Gray Widow Trilogy 1: Gray Widow's Walk

by Dan Jolley

  Janey’s eyebrows drew together. “Actually, ah, I never really tried that.”

  Tim scowled at her. She shrugged.

  “Okay. Fine. But I want to see you do it. Not in any closets, or behind closed doors. I want to see you do it, right in front of me.”

  “What, taking you to the basement didn’t convince you?”

  “I don’t know what that was, but I do know if I’m going to believe what you’re saying, I want to see it myself. With these eyes. On my terms.”

  Janey set her mug down on the coffee table. “Well, that’s just it, that’s why I do it where nobody can see it. It has to be in the dark.”

  “Oh, convenient. Why? Why in the dark?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never known. That’s just the way it is.”

  Tim thought about it for a while. “All right. We can deal with that.” He looked around, considering. “Here. I’ll turn off the overhead lights, and—get up.” They got off the couch, and he shoved the coffee table over so that it touched the seat cushions. “Now.” He peered under it. “It’s nice and dark under there. If you can really do this, this stuff you’ve been telling me, I want to see you crawl under that coffee table and come out somewhere else.”

  Janey wrinkled her forehead again. “...Okay. Where?”

  “Anywhere, I don’t know! Here, okay, how about this.” He went to the kitchen, climbed up on the counter, and sat down with his legs folded. “All right, I can see you get under the table from here, and, uh, switch off that lamp there, would you?”

  Janey obligingly turned off a floor lamp in one corner of the living room. “Good. Now there’s lots of nice dark shadows right here behind the counter. So crawl under the table, and come out here, right below me. No sleight-of-hand. No secret doors.” He set down the mug of tea and crossed his arms, his jaw set. “And you can let me know when you get tired of lying there on the floor.”

  Janey walked over, looked behind the counter, and went back to the couch and the coffee table. Tim watched her closely. She set her own mug of tea on the table and got down on the floor. “I feel really stupid.” She pulled her knees up to her chest and scooted underneath.

  Tim started to say, “How you doing down there?” when he noticed the mug of tea on the coffee table begin to boil. A wave of hot air touched his cheek, and Janey rolled out of the shadows below him and stood up in the kitchen.

  She said, “How was that?” and had to lunge to catch him as he pitched backward off the counter.

  * * *

  Tim sat and shivered. Janey stood a few feet away from him and tried to think of something to say, but eventually decided to wait for him. Outside, fat raindrops started pattering against the window.

  After a few minutes he said, “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

  Carefully, Janey asked, “What?”

  He looked up at her. “The—all the things—wait a second. Okay. All the stories I used to read, the movies I used to watch, when something really bizarre happened. I’d always wonder what I’d do, y’know, if I got faced with something like that. And now here it is. You just teleported across the room.”

  She shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “I just...I feel like somebody just proved the world is flat.”

  He shook his head and shivered some more. Janey walked over and sat beside him.

  “You’re the first person who’s known. Well, almost the first. I didn’t know how you’d take it.”

  “How I’d take it! Jesus God, it’s...aaah! I don’t know, I don’t know! I mean, of course, you just did it, right there and I saw you do it, but... Oh, Jesus. How...how did...what...you were born able to do this? What caused it? What’s...” He trailed off.

  Janey touched his face, lightly, and turned it toward her. “I’ll tell you. All of it. But I want to take you somewhere.” Tim tensed, and she quickly said, “In a car, in a car, don’t worry.”

  “Where? Where are we going?”

  She went into her bedroom for a couple of minutes, and came back out in street clothes, carrying an umbrella. “I want you to meet someone.”

  * * *

  They headed out of the city. For the first five minutes or so the silence remained unbroken. Tim had stopped in at his place and grabbed a long gray raincoat, and he sat in the passenger seat, playing idly with the belt buckle.

  “I keep waiting for a commercial.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I said I keep waiting for a commercial. I feel like I’m watching a show on TV. None of this seems real.” He stared out the window. “You said you’d tell me about it.”

  Janey hesitated.

