Although Penelope had drunk three cups of the strongest coffee on the face of the planet with Mrs. Johnson, she was still drooping with fatigue. Not even the racing apprehension concerning Jeremy’s possible fate could perk her up. All she was feeling was extreme exhaustion combined with the horror of what might have happened inside that Victorian Gothic eyesore on Durfrene Row.
Jeremy is as smart as I am, she told herself. He’s smarter than most of the people I know. He taught himself how to use computers. He has a whole network of people who regularly trade information on creeping techniques. He’s in the Caribbean with that girl, what’s her name? He likes her a lot. He wants to bring her here, but he’s afraid to tell her what he really does for a living because she might not be as understanding as some of Dad’s friends’ wives were. And, and, and, oh, dammit to hell.
Penelope brought the keys up and hesitated. Instead of opening the door, she knocked. She didn’t want to believe what the lurking whispers deep in the shadows of her brain were telling her. Hope futilely waged against cold-hearted reasoning. The keys in her hand rattled in the stairwell and echoed fruitlessly in the emptiness.
She was alone, and she knew it. Penelope was the only one breathing on the third floor. It doesn’t mean that…she couldn’t bring herself to finish it, even while someone else wasn’t around to hear her say it, even while it was only in her thoughts.
The key slid easily into the lock. She repeated the process with the two deadbolts and mentally prepared herself for the security system just inside the door. One hand pushed the door open, and she suddenly smelled the musty aroma that indicated long-closed curtains and a lack of human activity. The little white box beside the door blinked frantically at her as it counted down the seconds before the alarm would trip, and some anonymous security company operator would call the local police to check out the disturbance.
The alarm code was a little more complicated than the combination of the safe at the house she had so recently burgled. One weary finger stabbed the correct buttons, and she watched as the little red light changed to a steady green. Then all was still and apparently well.
Penelope stood by the open door and took in what she could see and hear for the moment. Pale streams of light let themselves in through the cracks in the curtains covering the windows on the eastern expanse of the house. Dust motes floated along the beams as they made leisurely beelines for unimportant locales. A long hallway stretched out before her, and one side opened up into a small living room. The kitchen was further down on the left, then the bathroom and the two bedrooms that constituted the remainder of the floor plans of the top floor. The rooms were silent. No interior noises ricocheted back to her.
There was a communal laundry room in the basement, and all were welcome to use the picnic area and barbeque pit in the back yard. Frequently all the tenants of the brownstone would get together on Saturday nights for a potluck. Penelope knew because she had attended several of them. Although she was the only white face there, she never felt out of place. Mrs. Johnson’s residents were friendly and easy going. They had welcomed Jeremy and with him, his closest friend. But now the place seemed dead. It was almost as dead as the other house she had been in mere hours before, and the thought made her swallow convulsively.
Penelope frowned, her expressive mouth turned downward, and she finally shut the door behind her. No one would have been able to get into the apartment without the security code. Even the windows were connected to the system, and Mrs. Johnson protected her access with the same pleasant resolve she showed in all aspects of her life. Turning the deadbolts, Penelope also reset the alarm system. She didn’t want any unwelcome visitors. She wasn’t sure how they could have followed her to this place, but she didn’t want to take chances.
Slowly she patrolled the perimeter of the apartment. Penelope checked all the windows and all the closets. She even knelt to peer uneasily under Jeremy’s king-sized bed. When she was sure that the place was devoid of even the smallest amount of life, she sat on his couch and looked around her with the eagle-eyed determination of one who desperately wanted to understand what was happening to her. She took the bag off her shoulder and head and laid it beside her where she could reach it quickly.
The big ogre of a man seemed to dig his way out of the ground, like he was lying in wait for any interloper. Penelope sank into the plush leather cushion as thoughts battled for dominance inside her mind. Jeremy’s been gone since about the time we planned the first creep. She shut her eyes. They seemed to follow me like they could smell me. Jeremy might have been in a hurry to do the creep. She folded her arms over her chest protectively.
Adjusting her body, Penelope’s head sank back against the restful cushions on the back of the couch. Her thoughts began to slow dramatically. Jeremy could have been in a hurry to visit…Lucie? He might have wanted the money. He might have not wanted to bother me while I was busy with Mama. He probably would have even cut me in so I wouldn’t have to worry about…
Then with a deep sigh, Penelope fell asleep.
*
Penelope was in the house again. The Victorian Gothic mansion on Durfrene Row had called her back as inevitably as the tides flowed on the face of the planet. Darkness peered around corners as if it had come to life. Black shadows flowed like living beasts. She stood in a patch of moonlight in the hallway, next to the little kachina doll with the perverted malevolent expression on its tiny painted face, and shivered as she held still.
All around her, things were moving, and twisting shapes reached for her tender flesh. “Penelope,” a voice said and another repeated the word. A third called to her again, and the word was a warped perversion of her name. “Pa-nel-o-pee.” The last time a voice called it was unmistakably Jeremy’s hoarse tones. He sounded as worn out as she was, but it was distinctly him. “Penelope,” he said, “remember when we almost got caught down near Cedar Hill?”
