Stuffing the now soaked t-shirt back into her pack, Eve bounded down the stairs. She passed the newspaper on the front walk and considered setting it inside to delay the moment of discovery, but then rejected that idea. It would only slow her down. And anything out of the ordinary, even someone thoughtfully bringing in the paper, would make her mom investigate. Eve was three blocks away before she stopped looking over her shoulder. She didn’t slow down until she got to Alex’s house.
Alex and Dominic were already standing on the lawn staring at the front of the house. As soon as Eve walked up, she saw what they were looking at.
“Oh, no. You, too.”
The black graffiti was right on the house under the front window. Some of the paint had dripped down, almost like it had sprouted legs. It looked more like a Red Spot than ever. Eve put a hand on Alex’s arm.
“Yeah,” Alex sighed. “Yeah. And Dom. His house has one, too.”
“So does mine.”
Dominic grunted. Alex turned wide eyes on Eve. “What does this mean? Someone is marking us, but what for? What are they going to do? If they bring more Red Spots here…”
“I know. I don’t know.”
Eve turned at the sound of footsteps behind her and saw Logan. He was walking toward them, his eyes fixed on the painted symbol. He came to a stop next to them, still staring, but he didn’t say anything.
After a minute, Eve said, “So yeah, you were right.”
Logan nodded but still kept silent.
“What are we going to do?”
No one answered. It was another five minutes of silence before Adam came panting up. He looked like he had run the whole way from his house, which had to be a couple of miles.
“You…too…,” he gestured at the front of Alex’s house. “Mine…same…” He leaned over, hands on knees and waited for his breath to return. Finally he straightened up. “What are we going to do?”
“That’s what I asked,” said Eve. Everyone just stood there for a minute. “I got the same answer,” she finished.
“Well, we have to do something,” said Adam. “This is… This is our families now. This could be really dangerous.”
“Now?” said Logan in a dangerous tone. “It was already our families yesterday. Maybe we should just go off and play with the Gylf for a while.”
“Logan…” Eve started.
“No,” Adam interrupted. “He’s right. I’m sorry, man. We should have listened yesterday. It was just…it was only one house...and there was no way to know for sure.”
“Right,” said Logan. “And it wasn’t your family then.”
Adam looked like he had been stabbed.
“Logan,” Eve said. “You know we love your family. We would never want anything to happen to those kids. Or your mom either. We just didn’t know. It seemed like it could just be graffiti. And now…”
“Paint on a wall in a nice neighborhood is more than graffiti.”
Now Eve was mad. “The neighborhood has nothing to do with it, and you know it. It’s all of us now. That means it’s not a coincidence.”
Logan shrugged. Eve wanted to slap him.
“We were wrong. We apologized. Now let’s just get over it and figure out what we should do.”
A tense silence was broken by Alex’s sigh. “I think it’s time to tell…”
“We’re not telling our families,” Eve broke in.
“Eve, they might be in danger,” said Alex. “We can’t just ignore that. This is getting to be more than we can handle alone.”
“They aren’t going to believe us, Alex! Do you have any idea how crazy it would sound? Someone is marking our houses. We think they’re going to bring nasty exploding bugs to kill us all. Oh, and no one but us can see the bugs. But just trust us, they’re real. How is that possible? Because we read this old book. You think they’re just going to buy all that and what? Evacuate our houses? Call the police and have them look for a mysterious assassin we can’t prove exists?”
Alex’s eyes welled up with tears. “I don’t know. I know it’s crazy. But my dad is in there. Working and doing his thing and he has no idea. No idea that someone might be going to…hurt him. And it’s all because of me! I’m going to get him hurt, and I’m going to lie to him about it.”
Eve crumpled. She put her arms around Alex. “I’m sorry. I know. I’m sorry.” The combined feelings of panic and guilt were making her heart race and her head pound. She held on to Alex and closed her eyes, trying to find a sane thought somewhere in her brain.
“It might not be quite as bad as it seems,” said Dominic.
Eve and Alex broke apart, staring at him.
“There is definitely someone out there watching us, but we already knew that. They’ve marked us out now, so they aren’t trying to be as secret as they were before.”
“Where’s the part that isn’t quite so bad?” Eve asked.
“We can see the Red Spots. We saw the last ones. And we killed them. The Red Spots have to grow before they can explode. Unless any of you have underground caves by your houses, we would see them before they got big enough to do any damage. And we could deal with them just like we did the last ones.”
Eve took a deep breath. Dominic was making sense.
“At least until the Changing Tree runs out of leaves,” muttered Logan.
Dominic ignored him. “The Gylf told us the Red Spots are really rare, which means whoever brought them here would probably have a hard time getting more to bring in. But even if they did…As long as we’re keeping our eyes open at home, we would see them.”
Eve saw Alex close her eyes. She was nodding her head.
“The real question,” Dominic went on, “is why they did this.” He gestured at the paint. “Whoever it is has to know we killed the last Red Spots. They obviously know we killed the pilpi last year, too. So why are they letting us know they are here? They would have a better chance of hurting us if they didn’t give us any warning. So why do this? I think maybe they just want us to be afraid.”