  “It…started about seven years ago. Well, no, actually before that, when I was sixteen. So. Eleven years. My dad—”

  Janey stopped. Her throat seized unexpectedly, and she fought back sudden tears. She hadn’t tried to recall that night in a long while. She blinked a few times and swallowed, breathed deeply.

  “My dad was a stage magician.” The words came out okay, as long as she kept her breathing right. “He made things disappear. He was good, really good, and nobody ever figured out his tricks. That’s ’cause they weren’t tricks. The stuff actually disappeared.”

  “What, like cars and statues...?”

  “No, no. Small stuff. Apples, keys, rabbits. But oh, it looked great. The crowds loved him. So. These guys approached him and asked him to do some tricks for them. Basically, they wanted him to make some money disappear out of a safe and reappear in their pockets.”

  Janey took a ramp onto I-85 north. Tim said nothing.

  “He refused. I think he refused more than once, and maybe said he’d go to the police. ...Not the wisest thing he could have done. So they showed up at our house one night, a couple of days after my sixteenth birthday.

  “I’d just gotten my black belt in karate, and I was studying jujitsu and aikido at the same time, and I thought of myself as a real tough kid, y’know? The kind of kid who could handle anything? And it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. A guy was waiting for me when I came through the door that night, and he hit me in the back of the head with a lead pipe. They chained us both up in the kitchen, and killed my dad, and shot me.” Her fingertips brushed the scars high on her chest, through her shirt. “I guess they thought I was dead.

  “Before they shot him, he... The guy, the one in charge, his name was Sammy Kyle. He kept pointing his gun at me, said he’d kill me if Dad didn’t cooperate with him. I don’t know what happened, if Dad tried to kill him first, or if he just lost control, or what. But when Dad did his trick, made something disappear, there was always this feeling in the air. I could tell when he was doing it. Well, the whole kitchen lit up with this feeling, and Sammy Kyle started screaming, and...um.

  “Dad made Sammy Kyle’s left eye disappear out of his head. One second Kyle was just standing there, and the next second his eye was hanging in the air beside his head. It fell on the floor, and Kyle staggered, and he stepped on it. It made this pop...

  “Anyway. Kyle realized what my father had done, and he put his gun between Dad’s eyes and pulled the trigger. Then he turned and shot me twice, and I went over backward in the chair—but the gun he was using, it was really small caliber, a .22. He used that, I think, because he thought it was the kind of gun a real Mafioso would use, like in a mob-style execution—but he wasn’t seeing that well, y’know, so his aim wasn’t great, and he didn’t manage to puncture anything too vital. And I lived.”

  Janey kept her eyes straight ahead.

  Tim said, “Dear Lord.”

  “I stayed in a hospital for a while, till my body healed. But my head was another story. I needed a lot of therapy. One day, one of the interns brought me some paint and paper. I started painting. I’ve kept that up.”

  She gave him a tiny smile.

  “Anyway, I was lying in bed one night,
about half asleep I guess, and there was this thing. This thing happened. I’ve...been trying to put words to it ever since then, and I can’t really, it was just…something happened, and I really really wanted to be outside, away from there. And bang. I was out on the lawn, in my underwear.”

  “In the dark.”

  “Right, in the dark. And it felt just like what my Dad used to do, except so much stronger. So much stronger. And there was the heat.”

  “So you inherited it?”

  “I think so. I must have gotten it from Dad, and then—whatever that thing was—whatever happened, it boosted the power. Dad never knew anybody else that could do anything like this, and I hadn’t ever met anybody either until we saw that guy in the park.”

  “The mugger?” His victim, the girl, flashed in Tim’s mind, curling bloody welts on her arms and face.

  “Yeah. I think he’s like me. I mean, not just like me, but I think something similar happened to him. I’ve been looking for him.”

  “What, and you’ve found him? Is that where we’re going?”

  “No! No. This is…something that’ll explain a lot. I think.”

  They made the rest of the trip in silence. Soon Janey got off the freeway and took them down a two-lane road lined with oaks, pines, and hickories. Tim spent the time staring out the window, trying to decide whether or not he was going insane.