Penelope cast a frantic glance around her. She didn’t want to speak with the thing that had once been Jeremy. She knew whatever it was now, it wasn’t her friend. It was something else. It was something that would hurt her, something that would change her forever.
“They just finished the house, and the man was moving in,” the voice went on. “He went right ahead and put his best shit in the safes and didn’t think of security at all. Good thing I got a tip from that guy that owns the fancy furniture place he was using. He had fifty thousand dollars’ worth of cut diamonds in a little box just sitting there. Not such a smart guy, considering he smuggles illegal aliens from Chihuahua to Dallas three times a month without getting caught even once. We wanted to put him in his very own railcar in the hot sun. Remember?”
“I don’t want to remember!” Penelope suddenly screamed.
“Penelope,” Jeremy’s voice chastised her gently. “You ain’t got nothing to be ashamed of. You gave most of your share away to one of those societies that help illegals get a legal status here. I’m the one who lost half of it in a card game a month later.”
Penelope covered her ears and ducked her head. Then someone tapped her softly on her shoulder. She lowered her hands and slowly turned her head to see the giant in the kachina mask. Under his black robes, bumps moved just like the shadows beyond him. Lumps of flesh pushed at the material as if struggling to get out and caress her flesh with naked contact. At that very moment, she knew that if she moved from the little square of moonlight, she would be captured and consumed.
Her horrified eyes stared at the enormous thing standing behind her. Jeremy’s gentle voice rasped, “Join us. It won’t be so bad. You’ll be one of us.”
There was an abrupt howl of an animal from somewhere outside of Penelope’s range of vision, and the kachina mask twisted suddenly in an effort to see where it came from. The growl that followed obviously came from the gargantuan being in the frightful masquerade mask, and Penelope, terrified beyond belief, barely prevented herself from leaving her spot of safety by simply taking a step backwards.
There was a hum of dissimilar voices that all said the same thing in a similar tone of dismay and fear. Penelope strained to understand the word and then couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing. “Coyote.” “Coyote.” “Ki-yo-tee.” “Coyote.” The words died away like a careless whisper swept away by a mournful wind.
Then, with its mismatched limbs the thing with the colorfully and horribly painted face began to take off the mask. When Penelope saw what was underneath, she screamed herself awake.
And the large gemstone, still in her pocket, was burning her flesh, even through two layers of clothing.
Chapter Nine
Saturday, July 5th
Pancake (slang, origin probably American, circa 1920s) - hardboiled dame, a tough woman
There was an instant of time when Penelope honestly thought something was on fire, and it was touching her. In a lethargic state of wakefulness, she frantically fumbled for her pocket, shoving her fingers inside, and yanked the contents out. Gloves, both leather and latex, tumbled out, stuck to each other because of dried blood and sweat. Her Leatherman Tool plummeted out and onto the floor with a dull clank as it hit carpet. Finally the gemstone fell out.
It settled itself on the leather couch as if it placed itself there, and Penelope stared at it, even while she blinked the sleep out of her eyes. As soon as her fingers made contact with it, it didn’t seem to be hot at all. As a matter of fact, it was icy cold.
Penelope blinked again and studied the gemstone lying so serenely on the couch beside her. It was a jewel, like a thousand others that she had seen before. Certainly, it was bigger than some, the size of a large hen’s egg, but where it was different was its intense color. It was the sleek, unfathomable black lines of its multifaceted surface that made her lean in closer.
Outwardly, it looked like a huge diamond, but Penelope hadn’t ever heard of a black diamond before. The graying light of the room reflected off its impenetrable surface and showed a rainbow of colors, like an iridescent pool of oil on water. Pure darkness fell away under the surface revealing none of its innermost secrets. She slowly realized that she was having a hard time looking away. Gradually she remembered the foul nightmare that woke her up.
She wasn’t in the Durfrene Row house any more than there was a huge man with a kachina mask towering over her. The fact that she was thinking more and more of this man as an “it” because she wasn’t sure if she was dealing with something from this plane of existence, was more than unsettling.
It made her briefly consider her own background and the scheme of convictions upon which she had been raised. Jacob and Jessica Quick had never been particularly religious individuals. As a consequence, Penelope pretty much followed a similar line of values. God probably existed, but she needed proof. However, she believed in good friends. She believed in family. Stealing was okay as long as the stealee wasn’t going to miss the loot. She believed in her own ability to control the universe, although she was a little shaky on that count at the present moment. So thinking about the giant in the mask as something rather than someone was jarring to her belief system.
The basics were these. Penelope had creeped a house that she believed belonged to a shady character, someone who was fair game to thieves. Penelope had emptied his safe. Penelope had run into Mr. Tall Lumpy and Very Frightening. Penelope had been shot at with a big gun with powerful bullets. Penelope had run into Ms. Beautiful but Equally Frightening. Then Penelope had been chased by several other things slash questionable human beings with strange red eyes. They had followed Penelope unerringly and cornered her on the DART train on the Houston Street Viaduct, probably killing a Dallas police officer in the process. In a manner that seemed very improbable, Penelope had encountered the two above named individuals and heard what also seemed impossible. Jeremy, Penelope’s very good friend and fellow thief, had spoken to her from out of the darkness. Then Penelope had done what any normal thief would have done in the same situation. Penelope had taken a header off the bridge into the Trinity River, where a group of inebriated psychiatrists had rescued her.
