by Paula Guran
There was a fountain in the back, built into a terraced garden; the upper spillway was dry, the pool brackish. Inchy heard an electrical humming from the little black-plastic pump, half hidden in the grass. A pipe in the base of the fountain made a sucking noise as it sipped at the shallow, stagnant puddle where the light from a kitchen window surged and rippled.
Inchy turned his attention to the house. The back door stood ajar, atop a flight of red-painted concrete steps. Another flight of flagstone steps led down to where a second light issued from a white wooden door. Through a pane in the basement door he could see, distorted by the beveled glass, the boy from the subway, crossing a dull gold carpet. He couldn’t see anyone else.
“Maybe the man’s upstairs,” he whispered. “Why doesn’t the boy run? Pearly?”
He waited but Pearly neither emerged nor answered.
He started down the steps to the basement—and then dizziness whirled up in him and he had to stop to steady himself on the stairwell wall. Pearly wouldn’t abandon him now—wouldn’t leave him alone, to this. Maybe Pearly was too scared to come out. He thought of the times Pearlywhite had helped him, had given him the courage he needed to go on.
He wished he could do the same for Pearly now. But the only one he could do it for was himself.
He took a deep breath and reached for the doorknob. It turned in his fingers. Unlocked!
He pushed the door open quietly, searching for the boy, afraid of seeing the man. A fire burned in a black-metal fireplace, but the logs it danced upon were fake, cement. A pool table sat somewhat slanted on the gold carpet; all the balls had gathered in one corner, or fallen into pockets. At the far end of the room was a little cocktail bar; bottles tried to gleam in a glass case under it, but a thin layer of dust seemed to choke them. To the left of the bar, stairs led up to the kitchen.
He took a step into the room, and suddenly heard a gasp.
Inchy stiffened as the boy rose up from behind the padded bar, mouth and eyes wide. His head jerked sideways, toward the stairs, obviously listening and looking for the man. Inchy listened too, but he heard nothing.
“Kid!” Inchy hissed. “Come on! He left the door unlocked!”
The boy had tired brown eyes; he looked as skinny as Inchy, despite having grown up out here where people didn’t have just one refrigerator, they had two. Inchy waited for the kid to respond, waited with his head throbbing, wanting to get out of here and take the kid to the cops and lie down somewhere safe. But the boy just looked at him. Too scared to move, maybe.
Inchy decided to help him. He came all the way into the room and edged past the fireplace, past the pool table, circling the bar.
His foot bumped something and he looked down, saw a small wooden baseball bat, the kind you give to preschoolers. He stepped over it and crossed to the boy.
“He left that back door open! Let’s go!”
“No,” the boy said. “I can’t.”
“I know all about him,” Inchy said. “We can get out of here. I can hide you somewhere he’ll never find you, and we’ll tell the cops and . . . ”
“If I try to leave,” the boy said raspily, sounding like he had a bad cold, “he’ll come out and get me.”
Inchy could see that the boy’s nose was running, his eyes red; he’d been crying.
“It’s okay, uh—uh—what’s your name?” Inchy said.
“Errol.”
“It’s okay, Errol. I know about him. I know what he’s been doing.”
“No . . . no you don’t. You only think you know, but you were stupid to follow us, now he’ll get you. I saw you in the city. By the alley this morning, and at the library, and then at the train station. I thought maybe you would get away, but then you had to go and follow me, so I know he was still using me. And it worked. Other kids, he made me talk to them till they followed. Telling them I had food and stuff. But you . . . he must have known you wouldn’t fall for that. You, he had to lead on a chase. Used me again.”
“So stop letting him. Get out of his house.”
“It’s not his house. It’s mine. And . . . and hers.”
Errol turned and looked for some reason at the bar refrigerator. It was long and white, like a big white coffin, and suddenly Inchy felt Pearlywhite’s claws sharpening on his shoulders, underneath his clothes; tightening around his rib cage, right where the gun rode. He thought about reaching for the gun, just as the boy was reaching for the chrome handle of the fridge.
