinned to the dirty floorboards and helpless, Jeff began screaming at her. “Fuckin’ bitch! You cain’t come in here like ’is!” Jeff tried to spit at her, but his face was pressed too tightly to the floor. “Fuckin’ cunt, I’ma bend you in half an’ pound yore pussy till it bleeds, y’hear me? Y’hear me?”
The hatred in Jeff’s voice took Janey off-guard. Not enough to make her loosen her hold on him, but enough to realize the sheer depth of it. She lowered her voice to a smoky growl. “You’re not going to do a damn thing.”
“Fuck you! I’ll rape you till yer dead, bitch! Gitcher cunt hands off’a me, git ’em off’a me you fuckin’ cunt bitch!”
A feminine voice somewhere else in the house shouted, “Gray Widow! Gray Widow!” and multiple footsteps pounded up what sounded like a wooden staircase. Janey had just enough time to realize she might have made a serious mistake when a door burst open and five more redneck teenagers boiled out of it, a collection of neck beards and “Don’t Tread On Me” T-shirts, and every one of them was armed.
Janey rolled out of the way as the first spray of bullets kicked at the floor and wall. She thought a couple of the rounds might have hit Jeff, who didn’t try to rise from where Janey had pinned him. Janey dropped the police batons, and throwing spikes whickered and flashed in the air and sank deep into the gun hands of two of the youths.
The other three fired madly, randomly, screaming at her and each other. The room filled with the roar of gunfire, and Janey heard bullets buzzing past her like super-sonic hornets. Dust and bits of plaster clouded around her as the gunshots tore huge chunks out of the floor, walls, and ceiling, and for an instant Janey grew disoriented.
A large-caliber round took her in the side, kicked her off her feet and forced the air from her lungs in a whoosh. Gasping, she rolled again, throwing more spikes. Two of them sank into the right legs of two more of the teenagers, but the rest went wide. The pain of the impact began to reach her, and she doubled over, clutched her ribs, but didn’t lose her balance. She knew the Vylar padding had dispersed a lot of the force of impact, and probably kept her ribs from shattering.
Janey straightened, willing her eyes to focus, just as the one unhurt youth fired an Uzi. Seven bullets stitched their way across Janey’s chest and knocked her backward through the front window. A shower of broken glass followed her down into the shadows.
* * *
Simon dropped away from another truck onto an ill-lit section of street.
He straightened his clothes, set off at what he hoped looked like an easy stroll down the sidewalk, and tried not to let his outward appearance reflect his emotions, which yawed wildly between rage and shame.
Absently he pulled an inch-long shard of glass out of his lower chest. He didn’t notice as the wound sucked the blood back in and sealed itself shut.
The sudden interruption of the proceedings had done nothing to stop his urge. He needed it. And hated himself for needing it. His mother and the house in Louisiana called to him, and he wanted to go home, but that line of thought slammed into the urge, which strummed along his nerves harder every second.
He’d have to do it. Again.
Briefly he thought about the tall woman from the park, the woman who’d put on the gray suit and chased after him. The woman who...stepped into the darkness and...moved through it... Simon shut his eyes and waved his hands in the air. Couldn’t think about that. That wasn’t real. He said it over and over again, first silently, then out loud.
Simon stopped abruptly and stared down at his hands. For the first time it hit him: the monster under the bed. The monster in the dark. Maybe it was the bitch in the mask...but it was also him. Simon Grove, himself. The face in the mirror. The thing in the dark was him.
He felt more afraid than ever, and wanted to cry. Concentrate. Come on, think about something else!
Simon glanced around him as he walked, taking in his surroundings.
He hadn’t been in Atlanta for long, and was still unfamiliar with it. He didn’t recognize the place where the truck had unknowingly delivered him. The dull, steady vibrations of I-285 hummed from a nearby overpass. The street he now walked down appeared to lead into a low-income housing district after it passed under the freeway.
Up a steep hill on his right, however, a brightly lit apartment complex looked out over
the city. The units, stacked three high, presented perfectly square faces, white stucco faded to gray, decorated with wrought iron railings on patios and balconies. Straight out of the sixties, Simon thought. He looked over his shoulder and saw an entrance to the complex, a steep blacktop drive winding up the hill. He reversed his course and walked quickly toward the sign.
Bright lights artfully concealed in low shrubbery illuminated the words.
“Crestwood View,” Simon read aloud. He started up the smooth, recently re-paved drive, and whistled a tune.
The drive was lit better than the street it branched off of. Every sixty feet or so a street lamp overhung the way, giving Simon enough light to notice a macadam jogging trail that wound its way down the hillside, crossed the drive, and angled back up toward the apartments. He eyed the path and thought for a moment about late-night joggers, until a car’s headlights washed over him.
He stopped walking and raised a hand to shield his eyes.
A late-model Chrysler made its way up the drive, and thanks to the street lamps’ illumination Simon could see the driver. He locked eyes with her for a long, heart-stopping moment before she rolled past him.
Simon remained perfectly still, stared after her, and savored her image like an aftertaste.
He sprinted after the car.
Its taillights had already disappeared around a bend in the drive, so he didn’t worry about her seeing his pursuit, though he did have to hold himself back to keep from catching up with her. He’d discovered he could move at a good thirty or forty miles an hour when he tried.
Long, golden hair. Bronze skin.
The driver. Simon knew he had to have her. At the top of the hill he stopped, ducked down behind a hedge, and scanned the parking lot. No cars moved, no doors thumped shut, so he dashed to the edge of the first building, where the lot turned to the left. There. He saw the Chrysler pull into a space in front of a building with a three-foot-high letter G on it, and the girl got out. He couldn’t see her face clearly at this distance, but her athletic body was visible enough, and he felt the twinge, the need to change, and fought it back.