Penelope abruptly covered the gemstone up with a leather glove. She no longer wanted to look at it. Then she glanced around her. From the way the light was spilling into Jeremy’s living room, she could tell she had slept most of the day away. God alone knew what Mrs. Johnson thought she was doing up here.
Furthermore, there wasn’t a sign that Jeremy was planning on returning soon. Typically he would have called Penelope or Mrs. Johnson up a few days before he came back. Penelope had left messages on his cell phone, and there wasn’t a phone in the apartment. Jeremy had a phone line, but it was used exclusively for his DSL connection. All human communication was accomplished through cellular.
It made her think of checking his email. But Penelope knew that it would be encoded or encrypted or would have some kind of fancy security system that would foil 99% of thieves, to include computer savvy ones, of which she was not. Jeremy didn’t trust anyone with the codes to his computer, not even her.
But her train of thought led her to something else. She checked her other pockets, systematically emptying out what she had brought with her to the creep. Most of the items were not traceable. Clothing, gloves, the wig, and other materials. Every last piece. All purchased from secondhand stores on Thursday, July the 3rd, or with cash from big anonymous department stores where she wouldn’t be remembered, and no one cared anyway.
There were only two exceptions. The cell phone was a cloned one, purchased from a kid on Third Street who made his living off stealing cell phones and reprogramming them. The other exception was the Leatherman. It belonged to her, but it was ten years old and couldn’t be traced to any one sale because there were no specific marks on it. She had bought it at a garage sale when she was fifteen years old.
The cell phone fell beside the lump that the gemstone made under the glove. In a moment Penelope would take a trash bag and put everything she had used from the creep in it. Then she would throw it in the dumpster of some unlikely recipient. And that included the Leatherman and the Slim Jim tool. She didn’t know what the people in that house had seen, but she wasn’t going to take the gamble. That was a mistake that got stupid thieves caught.
But for now, Penelope focused on the cell phone. She stroked it with tentative fingers and found that it was still a little moist from her precipitous dip the evening before. Idly she wondered if it worked and pressed the power button with a firm touch. A little beeping noise and a cheery set of musical notes announced its readiness. How about that? Just like a Timex. Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
Penelope picked it up and dialed Jeremy’s number. It rang once. She perked up and waited with bated breath. It rang again. And then she heard it again. But it wasn’t through the little cell phone that she heard it. It was ringing somewhere in the apartment. Jeremy’s cell phone was in the apartment. He hadn’t taken it with him.
Letting the phone drop to the couch, Penelope stood up and followed the sound with a growing sense of dread. Jeremy never took a phone with him on creeps. He thought that when Penelope bought cloned phones from the kid on Third Street she was setting herself up for an eventual fall. He thought that the kid would roll over on her one of these days when the FCC or whoever did the regulation on illegal cell phones, came knocking on his door. Specifically, the only time Jeremy didn’t have his cell with him was when he was on a job.
On the fifth ring the phone stopped chiming as the voicemail automatically picked up, but Penelope knew where it was. She slowly made her way into the kitchen and opened a drawer under the microwave oven. Jeremy’s phone sat on top of a local phone book next to an old switchblade and a set of lock picks. The phone was a different model from the one she was using, but she knew it belonged to him. The little menu on the front announced that it had twenty-three missed calls. Three of them, she knew very well, are from me.
Penelope also knew what the presence of the phone meant. Jeremy had gone to creep the very same hou
se. But he had never come back. He hadn’t wanted to bother Penelope, lost in a crisis with her mother, so he hadn’t told her. What did they do to him? she thought with mounting horror. What could they have done to make Jeremy say those things to me, in that tone of voice that indicates his complete capitulation? God, who are those people, and what will they do to me if they find me?
Making people angry went along with the job of creeping. Penelope had known that from day one. It was why they chose particular people to steal from; it simply made things easier for them. However, the circle of truly professional thieves in the metroplex was a very small one, and if someone she had stolen from was truly determined and even in the least little way “connected,” he might find a way to discover her identity. It hadn’t happened before. There had been tidbits of information that had trickled back to Jeremy and Penelope about people who had been creeped. Furious at their victimization they had vowed revenge and even offered rewards but met with a dead-end.
Penelope was sick to her stomach, both out of fear of what had happened to Jeremy and what would happen to her. She had never had to worry about such a thing before, and it was a sensation that made her supremely uneasy. After a moment of indecision, she picked up Jeremy’s phone and set her jaw in place. Finding a box of kitchen-sized garbage bags under his sink, she set about her given tasks. She knew what she had to do, and she had to do them quickly.
*
Penelope stripped and took a shower in Jeremy’s bathroom. While she soaped off the remnants of sweaty fear and river mud, she tried not to think about whose shower she was using. When she was finished, she dried her hair with a blow-dryer he kept under the sink for various guests.
Shadow People Page 8