Errol pulled on the handle, hard, and cold mist streamed out of the open case; cold white light streamed out of it. It wasn’t a refrigerator, it was a freezer. Full of frozen meat pies and plastic-wrapped steaks and chicken parts all crammed into every last bit of space that wasn’t taken up by the two hard-frozen bodies of grown-ups. The stiff wrinkles in their clothes looked like snowy valleys; ice bearded their faces, pressed so close together; bearded the woman’s face as well as the man’s. One of her eyes was red-crusted shut, her blue lips parted; the frost on her lashes looked like some kind of exotic white makeup. She’d been a smallish, foxy-faced woman, with curly brown hair, closely resembling the boy. Her face was pressed into the man’s face. The freezer had turned his pouchy cheeks and jowls into hard, bluish ice. But Inchy knew him at once.
“It’s—it’s—you killed him!” Inchy looked at Errol in awe, wondering how it was possible—how anything could have frozen so quickly, even in a freezer this size.
“Because he hurt her. Like that, you see?” Errol’s voice went flat as his eyes roved the frozen wasteland of her features. “He—he gave me the bat when I was little, and then he used it to hurt me when, when he said I was bad, which was all the time. And then he used it on her.” Errol’s eyes welled up with tears. “I heard them, I heard it happen, but I . . . I didn’t see anything until I came in and saw him next to her, on his knees, drinking from one of his bottles and laughing and sort of crying too. The . . . the bat was there, on the floor, and he didn’t hear me pick it up. He didn’t hear a thing until I hit him in the head. He didn’t see me, but he knew it was me. He had to know. That’s why he stayed. He tried to get up but he slipped and I hit him again and he fell and I hit him again and . . . it didn’t matter. He still wouldn’t go away.”
“Inchy . . . ” Pearly’s voice. Pearly was constricting around his chest, squeezing him so hard he could hear his heart beating louder than Errol’s voice. “Inchy get out of here now.”
Errol’s eyes widened. “What . . . who said that?”
“Move away from him, Errol,” came a deep, mocking voice from behind Inchy.
Inchy spun, heart leaping, and saw the man standing there holding the little baseball bat. The man who . . . what was he, the brother of the man in the freezer? A twin?
Inchy pulled out the gun, catching it on his coat-zipper—tore it loose as the man lunged at him, shoving Errol aside. Raised the gun and squeezed the trigger.
Pulling the trigger was harder than he’d thought. He had to use both hands as the man towered over him, raising the little baseball bat to bring it down on Inchy’s skull.
The gun went off, dead center into the man’s chest.
The man stopped—
—as the bullet splashed into his chest.
Inchy fired again—
—the second bullet making the man’s substance splash and swirl so that for a moment Inchy could see right through the hole where the bullet had gone, could see the light from the kitchen and the gas flames flickering on the wall. Then the hole closed, like heavy fog, and re-formed as before.
Inchy staggered back. “You’re . . . ”
“Invisible,” whispered Pearlywhite, slithering up along his back, clawing up to the top of Inchy’s skull. And the man caught sight of Pearlywhite, his head literally splitting in a grin obscenely wide. He paused, chuckling, and raised one finger, beckoning. Not only to Inchy, but to Pearly. His pouchy features starting to squirm and tremble and flow into distinct, writhing pockets. The icy eyes began to slip below
a surface of bubbling, molten flesh, but the man didn’t need eyes to see. He saw with his whole horrible essence, beyond physical form.
Hopelessly, Inchy threw the gun at the man, but of course it passed harmlessly through him.
At that same instant, with a snarl that traveled down Inchy’s spine, Pearlywhite tore itself free, leaving stinging gouges in his scalp, and launched itself at the . . . the Invisible who was starting to lose the form of a man. The blue suit of the other Invisible flickered and reformed into some kind of horn, an armored skin. Pearlywhite was a blur of teeth and claws, as Inchy had seen him earlier at the Pit; but this time Pearly could find no purchase on the scaly coat. The smokedragon grew dense and knifelike, striking and plunging repeatedly, but the “man” was nothing like a man now—even his laugh became less and less human as it cackled on and on and on.