“It’s working,” said Eve, but her heart was beating normally now. She had never felt more thankful for her friends. Laid out logically like that in Dominic’s calm, steady voice, things seemed so much more manageable. Maybe they really could deal with this.
Logan didn’t agree. “So we know how to deal with Red Spots, but we don’t have any idea what their next attack might be. There could be all kinds of things out there, things even worse than Red Spots, that we’ve never seen before. We didn’t know what to do about Red Spots until they had already blown a hole in the earth.”
“True,” said Adam. “But we weren’t looking, either. Now we know to look. Whatever it they are going to do may be invisible to most people, but we’ll be able to see it.”
“So let’s look,” said Alex. “Let’s check out around all of our houses. See if anything looks suspicious.”
“It’s not much,” said Eve. “But it’s a place to start.”
Logan was still shaking his head, but he didn’t argue.
“We can start here,” said Dom. “Then we’ll make the rounds.”
“Logan’s house is next,” Alex said as they started walking around the side of the house. “He was marked first, he ought to get first priority.”
Eve’s eyes scoured the ground, the bushes, the trees. Searching, searching, for something, anything. It all looked normal.
As they slowly spread out, she allowed herself one sigh. She was so tired of looking without even knowing what she was looking for. Sometimes, a little bit, she almost wished she had never seen the Book of Sight. Almost. Her life had been so much easier before. Boring. Colorless. But easier.
Kneeling down to look under a shrub, she gave herself a little shake. This was the real world. It was ridiculous for a person with eyes to wish they were blind just because some things were ugly. An image of the writhing mass of dying Red Spots flashed across her mind, and she shuddered.
It didn’t matter anyway. She was in it no
w. Someone was threatening her family and her friends. Looking away wouldn’t help them now. The only way to keep them safe was to keep her eyes wide open.
• • • • •
It was almost noon by the time they were walking back through Alex’s neighborhood. They had searched thoroughly around everyone’s houses and seen no sign of Red Spots or anything else out of the ordinary. Nothing had happened. They had even managed to avoid Eve’s mom seeing them.
It was a relief to find nothing, but it was also worrying. What do we do now? thought Eve.
“I guess we just keep checking our houses every day now?” she said aloud. “There isn’t much else to do.”
Logan muttered something under his breath, but everyone else was silent. Eve looked at Logan out of the corner of her eye. His face had been getting darker and darker all morning. Now he was positively glaring at the ground. She was worried about him. She had tried to talk to him a couple of times, but he kept brushing her off, pretending to be too busy searching to answer. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to give him a hug or give him a kick, but he definitely needed something.
“Do you think…” she started, and then she broke off, staring.
The house they had just passed was bizarre in every possible way. It was a nice two-story Victorian, or at least, it had been. Now a sagging porch, peeling paint, and some broken gutters were its proudest features.
Other than the yard.
The yard was spectacularly littered with lawn ornaments of every possible description. Flamingos, plaster gnomes, Santa in his sleigh, stone animals, plastic ducks, one marble angel, an Easter bunny, and a whole family of deer all mingled together on the yellow grass. And it wasn’t just the yard. The porch was so jammed full of buckets, boots, chairs, tools, and rusted odds and ends that you could barely see the front door. Eve could only imagine what the inside of the house looked like.
Still, none of that was what had caught Eve’s eye.
Alex laughed. “Yeah, I know. It’s always been like that. Maybe a few of the lawn ornaments have changed over the years, but how could you tell? Guess you’ve never been down this way before. Crazy, isn’t it?”
“Did you see it, too?” asked Eve.
Alex raised her eyebrows. “I think we can all see it.”
“It totally moved all on its own.”
“It’s just…wait, what moved?”
“You didn’t see it?”
“I didn’t see anything move.”
“I did,” said Dominic. “That stone rabbit.”
“Yeah!” said Eve. “We were just walking past when all of a sudden it just hopped like four feet!”
“It hopped?” Adam said.
“Yes, it hopped.”
“Like one giant leap?”
“No, like a bunch of small hops.”
“Like bunny hops?”
“Seriously, Adam? The important thing is the kind of hops? It’s a rock. And it moved. On its own. Can we just focus on that for a minute?”
“I think it just did it again,” said Logan.
They all spun back to look at the rabbit again.
“Just keep watching,” said Eve. “Maybe it will do it some more.”
A minute passed. Then two. Then five. Finally Adam said, “I don’t think this is working.”
“Maybe we need to look away,” said Eve. “Maybe it won’t move if it thinks we’re watching it.”
Adam laughed, then held up his hand at Eve’s angry look. “I know, I know. We’ve seen weirder things than statues that only move when you aren’t looking. But it’s still pretty funny.”
“I’ve actually seen a rock move on its own before,” said Alex as they all carefully turned away from the lawn while trying to peek through their peripheral vision. “In the first few days after I got the Book. At least, I think it was moving. It seemed like it was moving, but that was before everything else happened, so I wasn’t too sure about it.”
“Me too,” said Logan. “I saw a bunch of pebbles rolling down the street the very first day I read the Book. There was no hill and no one else around. I thought it was weird, but I had a really bad headache, so…”
“There!” said Eve.