  More and more made sense now. Of course she wasn’t wet when he saw her during the storm. She hadn’t been outside. She’d been wherever that place was. Her hidey-hole. Her basement.

  And the painting...the painting must have soaked up some of her power. He wanted to ask her about it, but she didn’t look as though she had anything else to say for a while. So he kept quiet.

  Soon they reached their destination, and Tim got an inkling of why Janey had brought him.

  They turned off the road onto a wide circular drive, which curved up through a very green, perfectly clipped lawn and stopped in front of a massive three-story white brick house. Huge columns on the front porch supported a small balcony on the third floor. On a small, tasteful sign near where they parked were the words, “Leslie O’Brien Care Facility,” and below that, “est. 1946.”

  Janey left the car. She tried to open her umbrella, but it ripped as soon as it sprang open, so she threw it in the backseat and sprinted through the rain. Tim followed wordlessly, alternating between looking around him and watching her. Waiting for him out of the downpour, Janey’s jaw was set hard, but her eyes glistened.

  A young woman dressed in white met them in the lobby. She wore an identification badge clipped to her left shirt pocket, which gave her name as Loreen Fugett. Loreen lifted the corners of her mouth in a smile that Tim had seen before. In hospitals.

  Janey asked, “How is he today?”

  “He can see you,” Loreen Fugett said. She looked frankly, but politely, at Tim. “And who might this be?”

  “This is my friend, Tim Kapoor,” she answered, her voice mild. “He’s my captive for the day.”

  Tim and Loreen Fugett shook hands cordially. To Janey, Loreen said, “Call if you need me.” Janey nodded and led Tim through a door and down a hallway.

  The house had once been spectacular, and still preserved some of its former grandeur, but it couldn’t hide its purpose. Whitewash covered everything, and the place smelled faintly of disinfectant. Janey stopped in front of the third door on the left, and seemed to collect herself before she opened it.

  As the latch clicked and a gap appeared between door and frame, Tim noticed two things: a faint scent of blueberries, and a clear male voice halfway through the A-B-C song.

  Tim followed Janey into what had once been a medium-sized bedroom, but which now carried the unmistakable air of professional care. The off-white walls matched the beige curtains on the window, as well as the light brown cover stretched across the neatly made hospital bed. A small table and three chairs, all built of blonde wood, sat in a corner, and a metal wardrobe stood against one wall with a door half-open. Tim saw several shirts and pairs of pants on hangers inside it.

  In the middle of the floor sat another nurse and a handsome, pajama-clad young white man with a mop of curly yellow hair. A partially completed large-piece jigsaw puzzle lay on the floor between them. They both looked up as the door opened, and the nurse smiled and said, “Ms. Sinclair.”

  The young man surged up, arms wide, and shouted, “Janey!” He caught her in a fierce hug, and though he was a good three inches taller, Janey lifted him off the floor as easily as if he’d been a tiny child and spun him around in a circle. As they turned, Tim saw tears in Janey’s eyes.

  Janey set the young man back on the floor, brushed away her tears with a thumb, and said, “Here’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

  “Okay!” the man said, and Tim noticed he slurred his speech slightly. A lock of his blond hair shifted, and Tim saw a large, irregular indentation marring the left side of his forehead. He smiled brightly at Tim and stuck out his hand just as a tiny line of saliva escaped from the corner of his mouth. Janey deftly dabbed that away.

  “This is my friend Tim,” Janey said, as the yellow-haired young man pumped Tim’s hand. Janey pulled a small Matchbox car out of one pocket and held it out for him. “I brought this for you.” He squealed and thanked her and ran to show the nurse.

  Janey’s eyes made Tim’s whole body ache. “That’s Adam,” Janey said, barely above a whisper. “My husband.”

  * * *

  Zach Feygen visited Nathan Pittman in the hospital in mid-afternoon.

  He’d gotten a call twenty minutes earlier. Nathan had regained consciousness at just after two, and spoken lucidly, but passed out again. Feygen got there as soon as he could.