Inchy saw Errol sunk to the floor, watching the struggle in terror, his hands clamped over his ears. Pearly was weakening, he saw that now; the poor thing had used up nearly all its strength. As if, somehow, the man-thing was drawing Pearly’s power out of it. Every time Pearlywhite flashed into a new form, the enemy Invisible seemed to thrust out some part of itself—a face tendril, an amorphous finger—and wrap it deep in Pearly’s misty core and rip out a bit of the stringy stuff that suddenly didn’t look so insubstantial. And every time it ripped a bit of Pearly loose, it thrust the filthy finger deep into the writhing pouchy face and sucked at it with a juicy sound that echoed the dry slurp of the evaporated fountain.
Inchy crawled back toward the fire because he had to get away, and there was nothing he could do for Pearlywhite—he knew that with complete certainty. Pearlywhite was giving his essence to save Inchy. The smokedragon whirled for a moment and cast a desperate look back at Inchy, a pleading look, as if warning him to flee while he had a chance. Alone, they had no hope of beating the thing. It fed on Invisibles, sucked them dry, turned itself into this fat, powerful monstrosity. Look how many it already had consumed.
Thinking of the others it had taken, Inchy felt a stirring in his pockets.
“Let . . . us . . . ”
The man-thing heard the whisper, just as Inchy did. It slipped its triumphant stranglehold on Pearlywhite and started toward Inchy. But Pearly hissed and slithered, tightening like a bit of moonwhite noose, binding with translucent sinews, throwing the monster back toward the bar where every bottle shattered as they hit it. And Inchy dug his hands deep into his pockets and removed the coiled ball of string, the bloodied paperback, the kerchief freshly steeped in gore.
The man struggled up, tearing Pearly free, shredding Pearlywhite to its last bit of matter—but thankfully not consuming the stuff. Some of it floated free on the air. The monster’s arms widened to surround Inchy, but he had already hurled the homebases of his murdered friends. He could see them uncoiling, awakening in the flickering air, rising above the man whose face was no longer a face or anything much at all except a void, a hunger, an absolute emptiness. The man’s arms clamped reflexively around Inchy, and his breath was just . . . gone. It was not like the physical touch of another human being—it was like gravity pulling when he jumped from a fast swing, or a heavy wind all compressed into a man-shape. Inchy’s life was almost squeezed out in that instant.
Then the man released him. Inchy collapsed on his back, paralyzed and stricken, gasping up at the scene above him. The man stood there, thrashing at the forms of the other Invisibles, snatching at the weakened bits of them. Koil and Slink and Leafjacket and a storm of white froth that seemed to be all that remained of Pearlywhite. They were so weak, so insubstantial, that the man couldn’t get a purchase on them. He swatted and they swarmed; he tried to snag them but came up empty and a black rage poured from the vacuum of his mouth.
Inchy saw Errol, then. Errol standing behind the man, with the bat raised as if to try once more to brain the thing. Utterly futile. Errol pulled back and the man thing, Errol’s enraged and insane Invisible, turned and took a swipe at the boy but the other Invisibles closed in around the thing’s mouth, choking it with themselves.
Inchy felt pearls in his fingers, sensed Pearlywhite whispering something to him, and he managed to choke out to Errol, “Burn it!”
The man-thing struck at Errol, struck him hard in the head, clapped his two massive hands together so hard on either side of the boy’s head that his life was extinguished. All the rage he hadn’t been able to bring to bear on the elusive Invisibles, spent in a final blow that made of Errol’s skull a thing misshapen.
The bat flew. Went spinning. Struck cement with a hard clink, and a moment later Inchy smelled burning wood.
The man let out a roar and tried to rush to the fire. His foot struck Inchy’s leg, but the blow felt soft and unreal. The man toppled flat across him, but the weight was almost nothing. The other Invisibles followed him to the ground, harrying and tearing at him, diving into his eye sockets, tearing at the folded flesh. He shredded them with his bare hands, clawing them as a man would wave away cigarette smoke, but they just reformed. He opened his gulf of a mouth to howl and they stuffed themselves inside and allowed nothing out. The Invisibles caught the edges of the man’s face and pulled him inward, drawing his extremities down into the hungry maw. The thing was consuming itself, and all of them as well. Inchy prayed that as a result of what the Invisibles had done, they would find another way out, once they had destroyed this one. They deserved something more than the void into which they threw themselves.