“I saw it!” said Adam.
They had all seen it. It would have been hard to miss. The rabbit, which before had been between two plastic deer, was now several feet closer to the street and sitting right next to a very ugly plaster cherub. They were staring at it so intently that no one heard the creaking door until it slammed loudly.
“You there! Kids!”
Everyone jumped, and Eve grabbed Alex’s arm, turning her toward the street. “Keep walking,” she whispered fiercely. “Pretend you don’t notice her.”
Alex pulled back. She didn’t like hiding what she was doing, especially when she wasn’t doing anything wrong.
“Don’t pretend you can’t hear me, kids! I know you can hear just fine. And see just fine, too. Don’t tell me you didn’t see it. I know you did.” The woman didn’t come down off the porch, but she was shaking her finger at them, making a dozen cheap bracelets rattle on her skinny arm.
“See what?” called Adam pleasantly.
“See what? See what, they say, just like it was nothing. You know what you saw. You can’t tell me seeing a statue move is so common that you don’t even notice. Ha!”
“You saw it move, too?” asked Alex, ignoring Eve’s sigh.
“Course I saw it. You think I can’t see a rock animal that starts out in one place and ends up in another? I may be getting old, but I’m not that old yet. I put that thing right here by the bottom of the steps this morning, and now it’s just about to take off down the road.”
“Maybe someone came by and moved it,” suggested Eve. “Not us. We didn’t. We wouldn’t, of course. But someone could have.”
“Think you’re a slick little liar, don’t you, missy? Well ‘someone moved it’ don’t cover what you and me both saw. That little thing was jumping, and you know it. I saw you do some jumping yourself. Jumped just about out of your skin when you was walking by before. ‘Someone moved it.’ Ha! That’s the sort of thing my girls would say, but they’ve got the excuse of they haven’t seen it themselves.”
“Does it do this a lot?” asked Alex.
“A lot?” The old woman stepped forward a bit into the sunshine, revealing a crooked grin and two bright eyes under a mop of untidy gray curls. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, girly. Come on in. Come right on in. I been waitin’ a long time for someone to believe me. You’re the first ones ever saw it besides me, and I got a lot more to show you.”
They all looked at each other in question. Eve shrugged. It was too late now. They had already admitted to see seeing the rabbit move. They might as well see what was up. Logan raised his eyebrows.
“Come on now. I ain’t gonna bite ya.”
Dom led the way up the steps. The porch creaked alarmingly under their combined weight. It suddenly seemed by far the safest choice to go into the house quickly, in spite of the musty smell emanating from the front door.
As expected, the inside of the house was jam packed. The entry hall sported two stuffed chairs piled high with papers and magazines. At least forty pairs of shoes were imprisoned underneath the chairs, and enough of them had escaped to create a serious obstacle course on the cracked linoleum.
The old woman led them straight through, past a narrow staircase, down an even narrower hall. They came out briefly into a kitchen piled high with every sort of thing imaginable, the most prominent of which was an eye-popping purple and orange rooster that stood four feet tall. Eve barely got a glimpse of this unnatural phenomenon before the old woman whisked them out the back door.
They were standing on another porch, this one slightly more stable but in even worse need of paint. Once Dominic moved to the side, though, Eve never thought about the porch again.
The back yard was huge and surrounded by a tall privacy fence almost completely overgrown with ivy. Every s
quare inch of it was packed with statues. There were statues of animals and people, of angels and demons and a few Greek gods, statues carved into fountains and bird baths and sun dials and benches, six foot tall statues and statues that would fit in the palm of your hand, and every single one of them was made of the same dull gray stone as the rabbit they had seen out front. Eve had never seen anything so bizarrely creepy and…well, wonderful.
“What the…?” Eve couldn’t be expected to just say nothing, even when she was speechless. “That’s just…wow.”
“There they are,” said the old woman proudly. “I been collectin’ ‘em for just on thirty years now. It’s gettin’ so crowded back here, I just stuck that bunny out front, just to sort of experiment a bit. They have a hard time movin’ around when they’re packed in like so. Course, that ain’t totally a bad thing. If they can’t move much, I don’t have to wake up to find ‘em peekin’ in my window. That’ll give you quite the turn, let me tell you.”
“They all move?” said Adam.
“Every single one of ‘em. Put any one outside the fence and just you see where they end up. It won’t be where they started, I can tell you that. One time I put one out front and then followed it. Well, you know, you gotta sorta let it think you ain’t lookin’ and then you just move along after it when it goes. Made it about five streets over before Augusta Ryan stopped me and asked what I was up to. I couldn’t hardly tell her I was following a deer statue through town, now could I? I been down that road before. My kids like to locked me up. Not gonna be that stupid again. So I just told the old busybody that I was takin’ a stroll and she got to talkin’ about her grandkids and one thing led to another and an hour went by. When I finally went a lookin’ for that deer, I couldn’t find it nowhere. It was just plain gone. And I never did see it again. That sort of spooked me a bit and I never have had the spunk to try again on my own.”
The Broken Circle (The Book of Sight 2) Page 10