  He’d talked with Nathan’s doctors. The convenience store robber had used a .32 revolver, and all three of the bullets he put in Nathan had struck bone. If Nathan had been incredibly lucky, the gunshot wounds might not have been all that serious. As it was, fragments of bone had penetrated one lung and sliced a chunk out of his liver.

  Feygen reached Nathan’s room, pushed the door partway open, and knocked lightly. No one answered. He stepped inside and found Nathan’s parents staring at him, one standing on either side of Nathan’s bed. They had on expensive clothes but wore them badly.

  The mother grunted, “Who’re you?”

  Looking at the two of them, Feygen couldn’t help but think of the nursery rhyme, “Jack Spratt could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean,” except in reverse. Nathan Pittman’s father didn’t appear to have eaten anything lean in quite some time, although, judging by his wife’s brittle frailty, he might have eaten all of her food along with his.

  “I’m Detective Feygen, Atlanta PD,” he said. He let the door close behind him. “I was hoping to ask your son a few questions. About the Gray Widow.”

  The mother said, “Nathan can’t answer any questions.” The father stayed quiet. Feygen stepped farther into the room, and for the first time got a good look at Nathan Pittman.

  Tubes sprouted from the boy in far too many places, and an oxygen feed ran up his nose. Feygen had seen pictures, and knew Nathan was normally very thin. Now the kid looked worse off than Chooley. His cheeks and eyes were sunken, his skin the color of chalk. He looked like a corpse.

  “He did regain consciousness a few minutes ago, didn’t he?” Feygen asked politely.

  “Yes,” the mother said. Her expression—the kind of expression someone has right after they swallow half a glass of curdled milk—hadn’t wavered since Feygen entered the room. He began to suspect she looked like that all the time.

  “For about a minute and a half, he woke up. He said something about that Gray Widow bitch. And he asked for water, and I couldn’t give it to him. He’s not up for any kind of third degree.” She put her hands on her bony hips. “We’ve already talked to the police about fiv
e times, Detective. What’s the point of this?”

  It hadn’t taken long for the investigation of Nathan’s shooting to turn up the trove of Gray Widow-related items in the boy’s room. He practically had a shrine to her Scotch-taped to his walls.

  Feygen stuck his hands in his pockets. “I don’t intend to give your son any sort of ‘third degree,’ Mrs. Pittman. I tried talking to his friends at school, but no one there seems to know him very well. I only wanted to ask him what kind of prior contact he had, if any, with the Gray Widow.”

  “None, that we know about,” Mr. Pittman said, speaking for the first time. He settled heavily into a chair in the corner. His wife remained standing.

  Mr. Pittman sounded as if he were gargling wet cement when he talked, and Feygen thought, Christ, what a pair. The father continued, “Far as we can tell, he went and did this all on his own, just readin’ about shit in the papers and such.” Mr. Pittman’s hairline was severely receding, and he ran one hand across it, tugged on the hair. Several strands came away with his fingers. He shook his head. “Still can’t believe he went and did this. Just can’t believe it.”

  Mrs. Pittman said, “It’s practically all I’ve heard about. Whole family calling about it, newspapers, TV, folks at church.” She, too, shook her head slowly. It was like a twisted, mean-spirited parody of a Norman Rockwell painting, the two parents hovering over their hospitalized son, shaking their heads and looking...looking how?

  Mrs. Pittman’s face soured even further, and Feygen realized how they looked. His stomach rolled queasily.

  Nathan’s parents weren’t grieving. They were embarrassed.

  Feygen remembered the photographs he’d seen of the boy. Head half shaved, multiple facial piercings—all of which had been removed, and he wondered if the hospital or Nathan’s parents had done that—but good Lord, was it any wonder the kid felt alienated, raised by these two? Feygen started backing slowly toward the door. Nathan Pittman’s parents both stayed silent, and both stared at him.

  “Well,” Feygen said carefully, “I know you’ve both given your statements, and I really wanted to talk to Nathan, so, ah, I’ll come back once he’s awake and clear-headed.”