The man’s fleshy fingers, arms, and thrashing blue limbs all stretched and drew into the center of the blackness, caught by the relentless pull of something graver than gravity, which he had experienced for less than an instant and would never forget. There was no escaping it now, not even for the man itself. The collapse, when it came, came quickly. A sudden indrawing, a quickening, and then an explosion that made Inchy wonder how he could ever have called his friends and guardians “Invisibles.” This was invisibility. It was an absence of sight—of everything.
They were gone. All of them.
He raised his head weakly. “Pearly?”
White mist still hung in the air, but he couldn’t tell if it was Pearlywhite or smoke from the burning bat. He looked at Errol. He was dead, very for-sure dead. Inchy turned away—and almost fell over. The fevered weakness was pulling him down like a drain.
Inchy knew, now, that he needed help—help that Pearly couldn’t give him. He needed real help, and he needed to help himself.
The last thing he did, summoning all his strength, was to drag himself behind the bar, where a telephone sat. He picked it up. And although he couldn’t remember it later, he must have called a number he had never called before.
Officer Cat was sitting beside him, in a chair, and he was in a bed. A bed with crisp white linen. That was the first thing he noticed: he was lying down in a white bed in a white room, and Officer Cat was sitting beside him. The second thing he noticed was that she wasn’t wearing a uniform. She was wearing some white slacks and a soft yellow blouse. He felt weak, but the throbbing was gone. There was a tube going into his arm, he saw then, from a bottle hanging from a metal stand on the side opposite Officer Cat.
She smiled at him. “They said you’d probably feel better this morning. Looks like it’s true. They’ve had you on IV antibiotics for two days. You had a bad infection, on top of everything else.”
“Two days?”
“Seemed like longer, to me,” Mina said.
She came from a doorway behind him, a half-eaten candy bar in her hand. She was cleaned up, and she had a new blue shift on, and—no glasses.
He looked at her and she shook her head. Glimmish was gone.
Pearly!
He sat up, fumbling in the bedclothes. “You looking for those pearls?” Officer Cat asked. “They’re in that drawer by the bed.”
There was a little white table next to the bed with a vase of daffodils on it. He opened it and found the pearls, clutched them to him.
; “The others?” he asked Mina.
She shrugged. He turned to Officer Cat. “There was a book, and . . . and Garvey’s handkerchief, and a ball of string. Where they found me . . . ?”
“I haven’t been there, Inchy. But I imagine it’s all in Evidence now. What do you need to trouble yourself with that stuff for? I know the history. It all belonged to your friends. But those are morbid memories, Inchy. Bloodstained and all . . . even if you could have them back, why would you want them? Some things you’re better off putting away. Believe me.”
Beyond her, Mina was nodding slowly, and he knew it was the truth.
“Of course, no one’s saying you should throw away those pearls, Inchy. I know what they mean to you.”
A beeper sounded from Officer Cat’s purse. She opened the purse, looked at the beeper, and said, “Be right back, have to call in.” She got up, patted his arm, and went out into the hall.
Mina seemed to know he was thirsty. She poured him a glass of water from a plastic pitcher at the bedside. He drank deeply as she sat on the edge of his bed; she waited. Then he told her what had happened.
“So the man won’t be back?” she asked.
“I don’t think so. But neither will Errol.” He pressed the pearls to his cheek and whispered, “Pearly? Pearlywhite?”
There was no answer. He had known somehow that there wouldn’t be. He could feel some sort of difference in the pearls. They didn’t seem lighter: they just seemed less.
“Glimmish is gone, too,” Mina said, looking at her feet. New tennis shoes on them. “I don’t know if it’s because my brother’s glasses broke, or if it’s because I . . . I told Cat yes.”
“Yes what?”
“She filled out some forms and talked to some office people—asked if we could live with her. They said yes and I said yes. Now it’s your turn.”
